Ed Kilgore

Yes, I watched every minute of the Georgia-Florida game on Saturday. Perhaps it’s just the pathetic fallacy at work, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the skies over my abode are weeping today. Here are some less unhappy midday news/views treats: * Marco Rubio’s performance in a new Monmouth poll of NH does […]

Over the weekend the New York Times published a large, alarming report by Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Michael Corkery about the increasingly successful use of arbitration requirements by corporations to avoid litigation and force those they have allegedly injured into an arena that wildly favors their own point of view. These requirements amount to a privatization […]

Gage Skidmore/Flickr Of all the theories circulating about Jeb Bush’s poor performance so far in this presidential cycle, Buzzfeed‘s Ben Smith may have the most original: Bush last ran a political campaign in 2002, a sepia-toned political time before bloggers got Dan Rather fired. Back then, the internet was a colorful sideshow, and a slow, […]

In all the debates over the death penalty in the political arena, the actual mechanics of how the penalty is imposed are often forgotten. As Stetson University law professor Susan Rozelle (whose work has been cited in Supreme Court opinions on the subject) explains in a web exclusive at Republic 3.0 today, the exclusion of […]

Gage Skidmore/Flickr In a morning without much in the way of hard news, I became transfixed by Shane Goldmacher’s piece at Politico about the strange lassitude of Ted Cruz’s multiple Super-PACs, which are currently sitting on tens of millions of dollars which they are not spending, and moreover, have no particular plans to spend, at […]

Gage Skidmore/Flickr WaPo’s Dave Weigel and Robert Costa did a good job yesterday of sorting out all the strands of the big GOP brouhaha over presidential candidate debates. What comes through most clearly is that despite the joint meetings and the decision by the campaigns to retain Republican super-lawyer Ben Ginsberg to represent them in […]

freddthompson/Flickr He became best known as a TV actor (and for some, a reverse mortgage pitchman), but landed that career–and subsequently, a career as an elected official–via his participation in the burst of drama in Washington that briefly made television a national civics class, the Watergate hearings, where he was counsel to his fellow Tennessean, […]

Chicago blues pianist Little Johnny Jones was born on November 1, 1924. Here he is with probably his biggest hit, “Big Town Playboy,” recorded in 1949.

This weekend I’ll be watching, with considerable trepidation, the Georgia-Florida football game, a.k.a. (though the schools have been trying to suppress this nickname for years) the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party. I’m old enough to have lived through eras of domination by both teams, and nervous enough that I actually took a bathroom break and […]

You know that Jeb Bush internal campaign document that everybody’s quoting this week? Well, turns out it has something even more interesting than the talking points about Marco Rubio’s personal finances. The Week‘s Jeva Lange explains: The Iowa caucus, on February 1, is 93 days away. Bush’s campaign has set the goal of receiving 18.45 […]