Ron Fournier/Convulsions:
No Guts, No Balls Pete Hegseth
Elissa Slotkin shows Democrats how to neuter MAGA
I've known Elissa Slotkin for years. I watched her career develop from narrow victories in her MAGA-leaning House district outside Detroit to a solid win for the Senate in 2024. And I know this about the former CIA and Pentagon analyst: She doesn’t suffer fools.
Enter Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
During a contentious Senate Armed Service Committee meeting Wednesday, the freshman Democrat grilled Hegseth over whether he had authorized members of the military to "detain and arrest protesters" in Los Angeles. He ducked and deflected. She erupted.
"What is the order?" Slotkin demanded. "Be a man, list it out. Did you authorize them to detain or arrest? That is a fundamental of democracy. I'm not trying to be a snot here. I'm just trying to get the actual — did you authorize them to do that?"
Be a man, she said. But Hegseth didn’t have it in him.
Reports are that Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard are ignored when it comes to input on what Trump is supposed to do. No surprise; they, like DHS Sec Noem are only there to cosplay. And as for Bibi Netanyahu, Trump knows any advice he gets is to benefit Netanyahu, not Trump.
When it comes to Iran, Trump is stuck with making a decision. The buck stops with him. And he’s afraid to decide.
My best guess is that Trump will do the right thing (not bomb Iran) for the wrong reason (he’s a coward and is afraid of his base turning on him). But who knows? Trump’s a damaged human being and is hard to predict when it comes to doing something difficult.
Jonathan Lemire and Isaac Stanley-Becker/The Atlantic:
The MAGA Coalition Has Turned on Itself
And Donald Trump is caught in the middle.
Right-wing figures have descended into vicious debate over whether the White House should take a more active role in Israel’s bombardment of Iran—one that, with American help, could dismantle Tehran’s nuclear program or even lead to regime change. Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and other isolationist voices are demanding that Trump stay out of another Middle Eastern war. Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and other more hawkish conservatives are making the case that there has never been—and may never again be—a better time to take on Iran. That same split has surfaced among Republicans on Capitol Hill. Senator Lindsey Graham and others are pushing Trump to help Israel destroy Tehran’s nuclear program, a goal of American presidents dating back decades. Meanwhile, MAGA luminaries such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have declared that further U.S. involvement would betray the president’s “America First” ideals.
Thomas Edsall/New York Times:
Could the Third Time Be the Charm on Impeachment and Removal?
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the Berkeley law school, replied by email to my inquiries, listing five grounds for Trump’s impeachment:
Trump has repeatedly ignored due process of law, such as in sending people to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador and to the South Sudan without a semblance of due process. The cutoff of funds to universities and to grant recipients has been done without any due process. This is a very serious abuse of power.
President Trump has used his power for retribution. His actions against law firms, which have been done without due process, have been expressly stated to be for personal retribution because they employed lawyers who investigated or prosecuted him. This is a very serious abuse of power.
The list is too long to post here. But it takes a Democratic House to impeach him (and a heavily Democratic Senate to convict).
Omar Wasow and Robb Willer/ New York Times:
This Is What Makes Protests Successful
Cross-national research by Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth finds that when states crack down violently on nonviolent protest, it often backfires. Rather than quell dissent, repression can mobilize opposition and erode the government’s legitimacy. Other scholarship suggests that when state officials use excessive force against peaceful protesters — such as when the police commissioner Bull Connor in 1963 blasted civil rights activists with fire hoses in Birmingham, Ala. — the images generated can be particularly effective for movements.
These findings suggest that the more force the state uses on peaceful demonstrators, the more the state may inadvertently fuel precisely the kind of mass opposition it seeks to suppress.
Perry Bacon, Jr/Washington Post:
How red states tiptoe around Trump’s wreckage
Budget cuts, funding pauses and Trump policies are causing deep anxiety in communities across the country.
Describing the precise impact of Trump’s policies on Kentucky is complicated. DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, has cut numerous grants for projects in Kentucky (and other states). The Education Department and other agencies have also suspended grants for programs. But Kentucky officials aren’t necessarily ending these initiatives. For now, they are searching for state, local or private funds to replace the lost federal dollars — or trying to keep these programs going in truncated forms.
Liz Dye/Public Notice:
Judge rules that anti-woke is just racism
You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a rancid bigot.
“Have we no shame?” Judge William Young asked, in an unmistakeable echo of attorney Joseph Welch, who famously punctured Joe McCarthy’s popularity with his simple plea for decency.
Seventy-five years ago, McCarthy and his sidekick Roy Cohn hunted Communists. Now, Donald Trump, who was mentored by Cohn, hunts a different kind of subversive. In executive orders signed during his first weeks in office, he targeted “Illegal DEI and DEIA policies,” claiming that they violate civil rights laws. He declared that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” and branded “efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex” as discriminatory against women and girls.
This is a radical misstatement of the law. No court in the land has ever held that DEI — whatever that means — constitutes racial discrimination, or that allowing trans people to participate in society amounts to gender discrimination. It also defies the medical and scientific consensus about sex, gender, and biology. But no matter! The president redefined reality by executive fiat, and then instructed his minions to carry out a purge consistent with his edict.
Philip Bump/Washington Post:
Parsing ICE’s mixed-up, hard-to-believe assault claims
ICE officials keep touting a 413 percent increase in assaults on officers to justify anonymity.
The acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, took the time to respond to my column in a letter to this newspaper. He lamented my allegedly having disparaged his officers during National Police Week, insisting that officers were covering their faces for their own safety. He noted that a man in Texas faced criminal charges for threatening ICE officers and claimed that “ICE officers have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them.”
Given that it is no longer National Police Week, I assume Mr. Lyons will have no objection to my digging into his claims a bit more robustly.
The above is a reference for not permitting ICE to stage in their parking lot. Chavez Ravine used to be a neighborhood of Latino families, evicted to create Dodger Stadium. Watch:
David Shuster on Karoline Leavitt’s hypocrisy:
