Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), joined by a conservative law professor and judges, complained Thursday about the Judicial Conference’s announcement of a new policy to crack down on the judge-shopping that has been so beneficial to right-wing litigants.
Continue reading “McConnell Leads Disgruntled Right-Wingers In Complaining About New Judge-Shopping Fix”A Brief ‘Are You Kidding Me?’ Coda to the Ad Stuff
I want to do a brief follow up to the last few posts I’ve done on the changes in the digital ad market for news. First, I published the charts and a description of what it meant. Then I did a follow up. In those exchanges one of the people taking me to task was a guy who runs a tech site who was saying basically, this is sensationalism and hyperbole! We’re making bank on ads. It’s awesome!
Continue reading “A Brief ‘Are You Kidding Me?’ Coda to the Ad Stuff”Schumer on Netanyahu in Context
There was really quite a stunning development in the Senate this afternoon. Schumer went to the floor to call for new elections in Israel, calling Netanyahu “an obstacle to peace” and going on to say he is pursuing “dangerous and inflammatory policies that test existing standards for assistance.” If Netanyahu remains in power after the war, the U.S. should “play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course.”
These words require some context and deconstruction.
Continue reading “Schumer on Netanyahu in Context”Polls Eight Months Out
Elliot Morris, the new boss at 538, has up a helpful discussion on the question of just what polls in March mean about the outcome of the November election. As you’d expect, they’re not terribly predictive. In fact, when Morris goes back through 538’s database, which goes back to the 1940s, they’re not really predictive at all and are frequently wildly off. You can read the piece for the examples. Of course that doesn’t mean they’re “wrong” necessarily. It just means they’re not predictive.
The big qualifier is that the big swings from earlier polls to final results have gone down over time. And the big driver of that is partisan polarization. The biggest example of a huge swing from March to November was Jimmy Carter being up by 14 points and then losing to Ronald Reagan by 10 points. Neither of those margins are remotely plausible today in a presidential general election. It just shows how many fewer voters are really up for grabs these days. The other factor which likely constrains movement in the polls, unique to this race, is the fact that the race is between, in effect, two incumbents. We literally know in advance what each man would be like as President.
Cash-Strapped Trump’s TikTok Flip-Flop Exposes His Extreme Personal Vulnerability
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Spot The Easy Mark
Donald Trump is facing more than half a billion dollar in civil judgments that threaten his personal finances, and he’s running behind Biden in campaign fundraising. While Trump has always been an easy mark from a national security perspective, the new cash crunch brought on by his big court losses makes him even more vulnerable to outside influence, whether that’s foreign adversaries, lobbying campaigns, or the personal intervention of big donors protecting their own interests.
Trump’s big reversal on whether to effectively ban TikTok in the U.S. is not the first time Trump has flipped his position on TikTok when it would benefit a billionaire donor, but Trump’s own personal financial position is considerably weaker now than it was then.
Chris Hayes went a bit deeper on the the ways in which Trump’s compromised position can and will dictate policy choices, but in ways that are unpredictable, fleeting, purely transactional, and which won’t line up neatly or consistently.
More on this from Brian Beutler: Trump’s Corruption-Policy Nexus Comes Into Focus.
I have to resist the temptation to include in Morning Memo a reminder every damn day that the Trump Republican Party has no party platform.
The divorce of policy from ideology and ideology from policy has been a long time coming in the GOP. It’s not a Trump creation, but it did pave the way for Trump. It creates laboratory conditions for graft, fraud, undue influence, and transactional politics in which the public interest is largely an irrelevance. It is a foundational element of authoritarian politics. Everything is for sale, and the strong man is the seller.
TikTok Bill Faces Tough Road In Senate
The House-passed bill forcing Tik Tok’s Chinese parent to divest its U.S. operation or face a ban in the states faces uncertain prospects in the Senate. It doesn’t appear likely the Senate will pass the House bill as-is, but what emerges from the Senate and whether it can pass the House again remains a work in progress.
In the meantime, a smart David Sanger piece on how the current approach on the Hill doesn’t really address the underlying security threat: “In the four years this battle has gone on, it has become clear that the security threat posed by TikTok has far less to do with who owns it than it does with who writes the code and algorithms that make TikTok tick.”
Georgia RICO Counts Tossed
A significant win for some of the defendants, including Donald Trump, in the Georgia RICO case, where the judge agreed that some of the counts in the indictment were too vague as a matter of law and dismissed six of the 41 counts.
Atlanta District Attorney Fani Willis can re-file those counts with more specificity if she chooses to and has the facts to do so. But for now chalk this up as a victory for the defense team.
