Okay, first the overview.
There’s a mystery phone call emerging at the center of the Rob Ford scandal and shortly after that phone call Mayor Rob Ford’s ‘associate’ / bodyguard / driver / goon Sandro Lisi tells someone to cough up the crack video or “you’re fucking dead and everyone on your block is dead.” To another gentleman in the local drug commerce community, Lisi predicted: “Tell all his boys that it’s going to get worse and worse, all summer, until that phone gets back and that the whole place is going to get lit up.”
New jobs report just out: economy added 192,000 jobs; unemployment steady at 6.7%; upward revisions of January and February.
Theda Skocpol reminds us that Republicans and folks on the left fought Social Security tooth and nail for years, amidst delays and worries. Opponents on the right didn’t accept the program’s legitimacy for 20 years.
For months we’ve been getting various different metrics purporting to show the success or failure of Obamacare. There are a bunch of different numbers, different reporting methods by state, an orchard of apples and oranges. And behind all these uncertainties you have the question of how many of the people who’ve gotten coverage under some flavor of Obamacare are actually newly covered – as opposed to people who simply traded one kind of insurance for another. The 7.1 million private sector sign ups number got all the attention this week. But getting less attention have been a series of new reports using distinct, though internally consistent approaching to quantifying just how many more people have coverage today than did before Obamacare.
Nothing like a candidate running for former Rep. Trey Radel’s (R-FL) seat skipping out on a vote at the statehouse because she was scheduled to go to a barbecue fundraiser with Sarah Palin. Weird thing is, her “yes” vote was still recorded.
A veteran comments on the media coverage of the Fort Hood shooting: “But in an era where less than one percent of Americans serve in the armed forces, our collective image of ‘the veteran’ doesn’t come from empirical data. Rather, for most Americans who don’t know a combat vet, this image comes from pop culture. And pop culture has been especially irresponsible in its portrayal of veterans.”
TPM Reader JL has some thoughts on the ‘brittle grip.’ This is a point I’ve given a good deal of thought to this point but more from the perspective of what the whipsaw effect of looking into the financial abyss and then getting all your money back and more. But JL looks at 2008 and Randian ideology …
Josh, love the Brittle Grip stuff. You’re definitely getting at something really important and the way Roberts is going, it’s getting more important, not less.
I just have one small thing to add. Maybe just another lens—one among many–through which to view all of this.
I’ve developed a rule of thumb over the last four or five years, maybe dating back to the Santelli rant that ignited the tea party. Maybe it was a bit before that, maybe a bit after. In any case, the rule of thumb is this: when it comes to the outer fringes of conservative thought–or at least what would have been outer fringes ten, twenty years ago, and now looks more like orthodoxy–never underestimate the influence of Ayn Rand. And that influence seems to run particularly deep on Wall Street and maybe even deeper in places like Greenwich and Menlo Park that are home to so many in the 0.01%.
Medal of Honor winner shuts down John Lott, the notorious ethically-challenged ‘scholar’ who argues that arming everybody makes everyone more safe. Now he wants everyone on military bases to carry weapons. Watch.
Daniel Strauss has a good roundup of the conservative outrage over Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich resigning after criticism for his $1,000 donation to the anti-LGBT Proposition 8 campaign in California. Conservatives seem outraged that you can lose your job over your political views. They apparently are unaware of the irony that they oppose legislation that would protect your right to a job if you are actually are gay or transgender.