<....Offstage, Trump’s campaign was contending with attacks on his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio). Vance has faced intense criticism in recent days for comments he made in 2021, when he said that Democrats without children, whom he characterized as “childless cat ladies who are miserable,” should not control government. (He included Harris in his characterization, even though she has two stepchildren.)

In an interview with Megyn Kelly on Friday, Vance said he has no gripe with women who have struggled to have children and supports efforts to get pregnant through in vitro fertilization, but defended his criticism of those who decide not to have children.

“Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats. I’ve got nothing against dogs. I’ve got one dog at home, and I love him,” Vance said. But he added: “It is true that we’ve become anti-family. It is true that the left has become anti-child.”

The Harris campaign announced that she would travel to Atlanta on Tuesday for an event, her sixth visit to the swing state of Georgia this year and her first since Biden dropped out of the race and she launched her presidential campaign. She’s in the midst of an all-out push to identify a running mate ahead of the Democratic National Convention.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), a possible Harris running mate, made plans for an event Saturday in his battleground state. Harris’s campaign said Shapiro will “kick off a weekend of action in Pennsylvania to mark 100 days until the election.”

Despite the Turning Point USA summit’s location, just down the road from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, much of the crowd was more focused on religion than on politics. Only a handful of attendees wore red MAGA ball caps; more people wore T-shirts with Bible verses and psalm numbers on them than anything political.

But Charlie Kirk, the Trump ally and Turning Point USA president, reminded attendees why they were there. “Our mission is very simple. We exist to kick wokeism out of the American church.”

The audience booed, briefly, when Kirk mentioned Harris. “It’s easy to boo. It’s harder to register voters,” Kirk said.

Harris “stands against everything that we as Christians believe,” Kirk said.>

<The news cycle is a vicious tornado that just keeps on spinning.

Just one month ago, the first presidential debate unmasked President Biden to the American people as unfit for a second term. Then a loner tried to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Penn. Only days later, Biden came down with COVID and then dropped out of the race due to party pressure, endorsing his vice president, Kamala Harris. Now, some Republicans are attacking her as a “DEI hire.”

Despite these attacks, Harris has quickly rallied Democrats around her campaign, receiving several high-profile endorsements and raking in large fundraising totals. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has sought to quell the DEI talk, saying it “has nothing to do with race.” It doesn’t help that Biden himself recently said he had “the most diverse administration in history” that represents “the values of diversity, equality, inclusion … and it starts at the top with the vice president.”

DEI, shorthand for diversity, equity and inclusion, started in the 1960s as a way to balance the sins of our past, and seeks to create a workplace where “everyone feels welcome and respected.” However, the effort has failed to achieve its goals; instead, it has created a backlash, leaving many conservatives to view DEI statements as a political litmus test rather than a solution to a problem. Instead of lifting others up, DEI has empowered a group of grifters who seek to profit for themselves.

The idea of hiring based on diversity, equity and inclusion rather than solely qualifications, experience and competency has fueled the rights fight against DEI. However, Republicans attacking Harris as a DEI hire are showing off their hypocrisy, and the evidence can be found in comments made by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Back in 2020, he said, “I think [Biden] came to the conclusion that he should pick a Black woman. … They are our most loyal voters and I think that the Black women of America deserved a Black vice-presidential candidate.” While on the surface it appears Reid is speaking of race, in reality, he is talking about patronage.

Political patronage is unavoidable in our republican system. It exchanges political appointments and jobs in return for political support and loyalty. Biden selected Harris because she could deliver a large voting block that he needed to win the presidency.

During times of political divide, patronage is often turned into a system of spoils. It hit the national stage with the Jackson administration during the Antebellum period, used to advance the interest of slavery against the will of the nation. After the Civil War, it was used by northern Republicans to maintain control of Congress and advance the interests of northern corporations. When patronage is spoiled, it elevates leaders who are incompetent and corrupt.

This can be seen in the story of Roscoe Conkling, As a lawyer, he championed the 14th Amendment, designed to provide equal rights to formerly enslaved Americans, as a way to represent his corporate clients in the San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. This established the idea of “corporate personhood” — similar to the way modern DEI advocates have championed diversity to create a multibillion-dollar industry.

Republicans who are upset at Harris as the Democratic nominee are noticeably quiet on Trump’s plan to reclassify civil service employees as political appointees. Trump said he plans to restore “the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. … And I will wield that power very aggressively.” While Republicans might support the idea of removing “rogue bureaucrats,” this would give the Trump administration enormous power of patronage not seen since the days of the Gilded Age.

Will Trump hire the best and the brightest to replace them? No, he plans to reward loyalists and hire “patriots who love America.” I mean, who is he to decide who loves and doesn’t love America? That’s the type of vague policy practice that conservatives dislike about DEI.

