Desperate and Absurd

It's the 20th most important thing in the Geoff Berman testimony. Or maybe the 100th. But I was struck by this line from Barr after Berman refused to resign from his job as US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. According to Berman, Bill Barr told him "that getting fired from my job would not be good for my resume or future job prospects....

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Where Things Stand: Something Else On Our Radar

While we digest today's SCOTUS rulings on President Trump's financial records -- you can find our first breakdowns here and here -- there's something else we're monitoring this afternoon that might be of interest.

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Into The Storm

From TPM Reader ES ... I remembered a wistful email exchange we had on election night in 2016 - now we were going to see how resilient American institutions truly are or something to that effect. In retrospect our mistake was to only consider institutions like government and the press, and not the myriad of other small-i institutions that, taken...

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Into the Storm #2

I'm publishing this letter from TPM Reader LS not because she and her family have encountered any great tragedies but because it illustrates the level of life disruption even for people who've been pretty lucky: reasonably comfortable financially, no job loss, no one seems to have gotten badly sick or died of COVID. From LS (lightly edited for...

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Where Things Stand: SCOTUS Decision On Trump Finances Coming Tomorrow

We're already preparing for a busy Thursday morning. 

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Ongoing Site Issues

UPDATE: We are back up. We believe we have a resolved the source of the issue that has been causing systemic site issues over the last week or so. Thank you again for continued support and your patience. —- Since about 5 a.m. ET this morning, you may have noticed a number of technical issues when visiting the site, including: seeing ads despite...

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Making Sense of the (Happy) Mystery of the Declining COVID Death Toll

One of the true mysteries of this stage of the COVID Crisis in the United States is why the death toll from the disease continues to fall, albeit slowly, even after months of plateaued cases and weeks of rapid case growth in most of the country. The White House has glommed on to this disjuncture in a highly dishonest and opportunistic way. But that...

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Where Things Stand: An Endless Quest For Leakers

The pattern has become pretty predictable.

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On the Schools #1

From TPM Reader JS on the whether the schools should reopen in the Fall ... I’m a high school teacher. I teach math in a rural, Title I school. I have very conflicted feelings about the re-opening, but I can tell you there is a very vocal portion of my colleagues that feel like being sent back this fall is being treated like cannon fodder (check...

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School Reopening and Magical Thinking

We're now down to little more than two months before school starts in most of the country and a great many districts, if not necessarily most, are yet to announce definitive plans for how they are going to conduct school in the Fall semester. Indeed, the entire subject of school closures and openings is another example of a country trapped in magical...

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