Federal judge refuses to stop same-sex marriages in Utah, as per the governor’s and acting attorney general’s request.
State Assemblymen says Christie’s latest claim about bridge closure is “false.”
I don’t know whether Chris Christie was personally involved in the boffo Bridge Closure payback earlier this year. And I find it very hard to believe he got his fingerprints on it. But he’s managing so far to play into the hands of his political opponents and all national Democrats in the way he’s handling the story. In fact, he’s doing so so completely that I suspect he’s in a situation in which he’s simply not characterologically capable of behaving otherwise.
Alan Turing helped break the Nazis’ ‘Enigma’ code during World War II and laid the foundations for modern computing and artificial intelligence. But he was later driven to suicide by his criminal conviction and enforced ‘treatment’ for homosexuality.
Today he received a posthumous pardon from Queen Elizabeth II.
TPM Reader XX (initials withheld because would be too easily identifiable) gives us some background on two men currently in the news …
I thought it might be worth pointing out that two folks in the political news over the past couple of weeks were in fact law school classmates in the University of Virginia School of Law Class of 1998: Bill Baroni (who resigned over the GWB traffic controversy) and Robert Shelby (the U.S. District Judge in Utah who struck down Utah’s gay marriage ban this week). I was also classmates with Bill and Bob in the class of 1998, and they could not have been more different.
A car bomb has killed at least 14 people north of Cairo. The military backed government has blamed the attack on the Muslim Brotherhood and branded the group a “terrorist organization.”
We got Ralph Steadman (longtime collaborator of Hunter S. Thompson) to give us his take on Ford. This week’s cover: pic.twitter.com/nu8tyV0eT2
— NOW Magazine (@nowtoronto) December 24, 2013
Ed Kilgore: “This year there are indeed tidings of great joy — or at least intimations of change — that call into question the usual identification of American Christianity with monolithic and triumphant Christian right.”
TPM Reader JJ continues our series on Pope Francis …
I’ve enjoyed your pieces on Pope Francis.
As someone blessed—or cursed—by four years of Jesuit high school education (Bellarmine College Prep in San Jose, CA) and whose father enjoyed the same (St. Ignatius in San Francisco), I would offer that it’s not possible to understand Francis without understanding the Jesuits.