Peter Hollen

To live up to its promises ! “Everything that is wrong with America can be fixed by what is right with America.” kiteandkeymedia.com/videos/frederi…

Can we be done with the pretense that Republican primary voters vote for MAGA candidates in spite of their apostasy and corruption? The transgression is a feature, not a bug. It tells voters they don't care about law or morality. Only power.

What is the Republican Party now ? “President Donald Trump got what he wanted in Texas on Tuesday night. It could very well derail his agenda. 
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) lost his bid Tuesday for a fifth term after Trump endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the GOP runoff. This saddles Republicans with a scandal-plagued nominee whose liabilities will probably force the national party to spend significant sums this fall to hold what would have otherwise been a safe seat.” washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/…

“Tell me three true things about yourself. If I had to define the parenting style of my father, Ben Sasse, in one sentence, it would be those seven words. I can’t pinpoint the first time I remember him using them, but over the years, I’ve been directed by the prompt many times. After any success or failure, whether jumping with excitement or drenched in tears, my dad asked us to recite three things: one that reaffirmed our relationship with God; one that reaffirmed our family’s unconditional love for us; and one that reaffirmed qualities we most valued, like perseverance and grit.” thefp.com/p/ben-sasse-pa…

Hasan Piker just accused a Jewish member of Congress of being “Israel first” because he refuses to condone a Nazi tattoo. Think about that. A Jewish lawmaker opposes Nazi imagery and Piker’s response is to question his loyalty and suggest his views are driven by Israel. Piker is weaponizing the Congressman’s Jewish identity to inject Israel into a completely unrelated topic. Accusations of dual loyalty are an age-old antisemitic trope that have long been used to question Jewish Americans’ patriotism, undermine their credibility and silence them from participating fully in public life. antisemitism.adl.org/disloyalty/

“The point of reminding you of all this verbiage is simple. Never in the field of human conflict has so much drivel been spouted by just one individual to so many avid readers. And the irony is that this barrage of “truth” has concealed the one genuinely important decision that Trump has taken throughout the conflict. That decision was taken about six or seven weeks ago, I would guess, probably around the time of the multi-post Truth storm of April 2-5. It was the decision not to proceed with a forcible military reopening of the Strait. My understanding is that a plan to achieve that objective was presented to the president by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, and the commander of U.S. Central Command, Brad Cooper. It would have involved the deployment of thousands of special forces operators and Marines to Iranian territory, as well as the forcible opening of the Strait by Navy destroyers. In my view, it was the only option available to the president to avoid the prolonged battle of the blockades that has since unfolded. The reason he turned it down was the classic reason so many American presidents have recoiled from deploying “boots on the ground.” He dreaded the body bags and the coffins. He feared the stricken destroyer. Above all, he feared the media coverage and the popular revulsion. He was, in other words, like many another president before him. As Camus said, when a war breaks out, as when a plague begins, we cannot believe something so awful can last long. “It’s too stupid,” we say. But stupidity does indeed have a knack of getting its way. And just as Trump’s “truths” are mostly stupidities, it is we who read them as if they are true who are—truly—stupid.” thefp.com/p/niall-fergus…

I’ll never vote for any candidate, to include one saying he’s a Republican, if they espouse anti-Semitism views or surround their campaigns with them on their campaign team.

“Americans look longingly at Europe, where many countries have relatively high social spending, and dream of bringing that system to the United States. U.S. politicians, aware of this desire, campaign on two falsehoods. First, that the U.S. government does not already spend massively on pensions and health care. Second, that the only obstacle to bringing a European-style welfare state to the U.S. is a lack of taxes on the rich. The reality is more complicated, and growing America’s tax wedge brings serious risks in and of itself. Some of the other wealthy countries in the world do indeed have more robust safety nets than America. Yet they don’t rely on narrow taxes on their most wealthy citizens; rather, they’re financed by broad levies on the middle class. And as rising defense spending squeezes national budgets, those already high taxes are rising.” washingtonpost.com/opinions/inter…

