Politics Archives

Friday

July 21, 2023

Will Chuck Grassley’s Burisma bombshell finally get the Bidens fired?

A famous clip from recent history: “I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.” That was Joe Biden in 2016. He was relaxing among friends at a chummy event at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ha, ha, ha, tittered the appreciative audience. What a lark! Here was a former vice president of the United States bragging about how he (naughty word) blackmailed an official from a foreign government who was investigating the company on whose board Joe Biden’s son sat. This is old news, of course.

Thursday

July 20, 2023

Michael Bachmann

RFK’s congressional hearing was basically an ouster from the Democratic Party

Thursday’s explosive congressional Weaponization subcommittee hearing didn’t uncover any new evidence on government censorship, but it did serve as an unofficial excommunication of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from the Democratic Party. During the House Judiciary Committee's three-hour hearing, Kennedy was relentlessly characterized by Democrats as a racist bigot spewing misinformation and hate. He was repeatedly denied the opportunity to respond to accusations or even answer questions by members of his own party who no longer claim him. For House Democrats, it seems that Kennedy is the new Donald Trump.

Ben Domenech

Ron’s reset

Welcome to Thunderdome! We are a month away from the first presidential debate, and the big news this week was that Mike Pence is dead. Not legally or physically mind you, and certainly not spiritually, where he’s probably the only living politician ensured of a spot in the heavenly choir, but electorally? The former vice president’s fundraising and donor numbers are so low, he may not even make that first debate... and Doug Burgum will! Listen to the podcast, and stick around to hear why No Labels could actually matter… Reset Ron “All men who run for presidency of the United States are amateurs,” Theodore H. White wrote sixty years ago.

Michael Bachmann

New York discourages migrants from coming

New York mayor Eric Adams is discouraging asylum seekers from coming to the Big Apple by emphasizing the city's expensive cost of living. The mayor’s office released flyers Wednesday asking asylum seekers to consider cities other than New York when choosing where to settle in the country. The flyers, which will be handed out to migrants at the border, warn that “cost of food, transportation, and other necessities in NYC is the highest in the United States.” They also say there is no guarantee of “shelter and services to new arrivals.” In addition to the flyers, Adams announced a new mayoral directive Wednesday that requires single, adult migrants to reapply to stay in the city’s shelter system after sixty days if they cannot find alternative housing.

Michael Bachmann

IRS whistleblowers allege special treatment for Hunter Biden

The Department of Justice denied agents investigating Hunter Biden’s taxes and foreign business deals access to evidence and witnesses, according to two IRS whistleblowers. The House Oversight Committee heard testimony from Special Agent Joseph Ziegler and his supervisor Gary Shapley of the IRS during a six-hour hearing Wednesday. The two agents involved in Biden’s criminal probe expressed frustration at how US attorney for Delaware David Weiss and prosecutors within the DoJ handled the investigation.

Wednesday

July 19, 2023

Oliver Wiseman

No Labels puts its cards on the table

The centrist group No Labels held a coming out party for itself in New Hampshire this week. In an event at St. Anselm College — a regular stop for presidential hopefuls — West Virginia senator Joe Manchin and former Utah governor Jon Huntsman talked up the prospects of a third-party run and the market for a ticket that appeals to the exasperated and underserved middle ground of American politics. Meanwhile, No Labels is getting more specific about what its approach to 2024 will be. Until this week, the group had been noncommittal about exactly which Democratic and Republican candidates it would challenge, and when it would make a call on entering the race.

Ben Domenech

Can we get bipartisan consensus on banning Congress from owning stocks?

Trying to make horseshoe theories of left-right politics happen is harder than it seems. Much as the topic of a political realignment has dominated discussion in Washington since the rise of Donald Trump, there has always been something missing: actual legislation to prove such a realignment is possible as policy. I included this point in my piece on the New Right this spring: One astute observer of national politics, supportive of the New Right’s goals, told me he believes the real fault is the lack of a single clear legislative victory.

