Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie, New York City, September 1947.
Top Tea Party lawyer, J. Christian Adams, says he’ll review election observer reports before deciding on whether to pursue legal action.
TPM Reader RF steps back to look at the big picture on the Mississippi runoff and doesn’t like what he sees …
I read the pieces on the Cochran/McDaniel runoff in Mississippi. The punches and counter-punches we see thrown in this race are laying bare what the GOP really thinks about the intersection of voting and race. As soon as Cochran announced he was hiring someone to focus on getting African American Dems to vote in the run-off, the McDaniel Campaign and it’s allies have been beating the voter fraud drum.
As you’ve probably heard, Thad Cochran, improbably – almost unbelievably if you go back to late on primary night – came back to beat Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel. It’s important to note that Cochran fielded a much more together and aggressive GOTV operation than they did in round one. And I think a careful analysis of the vote totals will suggest that that increased margin was more about turning out Republicans than pulling in Democrats. Still, it seems clear that Democrats played some role, quite possibly a very important role in Cochran’s victory. And the fact that almost by definition a lot of them were black Democrats, courted by the Cochran camp, is going to put gas and kerosene and everything flammable on the bonfire of intra-party recrimination. This will not go down easily. See here for more.
It’s still early and it’s still close. But as of this moment, 42% of the precincts are reporting and Thad Cochran is holding a consistent mid-single digit lead over Tea Party Republican McDaniel. If that holds – a big if – it’s going to be like putting the nitro and the dynamite and the plastique of GOP crazy in one can and tossing it into the oven for the evening.
Joseph Farah, publisher of far-right World Net Daily and a guy who’s got a real beef with the TSA, caught trying pass through security to board a plane at Dulles with a loaded .38.
The only surviving manuscript draft of Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ sold today at auction for $2 million dollars.
Interesting that in addition to the scribbles and pictures interspersed with the lyrics (see the photo here), the song was at least written on the stationery of the Roger Smith Hotel in Washington, DC.
Larry Lessig will be stopping by for a live chat on Friday at 3 p.m. ET to discuss his new super PAC aimed at taking down super PACs. It’s something TPM Prime subscribers won’t want to miss.
There’s been a bubbling hum of controversy surrounding the Senate Daily Press Gallery’s decision to deny credentials to SCOTUSBlog. And as it happens, the issues involved here are ones I know fairly well since I’m the owner of a new media company and had to navigate the DC credentialing for something like 15 years, first for The American Prospect and later for TPM. And in the case of TPM this was when the whole concept of such an organization was far more novel and hard to make sense of. We’ve been successfully credentialed on Capitol Hill for years now. But I have a fair amount of hard experience and built up on knowledge on this issue. So I thought I’d share my thoughts.
There is so much going on with this story: a separation of powers clash; delicious insider trading muck; political vendettas backfiring spectacularly; and the veil pulled back a bit on how DC works. Take your pick.