Because It's My Birthday

As a gift to myself, I am taking the day off

I never do this, but I hope to be a model to all of you. So tune in Wednesday for a wrap-up on Tuesday’s primaries and Friday for an interview with economist Matt Kahn about the future of working from home!

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Short takes:

• Could the GOP lose it all in Pennsylvania? Apparently so—the strategy of letting 1000 Trumpies bloom seems to have thrown both the GOP Senate and gubernatorial primaries into turmoil. Tal Axelrod at The Hill gives you the complete rundown. The best quote is from a political strategist who has extensive experience working with GOP candidates in the Keystone state: “It would be like the voyage of the Titanic, but no survivors.” (May 14, 2022)

• You have to wonder how some of the yo-yos in the GOP Congressional caucus got there in the first place, don’t you? In the case of Madison Cawthorne (NC-11), a little more than 1,000 primary voters and a solidly red district did the trick. But what is even more interesting about this excellent profile by Politico’s Michael Kruse is the portrait of a person who always believed he was more intelligent and more accomplished than he was, who then had a devastating spinal injury. Aside from all of the ways that becoming disabled changes the life and expectations of a young person, it threw Cawthorne’s self-image as a man of destiny into crisis, something that seems to be playing itself out in bizarre and erratic behavior. You also have to wonder if Cawthorne, in the only real job he has ever had, is only now being confronted with the truth: that he is uneducated and incapable. (May 13, 2022)

• Tara Palmieri of Puck dropped this scoop last week: Judy Woodruff of the PBS NewsHour will step down as anchor by the end of the year, leaving the show in the capable hands of Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett. Although Bennett is new, Nawaz has had an increasingly prominent role and frequently substitutes as an anchor. Woodruff, 75, “is planning to stay at the network in a role that hasn’t yet been determined,” Palmieri writes, citing inside sources, “and enjoys the full support of PBS’s all-female troika: chairwoman Sharon Rockefeller, C.E.O. Paula Kerger, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting C.E.O. Pat Harrison.” (May 12, 2022)