TPM Reader MG shares a Thanksgiving experience …
We just finished a Thanksgiving dinner between my immediate family and some old family friends. The adults are sitting around the table sharing stories, and the three college students (my nephew, who is an undergraduate at a state university in Kentucky and the son of the other family, who’s an undergraduate at a fundamentalist Christian school outside Nashville) are sitting in the living room listening to YouTube videos peddling conspiracy theories about Walmart stores being converted into concentration camps. The videos are well-produced and uses real events as evidence but preys upon the ignorance of my nephew and the other young man about the true context of those events (for instance, the truck-full of migrants who died in a Walmart parking lot). Anyway, they eat this stuff up and are being radicalized. There’s nothing more to say: rural youths are being radicalized.
I hope you’re having a great holiday. Eat well. Friend well. Family well.
Nancy Pelosi turning Rep. Marcia Fudge back to supporting her candidacy was a critical development. Having one of the sixteen letter signers switch to support likely means this challenge is effectively over.
What’s especially notable about Chief Justice John Roberts’ rebuke of President Trump is that it seems to have come in the form of a statement from the Supreme Court after the Associated Press apparently asked for a response to Trump’s remarks. This wasn’t an off-the-cuff remark at some seminar or symposium.
Robert Mueller having none of George Papadopoulos reneging on plea deal and trying to avoid jail.
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: