Today is the 10th Anniversary of Josh Marshall’s first post at Talking Points Memo. They started celebrating yesterday. I’ve been a reader of TPM for years and did not want the day to pass without singing their praises.
Back when the Abramoff Scandal broke I was looking for outlets to report on untold stories that I discovered as I went though my collection of Abramoff related documents. By 2005 these documents included billing records from Team Abramoff for work done to protect sweatshops on the Marianas Islands, a US Territory 4o miles North of Guam.
I had been talking with lots of reporters, but most of them were only interested in isolated aspects of the scandal. Josh was different. In September of 2005 he had broken the Abramoff Scandal code:
On paper, Jack Abramoff was a lobbyist. And he made a great deal of money for himself. But if you think of Jack Abramoff as just a crooked lobbyist most of the facts coming out about what he did don’t make a great deal of sense. He was a key player in a very big political machine and he was managing a slush fund.
Look at the pattern.
Notice how all Abramoff’s clients seemed to get ‘bilked’ out of large sums of money that ended up going to other conservative foundations, consulting firms, Ralph Reed, lobby shops, Grover Norquist, astroturf organizers, politicians, etc.? All of them part of Washington’s Republican infrastructure?
Jack was just a 25-year bag man for the GOP and that is what the scandal was all about.
I got in touch with Josh and met him on a trip to New York along with one of the first reporters he hired, Paul Kiel. I gave Josh hard copies of lots of documents and more as PDF technology and online document sharing sites made the transfer and searching of documents easier. Josh launched TPM Muckraker and gave the endless stream of corruption stories a home. In the coming years, Josh and TPM broke many scandal stories about Abramoff and other dealings of the shady side of politics. I helped with a few of the Abramoff related stories, but Josh, Paul and the rest of the team always found more details than I had in any lead I gave them. The reporting and follow through has been invaluable. To this day they are one of the very few news outlets that continues to follow scandals (and what the scandal figures are doing now) long after the initial excitement has worn off.
TPM is an important resource and excellent journalism. That entire Bush scandal concerning firing and hiring DOJ AGs and staff for partisan purposes and vendettas would never have come to light without the relentless reporting of TPM. Josh also took a lead in the effort to fight Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security. There has been many, many other stories and there will be more.
So tonight I raise a glass to Josh and his Team, past and present. Congratulations and a big Thank You for all you’ve done.
Cheers
dengre
sherifffruitfly
I’ll always remember how TPM sort of took the lead for the media on defeating bush’s Social Security privatization efforts.
stuckinred
we were just talkin about you! You know that Gwen and Jared are both in run-offs?
asiangrrlMN
Congrats to Josh and TPM. May they keep fighting the good fight.
Elia
perhaps the most valuable site on the bloggaleft
for a bunch of DFH they sure can report the hell out of a story
MikeJ
TPM was one of the few sites that you have to register for with a real email address that I ever bothered with. And then they spammed me. Went into my profile and changed my email address to [email protected] and haven’t been back since.
Dennis G.
@stuckinred:
Somehow I thought the race was over and that Gwen lost and Jared won, but I always forget that old Jim Crow era run-off system they have in Georgia. It was design to be sure that the white guy always won.
I checked in with the ABH and Flagpole the other day to read the stories about the fire at The Print Shop and I didn’t see any mention of a run-off.
Well, I hope they both win. When is the runoff vote?
Cheers
Jim, Once
I think someone needs to proffer a simple thank you to Josh, TPM, and you, Dennis. Thank you.
stuckinred
@Dennis G.: It’s the 30th. Charlie Maddox, one of the candidates who is African American, endorsed Nancy Denson today. Gwen is working her butt off so we’ll see what happens. There is a debate this week and the two of them have not spoken ill of the other so that should be interesting too.
Don’t know what they are going to do with the Print Shop.
J. Michael Neal
I’m of two minds about TPM. As pointed out, they do a lot of good work. However, they can also focus on salacious stories that have little political content and cover them with a HuffPo level of complete shamelessness. I forget which incident set me off to write a very angry letter to Josh that his site should be better than that sort of bottom feeding. I’ve seen less of that lately, so maybe I wan’t the only one.
Also, David Kurtz is an over-the-top concern troll. Too.
Dee Loralei
I’ve been a Josh fan since, wow, almost 5 years now. But yea, they were the only folks to actually focus on Abramoff, on the Attorneys General firings, and a lot of the Plame stuff. And doggedly they followed those leads. Hell they actually made the attorneys general firings into a story. Because the first day, there was a blurb that such an AG had been replaced. Next day another note that another AG had lost his job. The next day another… somewhere Josh said ” This is weird, what’s up wit dat?” And then they found five and then six, seven, eight… etc.It was breaking news, it was weird and unheard f, it was important, and it was because Josh and his reporters and their readers started putting things together, and then it became a story and then it became a cause. Watching it all fall out in real time was amazing, especially after the fact when you realize how pervasive and wide-spread it was, how far-reaching and how chilling it was to the supposed desire for a non-political branch of our politics. It was ugly stuff and TPM was tenacious in figuring it out.
