Weigel

Opening Act: Trespass

This is the key line in the story of Mark Sanford’s alleged trespassing onto the home of his unhappy ex-wife Jenny.

The complaint says Jenny Sanford confronted Sanford leaving her Sullivans Island home on Feb. 3 by a rear door, using his cell phone for a flashlight. Her attorney filed the complaint the next day and Jenny Sanford confirmed Tuesday the documents are authentic.

The fact that Sanford had approached Jenny and asked her to run his campaign was reported one month later. The fact of the complaint was not, and Sanford fought a primary and a runoff without revealing it. I’ve heard a few Republicans suggest that it would be easier to lose the seat—no risk of flipping the House to Democrats, little risk of losing it again in November 2014—than to elect Sanford. More evidence for the prosecution here.

Peter Frase keeps it real on wonkblogging.

[T]he wonk … needs to appear to be deeply knowledgeable about a wide range of obscure and technical subjects. But this entails concealing both one’s ideological biases and one’s substantive lack of knowledge, and relying on the borrowed prestige of academics and experts. In doing so, the wonk becomes the conduit for the experts, or more exactly a crucial means by which their authority is reproduced.

Michael Moynihan mocks the reporters who credulously credited Julian Assange with a scoop.

I suppose Assange and I can now agree on at least one point: the lamentable state of modern journalism, where gangs of hyperconfident children churn out third-rate content in the never-ending quest for clicks. As a result, almost every news outlet misdescribed at least one detail of the WikiLeaks stunt.

Elspeth Reeve enjoys watching conservatives (mostly) hope and hope that some liberal tries to politicize the Boston bombings. It feels like people have hard-wired their partisan reactions to these sorts of events, because it’s been so long since it took a few days or some doing to find the identity of a killer, and thus properly kick off the investigations.

Slavoj Zizek wants a Thatcher of the left.

And a super-team of NYT investigative reporters peer into the world of online gun sales, which a majority of senators will vote to regulate today. That means the regulation is likely to be filibustered.