House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Fox this week
“A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.” — Michael Kinsley
In an interview on Fox earlier this week, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the current House majority leader and presumptive next speaker, tacitly admitted that the true mission of the current (and eighth or ninth) Benghazi investigation is to bring down Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers.
The company he keeps – from left: Paul “Big Paul” Castellano, Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, Roy Cohn, and Trump
It is the most under-reported story of the summer, and the mystery is why. Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner, is well known to have had ties to notorious crime figures like Paul “Big Paul” Castellano, head of the Gambino crime family, Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, boss of the Genovese mob, and others of their ilk in New York City, Philadelphia and New Jersey.
Click the photo to see the full, uncensored photo of future First Lady Melania Trump posing in 2000 for a photo spread in British GQ
Update May 2016: Google informed us that it considers this photo of the wife of Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s nominee for president, to be obscene and ordered us to remove the photo because this page features Google advertising. You can see the full, uncensored photo here.
Original story:
Now that we have a Republican frontrunner who is an infamous serial adulterer and whose current wife once posed nude for a magazine in his private jet, can we say that the GOP’s 35-year masquerade as the party of “family values” is officially over?
Imagine for a moment that photos had emerged of a wife of a past Republican frontrunner — Ann Romney or Cindy McCain, for example — supine on a fur rug in the altogether. Their husbands’ campaigns would have been over faster than Rick Perry could say “Oops.” But this is Teflon Don, so even evangelicals are apparently okay with what they’d otherwise consider a sinful display.
And then there is the candidate himself. Just 14 years after impeaching Pres. Clinton over a sex lie in civil lawsuit, the Republicans are now giving majority support to a notorious philanderer who openly carried on an affair with wife number two while still married to wife number one, and may have started seeing number three (the one who posed nude) while still married to number two.
Once he emerged as the early front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination, this summer, his airport comings and goings posed a delicate staging issue: a rogue wind off the tarmac could render his comb-over fully erect in front of the campaign paparazzi. So, in Laredo, Trump débuted a protective innovation: a baseball hat adorned with a campaign slogan that he recycled from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 run for the White House — ‘Make America Great Again!’ The headwear, which had the rigid façade and the braided rope of a cruise-ship giveaway, added an expeditionary element to the day’s outfit, of blazer, pale slacks, golf shoes—well suited for a mission that he was describing as one of great personal risk.
Regardless of whether Clinton survives her primary battle with an ever growing list of potential foes, Republicans ought to think hard about the reasons why Bush might be the easiest of the serious GOP contenders for the Clintons to beat. And it’s not just because they’ve done it before. … Think the Clintons have political baggage? Well, so do the Bushes. And Jeb is being crushed under the weight of it. So far, Bush evokes as much allure among the Republican rank-and-file as a Dixie Chicks concert on Earth Day. There’s a reason almost no one has commented on Jeb Bush’s performance in the first GOP debate. He wasn’t terrible. He wasn’t great. He was just, well, there. Mediocrity is apparently the plan.
The ones where he hits the kids smack in the face are the best, but they’re all good. You’d think Markie Marc would learn after the first couple of passes how to do this thing.
Always Wrong: PNAC founders, from left, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul WolfowitzFive days after calling his brother George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq a “mistake” and saying he “wouldn’t have gone in,” Jeb Bush announced to a war-weary nation that he’s running for president not just to become the third Bush in the White House, but also to be the third Bush president to invade the Middle East.
In a speech at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif., yesterday Bush announced essentially that, if elected, he would revive the Bush Doctrine, the plan concocted by George W. Bush, Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, and other neoconservatives that called for using military force to subjugate the Middle East under the guise of democratizing it but with the real intention of control its “strategic interests,” which is to say its oil reserves.
Of the top 50 Republican donors from the 2014 cycle “have so far contributed at least $1 million to the presidential hopefuls and the outside groups that can raise unlimited sums on their behalf,” Politico reports. “Meanwhile, 45 deep-pocketed donors who didn’t give much in 2014 have stepped up and written those checks early in the race.”
Jeb Bush said he is not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues. Now, he has got no problem giving billions of dollars away to super wealthy and powerful corporations, but I guess women’s health just isn’t a priority for him. … This really isn’t complicated. When you attack Planned Parenthood, you attack women’s health, and when you attack women’s health, you attack America’s health.
