Open Thread time
I’m of the opinion that we should always have an Open Thread in the list of 10 Recent Posts….
"This is the Voice of Moderation. I wouldn't go so far as to say we've actually SEIZED the radio station . . . "
“just the slush fund” /= “just a slush fund”
More on the slush-fund settlement and audit-immunity amendment.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/20/tax-world-gawks-at-trump-audit-agreement-never-seen-anything-like-this-00929576
The leak under tRump and the prosecution of the leaker under Biden – resulting in a 5-year prison sentence, mind you. How this results in a fund to compensate people prosecuted under Biden is a logical mystery. Biden prosecuted the guy who harmed tRump so tRump gets to hand out money to people Biden prosecuted.
MAGA is completely convinced that Biden was 1000x as corrupt as Trump could ever be and that people complaining about Trump are hypocrites.
it’s a self-healing bubble.
At least there’s this:
https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-silver-bulletin
Net approval: -20.6%
Approval: 38%
Disapproval: 58.6%
It seemed for a while, just based on my checking the numbers fairly regularly, that 40% approval and -15% net approval were floors that tRump would never go under. Not anymore, particularly as concerns net approval.
Meanwhile, I’m astonished that neither the Guardian, the Times nor the NYT seem to make anything of the fact that China has warned Trump not to threaten Cuba. I thought when I saw it on C4 News that it was a tremendous slap in the face after Trump’s rosy description of their relationship, but it seems that most of the world press is not necessarily taking it that way. How interesting…
Thanks lj, if I can come up with something coherent that folks here might actually want to read and seems in any way useful I will be in touch. I was thinking about getting in touch with the people doing the Running in the Red series at Balloon Juice, they are probably better situated to handle Chris’s circumstances. Anything I put together would be more personal, though including regional political history and demographics for context. The one line summary is Chris Harden is precisely the kind of person/candidate that Democrats need running in “lost cause” districts (60/40 R in this case) to provide a genuine, humane alternative should a political earthquake create a window of opportunity.
Here’s Chris’s campaign website for anyone who wants to learn more:
https://www.chrishardenforcongress.com/?fbclid=IwY2xjawR9o25leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETBhVnBSektMYWFWekV4NDNtc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHluklCzqZFGqMTxlsCqrxS1vGIwXlhmBRvHtMux2g8sn4cCpDitg2IEbzvgF_aem_iyTRcytDDEExu7jsnmkplw
To fill the vacuum…
Chris Harden seems like one of the better political animals. But, if elected, can he survive DC intact?
“Overall Assessment
As of May 2026, shortly after his primary victory, Chris Harden’s reputation is that of an authentic, pragmatic, hometown moderate Democrat with a compelling personal story of overcoming humble beginnings. Democrats and his campaign materials portray him positively as empathetic, hardworking, honest, and results-oriented—an attorney and father who “gets it” and prioritizes practical help for families over national culture-war noise. Criticisms appear limited to intra-primary questions about the sincerity or timing of his Democratic affiliation. He does not appear to have accumulated significant negative baggage or a polarizing reputation. Coverage remains limited because he is a relatively new figure on the broader political stage in a long-shot race.”
Chris Harden Reputation
“The site is effective at what campaign websites are designed to do: build an emotional connection, articulate broad values, drive donations and volunteers, and define the candidate favorably against an implied extremist opponent. It contains no glaring misrepresentations but relies on platitudes, personal storytelling, and partisan framing typical of such materials. Specific policy depth is limited, as is common in early/general-audience campaign communication.”
Campaign Website Fact Check Analysis
This is from a depressing piece by Tina Brown (whom I find reasonably astute about US electoral politics, and I like her turn of phrase) which she ends like this:
Don’t expect House members to return emboldened when Trump has just gone four for four in the primaries, whacking, not just Cornyn, but his Epstein Files Transparency Act foe Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Georgia GOP gubernatorial candidate Brad Raffensperger, who committed the ultimate crime of failing to “find” 11,780 more Trump votes in Georgia in the 2020 election. Sorry, not sorry about Senator Bill Cassidy from Louisiana also hitting the bricks. He’s the physician who oversaw a nationally-recognized vaccine campaign in his home state, but later revealed his inner worm by casting the deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary. Trump punished him anyway for having voted in 2021 for his second impeachment. So long, mofo.
