Baltiore’s iconic Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed into the Patapsco River in the early hours of Tuesday, March 26, after it was hit by a giant container ship. The ship lost power and sent a mayday signal shortly before impact with a support beam. The death toll is still unclear; several vehicles and road workers are believed to have been on the bridge during the collapse. An extensive search and rescue operation is underway.
Container ship and collapsed bridge as the sun rises
The collapsed steel frame of the Francis Scott Key Bridge and a section of the roadway still upright sit on the water in Baltimore, Maryland, on March 26, 2024. The bridge collapsed after being struck by a container ship, sending multiple vehicles and up to 20 people plunging into the harbor below. “Unfortunately, we understand that there were up to 20 individuals who may be in the Patapsco River right now as well as multiple vehicles,” Kevin Cartwright of the Baltimore Fire Department told CNN. Ship monitoring website MarineTraffic showed a Singapore-flagged container ship called the Dali stopped under the bridge. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
Collapsed bridge hangs over container ship
(Photo by Rob Carr/Getty Images)
Where the roadway ends
(Photo by Rob Carr/Getty Images)
Sections of the bridge submerged in water
(Photo by Rob Carr/Getty Images)
Search and rescue teams on the Patapsco River
(Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)
Steel frame of the Francis Scott Key Bridge sits atop the container ship
(Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Some sections of the bridge are almost completely submerged
(Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Road closures leading up to the bridge
(Photo by Rob Carr/Getty Images)
Part of the roadway remains upright
(Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Parts of the bridge stuck on the bow of the container ship
(Photo by Rob Carr/Getty Images)
Steel frame draped over the container ship
(Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
Mangled steel frame lies in the water
(Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Sections of the bridge sticking out of the water
(Photo by Rob Carr/Getty Images)
Container ship and collapsed bridge seen from a distance
For this Supreme Court to reject abortion restrictions, the argument has to be pretty bad.
“That it?” Justice Amy Coney Barrett cut in tersely as anti-abortion group lawyer Erin Hawley (yes, that Hawley) enumerated the supposed harms to a group of doctors from the Food and Drug Administration lifting restrictions on abortion drug mifepristone.
In response to yesterday’s post on Ronna X TPM Reader JG said I may be missing the true elephant in the room, and by that he means something a number of others have suggested over the last 48 hours or so. That idea is that this doesn’t have anything to do with having Ronna on the air at all. She’s there to prepare for Trump’s possible return to power, an insurance policy, as it were. There’s an additional layer of this. NBC is a big corporation with a bunch of channels and entertainment brands. But it’s part of Comcast which is a huge media and telecom conglomerate with interests across various sectors of the economy. If you’re Comcast this isn’t just a matter of NBC News or NBC. You have to worry about whether Trump is going to go to war with Comcast itself, which is vulnerable on numerous business and regulatory fronts, if he gets mad at NBC News.
I guess I thought this was implicit in what I wrote yesterday. But it definitely wasn’t my emphasis. What I was focused on yesterday was how this works when you don’t have a lawless authoritarian in the White House. But when you do, well … yes, that introduces a whole new dimension to it.
The anti-abortion side emerged from Tuesday’s oral arguments considerably worse for wear after even their ideological allies on the bench questioned their standing to bring the case and the sweeping scope of the restrictions they sought.
At times, it became a full Court pile-on, particularly in response to the anti-abortion group’s quest for nationwide restrictions on the drug due to a handful of doctors’ objection to maybe, perhaps, one day, having to complete an abortion for a woman suffering from mifepristone’s side effects.
While the legal underpinnings of the mifepristone challenge are widely considered to be shoddy, we’ve seen the work that judges’ political preferences can do in bridging the gap to the preferred result. In this case, both Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals were willing to make that leap. The Supreme Court, based on what we heard today, seems not to be.
Ronna McDaniel is such a buffoonish and servile character that her presence on NBC News threatens to topple the partisan talking head model around which the news nets build their political coverage.
It’s been a long time coming.
McDaniel, because of her prior role as an enabler of Donald Trump and the Big Lie of 2020, is an order of magnitude worse than the parade of predecessors who took the revolving door from political operative to network news contributor. But they are not fundamentally different from her. Remember Rick Santorum?
The whole fetid paradigm for political coverage – which probably started with the original CNN Crossfire – should be tossed in the garbage. Along with it should go the dubious tradition of the news networks “sponsoring” political debates, which may look on the surface like a civic endeavor but in reality is a ratings and brand enhancer. Multiple reports suggest that the McDaniel fiasco originated in negotiations she conducted as RNC chair with a NBC News political unit desperate to land a GOP presidential primary debate.
The simplistic formula of talking heads from the right and from the left jousting on live TV as a form of “news” or “coverage” is cheap, easy to produce, and positions the news nets as having convening authority. But substantively? They’re vapid. They always have been. They got worse in the reality TV era, where the “jousting” became the entire point. The more provocative, in-your-face, and over-the-top the pundit, the better the spectacle.