Both DEI and patronage emphasize something other than qualifications and experience in the hiring process. They both shrink the talent pool and create opportunities for corruption, attracting grifters for power and wealth. Republicans should know better than to throw stones into their glass house. If they are serious about their concerns, they should focus on cleaning up the mess in their party first.>

<Republicans, conservatives and MAGA fellow travelers love to beat their chests about their commitment to free speech. But when it comes to the current leadership of the party, it’s an absurd claim.

Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, got into the free speech act during his July 17 speech at the Republican National Convention when he accepted former President Donald Trump’s nomination to be his 2024 running mate.

“Shouldn’t we be governed by a party that is unafraid to debate ideas and come to the best solution? That’s the Republican Party of the next four years, united in our love for this country and committed to free speech and the open exchange of ideas,” the senator intoned in Milwaukee.

Those words would sound great to my civil libertarian ears, if I hadn’t already heard them all before.

For all the MAGA posturing about free speech, few political figures are more hostile to free expression than Trump, who every day continues to pad his lengthy resume of trying to silence his critics. And Sen. Vance supports some disturbing carve-outs to the First Amendment.

To cite just a few examples of Vance’s free speech tourism: He told Tucker Carlson that the government ought to seize the assets of non-profit groups who advocate for political initiatives he doesn’t like; he called for raising taxes to punish corporations who engage in political activities he doesn’t like; as a senator he sent a menacing letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding a federal investigation of a Washington Post writer who penned an op-ed he didn’t like; he expressed the hope that the U.S. would emulate Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s move to take government control of universities and purge them of teachers and ideas he doesn’t like.

In 2021, Vance told a reporter for a Catholic magazine that he supports a ban on pornography, a proposal that’s also included in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy document. (Incidentally, Project 2025’s lead writer, Kevin Roberts, has a book coming out in September with a foreword written by Vance, making the Trump campaign’s feigned ignorance of Project 2025 even less plausible.)

That’s about as “free speech for me, not thee” as it gets.

When it comes to the GOP’s boss, Trump, free speech hypocrisy is one of the only consistent political principles he’s ever held. Just this week, he reiterated his long-held support for criminalizing flag burning. And he’s called for using the government to strip TV stations of their licenses for running content of which he disapproves; banning vaguely defined “woke ideologies” from classrooms; and has used his wealth to file an endless stream of bogus lawsuits against media outlets and journalists as a means of making their lives “miserable.”

He’s also repeatedly called for lowering the bar for journalists to be sued for libel and defamation. While a president can’t do such a thing, a MAGA-dominated Supreme Court could by overturning the landmark Sullivan v. New York Times decision — something that Justice Clarence Thomas indicated he’s open to doing. Thomas called the 1964 decision and subsequent judicial affirmations of it “policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law” and having “no relation to the text, history or structure of the Constitution.”

Now, to be sure, Democrats have not cloaked themselves in glory and honor when it comes to protecting Americans’ rights to free expression. Support for rigid, punitive and selectively enforced campus speech codes, poorly-thought-out policy proposals to clamp down on free expression in the name of fighting disinformation and the government’s “jawboning” of private companies to intimidate them into policing certain speech … all that stuff’s really bad for freedom of speech. But it’s been a long time since Democrats writ large have made vocal and robust support for free speech a major part of their branding.

It’s Republicans like Trump, Vance and allies like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who talk a big game about standing tall for free speech in the face of the tyranny of the “woke mind virus” — while also deciding that they should be the arbiters of acceptable speech, for the good of society.

Don’t let them get away with calling themselves free speech warriors. They’d absolutely curb Americans’ rights if given the power. We know this because they’re saying it — right to our faces.>

<In his bid to claim the House speaker’s gavel and end three weeks of chaos last fall, Rep. Mike Johnson mapped out an ambitious agenda.

Week by week, month by month, the Louisiana Republican promised to meet the “urgency of this hour” with “bold, decisive action.” Above all else, Johnson promised, the House GOP would finish funding federal agencies before the traditional end-of-summer five-week recess.

“DO NOT break for district work period unless all 12 appropriations bills have passed the House,” he wrote on Oct. 23, in a letter sent to all House Republicans with to-do lists and all-caps directives.

Well, that didn’t pan out.

Before lunchtime Thursday, Speaker Johnson bowed to reality and sent lawmakers home a week earlier than originally planned, turning what is traditionally called “August recess” into a 6½-week break from legislative action.

Republicans have passed five of the 12 bills that fund the federal government, putting them well ahead of last year’s absolutely dysfunctional timeline, when just one bill had been passed at this point. But the House GOP failed to pass two others and decided the rest were too politically tricky to even attempt at this point.

