James Verini has a strong piece in the Washington Monthly with the backstory on how Tom Donahue and his Chamber of Commerce operate. Worth your time.
About six months ago, TPM Alum Andrew Golis decamped from the TPM hive to Yahoo with a brief to start a new 21st century news blog for the online leviathan. They’ve been working at it in the background for several months and hiring up staff. And they launched it yesterday, The Upshot. Give it a look.
When it starts like this.
In 35 years of following debates over nuclear arms control, I have never seen anything quite as shabby, misleading and–let’s not mince words–thoroughly ignorant as Mitt Romney’s attack on the New START treaty in the July 6 Washington Post.
Fred Kaplan in Slate.
Mitt!!!
It was a done deal that there wasn’t going to be an election to fill Robert Byrd’s seat until 2012. But now it’s not so done. West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin (D) just held a press conference and announced that he would try to hold a special election this year — which is what Republicans have been dreaming of and pressing for. Manchin still says he won’t appoint himself to the seat. But he says he may himself run in the special.
Georgia Gov. candidate and former Gov. Roy Barnes laments the stiff toll the Crazy ™ has taken on his state. “It’s hard for industry to take us seriously when the Legislature … passes bills about microchips in the brain, and talks about seceding from the Union.”
Republican masses clamoring for Boehner to phase out Social Security.
You probably heard the story a couple weeks ago that Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) had a guy on his staff who attacked and actually stabbed (with a relatively minor wound, but still …) his girlfriend. But Vitter kept the guy on staff and even, reportedly, assigned him to handle women’s issues in the office. Somewhat as he did with the earlier hooker scandal, Vitter has been out of the public eye and refusing to answer any questions. But today he had to go and file papers to run for reelection and the press was there staked out to get a crack at him and ask him what was up. We’re getting initial reports and apparently he again refused to answer questions other than blurting out that it wasn’t true that he’d assigned the guy to handle women’s issues.
It actually kind of reminds me of this incident from a couple years when the local media was staked out to ask him about the hooker charges and he was in such a hurry to get away that he backed his car up into a sign in the parking lot when trying to make his getaway.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Nathan Deal says when he becomes governor he’s going to use Georgia cops to deport illegal immigrants.
Government documents reviewed by TPM show the federal government dramatically underestimated the effects of an oil spill when signing off on the BP Deepwater Horizon lease. Check out our report.