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.
From Trump’s “stolen election” lies, we can’t get no relief,
He carps on about stolen votes, but he never names the thief.
Somebody needs to tell this guy
Americans aren’t buying his lies,
And that he’s turned us into the United States of Disbelief.
“If you are committing fraud against the American people, all of us in public leadership should be trying to stop it and throw you in prison for enriching yourself off the American taxpayer.”
“We are done, Americans are done with endless conflict in the Middle East, spending trillions of dollars, American lives… this is insane and we have to call it for what it is.”
“The U.S. State Department announced on Monday that it has revoked more than 175,000 visas during President Donald Trump’s administration so far,” Fox News reports.
President Donald Trump is asking for $1,500,000 million for the military for next year. That’s close to $600 billion (adjusted for inflation) more than we were spending on the military in fiscal year 2025, before Trump took office, Alternet reports. This increase is huge by any measure. It comes to around $4,600 per household. It is around 8% of the total budget.
A new Emerson College survey of likely 2026 voters finds the Democrats with an 11-point advantage over the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, leading 53% to 42%. President Trump holds a 39% job approval rating, consistent with the past two months, whereas his disapproval increased another point, to 57%.
A new American Research Group poll finds just 30% of Americans say they approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president and 67% say they disapprove.
Wall Street Journal: “Around 40% of voters in the 2024 election said the economy was their top issue, far outstripping any other matter. And those voters favored Donald Trump by 60% to 38%. Many say they were moved by his pledges to tame inflation, rebuild U.S. infrastructure, cut red tape and trim government waste. … About a year and a half later, more voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy than approve, 61% to 35%, an average of polls by the Cook Political Report found this month.”
