From TPM Reader PT …

You and numerous other observers have commented on the peculiar passivity of the Democrats going into what was always going to be a challenging midterm election, which will of course be even more challenging if they don’t really make much of an effort to contest it. What could be responsible for this malaise in the party?

tl;dr: Joe Manchin.

One of the abiding features of early 21st century American politics is that a lot of change on the right happens in the subterranean world of what we used to call “the Crazy.” In the pre-Trump years it’s not that any of this was really hidden. It wasn’t subterranean in that sense. But it was off the radar of most of conventional journalism and the mainstream political discourse because it wasn’t serious. It wasn’t real. It was just crazy antics on the margins. But as we’ve tried to chronicle for decades now, that was never the case. That was the real GOP politics. It controlled and drove the presentable mainstream leaders — the Boehners, Ryans, McConnells and more. The ascension of Donald Trump was in many ways a simple inversion of this dynamic, putting “the Crazy” in formal and open leadership of the party.

Something has happened as recently as the last four to six weeks that follows this pattern, is important and dangerous and is still mostly coasting under the radar of “proper” U.S. political discourse and reporting.

A new AP poll says that 54% of Americans think President Biden has been “not tough enough” on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. These kinds of public perceptions can be shaped by perceptions of a leader as much as they drive them. So you think Biden is weak as your starting point and therefore you think he’s not being tough enough on Russia rather than the other way around. Also notable, Americans’ hawkishness over Ukraine has dipped a bit from a month ago. But the first, second and third most important thing about this poll is that this is what you get when you’re not reminding Americans every day — and I mean every god-damned day — that the GOP has spent the last 7 years boosting, allying with and even conspiring with Russia.

I want to thank everyone, especially Prime members and Prime AF members, for their patience over the last few days as we’ve worked to resolved a number of technical issues tied to moving TPM over to a new server set up. Your memberships and your support are the bedrock of TPM and our team has worked at a fever pace to resolve what are fairly complex technical issues (for tech folks, basically interweaving authentication and caching). As of last night we believe we’ve resolved the issues with ads showing up for people who shouldn’t be seeing them as well as restoring comments. (Yippee! Appreciate the Congrats.) The remaining issue is some subscribers seeing partial RSS feeds instead of the full post RSS. We believe we will have that resolved too as soon as today, assuming no new unforeseen issues.

As you can see here, pre-Jan 6th text from Oath Keepers paramilitaries show they were actually afraid a massive Antifa army of feral Portlanders descending on Washington, D.C. It’s a fascinating prism into the Trump/alt-right/fascist paramilitary world. But we should remember that this is par for the course with coups, fascist takeovers, genocidal violence. It’s how incitement works. You can seldom get large numbers of people to do really bad things without getting them to believe that those people are getting ready to do something similar to them.

Getting a lot of questions like this one from TPM Reader NL …

Help me out here. Why on earth are Democrats/Biden beating this drum? It seems like the right and politically convenient thing to do. We are in a fight to save our democracy and many others around the world. Why are people not calling this shit out and putting MBS and Jared in the spotlight?

At the moment some Prime AF and Inside members are getting ads on the site. This is a site glitch tied to the publishing software switchover over the weekend. In fact, I’m getting ads myself at the moment. Annoying! (Technically my account is an Inside account.) In any case, this is a technical glitch we are working to resolve absolutely as soon as possible. For the moment if you log out and log back in that will likely resolve it. But again, you shouldn’t have to do that and I assure you were are working to resolve this as our top priority.

A few days ago, investigative journalist Vicky Ward published an account which claimed to explain just why Jared Kushner was able secure that $2 billion investment from a Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund for his freshly hatched investment fund, Affinity Partners. Her explanation also claims to explain why Kushner was successfully prevented from receiving a top level security clearance while he was in government.

According to Ukrainian defense officials, Russia has begun a major new offensive in the east of the country. So far these statements are from the head of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council and also the General Staff.

There seems to be some definitional disagreement on this. The U.S. appears less clear that this is actually the beginning of the major offensive, as opposed to preliminaries to set the stage for it. Again, perhaps a definitional or semantic question.

A number of you have written in to say that comments are currently down along with some other small site glitches. We did a site/software upgrade over the weekend and as often happens there are some small breakages that came with that. Our team is working to get everything ironed out as soon as possible. To respond to some of your questions: no, there is no change in commenting policy or anything about commenting. This is simply a tech issue which we will have resolved shortly. We appreciate your patience.