Ed Kilgore

Blues musician George “Wild Child” Butler was born on this day in 1936. Here he is with “Roll and Squeeze.”

Amazing how little play David Corn’s piece on Ben Carson, which ought to be a mortal blow to the man’s presidential candidacy, is getting today. Have a feeling MSM will keep describing Carson as this mild-mannered common-sense conservative…. Here are some remains of the day: * Probably not the best sign that Jeb Bush is […]

Here are two news items that just have to be read together. One is from Julian Hattem of The Hill: The House’s committee investigating the 2012 terror attack on a U.S. facility in Benghazi, Libya, has been running longer than any other special congressional inquiry in the nation’s history. As of Monday, the committee has […]

I’ve been having some fun of late mocking the frantic efforts of various personages in the GOP and the MSM to show Donald Trump in some sort of free fall. We have a fresh example today in a decidedly odd message from the ABC/WaPo polling team about a comparison of Trump with Ben Carson and […]

At TNR today, Brian Beutler does a fine job of exposing the bait-and-switch that a lot of us have discerned not just in the current conservative campaign to shut down Planned Parenthood, but in the entire antichoice crusade against late-term abortions, its preferred tactic for well over a decade. The abortion abolitionists who produced the […]

Believe it or not, there’s talk of rain today and tomorrow for the central coast of California. The age of miracles is not over. Here are some still-bone-dry midday news/views snacks: * Russian airstrikes begin in Syria. * Despite pleas from Pope Francis and many others, the good righteous Christians running the State of Georgia […]

Gage Skidmore/Flickr In an interesting First Read item about early TV advertising in the 2016 presidential race, we learn the following: How much does money matter in the current presidential contest? So far, not that much — at least in terms of those who have spent the most on TV ads. Indeed, with a few […]

Casa Rosada/Wikimedia Commons So the Vatican is confirming that Pope Francis had a private meeting with Kim Davis and her husband, and did not dispute reports from her attorneys that the Supreme Pontiff gave the embattled Kentucky County Clerk a blessing, an admonition to “stay strong,” and rosaries for her Catholic parents. This is in […]

I often use my weekly TPMCafe column to pull together strands of stuff I’ve thought about in the course of news-cycle-blogging over days and weeks. That’s the case today when I wrote a brisk essay on things the commentariat–and particularly progressives–may be misunderstanding about the whole congressional Republican “civil war” we’ve all been reading about. […]

It’s very, very likely that Rep. Kevin McCarthy will succeed John Boehner as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. But it’s worth noting that the solon most likely to challenge him on behalf of disgruntled conservatives, Rep. Dan Webster (R-FL), is not just a bit to the right of Jimmy Dean Sausage, but has […]