Last night I wrote about the amazing story of the paramilitaries from Bulletproof Securities in Scottsdale, Arizona and how they’ve scarred the crap out of the good people of northern Wisconsin. Now, after looking at Bulletproof Securities and their purported private army run out of a real estate office I was sort of suspicious if they have quite the firepower or quite the range of clients they claim to. Read More
It wouldn’t mean that much if you’re average pol had someone working for him who has a white supremacist/pro-confederate/white rights past. Maybe they’ve changed or maybe the pol didn’t know. But when it’s Rand Paul, given that his dad has basically always been surrounded by these types of people, it’s a bit different.
Here’s a fascinating little story. There’s been a battle royale up in Wisconsin over an effort to establish a big iron mining operation near Lake Superior, to be owned and operated by a company called Gogebic Taconite. The Republican legislature approved the mine in March over environmentalists’ objections. Some protests have been staged since the operation got started. But people started to get freaked out over the weekend when the company brought in what the Wisconsin State Journal calls “masked security guards who are toting semi-automatic rifles and wearing camouflaged uniforms.” Read More
Like many of you I’ve been using Twitter, among other sources, to follow and try to make sense of the on-going situation in Egypt. And yesterday I saw a tweet from a very knowledgable observer of Egyptian politics and culture (an Egyptian national living in Egypt, to be clear) write something that, quite simply, showed a really weak grasp of US politics. It made me realize once again how difficult it is for the vast majority of us to make sense at any deep level of what’s happening in a country like Egypt. And by ‘we’ in this case I think means me and virtually everyone else stateside who hasn’t either spent a good deal of time in Egypt or studied the country or at least the Arab Middle East in some depth. Read More
With the original IRS ‘scandal’ crumbling on every front, GOP Rep. Mike Kelly (PA) tries to revive it by pointing out that he got audited.
Great piece. Now that the House GOP has decided to kill immigration reform, they have to come up with an excuse why they did it to avoid all the blame.
If Jupiter was as close to Earth as the moon, what would it look like in the evening sky? Take a look.
Not everyone agrees. TPM Reader SR offers his own perspective on the Snowden Prism and sub-prisms …
I haven’t detected the supposed excessive “snarkiness” of your coverage of Snowden others apparently have, at least, it hasn’t been any snarkier than the coverage of many other figures, including Obama. And certainly not by comparison to my comments about him.
But the thing that’s driving a lot of my snark is the pervasive left wing truthiness that has followed the man on his flight.
Another longtime TPM Reader, DG, questions the tone of my writing on Snowden …
I am a long time reader of TPM, an early joiner to TPM Prime, and a huge admirer of your work and TPM Media, which I recommend to all my friends for its excellent coverage and analysis of American politics. When I returned from a recent family vacation in Yosemite I used the Livewire to catch up on news. It’s the first site I read every day after the daily paper and my go to for short breaks in between work.
I am sure I am not the first long-time reader and fan to make note of my displeasure with TPM’s coverage of the Snowden case. I agree that to say “you have a problem with Snowden because he’s a punk” is a caricature of your position, and I think you’ve written quite eloquently about Snowden in the context of your belief in the necessity of military secrecy. Still, I get why JO thought to describe your position that way – there’s a snarkyness in the editorial tone to TPM that conveys certain disgust with the person beyond a disagreement over the efficacy of his actions and the extent to which we should or should not tolerate government secrecy. Personally, I find the mocking tone towards Snowden off-putting. And I write that as someone who is not a huge fan of the man himself – the kind of knee-jerk libertarianism he seems to represent does not appeal to me.