Not literally, of course. But Connecticut’s Democratic Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal, whose misstatements/embellishments/lies about serving in Vietnam have already cost him dearly in the polls, probably didn’t need a self-described “good friend” like former Republican congressman Christopher Shays to blab about his concerns to the Times. “I felt inclined to go to him and say, ‘Dick, in your service in Vietnam, you weren’t on the firing line, you don’t want to overstate that,’” Shays tells the paper that broke the story. Thanks, pal!
THE FEED
Police knew the shooter in last week’s Aurora, Illinois rampage wasn’t allowed to own a gun. But all they did was send a letter.
Illinois State Police records show Martin was sent a letter on April 15, 2014, telling him he was required to relinquish his state firearms license. Police gave Martin 48 hours to transfer his firearms to a licensed gun owner or give them up to police.
If he saw the letter, he ignored it.
He would hardly have been alone.
Fewer than half of Illinois gun owners whose licenses are revoked follow through with the requirement to show authorities that they no longer own firearms, according to State Police data.
State Police sent more than 10,800 revocation letters to Illinois residents last year. But “in most instances,” the agency said in a statement, the gun owners failed to vouch that they no longer possess a firearm.
youtube
Problematic Tech Billionaire Teams Up With Problematic YouTube Millionaire
This doesn’t sound good
Whistleblowers from within President Donald Trump’s National Security Council have told a congressional committee that efforts by former national security adviser Michael Flynn to transfer sensitive nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia may have violated the law, and investigators fear Trump is still considering it, according to a new report obtained by NBC News.
The House Oversight Committee has formally opened an investigation into the matter, releasing an interim staff report that adds new details to previous public accounts of how Flynn sought to push through the nuclear proposal on behalf of a group he had once advised.
the city politic
The Obscure, Overcrowded Election That Could Change New York City Politics
Eight months after AOC beat him in a Democratic primary, Joe Crowley joins one of K Street’s largest lobbying firms
NEW: Ex-Rep. Joe Crowley joins Squire Patton Boggs
—@ShaneGoldmacher
vision 2020
Meet the New Bernie Campaign, Same As the Old Bernie Campaign
the national interest
Trump’s New Defense: Can’t Investigate Him Because There Are Too Many Crimes
Politics
CNN hires a GOP operative with no news experience to run its coverage of 2020
President Donald Trump has derided CNN as a leading purveyor of “fake news,” and now, a recently departed administration official is joining the network in a senior role.
Sarah Isgur, who served as the Justice Department’s leading spokeswoman under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is joining the network as a political editor next month, where she will coordinate political coverage for the 2020 campaign. …
While it is common for departing administration officials to join cable news networks as analysts or contributors, it is less common for them to oversee news coverage. Isgur has no experience in news but a long history as a political operative, most recently with the Trump administration and the Fiorina campaign. Before that, she worked for the Republican National Committee and on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Benjamin Hart
Eric Levitz
Jonathan Chait
Eric Levitz
Jonathan Chait
Eric Levitz
Jonathan Chait
sarah.jones
Eric Levitz
Ed Kilgore
howard schultz
Howard Schultz’s Deficit of Honesty
first amendment
Clarence Thomas Wants to Make It Easier to Sue for Libel
Roger Stone’s conspiracy-theory rants aren’t helping his legal cause
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered political operative and former adviser to Donald Trump, Roger Stone, to explain his since-deleted Instagram post on Monday in which he slammed the judge and later issued an apology to her.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson issued an order for Stone to return to U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on Thursday for a show cause hearing to explain why the conditions of his release and limited gag order”should not be modified or revoked in light of the posts on his Instagram account.”
“Through legal trickery Deep State hitman Robert Mueller has guaranteed that my upcoming show trial is before Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointed Judge who dismissed the Benghazi charges again Hillary Clinton and incarcerated Paul Manafort prior to his conviction for any crime,” Stone wrote in a caption to the post, which featured a picture of Judge Jackson with a what appeared to be a crosshairs in the upper corner.
authoritarianism
Trump’s National Emergency Is Off to a Bad Start
A sign of the considerable grassroots support Bernie has retained
Bernie Sanders campaign confirms they raised $1 million in the first 3.5 hours since his announcement.
—@aseitzwald
Even for an Egypt, this is an unusually authoritarian move
Egyptian officials detained a New York Times correspondent after he arrived in Cairo on Monday, holding him incommunicado for hours before forcing him onto a flight back to London without explanation.
The move against the correspondent, David D. Kirkpatrick, is an escalation of a severe crackdown against the news media under Egypt’s strongman leader, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Egyptian journalists have borne the brunt of Mr. el-Sisi’s repression, with dozens imprisoned or forced into exile. But of late, a lack of pushback from the United States has emboldened Egypt’s security forces to take stronger action against representatives of Western news outlets, including expulsion.
flat-earthers
Can You Believe YouTube Caused the Rise in Flat-Earthers?
Will Bernie’s detachment from mainstream Democrats help him once again?
It’s probably an advantage for Bernie that all the other candidates like and respect each other but not him. They’ll attack him but not each other and he’ll get to stand apart.
