Armed anti-Islam to mount Saturday protests in front of mosques in 20 cities.
It looks like opposition forces have gotten together to battle Facebook’s and Apple’s efforts to carve up the open internet, kill it and make the prime cuts into subsidiaries of Facebook and Apple.
Watching the lead up to tomorrow’s Speaker vote, the supreme irony is you can see in painful detail and intensity just how much the Republican House caucus needed John Boehner. What’s happening right now doesn’t even rise to the level of conflict or disorder. That gives it too much credit. Kevin McCarthy was already saddled with all the baggage of John Boehner – in terms of holding the reins of responsibility, establishment backing, need to prevent catastrophic damage to GOP, etc. But since he entered the race it’s been clear he’s not at all good at leading the caucus – definitely not in the public spokesman sense, and seemingly not in the backroom sense either. So he’s got Boehner’s liabilities and then an entirely new one.
With the election for House Speaker scheduled for tomorrow, and the helpless and enfeebled Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) being helped or dragged along by establishment supporters, McCarthy today is reduced to demanding Democrats “stop playing politics” with Benghazi.
Meanwhile, Rep Trey Gowdy (R-SC), Chairman of the Benghazi committee is saying McCarthy’s apology “doesn’t fix it.” He goes on to say that all things being equal he’d rather have Paul Ryan (R-WI) as Speaker “because he’s super, super smart.” But it’s too late for that now and Ryan’s not running. So strong endorsement for McCarthy!
As I’ve mentioned a few times, through most of my life I was an avid book collector. Perhaps a hoarder. Regardless, I had a ton of books. Maybe literally. Like many of you I don’t just enjoy reading, I’m into books, the physical artifact of the book. But then maybe half a dozen years ago, I started reading books on a Kindle. Soon after I moved to the Kindle app on an iPad – the Kindle devices themselves I’ve never liked, though I haven’t tried the new ones in years. And something clicked in my brain and I switched – to the point where I have almost a block on reading physical books. This isn’t an ideological or aesthetic choice or decision. To the extent that it is, I’d be on the physical book side. But, as I said, something just clicked for me and I couldn’t go back.
So in our Insight polls I decided to ask this question. How are you reading books these days. Results after the jump.
Ed Kilgore on progressives’ sudden realization there is no such thing as compromising with Second Amendment cultists.
You must read Catherine Thompson’s interview with the Alabama state auditor who has been cavorting with a white supremacist group that thinks the South should secede again. But it’s not a hate group, he declares. “There was no hate in that meeting except for one thing,” Zeigler said. “They hated it when the fried chicken ran out.”
As I wrote on Friday, the craze to refuse to name the names of mass shooters is a grand form of evasion. Unable to address the actual causes of mass gun violence we stumble around for some feel-good nonsense that allows us to pretend we’re taking action. But you can see the same drive expanding in other directions as well: even to the level of blaming the victims themselves.
I don’t think I’ve ever written anything positive about WaPo editorial page editor Fred Hiatt (so maybe I should give this more thought?). That’s mainly because of the page’s relentlessly establishmentarian tone and our radically different ideas about foreign policy. But here’s a column that is important and which you should read. Hiatt gets at a key issue: the biggest victory of the NRA over the last generation isn’t so much making even the slightest and most modest gun control measures a political impossibility. The bigger win is the strategic victory of focusing the ‘debate’ on to such small-bore measures. Let me unpack what I mean by this.
The inside story of that other time Donald Trump almost ran for President.