The perverse set of institutional and commercial interests that gave rise to cable news’ surfeit of partisan talking heads hasn’t changed. I’m not under any illusion that the news nets will abandon the format anytime soon.
When even the opponents to McDaniel’s hiring concede that it’s “important to have conservative voices on air,” it suggests the format has continued staying power. Before you write in that I’m trying to silence conservatives, consider whether this format truly gives voice to any side in American politics or is merely its own spectacle serving as a poor proxy for genuine public debate.
MSNBC Blows Up Over Ronna McDaniel
The liberal-branded cable news net was left spluttering over the decision by its broadcast network sibling (parent?) to pay former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel $300,000 a year to be political contributor.
The corporate and editorial structure between NBC News and MSNBC has always been a bit Byzantine, and there’s precedent for the two entities to alternatively embrace and distance themselves from each other. But nothing quite like this before.
In her long, 12-minute segment last night on the controversy, Rachel Maddow waded into the internal tensions. “Ronna McDaniel will not be on MSNBC,” Maddow told her audience. “And I say that and give you that level of detail because there has been an effort since by other parts of the company to muddy that up in the press and make it seem like that’s not what happened at MSNBC. I can assure you that is what happened at MSNBC.”
Here’s the full segment:
On A More Serious Note
The corporate interest in mollifying MAGA Republicans in order to maintain their steadfast neutrality is precisely the kind of quiet acquiescence that abets a wannabe strongman like Trump.
Princeton Yale historian Timothy Snyder eloquently spoke of this kind of placation … on MSNBC … yesterday:
Timothy Snyder perfectly explains on #DeadlineWH why NBC News hired Ronna McDaniel, "So this is like a trial run for NBC and everyone else to say okay, we're going to practice appeasing a dictator and then when it comes, we'll be better at it." pic.twitter.com/F3LA6qDqvL
Aaron Blake: Why the Supreme Court abortion pill case is so fraught for the right
Trump Gets A New Trial Date
The trial judge in the New York hush money case was unimpressed by the pre-trial dispute Trump attempted to gin up to force a substantial delay in his upcoming trial. He reset the trial for April 15, which means Trump did succeed in delaying it three weeks but failed to push it past the November election.
Trump Gets Some Relief From Mammoth Civil Judgment
A mixed bag for Trump in the civil case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James when an appeals court gave him 10 extra days to come up with an appeal bond and dramatically reduced the size of the bond to $175 million. Not an inherently unreasonable decision, even though it adds to the general sense that Trump continues to skate. But $175 million ain’t nothing. It’s a lot to cough up and it’s there for James’ taking if Trump through other legal means ultimately loses on appeal, which is easier for her to do than seizing his property to pay the judgement.
I See …
Reuters: Billionaires sought to help fund Trump bond in civil fraud case, sources say
Sign Of The Times
The DOJ announced Monday at as press conference in Arizona that it is investigating dozens of threats against election workers and has charged 20 people so far. Arizona has been an epicenter of the threats.
Black Swan Event
The House GOP majority is now so narrow that the possibility of the lower chamber flipping to Democratic control before the November election can’t be ruled out. To be clear, the House has never changed power from one party to another between elections. But the current narrow GOP majority and disaffection within the House GOP conference are prime ingredients for a mid-Congress flip. Fox News’ Chad Pergram, a longtime Hill reporter, games it out.
2024 Ephemera
Spoiler alert: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expected to announce today that his running mate will be Silicon Valley lawyer Nicole Shanahan, a 38-year-old with no prior political experience. Shanahan was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin from 2018-23.
‘Too Big To Rig’: The goofy origins of Trump’s latest mantra
Bridge Collapse In Baltimore
Unbelievable video of a container ship knocking over the I-895 I-695 bridge overnight, severing a major East Coast transportation link (especially for truck traffic) and shutting down the busy Baltimore harbor to ship traffic:
Clear Video of Traffic movement on Bridge before hit by a ship
There’s been speculation for some time that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) filed the Kevin McCarthy motion to vacate — and got seven of his colleagues to join him in ousting the former speaker — as part of a personal vendetta.
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We’re seeing an ongoing — and to me, pretty comical — garbage fire at NBC News over the hiring of Ronna McDaniel (or who I guess we might call Ronna X, since her last name may be subject to ongoing contract negotiation) as a paid contributor. I’ll assume you’ve seen at least some reports on the controversy. I want to add three things. First a personal aside, second a guess about what happened and third something about the structural roots of “bothsidesist” news coverage.
So we have another on-set rewrite on the Saving Private Trump movie.
Today was the day Trump’s 30-day grace period ran out and the State of New York, in the person of NY AG Tish James, could start collecting on the $464 million judgment. But now a New York appeals court judge has stepped in and given Trump a significant reprieve. He now has ten days to come up with a significantly reduced bond of $175 million. Remember that the judgment was actually $355 plus almost $100 million in interest. So the logic of the number seems to be cutting the main judgment roughly in half (that’s my speculation) and making that the amount of the bond. The judgment itself stands. This is just about the bond.
Needless to say, this is a big, big win for Trump, at least for now.
