With Texas Democrats fleeing the state to prevent the quorum state Republicans need to ultra-gerrymander their state, I’m surprised there isn’t more mention on how the exact same thing happened 22 years ago when Texas legislators did the exact same thing. This all happened back in early 2003. More than a few of you will remember this. But it’s more than a bit of interesting trivia. Because the circumstances of that earlier example are a key, though semi-forgotten, step in understanding how we arrived where we are today.

Twenty-two years ago, mid-decade redistricting was unheard of. There was, as we say now, a very strong norm against it. The U.S. Census comes out every decade and then congressional seats are redistricted for the next election. That created regularity and prevented the chaos and gamesmanship of state legislatures rushing to redistrict at every moment of partisan advantage.

In that interval of a few hours between the release of the Friday jobs report and President Trump’s decision to fire of the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I had a few people ask me whether I thought it was possible that the books for May and June had initially been “cooked,” since they ended up being revised dramatically downward. That question seemed a bit quaint after the subsequent firing of Erika McEntarfer. But the answer I gave is relevant in a few ways to the situation going forward.

What I said was that in the Trump era we can’t really rule anything out. (More than cooking, I noted just a few days ago that DOGE-cuts have forced BLS to rely more on estimates relative to data collection in its inflation calculations.) But we should go in with a strong assumption that that is not the case — that there isn’t any cooking — for a number of important reasons.

For me, trust figures very little into this judgment. The first of those reasons is that it would simply be very hard to do. BLS is staffed by career government economists and statisticians, very apolitical people in their work, who are just not the kind of people who are going to go along with anything like that. To the extent they were ordered to do so or Trump found a compliant statistician willing to cook for him, that fact would almost certainly leak out in short order, either through leaks to the press or people resigning.

Going back to my Backchannel on not being surprised when President Trump pardons Ghislaine Maxwell … Trump has now moved her from her Florida prison to a Texas “club Fed” prison camp (Camp Bryan) near Houston, a low-security facility which currently houses prisoners like disgraced Theranos chief Elizabeth Holmes and Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Star Jen Shah.

While we watch the horrific and increasingly senseless immiseration of the civilian population of Gaza, it’s important to look clearly at why it’s happening. “Why” may be too big a question. It may be better to try to answer not that big “why” but, in a more focused and discrete way, why this war hasn’t stopped. Prime Minister Netanyahu has managed to lose even President Trump now on the question of whether people are starving in Gaza. More significantly, Netanyahu some time ago lost even fairly hardcore Israeli hawks who are not members of his governing coalition on why the war is still going on at all.

You’ll remember that for about a year, between 2021 and 2022, Netanyahu was actually out of power and Naftali Bennett was Prime Minister. Bennett is from the “religious Zionist” world and political camp, and from almost every perspective that’s a very right-wing and nationalist world. But he was heading a coalition of basically every part of the Israeli political world which wasn’t behind Netanyahu. That stretched all the way from his own religious Zionist political party right through the center and left of Israeli politics, such as it is, and all the way to one of the Arab Islamist parties. A few weeks ago Bennett said again: we need to end this. Stop the war. Get the hostages home. We’re not going to have a final victory over Hamas. It would be great if we could, but that’s not going to happen. Leave that for another day.

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.