I remember many of those Friday afternoon news/ document dumps when a bunch of TPMers would start reading and posting interesting and pertinent info to the site. As far as I can tell Josh was the first to actually utilize his reader’s in that way. Giving us ownership of our news and our government. It was very empowering.
Josh created something new and different and very special. He deserves all sorts of kudos for that. They were amazing, in the opposition. And whatever problems I might have with them right now pale in respect to that.
But hell , in retrospect, Josh Marshall created a damned good thing and I will forever be grateful .He and his commentariate kept me sane during some of the bleak years when I thought I was the only person on the planet who felt the way I did.
So mazel tov, Josh, and thank you.
ktward
An i-world of so many news/blog options renders choice not only ridiculously difficult, but it remains in constant flux.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve painfully culled my iGoogle pages. (There are only 24 hours in a damn day, after all.)
But I’ve never cut TPM’s feed.
Mebbe Josh don’t know it, but that’s saying something.
DaddyJ
I completely agree; TPM and JMM deserve kudos, particularly for their role in the SS privatization fight.
Back in the early oughts, I was a regular reader of Salon. As I recall, Salon did an article on this growing phenomenon called “blogging” and how it offered an alternative to the Bush-buffing being practiced in the established media. I believe TPM was one of the blogs mentioned. TMP lead me to Atrios, Digby, the Sadlys, eventually here.
Amusingly, Instapundit was another of the “independently-minded” blogs touted in that article. Heh, indeedy!
Julia Grey
I’ve never been spammed by TPM, myself*. Maybe they did that earlier on, but no longer?
Anyway, it’s my first stop of the day. Always something interesting going on over there!
ETA: * I do get a headline once a day, but I’m pretty sure I signed up for that on purpose.
Yutsano
Omedeto gozaimasu Josh-san and the folks at TPM! May the hair on his toes never fall out.
CJ
Nobody can deny.
Evolved Deep Southerner
Dennis, stuckinred mentioned upthread that your ears ought to have been burning a few minutes ago.
By God, I’m glad I can still enjoy your work.
FlipYrWhig
TPM is very good for news — and Josh even occasionally returns emails I write picking at his analysis of something or other. They do original reporting like nobody else in the blogosphere. But I do think they sometimes pick up some weird emphases, like the thing about the House Democrats’ leadership fight recently. They sometimes do slip into HuffPo-esque “spot the gaffe, speculate on what it means” meta-mode. And when Josh prints reader emails, egad are some of his readers the worst kind of Eeyores. Oh, and his reader-community stuff is bananas. Yglesias has those hardcore weirdos, Digby has the gloom-mongers, Atrios is like the monkeys from one zoo got loose in another zoo, but the TPM commenters, yikes.
But TPM, Benen, and here are the circuit I run. Plus Pandagon when I’m feeling like other kinds of news and debate. Sadly, No has been on the downswing lately. I used to be there more than anywhere else, but I’ve cut way back.
SiubhanDuinne
Nice tribute, dengre. Congratulations to Josh and TPM.
A bit O/T for asiangrrlMN and any others who might be interested, but tomorrow’s NYT has a nice editorial shout-out to NaNoWriMo in a piece called “Word After Word After Word.” (I would have put this in the Open Thread next door, but the thing has gone to well over 200 posts [at least six of which, or approximately half the total bandwidth, are courtesy of one plagiarizing troll.])
Buffalo Rude
Cheers to TPM!
MikeJ
@Julia Grey:
March 1, 2010. I had been a member on their old blogging software, stayed on when they switched to their newer platform, was a member for several years. I never signed up to receive anything, and they never sent anything. Years and years of good behavior.
March 1, 2010 they started spamming me. I sent them email asking WTF and never heard back. So I changed my contact info and null routed them.
J. Michael Neal
@FlipYrWhig:
Hey, just because I post there sometimes is no reason to slander the rest.
Yutsano
OT but GO BULLDAWGS!!
(no not them, the ones from Fresno.)
Steeplejack
@Yutsano:
They are fucking up Nevada. Got some
skankylurid red uniforms, though.J. Michael Neal
@Yutsano: The Bulldogs swept Michigan Tech this weekend. With BU tying lowly Merrimack twice, they might get the #1 ranking on Monday. I’m impressed. After a decade and a half in oblivion, the UMD hockey team has been really tough the last few years. I’m not supposed to say this as a Gopher fan, but I enjoy that they are good.