Keep On Confessing, Bub
Ahead of a daylong hearing today in the Mar-a-Lago case to argue over two of Trump’s frivolous motions to dismiss, the man continues to provide evidence against himself:
The Full CNN Interview With Brian Butler
“Trump Employee 5” spills the tea on the Mar-a-Lago coverup:
Red Alert
Former OAN reporter Christina Bobb, a Big lie proponent who touted the Arizona 2020 audit and as Trump’s attorney was deeply entangled in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents coverup, is being installed at the new Trump-controlled RNC as a “as senior counsel for election integrity.”
TPM’s Election Threat Mini-Series
Our newest reporter, Khaya Himmelman (welcome, Khaya!), has compiled an introductory series of posts about the threats to the upcoming election and some of the attempts to address those threats:
- The 5 Most Pressing Threats To The 2024 Election
- Election Officials Prep For An Ugly 2024 With Mental Health And Stress Trainings For Staff
- Election Departments Partner With Local Police To Get Out Ahead Of Expected 2024 Threats
- States Pass Protective Bills To Get Ahead Of Far-Right Threats Against Election Workers In 2024
These types of stories will be a big part of Khaya’s coverage this year, so if you have tips on threats to election workers, Big Lie proponents embarking on new crusades, voter suppression, and the like, you can send them to our tip line. Put “Welcome, Khaya!” in the subject line so she can spot them. Thanks in advance!
2024 Ephemera
- CO-04: District-switching Rep. Lauren Boebert won’t run in the Colorado special election to finish the term of the resigning Rep. Ken Buck, but will instead finish out her term representing the CO-03 and continue to run in the regular election to fill Buck’s seat for a full term.
- OH-Sen: Democrats are meddling in next week’s GOP Senate primary by boosting Trump-backed Republican Bernie Moreno, whom they consider a weaker general election opponent for Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH).
- Vice President Kamala Harris will be the first president or vice president to tour an abortion clinic when she visits Minnesota today.
Essential Reading
Nikole Hannah-Jones for NYT Mag: How the ‘colorblindness’ trap hijacked a civil rights ideal
Hmmm …
The Guardian: Alexander Smirnov, the former FBI informant indicted for spreading lies about the Bidens and Burisma, was paid $600,000 in 2020 by a U.S. company that is connected to a UK company owned by Trump business associates in Dubai.
The Tropiest Of Political/Journalistic Tropes
Alexandra Petri on the maddening “if everyone’s mad, you must be doing something right” trope embraced as validation by assholes everywhere.
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The New New Right Is The Old New Right
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It is based on the podcast Landslide, which tells the story of how the 1976 primary transformed the Republican Party.
Whiplash-inducing breaks from long-held party positions have become the norm in today’s Republican Party.
Continue reading “The New New Right Is The Old New Right”With VP Pick, Trump Tries To Dull Impact Of The Abortion Problem He Created
Instead of campaigning on what anti-abortion activists have declared his legacy — laying the groundwork for Roe’s overturning with the appointments of three conservative SCOTUS justices — Donald Trump has been reluctant to talk about his views on abortion in any specific terms for the better part of the past year, and really, ever since the 2022 midterms.
Continue reading “With VP Pick, Trump Tries To Dull Impact Of The Abortion Problem He Created”States Pass Protective Bills To Get Ahead Of Far-Right Threats Against Election Workers In 2024
Nicole Browne, president of the Indiana Association of County Clerks and Monroe County Clerk, has been at the forefront of pushing legislation to protect Indiana election workers against threats and violence heading into the 2024 election.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Browne heard stories about election workers getting followed to their cars and experiencing other forms of intimidation, and told TPM in an interview this week that she and her colleagues have not been immune to the new dangerous world election workers now find themselves in.
Continue reading “States Pass Protective Bills To Get Ahead Of Far-Right Threats Against Election Workers In 2024”Judge Tosses Six Counts In Trump’s Georgia RICO Case
Donald Trump and some of his co-defendants scored a win on Wednesday when a Fulton County judge dismissed six counts in the Georgia RICO case.
Continue reading “Judge Tosses Six Counts In Trump’s Georgia RICO Case”Biden’s Options
There’s a good article in Haaretz today about the limits of U.S. sway over Israel with any kind of cut-off in U.S. weapons supplies. The piece is paywalled, so you can’t read it if you don’t have a subscription. But the gist covers a lot of ground we’ve discussed. Israel can make a number of the weapons itself, just not as quickly or cheaply. Most big-ticket items either aren’t being used in Gaza or don’t need to be replaced — aircraft, for instance. What Israel really needs are various munitions. But in the absence of those it might be forced to use bigger and more lethal bombs in Gaza. There’s even the risk that it might boomerang and strengthen Netanyahu at home.
Continue reading “Biden’s Options”