Going to get right to it this week:
Republicans in disarray
That’s no party. That’s the Republican Hot Mess.
At this point, the Republican Party really ought to change its name. It’s not a coherent political party anymore. To comply with truth-in-advertising standards, it should call itself the Republican Hot Mess.
The member of his ranks currently giving McCarthy the biggest migraine is Rep. Madison Cawthorn (N.C.), who recently said on a podcast that, since taking office, he has encountered “sexual perversion,” including an invitation to “come to an orgy,” and has seen individuals who publicly stand against illegal drugs “do a key bump of cocaine right in front of you.”
Looming over the whole Hot Mess, of course, is former president Donald Trump. From his Elba at Mar-a-Lago, Trump has been trying to boost the prospects of incumbents and challengers who support his “big lie” about the “stolen” election — and to end the careers of Republicans, such as Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), who stand for the party’s traditional values.
Trump recently pulled his endorsement from Rep. Mo Brooks (Ala.), who is seeking a Senate seat, because Brooks — who went so far as to give a fiery speech at Trump’s Jan. 6 rally — has said it is time to move on from the 2020 election. How far out on the fringe do you have to be to get and keep Trump’s support?
By making every race all about himself, Trump could be his (putative) party’s worst enemy. It would be beyond ironic if Democrats held on to their majorities thanks to his whims and grudges.
The GOP Was Hard to Embarrass. Then Came Madison Cawthorn.
This week was a revelation—we finally discovered that Republican leaders actually have limits to their shamelessness.
Even after spending the past six years consistently enabling a racist vulgarian who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy, paid off a porn star to cover up an extramarital affair, and incited a violent insurrection to overturn our elections—it took a bizarre comment by freshman Rep. Madison Cawthorn to force GOP leadership into showing us their embarrassed face.
Cawthorn got a little too comfortable on a podcast last week, waxing poetic about Republican orgies—a.k.a “sexual get-together[s]”—featuring “key bumps of cocaine” at an older colleague’s home. What should have been a salacious story of D.C. sexual politics (and a middle-aged lament on my part as to why I haven’t been invited to such amazing events) has instead become a full-blown GOP family drama.
According to McCarthy, Cawthorn said his allegations were exaggerations, and also completely changed his story—now alleging he “thinks he saw maybe a staffer in a parking garage 100 yards away.”
Longtime GOP dirty trickster Roger Stone, who has a friendly history with orgies, came in with a last-second plot twist. On the right-wing social media platform Gab, Stone wrote, “Congressman Madison Cawthorn just told me [he] has NOT retracted his claims about drug-fueled orgies among D.C. elites.”
Who should we believe? Who cares? It’s a mortifying episode for the Republican Party, but unlike so many other outrageous sins committed by GOP members, the leaders are actually mortified this time!
The *real* reason so many Republicans are mad at Madison Cawthorn
why the harsher response for Cawthorn?
Simple: The actions of Greene and Gosar reflect poorly on them and only them (in some Republicans’ minds). What Cawthorn is alleging looks bad for every single Republican member of Congress.
See, while Cawthorn didn’t say that it was members of Congress who invited him to orgies or who did cocaine in front of him, he didn’t not say it either. Which, in their minds, means they are at risk of being implicated.
“I asked a bunch of Republicans why *this* was the thing that broke the camel’s back with Cawthorn,” tweeted CNN congressional correspondent Melanie Zanona. “Their response: the orgy & cocaine allegations implicated fellow Republicans. And some members were getting questions from concerned constituents – and spouses – about the claims.”
GOP Senate Hopeful Peddled False Claims About His Education for Years
A CNN report found that Herschel Walker—a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Georgia—repeatedly made false statements when he said he graduated in the top 1 percent of his class at the University of Georgia, including as recently as 2017. In fact, Walker never graduated from the university, and when he attended, he maintained a “B” average while he played football.
Donald Trump's Truth Social App Is Failing Fantastically, Report Says
The former president’s social media network for MAGA disciples has sunk to about 60,000 new users a week.
“This is down 93% from its launch week, when it saw 872,000 installs during the week of Feb. 21,” Stephanie Chan of the analytics site Sensor Tower told The Wrap. “We estimate that Truth Social has so far reached approximately 1.2 million installs since its launch.”
Truthsocial.com reportedly has fallen to 1.9 million weekly visits from a high of 6 million in the debut week for the Twitter-like platform, according to Similarweb stats cited by the news website.
Could Trump blow the midterms for the GOP?
One of the few ways Republicans could potentially blow this electoral equivalent of a layup is if former President DONALD TRUMP suddenly returns to center court.
Trump is not toxic for his party everywhere. Republicans did better than expected in House races in 2020 because of the high MAGA turnout Trump generated. But he’s deadly for the GOP in the decisive suburbs at the heart of 2022 politics. Recall how Virginia’s GLENN YOUNGKIN treated Trump like Voldemort, concerned that even uttering his name would repel potential supporters in NoVa.
