by Steve Benen | May 12, 2026 | Maddowblog, News, Politics
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s first effort to go after Sen. Mark Kelly hasn’t fared well. After the beleaguered Pentagon chief tried to punish the Arizona Democrat for appearing in a video urging service members not to follow illegal orders, Kelly went to court to block Hegseth’s effort, and in February, a federal judge appointed by George W. Bush agreed that the secretary was ignoring the First Amendment.
Undeterred, Hegseth appealed his legal defeat. But while he waits for his second court loss, the former Fox News host has apparently found another reason to go after Kelly. The Hill reported:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s latest attack against Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) is underscoring the alarm over the state of the U.S. military’s weapons stockpiles more than two months into the war with Iran.
Hegseth accused Kelly, a Navy veteran and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), of divulging classified information regarding key U.S. munitions during his appearance on a Sunday news show, putting a spotlight not only on his ongoing feud with the Arizona Republican but also on the high-usage rate of premier munitions against Tehran and the time it will take to replenish them.
The trouble began on Sunday morning when the Democratic senator and decorated veteran appeared on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” and expressed concern about the resources the military has expended during the war with Iran.
“We’ve expended a lot of munitions,” Kelly said. “And that means the American people are less safe. Whether it’s a conflict in the western Pacific with China or somewhere else in the world, the munitions are depleted.”
Hegseth responded with an odd tweet, alleging
by Steve Benen | May 12, 2026 | Maddowblog, News, Politics
Donald Trump’s original plan for Kari Lake was badly flawed. Not long after returning to the White House, the president tapped the Arizona Republican, best known for her failed Senate and gubernatorial campaigns, to oversee the administration’s plan to gut the Voice of America.
That plan didn’t go especially well, and as recently as March, a federal judge invalidated Lake’s VOA tenure and nullified the mass layoffs she ordered last year.
This week, she received a consolation prize. The New York Times reported:
President Trump on Monday appointed Kari Lake, a fierce ally of the president who had led the administration’s efforts to shutter Voice of America and other federally funded news groups, as the next ambassador to Jamaica.
Her appointment, if confirmed by the Senate, would end her tumultuous time at the parent agency for federally funded news groups that broadcast to countries with limited press freedom, such as China, Russia and Iran.
Lake’s nomination coincided with the president also tapping Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano — another prominent Republican election denier who launched a failed gubernatorial campaign — to serve as U.S. ambassador to Slovakia. The far-right state senator will also need to be confirmed by the Republican-led Senate.
Time will tell when and whether Lake and Mastriano receive the support they’ll need on Capitol Hill, but their nominations are emblematic of a larger pattern: The White House sure does like to hand out ambassadorships to those whose earlier political plans didn’t quite work out.
When Trump ousted Mike Waltz, for example, following his troubled tenure as the White House national security adviser, he didn’t exit empty handed: The former Florida congressman soon after became the U.S.
by Steve Benen | May 11, 2026 | Health, Maddowblog, News, Politics
Last Thursday, during a presidential field trip to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a reporter asked Donald Trump whether he’d received a hantavirus briefing. He acknowledged that he had. Asked what he’d learned, the president said he and his team “hope” the matter is under control.
When a reporter quickly followed up, “Should Americans be concerned it’s going to spread?” Trump replied, “I hope not.”
The exchange didn’t exactly inspire confidence. Nevertheless, a day later, during another White House Q&A, he added that “very good people” have looked into the threat and concluded that hantavirus transmissions are difficult. “We hope that’s true,” Trump said.
For those with PTSD from the Republican’s failure to respond responsibly to the Covid crisis six years ago, his unscripted comments were hardly reassuring. But more important than what Trump has said is what he has done. The Associated Press reported:
No quick dispatching of disease investigators. No televised news conference to inform the public. No timely health alerts to doctors.
In the midst of a hantavirus outbreak that involves Americans and is making headlines around the world, the U.S. government’s top public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been uncharacteristically missing in action, according to a number of experts.
While the United States has traditionally taken a leadership role in response to issues like these, the AP report added, “It has been health experts in other countries … who have been dealing primarily with the outbreak in the past week.”
Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University, told the AP, “The CDC is not even a player. I’ve never seen that before.”
