According to Donald Trump and all his echo-chamber sycophants, President Joe Biden exerts an amazing amount of control over the entire country's judicial system. He has "weaponized" the Department of Justice, he has been waging "lawfare" against Trump, and his control reaches all the way down to state and local prosecutors as well. Biden pulls the puppet strings, according to them, and the entire judicial system dances to his tune. He uses this evil influence to "persecute" Trump (and, by extension, all his fellow Republicans). Trump swears retribution if he is re-elected (meaning that the entire scenario is probably just projection of his own desires).

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Since today is Memorial Day, I'd like to begin with a remembrance of our most forgettable war, the War of 1812. How forgettable was this war? Well, its bicentennial passed by a few years ago, but the country as a whole took little notice. That's pretty forgettable, as these things are measured. In fact, only one event during this war has become what one might call (if one were in the mood for a pun) a "Key" moment, but more on that in due course.

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It is supposed to be a metaphor, of course. It's supposed to be said when a person or company is about to try out a new idea or product: "Let's run it up the flagpole and see who salutes." In other words: "Let's try it out and see how it goes -- it might wind up being popular." But this week the saying sprang to mind in a much more literal fashion, since Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito already knew who was going to salute the two very real insurrectionist-themed flags that got run up the flagpoles in front of both his house and his vacation home. Flying them after the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol signified support for those who had besieged the building, plain and simple. It was a rather treasonous thing to do, when you get right down to it. Which Alito fully knew (or should have, at any rate).

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With most of the "must-pass" legislation already out of the way for this year, both the House and the Senate are now planning a series of what are commonly called "messaging bills." These are bills that have one main intent -- not to pass the other house of Congress and become law, but instead to "send a message" to the voters. It's a polite way of saying "generating partisan talking points to use on the campaign trial."

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Donald Trump has broken many parts of the American political system. His supporters revel in this destruction, lumping it all in with Trump's battle to "drain the swamp" or fight back against a supposed "Deep State." His opponents decry Trump's shattering of political norms and conventions and rules (both written and unwritten) as a direct and existential threat to American democracy. But whatever you think, one thing seems more and more obvious. A lot of Trump's bull-in-a-china-shop destruction will outlive his time on the national political stage. And one of the biggest of these might be called "the death of shame."

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You'll have to forgive us, but nobody really has any experience with this sort of thing -- an adult film actress/director testifying under oath in a criminal trial about a sexual encounter with a man who would go on to become president. Even Bill Clinton's got to be shaking his head in disbelief somewhere, one assumes.

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What we should all really be seeing, at this point, is a drawn-out split-screen moment. Call it a "split-screen couple of weeks," maybe. However, this hasn't really been the case, for two reasons. The first is that cameras are not allowed inside the courtroom of the first criminal trial of an ex-president in American history. So even following the trial at home is a once-removed experience: following along with the New York Times liveblog (who seems to have the most comprehensive coverage of all the newsfeeds I have sampled) as they document each development in the case, whether monumental or simply mundane. Snippets of what is going on in the courtroom appear all day long, from the jousting of the lawyers and the witnesses to the reactions of the judge and jury to whether Donald Trump seems to have fallen asleep again or not. Fascinating stuff, but not exactly the same as it would have been on live television.

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And so Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene's doomed attempt to take down yet another Republican House speaker appears to have ended with a whimper, not a bang. After meeting with Speaker Mike Johnson twice (both yesterday and today), she appears to have backed off -- at least for the foreseeable future. With Greene, you never really know what she'll do next, but at least for the time being she appears to have been talked out of forcing her "motion to vacate the chair" onto the House floor this week.

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Again, we open with a joke or two. From last weekend's White House Correspondents' Dinner, President Joe Biden got off a few good burns on the man he's running against:

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Today President Joe Biden gave a short address on the spreading campus protests and violence over the war in Gaza. In doing so, he had an awfully fine line to walk, since both the Palestinians and the Israelis have valid views and political positions that are worth respecting. So he tried to thread this needle very carefully in his prepared statement.

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