This week, despite a war in Europe, a new presidential budget at home and a Supreme Court nominee battle, Trump emerged as the dominant story, mostly because of the geyser of news related to the Jan. 6 committee in recent days:
— VIRGINIA THOMAS, wife of Justice CLARENCE THOMAS, pressed Trump’s White House chief of staff to execute the JOHN EASTMAN plan.
— JARED KUSHNER will not be protected by executive privilege when he is expected to voluntarily appear before the panel Thursday.
— DAN SCAVINO and PETER NAVARRO, two former Trump White House advisers, have been recommended for criminal “contempt of Congress” citations.
— The White House records of Trump’s phone calls from Jan. 6 have a seven-hour gap that raises the possibility Trump was using a “burner phone,” per Bob Woodward and Bob Costa’s latest.
— Trump unendorsed Rep. MO BROOKS (R-Ala.), who is running for a Senate seat now hints that he may cooperate with the Jan. 6 committee and says he was repeatedly (and fairly recently) pressed by Trump to overturn the 2020 presidential results. (Nicholas Wu and Kyle Cheney note that the Brooks news could change the committee’s previous decision not to try to compel Republican lawmakers to testify.)
Trump has eagerly jumped into the Jan. 6 news cycle. He was slinging the usual conspiracy theories at a rally in Georgia on Saturday. He says he’s never heard of a burner phone. He called on Russian President VLADIMIR PUTIN to release dirt on the Bidens. (Yes, that’s a real and true sentence and it is as shocking as you think, but we will spare you the adjectives and outrage. Full details here.) Oh, Trump also said he got a hole-in-one recently.
There is a debate among Democrats about whether there is any strategic value in making Trump the center of the election. The moderate Dems barely clinging to their seats insist they have no interest in talking about him. The make-2022-about-Trump faction insists that the only way to recreate the Dem surges of 2018 and 2020 is to recreate the Trump-saturated political environment of those years when right-leaning suburbanites flocked to the Dems.
But that debate may be moot.
This week’s convergence of 2020 election subversion news and wild Trump comments is a harbinger of things to come. The Jan. 6 committee’s major reports, when released this year, will force every candidate to discuss Trump and 2020. And as the midterms approach, Trump, who has big bets placed on dozens of candidates up and down ballots across America, will be a central player in campaigns everywhere, whether either party likes it or not.
Union, Yes!
America finally gets an Amazon union
In one of the biggest worker victories in modern US labor history, a majority of employees at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York, have voted to unionize with a worker-led union that didn’t even exist a year ago. The election results mark the first time a majority of workers at an Amazon facility in the US have voted to join a union.
Workers at the warehouse in Staten Island, known as JFK8, voted in favor of being represented by Amazon Labor Union, or ALU. The union captured 2,654 votes, while 2,131 voted against. Another 67 ballots were contested by either Amazon or the union, but the margin of victory was greater than the number of challenged ballots so the results are final.
How great is this guy?
Teachers across the country are demanding better pay and support
After weeks-long walkout, a major teachers’ strike in Minneapolis has ended — at least for now — with a deal between the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) and the Minneapolis school district.
As the Minneapolis strike ends, however, another is starting: Public school teachers and support staff in Sacramento began their own walk-out on Wednesday, which has shuttered schools for 40,000 students across the K-12 district. Other teacher strikes in Sonoma County, California, and Illinois also took place earlier this year as part of a wave of protest against underfunded classrooms, low wages, and Covid-19 protocols.
these teachers’ strikes are more than a symptom of the country’s growing labor movement spawned from the inequities wrought by the pandemic. They may be a sign of a education system in dire need, and educators across the US are raising their voices to be heard.
Great Economic News
US March payrolls confirm economy strong, jobs market tight
U.S. job growth continued at a brisk clip in March, with the unemployment rate falling to a new two-year low of 3.6% and wages re-accelerating, positioning the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates by a hefty 50 basis points in May.
The Labor Department's closely watched employment report's survey of establishments showed that nonfarm payrolls increased by 431,000 jobs last month.
Data for February was revised higher to show 750,000 jobs added instead of the previously reported 678,000. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast payrolls increasing 490,000. The unemployment rate dropped to 3.6%, the lowest since February 2020, from 3.8% in February
Unemployment hits pandemic low in March
The U.S. labor market extended its streak of unprecedented growth, adding 431,000 jobs in March and sending the unemployment rate to a new pandemic low of 3.6 percent.
Two years into the pandemic, the country has recovered almost all of the jobs lost early on, although the pace of recent gains — an average of more than 600,000 monthly new jobs in the past six months — is raising questions about the job market’s sustainability with inflation at 40-year highs.
Biden says ‘Americans are back to work’ after jobless rate hits new pandemic low
President Joe Biden on Friday touted the March jobs report that showed the US added another 431,000 jobs in March and the American unemployment rate fell to a new pandemic-era low of 3.6%.
“Americans are back to work. And that’s good news for millions of families who have a little more breathing room and the dignity that comes from earning a paycheck, just the dignity of having a job,” Biden said in remarks from the White House.
The President argued the new report, released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday, showed that “our economy has gone from being on the mend to being on the move.”
