Over the time I’ve been telling you about the different aspects of our Prime membership program, many of you have written in to ask if you can contribute more to our efforts in addition to subscribing to Prime. Yes, there is a way and we’ve set up a program to allow you to do just that. I actually first announced this program in February. But it’s taken us since then to get all the different parts of it in place to do it right and do it at scale. After the jump I’ll explain the whole thing. Even if you don’t want to contribute – which is fine and which you should feel no obligation to do – you may still be interested to read because as part of this program we will be giving free TPM Prime memberships to all currently enrolled students – high school, college, community college, graduate school. All enrolled students.

People with certain autism spectrum disorders have difficulty reading social cues which most people understand intuitively. Therapists have developed techniques which can help them learn through training what comes effortlessly to others. I can’t help thinking of this when I see President Trump touring Texas with his litany of jarring, tone-deaf or just plain weird comments. But the deficit in this case isn’t social cue cognition. It’s empathy.

With the news that Robert Mueller has a copy of the original letter on James Comey’s firing written by Trump aide Stephen Miller and Trump himself, we need to return to the great mystery of that lost hour on the tarmac on Air Force One.

What am I talking about? Well, with a touch of dramatic flair I’m talking about this odd and increasingly odd over time mystery about what was happening the night President Trump came back from his Bedminster villa after a weekend of stewing about James Comey and then fired Comey 36 hours later.

An unintended effect of Google’s heavy-handed attempt to silence Barry Lynn and his Open Markets program at New America has been to shine a really bright light both on Google’s monopoly power and the unrestrained and unlovely ways it use it. Happily, Lynn’s group has landed on its feet, seemingly with plenty of new funding or maybe even more than it had. I got a press release from them this evening. This seems to be their new site. I’ve already seen other stories of Google bullying come out of the woodwork. Here’s one.

It’s great that all this stuff is coming out. But what is more interesting to me than the instances of bullying are the more workaday and seemingly benign mechanisms of Google’s power. If you have extreme power, when things get dicey, you will tend to abuse that power. That’s not surprising. It’s human nature. What’s interesting and important is the nature of the power itself and what undergirds it. Don’t get me wrong. The abuses are very important. But extreme concentrations of power will almost always be abused. The temptations are too great. But what is the nature of the power itself?

Fascinating bit of news on the Manafort front from NBC News. Manafort’s notes from the infamous Don Jr./Trump Tower meeting with that Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer contain a reference to “donations” which are “near a reference to the Republican National Committee,” as the NBC report puts it. The report also says that the meaning of the notes is “cryptic.”

One of the many oddities – perhaps fascinating side stories – to Trump is how the rise of his son-in-law Jared Kushner was almost designed in the lab for the most epic kinds of corruption. It has become a commonplace over the last year that Donald Trump’s second act as TV star and brand licensor since the early part of this century was heavily financed by Russian money. It’s a commonplace because it’s true. And in itself there’s nothing illegal about that or even wrong. But despite Trump’s need for foreign investment capital, because he had been and remains blackballed by all the big US banks, there’s never been any clear evidence that Trump was in acute and specific need for a big amount of capital around the time he ran for President.

That is not the case with his son-in-law. 

Even some Republicans in New Hampshire are dismayed that the Democratic secretary of state is lending credibility to Trump’s Presidential Bamboozling Commission On Voter Fraud.

Republicans may hold children’s health insurance hostage for tax cuts.

As I discussed below, here’s my podcast interview with Barry Lynn, head of the Open Markets program at The New America Foundation. As the Times reported today, Google appears to have used its muscle as a major funder of New America to shut the program down. Happily, they’ve landed on their feet, apparently with even more funding as an independent group. Here’s our discussion of the critical and too little understood role of monopolies doing everything from driving income and wealth inequality to making your cable and internet service suck.

I want to note an unexpected but fortuitous confluence of events. A number of times over recent months – here and on Twitter – I’ve written about the importance of monopolies and particularly platform monopolies both in the early 21st century economy and in our larger political economy. I know this most directly from how it affects the media industry because it’s the industry I work in. But it affects every part of our economy. And people are starting to realize that monopoly concentration is also a major driver of income and wealth inequality.

With Felix Sater back in the news, here’s a good overview of who Sater is, his criminal background and his longtime role as a top business associate of Donald Trump. And here’s Sam Thielman’s update on Sater. And what’s the connection between Felix Sater and Michael Cohen? Long before they were top Trump operatives, managing building projects with Russian capital, they grew up together in the Russia emigre world of Brighton Beach.

Secretary of Defense Mattis has announced that he is freezing President Trump’s transgender ban until the completion of a study of the topic by an expert panel. In practice this means that currently serving transgender members of the uniformed services may continue to serve.