Senate Democrats are continuing their efforts to put their colleagues across the aisle on record for their unwillingness to support reproductive rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, which opened the door to a flood of state-level abortion bans. Last week, Democrats brought forward a bill to protect access to contraception. This week it will be a bill to protect access to in vitro fertilization.
Continue reading “GOP Sens Scramble To Find Reason To Oppose IVF Bill, Warning Of An ‘Anti-Religious Agenda’”A Favor and a Question
I wanted to ask you a question for a project I’m putting together: Do you have a favorite Editors’ Blog post? This isn’t one of those things where you have to choose a single one. There are going on 24 years of posts in the Editors’ Blog. So I’m curious to hear from readers if there are particular ones that stand out or that you found memorable or anything else like that over that period. One, none, five — any number is fine. If there are ones that come to mind, can you drop me a line at the regular TPM email address — talk (at) talkingpointsmemo dot com — and just put in the subject line “Editor’s Blog,” or something like that?
You don’t need to know the title. For the first eight or nine years they didn’t even have titles.
Mount Everest, World’s Highest Garbage Dump, Sets New Waste Removal Mandates For Climbers
Mount Everest is known for many things: It’s the world’s highest mountain, an often-deadly climb, the experience of a lifetime, and… the world’s highest garbage dump. The waste situation at the mountain has reached a critical point as more and more high-priced climbing groups flock there, exhibiting, in many cases, little regard for their impact on the delicate and extreme environment. For over a decade, the Nepalese government has coordinated high-risk expeditions to help clean up waste on Mount Everest, but there seems to be a never-ending quantity of discarded cans, bottles, oxygen tanks, tents, ropes, human waste, and even dead bodies. A 2019 cleanup attempt removed 24,000 pounds of trash from the base camps.
This has led to a new mandate set by the local government, the Pasanglhamu rural municipality. Climbers will have to purchase “poo-bags” to carry their own waste, and those bags will be checked upon their return. Although this only addresses part of the problem on the mountain, it focuses on the more hazardous types of waste found around base camps.
Discarded climbing equipment scattered around Camp 4 of Mount Everest
A Nepalese sherpa collecting garbage left by climbers
Workers from a recycling company load garbage collected from Mount Everest
Close up of waste collected from Mount Everest
Full sacks of garbage collected from Mount Everest
Workers from a recycling company show collected garbage to the media
Workers load bags of garbage collected from Mount Everest
Nepali Army personnel throw bags of waste collected from Mount Everest
Nepali climbers pose with the waste they collected at Mount Everest
Nepalese sherpa packing up garbage collected during a clean-up expedition
Mountaineers begin their ascent, leaving discarded items in the snow behind them
Nepalese climbers posing with garbage collected during a clean-up expedition
Climbers collect garbage ahead of the 60th anniversary of humans summiting Mount Everest
Climbers collecting garbage at Mount Everest
Garbage left by mountaineers at Mount Everest in 1993
Mountaineers lined up as they climb a slope during their ascend to the summit
What To Make of the Departure of Benny Gantz
A number of you have asked me to share my perspective on one of the Israeli opposition leaders (one of, not the official one) Benny Gantz leaving the Netanyahu coalition. So here goes. My overall impression, sadly, is perhaps best captured by not posting on it until now, though I was kind of letting it marinate while I thought of what to say. Basically, I think it matters very little. But it’s helpful to walk through the different dimensions of non-mattering.
In the most basic sense it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t endanger the governing coalition’s majority. That majority had 64 seats on October 7th, which means a majority and three seats to spare. They were added and now taken away, a wash. In the short term it only makes Netanyahu more reliant on the ultra-rightist parties in the coalition — something Gantz’s party’s entry was in some ways meant to limit.
Continue reading “What To Make of the Departure of Benny Gantz”Behold The House GOP’s Never-Ending Stream Of Disinformation
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
A Never-Ending Stream Of Disinformation
A year and half after Republicans captured the House majority, I’m still not sure it has sunk in how all-encompassing their effort has been to yoke the powers of the lower chamber to the Trump Republican Party’s 2024 electoral aims.
In particular, House Republicans have done a phenomenal job of taking advantage of the existing constructs and conceits of traditional journalistic outlets to peddle their disinformation campaign.
