Blue Origin rocket that blew up during test debacle cost Jeff Bezos’ space company $150M
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The Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin rocket that dramatically exploded on Florida’s space coast Thursday night costs upwards of $150 million to construct — and the Amazon founder pledged to “rebuild whatever needs rebuilding.” It costs more than $100 million to build the New Glenn rocket’s first stage, a 188-foot-tall rocket booster, and north of $50...
Joe Walsh, the former Republican congressman turned Trump critic, says Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones may have just handed Democrats the opening they needed to flip the governor's office after a recording surfaced of Jones saying he supports banning all abortions.In what appears to be a 2022 GOP debate, Jones is seen agreeing with others that abortion should be banned entirely, as opposed to endorsing a six-week heartbeat bill."Wow, this'll get Georgia Democrats licking their chops," Walsh wrote on X, reacting to the tape of Jones, who is considered the leading GOP candidate for governor. "Here's Lt. Gov Burt Jones, the leading GOP candidate for Governor, on tape saying he's for banning all abortions."Walsh, who has made a point of calling out Republicans he believes are out of step with the broader electorate, was blunt about the political damage. "That ain't gonna play well," he wrote. "It won't play well with Georgia voters at all. This is how Georgia goes blue."Georgia has become one of the most competitive states in the country over the past several election cycles, with Democrats carrying it at the presidential level in 2020 and winning two Senate seats. Abortion has been a driving issue for Democrats since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, helping the party outperform expectations in multiple cycles.Jones has not yet responded publicly to the resurfaced remarks. His position, if it becomes central to the governor's race, would put him well to the right of most Georgia voters on an issue that has repeatedly proven costly for Republican candidates in competitive states.
Former Attorney General Pam Bondi's attempt to deflect responsibility for the Justice Department's mishandling of the Jeffrey Epstein files has been soundly rejected by a former DOJ official, who emphasized that Bondi was a documented participant in the obstruction from day one — not a passive bystander.In a column for MS NOW, former director of the Justice Department's Office of Public Affairs Anthony Coley dismantled Bondi's Friday testimony before the House Oversight Committee, where she attempted to shift blame to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel."Bondi owns every decision she made as attorney general," Coley wrote. "And before she was ousted by Trump in April, she ran a department that refused to meet with Epstein survivors, stalled disclosure demands and fought transparency even after Congress overwhelmingly ordered it."The most damaging indictment, he wrote, concerns Bondi's treatment of Epstein survivors — women, many victimized as children, who asked for a meeting with the attorney general. Bondi refused, and later refused to even acknowledge their presence at a congressional hearing.Coley pointed out that Bondi found time for a very different kind of meeting. Last November, Rep. Lauren Boebert was summoned to the White House Situation Room — a space normally reserved for matters of national security — where she was pressured not to support a discharge petition that would force a floor vote on disclosing the Epstein files."Survivors can't get a meeting but a GOP member of Congress gets the Situation Room," Coley noted.Even Trump's White House eventually soured on Bondi's personal handling of the files with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles telling Vanity Fair that Bondi "whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this."Wiles was particularly scathing about Bondi's claims regarding the Epstein client list. "First she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn't on her desk," Wiles said.That led Coley to write, "Bondi tried to wash her hands of the Epstein files mess in a closed-door interview before the House Oversight Committee on Friday — not on camera and with Todd Blanche’s name ready for every hard question. Don’t be fooled. It was her job to be transparent. And she wasn’t."
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.
I was stumped. On Wednesday, I watched Trump’s Cabinet meeting. I’m not only a glutton for punishment, but I will not be handing out compliments for a very long time. Stunned, I have been mulling over what to write about that beyond-cringe meeting, trying to figure out what prompts middle-to-older-aged, white adults - educated, although… - suck up to a man like this.I’ve been around and followed politics long enough to know that sycophancy is as old as licking George Washington’s revolutionary boots. I worked on Capitol Hill in the 1980s and 1990s, and believe me, members of Congress lived in self-constructed bubbles where staffers, lobbyists and hangers-on told them exactly what they wanted to hear. But there is not a gross enough word that can even begin to describe what happened in the White House Cabinet Room on Wednesday, an over-the-top lesson in leeching that made your skin crawl, your mouth gape, your stomach churn, your ears melt, your eyes cross.The sensation of watching it was a full-body blow of epic adulating proportions. And if you think I’m exaggerating, try and watch the whole thing as I did. But don’t watch it more than once.Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler looked Donald Trump dead in the eyes and said, “Mr. President, you have made us a nation of builders again. You’re leading us to the greatest economy that the world has ever known… I hear it everywhere I go: ‘Please thank the president for putting us back on track. Thank you.’ They love you.”They love you. Bleck!.Yuck! That is now part of the historical record. And I don’t know whether my eyes were crossed and I wasn’t seeing straight, but she looked like someone AI-generated not only her, but her words.Speaking of bleck and yuck, there was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. When he opens his “manly” moronic motor-mouth, it’s akin to watching a blue whale dump 50 gallons of excrement on your head. His words are that abhorrent and that disgusting, and so hard to wash off.He defecated praise on Trump’s renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, describing the maintenance efforts as "a great segue" and linked it to the Iran war.What?But then again, maybe Hegseth knows of what he speaks. Because Trump said that the reflecting pool was a “disgusting place,” and that crews had to pull "more than 10 dumpsters" of accumulated garbage and waste from it. The reflecting pool sounds an awful lot like Hegseth.Hours before the meeting, as if they knew the tragedy that was about to transpire, the New York Times ran an analysis article titled, “Trump is the Only Person Who Can Save America, According to His Cabinet.” If you haven’t read this, read it now. It found that at least one in six sentences spoken by Cabinet members contains praise for Trump, attributes every administration success to him personally, or attacks Democrats. One in six sentences. Watch yesterday’s Cabinet meeting and you will see that come to life.Six sentences go by fast, so your head will start to spin once your brain starts catching on. It’s almost like each Cabinet member goes five sentences, and then Trump pushes an electrical shock button, and that sixth sentence of praise is jolted out.When you are watching, you have to keep reminding yourself that these are the people running the most powerful government on earth. And they spend a sixth of their time essentially writing pseudo-Hallmark cards to a man who eats McDonald’s everyday and calls people “piggy,” “dummy” and “scum” on social media.This is a man who reportedly emits a bad odor. And if you believe the viral videos from yesterday — and other instances — did Trump have an accident in front of the White House after returning from his medical check-up?Here’s what these people need to understand. You are making absolute fools of yourself and you're wasting your time and your careers tripping over yourselves and fighting each other in order to get a quick lick in on this man’s odorous derriere. History is littered with the political corpses of people who kissed Donald Trump’s ring and got nothing but humiliation in return. Pam Bondi spent years fawning over this man. Gone. Chris Christie practically built a shrine to Trump after 2016. Trump mocked his weight publicly and called him a loser. Even John Cornyn, a senator in his 70s who should have known better, genuflected before Trump and still got crushed in his primary by Ken Paxton, a man with one of the most scandal-ridden records in history. Where do these people go when Trump is done with them? They end up as guests on NewsNation. They write books nobody reads. They show up on panels where the other panelists are also people Trump fired or humiliated. Do they then try and kiss up to Sean Hannity, thinking that’s their way back into Toady Trumpland?Earlier this year, The Bulwark writers Sam Stein and Andrew Eggers did what I did and watched an entire Cabinet meeting.
