AZ Gov. Brewer (R) writes to Obama: “I would also ask you, as overseas operations in Iraq and Afghanistan permit, to consider wider deployment of UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles] along our nation’s southern border. I am aware of how effective these assets have become in Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom, and it seems UAVs operations would be ideal for border security and counter-drug missions.”
The zaniness keeps coming from South Carolina. Overnight, the blog of the GOP political consultant turned blogger turned alleged paramour of the leading Republican candidate for governor published what it claims are a series of texts exchanged in the days before Will Folks went public with his claim/admission that he’d had an affair with state Rep. Nikki Haley.
Haley has strenuously denied Folks’ allegations, but the texts, if accurate, show Haley’s campaign manager scrambling to contain the story in multiple exchanges with Folks himself, game planning how to keep the affair under wraps as reporters from the local alt weekly and the AP poke around.
Late Update: Here’s our report.
Do NOT have written communications with the alleged lover of your candidate.
Our Brian Beutler and Christina Bellantoni go behind the scenes to explain how the DADT deal got done.
It’s been about 12 hours now since those purported text messages were published by Will Folks, and so far no one who was allegedly a party to those texts has come forward to deny their authenticity. In fact, the only ones to come forward so far have confirmed their authenticity.
Wes Donehue, a GOP consultant who did work on the campaign of one of Nikki Haley’s rivals says the texts of his that were published are the real deal. Most significantly, Haley’s campaign manager says his texts are authentic, but maintains his denial that there was an affair between Folks and Haley. More on that tricky position in a moment. Read More
As the ban on gays in the military goes into its death throes, the dead-enders are getting increasingly creative with new scare tactics. We’ve heard in the past that gays are too effeminate or too easily blackmailed or simply too disruptive to serve openly in the Armed Forces. But Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association says that, quite the contrary, gays are simply too brutal and ferocious to be safe to use as soldiers and uses the rather historically iffy claim that Hitler used gay soldiers as his top enforcers because straights couldn’t be sufficiently brutal.
Progressive activists put Dems on notice about watering down Financial Services Reform bill in conference committee.
There’s a rising tide of criticism from Republicans about the president’s management of the Gulf oil spill catastrophe. But it’s not just Republicans. On the one hand, I’ve tended to dismiss the criticism since obviously the system of offshore drilling and regulation isn’t something he or this administration had anything to do with. And the idea that Obama is too close to the oil business seems silly. Wall Street, there’s a decent case for that. And on the Health Insurance industry too, though that’s more complicated. But not the oil industry. I also think there’s a decent argument that as frustrating as it is, it’s the people who actually run these rigs who know best how to stop them and how they run. So it’s like the president can just tell BP to go take a hike and call in the Navy to plug the thing up. Read More
From TPM Reader CW …
I live in Monterey, home of the Navy Post Graduate School and many national Oceanography centers and have been speaking with friends and neighbors in those centers.
There is a near concensus that there is too little sense of urgency. For example, a specialized submarine from MBARI is just now being readied to be dispatched to take water samples that might help determine the size of the underwater plume; why wasn’t that shipped within a week?
From TPM Reader DB, who appears to be from NOLA …
What’s been eating at me has been: 1) Why wasn’t the Obama administration more effective at getting accurate estimates of the oil flow rate?