We have a report from Reuters that Syria just shot down a Turkish military jet over Syrian territorial waters. (Remember, Syria and Turkey share a border and are scrunched up against each other in the northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea.) Given where we are right now with what amounts to a Syrian Civil War, this is the kind of incident that easily spins out of control or becomes a tipping point to internationalize the Syrian conflict.
However, everything we’ve heard so far indicates the Turks are taking an extremely low key approach to the incident (probably helped considerably by the fact that the Turkish pilots apparently survived.) Syria too seems equally cautious.
We’ll keep a close eye and report more as we hear it.
We’ve seen two stories over the last 48 hours (one an exclusive) with Republicans in West Virginia and Montana both disparaging the Ryan Plan back in their home states. Read More
Politico has suspended reporter Joseph Williams for saying Mitt Romney seems most comfortable around “white folks.”
While Democrats may hold a serious advantage with the growing Latino vote, there is a large cross-section of Hispanic evangelical voters who desperately want to hear about real immigration reforms from Republican candidates. After Mitt Romney’s speech to Latino leaders yesterday, many evangelical leaders we spoke to remain unconvinced.
With the Washington Post today reporting that with Mitt Romney at the helm, Bain Capital was a pioneer in the age of outsourcing, expect a whole new fusillade of Democratic attacks on the subject.
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977, will soon become the first vessel to push past the edge of our solar system. And 76 year old Ed Stone, the project’s chief scientist, tells TPM it is the mission’s “crowning achievement.”
I’m very proud of this piece.
In early May, well-known Arizona border vigilante and Neo-Nazi JT Ready, armed to the teeth and clad in body armor, walked into his girlfriend’s house and fatally shot her, her daughter, her daughter’s boyfriend, and her daughter’s baby.
It was a gruesome and shocking crime, but to those who had watched Ready’s rise in Arizona over the years, his life ending in a burst of violent rage was not entirely surprising.
And so the question has remained: With Ready so well known to law enforcement across the state, were chances missed to take him off the streets before something like May’s massacre could happen?
Records obtained by TPM through a public records request show that border agents referred multiple cases — as recently as 2011 — to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Phoenix after encountering Ready and his band of border “guards” holding migrants in the desert.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office, records show, declined to take up the cases.
Nick Martin has our story.
Joe Scarborough is sick of you talking yourselves down, America.