TPM Reader JB reminds us and me that elections are about the future, not the past and not to focus too much on a relatively thin slice of voters …
You make a number of good points about Trumpism and the Democrats. They call for thought. So, here is mine.
TPM Reader CM refocuses us on gender …
I agree really strongly with your general take on Trump being an expression of white backlash, but I also wanted to add that I think you’re missing a really important component: GENDER.
Apropos of reports that some of Trump’s lawyers wanted Jared Kushner to resign early last summer, here’s a bit of additional detail. Read More
Barack Obama’s Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, is joining us in The Hive at 1 PM eastern to answer your questions. I just asked my question about how we balance combating Russian meddling in our domestic elections while not becoming obsessed with what I at least see as a declining state in strategic and economic terms? Get your questions in now and join us at 1 pm.
Somewhat like the Trump White House, the ‘vote fraud’ racket tends to attract all the world’s worst people. Here’s the John Lott edition, a gun rights writer who doesn’t want any restrictions on your guns but would like you to need to do the equivalent of a gun background check in order to be allowed to vote.
Ben Smith has a piece up looking at what we might call the groundswelling backlash against Big Tech. It’s not tech per se of course. It’s the big platform monopolies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft) and a few associated companies with similar characteristics. Ben is largely pulling together a number of threads that we’ve seen over recent weeks and months. It was punctuated by the ham-handed expulsion of Barry Lynn’s anti-monopoly group a couple weeks ago at the New America Foundation. But it’s been growing on numerous fronts: new policy research, new books, new political coalitions that are, if not bipartisan, at least cutting across established political factions and tribalism.
I wanted to add a couple thoughts to this emerging story. Read More
We’ve seen a handful of very interesting articles over the last few days about Russian efforts to spread pro-Trump political propaganda on Facebook as part of their larger 2016 dis-information operation. As we noted last week, the seemingly paltry sum of $100,000 may belie the reach that was possible for that amount of money, given the way that the Facebook ecosystem can be used to amplify messages through a mix of highly targeted advertising and troll armies. The Facebook campaign also seems to include the first evidence of Russian operatives attempting to organize actual political events on American soil, as opposed to just spreading memes and fake news on the web.
But there’s a separate, broader issue I would like to focus on. Read More
There have been several articles by liberals warning against the embrace of Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All” plan, the latest version of which he will unveil today. To wit: it’s politically dangerous because it would require large tax increases; the opposition from the insurance/hospital/medical/pharmaceutical lobbies would be ferocious; and we can get to the same destination through less controversial incremental reforms of Obamacare. I’ve made some of these arguments myself. But I want to make the opposite case for the moment. Here’s why Sanders’ approach makes sense:
Both Rep. Pelosi and Senator Schumer and, separately, the White House have released statements on this evening’s dinner at the White House. Note the references to DACA and the non-references to the wall. Read More
The word this morning is that leaders Pelosi and Schumer say Trump agreed to make DACA law as part of a deal that upped funding for “border security” but not for a wall. But Trump came out and said there’s no deal. So it’s all a mess and a big dispute.
I think if you look closely, that’s not quite what happened. Read More