Ed Kilgore

It’s Friday afternoon, and thus an appropriate time for another open thread where readers are encouraged to share musical finds with each other, and generally talk about tunes. Go to it!

In all the endless speculation over the trajectory of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the role of media in keeping him aloft, it is sometimes forgotten that the fissures in the Republican Party he has exposed will not necessarily go away when he does. Over at The Democratic Strategist Andrew Levison has penned a thorough […]

I really shouldn’t feel this way about a fellow human being, but can’t help but keep smiling at Bobby Jindal’s political problems. It’s not like he’s going to have trouble paying his bills or anything, but maybe he should get out of the presidential race while a Cabinet post or a think tank presidency is […]

Seems Bobby Jindal might as well spend all his time in Iowa right now. He’s sure as hell not doing himself any good by any time he’s spending in Louisiana, doing the job to which he was elected. Check out the numbers from this new poll of the Pelican State, per WWL-TV in Nawlins. In […]

The off-year Kentucky Governor’s race continues to be a hard-to-call event despite the increasingly conservative character of the Blue Grass State and the non-presidential electorate that might turn even redder than usual. The fine folks at Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball have seen enough of GOP nominee Matt Bevin that they are no longer rating this […]

The fact that Kevin McCarthy’s “gaffe” about the political motivations of the House Benghazi! committee stated something absolutely everybody already knew is no reason to brush it off. Nor is the remark’s utter predictability as an assurance to the conservative base which ran off John Boehner that House Republicans are capable of being viciously, obnoxiously […]

So the September Jobs Report was pretty lousy, per this report from the New York Times‘ Patricia Cohen: Employers added a mere 142,000 jobs in September, the Labor Department said on Friday, suggesting that the American economy is losing momentum after a similarly lackluster report for the previous month. The official unemployment rate held steady […]

Methinks Dr. Ben Carson is having to refine the dog whistles by which he alerts like-minded conspiracy theorists without attracting too much scrutiny from, you know, us more normal people. Back in December of last year he got upbraided by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer for suggesting that Barack Obama was turning the United States into another […]

If you didn’t hear the president’s remarks about the Oregon shootings yesterday, you really need to watch this: It has to be the most candid presidential reaction to breaking news in my memory; Obama even angrily mocked the ritualistic character of his own past reactions to gun massacres. But the center of his argument is […]

Punk pioneer Richard Hell is 66 today. Here he is with his high school buddy Tom Verlaine performing with Television; it’s a rehearsal of “I’m Gonna Find You,” in 1974. Love these guys.