A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss Kyrsten Sinema’s self-imposed exile from politics, Super Tuesday results and the end of Nikki Haley’s campaign.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
The whole Alabama/IVF situation is an example of the number of absurd logical culs-de-sac you get into when you start with premises that are, at least to many of us, not only absurd but which at least a number of these premises supporters don’t even entirely believe. As noted below, Alabama has now passed a law which leaves in place the idea that embryos are full people in the state but gives people immunity from prosecution or civil liability if you kill one of these people.
Continue reading “Can This New Alabama Law Possibly Stand Judicial Scrutiny?”No, really. That’s pretty much what the Alabama legislature just did with a new law, hastily passed and now signed by the state’s governor.
As you know, Alabama created a firestorm last month when the state’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos in IVF clinics are the legal equivalent of minor children. This ruling sent shockwaves through the United States, pushed a new dimension of the Dobbs/abortion debate to the top of the national election debate and temporarily shuttered the state’s IVF fertility clinics. In response Alabama has now passed a law which appears to have created enough legal assurance to allow the state’s clinics to reopen. This is not just a win for reproductive rights in the state. Numerous couples had their ongoing fertility treatment halted by the ruling.
But as in-state critics have made clear, the new legislation is at best a band-aid rather than a solution.
Continue reading “Alabama Now Says You Won’t Get In Trouble If You Murder Your Embryo … If It’s for IVF”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
The cult of Donald Trump has swallowed the old Republican Party and nearly everyone with any significant power in it. Mitch McConnell, a remarkable national figure over the last 16 years, is no different than Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or any of the countless others whose personal dignity was sacrificed in service of fealty to Trump. All the way down to the racist and sexist screeds Trump launched against McConnell’s own wife.
McConnell will spend his twilight years trying to ensure that his epitaph will be free of Trump. It would be a travesty if it is. The excuse-making for McConnell will linger, but he’s no conservative, he’s no institutionalist, and he’s no evil genius.
Monuments in Kentucky will bear his name, Democrats and journalists will murmur niceties over his ability to wield power, and time as it does will soften the judgments of him. Hold firm against the erosion of memory. McConnell deserves the enmity of a generation.
Here are McConnell’s own words after the Jan. 6 attack:
The man who mustered indignation after his own personal safety was threatened in the coup attempt nonetheless voted to acquit Trump in his impeachment trial, so we knew the mettle of the man already. Yesterday’s endorsement of Trump confirmed it, but with the added twist that McConnell is now, unlike in 2021, a lame duck. He won’t be the Senate GOP leader next year, and he won’t run for re-election in 2026. But even the lack of real political risk wasn’t enough for McConnell to break from his tribe. He owns it now and for evermore. Let us not forget.
The guardrails are failing. They are failing not only to hold Trump accountable directly, but also, absent any serious legal and political consequences, to at least tell the people how exceptionally dangerous Trump and those who are fueling, enabling, and supporting him are. If someone assumes that this is still a country with functioning institutions, then it’s only logical for them to conclude that Trump walking free means his transgressions can’t be that bad. At some point, it becomes really hard to expect people to break through their routines and actively defend democracy, as is necessary in a situation of crisis, if the institutions we ask them to trust shy away from doing their part – if they instead continue to signal “normalcy,” that politics as usual is still an option or, at the very least, that exceptional, unprecedented measures would be “too extreme.”
The Supreme Court announced that oral arguments in the Trump immunity case will be held on the very last day of its argument calendar: April 25.
If you want to go deep on pretrial wrangling in the case, Joyce Vance has you covered.
New reporting from Politico suggests state Attorney General Kris Mayes is nearing a charging decision in her probe of Trump’s 2020 fake electors scheme in the state.
NYT: “A network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald J. Trump is quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states, an all-but-unnoticed effort that could have an impact in a close or contentious election.”
