We’ve got your FIFA corruption scandal covered: 5 Points on the investigation that is rocking international soccer, This Chart on how the allegedly corrupt enterprise worked, and the full indictment to peruse at the bottom here. In depth enough for soccer fans, accessible enough for muckraking fans!
So Joseph Hutchens, the pedophile former Arkansas State Trooper, now doing 56 years on a child porn conviction, says Jim Bob Duggar lied when he told police he’d taken son Josh Duggar to see Hutchens for a talking to about fondling young girls. Hutchens says Duggar dramatically downplayed what was known – claiming it was a single incident with a single girl and only through her clothes rather than multiple times with multiple girls, etc. Here’s the latest.
Carly Fiorina decided to show up and upstage Hillary at a campaign event to burnish her pitch as the 2016 campaign Hillary-slayer. But she ended up getting huffy and defensive. So the whole thing was sort of a trainwreck. Basically, she HP’d it.
I’m actually surprised advertisers are abandoning the Duggars quite this fast.
The day the Duggar scandal broke out I did a write up based on the initial reports of what had happened. So over the weekend I read the actual police report that pushed the whole story into the media and apparently ended the Duggar’s show at least temporarily. So what’s in there?
Ed Kilgore asks how the GOP will winnow down its 18 presidential candidates.
It’s reached a crisis point with the entry of George Pataki.
I did not know this. After Bernie Sanders graduated from University of Chicago in 1964, he went to Israel and lived on a Kibbutz for six months. When he got back to the states, he moved to Vermont.
Here’s Rick Perlstein’s look at Sanders’ time at U Chicago.
If there’s anything amusing about this morning’s FIFA raid and indictments, it’s that most of the stories hasten to point out — often in the headline — that FIFA president Sepp Blatter was not himself indicted. Because any story about FIFA corruption usually begins and ends with Blatter. The New York Times, for example: FIFA Officials Are Arrested on Corruption Charges; Sepp Blatter Isn’t Among Them. For a point of reference, here’s that remarkable Sepp Blatter takedown from John Oliver last summer.
It is increasingly difficult to find any unifying theory or rationale behind the Supreme Court’s election and election financing decisions other than the goal of securing the electoral interests of the Republican party. That sounds harsh. But a simple process of elimination leaves little other conclusion. States rights, originalism, deference to legislatures, various constructions of democratic theory and a lot else are controlling except when they’re not controlling. Most of the decisions line up with the conservative jurisprudence espoused by the Court’s conservative semi-majority. Except when they don’t. Cases are plucked out of the lower courts long before the high court has any obligation or need to intervene. The new case which will review the ‘one person, one vote’ rule which has been reining law for half a century would likely diminish the voting power of cities vs rural areas, minorities vs whites and Democrats vs Republicans, if decided on behalf of the plaintiffs. In other words, why not? It’s a big deal. Here’s our 5 Points run-down about what you need to know about this case.