Here’s first full account of just what happened this afternoon at the White House and Capitol Hill.
We still don’t know really anything about what led Miriam Carey on that string of actions that led to her death yesterday afternoon near the US Capitol. Given an apparent history of mental illness, some sort of severe psychiatric disturbance seems the most plausible scenario. (Carey’s mother says her daughter was suffering from post-partum depression. NBC this morning reports that Carey had begun to suspect she was under government surveillance and that President Obama was stalking her.) But I wanted to address a number of questions we’ve gotten via email and twitter why the police had to use deadly force since she was apparently unarmed.
VP Biden called that Park Ranger who was berated by GOP Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX) and forced to apologize for the government shutdown.
Republicans are seizing on an anonymous quote from a senior administration official quoted in the Journal saying the White House is winning the shutdown fight and they don’t feel pressure to cave since the GOP is losing. Speaker Boehner has seized on this and with high outrage told a morning press conference “This Isn’t Some Damn Game!”
As I write in a piece I’m publishing later today, this is all of a piece with 95, 96, 98, 2011 and more.
Can the Democrats roll Boehner but getting a government-opening CR to the floor through a ‘discharge petition’? They think it’s time to try. Here’s our story.
I’m going to be keeping a tally of the number of House GOP moderates who’s pledged to support a discharge petition. We’ve tabulated, re-tabulated and checked the number several times. So far the official tally is: zero.
Well, not precisely. But New Gingrich tells TPM he’s so upset about the shutdown of the “panda cam” at the National Zoo that he’s willing to “pay the cost of the panda cam’s electricity” personally to get the sucker back online.
I guess you’ve got to be really, really smart to say things this stupid. Ted Cruz says that his side has already compromised. They wanted to fully repeal Obamacare but they compromised and agreed only to demand that it be defunded.
Very odd story breaking down in Houston. Federal law enforcement from the city’s Joint Terrorism Task Force swooped into an upscale Houston neighborhood this afternoon after someone supposedly ordered chemicals of the sort you’d use “to make some sort of gas … like tear gas or nerve gas,” according to law enforcement officials quoted by the Houston Chronicle.