From TPM Reader BC …

I am a long time reader, since the early aughts.  I have been giving to the fund since I have been able.  In the past year I have noticed some of the changes at TPM with  the podcasts, newsletters,  and Substack conversations and they are helping me navigate my changing relationship to the internet and social media.   When I was thinking about this a couple days ago,  I was actually thinking about Yglesias even before the post today.   His history of punching down, smugness, and deliberate misinterpretation comes up a lot in my feed.  It’s always a little disappointing when he gins these things.  He is not stupid.  I actually have wondered if it is a program when he needs to get some new subscriptions.  Will Stancil and the people obsessed with him need to all take a breather.  There are great voices on bluesky and it has its use but I have been trying to curate a little more and hang out at my library.   

Your contributions are helping us make good progress toward our goal in this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. We need to get 1/3 of the way toward our goal by tonight. That’s $166,666. (Ignore the satany numerology.) It’s doable tonight if we can keep up the current momentum. Can you make this evening the moment you join us? Just click right here and make a contribution at any amount that works for you.

Thank you from all of us.

This morning on Bluesky Politico’s Josh Gerstein flagged to me and others a piece by Matt Yglesias in which, he said, Matt “says progressive Dems [are] too obsessed with fighting Trump rather than winning in marginal states/districts [and] picks fight with Josh Marshall over it.”

It turns out Yglesias is responding to a piece I wrote a couple weeks ago entitled “Centrists, This Is on You.” I sat down and read Matt’s piece and found myself kind of baffled because he has me saying perhaps not the diametric opposite of what I wrote but pretty close to the opposite of it. I always try to be sensitive to the possibility that when someone so thoroughly misunderstands what I wrote that it may be that I just wasn’t clear. There’s the additional factor that I usually write assuming familiarity with the stream of posts I’ve written on the same topic in recent days and weeks. People read a single post and some of my meaning might not be clear. Here though I can’t help but think that Matt zipped through the post in question, zeroed in on a few buzzwords like “fight” and then just plugged those into his existing framework and didn’t actually pay attention to my argument. Because, as I said, he’s just arguing against these stock arguments that I never made.

Still, there are some illuminating things that can be drawn from the misunderstanding and/or disagreement.

We’re into our second day of this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. And we’re off to a solid start. In fact, one day in we’re coming up on 1/3 of the way toward our goal of raising $500,000, which is great. If you haven’t had a chance yet I would be so in your debt if you could take a moment right now to join us by contributing in any amount that makes sense for you. Just click right here.

We need to try to get past the 1/3 mark by the end of today if at all possible.

Click here to hear about why this year’s drive is so important.

From TPM Reader WM …

Three thoughts on Platner from a coastal Maine resident and why while I’m mad as hell, I’m not feeling all that pessimistic — yet: