The ex-POTUS who claims he was taken down by the deep state is looking even smaller in court, getting scolded by the judge and sitting through testimony about how he and Melania don't sleep in the same bed. Plus, RFK Jr.'s brain worm, winning over the still-going Haley voters, and the plan to ban porn. Adam Kinzinger joins Tim Miller.
show notes:
Tim's interview with Tammy Baldwin
Tim's interview with Colin Allred
Adam Kinzinger for President. He's made me a better person.
On us senate candidate support — Would be interested in your thoughts on the ND senate race as a possible pick up from MAGA candidate Kevin Cramer. Katrina Christiansen https://www.katrinaforussenate.com
North Dakota used to have a democrat in senate - Heidi Heitkamp 2013-2019.
re fringe “Rick Perry” take … i don’t have pushback per se, well at least I can’t formalize thoughts based on Tim’s brief take, but I would be interested in understanding if there are any think tanks or other organizations acting in good faith (ie not MAGA brain rot) who do deep think about improving government? Any references/links Tim?
It’s certainly easy to say limited government, I imagine actually doing something proves challenging once one understands a given entity’s mission and impact… the recentish Michael Lewis book provided instructive examples such as NOAA and Accuweather ha
Doesn’t matter with low information voters.
Great discussion, thanks Tim. Love Adam. Agreed with everything.
Tim, I’m in Las Vegas this week and gas is 4.40 a gallon. This makes me very worried for Jacky Rosen’s chances.
Who raises gas prices? Not politicians. We are the largest producer of oil in the world. We are the largest exporter of oil. We refine our oil over seas. The price of gas here is lower than most countries. But it is the wholesaler who sets prices, not the politician.
Tim, how about some Kinks and/or Neil Young on your playlist?
I love the Kinks, they were always way undderated in my opinion
Please don't ask the Dems, even jokingly - to be the pro porn party.
What’s not baked in…
I have written various versions of this in my head for a coupla months now, and it just keeps getting truer and darker. And the testimony of Stormy Daniels yesterday really solidified my thinking.
When you said the tale she told sounded kinda rapey, you weren’t wrong. The story – he talked to her, sent his bodyguard to ask her out to dinner, but she had to go to his hotel room first, he met her at the door in satin (I refuse to believe they were silk) pajamas (gag), she told him to get dressed, they talked for two hours about her work and what she wanted, she goes to the loo and emerges to find him Burt Reynolds-ing (cause it’s the 70s) on the bed (GAG), and he is between her and the door outside of which his bodyguard is standing, and says to her “This is the only way you’re getting out of the trailer park” and, for some god awful reason says that she reminds him of his daughter (unnamable guttural emission).
Also, he offered to help her CHEAT on The Apprentice, cause of course, CHEATING.
It wasn’t rape - it was a classic old fashioned “casting couch” scenario. “You want the role? How much?” It’s not rape, but it’s coercion. Paying for a job with sex. Shades of Weinstein and millions of male producers since Euripides.
The Trump sleaze might have been baked in with the Access Hollywood tape in 2017 or even 2018. But he did lose the popular vote in 2016 and lost all the votes in 2020. And that was before Dobbs and the E. Jean Carroll verdict.
I’m not a poll truther, but I don’t think women (and the men who stand with us) are being weighed heavily enough – the numbers and the intensity are evident in every election since Dobbs. And, before we walk over fiery coals to vote against that pathetic monster, we’re going to bloody our knuckles knocking on doors, and sprain everything else writing postcards and making phone calls and telling anyone who'll listen to us the rape story and the rapey ones too. Every voter available to us will be contacted at least five times.
Women get shit done. And furious women slay (monsters not puppies).
This is going to be the Hell Hath No Fury election and I don't think it'll even be close. We'll carry people on our backs if we must. #VOTEhard
I am with you 100%. Women vote in a higher percentage then men. And I've always said, you can't take a personal RIght away from a group of people, even if they never use that right. Woman are angry and they will vote.
Tim,
Careful with the call for cutbacks. As a retired career federal civil servant (you know a GS-13), I might need to tighten the belt and cutback on my podcast subscriptions.