Good News from Ukraine
No, Putin is not actually achieving his goals in Ukraine
For many, the blunder-filled Russian invasion of Ukraine has demolished the longstanding trope of Vladimir Putin as master strategist. Russia’s inability to overwhelm its weaker neighbor, its massive battlefield losses, the punishing international reaction — all of this suggests that Putin made a terrible mistake.
But others see it differently: Look beyond the haze of mainstream coverage of the war, they argue, and you’ll see that the Russian president has once again hoodwinked the West.
“Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine, that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s),” Bret Stephens writes in the New York Times. Stephens is not alone in this: National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty and prominent Substacker Glenn Greenwald have both recently advanced versions of this claim.
Yet their arguments do not stand up to even light scrutiny: They are not consistent with the structure of Russia’s military campaign, public statements by Russian authorities, or even a basic cost-benefit analysis.
“Putin didn’t really want to take Kyiv is this war’s equivalent to the Biden did not win the election fairly [falsehood]. A clear dividing line between those looking honestly and those who will grasp at any lie to support their point,” writes Phillips O’Brien, a scholar of military strategy and tactics at the University of St. Andrews.
The West is winning the economic battles in Putin’s war against Ukraine
As the Ukraine war grinds on, the West continues to prevail on the economic battlefield. Its sanctions are punishing Russia’s economy. Russian attempts to counterattack appear likely to backfire. And the result is a psychological blow to China, whose state-capitalist system was already looking vulnerable.
Start with the sanctions. By freezing the bulk of Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves, the West disabled Moscow’s main tool for defending its currency.
The confrontation has also hit foreign investors.
Russia’s latest gambit is to demand payment for its natural gas exports in rubles. The idea is to force Germany and other energy importers to buy the Russian currency, thereby boosting its value. But the German government appears ready to call Putin’s bluff: Instead of agreeing to pay in rubles, it has taken the first formal step toward gas rationing. Rather than deprive itself of revenue that it desperately needs, Russia may well back down. Either way, its threat has reinforced Germany’s determination to wean itself off Russian exports.
What does all this mean for China, Putin’s most significant ally? China’s economy is far larger and more sophisticated than Russia’s, but it looks newly vulnerable.
To begin with, Beijing’s $3 trillion-plus stockpile of foreign-currency assets looks less potent
What’s more, China’s economy appears susceptible for other reasons. Much as Putin invaded Ukraine out of a misguided sense of national pride, so China’s leaders have refused to buy effective foreign vaccines against covid-19.
Meanwhile, China’s financial sector is shaky. Property developers are defaulting on bonds, and their auditors are quitting with alarming frequency.
The West has been through a grueling few years. Populists have risen, alliances have frayed, and everything from inflation to the chaotic Afghan withdrawal appeared to signal incompetence and fragility. But the Ukraine crisis has changed the mood. The conflict is far from over, to be sure. But for now, the West exudes an unfamiliar confidence.
emphasis added
Democrats are doing great things
The US House of Representatives has voted to decriminalize marijuana
The US House of Representatives voted Friday to approve a bill that would decriminalize cannabis at the federal level. It’s a first step toward making the drug legal and attempting to undo some of the damage caused by punitive drug laws, particularly among communities of color. The voting happened along party lines, with 220 votes in favor and 204 opposed. The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate, but advocates say with Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, they’re more hopeful that the legislation will finally become law.
Ketanji Brown Jackson is the most popular Supreme Court nominee in years
Five recent surveys have indicated strong support for President Joe Biden’s decision to nominate Jackson for the Supreme Court seat retiring Justice Stephen Breyer is vacating. According to an average of polls by Gallup, Fox, Monmouth University, Quinnipiac University and the Pew Research Center, about 53% of Americans supported her confirmation, with about 26% of Americans opposed. This is good for a +27-point net popularity rating.
If Jackson’s ratings hold up through her likely confirmation, she would be the most popular nominee to be confirmed since John Roberts in 2005. Jackson’s popularity should only help her in the confirmation process.
I love this woman:
and this guy:
Justice is coming
Justice Dept. expands Jan. 6 probe to look at rally prep, financing
The criminal investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has expanded to examine the preparations for the rally that preceded the riot, as the Justice Department aims to determine the full extent of any conspiracy to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election victory, according to people familiar with the matter.
The development shows the degree to which the Justice Department investigation — which already involves more defendants than any other criminal prosecution in the nation’s history — has moved further beyond the storming of the Capitol to examine events preceding the attack.
Garland, who has faced pressure at times from Democrats and others to more aggressively investigate those close to Trump and the events that preceded the attack on Congress, said in his Jan. 5 speech that complex investigations like this one take time and are built from the bottom up.
“We follow the physical evidence. We follow the digital evidence. We follow the money,” Garland said. “But most important, we follow the facts — not an agenda or an assumption. The facts tell us where to go next.”
On the lighter side
What you Can Do to Save Democracy
Most important: DON'T LOSE HOPE. This is a giant and important fight for us but, win or lose, we keep fighting and voting and organizing and spreading truth and light. We never give up.
I am lucky and proud to be in this with you ✊🏾✊🏻💙💚💛💜🧡✊🏽✊🏻