As you know, TPM has been on the ‘vote fraud’ bamboozlement front for many years now. That was the root issue behind the US Attorney firings scandal — prosecutors who weren’t willing to whip up phony ‘vote fraud’ indictments to game elections. So as TPM grows and we send more reporters into the field on reporting assignments, we decided we should send our reporter Ryan Reilly to this weekend’s annual summit of True the Vote, the big emerging ‘vote fraud’ activist group in the country.
Alas they didn’t make it easy. Read More
There’s a feature piece in Politico today that perfectly captures the assumptions most national political reporters, especially at certain publications, bring to the core questions of budgetary politics. The gist of the piece is that ‘we’ all agree that the message of the 2010 election was that the public has decided that government is too big and wants dramatic budget cuts. But now it seems like the governors who are really going whole hog on this — overwhelming Republicans — are getting really unpopular. Ergo, the public isn’t really ready for the “grown-up conversation” about budgets that it seemed they might be.
The Vice President’s office is apologizing to a Florida reporter for using a storage closet as a holding area where he had to stay for most of a recent fundraiser event in the state. Alas, the buzz over the weekend that he was held against his will turns out to have been a tad overblown, as in didn’t happen.
When this latest controversy in Wisconsin broke out I hadn’t realized that William Cronon was the incoming president of the American Historical Association. The group, which is the main professional association of the historical profession in the country, has released a statement decrying attempts to intimidate him.
Reuters is reporting that Libyan rebels claim that Col. Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirte has fallen into rebel hands. This comes on the heels of earlier rebel successes over the weekend.
Singing ‘The Times They Are a-Changin” a year ago at the White House.
There’s been an amazing turn of events late this afternoon and this evening in Wisconsin. State Republican leaders have pushed ahead with an effort to put Gov. Walker’s union-busting bill into immediate effect in defiance of a state court order blocking the law from going into effect. Here’s our report.
Our reporter on the Wisconsin story and I are trying to piece together the details of breaking news out of Wisconsin this evening. But the gist is that Wisconsin Republicans have seized on a highly questionable work-around to defy the court order halting implementation of the union-busting budget repair bill and put the law into immediate effect. Whether what they’ve done is legally valid is an open question, which will undoubtedly spawn much more litigation. But since they appear to have taken the step of acting in defiance of the state judicial system itself, it raises the question of whether the legality of the move — in the sense we normally understand it, as in ‘does it count’ — even applies. Here’s a piece out earlier this evening from the Journal Sentinel. We’ll have a fuller report shortly.