Ed Kilgore

Charlie Cook takes a look in his National Journal column at a focus group of Indiana Republicans convened by Peter Hart and Corrie Hunt and finds this gem about the willingness of GOPers to support Donald Trump and Ben Carson: In what I thought was their most perceptive conclusion about Republican voters’ state of mind, […]

In a pretty classic case of letting itself be panicked into a precipitous action by the excitement of the moment, the RNC has announced it has canceled the February 26 debate that was going to be cosponsored by NBC in order to punish the parent network for the behavior of the CNBC moderators of Wednesday […]

Glad to see all the interest in Grace Slick’s birthday this year. At the end of the buffet line I’ll repost a remarkably clear video of a performance 45 years ago that will amaze you, especially if you haven’t see it before. Here are some more contemporary midday news/views treats; no hallucinogens have been added. […]

My first thought when I read that the president’s sending 50 special ops troops into Syria to train the non-ISIS rebels was “isn’t the whole idea of tiny units of special ops troops that nobody knows they are there?” So it’s unclear to me why a “senior administration official” would be leaking this potentially inflammatory […]

It’s pretty well established that whatever its heresies in terms of same-sex marriage or Obamacare the conservative majority on the Supreme Court is intensely and predictably loyal to corporate interests. Sometimes that’s obvious, as in Citizens United. Sometimes it is less obvious. That’s the situation with a case illuminated for us at Ten Miles Square […]

In reviewing the CNBC debate I observed that Rand Paul seemed listless even in announcing his upcoming filibuster on the Bipartisan Budget Deal, which you’d have figured would represent a last chance for him to plunge an electric cattle prod into the tepid waters of his candidacy. Turns out this not-so-fighting-spirit characterized the “filibuster” as […]

Speaking of Marco Rubio… a big part of his boffo performance at the CNBC debate the other night was his claim that the MSM had become a “Democratic Super-PAC,” with the supposed evidence being its cover-up of HRC “lies” about her behavior after Benghazi! “exposed” by Trey Gowdy’s committee. Yea, verily, the MSM went “around […]

With his strong performance at Wednesday night’s CNBC debate, compounded by a Jeb Bush performance that seems to look worse the more it recedes in the rear-view mirror, Marco Rubio can now for the first time plausibly claim to be the Establishment favorite for the Republican presidential nomination, and its best hope of heading off […]

For all the “cleaning the barn” talk about the two-year “budget deal” that cleared the Senate in the wee hours this morning, it does not actually resolve all the troublesome spending issues or eliminate the possibility of conservative mischief. As David Dayen notes at the Prospect, while the deal set overall spending levels, is does […]

My fellow Californian Grace Slick is 76 today, and yeah, it’s as incredible as it was on her birthday last year. Here she and the Airplane are in a double lip-synch and interview feature on American Bandstand in 1967.