From TPM Reader DH …

I was reading your column about reaching your fundraising goals, and your explanation of the curious attachment many of your readers have formed with respect to TPM. I’m a retired journalist, and somehow, even though I read the NYT, WaPo, Politico, and other sites daily, I don’t feel the same sense of connectivity with these other journalism sites. Something about TPM has always felt more like writers speaking to a community of readers rather than just firing off the day’s shotgun blast of news with clickbait headlines. I don’t really know what the secret is, but watching you guys raise a half a million dollars is uplifting and inspiring.

Overnight we crossed the $500,000 mark. And, as I’ve told you maybe five million times now, that was our goal. That’s amazing. We are all super pumped. We’re really grateful.

It reminds me of a central reality of this organization and this community: the sheet anchor of a robust and resilient news organization is a community of readers who are engaged with and feel personally connected to its work and existence. I wasn’t kidding when I said yesterday morning that I thought we were going to miss this milestone. Yesterday mid-morning we were at about $455,000 and we’d been averaging in the low-teens of thousands on weekdays in the final days of the drive. I figured we’d have some final surge. But the math with two more days was still a stretch. But over the whole day yesterday we ended up raising just under $50,000. So what seemed like a stretch over two days we ended up accomplishing in a single day.

Okay, admittedly I’m mixing my metaphors and allusions here. But this morning I was thinking we were pretty definitely going to fall short of our goal. We’d gotten close, and obviously close counts in this kind of situation. But again, having had such a successful drive so far it would be kind of heartbreaking to come up just short. But here you go again flipping the script on me, making me believe again! As of this moment we are at $482,790 $490,136. That’s almost $30,000 $42,000 contributed to Fund just today, more than twice three times our recent daily totals. So now hitting our goal is starting to seem very doable again, conceivably even tonight. So let’s do this! We’re totally in final countdown mode. Just click right here!

QAnon congresswoman-turned-GOP House leadership darling Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) membership with the House Freedom Caucus has been in question ever since she laid down her life/remaining dignity to back House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) in his speakership race. Since then, she’s been picking fights and at odds with members of the rebellious faction for being too tight with the establishment crowd.

While there’s been speculation for weeks that the Georgia congresswoman may soon get the boot from the fringe group, it turns out that the Freedom Caucus has actually already voted to punish Greene for forgetting where she came from.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the end of the Supreme Court term along with some terminally online conservatives.

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

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.