This is quite the photo. (Click the headline of this post to see full sized image.)

I flagged this on Twitter before President Trump started flogging it. But I’m not at all surprised that he did. Because, somewhat to my surprise, it revealed that Facebook seems still to be committed to lying, albeit now more artfully, about its role in the 2016 election and more broadly as a channel of choice for propaganda and misinformation. Read More

What now looks likely to be a plea deal agreed to by Rick Gates is a very big deal. What’s not clear yet is who it’s a big deal for. Read More

Here’s your weekly Sum Up of key developments in voting rights and democracy.

The circle is tightening around Paul Manafort.

Here’s your weekly – every Tuesday – Sum Up of all significant developments on Obamacare and health care policy over the past week. Read these 500 words and we’ll make sure you’re totally up to date and haven’t missed anything. Voting rights and Democracy on Monday; Health care policy and Obamacare on Tuesday; Russia on Friday.

Vox today announced a round of layoffs, joining a seemingly endless list of digital media companies that have laid off staff in recent months. First, this is not “Vox”, the political news / explainer site, which you may be most familiar with. It’s the parent company, Vox Media – which owned Curbed, Racked SB Nation, Polygon, The Verge, etc. The latter owns Vox and maybe ten other sites, many of which are big or dominant players in their respective spaces. Vox Media is laying off 50 employees.

I’ve written about this meta-topic a lot in recent months – what amounts to a crash in digital media. Vox is laying off 50 employees, what they say is roughly 5% of their staff, a comparatively small number in percentage terms relative to other recent blood letting. What I wanted to flag your attention to is what seems to be getting cut. Read More

Over the weekend, several prominent news media figures announced themselves as Trump/Russia skeptics. Politico’s Blake Hounshell seemed to kick off the discussion with this essay. This isn’t “fake news” type skepticism. It’s much more focused and I think reasonable. These folks fully grant the extensive and multi-pronged Russian effort to interfere in the 2016 election. That involved fake news, email hacking, and multiple approaches to Trump associates to gauge interest in working together. The skepticism is whether we’ll ever find a proven and explicit agreement between President Trump and Vladimir Putin or some other similarly high-level Russian official to collaborate in subverting the 2016 election. If not documented proof of such an agreement then at least well-attested evidence of the same. Read More

No, it’s not about Prime. Tomorrow is the official launch of my new podcast, The Josh Marshall Podcast. But it’s live now on iTunes. So if you listen to podcasts, please give it a listen. And even more important – here’s the favor – subscribe. Please subscribe. And if you want to be truly awesome, rate us 5 stars. This isn’t just about my ego. Hitting the ground running with a lot of subscribers and good ratings helps us a lot and it will allow us to put lots of resources into this new effort. The new show has a different format; it’s free to all and it’s now weekly. Take a listen and let me know what you think. Reading listener emails is going to be a big part of it. Find it here on iTunes.

We’ll also have the show on Stitcher, Google Play and Spotify, in addition to the actual RSS feeds.

Watching the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre hold forth at CPAC–carried live on the news nets–is a good reminder that while it carefully crafts an image as a membership association of gun owners, the NRA is really a house organ of the Republican Party. What I’m saying isn’t new. The reporting documenting the NRA’s shift under LaPierre has been out there for years. But listen to his rhetoric. This isn’t about guns or gun rights.The Second Amendment argument, as anathema as it is to many people, is window dressing. It’s about using “guns” as a political cudgel, using “guns” to catalyze the resentments and grievances of conservatives, using “guns” as a bulwark against political threats to the Republican Party. Plain and simple.