rachel maddow

The day after Rachel's report (above), McConnell fired Jesse Benton as his campaign manager. BOOM! Out! McConnell didn't like him much anyway, since Benton has been quoted and requoted telling Kentucky libertarians that he was "sort of holding my nose for two years because what we're doing here is going to be a big benefit for Rand in 2016." Benton, a longtime Paul family retainer, is married to Ron Paul's granddaughter, Valori Pyeatt (Rand's niece). Before remaking himself into a Paulista, though, he worked for Louisiana sleaze bag David "Diapers" Vitter.

I would call this Horsey cartoon from yesterday's L.A. Times pretty risqué. It uses an image of a cocaine snorting Miss McConnell to portray and mock his addiction to extreme right-wing Koch brothers cash. David Horsey is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Times and he can get away with stuff like this.

It's futile trying to claim one state is the most corrupt instead of another state. No doubt, New Jersey, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New York, California, Louisiana, Nevada, Illinois are on anyone's short-list. Wisconsin always prided itself on being one of the least corrupt-- until the advent of Scott Walker, who has turned the state into an ethical cesspool.

Is the tragedy of Ferguson serving as a national teaching moment? Maybe… at least for people open to learning. Nate Silver made a point the other day, for example, of how most police don't live in the cities they serve-- especially not white police serving in minority areas. In Ferguson, for example, "more than two-thirds of the civilian population is black.

I saw a lot of coverage of Ferguson, Missouri in the last few days. But I didn't see any photos of Georgia Republican congressional candidate Jody Hice. Hice never showed up-- or maybe he was hiding under something.

Only 11 Republicans voted against the draconian anti-DREAMers bill that passed Friday night night, mostly Republicans in vulnerable seats with large Latino constituencies like Jeff Denham (R-CA), David Valadao (R-CA), and Joe Heck (R-NV). But one name that stood out on the list of 11 who wouldn't back the Ted Cruz/Steve King anti-Hispanic caucus bill was Colorado extreme right-winger Cory Gardner.

Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, as we've explained before, is probably the most overtly extremist governor anywhere. Polls show that Kansas voters are determined to remove him from office and that he's likely to be beaten by a moderate Democrat Paul Davis.

Almost every Senate Republican-- even extremist obstructionists like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Mike Lee and Richard Burr-- followed Bernie Sanders' lead last month to pass a bill to address the sordid situation at the V.A. It passed 93-3 with the only dissections from mentally unstable right-wingers Ron Johnson (R-WI), Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (R-KKK) and Bob Corker (R-TN).The House Republicans can't quite get their shit together on the whole V.A.

If you want to understand why there's a crisis of refugee children at the southern border, you're probably not a Republican-- and you're surely not Texas reactionary and would-be-presidente Ted Cruz. But reading about the horrific U.S. policy agenda in Guatemala is probably a good place to start.

Tuesday we took a quick look at the story of how the NSA's war against patriotic whistleblower Tom Drake persuaded Ed Snowden to move outside the system to expose the criminal activities the government was perpetrating against the American people. In the story we met William Binney. Up top is the short documentary Laura Poitras did for the NY Times about Binney in 2012. It should scare your socks off.Binney was a top intelligence officer/code breaker with the NSA for over 30 years.