Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) told Fox News that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is a media favorite because she “checks all the boxes,” but is as “shallow as a puddle.”
Said Kennedy: “Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez is a creature, or creation of the media. She checks all the boxes. She’s young, she’s liberal, she’s attractive, she’s ethnic. Her problem is that she’s shallow as a puddle. You scratch the surface, and you just get more surface.”
James Walkinshaw (D) has won Virginia’s deep-blue 11th congressional district, an expected win for his party that adds another Democrat to the narrowly divided House of Representatives, NBC News reports.
Once sworn in, Walkinshaw will bring the House roster to 432 members. His win means Speaker Mike Johnson can lose only two GOP members on a party-line vote.
For members: Another Test of the Special Election Surge
“The fight for the future of the Democratic Party will take place in nearly every Senate primary this cycle, pitting party leaders against progressive icons,” Axios reports.
“Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and DSCC Chair Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) have preferred candidates in Michigan, Maine and Iowa.”
“But Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), still the vanguard of the American left, is having none of it and campaigning for insurgents on a megawatt scale.”
“Inflation ate into Americans’ wage gains last year, leaving household incomes little changed beyond the richest households,“ the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The data also show how average households haven’t gained ground economically since the Covid-19 pandemic hit, underscoring the continued toll of rising prices. Inflation-adjusted median household income last year was at roughly the same level as in 2019, before the pandemic struck, following sharp declines after Covid’s onset and a tepid recovery since then.”
Punchbowl News: “House and Senate appropriators say they’re closing in on a deal on a short-term CR with a three-bill minibus.”
“But at the same time, the White House, GOP leaders and top Democrats are on completely different pages about what they want in a stopgap funding bill in order to avoid an Oct. 1 shutdown.”
“Until a month or two ago, Nicholas J. Fuentes was regarded by right-wing influencers as a mosquito-like interloper whose lifeblood was attention. Ignore his openly racist and sexist rants, their thinking went, and Mr. Fuentes would eventually flitter off into oblivion,” the New York Times reports.
“But today an entirely different consensus has emerged on the right. The footprint of the oratorically proficient late-night streaming show host has not dwindled in the least, with his tens if not hundreds of thousands of alienated young male conservatives followers known as Groypers, a nickname derived from an alt-right meme. If anything, his anti-Israel, anti-immigrant, anti-transgender and anti-civil-rights views seem to have gained new currency during the second Trump administration.”
“The Supreme Court announced Tuesday it will take up whether President Trump can use emergency powers to justify sweeping tariffs on trading partners across the globe, agreeing to the administration’s request to hear its appeal — and fast,” The Hill reports.
“The expedited schedule will have the justices take the bench for oral arguments in the first week of November, a late addition to the calendar.”
Eli McKown-Dawson: “The more the state aligns with national trends, the more vulnerable she’ll be — to the point where the race is a toss-up, or even leans Democratic, as some early statistical models show. But she’s probably less vulnerable than a naive read of the data would suggest. We sometimes talk about ‘generic’ candidates, but Collins has been about as far from a generic Republican as you can get when it comes to getting reelected in Maine.”
“So we’re in what I’ve taken to calling a Schrödinger’s Collins situation: she’s simultaneously one of the most vulnerable Senate incumbents and as much of a Maine institution as the lobster roll.”
“Two key figures in the Iran-Contra affair quietly married last month, nearly 40 years after the scandal rocked U.S. politics and President Ronald Reagan’s administration,” CNN reports.
“Israel on Tuesday ordered the evacuation of the entire city of Gaza, the first time it has done so in the run-up to its planned full invasion of the largest urban center in the Gaza Strip’s north,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
“House Democrats privately exploded Tuesday at their emerging strategy to focus on health care in the upcoming government funding fight, saying the party should demand more for its votes,” Punchbowl News reports.
“These members added Senate Democrats must be willing to shut down the government if needed.”
“Twenty-one days before the government funding deadline, angry rank-and-file House Democrats told their leadership that the health-care-focused strategy is seriously lacking and exudes weakness.”
“These Democrats don’t think it’s enough to ask to extend enhanced Obamacare premium subsidies. They want Democratic leaders to take the fight to President Donald Trump and Hill Republicans — even if it means a government shutdown.”
Aaron Blake: “He has campaigned for a decade on ending wars and even recently lobbied extensively for a Nobel Peace Prize. But his second term has involved increasingly threatening – and potentially risking – military confrontations.”
“The bellicose rhetoric has kicked into overdrive in recent days.”
“A bipartisan House resolution directing the Justice Department to release all of its investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein appears poised within weeks to draw enough backers to force action on the House floor,” the New York Times reports.
“But while the effort will probably remain a headache for President Trump and Republican leaders, there is still no guarantee it will receive a vote and little chance that the Justice Department would comply even if it did.”
“Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, took the unusual step of ordering the National Security Agency to retract an intelligence report on Venezuela,” the New York Times reports.
John Ganz: “It used to be that one could roughly say that while paleocons were fascists at home, reimagining America as a white ethnostate, they were relatively more dovish abroad and skeptical of foreign entanglements, while the neocons were fascists abroad, favoring unabashed imperialism, foreign adventures, and unilateral wars, but broadly in support of center-right liberal democracy at home.”
“The current fusionism of the right is the worst of all possible worlds: fascist at home, fascist abroad.”
Matt Glassman: “The Democrats are well-positioned to win the House in 2026 and perhaps even make serious gains in the Senate. Thermostatic public opinion is real in America, and the public almost always punishes the president’s party in the midterms. Trump is incredibly unpopular and his party remains divided over a number of his major policies.”
“It can be hard in politics to do nothing, but if the Democrats strategically shut down the government, they will likely hurt themselves on the margin electorally, for no real potential upside.”
Robert Reich: “Under ordinary circumstances, people like you and me — who believe that government is essential for the common good — would fight like hell to keep the government funded beyond September 30.”
“But we are not in ordinary circumstances. The U.S. government has become a neofascist regime run by a sociopath…”
“So I for one have decided that the best route is to shut the whole fucking thing down.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
