President Obama breaks through the wall of cable chatter to deliver a statement on the situation in Egypt.
TPM Reader ML wonders what kindling to the fire may have been added by the McCain/Graham visit to each which, remember, President Obama greenlighted …
As a person who worked on national security issues in the federal government for many years, I will certainly comment. If you are representing your country abroad on official business, you have to be very mindful that you are not on the hustings in Iowa. You must measure your words with excruciating exactness. When I saw senators McCain and Graham commenting from Egypt on CBS News, I told myself “boy, this is not good.”
Patrick B. Pexton, former Washington Post ombudsman, has one piece of advice for new owner Jeff Bezos: fire Jennifer Rubin. In a briskly indisputable judgment he says “She’s just plain bad. She doesn’t travel within a hundred miles of Post standards.”
For some time I’ve been a fan of the artist and illustrator Molly Crabapple. I’m not quite sure how to describe her style. The Guardian once described it as “equal parts Hieronymus Bosch, William S. Burroughs and Cirque du Soleil.” She once described it herself as “Where’s Waldo for Perverts.” To place it in the most general terms, much of her work has the feel of high-end contemporary graphic novels. In any case, recently I got a PR email saying she’d just been down to Guantanamo Bay to draw the detention facility and the court proceedings. And I thought, wow, that seems like such a culture clash or coming together of two worlds, Crabapple on the one hand and the tight, hyper-secretive, militarized scene down at Gitmo, I’ve just got to hear more about how that went. So TPM’s Catherine Thompson interviewed her about it (she also wrote a long graphic essay for VICE) and she was kind enough to share several original sketches from her time down there. Here’s the piece which I’m thrilled we’re publishing.
So today we have a great-grandmother (#16) who works for the City of San Diego accusing Filner in addition to a another woman (#15) who says that among other things “he made an inappropriate movement on my body.”
Scientists discover a new mammal, the ‘olinguito’, so adorable it’s likely to get its own vertical on Buzzfeed.
We’re used to New Yorkers going to Florida. But is Florida coming to New York? A weird set of circumstances is forcing New York City to switch back to old voting machines which have been in storage for so long that they might be too rusty or musty to even work any more for just the primary election and no one knows what’s going to happen. Amazing story. For all we know it might be Mayor Carlos Danger after all.
I’m far from thinking the Egyptian military is a reliable or disinterested source on this. But this caught my eye …
The Egyptian military source said public outrage after critical comments by visiting U.S. senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham last week and leaked reports of a possible deal between the authorities and the Brotherhood had put the army in a tough position.
The mediators warned that any move to break up the sit-ins would likely cause hundreds of deaths and drive many conservative Salafi Muslim activists, initially supportive of Mursi’s overthrow, to join forces with the Brotherhood in fierce opposition to the authorities.