Lunch Buffet

by Ed Kilgore
Politics

It’s the penultimate Lunch Buffet, and I’ve loaded the chafing dishes will some good stuff. Get you one a them biscuits! Snag you some chicken! Don’t miss the cheese grits! Try the okra! And oh yeah, there’s this:

* Conservatives cheer as United Health mulls dropping out of ACA exchanges.

* TNR’s Jamil Smith thinks Donald Trump is really beginning to make it hard to avoid applying the “F” word to him. That seems unfair; his supporters haven’t designed uniforms yet!

* Martin O’Malley getting pretty close to running out of dough; whole campaign being moved to Iowa.

* Brennan Center refutes the whole idea of a 2015 “crime wave.” Murders up in some cities, but for the most part not outside the normal year-to-year variance.

* WaPo compiles list of all 336,000 donors to anyone or anything named Clinton going back to 1974.

And in non-political news:

* 1111-carat diamond found in Botswana.

As we break for lunch, here’s another personal favorite related to nothing much other than its power to evoke a whole era: The Roys performing at the Atlanta Arts Festival at Piedmont Park in 1983, with a cameo appearance by Anne Richmond Boston and Jeff Calder of the Swimming Pool Qs.

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Ed Kilgore

Ed Kilgore is a political columnist for New York and managing editor at the Democratic Strategist website. He was a contributing writer at the Washington Monthly from January 2012 until November 2015, and was the principal contributor to the Political Animal blog.