I’ve been subscribing to Talking Points Memo for some time now, but lately I’ve really begun to appreciate the work Josh Marshall and his crew are doing. It’s even more valuable as the mainstream media increasingly fails to do its job and pushes faulty and misleading narratives.
TPM does long-form reporting and deep dives as well as daily coverage of political news. They also offer insightful analysis that can be a refreshing change from MSM goupthink and locked-in narratives. Their funding model looks really good as well — scroll down the About page to see the mission, the team, and the numbers. Frankly I feel a lot better sending them my money than to The NY Times.
(Let me also recommend Mother Jones as well. Even if you don’t want to subscribe to either, you should make a practice of at least checking their digital front pages daily to see what the MSM is missing or skipping over.)
If you saw the recent CNN report about the Trump lawyer behind the fake elector’s scheme and the secret Twitter account he lied about using, TPM actually covered it days earlier. CNN gives them grudging credit way down in the story. Josh Marshall noted wryly that Bigs Following TPM, as usual. TPM had extensive coverage of the “Chesebro Docs — I wrote it up the last installment here, with links to all of the TPM stories.
Marshall has been scathing about the way the media and the Republicans have essentially by played by Russia all the way back to 2015. See More Aftershocks Out of Russia’s Long Hunter Biden Disinfo Campaign. Referencing the former intelligence officials who expressed doubts about the laptop,
...But as I’ve argued, I’m pretty sure they were right. And I’m pretty sure they think they were too. The latest Smirnov revelations only make that even more clear. At every stage of the Hunter Biden and Burisma/Biden/Ukraine bribes stories the fingerprints of Russian intelligence have been there. It simply defies credulity to believe that the younger Biden’s trove of emails coming to light weeks before the 2020 election somehow was the one legit link in the whole chain. That is especially the case because the purported legend or cover story has simply never passed the laugh test.
My strong sense based on all the available evidence is that the government has simply never really investigated that point. To the best of my knowledge the most specific information about this comes from a filing by Special Counsel Weiss’s office from January responding to Hunter Biden’s petition to throw out the charges against him. That filing notes that prosecutors verified at least some of the contents of the laptop by comparing them to contents of Hunter Biden’s Apple iCloud account, which they had subpoenaed. But about the physical device itself it simply says in passing: “Investigators also later came into possession of the defendant’s Apple MacBook Pro, which he had left at a computer store.” This suggests little more than a pro-forma investigation of the chain of custody of the laptop. Whistleblower Gary Shapley told House investigators that the FBI had also tied the computer’s device ID to that iCloud account, suggesting that that computer had at least backed up to Biden’s iCloud and lends credence to the belief that the physical device was Biden’s regardless of how it got to the repair shop….
emphasis added
If the press and the government have conceded they were played by Russia, or have learned anything from it, I’ve yet to see it.
David Corn at the Mother Jones newsletter Our Land called out the press for essentially forgetting the early and obvious links between Trump and Russia. Josh Marshall also had quite a bit to say at TPM on the same heading, that we’ve been the target of a long-running Russian campaign — see my write up with links: David Corn & Josh Marshall: It IS Russia, Russia, Russia - BIG STORY is GOP is fine with that.
So, what else is shaking at TPM?
Here’s some recent stories:
Remember how state by state, Republicans chipped away at abortion, incrementally adding more and more restrictions, upping the level of fear? Josh Kovensky and Kate Riga at TPM warn that Tennessee is applying the same tactics to target the LGBTQ community by making it harder for them to get married.
A new Tennessee law undercuts the Supreme Court’s 2015 landmark, closely divided decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide, and marks a significant victory for a resurgent conservative movement to restrict LGBTQ rights.
The law, signed by Gov. Bill Lee (R) to little fanfare on Wednesday evening, allows state officials to decline to “solemnize marriages.”
The new law effectively removes half of what is needed under state law to become legally married. In Tennessee, marriage occurs after two events: the issuance of a marriage license, and the formal solemnization of a marriage, which can be carried out by a religious official, a state notary public or a state official...
Remember Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and the outrageous price for a new podium — that may not exist? There’s new questions about what she’s been up to. Hunter Walker asks:
Taylor Swift was not the only high profile Kansas City chiefs fan to enjoy incredible access to the Super Bowl in Las Vegas earlier this month. Like the pop megastar, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) watched the game from a luxury suite and celebrated on the field. However, unlike Swift, who is dating one of the team’s star players and broke all kinds of records with her ongoing multibillion dollar tour, it’s not quite clear how (or if) Sanders and her family paid for tickets to the most expensive football game of all time.
So, TPM set out to figure out just how exactly the governor ended up with such exclusive access to such an exclusive event. Chasing Sanders’ splashy Super Bowl trip was a confounding journey. A combination of brazen spending, stonewalling from the governor’s office, and Sanders’ successful efforts to erode transparency laws left us sure of nothing except the fact a state official somehow managed to enjoy a big night out that almost certainly cost more than her annual salary...
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There’s much more at the link.
Notice that Republicans are increasingly clueless about sex? The evening briefing by Nicole LaFond notes:
The floodgates opened on Friday as every Republican got the memo that they needed to be loud and proud about the party’s recently discovered support for in-vitro fertilization treatment, a common form of reproductive health care that was, apparently, not much thought about by today’s anti-abortion movement — at least until the Dobbs ruling opened a window for the Alabama Supreme Court to declare embryos “babies” earlier this month.
This month’s decision out of Alabama — which found that embryos are children and have the same rights in wrongful death suits — has stoked panic about the future of IVF treatment in Alabama and across the country post-Roe. But it has also unearthed yet another layer of how deeply Republicans do not understand how reproduction and reproductive care work...
The briefing goes on to lay out just how contradictory and clueless Republicans are on the matter of reproduction. That’s what happens when everything is performative for these people and all facts are alternative.
As a compulsive consumer of information, I’m finding traditional news sources just aren’t cutting it. We’re a long way from the days when everyone could choose between the evening news on CBS, NBC, or ABC to get handle on what was happening in the world.
It’s apparently frustrating for people who want to do actual journalism or bypass the MSM gatekeepers these days as well — Substack seems to be a place where many of them are setting up shop and trying to make a go of it, where traditional papers, magazines, etc. are increasingly cutting back and/or going under.
As always, the problem remains as Atrios put it many years ago in blogging time: “Information wants to be free, but the rent wants to be paid.”
UPDATE: One of the benefits of a TPM membership is that you can share member-only stories to other people. Anyone can read them. For example: Some Thoughts About Tonight’s Michigan Primary.