You’ve probably seen some coverage of the NATO summit in Vilnius this week. With that meeting we’ve seen an acrimonious debate over whether Ukraine should be allowed to join NATO now, arguably when it needs to most. Ukraine wants it. Indeed, it’s demanding it. Many of Ukraine’s most ardent supporters in Europe and North America are too. So I wanted to take a moment to go on record as saying this is unwise, unnecessary and, to a non-trivial extent, borderline insane.

The arguments I’ve at least seen come down to versions of “moral clarity,” the importance of making a clear and emphatic statement about Western commitment to Ukraine and the unacceptability of Russian behavior. These are important goals. But it’s a good rule of thumb that when people lean too hard on “moral clarity” there are good reasons to believe it’s because more considered and logical arguments can’t sustain the idea.

It’s certainly true that mainstream media organizations have published stories on the sometimes clownish work of House Republican investigators. But even this doesn’t detract from the fact that new accusations from the same folks are routinely presented to the public as credible, serious, even damning news. I was considering this this afternoon and it’s hard to think of any other part of life, personal or professional, in which someone’s claims are so consistently shown not only to be inaccurate but comically cynical and dishonest and yet continue to be treated with great seriousness and respect. It’s a sort of credibility Groundhog Day, in the sense of the movie. Just the same damn thing from scratch every time.

Yesterday we noted how a major tentpole in the House GOP’s “crime family” investigations of President Biden collapsed when U.S. Attorney David Weiss denied there was any interference in his investigation. Now we have a revelation that manages to be even more stunning while being somehow entirely predictable. We and others last month had some fun at the expense of investigative ringleader Rep. James Comer (R-KY) when he said he had “lost” what he claimed was his top Biden whistleblower. What this meant was never clear and given how things work in Republican investigations it was never certain whether it actually “meant” anything. Now we know what he meant.

Let me flag something to your attention. For the better part of two weeks the national press was consumed by House Republican claims that there was a cover-up in the investigation of the President’s son Hunter Biden and that the investigation had essentially been shut down by DOJ political appointees. According to a purported IRS whistleblower, U.S. Attorney David Weiss had been turned down when he requested special counsel status. His efforts to bring additional and more serious charges against the younger Biden were thwarted. Just as it seemed that the whole saga had come to a conclusion, suddenly it was ramping back up again, despite very little evidence that any of the claims were true.

Ordinarily this would not be a surprising or especially newsworthy story, at least not at the national level. A controversy-tangled freshman Republican member of the Florida state House of Representatives, Fabian Basabe, has been accused of sexual harassment and some mix of unwanted touching and assault by two members of his staff. Basabe, 45, is billed as a former New York City socialite who appeared on a couple reality shows. He’s married Martina Borgomanero, the heiress to a lingerie fortune. (A very South Florida story, as you can tell — he represents Miami Beach and environs.) He was already in some hot water in his socially tolerant, gay-friendly district for voting in lockstep with state Republicans pushing Ron DeSantis’s anti-“woke”/LGBTQ agenda. The accusers are one staffer, Nicholas Frevola, 25, and one former intern, Jacob Cutbirth, 24.

As I said, not unremarkable, but bordering on a news story cliche: An apparently closeted, if in this case perhaps lightly closeted, Republican rep accused of harassing and fondling male staffers. He denies it; news at 11.

Where it gets interesting though is that the investigation by The Miami Herald and CBS News Miami strongly suggests a cover-up by the Republican leadership of the state House, specifically House Speaker Paul Renner, a key DeSantis ally.

From TPM Reader DH …

I was reading your column about reaching your fundraising goals, and your explanation of the curious attachment many of your readers have formed with respect to TPM. I’m a retired journalist, and somehow, even though I read the NYT, WaPo, Politico, and other sites daily, I don’t feel the same sense of connectivity with these other journalism sites. Something about TPM has always felt more like writers speaking to a community of readers rather than just firing off the day’s shotgun blast of news with clickbait headlines. I don’t really know what the secret is, but watching you guys raise a half a million dollars is uplifting and inspiring.

Overnight we crossed the $500,000 mark. And, as I’ve told you maybe five million times now, that was our goal. That’s amazing. We are all super pumped. We’re really grateful.

It reminds me of a central reality of this organization and this community: the sheet anchor of a robust and resilient news organization is a community of readers who are engaged with and feel personally connected to its work and existence. I wasn’t kidding when I said yesterday morning that I thought we were going to miss this milestone. Yesterday mid-morning we were at about $455,000 and we’d been averaging in the low-teens of thousands on weekdays in the final days of the drive. I figured we’d have some final surge. But the math with two more days was still a stretch. But over the whole day yesterday we ended up raising just under $50,000. So what seemed like a stretch over two days we ended up accomplishing in a single day.

Okay, admittedly I’m mixing my metaphors and allusions here. But this morning I was thinking we were pretty definitely going to fall short of our goal. We’d gotten close, and obviously close counts in this kind of situation. But again, having had such a successful drive so far it would be kind of heartbreaking to come up just short. But here you go again flipping the script on me, making me believe again! As of this moment we are at $482,790 $490,136. That’s almost $30,000 $42,000 contributed to Fund just today, more than twice three times our recent daily totals. So now hitting our goal is starting to seem very doable again, conceivably even tonight. So let’s do this! We’re totally in final countdown mode. Just click right here!

We have today and tomorrow left in this year’s TPM Journalism Fund drive. We’re at $455,000, $45,000 short of our goal. Just two days. I’ll be honest with you. It’ll be straight up heartbreaking if we get this close and don’t make it over the top. You’ve heard all our yakking and arguments. They’re good ones. It’s important. So please make today the day if you’ve been considering contributing. It literally takes about one minute. If you’re a member you don’t even have to pull out your wallet. Just click a few times, starting with this link right here.

I mentioned yesterday that Twitter became unstable over the weekend because of evil forces which Elon Musk and crew had to combat — that is, according to Elon Musk. Mainly that’s just BS from a company that has stiffed service providers and cut staff to a level that they couldn’t keep the site online anymore. But there likely are more efforts to “scrape” Twitter and other platforms going on right now. (Scraping here means bots which scan through a site and collect copies of its public or non-restricted data.) So there’s some element of truth to Musk’s claims that they’re facing more demands on the site’s capacity. The key is that that only becomes a big problem if you’re running very close to the edge already. But I want to zero in a bit on this point.