Whether it’s AI or Social Media, for me at least, the routine is pretty similar. I look to see if something seems interesting or interests me. And if it does, I try to reproduce it or verify it with a human brain, i.e., my own. This morning I saw a tweet claiming that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was moving from collecting the pricing information that goes into building government’s canonical inflation numbers (CPI) to relying instead on a higher percentage “imputed” numbers, i.e., estimates. “Estimates” aren’t all bad. A few years back it became a topic of pretty intense partisan warfare with the Census. As I recall it, the Census was combining data collection with statistical models to get more accurate counts for more marginal and transient populations where underreporting is chronic. (As you might imagine, undocumented people aren’t terribly eager to fill out government forms.) In any case, was it really true that BLS is cutting back on data collection?

Actually it is.

I’m not sure I’ve seen in six months a better capturing of the second Trump administration. I write this just as I saw that the White House just produced a fact sheet about the US-European Union trade deal which contradicts and asserts different terms than what the EU says it agreed to. That’s pretty redolent too. But this one is even deeper in it.

A few moments ago I got an email alert from STAT News that reads: Top White House pandemic preparedness official resigns, officials say, in sign of broader disarray. But it’s the summary of the story that really captures it.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the TPM Journalism Fund over the last 24 hours. We’re now at over $350,000 — $357,221 to be precise. We’re trying to get to $365,000 tonight and $375,000 tomorrow. That’s 75% of the way toward our goal at two weeks into our annual drive. I know these posts can be a bit annoying. Tedious? Repetitive. But we’re doing it because it’s really important. If you’ve been mulling contributing this year just take a quick moment to make tonight the night. If we can get to our goal, it will be a big big deal. Just click right here.

I mentioned yesterday the importance of keeping up with stories that are absurd in their substance but real in their consequence. Along those lines I wanted to give you a brief update on the Jeffrey Epstein story. If you’ve been following it closely this may not be news. But I know not everyone is doing so. And while I said that it’s important for political journalists to keep track of these stories, that doesn’t mean that you (a non-journalist) have to.

So a few points.

The first is that Donald Trump really does appear to be seriously considering issuing a pardon to Epstein confederate, procurer and one-time girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell. I’m not saying he will. But I think it’s a real possibility. All the standard signs are there. He’s going into full “finding the real killers” mode, and getting “the truth” from Maxwell is central to that. The question has all the standard will he or won’t he drama. But this isn’t our first rodeo. We’ve been at this long enough to know the signs when Trump is warming to an idea and when he’s laying the public groundwork for it. We have the standard lines like, I haven’t decided to but I totally have the power to pardon her if I want. We’ll see. Everybody agrees I’m “allowed.” We’re seeing all the standard lines in the progression.

Tomorrow is two weeks since we launched this year’s annual TPM Journalism Fund drive. We’re doing okay. But we’re at the point where we really, really need that second wind. We’re at $316,000 and we need to get to $500,000. If you’ve been considering contributing or meaning to but you just haven’t found the right moment, can you make it today? It would really help. Any amount helps. You can just click right here. It’s super simple and quick. Just take a moment and make today the day. We really appreciate it.

I think this was pretty much in the cards. But now it’s official. Former Gov. Roy Cooper (D) enters the North Carolina Senate race, which is now an open race after Sen. Tom Tillis (R) announced his essentially (Trump) forced retirement. Nothing is a sure thing for Democrats in North Carolina. But this is about the best case scenario they could have hoped for — no incumbent, one of the most if not the most popular Democrat in the state running. (I heard from someone that the new Gov., Josh Stein, may be slightly more popular now.) Of course it is an absolute must pick up for Dems to be in contention to take hold of the Senate. So they’re at least laying the groundwork if the winds are moving just right next November.

A few days ago I got in a back and forth with someone on Facebook about the Jeffrey Epstein story. This person insisted it’s a non-story and criticized the Times — that’s what was important to him — for devoting so much time to it. It was a “pseudo-story” as the journalism argot has it, a kind of pent-up story with no substance or consequence or even existence beyond journalists pretending it’s real. I said that this was a category error. As journalists, our job is to cover and explain what is actually happening, not to act as gatekeepers deciding what’s up to our standards of substance or policy-seriousness or whatever else.

