Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) is set to return to the Senate this week, after a nearly three-month absence as she recovered from shingles, a spokesperson for the senator confirmed to TPM.
Continue reading “Feinstein Set To Return To Senate This Week After Weeks Of Uncertainty And Missed Votes”Jury Finds Trump Liable For Sexual Abuse, Defamation In E. Jean Carroll Rape Case
A civil jury found former President Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation of former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll Tuesday, awarding her a total of $5 million in damages.
Continue reading “Jury Finds Trump Liable For Sexual Abuse, Defamation In E. Jean Carroll Rape Case”Readers Interpret Yellen #2
From TPM Reader JB …
Continue reading “Readers Interpret Yellen #2”I think that the suggestion that the government pays some bills but not all of them is setting up a lawsuit more than the actual plan. SCOTUS made clear that the President does not have the choice to execute only parts of the spending of the US as commissioned by Congress in Clinton v. City of New York.
Readers Interpret Yellen #1
From TPM Reader CB …
Continue reading “Readers Interpret Yellen #1”Josh, I know I’ve written to you previously about this issue, but this Yellen statement is astounding. If this is their plan, it’s a disastrous plan.
It will make enemies of those who get the short end of the stick, and ingrates of the others. The Republicans, however, will love the plan, because it leaves Biden twisting in the wind, while Republicans cackle and criticize and say to the American people, “Biden is doing this to you. All he has to do is sign on to the House bill and everyone gets paid.”
Interpreting What Yellen Said
Let me follow up a bit on this post from last night about Janet Yellen’s CNBC interview. I don’t read her as ruling out “consol bonds” or the 14th amendment or various other approaches. I see her communicating two things: one overarching and one immediate and specific.
Let’s deal with the first of those first.
As we’ve hurtled closer to the cliff, there’s been a rising chorus among those who are fiercely opposed to any negotiation with parliamentary terrorists. That chorus is anxiously asking this question: what is your plan when they call your bluff? What steps are you planning once they start shooting the hostages?
Continue reading “Interpreting What Yellen Said”In 2020 Texts Tucker Carlson Lamented He Would Likely ‘Die’ At Fox News
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson was worried that former president Donald Trump’s election denialism and false rhetoric around the 2020 presidential election would trap him at Fox News for the rest of his career, according to texts obtained by The Daily Beast.
Continue reading “In 2020 Texts Tucker Carlson Lamented He Would Likely ‘Die’ At Fox News”There’s Plenty Of Debt Ceiling Drama. Don’t Fall For The Fake Kind.
`A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
No, Today’s Meeting Is Not An Epic Showdown
I don’t want to turn into a curmudgeon about the news coverage of the GOP’s debt ceiling hostage-taking, but the bigs aren’t making it easy!
Here’s how they’re portraying today’s White House meeting between President Biden and the congressional leadership:
NYT: “critical face-to-face confrontation”
WaPo: “urgent bid to avoid default”
WSJ: “high-stakes meeting”
I’ve mentioned before that I find news coverage of negotiations of any kind to be painful. Contract negotiations, labor negotiations, legislative negotiations – it doesn’t matter which. The coverage ends up overdetermined, overwrought, and often just plain wrong. It’s not hard to see why.
Every negotiation is different, but rarely do they satisfy the demands of news coverage for movement, dynamism, and incremental developments. Instead, negotiations are typically slow, tedious, and not much happens until suddenly it happens.
In contrast to what’s actually happening, news coverage tends to want to frame negotiations as steady movement toward a resolution, or as a hardening of positions that shows everyone involved to be unreasonable.
What’s actually happening instead? It’s invariably two sides at loggerheads for an extended time until the pressure builds and a complex combination of factors – fatigue, resignation, clarity about what’s really at stake, and miscalculations coming home to roost – wears the parties down.
That’s what we should expect in the coming weeks in the debt-ceiling standoff. Today is the beginning, not the end. It’s the start of the public-facing phase of the hostage-taking. The White House meeting is neither critical nor determinative.
On top of all the other problems with the coverage of negotiations, journalists and editors experience their own fatigue and resignation covering them and end up becoming cheerleaders for a resolution of some kind, any kind, the substance be damned. Just make it be over already! That’s not news coverage.
The coverage of the GOP’s manufactured debt-ceiling crisis is no different, except the stakes are so high and the culpability of the Republican Party so obvious that the usual bad coverage tropes are more damaging, less informative, and skew the public debate in especially misleading and destructive ways.
I’m sorry to report that we have weeks more of the same ahead.
