This is out of the blue. Here at TPM or at least at my desk we’d basically forgotten about crackhead Mayor Rob Ford of Toronto. Basically a bad memory when we thought Canada really had it in him/her? to really roll in the international scandal world. But after all that, maybe it’s actually going to happen. The police now have the goods, include THE TAPE.
So here’s the deal.
Edward Snowden has taken a tech support job at a major Russian website.
[THIS POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED.]
We’re hiring a Publishing Assistant to work with our publishing and sales team in our New York City office. If you’re interested in learning the nuts and bolts of running a digital news site from the ground up in one of the most innovative digital news operations in the country, this is the job for you.
See the full listing after the jump.
When it comes to the history of judicial filibusters, it seems that Democrats may have started it, but Republicans have perfected it.
There’s a lot of backstory to today’s showdown in the Senate over President Obama’s nominees to DC Circuit Court of Appeals. Sahil Kapur reports on much of it here. There’s no question that the showdown implicates the filibuster, or the abuse thereof by minority Republicans. We have more on the historical trendlines on the filibuster of judicial nominees here.
But there’s more to this particular face-off than the usual opposition to judicial nominees or the fight over whether the use of the filibuster has crippled the Senate. In this case, the underlying battle is just as if not more important than the supposedly larger issues it implicates.
New radio ad by Mitch McConnell’s Tea Party challenger features clips of Democratic Sens. Reid, Durbin, and Schumer praising McConnell for helping to end the government shutdown.
Mitch McConnell concedes HealthCare.gov will eventually be fixed and labels calls for Kathleen Sebelius’ resignation a “distraction.”
Republican opportunism over the problems with HealthCare.gov was always going to have its limits as an effective strategy. The problems will eventually be fixed, and more importantly the critique — you should be able to access this terrible program more easily — had a built-in dissonance.
That’s why this week’s attack line about you’re not really able to keep your old individual insurance plan resonates more, even if its disingenuous and is predicated on the ridiculous notion that most people with individual plans actually like their plan.
You could see the shift in GOP strategy pretty clearly during yesterday’s grilling of Kathleen Sebelius on the Hill. The hearing was ostensibly about the HealthCare.gov problems, but the focus was on President Obama’s “you can keep you plan” promise. Dylan Scott was there and filed this report.
Weiner blames NYT reporter for going too easy on him on texting in political comeback article.
From TPM (Non) Reader DS …
I just read your blog stating that changes and or losses of peoples coverage is being overstated by repubs. I truly wish that you had a bigger budget for research and were writing about something you know about.