Here comes news that Chris Hughes is putting the august but now tumble-down New Republic up for sale. I will first say that I met with Hughes for lunch not long after the purchase and later signed off on some partnership discussions well before the epic implosion of a year ago (nothing came of them). And Chris was friendly and generous with me and idealistic in his outlook. But now it’s hard not to see this as a perfect inversion of the classic private equity model: a few years of transformative ownership in which his team managed to radically increase costs while completely destroying the company’s brand equity.
We are now moving into that period of time when the early state polls really start to matter. Both Iowa and New Hampshire will happen in the next thirty days. A new poll out today on New Hampshire shows Donald Trump remaining in a wildly dominant position in New Hampshire, at 32%. But the runners up are just as important. Cruz is at 14%, a good showing for him considering his politics are not terribly well-suited to New Hampshire. But John Kasich is also at 14%. And that strikes me as a big deal. (Rubio is close at 12%.)
Public arguments are notoriously unreliable indicators of Supreme Court outcomes. But if today’s arguments were any sign, things look quite ominous for public sector unions. The case is Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association and it concerns the issue of union dues. It has long been the case that teachers in union workplaces can opt out of paying the dues which go to political activities, on the reasoning that that violates their 1st Amendment rights. But they have to pay the dues which fund collective bargaining because they benefit from the salaries, benefits, etc. that come from the collective bargaining process.
TPM’s Allegra Kirkland just talked to William Daniel Johnson, founder of the white nationalist SuperPAC which is spending on behalf of Donald Trump in Iowa. And he tells Allegra his American National SuperPac (ANS) plans a massive new wave of robocalls in states around the country on behalf of Trump’s racial message – with New Hampshire apparently lined up to get hit next.
Mark Fenster, a University of Florida law professor and expert on conspiracy theories, will visit the Hive for a chat with Prime members.
Fenster, the author of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, studies how and why conspiracy theories circulate and the effects that they have on culture and politics. He’s also working on a forthcoming book on government secrecy, which asks why are we never satisfied with the amount of information the government discloses.
He’ll be stopping by at 2 PM on Friday January 15th to answer Prime members’ questions about his research and the conspiracy theories currently bubbling away on the fringes of the American political sphere. Please drop them here at or before 2 PM Friday. See you then!
Will allowing the Bundys to destroy federal property with impunity encourage a culture of lawlessness in other members of the rural white community in the West?
Bundy militants start searching government files and databases to “expose” transgressions of federal employees.
Meet the White Supremacists who see Donald Trump as their “great white hope” and who Trump is bringing into the mainstream.
There is a price for making everyone you come into contact with think you’re an asshole and a jerk. Back in 2008, Republican and Democratic Senators came together to pass a sense of the Senate resolution affirming that John McCain was a natural born citizen. Claire McCaskill says today that she won’t be doing any similar favors for purported American Ted Cruz. But it’s not just a Democrat. The silence of Senate Republicans is positively deafening. Mitch McConnell also says he’s not getting involved. Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney have both tried to put the kibosh on the growing Cruz-birther movement. But in the Senate, where people know Ted Cruz, virtually no one is coming to his aid. McCain himself is suggesting he’s at least Cruz-birther-curious if not coming out as a full-blown Cruz birther.