Since I know next to nothing about macroeconomics, I don't feel qualified to comment on today's news that the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates another 0.25 percent. They indicated that this will be the last one for a while, and inflation has already come down dramatically without crumbling the rest of the economy, but the future (as always) is uncertain. That's about the most intelligent commentary I can offer up on the matter.

Instead, let's take a look at how the Republican field of candidates for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination is shaping up. Because it seems certain that the number of candidates actually in the race is going to soon expand.

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It is a rare day when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nikki Haley agree on anything, but both of them are now on the same page on one particular subject -- that Senator Dianne Feinstein needs to resign her Senate seat if she can no longer do the required duties. I share this view, personally, and my opinion is perhaps more relevant than either of theirs, since I am an actual constituent of Feinstein's. California deserves to have two senators that are able to show up and cast votes and represent the most-populous state in the United States Senate. Feinstein hasn't been able to make it to Washington since February, and every week that goes by is another week of delay for many of President Biden's judicial nominees. If Feinstein weren't a crucial vote on the committee responsible for vetting such nominees, perhaps I wouldn't feel as strongly about it, but she is -- and the Republicans have blocked Chuck Schumer from replacing her on that committee. Feinstein has already announced she will not be running for re-election next year, so asking her to step down now isn't as contentious (or as insulting) as it might seem.

But there was one bit of snark from Haley, in her call for Feinstein to resign. This is what passes for subtlety in the Republican Party these days, because it is a barb that has more meaning for Haley's presidential aspirations than just commenting on one senator. Haley wrote: "At 89 years old, [Senator Dianne Feinstein] is a prime example of why we need mental competency tests for politicians." She had previously called for all politicians over the age of 75 to face "mandatory competency testing" before being allowed to run for office. But Feinstein wasn't her real target when she first floated this idea. Haley is directly challenging not just President Joe Biden (who is 80), but also her own party's frontrunner, Donald Trump (who is 76). Haley herself is well below her proposed limit of 75 years old, it almost goes without mentioning.

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We have moved into a new stage of the debt ceiling standoff between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden. This clock could now be ticking down faster than anyone expected. If Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is right, the United States could be facing a default on its obligations as soon as the first of June -- one month from today. Biden has been holding firm on his refusal to negotiate budget matters in exchange for McCarthy freeing the hostage of defaulting on the nation's debt, and McCarthy is likewise holding firm on his insistence that a clean debt ceiling hike bill will not pass the House and that negotiations are the only way forward. McCarthy has now managed to get a rather bare-bones plan passed through the House (with zero votes to spare), which is effectively the GOP's list of demands -- their ransom ask in the hostage-taking, in other words.

McCarthy had previously promised that Republicans were going to have passed their budget blueprint by now. This would be a big-picture summary of the budgets for each department of the federal government (without a whole lot of line-item detail beyond that). Later in the year, McCarthy's going to have to pass some sort of budget with all the numeric details filled in, but a blueprint would have at least given an overview of what the Republicans want to see in the next federal budget.

But McCarthy hasn't passed that. Instead he passed an even more generic overview which didn't put any actual numbers into the budget process -- beyond a few cherry-picked items that Republicans either want to zero out entirely or at the very least slash to the bone. By his failure to put out a budget blueprint, however, McCarthy is essentially in the same position he was in before he passed the debt ceiling plan last week. As things stand, Democrats are free to do the math themselves and come up with what McCarthy's sweeping generalities in the debt ceiling bill would actually mean to each and every part of the federal budget. Republicans will try to deny the most politically potent of these accusations, but they have no real leg to stand on, since they haven't managed to pass any actual budgetary numbers. Each and every GOP denial will be met with exactly the same response from Democrats: "OK, then what else are you going to cut even deeper, to get to your final numbers?"

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This is the big White House Correspondents Dinner weekend, but somehow our invitation was either lost in the mail or otherwise overlooked. So we'll have to watch the clips later, like everyone else.

This was a pretty momentous week in politics, as President Joe Biden announced his re-election bid, Donald Trump's rape court case got underway, and Kevin McCarthy was actually able to corral his various factions to vote for a bill that Democrats will use as fodder in the upcoming congressional campaigns. So let's get right to it all, shall we?

President Biden released three-minute video this Tuesday, and it was immediately countered with a 30-second video from the Republican Party. Biden's video was positive and upbeat for the most part, while the GOP response can only be called words like "apocalyptic" or "dystopian." We wrote about both videos earlier in the week in more detail, but the upshot is that Republicans -- surprise, surprise! -- are obviously going to run their campaigns purely on fear, once again. Be afraid! Be very afraid!

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Remember when conservatives decried "cancel culture"? It wasn't actually that long ago that they regularly did so. The phrase originally meant, essentially: paying a price for offensive behavior. Anyone (usually celebrities) caught saying anything deemed beyond the pale was subject to harsh criticism (usually online) and efforts were made to ostracize or shun them -- which usually included pressuring their employers to fire them or otherwise exacting an economic price from the offender. Republicans, led by Donald Trump and others, began denouncing such efforts as somehow being unacceptible, under the very Trumpian ideal that nobody should ever have to pay a price for anything, no matter how offensive. Hadn't Trump shrugged off multiple scandals that would have destroyed any previous politician and gotten elected anyway? So everyone else should be just as free to offend anyone they pleased without ever having to answer for the offense in any way.