Looking at their roster, I don’t see any players from Fresno, though.
J. Michael Neal
Yay! Finland took third place in the Four Nations Cup! Yeah, that doesn’t sound like much, but everyone knows going in that the US and Canada will play for first and Finland and Sweden will play for third.
Noora Räty gets the win. Go Gophers!
Yutsano
@Steeplejack: Skanky is good. No haz TV so can’t really comment. Just saw the score on ESPN.com and was like yeah baby.
J. Michael Neal
Where the hell is everyone? I’m awake, I’m bored, and I’m lonely. I’m counting on you people to keep me amused.
Yutsano
@J. Michael Neal: :: tosses caramel corn ::
That help? Though you got the mimic of wifey’s whines down pat I must say.
MattR
@J. Michael Neal: Busy working. Though I think I am finally done with my part until they call me in 2 hours to restart things. Yay.
FlipYrWhig
@J. Michael Neal: That comment section is chockablock with crazy people. Don Williams, Morgan Warstler, Steve Sailer himself… trainwrecks coming from all angles.
J. Michael Neal
@Yutsano: Thanks. I’m thinking of trying to break into the field of impressions.
Yutsano
@J. Michael Neal: We all start with a dream and a plan.
J. Michael Neal
@FlipYrWhig: No kidding. I wonder why I bother. If all I want is abuse, I can get that here.
J. Michael Neal
@Yutsano: Hey, I applied for another job with your employer. The bastards.
Yutsano
@J. Michael Neal: What division? I know LB & I is hiring all over the damn place.
Steeplejack
@Yutsano:
The game is on ESPN2. Got it on in the background while I wait for SportsCenter or a 1950s Japanese mutant insect fear film on Cable Channel Z.
Yutsano
@Steeplejack:
Damn. If it was subtitled and I was there I could make fun of the translations.
J. Michael Neal
@Yutsano: It’s an internship in Small Business. I have no idea what the official name of the division is. It’s clearly meant for someone who is still in school, as it talks about the way they will schedule around your classes. I have no idea whether having graduated will be a positive or a negative.
I’m just frustrated. I got together with some of my former classmates last week. Listening to all of them talk excitedly about the high paying jobs they’ve started, while I’m just hoping that Accountemps can find me a short term position that pays $14/hour was really painful. I don’t begrudge them their jobs, but I don’t want to hear about them.
Yutsano
@J. Michael Neal: Small Business/Self Employment. Okay. If it’s an internship I’m not exactly certain how that will work. There’s several GS-6 positions open in LB & I, I’m not ready to jump out of ACS just yet, but at some point in the future I’ll be moving that direction because International is under them.
J. Michael Neal
@Yutsano: At the moment, I’d very much prefer to stay in Minnesota. It wouldn’t be fair to uproot Eddie in what are presumably his last months.* Also, there are very few states where I’ll be able to get health insurance if something goes wrong and I leave whatever job I get. I don’t want to give up Minnesota residency until the rest of the health care bill kicks in.
GregB
Exclusive footage of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus at their first meeting.
Praise Jeebus.
Yutsano
@J. Michael Neal: First thing that jumped out at me on USAJOBS was a legal assistant position in St Paul. I think you’d qualify for it based on what they showed there. Good luck regardless.
@GregB: Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot??
Steeplejack
@Yutsano:
Not necessary. The subtitles or voiceovers are usually self-mocking enough in their ineptness/badness.
I still have funny/weird memories of seeing Prince of Space on Sunday morning in a hotel room in the French Quarter in New Orleans in the early ’80s. Flashback freakout when it turned up later as an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
J. Michael Neal
@Yutsano: What really pisses me off is that they offered me a position two years ago. I got a call at 8:00 in the morning, and they said they wanted to hire me. I said, “Great.” Then she said she just wanted to be sure that I had taken advanced accounting. I tried to figure out what that meant. It turned out that they wanted me to have had a class with “Advanced” in the title. I told her that I hadn’t, and that I’d sent a copy of my transcript in with the application, so they should know exactly what classes I’d taken.
She withdrew the offer, and I haven’t been offered one since.
Yutsano
@Steeplejack:
I’m sensing a bizarre twisted sordid tale here, but maybe I’ll let you fill in the blanks. Trust me you don’t want me getting creative here. :)
Yutsano
@J. Michael Neal:
Welcome to the IRS. But trust me: assume nothing. If someone asks you for information, even if you see it on their fucking desk, offer to give it to them. There are so many forms and papers flying around everywhere even nowadays that things get lost or confused like you wouldn’t believe. Hell I just closed a case on Friday open since 2008 that shouldn’t have been opened in the first place.
