Ed Kilgore

Michael Vadon/Flickr One of the major questions in the GOP presidential nominating contest is whether, when and to what extent Jeb Bush uses his vast Super-PAC dollars to go after his Florida buddy Marco Rubio with a claw hammer. It’s been obvious for a good long while that Rubio is an existential threat to Bush’s […]

So today House Republicans are due to vote on their “nominee” to become Speaker of the House, presumably choosing between Establishment favorite Kevin McCarthy, House Freedom Caucus nominee Daniel Webster, and would-be “compromise” candidate Jason Chaffetz. McCarthy will win a comfortable majority in the first round, closing the formal proceedilengs until the full House elects […]

Gage Skidmore/Flickr Two months ago, Dr. Ben Carson publicly started raving about Saul Alinsky-inspired liberals like Hillary Clinton plotting to destroy America on the stage of a presidential candidate debate. A little over a week ago, David Corn of Mother Jones published an extensive article on Carson’s deep and very recent attachment to the Bircher […]

Glenn Fawcett/Wikimedia Commons Before anyone much had time to speculate about what Hillary Clinton would do about the just-completed Trans-Pacific Partnership, she told Judy Woodruff in Iowa late yesterday that she was “not in favor of what I have learned about it,” and doesn’t “believe it’s going to meet the high bar I have set” […]

George Bellamy of the Tornados was born on this day in 1940. Here’s the band performing their iconic 1962 hit, “Telstar.”

So my blogging hiatus started and ended quite a bit later than I expected, but we didn’t miss a whole lot according to the aggregators. Here are some remains of the day: * Interesting Jonathan Martin piece about Joe Biden’s appeal to–or the lack thereof–minority voters if he runs against HRC. * Bernie Sanders gets […]

As fate would have it, we got a pretty good idea of some of the implications of the widespread conservative call for crime-fighting to be transferred from the police–you know, those government bureaucrats–to a heavily armed citizenry today in Michigan. Mike Martindale of the Detroit News has the story: Police responding to a “shots fired” […]

Gage Skidmore/Flickr At Salon today, Simon Maloy draws attention to a strange phenomenon: Marco Rubio managing to make the nothing-burger of his bad Senate attendance record a problem by claiming he’s still doing the important stuff Senators do–just not the voting on legislation stuff. It’s a strange case for Rubio to make, given that he’s […]

I have an actual lunch appointment today, so there may be a blogging hiatus for a bit after this post. Here are some Lite Lunch news/views treats for your midday enjoyment: * At The Hill, Scott Wong writes up a scenario whereby nobody can get 218 votes to succeed Boehner as Speaker and the Orange […]

Michael Vadon/Wikimedia Commons So this morning I expressed not just concern but some actual fear over Dr. Ben Carson’s recently announced conviction that the Second Amendment was necessary to prevent “tyranny,” mostly because Dr. Carson’s definition of “tyranny” seems to include the kind of things readers of this blog support routinely. As it happens, over […]