The MAGA Trashiest Police Report in History
Tim Miller wonders: Is Corey Lewandowski a murderer or does he just pretend he is to get chicks?
🏒 FACEOFF 🏒
What the heck happened to Facebook?
The social media giant was dead in the water for about six hours today.
It will take some time to find out why. But it could be worse, you could have written a take advocating for Amazon and Facebook to have a seat at the table at the United Nations just yesterday.
I am not a tech nerd, but the nerds are doing their thing looking at the domain records and the back-end and the ISPs and DNS files and a lot of people are predicting this is not good and Facebook is in a fair amount of trouble. From a financial standpoint, with the whistleblower story, this was already true. Being down for the better part of a day, of course, adds to that.
This morning, I started my day like many people do: copy and pasting “Happy Birthday!” to people I have not seen or spoke to in a decade or more. Don’t get me wrong, Facebook has a lot of ills: Its allowance of misinformation chief among them. But it did allow us to stay in touch with people we might not have otherwise been in touch with. Which is to say, it wasn’t all bad.
Instagram, which Facebook owns, was down, too.
An outage like this reminds me of the great northeast power outage of 2003. It was funny at first, then immediately scary, cool for maybe a day, and then sort of scary at the end until we knew things were OK.
And the controversy surrounding the site will continue.
In the meantime, you can find me on ICQ, Yahoo chatrooms, and MySpace. Or you can email me!
Leading The Bulwark…
The MAGA Trashiest Police Report in History
TIM MILLER: Is Corey Lewandowski a murderer or does he just pretend he is to get chicks?
🎧 On the Pods… 🎧
Mona Charen on The Future of the Pro-Democracy Coalition
One party has embraced its inner lunatic, while the other plays political chicken. Can the Democrats not implode — and keep the pro-democracy coalition together? Mona Charen joins Charlie Sykes on today's podcast. Plus, we're not living in a new Gilded Age, we're living in the Grifted Age.
THE FOCUS GROUP: Miller versus MAGA
Tim Miller joins Sarah Longwell on The Focus Group to discuss Trump supporters in Ohio and Georgia, two states that feature crucial 2022 Senate races with Trump-endorsed candidates. Hear what they’re thinking about Josh Mandel, Herschel Walker, and more.
For Bulwark+ Members… 🔐
MORNING SHOTS: It's About The Trust, Stupid 🔐
CHARLIE SYKES: What an awful way to write legislation
THE TRIAD: How to Stop Worrying & Love the Infrastructure Disaster 🔓
JVL: This too shall pass.
WEEKEND SHOTS: How Deplorable Is the Claremont Institute? 📩
NEWSLETTER OF NEWSLETTERS: Peloton Addiction Is Real ✉️
From The Bulwark Aggregator…
How an Instagram star’s $7 million mission to rescue Afghan civilians struggled to get off the ground - Jon Swaine, The Washington Post
Anti-Vaxx Parents Don’t Care If You Get Sick - Arija Iverson, The Cut
Trump’s Sprawling Use of NDAs Now Threatens to Humiliate Him - Roger Sollenberger and Asawin Suebsaeng, The Daily Beast
Jan. 6 panel braces for collision with Trump - Kyle Cheney, Politico
Kevin McCarthy’s claim that Biden’s plan will raise taxes on families making over $50,000 - Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post
Nearly 1 in 5 Health Care Workers Have Quit Their Jobs During the Pandemic - Gaby Galvin, Morning Consult
Internal Park Police Emails Reveal More Gun Incidents & Warnings on Jan. 6 - Scott MacFarlane, Rick Yarborough and Steve Jones and Jeff Piper, NBC Washington
In Today’s Bulwark...
Swab Job: Fox Folks Nix Vax
JIM SWIFT: Dozens of Fox News employees in the Washington bureau apparently refuse vaccination, preferring daily nasal swabs.
Facebook Is Not the Town Square
YEVGENY SIMKIN: Stop treating this monstrosity like a useful human connection point.
Iran’s Self-Inflicted Water Crisis
SHAY KHATIRI: Locking up environmentalists while the regime’s policies leave the rivers running dry.
🚨OVERTIME 🚨
I hope you had a good weekend! Ours was spent with family celebrating birthdays, and the weather couldn’t have been more wonderful. We concluded last night with a S’More cookout involving pumpkin shaped Peeps.
Remember, J.D. went to Yale law school. But he sounds like he went to InfoWarsU.
It will take a while to find out about this outage, but “you’ll never convince me otherwise” is quite the take.
Farewell, “Mr. National.” The longtime Washington National may have played his last game. What a tribute. And kudos to Boston for their class. Zimmerman is about a year younger than me, and to think of retirement before 40? Sports ain’t like journalism.
Robert E. Lee? Meet Bruce Lee. A petition to change the name of a county in Florida.
Farewell, Twitter Poet. At Defector, a eulogy for an elderly man who liked spending his time on Twitter sharing his thoughts, poetry, and being mean to sports writers.
What The Pentagon Wars got right.
The Supreme Court Has Gone Off the Rails… At the NY Times, a must read from Donald Ayer.
The Reagan revolution pitted itself against “activist” judges who were seen as following personal whims by altering the law and creating rights not found in the Constitution. Through interpretive tools like textualism and originalism, the Reagan lawyers sought to make the law more predictable and steady — as articulated by John Roberts, the job of justices was “to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”
That revolution, however, has morphed into what it was meant to curtail, as the expanding right-wing majority on the Supreme Court has relied on an array of innovative constitutional rights to undermine traditional governmental actions while discarding longstanding precedents with which they disagree.
My friends…
BONUS EXIT CLIP: What a country!
That’s it for me for today. We’ll see you back here tomorrow. Tech support questions? Email support@substack.com. Questions for me? Drop me a line: swift@thebulwark.com
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Editorial photos provided by Getty Images. For full credits, please consult the article.