A small wave of primary and special elections happened yesterday, and the results were summed up in a Washington Post headline today: "Republicans Keep Having Bad Elections." This continues an 11-month streak of good showings at the ballot box for Democrats, which began immediately after the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision threw out Roe v. Wade. And while off-year primary elections and midterms aren't always a good predictor of what will happen in the next presidential race, the trendlines certainly do seem to be favoring Democrats.

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May is half over. June looms.

That is where we are, as President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy try to hammer out some sort of deal which will allow the nation not to default on its debt. Nobody's really sure if June first will actually be the deadline -- the "drop-dead date" is constantly in flux as money comes into government coffers and flows back out again. If we make it to mid-June, the drop-dead date could shift as late as August or September, for instance. But we can't count on that happening -- we must act before the earliest possible date it could happen, which is the first of next month.

There was a big meeting today between Biden and McCarthy and the other three congressional leaders (Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and the most significant thing that appears to have been decided is that the other three will largely bow out of the final negotiations and leave it to staffers from Biden and McCarthy to finalize a deal. That is progress, of a sort, since such negotiations will be easier between only two parties.

It sounds like at least the outlines of a deal are coming into focus, although there is one remaining large sticking point that both sides seem to be drawing red lines on -- adding work requirements to federal programs (which would really be "expanding work requirements," since they already exist). Putting that aside, it seems that much has been at least tentatively agreed to already.

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President Joe Biden continues to goad House Republicans into doing exactly what he wants them to do. This is a bit of rather astonishing political jiu-jitsu which has only been possible because House Republicans refuse to publicly admit exactly what they want to slash in the federal budget. If Kevin McCarthy's House Republicans had kept their campaign promises and passed a budget as one of their first orders of business, then Biden wouldn't even have this opportunity (he'd have other opportunities, depending on what cuts Republicans were proposing, but they'd all be out in the open in that case). This week, Biden continuing to heap scorn on the Republican budget plans may serve up another victory for him, which clueless Republicans are going to try to tout as their own victory. Biden, though, has already moved on and has picked a new target. He will likely continue to do this for endless line items in the federal budget (with an emphasis on the ones that Republicans have traditionally supported).

Politico reported on this today, while completely buying in to the GOP spin with their headline: "House Republicans plan to debut their veterans spending bill this week, strategically undermining one of Joe Biden's talking points against them in the debt limit fight." But who is really undermining whom, here? Here is how they reported it:

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Let's make sure we all get this correct. Donald Trump is now technically not a "convicted rapist." He's not a convicted anything, because the verdict handed down against him this week was in civil (not criminal) court. And the jury balked at declaring that Trump had raped E. Jean Carroll, but they did find Trump liable for sexually attacking her and defaming her publicly. To the tune of $5 million. It only took them about three hours to do so, meaning the case was pretty iron-clad to begin with. So Donald Trump is merely the first ex-president to be found liable of being a sexual predator rather than being an actual convicted rapist.

Legal semantics aside, this week might become known as the point when the first chicken came home to roost for Donald Trump. For once, he didn't skate away scot-free and he wasn't even able to make the case disappear (or be endlessly delayed). That is an achievement on its own. Perhaps it will embolden prosecutors to bring some actual criminal charges against him, who knows?

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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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