Budget crises affect people in weird ways. A top Brownback aide who is now a key lobbyist/advisor on the outside and apparently being investigated by the FBI went off on a Topeka Model UN coordinator for purportedly disrespecting the governor in her model UN speech.
Netanyahu said Iran would develop its first atomic bomb by 1999 in 1991.
Feeling Bridgegate was out of the news, Chris Christie has cued up what looks to be another mega scandal.
I mentioned earlier this week that the ‘Zionist Camp’/Labor party had again opened up a very thin lead over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party in the fast-approaching Israeli election. Now we’re two days post-Apocalypse Speech. So how has it played so far in Israel?
TPM alum Dylan Scott comes out as a degenerate internet forum addict to report on the psychology of forum aficionados and what we’ve lost in the everybody’s doing it mass Facebook and Reddit era. You’ll like this one.
The fiscal mess Sam Brownback created in Kansas with his tax cuts is now forcing him to accept the prospect of Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. It’s not a done deal yet, but the handwriting is all over the wall.
Five points on the most disturbing revelations in the DOJ Ferguson report.
The arrest Eric Holder just described — the one with the guy who had just been playing basketball — is simply horrifying. We’ll have a full write up on the DOJ’s report on Ferguson later this afternoon.
We’ll have details from the report itself later, but here are Holder’s words describing the incident from his presentation this afternoon …
Livni: “The ties between capital, government and [gambling] chips are destroying our vital relationship with the United States and undermining Israel’s security. Netanyahu and Adelson conceal the amount of money spent on Israel Hayom’s election propaganda. Adelson is a casino magnate who, with his billions, controls the Republicans in the United States, and here, he controls Netanyahu. And as in a puppet show, he pulls the political strings both there and here.”
Tzipi Livni is the number two candidate on the ‘Zionist Camp’ ticket. In effect she is running as a joint ticket with the Labor Party, headed by Yitzhak Herzog.
Ed Kilgore reviews the new mini-debate about whether the American constitutional order is in fact doomed (I’m skeptical) and offers his own take. My own take is that the structure of American government (presidential vs parliamentary systems) is relatively unimportant. I’m closer to Chait in thinking the driving issue is the rise of conservative absolutism, grounded in white identity politics, coming into its own in mid-90s and growing, more or less, ever since.