The irreplaceable Ed Kilgore surveys the wreckage of the GOP “rebrand” that never was.
The situation in Iraq is complicated. Getting foreign policy advice from Dick Cheney isn’t.
Yesterday CNN and Tumblr co-sponsored a much-touted town hall with Hillary Clinton. The official subject was her new book, but the actual subject was her future presidential run. Undoubtedly one of the more cringeworthy moments to watch was when CNN Chief international Correspondent Christiane Amanpour asked Clinton about race:
This emerging battle on the Hill over the new carbon emissions regs from the EPA really bears watching. You now have a group of Republican senators saying they’ll consider shutting down the federal government this fall to block the new regs. That’s on the usually more moderate Senate side.
It’s hard to figure the political upside for the GOP of a government shutdown right before the midterm elections. Could Democrats and the White House get so lucky?
“If Republicans want to repeat their government shutdown play to protect the profits of big polluters, they’re placing a pretty risky bet,” a White House official tells us.
In case you hadn’t heard, Republicans want to shut down the government again.
‘Sovereign citizens’ are strange folks. What’s fascinated me most about them is the weird mix of anarchism and formalism. On the one hand, their angle seems to be that they are totally laws to themselves. No one has any rightful claim to authority over them. And, not surprisingly, they’re really into guns. On the other, they’ve got all the these weird concepts and titles that are pretty deeply rooted in the intricacies of the American state. So they’re ‘constitutional Sheriffs’ or ‘statutory Attorney Generals’. In the latest example of far-right violence against federal officials we’ve got Brent Douglas Cole shooting a BLM official and also claiming he’s “statutory Attorney General of the United States.” Our Dylan Scott delved into the crazy to figure out just what that is supposed to mean. Read the story here.
When the latest gun/stand your ground type law goes under the name of a “Make My Day” law, you know the results are going to be great.
The Obama regime’s propaganda about “the video” sparking the attack on the Benghazi compound was so pervasive it even convinced the guy who led the attack. You heard that right. Ahmed Abu Khatallah, the ringleader of the attack that killed four Americans in September 2012, told others at the time he was motivated to attack the compound “to take revenge for an insult to Islam in an American-made online video.”
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ICYMI: For all the talk about partisan antagonism and fisticuffs, we’ve actually in the midst of a Long Truce in our national politics.