How many moral panics in our lifetimes? Five years ago Pride Month was not an issue. And now? Now trans panic is the Satanic ritual abuse panic for the early 21st century. Except the latter never really went away. But it is now joined and amplified by trans panic, fears of “grooming,” etc. CBS News: Protests outside a Glendale school district meeting turned violent as groups began several brawls as administrators discussed recognizing Pride Month, while the public debated gender and sexual identity studies. Demonstrations outside of the Glendale Unified School District building stayed relatively civil throughout the day. However, scuffles between the around 200 protesters and counter-demonstrators began after 6 p.m. School administrators said many of the protesters did not have students in the district. The city’s police department deployed around 50 officers to the meeting to prevent scuffles among the groups. After several brawls, officers ordered the protesters to disperse and threatened to use less-than-lethal force to break up the crowd. The attempts to de-escalate the crowd failed, prompting officers to arrest at least three people.
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Capitalism takes no prisoners This is just breaking. CNBC reports that after little more than a year, CNN CEO Chris Licht is leaving. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said executives Amy Entelis, Virginia Moseley, Eric Sherling and David Leavy will lead CNN until a replacement is found. “Unfortunately, things did not work out the way we had hoped – and ultimately that’s on me. I take responsibility,” Zaslav said in a memo: Licht drew heated criticism in recent weeks after the network hosted a town hall with Donald Trump that was packed with scores of the former president’s cheering fans. While the event drew 3.3 million viewers, CNN’s ratings plummeted afterward. Two days after the town hall, CNN’s prime-time viewership came in below right-wing outlet Newsmax, a much smaller network. But it was an unflattering 15,000-word profile of Licht in The Atlantic – titled “Inside the Meltdown at CNN” – that might have sealed his fate. He apologized to staffers Monday morning, but top brass at CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros.
Now that the debt ceiling has been raised and all the smoke has cleared, it’s worthwhile to step back as assess the political fallout from the first major test of Kevin McCarthy’s speakership — and the clout of the House Freedom Caucus. I certainly didn’t think it would end with a whimper, not a bang, but that’s exactly what happened. Considering how nuts the MAGA Republicans are, it was fair for most of us to assume they would hold McCarthy’s speakership hostage if he capitulated on any of their demands. After all, that was the whole point of the speakership battle back in January — they wanted the ability to dictate what bills would be voted out of the rules committee and come to the floor. And they guaranteed that by loading the committee with Freedom Caucus members and demanding that any one member could file a motion to vacate the Speaker’s chair and require Kevin McCarthy to endure another election.
I don’t know what to say about the following. The person speaking gobbledygook may have had a few too many White Claws. You hve to admit, defending the Saudi human rights record and giving them credit for their sportswashing is pretty bold. Meanwhile, guess who else is going to benefit? The surprising deal on Tuesday ending a civil war in the world of professional golf stands to produce benefits for former President Donald J. Trump’s family business by increasing the prospect of major tournaments continuing to be played at Trump-owned courses in the United States and perhaps abroad. The outcome is the latest example of how the close relationship between Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and Saudi Arabia, whose sovereign wealth fund is the force behind the upheaval in the golf world, has proved beneficial to both sides even as it has prompted intense ethical scrutiny and political criticism. Even as it has injected new money and competition into professional golf, Saudi Arabia has been accused of using its wealth to buff its global reputation and obscure its human rights record through sports.
Can we just get on with it? We keep getting teased that Donald Trump will soon be wearing an ankle bracelet over charges in one or another of the criminal investigations pending against him. So far, nada. Seriously, are we going to have to go Ralph Kramden on Jack Smith’s Ed Norton? (A very old cultural reference, sorry.) Again Monday, nada. CBS News: Attorneys representing former President Donald Trump — John Rowley, James Trusty and Lindsey Halligan — met with special counsel Jack Smith and federal prosecutors at the Justice Department at around 10 a.m. Monday, according to two people familiar with the matter. The meeting took place weeks after Trump’s lawyers had requested a meeting with top federal law enforcement officials. The attorneys for the former president spent just under two hours inside the Main Justice building and declined to comment on their meeting as they left. Trump himself, increasingly anxious under his Swords of Dumbocles, is freaking out in all caps on Truth Social, as Digby noted Monday.
