I wanted to follow up on my post below about Kavanaugh being a made to order Justice, courtesy of the Federalist Society and the rest of the conservative judicial incubation infrastructure. One highly knowledgeable reader of ours, who comes out of the DC legal world, notes more specific points: specifically, the way Kavanaugh’s grooming and incubation was conducted for the specific purpose of a) being absolutely certain that he was a strict right-wing ideologue, with no hidden dimensions of possible heterodoxy unexamined and b)that he was clean as a whistle, not only with no scandals but no paper trail that would cause undue problems. No more emerging heterodoxy like Kennedy and Souter. No more flame-outs like Bork.
From TPM Reader XX (true initials witheld) … Read More
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) was casting a lot of aspersions on Brett Kavanaugh. Will she deliver the goods?
We’ve just released the third installment in our 2018 special editorial series on Voting Rights and Democracy. In installment three, Rachel Cohen looks at the critical issues of gerrymandering, redistricting reform and other reforms like automatic voter registration to see whether the various progressive groups who are now dedicated to fighting on these issues will be successful in making them top tier issues not just in the abstract but for voters when they enter the ballot box.
If you’re reading this post on the TPM front page, you must be a Prime member. It’s not behind our Prime paywall. It doesn’t even show up on the site unless you’re a Prime member who is logged into the site.
What’s the point?
I don’t imagine we’d use this very often. But the main issue is that as we’ve steadily built our number of Prime subscribers – now at just shy of 29,000 members – we’ve realized that it’s probably annoying to hear pitches to join Prime when you’re already a member. So this system let’s me have some posts show only to non-members and others only to members. All of which is to say that you won’t have to see anywhere near as many of those Prime pitch posts. I still may occasionally do one that everyone sees if we hit some big milestone or something else that might be relevant to current members. But mostly not.
This will also make it possible for me to share news about relevant updates to Prime or news that for whatever reason is only relevant to members.
Basically a tie. But Democrat Phil Bredesen has a two point margin over Marsha Blackburn.
We’ve now seen that a growing list of top Trump administration officials are denying that they wrote the New York Times op-ed. There’s much less here than meets the eye. Let me explain. Read More
Giuliani rules out Trump ever answering investigators questions about obstruction, either in person or in writing.
Kavanaugh concludes his public testimony. Catch up with Tierney Sneed’s reporting from the hearing.
I strongly recommend reading this piece. A humorous and bizarre look into the sleazy world of Manafort/Trump-aligned operatives.