DeSantis can’t seem to get Florida officials to endorse him He’s an ass. That’s all there is to it: It was supposed to be RON DeSANTIS’ big day on Capitol Hill. Yet DONALD TRUMP managed to overshadow him from almost 1,000 miles away. In the 24 hours leading up to the Florida governor’s much-anticipated meeting with GOP lawmakers, two members from his own state — Reps. JOHN RUTHERFORD and GREG STEUBE — endorsed Trump. A third Floridian — Rep. BRIAN MAST, who was once considered close with DeSantis — told CNN’s Mel Zanona that he’ll soon follow suit. And a few hours later, in a stone-cold act of political brutality, Rep. LANCE GOODEN (R-Texas) walked out of the DeSantis meeting and declared his support for Trump. “It’s a killer!” said one positively giddy Trump confidant, who was on the phone with Playbook when news of Gooden’s surprise endorsement broke.
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Tester knows what he’s doing. Manchin doesn’t. Maybe Manchin should have kept his mouth shut instead of showboating with Kyrsten Sinema. He might not have found himself in this position: Sens. Jon Tester of Montana and Joe Manchin of West Virginia are expected to face among the toughest political environments as the Democratic Party attempts to hold the Senate next year, given that the two incumbents hail from states where President Joe Biden performed poorly against then-President Donald Trump in 2020. But the Montanan is beginning the cycle with a huge popularity advantage, while Manchin remains among the country’s most unpopular politicians — fraught territory in the face of an expected challenge by his state’s popular Republican governor, Jim Justice, according to the Morning Consult’s latest quarterly approval ratings. Surveys conducted between Jan. 1 and March 31 show that 58% of Montana voters approve of Tester’s job performance, making him one of America’s most popular senators.
That’s what Trump is sharing with his followers today. Seriously. Here’s more: And then he whined: His cult swallows it all. Does it concern you that these people are allowed to have driver’s licenses and own assault weapons? There are millions of them. It sure concerns me.
Look at what they’re doing now: Soon after Tyre Nichols’s brutal killing by Memphis police officers in January, the chairman of the city’s civilian review board, James Kirkwood, appealed to the city council to strengthen its oversight of police. “If you slap someone on the wrist for something they’ve done wrong, then covered it up and left it alone, they’re going to do it again,” Kirkwood, a pastor and former police officer, told the council, requesting more money, more staff, and more power to conduct independent investigations. Instead, what little power the board did have may soon vanish, as the Tennessee legislature draws closer to gutting civilian oversight over police in Memphis and other cities in the state.
One of my friends, Aran, just started playing Disco Elysium, the game my son and I have been playing together for months. It’s a role-playing game set in the run-down neighbourhood of an occupied city in an alternate world. You play a detective for the local police investigating a murder who is in such a … Continue reading The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Offered as a public service. This man is the likely GOP nominee for president and it will be close. Dear God. He wants to build concentration camps. Maybe they can build munitions for the war effort against Mexico.
Trump’s suit against Michael Cohen is characteristically stupid From David Corn: Last week, when Donald Trump filed a $500 million civil lawsuit in federal court against his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, legal experts scoffed and guffawed. Trump’s suit accused Cohen of breaching confidentiality and “spreading falsehoods” about the former president—that is, ratting out Trump. The timing of the filing was suspicious, given that it came shortly after Trump was indicted in the porn-star-hush-money case for which Cohen is a key witness. It seemed an act of revenge on Trump’s part. The Florida attorney Trump retained for this effort, Alejandro Brito, is a specialist in franchise disputes (not half-billion-dollar high-stakes cases), and the complaint was written in a bombastic and amateurish manner often associated with many of Trump’s legal efforts. The lawsuit raised the boomerang-ish prospect of Cohen winning the opportunity to submit Trump to the discovery process and obtaining documents and testimony from the former failed casino operator.
Dan Pfeiffer (subscription) explains why MAGA’s usual childishness is actually quite savvy in this case: One of the Super Pacs allied with Donald Trump released a video on Friday morning that took the Internet by storm. The ad uses the potentially apocryphal story of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis eating chocolate pudding with his fingers to attack his past support for cutting Social Security and Medicare. Most Trump World shenanigans are stupid, bordering on self-destructive. That is not the case with this ad, which ran on CNN and Fox News on Friday morning. On the day after DeSantis signed a dangerous six-week abortion ban, it seems trite to care about the manner in which he consumes packaged desserts. While impulse control is a valuable attribute in a Commander-in-Chief who can unilaterally launch nuclear warheads, no one should really care that DeSantis was unwilling to wait for a spoon. Frankly, his pudding impatience may be the most relatable thing about the otherwise painfully awkward, malfunctioning Westworld robot authoritarian.
It’s just a legal license to kill The NY Times had this on the shooting of Ralph Yarl in Kansas City: Chief Graves said that the teenager was expected to give a formal statement to investigators when his injuries allow. She also said that there was a “potential” self-defense or “stand your ground” element that investigators were examining. But the following day, Mayor Lucas said that Missouri’s Stand Your Ground law, which was adopted in 2016, should not apply in this case. “If Stand Your Ground really lets somebody just shoot somebody that rings a doorbell,” he said, “that put the life of every postal worker, every campaigner, every Amazon delivery person at risk in this country.” I’m sure the man believes he was standing his ground because he “felt threatened” when a Black teenager rang his doorbell. Then there’s the man in New York who shot at a car that accidentally turned into the wrong driveway and killed a young woman as the car was turning around. I’m sure he believes he was “standing his ground” too.
Here’s the latest on the debt ceiling from TPM. Sigh. This could easily go sideways. It’s a clown show. And after all, Marge Greene is the shadow speaker of the House. Kevin McCarthy is Speaker in name only: Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has such a tenuous grip on his own conference that the debt-ceiling hostage-taking he is attempting to pull off has all the hallmarks of the bumbling kidnapping capers you see in the movies: -The House GOP can’t agree amongst themselves what to ask for as ransom. -They can’t get the White House to take them seriously enough as a ragtag band of kidnappers to engage in negotiations. -They keep threatening dire consequences for not taking them seriously but are repeatedly hobbled by their own lack of consensus. At this point, McCarthy wants the House to vote by the end of the month on a package that combines the debt ceiling with draconian spending cuts, but he clearly doesn’t have (i) internal agreement on those cuts or on how much to raise the debt ceiling by; or (ii) the votes to push a package through as early as next week.