This disaster of a “Fact Check” by the Associated Press is almost a testament to the broad accuracy of Bill Clinton’s speech last night.
Not that Clinton didn’t spin facts in Obama’s favor or assert things that deserve real scrutiny — he did. But when you’re forced to fill a content gap with non-sequiturs, beltway bromides about partisanship, or, say, reminding readers that the speaker once lied about extramarital fellatio — yes, really — it suggests you don’t have a lot of material to work with. Read More
At the point in the movie thriller when they break into the offices of a Big 4 accounting firm and steal the tax returns of the presidential nominee is when I roll my eyes, so I’m still assuming this is an elaborate hoax. But …
“This convention is done. This will be the moment that probably re-elected Barack Obama.” — Top Republican strategist and CNN yacker Alex Castellanos just after Clinton’s speech.
10:34 PM: Still weird to me, as a Clinton diehard from the 90s, how suddenly Bill is not only universally revered among Democrats. But even Republicans fall over themselves apparently to profess his awesomeness, if only to trash his would be successor.
10:37 PM: Still a mystery to me why Republicans spent the last month building Bill up when he’s going to slip them the shiv like no one else.
10:44 PM: “It turns out advancing opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics, because of poverty and ignorance restrict growth.”
10:53 PM: Brings it back to the key question: Are you better off?
10:53 PM: Folks with a hard copy of the speech tell me it bears little resemblance to what Clinton’s actually saying.
10:56 PM: “I believe it. With all my heart, I believe it.”
10:57 PM: Hard for me even to fathom how much Clinton is relishing this. Like a caged animal let back out for a brief run in the wild.
11:10 PM: Shorter Bill Clinton: W’w’wait! There’s more!
11:11 PM: Shorter Bill Clinton: Hey, I got a million of these!
11:12 PM: This is excellent news for Mark Halperin!
11:18 PM: This is starting to remind me of when my Daddy taught me to gut and clean fish. I think we’re at scraping off the scales now.
11:22 PM: Okay, I think we’re rising to the finish here. But how can you know?
11:23 PM: Wow, like every great Bill Clinton speech, incredibly long but incredibly good. At post-1988.
Here’s the lineup for this evening at the DNCC. You can watch along with us here.
This has been bubbling up in tech blog circles much of the day: claims by unknown persons on a website popular with hackers that they broke into an office of PricewaterhouseCoopers in Franklin, Tenn., accessed a computer, and stole the tax returns of Mitt and Ann Romney. It’s a fantastical claim, made all the more so by the accompanying extortion demand: pay us $1 million not to release them.
But here’s the thing.
One of the posts going around claimed that thumbdrives containing the tax returns were delivered to the local county offices of the Republican and Democratic parties in Franklin. Both offices have now confirmed receiving packages containing thumbdrives in recent days.
Today the Secret Service visited both offices and took the thumbdrives and confirmed to TPM that they are investigating. Eric Lach pieces it all together.
Secret Service looking into alleged Romney tax return blackmail attempt.