I’m a heavy Facebook user in my personal life, with friends and family, as I’m sure many of you are too. It’s also a very key part of our distribution and reader recruitment strategy at TPM. I say that to be clear that we and I are deeply invested in the Facebook ecosystem. But one of things I find fascinating about Facebook’s efforts to assimilate much of the news publishing industry is the mix of genuine newness and benign unfamiliarity with the business and trade practices of journalism on the one hand combined with a realistically confident assumption whatever they don’t figure out at first doesn’t really matter all that much because they’re still Facebook and you have to do what we want you to do.
Kilgore: No, the Cameron victory in the UK really doesn’t have many lessons for the US or the 2016 election.
Jeb Bush went on Hannity yesterday afternoon to try to recover the Iraq answer from the day before. It wasn’t pretty. In case you missed it, here’s what happened.
How three Poli Sci profs ridiculous experiment broke Montana law and created headaches for researchers probably forever.
You’ll remember back in the fall we reported on three political scientists from Stanford and Dartmouth who stumbled and bumbled their way into all kinds of controversy in Montana with a research project pegged to state Supreme Court elections. Now the state’s commissioner of political practices has released his report on the fiasco, and found that Stanford and Dartmouth are on the hook for violating state elections laws. Here’s our complete report on his decision, including the backstory on the research project for those who missed this back in the fall.
Chris Christie’s wife, Mary Pat: Yeah, there’s a lot less enthusiasm for Chris running for President.
Jeb: Answering that Iraq question would be a “disservice” to the troops.
We’ve got some fascinating polling data looking at the GOP primary race through the prism of the federal military takeover of Texas, separating out “takeover” voters (who believe the federal government is trying to take over Texas) and “squishes” (who are taking the Pentagon’s word for it that the takeover isn’t happening). Among “Takeover” voters the top choice is Scott Walker. For “Squishes”, it’s Jeb Bush.
The two candidates with the highest percentage of takeover voters are Rick Perry (76%) and Ted Cruz (56%). That’s the percentage of their supporters who are “takeover” voters.
Governor Bush has a fun moment in Reno …
“Your brother created ISIS,” the young woman told Jeb Bush. And with that, Ivy Ziedrich, a 19-year-old college student, created the kind of confrontational moment here on Wednesday morning that presidential candidates dread.
And now Rubio says he wouldn’t have invaded Iraq, knowing what we know now.
Even though he said the opposite two months ago.