Mike Rogers

Just a few hours before Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, he told me that he was going to “beat the shit” out of his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, in the November general election. His tactic, he explained in a Detroit farmers’ market yesterday, would be to “staple his [Rogers’s] sins to his forehead.” What those sins were, El-Sayed wouldn’t say. He has in the past criticized Rogers as a "corporate shill" who prioritized pharmaceutical and corporate interests over Michiganders while in Congress.  November looks likely to be a fight between capitalism and communism In truth, although he did scrape to victory last night, it was El-Sayed who almost had the shit beaten out of him by Haley Stevens, a mainstream Democrat.

White House officials confirmed Tuesday that defense secretary Lloyd Austin kept his prostate cancer diagnosis to himself for a month before informing the White House, adding further scrutiny to Austin’s recent failure to inform Biden or the National Security Council that he was in the ICU for several days. Austin, who oversees a department tasked with deterring conflict, received his diagnosis in December, according to a statement from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center officials.

The Biden administration’s latest $3.5 trillion spending proposal continues to attract attention. With a hodgepodge of Democratic priorities ranging from climate change to Medicare expansion, the bill is the more partisan companion of the administration’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan. Of course, another blockbuster story has been distracting attention from these packages — the difficult withdrawal from Afghanistan. Many in Congress continue to be critical of the administration’s handling of the pullout, and some are determined to use the crisis to their political advantage.