To what do we owe this bumper crop of candidates? There are three main reasons. 1. This year there is no obvious front-runner; it’s no one’s turn (in stark contrast with the Democratic primary). 2. The outside groups known as ‘super PACs’ make it easier to fund campaigns — and while they guarantee that more money is spent, they also make it easier to raise that money. 3. Republicans believe the next president may very well be a Republican and the nomination is worth winning. While being near the back of the pack in a large field might seem hopeless, strange things happen in politics, and the odds of being the next president are definitely worse if you don’t run.
Elon throttled Starlink because Ukranians were killing Russians,
But by throttling it, Elon enabled Russians to kill Ukranians.
So the world’s richest, weirdest guy,
Gets to decide who lives and who dies?
That’s too much power in the hands of a dude who wants to be a Martian.
“Stephen Miller is a stone-cold racist. His track record speaks for itself, and I’ve got zero interest in working with that kind of individual.”
— “House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller a ‘stone-cold racist’ and said he can’t work with him,” Punchbowl News reports.
“Take, for example, the French Revolution. Remember when Marie Antoinette said, ‘Let them eat cake’? Now, is that a problem of accountability and tyranny, a corrupt government? Or is it a problem of affordability and standard of living? It’s both! Authoritarianism and tyranny are extremely expensive for the people. And it’s the exact same thing when you go down the line with Donald Trump. So, are we going to go after the corruption? Yeah, you’re damn right. And are we going to go after affordability and making people’s lives easier? Yeah, you’re damn right. We’re going to do both of them.”
“Here’s the problem with the red meat: It becomes an addiction. Once you go there and you put that out there, then you’re forced to defend it. So what do they do? They double down. They triple down again.”
— Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed (D), quoted by the Washington Post, on Republicans relying on anti-Muslim attacks in the Michigan U.S. Senate race.
<2>U.S. inflation was higher than expected last month as the rising prices that powered sweeping Democratic victories in last week’s midterm elections appear likely to pose ongoing challenges for the White House and the Federal Reserve, the Associated Press reported. The consumer price index rose 0.4% from September to October, the Labor Department said Tuesday, down from 0.6% the previous month. The government did not report a yearly inflation rate because last year’s government shutdown meant no data was released for October 2025. But excluding the volatile food and energy categories, core prices rose 0.3%, the same as the preceding month. Both figures were a tenth of a point higher than forecast, and at an annual rate would be well above the Fed’s 2% target.
President Donald Trump’s approval rating held near the lowest level of his political career, depressed by national concerns over rising prices that tanked his Republican Party in last week’s midterm elections, according to ?a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Monday. Some 32% of Americans approve of Trump’s performance ?in the White House, unchanged from two prior Reuters/Ipsos polls conducted between late ?October and early November. It was one percentage point higher than his 31% rating ?in a Reuters/Ipsos poll in mid-October, the lowest of his career in politics, reported Reuters.
A record number of women are running for state legislative seats this November, more than two-thirds of whom are Democrats, reports Florida Phoenix. Across the 46 states with legislative seats on the ballot, a total of 3,824 women are running — up from 2022’s previous record of 3,621 women candidates, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. Women make up 35.5% of all state legislative candidates this cycle. Currently, women hold about one-third of state legislative seats across the country — a record level of representation but nowhere near parity.
“Prediction markets about the 2026 midterm elections have surpassed $1.4 billion in trading volume as Election Day fast approaches,” CNN reports. “This year has seen massive growth in the prediction industry, where people can bet on real-world events like sports, entertainment and the weather. While small-scale election markets have been around for a while, they gained traction before the 2024 presidential election and have seen huge numbers for the 2026 midterms.”
G. Elliot Morris: “Low-knowledge 2024 voters say they backed Trump by 8 points, according to our poll. Today they give him a net job approval of ?27, a 35-point shift. Compare that to Trump’s approval rating among voters who got both questions right: These voters backed Harris by 1 point and now give Trump a net ?24 approval, a 23-point shift. … Low-information voters have moved against Trump at a higher rate than high-information voters, by 12 points.”
