I wanted to tell you about a new election news site which is actually a very old one. You’re likely familiar with Daily Kos Elections. If you’re not, it’s long been a section of the Daily Kos website which specializes in downballot races. In other words, all the races besides presidential races. They don’t totally ignore presidential contests, of course. But their bread and butter is everything else. That means congressional races, especially ones operating below the radar. They’re even more priceless on everything below the level of federal elections: state legislatives contests, state secretaries of state, state Supreme Court elections, district attorneys, etc. As we’ve learned over the last decade, those offices are the true taproots and ballast of political power in the United States. Presidents are the great lumbering apex predator of the political ecosystem who exist and survive only because of all the lesser known parts of that ecosystem.
Over a couple decades, DKE became an irreplaceable source of information for all the nitty-gritty of electoral life in American politics. Perhaps the greatest tribute to the quality of their work is that their following was bipartisan. If the information is solid and you can’t find it anywhere else, everyone wants to have it, regardless of who they want to win the election. This has always been my standard in the world of independent and engaged media: have your reporting be good enough, clear enough and sufficiently free of cant that it becomes a must-read even for those who don’t share your political viewpoint. That’s their calling card. They’re really that good. It’s an ironic day to make this recommendation since we begin today the quadrennial four-day festival of worship in the cult of presidenting. But I’m telling you this because DKE is now hiving off from Daily Kos and relaunching as a independent website called TheDownballot. They actually launched at the end of last week. I can’t recommend their work strongly enough. It’s where you go to get the details, to find out which races are really going to matter, and to find leads on where change is happening, where you go to see the cacophony of data kicked up by political life corralled into usable datasets. It’s also the kind of work worth supporting with your dollars, sort of like the coral reefs of nitty gritty political knowledge, if you will.
So that’s my pitch. Needless to say, I’m not involved financially or otherwise with TheDownballot. My only relationship is as a consumer of their work over many years. Check them out.
One of the things that happens in the world of digital media is that your published writings are always at your fingertips and can vanish in an instant. Some publications go under entirely and their back catalog disappears. Today I was discussing a new Maureen Dowd column about the “coup,” as she put it, against Joe Biden (good lord…) and I was reminded that the first piece of journalism I ever published in an actual publication was about Dowd. I tried to find it and realized it was no longer online. But I didn’t want to leave it there, so I went back to my email archive, found the emails with the person who edited it and got the original URL. With the original URL I was able to track it down on the WayBack Machine. My memory was a bit off. But I was close. It wasn’t the first piece I published. That was two years earlier. I conflated the two because they were both published in the same publication, Feed Magazine, one of the great now-departed publications from the first wave of Internet journalism.
I was excited to find it. It was a piece I was kind of proud of because I was still very early in my journalism career and I was able to hit a number of themes that were important to me. Reading it again I realize that a number of those are ones that have been constants through my writing at TPM. I realized that since I own the copyright and the publication was defunct (for at least 20 years) I should simply republish it here at TPM so it’s resurrected digitally and I can refer back to it whenever needed.
It was published on April 19th, 1999, on the occasion of Dowd receiving a Pulitzer for her commentary on the Lewinsky scandal. The original, as published 25 years ago, you can find after the jump.
I flagged this on social media, but I wanted to make sure you knew. Trump just announced a “crime and safety” rally for next Tuesday in Howell, Michigan, a town that has for decades been heavily associated with the KKK. Indeed, just late last month, white supremacists marched in the town chanting, “We love Hitler. We love Trump.” Some but not all of the town’s reputation comes from the fact that a long-time Grand Drago of the Michigan Klan lived there and his farm was a sort of home base for the Klan. (I just found out this afternoon that a good bit of the 1991 documentary Blood in the Face — great doc, by the way — was shot there.)
This is the kind of move that will be lost on many reporters and especially most out-of-state reporters. But it won’t be lost for a moment on Blacks and Jews from Michigan. It’s a bullhorn, not a dog whistle. I had to have the connection pointed out to me too though, once I did, the connection with the Blood in the Face documentary which I saw when it first came out placed it for me.
This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Is there anything more pathetic than a used plastic bag?
They rip and tear. They float away in the slightest breeze. Left in the wild, their mangled remains entangle birds and choke sea turtles that mistake them for edible jellyfish. It takes 1,000 years for the bags to disintegrate, shedding hormone-disrupting chemicals as they do. And that outcome is all but inevitable, because no system exists to routinely recycle them. It’s no wonder some states have banned them and stores give discounts to customers with reusable bags.
