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I’ve been wondering this for ages. Is he cooperating? He doesn’t seem to be a presence at Mar-a-lago. Is Trump unhappy with him? CNN takes a look at what he’s been up to: In January, as Kevin McCarthy fought to win the House speakership through 15 rounds of grinding votes and late-night sessions at the Capitol, a few blocks away a group of right-wing holdouts huddled with a familiar but surprising source – former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. A founding member of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, Meadows spent years in the House agitating against GOP leadership, trying to move his party increasingly to the right. Now, Meadows was counseling a new batch of Republican rebels, advising them on specific demands to make and gaming out how McCarthy would react to their maneuvering, according to multiple GOP lawmakers who were part of the planning sessions. The group was so taken by Meadows, at one point they considered nominating him for speaker. Meadows ultimately rejected the suggestion, telling lawmakers he preferred to operate behind the scenes. “We talked to him about being speaker.

Actually it was a joke… That’s what happened. It glitched and went silent and people lost connections and they left and then they started a new “space” and only a few people stuck around so hardly anyone heard this catastrophe of an announcement speech. You couldn’t make up a better metaphor. Oh, and a wiseacre took a shot too: When they got it back up, this was an example of the discussion: The cover of The Daily Mail: Meanwhile, the front runner had this to say: Hookay… It must be prescription drugs. Josh Marshall has the full take: Okay, here’s my take. Obviously the tech snafu at the beginning is going to be the irresistible headline. A major fail. The announcement he read was a mess. Once they actually got down to talking, DeSantis is fairly good at talking about the issues that matter to him. But the issue is what matters to him. This is a way way WAY online minded campaign. And really lives within the keyboard warrior world of the right. What are the issues a winning GOP presidential campaign is going to run on?

On May 27, Henry Kissinger will celebrate his one-hundredth birthday. His centenary couldn’t come at a more symbolic time: Kissinger’s century was the American century, and they’re both coming to a close. Kissinger is probably America’s most controversial and polarising statesman — reviled as a war criminal by his critics, hailed as a master in …

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Trump is hard at work trying to woo voters Trump backed out of the recent campaign event in Iowa and it doesn’t appear that he is planning to leave his beach club any time soon (unless it’s to decamp to his Bedminster club for the summer.) But that doesn’t mean he isn’t campaigning. Here’s what it looks like: Some interesting commentary on all this: “Forcing reality” is a great term. All that bullshit about great polling is nonsense. He posts polls from fly-by-night partisan pollsters and some with no attribution at all that show him winning. The thing is that it works. If he pushes it hard enough and with the back-up of sycophants and partisan opportunists, millions of people will believe him. He has good reason to believe that he can “force reality” on a whole lot of Americans. He’s made tens of millions of them believe that the election was stolen and he is the rightful president. He had help, of course, from the right wing media but really it was almost all him. He “forced reality.” Can he do it again?

Apparently, they just convey quite enough hate and bigotry toward LGBTQ people: On air, Fox News personalities have been endlessly attacking so-called “woke corporations.” But now, Fox News finds itself in the right’s cultural crosshairs — with conservatives accusing it of promoting “trans ideology” in its own workplace. The inciting incident is a Monday morning story in the Daily Signal, the media arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.

BY the way, Texas Attorney General Paxton is under indictment for fraud. And there’s this mysterious activity, also from today These Texas Republicans are very busy upholding the traditional values to which we all wish the country would return: drunken, corrupt white men running everything. That’s just how God intended it.

Look what they’ve done There is no doubt in mind what’s causing that bizarre disconnect: Last year, the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson summarized the national mood succinctly: Everything is terrible, but I’m fine. He was reacting to research published by the Federal Reserve evaluating how confident Americans were about their own finances and the nation’s more broadly. What the data suggested was that there was a gap, that while three-quarters of Americans said their own finances were doing all right, only a quarter said the national economy was doing well. On Monday, the Federal Reserve released the 2022 iteration of those same numbers. When Thompson was writing, there was a 54-point gap between confidence in Americans’ own finances and those of the nation generally and a 30-point gap with perceptions of the local economy. Now, the gap with the local economy is 35 points, with fewer than 4 in 10 Americans saying their local economies are doing well. Only 2 in 10 Americans say the same of the national economy. I include social media in that indictment. There is no material reason that Americans should be so sour about the economy.

If you haven’t been following all the Clarence Thomas news, I’ve been talking with a lot of media outlets about him, the corruption scandal, how it fits with his larger life story, and where things are headed with Thomas and the Court. At the bottom of this post is a roundup of all the interviews and programs and pieces I’ve been involved in. Aside from tooting my own, I’ve for a reason for listing all my media appearances about Thomas. As you’ve probably noticed, there has been a demonstrable uptick in interest about Thomas—and his Black nationalist origins—since last year. It began with his infamous concurrence in the Dobbs decision, which I wrote about at The New Yorker, and it […]

The U.S. does it if they’ve been elected to Congress While President Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy do the debt-ceiling two-step, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen cautions that the government is “highly likely” to run out of money as early as June 1, reports Axios: MAGA Republicans holding McCarthy’s short leash demand cuts to the federal budget, or else. Or else they’ll set fire to the country they failed to on Jan. 6 and likely revoke his speakership, Politico suggests, because “any single disgruntled member [is] empowered to orce a vote on ousting him.” The American Prospect sees the debt limit as an unconstitutional congressional veto on the Executive branch’s responsibility to authority to fulfill existing U.S. obligations: The Constitution gives Congress the power to make contracts. It does not give Congress the power to renege on these contracts. Once Congress has committed the United States to perform a promise, the president’s duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” requires the executive branch to perform.

When you want to go forward, you put it in ‘D’ Something David Roberts (@drvolts) tweeted Monday is worth your attention: As I say over & over, there’s no clearer way to understand the contrast between America’s two political parties than by looking at what they do when they control state gov’ts. Dems solve real problems; Republicans gang up to visit cruelty on vulnerable out groups. Roberts cites the transportation bill the DFL just passed in Minnesota as an example of Democrats solving real problems: Added to an already passed metro-area 0.25% sales tax for housing programs and projects, the seven counties of Hennepin, Ramsey, Washington, Dakota, Scott, Anoka and Carver counties will see a 1% sales tax increase. Taken together, the transportation tax and fee increases would raise an additional $1.48 billion for roads, bridges, transit and other transportation needs in the next two-year budget period and $2.22 billion for the following two-year budget. Memory of the Interstate 35W bridge collapse is still fresh in Minnesota. Rep.