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Late Update – 7:46 PM: Now just 40 to go!
The Republican party Super PAC tasked with attacking Hillary Clinton is out with a new ad which it will show tonight during the CNN debate. It features video images of Ambassador Chris Stevens’ grave. As I noted last week, Kevin McCarthy had to go because he endangered a primary RNC asset – exploiting the deaths of these four Americans for political mileage.
Fascinating look at how Haiti became a critical wedge issue in the 1932 presidential election, allowing Republicans to keep African-American votes for FDR remarkably low. The story goes back to the US occupation of Haiti almost a century ago and how FDR, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, actually wrote the new Haitian constitution himself. Yes, FDR wrote the Haitian constitution! That fact and the US occupation itself came back to haunt him in 1932. Check it out – amazing chapter of 20th century history I was totally unaware of.
Tennessee legislature considering bill to shield Tennessee students from Islamic ‘indoctrination’.
Please join us for a discussion with J. Dana Stuster, a counterterrorism expert and journalist, who will be joining us in the Hive at 2 PM Eastern (sub req). Dana is a policy analyst at the National Security Network, and he’s written about the Middle East for publications including The Atlantic, Foreign Policy and Defense One.
Alabama Governor Bentley (R) floating plan to reopen DMVs in Alabama’s ‘black belt’ after voting rights outcry.
As Hillary Clinton gets ready for the first Democratic nomination debate tonight and testimony before the ‘Benghazi Committee’ later this month, the tables are suddenly dramatically turned. Ever since ‘Benghazi’ got pulled into the maelstrom of the House GOP leadership debacle with former-future Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ill-considered frankness about the political priorities of the ‘Benghazi’ ‘investigation’, everything’s changed. There are calls for the committee to be disbanded. Everyone associated with it is on the defensive. And now suddenly there’s a former committee investigator suing over wrongful termination because he claims he refused to focus the entire investigation on Hillary Clinton.
The most notable change is the attitude of the Beltway press corps. After a year of peddling selectively leaked transcripts and hyperventilating over and repeating tendentious readings of unexceptional process stories, suddenly everyone is asking whether it could possibly be true that this was just a political witch hunt all along.
Whenever we have a spate of news on a highly polarized issue, I usually get at least one lengthy email from a reader who seems to confound the accustomed partisan and ideological alignments behind the issue. (Remember TPM Reader LC, the liberal cop from the greater New York metro region during the height of the Ferguson protests). This time it’s guns and TPM Reader JA, self-identified ‘liberal gun nerd’ from Austin, Texas. As preface, as I told JA privately via email, I disagree with his core premise, which is that gun control advocates are missing or passing up lots of opportunities for constructive compromise with responsible gun owners. As I noted, in my posts last week I think the last two decades have shown this is demonstrably not true.
Militia members look to stop takeover by white supremacist.
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