Of all the reactions to last night's CNN town hall with Donald Trump, the most interesting came from Michael Fanone, a former D.C. police officer who was attacked and almost killed by the mob of violent insurrectionists at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. His take on Trump's CNN performance: "It's worse than I could have ever imagined. It's an absolute disaster. There's no way to fact-check this guy in real time. He's a volcano of bullshit."

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The first major television event of the 2024 presidential race will be held tonight, on CNN. The network is hosting a live town hall in New Hampshire with Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins will moderate the event, which will also feature questions from New Hampshire Republicans and undecided voters. This isn't the first town hall event to feature a presidential candidate, but it will be the first one that draws a very wide audience, so it can be seen as the real kickoff to the campaign season.

CNN is already getting some grief for inviting Trump onto their network, but the alternative that some seem to prefer would be for all the major networks (both cable and broadcast) other than far-right propaganda outlets to shun Trump during the entire race. Which isn't going to happen -- nor should it. Trump is many things, to be sure, but he is currently leading all the polls of Republican voters -- by a lot. He regularly charts over 50 percent support, and his closest challenger struggles to even match half of Trump's support. Are the news networks really supposed to just ignore a candidate like that? Hardly. If Trump were polling at five percent, he'd be ignorable -- but not at 55 percent.

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In 1888, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a book of aphorisms which contained the following: "Aus der Kriegsschule des Lebens. -- Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker." This can be translated into English as: "Out of the war-school of life. -- What doesn't kill me, makes me stronger." In a different book he wrote in the same year, Nietzsche refined the thought a bit, speaking of "nature's lucky strokes... among men," and saying of such lucky individuals: "He divines remedies for injuries; he knows how to turn serious accidents to his own advantage, that which does not kill him makes him stronger."

I went and looked the quote up today (in order to get it right) for a very obvious reason. The jury in the New York sexual battery and defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump only needed three hours to return with a unanimous verdict against him. Donald Trump is now liable for sexual battery and defamation against Carroll, to the tune of five million dollars. But the thought virtually everyone who comments on politics immediately had was: "Will this make any difference?"

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I realize it is the wrong season for this sports metaphor, but it now seems that the most likely outcome of the debt ceiling showdown is going to include a punt. For any long-term solution to emerge, there's going to have to first be a short-term solution that kicks the ball down the field a bit.

It is now crunch time. Tomorrow, President Biden will meet with the four congressional leaders (the leaders of both parties in both houses) for the first time in months. They are miles apart on what they want to see happen, and nobody really expects a huge breakthrough compromise to emerge from tomorrow's meeting. But the drop-dead date has been moved up to (possibly) the first of June, which only leaves a little more than three weeks to do something, or else the United States is going to default on its debt for the first time in history.

Getting all sides to a deal is going to be extremely hard, if not downright impossible. But even assuming a deal is somehow possible, there isn't really enough time for any major compromise to be written into legislative budget language and pass both chambers of Congress. Even if Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached some sort of big-picture deal tomorrow (which, as mentioned, does not seem particularly likely), it might be impossible for them to implement it before the Treasury runs out of money.

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President Joe Biden will not be attending the coronation of King Charles III tomorrow, which is entirely appropriate (although he is sending First Lady Dr. Jill Biden instead, out of respect). No U.S. president has ever attended a British coronation, and with good reason -- after all, we fought a whole war just so no American would ever have to show any sort of fealty to any King or Queen of England ever again. But even though Biden won't be there, the two men do share one notable similarity: they both waited all their lives -- decades and decades of it -- for the chance to sit at the head of their country. So it's pretty easy to see they do share how long the wait has been for both of them.

Americans will be inundated with the entire spectacle tomorrow, which we plan on skipping entirely -- both for patriotic reasons and because this sort of thing tends to bore us silly. Also, we always cringe at all the fawning attention the American media shower upon the British royalty just as a general rule, so it's a pretty easy choice not to pay it any attention. Although we did have to laugh at the work of some unnamed British pranksters who wordlessly expressed their own dismissive feelings towards all the hoopla. Here is both the SFW story and the NSFW image, for those who want (in... ahem... a Cockney accent?) a bit of a larf.

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The two sides have dug in to their respective positions on the debt ceiling crisis, and nobody at this point can predict what the eventual outcome is going to be. America is watching Washington politicians essentially play Russian roulette with our country's -- and by extension, the whole world's -- economy. While most sane people would prefer that the politicians don't kill the economy to score ideological points, that is a very real possibility at the moment. Both President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy are walking a tightrope, as the crowd breathlessly watches the high-wire act play out. But what I find myself wondering is whether McCarthy will survive the experience without plunging back to Earth -- or, more accurately, back to the back benches in the House Republican caucus.

