Minneapolis Mayor candidate promises to quit going to strip clubs.

If you’re seeing this post, we’re currently having episodic site slowness and downtime tied to problems at AWS (Amazon Web Services), where a huge number of websites are now hosted. It seems to be improving and we hope to be back to normal shortly.

Bloomberg’s gun control groups says they’re not backing off after this week’s drubbing in Colorado. They say they’re eyeing battles in five more states around the country.

After my post on this yesterday we now have dozens of moving, fascinating, in a few cases infuriating emails about remembering 9/11. I’m not sure quite how many to publish; I’ve reprinted about half a dozen so far below. It’s just a bromide to say everyone experiences the anniversary differently. But the patterns are different and worth understanding. Read More

Three year old accidentally shoots two year old in South Carolina.

On “What’s Your 9/11?”, TPM Reader DE thinks many of us, across the political spectrum, can’t escape the unresolved politicization of what happened twelve years ago …

I suspect that your question about 9/11 is basically unanswerable, because it gets to the issue of why we have memorials at all, which is itself an unanswerable question. We obviously don’t observe memorials for the dead themselves– they are gone and don’t care what we do. So we must do them for ourselves, out of some belief that we will either feel better or benefit from remembering the dead. Think about, for instance, what Lincoln did in the Gettysburg Address– remembering the dead so that we remember how important the cause was that they died for, and so that we remind ourselves that we should be willing to put our lives on the line for that same cause.

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More of ‘What’s Your 9/11?’ … from TPM Reader MS …

I was a congressional intern working at the Capitol on 9/11, so not close enough to see actual carnage, but close enough to be scared. I remember briskly walking (people weren’t running) alongside members of Congress and staffers alike toward the Metro and seeing the plumes across the river. Not sure I even knew then that that was the Pentagon.

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The Atlantic has a piece up grabbing on to the new but seemingly now almost ever-present discussion of ‘American Exceptionalism’ and saying that the phrase was actually invented by Joseph Stalin. Well, sorta. But not exactly. Read More

So it turns out there was almost a quarter billion more Koch dollars in last year’s campaign that we didn’t know about.

Apparently, no one was impressed with Vladimir Putin’s New York Times op-ed.

Full-size version.