Hi, this is Josh Marshall, and this is the Josh Marshall podcast featuring Kate Riga.

We've got a lot of talk about today.

We are recording on Wednesday, March 4th.

We have this unfolding war that the U.S. is in with Iran alongside Israel.

And Iran is obviously trying to bring in as many other players as possible.

They're in a difficult bind since it's easiest for them to bring in other countries against

them. But we'll get to that in a minute. We also have the results of a number of elections

from last night, probably the most high profile of which is the

Senate primaries down in Texas. But before we get to that, I want to tell you that yesterday,

we kicked off our annual membership drive here at TPM. I know that probably a majority

of the people who listen to the podcast are members of the website, talking points memo.com. But if you are not, please consider becoming a member. This is super,

super important. This is how we fund what we do. The funding of TPM is something like 90%

from membership and reader fees. So this is really critical. And it goes beyond

just us as a news organization individually. We are in a time where independent news organizations

are especially critical. And what I mean by that are one of the the things I mean by that, is if you look at the

political context that we have today with a president like President Trump, especially how he

has acted in his second term as president, basically no news organization that is owned by a big

diversified corporation can be truly independent because they're too vulnerable to

a rogue president. Regulatory reasons, mergers, they can't afford to offend this president.

And that means that the news organizations that they own can't really either. And we've

seen example after example of that over the last year. So independent news organizations,

news organizations like TPM, who don't answer to any outside force player ownership in, you know, parent ownership or something like that that

...