Editors’ Blog

I hope you have a chance to check out our new exclusive from TPM’s Josh Kovensky. Josh got access to a trove of documents from a secret society of right-wing Christian men who are on a crusade to build a Christian government-in-waiting for after the right achieves “regime change” in the United States, either through a civil war or a “national divorce.” The group goes by a fairly anodyne name, the Society for American Civic Renewal. But that belies the extremism of the program.

Of course you and your three weirdo pals can call yourself a secret society. And we’ve seen examples of militia groups or boogaloo boys saying some of the same things. What’s different here though is that these aren’t people on the fringe. They are people who present as respectable business leaders, academics, think tankers. Indeed, one of their number is the President of the Claremont Institute, which, in recent years, has functioned as a kind of brain trust of Trump campaign intellectuals. It’s fascinating, disturbing and important story and your memberships made it possible. You can read it here.

I thought this was a strong speech. Strong on a few different fronts. Biden got into it a few times with House Republicans which he and his advisors clearly wanted to happen. He also got some good applause lines and clippable moments where he called out things like Republicans killing the border bill. He hit a number of policy points where Biden’s policies are just much more popular than Republican ones. State of the Unions can play a big role because they allow a President to make a key point that maybe just hasn’t broken through before. Here everyone’s watching. So a President can force the matter. There are probably ten other boxes they checked more or less well.

But a political speech is only really good or bad judged against a specific, contextual need. Bill Clinton’s SOTUs were often plodding and, for political insiders, boring. But they usually accomplished his specific political goals. In this case, Democrats have been worried. Worried about the stakes of this election. Worried about the poll numbers. They’ve been worried about whether Biden has the energy and whatever else to really do this. Can he be vigorous? Can he show up and deliver? Does he have the energy to get this done? Answering that question in the affirmative was in many ways the first, second and third goal of this speech. And on that measure he did very well.

As he had the confidence to dwell on towards the end of the speech, Biden is an old man. He’s over 80 years old. But I think people who’ve had these doubts, Democrats who have been worried … I think they will see this speech and think, “Ok, I think we can do this.”

10:26 PM: So far, so good.

9:47 PM: In the pre-Trump era I might have thought, hey we shouldn’t have political slogans on a State of the Union night. But, that’s a bygone era. We’re in a call and response era now.

9:34 PM: Johnson’s facial expressions through the J6 stuff was remarkable. He didn’t know how to play it. He ended up shaking his head through a lot of it.

9:30 PM: Biden is clearly going to use this speech in part to try to taunt Republicas to have outbursts at completely uncontroversial things.

See our Live Blog over to the right (if you’re on the desktop site). I’ll be sharing my thoughts here in the Ed Blog.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss Kyrsten Sinema’s self-imposed exile from politics, Super Tuesday results and the end of Nikki Haley’s campaign.

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

The whole Alabama/IVF situation is an example of the number of absurd logical culs-de-sac you get into when you start with premises that are, at least to many of us, not only absurd but which at least a number of these premises supporters don’t even entirely believe. As noted below, Alabama has now passed a law which leaves in place the idea that embryos are full people in the state but gives people immunity from prosecution or civil liability if you kill one of these people.

My post about the iPhone generated all sorts of fascinating responses from TPM Readers. Some of these responses were on the secondary question I raised about the pace of invention and scientific breakthroughs and whether or not it’s slowing down. One of the most interesting replies I got was from TPM Reader DN who sent in this note …

I liked your aside about iPhones. I’m writing this from the big American Physical Society meeting (this year in Minneapolis) that focuses on “condensed matter” or solid-state physics, the branch of physics that basically gave us the iPhone and a huge fraction of modern technology. The fact that we, humanity, understand and can control/engineer the properties of materials on a deep level is one of the great intellectual accomplishments of the species, and it’s massively underappreciated. Astro and particle physics get vastly more press and attention in pop culture, but solid-state physics affects your daily life far more. It’s rich and full of beautiful ideas, though admittedly it can be very tough to explain to a general audience.

In this late post below, I discussed the now very consistent polling errors overestimating Donald Trump’s margins over Nikki Haley. I get why some analysts are quick to dismiss the larger import of this phenomenon: people assume you can draw direct, linear conclusions about a general election from polling anomalies in a primary election. And you can’t. But as I said last night, it’s a mistake to say this means nothing. G. Elliot Morris, the new head of 538, has a good piece up about this. The gist is that because of a mix of those sampling and modeling issues discussed in yesterday’s Backchannel, pollsters seem to be having a hard time finding normie Republicans. Needless to say there aren’t many of them these days. And that is part of the polling challenge. But these primaries show they are there and that pollsters seem to be missing a non-trivial number of them.