Ed Kilgore

State of Tennessee /Wikimedia Commons First they abolished Christmas, and now they’re shooting Christians. This seems to be the thinking, so to speak, behind Tennessee Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey’s call for Christians to start packing heat. He even made it a sort of test of religious fidelity, according to a report from WaPo’s Elahe Izadi: […]

Marc Nozell/Flickr The actual news yesterday was that New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan has agreed to run against Sen. Kelly Ayotte next year, a huge recruiting coup for Democrats. But the way Politico‘s Kevin Robillard wrote it up, the NH race only partially offsets the headaches produced for Democrats by primary challenges to party establishment […]

It’s certainly well established that heavy media coverage has played a big role in the shocking success of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy so far; Nate Silver’s characterization of The Donald as “The World’s Greatest Troll,” irresistibly luring those who hate covering him to cover him, still makes sense. But a little-discussed side benefit of this […]

Marc Nozell/Flickr This week’s episode of the Washington Monthly Show on BloggingheadsTV features our own web editor Martin Longman as guest. It was a wide-ranging discussion that included the future of gun policy; the conservative effort to use the GOP leadership election to extort fiscal brinkmanship in December; the extraordinary loathing Ted Cruz has aroused […]

One of our smartest progressive thinkers and writers is American Prospect co-editor Paul Starr. He has a column today suggesting that rank-and-file Republicans are pushing their presidential candidates to the right via a phenomenon known as “group polarization,” and warns liberals to beware the same temptation. On the Democratic side, the candidates are unlikely to […]

Detroit-based blues harmonica champ Little Sonny (Willis) is 83 today. Here he is with “The Creeper Returns.” Classic.

After multiple Skype outages, we did get a BloggingheadsTV episode recorded this morning, featuring our own Martin Longman as guest. We’ll put it up tomorrow. Here are some remains of the day: * As expected, center-right wins elections in Portugal despite austerity policies. * Oh great: NBC execs mulling MSNBC lineup are considering expansion of […]

When I said earlier that Bobby Jindal had zero chance to become the 2016 Republican presidential nominee, I had yet seen the new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll of Iowa that showed Bobby moving up to a booming 6% of the vote, double what he drew in a poll of his home state of Louisiana last […]

Snakes alive, the negative resume of Carly Fiorina gets bigger and badder every day. On the same day that Wall Street veteran (and long-time Democratic operative) Steve Rattner argues in the New York Times that Fiorina’s record as CEO at HP is even worse than previously assumed, WaPo’s Robert Samuels looks at an aspect of […]

So the big news today in the troubled House Republican Conference is that John Boehner has canceled early intra-GOP elections for the number two and number three spots in the leadership until after his successor has been chosen by the full House in a vote now scheduled for October 29. It was perceived as a […]