Hong Kong to U.S.: Sorry, your man Snowden has left the country … now tell us more about this hacking you’ve been doing here.
Read the text of the statement from the Hong Kong government.
New poll: Markey over Gomez by 10. I blame Charlie Cook et al for ever pretending this was a close race.
Snowden reveals more detailed information about alleged US cyber-spying targeted at Hong Kong and mainland China. Read More
I’m excited to announce that TPM has hired Amanda Hale as our newest ad seller. Amanda comes to us from The Nation and will be joining us next month working out of our New York office. Personally, I couldn’t be happier that Amanda is joining our team. She’s got an amazing grasp of what’s happening today in the digital news and ad economy – the potential and the challenges – and the critical importance of constant innovation.
Those of you in the business side of publishing will understand why we’re so pumped about this hire. For those of you who come to TPM everyday for the news, you won’t see her byline. But along with the rest of our business and publishing staff, she’ll be helping us bring you the news everyday.
Now that the Senate’s immigration bill is on a glide path to passage, I want to take a minute to draw out the connection I drew between House Republicans’ inability to pass a farm bill and immigration reform in greater detail. And I think the best place to start is with a mild disagreement between Chuck Schumer and the duo of Harry Reid and Dick Durbin over whether it was worthwhile to concede enough to the GOP to garner 70-ish votes for the Senate bill. Read More
You knew it was going to be a special day on Fox when they kicked things off with “take your dog to work day”.
Hunter Walker dug up some vignettes from Paula Deen’s memoir which helps explain some of her current predicament. Deen is candid, after a manner, about her own obliviousness to the Civil Rights Movement that was going on all around her growing up in the 50s and 60s. But she also comes off as a sort of racial Mr Magoo, perhaps not outwardly or knowingly malicious but so antediluvian in her mentality and oblivious to living in the early 21st century that she’s constantly stumbling into cringeworthy or worse racial gaffes that only her handlers save her from at the last minute. Just like her staff told her the black servant plantation wedding idea wouldn’t go over well, they also pulled her back from the brink on the “Sambo Burger.” Then there’s her childhood story about beating a young black girl with a bolo bat, an incident which ended up getting the girl’s mother thrown in jail. Read it here.
Senate Democrats have made the calculation that in exchange for Republican support on a ‘pathway to citizenship’ they’re basically willing to agree to almost any level of wasteful and in many cases needless spending on border security – moat, laser fence, 20 million border guards. But as Sen. Leahy says, it’s basically “a Christmas Wish List for Haliburton.”
Local Savannah TV News anchor comes to Paula Deen’s defense. You’ve got to see this. Watch after the jump … Read More
The highlight of Mitch McConnell’s event at AEI today was his encounter with Norm Ornstein, whom he described as a “good old-fashioned far-left guy” who has been “consistently wrong about everything.” The audience predictably ate it up.
Watch below the fold. Read More