It’s almost as if the BridgeGate report commissioned by Chris Christie’s office was one big PR stunt that ignored vital questions and lets him pivot toward 2016.
Anti-abortion advocates are posting the names, addresses and photographs of a pro-choice activist, journalist and doctor. TPM Cafe writers David S. Cohen and Krysten Connon wonder, when do we start taking this kind of harassment seriously?
Robin Marty has a great look at the infighting happening in the anti-abortion movement in Georgia, where the state affiliate of National Right to Life is so extreme it might lose its ties to the national organization.
Coming off his multiple felony indictments for campaign finance fraud involved involving both his estranged wife and then mistress, disgraced and defenestrated former Christian college President Dinesh D’souza has a new film coming out. And to promote it, he’s come out with this ‘parody’ version that “Between Two Ferns” interview President Obama did a few weeks ago with Zach Galifianakis
I just got it in a PR email about (though I just realized we wrote it up at LiveWire yesterday) and it is clearly meant to be funny. But … well, just watch …
Chris Christie swears he doesn’t remember having a conversation about the bridge lane closures, but he does remember the conversation had nothing to do with getting back at some mayor.
Given the apocalyptically bad launch of the national health care exchange website, the sign up numbers have made a pretty remarkable come back. Today, the White House is saying they’ve hit 6 million private insurance sign ups to date. They’re not exactly clear when that 6 million number is from. Is it from today? Yesterday? The end of last week? Let’s assume, it’s yesterday.
Despite the gloss, there were some real pieces of news that came out of the BridgeGate report just released by Chris Christie’s lawyers.
Ouch. An email designed to tout Rep. Bruce Braley’s (D-IA) farming background after getting caught dissing “farmer” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) managed to misspell “baling” and “detasseling” — terms that Iowa farmers should be familiar with.
For what it’s worth, you can see my farmer cred in this photo.
This whole Krugman/Silver brouhaha broke out when I was on vacation. And I’m only beginning to catch up on the details. But TPM Reader SR has some interesting thoughts on trying to “disrupt” fields of inquiry which, unlike politics and formerly sports, already have a lot of highly numerate practitioners …
Krugman and Silver are both notoriously a bit prickly—whether by nature or just because of all the idiotic hack pushback both of them have endured for years for the unpardonable sin of being right again and again when the Cohens and the Noonans and the Scarboroughs of the world have been willfully wrong.
But when you see Silver trying to refute Krugman’s criticism that people on his new site have so far been using data as like a drunk uses a lamppost by conflating correlation with causation and, more generally by treating Krugman as if he was just another hack defending the NYT and his own blowsy, fact free turf, he rather conclusively establishes the truth of Krugman’s criticism.
When your Democratic candidate makes a huge mistake like dissing farmers in the state of Iowa, who do you call? Elizabeth Warren, of course.