I am tired of the debate over the Mueller report. I am sick of hearing about the PWA (President With Attitude). Since he only has a year left, let’s forget about impeachment and focus on beating the crap out of him. We need to elect a president with real policies and that is why I am still rooting for Elizabeth Warren.

Jane Mayer reports in The New Yorker:

Trump has made the debate a point of pride. He recently boasted to the Times that he’d won it despite being a novice, and despite the “crazy Megyn Kelly question.” Fox, however, may have given Trump a little help. A pair of Fox insiders and a source close to Trump believe that Ailes informed the Trump campaign about Kelly’s question. Two of those sources say that they know of the tipoff from a purported eyewitness. In addition, a former Trump campaign aide says that a Fox contact gave him advance notice of a different debate question, which asked the candidates whether they would support the Republican nominee, regardless of who won. The former aide says that the heads-up was passed on to Trump, who was the only candidate who said that he wouldn’t automatically support the Party’s nominee—a position that burnished his image as an outsider.

Of course they colluded.

David Brooks writes in The New York Times:

Were Republican House members enthusiastic or morose as they decided to turn off their own moral circuits, when they decided to be monumentally unconcerned by the fact that their leader may be a moral cretin?

Do they think that having anesthetized their moral sense in this case they will simply turn it on again down the road? Having turned off their soul at work, do they think they will be able to turn it on again when they go home to the spouse and kids?

This is how moral corrosion happens. Supporting Trump requires daily acts of moral distancing, a process that means that after a few months you are tolerant of any corruption. You are morally numb to everything. You end up where Representative Jim Jordan blandly ended up Wednesday, in referring to the hush-money scheme: “I think it’s news we knew about.”

This is why I will never vote for these immoral, soulless motherfuckers. They are so up on his ass.

Peter Wehner writes in The New Times:

By now Republicans must know, deep in their hearts, that Mr. Cohen’s portrayal of Mr. Trump as a “racist,” “a con man” and “a cheat” is spot on. So it is the truth they fear, and it is the truth — the fundamental reality of the world as it actually is — that they feel compelled to destroy. This is the central organizing principle of the Republican Party now. More than tax cuts. More than trade wars. More even than building a wall on our southern border. Republicans are dedicated to annihilating truth in order to defend Mr. Trump and they will go after anyone, from Mr. Cohen to Robert Mueller, who is a threat to him.

He is their emperor, and they are his political Praetorian Guard.

If you didn’t get to watch it, just check out Seth Meyer’s “A Closer Look” segment.

Alex Kotch writes in the Sludge:

Rao’s judgeship nomination is perhaps the crowning achievement of the Antonin Scalia Law School’s initiative to reshape the federal judiciary. In 2017, the law school’s Law and Economics Center, which CKF had been funding for years, drew up a funding proposal for the center’s “Federal Judges and Attorneys General Initiatives.”

I have not read this publication before this piece, but it gets the fact right.

Dr. Jen Gunter shares her profound experience of giving birth to her short-lived son:

Politicians who twist the memory of a birth followed by a death to score political points and mislead about the reality of both abortion and newborns who are born to die should be ashamed of themselves.

No one is executing children at birth. Doctors are providing standard medical care.

Pregnancy terminations at or after 24 weeks of gestation, the time largely accepted as viability, are typically performed because of severe fetal anomalies or fetal anomalies combined with maternal health problems.

Politicians need to listen to doctors and mothers and do the right thing.

Katrina vanden Heuvel writes in The Washington Post:

Warren’s proposal should spark an overdue and necessary conversation about a problem that leaders in both parties have long neglected. More than half of Americans now live in child care “deserts,” according to the Center for American Progress, including significant majorities of rural and Latino families. Compared with the rest of the world, the United States spends pathetically little on family benefits, ranking second-to-last among developed nations. “This dearth of family benefits leads to two cruel outcomes,” writes Matt Bruenig, whose People’s Policy Project recently published its own set of ideas for addressing the child-care crisis. “It denies many people the ability to have the families that they want and inflicts financial ruin on many of those who go through with parenthood despite the lack of social support.”

Women especially suffer the consequences of this neglect, often sacrificing their careers and other opportunities to pick up the slack. Yet while it is fitting that universal child care would gain traction at a time when women are playing an increasingly vital role in the national debate, Warren’s proposal would not only improve the lives of women or even parents. Its impact would also ripple outward, benefiting all Americans. In fact, Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi estimates that Warren’s plan would generate twice as much growth per year over a decade as Trump’s corporate tax cut at less than half the cost — and that’s if the $1.5 trillion in tax cuts were paid for, which of course they were not. So, in addition to proposing good family policy, Warren is offering a boost to the economy that deserves to be covered and debated accordingly.

If this proposal were to become policy in the future, I won’t be benefiting from it, but I am still supporting it for the good of middle America family.

Mehdi Hasan writes in The Inception:

The inconvenient truth that our lazy media elites do so much to ignore is that Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Warren are much closer in their views to the vast majority of ordinary Americans than the Bloombergs or the Bidens. They are the true centrists, the real moderates; they represent the actual political middle.

Jonathan Alter explains in The Daily Beast:

Under Warren’s plan, inspired by Thomas Piketty’s influential 2014 book, Capital in the 21st Century, and drafted by Emmanuel Sanz and Gabriel Zucman of Berkeley, Americans with a net worth of more than $50 million would pay two percent a year on their wealth over that $50 million. American billionaires (who number around 680 right now) would pay three percent on their wealth over that $1 billion. In most years, two or three percent is far less than the appreciation of their assets. The vast majority of people paying the tax would still be getting richer every year.

Elizabeth Warren has announced that she be taking money from big donors. This is a move to differentiate herself from other Democratic candidates. She is not letting big money in politics influencing her campaign and policy. If you would like to help her campaign, don’t wait to donate.