There’s a great trend piece to be written on how most of the big wig journalism organizations got bamboozled into thinking it’s more or less certain that COVID originated in a lab in Wuhan, China. Here’s yet another example from The Washington Post, emphasizing how it’s essentially a media story about how journalists too quickly dismissed the wild claims of Donald Trump and Tom Cotton which included no evidence and transparently political motivation.

We didn’t need a poll to tell us that the globe at large is likely relieved that Donald Trump is no longer the U.S. president.

But a new Pew Research survey reveals that the U.S.’s image overseas has improved substantially and at record speed since President Biden took office.

I wanted to make sure you saw this piece yesterday on the Park Police Inspector General’s report about the clearing of Lafayette Square on that critical day last year in Washington DC. The big takeaway from most accounts – and what folks on the right have gone to town about – is that the decision to clear the park doesn’t seem to have been immediately tied to President Trump’s bible press op a short time later. It’s one of those stories where a closer look shows more chaos than intentionality.

I wanted to give you a heads up that in a few days we’ll be kicking off our annual drive for The TPM Journalism Fund. This is a big, big deal for TPM. The short version is that the Fund allows us to add more original reporting and also create free memberships for readers who have some financial hardship and can’t afford one. These are super challenging days for all news organizations, as you know. So this is a critical part of how we make the financial pie work for us. Readers ask us a lot what they can do to support our work over the price of a membership. This is how you can do that. So please keep your eye out for the launch.

More soon.

In my series of posts about the specter of political violence seeping into conventional politics, one examples was in San Luis Obispo, California. San Luis Obispo isn’t Santa Monica or Marin. But it’s very much not one of the northern or rural counties in the east of the state that are very Republican and might as well be in Idaho or rural Nevada. It’s sort of middle of the spectrum – used to be fairly Republican but in recent decades has been more Democratic in national politics.

As the face of all things anti-Clinton, Barbara Comstock has been a TPM fan-fav villain for years. But she’s made an unlikely reemergence in recent weeks on a very different side of history.

We’ll get into that in a minute, but first, let’s hit the archives.

A brief addition on Manchin. A number of you have written in to cite a segment on Rachel Maddow’s show, apparently last night, which showed a bunch of polls that suggest the laws in question – infrastructure, voting rights, etc. – are actually very popular in West Virginia. So either Manchin is just confused or is doing something other than following the lead of his constituents’ more conservative views. I didn’t see the segment. The results as relayed to me do not surprise me. But these polls don’t necessarily mean what you think. You can’t really take them at face value.

Liberals or various people on the left will often point to polls which seem to show that Republican voters actually support liberal policies. We’re not winning elections but we’re winning on the issues. The answer is usually to push liberal policies more aggressively.

There are a lot of cases where Democrats should push liberal policies more aggressively. The COVID relief and infrastructure bills are good examples. But again, you can’t make a straight line between these polls and that end point.

From TPM Reader MW …

Re Josh’s post this morning, which includes these sentences:”There are a lot of people who are super mad at Joe Manchin. They say he’s a closet Republican. That’s not where I am. It’s more confusion because his points are contradictory.”

To give Manchin some (but not too much) benefit of the doubt, his contradictory statements may be a reasonably accurate reflection of the views of West Virginia voters. As we continually remind ourselves, in 2020 Trump won every county in West Virginia, and won the state by 38 points.These days that fact is usually brought up in reference to Manchin thinking he knows what he needs to do – and not do – to keep getting elected senator in WV. But those numbers might also be emblematic of a confusion that Manchin is playing (pandering?) to.

From TPM Reader NR …

Being angry with Manchin is like being angry with the spouse you love – eventually you are going to have to get over it. The quickest way resolve that anger is ensuring that you have really tried to understand where the other person/party is coming from – and that your position has been heard as well.

In general I don’t think I wholly agree with TPM Reader GT’s take here. This is likely right as a general matter. But what makes me very leery of underestimating Manchin is that he has managed to win three Senate elections (2010, 2012 and 2018) during a period when West Virginia has gone from being a very to an overwhelmingly Republican state in terms of national politics.

Here’s GT …

I like your point on Manchin’s position is simply confusing. Here is how I resolve that. I’ve been minorly active in my small state’s Democratic party. I’ve met state legislators and similar. And, not to be mean, but a lot of these people are simply not that talented. Being in small state politics is kind of the boobie prize for the provential elite. Your friends make all the money in real estate and other while you play student council in the state legislature where the majority leadership does everything.

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