Scott Walker is onboard with a new 20-week abortion ban for Wisconsin. No exceptions for rape or incest.
Scott Walker won three straight elections in four years. But the budgetary mess he created is now sinking his presidential ambitions.
Hulu pulls episodes of Duggar mass-kid reality show as scandal spreads.
I’m gonna need you to help me with some extra WTFs here. But former Speaker Denny Hastert has been indicted on charges of ‘structuring’ a cash withdrawal of almost $1 million and lying about it to the FBI.
It’s going to be quite the irony if Hastert is the member of that leadership team who ends up doing time.
It was quite a shock to hear that former Speaker Denny Hastert had been indicted under a law used to prevent people from concealing movements of major amounts of cash. So what could it possibly be about and why was Hastert trying to conceal the movement of roughly $1 million in cash.
We now have the indictment and the charges stem from Hastert’s efforts to pay off an unnamed individual to conceal “past misconduct by defendant against [the individual] that had occurred years earlier.”
Brendan James wrote up this column by Rich Lowry in Politico in which Lowry says that to protestors “some black lives really don’t matter.” In part, this is no more than a more biting version of the old saw of ‘why don’t blacks get more upset about black on black crime?.’ – a high-toned form of concern trolling.
I’m not interested in digging into the outrage tug of war over this. But there’s a pretty elemental blindspot to all these arguments.
Let’s back up first for some context.
A Pam Geller acolyte named Jon Ritzheimer is holding a ‘draw muhammad’ contest outside the Arizona mosque attended by the two men who tried to shoot up Pam Geller’s event in Garland, Texas. Anderson Cooper had a talk with him last night. Watch.
Having watched many of these stories unfold in real time, I left work yesterday with a sense of foreboding about the late-breaking Hastert story – something like seeing a fuse already lit and waiting for a bomb to explode. And yet, to my great surprise, we’re into the next day and no news organization appears to have uncovered, at least in a publishable form, what happened.
TPM Reader MM responds to my piece yesterday on the DNC’s apparent christening of Bernie Sanders as Hillary’s official opposition …
The big DNC hug for Bernie is interesting. I think there’s more to it than simply everyone knowing how the story ends.
Remember a month or so back when those two gay hoteliers from New York got in a heap of trouble for hosting the extremely anti-gay rights Ted Cruz at a dinner/fundraiser at their luxe New York apartment? But, wait, no it wasn’t a fundraiser!
Well, yes it was. The two guys, Ian Reisner and Mati Weiderpass were just getting some good press this weekend in the Times … finally … now portrayed as well-meaning but bumbling political neophytes who’d stumbled into the Cruz mess. But now it comes out, after the fairly glowing weekend article and repeated denials, that Ian Reisner actually did give a max-out contribution to Cruz right when the dinner took place.