I think many of us who were watching the build-up to the Syria vote are still trying to get our heads around just what happened yesterday. And I strongly suspect that a lot of folks at the White House are doing the same, though perhaps we’ll find out differently as the story develops. But whether there was more of a plan than we think or this was just a clunky deus ex machina interrupting a play we all knew the end of, yesterday’s developments were actually a very big deal, for reasons I tried to sketch out early yesterday.

Let’s set aside for the moment the domestic political implications for Obama, that this new track (at least for the moment) gets him out of a painful climb-down or congressional defeat. Read More

State Republican officials say Republicans obstruction in Congress is holding up their voter suppression efforts back home.