How is social media transforming coverage of political campaigns? How has the Internet killed the news cycle? A few weeks ago I was on a panel where I discussed these issues with NBC News Vivian Schiller and GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram. See the video after the jump and let me know what you think. Read More
The White House announced this evening that Commerce Secretary John Bryson is taking a “medical leave of absence from his position as Commerce Secretary as he undergoes tests and evaluations.”
Not that weird, says TPM Reader KM:
I just wanted to put in my $0.02 on this topic, because it sounds like there’s a lot of confusion (no pun intended). Nothing in any of the statements put out so far is at all inconsistent with Bryson having had a seizure, and I speak as someone who’s had a lot of them.
I think people tend to only think of seizures as the convulsive grand mal (tonic-clonic) type, or sometimes petit mal (blacking out), which is not at all true. There is a huge range of different things that can happen when your brain screws up.
The Justice Department warns Florida that is is preparing to file a lawsuit to stop the state’s purge of voter rolls.
The Commerce Department confirms that Secretary John Bryson had a seizure, but can’t or won’t say what connection the seizure had to the alleged hit and run incident Saturday. The White House, obviously wanting to distance itself, is referring questions to the Commerce Department.
A Commerce official tells AP that Bryson, who was cited for felony hit and run, has only a “limited recall of the events.” The official also says that Bryson has no history of seizures. So we’re left with a 68-year-old man having his first seizure — apparently though still not certainly while driving — spending Saturday night in the hospital for observation, then jetting from California to DC for work on Monday.
Stay tuned.
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Remember the gay soldier booed at that GOP debate last year? Now he’s campaigning against DOMA. “It literally takes away rights from soldiers. For me not to be able to go home and bury him is crazy,” says Army Captain Stephen Hill.
People say there’s no legislative progress on climate change. But legislators in multiple states are now pushing laws to ban discussion of rising sea levels.
Josh Barro, Matt Yglesias and others have teed up this post to bat around various theories explaining why Democrats seem so much more concerned with getting Republicans to vote for higher tax revenues than with simply achieving higher revenues by doing nothing — allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire and then fixing tax code retroactively.
In one sense I think the question’s easy to answer. But I also think it’s a surface manifestation of a deeper fight between the parties, and that the real answer’s about much, much more than near-term politics. Read More
In today’s episode of The Set-Up, I look at the fate of public sector unions coming out of last Tuesday’s recall results in Wisconsin.