In hindsight, perhaps uprooting
by Steve Benen | May 11, 2026 | 2026 election, Maddowblog, News, Politics
As Republican lawmakers look ahead to a challenging midterm election cycle, many have already begun airing television ads focused on a specific issue: funds for rural hospitals. In fact, the message of the ads makes these GOP incumbents appear rather liberal on an issue that has long been a serious problem for the party.
But as The Washington Post reported, there’s a key detail that the Republican commercials are omitting, in the apparent hope that voters won’t know the difference. From the article:
On rural health care this year, Republicans want voters to remember the Band-Aid they helped create, not the reason the bandage was needed in the first place.
It’s an interesting dynamic playing out in races nationwide, with groups and campaigns spending money to inform voters that Republican senators supported the Rural Health Transformation Program, a $50 billion fund aimed at strengthening overall health care in rural America. But those ads are somewhat misleading. They wholly ignore that the program was needed only because of the sizable cuts to Medicaid that Republicans made elsewhere in the same sweeping 2025 tax-and-domestic policy law that created the rural health program.
At issue is the inaptly named “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which Donald Trump signed into law last summer, and which included some of the largest cuts to U.S. health care in modern history. Of particular interest were the nearly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid funding, which Congress realized would do more than just hurt low-income families.
As The Associated Press reported the day the president put his signature on the far-right package, the Republican cuts were poised to “hit already fragile rural hospitals hard
by Steve Benen | May 11, 2026 | Maddowblog, News, Politics
The New York Times published a curious item in early February, highlighting something called “Don Colossus” — an enormous bronze statue in honor of Donald Trump featuring a thick layer of gold leaf.
“For more than a year, the golden statue has been at the center of one of the stranger moneymaking ventures of the Trump era,” the Times noted. “A group of cryptocurrency investors paid $300,000 to have a sculptor create it as a tribute to Mr. Trump, an outspoken crypto proponent. Then they used it to promote a memecoin called $PATRIOT.”
The article added that the cryptocurrency investors hoped the statue would soon be installed at one of the president’s Florida golf courses. Evidently, they got their wish. The Daily Beast reported:
A bizarre unveiling of a 22-foot golden statue of President Donald Trump has taken place at one of his golf clubs — complete with a dedication from an evangelical pastor. […]
The ceremony was led by Pastor Mark Burns, who has been a member of Pastors for Trump since 2023 and is seen as the president’s informal spiritual adviser. The White House insists it has not been involved in the project, but Burns said Trump called him and addressed the crowd directly.
About a month after Trump left the White House following his 2020 defeat, the then-former president spoke at a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which was notable in large part because it featured a golden statue of him that was wheeled around to the delight of attendees.
More than five years later, however, “Don Colossus” is far larger; it’s found a permanent home at a Trump-owned property; and it’s received
by Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner | May 10, 2026 | Opinion, Politics
Parents in the United States, particularly mothers, are facing an unprecedented affordability crisis. A glaring sign of that crisis is revealed in statistics showing that Generation Z and millennial women are regularly delaying parenthood, having fewer children or not becoming parents at all. The data shows that many of these women want families but find the costs of housing, childcare, groceries, healthcare, utilities and more make parenting unaffordable.
People feel worse off financially now than they have at any point in the past 25 years. Those feelings are rooted in fact. The same basic pillars of living — housing, healthcare, food, transportation, childcare, utilities — now consume so much of a household budget that a typical family needs to earn $145,000 a year to make ends meet.
A pound of hamburger now costs more than people earn for an hour of work at the federal minimum wage.
A pound of hamburger now costs more than people earn in an hour at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Gas prices (and car prices) are going up steeply. Groceries are up. Healthcare costs are rising steeply, and millions are being pushed off healthcare altogether as premiums rise. And for those who are taking care of older parents or family, paying for dignified aging and disability care is also mind-bogglingly expensive.
And that’s before we even really start talking about the costs in money and time that come with raising kids.
No amount of juggling, balancing, flowers, calendar maintenance, self-care moments, wine, chocolate or walks can fix the chain of dominoes that currently start disastrously falling the moment a person becomes a mom.
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Will Trump’s ‘baby bonus’ boost the nation’s birth rate?
May 1, 2025 / 07:39
For the households that
