Could this be the end? Probably not. But maybe. The word out of Toronto tonight is that embattled, poll-rising crackhead Mayor Rob Ford is going to make a special “announcement” tomorrow on his weekly radio program which he does with his brother. In case you’re keeping score at home, remember, that’s Doug Ford, who sits on the City Council and was apparently was the big drug dealer in the Ford’s home town when they were growing up. Read More
A great interview with Lou Reed, from about 15 years ago, considerably mellowed from his early years. After the jump. Read More
In his much-ballyhooed announcement on today’s radio show, Mayor Rob Ford says he’s not resigning (aka, too legit to quit), says he’s sorry for mistakes, will “ride out the storm”, “continue fighting for the little guy…” Says he needs to “slow down” on his drinking.
If the Mayor Ford story weren’t crazy enough (it took a big leap forward today on the Ford brothers weekly radio show), there’s something else getting discussed fairly feverishly among Toronto reporters. That’s the existence of a second video.
We know from last week’s police press conference that the police have more that one video in their custody. So there is more than the crack video. That is a fact, to the extent we really know anything in this cartoon. About what’s on it, nothing’s publicly known or confirmed.
Nobody has been willing to say publicly yet what is suspected to be on it. But here’s one of Toronto’s top columnists hinting today that it could dwarf everything else to date.
A TPM special investigative report on the extreme lengths health insurers across the country are going to hold on to their existing customers and deny them the benefits of Obamacare. Read it here.
Speaker Boehner comes out against the ENDA workplace anti-discrimination law, effectively nixing any chance it will get a vote in the House this year or become law before 2015.
By now you’ve probably seen our big piece on Insurance Companies hiding savings and benefits from Obamacare from their customers, sometimes going so far as to hard-sell them on new policies that are actually more expensive than the same policies the same carriers are offering in the exchanges.
But now we want to go deeper.
Along the lines of the “Yes, You’re Probably Racist” twitter feed (or is it a website?), I think we need a Primer for Halloween for people who seem developmentally challenged in entering the 21st century. So, is it cool to dress up for Halloween in black face? No, not cool. Is it cool to dress your child up as a member of the Ku Klux Klan? No, that’s not cool anymore. Not sure when it was cool.
So in case you were wondering, here’s how the last desperate day of Joe Lhota’s campaign went in our Mayor’s race here in NYC
The truly comical last day of the Lhota campaign …. pic.twitter.com/nqURBvs29D
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 4, 2013
It’s an example of some of the new directions we’re going at TPM, doubling down on but also branching out from our core focus on high-speed, iterative coverage of politics.
This piece “Why Do Poor People ‘Waste’ Money on Luxury Goods?” by Tressie McMillan Cottom, which we published on Friday, has been one of the most popular pieces on TPM in all of 2013. I really recommend it to you.