South Dakota House shelves a bill that, despite the protestations of the author, seemed to classify the killing of abortion providers as justifiable homicide.
I know the labor folks in Wisconsin are — with a bit of poetic license — comparing the situation in Madison to the protests in Cairo. But does Rep. Paul Ryan (R) really want to use that analogy?
The big anti-union bill in Wisconsin was voted through committee late last night. And it will likely come to a vote in the state Senate today. Here’s our latest report.
DARPA, the DOD’s advanced planning and research agency that ‘invented’ the Internet, has plans for travel to the closest stars. As soon as 2111.
Speaker John Boehner is doubling down on “so be it.” At a press conference this morning the Speaker said …”I don’t want anyone to lose their job, whether they’re a federal employee or not. But come on! We’re broke! We’ve got to make tough decisions.”
Democrats in the Wisconsin state Senate have staged a walkout to deny Republicans a quorum with which to take up Gov. Walker’s union-busting bill.
Even better, the Republican Senate president is threatening to send out the state police to round up absent Democratic senators.
So now we have at least one report from local TV in Wisconsin that the state’s Democratic senators have left the state entirely, putting them out of the reach of the state police who have been ordered to round them up so that Republicans have a quorum and can take up Gov. Walker’s union-busting budget bill.
But wait. There’s more.
The Senate majority leader, Scott Fitzgerald, who is ordering the state police to track down the wayward Democratic senators is the son of the head of the state police, Steve Fitzgerald, who in turn was appointed to the top spot by Walker. Steve Fitzgerald is also the father of the state’s speaker of the House, Jeff Fitzgerald.
As for whether the Democratic senators have in fact left the state, the spokesperson for the state Democratic Party tells TPM: “I know the whereabouts of not a single Democratic senator. I do not know what latitude they’re on, or know what longitude they’re on. I assume they’re in this hemisphere, I’ll say that.”
The Democratic congresswoman trying to zero out Pentagon funding for NASCAR sponsorships received a viciously racist and misogynistic fax in response that her office has referred to Capitol Police, TPM has learned.
Rep. Jeff Flake, GOP Senate candidate in Arizona, goes for the big GOP-birther smackdown: “We ought to get off this kick.” Watch.