—@MikeGrunwald
crime
Jussie Smollett Reportedly Rehearsed Attack Days Before It Happened
RBG is back in business
Justice Ginsburg will return to the bench this morning, a Supreme Court spokeswoman confirms
—@adamliptak
Bernie Sanders decries age discrimination when asked whether he’s too old to be president
“We have got to look at candidates, you know, not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender and not by their age,” Sanders said. “I mean, I think we have got to try to move us toward a non-discriminatory society which looks at people based on their abilities, based on what they stand for.”
McCabe says that key Republican senators knew, and were fine with, an investigation into Trump
McCabe says the FBI, in the days after Comey’s firing, told the Gang of 8 that the FBI had opened a counterintelligence investigation into Trump.
GUTHRIE: Did anyone object?
McCABE: No one objected. Not on legal grounds not on constitutional grounds and not based on the facts.
—@kylegriffin1
GUTHRIE: Did anyone object?
McCABE: No one objected. Not on legal grounds not on constitutional grounds and not based on the facts.
Elizabeth Warren begins rollout for big universal childcare proposal
Another big, structural change we need: #UniversalChildCare. I’m proposing a bold new plan that guarantees high-quality child care and early education for every child in America. It will be free for millions of families, and affordable for everyone. pic.twitter.com/lFFZO7kwhu
—@ewarren
Somehow Teflon Rod survived a potential Saturday Night Massacre, and claims that he talked about removing Trump from office
Rod Rosenstein, the US deputy attorney general who appointed a special counsel to investigate possible ties between Russia and President Donald Trump’s campaign, is expected to step down by mid March, a Justice Department official has said.
Rosenstein had been expected to depart shortly after new Attorney General William Barr assumed office. Barr was confirmed for the role by the US Senate last week.
The Justice official said Rosenstein’s departure was not related to renewed allegations that he considered wearing a wire in meetings with Trump and using the 25th amendment of the U.S. Constitution to remove the president from office.
In a Medium post, Howard Schultz vows that he will not help reelect Trump … if Democrats nominate the type of candidate he likes
As I’m sure you’ve seen, there have been some skeptical and even downright angry comments from party activists and inside-the-Beltway pundits in the press and on social media. Others have expressed genuine fears that an independent candidate could help re-elect President Trump. I hear and respect this overriding concern, and have repeatedly promised that I will not be a spoiler. I am committed to ensuring that I will do nothing to re-elect Donald Trump. I mean it.
… The stakes are too high to cross our fingers and hope the Democratic Party nominates a moderate who can win over enough independents and disaffected Republicans, and even fellow Democrats, to defeat Trump next year. That any opponent can oust Trump, no matter how far to the radical left they are, is a fallacy. Those so concerned about a centrist independent being a spoiler should perhaps ask another question: Will the eventual Democratic nominee be the party’s own version of a spoiler? Of course, it’s too early to know who the nominee will be. We must let the process play out. And that same standard should apply to a discussion of a possible independent candidacy.
The thinking behind Bernie’s decision to run
Many Dems and even some longtime supporters are exasperated by Sanders’s decision. But people close to him say he was always likely to run. They say he came too close last time to just walk away and has the energy to do it. Firmly believes Dem Party is moving twd his ideology. https://t.co/LRZYVCkFHI
—@costareports
Washington Post reporter Robert Costa
Amazon may have canceled its headquarters in Queens, but it’s still bringing jobs to NYC
The e-commerce giant expects to continue hiring even if it doesn’t build a campus jewel in Queens that makes good on its pledge of bringing 25,000 new jobs to the area. It is moving forward with plans to add as many employees to its other so-called HQ2 selection, the Crystal City neighborhood of Arlington, Va., just across the Potomac River from Washington.
And Amazon plans to boost hiring in the 17 other cities in the U.S. and Canada it considers technology hubs—areas in which it has at least 80 tech workers. It already has approximately 7,000 tech workers in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1,000 in Austin, Texas, and 1,800 in Boston.
… For a company whose global head count has more than quintupled in the past five years to nearly 648,000, walking from the New York deal is unlikely to either slow its ascent or stop its hiring in the city. The company has more than 800 open positions in New York.
For one thing, Amazon planned to hire slowly. It had projected adding just 700 employees in 2019 to the Long Island City campus and not reach its 25,000 target until 2028, The Wall Street Journal previously has reported. And, Amazon already has significant operations in the city, including workers in advertising technology, publishing and fashion.
Do Democrats still feel the Bern? We’re about to find out
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whose 2016 presidential campaign grew from a left-wing insurgency to a force that reshaped the Democratic Party, announced Tuesday that he will seek its nomination for president again in 2020.
“We began the political revolution in the 2016 campaign, and now it’s time to move that revolution forward,” Sanders told Vermont Public Radio in an interview airing Tuesday morning.
urbanism
Hudson Yards Is a Gilded City Straight Out of a Billionaire’s Fantasy
urbanism
How Stephen Ross Became the Most Powerful City-Shaper Since Robert Moses
Elizabeth Warren has a plan for universal child care
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) will unveil a major new initiative on Tuesday designed to make sure every family can afford high-quality child care, according to several people who have heard about the proposal or seen material describing it in the past week.
The plan seeks to make access to child care universal, the sources told HuffPost, by offering federal funds to providers that offer care at their facilities on a sliding income scale.
No family would have to spend more than 7 percent of its household income on child care, no matter the number of kids. Families with incomes below twice the poverty line, which is roughly $50,000 a year for a family of four, would pay nothing.
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