Tuesday

July 18, 2023

Michael Bachmann

Trump says he will likely be indicted by the Justice Department, again

Donald Trump said Tuesday that he has received notice he is a target in the federal criminal investigation into the January 6 riot and efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. “Deranged Jack Smith, the prosecutor with Joe Biden’s DOJ, sent a letter (again, it was Sunday night!) stating that I am a TARGET of the January 6th Grand Jury investigation, and giving me a very short 4 days to report to the Grand Jury, which almost always means an Arrest and Indictment,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social site. Two sources with direct knowledge of the grand jury probe confirmed to NBC News that Smith had sent Trump the target letter.

Monday

July 17, 2023

Daniel McCarthy

The once and future president?

Donald Trump is having a better year than Joe Biden, notwithstanding an indictment or two. Both men hold commanding leads in the race for their parties’ presidential nominations. But the comparison works to Trump’s benefit: he isn’t quite an incumbent, while President Biden most definitely is. Not since George H.W. Bush in 1992 has an incumbent president faced a challenge within his own party as serious as the one Biden faces from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. After weeks of unceasingly hostile press coverage, RFK Jr. still holds onto 15 percent of the Democratic primary vote. Meanwhile, polling averages show Biden barely beating Trump in a prospective rematch next year.

Roger Kimball

Operation Get Trump

Humankind, said T.S. Eliot, cannot bear very much reality. A case in point was the chyron that Fox News posted briefly on June 13. That was the day that Donald Trump was arraigned in Miami. The news story featured a split screen. On the left was Joe Biden speaking at an event in Washington for the secretary-general of NATO. On the right was Donald Trump addressing supporters in New Jersey. Underneath ran the unspeakable truth: “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.” That fresh-breeze-of-truth window was open for a total of twenty-seven seconds. Then it was slammed shut. But that was long enough. Our Guardians on the internet erupted in fury. Fox issued a public apology and canned the veteran producer responsible on the spot.

joe exotic OE EXOTIC BY GONZALO LANZILOTTA. PLASTIBOY AND EL PLANTEO

Chadwick Moore

Joe Exotic’s presidential plans from prison

“Do you have any advice for other presidential candidates who might end up in federal prison?” I ask Joseph “Exotic” Maldonado-Passage, of Tiger King fame, on a recent phone call. And I say “other” candidates because Joe Exotic is running for president. “You know what, Trump ought to stop bashing the Mexicans too bad on that border crisis stuff down there because when he gets in here, he’s going to be outnumbered. He’s going to find out they’re going to be his best friend,” Exotic says. “And he better stock up on Big Macs because they don’t serve that shit in here.” After claiming he’d spent two-and-a-half years in solitary confinement, Exotic was recently released back into general population.

Amber Duke

The war on life’s simple pleasures

There are few things better in life than taking a hot shower at the end of a long day, crawling into a freshly made bed and passing out into the deepest sleep ever. There are also few things that ruin this uniquely cozy experience more quickly than stepping into a shower with dinky water pressure. Luckily, I’ve rarely dealt had to deal with that issue because I grew up with a plumber for a dad. We eschewed so-called “water-saving” shower heads in our home in favor of ones with such high water pressure that showers felt like a deep-tissue massage. When I moved out after college, my dad would drop by my various apartments to drill a hole in the non-removable flow restrictors put in shower heads by management.

John Pietro

Learning from the past to stop the next Jordan Neely moment

Daniel Penny is heading back to a New York courthouse today to face charges for the murder of Jordan Neely. Penny, with the help two other bystanders, held Neely, who had a criminal history and mental health issues, in a chokehold after Neely made repeated threats to other passengers on a subway car. Neely died during the incident — and Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg chose to indict Penny for second-degree murder, despite downgrading over 50 percent of felonies to misdemeanors in 2022. Crime has risen in New York City since 2020, and the city has done precious little to address it, though Mayor Eric Adams has been slightly more proactive than his predecessor, Bill de Blasio. Go back a few decades, however, and you find the Big Apple in an almost unimaginably worse situation.

