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”The Largest Wildfire In Texas History
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.
Smoke from the Smokehouse Creek fire billowing over a road
Fire crosses a road in the Texas Panhandle
Smoke rises as workers try to contain a fire in Armstrong County
A fire truck driving towards the Smokehouse Creek fire
A fast-moving wildfire in the Texas Panhandle
Flames approaching structures near Sanford, Texas
Firefighters battle the Smokehouse Creek fire
A small island of grass for grazing in the aftermath of a fire
Cattle grazing on small islands of hay in a burned pasture
Remains of a burnt residence in Stinnett, Texas
Looking through debris of a garage destroyed by the Smokehouse Creek fire
Residents search for items in the remains of their home
Charred landscape as far as the eye can see near Fritch, Texas
Is Your iPhone Cooler Than You Think?
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.
Why Is Your News Site Going Out of Business?
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?”The Unholy Alliance Of Donald Trump And Elon Musk
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Is It The 2020s Or The 1920s?
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.
Nikki Haley Suspends Campaign
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.
Mourning In America
Josh Green: Trump Triumph Writes an Epitaph for Reagan Republican Party
Trump Again Conjures A Dark Vision
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.”
Not Up To The Task
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.
Schiff Poised To Be New California Senator
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.
The Super Tuesday Landscape
- NC-08: Republican Mark Harris, whose 2018 campaign for Congress was upended by a fraudulent absentee ballot scheme, is on the verge of returning to Congress.
- A smattering of “uncommitted” protest votes against Biden over Gaza showed up in Democratic primaries across the country.
- The Oddities: Trump lost in Vermont, and Biden lost in America Samoa.
So Long, Kyrsten!
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.
Picking Through The SCOTUS DQ Clause Decision
- Aaron Blake: A conspicuous line on Trump from the Supreme Court’s left flank
- Marty Lederman: What’s dividing the Justices (and other initial reactions to the Court’s decision in Trump v. Anderson)
The 5 Most Pressing Threats To The 2024 Election
TPM’s Khaya Himmelman talked to the experts, who laid out the threats:
- Election deniers are running the show
- Election misinformation and disinformation
- Violence, harassment, and intimidation of election workers
- The weaponization of a decentralized election system
- Voter suppression and voter intimidation
It Never Ends
Feds slap 12 new counts on Sen. Robert ‘Gold Bars’ Menendez in yet another superseding indictment.
Great Read Right Down The Memory Hole
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.
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
Searching for the Elusive Normie Republican
In this late post below, I discussed the now very consistent polling errors overestimating Donald Trump’s margins over Nikki Haley. I get why some analysts are quick to dismiss the larger import of this phenomenon: people assume you can draw direct, linear conclusions about a general election from polling anomalies in a primary election. And you can’t. But as I said last night, it’s a mistake to say this means nothing. G. Elliot Morris, the new head of 538, has a good piece up about this. The gist is that because of a mix of those sampling and modeling issues discussed in yesterday’s Backchannel, pollsters seem to be having a hard time finding normie Republicans. Needless to say there aren’t many of them these days. And that is part of the polling challenge. But these primaries show they are there and that pollsters seem to be missing a non-trivial number of them.
Schiff Beats Out Split Progressives On Glide Path To California Senate Seat
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), using ruthless tactics belied by his cherubic face and upstanding public persona, has won the California Senate primary, according to the Associated Press.
Continue reading “Schiff Beats Out Split Progressives On Glide Path To California Senate Seat “More Trump-Haley Polling Errors
Outside of Vermont, which Haley appears to have won, Haley is getting beaten just about everywhere tonight. That’s 100% expected. But we are seeing that polling seemed to dramatically overstate Trump’s margins. So for instance 538 had Trump up 49 points over Haley in Virginia. But it looks like it will be just under 30 points. Needless to say these are still very lopsided defeats. But that’s also a pretty big polling miss.
Continue reading “More Trump-Haley Polling Errors”Big Freak
Folks, North Carolina Republicans just chose this whack-job as their nominee for governor.
A Bit More on Polling
There’s one point I didn’t get a chance to get into in the post below about polling, though I allude to it in the part about crosstabs and subgroups. One thing people do when they don’t like what a poll is telling them is they dig into the crosstabs and find things that just don’t add up. Maybe the party mix seems kind of off. Or they’ll show a very Democratic group favoring Republicans or vice versa.
Basically, don’t do this.
It’s just too good a way to fool yourself.
Continue reading “A Bit More on Polling”