Two police officers were fatally shot in Hattiesburg, Mississippi last night when a speeding traffic stop erupted in gunfire. A bystander who came upon the officers said one asked “… ‘Am I dying? I know I’m dying. Just hand me my walkie-talkie.'”
There is a great deal to be gleaned from last week’s UK election: an unexpected and highly consequential victory for the Tories, a major setback for post-Blairite Labour and a real question about whether Labour can manage to remain a potential majority party without its base in Scotland. For that matter, despite the failed independence referendum vote, is there a future for the United Kingdom? All that aside I wanted to note one eye-popping result that you may not have heard about if you’re only reading the top headlines.
With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now settled down to a new coalition government – his fourth – with what is literally the slenderest coalition possible, there’s a raft of stories like this one in the Israeli press about how Netanyahu has gone from a shattering resurgence to ignominy and helplessness in less than two months. It is, as I put it a couple days ago, a government already at war with itself.
A heretofore gay friendly town in Arkansas, best known for being the site of the so-called “Christ of the Ozarks” statue is being roiled by an anti-discrimination backlash.
With the surprising upset victory of David Cameron’s Tory party in the UK last week, David Frum wrote this article noting how conservative parties in the rest of the Anglosphere, specifically the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are all riding high while US Republicans, while doing nicely at the congressional level still seem stuck at the presidential level, preoccupied with a series of concerns that seem to separate them from not only Democrats but the bulk of independent swing voters. The GOP could definitely win the 2016 election. But if they do, it will probably be much more about the difficulty any party has securing a third term in the White House than a real shift in the dynamics which have been in play in the last two election cycles, or arguably the last six.
Glenn Beck hints he may be eliminated like earlier leaders such as Jesus, Gandhi, and King.
When I was a little kid in the mid-70s hitchhiking was part of the normal landscape of driving, neither odd nor unexpected or worrisome. By the time I was a young adolescent in the early-mid-80s, hitchhiking was something for people who were either desperate or reckless or looking for someone to kill. And I should be clear that I certainly wouldn’t let and would do everything I could to prevent my own sons from doing it when they get older. In the third part of our four part series on the end of the open road we look at how and why hitchhiking died.
Megyn Kelly: “Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the [Iraq] invasion?”
Jeb Bush: “I would have.”
I would have totally expected Jeb to back W. on Iraq if the question were framed as “Knowing what we knew then …” But knowing what we know now? That gives him all kinds of outs. But Jeb didn’t take them.
Read the rest here.
The Jade Helm conspiracy theory only took off when Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that he was concerned about a takeover too and ordered the State Guard to monitor military activities to be on the look out for signs of a takeover. And now he’s doubling down. It’s Obama’s fault, he says, that everybody is so convinced the military is plotting to takeover Texas.