A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the ousters of Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon, as well as the Supreme Court order on mifepristone.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
The Washington Post just published its own “why Tucker was canned” story.
Now it’s a mix of the endless controversy, Tucker’s hubris and his still redacted criticisms of Fox brass contained in discovery material from the Dominion case. But now the kicker is Ukraine. Rupert Murdoch got fed up with Carlson’s relentlessly pro-Russian commentary about the Ukraine war and his withering attacks on Ukraine itself. Even more, key Republican senators had had enough; and they were talking to Murdoch about it directly.
Continue reading “Now It’s Ukraine! (Tucker Firing Explanation Whack-A-Mole Continues …)”Counties across the country are likely to see massive turnover in their local election administration before the 2024 election, a new study finds.
Continue reading “Survey: Massive Turnover In Local Election Officials Due To Harassment Is Likely By 2024”We’re about to have a Speaker Week Vote-O-Rama replay in which Speaker Kevin McCarthy will try to pass a pseudo-budget to kick start negotiations with Joe Biden over the debt ceiling, despite the fact that Biden has made clear he’s not going to negotiate over the debt ceiling at all. Biden has made clear he won’t negotiate but he’s definitely not even going to get into it until McCarthy says what it is is he wants. This pseudo-budget is the bill of particulars in which McCarthy says what he — or rather the Freedom Caucus — wants. As I said, it’s the Speakership vote all over again.
Following all this? Well, as you can tell it’s pretty convoluted. There’s a lot of kabuki and signaling wrapped around what should be an ordinary budgetary process. Because it’s so convoluted I wanted to provide some big picture points to keep in mind as this unfolds.
Continue reading “McCarthy Herds Republicans for Joe Biden”Fox News host Tucker Carlson is no longer with the network, per a terse statement from the right-wing media juggernaut released Monday morning.
What’s left now is a huge mystery: Why? And why now?
Continue reading “Why Is Tucker Carlson Out At Fox NOW?”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
In a sign of how badly things are going for Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the House Rules Committee went into the wee hours of this morning before it coughed up a debt-ceiling hostage-taking package that the GOP leadership thinks might be able to win the support of its conference.
McCarthy was forced to make changes to the bill to get it through the committee, something he had vowed he would not do.
A lot of the coverage is focused on the intra-GOP stakeholders holding out for this or that concession, like the Iowa delegation on ethanol subsidies. But I don’t want to get lost in the weeds on this. This is McCarthy’s hand-crafted, top-down, avoid-the-committee-process, limit-amendments proposed bill that he must get passed in order to pursue the House GOP’s debt-ceiling hostage-taking dream.
Even if McCarthy succeeds in getting this bill through, the fact that he is struggling with a proposal that gives GOPers everything they want and more tells you all you need to know about the burn-it-all-down, wreck-the-world-economy political ambitions of the Republican Party.
This is like a test-tube incubation of the worst tendencies of the House GOP. McCarthy is playing to all of them and still isn’t assured of passing the bill.
We’ll have a better handle on things this morning after the House GOP conference meets. Leadership had hoped to get the bill to the floor as early as today. Not clear whether that will happen. It could get pushed until tomorrow. The House calendar means it has to pass this week.
Abby Grossberg, the former Fox News producer for first Maria Bartiromo then Tucker Carlson who sued the right-wing news network, is turning out to be a pivotal figure. Her lawsuit and the audio recordings she made while at Fox quickly complicated Fox’s defense of the Dominion defamation lawsuit, and she’s since been subpoenaed in the Smartmatic defamation case against Fox.
Now there’s more (this is more video than I usually urge you to watch but it’s all relevant here):
For his part Cruz says he was consistent in couping publicly and privately:
Opening statements in the civil trial of E. Jean Carroll’s rape and defamation claims against Donald Trump were completed Tuesday, and Carroll could take the stand as early as today. As for whether Trump himself will testify, Carroll doesn’t plan to call him but he’s playing coy about whether he’ll testify in his own defense. The judge in the case has had enough of the gamesmanship and demanded to know this week whether Trump will testify: “Fish or cut bait.”
MSNBC’s Lisa Rubin was in attendance for opening statements:
Closing arguments were completed Tuesday in the four-month-long seditious conspiracy trial of the Proud Boys. The jury is set to begin deliberations today.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is citing former President Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified info as grounds for asking the judge to limit Trump’s access to certain information in the Stormy Daniels hush money case.
I’ve been remiss in not flagging this to your attention sooner. The first and only transgender member of the Montana House has been under sustained attack by Republicans since she called them out a week ago for a proposed ban on gender-affirming care.
In retaliation for what Republican members claimed was her “hateful rhetoric,” House Speaker Matt Regier (R) has refused to recognize state Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D), essentially silencing her in the body to which she was elected. You know the reverse victimization move by heart now. Republicans hatefully attack transgender people but label any criticism of them for doing it as itself “hateful.”
The speaker cancelled yesterday’s session after a Monday protest in the chamber by supporters of Zephyr, 34, led to seven arrests.
Republican members are set to consider censure or other disciplinary action against Zephyr today.
Former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), now the CEO of Trump’s Truth Social, lost his defamation suit over a 2018 Ryan Lizza’s story in Esquire. The judge in the case ruled that the article’s claims were “substantially, objectively true.”
Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA) signed into law an immediate ban on military-style semiautomatic weapons, making it the 10th state to do so.
Nate Silver is leaving FiveThirtyEight, the site he famously founded in 2008 and later sold to ESPN, where it was eventually folded into ABC News.
Chris Hayes had a lovely remembrance last night of Harry Belafonte, as both artist and activist:
Let’s end on a more whimsical note:
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Kate Riga and I discussed this during the podcast today — for scheduling reasons we recorded one day early this week. But so many of you have asked me this question that I wanted to address it here in the Ed Blog. The question is this: Is it possible that Tucker Carlson’s termination was a non-public part of Fox’s settlement agreement with Dominion? I have no inside information. But I’m pretty sure the answer is no.
Continue reading “Was Tucker’s Firing Part of the Dominion Settlement? (No)”It’s House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) first major (self-imposed) legislative showdown.
Continue reading “McCarthy Attempts To Keep Debt Ceiling Vote From Devolving Into Speakership Circus Part 2”Republicans’ inability to find their footing in a post-Roe America remains an omnipresent issue not just for the GOP as a whole, but one that is increasingly tripping up nearly every Republican with 2024 ambitions.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: Another 2024 Republican Avoids Abortion Specifics”I’ve mentioned a few times my love/hate relationship with the media reporting of Dylan Byers and Eriq Gardner, the glitz media columnist for the prestige newsletter bouthemoth (boutique+behemoth) Puck News. It’s all leveraged buy-outs and acquisitions and gossip about top personalities and nothing much about journalism or the law of journalism. But, I thought, if they’re ever going to come through for me it’s going to be on the Carlson/Fox story. So I checked out what they had with no little expectation.
Continue reading “The Mystery Continues”
