“Even if we cut some slack for Esper and all the others who served as honorably and conscientiously as they could until they were faced with either the dead end of resignation or being fired, the fact is that these men and women remained silent for far too long once they were out of government service. They held back important things that the American people and their elected representatives needed to know. They kept them as their own personal secrets, either out of some misplaced sense of bureaucratic propriety, or because they had a book deal and didn’t want to steal their own thunder from release day.”
Soon as the deal was done, the GOPers started to bitch,
Though they closed no loopholes nor upped taxes on the rich.
Sure, right-wingers ain’t happy
About getting an ass-whupping from Pappy,
To which we say, “Shut up and eat your turd sandwich.”
“I’m going to leave it up to Kevin McCarthy to see if he wants to help defeat Putin,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Punchbowl News. “I mean, he’s been pretty good… But is the Republican Party going to be the party that bails out [Russian President Vladimir] Putin? I hope not.”
“You know, I have conversations with my father and my uncle about what I’m doing. I do meditations every day, and that’s kind of the nature of my meditations. I have a lot of conversations with dead people.”
— The Free Press asked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. how he thinks his father or uncle would have responded to the challenges facing Democrats today.
“Ronald Reagan said: ‘If you got seventy-five or eighty percent of what you were asking for, I say, you take it and fight for the rest later. Speaker McCarthy’s version: ‘If you can get five or six percent of what you were asking for, you take the deal and claim victory.”
— Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), on Twitter, blasting the debt ceiling deal.
“Let’s be clear, this is shitty public policy foisted on the nation by a radical Republican House willing to blow up the economy and cause millions of jobs to vanish. Efforts to deal with deficits that do not include asking the wealthy and corporations to pay what they owe are cruel and wholly unserious. The tightening of access to aid for the most vulnerable Americans serves no purpose other than performative cruelty to appease the MAGA base. … But this could have been way worse in so many ways. The devil is very much in the details, but it seems like President Biden and his team outplayed McCarthy.”
“The annual ‘Accelerating Acceptance’ study published Thursday by the advocacy organization reported that 70% of non-LGBTQ+ people want companies to include the LGBTQ community in hiring, advertising and sponsorships,” reports The Messenger.
The Economist: “A demographic tragedy is unfolding in Russia. Over the past three years the country has lost around 2m more people than it would ordinarily have done, as a result of war, disease and exodus…. The life expectancy of Russian males aged 15 fell by almost five years, to the same level as in Haiti. The number of Russians born in April 2022 was no higher than it had been in the months of Hitler’s occupation. And because so many men of fighting age are dead or in exile, women now outnumber men by at least 10 million.”
A new Monmouth poll finds a majority of Republican voters feel Donald Trump would be their strongest nominee in the 2024 election.“Nearly half (45%) of Republican voters – including those who lean toward the GOP – say Trump is definitely the strongest candidate to beat President Joe Biden in 2024, and another 18% think he is probably the strongest candidate. Just one-third of GOP voters say another Republican would definitely (13%) or probably (19%) be a stronger candidate than Trump.”
Los Angeles Times poll: “Trump has the support of 44% of California’s likely Republican primary voters, while DeSantis was backed by 26%… That’s a notable reversal of their standings three months ago, when DeSantis led Trump by 8 percentage points among the state’s GOP voters.”