Two points Secretary Clinton is making here. One pretty clearly, another more subtly. The first is that the Benghazi attack was nothing new under the sun. These tragic incidents happen all the time. In recent decades there have been attacks on US diplomatic facilities and US diplomats where the death tolls were vastly higher. Diplomats and what they do are most vital precisely in the least stable settings, dangerous places where people and yes diplomats get killed.
We’re all set for the Benghazi committee clown show today. Watch it with us! Or we’ll watch it so you don’t have to and we’ll just bring you the highlights and details.
The latest from committee this morning is that they’ve got some new, new stuff that’s gonna change everything.
The AP got a hold of self-described “soldier of Christ” Kim Davis’s emails during the period earlier this fall when she was fighting a holy war on behalf of heterosexual intercourse. And they’re a doozy.
TPM Reader PK wonders if we’ve reached effective multi-party government on Capitol Hill …
I think more attention should be given to the repeated and consistent claim made by members of the “Freedom Caucus” that they can’t make a deal with Ryan unless 80% of their membership (of 40-odd) agree to it. I haven’t been counting, but it seems to me that at least nine of them have already indicated that they won’t agree to Ryan’s terms, which means that the Ryan speakership is already dead in the water, no?
So we have the Freedom Caucus’ answer to Paul Ryan. They’ll support his bid, but not his terms. Around 70% of members of the group voted to support him in a Caucus meeting. But apparently their rules require 80% support for an official Caucus endorsement. But the key point is its endorsement without agreeing to Ryan’s terms. And notably, Ryan would have to climb down some more since he made an actual endorsement a condition.
It’s a pretty rough moment when the German government has to correct the Prime Minister of Israel about German responsibility for the Holocaust.
Did the Ryan boom last less than 24 hours? Or was the whole thing just more establishment delusion? I guess we don’t know their final answer yet. But the tone coming out of the ‘Freedom Caucus’ seems to tell the story clear enough. Caucus co-founder Matt Salmon compared Ryan’s demands for family time to “interviewing a maid for a job and she says, ‘I don’t clean windows, I don’t do floors, I don’t do beds, these are the hours I’ll work.”
The House Freedom Caucus just adjourned its meeting and declared that it will not endorse Paul Ryan for speaker or accede to his conditions for an endorsement, but that a super-majority of members of the Freedom Caucus do support him for speaker, Tierney Sneed reports from the Hill.
In purely numerical terms, that appears to give Ryan enough votes to secure the speakership in a vote of the full House, but not on the terms he laid out. This looks like an effort to put the ball back in Ryan’s court. The question at this moment: Will he take it and go home?
Josh Marshall is currently in the Hive taking questions from Prime members, join us here.
When the White House announced that Joe Biden would be making an announcement in the Rose Garden with the President at his side it was pretty clear Biden was a no. The only other possibility was that Obama had moved to a level of Not Giving a F*ck mode beyond anything we’ve seen before. Obama: Okay, folks, I’ve watched both these two work on the great issues of our time. And you want Joe. Trust me. Joe’s the guy.
No, that didn’t happen.