Chatting with Fox Business’s Lou Dobbs, chief Republican investigator Rep. James Comer (R-KY) got so frustrated that Trump DOJ appointee David Weiss hasn’t indicted Hunter Biden yet that he went on a tangent venting that the President’s elder son Beau Biden hadn’t been indicted either, according to a report in The Daily Beast.

Every day we see more evidence that Donald Trump has jumped the shark — poor fundraising, deteriorating elite GOP support, mounting criminal legal peril and more. Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis, coming off a resounding reelection win, has all the malevolence and lib-owning of Trump and none of the baggage. The only remaining bright spot for Trump are the polls which continue to show him … well, to be the leader of the GOP and the odds-on favorite to be the 2024 GOP nominee. Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Don’t believe the hype: Trump is still the guy. And if you look at recent polls he seems to be becoming more the guy rather than less as we get further from the November election.

As a follow-up to the that ludicrous Times op-ed yesterday about an open primary for vice president, TPM Reader JS shares some thoughts …

I was never a Kamala partisan, I was for Loretta Sanchez in the primary (even after she came out dancing around at the state party convention, even after she lost the nomination there). There was just too much trying to bottle Obama’s lightning going on with how her ascent was handled in California politics and Loretta had my eternal thanks for ridding us of Bob Dornan. I thought Kamala was the inevitable and solid pick for VP. I agree that she’s less than ideal as a presidential candidate, that her performance was poor in the primary, and that performance was connected to her indelible traits as a leader.

But what all of these stupid articles miss, whether it’s NYT editorialists who’ve had too much box wine or a certain former-Slate podcaster or some other hot take, is that the perfect way to make her stronger is for her to, you know, actually be the President.

There’s lots of coverage, quite properly, of Rupert Murdoch admitting that he knew from the beginning that all the Big Lie claims were bogus while allowing numerous Fox hosts to repeat the lies for months. But there’s been less, though some, focus on the revelation that he personally gave Jared Kushner confidential information about Biden campaign ads and debate strategy. Here’s the passage from the court filing (emphasis added).

During Trump’s campaign, Rupert provided Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, with Fox confidential information about Biden’s ads, along with debate strategy. Ex.600, R.Murdoch 210:6-9; 213:17-20; Ex.603 (providing Kushner a preview of Biden’s ads before they were public). But, on election night, Rupert would not help with the Arizona call. As Rupert described it: “My friend Jared Kushner called me saying, ‘This is terrible,’ and I could hear Trump’s voice in the background shouting.” Ex.600, R.Murdoch 65:6-8. But Rupert refused to budge: “And I said, ‘Well, the numbers are the numbers.’”

I don’t find any of this shocking. But it’s notable to get it admitted officially and formally in court.

I am very curious about this. Semafor’s Joseph Zeballos-Roig reports that what the article calls a “bipartisan group” of senators is working a plan for various cuts to Social Security including raising the retirement age and changing the cost of living formula to phase in mounting benefit cuts over time. (They also have the idea of creating a sovereign wealth fund to put excess Social Security taxes into.) But the only senators mentioned in the article are Bill Cassidy (Louisiana) and Mike Rounds (South Dakota), both Republicans, and Angus King (Maine), who is an independent.

Now King does caucus with the Democrats. So he is part of their 51 seat majority. But this is a still a pretty strange definition of “bipartisan” since the article at least includes no Democrats.

Greg Craig, impeachment lawyer for Bill Clinton and briefly the White House counsel for Barack Obama, has fallen a lot in standing among Democrats over the last decade. But there’s always further to fall. Today he has a piece in the Times arguing that to take account of his age, Joe Biden should announce that he is going to leave the choice of his vice presidential nominee in 2024 up to Democratic voters. In other words, a contested primary for vice president. I should give you this context: I’m not a big Kamala Harris partisan. I started off as one but her performance in the 2020 primaries — before she got the veep nod — made me question her political and campaign instincts. But this is such a spectacularly bad idea that it’s barely possible for me to understand how this piece even got published let alone how Craig came up with the idea.

In recent days I’ve seen every major paper write a version of the How Did This Tragic Train Derailment Become a New Culture War story. I didn’t need to ask myself whether any of them gave the actual answer, which I think most of us know. How is it that a train derailment caused by a major GOP-donating corporation, in a state run by a Republican governor, caused at least in part by regulations rolled back by Republican President Donald Trump … well, how exactly is that a story about Democrats not caring about people in “flyover country”? The Republican crackpot investigations complex is even now prepping to hold hearings about it.

For those of you who receive The Dispatch, I want to thank you for the responses to my question about your news consumption habits which I included in Friday’s email. I’ve gotten between three and four hundred of your replies so far. I really can’t express how valuable your comments and replies are. They’re very interesting and gratifying to me personally to read. But more importantly, they are really, really valuable for our ability to make decisions about how we run the site and, increasingly, how we operate and communicate with you beyond just the website itself. They amount to audience research, though a much more personal form of that than the phrase usually describes.

As I said, there’s more than three hundred of them. So I’ve only gotten part of the way through them. I think I’ve replied to all the ones I’ve read, at least to the point of acknowledging. With some I have follow up questions and with some of you I’ve already exchanged a few emails back and forth. I’m going to try to get to all of them over the next couple days.

Thank you.

Since I spend time, for better or worse, swimming in the swill of right wing influencers and Trumpists, I’m often able to see things before they go fully mainstream — or rather before their existence gets picked up in mainstream media. Just over the last few days there’s been a burst of claims that something is not quite right about the Ukaine War, that the whole thing might be made up. Perhaps it’s a potemkin war. Maybe the Ukrainians are just crisis actors, as we sometimes hear claimed about the victims of mass shootings in the United States. The “questions” are characteristically vague and open-ended, designed to sow doubt without stipulating to any clearly disprovable claim.

The particular claim or question is, where are the pictures? Why isn’t there more war reporting as we’ve seen with every other war. How is it world leader after world leader is able to visit Kyiv in relative safety?

I haven’t published so many reader replies in a while. But I’m doing so in this case because I find them very interesting and think some of you will too. But there’s a bit more than that. These discussions help me understand with more clarity some basic discussions we’re having as a society about artificial intelligence. They also help me line these discussions up with my own thoughts about the nature and utility of knowledge, the validation of theories by their ability to predict experimental results, and so on.