Jury Gets The Carroll Case Today
Closing arguments concluded yesterday in the civil rape and defamation trial of Donald Trump, and the jury is set to begin deliberations today. No big surprises in closing arguments. Here’s a good succinct thread summarizing the day:
Judge Ties Trump’s Thumbs
The judge in Donald Trump’s criminal hush money case issued a protective order barring Trump from distributing discovery materials handed over to him by prosecutors, including on social media.
Stewart Rhodes Wants Time Served
Ahead of his upcoming sentencing for seditious conspiracy, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes is asking the court for leniency, seeking to get away with only the jail time he’s served so far. He’s been jailed since January 2022. Prosecutors are seeking a 25-year jail term for Rhodes.
Still Seeking Accountability For Sidney Powell
Former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell faces a new ethics complaint in Michigan for a “frivolous” challenge to the state’s results in the 2020 presidential election.
Great Read
S.V. Date: Call It Trump’s Coup Attempt, Because It Damned Well Was
Dick Durbin Is On The Case!
After hitting the snooze button for a few weeks, the Senate Judiciary Committee has finally roused and taken off its sleep mask.
Mirroring the move that the Senate Finance Committee made two weeks ago, Senate Judiciary is asking billionaire GOP donor Harlan Crow for a complete accounting of the gifts he’s given to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Welcome To The Party!
The NYT catches on to Republicans’ nationwide voter suppression agenda.
Disney Expands Its Lawsuit Against DeSantis
Disney has amended its lawsuit accusing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and other state officials of illegally retaliating against it for opposing the “Don’t Say Gay” law. It is now alleging that a new law signed just Friday is part of the retaliation campaign.
Texas Outlet Mall Shooter Had Nazi Sympathies
The gunman in the weekend shooting in suburban Dallas had an extensive social media record that showed him fantasizing over race wars.
His personal politics were very hard to figure out pic.twitter.com/igGpzGJzkt
— Aric Toler (@AricToler) May 8, 2023
But sure Republicans, go ahead and prattle on about the mental health crisis in America.
SUV Driver In Texas Charged With Manslaughter
Authorities still don’t have a motive for why the driver of an SUV barreled through a crowed of migrants outside a shelter over the weekend. They haven’t ruled out it being intentional. He’s been charged with eight counts of manslaughter, 10 counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and reckless driving
Ft. Hood Is No More
The Army base in Texas will be renamed Fort Cavazos today, part of the broad initiative to remove the names of Confederate military heroes from U.S. military installations.
First They Came For Christmas
Household appliances are the focal point of the latest ginned-up fake culture war:
Tips for Morning Memo? Let us know!
Yellen Shows Her Hand
We’ve had this running question for months about just what happens if the U.S. Treasury runs out of funds to meet all the government’s spending obligations. To be clear, those include ordinary spending as well as servicing of the principal of and interest on the U.S. debt. Secretary Yellen went on CNBC this afternoon and I think we got the first piece of an answer. It was a long interview, mostly about other aspects of the economy. But she discussed the debt ceiling standoff at the beginning. Here’s the key passage.
Continue reading “Yellen Shows Her Hand”Where Things Stand: GOP Resurrects Decades-Long War On PBS Because Of An LGBT Cartoon Character In ‘Clifford’
Take the fact that the Republican Party doesn’t have a policy platform beyond red-meat one-sided culture wars and pair it with the fact that Republicans have raised defunding PBS every few years for the last three decades or so and it becomes perhaps inevitable that conservative politicians would try to get “Clifford The Big Red Dog” canceled.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: GOP Resurrects Decades-Long War On PBS Because Of An LGBT Cartoon Character In ‘Clifford’”Douthat’s Elegy for Meatball Ron
Ross Douthat makes several decent points in this column on 2016 déjà vu before coming around to what seems to be his real point: Trump’s getting a leg up because “the press” actually wants him back. “[A]t some half-conscious level the mainstream press really wants the Trump return. It wants to enjoy the Trump Show’s ratings; it wants the G.O.P. defined by Trumpism while it defines itself as democracy’s defender.”
To be fair to Douthat, he does say leading up to those lines that if Trump is renominated it’s ultimately on GOP primary voters. Fair enough. But I really don’t buy this. Yesterday, HuffPost’s S.V. Date wrote that the U.S. press has failed its responsibilities by not putting front and center in all coverage of the man the reality of Jan. 6. This is true. Every general press account of Trump should begin with a descriptor something like “Donald Trump, the former president who staged an unsuccessful coup after being defeated in the 2020 election …”
But even this failure isn’t the same as wanting him back. I simply don’t think this is true even for the silliest and most conventional of national political reporters.
Continue reading “Douthat’s Elegy for Meatball Ron”