Careful where you point that thing It’s all fun and games until someone loses their beach house or their life’s savings (Axios): Insurability in an age of climate change is a 50-state problem. It’s just growing more actute in California, Florida, Texas, Colorado, Louisiana and New York “as insurers are being forced to re-assess their risk tolerance as climate change leads to more common and severe extreme weather events, says Steve Bowen, chief science officer at Gallagher Re.” Rates in Florida “are expected to rise about 43% to nearly $6,000 in 2023,” according to the Insurance Information Institute. No problem. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican state legislators will just madate that “woke” insurers offer coverage anyway. Because Florida is where capitalism goes to die.
You’ve got to be joking. Philip Bump unravels the looney tunes James Comer and Chuck Grassley jihad against Chris Wray for failing to “turn over” a document they’ve already seen. It’s a complicated story and it’s very, very stupid so take a deep breath: Over the course of 2019, President Donald Trump and his allies were focused on the electoral threat posed by former vice president Joe Biden, the candidate leading in polling for the 2020 Democratic nomination. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani thought he had a useful angle to that end: an allegation from a former Ukrainian official that Biden had leveraged American funding to benefit a company for which Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, worked. That official, Viktor Shokin, met with Giuliani, then Trump’s attorney, to allege that the vice president had pressured Ukraine to fire him to block a probe into the energy company Burisma. The claim didn’t withstand scrutiny. Shokin’s ouster was a multinational effort predicated on the prosecutor’s failure to address corruption.
In case you were wondering about all the “leaks” we’ve been getting from the Mar-a-Lago case — and Trump’s lawyers screaming bloody murder that Jack Smith himself is doing the leaking , here’s an explainer from TPM: The short answer is that the sources of the flurry of stories we’ve seen are witnesses in the case or, more precisely, their lawyers. Trump World figures, in responding and reacting to some of the disclosures, have divulged some new information, too, but that’s been less revealing of the underlying facts than of potential defenses they might use and the public narrative they want to create. None of the big reveals about the MAL evidence from the last few weeks bear much sign of having come from Smith, the FBI, or DOJ more broadly. Kurt Eichenwald, the veteran investigative reporter, had a good thread on the dynamics: As a flood of details of the Trump MaraLago case come out, Trump, commentators etc say Smith’s team is leaking. As someone who has covered these kinds of cases many times, that is almost certainly not true.
In fact, it should be ready in two weeks Ah memories: “My first day in office, I am going to ask Congress to put a bill on my desk getting rid of this disastrous law and replacing it with reforms that expand choice, freedom, affordability,” said Trump on Oct. 25, 2016 a day after he St. Augustine speech, in Sanford, Florida. “You’re going to have such great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost. And it’s going to be so easy.” Fast forward to 2020: Trump began teasing his own replacement plan during his first presidential bid, five years ago. Back then, he pledged to swap out the Affordable Care Act for “something terrific,” details TBD. Over subsequent months and years, Trump boasted about the benefits of his plan. It would be cheaper yet somehow also more generous than Obamacare. It would be “so easy,” even though “nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” It would “take care of everybody,” even as it took literal care away from many.
You can’t make this stuff up. A good piece from Mark Sumner at DKos on some of the weirdness coming out of the Ukraine war these days: On Tuesday, Wagner Group CEO Yevgeny Prigozhin sat down for an interview with pro-Russian military blogger Konstantin Dolgov. Over the course of the discussion, the mercenary leader continued his barbed criticism of Russia’s military leadership, disparaged the sad state of the Russian army, and even seemed to suggest that a general revolt against the government of Vladimir Putin was right around the corner. In the wake of that widely viewed interview, Dolgov was fired from his position at a Russian propaganda network, but Prigozhin … goes on. In what may be one of the most inexplicable chapters of Russia’s labyrinthine political system, Prigozhin still hasn’t had a stairwell accident, an unfortunate illness, or a visit to an open window despite months of increasingly blatant disdain for everyone and everything involved with Putin’s personal war on Ukraine.