Editor’s Blog
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After Labor Day we’ll begin a fourteen-month, jagged, probably ugly and immensely consequential dash toward the 2020 presidential election. The primary campaign will turn to real live primaries, then conventions, and soon enough we’ll be at the big moment. Before that I’m off for a week away with my family, hopefully to recharge, read, and gain whatever perspective we gain from deep inactivity.
As always you are in good hands with the rest of the TPM Team. See you soon.
As you may have seen I’ve been calling the parade of incel/rightist/white nationalist mass shooters or would-be mass shooters “feral dweebs.” I mainly attach this description because it is accurate. Loners, angry, awkward, failures, sexually frustrated, women- and minority- and Jew-hating. It seems like a popular tag for these guys. But unsurprisingly and I think understandably, some people say it makes light of something that is literally deadly serious.
The House GOP leadership has circulated talking points to its members instructing them to respond to questions about mass shootings by claiming they are all motived by people “from the left.”
Authorities at that immigration detention facility appear to have suspended the guard who drove his truck into/over those protestors outside the facility. The facility suspended Capt. Thomas Woodworth; they wouldn’t say whether he was the one at the wheel though videos of the incident show people calling his name.
Let me comment on Israel’s apparent decision to bar entry to Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
I wanted to flag your attention to this video. It’s video of a protest by the Jewish activist group Never Again Action protesting outside the Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, Rhode Island, a private immigration detention facility.
Tierney Sneed reports on the continuing struggle over Ohio’s embrace of extreme voter purges.
That feral dweeb who was arrested for planning massacres at a local synagogue and LBQT nightclub, and who had earlier stalked a neighborhood with his AR-15 to ‘prevent crime,’ turns out to be affiliated with a neo-Nazi group.
Happy Thursday, August 15. The New York City medical examiner could not determine Jeffrey Epstein’s cause of death after finding unusual broken bones in his neck. Here’s more on that and the other stories we’re watching.
Ken Cuccinelli, longtime focus of TPM reporting and now President Trump’s non-Senate-confirmed immigration chief, tells CNN that the poem on the Statute of Liberty is actually referring to “people coming from Europe” and “wretched” didn’t really mean “wretched” — just that they were commoners, not members of the nobility or gentry.
Cuccinelli: That statue of liberty poem was about "people coming from Europe." pic.twitter.com/nrDcUGJsU3
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 13, 2019
For all the arguing and analyzing and prognosticating about the 2020 presidential race I am surprised how little attention has been given to what may or I think likely will play the biggest role in the outcome: third party candidates.
We’re making a major push to grow our membership base in the second half of 2019. It is both critical to the future vitality of TPM and also a major opportunity. This post will explain what’s at stake, what’s within reach as well as important context and background. It’s mainly filled with points and details I’ll refer back to over time and it’s mainly intended for our core audience and members as some transparency into what we’re doing and why. But it also includes details about the nuts and bolts of the digital publishing economy. So others may be interested as well.