No shame. But you knew that. The right is addicted to daily outrage like a meth addict to crank. It is the fuel without which Tucker Carlson has no show and the Matt Gaetzes cannot show out. There is no close-up magic artistry to it. That their daily performances of outrage are strained and obvious is of no more concern than a dope-slap is to fans of the Three Stooges. Subtlety is not part of the shtick. But gas stoves? The GOP once felt obliged to dog-whistle its prejudices. But that was pre-Trump. Nowadays MAGAs wear their animus on tee shirts or fly it from the back of a white Dodge Ram. That said, a whispering campaign on the part of the GOP against one of their own almost evokes nostalgia for the Karl Rove-era (Politico): As Harmeet Dhillon seeks the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, opponents have begun raising concerns about her Sikh faith — a development that has left some members of the committee unsettled. Two supporters of Dhillon, who is challenging incumbent RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, told POLITICO that McDaniel allies have brought up Dhillon’s religious affiliation with them in recent weeks.
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Budgets are moral documents The cartoon at the top has stayed with me since I first spotted it. “This is my list of things I don’t want others to have” describes in a dozen words the conservative governing philosophy in a way that might otherwise require a doctoral dissertation. The entire Jim Crow era was based upon keeping black people from sharing in freedoms, privileges and power white people enjoy. New Jim Crow voting restrictions being passed today are based on it. Every time a conservative utters the phrases “real American” or “real America” they are making a claim to privileged status they believe is their birthright. Others equally American, at least in theory, must prove themselves worthy in a world where conservatives claim a veto over their advancement. Typically, whenever conservatives feel their social status threatened. Republican budget priorities and fixation on tightening election rules reflect a narrow, exclusionary view of who counts as a citizen and who does not. Catherine Rampell examines the new rule set House Republicans just passed and finds the same bias towards the right’s kind of people.
It's always someone else's fault – according to the party that has been in power for 13 years (although not according to its cheerleaders), writes Iain Overton
Mystery remains around a Government fund that invested heavily in developing countries where a company run by Conservative Party donor also has significant investments
Quatro coronéis da cúpula da corporação suspeita de ser cúmplice de terrorismo são próximos de Jorge Oliveira, presenteado por Bolsonaro com cargo no TCU.
The post PM do Distrito Federal é comandada por colegas de turma de homem de confiança de Bolsonaro appeared first on The Intercept.
I mentioned the possibility of the Democrats and some swing district Republicans using the discharge petition as a way to get the debt ceiling raised against the will of the GOP House majority. It’s not a very promising route unfortunately. Semafor’s Joseph Zeballos-Roig explains(subscription only): The discharge petition may be ill-suited to raise the debt ceiling, which carries a hard deadline before causing economic calamity. The process for forcing a vote is clunky and time-consuming and some experts believe House leadership could throw up additional roadblocks along the way. “It’s kind of like trying to do open heart surgery with an ax,” Josh Huder, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University, told Semafor.
A dispatch from red America: Missouri has a lot of problems, but if you were in the statehouse today, you would have thought the biggest one was what female legislators wear. Peter Merideth (D-St. Louis) shared the news on Twitter, “Debating the house rules on the floor today, and the first amendment offered by a Republican is about making stricter the rules of what women have to wear in here.” “Yep, the caucus that lost their minds over the suggestion that they should wear masks during a pandemic to respect the safety of other is now spending its time focusing on the fine details of what women have to wear (and specifically how many layers must cover their arms) to show respect in this chamber,” Merideth added. He also clarified that lawmakers “thought a couple women last year didn’t dress nicely enough for their standards.” I guess there was quite a debate but they ended up compromising by allowing women to wear cardigans to make sure their arms are covered if they didn’t want to wear a jacket. I wonder if they consulted with the Iranian Ayatollahs.
Closer than we knew Vanity Fair looks at the 13,000 addendum to the new paperback release of NY Times reporter Michael Schmidt’s Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President featuring a long profile of former Chief of Staff John Kelly: Last March, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Donald Trump reportedly told a room full of Republican National Committee donors that the US should “put the Chinese flag” on a bunch of military planes and “bomb the shit” out of Russia—and afterward, “we say, China did it, we didn’t do it, and then they start fighting with each other, and we sit back and watch.” Maybe you remember this, because it was a fucking insane thing to say. Or maybe you don’t, because Trump has said and done fucking insane things on a near-daily basis for many years now. Either way, it seems that this was not a one-off, and that suggesting the US attack another country and blame it on someone else is reportedly very much the 2024 presidential candidate’s thing.
I’m not talking about Prince Harry That’s the person the media was touting as the moderate, sober choice to replace Kevin McCarthy if he didn’t get over the line on the speaker vote. He is much more popular in the caucus than McCarthy and you can see why. He’s nuts and so are they. Here’s an example of Scalise’s rhetoric from December: “Today’s final report is further proof that Democrats’ sham panel never was about impartial oversight—it was purely about politics. Instead of conducting impartial oversight of the federal government’s pandemic response, Democrats worked overtime to cover up President Biden’s failure to protect Americans. Democrats refused to investigate after we exposed the Biden White House manipulating the science to allow a radical teachers union to rewrite CDC guidance so they could make it easier to shut down schools. They refused to investigate the origins of COVID-19 and efforts by Dr. Fauci to downplay the Wuhan lab leak theory.
On the news that AG Garland has appointed a Special Counsel to investigate Joe Biden’s classified documents here’s Donald Trump’s response: The DOJ took months to decide to name a Special Counsel for Donald Trump’s Mar-a-lago but it only took a month or so to do it in Biden’s case. I suppose you might think that means the Biden case looks much worse than the Trump case ever did but that would be stupid. Garland did it because of politics and I suppose I don’t really blame him. It does fry me that they continue to think that naming Republicans (or someone who’s been out of the country for 5 years as Jack Smith has been) would somehow appease Trump and the GOP. They have made it an unofficial rule that only Republicans can be Special Counsels whether the subject is a Democrat or Republican and it hasn’t helped to legitimize these probes on the right one bit. They only care that a Democrat is taken down and if the prosecutor fails to do that they are either liberal symp or incompetent. Look at what they said about rock-ribbed Republicans James Comey and Robert Mueller. As for Trump, well just look at those posts above.