“Investigations,” “contempt of Congress,” and “impeachment” have been rolled out one after the other by the GOP House. We know the predictably slavish and uncritical amplification these efforts get in right-wing media. But more mainstream news outlets continue to be hobbled by their own institutional and competitive imperatives to cover these House machinations with the same breathless procedural myopia that they would bring to their news coverage if these were legitimate legislative efforts grounded in facts, evidence, and some modicum of good faith.
The House GOP keeps running the same tricks up the flagpole, and mainstream outlets continue to salute. The latest gambit is to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt for failing to turn over to Congress audio recordings of President Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur in his classified documents investigation.
But the particular flavor of the latest gambit hardly matters, or is at least secondary to the broader pattern. Institutionally, it remains incredibly difficult for news outlets to conclude that these are bad faith efforts and adjust their coverage accordingly. Even harder still seems to be placing these efforts in the larger disinformation ecosystem created by Trump Republicans and contextualizing each episode accordingly.
Good disinformation coverage exists at the mainstream outlets. The WaPo published a strong example just yesterday. But the disinformation coverage tends to exist separate and apart from the political coverage, especially Hill coverage, which is its own beast and operates according to long-held traditions.
The James Comers and Jim Jordans of the world have been churning out disinformation at a staggering rate since even before they won the majority. But each “story” they package exists in its own little universe in the media coverage instead of as another in the long and never-ending stream of disinformation.
That larger pattern tells its own story, one that is a much clearer distillation of the House GOP effort to tear down and delegitimize Joe Biden, his administration, their top officials, and their agenda items while elevating Donald Trump. It’s going to continue right on through Election Day but without the coverage ever coming to grips with what’s actually happening.
A For Effort
It’s impossible to debunk each and every falsehood, half truth, and conspiracy ginned up by MAGA world — and that’s largely the point of their exercise. But MSNBC’s Lisa Rubin does a nice job deconstructing the false notion that President Biden was pulling the strings on the prosecution of Trump in the New York hush-money case.
In The Aftermath Of Tina Peters
A really good read from TPM’s Khaya Himmelman on the effort to repair the damage that former Mesa County, Colorado clerk Tina Peters did while spewing lies about the 2020 election.
‘Our Work Continues’
I wrote at length yesterday about the Hunter Biden conviction, but let me note one other bit of news from yesterday. In his post-verdict news conference, Hunter Biden’s bespoke Special Counsel David Weiss said, “Our work continues.” That suggests that even with one trial done and another scheduled for the fall in California, the investigation of Hunter Biden is not done. Whether that’s FARA-related or connected to other business dealings is not clear.
Bannon Makes Final Push To Avoid Prison
With his July 1 deadline to report to prison looming, former Trump White House aide Steve Bannon filed an emergency motion with the DC Circuit to allow him to remain free while he seek Supreme Court review of his case.
House Dems Prep Resistance Playbook
Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., is spearheading a task force to oppose Project 2025, the plan crafted by conservative groups to replace much of the current federal bureaucracy with reliably right-wing personnel and pursue dramatic policy changes through administrative fiat.
AP:
Kevin Roberts, the president of The Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action for America, scoffed at the “unserious” effort and said the left is “in a frenzy” as Project 2025 tries to wrest control of the federal bureaucracy.
“Project 2025 will not be ‘stopped,’” Roberts said in a statement. He said the Democrats fighting Project 2025 are “more than welcome to try. We will not give up and we will win.”
Seems Reasonable
Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are proposing to impose on Supreme Court justices the same $50 cap on gifts that members of Congress are subject to:
In Case You Need A Primer …
I can’t imagine anyone who reads TPM needs the barebones survey of the Christian Right that the NYT published, pegged to the secret recording of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and his wife, but here it is just in case.
What Makes Them Think They Can’t Trust Trump?
WaPo: Some abortion opponents worry about Trump’s Republican platform rewrite
2024 Ephemera
- SC-01: Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s effort to avenge his ousting as speaker of the House by supporting a primary challenger to Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) fell far short of success.
- SC-04: Rep. William Timmons (R-SC) held off a tough challenge from his right flank in a race that pitted the Trump-backed incumbent against several members of the House Freedom Caucus.
- NV-Sen: Trump-backed Sam Brown won the GOP Senate nomination and will face incumbent Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) in the general election.
