Here’s a really good article from the Jackson Free Press about Cindy Hyde-Smith, the appointed Republican US Senator now running for election in her own right against Democrat Mike Espy. It’s a more detailed and complex story than the way it’s been presented when aggregated in other publications. Hyde-Smith went to one of the notorious segregation academies set up in the deep south to escape desegregation in the public schools. She in turn sent her daughter to the descendent of one of those academies, which remains almost exclusively white. Hyde-Smith herself comes off in the story as mostly a cypher and a weather vane but one whose tendency and instincts have always been toward the worst aspects of the state’s racist past and present. Hyde-Smith was actually a Democrat until about a decade ago. It’s a good read.

Jerome Corsi is a professional liar and a volatile one at that. But the Post is reporting that he is now in negotiations to plea agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. If that’s true, if it happens, that will likely bring him significantly closer to Roger Stone (who I strongly suspect Mueller already has more than enough information on to indict). And that in turn should be a big step closer to unraveling what went on between the Trump campaign, Russia and Wikileaks. They’re all part of one big story.

As you recover from your holiday meal I wanted to show you some videos I clipped this morning. On live video, the President spoke to service members abroad sending Thanksgiving greetings – a pretty standard presidential tradition. But he’s in Florida without most of his usual minders.

Most of the press commentary was that he ‘went off script’. But that’s not it exactly. On a live call he pressed the people he was talking to on gratuitously political points, asked hem to agree with him on trade deals or keeping bad people out of the country or even his pet peeves about new military technology he clearly doesn’t understand. As usual, he pressed them to agree with various false or nonsensical points.

Here are a few examples. Read More

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