The Whole Delivery

The esteemed Service Employees International Union is set to officially name a new President. And that President is poised to be the first women President in the union's history, as well as the first openly gay leader of the SEIU. With the retirement of current President Andy Stern, the big union groups from across the country have chosen Mary Kay Henry over Stern's preferrer choice Anna Burger as the next person to lead the SEIU (and guarantee her position on the chalk board next week of the Goldboy nutty one). As Ben Smith notes in one of the rare Politico pieces I will ever link in a post coming from me, the SEIU wanted a change from the pace they were clearly on in regards to their focus : Stern turned SEIU into a political juggernaut, with millions of members, an activist tradition, and a willingness to spend more than $30 million electing President Obama the ultimate mark of its emergence as arguably the most important independent political force in America. Stern wa...

Stupid reporting from a usually bad reporter in Ben Smith FBI agents visited the offices of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine yesterday after a shooting at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and told employees they'd found the magazine's address The magazine is about a mile north of the Holocaust Museum, and there's no other indication that von Brunn had targeted it. Von Brunn's published rants included attacks on "neocons," and the Standard has been at the heart of the neoconservative movement. The suggestion that the Standard may have been a target complicates any view of the racist shooter in contemporary left-right terms. Von Brunn's white supremacist roots put him under the rubric of a "right-wing extremist," but the substance of his views -- which included everything from believing that President Bush may have been in on the September 11 attacks to denying that President Obama is an American citizen -- are too far on the fringe to fit i...