A handful of House Democrats are making it clear that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) — who previously said he wouldn’t launch an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden without a House vote — went back on his word because he doesn’t have the support of his caucus.
On Wednesday they were not shy about taking shots at McCarthy and the House Republican caucus for it.
Continue reading “Dems Mock McCarthy For Not Being Able To Muster The Votes To Launch Bogus Biden Impeachment Inquiry”Freshman Rep. Mary Peltola’s husband Eugene died this morning in a plane crash in Alaska. He was the only pilot and there were no passengers. He was 57.
Any premature death is tragic. But it is hard to overstate how many Alaska politicians and their spouses have died in plane accidents. And that’s just a particular window into the dangers of air transportation in the state. Peltola was elected after the death of long serving Rep. Don Young (R). Young was elected after his predecessor, Rep. Nick Begich (D) died in a plane crash in 1972. Also killed in that crash was then-House Majority Leader Hale Boggs. In fact, while “crash” is basically certain neither the plane nor any of its four occupants were ever found, even after one of the biggest searches in US history.
Continue reading “Rep. Peltola’s Husband Dies in Plane Crash”We have a new Quinnipiac poll out today. No big surprises. About where the rest of recent polls have been: Biden 47%, Trump 46%. But it’s this paragraph down in the poll release that has my attention.
Half of voters think Joe Biden was involved in Hunter Biden’s business dealings with China and Ukraine, while 40 percent think Joe Biden was not involved. Thirty-five percent of voters believe Joe Biden was involved and did something illegal, while 13 percent believe he was involved and did something unethical but nothing illegal, 1 percent believe he was involved but he did not do anything wrong, 11 percent did not offer an opinion, and 40 percent of voters believe Joe Biden was not involved.
At the risk of stating the obvious, Republicans have produced no evidence whatsoever to show that President Biden was involved in any of his son’s business dealings and there’s quite a bit of contrary evidence. But by simply repeating the accusations often enough it shapes public opinion in clear and damaging ways.
We know this but it never stops being worth noting it.
As he has pursued the unprecedented and complex case against former President Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 election, Special Counsel Jack Smith has had help from a longtime colleague. Joseph “J.P.” Cooney is a veteran federal prosecutor with a deep distaste for corruption and a hard charging approach.
Continue reading “Jack Smith’s Deputy In Jan. 6 Case Is A ‘Lawman Type’ Who’s Taken On Trumpworld Before”Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz’s landslide April victory continues to be an existential threat to state Republicans, who have gerrymandered the state so aggressively as to be assured permanent legislative control no matter who voters choose.
Continue reading “Evers Condemns Wisconsin GOP’s Newest Gambit To Entrench Its Control Permanently”Back on July 28th I wrote about Eliot Cohen’s piece in The Atlantic arguing Biden should step aside and let another Democrat be the nominee for 2024. That Cohen piece seems to have become almost a genre in itself, a set piece even down to the same outline making the same point. David Ignatius wrote almost the identical piece last night in the Post.
It’s become a latter-day wise man formula: Biden has done a great job. He had a historic achievement in stopping Trump in 2020. But now because he’s so old he could squander that achievement by losing to Trump. So he should bow out and let someone else run.
Since it’s basically the identical piece, albeit brisker and to the point, you can see my take from July. But I wanted to note one addition Ignatius makes to the argument. While first suggesting the absurd idea that Biden should soft-heave-ho Kamala Harris and “encourage a more open vice-presidential selection process” he has a realization: “breaking up the ticket would be a free-for-all that could alienate Black women, a key constituency. Biden might end up more vulnerable.”
Ya think?
Continue reading “Get Real and Get Focused”I have been so pleased by the way TPM Readers have allowed me to expand on the complexities of the Musk/Ukraine/Starlink question. As TPM Reader JS explains, it’s actually not true that the US military doesn’t need Starlink or isn’t using it. It’s true that the US military has a whole system of secure satellite communications. The US wouldn’t have found itself in the situation the Ukrainian military did when Musk blocked the use of his satellites over the Crimean coastline. But that’s not the whole story.
Continue reading “The Pret-a-Porter Warzone”A special edition of TPM’s Morning Memo, where I test your willingness to put up with me writing about the glittering world of property insurance – but it’s really about climate change, if that helps. Sign up for the email version.
With respect to Sam Cooke … a lot has been written in the past few weeks about the property insurance industry beginning to assess (properly!) the growing risk of climate change.
It’s not surprising that the initial pinch of climate change for property owners as a group would come not in the real estate market but in the property insurance market. It’s just surprising that it’s taken this long to begin to show up … except has it really?