Even those bills that did pass contain so many extremely conservative policy riders and spending cuts to important programs that they are dead in the Senate, where a traditional bipartisan process is playing out as expected. All that House Republicans have to show for their work on government funding is creating more political exposure for a couple dozen incumbents that might further endanger their majority.

While most Americans have focused their attention on the made-for-Hollywood presidential campaign, House Republicans have continued sputtering along in the shadows the past three months in their traditionally chaotic fashion.

A few weeks ago, as President Biden struggled, that might have been a fine enough strategy. But his decision to stand down has lit a fire under liberal activists rallying for Vice President Harris, and up to 10 of the most vulnerable House Republicans reside in California or in the New York media market. In those places, former president Donald Trump remains a political anchor while Harris might energize her base out of their Biden-induced slumber — possibly setting the stage for a net gain of at least four seats that would vault Democrats into the House majority next year.

It didn’t have to be this way for House Republicans. Back in the early spring, Johnson allowed passage of a national security bill that included $60 billion for Ukraine. That came right after the passage of two massive packages that included all 12 spending bills at the funding level agreed to last year by Biden and Johnson’s predecessor, Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

As a result, some of Trump’s loudest House allies tried to force him out in similar fashion to McCarthy. But Trump gave the speaker the support he needed to fend off the challenge (also bolstered by some Democratic votes). Johnson’s path to remaining in power became clear: retain the majority and hope Trump wins the presidency and endorses him for another term.

Trump has never shown much interest in the specificity of agency budgets, other than those dealing with border security. Some of the most conservative members encouraged the speaker to not even bother trying to approve the 12 spending bills until after the election, hoping for a Republican sweep that would lead to a very conservative budget.

But House GOP leaders have tried to split the difference by sticking to the rigid outline of the Biden-McCarthy deal. They’re ignoring side deals that led to billions more in domestic funding while also allowing some very conservative policy riders to creep into funding legislation.

Democrats accused the speaker of genuflecting, again, to his most conservative wing by engaging in a spending process that would fail. “They knew these bills could never pass. They went through this charade to appease Republican extremists, and now, Speaker Johnson is sending members home despite promising he would not take August recess unless all 12 bills passed,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee.

Republicans defend their dismal showing by blaming Democrats for never providing more than a handful of votes for the bills, leaving them little margin for error. “You eventually hit a wall because, you know, we have a few of our own members that vote against some of these bills,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), who made the call to send lawmakers home early, told The Hill.....>

<....By pushing ahead with these GOP-only bills, Republican leaders have repeatedly forced their most politically vulnerable members to cast votes in the committee and on the House floor that aren’t exactly appealing to centrist voters.

Because of their own conservative political demands, House Republicans protected funding for the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs, as well as Social Security and Medicare. That forced deep cuts to some domestic programs in order to slash overall spending consistent with their political and policy aims.

The result: Democrats estimate that 72,000 teacher positions for low-income students would be eliminated in the bill funding the Education Department, while the Environmental Protection Agency could face a 20 percent cut. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service budget would come in more than $300 million below the president’s request.

These domestic programs don’t grab national headlines, but they are often beloved in certain regions and can be quite easily turned into political weapons.

Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.), a freshman whose district narrowly backed Biden over Trump four years ago, received an early lesson last year when he voted in committee for the bill funding the Agriculture Department. It included restrictions against mail delivery of pills related to abortions, a vote that Democrats turned into a quick video ad against him.

Democrats homed in on Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), a senior member of the committee who is facing a difficult reelection in his suburban district, for voting to strip LGBTQ+ community funding projects out of another bill.

The more establishment-friendly corner of the House Republican conference often begrudgingly goes along with leadership even if it means supporting bills pushed by far-right Republicans from safe conservative districts.

After final votes Thursday, Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.), from a Long Island district that leans Republican, told reporters he would center his campaign on bills passed last year that tried to deal with key issues for swing-district voters.

“I’m going to focus my campaign on policy and ensuring that voters know where I stand on the issues that matter the most — about the border, about the economy, public safety, pocketbook issues, inflation,” said LaLota, who faces a well-funded opponent, former CNN news personality John Avlon.

He said he was ready to defend cuts to some domestic programs as a down payment toward reducing the nearly $35 trillion national debt.

“There are things that responsible people from Washington need to do, and that should not be a partisan issue. Members of both parties should be able to join in reasonable, responsible spending cuts,” LaLota said.

Some GOP moderates have rebelled against the spending bills — along with some arch conservatives who make it a habit of voting against almost every funding plan — and that has stalled the appropriations process until the fall, or more likely, until after the November elections.....>

<....In trying to placate his hard-line members, Johnson and other GOP leaders are fighting the last war. They continue to act as if their biggest fear is a right-wing coup, as befell McCarthy, when their most immediate concern should simply be protecting their majority.

About 20 House Republicans antagonized McCarthy last year, beginning with forcing him to go 15 rounds in early January 2023 before electing him speaker. In October, eight of them joined with Democrats to oust him as speaker.

