In Episode 21 of the Josh Marshall Show podcast David Frum and I talk Trump.

I confess that I’m feeling pretty good about sitting out the ‘Dean Heller might not actually be awful on taking away your health care’ market bubble from earlier this year. Now he’s a key driver of the latest push to repeal Obamacare. A pro-Obamacare group is already up with a digital ad campaign targeting Heller’s flip.

This is quite a paragraph (emphasis added)…

Tension between the two comes as life in the White House is shadowed by the investigation. Not only do Mr. Trump, Mr. Kushner and Mr. McGahn all have lawyers, but so do other senior officials. The uncertainty has grown to the point that White House officials privately express fear that colleagues may be wearing a wire to surreptitiously record conversations for Mr. Mueller.

I’ve spent a lot of time in recent months thinking about how we should be covering the news in light of huge changes in the news business and the world we’re covering in the last two to three years. How do we, as a small news organization, use our resources most effectively to inform our readers? The most fundamental and important way is to do more original reporting, which is where you’ve seen us focus most of our resources this year. We hope to have hired three additional reporters by the end of 2017 – not a dramatic increase for larger organizations but a big expansion for us. But it’s not only a matter of numbers. It’s how we deploy those resources. More specifically, how do we react to this new environment to do what we do better? Read More

As I mentioned last week, we delayed the last two weeks of our annual Prime drive until we had the signup system and account system simplified and more user-friendly. Check it out here. Our team put a lot of work into making it more user-friendly and awesome. With that now in place, we’re kicking off the final two weeks tomorrow. We will try to keep the pitches as congenial as possible. But remember, we are doing this because our subscription program is what has kept TPM vital and growing while many other publications, relying on ads alone, are cutting staff or ‘pivoting to video’. Your subscription keeps TPM vital, growing, focused on you and digging deeper into the myriad of stories that matter right now. If you’re a regular reader and you haven’t taken a moment to join Prime, please take a moment to join us now. It’s cheap, gives you a lot of cool features, and supports our independent journalism. Just click right here.

The people I’m really hoping to get to over these two weeks are the people who I sometimes meet who tell me how they love TPM and have been meaning to join Prime. Hopefully, those folks have signed up. But what I mean by this is that in my own life there are always a handful of things I want to do, should do, have been planning to do but for whatever reason haven’t done. I blame some mix of busy-ness, inertia, the pain of getting my wallet out and typing in those numbers and whatever other low on the scale crookednesses in the timber of my humanity that stand in the way. Anyway, I get it. That’s me too. But if that’s you, I’m going to do my best to bring you over the line. We know that there is a substantial number of our readers who are daily readers, plan to sign up for Prime, want to sign up but simply haven’t gotten around to it. If that’s you, we really need you to join the club too. It’s important. Just click here.

Rhode Island is getting used to its top TV station being owned by right-wing broadcast conglomerate Sinclair Broadcasting. That means WJAR must run regular segments from Trumper Boris Epshteyn, now rebranded as Sinclair’s chief political analyst in addition to a daily Terrorism Alert Desk, “advertised as a daily news update about terrorist activity” even when there’s no terrorism happening.

I strongly recommend you read this reply from George Packer to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay in The Atlantic. There’s an undeniable personal edge to this reply since Coates took Packer to task by name and called him to account for infidelity toward ideals which are central to any progressive and humane vision of America’s future. But I think he captures key things that are missing in Coates’ recent writing. Read More

TPM Reader PB reads some tea leaves about Google …

Recently I was at an industry round table which included many of the tech players. We are all being affected by certain decisions made by Google and more importantly so are Internet users. Read More

It now seems clear that the massive data breach at Equifax was caused not simply by aggressive hackers but by clear and potentially negligent security errors by Equifax itself. But fundamentally, this isn’t a security problem. It’s a market failure and a legal and regulatory failure.

There are many businesses in which the cost and assumed liability of taking possession of certain goods – real or intellectual – is quite high. Indeed, that is often a major part of the business model itself – they are paid to take on that liability. Some extreme examples are transporting dangerous or volatile chemicals. This may be the biggest personal data security breach yet. But breaches that are nonetheless quite large happen basically all the time and the costs to the company are usually negligible. Yes, there’s a big PR hit and there’s usually some fine. But the costs in fraud and disruption in the lives of affected consumers totally dwarfs the financial cost to the company. On the most basic measure, the costs are not great enough to prevent companies like Equifax from making really basic mistakes like failing to install new security patches in a timely manner. It’s a cost of doing business.  Read More

It hasn’t been the best 24 hours for Harvard University. You’ve probably heard that Harvard managed to piss almost everyone off by first extending and then rescinding a fellowship appointment to Chelsea Manning. But you may or may not have seen this article in the Times about a woman named Michelle Jones.

It is a fascinating and powerful story on many levels. Jones, now 45, just finished a 20 year stint in prison for killing her 4-year old son. It’s not entirely clear to me from the story – and I sense it was never entirely clear – whether Jones intentionally killed her son in a discreet act of violence or whether he died from some combination of physical beatings and neglect. Regardless, the ghastliness of the crime is not in dispute. Jones was originally sentenced to 50 years in prison and was released after 20 years for good behavior. Read More