Rep. Jake Auchincloss urging Democrats to vote against the presumptive Maine Senate nominee exposes the limits of party unity. The post Graham Platner Is Forcing Centrist Dems to Reckon With “Vote Blue No Matter Who” appeared first on The Intercept.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) said on Saturday that she has “no regrets” about her decision to push for the release of files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, even after President Trump endorsed her challenger in the upcoming GOP primary for South Carolina governor. “I voted to release the Epstein files. NO REGRETS,” Mace…
Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt said he’s focusing on laws that already exist to make “the streets safe.” “We are going to make sure that moms feel safe in Los Angeles,” Pratt said on Fox News’s Saturday in America. Pratt said current city Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) made up statistics, […]
Katie Miller, who is married to Stephen Miller, lashed out at a young Democratic operative on Thursday, after the Democratic Party’s official account called Miller’s husband an “ugly f–k.” The aggrieved wife of the top White House adviser posted the operative’s picture on X and ridiculed her personal life, declaring, “She’s 30, unmarried with no kids,” and adding: “This is what a sad, unhappy, female Liberal looks like.”That liberal is Paulina Mangubat, 30, who writes many of the Democratic National Committee’s tweets as its deputy chief mobilization officer. After Katie Miller named her and posted her picture, the MAGA fury started rolling in. I spoke with Mangubat Friday morning. The MAGA backlash has been swift, with people circulating images of her engagement photo shoot and insulting her and her fiancé’s appearance. People are posting decade-old pictures of her while commenting on her appearance, weight, and even her happiness in life.But in our interview, Mangubat stressed emphatically that this dustup should refocus everyone on the real victims of the moment.“Ultimately, this is not really about me,” Mangubat told me. “It’s about the people who are really being attacked by the Trump administration.”This saga all started after MAGA extremist Ken Paxton won the Texas GOP Senate primary, after which the DNC posted a fairly conventional tweet that included a picture of the Democratic nominee, James Talarico, adding: “It’s time to take back Texas.”That prompted Stephen Miller to tweet: “Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate.” It’s a strange claim—Talarico is not transgender, though he’s spoken up for trans rights—but it’s obviously in keeping with the GOP strategy, which is to portray Talarico as woke and effeminate. Regardless, that’s the tweet that the DNC feed—Mangubat—responded to with “Shut up you ugly f–k.”Mangubat’s tweet was approved by the DNC. She says that the effort to make the Democratic Party’s social media presence more nimble and responsive is the much more important story here, especially given how well Trump and the GOP prosecuted the information wars in 2024. The DNC says its program has grown, pointing to an additional 6.3 million followers across all its social media platforms. It claims the programs have produced over nine billion impressions since Trump took office.Mangubat says that when Democrats did research into how to reach more people, “overwhelmingly what we heard is people want us to be more direct, speak more like real people, and be faster.”Speaking like real people also means letting them react in real time with real feeling—which is what happened here with Stephen Miller, Mangubat says.“All we did was say what everyone else is thinking, which is, ‘Shut up—that’s not what people care about right now,’” Mangubat says. She added that there’s no reason to regret using the “ugly” moniker to describe Miller.“What he’s doing is ugly—siccing federal agents on civilians, applauding when families are separated. It is ugly behavior,” Mangubat said. “The reason this happened is because Stephen Miller, who is one of the most powerful men in the country, decided that it would be a good use of his time to go on Twitter and hurl an untrue and transphobic attack against James Talarico.”It’s worth stressing that the roots of this saga lie in the depiction of Talarico as transgender—and that this was intended as a vicious insult. Indeed, Stephen Miller went on a tear after this exchange, going on Fox News and ripping Talarico as soft and effeminate in every way he could. Miller derided Talarico as “transitioning to female,” mocking his testosterone count and claiming Talarico’s blood is made of “soy milk.”It’s also worth dwelling on the vision of masculinity that Paxton presents. His wife divorced him on biblical grounds, he’s been impeached and indicted while in office, and he has subjected LGBTQ people to relentless abuse.But this is very much the MAGA vision of masculinity in action, according to Stephen Miller. During that Fox News hit, Miller described Paxton as a “real conservative” and “patriotic” and “God-fearing,” while claiming that Talarico will be roundly rejected by red-blooded Texans, given their manly “pioneer heritage” and “frontier history.” The roots of this saga, then, really lie in the MAGA-approved view that Talarico doesn’t count as a Real Man, while Paxton somehow does.Mangubat, the daughter of two Filipino immigrants, tells me she was born in Louisiana and raised in Arizona. She said Katie Miller’s claims about her being an unhappy liberal are false. “I feel very blessed in my life,” Mangubat said. “I love this country.
Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed admitted on a podcast to destroying a bottle of vodka in a Detroit liquor store after being confronted about his beard.
President Donald Trump reached an unprecedented agreement with his own Justice Department last week in which he, his family and his businesses would be granted broad tax immunity, but some experts say the agreement would be effectively worthless the moment Trump loses power, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday, kicking off a potential tax reckoning.“[Acting Attorney General Todd] Blanche signed an agreement that is not worth the paper it’s written on – except that government personnel at present will not challenge it,” said Stuart Bassin, a former Justice Department tax litigator, speaking with the Journal.Trump reached the agreement after agreeing to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) he filed over his tax returns leaking in 2019. In exchange, Trump received a nearly $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded settlement for his newly created “anti-weaponization fund,” designed to compensate those who’ve alleged to have been unfairly targeted by the Biden administration’s DOJ, including violent Jan. 6 Capitol rioters.In addition to the $1.8 billion settlement, the agreement also ended all pending audits of tax returns of Trump, his family and his businesses, despite the federal government having several "plausible defenses that it never asserted,” the Journal reported.Even so, several experts pointed out several flaws in the agreement. One, the agreement left open the opportunity for states to pursue their own audits of some of the president’s tax filings.“Trump and Blanche can give away federal stuff. They can’t give away the state stuff,” Bassin told the Journal.Secondly, the IRS has no deadline for unfiled gift tax returns, noted Duke University tax law professor Larence Zelenak, speaking with the Journal.“A future IRS could contend that Trump effectively received the $1.8 billion in the settlement agreement and directed it as gifts to fund recipients,” the Journal wrote, paraphrasing Zelenak’s comments. “Under that argument, which the settlement attempts to prevent, Trump could have taxable income and taxable gifts.”And thirdly, once Trump leaves the White House, the IRS under a different administration could simply perform an audit on Trump’s tax returns, the Journal’s report reads.“Typically, the IRS gets three years to audit a return, which would likely keep returns from tax years 2025 and beyond open to examination,” the report reads. “But there are exceptions that let the IRS reach further back. The IRS has six years if there are substantial omissions of income, and an unlimited amount of time to pursue tax fraud.”
Illinois city official Sylvia Sims Bolton turned herself in this week after allegedly trying to cast her dead mother's ballot, fueling broader concerns about the safety of mail-in voting.
The DOJ is searching for an anti-ICE agitator who allegedly threatened to kill a federal agent's family outside a New Jersey detention facility.
An eighth prosecutor in Virginia announced Thursday that the state’s recently-enacted ban on so-called “assault weapons” is unconstitutional and he wouldn’t enforce it. Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed the legislation, […]