While there is life there is hope. As for statistics, I will spare us any thoughts on the meaning of a Stage 4 pancreatic cancer diagnosis, which Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) announced this afternoon. For decades Lewis has been one of history’s immortals who is yet still walking among us. Elected to Congress in 1986, Lewis has now served almost 34 years as a member of the Georgia congressional delegation. But at 46, when he came to Congress, he had already accomplished enough for several lifetimes. Indeed, one could say the same by the time he turned 26.
I flew home yesterday after a week away. The first news I saw was this stabbing attack on a Hanukah party at a Rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York. Police have arrested 37 year old Thomas Grafton, an African American man from Greenwood Lake, about twenty miles northwest of Monsey. Monsey hosts a large enclave of ultra-orthodox, or Hasidic, people — so people who are very visibly Jewish. According to this 2012 Times article, Monsey has the highest concentration of ultra-orthodox anywhere in the world outside of Brooklyn and Israel. Other than being an apparent hate crime, it’s not clear whether the attack was tied to a particular ideology, as seems to have been the case in the multiple fatality attack earlier this month in Jersey City, or a more individual hatred of Jews. But if Grafton was in Greenwood Lake and wanted to attack Jews Monsey would be the logical and closest place to go.
A recently-released Justice Department inspector general review of the 2016 Trump-Russia probe did not convince a judge that Michael Flynn’s wild-eye allegations of prosecutorial misconduct were legitimate enough to push off his sentencing.
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Among the already surreal cast of characters unleashed on all our brains by the Ukraine scandal, there’s one particularly weird individual.
I used to meet with him in Kyiv.
JoinSatirizing president Trump isn’t easy, and it’s no secret that American comedians have struggled to do it. We have an article in Cafe today by five writers — four of whom grew up in countries that had recent brushes with authoritarianism — about what the U.S. can learn from comedy abroad. Other countries have dealt with leaders like Trump, and the circumstances that lead to his rise, before, and satirists there have had to find ways to make lemons into lemonade. This Cafe piece looks at how they did it.
It’s time to dole out our annual Golden Dukes, recognizing the biggest political disasters of the year. And what a year it has been.
We’re introducing a new feature for 2019: TPM members can vote for which of the nominees they’d like to see win.
The very important year is almost here. Kyle Kondik, managing editor of the election-prediction outlet Sabato’s Crystal Ball, joins Josh Marshall to talk through how the American electorate is feeling, and how the electoral map has changed since 2016.
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It’s not the only or main reason for doing it. But it is instructive how even a short and uncertain pause in the House transmitting its articles of impeachment to the Senate and thus even slightly delaying a Senate “trial” has unhinged the President perhaps even more than being impeached itself.
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Good morning and happy Friday December 20. The New York Times is reporting that John Durham, the Bill Barr-appointed prosecutor carrying out President Trump’s pet Russia investigation origins probe, is now targeting former CIA Director John Brennan. Here’s more on that and other stories we’re following.
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