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In Michigan and Minnesota, Democrats have Republicans on the run
In Michigan and Minnesota, Democrats have Republicans on the run, Michael A. Cohen, MSNBC
As the GOP increasingly moves to the far right, it has ceded the middle ground to Democrats.

It’s not easy being a progressive these days. Republicans control the House of Representatives and are threatening to tank the economy by refusing to raise the debt limit. The Supreme Court, after having overturned Roe v. Wade and set an impossibly high standard for new gun control legislation, looks primed to undo President Joe Biden’s student loan relief. And at the state level, it seems not a day goes by that a red-state legislature doesn’t pass new laws targeting LGBTQ people or imposing new mandates on schoolteachers.

But not all is lost, liberal America — Michigan has your back.

The Wolverine State is not normally where progressives look for hope. But since Democrats formally took control of both houses of the Legislature in January — after a clean sweep of all statewide races, from governor to attorney general, in last fall’s midterm elections — Michigan has quickly become a contender to be America’s wokest state.
Macron puts his government at risk with decision to raise the retirement age in France
Macron puts his government at risk with decision to raise the retirement age in France, The Associated Press, NPR
Macron shuns French parliament to push through unpopular plan to raise retirement age

French President Emmanuel Macron shunned parliament and opted to push through a highly unpopular bill that would raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 by triggering a special constitutional power on Thursday.

The risky move is expected to trigger a quick no-confidence motion in Macron's government.
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What the Silicon Valley Bank blowup tells us about politics in 2023
What the Silicon Valley Bank blowup tells us about politics in 2023, Dave Weigel, Semafor
Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, who’s challenging independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema for her seat, attacked her for supporting the 2018 Dodd-Frank rollback and said that Republicans would struggle to blame “wokeness” for the tumult. If 2022 GOP nominee Blake Masters ran again, said Gallego, he’d have to explain his mentor Peter Thiel’s role in the bank run; if any other Republican ran, Gallego would attack the “woke” distraction.

“Not everything in the world is a noun, a verb and ‘woke,’” the congressman told Semafor. “Thinking that way is how we end up with Republicans de-regulating these banks to the point where they become ticking time bombs for the economy.”
GOP Elites can't simply wish Donald Trump away
GOP Elites can't simply wish Donald Trump away, Molly Jong-Fast, Vanity Fair
They may be done with Trump, but he isn’t done with the party.

If this polling is right, the base is not “sick of losing.” There is no tangible evidence to support the GOP braintrust’s fantasy. If anything, the base seems stuck in 2016, as four polls last month showed Trump experiencing a February bump, expanding his lead over Ron DeSantis. It’s been clear for months—to me, at least—that Trump shouldn’t be counted out, whereas “several top Republicans,” Axios noted Tuesday, “keep saying there’s no way” he can win the nomination.

But what’s the base saying? Thirty-eight percent of CNN respondents said they consider America’s “increasing racial, ethnic, and national diversity” to be a threat. More than half of the respondents want a candidate who would “support government action to oppose ‘woke’ values,” while a whopping “78% majority of Republican-aligned Americans” said that “society’s values on sexual orientation and gender identity are changing for the worse.” Oh, and 84% of those who identify as very conservative consider Biden’s indisputable 2020 victory to be illegitimate. Trump continues to very much have a hold over the hearts and minds of the GOP base.
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The DeSantis Mini-Trump Strategy
The DeSantis Mini-Trump Strategy, Charlie Sykes, xxxxxx
It's not going well.

Think of yesterday as the first real day of the 2024 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

And it didn’t go well at all for Ron DeSantis.

Making his first foray into foreign policy, the Florida culture warrior managed simultaneously to look both weak and out of his depth. David Frum summed it up: “Message: Tough on drag queens. Weak on national security.”

On yesterday’s xxxxxx Podcast, the Wapo’s James Hohmann said that DeSantis’s attempt to align himself with Donald Trump made him look “small and unserious.”

“It’s bad policy and bad politics,” he said. “He's being a follower, not a leader.”

DeSantis’s dismissal of Russia’s savage and illegal invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute” was widely panned, even by some of his allies.
I Was an S.V.B. Client. I Blame the Venture Capitalists.
I Was an S.V.B. Client. I Blame the Venture Capitalists., Elizabeth Spiers, The New York Times
It’s easy to see how a whisper network of a few hundred C.E.O.s — all convinced they have exceptional vision, all working themselves into a panic — could spiral out of control. But what happened in that chat is an extension of the fundamental way that these venture capitalists operate, which is groupthink on a staggeringly consequential scale.

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