This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It first appeared at The Conversation.
Leaked internal documents suggest Facebook – which recently renamed itself Meta – is doing far worse than it claims at minimizing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on the Facebook social media platform.
Continue reading “Facebook Has A Disinfo Problem. And It’s Blocking Access To Data About How Bad It Is.”I just saw this comment from my friend Chris Hayes …
My unified theory of American social and political life is that we’ve lived through and are living through a once-in-a-century trauma/disruption and the results of that are going to revereberate throughout almost every facet of politics for a while.
I agree with this, with this additional and I believe critical fact: the pandemic hit during a period of intense social and political turbulence and instability in the United States. Not only Trump’s presidency, the escalation of destabilizing actions during his presidency but remember that the pandemic struck within days of the end of the President’s impeachment trial.
Continue reading “The Pandemic Through A Mirror, Darkly”Formerly convicted Trump associate Roger Stone is demanding that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) launch an “audit” of the state’s 2020 elections. Or Else.
Continue reading “Roger Stone Threatens To Run For Florida Guv If DeSantis Doesn’t Do Trumpy Election Audit”Today is the day for those off-year elections which in addition to electing governors and mayors and various other officials are taken as harbingers of the political climate going into the following year’s midterm elections. Attention tends to focus on New Jersey and Virginia. Democrat Phil Murphy looks set to win handily in New Jersey. But Virginia, where incumbents can’t run for reelection, looks way too close to call. There are two governing patterns in Virginia. One is that it is an increasingly Democratic state. Joe Biden won it by 10 points and it went narrowly for Hillary Clinton in 2016 even as she lost Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The other pattern is that it tends to be won by the party not currently holding the presidency. The guy who broke that latter pattern, ironically, is none other than Terry McAuliffe, who won in 2013, a year after President Obama was reelected.
Now we see which of those patterns will hold.
Continue reading “Into Virginia”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) on Monday released a copy of his keynote speech at the National Conservatism Conference the day before, and it’s a deeply embarrassing ode to the apparently dying breed of “masculine” men at the hands of the Woke Left.
? Morning Memo Radio ?
It’s Election Day!
A voter says critical race theory is the most important issue in the Virginia gubernatorial race–while fully admitting he doesn’t know what it is.
Professional far-right troll Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is being forced to cough up at least $48,000 in fines for repeatedly flouting the requirement to wear a mask while in the House chamber.
Laurie Snell, the wife of Pennsylvania Senate candidate Sean Parnell who is seeking a divorce, testified under oath in a child custody trial on Monday that he allegedly strangled her until she bit him to get free, and that the GOP candidate abused their kids.
Arizona Senate President Karen Fann (R), who commissioned Cyber Ninjas’ joke of an election audit that ended up finding absolutely nothing but apparently more votes for Biden than originally counted, announced yesterday that she won’t be seeking reelection in 2022.
The Biden administration on Tuesday unveiled sweeping limits on methane emissions, the second biggest greenhouse gas contributor to climate change after carbon dioxide, as the President attends the U.N.’s global summit on climate change.
The 80-year-old civil rights icon has been admitted to the hospital after suffering a fall and hitting his head at Howard University.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) sent the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) a letter yesterday demanding that they get rid of “pornography” and “inappropriate content” in school libraries, though he didn’t provide any examples of whatever material he was complaining about.
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While the percentage is significantly higher among Republican voters (and deeply influenced by where said Republicans get their news, which I’ll get into below), the percent of Americans who believe that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Trump has remained relatively steady for (almost) an entire year.
The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute put out the staggering results of a new poll today, the highlights of which my colleague Josh Marshall lays out here. The results of the poll shed light on Americans’ perceptions on a number of topics, including revealing a concerning uptick in GOP voters being increasingly on board with acts of political violence as a necessary tactic for preserving their take on the country’s founding ideals. But one statistic was particularly striking to me, especially when juxtaposed alongside the same survey’s findings on Americans’ voter fraud concerns.
About three in 10 Americans still believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, approximately 31 percent. On its face, the number isn’t that surprising. The more unsettling part lies in this segment of the data: That number hasn’t shifted much, and has actually grown, albeit minimally, over the course of this year — even after countless courts have tossed out Big Lie-related litigation for lacking sound evidence to back up the Trumpy claims and even after politically-motivated election “audit” results have left much to be desired for the far-right proponents of the cause. Nonetheless, from PRRI: “This share has remained steady throughout 2021, in August (29%), June (30%), and March (29%).”
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: One Year Later, Big Lie Firmly Lives Rent Free In Trumpers’ Heads”While some of the conservative justices admitted that the plaintiffs Monday had strong cases against the six-week Texas abortion ban, they wrung their hands about how to remedy it.
Continue reading “Conservative Justices Bemoan Bad Options To Block Texas Abortion Ban”Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) on Monday said that progressives plan to vote for both the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the reconciliation package even without Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) commitment to support the latter.
Continue reading “Jayapal Says Progressives Ready To Vote For Both Infrastructure Bills Regardless Of Latest Manchin-ing”The liberal women Supreme Court justices let the snark fly Monday as they picked apart the six-week abortion ban out of Texas.
Continue reading “Liberal Justices Can’t Help Showing Their Disdain For Texas Abortion Ban”We went into the weekend thinking Congress was finally on the verge of passing a substantially reduced Build Back Better bill, at roughly $1.75 trillion. Joe Manchin was likely more involved in that negotiation than any other member of Congress. He just held a press conference on the Hill in which he not only refused to support it but actually trashed the whole proposal in entirely new ways – now saying he can’t vote on any version of it until he learns more about what’s happening on inflation, gets a report from the CBO and other complaints. He demanded a vote on the so-called BIF and said he’s open to voting against the whole Biden reconciliation bill.
One other dimension to this is that Manchin’s announcement came just as Democratic leadership seemed on the verge on getting House progressives to believe that they had the outlines of a recon bill covered and thus vote for the BIF in advance of a recon bill. In other words, he was about to get what he has claimed to have wanted: passing the BIF bill before reconciliation and still having leverage to shape the reconciliation bill after the rest of the party has surrendered its leverage. The odds of that happening now seem close to nil.
Continue reading “Manchin’s Playing Everyone for Fools”
