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.
Continue reading “McCarthy Uses MTG Motion To Vacate To Spill Some Tea On Matt Gaetz”Can You Do This Today?
We’re currently at 437 new members in our Annual TPM Membership Drive. It’s really important we get that to 500 by tomorrow. If you’re not a member, can you make today the day? It’s really important. Just click here.
Late Update: Currently at 499!!!!!!!
The Lonesome Tale of Ronna X
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.
Continue reading “The Lonesome Tale of Ronna X”Judge Sets Trump NY Criminal Trial For April 15, Rejecting Bid For More Delay
For all of the huffing and puffing and loud attempts to push his Manhattan criminal trial back, Donald Trump only got a few weeks of what he wanted.
Continue reading “Judge Sets Trump NY Criminal Trial For April 15, Rejecting Bid For More Delay”On-Set Script Rewrite in Saving Private Trump Project!
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.
But he’s not necessarily out of the woods.
Continue reading “On-Set Script Rewrite in Saving Private Trump Project!”Crunch Time For Trump As Letitia James Closes In On Her Big Prize
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Trials And Tribulations
Donald Trump faces a deadline of today to secure an appeal bond or hope for relief from an appeals court to forestall New York Attorney General Letitia James from executing on her $454 million judgment against him.
For obvious reasons, folks are pretty ginned up about seeing some portion of the Trump biz empire dismantled piece by piece, but a few words of caution on what this will look like:
- It’s going to take time. James may not begin the heavy lifting on collecting on the judgment until after an expected appeals court ruling later this week. But whenever she begins the process, it’s not going to happen in blazing fashion. It will happen at legal speed, which is somewhere between ponderous and bureaucratic.
- Don’t forget about the debt. Many of Trump’s assets, like many of your assets, are collateral for debt, so when you see talk about the multimillion dollar valuation of this or that Trump property, that’s typically an estimate of the fair market value of the asset. It doesn’t usually account for any debt or other encumbrances against the asset. He may be a billionaire, but he’s leveraged, too.
- James will be strategic. There’s not much upside for James in going through an extensive legal process to force liquidation of assets that don’t contain much equity. So don’t expect her to willy nilly start going after all the high-profile Trump assets. But that doesn’t mean Trump has skated in some way. Trump may have his name emblazoned on a building but it might be heavily encumbered and provide him with only nominal equity. If he even owns it at all.
Trump In Court Today
We’ll get more insight this morning on the status of the hush money case in Manhattan, which has been delayed in a pre-trial dispute over new documents provided by federal prosecutors from their closed related investigation. The trial judge is trying to get to the bottom of what happened in deciding whether to grant Trump even further delay. We might even get a new trial date. TPM’s Josh Kovensky will be reporting from the courthouse in lower Manhattan.
The Most WSJ Of WSJ Headlines
“Trump Is in a Race Against Time to Protect His Fortune“
On What Planet?
These two paragraphs from the NYT’s inside account of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s effort to prosecute Donald Trump rattled around in my head all weekend:
In trying to avoid even the smallest mistakes, Mr. Garland might have made one big one: not recognizing that he could end up racing the clock. Like much of the political world and official Washington, he and his team did not count on Mr. Trump’s political resurrection after Jan. 6, and his fast victory in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, which has complicated the prosecution and given the former president leverage in court.
In 2021 it was “simply inconceivable,” said one former Justice Department official, that Mr. Trump, rebuked by many in his own party and exiled at his Florida estate Mar-a-Lago, would regain the power to impose his timetable on the investigation.
I really struggle to buy the assertion that the political world had written Trump off as politically dead in 2021. But I really don’t know how anyone can say with a straight face that his future political viability was “inconceivable” at the time.
Why Jack Smith Can’t Get Aileen Cannon Removed Yet
Former CIA attorney Brian Greer, who posts on X/Twitter as @secretsandlaws, offers a cogent and reasoned explanation for why it is still premature for Special Counsel Jack Smith to try to seek the removal of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon from the Mar-a-Lago case.
The Mystery Of Paul Manafort
TPM’s Josh Kovensky, who has covered Paul Manafort from Kyiv to NYC, on what we still don’t know about his various misdeeds and murky schemes.
