I mentioned yesterday how the vaccine nonsense is just another sign of why Rand Paul will never make it as a serious presidential candidate. Now TPM Reader JS passed on this 2010 TPM piece about Rand warning about the 10 lane “NAFTA Superhighway” connecting Mexico to Canada which would be the end of American sovereignty. Of course the whole thing was a myth and conspiracy theory.
A quick explainer on just how vaccines became the first GOP litmus test of the 2016 presidential cycle.
You’ll see here that ‘dozens’ of Democrats are reportedly considering boycotting Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech in early March. What jumps out to me though is that Vice President Biden has not yet committed to attending.
Monica Potts looks at the two century history of policing – from constabulary to quasi-paramilitary – and asks, What are cops really for?
After I posted a link to Aurin Squire’s piece on the forgotten women of Black History Month and the death of Martin Luther King Jr’s mother, Alberta, in 1973, I got into a twitter exchange with my friend Eric Umansky about what counts as an ‘assassination’. The dictionary doesn’t provide us too much guidance. Webster’s defines it as “to kill (someone, such as a famous or important person) usually for political reasons.” Webster’s also refers to the importance of “suddenness and secrecy”. That gives us some direction but still leaves the borders of the definition vague. The question interests me because by using the word we clearly signify that some killings have more public consequence than others. Or to be more specific, I think we mean that some killings go beyond the desire to end one particular person’s life but rather to make some larger public statement, a public act. Put baldly, the ‘assassination’ label amounts to the promotion of the significance of some deaths over others, if not at a human level then a public one.
Aurin Squire on the forgotten women of Black History Month. Did you know that Martin Luther King’s mom was gunned down just 5 years after he was?
I’m sure this will spark a productive conversation.
From the Daily News …
President Obama was shocked and irritated by Mitt Romney’s concession call in the 2012 presidential election – and claimed Romney insinuated that Obama won only by getting out the black vote, according to a new book by presidential campaign strategist David Axelrod.
Obama was “unsmiling during the call, and slightly irritated when it was over,” Axelrod writes.
The president hung up and said Romney admitted he was surprised at his own loss, Axelrod wrote.
“‘You really did a great job of getting the vote out in places like Cleveland and Milwaukee,’ in other words, black people,'” Obama said, paraphrasing Romney. “That’s what he thinks this was all about.”
These appear to be genuine pictures, from a dashcam, of the plane crash in Taiwan …
Whoa RT @W7VOA These images showing #GE235 from @Missxoxo168 dash cam. pic.twitter.com/UADYBd2N6M
— Hiroko Tabuchi (@HirokoTabuchi) February 4, 2015
The state of Utah is revising its rape statute. But some lawmakers, like Rep. Brian Greene, think it may be going too far – specifically by suggesting that it’s always rape when you have sex with a person who is unconscious.
It looks like whether or not to get vaccinated is shaping up as a central issue in the 2016 GOP primary race. So here we present your definitive guide to potential 2016 contenders and vaccines.