Great speech by Biden. Not his usual equivocation. He needs to keep that up. It’s not just morally right and correct policy, it’s good politics. For people age 50 and over (the people who consistently vote) 90% support Israel over Hamas. I don’t know what the other 10% are thinking, but whatever. He doesn’t need to cater to these stupid kid protesters. He comes across weak to both sides when he doesn’t take a clear stand. He looked strong today.
Oh the closing music. 😩😂
Am I the only one confused by the Bulwark fascination with Kinzinger? He watched Trump in office from a more informed spot than the rest of us and still voted for him in 2020. He saw the light after Jan 6, and I guess good for him. My question is what insight does he offer? What difficult questions does he answer? He has voted for trump at every opportunity and doesn’t contribute much of interest to me. In closing, go Wolves
Politics is a team sport. Kinzinger stayed with his team until they crossed a red line. He wasn't the only Republican who lost favor because he insisted on telling the truth about January 6.
When Democrats unanimously move to expel Robert Menendez from the Senate, then maybe they'll be in a position to claim the high ground.
What a pointless response. First of all, I didn’t say anything about democrats. Second, if there wasn’t a line Kinzinger could see before the 2020 election, I remain unimpressed with his conversion. Ditching trump after Jan 6 is like returning a lost wallet without taking the cash- It’s simply the right thing to do and doesn’t deserve praise. Running and losing in a primary still offers a large microphone if you want to press something you believe in. He chose not to. I’m grateful for his service as a pilot but as a rep and commentator I don’t find him interesting.
Oh, I see. You just wanted to emote, not start a conversation.
pretty catchy, that Worm song!!!!!
Trumpster should wear a new cap, perhaps in his trial;Make America Gag Again.
For your Mailbag question, the questioner should check out Vote Save America. They’ve got the formula for where money should go down to a science.
Bad news for the MAGA brain trust: All meat is cell-based, including us meat puppets.
There are no worms in anything lab-grown. What RFK, Jr. had was a tapeworm, probably from a trip to Southeast Asia somewhere. If they get in your brain they suck up some nutrients and then die. They are there forever, no harm no foul. If they get into your intestines, they grow many feet long and you want to go see your doctor.
He got mercury poisoning because he was addicted to tuna fish sandwiches, apparently. The cure for that is to stop eating tuna fish sandwiches.
He’s a complete idiot.
Lab grown meat should make it less likely you get brain worms. Animal agriculture is a massive source of parasites and diseases. Shifting production into sterile labs would dramatically reduce, if not eliminate those risks.
Thanks for brining up the truancy-to-juvi pipeline Tim. It's a fucked up issue a lot of folks don't know about. I'm actually a byproduct of that model myself. I was truant for a good portion of my freshman high school year at the age of 14. It was actually *family court* who sent me there--a byproduct of my parent's divorce and the court having a psychologist evaluate all of the children. They put me under a "PINS petition" (Person In Need of Supervision) and then sent me to Pleasantville not too far from where the Clintons lived in upstate NY. I was there for 2 years from 2001-2003, starting right after 9/11 happened. It was a shitty place for any kid that age to be stuck at and I had to do some pretty ugly shit to try to survive there. The place went through some things during that period and it made Newsweek during that time (see article below). I came out of it okay and had a goal to get out of there in time to be able to finish high school and enlist in the Marines and my life straightened out from there, but it was an ordeal that affected me deeply at the time and was pretty fucked up in hindsight.
https://www.newsweek.com/nightmare-pleasantville-147861
On mentioning Gallego at the end, after enlisting in '04 I ended up doing my first deployment with the unit that replaced Ruben Gallego's in Haditha. Listening to his audiobook was chilling for me and my hat is off to that man and the rest of the folks in his unit for everything they went through there. He's going to clean Lake's clock and be the next senator from the great state of Arizona.
The closing song was chosen because of RFK Jr's brain worm wasn't it? LMFAO
wow that's crazy so sorry you had to go thru that will check out the story.
And yeah. Every day is a theme!
A question for Adam. You give Biden a solid “B” for his handling of the Gaza situation. What would earn him an “A” grade? What should he be doing or not doing?
Kinzinger is unrealistic about Gaza.
Also, JORDAN? The shortest distance between Gaza and Jordan is just under 300 miles. Israel would be giddy about transporting tens to hundreds of thousands of Gazans from Gaza to Jordan? Anyone who believes that may be interested in investing in ski resorts in the Negev.
