Editors’ Blog

Perhaps the single biggest easily identified cohort of TPM readers is from the academic community. So many .edu members and contributors! The heat map of the TPM readership lights up around college towns across the country. 

Quite a few of our .edu contributors have given very generously, so a special shoutout to them. Thank you for your support as we race to hit our $500,000 goal for the TPM Journalism Fund. 

If you haven’t managed to click through and make your contribution, now is the time. Under 48 hours to go!

We have today and tomorrow left in this year’s TPM Journalism Fund drive. We’re at $455,000, $45,000 short of our goal. Just two days. I’ll be honest with you. It’ll be straight up heartbreaking if we get this close and don’t make it over the top. You’ve heard all our yakking and arguments. They’re good ones. It’s important. So please make today the day if you’ve been considering contributing. It literally takes about one minute. If you’re a member you don’t even have to pull out your wallet. Just click a few times, starting with this link right here.

I mentioned yesterday that Twitter became unstable over the weekend because of evil forces which Elon Musk and crew had to combat — that is, according to Elon Musk. Mainly that’s just BS from a company that has stiffed service providers and cut staff to a level that they couldn’t keep the site online anymore. But there likely are more efforts to “scrape” Twitter and other platforms going on right now. (Scraping here means bots which scan through a site and collect copies of its public or non-restricted data.) So there’s some element of truth to Musk’s claims that they’re facing more demands on the site’s capacity. The key is that that only becomes a big problem if you’re running very close to the edge already. But I want to zero in a bit on this point.

Special Counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed the Arizona secretary of state’s office as recently as May for information related to the unsuccessful lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign and the Arizona Republican Party about supposed errors in the 2020 election. As you’ll recall, Arizona was a hotbed of conspiracy theories tied to the effort to overturn the election after President Biden flipped the longtime Republican stronghold state, leading to Trumpworld outrage, a phony and expensive state election “audit” and the lawsuits.

As we make the final push to reach our $500,000 goal for the TPM Journalism Fund drive, I want to thank all of the lawyer contributors and see if I can convince a few more to help out. 

Some of the biggest contributions to date to the TPM Journalism Fund drive have come from the legal community. We can’t thank you enough for that. 

We’re at the end of the drive, folks. Three more days. Friday is the last day. We’re at $445,000. That’s 89% of the way toward our goal. We have $55,000 to go. If you’ve been waiting, if you’ve been on the fence, now is the time. We can still get there but we’ll need a big final surge to do it. Here’s the link. It’s super fast, especially if you’re already a site member. We thank you in advance.

The ups and downs of social media platforms aren’t usually a focus of my writing. But they interest me to the extent they intersect with politics and public conversation in this country. You may have heard that over the weekend Twitter went into a kind of extended meltdown, rapidly introducing a series of “rate limiting” restrictions because the platform was having a hard time staying online. Behind the jargon of “rate limiting,” this essentially meant the site was forced to start rationing Tweets and the ability to engage with them, an ominous move for a company whose business is literally selling engagement. The site’s owner, Elon Musk, later claimed that this was in response to various online bad actors overwhelming the site’s infrastructure. The site’s (for the moment) CEO later claimed that it was all done out of the blue to catch the online bad guys unaware and off guard. Giving any advanced warning (even to employees, it turns out) would have given the online bad guys a heads up and allowed them to escape.

The Washington Post published a piece this weekend on the ways in which moderate Republicans in the House are getting sick of the far-right Freedom Caucus’ ongoing revolt as its members flex their power over House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), pushing increasingly extreme and sometimes bizarre messaging bills that will harm those in swing districts in 2024. There’s an interesting nugget of reporting tucked into the piece that touches on the trend we’ve seen since Roe was overturned: Republicans are seeing the writing on the wall with abortion and it’s not looking pretty.

I hadn’t planned on flagging this part of what we do with the TPM Journalism Fund today. But I just got this note from TPM Reader JC which kind of touched my heart. So I wanted to share it with you. The context is that Journalism Fund contributions are what make possible our community membership program which provides free memberships to those in financial need and registered students.

I just wanted to say thanks to TPM and my fellow TPM members. For the past few years I have not been able to work full time due to a major medical event, and I am grateful for the existence of the community membership. Talking Points Memo was part of my political awakening way back during follies of the Bush Administration and I have been a reader since. So thank you to my fellow members and to TPM for doing a little extra to make this crucial resource available for those of us going through some things. 😉 

To my semi-surprise and with immense gratitude I’m seeing that we actually have a shot at hitting our $500,000 goal for this year’s TPM Journalism Fund drive. It ends Friday and we’re currently at $431,000. That’s more than 85% of the way toward our goal. If you’ve considered contributing please make it today. We will be so stoked and relieved to hit the big number I can’t even tell you. Just click right here.