New Jersey Democrats are demanding that Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) resign after his second federal corruption indictment in ten years.
Continue reading “Schumer Signals Menendez Will Stay As New Jersey Dems Call For Him To Resign”Supreme Court Extends Stay In Biden Administration Social Media Case
The Supreme Court further extended its administrative stay of a lower court ruling banning Biden administration officials from flagging misinformation to social media companies on Friday.
Continue reading “Supreme Court Extends Stay In Biden Administration Social Media Case”What Exactly Is Going On In The Minnesota Disqualification Clause Case?
The effort to remove Donald Trump from the Minnesota ballot under the Constitution’s Disqualification Clause may move far faster than you might expect.
Continue reading “What Exactly Is Going On In The Minnesota Disqualification Clause Case?”Kacsmaryk Cites ‘Gays Against Groomers’ In Decision Calling Drag Show Unfit For Children
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, quickly becoming one of the most well-known Donald Trump appointees, cited an anti-LGBTQ group in a new ruling concluding that drag shows are too “sexualized” for children and likely not entitled to First Amendment protection.
Continue reading “Kacsmaryk Cites ‘Gays Against Groomers’ In Decision Calling Drag Show Unfit For Children”Back to One of My Hobbyhorses
While English-language AI is gobbling up much of the online English language almost always without permission, there’s a problem for Danish AI, reports Bloomberg. Apparently, most of the Danish web is under pretty stringent copyright protections. And Danish law makes the kind of recourse-less stealing that Silicon Valley AI companies are getting away with way too hard. Government records and legislation are in the public domain. But that formal Danish is too distant from how people really speak and write to serve the purpose. The solution turns out to be horses.
Continue reading “Back to One of My Hobbyhorses”GOPer Praises Pelosi’s Leadership As McCarthy Lets Himself Be Held Hostage By Far Right
As the chaos and dysfunction within the House Republican caucus brings the country closer and closer to a now almost inevitable government shutdown, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) praised former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for her leadership and ability to keep her caucus together when she held the gavel.
Continue reading “GOPer Praises Pelosi’s Leadership As McCarthy Lets Himself Be Held Hostage By Far Right”Kilos of Gold Bars, A Benz, and a Halal Meat Monopoly: The Bribery Case Against Bob Menendez
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) spent years after his unrelated last prosecution brazenly taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes while doling out favors to a foreign government and criminal defendants in exchange, Manhattan federal prosecutors alleged in a Friday indictment.
Continue reading “Kilos of Gold Bars, A Benz, and a Halal Meat Monopoly: The Bribery Case Against Bob Menendez”Clarence Thomas Secretly Participated In Koch Network Donor Events
This article was originally published at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ decadeslong friendship with real estate tycoon Harlan Crow and Samuel Alito’s luxury travel with billionaire Paul Singer have raised questions about influence and ethics at the nation’s highest court.
Continue reading “Clarence Thomas Secretly Participated In Koch Network Donor Events”Clarence Thomas Caught Playing Footsies With The Koch Brothers
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Oy vey, Oy vey, Oy vey
ProPublica has yet another big new reveal on the ethically challenged Clarence Thomas.
In the latest installment in its Thomas series, ProPublica unearths evidence of the Supreme Court justice playing footsies with the Koch brothers and their donor network at its annual winter conference in California in 2018.
Combine that with an earlier previously reported incident of Thomas doing a “brief drop-by” at the 2008 Koch network annual conference, and we’re left with at least two documented instances of Thomas being used as a draw for wealthy conservative donors to one of the most influential political and legal advocacy operations of the last quarter century.
The details of this particular Thomas entanglement echo the other reporting by the relentless ProPublica on his cozy relationship with the billionaire conservative donor class:
- Thomas flew to and from the Koch conference aboard a private Gulfstream G200, but he didn’t report the trip on his financial disclosure form and it’s not clear who paid for the flight. The Koch network said it didn’t pay for it.
- Leonard Leo, who was at the time of the 2018 conference still a top official at the Federalist Society (a big recipient of Koch network money), was the “conduit” between Thomas and the Koch network.
In a particularly telling response, Leo told ProPublica (emphasis mine):
Justice Thomas attends events all over the country, as do all the Justices, and I was privileged to join him. Justice Thomas has been a dear friend, and I would never pass up an opportunity to help him share, in his own words, his lifetime of accomplishment and judicial philosophy with new audiences. All the necessary due diligence was performed to ensure the Justice’s attendance at the events was compliant with all ethics requirements.
