As I mentioned over the weekend and as Alice Ollstein has been reporting, the Trump administration moved from its very lax standard for separating families to a very high bar for reuniting them. It not only wanted lots of proof that parents were parents but also that they were ‘fit’ parents. A judge in the case just told the administration to knock it off: just reunite the families and don’t create needless obstacles.
There’s a little gem packed away in this article from The Daily Beast on that GOP-only Senate delegation to Moscow. Apparently US diplomats who briefed the Senators told them that Russian officials are under the impression that only Democrats care about or are critical of Russian election meddling and incursions in Eastern Europe. Read More
Something is brewing on Capitol Hill that has an eerie resemblance to another set of events that happened just about 12 years ago as Washington hurtled toward the 2006 midterm election. In September 2006, ABC News first reported that Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) had exchanged sexually explicit text messages with underage male congressional pages. Later it was reported that after turning 18 at least two pages had had sexual encounters with Foley. Foley resigned from Congress and entered an alcohol rehabilitation program on October 2nd. Later Foley revealed that he had himself been molested years earlier as a 13-year-old altar boy by a priest named Anthony Mercieca — claims Mercieca appeared to confirm in an interview with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune a week later. Read More
Republicans made a point of railing against the health care law in past elections. But this year, Democrats are hoping that the popularity of the law’s Medicaid expansion will win them voters. For the first time since the law was created, Alice Ollstein writes in her Weekly Primer on Obamacare, Democrats are spending more on ads about it than Republicans are.
This comes as the Trump administration continues to chip away at various aspects of the law, dealing the latest blow this past weekend when it cut off risk-adjustment payments.
Kate Riga explains how former RNC deputy finance chairman Elliot Broidy, a character in the Michael Cohen storyline, is now also part of the Michael Flynn storyline.
In November 2017, a rising star in Republican politics, Wesley Goodman, was forced to resign from the Ohio State House seat he’d won the year before. A staunch family values Republican, the married Goodman had apparently had sex with a man in his State House office. When confronted about the incident by Ohio State House Speaker Clifford Roenberger, Goodman resigned. What quickly emerged was that Goodman lived a secret life as a gay man. But he also had a history of harassing behavior and at least one documented instance of sexual assault which remained secret even after it came to the attention of his de facto boss, Tony Perkins, President of the Council for National Policy.
Goodman was also a protege of and former senior staffer for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH). Read More
The Washington Post has just confirmed that in his quest to sow chaos and generally blow up NATO President Trump is now demanding that NATO raise its member state defense spending from a current goal of 2% (by 2024) of GDP to 4%. This is of course blathering nonsense. But I thought I’d try to put some numbers to this in any case. Read More
One of the curious dimensions of the evolving Jim Jordan story is that the defenses of Jordan often become close to indistinguishable from the accusations against him. The first instance was that interlude in Jordan’s interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier in which he switched from adamant denials to making a distinction between formal accusations and “conversations in a locker room.” When Baier asked what “locker room” talk he’d heard, Jordan shifted back and insisted he hadn’t heard any. Now there’s another instance of this, an admission that essentially demolishes Jordan’s denials. The head coach Jordan worked for, Russ Hellickson, admits he knew Dr. Strauss was acting inappropriately with wrestlers on his team and confronted him about it. Read More
Wow pic.twitter.com/nyRwPTGojO
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 12, 2018
Learn some little-known TPM history and the inside logistics of covering the Paul Manafort trial as TPM Managing Editor David Kurtz joins us for a special episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast.
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