The Texas Senate race has become a national laboratory for anti-"woke" politics, testing whether voters still recoil from the language of 2020 amid the economic pain of 2026.Why it matters: Republicans came away from 2024 convinced they had won more than an election — they had broken through on culture, turning Democrats' progressive language and identity politics into symbols of elite detachment.The durability of that culture-war coup is now an open question, as the GOP tries to redeploy the same playbook in a far more hostile midterm environment.Zoom in: Texas has produced a Senate race in which both parties see the other nominee as the perfect caricature of everything voters hate about the opposition.For Republicans: Texas state Rep. James Talarico offers the dream target — a young, viral progressive whose old comments can be stripped of context and turned into a one-man museum of "woke" Democratic excess.Republicans have seized on Talarico's 2021 floor speech declaring that "God is nonbinary," along with past comments on racism, whiteness and trans children, to cast him as a radical disguised as a Texas preacher.The attacks already are veering into sexuality- and masculinity-coded territory: Talarico's opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, has mocked him as "Low-T," while White House adviser Stephen Miller falsely labeled him as Democrats' "first transgender Senate candidate."Talarico has conceded that he "missed the mark" on some "cringey comments," while insisting his underlying principles — that "racism is immoral and wrong" and that "trans people deserve dignity and equality" — flow from his Christian faith.For Democrats: Paxton is a scandal-scarred Trump ally whose legal and ethical baggage could turn even a red-state Senate race into a referendum on Republican corruption.Paxton was impeached by the GOP-led Texas House in 2023 — then acquitted by the Texas Senate — over allegations that he abused his office to benefit a donor.He spent nearly a decade under indictment on fraud charges before reaching a pretrial deal in 2024, and has been plagued by whistleblower claims, a now-closed federal corruption probe and a very public divorce tied to allegations of adultery.Talarico's campaign wants to make Paxton the face of Republican impunity — arguing that his scandals are not distractions from the race, but the clearest evidence of what the GOP has become.Between the lines: Republicans believe Texas will prove the anti-"woke" playbook still works. Democrats believe prices, Paxton and two years of Trump have changed the terms of the fight.An influx of new residents — plus signs of buyer's remorse among Latinos who backed Trump — has cracked open a once-unthinkable Democratic scenario: Texas as the path to a Senate majority.Flashback: The Trump campaign's most memorable 2024 attack ad turned trans rights into a broad indictment of Democratic priorities, ending with the now-famous tagline: "Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you."Testing by Harris' top super PAC found the ad — which highlighted her 2019 support for taxpayer-funded gender-transition surgeries for prisoners and detained immigrants — moved viewers 2.7 points toward Trump.The big picture: The ad worked because it converted one obscure policy position into a sweeping theory of Democratic "wokeness": a party fluent in elite cultural language, but alien to voters' daily lives.But it didn't work in isolation: The Biden administration's handling of inflation, immigration and affordability were already making Democrats look out of touch before "they/them" gave the GOP the perfect slogan.Today, those forces have flipped: Trump is now 52 points underwater on inflation, turning the economy from a tailwind into the central threat to his party's midterm survival.The bottom line: Texas will be the ultimate test of whether the GOP's anti-"woke" strategy can survive the transition from insurgency to incumbency.
Trump’s pursuit of policies that drive up prices, including tariffs and war, might be punished in November’s electionsFor such an uncannily successful politician, Donald Trump exhibits a perplexing political myopia. His most recent own-goal was endorsing Ken Paxton, a state attorney general, against four-term senator John Cornyn in the Republican primary for Senate in Texas. Trump’s endorsement helped push the ethically compromised Maga firebrand over the top, to run against popular Democrat James Talarico in November, complicating the Republicans’ chances to keep the seat.But what truly screams “I want us to lose the midterms” is what Trump is doing about inflation, which is becoming his most vulnerable issue. According to a New York Times/Siena poll of registered voters earlier in May, Trump’s approval on handling the cost of living is underwater by 42 percentage points, poorer than his rating on handling the economy (minus 31 points) and the unpopular war in Iran (minus 34 points). Continue reading...