Read that again. Aside from the obvious chummy tone, does that sound like Leo repping himself, his orgs, the Koch network … or Thomas? It’s an extraordinary defense of Thomas in that it suggests Leo is speaking for him, kinda. The passive voice in that last sentence from Leo is doing yeoman’s work.
Perhaps the sharpest edge of the new ProPublica report is in how it ties the Koch brothers’ decades long effort to overturn the 1980s Chevron case to Thomas’ own change of heart on whether that case remains good precedent. Chevron, which is a legal cornerstone of what conservatives derisively call the “administrative state,” has been a white whale of conservative legal activists on par with Roe and stacking the Supreme Court. Thomas was not on board originally, but eventually came around. (Read all the way to the bottom of the ProPublica piece for a wonderful kicker on this point.)
Finally, ProPublica dumps a whole bunch of string on Thomas and the Kochs frequenting the Bohemian Grove together, along with Harlan Crow, the billionaire conservative donor who – and I can’t emphasis this enough – owns the house Thomas’ mother lives in.
Congrats all around. It’s a tour de force of investigative reporting by ProPublica and of boldly breaking through new ethical frontiers by a sitting justice. Bravo!
House GOP In Total And Utter Chaos
The GOP-controlled House left town yesterday with no path forward on government funding and a shutdown looming when the fiscal year ends a week from tomorrow.
That Freedom Caucus-friendly continuing resolution that was supposed to give them everything they wanted? It didn’t even get a vote as there wasn’t enough GOP support for it either.
- WSJ: McCarthy Sends Republicans Home After Losing ‘Shock’ Vote in House
- Dana Milbank: In a leaderless House, the ‘clowns’ stumble toward a shutdown
- CNN: McCarthy visibly frustrated after GOP hardliners put his plan to avoid a shutdown on ice
‘Dead On Departure’
TPM’s Kate Riga and Emine Yücel captured this marvelous riff by two Democratic senators on McCarthy’s ill-fated continuing resolution:
“I don’t know how much clearer we can make it to McCarthy that what he’s looking at is dead on arrival,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told TPM of the new bill.
“I don’t think it’s even going to arrive — dead on departure,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) added.
Zing.
What A Concept!
Intrepid reporter ventures into the wilds of suburbia in search of the elusive Republican Biden voter:
Big Trouble For Rudy G
Every day it’s something else with Rudy Giuliani.
This time he’s allegedly failed to comply with a court-ordered sanctions against him in the defamation case brought by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.
Giuliani was supposed to pay a total of $132,856 in attorney fees for his failure to turn over discovery. He’s neither paid them by the Sept. 20 deadline nor furnished them with the discovery that got him in hot water to begin with, they told the federal court in DC on Thursday.
Rupert Murdoch Relinquishes The Reins Of His Empire
The man who has done more damage to American civic life than anyone else this century is stepping down from the leading roles of Fox Corp. and News Corp.
Off Message
TPM alum Brian Beutler today launched his new independent publication Off Message. Make it part of your news diet. It may seem like a scramble among like-minded journalists for the remaining crumbs of the collapsing news industry would lead to competitive pressures to ignore each other’s work. But love is not a pie. We need more indy news outlets at every level and with a variety of business models.
David Brooks Is At It Again
The dunking on David Brooks over this tweet damn near broke the internet:
(Note that even Elon Musk’s Twitter added a user fact check to the tweet.)
A sample of the dunking here, here, and here. But the prize goes to the Newark airport restaurant that Brooks’ complained about:
Enjoy your weekend! 🥃
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Trump Openly Calculating His Abortion Messaging
After Donald Trump’s disdain for Ron DeSantis prompted him to declare that he thinks the six-week Florida abortion ban is “terrible,” lots of speculative pieces were written on whether Trump — the man who stocked the Supreme Court with enough uber-conservative, anti-abortion justices to overturn Roe — might actually be moderating on the procedure. My colleague Josh Marshall wrote a handful of ed-blogs unpacking just how silly this news cycle was, and he and Kate Riga got into it on the Josh Marshall Podcast, as well.
Continue reading “Trump Openly Calculating His Abortion Messaging”