Maybe he should look into that MT @mattdpearce: Ferguson chief tells me arresters were "probably somebody who didn't know better."
— @speechboy71
I just called Ferguson police chief to ask about @WesleyLowery and @ryanjreilly, told him what I knew. His response: "Oh, God."
— @mattdpearce
:
Throughout this time, we asked the officers for badge numbers. We asked to speak to a supervising officer. We asked why we were being detained. We were told: trespassing in a McDonald’s.
“I hope you’re happy with yourself,” one officer told me. And I responded: “This story’s going to get out there. It’s going to be on the front page of The Washington Post tomorrow.”
And he said, “Yeah, well, you’re going to be in my jail cell tonight.”
I keep having thoughts of the
Chicago convention, 1968:
A federal commission later called it a police riot, and the mayhem outside the Chicago convention continues to influence political protests today.
Indeed.
Quick writeup of my call to the Ferguson police chief, notifying him of @wesleylowery and @Ryanjreilly's arrests:
http://t.co/...
— @mattdpearce
Here's the video of police entering McDonald's and illegally telling WaPo reporter @WesleyLowery to stop filming.
http://t.co/...
— @trevortimm
Last week a reporter friend told me Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has presidential ambitions.
He can forget the shit out of that after #Ferguson.
— @imillhiser
And then...
So the police have:
1) Killed an unarmed teen
2) Fired tear gas & rubber bullets at mostly peaceful protesters
3) Arrested & blocked media
— @ObsoleteDogma
There'll be a lot more written over the course of today. For now, more politics and policy below the fold. And a huge THANK YOU to the reporters covering Ferguson.
Alex Seitz-Wald on the MIA Gov Jay Nixon:
Jay Nixon may not be a household name in much of the country, but in Missouri, he’s a popular two-term Democratic governor who won his reelection by double-digits even as Barack Obama lost the state by 10 points. In another year, he’d be prime 2016 presidential material in the mold of Third Way Democrat Bill Clinton – if there weren’t already another Clinton likely in the race.
But as Nixon contemplates what comes next for him two years from now when his final term ends, he’ll first have to wrestle control of a disintegrating situation as racial unrest grows in the St. Louis suburbs after a police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager this weekend.
Jill Lawrence imagines President Hillary in 2019:
Clinton's leadership style in office has been her trademark combination of showy, steely attitude on international matters and a maternal "hug it out" strategy for resolving conflicts within her Cabinet, staff and party.
Those contrasts have been apparent to the close observer since her husband's 1992 campaign. When she said she could have "stayed home and baked cookies and had teas" but preferred to continue her work as a lawyer, the comment came off as harsh toward homemakers and dogged her for years. She received far less attention a few days later for a gentle reading of "Where The Wild Things Are" at a New York school. "Let the wild rumpus start," she read to the young children, and laughed, recognizing that it had already begun.
For Clinton, decades later, it has never stopped.
Jackie Calmes:
There is little dispute that Mr. Obama is a significant drag on Democratic candidates given his low approval ratings, especially in Southern states where many competitive Senate races are unfolding. But even some Republicans say that Mr. Obama’s competence is not this election’s defining issue, or much of an issue at all except among conservatives who have never liked him.
“His problem is that too many people aren’t sure they like where he’s led us, or that they want to go further for two more years,” said Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report. “They think he’s smart. They do think he’s a little distant, and a little detached. But is the problem that he’s incompetent? I don’t think that people think that.”
Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist, said that making competence a campaign centerpiece is “the fool’s gold of politics” — rarely successful.
AP:
AThe federal appeals court that last month struck down Virginia’s ban on same-sex unions refused Wednesday to delay the effects of its ruling. State officials said that unless the United States Supreme Court interceded, Virginia counties could begin issuing marriage licenses to gay couples next week.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., voted 2-to-1 in July to uphold a Federal District Court’s ruling in February that Virginia’s ban, which voters approved in 2006, was invalid. In another 2-to-1 ruling announced Wednesday, the court said it would not stay its decision. The judges who voted to deny the stay, Henry F. Floyd and Roger L. Gregory, did not explain their reasoning.
The ban’s supporters quickly said they would appeal the Fourth Circuit’s decision on the stay to the Supreme Court, which has already received an appeal of the Richmond panel’s July opinion.
Drew Altman:
The sharp partisan divisions over the ACA explain the politics we see playing out as the midterms approach. Each side knows it can’t convince the other to change its views of the health-care law. So each plays to its base; especially Republicans, whose core voters feel most strongly about the law. There is no treasure trove of independents to go after with arguments on the ACA. Most independents lean either Democratic or Republican and pro- or anti-ACA; there are few true independents for politicians to woo with messages about the Affordable Care Act.
Opinions of the ACA are also stuck in neutral because the law is a proxy for people’s feelings about the president and the direction of the country, which are similarly divided along partisan lines. For many voters, it is almost impossible to tell where opinion on Obamacare ends and opinion on its namesake begins.
Brent Thompson:
Preventing Suicide: If You See Something, Say Something
Jonathan Chait:
[Robert] Draper’s analysis hinges on the premise that young voters harbor “libertarian leanings.” He offers two data points to support this, both fallacious. The first is that “fully half of voters between ages 18 and 29 are unwedded to either party.” There has been a long-term generational rise in people describing themselves in polls as independents rather than as Democrats or Republicans. But this has not caused more actual independent voting. Indeed, the rise of independent identifiers has coincided with rising polarization and a decline in swing voting. Both experimental evidence and actual voting behavior show that the majority of self-identified “independents” support one party or the other as reflexively as self-identified partisans.
When I pointed out this phenomenon, which is by now well known among political professionals, Draper merely shrugged it off in a way (“point was, they don’t consider themselves D’s”) that misses the point. What young voters “consider” themselves doesn’t matter. What matters is how they vote.
Draper’s second piece of evidence is a quote from Emily Ekins, a pollster for the Reason Foundation, who asserts, “Unlike with previous generations, we’re seeing a newer dimension emerge where they agree with Democrats on social issues, and on economic issues lean more to the right.”
This is a very strange statement.
Ed Kilgore:
The So-Called 'Libertarian Moment' Is Engineered By The Christian Right
