You may not have heard of Tim Fasano, a third party candidate in the Nevada Senate race who is far, far behind but he’s pulling enough votes, at least in early polls, that he could conceivably affect the outcome. And he now reports getting threatening phone calls from Angle supporters telling him to get out of the race.
Ironically, he’s the candidate of the Independent American Party, the far-right third party Angle herself used to be a member of until going soft and becoming a far-right Republican.
So what’s the story on that couple, one an AWOL Army specialist, who tried to drive on to MacDill Air Force Base with a bunch of weapons and fake military ID? Justin Elliott tells us the latest on what we know.
Last decade the ‘undisclosed location’ was the preserve of vice presidents. In this decade it’s for rookie Senate candidates who have a habit of saying totally whacked things on TV.
In this new piece, our Christina Bellantoni looks at Operation Lockdown, the GOP effort to keep Sharron Angle and Rand Paul away from the media, with the exception of the occasional pre-screened questions from Fox News.
John Cornyn and Senate Republicans would like every senate contest this year to be about Obama, Health Care Reform and runaway spending. Every time Sharron Angle kicks the national dialog on to abolishing Social Security to preserve our freedom is at best a wasted media day and at worst gives Democrats a poster girl for the GOP embrace of The Crazy ™.
I’ll be curious to see the details of this $20 billion fund BP has agreed to set up. I’ve seen various reports as to its intended purpose, among them: making sure there’s still money for victims even if BP goes belly up (would creditors let that stand?), making the claims process easier for victims, and getting payment to victims faster.
None of those are necessarily mutually exclusive objectives, but they don’t get to the heart of the matter: What’s the standard for paying claims? Read More
Disgraced former Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN), gets Sanford-esque on his affair with his staffer:
“I prayed multiple times a day, sang hymns with emotion and tears, felt each time that it wouldn’t happen again, read the Bible every morning. . . . So how in the world did I have a ‘torrid’ (which is an accurate word) many-year affair? How could I compartmentalize it so much?”
If Fox & Friends‘ Steve Doocy didn’t exist, Jon Stewart would have to invent him. Watch.
The brother of the American detained in Pakistan on a solo mission to off Osama bin Laden not only knew about his brother’s plan, but he drove him to the airport and “felt he had a good chance.”
I tend to think of making fun of Sarah Palin as pretty old hat. I mean, she has to say something pretty silly at this point to make me take notice. But last night she went on O’Reilly to rail on the president for not getting the oil leak at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico stopped. And when pressed on just how he was supposed to do that by all of people Bill O’Reilly, Palin said Obama had really blown it by not reaching out to the Dutch since they proved themselves so good at building dikes and sluices and dams to reclaim land from the sea. Which when you think about it is pretty much the same thing as capping an oil gusher a mile underwater.
Video after the jump. Read More
When President Obama declared from the Oval Office that the Deepwater Horizon blowout “is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced,” he was giving this crisis historic stature and perhaps also missing the point (watch it here).
The Gulf is not a pristine environment. If your only exposure to the Gulf has been on the beaches of Florida, you might convince yourself that the Gulf is a deep blue aquatic wilderness. But as you travel west, the beaches give way to the marshes of the Mississippi delta, which are crisscrossed by oil and gas pipelines, manmade canals, and flood control levees. Further west, in Texas, the beaches reemerge, but shipping canals, giant refineries, and petrochemical factories persist. Over the horizon, in the Gulf itself, thousands of oil and gas wells pump night and day. Read More