Yesterday I wrote that a subset of users were experiencing a couple issues. We now believe this issue has been resolved. The source of the problem was some server maintenance work gone awry by one of our hosting partners. But our crack team of developers figured out what was going on, notified the partner, and they were able to fix the issues last night.

Thanks to all the readers who wrote in, was a big help. Teamwork makes the dreamwork.

Also, if you aren’t a member, how about changing that today?

Amazing what people are capable of. Indiana House GOP Rep. flashes his loaded handgun at high school students at the capitol to discuss their concerns about gun violence and getting shot to death during algebra class.

The news startup, The Messenger, announced today that it is closing, effective immediately. This comes only a few weeks after a round of layoffs that made it seem that the site’s days were numbered. It does not come as a surprise. The first thing to say about this is the obvious one which is that a lot of journalists lost their jobs today. And, in addition to the personal shock and hardship entailed in anyone losing their jobs, journalists play a unique and important role in the civic and news infrastructure of society. So it sucks.

The Messenger was also a specific kind of failure. There is an uncanniness to it since it was perhaps uniquely predictable. In fact, it was so predictable it’s still a real mystery why the site was able to come into existence in the first place. This isn’t snark or crocodile tears. It’s a very strange story. This requires some explanation.

For some time I’ve wanted to take up a question that David Kurtz took up recently in Morning Memo. In short, the federal judiciary has failed the country in allowing a renegade ex-president to nullify federal law by means of a more or less open policy of endless delay by means of frivolous motions, appeals and more. As the old adage has it, justice delayed is justice denied. This hasn’t simply been during his criminal prosecutions, which I will discuss in a moment. It stretched over the time of his presidency as well. We know that during his presidency President Trump filled the federal judiciary with a slew of right-wing judges, many of them out-and-out corrupt. He also corrupted the Supreme Court with his unprecedented three appointments in a single term. But here I’m not even talking about right-wing Republican judges who often appear partial to Donald Trump’s ideological aims and frequently his narrower electoral ones as well. We know for instance that Judge Aileen Cannon, a corrupt and transparently partisan Trump appointee, has more or less single-handedly sabotaged the classified documents prosecution. Set that all aside. What I’m talking about are the fair-minded judges who allow a mix of institutional courtesy, established practice and inertia to allow Trump to make a mockery of the criminal justice system

We are aware of an issue currently affecting some users that prevents them from accessing site features and also displays the wrong number of ads. Specifically, we believe it’s affecting users from the greater Chicago area.

If you are experiencing this issue, you could help us resolve it by letting us know if any of the following are true for you:

• You are NOT from the greater Chicago area.
• Logging into TPM while on another network resolves the issue. For example, if you have trouble using the site on your mobile device while on a wifi network, but not  when wifi is off and you are using cellular data.

You can contact us at siteissues at talkingpointsmemo dot com.

Getting this fixed is the top priority and we apologize for the inconvenience.