Xenos
@GregB: I am in favor of ecstatic mob scenes in the course of religious worship, but that has got to be the most dreadful pack of dorks I have yet seen. How can you dance yourself to a transcendent state if you have no rhythm? It looks like a Tourette’s convention.
They probably forgot to get drunk or take some drugs first.
J. Michael Neal
@Yutsano: My big thing is, why the fuck are you offering someone a job if you aren’t sure that they meet the qualifications? Mostly, I think the hiring process at the IRS is badly screwed up, and they’d be much better off if they let the district offices (you know, the people who actually interviewed me) make the decisions rather than just taking notes and sending it all to Washington.
Yutsano
@J. Michael Neal: That’s how it worked in my division: everything went through Fresno except for one FAX that went to OPM in DC. The IRS is a huge organization though, it wouldn’t shock me if another unit did it in some bizarre fashion like that.
J. Michael Neal
@Yutsano: I think it has more to do with the specific program I was applying to, which has some acronym I can’t remember, but is specifically targeted at recent graduates and bringing them in as trainee revenue agents. The same thing happened with the position I applied for in Boston over the summer.
Where’s your better half?
Yutsano
@J. Michael Neal: Writing or napping most likely. If I were a betting man I’d go with the former, she’s busy doing her writey thingie, I choose not to interfere with that.
EDIT: There is the slight possibility she’s hunting for late night Chinese food, however I have no confirmation of that fact.
frosty
Glasses have been raised. The thing that made me most impressed with TPM was the US Attorney scandal. Lots of local news organizations were reporting bits of the story.
TPM crowd-sourced the journalism, had their members email what was going on in their neck of the woods, and put together a nationwide pattern..
There’s no other way the story could have come out. No for-profit news organization could afford to put enough reporters in enough locations to get the info to see the pattern.
Here’s for another 10, 20, whatever years.
Yutsano
Stupid question for dengre and anyone else: does TPM turn a profit? If so, then frosty may just have solved how news will evolve in the future: the national networks like TPM will aggregate what the smaller community news organizations are sussing out. I wonder if this model is indeed adaptable.
Steeplejack
@Yutsano:
Trust me, you don’t need to get creative. I love New Orleans, not least because it’s the best eating city in the country, and I used to go there a lot when I lived in the deep South. (Haven’t been since Katrina.) Everything is exotic there (to me). So it was weird but normal to get up in the morning after a late night out, flip on the TV and see this strange, grade-Z movie that turned out to be Prince of Space. I think we (former future Mrs. Steeplejack and I) went for beignets at the Morning Call afterwards. Good times. I think I need a Pat O’Brien hurricane now.
ETA: Movie starts at 5:50 in clip.
frosty
@Yutsano: TPM does indeed turn a profit. Josh Green at the Atlantic had a nice post on the early days, starting from blogging at Starbucks. He was most impressed at how Josh had turned TPM into a business that could sustain itself.
Yutsano
@Steeplejack: I watched the whole thing. I heart direct translations from Japanese, there are just some concepts that make zero sense to poor wittle American brainz.
@frosty: That’s sweet. Journalism may yet survive the death of the newspaper.
MikeJ
@Yutsano: My guess is that a big part of is Josh Marshall is happy enough making a living and doesn’t have unrealistic ideas of what constitute success.
No media company in the world would put up with a property plodding along, earning enough to pay everyone and garnering a good reputation.
If he wanted, Josh could really turn that place around. Bring in Tina Brown and lose $30 million per year. Then he’d be big time.
Ruckus
This may be the last place I check into and the one I spend most time on but TPM is the first place I go every day. It is real reporting, something we see little enough of any more.
Napoleon
I agree whole heartedly.
HB TPM
mai naem
I like TPM for its reporting but have never liked the site. Not in the beginning and not now. Its just unattractive,clunky and takes longer to load than any other blog I go to. Josh really should be a regular on any number of cable shows for the reporting TPM does but ofcourse he isn’t because he’s a liberal. And yes, TPM does have the wackiest commentariat.
SBJules
@Julia Grey:
Baloon Juice has become my first stop of the morning, but ever since I heard Josh on Al Frankin’s radio show, I’ve been a regular reader. Happy Birthday & many, many more!
Quiddity
@sherifffruitfly: But TPM hasn’t been as vocal this time around defending Social Security. I don’t understand why that’s so.
liberal
@J. Michael Neal:
AFAICT this is kind of a trend, and the site has gone way, way downhill. It’s still on my primary list of blogs I read, but I’ve lost most of my respect for it.
Moreover, they talk as if they have real funding for the site, and I can’t imagine where they’re putting the money.
Too bad.