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Many things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Do They Never Learn?
JD Vance launched a spurious and baseless attack on Tim Walz’s military service reminiscent of the 2004 Swift Boat attacks that targeted one of John Kerry’s key political strengths: his heroism and valor in Vietnam . But instead of using the last 20 years to reflect and reconsider familiar coverage patterns, some political editors are still playing like a fiddle when it comes to covering GOP attack lines.
The WaPo was probably the worst culprit, with this one title: “Tim Walz’s military record, National Guard departure gets new scrutiny.” He happily spouts Vance’s line of attack with no self-knowledge or historical knowledge of the past two decades of American politics. “New scrutiny” – like its weasel word compadres “raises questions about” and “it is said about” – confers a miraculous virgin birth to scurrilous political attacks even if they are launched right in the open.
To his credit, Politico is much more direct and puts the attack in the wider context with a story titled: “Vance Leads Swift Boat Attack Against Walz’s Military Service.” You can take issue with Politico’s management, but it’s clearly not the same laundry operation that WaPo ran on it.
The irony of the Vance attack and the media coverage is that the originator of the Swift Boat attack against Kerry back in the day was Chris LaCivita, who is now a former Trump campaign adviser.
Can’t Project Memory Hole 2025 so easily!
In addition to undermining Donald Trump’s false claims that he knew nothing about Project 2025, the WaPo has discovered a private flight (photo included) that Donald Trump took with the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, in April 2022, to a Heritage conference where Trump appeared to refer to Project 2025. The work of Project 2025 is was made under the auspices of the Patrimonio Foundation.
Meanwhile, Roberts has sent back the launch of his new book – with a fronted by none other than JD Vance himself – until after the November elections.
At the track
- Kamala Harris is once again belting out a ‘Lock it up’ song, this time at her campaign rally in Michigan:
- At the same Michigan rally, Harris also shut down the hecklers (all of them, look at the 2:12 mark):
Quote of the day
The Holocaust is taught too often purely as a historical event, an anomaly, a moment in time. The students understood what had happened and that it was terrible and that the people who did this were monsters. The problem is that it absolves us of responsibility. Obviously, the mind was sociopathic, but on the scale to happen, there must have been many people in the country who chose to go down that path. You have to make the intellectual leap to understand the reasons for that.
then-Rep. Tim Walz (D-MN), in a 2008 interview with the NYTabout teaching high school students in Nebraska in the 1990s about genocide
2024 Ephemera
- WaPo: Trump complains about campaign as advisers try to focus on attacking Harris
- HOUR: The sudden rise of Tim Walz in the Democratic Party was no accident
- WSJ: The Personal Finances of Tim Walz and JD Vance Couldn’t Be More Different
Biden warns that Trump will not lose in peace
In his first interview since his re-election, President Biden says he is “not at all confident” that there will be a peaceful transfer of power if Trump loses the November election:
The Arizona Grand Jury also wanted to indict Trump
The Arizona grand jury that dropped indictments in the state’s voter fraud probe was interested in indicting Donald Trump as well, but it was discouraged to do so by prosecutors with the state attorney general’s office, according to a new filing this week that defends against attacks that the prosecution was politically motivated. Attorney General Kris Mayes has not publicly addressed the thinking behind that strategy since the filing.
On January 6, the accused was taken into custody after the threatened posts
Prosecutors move to revoke bail for a Jan. 6 defendant who allegedly posted online threats against Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Attorney General Merrick Garland, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Georgia Judge Scott McAfee.
The 2020 election is not over in Georgia
The Georgia Board of Elections voted 3-2 to reinvestigate The 2020 presidential race from Fulton County. The three Republican members who voted to ask the state attorney general to review the results once again were publicly praised by Donald Trump just last weekend.
For legal nerds…
An unusual sequence of events this week in the legal fight to install buoys in Texas on the Rio Grande, a move the federal government is fighting but recently lost in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. The case is now back to the trial judge. Here’s where things get interesting.
After a status conference two days ago, the Texas attorney general’s office took the unusual step of rushing to the appeals court to hit, basically, on what the trial judge had said at the status conference. What prompted a quick order by the trial judge who sent the parties back to court yesterday for a second status conference in which he slammed the attorney general’s office.
Politician legal affairs reporter Josh Gerstein has some choice excerpts from the transcript of the second status conference.
Astronauts can be stuck until 2025
The two astronauts leaving Earth for a planned eight-day mission aboard Boeing’s Starliner two months ago may not return until 2025 as NASA works on a safety plan to have them ride in a Space X vehicle. The astronauts were stuck on the International Space Station due to technical problems with the Boeing craft that raised safety concerns for use for the return trip.
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