Heather Cox Richardson with a reminder on the straight line that runs from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
It’s too early and it oversimplifies things to say that the House is working normally again, but Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has now used Democratic votes twice to get the two spending bills through that will avoid a government shutdown — and he has kept his job, as tenuous as that may be.
Morning Memo hates the rote State of the Union coverage with a white-hot fury, so just one word on tonight’s tired spectacle: It marks a pretty dramatic turn in our underlying politics over the past few years that a Democratic president would front tax increases of any kind in an election-year State of the Union address.
Alabama has quickly enacted a new law protecting IVF practitioners from civil and criminal liability in the aftermath of the state Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos have the legal rights of children.
Former Florida GOP Chair Christian Ziegler will not face charges for illegally videotaping a woman who accused him of rape. Prosecutors had already decided not to pursue sex assault charges.
Morning Memo stopped by a book event in DC last evening moderated by TPM alum Brian Beutler for the new book The Truce by TPM’s Hunter Walker and Luppe Luppen. A great discussion of the book and progressive politics in 2024 and beyond. Proud of those guys.
Cole Brauer completed the Global Solo Challenge overnight in Spain, becoming the first American woman to sail solo around the world. She finished in second place in the race, arriving some four months after she set sail in October.
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In a normal election year, election workers would be focused on recruiting and training poll workers, securing polling sites, preparing voting technology, and providing voters with the information they need to cast a ballot in the months leading up to November. But after the chaos, threats and violence of 2020, election officials across the country are adding mental health training for election workers to their election prep to-do lists.
Continue reading “Election Officials Prep For An Ugly 2024 With Mental Health And Stress Trainings For Staff”They never really had anything to begin with.
Continue reading “House Republicans Suddenly Chill With Public Hunter Biden Testimony—Now That They Officially Have Nothing”Texas is battling an ongoing and record-breaking set of wildfires that has already burned over 1 million acres and killed two people. The most destructive of them, the Smokehouse Creek fire, has seriously damaged communities and cattle ranches in northeastern Texas and western Oklahoma. After a week of battling flames, there are still several active wildfires in the Texas Panhandle and they remain largely uncontained.
My post about the iPhone generated all sorts of fascinating responses from TPM Readers. Some of these responses were on the secondary question I raised about the pace of invention and scientific breakthroughs and whether or not it’s slowing down. One of the most interesting replies I got was from TPM Reader DN who sent in this note …
Continue reading “Is Your iPhone Cooler Than You Think?”I liked your aside about iPhones. I’m writing this from the big American Physical Society meeting (this year in Minneapolis) that focuses on “condensed matter” or solid-state physics, the branch of physics that basically gave us the iPhone and a huge fraction of modern technology. The fact that we, humanity, understand and can control/engineer the properties of materials on a deep level is one of the great intellectual accomplishments of the species, and it’s massively underappreciated. Astro and particle physics get vastly more press and attention in pop culture, but solid-state physics affects your daily life far more. It’s rich and full of beautiful ideas, though admittedly it can be very tough to explain to a general audience.
Over the years I’ve written about structural problems in the digital news industry, often driven by the growth of platform monopolies and other issues. Just in the last few months and even in the last few weeks we’ve seen a new round of publications shuttering or pivoting to publication zombiehood. So why is this happening? Why is your favorite news site suddenly going under? If you’re listening you’ve probably heard the story in general. But I wanted to share some numbers with you that I think will make it much more concrete.
(I think we can add something to the equation here because for a mix of business and personality reasons, we’re willing to share very granular dollar figures that very, very few other publications are willing to share.)
This chart which I just made shows the exact dollar amounts TPM brought in over the previous eight years through programmatic or “third party” advertising. As I think is pretty clear, if this is your business, you’re dead. You don’t have a business.
Continue reading “Why Is Your News Site Going Out of Business?”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Internet sleuths over the weekend picked up on Elon Musk’s private jet traveling to West Palm Beach, setting off speculation that the world’s richest man and Donald Trump might be meeting – at a time when Trump is in desperate need of cash, both to forestall the execution of hundreds of millions of dollars in civil judgments against him and to fund his presidential campaign.
