Josh Marshall

Yesterday, Josh Marshall brought up the June 14, 2016 incidents again-- it can never be brought often frequently enough... the one where GOP House Majority Leader blurts out that Putin is paying off Trump and Rohrabacher... "so help me God." My favorite part of this story-- other than the pays offs themselves-- is how Ryan and McCarthy tried to cover it up and kept changing their stories as the Washington Post closed in on them and finally revealed they had a tape. Oops!

Estonia is a tiny little country on the Baltic Sea. It covers 17,462 square miles, slightly larger than Massachusetts-- about the size of New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware combined. The population is 1,319,133, about the same as Maine. It's a digitally advanced country with universal healthcare, very high education levels and, for that matter, free education.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer is on the job.by NoahThat the Trump White House has become a home for crazy people shouldn't come as a surprise to any sane observer of the events of recent years. Face it: We've seen the Republican Party cross over the edge of sanity since the dawn of the Tea Party. That was the point where it became apparent that the Republican Party had fully become the Crackpot Party.

Saturday I did a brief post at the travel blog about the fantastic Museum of Russian Political History in St. Petersburg which I visited a few weeks ago.

The superficially crafted messaging of the Republican convention has been stepped on and obliterated every day. But Hillary better not feel powerful for having had anything to do with it. It's all Trump and his incompetent, deranged micro-campaign that's causing all the seemingly self-destructive chaos. Trump lifted those plagiarized passages from Michelle Obama's speech and put them into Melania's address and ate up two-and-a-half days of headlines that might have gone to republican messaging.

Yesterday Howie pondered, "Did Boehner Lose Netanyahu His Reelection By Bringing Him To Washington?," and looked at the surprising reports coming out of Israel regarding prospects for the March 17 election. Meanwhile, the reports that Bibi may be in trouble already had our colleague GP pondering too.