After three weeks of paralysis over electing a speaker, Johnson’s best résumé highlight might have been that no one hated him, meaning he could win the floor vote for speaker.

But in the past few months, the atmosphere shifted away from the 20 or so most strident conservatives and toward whatever best serves the interests of Trump — who seems to clearly get that last year’s chaos should not be repeated anytime soon.

Trump demonstrated that by helping defeat the effort by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), considered one of Trump’s closest allies, to oust Johnson. And not a single Republican has paid any political price in their primary election for supporting Ukraine aid, with Trump silent in most of those races.

The Trump-Johnson connection was on display at the GOP convention in Milwaukee, where the speaker regularly got spotted in the VIP front rows with Trump and other high-profile Republicans. And some of the fringier conservatives were somewhat sidelined, including Greene, who was often seated a row or two behind Trump and got relegated to a non-primetime speaking role. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) never spoke onstage.

If Trump wins and Republicans retain the House majority, Johnson stands a good chance of winning his endorsement to remain speaker — which would all but silence Johnson’s critics.

If Republicans lose the majority, whether or not Trump wins, Johnson will have a hard time remaining GOP leader.

And Democrats want to make Republicans pay for every vote they’ve cast the past 18 months.

“I think what we should use against them is the fact that they are incompetent,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (Mass.), the top Democrat on the Rules Committee. “I have served here for a long, long time, and I’ve never seen such incompetence.”>

<[Event "3rd Bradley Open"] [Site "Windsor Locks Conn"]
[Date "1998.08.01"]
[Round "2"]
[White "Plum, Marc"]
[Black "Formanek, Edward"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[ECO "E04"]
[WhiteElo "2265"]
[BlackElo "2389"]

1.d4 g6 2.e4 Bg7 3.Nc3 c6 4.Bc4 d6 5.Bb3 b5 6.Bg5 Qb6 7.Qf3 e6 8.Nge2 Nd7 9.Qg3 c5 10.a4 c4 11.Ba2 a6 12.Be3 b4 13.Nd1 d5 14.f3 Bb7 15.c3 Ne7 16.Bb1 a5 17.O-O Qc6 18.Bg5 Nb6 19.Ne3 h6 20.Bxe7 Kxe7 21.Nf4 Rhe8 22.e5 Kd8 23.Bxg6 fxg6 24.Qxg6 Bf8 25.Ng4 Re7 26.cxb4 axb4 27.a5 Nd7 28.Nf6 Kc7 29.Ne2 Ba6 30.Rac1 c3 31.Nxc3 bxc3 32.Rxc3 Bc4 33.b3 Rxa5 34.bxc4 dxc4 35.Ne8+ Kb7 36.Nd6+ Ka6 37.Rxc4 Qb6 38.Qc2 Nb8 39.Rb1 Qa7 40.Nc8 Qa8 41.Nxe7 Bxe7 42.Rc7 1-0>

Call these posts 'pointless' all you like, <budapest tosspot>, but no-one compels you to pass by.

<We’re 100 days out from the general election, and if you think Kamala Harris’ candidacy as the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee is unprecedented, wait until you see the unprecedentedly vicious and ugly attacks against her.

Of course, former President Donald Trump’s campaigns are always nasty work; that’s to be expected from a loud-mouthed, racist, sexist, petty, congenital liar of a candidate. But Trump has always singled out Black women for his most denigrating abuse.

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of misogynoir, which describes the coupled misogyny and racism thrown at Black women, please familiarize yourself, stat, because this election season will be lousy with it.

Now that the felonious ex-president must face off against Harris — a biracial Black woman and erstwhile prosecutor nearly 20 years his junior — we’re already seeing disgusting assaults on the vice president’s character that aren’t remotely based in fact.

Remember those vile T-shirts, popular with Trump’s supporters earlier in the campaign, that read, “Joe and the Ho Gotta Go”? Expect even more hypersexualization toward Harris by Trump, his surrogates and his MAGA followers. They’re alleging Harris “slept her way to the top” — as Megyn Kelly claimed — referencing her relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who had been separated from his wife for over a decade when he and Harris dated 30 years ago.

Those falsehoods are also being paired with claims that Harris is a “DEI hire,” a repurposing of “diversity, equity and inclusion” favored by conservatives who are too media-savvy to use overt slurs.

Before becoming multiple firsts as vice president and in Congress, Harris was elected the first woman, first African American and first South Asian attorney general in California history, and served as San Francisco’s first woman and nonwhite district attorney. Her track record easily beats the allegations, but when she proves her rhetorical and intellectual competence against Trump, which will be fun to watch, they’ll try to portray her as a “typical angry Black lady.” These bad-faith allegations will be lodged by people who believe Blackness and womanness, regardless of resume, are inherent markers of unfitness.

