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Jack Texeira was a ticking time bomb He appears to be one of those heavily armed, racist, incels with a propensity for grandiosity and violence. How in the hell did he get that top security clearance?  Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of posting classified documents online, repeatedly tried to obstruct federal investigators and has a “troubling” history of making racist and violent remarks, Justice Department lawyers said in a court filing late Wednesday. In an 18-page memo, released before a detention hearing scheduled for Thursday in a Massachusetts federal court, the department’s lawyers argued that Airman Teixeira needed to be detained indefinitely because he posed a “serious flight risk” and might still have information that would be of “tremendous value to hostile nation states.” Airman Teixeira tapped into vast reservoirs of sensitive information, an amount that “far exceeds what has been publicly disclosed” so far, they wrote.

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said Wednesday that President Joe Biden, 80, will likely die within five years and that his supporters would have to count on Vice President Kamala Harris if he were to win re-election next year. “He announced that he’s running again in 2024, and I think that we can all be very clear and say with a matter of fact that if you vote for Joe Biden you really are counting on a President Harris, because the idea that he would make it until 86 years old is not something that I think is likely,” Haley, 51, said in an interview on Fox News. It’s even less like that Nikki Haley will be in politics in five years so …

This truly shows that DeSantis is not ready for prime time. He sounds confused at best and shifty at worst. I’m not sure what he believes but whatever it is he’s communicating it very poorly: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that it’s in the world’s interest for a cease-fire to be negotiated in Ukraine. DeSantis made the comments during a wide-ranging interview with Nikkei Asia on Tuesday while the Florida governor is in Japan on an international trade mission. In the interview, DeSantis warned that an extended war is possible in Ukraine. “You don’t want to end up in like a [Battle of] Verdun situation, where you just have mass casualties, mass expense and end up with a stalemate,” DeSantis said. “It’s in everybody’s interest to try to get to a place where we can have a cease-fire.” DeSantis also called out Europe, and Germany in particular, for allegedly not doing enough to help Ukraine. “The Europeans really need to do more [on Ukraine]. I mean, this is their continent. The U.S. has provided security for them.

“One of the great renewable resources” “You can’t keep a good homicidal maniac down” is an essential trope from slasher films. In the zombie genre, the lingering question of, “How long can they last?” persists alongside the infectious, shambling dead. Given the Outrage Industrial Complex extant since the 1980s, the same uncertainties apply to MAGA. How long can people addicted to daily outrage keep going before burning out? “What used to rule the day on the American right was ‘owning the libs.’ But now they are owning one another,” writes Peter Wehner in The Atlantic. How long can political meth addicts maintain before finally, beset by paranoia, visual and auditory hallucinations, they crash and/or devour each other? With Dominion’s massive defamation settlement against Fox News, with Tucker Carlson’s ouster from the network, and with looming legal accountability for Donald Trump, perhaps MAGA’s collapse is, if not as imminent as that Fani Willis indictment, on the horizon.

… and created a bunch of jobs. Was it worth it? There is a tendency among some on the left to reflexively adopt the enemy of my enemy is my friend concept when it comes to certain critiques of “neoliberalism” and the Democratic establishment. In my view it’s a lazy kind of thinking and I don’t pay much attention to it. That impulse was on display yesterday when The American Prospect published a lauditory piece on Tucker Carlson and the internet blew up. It was a very bad piece. Today the magazine offered a response and it’s quite good: On Tuesday afternoon, the Prospect posted an article about Tucker Carlson on its home page. Focusing almost solely on Carlson’s opposition to corporate globalism, it missed a very large forest for some very cherry-picked trees. It failed to note the roots of Carlson’s positions, in a broader sense failing to note that opposition to neoliberal orthodoxy is an element of both progressive and fascist politics, and hence, depending on whence it comes, not automatically worthy of celebration.

Jonathan Martin, Politico’s answer to Maureen Dowd (when she was a snotty reporter) says that the GOP is starting to come to terms with the fact that they are stuck with Trump for another round. I have always thought so (barring some intervening event like Trump dropping dead on the golf course.) He addresses the biggest problem they face — the fact that Trump will never concede gracefully if he loses: Just as progressives privately worried that Hillary Clinton and her party’s moderates would never truly embrace Bernie Sanders if he prevailed, many pessimistic Republicans wonder the same about Trump next year. That ridiculous. The test was in 2008 when the delegate count in the primary was super, super close and yet Clinton endorsed Obama at the convention (saying “were you in it for me or were you in it for the country” to her disappointed followers) worked to get him elected and was then brought into the cabinet as Secretary of State. Both of the primaries in 2008 and 2016 were very tough (I hope to never relive them) but to assume that Clinton would never have “truly embraced” Sanders is typical.

This piece by Tim Miller made me laugh. He’s so right: Brokeback Party The Republican party has barely tried anything in their effort to move on and they are already out of ideas. After a few bad weeks in the polls for Tiny D, the party poohbahs are throwing in the towel and getting back aboard the Trump Train.  Whether it’s a pheremonal attraction to his rakish, devil-may-care persona, an addiction to the small donors and the retweets, an unquenchable desire to be invited to a disgusting dinner in a gaudy dining room, a cowardly fear of being shouted down at the airport by obese hillbillies, a boner for making the libs squirm—or a little from columns A, B, C, D, and E—the GOP grownups are signing up to Do It all over again. Like the besotted Jack Twist staring at their mountain man, these Republicans just don’t know how to quit Trump.  In just the past week, the former guy has received endorsements from both the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Steve Daines, and Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor in New York in 2022.

I find it deeply disturbing that the tech industry represents 9% of the U.S. GDP and only five Big Tech companies account for 25% of the S&P 500. Prior to Covid, most of the growth in stock market came from Big Tech (not the Trump Administration…). Now, as the U.S. economy is all sorts of […]

Begins with securing freedoms now under attack President Joe Biden released his opening reelection ad early this morning. First word: Freedom. That’s an excellent start. Personal freedom is a sacred value Democrats must hammer and reclaim from a movement bent on unmaking America. MAGA extremists’ twisted idea of freedom is standing athwart history, yelling “Stop, or I’ll shoot!” Without the “stop.” “We are in a battle for the soul of America,” Biden said four years ago. “And we still are.” Our freedoms are under attack from the right (if you haven’t noticed). Elections are about choices, not poll numbers. So amid Politico’s recent pronouncement that President Biden’s poll numbers are “grim” and NBC’s reminder that Biden is still more popular than Donald Trump, remember that election outcomes hinge on turnout. Voters need a reason to. Michael Tomasky believes Biden has to go for broke. “What can he and the Democrats do to energize people about the 2024 election?” (The New Republic): Biden should do something bigger and bolder.