As you know, a fence-jumper managed to hop the White House fence on Friday and get just inside a White House foyer before he was subdued. The White House seems to be something of a magnet for people – often with some range of psychiatric problems – who hop the fence and make a dash for the mansion. In almost every case, they’re tackled somewhere on the lawn before they get very far. But this breach last week is leading the Secret Service to consider further extending the White House security perimeter. President Obama should say no.
ICYMI: Is “Homeland” a word you associate with the kind of America you grew up in?
Alaska TV makes dramatic on screen exit to take up the battle for legal pot in her state.
Photos from yesterday’s big protest in New York City urging action on climate change.
For those of you who use Macs and/or iPhones and iPads, curious what you think of the “flat”/arialized aesthetic of iOS8 and OSX Yosemite. We’re discussing it here in The Hive. If you’re not a Prime member, shoot me an email and let me know what you think.
Protecting the White House is a very high stakes proposition. The potential costs of getting it wrong are weighty. So I find it notable that none of these guys who’ve tried to breach the fence – even this guy who managed to get into the building itself – has gotten shot. No shots fired.
We got a huge number of great reader emails in response to my post about “homeland security.” One of them came from TPM Reader BD …
And why on earth was the agency not named the Department of National Security, which would have been the most natural formulation in the world and yet still serve to warm the hearts of the Cheney-Krauthammer claque of folks who like to think they’re more serious-minded, vigilant, rock-ribbed, etc. than the rest of us?
Alabama Governor mixes up his ‘pathologies of the black family’ script with his ‘we’re devastated that this innocent child died tragically’ script.
The joker Georgian President who inspired John McCain to tell us “We’re All Georgians Now” is now living as a hipster in Brooklyn.
TPM has just confirmed that Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has ordered that absentee ballots for overseas military personnel be shipped out immediately without the name of any Democratic candidate on them.
This is a seeming reversal from Kobach’s earlier stated plan to delay the issuance of those ballots until Democrats submitted a new nominee.
If you’re new to the story, the previous Democratic nominee withdrew from the race as part of a pretty obvious but still unconfirmed Dem plan to clear the field for independent Greg Orman to take on incumbent Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS). Kobach, for his part, has been trying to thwart that plan. His political motives are about as thinly veiled as Dems’ were in getting their nominee out of the race in the first place.