The terms “militant,” “radical,” “California socialist” and “Marxist” will be in heavy rotation, and Trump’s team will claim Harris, as president, will defund every police department and encourage mass migration to let undocumented immigrants vote in elections for Democrats.

Just this week, in fact, Trump advisers boasted to The Bulwark of their strategic plan to “Willie Horton” Harris, a reference to racist campaign ads during the 1988 presidential campaign appealing to white panic over perceptions of Black criminality, which portrayed then-Massachusetts governor and Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis as lenient on violent offenders.

That messaging will go hand in hand with fearmongering about immigration, with the GOP repeatedly claiming Harris failed as the Biden administration’s “border czar” — a title she never held, which the GOP made up and a complicit media helped proliferate....>

<....Numerous Republicans have filed impeachment articles against Harris since she became the presumptive nominee, and they’ll continue in this vein because their base loves a good show, however performative. Their own party thwarted a border security bill early this year because Trump wanted to run on immigration chaos. In any case, border crossings have fallen hugely in recent months, and currently stand near where they were in the final months under Trump’s watch.

The Republican Party’s boundless hypocrisy means they’ll contradict themselves at every turn. The same partisans who wanted you to believe Harris slept her way to the top of a major-party ticket will also portray her as a childless, careerist feminazi whose hatred for America’s family model is surpassed only by her passion for funding post-birth abortions.

Regardless of how she handles the Israel-Hamas war, some of the same Republicans known to dabble in antisemitism will claim Harris — the first Biden administration official to call for a cease-fire, but also a consistent defender of Israel’s “right to defend itself” — is stridently anti-Jewish.

While using a super-racist nickname like, say, “Kamala X,” they’ll insist her Jamaican and Indian immigrant parentage makes her neither Black nor American — a reconfiguring of the racist “birtherism” directed at President Barack Obama. (Misogynoir being what it is, they may also falsely suggest, as they do with former first lady Michelle Obama, that she isn’t really a woman.)

She’ll be cast as lax on crime, but also labeled “Kamala the cop,” and since they think Black people are gullible, criminal morons, Trump will trot out rappers while surrogates celebrate his felonies as proof he’s Blacker than Harris. Vivek Ramaswamy and every Black Republican will obligingly repeat these lines to defang any racism accusations.

But the most insidious claim of all will be that Harris cannot win. Not only will this messaging come from Trump and Co., but also from lots of other sources. Paid disinformation agents in Russia, which targeted Black voters most intensely in 2016. Red-pilled American trolls clad in digital blackface.

And it’ll come from mainstream reporters concern-trolling about her campaign’s divisiveness, or a New York Times article where rural diner patrons are polled on the “scariest” things about Kamala Harris. The result will be a lot of people saying they want to vote for Harris, but they worry that no one else will.

But the stats are currently on Harris’ side.

In the 48 hours after Harris became the Dems’ presidential nominee, ActBlue raised $81 million, one of its highest one-day tallies in history. Politico reported that during the first 48 hours of her candidacy, Vote.org saw a 700% spike in voter registrations, which outpaces the increase that resulted from a Taylor Swift social media post. Calls organized for Black women, South Asian women, white women, Latinas, Black men and Black LGBTQ men have raised funds and helped galvanize those communities. Harris’ support among Black and Hispanic voters has bested that of Biden’s, by 8% and 6%, respectively. Polls can be fickle things, but the first Reuters/Ipsos poll since Harris became the candidate has her leading Trump, 44% to 42%. The point is, she can absolutely win.

Over the next 100 days, we’re going to see horrifying levels of racism and sexism — misogynoir, that is — and it will be terrifyingly mainstream. But don’t give up hope. Vice President Harris has what it takes to beat back those representing the worst instincts of America. She just needs our votes to make it happen.>

<Meghan McCain gave her two cents after Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) claimed that former President Donald Trump isn’t a “vengeful guy” on Sunday.

“Every member of the McCain family can attest first hand that this is a bold faced lie,” wrote the daughter of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a frequent target of the former president’s attacks both during and after his life.

Vance, in an appearance on Fox News, cooked up his description of Trump after former Sen. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) dismissed portrayals of the former president being bent on revenge and claimed that the Republican nominee “forgives people for things they’ve said and done in the past.”

Vance, who once called himself a “never-Trump guy” and referred to Trump as “America’s Hitler,” acknowledged that he’s previously been critical of the former president.

“And he has looked at me as somebody who can contribute meaningfully to the future of the country so he asked me to be his running mate. This is not a vengeful guy,” said Vance of Trump, who declared that “revenge can be justified” last month.

Meghan McCain’s post arrives just days after she bashed Vance for his controversial “childless cat ladies” remarks.

