At this point, in my role as crisis communications expert, I think Paul just needs to relabel, rebrand the new book as an anthology and put this controversy to rest.
More seriously, there does seem to be an intergenerational issue in the Paul clan with plagiarist and racist staffers continually foisting on their byline things they didn’t write and in many cases who the foisters didn’t write either.
Some astonishing news came out of South Carolina Sunday. And it was good news. According to a new Winthrop poll, 52% of South Carolinians oppose legal recognition of same sex marriages. 39% support. That’s still a thin majority of adults in the state who oppose gay marriage. But, My God … this is South Carolina.
It’s an example of some of the new directions we’re going at TPM, doubling down on but also branching out from our core focus on high-speed, iterative coverage of politics.
This piece “Why Do Poor People ‘Waste’ Money on Luxury Goods?” by Tressie McMillan Cottom, which we published on Friday, has been one of the most popular pieces on TPM in all of 2013. I really recommend it to you.
So in case you were wondering, here’s how the last desperate day of Joe Lhota’s campaign went in our Mayor’s race here in NYC
The truly comical last day of the Lhota campaign …. pic.twitter.com/nqURBvs29D
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 4, 2013
Along the lines of the “Yes, You’re Probably Racist” twitter feed (or is it a website?), I think we need a Primer for Halloween for people who seem developmentally challenged in entering the 21st century. So, is it cool to dress up for Halloween in black face? No, not cool. Is it cool to dress your child up as a member of the Ku Klux Klan? No, that’s not cool anymore. Not sure when it was cool.
By now you’ve probably seen our big piece on Insurance Companies hiding savings and benefits from Obamacare from their customers, sometimes going so far as to hard-sell them on new policies that are actually more expensive than the same policies the same carriers are offering in the exchanges.
But now we want to go deeper.
Speaker Boehner comes out against the ENDA workplace anti-discrimination law, effectively nixing any chance it will get a vote in the House this year or become law before 2015.
A TPM special investigative report on the extreme lengths health insurers across the country are going to hold on to their existing customers and deny them the benefits of Obamacare. Read it here.
If the Mayor Ford story weren’t crazy enough (it took a big leap forward today on the Ford brothers weekly radio show), there’s something else getting discussed fairly feverishly among Toronto reporters. That’s the existence of a second video.
We know from last week’s police press conference that the police have more that one video in their custody. So there is more than the crack video. That is a fact, to the extent we really know anything in this cartoon. About what’s on it, nothing’s publicly known or confirmed.
Nobody has been willing to say publicly yet what is suspected to be on it. But here’s one of Toronto’s top columnists hinting today that it could dwarf everything else to date.
In his much-ballyhooed announcement on today’s radio show, Mayor Rob Ford says he’s not resigning (aka, too legit to quit), says he’s sorry for mistakes, will “ride out the storm”, “continue fighting for the little guy…” Says he needs to “slow down” on his drinking.