Glenn Elliott

Doesn’t he know that orange is the hardest stain to get out?

Mitt makes a good case for a GOP course correction here. But: 1. Most in his party hate him now and won't hear this. 2. Even if they did, after 10+ years of standing for nothing beyond one man's daily whims, the ingredients for thoughtful GOP policy realignment aren't there.

BREAKING: My Congressman who once wrote song lyrics celebrating rape and who converted to Catholicism last year shares Bible verse.

"I guess everything from here on in is going to be pretty shitty."

For today’s ‘It’s Only Socialism When They Do It’ file.

The intern running Fox News' X feed mistook the "fair and balanced" motto for a mission statement here. Meanwhile, her bosses are on the phone with their Central American affiliates organizing next week's migrant caravan.

With everything going so incredibly well, figured I’d check on the presidential edict prohibiting the use of the acronym AI. Oh . . .

Trump at Lindsey Graham funeral: “He felt in his bones that our destiny is to win, and that his job was to do everything he could to ensure our enemies would lose.” Trump yesterday:

“In the near future, I want to do what has not been done in 24 years: balance the federal budget.”

Four Scaramuccis and seven Zacharias ago...

You say your faith defines everything you do. You really think when it's all said and done and the leading cause of death for American kids is still bullet wounds, Saint Peter is going to be impressed with you being on the Dean's List for a firearms industry lobbying PAC?

“Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods.”

🚨Trust the plan!

Last week, @RepRileyMoore was in Brooke County at a GOP candidate event. He was asked about @aceforcongress, his opponent in the election (whose family fled the Iranian regime when he was a child and emigrated to America). His response speaks volumes about what he thinks matters to GOP voters—i.e., that one's ethnicity trumps his or her qualifications, ideas, or experience. Now, to be fair, Riley may be right about those voters. It would explain why he never mentions the ethnicity of other members of his own household. But if that's where we are, I sure hope we are headed somewhere else. Because it's gross and un-American.

Honest question: Have any of the four from WV's Congressional delegation had anything to say about any of the following Administration decisions: *To livestream the firing squad execution of a man in a wheelchair, almost certainly ensuring martyrdom for a man who sought [checks notes] martyrdom; *To reverse longstanding Congressional policy on the Russia-Ukraine war by buying diesel fuel from the former and giving it the funds needed to kill more civilians of the latter; or *To deem anyone who uses the acronym AI—including, by extension, the hundreds of students enrolled in AI-named courses in WV colleges—the "enemy"? Have they even been asked? I'm old enough to remember when Democratic officials at every level in WV were asked to defend every action, inaction, statement, or mere utterance of the Obama/Biden Administrations. Why do our federal-level Republicans always seem to get a pass? To a person, each is mortally terrified of publicly disagreeing with the President of the United States. They see their roles not as representing us but instead being ambassadors for this Administration to us. If this is not a direct breach of their oaths to the Constitution, I'm not sure what is.

The easiest thing for an American politican to do is to support the death penalty. It checks a “tough on crime” box and makes you sound serious. It appeals to Biblical notions of “eye for an eye” retributive justice. It grants vengeance to victims’ family members. And it prevents the offender from offending again. As a young man, I supported capital punishment for the worst of the worst criminals. It made sense. It felt right. And if I’m being honest, as a husband and father of two today, if anyone murdered someone in my family, I would want to see that person die. But what’s best for a victim’s surviving family may not be what’s best for society at large. My support for state-sanctioned killing of prisoners began to wane several decades ago. The more I read about the death penalty in practice—not in theory, but as applied in the real world—the less I could defend it. There was precious-to-no evidence that it deterred heinous crimes or made society any safer than long-term incarceration. There was ample evidence that it was applied very disproportionately to men of color. Because of separate sentencing hearings, more appeals, and the extreme safeguards needed to detain inmates on death row who literally had nothing to lose, there is evidence that it costs more than standard long-term incarceration. And there was the fact that its application is irreversible (Christa Pike, notwithstanding). Today, my opposition to capital punishment has moved beyond its application in practice to its existence at all. Though I believe there is a strong role for government to play to keep us safe, I do not believe that government should have the power to strap a detained person onto a table or a pole and kill them. I do not believe in teaching our children that state-sanctioned killing is a solution to a problem. And I believe that empowering our governments with such a weighty power does more to diminish us than protect us. I yearn for the day when we join the rest of the civilized world in abolishing this primitive and barbaric form of “justice.” And yet just today (in this Administration’s latest “flood the zone” distraction), we learned that the federal government is going to live-stream the firing-squad execution of a prisoner confined to a wheelchair later this year. If that sounds un-American, perhaps that’s because of the several dozen countries that still have capital punishment, only five (Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, Somalia, and Yemen) do so publicly. Even accounting for our current President’s affection for strong-armed rulers, I cannot for the life of me understand why a nation confident in its values would want to emulate any of these failed and/or rogue states. All that said, as awful a spectacle it will be, there’s a part of me that feels that if we are going to have state-sanctioned killings of prisoners, it should be done in public. Indeed, one can argue that the only reason capital punishment has persisted in America so much longer than other Western nations is that we have hid it from the public and replaced hangings, shootings, gassings, and electrocutions with a more sanitized, clinical injection process. So maybe, just maybe, some good will come from this Third World spectacle being broadcast like a UFC event this December. For the three of you who may still be reading at this point, let me just anticipate the argument invariably made by death-penalty proponents that opposing capital punishment necessarily suggests sympathy for those subject to it. Quite the contrary. I cherish a society that embraces rules and promotes safety, and I believe in strong punishment for those who harm others. And I believe that some crimes are so heavy and excruciating that their perpetrators must necessarily forfeit the right to ever walk in that society again. But the fact of the matter is that we have the technology to detain the worst of the worst in super-max security facilities where they pose little-to-no threat to other inmates or to corrections officers, and where escape is mathematically impossible. Nidal Hasan, the former U.S. Army major who fatally shot 14 and injured 30 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, deserves to spend out what’s left of the miserable life he already threw away in such a facility. I have not one ounce of sympathy for him. It’s my country that I want to keep.

If you are a Democratic candidate running against a Republican who has turned a blind eye towards—or directly contributed to—the racist energy percolating within that once-proud party, watch this clip. Then adjust your response accordingly. These are not times for timidity.