Democratic Rep. Rips JD Vance For Defending Policies That Are ‘Defiant Of Common Sense'

Democratic 'Party Apparatus' Needs New Leadership

The flawed policies driving Medicare waste — and how to fix them

Medicare hemorrhages about $60 billion a year in waste, fraud, and abuse — money lost from a program serving 69 million Americans. Fraud reflects deliberate deception, but much of Medicare’s waste stems from flawed policy and perverse incentives. The Trump administration is on the warpath, taking unprecedented administrative steps to curb this abuse of taxpayers’ […]

Inside one southern Republican's defiant stand against Donald Trump

Pondering our nation’s upcoming Memorial Day, it’s hard not to get emotional. I still get a lump in my throat when we stand for the national anthem at Bears home games. I fidget, look down, or look away so people don’t see my tears and think I’m loopy. But when I hear ‘perilous fight,’ and ‘proof through the night’ I really do see the old yellowed flag: 15 stars and stripes, tattered and frayed, still standing against all odds for a new freedom the world had never heard of. We were founded on a novel concept of liberty never before articulated: an intangible, deeply profound declaration that all men were created equal, endowed with the same right to pursue happiness. Not because those rights were bestowed by a king, but because people were born with them. They were inalienable. Five hundred days into this administration, sensing the precarity of those rights, seeing the momentum of attempts to erase them, guts me. Not because we’re exceptional, not because we reached our goals. We never did, and we’ve recently begun marching so determinedly backward it’s easy to feel helpless, despondent, even. Then suddenly, and unexpectedly, I hear the song sung from an unexpected voice, and there’s that tattered flag again, still standing. A light through the night from the rightOn May 12, 2026, South Carolina State Senator Shane Massey made a singularly impassioned argument about why we are, and what we stand for. He is a Republican.Massey took to the floor to reject Trump’s demand that South Carolina gerrymander itself so that, despite being having a statewide population that is 26% black, no black member of Congress can ever get elected again. South Carolina, a slaveholding state, has sent only one Black Democratic representative to Congress since 1897: James Clyburn. Massey spoke of the evils of permanently silencing Clyburn, the citizens who elected him, and an entire opposing political party just because an ethically compromised Supreme Court, with a wink to their corporate backers, says you can. In a 45-minute address at the state’s capital, Massey rejected Trump’s redraw of SC’s congressional map and instead embraced American pluralism, now all but forgotten as Republicans do an about face on states rights to serve an unschooled master. A Republican sees the peril of uni-party ruleFirst, Massey reminded his colleagues that our system was designed to divide power not only between the three branches of the federal government, but also, crucially, between the federal government and sovereign states. Massey said Trump should not try to dominate the federal government to the exclusion of the judicial and legislative branches, and should respect the federal/state division of power as well. “The separation of powers may actually be the most important governmental doctrine that has been created in the history of man,” Massey said, astutely. “It is that important. And what the Congress has done to relinquish their authority to the executive is terrible. And we all see the results of that.” He didn’t say “abuse of power,” “despot,” or “corruption,” because he didn’t have to.Instead, Massey stressed the founders’ “brilliant creation of federalism and the sovereignty of the states,” and said he didn’t want to participate in eroding federalism or diminishing the essential role of states. It’s obvious that Trump is destroying the federal government, but no republican before Massey has publicly acknowledged that he’s also trying to erase state boundaries and state authority, the very basis of federalism.Healthy opponents make us strongerMassey also recognized a fundamental human dynamic, a principle self-evident in free markets, commerce, education, scientific achievement, sports, and most realms of human performance: competition makes us stronger. He argued that Republicans should not seek to destroy Democrats just because they can, because the Democratic party makes Republicans stronger. In a truth rarely spoken by any politician, Massey declared, “I will tell my Republican friends: Republicans are stronger when the Democrat Party is vibrant and viable. We are. Competition makes you better, y’all.”It’s a message for all factions. Healthy political parties make each other better. Without an effective opponent, they turn on each other. They infight. They lose the incentive to address what they were elected to address, to fix what they came to fix, and instead focus on how best to stay in power. Specifically, Massey said, when facing criticism and accountability from democrats, republicans rise to the challenge because they have to. He boldly suggested that Republicans should stop and assess why they can’t now win a popular election without first rigging it.

Rubio pushes back on India's concerns over US visa curbs, says policy must be 'America First' under Trump

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says Trump's immigration reforms are not targeted at India but applied globally during a news conference in New Delhi.

Democrats' Radicalism Is Their Biggest Problem

The release by Democrats of their party's so-called autopsy on the 2024 election is deservedly getting trashed for being late, superficial and scattershot.

GOP Rep. Blasts Trump, Criticizes 'Absurd' Nature Of 'Anti-Weaponization Fund'

Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) also addressed an exchange between the president and CNN's Jacqui Heinrich, who is the congressman's fiancée.

