Friday Clip Dump

Wrote a whole long well-reasoned post late last night that I decided not to use. So since it's a journo-political tradition to dump crap late on a Friday when no one will notice, especially since blogs are dead, here's some stuff I read this week.If you follow me on Twitter save your time.

 

At the Bush Library opening: six presidents in one picture. Bret Hayworth asked me Michelle or Hillary; all I know is if Barbara has any say it's not her or Laura.

Craig Robinson handicapped the GOP senate field yesterday - after the Joni Ernst boomlet started but before mattwhitaker.org went up. (Not listed: Jim Leach, whose resignation from teh National Endowment for the Humanities started one rumor just for fun.) Steve King is still ranked first in the field, but with just a 15% chance of actually running, his will he or won't he decision drama is starting to rival the final seasons of Brett Favre. King's latest non-statement (“very close (sic)… within weeks”) indicates he may drag this out as Bruce Braley continues his head start.

We've all pretty much decided King's not running and will keep his immigrant bashing career going on the House side. Speaking of: "Marco Rubio's getting his ass kicked" on right-wing radio over immigration:

National syndicated host Lars Larson questioned whether Rubio would be proposing “amnesty” for the 11 million people in the country illegally if his name was Mark Roberts and not Marco Rubio. Nationally syndicated host Mike Siegal of Genesis Communications asked how Rubio’s promises to secure the border this time are different from then-President Ronald Reagan’s promises in 1986 when he signed an immigration bill that failed to stem a wave of illegal immigration. Michael Brown of KHOW-AM in Denver, Colorado told Rubio that amnesty should not come before securing the border.

This isn't about "rule of law," even though that's the sanitized conservative reason. This is about visceral hostility to a multi-cultural, multi-lingual America. Like I keep saying: the talk radio base wants nothing short of mass deportation, and it's just a matter of time till someone, either a shock jock or a guy with a safe red House district, says so. King's as good a bet as any.

Tweet of the Week:

Was interviewing a guy who encouraged a passerby to go vote for the justice center. The guy responds: "ok, got to go put on underwear first"
— Mark Carlson (@markwcarlson) April 24, 2013

That's um, not something we're going to check, and not something we've had checked since about junior high gym class. Like your ballot, it's secret. And we looked but couldn't find anywhere in the Code of Iowa where it's required. The legal Code of Iowa,not the dress code.

Oops: More than five months after the Nov. 6 election, 65 uncounted ballots were found last week inside a vault, Chief Elections Officer Mark Church announced Thursday.

Although there weren't nearly enough ballots to swing even the closest of contests, Church promised to investigate why they were misplaced and that it won't happen again.

Elections Manager David Tom said the county has not "conclusively" determined who put the ballots into the covered bin, but suspects it was a temporary worker or workers. 

Occam's razor: human error, a simpler explanation than malice.

Speaking of razors: the best political facial hair since the Arthur Administration is back, and which of your household expenses is excessive?



No one happier than SNL's Kenan Thompson. Little know factoid: Rutherford Hayes was in an early lineup of ZZ Top.