Really excited to have my old friend Ed Kilgore in our pages here at TPM. Don’t miss this piece. “It’s the Fundamentals, Stupid: Elections Aren’t Determined By Short-Term ‘Game Changes’“
Late last week Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) made a big show of trying but failing to sign up for Obamacare because of the notoriously buggy website. (Actually he appears to have been using the DC exchange site.) He even did a special tweet noting his hopeless situation. Not terribly surprising given the frustrating experiences so many have had.
Actually, it turns out he had successfully enrolled and got a call confirming that about an hour after his tweet. But it gets better.
An essay in a Harvard student-run journal of Christian thought that claims Jews suffered because they “killed Jesus” is taken down for “further editing.”
I just wrote about this below. But I wanted to say a bit more. I think all of us have probably seen that iconic video of Walter Cronkite announcing President Kennedy’s death live on CBS and then struggling, not entirely successfully, to hold back his own tears. It’s incredibly affecting but almost worn into cliche by decades of repetition.
What I’d never seen before was the half hour or so lead in to that moment. I just posted the video here.
It sure seems like it’s getting harder and harder for Mitch McConnell’s campaign to hide its frustration with the tea party.
Some people have serious projection issues: Mary Landrieu’s senate challenger’s campaign tweets image of Landrieu as Mussolini …
Sahil Kapur points out that filibuster reform holds a lot of good news for Obama: He can tilt the balance of the D.C. Circuit Court, pile up potential liberal Supreme Court justices and, ahem, fire whomever he wants.
On the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, Larry J. Sabato, author of The Kennedy Half Century, says this, “There is only one prediction I can make with certainty: A hundred years from now, there will still be books written and TV documentaries proposing theories while sifting evidence about the Kennedy assassination.”
We’ve been so thrilled to have Larry this week as we bring back TPM Cafe’s Book Club. Do him a solid and buy his book.
This is pretty intense stuff. Video from CBS of the initial reports out of Dallas. Dealing with initial reports, first an attempted assassination, then unconfirmed reports of the President’s death, unconfirmed (and wrong) reports of an injured LBJ, and then more. I’m not sure how to describe this but it is surprisingly jarring, upsetting, riveting for something that happened 50 years ago and for a story we all know the end of.
On the day the filibuster effectively ended (yes, this is fatal blow, even if this move is only limited for now to non-SCOTUS nominees), TPM’s Sahil Kapur talks the Senator who led the filibuster-busting crusade.