But the plastics industry is working to make the public feel OK about using them again.
Companies whose futures depend on plastic production, including oil and gas giant ExxonMobil, are trying to persuade the federal government to allow them to put the label “recyclable” on bags and other plastic items virtually guaranteed to end up in landfills and incinerators.
They argue that “recyclable” should apply to anything that’s capable of being recycled. And they point to newer technologies that have been able to remake plastic bags into new products.
I spent months investigating one of those technologies, a form of chemical recycling called pyrolysis, only to find that it is largely a mirage. It’s inefficient, dirty and so limited in capacity that no one expects it to process meaningful amounts of plastic waste any time soon.
That shouldn’t matter, say proponents of the industry’s argument. If it’s physically capable of being recycled — even in extremely limited scenarios — it should be labeled “recyclable.”
They are laying out their case in comments to the Federal Trade Commission as it revises its Green Guides, documents that define how companies can use marketing labels like “recyclable” or “compostable.” The guides are meant to curb greenwashing — deceptive advertising that exaggerates the sustainability of products. They were last updated in 2012, before the explosion of social media advertising and green influencers; the agency declined to answer questions about the revision or give an idea of when it will be done.
The push for a looser definition of “recyclable” highlights a conundrum faced not just by companies represented by the Plastics Industry Association, but by members of the Consumer Brands Association, whose plastic-packaged products fill grocery shelves across the world. (Neither trade group, nor ExxonMobil, wanted to elaborate on their positions advocating for a more liberal use of the word “recyclable.”)
Under increasing pressure to reckon with the global plastics crisis, companies want to rely on recycling as the answer. But turning old plastic into new plastic is really, really hard.
Products made with dyes, flame retardants and other toxic chemicals create a health hazard when they’re heated for recycling. That severely limits the types of products you can make from recycled plastic. And most items are too small for companies in the recycling business to bother sorting and processing, or they are assembled in a way that would make it far more costly to strip them down to their useful elements than to just make new plastic. Plastic forks? Straws? Toys given out in fast food meals and party favor bags? Never actually recycled. In fact, only 5% of Americans’ plastic finds new life.
Environmental experts worry that if the FTC sides with the industry, companies could slap the “recyclable” label on virtually anything.
Though the agency only pursues a few greenwashing cases a year, its guides — which are guidelines instead of laws — are the only national benchmark for evaluating recycling claims.
They’re used by companies that want to market their products in an honest way. They also serve as a reference for state officials who are drafting laws to try to reduce plastic waste.
What good will such laws be, environmental experts worry, if those words mean nothing?
For at least three decades, the industry has misled the public about what really is recyclable.
Take a close look at any plastic product and you’ll likely see a little number stamped on it called a resin identification code; it distinguishes what kind of plastic it’s made of. Plastic bags, for example, are labeled No. 4. Only some No. 1 and No. 2 plastics are widely recyclable. In each case, the number is surrounded by the iconic “chasing arrows” symbol, which has come to denote recyclability, regardless of whether that product can actually be recycled.
Around that time, the plastic industry was contending with the nation’s growing awareness that its products were the root of an intractable pollution problem. States were weighing legislation to deal with it. And the American Plastics Council was convening meetings to head off threats. The council discussed the arrows, which they described as “consumer tested,” according to meeting notes obtained by the Center for Climate Integrity, an advocacy group that works to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable.
The industry persuaded 39 states to require the use of the symbols. Their purpose, the notes said: “to prevent bans.” They pursued the strategy despite warnings from state regulators who predicted the arrows would lead consumers to overestimate the recyclability of plastic packaging.
By 1995, state attorneys general were telling the FTC that’s exactly what was happening.
The agency ruled in 1998 that brands could continue using the codes with the recycling symbol, but could only display them prominently — by printing them next to the brand name, for example — if the product was recyclable for a “substantial majority” of consumers. If not, the symbols could be stamped in a less obvious place, like the bottom of containers.
These mandates did little to ease consumers’ confusion. “You mean we’re not supposed to throw plastic bags in recycling bins?” a colleague recently asked me.
During a tour of the New York facility that sorts the city’s recyclables, I saw the result of a million well-intentioned mistakes — countless bags sloshing over conveyor belts like the unwanted dregs at the bottom of a cereal bowl.
