Weiner and Spitzer topping the polls for top New York City races.
Canadian transport minister Steven Fletcher was among those ousted by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in today’s big cabinet shakeup:
I am Conservative. I am a traditionalist. I wish I left Cabinet in the traditional way— with a sex scandal! #cabinetshuffle #cndpoli
— Steven Fletcher (@stevenjfletcher) July 15, 2013
On the merits, I hope the DOJ decides not to get involved in the Zimmerman case. But if it did, pretty much guaranteed we’d have the biggest conspiracy theory and white panic freakout in history.
If you’re having a party out in backyard and everyone’s kinda drunk, probably not the best time to show off your cool new gun. Especially if it’s loaded.
Over the last couple months we’ve seen an increasing desire – centered on the House GOP – to kill immigration reform with a growing belief that Republicans can continue to win elections simply by doubling down on white voters. In other words, the supposed ‘lesson’ of the 2012 election is rapidly being forgotten. Let’s remember, for all the growth in minority population numbers, whites still make up the overwhelming majority of Americans, and especially American voters. And if Republicans can expand their share of the white vote even as the overall white vote declines, perhaps it’s doable? Read More
The busiest abortion clinic in Virginia has been forced to close because of stringent new state regulations.
And this is likely coming to red and reddish states across the country.
Why Texas Republicans aren’t trusted to protect minority voting rights.
As immigration reform looks set to die a slow death in the House, TPM Reader JS looks to history to try to square the circle …
So as the wheels look like they’ve almost come off of immigration reform, and the 40 year urban-rural farm bill detente seems to have collapsed, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Compromise of 1850.
This is shaping up as a week of reckoning in the Senate. Either Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans relent and allow the president to exercise his power to appoint people to positions at the NLRB and CFPB so that they can function as Congress intended, or Harry Reid and Senate Democrats finally push the nuclear button on filibuster reform.
Important to keep in mind that filibuster reform would be a result of this reckoning, but not precisely the point of it. Filibuster reform is the tool Democrats are waving about — the threat of it, to be exact — but the narrow objective is to get the NLRB and CFPB up and running. If Democrats can achieve that short of changing Senate filibuster rules, they would leap at the chance. For that reason, I suspect we’ll see some kind of deal struck between Reid and McConnell, but it’s hard to conceive of a deal in which both sides are truly happy with the result. Someone is bound to lose here.
Glenn Greenwald says the documents Edward Snowden has not released contain the ‘blueprints’ for the entirety of the NSA’s signals intelligence and data collection operations – information that “would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it.”