Policy expert flags telling detail in Trump post: 'This clearly was not written by him'

On Saturday, President Donald Trump announced via social media that a negotiated settlement with Iran to end the war had “been largely negotiated," but on Sunday, a foreign policy expert raised doubts about whether the president himself authored the post, and what that may reveal about the ongoing negotiations.“First of all, there's no misspellings, there [are] no grammatical errors, there are no attempts at humiliating any side. He's got the titles and the names of each of these different world leaders correct,” said Trita Parsi, an Iranian-Swedish writer, political analyst and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, during an appearance on “Breaking Points.”“I'm mentioning this because before, we have seen Truth Social posts by the president in which he says 'we're really close [to a deal with Iran],' and it's not a serious post – it is timed to manipulate the markets, it doesn't have any indication that anyone else has reviewed the post in any way shape or form.”He added, “This clearly was not written by him alone, although it does have his flavor to it as well towards the end.”As to why Trump may allow someone other than himself to author a social media post on his personal Truth Social account, Parsi suggested it to be a form of protection from domestic right-wing figures that have urged him to walk away from negotiations and resume the war against Iran.“It gives him a certain degree of protection here in Washington,” Parsi said. “We saw the massive meltdown of warmongers last night when this was first announced, and even before it was announced when they were getting notice that this was coming. They were just in a public panic.”In his announcement, Trump named nearly a dozen world leaders that had helped in negotiations between Washington and Tehran. Their inclusion, Parsi claimed, may have been a pro-active attempt to get ahead of right-wing critics of a deal to end the war.“For him to be able to say 'look, I'm doing it because all of these regional leaders are asking me to do this' is very important,” Parsi said. “Not just to be able to show the regional anchoring of this, but also to be able to deflect the criticism that invariably will come, which is 'you abandoned Israel.' Well, perhaps Israel had abandoned the United States by manipulating the United States into this war in the first place.”

The Democrats need to get over themselves

Well, the much-ballyhooed autopsy on the 2024 election has arrived from Democratic National Committee’s headquarters, and it is a shame it didn’t stay buried in a trashcan in one of their offices deep inside the Beltway, and as far away from real people as possible. Before moving on just as quickly as I can, from this unmitigated mess of typos, redactions, double-talking and sniping — and better yet, the leadership who allowed it — I want to underline some finer points, and hard-earned lessons we can take from it, and the disastrous 2024 campaign season.First, given all the unprofessionalism, money-wasting, bickering, and out and out dysfunction in the party, it’s a wonder Kamala Harris didn’t lose by 25 points. It is clear that because of a series of self-inflicted wounds, the Democrats were not ready to do battle during the most important election in U.S. history.That is tragic. The report, and the way Democratic leadership comported itself, is truly embarrassing. Anybody who was a part of it, needs to be banished, and never allowed near a campaign again.They’ve helped elect enough Republicans.In the wake of of the report’s release Thursday I typed this in a huff on social media: 1) The dysfunctional DNC is a major problem for the party, not an answer.2) Navel-gazing, self-doubt and sniping like this are what damaged the party in the first place.3) The autopsy itself is a joke and illustrates how out of touch the Inside the Beltway party “hierarchy” is with voters. There is no mention of Biden’s advanced age, going back on his promise not to run again, Israel, Gaza, the pick of Walz for VP, or the shitshow that resulted in Harris getting all of 100 days to run. All factored heavily in the terrible outcome.4) Read No. 1 again.I stand behind all of that now.But there is a sliver of good news here ...Maybe the people who have been claiming the election was somehow stolen will finally go quiet, and use their considerable energy to start focusing on the myriad problems within the party that so severely mucked up that crucial election.Look, if it helped you to believe Trump stole the election in its gory aftermath, I won’t judge, I really won’t. Those were some very hard times emotionally, and our sensibilities had just taken a severe pounding by a lewd racist and his soulless cult who have no standards, and an unlimited capacity to always go lower. That has to stop now. Too much is on the line.If after everything we’ve learned from Democratic leadership itself, you are still repeating this hogwash, I want to tell you gently that you sound a lot like the people on the Right who are still hollering about the 2020 election being stolen from Trump.That just isn’t a good look, and I am doing you a favor telling you this.By implying the 2024 election was swiped away from Democrats you are also implying that the party, starting with Kamala Harris, had evidence it somehow was, and decided for some bizarre reason not to pursue it, and to just forget the whole thing.That would be absolutely catastrophic, of course, and leaves me wondering why you would support a party that is incapable of defending itself from the greatest heist in world history. Your issue should be with the party, not the boogeymen who allegedly somehow stole the election.Even I, a steady critic of recent DNC leadership, don’t believe this happened in a million years. They ran an inept campaign, have admitted it in so many millions of jumbled words, and are even now still bashing away at each other, and pointing fingers. The party is a mess, and most Americans know this. Thankfully, they aren’t real hot on the Republican Party right now, either. Frankly, my real ire here is not directed at those who believe in these conspiracy theories, but the hucksters who are still lining their pockets by preying on people’s hurt and anguish by spreading all this manure. They know who they are and should be ashamed of themselves. Unfortunately, they won’t be, because they have proven to be no better than the troublemaking trolls on the Right who do the same thing.Thankfully, most of this is contained to the spurious realm of social media, and in the dark corners of Substack, and other content-providers, where too many facts go to die, and people deal in impulse and emotion, not reason.By implementing MAGA’s playbook to complete their grift, these phonies are preventing people from doing the truly important work of processing what really happened, and demanding better from the leadership of a party that clearly has no sense of itself.The DNC is a complete wreck, and if that surprises you, then it really is time for you to start paying attention, and stop with all the stupid conspiracy theories.