The former co-host of “The View” said the comments have caused “real pain” and referred to them as “just innately unchristian.”

“I have been trying to warn every conservative man I know - these JD comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends,” she wrote on X.

Vance told SiriusXM’s Megyn Kelly on Friday that his comments were “sarcastic” in nature before adding that the substance of what he said was “true.”>

No peace, <biyatch>!!

<I like J.D. Vance’s background. Humble beginning, Marine, Big Ten and Ivy League graduate, author, venture capitalist. He even headbanged to Kid Rock in Milwaukee. As politics work, he’s the heir apparent to conservatism and the Republican Party. But in his bid for populism’s golden scepter, he’s abandoned any free-market bona fides he ever had. The vice-presidential candidate is considered part of the “postliberal” new right. I suppose that’s close to being a conservative, but as is often attributed to the baseball great Frank Robinson, “close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”

Politics isn’t a straight line. At the extremes, the far left and far right often bend around and almost touch, it’s been said, like a horseshoe. We’re seeing this play out in real time. Check out this rhetoric: “Organize the dispossessed in community movements for economic gains.” “Movements of welfare mothers, the unemployed, tenants, and others have been organized around their particular grievances.” Compare that with: “We’re done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit to the working man.” “We will protect the wages of American workers.”

The first quote is from the 1962 Port Huron Statement written by liberal activist Tom Hayden and the Students for a Democratic Society. The second is from Mr. Vance’s nomination speech. Similar, no? Close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades. Politics these days isn’t at the center. It’s at the extremes, with socialism and populism almost linked. Dogs and cats living together. That doesn’t seem stable to me.

Both sides are protectionist: President Biden never rescinded Donald Trump’s foolish tariffs. Now Mr. Trump wants 10% tariffs on all imports and at least 60% on Chinese goods. This is bad industrial policy and a growth-killing closet tax hike on the rich and poor. Mr. Vance told CBS’s “Face the Nation,” “We need to protect American industries from all of the competition.” Reed Smoot, is that you? Also watch for a weak dollar to “stimulate” exports. Dangerous moves.

Both are anti-free-market: Think of the Biden administration’s green subsidies and heavy regulatory hand. Now we’re hearing calls for big-government intervention from Republicans, including deficits all the way down. Mr. Vance proposed $7,500 tax credits for U.S.-made gasoline-powered vehicles after years of $7,500 electric-vehicle credits. Like Oprah: Everybody gets a car subsidy! A better plan is to let markets price vehicles, and may the best car win.

Both are pro-union: “Great to visit the auto workers striking in Toledo this morning.” Mr. Biden? No, that was Mr. Vance in October 2023 as he visited a United Auto Workers picket line. Kamala Harris joined UAW picketers in Reno, Nev., in 2019. Horseshoe vote pandering. Unions love tariffs. It’s easier to skim dues from higher worker pay than it is to deliver better worker productivity. No wonder job-replacing automation is rampant.

Both think Big Tech is bad: In February, Mr. Vance said Federal Trade Commission Chairman Lina Khan is “doing a pretty good job.” At losing antitrust suits? Progressives think Big Tech helped elect Donald Trump. Many on the right think Big Tech aggressively censors conservatives—which it certainly did to Covid critics. Another horseshoe of mutual disdain. If Mr. Vance really wanted to be useful, he would lobby the FTC to end the public-school monopoly, helping underprivileged children stuck in bad schools. Popular and effective.

I get it, populism is about getting votes and winning elections. But it’s no way to govern. This is as big a transition for the GOP as the 1960s Southern strategy, turning Southern states reliably red, pandering to white grievances. It is equally distasteful. This new-right populism could be called interventionist conservatism, abandoning free markets. It’s good for votes but bad for progress. That’s no way to make anything great again. I’d rather see a leader fight for an educated workforce and great jobs for our economy—not give speeches on tariffs, protecting wages and browbeating Wall Street.

At least Mr. Vance is malleable. In 2016 he told National Public Radio that Mr. Trump is “leading the white working class to a very dark place.” Now he’s Mr. Trump’s biggest cheerleader. That’s politics. If I were Mr. Trump, I’d make Mr. Vance do a two-week intensive how-capitalism-works boot camp with economics guru Larry Kudlow to learn how to create real economic growth.

Every farmer will remind you that horseshoes need to be in the shape of a “U” to catch luck. A warning for the new right: If you’re closed at the top, luck runs out.>

<Vladimir Putin’s unjustified attack on Ukraine has upended the global fossil fuel market. The United States and its allies have responded with devastating sanctions, including a recent action from President Joe Biden to ban Russian oil, natural gas, and coal imports to the United States. Because international energy markets have been tied to fossil fuels for decades, this ban could result in higher gas prices for American households and supply disruptions for our European allies. The solution to this price crunch is a swift and urgent transition to clean energy—not more leasing, drilling, or investments in the same volatile fuel sources that are contributing to the current energy crisis.

