Toward the end of last week, as David Kurtz and Joe Ragazzo took the lead on the drive, for the first time I started to think we would actually hit our goal. Not certain, mind you. But increasingly confident. We have the holiday taking up a lot of the first half of this week. And the last day of the drive is Friday. So there’s not a lot of time left. Right now as I write we’re $137 short of $430,000. So we’ll almost certainly hit that milestone tonight. That’s 86% of the way toward our goal. As Joe said on Friday, once we got past $400,000, the momentum started to build again. It will be a photo finish. But I think we’ve got a good shot.

The New Yorker has a marvelous — in both sense of the word — piece out this morning about the doomed OceanGate submersible. Reporter Ben Taub gained access to new materials. It puts to rest whatever possibility there might still be that the criticisms of the safety of the Titan craft might be some form of Monday-morning quarterbacking. Everyone with experience in submersibles who made contact with this thing was sure it was a death trap. Taub has the receipts, the contemporaneous whistleblowing documents, the lawyers tasked with gagging them. An amazing and terrible story.

TPM is a small company and at small companies, people have various responsibilities that at larger companies would each be handled by different people, or even entirely different departments. Some larger media outlets might have whole fundraising teams. We do not. And so, over the last three weeks, TPM’s staff has been talking about our TPM Journalism Fund drive and explaining how it fits into what we do.

Yet, the fact remains I am TPM’s publisher and so my ultimate responsibility is to make sure TPM brings in more money than it spends. So answering the question, “Why do you ask people to give you contributions?” falls, ultimately, to me. Why have memberships if you are just going to ask for money? Why don’t you sell more ads? Why don’t you have an events business? Why don’t you sell merch? Are you simply bad at being a publisher?

All fair questions, especially the last one! So here I want to explain why we have the TPM Journalism Fund. There’s a short and a long explanation. I think through other posts and through various pitches on the site, you’ve seen the short explanations: We face a particularly challenging financial year in a particularly challenging industry and rather than shrink in size, we want to keep our momentum going. In the past, we’ve said we’ll use the contributions from the TPM Journalism Fund to expand our investigative capacity and provide free memberships to readers who need them. These are good and true reasons. If this is all you need to hear, then by all means go right here and contribute. But if you are looking for a deeper explanation, stick around.

A numbers of readers have written in this morning to tell us that Twitter no longer allows you to see any of the content on the platform unless you log in. Logging in is pretty simple of course. But you need an account. And many of you don’t have one and don’t want one. That is a very reasonable position. While I continue to spend an inordinate amount of time on the platform, not wanting to have any connection to it is a totally reasonable stance. Indeed, under it’s current degenerate ownership it’s probably a good stance. For myself, a mix of character defects and needing to promote TPM keeps me there.

The one thing this really impacts is those lists I sometimes flag to your attention — a couple about Ukraine, one about electoral number crunching, one about COVID. I find those immensely valuable tools for keeping abreast of key topics.

We’re on an emerging investigative story that we just learned about this morning. Ron DeSantis apparently came to Manhattan to have pizza with Tucker Carlson replacement Jesse Waters. You can see an image here from Axios.

There is a ballot initiative on track to go before New York voters next fall that, if approved, would codify abortion access and several other things, including LGBTQ rights, into the state constitution. While it is jarring to imagine a world in which such a protection would be necessary in very blue New York, it falls in line with efforts in other blue and purple — and even some red — states post-Dobbs, as the rogue Supreme Court signals that other privacy-related rights may also be at risk.

But New York Democrats are also taking political lessons from other states that have witnessed the energizing power of abortion for the party in elections since Roe’s overturning and are viewing the ballot measure as a tool to boost Democrats’ chances of retaking the House.

Let me share a few brief and general thoughts on today’s decision.

First, on its internal logic, the decision can appear compelling. But step back and you see that a specific class of Americans who were enslaved for two centuries and then mostly lived under a system of legal apartheid for another century somehow still remain largely excluded from social and economic preferment. And we’re told that the constitution not only bars the government from doing anything about that but also bars private institutions from attempting to do anything about that. Judged from that more holistic perspective it’s very hard to see how that can possibly be right whatever the internal logic of “color blindness.”

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the independent state legislature decision, an incriminating tape and House Freedom Caucus squabbling.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here (Note: recorded before today’s affirmative action ruling).

Much appreciation to those of you who stepped up in a big way in response to my post yesterday. One reader doubled his initial contribution, and several other readers also came forward with four-figure contributions.

Your substantial giving has pushed us close to the $400,000 mark. 

If we can get over that hump today, then we can spend next week sprinting toward $500,000 in the final stretch run. 

Keep it coming!

My colleague Kate Riga will do a better job explaining the nuances and particulars. For myself, I can only say this is no surprise. I think it affirms the point I made yesterday which is that to the degree there is any shift on the Court it is pulling back from giving SCOTUS goodies to every rightwinger who has an ideological hobbyhorse and servicing every electoral need of the Republican Party. The blowback and backlash may have made the costs of that bust-out jurisprudence a bit too high. Rather they’ll concentrate on the core stuff they really care about. And affirmative action has been one of the core half dozen or so things the conservative judicial movement has cared about for decades. They have the power and they’re gonna do it.