Robert Houle and Bruce Peabody look at presidential legacies at home and abroad, from George Washington to Nelson Mandela: “But citizens need to grapple with a more complex legacy of these political icons. We should recognize the limits of their examples, and the dilemmas they leave for us today.”
I turn 45 today. So I’m trying out this phrase. Think it will start coming in handy more and more.
In other news, for your reading pleasure today, we explain that weird medieval senate maneuver at the heart of the new House of Cards and consider what Downton Abbey tells us about the future of abortion.
So what’s the story with Frank Underwood’s medieval senate maneuver in “House of Cards”? Sahil Kapur explains.
Tom Perkins, the guy who got in trouble predicting the coming progressive Kristallnacht, has a new proposal: you get one vote for each dollar you pay in taxes.
I’ll be answering your questions this afternoon at 3:30 PM eastern in this thread at The Hive (sub req.). Get your questions in now. About the news, about TPM, or whatever else. I’ll answer as many questions as I can answer in one hour.
Anti-Media hound Brent Bozell denounced media laziness in columns he probably didn’t write.
The federal court rulings tossing out or undermining state same sex marriage bans are coming fast and furious. We now have Utah, Oklahoma and Virginia where federal judges have ruled that these bans are unconstitutional. (Each ruling is stayed pending appeal.) In two other states, Kentucky and Ohio, judges have ruled on narrower issues which have not overturned the bans themselves but signaled clearly that the bans themselves are likely constitutionally untenable. These are all the fall out of the Supreme Court’s historic Windsor decision which was decided in June of 2013 and ruled DOMA unconstitutional.
Nichole Perkins asks: “Why does seeing a black man with a white woman stir up a hornet’s nest of racism, but not the reverse?”
The Second Machine Age authors Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson imagine the future: “New varieties of robot are rapidly diffusing throughout the manufacturing and logistics industries, high-end professions like medicine and law will be affected by digital discoverers and diagnosticians, and even the stereotypically lousy-but-safe job of ‘burger-flipper’ faces competition from technology: a recently unveiled machine can convert raw materials into more than 300 totally customized burgers per hour.”
Tune in for a live chat (sub. req.) with both of them at noon today!
Welp: Prominent open carry gun rights activist jailed over threatening people with his gun.