It’d be eye roll-inducing if it weren’t so darkly nauseating.
A woman named Lia Thomas won the NCAA Division 1 national championship for the 500-yard freestyle swimming race last week. Thomas is the first transgender athlete to earn this title, beating out Tokyo Olympics silver medalist Emma Weyant, who won second place at the NCAA tournament.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: Boebert Brings GOP-Manufactured Culture Wars To Congress”A line has been crossed — so says House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) after getting Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) to confess that those cocaine and orgy allegations he lobbed against his colleagues over the weekend were, in fact, overblown.
Cawthorn apparently blew the “trust” he had with McCarthy when the freshman congressman suggested there was a groundswell of cocaine use and sex party invites coming from his colleagues in Congress — amusing accusations that Cawthorn reportedly walked back during a one-on-one meeting with McCarthy on Wednesday.
Continue reading “McCarthy Knocks Cawthorn After Private Chat: ‘He Doesn’t Know What Cocaine Is’”Republicans are currently engaged in a masterclass in bizarre deflection.
GOP senators in recent days have stretched themselves thin to avoid engaging with calls for Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from Jan. 6-related cases in light of his wife, Ginni Thomas’ explosive pro-coup texts sent to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election.
Continue reading “‘Misogyny!’ ‘Bullying!’: GOP Grasps At Weird Straws To Defend Justice Thomas Against Recusal Calls”For years I’ve been corresponding with TPM Reader BF. He’s in the national security world, whereas I’m just an outside observer. He’s prone to intense responses to events whereas I’m characterologically more cautious. But this is his field not mine. So in recent days I was struck to see that he thinks I have the Ukraine situation totally wrong and that notwithstanding its battlefield embarrassments and mishaps Putin is on the verge of getting everything he wants and Ukraine is on the verge of what amounts to surrender.
Continue reading “Is Ukraine on the Edge of Defeat?”A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate talk about new revelations into what major Republican players were doing during and around the insurrection.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
From TPM Reader JJ …
Continue reading “Traditionalism and Aggression”Years ago I worked for a building trades union. I once had a car ride with a fellow staffer, an older Catholic guy who I’d once heard express opposition to abortion. I thought I’d ask him about it.
I assumed I’d hear a version of the Catholic take on it. Instead, he was refreshingly honest–
“These c**ts have gotten out of control.”
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) announced on Wednesday morning that she plans to vote “yes” for Supreme Court Justice nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation on the high court, the first drop of support Jackson has received from a Republican as President Joe Biden’s SCOTUS pick.
Continue reading “Susan Collins Announces ‘Yes’ Vote For Jackson, Giving SCOTUS Nom First GOP Backing”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Georgia GOP gubernatorial hopeful David Perdue insisted on Tuesday that when he gave a thumbs up at his supporters chanting “lock him up!” about incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp (R) at a rally on Saturday, he “misunderstood” what they were saying.
The Washington Post and CBS News obtained the White House records of Trump’s Jan. 6 calls that were turned over to the House Jan. 6 Committee–and said records have a seven-hour hole that don’t include any calls Trump made during the actual Capitol insurrection. But the New York Times and Washington Post lay out all the newly revealed calls in those logs that we still got.
“Ginni Thomas’ Texts Are a Barometer for the Far Right” – The Atlantic
Just 24 hours after Biden unveiled his proposed “Billionaire Minimum Income Tax” that would apply to households worth more than $100 million (only to the top one-hundredth of one percent of American households, per the New York Times), Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) made it clear on Tuesday he won’t let it get off the ground.
Evgeny Popov, a Russian state-owned media host, called for regime change in the U.S. and declared that it was time to “help our partner Trump to become President,” according to Daily Beast columnist and Russian media expert Julia Davis.
Something that might be flying under your radar: Tennessee is on track to block former Trump-era State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus, who is now running for Congress in Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District, from the state’s GOP primaries with a bill requiring candidates to live in the state for three years in order to qualify. And a lot of Republicans, including Trump loyalists, reeeaaally don’t want her to qualify even though Trump endorsed her.
Trump son-in-law and former White House adviser Jared Kushner is expected to appear in front of the House Jan. 6 Committee for a voluntary interview tomorrow, and the White House confirmed on Tuesday that, unsurprisingly, Biden won’t be extending executive privilege over Kushner’s testimony.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced on Tuesday that it had authorized a second booster shot of the COVID-19 vaccine on Tuesday for certain immunocompromised people and everyone ages 50 and up.
Lynching is now a federal hate crime: Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act on Tuesday. Under the law, which is named after the 14-year-old Black boy who was brutally murdered by white men in 1955, lynching is a criminal offense punishable by up to 30 years. Congress tried to pass this kind of legislation about 200 times before.
Ex-Trump White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney is now a contributor at CBS News, where he’ll provide “political analysis across the Network’s broadcasts and platforms,” according to the press release I got.
Indeed, would CBS do without sage analysis like this?
From a guy who actively participated in Trump’s Ukraine aid quid-pro-quo scheme?
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
Senate Republicans don’t have the votes to take down Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, but they’ve used her confirmation process to broadcast their intention to roll back decades of civil rights progress.
Continue reading “Loud And Proud: Republicans Take Aim At Whole Constellation Of Privacy Rights”I was offline for a few hours and I came back to the news that ex-President Trump is calling on Vladimir Putin to help him unearth dirt about Joe Biden. I had been thinking it was going to be important going forward to remind people that Trump has repeatedly worked with Vladimir Putin to intervene in U.S. domestic politics and subvert U.S. elections. After all, it seems like Putin is getting less popular in the United States of late. But I guess that won’t be as pressing a need as long as Trump continues to re-collude out in the open on an ongoing basis. So here we are.
Continue reading “Trump Colludin’ and Losin’ Steam At the Same Time”
