Last night I wrote a couple quick posts on Jeff Bezos’s revelation about The National Enquirer, its parent company AMI and its attempt to blackmail him with ‘intimate photos’. This isn’t just a tabloid story. I suspect this is a huge story with potentially mammoth implications. I wrote this post explaining why and this one about key clues Bezos left in his public statement.

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In addition to the all the bombshellish parts of that Jeff Bezos posts I discussed below, there are a few breadcrumbs strewn through the text that may reveal more than it seems on a quick read. Let’s go over them. Read More

Late this afternoon, Jeff Bezos published a letter on Medium that is, frankly, one of the most stunning things I’ve ever read. It is also extremely important, far beyond the celebrity gossip of a billionaire caught in an affair or compromising photographs. Read More

There are so many threads of this ugly and increasingly bizarre (three scandals at once) set of scandals in the upper ranks of the Virginia state government. But one is the proximity of these two events to the end of Jim Crow in the South. Before delving into this, let me stipulate that by saying there were lots of racist attitudes in the 1980s I’m not saying there aren’t a lot today. I am trying to make a different point. These events happened in the early 1980s. The Civil Rights Act of 1965 was 15 years or so earlier. Brown v Board was almost thirty years earlier. But actual desegregation, even de jure, let alone de facto desegregation was accepted by the courts as a years long process. Basically the de jure end of Jim Crow had only happened maybe 15 years or so earlier. To place ourselves in time, it’s like looking back at the 2004 presidential election day. In other words, just a short time ago. Read More

Jerry Nadler will go into tomorrow’s high-stakes hearing featuring acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker with a subpoena in his back pocket.

One of the most important lessons, I would suggest one of the most ingrained lessons of the passage and subsequent defense of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) is that Democrats gained nothing for their efforts to accommodate Republican insistence on market-oriented solutions to expanding health care coverage. The ACA was, famously, based on the plan then-Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) passed in Massachusetts in the early aughts. The concept originated as a Heritage Foundation proposal meant to provide a ‘market-oriented’ alternative to Democratic universal coverage plans. Even worse than Republicans’ maximum resistance, many of the shortcomings of Obamacare were based on the plan’s concessions to the private insurance model of coverage.

For all these reasons, the experience has triggered a critical shift among Democrats. Single payer plans have always had substantial support among Democrats. For decades it was actually official party policy. But there was a middle group who supported single payer in principle but found either the politics intractable or the process of transition too complicated and disruptive given how entrenched the private system is and how interwoven it is with employment. Probably the majority of elected Democrats have been in this middle group for the last couple decades. Read More

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin says US is sticking with Trump’s policies, not “going back to socialism.”

Treasury Secretary says US not "going back to socialism" we had before Trump. pic.twitter.com/pntW3SjXU2

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 6, 2019

All things considered, for Trump, this struck me as a fairly anodyne speech. It was fairly long for a State of the Union address. Trump hit his key bloodthirsty points, portraying undocumented immigrants as a tide of murderers threatening the country. He bragged on his supposed accomplishments – some real, most pretended. But overall, it tended to emphasize national unity, regardless of how empty that charge may be coming from what is certainly the most intentionally divisive President in modern American history. He even had some genuinely touching moments, such as the stories at the end of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, with US soldiers who were the liberators and inmates who were there that day. Read More

9:56 PM: “You weren’t supposed to do that.”

"You weren't supposed to do that." hahahaha didn't see that comin' pic.twitter.com/TTJGEDo2YA

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 6, 2019

9:42 PM: Always important to note in these moments that immigrants – legal and undocumented – commit crimes at significantly lower rates than native-born Americans. If safety was the issue it would be better to toss a bunch of citizens and replace them with undocumented immigrants.

9:37 PM: How long til the story about the Mexicans busing caravaners up to parts of the border without a wall falls apart?

9:19 PM: Some fun.

Nancy catching up on paperwork like a boss. pic.twitter.com/0r0m4MN18P

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 6, 2019

9:15 PM: All incredibly anodyne so far.

9:08 PM: I didn’t see a single Democrat shake the President’s hand as he walked down the aisle. It’s a little hard to see. So I can’t say definitely. But it didn’t look like it … Jennifer Bendery of Huffpo tells me via Twitter that Jim McGovern, Bobby Rush, Jim Langevin did.

9:03 PM: Alright let’s get this over with.