- OH-06: Republican state Sen. Michael Rulli (R) won as expected in a special election to fill the remainder of Republican Rep. Bill Johnson’s term – but by a fraction of the margins that Johnson and Donald Trump had run up in the recent elections.
Oops, The Pope Did It Again
Pope Francis has reportedly again used a gay slur while voicing in a private meeting his opposition to ordaining openly gay men, just two weeks after apologizing for an earlier utterance of the pejorative.
Noted
WSJ: Elon Musk’s Boundary-Blurring Relationships With Women at SpaceX
Paul Ryan, Never Trumper
Following up on his confirmation last week that he will not be supporting Donald Trump in 2024, former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan took that message to Fox News:
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Photo of the Day
Doesn’t require much commentary.
Quiet, Boys: Where Are the Proud Boys?
Donald Trump has spent years talking a big game about crowd sizes. His 2016 rallies could draw tens of thousands of people, numbers he often inflated by an additional several thousand when boasting of them after the fact; his administration heralded its arrival in 2017 by trotting out press secretary Sean Spicer to loudly and falsely claim that his Trump inauguration crowd was larger than Obama’s.
Continue reading “Quiet, Boys: Where Are the Proud Boys?”GOP Cranks Out Whole New Disinfo Shitstorm After Hunter Biden Conviction
Ed. Note: Nicole Lafond will be back to helming Where Things Stand soon.
You might think tacking his son’s scalp above the door would calm for at least a moment the GOP’s venomous attacks, sinister insinuations, and relentless disinformation campaign against Joe Biden.
You would be so wrong.
The sad, poignant, and troubled life of Hunter Biden played out in his trial for all to see, a story of addiction, self destruction, and family dysfunction twisted into a criminal prosecution by Special Counsel David Weiss that won a quick conviction today on federal gun charges.
There was no doubt that Hunter Biden was guilty as charged, just as there was no doubt that he never would have been charged were he not Joe Biden’s son. Let that sit for a moment. The gun charges Hunter Biden faced are rarely brought as a standalone case absent a causally related crime, such as shooting someone with the illegally acquired gun. But it got worse from there.
The original resolution of the case and a companion tax case via a plea agreement was a reasonably just outcome to a case that arose during the dark days of the Trump Justice Department. But Republicans on the Hill howled in outrage over that outcome, and the special counsel quickly retreated, wrecking Hunter Biden’s plea agreement so he could pursue additional allegations against the Bidens by an FBI informant. It turned out the informant was spreading lies about the Bidens, which Weiss ended up charging criminally in a new case. That left Hunter Biden hung out to dry as Weiss pushed the gun and tax cases to trials on opposite coasts.
Donald Trump has long seen Hunter Biden as the key to getting to Joe Biden. While Joe Biden is above reproach, Hunter Biden is not. Trump’s first impeachment was rooted in his attempts to extract dirt on Hunter Biden from Ukraine, even if that meant feeding the U.S. ally to the Russian wolf. From that initial conceit – you take down Joe Biden by taking down Hunter Biden – grew the preposterous GOP disinformation campaign with the implausible title of “Biden Crime Family.”
The investigative capacity of the House GOP majority since January 2023 has nearly exclusively focused on Hunter Biden and various arcane allegations, half truths, misleading juxtapositions, and outright falsehoods. Like QAnon and other elaborate right-wing conspiracies, the “Biden Crime Family” has its own cast of characters, jargon, and intricate subplots that double back upon themselves in a labyrinth that facts cannot penetrate. Adherents recite its catechisms without regard to truth or evidence or anything that might contradict or undermine its premises.
For the House GOP in particular, it’s been a nonstop 18 months of the chronic abuse of power in pursuit of political advantage in the 2024 election. Hunter Biden is merely a means to an end, a pawn, collateral damage in the quest to take down his father. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that having achieved the undoing of Hunter Biden today, Republicans would not pause or flinch, let alone reflect.
