It’s time to kick off this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. This fund is a critical part of what keeps TPM vital and strong. If you’ve contributed in the past — and especially if you haven’t — I hope you will take a moment this morning and join us in contributing. Just click right here. If you’re thinking you might get to it at some point, please take literally about a minute and a half and do it this morning. That helps us get to our goal all the quicker, and get back to focusing on the news 100% of the time.

This year we need to get to $500,000, and if we can get over that that will be great and a real assist. I explained here over the weekend why this year’s drive is particularly critical. TPM is a collaborative enterprise. It’s that way within our operation and from the literal beginning it’s been a collaboration with our readers, who gives us angles and tips and perspective on stories and who have our operation’s back with your financial support. It is a collaboration with you and today our team needs your support. We literally can’t produce what we are producing, play our — I believe critical — role in the news ecosystem without your contributions.

In the coming days I’m going to be sharing more about what we have planned over the next year and why the drive is so important. But for now, we need your help. Any amount gets us closer to our goal and helps us get there as fast as possible. It would mean so much to us if you could join with us today. It just takes stopping in your routine and giving us no more than two minutes today. Just click right here. We thank you.

Kate and I recorded an emergency insta-pod episode of the podcast to discuss the sexual assault allegation against Graham Platner which Politico published this afternoon. That pod will be on your devices shortly. It’s looked, since we recorded around 5 pm ET, that this was it for his campaign. Comments like “assessing the best path forward” are campaign speak for we’re pulling the plug. More news since then only confirms that apparent read.

I’ve been beating the drums for years about reforming the Supreme Court to bring its corruption and anti-democracy to heal. In general I’ve avoided getting very detailed about what reform would look like for two reasons. First, there are technical details I lack knowledge about and which others are more able to address. Second, my focus is on building support for the premise, the necessity of reform. Getting too bound up or identified with really specific reforms can get in the way of that.

However, I get asked this a lot. So I wanted to explain the outline of the reform path that makes the most sense to me. I put this forward as a concept, with the understanding that some points might need fine tuning either for technical or constitutional reasons.

Donald Trump now appears to have latched onto “communist” and the threat of “communism” as his new turnkey solution to the building anti-Trump wave set to crash in November. I would submit that the proper response to this is, “liar! crooked fool!” and go back to the offensive messaging. End of recommendation.