In an interview with CNN on Monday, Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) says he finds Graham Platner's tattoo disqualifying and hopes Maine voters agree with him Auchincloss: “I find that tattoo and his commentary about it to be personally disqualifying. I hope Maine voters agree with me.” #MaineSenate

@TheDemocrats Using Memorial Day to score political points is categorically abhorrent

🇺🇸 “A young child waved
as the old men passed.
Home to a hero’s welcome.
Home at last. It’s a burden they carry
for a day like today.
It’s a hallowed price
that they gladly pay. But to those who carry
the greatest burden of all,
for their loved ones who never
came home— May God be with you
and let you know,
you’ll never carry that burden
alone.” theatlantic.com/books/2026/05/…

Trump’s disregard of the law and embrace of TikTok may be the single most detrimental legacy of his leadership - influence on minds is much harder to correct than a correction of laws.

Let’s be clear: my opponents filed an FPPC complaint that was immediately rejected. And donors are not requesting refunds. These types of attacks are par for the course when you’re challenging the status quo. But when news outlets put speed and clicks over factual accuracy, they undermine their own credibility and harm democracy. Over the final 9 days of this primary election, I’m going to continue to tell the truth — and the truth is, the status quo is not working for far too many Californians. We can and will do better.

I love how MAGA apologists who ignored or even celebrated Trump’s character flaws now suddenly discover them and pretend to be brave truth tellers. When it would have cost them, they happily promoted the cult. Now they’re like “oh my God it’s a cult! Why can’t you see it?!”

This Memorial Day weekend, CENTCOM remembers and honors the lives and legacies of service members who made the ultimate sacrifice.

I’m calling the 1990s. I want these Democrats back.

“We don’t have room for a seminar on the dividing lines between antisemitic, anti-Israel, and “anti-Zionist” views, but I can concede such lines do exist, at least on paper. But those distinctions get blurry in the real world. As Flynn learned, when you take a position—no matter how intellectually defensible—that finds “the Jews” on the other side of that position, people who really dislike “the Jews” will flock to it. That doesn’t make you antisemitic. But if you welcome antisemites into your ranks because they’re somehow on your team, you are part of the problem. For some, it’s all about Trump and resisting him. For others it’s all about supporting Trump (see J.D. Vance’s and Kevin Roberts’ “big tent” talk). And yet for still others it’s all about opposing Israel or the Jews, and if that leads to opposing or supporting Trump, so be it. And for a great many it’s a bit of both.” thedispatch.com/newsletter/gfi…

Not just the pillars of the Country, but of our conscience. “It is worth pausing to put the fund into the larger context of Mr. Trump’s political project: He is destroying pillars of American democracy to empower himself. He claims elections are legitimate only if he wins. He uses federal law enforcement to investigate and prosecute his perceived enemies. He purges his party of officials who defy him. He describes members of the other party and civil society as traitors and enemies. He incentivizes his supporters to break the law on his behalf and rewards them when they do. He directs his allies to change election rules to keep his party in power. For most of my life, the scourge of conservatism—in particular its Christian adherents—was moral relativism. Trump is moral relativism personified. Whether an action is right or wrong, good or evil, depends entirely on whether one benefits from it or not. The slush fund is the ne plus ultra of that belief. A group of paranoid cretins bent on installing a right-wing dictatorship committed crimes, and they’re going to be rewarded for it with the American people’s money. It’s simple theft designed to induce support for future fascist assaults on the social contract. You can’t defend the fund without endorsing that as a morally just outcome, and you can’t endorse that as a morally just outcome without ridding yourself of conventional morality.” thedispatch.com/newsletter/boi…

Have we no decency? The way the article glosses over the blaring deficiencies of character is astounding. To meet Trump’s degradation of our expectations of public character with a further decline is unbelievably wrongheaded. Slow and smooth is the descent..