They’re notorious for clogging equipment. Sometimes, they start fires. And when they get stuck between layers of paper, the bags end up contaminating bales of paper that are actually recyclable, condemning much of it to the landfill.
If companies started printing the word “recyclable” on them, I wondered, how much worse could this get?
When you see something labeled as “recyclable,” it’s reasonable to expect it will be made into something new after you toss it in the nearest recycling bin.
You would be wrong.
The current Green Guides allow companies to make blanket “recyclable” claims if 60% of consumers or communities have access to recycling facilities that will take the product. The guides don’t specify whether facilities can just accept the item, or if there needs to be a reasonable assurance that the item will be made into a new product.
When the agency invited the public to comment in late 2022 on how the guides should be revised, FTC Chair Lina M. Khan predicted that one of the main issues would be “whether claims that a product is recyclable should reflect where a product ultimately ends up, not just whether it gets picked up from the curb.”
Strangely, that statement ignored the agency’s own guidance. An FTC supplement to the 2012 Green Guides stated that “recyclable” items must go to facilities “that will actually recycle” them, “not accept and ultimately discard” them.
The industry disagrees with the position.
“Recent case law confirms that the term ‘recyclable’ means ‘capable of being recycled,’ and that it is an attribute, not a guarantee,” said a comment from the Plastics Industry Association. Forcing the material to be “actually recovered” is “unnecessarily burdensome.”
Citing a consumer survey, ExxonMobil told the FTC that the majority of respondents “agreed that it was appropriate to label an item as recyclable if a product can be recycled, even if access to recycling facilities across the country varies.” The company’s comments argued against “arbitrary minimum” thresholds like the 60% rule.
The FTC also received comments urging the agency to tighten the rules. A letter from the attorneys general of 15 states and the District of Columbia suggested increasing the 60% minimum to 90%. And the Environmental Protection Agency told the FTC that “recyclable” is only valid if the facilities that collect those products can reliably make more money by selling them for recycling than by throwing them away in a landfill.
The industry argues that recycling is never guaranteed. Market changes like the pandemic could force facilities to discard material that is technically recyclable, wrote the Consumer Brands Association. There is “simply no consumer deception in a claim that clearly identifies that a product is capable of being recycled,” the group wrote, despite the fact that “an external factor several times removed from the manufacturer results in it ultimately not being recycled.”
And what if consumers stopped seeing as many products marketed as recyclable? That could “dramatically” lower recycling rates, the group wrote, because consumers would get confused, seeming to imply people wouldn’t know if they could recycle anything at all.
“Wow, that’s some weird acrobatics,” Lynn Hoffman, strategic adviser at the Alliance for Mission-Based Recycling, said of the industry’s uncertainty argument. The group is a network of nonprofit recyclers that supports a zero-waste future.
Hoffman acknowledged the inefficiencies in the system. The solution, she said, is to improve the true recyclability of products that can be reliably processed, like soda bottles, by tracking them as they pass through the supply chain, being transparent about where they end up and removing toxic chemicals from products.
Calling everything “recyclable” would be a huge mistake, she said. “We have to be realistic about the role that recycling plays,” she added.
In fact, research has shown people can produce more waste when they think it will be recycled. When North Carolina began rolling out curbside recycling in different towns, researchers analyzed data on household waste before and after the change. They found that overall waste — the total amount of trash plus stuff in the recycling bin — rose by up to 10% after recycling became available, possibly because consumers felt less guilty.
“They get their blue bins, and they worry less about the amount of trash they generate,” said one of the researchers, Roland Geyer, a professor of industrial ecology at the University of California-Santa Barbara. “I’m probably guilty of that too.”
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
Kamala Harris’ quick, unexpected transformation from a low-profile vice president to the headline-dominating Democratic presidential nominee has upended the 2024 election in just a few short weeks.
Across the Pacific Ocean, Harris’ story may resonate with New Zealanders, like myself, who see parallels with Jacinda Ardern, a young, politically astute liberal, and her sudden rise to her party’s leadership in 2017. Ardern’s swift ascension disrupted the foregone conclusion that her political party was headed for a decisive defeat in an upcoming election.
Ardern, similarly, became the leader of her party and a prime minister contender after New Zealand’s Labour Party leader Andrew Little, 52, saw no pathway to victory and stepped aside just seven weeks before the September 2017 election.
