Before Matt Whitaker was installed as Jeff Sessions chief of staff and minder at the Department of Justice he was making more than $900,000 as the “director” of a pro-Trump dark money group called FACT.
The trend of ridiculously bad appointed Southern senate incumbents continues and is entertaining in a hideous kind of way. Cindy Hyde-Smith is no Roy Moore. But coming off a feel good comment about lynching and ‘jokes’ about voter suppression she’s making a real run at it. She has now apparently demanded that there be no audience and no press at tonight’s sole debate in the Mississippi senate run off. It’s Mississippi, an extremely conservative state with extremely racialized voting. She’s definitely the favorite. But it does seem to be an actual race, with Roll Call just today moving it from Sold Republican to Likely Republican. Read More
Take a few moments to read this statement just out from the President, on Saudi Arabia. Read More
This get a bit technical. (It’s about SCOTUS intervention in the on-going Census case Tierney Sneed has been covering for TPM.) But it’s a good example of how GOP court packing seems to paying quick dividends in efforts to further entrench GOP power and undercount blue states with significant immigrant populations.
Why President Trump hasn’t visited troops in Afghanistan or Iraq, according to the Washington Post:
A few TPM Readers were at Seth Moulton’s townhall last night in Amesbury, Massachusetts. TPM Reader MK went in unhappy with Moulton’s antics and wasn’t impressed with what he saw …
He was indeed a bit of a douchebag during the town hall.
As Amy Walter points out here, there are a number of new members in very competitive districts who pledged – in varying degrees – not to support Pelosi. There are good reasons to believe that provided a margin of victory, though obviously there’s no real way to know. Very, very few of them have signed this letter. The vast majority of the signers are from very safe districts. So the upshot here is that this likely forces freshmen Dems who will have very hard reelection races in two years to start their term with a tough vote which could get them tossed in two years.
The FBI officially considers the right-wing paramiliary Proud Boys an “extremist group with ties to white nationalism” and has since at least August.
The anti-Pelosi faction has released its list of 16 incumbents or apparent midterm winners who say they will not vote for Pelosi in the floor vote for Speaker. That is at least a few fewer than expected. Marcia Fudge, who has half-suggested she’d challenge Pelosi, apparently pulled her name from the list. So on a few fronts it seems like the effort is flagging.
But it remains important to understand what’s happening here. Read More
I’ve said so many times that our readers are truly a gift and year after year (18 and counting!) have remained a key part of our editorial process here at TPM. Here is really a special case. You may have noticed that President Trump made this bizarre and almost certainly false comment that the President of Finland told him the Finns avoid forest fires by aggressive raking.
It so happens TPM Reader JI (pictured here at a mushroom exhibition) is an avid TPM Reader from Finland who is also a Phd plant biologist. He did us the service of giving a detailed explanation of how forest fires work in Finland and how raking is just not part of the equation.
My short non-biologist summary would be this: it’s fairly wet and cold in Finland so it’s pretty different. They don’t use rakes to avoid forest fires. Their big problem is bog fires. Many of the best parts of JI’s letter are cris de coeur, insisting on the non-role of rakes in any part of Finnish forage management.
On behalf of all TPM Readers, thank you to TPM Reader JI and we’re sorry about the Trump thing. Email below … Read More