Oh …
NYT: “Jeff Yass, the billionaire Wall Street financier and Republican megadonor who is a major investor in the parent company of TikTok, was also the biggest institutional shareholder of the shell company that recently merged with former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company.”
Budget War Of 2023 Is Finally Over
Nearly six months into the current fiscal year, a budget for 2024 is finally at hand – thanks mostly to House Democrats who helped Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) get the final budget bill of last year through on Friday. “A total of 112 Republicans voted no on the minibus — including eight committee chairs — compared to just 101 supporting the measure,” Punchbowl noted. The Senate passed the bill after midnight early Saturday, nominally after the shutdown deadline but with little real impact.
Sucker Punched
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) surprised party leaders and narrowed the House GOP majority to a single vote with his decision to resign from Congress effective April 19. Gallagher had already announced he wasn’t going to run for re-election. His resignation date is one day after the deadline to call a special election, meaning House Republicans will be hamstrung by his departure all the way through the end of this Congress.
The Joy Of Being Mike Johnson
- CNN: Marjorie Taylor Greene files surprise motion to oust Speaker Johnson, a sign of growing revolt from the right
- WaPo: Weakened House GOP majority reckons with Johnson’s leadership
- WSJ: Why Mike Johnson Can’t Run the House Without Democrats’ Help
Sign Of The Times
TPM’s Khaya Himmelman reports on Maricopa County, Arizona turning its vote tabulation center into a virtual encampment to ward off threats, with measures like:
- permanent fencing;
- a badge requirement to enter the parking lot;
- additional badges to enter the building;
- metal detectors; and
- netting on the temporary fencing in the parking lot so that voters cannot take pictures of election workers or their license plates.
Welcome to 2024.
MSNBC Hires Ronna McDaniel As Paid Contributor
A public revolt is underway over the NBC News decision to bring on recently ousted RNC chair Ronna McDaniel on a paid contributor:
The outcry from MSNBC on-air personalities continued this morning.
2024 Ephemera
- NJ-Sen: New Jersey first lady Tammy Murphy has ended her bid for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate, clearing the way for Rep. Andy Kim (D-NJ) to be his party’s nominee for indicted Sen. Bob Menendez’s seat.
- NY-01: Ousted Rep. George Santos, still under federal criminal indictment, announced after the House passed its final 2024 budget bill Friday that he is leaving the Republican Party and will run as an independent in his new district.
It’s Not That Complicated
It really shouldn’t require falling back on foundational issues like the rule of law, democracy, or civic virtue to realize that Donald Trump is an utter buffoon who has no business near the Oval Office:
Good Read
Politico: What happens when an AG dares to investigate Leonard Leo’s network
Don’t Get Too Hung Up On The Anthropocene
Erle C. Ellis: The Anthropocene May Not Be An ‘Epoch,’ But The Age Of Humans Is Most Definitely Underway
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Membership Drive Update
This is a quick update on our very important membership drive. Tuesday will mark the end of the first week of the drive. Our goal is to sign up 1,000 new members during the drive. As of this moment we’re at 422. That’s getting close to half way there. So that’s great. Thank you! We’d really like to get half way to our goal by tomorrow evening. So if you’re a TPM Reader but not currently a TPM Member please make this the moment by clicking right here. We’re even running a special 40% discount. So it’s a great time to join.
Big News in New Jersey
To my great surprise and seemingly to the surprise of almost everyone else, New Jersey First Lady Tammy Murphy announced today that she is ending her campaign for Senate. That almost certainly clears the path for Rep. Andy Kim to become the Democratic nominee for the seat currently held by Sen. Bob Menendez. New Jersey isn’t quite in California sure-thing territory. But this makes it very likely that Kim will be elected to the Senate in November.
Continue reading “Big News in New Jersey”The Anthropocene May Not Be An ‘Epoch,’ But The Age Of Humans Is Most Definitely Underway
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
When people talk about the “Anthropocene,” they typically picture the vast impact human societies are having on the planet, from rapid declines in biodiversity to increases in Earth’s temperature by burning fossil fuels.
Such massive planetary changes did not begin all at once at any single place or time.
