We got Ralph Steadman (longtime collaborator of Hunter S. Thompson) to give us his take on Ford. This week’s cover: pic.twitter.com/nu8tyV0eT2
— NOW Magazine (@nowtoronto) December 24, 2013
A car bomb has killed at least 14 people north of Cairo. The military backed government has blamed the attack on the Muslim Brotherhood and branded the group a “terrorist organization.”
TPM Reader XX (initials withheld because would be too easily identifiable) gives us some background on two men currently in the news …
I thought it might be worth pointing out that two folks in the political news over the past couple of weeks were in fact law school classmates in the University of Virginia School of Law Class of 1998: Bill Baroni (who resigned over the GWB traffic controversy) and Robert Shelby (the U.S. District Judge in Utah who struck down Utah’s gay marriage ban this week). I was also classmates with Bill and Bob in the class of 1998, and they could not have been more different.
Alan Turing helped break the Nazis’ ‘Enigma’ code during World War II and laid the foundations for modern computing and artificial intelligence. But he was later driven to suicide by his criminal conviction and enforced ‘treatment’ for homosexuality.
Today he received a posthumous pardon from Queen Elizabeth II.
I don’t know whether Chris Christie was personally involved in the boffo Bridge Closure payback earlier this year. And I find it very hard to believe he got his fingerprints on it. But he’s managing so far to play into the hands of his political opponents and all national Democrats in the way he’s handling the story. In fact, he’s doing so so completely that I suspect he’s in a situation in which he’s simply not characterologically capable of behaving otherwise.
State Assemblymen says Christie’s latest claim about bridge closure is “false.”
Federal judge refuses to stop same-sex marriages in Utah, as per the governor’s and acting attorney general’s request.
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Thank you and Happy Holidays.
Over at TPM Cafe Book Club today, American University Professor Chris Edelson and author of Emergency Presidential Power: From the Drafting of the Constitution to the War on Terror destroys David Brooks’ recent argument for a stronger president with reminders of what happened with a strong presidency in history:
Roosevelt and the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II (Congress and the Supreme Court acted essentially as rubber stamps), Truman’s unilateral decision to make war in Korea, Johnson’s deceptions in Vietnam, Nixon’s nearly successful attempt to turn the presidency into a criminal enterprise operating above the law and Reagan’s involvement in the Iran-Contra affair.