After Ginsburg criticizes Trump, Trump says he wants her off the Court asap.
I’ve been wanting to assign this piece for quite a while. It’s owned by millions of law-abiding American gun owners. It’s also the weapon of choice for mass shooters. This is our biography of the AR-15. From battlefield, to state of the art marketing, to mass shootings and mass popularity. Give it a read (sub. req.). And let me know what you think.
After Dallas, Trump says “you were having big, big trouble in many cities. And I think that might be just the beginning for this summer.”
By endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, Bernie Sanders will finally and officially end his campaign for the presidency – and fittingly so. Was it all worth it? Political history is littered with dissident campaigns that made a splash but didn’t have much impact after they were over – Brown in ’92, McCain in 2000, and Huckabee and Edwards in 2008 – as well as those that did – Reagan in 1976, Hart in 1984, and Dean in 2004. It’s too early to tell about Sanders’ campaign, but here are several aspects in which Sanders either reinforced a trend or, perhaps, began one.
I had intended to do this on Friday. But with the horrific news out of Dallas I decided to wait. I want to tell you about a major expansion of Prime, TPM’s membership program. Over the next two months we’re going to be rolling out a number of new features and additions. But the one I want to tell you about most is The Arch, a new longform magazine we’re about to launch as part of Prime.
You’ll see the first piece tomorrow, followed by another every two weeks.
In recent editions of the Trump for President Dumpster Fire reality show, we’ve been seeing the name of retired Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency who was forced out in 2014 over policy clashes with Obama administration officials and went on to become a top Obama critic since leaving the military. He has reportedly been an informal campaign foreign policy advisor to Donald Trump for some time now. Now he’s rapidly emerged as a leading vice presidential contender. It seems so serious that after yesterday saying that he was pro-choice and creating a instant firestorm on the right, he today ‘clarified’ that he’s actually pro-life.
But enough of all that, stop the presses: I’ve just uncovered information that almost certainly proves that Flynn is completely nuts.
We had two police-involved fatal shootings of black men last week followed by the killing of five police officers in Dallas by a lone assailant during a Black Lives Matter protest. I want to return to those two killings last week because as soon as I saw the video of Philando Castile in St. Paul it reminded me of this video from two years ago in South Carolina.
News reporters Lauren Fox and Tierney Sneed will visit the Hive (Prime sub required) Thursday afternoon to talk about covering the national conventions. They’ll discuss what they are and are not excited about, as well as the general state of the election. They’ll be taking questions on what you should be looking for and thinking about going into these two weeks of around-the-clock news.
Lauren and Tierney will be taking questions on Thursday, July 14th — drop them in now or between 1 and 2 p.m. EST on Thursday.
Who could have imagined this? As we noted a week ago, the Trump camp’s massive fundraising blitz ending up hitting legislators in numerous foreign countries as well as spamming a seemingly limitless number of victims around the world. According to ReturnPath, 79% of Trump fundraising emails were caught in spam filters, an extremely high rate by industry standards, seemingly because Trump was using purchased or rented lists rather than ones the campaign had grown organically through campaign-related supporter sign ups.
In any case, this led to problems.
I want to share some thoughts on one of the minor subplots in the Dallas police ambush. Mark Hughes was one of the protesters at the demonstration where the ambush took place. He came with a camo t-shirt and a rifle slung over his shoulder. To be clear, Hughes had every legal right to do this under Texas law. He was not breaking any law. Dallas police briefly identified him as a suspect in the case, at different points calling him a “suspect” or “person of interest,” noting that it was a rifle which had been used against police officers that night. The alert went out on Twitter, with a picture of Hughes with his gun. Happily, everyone proceeded from that point in the best way possible. A friend alerted Hughes that he’d been identified. Hughes removed his camo shirt and flagged down a police officer to turn over his gun. He was taken into custody, questioned and released around 1am. As Hughes and others noted, it was a misunderstanding that might easily have cost him his life.