Friday

July 14, 2023

Matthew Foldi

Calls for energy secretary to resign over ethics violations grow louder

The Department of Energy was besieged with ethics complaints this week as energy secretary Jennifer Granholm stares down accusations of corruption and demands from Congress that she fire Christopher Smith, a top aide and former Ford lobbyist. Senator John Barrasso, one of the most powerful Senate Republicans, faulted Granholm for “repeated lapses in upholding basic ethical standards” and demanded she “remove Ford’s lobbyist from [her] advisory board,” while laying out how Ford has basically taken over the Energy Department. “Just over two months after Ford’s top lobbyist was appointed to the [Secretary of Energy Advisory Board], the department announced a $9.

Oliver Wiseman

Lina Khan’s very bad week

Have you had a bad week? Well, take some consolation from the fact that it probably wasn’t as bad as Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan’s. On Tuesday, a federal judge blocked Khan’s attempt to scupper Microsoft’s $75 billion takeover of gaming company Activision. The case is the latest in a series of high-profile defeats for the progressive wunderkind and face of so-called hipster antitrust. On Thursday morning, Elon Musk’s Twitter asked a judge to override an FTC order relating to its data practices and accused Khan’s agency of misconduct and bias towards it. Later that day, Khan appeared in front of the House Oversight Committee, where she received a no-holds-barred grilling from Republican chair Jim Jordan.

Cockburn

Handsiness or assault? Fondling in the post-#MeToo era

“If I wanted to, I could have had sex with people all the time,” said Kevin Spacey in court this week. Cockburn isn’t sure how the disgraced actor thought that would land during his cross examination for his London court case, where he pleaded not guilty to a dozen charges that include sexual and indecent assault counts and one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent. During his time in the witness box, the House of Cards actor had his final chance to convince jurors that he never assaulted anyone. The outcome of this case could affect whether he’s able to make a career comeback after sexual misconduct accusations. It isn’t exactly going swimmingly so far.

Cockburn

Is Kamala right about airplane bathrooms?

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day — and Vice President Kamala Harris may have finally met her moment. The immigration-czar-slash-voting-rights-activist-slash-common-sense-gun-safety-proponent is also now taking some work off transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg's plate as he wrangles infant twins. "This issue of transportation is fundamentally about just making sure that people have the ability to get where they need to go," Kamala said of her new issue set Tuesday. First up? Expanding tiny airplane bathrooms. "The majority of domestic flights do not have accessible restrooms. This is absolutely unacceptable," Kamala tweeted. "Our administration will soon announce a solution to help end this inequity." https://twitter.

Teresa Mull

An eye-opening trip to the local ICE processing center

I recently had an astonishing trip to the former correctional center in my town that entered into a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to become a processing center right after President Biden took office and issued an executive order cracking down on private prisons. The processing center is a big job creator in this rural place — and the people employed there, by all accounts I’ve heard and witnessed, are dedicated, hard workers. Yet what their jobs entail is astonishing. At a community outreach luncheon, I learned that as blue states refuse to allow ICE facilities to operate, central Pennsylvania has become a “hub” of the northeast for detainees. We receive immigrants from Maryland, New York, New Jersey and occasionally Ohio.

Thursday

July 13, 2023

Ben Domenech

Care for a little roleplay?

Welcome to Thunderdome, where this week we finally got to hear some fundraising numbers from the candidates and campaigns who were none too eager to share them... including a number who may not make it to even the first debate stage. The guys discussed this by engaging in a little bout of roleplay in the latest podcast, because who hasn’t wanted to pretend to be Doug Burgum for a day? Listen and learn, and stick around to hear why Democrats should be very nervous about RFK’s independent path... The Carolinians overperform One of the biggest questions heading into this quarter’s fundraising reports was what the performance would look like among the top three non-DeSantis candidates — Mike Pence, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott.

Wednesday

July 12, 2023

Oliver Wiseman

Biden catches a break on inflation

Things are looking up. Today began with some very good economic news in Washington: Labor Department data shows inflation falling to a two-year low. The consumer price index rose 3 percent in the twelve months to June. That is a steep fall from the 9.1 percent price rise in the twelve months to June 2022, and perhaps the clearest sign yet that the US is on course to tame inflation while avoiding a recession — the soft landing that Joe Biden, Jay Powell and every other policymaker in Washington has been praying for. Core consumer prices increased by 0.2 percent in June, the smallest single-month increase since August 2021 and an indicator that the pressure on prices is easing.