The latest from Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Nuremberg): Obama will make “slaves” of us all.
Sarah Palin jumps on the “Mark Begich should resign because Bush DOJ tainted his election by convicting Ted Stevens of corruption” bandwagon.
Obama, speaking in France on climate change: “We all know that time is running out. America must do more, Europe must do more.” That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
Iowa Supreme Court overturns state law limiting marriage to man and woman.
Sometimes, I have to confess, it’s just a pleasure to hear President Obama speak at news conferences abroad. Here’s video of Obama fielding a question yesterday in London about America’s standing in the world. The video has the question and answer in its entirety. But the part that really caught my ear as we were listening yesterday in the office starts at about 2:45 in where he discusses the comparison to Bretton Woods.
Here’s a link to the transcript of the entire news conference.
Ezra Klein, on Evan Bayh’s unsteady ideological course (including cool graph).
I’m not much of a vacationing type. But I’ve been going pretty much non-stop since late 2007 without a day off. So I’ll be away next week, taking some downtime with my family. Of course, I’m just one of a dozen people running this site. So TPM will be covering the news as usual. Just I won’t be here. I’ll be back in a week, refreshed I hope, and ready to see if there’s any news going on to cover.
A wistful TPM Reader RC checks in …
Something triggered a memory that made me wistful for the early days of the bailout. Remember “tranches”.
Sometimes a single word comes to represent an era, but rarely does a word so perfectly signify a single month, while that month completely circumscribes the usefulness of the word. For a brief moment, everyone was discussing tranches, what they were, whether they were edible, who was getting them and where they might turn up next. You’d drop tranche in a conversation just to show you knew what was happening – “I’m not giving Johnnie his allowance all at once. Instead, he’s getting the first tranche Wednesday.”
A month later, tranches were gone. “Tranche” didn’t even survive long enough to see the second tranche. Now, tranche is like “Ograbme” or “the XYZ Affair”, so distant that most people wouldn’t even know you were making a historical reference, let alone knowing the thing you were referring to. But damn, tranche was big for a few weeks.
Well, my investment banker friends had mentioned tranches to me here and there over the years. But yeah, brings back memories.