They called it "censorship" even though it wasn't. Of course, Republicans have been tossing around the term censorship with abandon in recent years, trying to apply it to all sorts of situations where it does not apply. Censorship is when the government somehow tries to silence someone's free speech. Period. An online pressure campaign to make a Hollywood actor toxic to all the major studios is not censorship. The government calling Hollywood actors in front of a congressional inquisition and forcing them to be blacklisted by the industry is, however (see: House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1940s). Likewise, a private online social media company cannot censor anybody, but they can indeed make corporate decisions on who they allow on their platform.

These days, however, what Republicans used to condemn as "cancel culture" seems to be alive and well within the Republican Party. Rightwing media companies (well, one in particular) are literally cancelling their own stars. Republican-led governments are trying to cancel corporate free speech -- even though conservatives fought very hard to prove that corporations are entitled to that same free speech, a few years back. GOP politicians are blatantly cancelling the political free speech rights of Democratic politicians. Republicans want to cancel certain authors, in schools and in libraries. Teachers are being targeted with laws that restrict what they can say to students. And the Republican House is attempting to cancel a district attorney in New York who is prosecuting Donald Trump, using its power as leverage in a pressure campaign to try to get him to drop the charges. Cancel culture isn't just alive and well in the Republican Party, it has grown and morphed into a much more dangerous form.

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Unless things change in a major way, America seems headed for a repeat election in 2024. President Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee, while Donald Trump will carry the banner for the Republicans. There are plenty of interesting things about such a rematch (such as the fact that Trump will be the first ex-president to run again in a very long time), but the most interesting thing currently is that most of the public simply does not want to see this rematch. They would prefer a different matchup, for various reasons. But they may get Biden-versus-Trump anyway.

The sentiment was quantified by an NBC poll released over the weekend (questions 11 and 12 in the data, on page 8). They asked people whether they wanted to see Joe Biden run again and whether they wanted to see Donald Trump run again. A whopping 70 percent didn't want Biden to run, while 60 percent didn't want Trump to run. Those are not positive numbers for either side, obviously. So why is it that the political system will offer up precisely what large majorities of the public do not want? Well, that's complicated. For starters, the reasons are different for both candidates.

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President Joe Biden announced his bid for re-election today, releasing a three-minute video in which he explains why he's running. As the ad makes clear, Biden will be running on one basic concept: freedom. He's in favor of it, and in favor of Americans having more of it. The Republican Party countered with a 30-second ad of their own, in which they present an apocalyptic vision of what a second Biden term would be like. No, that is not hyperbole or an exaggeration. The only other possible word to use is "dystopian." They have outdone themselves in the fearmongering department (where they regularly excel). Since the GOP doesn't have a nominee yet, they are restricted only to offering up criticism of Biden (whether real or, in this case, entirely imagined), perhaps hoping that their eventual nominee will offer up some sort of positive vision of their own (which doesn't exactly seem likely, but hey, it could happen, I suppose). Since Biden is almost certainly going to skate to the Democratic nomination unopposed (or "unopposed by any Democrat the voters would actually nominate," to be technically accurate), this means that for at least the rest of this calendar year, it may stay a contest between: "Freedom," and: "Be afraid, be very afraid!"

Let's take a look at the two videos, to see how what could be a central campaign theme is already shaping up.

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It looks like it's going to be a very cable news sort of week this week. Today two prominent cable news personalities lost their jobs, for different reasons. Most of the astonishment this generated in the media world is likely to be overshadowed tomorrow by two developments in the presidential race. President Joe Biden is rumored to have picked tomorrow to formally announce his candidacy for re-election -- four years to the day after he announced last time. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is going to go on trial in New York -- which could prove to be the first of many times he'll have to defend himself in court. So it's going to be a pretty momentous week all around on cable news, that's my guess at any rate.

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We admit using that subtitle dates us in a way, since we are indeed old enough to remember the popular song of the same name -- but we couldn't resist, since this week started out with Fox News caving at the last possible moment as a civil defamation trial was set to begin against them. First the trial was delayed a day and then came the bombshell news that Fox had settled with Dominion Voting Systems for a jaw-dropping $787.5 million. To state the patently obvious, you don't settle a case you fully expect to win. Fox knew it was in danger of not just losing the case (Dominion had sued for $1.6 billion, a little more than twice what Fox settled for) but having the network's dirty laundry exposed in even more painful fashion than it already had been (through releases of internal communications between executives and network personalities that were already embarrassing enough). Fox was indeed on the run, to the tune of over three-quarters of a billion dollars.

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There have been two legal developments this week which might go a long way toward proving that creating a business model out of peddling lies to unsuspecting people is maybe not the best plan of action -- unless, of course, your name happens to be Donald Trump. Trump is the king of all election-denying grifters, and so far nobody's scratched his Teflon coating -- although even Trump may eventually have to face some sort of music for monetizing falsehoods. One of the things the special counsel investigating Trump is reportedly looking into is how Trump made pitches to donors big and small between the 2020 election and January 6th. Trump raised a lot of money promising that it would be used to fight to "Stop The Steal," but he never actually created such a fund. But for the time being at least, Trump has been able to skate away from any consequences for gaslighting his supporters. This is now no longer true for others who jumped on the stolen-election bandwagon. Both Fox News and Mike Lindell are now having to pay for their lies, and this could just be the start of both of them -- and others -- having to cough up to pay for the damage they have done.

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