I was driving when this afternoon’s events in Los Angeles took place. So I didn’t know about them in real time and only found out what had happened a couple hours later. (Appropriately enough, I was listening to the audiobook version of a Raymond Chandler novel.) Secretary Noem is now claiming that she, along with everyone else there, didn’t even know who Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) was. This is even more absurd than you might imagine. The press conference was in Los Angeles and he’s one of the state’s two senators. More than that, he’s the ranking member of the Judiciary subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration. Of course she knows who he is. If she doesn’t remember his face, she’s an even dumber degenerate punk than I already thought.

As many of you have probably noticed, TPM had significant downtime this afternoon. It turns out it wasn’t just us. Cloudflare had a series of broad outages this afternoon and TPM was downstream of that. About 20% of all websites use Cloudflare for core site functions (things like DDOS mitigation, proxying, DNS, caching, and some other things I’m sure I’m forgetting).

We’re back now and closely monitoring the situation. Our apologies for the interruption, and thanks as always for sticking with us.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss the L.A. protests and Trump’s big boy birthday parade.

We’re getting a bit more information about that hideous rally when President Trump ripped into his political opponents at Fort Bragg to the cheers of soldiers arrayed behind him. Now we learn that Army commanders at the base pre-screened soldiers at the rally for ones who support President Trump. They also made sure to exclude any soldiers who are, in the words of base commanders, “fat.”