Right now we’re combing through more than 2,000 pages of documents that were just released in the Chris Christie BridgeGate scandal. We’ve posted them all here. See anything interesting? Email us at the address at the top of the TPM home page and include “Fort Lee Docs” in the subject line.
As we see with dying brands and companies (Blackberry) and even political ideas, when things start to go really bad there’s often a late spasm of what we now call (some of us tongue-in-cheek) rebranding. And with the galloping successes of pro-equality legislation picking up steam, we’re seeing something very similar on the anti-LGBT right. The most prominent Dylan Scott chronicles here in the series of states introducing laws aimed at rebranding hating gay people as “religious freedom.”
GOP House candidate says laws protecting gays are a step back to the days of Jim Crow.
Pope Francis puts poverty at the center of plans to reform Vatican finances. The Church must be “poor for the poor.”
Images from Ukraine, which continue to be as operatic and vivid as they are horrifying and harrowing.
Conor P. Williams argues at TPM Cafe that the “ballooning welfare state” might just be all Richard Nixon’s fault — he did, after all, kill universal pre-K.
Important story from Dylan Scott on how conservatives are reacting to same-sex marriage sweeping the country with a new rearguard legal action to enshrine anti-gay discrimination as protected religious freedom.
It looks like we might have our first out Neo-Confederate Senator next year.
Anders Behring Breivik, the mass shooter who killed 69 people (mainly teenagers) at a Labor Party youth camp in 2011, is threatening to begin a hunger strike if he is not given access to a bigger gym, more time on the phone and his Playstation 2 replaced with a newer model.
New Jersey’s got sleazy politics. We know that. But Governor Christie wants to innovate new levels of sleazy power plays and weirdness. This thread of the story has to do with the law firm which the Governor’s ‘office’ has retained to work on its behalf. The lead attorney is Randy Mastro whose reputation for aggressiveness precedes him. It’s not totally clear who or out of what bucket the firm is being paid, just who its client is or even exactly what it’s supposed to be doing. But in the guise of doing document collection and some sort of ‘internal investigation’ to help the Governor find out just what he did, it’s actually acting as what amounts to a counter-investigation.