A senior operations manager at Princeton University has been told to choose between his job and medical marijuana.
“I actually think of the irony as a virtue. This is the age of Colbert. So hacking the super PAC to end the super PAC is a completely viable and obvious strategy that everybody is happy to get behind.” Lawrence Lessig on his plan to raise $700 million for a PAC to end SuperPacs. And for all the freedom to spend without limit bequeathed by the Supreme Court, what about the great majority of billionaires who don’t donate any more to campaigns that your average small town doctor?
Human Rights Watch says ISIS carried out a mass-killing of 770 Iraqi soldiers when it overran Camp Speicher in June.
I just read an article in Haaretz that got me thinking again about a topic I’ve been mulling off and on for the better part of twenty years: namely, is part of the appeal of radical Islam tied the lack of a radical, trans-national revolutionary movement such as existed through the Cold War and in more diffuse respects for decades before that? The article itself is about the fact that a very high proportion of the ‘foreign fighters’ in ISIS and in other rebel groups in Syria/Iraq are ethnic European converts. In other words, not first or second generation naturalized immigrants from the MENA region or Central or South Asia, but white Britons, Germans, French and Belgians who’ve not only converted to Islam but into its most extreme, totalizing variant. In some cases, men (yes, largely men) who have little more than a passing knowledge of the basics of Islamic ritual practice.
From TPM Reader DC …
I enjoyed your post, The Rage to Oppose. Hearing what you had to say about ISIS and how you felt it was a long term trend reminded me what I had felt about the anti-government/libertarian movement in the US starting in the 1990s. Having seen all the anti-communist/anti-Russia paranoia in America in the 1980s, I felt that after the wall in Berlin came down, all the rage that had been directed towards the USSR was simply redirected towards the next big government institution they could find: the US government.
Federal Judge who was the first to uphold a same-sex marriage ban wrote that he worried allowing same sex marriage could lead to incest.
Gazprombank, the financial institution owned by the Russian state gas conglomerate Gazprom, has hired former Senators Trent Lott (R) and John Breaux (D) to lobby/fight deepening sanctions against Russia.
High-strung right-wing blogger who claimed Michael Brown had extensive criminal history crashes and burns as court reveals Brown had no felony record as a juvenile.
Some weird and very big news out of Kansas: Democratic Senate candidate Chad Taylor just dropped out of the race. Why? It seems that even though Taylor was getting within spitting distance of Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), who just fended off a tea party challenger in the primaries, faced a very big spoiler in the race.
Independent candidate Greg Orman, who Democrats clearly hope will be an Angus King-type Independent who would caucus with their kind in the Senate, has been polling ahead of Roberts in the race. Roberts’ campaign manager is already calling the news a “corrupt bargain.”
Did Democrats counter-intuitively just put Kansas in play by dropping out?