Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may not have announced his intent to run for president, but he’s already got some thoughts about what he’d do in the White House. Among them is a plan to decimate the civil service. And it may look familiar.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: The Ghost Of Power Grabs Past”More Observations on the Unfolding Crisis in Israel
Since I wrote this morning’s post there have been a number of new developments in Israel.
Continue reading “More Observations on the Unfolding Crisis in Israel”Sources of News On Events in Israel
For my thoughts on the unfolding crisis in Israel, see my post from earlier today. This is a short post with some pointers on finding good news coverage.
Continue reading “Sources of News On Events in Israel”Jordan Tries Again To Dunk On Manhattan DA
House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has doubled down on his intent to investigate Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg as he seeks to block the prosecutor from potentially bringing a case against Donald Trump.
Continue reading “Jordan Tries Again To Dunk On Manhattan DA”A Few Observations on Israel’s Spiraling Crisis
In general, the Israeli protests against the so-called judicial reform package have garnered much less news attention in the U.S. than one might have expected. But these are much more than mass protests of the sort that occur with some regularity across the democratic world. It’s not too much to say that the scale and scope of these protests are without any clear precedent in Israel’s 75-year history. They have gone on for roughly two and half months, and they have continued to gather momentum, expand in scope and grow in intensity. They have increasingly cut into the central institution of Israeli society, the IDF. They have united much of the country’s financial sector in arguing that the reforms threaten the future of the Israeli economy. And today they have spurred a general strike which has brought much of the country to a standstill.
Continue reading “A Few Observations on Israel’s Spiraling Crisis”DOJ Presses To Immediately Get Its Hands On Peter Navarro’s Encrypted Emails
Peter Navarro, Trump’s former trade adviser and a key Big Lie booster, has been harboring hundreds of government records that he’s appealing in federal court to keep. The Justice Department sued him over the records last August. Earlier this month, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled against Navarro. But Navarro isn’t giving up.
Continue reading “DOJ Presses To Immediately Get Its Hands On Peter Navarro’s Encrypted Emails”Ex-Fox News Producer Asks To Correct The Testimony She Gave In Dominion Case
Abby Grossberg — a former Tucker Carlson producer who sued Fox News last week accusing the network of pressuring her into giving misleading testimony about their coverage of supposed election fraud — filed new allegations Monday morning, claiming coercive coaching by Fox lawyers, bias and unprofessional behavior by staff members and retaliation by the network, according to NBC News.
Continue reading “Ex-Fox News Producer Asks To Correct The Testimony She Gave In Dominion Case”Grievance Tour 2024 Gets Its Grand Kick Off In Waco
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Branch Trumpinians Rally Around The Prophet
It’s been 30 years since the Waco siege, a touchstone for right-wing anti-government extremists.
On Saturday, Trump kicked off his campaign in Waco, an obviously sinister choice of venue. At one point, he held his hand over his heart as a video of the January 6 insurrection played in the background; for most of it, he went on about the injustices he currently faces before various elements of the legal system.
Here are a few choice quotes to give you a sense of the mood:
- On the investigations that beset him: “They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you.”
- On his ability to escape eight years of investigation without charges: “[It] probably makes me the most innocent man in the history of our country.”
- On Ron DeSantis: “He’s dropping like a rock.”
- On a song performed by a choir of January 6 convicts: “That song tells you a lot because it’s number one in every single category. Number two was Taylor Swift, number three was Miley Cyrus.”
Of course, this is nothing new.
To Trump, for whom there is only triumph and disaster, all of the various investigations represent the latest and greatest injustices in American history.
But that somewhat toddler-like inability to separate self from surroundings has always struck me as a weird strength of Trump’s: his sense of personal grievance is so intense that it serves as a way for his followers to connect with him, establishing a bond which has come to form as one of the many bases for the cult of personality that surrounds him. The WWE-style performance only helps here.
Trump benefitted from this in 2016, acting as a canvas onto which people could impose their various grievances with the political system. It served as much as an energizer for him as it did to blunt Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.
But as his legal peril increases, Trump’s focus goes from the general to the particular. It does make me wonder if his endless focus on his own, very specific legal troubles will dilute the cult of personality that he’s built for himself.
This report from the local paper suggests that I am naive beyond belief, and that his supporters find him as engaging as ever.
And I’m usually not one for crowd-size analysis, but you can draw your own conclusions:
Sad!
Indictment Watch Enters Week Two
The Manhattan grand jury that’s heard DA Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump is meeting on Monday. That alone will fuel speculation throughout the day that prosecutors may choose this very day to obtain an indictment of the former President. We’ll be following.
Bonus: Don’t miss Bragg’s interview with TPM’s very own Hunter Walker, available here.
