In this post I’m going to ask you to contribute to this year’s TPM Journalism Fund drive — because the journalism business is brutal at the moment and your contribution is really important to our future. That’s the gist. If that’s enough, awesome: click right here. You have our deep appreciation.

If you’d like to hear a bit more about the why, here goes.

Have you noticed how a week doesn’t seem to go by without another online news outlet closing its doors? The TPM Journalism Fund has been the critical difference that’s saved us from that fate. So it’s really important.

Last year I told you our unique brand of punch-above-our-weight investigative reporting was even more necessary today than in the past. The success of last year’s drive allowed us to make key decisions that resulted in our big Meadows Texts exclusives from last December, our big early stories on George Santos and, just recently, our exclusive about an influential neo-Nazi working as a congressional staffer.

We want to do more of that, and we can. But we need your help.

What makes this year’s drive particularly critical is that we have a large number of one-time expenses coming due in a single year — the bulk of which is tied to retrenchments we made early in the pandemic. Those were key strategic decisions that have put us on a firmer footing for the future. But the costs come due this year.

That’s why we’ve set an ambitious but necessary goal of $500,000 for this year’s drive. If we succeed it will get us through this year on a solid footing and keep us investing in breaking important stories. We want to keep moving forward, not back. But we need your help to do that.

Thank you for reading. If you would like to contribute, here’s the link. Again, you have our deep appreciation and thanks.

No surprise. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is now taking credit for the latest migrant trafficking stunt in which the state of Florida found a group of migrants in Texas and — apparently under false pretenses — drove them from Texas to New Mexico and then put them on a chartered private jet for a flight to Sacramento after which they were dropped off without warning or preparation at a church in the California state capital.

DeSantis is also proposing a kind of red-state bund which would coordinate running its own immigration policy in defiance of federal law and apparently coordinate trafficking schemes to blue states.

Mike Pence has been tip-toeing around actually criticizing Donald Trump ever since his former boss convinced a hoard of his supporters to bust into the United States Capitol and try to overturn the 2020 election, and to call for Pence to be murdered while they were at it.

His 2024 campaign announcement wasn’t all that different.

As you’ve likely heard, CNN CEO Chris Licht was fired today, not so much because of that headline-grabbing Atlantic article but because of a string of failures and reverses which might have simmered and percolated for a few months longer if a minor-defenestratory masterpiece had not wrapped them together with a bow in a way that was impossible to ignore. Of course, it’s part and parcel of being a big-shot media executive to go out in a blaze of glory, or ignominy, as the case may be. Nothing new there. What stands out is that Licht appears to have essentially zero supporters as he free falls to his end.

I was just reading this article in Roll Call and it contained this passage. It’s not at all surprising but still worth stepping back and absorbing for its sheer magnitude.

In March, TPM reported on several years of Facebook comments by North Carolina’s Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson that spanned an impressive range of bigotry that targeted gay people, Black people, immigrants of many backgrounds, and Jews. At one point he even seemed to question the Holocaust.

And yet, Robinson remains the leading contender to become the Republican candidate for governor of his state.

Astoundingly, a new report in the conservative publication The Dispatch suggests that Robinson himself may believe the enormous pile of damning past comments that TPM and other news outlets have surfaced publicly is just the tip of an even more enormous iceberg of toxic material contained in Democrats’ opposition research file, which has yet to drop in full.

After Donald Trump sounded the alarm on Truth Social in March that he was about to get indicted in Manhattan and alleged that DA Alvin Bragg was coordinating with the DOJ, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and his other House Republican foot soldiers entered Trump’s armageddon screed into the official record. In a letter sent days before Trump was even indicted, Jordan breathed life into Trump’s Truth Social conspiracy theory by requesting that Bragg turn over whatever supposed communications his office might have had with the DOJ about the investigation.

To express displeasure over Joe Biden taking them to the cleaners last week a group of Freedom Caucus hold outs today at least temporarily killed House Republicans’ gas stove freedom bill. Notably, another big reason for the mini-rebellion was furor over Rep. Andrew Clyde allegedly being mistreated in his efforts to block the ATF from cracking down on a kind of pistol brace now favored by leading mass shooters.

Just between you and me: We’re launching a really critical fundraising drive tomorrow. So please keep an eye out.

Just a quick update on the situation in Ukraine. We appear to be seeing the first probing actions of Ukraine’s long awaited counteroffensive. But two other big things have happened over the last 18 hours which I wanted to note. One is either the collapse or sabotage of a dam in the eastern part of occupied Ukraine, which has caused a vast flood surge through the region. There are competing explanations and accusations over what and how it happened. The other is a news story. The Washington Post is reporting new circumstantial but pretty strong evidence that Ukraine was behind the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines last year.