The NYT has now confirmed that the two men did meet Sunday at Mar-a-Lago, a startling image of the current era: The South African immigrant-turned-billionaire-turned-right-wing-anti-immigrant-provocateur holding the purse strings for the anti-immigrant, would-be-authoritarian seeking to reclaim the presidency he failed to seize in an attempted coup.
I mean really, y’all. It’s hard to paint a grimmer picture of the 2020s.
It’s made more grim by the NYT’s own staggeringly insufficient description of Musk’s politics:
Mr. Musk’s comments about immigration have grown increasingly alarmist. He has suggested that the president’s immigration policies threaten the existence of America itself and have pushed American democracy to the brink. He has suggested that Democrats are “ushering in vast numbers of illegals” to cheat in elections. There is no evidence to support his claim of mass voter fraud.
Musk has been trafficking in The Great Replacement Theory for months now. It’s deeply racist. It animates vast swaths of the American right wing. In addition, Musk has elevated himself into a leading light for right-wing extremists, turning his Twitter/X into a hot bed of neo-fascist rhetoric – and he himself has personally promoted and ratified some of the most rancid elements of that rhetoric.
A private Trump-Musk meeting at Mar-a-Lago might in normal times be the stuff of left-wing fever dreams, the pro-Russian kleptocracy flexing its muscle in the gaudy 1920s villa built by the world’s then-richest woman whose third husband was the second U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and who herself amassed a famously vast collection of Russian art.
You can’t make this stuff up.
The upshot of Donald Trump’s romp on Super Tuesday was to force his sole remaining rival out of the GOP primary, effectively locking down the Republican Party nomination for the president for third consecutive time.
Haley is expected to announce the suspension of her campaign at 10 a.m. ET in her home state of South Carolina. She is not expected to endorse Trump at this time.
Josh Green: Trump Triumph Writes an Epitaph for Reagan Republican Party
NYT: “Despite dominating the Super Tuesday nominating contests, former President Donald J. Trump gave a victory speech short on celebration or exultation and long on sinister evocations of what he portrayed as a grim fate for the country if President Biden is re-elected.”
The WSJ this morning has Exhibit A for the worst-of-the-worst style of political coverage of the 2024 presidential race. The story is all about the optics of two aging unpopular candidates. Never once is “democracy” mentioned.
Beyond passing reference to “competing visions” for America, the story is all surface and no substance. It gives itself permission to cover the entire race on these shallow terms, overlooking the stakes and abdicating any responsibility to inform and enlighten.
It promises months of such coverage with this lame assessment: “Should they occur, the debates will be scrutinized less for the agenda each candidate would bring to the White House than for whether verbal slips and tortured locution, already a feature of their public appearances, are indications of cognitive decline tied to their advanced ages.”
In contrast, here’s Parker Molloy doing it the right way: Trump’s Extremism Isn’t a Footnote—It’s the Story.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) vanquished Democratic Reps. Katie Porter and Barbara Lee and will face former MLB star Steve Garvey (R) in the general election.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) picked Super Tuesday to low-key bow out of her re-election bid. This was a remarkable success for progressives, but also a tremendous self-own by Sinema herself. It didn’t have to be this way. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) has shown that you can win in Arizona as a mainstream Democrat without pretending you’re stuck representing West Virginia.
In the unlikely event that Democrats hold the Senate, the filibuster could be in real trouble with Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) no longer in office.
TPM’s Khaya Himmelman talked to the experts, who laid out the threats:
Feds slap 12 new counts on Sen. Robert ‘Gold Bars’ Menendez in yet another superseding indictment.
Road & Track magazine commissioned a freelance writer to cover the Formula One race in Austin. The writer, Kate Wagner, produced a gem of a piece. The magazine published it. Then within hours, it yanked the story from its website and hasn’t said why.
You can still read this fine piece of magazine writing in its archived form … and you should, both on principle and because it’s good.
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