TPM – Talking Points Memo - Breaking News and Analysis

EDITORS’ BLOG

LIVE COVERAGE

8m agoFebruary 7, 2023

Quick Take on Biden’s Speech

by Josh Marshall

Watching State of the Union addresses is one of my least favorite parts of what I do at TPM. I find them a mix of tedious and stressful to watch. By and large they don’t matter. I’d prefer not to watch them. But it’s part of the job. This was very different from any of the State of the Union address I’ve seen in forty plus years of watching them.

Joe Biden isn’t a particularly rousing public speaker normally. The first ten or fifteen minutes of his address were fairly boilerplate, occasionally halting. The substance was pitched toward mid-sized and small towns in post-industrial America. This was unsurprising but well-executed. But then it went somewhere entirely different, not in substance but in presentation and tone.

I don’t need to describe the speech to you because you presumably saw it. Here are the two points that stood out to me.

LIVE COVERAGE

55m agoFebruary 7, 2023

Sanders Blogging

by Josh Marshall

10:50 PM: I’m not sure what else to say about this response. Dark, growling, over the top. Republicans not doing themselves any favors here. Especially after the speech everyone just saw.

10:47 PM: Sanders starting off SOUR. Eeesh.

LIVE COVERAGE

1h agoFebruary 7, 2023

Well

by Josh Marshall

I just have to say

My God, it's just poetry, watching Biden tussle with Marje Greene as she does her best imitation of that famous Real Housewives of New Jersey scene. pic.twitter.com/KDSauuGUqS
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 8, 2023

LIVE COVERAGE

1h agoFebruary 7, 2023

Quick Take, More Soon

by Josh Marshall

I’ll have a few more thoughts in a moment. I want to take in the official response from Huckabee Sanders. But that was much much livelier and better than I’d expected. I was surprised.

LIVE COVERAGE

1h agoFebruary 7, 2023

SOTU Blogging Second Thread

by Josh Marshall

10:18 PM: We may try to put some of this together later. But there seem to be a lot of prestige reporters tonight not quite willing to say what happened on the floor in that exchange about Social Security and Medicare, with Republicans hooting and hollering. We all saw what happened.

10:05 PM: There were some feral Republicans there yelling about the border.

10:00 PM: “Equal protection under the law is a covenant we have with each other in America.”

LIVE COVERAGE

2h agoFebruary 7, 2023

Okay, Let’s Do This

by Josh Marshall

9:47 PM: He’s doing considerably better than I’d anticipated. I didn’t have low expectations. I just find most of these speeches by most Presidents kind of meh. He’s enjoying himself and skewering the opposition with a bear hug.

9:45 PM: Joe, Medicare and Social Security saver …

9:43 PM: A lot of Republicans really don’t like the facts.

9:37 PM: Oy …

9:34 PM: He seems jazzed.

9:29 PM: ‘Jobs are coming back, pride is coming back.’

9:23 PM: “We came together” seems to be the theme.

9:20 PM: McCarthy is trying to follow the GOP vow never to clap but he seems to kind of give in toward the end. Can’t quite manage it.

9:11 PM: I guess we’re charm offensive-ing. I always have equivocal feelings about this. On the one hand, don’t bring a noodle to a knife fight. On the other, the audience isn’t the members in the building. It’s the public at home. That’s what’s important to remember.

9:08 PM: Apparently Biden and Santos made locked eye contact but didn’t say anything or shake hands. The news has been delivered.

LIVE COVERAGE

3h agoFebruary 7, 2023

Finally A Decent Balloon Article

by Josh Marshall

Unlike a lot of reporting on the Chinese balloon, this piece in the Post contains new and interesting information. The Pentagon believes the flight is part of a fairly extensive global effort that has been going on for about five years. Low tech balloons, married to high tech communications tools. Notably, according to the Post the US military doesn’t believe the flight across North America is an accident, as I’d speculated. But they also don’t believe it was a provocation. On the contrary, the Chinese were surprised that it was detected and chagrined that it led to the cancelation of Tony Blinken’s scheduled trip to Beijing.

Even based on this article, it still seems to me to be something of a mystery just how valuable the intelligence collected by these balloons really is. Experts seem divided on this point. Part of the answer may simply be that they’re vastly cheaper than launching satellites. So dollar for dollar they may still provide some value. Countries around the world now appear to be matching the balloon flights to what were past instances of unidentified objects in their airspace.

LIVE COVERAGE

4h agoFebruary 7, 2023

Back to Florida

by Josh Marshall

Back to my Miami Herald reading list. This evening I got a new headline via email: Florida high school board to hold emergency meeting after menstruation question controversy. What’s the ‘menstruation question controversy’, you ask? Since I’m up to date on Florida politics I can clue you in.

The Florida High School Athletic Association recently ruled that on the standard form to play high school sports in Florida there will now be a mandatory question about whether a student athlete menstruates: Date of first period, days between periods, most recent period. The strong suspicion is that this was a way to ferret out trans athletes, since it’s not clear why the coaching staff or the schools (where the records would be stored) would have any medical need for this information. Others feared it would be used to find proof of illicit abortions. These forms aren’t protected by anything like HIPAA. Coaches, staff or whoever else can just pull them out of the bank box and see what they say.

Loading…

Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.

LIVE COVERAGE

26m ago