For the first time I’ve read an article that presents at least the outlines of a convincing account of why Fox fired Tucker Carlson. The Times account, published an hour ago, isn’t dramatically different from other accounts we’ve seen over the last three days, at least not at first glance. So it may seem odd that I’m putting it in a different category. But on my read at least it provides a degree of specificity about the precise chain of events and who did what, when, that is different from all the earlier stories.

Republicans in the Montana state House just voted to formally punish a member of the legislature, Democratic Rep. Zooey Zephyr, a trans woman who has been blocked from speaking in chamber since last week. Her crime? Vocalizing the harms of the anti-trans legislation that the state House was considering at the time.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the ousters of Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon, as well as the Supreme Court order on mifepristone.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

The Washington Post just published its own “why Tucker was canned” story.

Now it’s a mix of the endless controversy, Tucker’s hubris and his still redacted criticisms of Fox brass contained in discovery material from the Dominion case. But now the kicker is Ukraine. Rupert Murdoch got fed up with Carlson’s relentlessly pro-Russian commentary about the Ukraine war and his withering attacks on Ukraine itself. Even more, key Republican senators had had enough; and they were talking to Murdoch about it directly.

We’re about to have a Speaker Week Vote-O-Rama replay in which Speaker Kevin McCarthy will try to pass a pseudo-budget to kick start negotiations with Joe Biden over the debt ceiling, despite the fact that Biden has made clear he’s not going to negotiate over the debt ceiling at all. Biden has made clear he won’t negotiate but he’s definitely not even going to get into it until McCarthy says what it is is he wants. This pseudo-budget is the bill of particulars in which McCarthy says what he — or rather the Freedom Caucus — wants. As I said, it’s the Speakership vote all over again.

Following all this? Well, as you can tell it’s pretty convoluted. There’s a lot of kabuki and signaling wrapped around what should be an ordinary budgetary process. Because it’s so convoluted I wanted to provide some big picture points to keep in mind as this unfolds.

Kate Riga and I discussed this during the podcast today — for scheduling reasons we recorded one day early this week. But so many of you have asked me this question that I wanted to address it here in the Ed Blog. The question is this: Is it possible that Tucker Carlson’s termination was a non-public part of Fox’s settlement agreement with Dominion? I have no inside information. But I’m pretty sure the answer is no.

Republicans’ inability to find their footing in a post-Roe America remains an omnipresent issue not just for the GOP as a whole, but one that is increasingly tripping up nearly every Republican with 2024 ambitions.

I’ve mentioned a few times my love/hate relationship with the media reporting of Dylan Byers and Eriq Gardner, the glitz media columnist for the prestige newsletter bouthemoth (boutique+behemoth) Puck News. It’s all leveraged buy-outs and acquisitions and gossip about top personalities and nothing much about journalism or the law of journalism. But, I thought, if they’re ever going to come through for me it’s going to be on the Carlson/Fox story. So I checked out what they had with no little expectation.

We just got news earlier this afternoon that Nate Silver is being let go by ABC News/538 as part of a round of Disney layoffs. ABC News is part of the Disney corporation. Just as important, though ABC News is apparently holding on to the 538 brand, they are apparently letting go of most of the staff.

I made the point clearly below that there’s going to be one big reason why Tucker Carlson got canned, not a bunch of little reasons that tipped the scales against him. It’s going to be one big, big thing that renders the secondary good and bad things basically irrelevant. Except there’s maybe one other possibility. Let me caveat this by asking you to think of this as somewhere between an edge case possibility and an explanation from an alternate universe.

Got it? Great. Let’s dig in.