Rhode Island is getting used to its top TV station being owned by right-wing broadcast conglomerate Sinclair Broadcasting. That means WJAR must run regular segments from Trumper Boris Epshteyn, now rebranded as Sinclair’s chief political analyst in addition to a daily Terrorism Alert Desk, “advertised as a daily news update about terrorist activity” even when there’s no terrorism happening.

As I mentioned last week, we delayed the last two weeks of our annual Prime drive until we had the signup system and account system simplified and more user-friendly. Check it out here. Our team put a lot of work into making it more user-friendly and awesome. With that now in place, we’re kicking off the final two weeks tomorrow. We will try to keep the pitches as congenial as possible. But remember, we are doing this because our subscription program is what has kept TPM vital and growing while many other publications, relying on ads alone, are cutting staff or ‘pivoting to video’. Your subscription keeps TPM vital, growing, focused on you and digging deeper into the myriad of stories that matter right now. If you’re a regular reader and you haven’t taken a moment to join Prime, please take a moment to join us now. It’s cheap, gives you a lot of cool features, and supports our independent journalism. Just click right here.

The people I’m really hoping to get to over these two weeks are the people who I sometimes meet who tell me how they love TPM and have been meaning to join Prime. Hopefully, those folks have signed up. But what I mean by this is that in my own life there are always a handful of things I want to do, should do, have been planning to do but for whatever reason haven’t done. I blame some mix of busy-ness, inertia, the pain of getting my wallet out and typing in those numbers and whatever other low on the scale crookednesses in the timber of my humanity that stand in the way. Anyway, I get it. That’s me too. But if that’s you, I’m going to do my best to bring you over the line. We know that there is a substantial number of our readers who are daily readers, plan to sign up for Prime, want to sign up but simply haven’t gotten around to it. If that’s you, we really need you to join the club too. It’s important. Just click here.

I’ve spent a lot of time in recent months thinking about how we should be covering the news in light of huge changes in the news business and the world we’re covering in the last two to three years. How do we, as a small news organization, use our resources most effectively to inform our readers? The most fundamental and important way is to do more original reporting, which is where you’ve seen us focus most of our resources this year. We hope to have hired three additional reporters by the end of 2017 – not a dramatic increase for larger organizations but a big expansion for us. But it’s not only a matter of numbers. It’s how we deploy those resources. More specifically, how do we react to this new environment to do what we do better? Read More

This is quite a paragraph (emphasis added)…

Tension between the two comes as life in the White House is shadowed by the investigation. Not only do Mr. Trump, Mr. Kushner and Mr. McGahn all have lawyers, but so do other senior officials. The uncertainty has grown to the point that White House officials privately express fear that colleagues may be wearing a wire to surreptitiously record conversations for Mr. Mueller.

I confess that I’m feeling pretty good about sitting out the ‘Dean Heller might not actually be awful on taking away your health care’ market bubble from earlier this year. Now he’s a key driver of the latest push to repeal Obamacare. A pro-Obamacare group is already up with a digital ad campaign targeting Heller’s flip.

In Episode 21 of the Josh Marshall Show podcast David Frum and I talk Trump.

Arizona’s Governor is on-board with the new Obamacare repeal bill. That means McCain will likely fall in line.

It’s great that the Mueller probe appears to be almost leak free. At least in theory it’s great. It’s not great if you want to understand the progress of the investigation or what is likely to come of it – something we have an understandable, even pressing interest in. We’re reduced to making inferences based on the slivers of information which emerge from the probe. Here Tierney Sneed explains why the fact that Mueller got a search warrant to get information from Facebook actually tells us some key information about the progress of the probe because of what Mueller’s lawyers had to prove to a judge to get that warrant. Read this piece. It’s important context to understand where things are. Read More

Obamacare repeal has been turned back now two times? Three times? It’s hard for me to know or keep track of how we score what counted as a ‘time’. We’ve been through this again and again. But this new round is as real as it gets. The CBO announced today that it will not be able to produce a full score of the Graham-Cassidy repeal bill for “at least several weeks.” But the Senate only has until the end of September to pass a bill with only 50 votes (complicated but those are the rules). So it appears they’re likely to plow ahead without knowing the cost or how many people will lose coverage under the new bill if they think they have the votes. This is real. It could happen very quickly.