Despite the oil and gas industry’s vigorous and incorrect public relations campaigns aimed at convincing people that their opportunism to drill more is a legitimate policy solution, the United States is already the world’s largest producer of oil and gas. Domestic oil production is at 90 percent of America’s all-time, pre-pandemic high, and the United States is producing more than twice as many barrels of oil per day as it produced in 2008. But energy independence won’t be found at the bottom of a well. We can never be energy independent while we rely on a fuel source that is both controlled by the global market and highly susceptible to international conflict and manipulation by autocratic regimes.

The fossil fuel industry’s wish list—more taxpayer subsidies, more land opened for dirty drilling, and fewer environmental and health safeguards—will not help people struggling with the price of gas today. But granting them free rein will lock the United States into decades of higher and more volatile energy prices; higher toxic emissions; and greater climate destruction. Now is the time for the United States to finally achieve real energy security by reducing our dependence on fossil fuels.

The oil industry can decide to produce more oil whenever it wants. In fact, the oil industry already possess more than 9,000 approved—but unused—drilling permits on federal lands. Nearly 5,000 of those permits were approved in 2021 alone—the highest figure since the second Bush administration.

The number of permits already approved is about six times the average number of wells drilled annually in the past five years. Over the past 10 years, permits and wells drilled have followed a similar trajectory—except for now, when permits have increased and wells drilled have decreased. The oil industry has all it needs to increase production but has chosen to profiteer off the current crisis rather than act. Industry CEOs are profiting hand over fist while average families suffer

Meanwhile oil and gas executives are raking in windfall profits while consumers suffer at the pump. Last year, four of the major oil companies—Shell, Chevron, BP, and ExxonMobil—posted record profits, totaling $75 billion. In the fourth quarter alone, ExxonMobil was bringing in $97 million dollars in profit every day.

The reason that U.S. oil companies haven’t increased production is simple: They decided to use their billions in profits to pay dividends to their CEOs and wealthy shareholders and simply haven’t chosen to invest in new oil production. According to Bloomberg, “U.S. oil companies generally have been reluctant to pump more, preferring to steer cash flows back to investors instead of spending it on new drilling that could flood the world with cheap crude.”

The oil industry already has at least 10 years’ worth of unused leases at its disposal. They are only producing oil or gas on roughly half of the area they have already leased. There are nearly 14 million acres onshore and more than 9 million acres offshore that are currently under lease but are not being used for oil production. At least one-quarter of these unused leases are sitting on lands that the Bureau of Land Management has deemed to have a medium or high potential for oil. What’s more, only 10 percent of U.S. oil and gas production occurs on federal lands and waters, limiting the federal government’s ability to impact leasing decisions—the other 90 percent is done on state and private resources.

Nothing on the industry wish list is a silver bullet to solve the short-term crisis. According to the Government Accountability Office, on average, it takes more than four years for companies to begin producing on the federal lands they lease. Offshore production takes even longer, as it takes at least two to three years to build the needed rigs. This delay is not due to drilling permit review, which—at most—takes fewer than 200 days. Even oil and gas industry executives themselves are saying it: Launching more oil and gas projects now will have no effect on short-term global energy markets.>

<....The United States is now in the era of extreme fossil fuel energy: The opportunities that exist for big new oil projects are not fast, not safe, and are not long-term solutions. Projects such as ConocoPhillips’ Willow in the Western Arctic; calls to drill the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; or ultradeep offshore drilling are several years if not a decade away from producing oil and only set the country up to continue on the unstable path of a fossil-fuel-dependent future.

The bottom line is that investments today—whether in fossil energy or renewables—are about our energy systems in a decade. Now is the time to invest in the energy system that will make the United States truly energy independent.

For the long-term transition, the market is pointing away from new drilling investments and toward renewables. Take this latest example: In November 2021, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management held the largest oil and gas lease sale to date and offered 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico. The sale has since been rejected by the courts, but the sum of high bids was $192 million—just $25 per acre—and about 97 percent of the bids were uncontested. Compare that to 488,000 acres in the New York Bight region offered for potential wind energy development in February, which drew competitive winning bids from six companies totaling approximately $4.37 billion—about $9,000 per acre.

The United States—and the world—cannot drill its way out of oil price volatility or into real energy independence. Energy prices are high because fossil fuels are a global market highly influenced by conflicts around the world. Increasing leasing and permitting rates even beyond their current historically high levels won’t change that, but it will lock the United States into fossil fuel dependence for decades to come. For true energy independence, for lower energy prices, and for our own health and well-being, we must urgently invest in clean energy.>

<The right-wing activist who helped shape the U.S. Supreme Court objected to President Joe Biden's three proposals for reform Monday.