Every liberal commentator now bangs on about an assured mid-term shellacking for the POTUS party over rising gas prices, thanks to the Trump-created catastrophe of the Strait of Hormuz closure and the universally unpopular Iran war. I suspect they and the polls are wrong again. It’s not just the creeping success of Republican redistricting creating more seats than Democratic efforts to do the same. Trump has found a diabolical way to separate his personal charisma from the destruction he perpetrates and the corruption he normalizes. He’s the angel of sabotage, freed from the shackles of his own malign deeds by the Supreme Court, the GOP’s moral turpitude, and the universal glint of greed from the Wall Street honchos, Silicon Valley bros, and Palm Beach plutocrats who see that the presidency is open for business. As last week’s Brennan Center newsletter put it, “There is a zone of lawlessness around the Oval Office.” In Trump’s first term, he was restrained by the need for a second, and by advisers schooled in the now-quaint ethos of governing by accepted norms. But then, he learned something transformative. Speaking to the NYT in January about prohibiting his family from profiteering overseas from proximity to official business in his first term, Trump said that, “he got no credit for it.” He then added a killer kicker that made less news at the time but has stayed with me as a rare moment of truth: “I found out that nobody cared.”
If there is any message that crystalizes the 250th anniversary of the U.S., it is not that America has changed but that Trump has changed America. There will be no snapback when he’s gone. Even as his approval ratings tank and the country is hurting, it feels as if his base has become wider and deeper and represents a new national state of mind. Tuned out on our phones, mesmerized by money porn, high on the idolatry of the big flashy win, we are getting used to the erosion of the rule of law, the threats to free speech, the banishment of government watchdogs, and the chasm of inequality. After ten years of Trump bludgeoning the first principles of the American experiment (ten because I don’t count the disappearing ink of Biden’s lame tenure when every headline was a new Trump indictment, scandal, or toxic blast from exile in Mar-a-Lago), Trump has refashioned the country in his image.
honestly, i don’t expect big Dems in November. not because i think “Dems” will fuck it up, but because i think voters will.
One caveat: the Congressmen and Senators that Trump primaried no longer have that threat hanging over them. And they might reasonably be looking for some payback. Won’t turn them into liberals, of course. But it might revive their devotion to the Constitution that they swore to “support, protect and defend.”
I’m aleady seen comments about the folly of trashing people on whom your paper thin majority depends, when they will be in office for over 7 more months.
This conversation may be informative about how the rest of the politically-conscious world is gobsmacked by the extent of Trump’s corruption.
It’s set up as centrist on average – Rory Stewart, the posh skinny one, is a former Conservative MP.
And Alastair Campbell was Tony Blair’s spin doctor, and the model (in In the Thick of it) for the immortal Malcolm Tucker of blessed memory. A propos of which, Tony Blair’s unbelievably unhelpful intervention into UK politics today shows how out of touch he is with our reality….
their suggestion that the Constitution could be changed to prevent future Trump-style corruption is adorbs.
I won’t read this article or provide a link. I only provide the text below for amusement at the pretzel logic applied to the tRump slush-fund settlement.
Google preview text of the wikipedia entry on the author:
I think I can imagine at least the generalities of the slop without reading it.
Well, HE IS very transparent except to those willfully blind.
Tom Fitton.. lol.
It’s charlatans all the way down.
For wj, since his example helped get me off my butt… The local county election office offered me a job as a “resolution judge” for the primaries, which I accepted. (1) Resolution judges sit in the counting facility and look at ballots rejected by the machines to see if voter intent can be determined. (2) Paper ballots with fill-in ovals for the vast majority of voters; no hanging chads. (3) There are no election volunteers in this county, everyone gets paid.
Good on you, Michael.
It may not be a huge deal in some senses. But the fact that people keep stepping up to do the little things required for our elections to happen? That really is huge.
My take is, we’re all volunteers. Certainly the pay isn’t enough to induce much of anyone; pretty sure I would make more if I spent the 16 or so hours washing dishes. In fact, my suspicion (I haven’t bothered to check) is that there’s some obscure legal or insurance, or similar reason that they need to pay us.