When I bought my first house back in 1996 in Louisiana, memories of Hurricane Andrew were still fresh, and major insurers had started to pull back from underwriting, as I recall it, south of I-10, which is where I was. It put me in a real bind at the time. While the bigs were recalibrating and limiting their coastal exposure, other insurers were willing to issue policies, but if memory serves they were crappy and expensive.
As it turned out, even the big insurers apparently had some discretion. I was 26 and had no idea what I was doing. So my first editor and first publisher went to bat for me with the State Farm agent they used and after a brief but nerve-wracking scramble that threatened to hold up the closing, I obtained a proper policy at a suitable rate and completed the home purchase.
I don’t have a great sense of how the ebb and flow of underwriting along the immediate coast has gone in the 27 years since then, but there are signs we’ve turned a corner. I suspect your initial reaction is: “Wow, this is bad!” But pricing in climate change impacts is actually an important step towards confronting the current reality, so there’s a way in which this is really a good thing.
We have a property value bubble right now, especially along the coasts, and insurers tightening up will be the kind of thing that takes the air out the bubble. That will be a painful readjustment financially for millions of Americans, especially if the collapse comes all at once, but that’s not the fault of whatever or whoever comes along and pops the bubble. It reminds me of the movie version of The Big Short, when mortgage default rates had gone through the roof but the pricing on even the crappiest mortgage bonds was impervious to the erosion – at least initially. The main characters were pulling their hair out at the incongruity (and fraud) of it all. Bubbles can be stubborn and persistent things, until suddenly they’re not.
But is this really a good thing? Maybe focusing not on current property owners but prospective ones will help make it clearer. We’ve all marveled at the unceasing pace of coastal development over the last 10-20 years despite the obvious and ever-plainer risks. Even in the immediate aftermath of devastating hurricanes, out come the hammers, plywood decking, and 2 x 4s. We do it all over again. But as this particular story shows, if developers can’t get insurance on their investments, they don’t build, at least not there.
I was warily looking at coastal property last year in a particularly vulnerable part of the country. Clearly, climate risk wasn’t being priced in yet. I asked one real estate agent how he talked to clients about the climate change risk. “Well, it depends on your time horizon. Is this your forever home?” I was not reassured.
Part of what got us into the climate change mess (at least in the 40 some odd years since the public became generally aware of the inexorable physics of global warming) has been externalizing the costs of carbon emissions. Until we begin to capture those costs, the incentives for decarbonizing won’t be lined up. This is a painful but important step in that direction, but it will need to be managed, regulated, and tackled as a public policy matter, not just a market correction. Not much good news to report on that front, I’m afraid.
The eventual impeachment of Joe Biden was assured before he took the oath of office, so long as Republicans could recapture the House. There’s no one motivation behind this power play, but revenge for Donald Trump’s two impeachments is a major driving force.
It is of course laughable and a disgraceful abuse of power while also being potentially effective, so long as the D.C. press corps lives up to GOP’s quite-low expectations. So far so good on that front. Political journalism still isn’t up to this task. More on that in the coming days at Morning Memo.
In the meantime, not everyone in the press corps is a gullible dope:
AP:
Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Tony Evers shot down as ‘bogus’ a surprise plan Republicans floated Tuesday that would have the Legislature approve new maps drawn by nonpartisan staff, preempting the state Supreme Court from tossing the current GOP-drawn boundaries.
More here.
Josh Marshall: The End of The Pro-Life Movement
Semafor: Elon Musk’s X/Twitter appears to throttle New York Times
Colin Woodard applies his study of America’s regional cultures to life expectancy: America’s Surprising Partisan Divide on Life Expectancy
WSJ: Try Hard, but Not That Hard. 85% Is the Magic Number for Productivity.
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Faced with what looks like a near certainty that a newly liberal-controlled state Supreme Court will toss out their notorious 2011 gerrymander, Wisconsin Republicans have threatened to impeach and remove newly elected Justice Janet Protasiewicz before she even rules on her first case. But today Republican leaders in the state House and Senate came forward with a new plan to workaround the lawsuits and controversies over the 2011 gerrymander and adopt new maps created by at least nominally nonpartisan staff.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who’d have to sign the new bill, quickly shot down the whole idea. “Republicans are making a last-ditch effort to retain legislative control by having someone Legislature-picked and Legislature-approved draw Wisconsin’s maps,” said Evers. “That is bogus.”
Continue reading “Bargaining”Despite what the Freedom Caucus claimed in its press conference this afternoon, there are a variety of factors behind House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) announcement today that he would direct House committees to open a bogus impeachment inquiry into President Biden.
Continue reading “Keeping The Real Speaker In The Loop”