The president called for Congress to pass a constitutional amendment that would undo the court's ruling on Donald Trump's immunity claims, limit justices' terms to 18 years and impose binding ethics rules to address the erosion of public trust in the court.

But judicial activist Leonard Leo objected to all three measures.

“No conservative justice has made any decision in any big case that surprised anyone, so let’s stop pretending this is about undue influence," Leo said in a statement. "It’s about Democrats destroying a court they don’t agree with."

As head of the conservative Federalist Society, Leo compiled the lists of potential justices that Trump released during his 2016 campaign and then advised the former president on nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Prior to that he also helped choose or confirm the other three conservative justices in the majority — Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

“If President Biden and the Democrats were truly serious about ethics reform, then they would ban all gifts and hospitality of any kind to any public official in any branch of government, starting with Congress, where the real corruption is," Leo stated.

"They would close all of the loopholes that allow Members to travel on private jets to fancy hotels and restaurants. With respect to judges, they would include the things where influence peddling is most present and dangerous — and that’s when the liberal Justices rub shoulders with influencers at places like law schools, bar associations, progressive think tanks and their conferences, and other groups and events funded by Left-wing billionaires, where they support real vested interests in the work of the Court."

Democratic senators have called for the Department of Justice to appoint a special counsel to investigate alleged violations of federal ethics and tax laws by Thomas, and Alito and Gorsuch have also faced questions about their acceptance of gifts from conservative billionaires.

“Let me be clear: If Democrats want to adopt an across-the-board ethics ban for all branches, I am in favor of that: no jets, no meals, no speaking honorariums, no gifts for anyone from anyone for any reason in any branch, starting with Congress," Leo said.

"Until they support that, let’s all be honest about what this is: a campaign to destroy a court that they disagree with.”>

<This week marks seven years since Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) historic vote to save ObamaCare. I will never forget a phone call I had with him just moments before he gave the big thumbs down on the Senate floor. He was reaching out about a statement I had issued opposing the Republicans’ effort to repeal ObamaCare. He thanked me for putting people over party and confidentially let me know he was going to do the same.

Although we shared the same concern that our health care system desperately needs commonsense reforms to lower costs, McCain and I both knew that the Republican bill to repeal ObamaCare was irresponsible and would jeopardize the health care coverage for our citizens.

As McCain told me that day, his vote was about far more than just ObamaCare. While he was courageously battling brain cancer, he wanted to send a message to his colleagues and the nation that the broken status quo in Washington could not continue. In a speech later that day, he appealed that the Senate was being weighed down by partisan dysfunction and was on the “decline.”

Can anyone dispute that the problem has grown far worse since McCain spoke those words seven years ago? Our political discourse is spiraling into rabid tribalism, hatred and violence. Politicians in Washington care more about appealing to the loudest and angriest voices than actually delivering for the people they serve. They are “trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle.” Ultimately, the losers of all this partisan dysfunction are the American people.

It wasn’t always this way. As McCain said: “I’ve known and admired men and women in the Senate who played much more than a small role in our history, true statesmen, giants of American politics. They came from both parties, and from various backgrounds.”

Last week, I had the honor of attending a memorial service to remember one of those giants: Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.). Though they were on different sides of the aisle, Lieberman and McCain were true friends who both loved this country and worked together on countless issues for the good of the nation.

When my father Larry Hogan Sr. served in Congress, he would debate about real issues with his colleagues across the aisle then sit down and actually get things done. Fifty years ago this week, he put aside partisanship and answered the demands of his conscience to do what he thought was the right thing for the state and nation that he loved, becoming the first Republican to come out for the impeachment of President Nixon.

This type of statesmanship has become far too rare. Increasingly, principled leaders who care more about making the Senate work for their constituents than their Twitter accounts are heading for the exits. Instead of serving as “an important check on the powers of the Executive” and working together to advance commonsense solutions, politicians in the Senate toe the party line and perpetuate the broken status quo to advance their careers.

Every election cycle, partisans on both sides of the aisle tell the American people that the only answer is just to vote straight party line regardless of the character and experience of the candidates. And every election cycle, our politics becomes even more divisive and dysfunctional as a result.

The only way we can fix this mess is to elect independent leaders who are not beholden to the broken system. I don’t need a job or another title. I am running to be a completely different kind of senator. As a key swing vote who has never hesitated to stand up to my party, both parties will have to earn my support.

Only Maryland can count on my vote. That independence will give me an outsized influence to stand up for what is right, put Maryland at the center of every deal, and help make the Senate work again for the people.

This isn’t just the typical fight between Democrats and Republicans. It’s more important than that. This is a fight for America’s future, and that is a fight worth fighting. McCain knew the truth: “The success of the Senate is important to the continued success of America…That responsibility is more important than any of our personal interests or political affiliations.”>