It’s really too bad ex-Louisianan David Kurtz isn’t here today to write about Edwin Edwards’ bid for Congress. The famed ex-con governor and failed reality TV star did an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd in which he claimed he totally would have voted for Obama in 2012 — if he hadn’t been convicted.
Sahil Kapur has a good look at what has happened after modest filibuster reform in the Senate. Despite all the dire predictions that the Senate would just become a rubber stamp for Obama’s liberal agenda, two failed nominees proves that it hasn’t.
Take a moment to read this excellent essay from Conor P. Williams about baseball, Detroit and the city’s role as a permanent underdog.
Today at TPM Cafe Book Club, What Unions No Longer Do author Jake Rosenfeld talks about how, if we really want to fight the war on poverty, we need to rebuild the labor movement. Ned Resnikoff responds, calling back to some of labor’s earlier disruptive tactics.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) has been making a pretty big claim about Obamacare lately. Namely, he says that it discriminates against the disabled. The problem, though, as TPM’s Dylan Scott dissects this morning, is that Jindal’s claim is complete BS. Be sure to read this one.
Look, I’m a New Yorker reader, and generally enjoy film critic Anthony Lane’s clever turns of phrases, but this new Scarlett Johansson profile. Yeesh.
Katy Waldman at Slate deftly culled some of the most cringeworthy phrases from the profile:
A school district in Louisiana gets popped for pushing Christianity and discriminating against a Buddhist student — but it sure doesn’t seem sorry about it. (You can still see the school board’s “beliefs” posted on its old website, where No. 1 is “God exists.”)
Ed Kilgore points out that it’s not just tea partiers that are sick of compromise. Thinkers on the left are too.
Politico’s Mike Allen swears he wasn’t taking a shot at FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver in this morning’s Playbook newsletter.
Sociologist and author of What Unions No Longer Do Jake Rosenfeld takes a look at the failed attempt to unionize a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee and takes away some lessons from the attempt.