The feud between Perry Johnson and John James just got worse • Michigan Advance Johnson takes fight to court, accusing James of deceiving voters with campaign logo

Once again Perry Johnson proves that a vain rich man and his money are easily parted in politics.

michiganadvance.com/2026/04/22/t...

Phelan’s firing comes after a rocky tenure under Hegseth and Feinberg, including tension over Phelan’s close relationship with President Trump, according to three people familiar with the internal discussions. Phelan regularly chats with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club, just down the street from his own Florida home, and told lawmakers last year that he texts with the president about shipbuilding in the middle of the night. The top Pentagon leaders were particularly annoyed last fall when Phelan pitched the idea for a modern battleship directly to Trump, bypassing Hegseth, the people said. 

According to the WSJ, Hegseth abruptly fired the Navy Secretary in the middle of a crucial wartime naval blockade because he was jelly of his closeness with Trump. These are the dumbest, most embarrassing, childish nitwits alive - and they are in charge of the world's most monumental military might.

Why can’t we rely on Canada, did our government do something that alienated them

I don't know, but I assume the same. $17 million is nothing to them. I doubt DOJ would have settled for such a tiny amount if they actually thought they had a case.

Sotomayor got this treatment before jackson was on the court, which I don't think is surprising

If you look at X after a Supreme Court argument, it’s almost always bubbling over with right-wing influencers suggesting that Ketanji Brown Jackson is stupid (usually based on a misinterpretation or a misleading clip of something she said during arguments). They also often just call her “Ketanji”

CDC won’t publish report showing covid shots cut likelihood of hospital visits The report, which had cleared the agency’s scientific-review process, had been delayed. It now won’t be published at all, people familiar with the decision told The Post.

Trump and RFK, Jr., continue to suppress information showing that COVID shots work. wapo.st/41JhAhb

Mitigating Metrics Malaise: Claude on Goodhart's Law Claude fought the law, and the bot won

Wonky stuff about how to make government work better is always distant from the headlines. But this is good advice.

open.substack.com/pub/eatingpo...

Remember, Democrats have repeatedly advanced measures to ban partisan gerrymandering and Republicans have voted against them time after time.

This is the game Republicans wanted to play. OK, then.

Federal Grand Jury Charges Southern Poverty Law Center for Wire Fraud, False Statements, and Conspiracy to Commit Money Laundering A Grand Jury in Montgomery, Alabama, today returned an indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspi...

1. The central claim in the indictment of SPLC is a lie.

The DOJ/FBI accuse SPLC of lying to donors about seeking to “dismantle” extremist groups while secretly funding them. But the funds were used to infiltrate & help law enforcement dismantle these groups. Kash Patel knows this is the truth…

The Justice Dept’s theory of the case— that the group that single-handedly disassembled the Ku Klux Klan defrauded its donors by concealing that it was using paid informant to do that work and more— has about as much merit as the now-dismissed charges against Jim Comey.

Today in Venn diagrams.

I Know the SPLC’s Flaws Better Than Most. This Investigation Still Looks Like a Witch Hunt. MAGA has wanted to take down the SPLC for years. Now it has the DOJ to try.

MAGA has fantasized about criminalizing the SPLC for a decade—regardless of the org’s many flaws, the MAGA DOJ is corrupt and weaponized.

Me:

open.substack.com/pub/michaele...

Great piece!

Speaker Johnson's beginning of the end Trump's elfish toady is quickly losing control of the House.

New in PN: Speaker Johnson's beginning of the end

"Johnson has such a small majority he can’t afford to alienate anybody, & he has nonetheless managed to alienate everybody. The coming months will be brutal for him & are likely to end w/his speakership destroyed in a humiliating, titanic blue wave"

Cancel the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Dinner The White House Correspondents Dinner shouldn't invite a president who is an enemy of free speech. Better no "Nerd Prom" than this one.

Exactly
washingtonmonthly.com/2026/04/21/c...

“Israel’s failure to prosecute settlers who attacked Palestinians in the West Bank led to the country’s former prime minister, Ehud Olmert, calling for the international criminal court to intervene to save Palestinians from “Jewish terrorists”, in an interview with the Guardian.”

This is damning.

Israeli soldiers using sexual assault to force Palestinians out of West Bank, report says Experts say attacks, also carried out by settlers, are leading girls to quit school and enter early marriages

This is horrific: www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...

Exclusive: Dems call for details on Trump drug price deals Polling indicates most of the public is skeptical Trump will deliver and lower drug costs for people like them.

Great work by @wyden.senate.gov and his colleagues working to expose the sham of Trump's drug price deals.

www.axios.com/2026/04/21/t...

This is a very easy thing for the Democrats to run on: stripping the Trump propaganda from every inch of DC in the name of (r)eplubican ideology. I would also prohibit the Arc de Trump.

"Every program that carries the president’s name sends a message that the benefits of government flow from him personally. Not from Congress, or the Constitution, or our collective project of self-governance."

"This is not something to be shrugged off as incidental. It is corrosive of America’s fundamental principles."

What Andy says here is, again, exactly right.

Yes, that's my most norm-y opinion.

From Res Publica to the United States of Trump This president's vulgar self-glorification is revolting to a self-governing people and must not stand

Exactly right from @andycraig.bsky.social

open.substack.com/pub/theunpop...

Discovery should be fun in this one.

This piece is incredibly important. Read the whole thing.

They run back the same playbook with the same players every Sunday.

Harry Keyishian, Lead Plaintiff in Academic Freedom Case, Dies at 93

Rest in Peace & Power, Harry Keyishian. 🗃️

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/u...

It's a good thing we have a federal executive branch that's committed to supporting development of mRNA vaccines.

You know, the whole time I served as HHS General Counsel, I never had even one of my tweets appear in a screenshot in a judge's opinion. Missed opportunity!

The Inflation Reduction Act was the single most aggressive investment in rural America since the New Deal.

Direct investment, high wage jobs, energy security, you name it. It was all there.

Too bad it happened 200 years ago and all the records of it are lost forever.