While Democrats debated in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s recent conviction whether to make a big deal about it, Republicans today doubled down, claiming — get this — that the conviction of the president’s son was a giant distraction aimed at protecting Joe Biden himself. The Trump campaign itself — not a surrogate, not a proxy, not at arm’s length — issued this ghastly statement from Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt:
This trial has been nothing more than a distraction from the real crimes of the Biden Crime Family, which has raked in tens of millions of dollars from China, Russia and Ukraine. Crooked Joe Biden’s reign over the Biden Family Criminal Empire is all coming to an end on November 5th, and never again will a Biden sell government access for personal profit.
Since this morning, the ghoulish Trump White House aide Stephen Miller has tweeted or retweeted at least eight times some variation of “DOJ is Joe’s election protection racket.” The Hunter Biden conviction, in Miller’s words, is “a giant misdirection.” As a mark of his ferocity, Miller tweeted more about how convicting Hunter Biden was a Deep State “op” to take the heat off President Biden than he did about the migrant “INVASION.”
House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-KY), a more-demented-than-Ahab character pursuing his great white whale has become a pathetic figure in recent months even in right-wing media appearances for failing to come up with the goods on Biden that he keeps promising. But Comer found renewed vigor in the Hunter Biden conviction, releasing a statement that said:
Today’s verdict is a step toward accountability but until the Department of Justice investigates everyone involved in the Bidens’ corrupt influence peddling schemes that generated over $18 million in foreign payments to the Biden family, it will be clear department officials continue to cover for the Big Guy, Joe Biden.
It’s madness, but these people aren’t crazy. It’s a tactical relentlessness in service of a clear and consistent strategy of flooding American public life with an unending stream of disinformation to achieve their own political ends, primarily the acquisition of official power to further entrench themselves.
Joe Biden is the proximate target at the moment, but whoever is perceived as an “enemy” may have the withering fire of disinformation trained on them next. And we are all at risk of being collateral damage, just like Hunter Biden.
The Best Of TPM Today
Mesa County is Still Reeling From Election-Denying County Clerk Tina Peters – Khaya Himmelman
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
Rudy G Gets Big Guffaws At Far-Right Confab For Calling Fani Willis A ‘Ho’ – David Kurtz
What We Are Reading
How Joe Biden Can Improve Perceptions Of The Economy – Brian Beutler
Judge Strikes Down Florida’s Ban on Transgender Care for Minors – NYT
Unfounded attacks on the Justice Department must end – Merrick Garland
Resilience Part 2 (or Thoughts on Sam Alito’s DGAF Justicehood)
I think a lot about resilience. It’s actually an underlying concern that forms a lot of my political opinions. Not about policy, though perhaps that too in some way, but politics in the sense of elections and how coalitions and individuals operate politically, how they sustain themselves. I thought about this when I heard these new recordings of Sam Alito, telling us in his own words what we’ve been learning in recent years from his actions. It was interesting to contrast Alito’s remarks with those from the parallel recordings of John Roberts. Roberts at least said the right things when pushed on these questions about polarization and the role of justices and the Court. I doubt the difference in the two responses is just about Roberts being more circumspect. While being part of the same corruption as Alito, he is at least concerned with public perceptions of the Court’s legitimacy and the historical reputation of the Court under his chief justiceship. He is concerned with the constraint of legitimacy, which is defined by public perceptions of the Court. It’s a low bar, but still a quite significant one.
The thing with Sam Alito is that he doesn’t give a fuck. He is a seventy-something Fox News watcher and religious fundamentalist who happens to find himself in a position of immense and almost incomparable power over all of American society and he’s going to take that power to the limit to advance his own political preferences. He’s not even going to go through the motions of pretending that’s not the case. You don’t like it? Well, tough shit. You should have thought of that in 2006. And he’s not the only one in this mode. Thomas is right there with him. The remaining four are functionally in the same place. They’re just more attuned to appearances and willing to pass up at least a few goodies in the interest of maintaining some patina of legitimacy and thus entrenching and confirming their illegitimate power.
So, resilience.
Continue reading “Resilience Part 2 (or Thoughts on Sam Alito’s DGAF Justicehood)”Mesa County is Still Reeling From Election-Denying County Clerk Tina Peters
It’s been nearly four years since Tina Peters, the elections administrator of Mesa County, Colorado, went rogue, allegedly breaching her office’s own equipment in a bid to investigate Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. She was indicted on state charges in 2022.
Continue reading “Mesa County is Still Reeling From Election-Denying County Clerk Tina Peters”