Kinzinger is also apparently CLUELESS about Palestinians not having a right of return. Israel would almost certainly refuse to allow any Gazan refugees who escape to Egypt or Jordan to return to Gaza.
As a former Republican, he still loves spewing the BS.
He said they can’t go to Jordan.
No matter how far or near it is, it will never, ever take Palestinians.
What he said was that Egypt and Jordan have closed their borders. He has a point with respect to Egypt. It was at best non sequitur with respect to Jordan.
Transcript at 6:53.
Jordan isn’t a non sequitor, it’s the other border county that will not, ever, take Palestinians.
Of course Israel wants them gone. Why would it want them there?
Jordan is irrelevant to Gaza due to the distance between them, separated by more than 290 miles of pre-6-Days-War Israeli territory.
You’re strangely fixated on that. Good luck with that.
Correct. He didn’t suggest they go to Jordan.
They cannot go anywhere because they’ve made themselves unwelcome in every non-terroristic Arab nation. He was making the point that that is one reason why they differ from the population of Mosul.
Arab countries don't want to touch the Palestinian issue with a ten foot pole.
I think people downplay how much the surrounding Arab countries want a Palestinian state because they don’t want to take in Palestinians. A) they’re worried they’re all indoctrinated and could be Hamas insurgents in waiting and B) they do want to normalize relations with Israel cause $$$.
Geopolitics doesn’t have morality, just objectives. Theres a reason the Saudis and Jordan helped shoot down Iranian missiles. There’s a reason Egypt has been pushing Hamas hard on a ceasefire with Israel.
This is an excellent podcast on the most recent hostage deal backstory. It echoes some of what Tim mentioned.
https://pca.st/episode/f30c7354-2038-4e70-b988-c2bc37697761
Exactly. Jordan also remembers them trying to assassinate Hussein, and Egypt remembers who killed Sadat.
Listening to you and Adam Kinzinger and wanted to address the issue of Nikki Hayley voters in the Indiana primary. I think quite a few of those were crossover Democrats hoping to knock Mike Braun out of the governor's race. Many of the races in the Democratic primary have only one candidate or no candidate- lots of Republicans run unopposed. So crossing over doesn't affect the Democratic primary much. It's sad here for Democrats.
Yep. I am still glad to see the warning light for Trump, albeit dim, because Indiana is an open primary, but I am one of those crossover Dems. In Indiana, I almost always take the Republican ballot in the primary because it's the only (slightly) useful thing to do.
The mass firings of civil servants sounds like a great way to inject chaos into our lives. If they gut the IRS and replace them with loyalists, what guarantees do you think we have that people’s tax refunds will be accurate and show up on time? Will FEMA have the equipment it needs?
A few months ago the new RNC heads instituted mass firings, and then began scrambling to get those people back. This sounds like the same thing to me. I value experience and expertise. Maybe a few people are superfluous, but it doesn’t sound like they’re going to take the time to figure out who is who.
That’s where I’m at. I want certain civil services to be better - the tax software lobby is too strong and rakes in $. If the IRS were better funded and run that’d be ideal.
FEMA is another one, though it’s been subject to fear mongering by right wingers for a long time.
FDA, FCC - these are critical and have been meticulously torn apart piece by piece until they’re the current shadow of their former selves.
FDA is one of the most corrupt agencies in Washington. It is a textbook example of the phenomenon of regulatory capture. It is owned by the pharmaceutical industry, which provides much of its funding. It needs reform. As a first step, the food and drug components should be separated into separate agencies.
Bingo. On the Food side, major food manufacturers have lobbied the FDA toward decisions that are really eyebrow raising. I have celiac disease and have done some advocacy for improving how the US does food allergens (we’re the only first world country to not label gluten ffs, but we have an onerous GF certification that’s separate and costly). Food lobby felt that IgE allergens aka hives and throat swelling was more important than IgA allergens (intestinal damage, cancer, etc.). Basically the standard “if it looks bad in the restaurant it’ll look bad for us, but who cares if they waste away at home”.
Good stuff…
This ^^
What is the podcast about the Tennessee juvenile detention facility?
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-kids-of-rutherford-county/id1707247008