Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada, who has shepherded numerous anti-gay and anti-transgender bills through that state's House over the last few years, has announced he'll resign his leadership post in the coming weeks. A Tennessean report revealed that Mr. Casada had exchanged sexually explicit text messages about women with his Chief of Staff; that's despicable behavior, obviously, but would it be too much to ask that bad legislators resign in shame after trying to pass despicable bills? (Mr. Casada says he'll keep his House seat; other Republican legislators have objected, but I doubt that'll amount to much.)
Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) becomes the first Republican House Rep to call for impeachment of our President, and Mehdi Hasan at The Intercept wonders why more Democrats aren't calling for it. They probably think it's "smart politics," but then they also think that running yet another center-right milquetoast who wants everyone to "get along" in the name of "bipartisanship" will beat our President in 2020, just like it didn't do in 2016. And they're also wrong, as Mr. Hasan says, to suggest that they don't want to do anything to rile up our President's base, because anything riles them up, and bases don't win elections without a lot of help. (And Jesus Mary and Joseph our President needs to shut up about "TREASON!" He's going to make the word meaningless, and that's one of those words we need to define accurately and precisely.)
I don't know that the Venezuelan media offer "far more diversity" than American media, but Lucas Koerner and Ricardo Vaz at FAIR make a fairly compelling case that the Venezuelan press is far more diverse than our "liberal" media would like us to think. No, I think imputing malice to our "liberal" media is entirely appropriate there -- weren't they just doing their damnedest to create the impression that a coup was about to take down the Maduro government any second now? Yes, they were. And the "facts" our "liberal" media often presents are easily refutable by folks who've actually spent any time in Venezuela. Maybe there's a solution in there, somewhere.
Fresh off his pardoning of a bankster who wrote a glowing book about him, our President is apparently thinking of pardoning a few actual American war criminals on Memorial Day. On Memorial Day! Could it be that our President really is a Democratic plant trying to make the very idea of ever voting for a flag-waving jingo again revolting? That's not the way to bet, of course, and (as Sen. Graham might say, if he weren't such a toady these days) the whole idea of being an American is most emphatically not to prove that you can act just as uncivilized as your enemy. (As an aside, I think the Times is rather optimistic to suppose that Attorney General Barr might be trying to prevent this from happening; Mr. Barr is, after all, the man who helped Bush the Better pardon all those Iran-Contra conspirators. I'd be happy to be wrong, of course!)
Finally, a warning about polls suggesting that folks feeling good about our economy won't help our President get re-elected: ask them again in late October of 2020. If the economy's still "good" then, and the Presidential candidates have spent six months tearing each other down, then I suspect a fatigued populace will be more likely to ascribe the drama to "both sides" and return our President to office, a tragedy continued Republican vote suppression will facilitate. But who knows? Maybe Democrats will nominate someone who changes the conversation away from our President and towards a just, sustainable, and hopeful future. I kid, of course.
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