That’s why it was controversial when, after over a decade of study and debate, an international committee of scientists – the Anthropocene Working Group – proposed to mark the Anthropocene as an epoch in the geologic time scale starting precisely in 1952. The marker was radioactive fallout from hydrogen bomb tests.
On March 4, 2024, the commission responsible for recognizing time units within our most recent period of geologic time – the Subcommission on Quarternary Stratigraphy – rejected that proposal, with 12 of 18 members voting no. These are the scientists most expert at reconstructing Earth’s history from the evidence in rocks. They determined that adding an Anthropocene Epoch – and terminating the Holocene Epoch – was not supported by the standards used to define epochs.
To be clear, this vote has no bearing on the overwhelming evidence that human societies are indeed transforming this planet.
As an ecologist who studies global change, I served on the Anthropocene Working Group from its start in 2009 until 2023. I resigned because I was convinced that this proposal defined the Anthropocene so narrowly that it would damage broader scientific and public understanding.
By tying the start of the human age to such a recent and devastating event – nuclear fallout – this proposal risked sowing confusion about the deep history of how humans are transforming the Earth, from climate change and biodiversity losses to pollution by plastics and tropical deforestation.
The original idea of the Anthropocene
In the years since the term Anthropocene was coined by Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000, it has increasingly defined our times as an age of human-caused planetary transformation, from climate change to biodiversity loss, plastic pollution, megafires and much more.
Crutzen originally proposed that the Anthropocene began in the latter part of the 18th century, as a product of the Industrial age. He also noted that setting a more precise start date would be “arbitrary.”
According to geologists, we humans have been living in the Holocene Epoch for about 11,700 years, since the end of the last ice age.
Human societies began influencing Earth’s biodiversity and climate through agriculture thousands of years ago. These changes began to accelerate about five centuries ago with the colonial collision of the old and new worlds. And, as Crutzen noted, Earth’s climate really began to change with the increasing use of fossil fuels in the Industrial Revolution that began in the late 1700s.
The Anthropocene as an epoch
The rationale for proposing to define an Anthropocene Epoch starting around 1950 came from overwhelming evidence that many of the most consequential changes of the human age shifted upward dramatically about that time in a so-called “Great Acceleration” identified by climate scientist Will Steffen and others.
Radioisotopes like plutonium from hydrogen bomb tests conducted around this time left clear traces in soils, sediments, trees, corals and other potential geological records across the planet. The plutonium peak in the sediments of Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada – chosen as the “golden spike” for determining the start of the Anthropocene Epoch – is well marked in the lake bed’s exceptionally clear sediment record.
The Anthropocene Epoch is dead; long live the Anthropocene
So why was the Anthropocene Epoch rejected? And what happens now?
The proposal to add an Anthropocene Epoch to the geological time scale was rejected for a variety of reasons, none of them related to the fact that human societies are changing this planet. In fact, the opposite is true.
If there is one main reason why geologists rejected this proposal, it is because its recent date and shallow depth are too narrow to encompass the deeper evidence of human-caused planetary change. As geologist Bill Ruddiman and others wrote in Science Magazine in 2015, “Does it really make sense to define the start of a human-dominated era millennia after most forests in arable regions had been cut for agriculture?”
Discussions of an Anthropocene Epoch aren’t over yet. But it is very unlikely that there will be an official Anthropocene Epoch declaration anytime soon.
The lack of a formal definition of an Anthropocene Epoch will not be a problem for science.
A scientific definition of the Anthropocene is already widely available in the form of the Anthropocene Event, which basically defines Anthropocene in simple geological terms as “a complex, transformative, and ongoing event analogous to the Great Oxidation Event and others in the geological record.”
So, despite the “no” vote on the Anthropocene Epoch, the Anthropocene will continue to be as useful as it has been for more than 20 years in stimulating discussions and research into the nature of human transformation of this planet.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Maricopa Transforms Tabulation Center Into ‘Encampment’ To Avoid Another ‘Lollapalooza For The Alt-Right’
Earlier this month, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer found himself explaining to voters how and why the county “can’t just register Mickey Mouse or your dog,” to vote in Arizona.
Continue reading “Maricopa Transforms Tabulation Center Into ‘Encampment’ To Avoid Another ‘Lollapalooza For The Alt-Right’”