With AIPAC staffers grousing that Benjamin Netanyahu ruined their chances of blocking President Obama’s deal with Iran and House conservatives trying to think of other ways to act out now that the battle is lost, advisors to Netanyahu are claiming that, despite appearances, he achieved a fabulous victory. Specifically, they’re pushing back against criticism in the Israeli press by claiming that by opposing the deal they’ve won a big new security package for Israel.
United Airlines CEO canned as probe into Bridgegate crony, David Samon, heats up.
Late Update: We’ve just updated the piece. This part should be interesting …
On at least one occasion, August 23, 2013, Chris Christie and David Samson together met with United CEO Smisek to discuss this arrangement. Two months prior to that meeting, and two months after signing of the new lease at Newark, thirteen United executives donated a total of $31,500 toward Christie’s re-election effort.
A new day? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything like it. The White House has given over basically its entire website front page to a merciless clip video of all Dick Cheney’s most ridiculous predictions and Iraq and Iran nonsense. Watch.
Confusing reporting coming out on just what is prompting the federal judge in Kentucky to release Kim Davis from jail and what comes next. Apparently her lawyers are saying she will block her deputies from issuing same-sex marriage licenses after she is released. Does that mean the judge may scuttle her release? Haul her right back to court as soon as she gets back to the office and starts causing trouble? Will Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz shackle themselves to her flowing tresses and insist on being jailed, too? Stay tuned!
I was on vacation last week. But I didn’t miss that the White House finally secured enough votes to block any attempts to scuttle the Iran Deal negotiated by the US, Iran and other world powers. We now know the Iran Deal antis have definitively lost. And today we have news of the final indignity: The White House has secured 41 votes for the deal in the Senate, which means that in all likelihood the GOP and Netanyahu and Ambassador Dermer won’t even get the vote they were hoping to use to embarrass the President and delegitimize the deal even if they couldn’t block it. But even more than in whip counts, which have been bubbling up over recent weeks, you could see this coming watching the social media accounts of the key propagandists and pressure group operatives as things went south and they made their journey from frustration, to disbelief and rage, culminating finally in a species of spittle-based vitriol and vainglorious derp.
After the early dog whistle on immigration, Trump has actually toned things down. Here’s a smart explanation on why.
One of the world’s most notorious eccentrics openly ponders run for the White House.
Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz each expected to be in Kentucky today to visit with/pay homage to/rally support for jailed county clerk Kim Davis.
If you weren’t around over the holiday weekend, here’s a post I wrote about how and why I spent several months building a small wooden sailboat and what I learned about woodworking and myself doing it.
While I’ve been away I’ve seen how the story of Kim Davis, the county clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky, has become the news of the moment, a sort of comical afterbirth to this summer’s historic Supreme Court decision in favor of marriage equality. The Christian right lauds her as a martyr to religious liberty while the pro-LGBT rights community lambastes her as hypocrite who is herself on her fourth marriage. For myself, I have a hard time taking either line very seriously because Davis’s argument, claim, hill to die on or whatever is so absurd it simply lacks the drama to mean anything more than a solitary ignoramus who will soon be crashed on the rocks of her own ridiculousness.