Will Kevin McCarthy still be speaker at the end of this process? That's not a bet I would take, at the moment. It seems there are multiple ways he could lose so much confidence within his own caucus that they essentially force him out of the position of leading them. This was one of the demands some of the extremists in his caucus forced McCarthy to agree to before he even became speaker -- ensuring that the option to depose a speaker remains open to any one House member at any time.

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Since I know next to nothing about macroeconomics, I don't feel qualified to comment on today's news that the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates another 0.25 percent. They indicated that this will be the last one for a while, and inflation has already come down dramatically without crumbling the rest of the economy, but the future (as always) is uncertain. That's about the most intelligent commentary I can offer up on the matter.

Instead, let's take a look at how the Republican field of candidates for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination is shaping up. Because it seems certain that the number of candidates actually in the race is going to soon expand.

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It is a rare day when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nikki Haley agree on anything, but both of them are now on the same page on one particular subject -- that Senator Dianne Feinstein needs to resign her Senate seat if she can no longer do the required duties. I share this view, personally, and my opinion is perhaps more relevant than either of theirs, since I am an actual constituent of Feinstein's. California deserves to have two senators that are able to show up and cast votes and represent the most-populous state in the United States Senate. Feinstein hasn't been able to make it to Washington since February, and every week that goes by is another week of delay for many of President Biden's judicial nominees. If Feinstein weren't a crucial vote on the committee responsible for vetting such nominees, perhaps I wouldn't feel as strongly about it, but she is -- and the Republicans have blocked Chuck Schumer from replacing her on that committee. Feinstein has already announced she will not be running for re-election next year, so asking her to step down now isn't as contentious (or as insulting) as it might seem.

But there was one bit of snark from Haley, in her call for Feinstein to resign. This is what passes for subtlety in the Republican Party these days, because it is a barb that has more meaning for Haley's presidential aspirations than just commenting on one senator. Haley wrote: "At 89 years old, [Senator Dianne Feinstein] is a prime example of why we need mental competency tests for politicians." She had previously called for all politicians over the age of 75 to face "mandatory competency testing" before being allowed to run for office. But Feinstein wasn't her real target when she first floated this idea. Haley is directly challenging not just President Joe Biden (who is 80), but also her own party's frontrunner, Donald Trump (who is 76). Haley herself is well below her proposed limit of 75 years old, it almost goes without mentioning.

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We have moved into a new stage of the debt ceiling standoff between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden. This clock could now be ticking down faster than anyone expected. If Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is right, the United States could be facing a default on its obligations as soon as the first of June -- one month from today. Biden has been holding firm on his refusal to negotiate budget matters in exchange for McCarthy freeing the hostage of defaulting on the nation's debt, and McCarthy is likewise holding firm on his insistence that a clean debt ceiling hike bill will not pass the House and that negotiations are the only way forward. McCarthy has now managed to get a rather bare-bones plan passed through the House (with zero votes to spare), which is effectively the GOP's list of demands -- their ransom ask in the hostage-taking, in other words.

McCarthy had previously promised that Republicans were going to have passed their budget blueprint by now. This would be a big-picture summary of the budgets for each department of the federal government (without a whole lot of line-item detail beyond that). Later in the year, McCarthy's going to have to pass some sort of budget with all the numeric details filled in, but a blueprint would have at least given an overview of what the Republicans want to see in the next federal budget.

But McCarthy hasn't passed that. Instead he passed an even more generic overview which didn't put any actual numbers into the budget process -- beyond a few cherry-picked items that Republicans either want to zero out entirely or at the very least slash to the bone. By his failure to put out a budget blueprint, however, McCarthy is essentially in the same position he was in before he passed the debt ceiling plan last week. As things stand, Democrats are free to do the math themselves and come up with what McCarthy's sweeping generalities in the debt ceiling bill would actually mean to each and every part of the federal budget. Republicans will try to deny the most politically potent of these accusations, but they have no real leg to stand on, since they haven't managed to pass any actual budgetary numbers. Each and every GOP denial will be met with exactly the same response from Democrats: "OK, then what else are you going to cut even deeper, to get to your final numbers?"

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This is the big White House Correspondents Dinner weekend, but somehow our invitation was either lost in the mail or otherwise overlooked. So we'll have to watch the clips later, like everyone else.

This was a pretty momentous week in politics, as President Joe Biden announced his re-election bid, Donald Trump's rape court case got underway, and Kevin McCarthy was actually able to corral his various factions to vote for a bill that Democrats will use as fodder in the upcoming congressional campaigns. So let's get right to it all, shall we?

President Biden released three-minute video this Tuesday, and it was immediately countered with a 30-second video from the Republican Party. Biden's video was positive and upbeat for the most part, while the GOP response can only be called words like "apocalyptic" or "dystopian." We wrote about both videos earlier in the week in more detail, but the upshot is that Republicans -- surprise, surprise! -- are obviously going to run their campaigns purely on fear, once again. Be afraid! Be very afraid!

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