If you missed it or are just interested in some good history book recommendations, check out my list of over 60 books of history books (mostly quality popular history, some from a slightly more scholarly direction) which I can recommend, ranging over various topics and a few thousand years of history.
Liberals are, as we’ve noted many times, often captive to policy literalism. While their policy positions are quite similar, Warren’s ethos and political style are fundamentally reformist while Sanders’ are more sectarian and anti-establishment. This difference shapes the coalitions which are available to them in ways that many observers underestimate.
The Department of Justice and Bureau of Prisons is making it unreasonably hard for some of us to remain in the reality-based world.
Another quick note of thanks to everyone who’s tried out our TPM Ad Free two-week trial. If you’re a current Prime member and you’d like to try out the cleaner, faster version of TPM with absolutely, positively zero ads, just click here. It’s free. There’s no obligation. It’s totally awesome. And upgrading gets us closer to a robust membership model that can sustain us into the future.
For those of you who are currently using the trial, I have a few updates.
If you’re mystified or just trying to make sense of all the different moving pieces in the health-care policy debate taking place in the Democratic presidential primaries, I’ve got something you’ll want to see. As you know, there’s the ACA expanded with a “public option.” There are various Medicare buy-in models which can be similar to the public option additions. Then there are various flavors of “Medicare for All.” There are many political, ideological and priority questions in this debate. But I was really most interested in clarifying the moving pieces in the different plans, the technical specifics, how transitions work, how you save money without creating big disruptions, how many people the different approaches actually cover. So last week we did a TPM Briefing with President Obama’s Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Andy Slavitt, to discuss these topics. I found it an incredibly illuminating discussion and many participants told me they did too. If you are a TPM member you can watch the Briefing here.
Look at this remarkable piece of video. President Trump announces that he’s received another “very beautiful letter” from Kim Jong Un in which Kim tells Trump he’s not happy about U.S.-South Korea military exercises, Trump appears to agree with Kim and Trump chides South Korea for not paying the U.S. more money.
Let me tell you about a new project we’re involved with. It’s called Crime Story. It’s the brainchild of a friend of mine named Kary Antholis. It’s about crime both in its story telling dimensions (in fiction, crime reporting, documentaries etc.) and also as a policy and social justice issue (mass incarceration, implicit bias in the criminal justice system, reform DAs, etc.) in American society.
Yesterday we learned more details about the White House’s continued indifference to or actual interference with the DHS’s efforts to combat violent white supremacist extremism and terrorism. This is hardly surprising. There’s basically no clear line separating the kind of folks Trump invited to his social media ‘bias’ festival at the White House and various white supremacist propagandists who radicalize guys like the shooter in El Paso. But it’s misleading to see this as particular to Trump or this administration. This goes back at least 25 years and is in its own way comparable to NRA-backed legislative mandates preventing federal public health officials from funding research on gun violence.
The lawyer for a Trump supporter (Curt Brockway) who assaulted a boy for not removing his hat during the national anthem says his client thought he was acting on Trump’s orders.
It wasn’t a central part of his note, really more an aside. But TPM Reader MP made one error in yesterday’s note when he wrote that “the Tree of Life massacre was the worst attack on Jewish people in American, nay, Western Hemisphere history.” A surprisingly large number of TPM Readers wrote in to say that this was clearly wrong. The largest, by really any definition, was the AMIA Jewish Community Center bombing in Buenos Aires in 1994 in which 85 people died and some three hundred were injured. Of course, massacres of this scale can’t really be compared in some apples to apples sense. Each is radically individual, separate, total in itself. But this is an important correction of the record.