I’ve mentioned a few times that I’m skeptical that the “anonymous” writer of that New York Times “resistance” oped is really as senior a figure as people think. In part it is difficult to believe that a Cabinet Secretary or top White House adviser would pen such an attack – inevitably they’d be found out. But that’s not the main reason. I learned a long time ago that this phrase “senior administration official” and similar phrases are actually highly elastic in nature. It can refer to a substantially greater number of people than the two or three dozen that includes cabinet secretaries, heads of top agencies and highest level White House officials. How many more? I have no idea. At a minimum I’d say two or three dozen White House officials and at a minimum the top and number two person at every department. It potentially includes a lot of people. Always has. Now comes some confirmation of this reasoning, but in a round about and somewhat a**-covering way. Read More

We’re three installments into our special 2018 Series on Voting Rights and Democracy. Our second installment, by Rick Perlstein and Livia Gershon, looks at the modern history of bogus vote fraud hysteria as a tool to suppress voting by Democrats or racial minorities or the poor or anyone else. I know quite a lot about the story from the late 90s onward. But the part of the story that goes back into 1960s and 1970s I knew much less about. If you haven’t had a chance to read the second installment you can read it here.

Yesterday I discussed the article and the hysteria of partisan vote fraud propaganda going back to the beginning of the 1960s. You can listen to our conversation here.

In the first week of our annual Prime sign-up drive we were able to sign up just over 1,000 new Prime members, which is great. Our goal for this drive – and it’s a critical one – is to sign up a total of 2,000 new members. This isn’t just an arbitrary goal or something that sounds cool to get to. As I’ve described in my earlier posts, it’s a critical benchmark in our efforts to transform TPM’s business model from one based primarily on ads to one based primarily on membership. This is a critical part of that equation.

So if you’re a regular reader and haven’t yet signed up for Prime, please consider doing so today. It costs only 14 cents a day, $4.99 a month or $50 a year, depending on which option you choose. You get a site with dramatically fewer ads, you get all the Prime only content. There are a bunch of other features. And with all that you become part of making TPM possible and, more than possible, a robust and vital organization that can continue doing the work our team does every day with a relative independence from the storms from the advertising, tech and social platform industries which are battering and in some cases destroying so many publications. Please, if you’ve been considering it, thinking that you would, make the moment now. Just click right here.

I’d look for whoever in the administration most vociferously denounces the author of the op-ed. My advice is based on my own experience. I have to be a little vague about this. In the late ‘90s, I was given by a second or third hand source a document showing that the Clinton administration had seriously misled the public.

Read More

I strongly recommend reading this piece. A humorous and bizarre look into the sleazy world of Manafort/Trump-aligned operatives.

Kavanaugh concludes his public testimony. Catch up with Tierney Sneed’s reporting from the hearing.

Giuliani rules out Trump ever answering investigators questions about obstruction, either in person or in writing.

We’ve now seen that a growing list of top Trump administration officials are denying that they wrote the New York Times op-ed. There’s much less here than meets the eye. Let me explain. Read More

Basically a tie. But Democrat Phil Bredesen has a two point margin over Marsha Blackburn.

If you’re reading this post on the TPM front page, you must be a Prime member. It’s not behind our Prime paywall. It doesn’t even show up on the site unless you’re a Prime member who is logged into the site.

What’s the point?

I don’t imagine we’d use this very often. But the main issue is that as we’ve steadily built our number of Prime subscribers – now at just shy of 29,000 members – we’ve realized that it’s probably annoying to hear pitches to join Prime when you’re already a member. So this system let’s me have some posts show only to non-members and others only to members. All of which is to say that you won’t have to see anywhere near as many of those Prime pitch posts. I still may occasionally do one that everyone sees if we hit some big milestone or something else that might be relevant to current members. But mostly not.

This will also make it possible for me to share news about relevant updates to Prime or news that for whatever reason is only relevant to members.