Now, it’s very true that “what’s actually happening” is carrying a lot of weight here. Lots of things are happening all the time. The Kardashians are happening. Reality TV shows are happening (a complicated topic we’ll return to). Fad diets are happening. But in political news when we say that “something is happening,” I mean chains of events which are driving public opinion, changing the dynamics of political power, shifting policy in ways that affects people’s lives, etc. When a sitting president is facing a significant rebellion in his political coalition, having his presidency consumed by efforts to contain the cause of that rebellion and so forth that is a major story. The fact that the essence of what is happening — the beliefs, conspiracy theories, etc. — are, in many ways, absurd does not change that fact. Indeed, if you can’t wrestle with the heavy amount of absurd at the heart of our political moment you will simply be lost or be having an irrelevant conversation with other gatekeepers.

I’ve argued at various points that TPM was ahead of the curve roughly during the Obama years because we paid a lot of attention to what was then sometimes called The Crazy — the subterranean world of GOP and far-right politics; the colorful, weird and almost-always super racist congressmen (and sometimes women) from obscure rural districts. That was portrayed as a sort of moving circus, cheap laughs, click-bait — not real politics. We were often criticized for giving it so much attention. I never thought that was right. And unfortunately the Trump presidency itself vindicated our read of that era. The Crazy was the reality of Republican politics. It was the John Boehners and Paul Ryans who were a kind of respectable veneer placed over its true engine of power and motive force. From the outside, it appeared that these leaders had to run the GOP while wrangling the far-right Freedom Caucus. In fact it was the Freedom Caucus that ran the GOP through a tacit collaboration with presentable and ultimately tractable figures like Boehner and Ryan. Trump’s intuitive political genius was to see that you could ditch the front man and run the GOP directly from the Freedom Caucus, which has been the story of the Trump Era.

I’m leaving the original version of this post up, below, as published. But it is incorrect. The “bias monitor” mentioned below does not report to the President of the United States but rather the President of Paramount, or at least that’s what the actual FCC agreement says. I was going on the article from Gizmodo which I linked below. I believe it was edited after I wrote this post. Because just what “president” they were referring to was something I tried to make sure I was clear on and the article seemed clear that they were referring to the President of the United States. In any case, what’s important is to correct the record. The broader corruptness of the deal notwithstanding this is an internal watchdog at CBS who reports to the President of the company which owns CBS.

…

Even today this is quite astonishing. FCC Chair Brendan Carr is making the rounds of conservative media bragging that to allow the Paramount/Skydance merger the company agreed to put in embed a political commissar at CBS (dubbed a “bias monitor”) who will report directly to Donald Trump on whether the news content is acceptable. This is Skydance, which is a creature of the Ellison family. So I would imagine it didn’t require that much pressure. But that’s where we are.

I want to thank everyone who came out to our D.C. happy hour tonight. Great turnout. It was wonderful seeing some old friends and meeting a bunch of readers who’ve been with us almost since the beginning but who I had never met before. We’re going to be doing more events going forward, not only in our home bases of New York and D.C. but in other cities around the country as well. We had a great podcast event in Chicago in the spring and we have another event coming in Boston in the early fall. Thanks to everyone who joined us.

I wanted to flag your attention to this piece by Jonathan Last at The Bulwark: The Washington Post is dying. I can tell you “how.” But not “why.” I’m not sure the central assertion is a big surprise to people. But Last does a good job at running through the details, the steps on the path of descent. He puts some focus on legacy systems — suboptimal arrangements, structures, compromises that any organization builds up over time. I first thought he was distracting from the decisions made under the ownership of Jeff Bezos. But I think he’s right to put some focus on them. These aren’t the reason the Post is dying. But this legacy debt — which most big and old organizations have — adds to the challenges that Bezos would have had even if he weren’t making terrible decisions.