Ardern’s 11th-hour promotion gave the campaign a jolt of energy and infused it with what Ardern called “relentless positivity.” Ardern quickly unified her party and ultimately, when the votes were counted and a coalition formed, landed the top job as prime minister.
Ardern’s whirlwind campaign and tenure also shows some pitfalls other women leaders, like Harris, might face, including being compelled to appear as competent and likable while fending off hateful attacks.
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is photographed with supporters at a campaign rally in Glendale, Ariz., on Aug. 9, 2024. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
No pathway ahead
In the first few months of 2017, it seemed like the center-right National Party in New Zealand would win reelection after nine years leading the government.
Ardern, then 37, accepted the nomination. She promised that she and her team would be “positive, organized and ready.” She gave herself three days to overhaul the campaign.
A campaign of unity
By connecting with voters and focusing on positivity, Ardern’s short campaign united a party known for fractious infighting.
What followed might seem familiar to many people closely following American politics today. Ardern kicked off her campaign with a photo of her smiling, captioned: “Let’s Do This.” She held lively campaign rallies across the country. And the public responded.
As a culture, we New Zealanders often avoid exuberance. So, the phenomenon of “Jacindamania” was remarkable.
As a prime minister candidate, Ardern embraced and promoted her brand of “relentless positivity,” as she put it.
The opposition tried to depict her as inexperienced and superficial and then launched attack ads – milder than what U.S. voters expect to see in a political campaign, but a rarity in New Zealand politics.
The attacks did little to dispel Ardern’s stardust. If anything, the jabs stood in contrast to her positive messaging. Ardern’s Facebook Lives with supporters were consistently upbeat. Her interviews and press conferences combined charm with detailed policy knowledge.
Harris’ early polling gains against Trump suggest a similar story. The sexist and racist attacks against Harris appear to be largely falling flat, at least so far.
Republicans’ attacks on Harris may, for now, be less effective with less time to embed themselves in voters’ minds. But attacks tend to accrue over time.
Ardern’s last-minute rise to leadership may give some Democrats an example to consider as they look to November. But Ardern’s story offers reasons for trepidation for those who hope for less malicious politics.
A clip made the rounds this week in which chief weirdo JD Vance said the “purpose” of post-menopausal women was to help raise children. This sort of thing falls outside the normal discourse. Many find it uncomfortable or unusual to talk about the ultimate purpose of wide swathes of society. What does it even mean when someone talks about someone else’s purpose? It smacks of Simon Birch.
Victims of former Rep. George Santos (R-NY) have been told that he is expected to plead guilty in federal court on Monday after being charged with multiple counts of fraud related to his campaign operation.
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) is in the fight of his life.
The incumbent won back his seat in 2012 and 2018, the latter race during a year that was a bloodbath for his fellow Democratic senators in Republican-leaning states. Brown’s margins grew much tighter, with his 15-point 2012 rout halved six years later. And now, for the first time since 2012, he’s up in a presidential year, with Donald Trump — who easily won Ohio in 2016 and 2020 — at the top of the ballot.
Democrats simply can’t hold their Senate majority without Brown. The brutal map means that Republicans only need to flip West Virginia — a near-certainty, with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) bowing out — and not fumble their incumbencies in Florida and Texas to reach 50 seats. If they flip either Ohio or Montana, both states Trump won twice, they win the majority. Democrats are also defending in the perpetual battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada, as well as fighting for open seats in Arizona and Michigan.
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I got another note from TPM Reader NS this morning. He expresses rightful frustration with the way that elite media continues to focus on Trump’s recent antics as an extended tantrum or flawed strategy when it is much more appropriately seen as a mental and cognitive state which is manifestly unfit for holding public office. Trump is also not morally fit for office. But that’s different, and that’s always been the case. The normal rejoinder is that Trump’s mental fitness is sort of irrelevant since most of us already know that and his supporters don’t care. Those conclusions are mostly true as far as it goes. But it represents a failure of journalistic logic which is remarkably widespread in media today. Put simply, that reasoning is mainly above the pay grade of journalism. It’s not the job of journalism to adjust the editorial choices or insights of daily news coverage based on driving electoral or public opinion outcomes. It’s to cover the news. There’s no single way to cover the news and no single, objective version of what constitutes the news. But that reasoning about impact is not an appropriate one and it is deeply damaging to journalism in myriad ways.
