Washington Examiner senior columnist Guy Benson argued Graham Platner became the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine to increase male support in the party. “I think that there is a reason why Maine Democrats decided to nominate Graham Platner, because they were like, ‘We need to connect better with men. We need someone who’s manly,’” […]
Washington Examiner columnist Guy Benson raised concerns about a possible agreement with Iran, noting that the regime has yet to demonstrate any good faith. “I think it’s a fool’s errand to count on the good faith of the Iranian regime,” Benson said on Fox News’s The Big Weekend Show on Sunday. “If anything’s going to […]
Washington Examiner columnist Guy Benson argued that critics are quicker to blame conservatives for political violence than to examine the Southern Poverty Law Center’s controversial “hate map.” Benson’s comments came as House Republicans scrutinized the organization’s hate-group designation process during a Judiciary Committee hearing, raising broader questions about the SPLC’s practices and recent allegations surrounding […]
The New York Times Editorial Board issued Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche a blistering rebuke Monday in urging the Senate – particularly Senate Republicans whose congressional careers had been cut short by President Donald Trump – to reject his confirmation for Attorney General.“President Trump has every right to select an attorney general who shares his policy views… But Mr. Trump has no right to expect that the Senate will confirm an attorney general with a track record of disdaining the law and using law enforcement as a partisan weapon,” the Times’ Editorial Board wrote.The Times chronicled Blanche’s history within the Justice Department (DOJ) that they argued had “already damaged the DOJ,” including by launching “politically motivated” investigations into Trump’s enemies, personally signing off on an agreement to grant Trump and his family broad immunity from tax audits, and by helping craft the $1.8 billion fund to award payouts to Jan. 6 rioters.With the slim GOP majority in the Senate, Blanche’s confirmation is far from certain. Further jeopardizing Blanche’s path to confirmation was a handful of GOP senators who have either demonstrated a willingness to buck Trump or have no reason not to, the Times noted, a list “plenty long enough to defeat Mr. Blanche.”“The group includes three senators whose political careers Mr. Trump has helped end: Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and John Cornyn of Texas,” the Times wrote. “It includes Mitch McConnell, who is also leaving Washington, and Rand Paul, both of Kentucky. It includes Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Ms. Collins is campaigning for re-election this summer by insisting that she can stand up to Mr. Trump. This nomination offers an easy test of that vow.”
After demolishing Gov. Janet Mills in Maine's Democratic primary, the political newbie confronts a major challenge running against the Senate's longest-serving Republican woman.
Imagine you were buying a car, and the only thing you knew about it was the color. Not the horsepower, not the number of cylinders, not the options; none of that. Just the color. Obviously, you wouldn’t make such a purchase. You’d demand to know more, and quite rightly so. Well, voters choose candidates on the basis of scant information all the time, especially when it comes to the economic realities that obtain in this country. This is largely the Democrats’ fault. The Republicans don’t want people to know these facts. The Democrats should, but they don’t talk about them nearly enough. Now that America has freshly minted its first actual trillionaire in Elon Musk, and Donald Trump has made working people’s lives far harder than they already were with his pointless, gas-price-raising little war, those of us who do know those realities need to demand of Democrats that they talk more about them.Before I get into it, let me say clearly: I’m not calling voters stupid. It isn’t their fault they don’t know this stuff—it’s, as I said, the Democrats’, and to some extent the media’s, which doesn’t talk about these things enough because they aren’t “news.” People do know in their bones that the American economic system is rigged—although, as we shall see, they generally have no idea how rigged. Okay. So: Let’s start with the fact that the top 1 percent of Americans now owns about 32 percent of the wealth. You may know this. This one fact does get reported or mentioned pretty frequently. It’s a shocking number, though. It’s not okay, and it’s not normal. Look at this historical chart from the authoritative St. Louis Fed. In 1990, it was around 22 percent. It’s been above 30 percent since 2014. And it just keeps going up—except, interestingly, for three dips, two during George W. Bush’s presidency and one during Trump’s first term; not because they were warriors on behalf of income equality, but because they tanked the economy.A pretty big chunk of that 32 percent is owned by not just the 1 percent, but the .1 percent. That’s about 135,000 households. I couldn’t find precise current numbers for 2025-26 on deadline, but I did find this study, from 2013, by the formidable duo of Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. In that year, the top .1 percent owned about 22 percent of the wealth. Again, this is not normal. It’s not “just the way things are.” The last time the top .1 percent owned that much wealth was—of course—back in 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression.Trump wants to take America back to the 1950s, does he? In this one respect, we should all wish he would. From the end of World War II until the late 1980s, the top .1 percent owned around 10 to 12 percent of the wealth. The current madness started after Ronald Reagan’s two big tax cuts. (The famous joke about everything about the United States going bad after the Reagan presidency isn’t quite as hyperbolic as it sounds.)Now—you may consider the above information old hat. If you read someone like me on a regular basis, you’re more likely to know this sort of stuff. But people—voters—generally do not. In fact, what they don’t know is astonishing.A week or so ago, I tripped across this video on YouTube. It’s old—it’s from 2013. So the reality described in it has only gotten worse. The narrator starts like this: “There’s a chart I saw recently that I can’t get out of my head. A Harvard business professor and economist asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth was distributed in the United States.” They thought the top 20 percent probably owned around 58 percent of the wealth. Then they were asked what they thought the ideal distribution should be. They thought that ideally, the top 20 percent should own around 33 percent of the wealth. The actual distribution, in 2013? The top 20 percent owned 82 percent of the wealth. This was 2013, but in the intervening years, people’s perceptions haven’t changed much. I did find a study from this year in which researchers asked people how many times wealthier an average member of the top 10 percent is than someone in the remaining 90 percent of the population. People said about 13.5 times wealthier. The actual answer is precisely twice that, 27 percent.You get the idea. So, what does all this mean for Democrats?I suppose some would say, well, a few things. First, they need to disenthrall themselves from the idea that talking about all this stuff is too “left-wing.” Undoubtedly, such rhetoric will be labeled that by Republicans and elements of the media. But so what? It’s just reality. This country is on an unsustainable economic path. It must be changed. You don’t change things by being afraid of how you’re going to be attacked. Non-confrontational Democrats are, to be blunt, not fit for purpose.Others would contend that even if the mass of voters knew these numbers and more, they wouldn’t care; it wouldn’t move them, and they wouldn’t vote on the basis of them. I think that, too, is cowardly nonsense.
Some Republicans saw a political opening in Sunday’s fights at the White House. Democrats said they saw a distraction from more pressing matters.
Home rental giant Airbnb is silent after its chief legal officer, former Biden White House chief of staff Ron Klain, described criticism of Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo as a "partisan attack" and argued that the ink was simply an attempt to remember "fallen comrades." The post No Comment From Airbnb as Chief Legal Officer Ron Klain Defends Graham Platner’s Nazi Tattoo—After Company Distanced Itself From a Cofounder’s Work With Trump Administration appeared first on .
