8:33 PM: Okay, cranking down the Dylan and cranking up the ABC News, let’s do this.
8:38 PM: “We will rise to the challenge of ISIL. And we will rise together to the challenges that we face in our economy. But we will only do so if we hold true to the values and the freedoms that unite us. Which means we must never surrender them to terrorists, must never surrender our American values to racists, must never surrender them to the fascist pleas of billionaires with big mouths. We are a better country than this. Our enduring symbol is not the barbed wire fence. It is the statue of liberty.”
8:39 PM: It’s almost worth electing Bernie Sanders simply to see him negotiating with the King of Saudi Arabia on building that coalition.
8:44 PM: Okay, I’m not sure that exchange between Sanders and Clinton amounted to bickering. It’s like O’Malley has data breach envy. Does he even have any data?
8:45 PM: This frustrates me so much. When the President says we know of no credible threat and some crazies turn out to be building pipe bombs in their basement and about to mount an attack. That’s not a contradiction.
8:55 PM: “Let’s calm down there, Martin.”
8:59 PM: “Use bluster and bigotry to inflame people.”
For most of today I was preoccupied trying to resolve some management issues at TPM. So I barely had enough time to keep tabs on the Sanders/DNC story through headlines and the barest skimming of articles. The first information I heard led me to think the DNC had wildly botched the situation. This is exactly the sort of situation where the head of the DNC needs to immediately get in touch with the heads of the two campaigns, resolve whatever needs resolving, fire whoever needs firing and get everything settled before anything goes public. Whatever the Sanders campaign did, suspending a campaign from access to its own voter file is a hugely draconian step which threatens to unleash an unpredictable and volatile chain of events.
Then later in the afternoon I got more confused. Because it looked like the Sanders campaign was taking a scorched earth tack when they’d actually got caught red handed trying to access the Clinton campaign’s data. Now, late this evening, I’m seeing new information which suggests those ‘caught red handed’ reports may have been overstated.
I know you’re probably on your way to work or at work right now … but it’s still relevant this evening! But I want to ask you for just maybe 2 minutes of your time. From my experience, the biggest block for regular readers signing up for Prime is actually just that hassle of pulling out your credit card, typing in the number, the expiration date, the little security number and the rest. I feel like that way all the time. I know not everyone wants to sign up. That’s fine. But if you do, if you’d like a cleaner, faster version of TPM and most importantly to support our independent journalism, I want to ask you to take a moment right now. Just … like literally right now, pull out your wallet and take the plunge. It’s a huge thing for us. And this morning we are only 281 191 160 129 sign ups short of hitting our annual sign up drive goal of 3,000 new members. If you’re ready, click right here.
And seriously, thank you.
The insurgent candidacy of Bernie Sanders has been almost polite, in a Vermont kind of way. And that has been more than okay for the DNC and the Clinton campaign. A deep, scarring split among Democrats is the last thing either wanted. But this press conference by Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver just now was anything but polite.
Bernie Sanders’ campaign is about to hold a press conference at campaign headquarters in Washington DC. You can watch it here.
As this gets underway, here’s the latest: The DNC chair is defending the decision to suspend the campaign’s access to the party’s voter data base; and the AP, citing unnamed sources, is reporting that as many as four Sanders aides “accessed proprietary voter data compiled by the campaign of rival Hillary Clinton.”
Ed. note: Post updated to reflect that the campaign, not Sanders himself, is holding the presser.
Again and again over the last six months we’ve seen Donald Trump take memes and messages which are either implicit in mainstream Republican politics or explicit on the fringes of conservatism and make them loud and explicit. That might be on bashing Mexican immigrants, banning Muslims or any number of other examples. Now we’re seeing the same thing with Vladimir Putin.
I really want you to read this Tierney Sneed piece about how immigration reformers are coming forward to dispute Ted Cruz’s account of where he was on immigration reform back in the key months of 2013. It’s become an issue because his account is at the center of a dispute between him and Marco Rubio. And that dispute is looking critical to determining which of these two freshman senators will get to be the alternative to Donald Trump going into 2016.
Over the last week or so I noticed that initial reporting that San Bernardino assailant Tashfeen Malik had talked about jihad with friends through private messages on Facebook has metamorphosed into reports and public discussion to the effect that that she was openly posting “Booyah! Jihad” type comments on her Facebook timeline.
It wasn’t clear to me whether there was new reporting or, as I suspected, an echo chamber effect from publication to publication and from initial reports to the presidential campaign trail which had simply transformed the story. I became even more curious yesterday when FBI Director James Comey stated definitively that the FBI had uncovered no information at all about her posting such statements publicly to social media.
This Rubio-Cruz fight over immigration can get a bit weedy, but it’s an important battleground both in the GOP primary and in the larger political and historical context of this era so there’s some value in unpacking it and remembering the context of the failed 2013 immigration reform push. Benjy Sarlin has a very nuanced explainer that I recommend to get you caught up on the backstory.
Neither Rubio nor Cruz has covered themselves in glory at any point in the debate. So you can’t feel much sympathy for either one of them as they clamor for meager political advantage. But TPM’s Tierney Sneed talked to some of the key reform figures today and the consensus among the people she talked to is that Cruz is full of it.