RIP To a Real One
The Texas Observer is shutting down after 68 years of publication.
It’s a real loss: a hard-hitting progressive, investigative publication with a humorous bent, the Observer is going out still publishing essential news on Texas politics and the border. One recent piece looked at grubby dealings around Gov. Greg Abbott (R)’s border wall, while another examined the impact of local anti-abortion laws on women’s health.
RIP.
Tornado Devastates Mississippi Town
A massive tornado killed at least 26 people this weekend, and leveled much of Rolling Fork, Missisippi. Take it from the local paper here. The Washington Post has a good explainer of how rare the gargantuan twister was, and how it worked.
Fox Has Its Time In The Barrel
The ex-Tucker Carlson booker who sued Fox News last week filed new claims alleging that attorneys for the company tried to coerce her into giving false testimony in the Dominion lawsuit.
Peter Navarro Is Fighting For What, Exactly?
Peter Navarro, the Trump adviser under indictment for ignoring a House January 6 Committee subpoena, has refused in a separate lawsuit to return documents that he squirreled away as the Trump administration ended.
The DOJ replied below:
Who’s Afraid of the FAA?
Biden’s nominee to run the Federal Aviation Administration withdrew over the weekend after Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) killed a committee vote on the nomination, putting her in league with Republicans who opposed nominee Phillip Washington. The pick received vociferous support from organized labor.
Washington was tanked partly by a suggestion that he was connected to a byzantine Los Angeles contracting scandal. The New York Times devoted multiple paragraphs to that issue in a December 2022 story about the nomination, but as LA-based journalist Alissa Walker points out, this may be another example of manufactured controversy coming from the right:
Khanna is Fine Where He Is
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) announced this weekend that he will not throw his hat in the ring for the California Senate primary. Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Katie Porter (D-CA), and Barbara Lee (D-CA) have all announced that they’re running.
One AUMF Down?
The Senate will vote this week on repealing the Authorization for the Use of Military Force which allowed the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
SVB sale
First Citizens Bank, a North Carolina-based lender, agreed to buy the remnants of Silicon Valley Bank, the FDIC said.
Israel protests
Massive rallies against Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial coup brought Israel to a standstill on Sunday evening. The country’s largest union declared a general strike; flights at Ben Gurion Airport were halted. Haaretz reports that Netanyahu is likely to put the judicial overhaul move on ice.
Take a look at the scale of the demonstrations:
Powerful Russians Admit: The War is Lost
One feature of politics in eastern Europe that we, happily, lack in the United States is that of the mysteriously sourced audio recording, typically collected by an internal intelligence agency before being leaked online or to the press.
A phone call between a former Russian senator and an influential music producer, both under western sanctions, appeared online this past week. It’s notable for how clear-eyed the two men are about what a disaster the war has been for Russia; they call it “fratricidal,” and at one point remark that Russia did not lose the war to the West, but rather to “Kvartal 95,” the comedy troupe of which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was a member before entering politics.
A subtitled version is below:
That’s not to suggest the West doesn’t have its own problems in continuing to back Ukraine:
- Adam Tooze gives a lucid overview of the “nightmarish” macroeconomic tradeoffs that the war has presented Ukraine.
- One European munitions factory complains that it can’t expand production because a local TikTok server farm is sucking up all the power.
More Nuclear Saber-Rattling
Putin announced that Russia would open a new storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. Perhaps not coincidentally, it comes after Finland cleared the last major hurdle to NATO accession last week.
Experts are skeptical.
Twitter Source Code Leaked Online
Twitter filed a copyright infringement suit on Friday, saying that swathes of its source code had been posted online.
Clock Ticking On Tik-Tok?
Tik-Tok is the heroin of social media apps, at once utterly addictive while completely devoid of content (in my humble opinion).
After a hearing last week that featured at least some easy-to-mock moments from members of Congress apparently unfamiliar with how the site works, Congress appears poised to restrict the app. What form that will take remains unclear.
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The California Primary Takes A Clearer Shape
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), a prominent, progressive member of Congress long assumed to be eyeing a Senate run, said on Sunday that he won’t mount a bid for retiring Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat and will instead endorse Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA).
Continue reading “The California Primary Takes A Clearer Shape”The Labor Movement Has Found A Strategic Advantage In The Airline Industry
In the early morning hours of Jan. 11, a hack shut down the FAA’s systems, grounding all flights nationwide. I had a flight that morning to Minneapolis–St. Paul with a tight connection to Boise, Idaho. Once the ground stop was lifted, my Delta flight left New York’s LaGuardia.
Continue reading “The Labor Movement Has Found A Strategic Advantage In The Airline Industry “