So what did Gregory Giusti have to do to get arrested for threatening Speaker Nancy Pelosi? A fair amount, it seems. At least 48 harassing phone calls over a seven week period. Many of them pretty not nice.
In one case, according to the criminal complaint released today, Giusti got Pelosi herself on the phone at her home and “used extremely vulgar and crude language and threatened her, stating ‘when you go back to California you won’t have a home to go back to’.” Justin Elliott has all the new details released this afternoon.
Jonathan Chait, on the “experts” who give anti-Enlightenment conservatives a patina of intellectual legitimacy: “You have a whole ideological movement that, to a substantial degree, relies upon the pseudo-expertise of cranks and hacks.”
The major speakers at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans — Mary Matalin, Liz Cheney, J.C. Watts, and Newt Gingrich — managed to get through the opening day of the convention yesterday without any mention of Hurricane Katrina.
Obama weighs in on Republicans’ struggles this week to throw off the burden of slavery.
The Michigan Democrat who became better known as the pro-life pivot point in the health care reform debate, will call it quits, according to multiple news outlets.
Two wildly disparate but in their own ways very significant passings: Anatoly Dobrynin, perrenial Soviet ambassador at 90; and Malcolm McLaren, true creator of the Sex Pistols and much of the British punk movement, at 64.
Most people who make serious threats against the lives of lawmakers turn out to look a lot like people who’d make serious threats against the lives of lawmakers.
Presumably another casualty of the Health Care Reform wars, Rep. Stupak to announce retirement.
Newt Gingrich, Liz Cheney and all the gang are whipping up the crazy in New Orleans. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
Even in a normal year, Dems would have been hard-pressed to hold on to Bart Stupak’s fairly conservative district. This year it’ll be a tall proposition.