This afternoon I saw an ad being run by a SuperPAC supporting Dan Osborn (“Nebraska Values PAC”) against Sen. Pete Ricketts (R) of Nebraska. It’s a brutal ad about a brutal crime. (You can watch it here.) A woman identified as “Jody S.” speaks over a montage of a crime scene imagery explaining that in 1993 an intruder broke into her home, tied her to her bed and violently raped her while her children listened to everything. A man named John Arias was arrested, pled guilty, was convicted and sentenced to prison. We then fast-forward to then-Gov. Pete Ricketts casting the deciding vote as the member of a pardon board that ultimately pardoned Arias. Jody S. notes that Arias told her she would never be safe from him and that he was now off the state sex offender registry and allowed to own a gun. She also notes that she wasn’t even informed about the pardon until after it happened.
I tend to be hard-hearted about political ads. I watched this one a few times to make sure I had the details right. It’s hard to watch; in a way it’s more hard to listen to. The ad has stark black and white imagery and has audio of Ricketts announcing, in an uncomfortably chipper tone, his vote during the hearing: “But with that you’ve got your pardon.”
This morning the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments on whether the Trump administration will be subject to a contempt of court inquiry for not stopping and turning around the deportation flights in the original Alien Enemies Act case, which began way back in March 2025, when the Trump administration sent more than 200 Venezuelan men to El Salvador’s CECOT prison.
Each side — the Trump DOJ and the ACLU — was given 30 minutes, but the oral arguments ended up lasting nearly three hours.
The top line: The en banc court is likely to rule against the Trump administration and allow U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to proceed with a contempt of court inquiry.
As I noted a week ago, we can’t know whether the current polls will be predictive of the November election results. But the polls themselves are at least speaking with a clear voice. I want to note two things that appear to be moving in unison: consumer confidence and the Republican position on the national generic ballot.
The House has already left town. The Senate is heading home this week. With the midterms just around the corner, GOP lawmakers are giving up on doing any more legislating and skipping town to try to mobilize their demoralized voters.
TPM’s congressional reporter Emine Yücel has chronicled all the drama for us. Emine joined publisher Joe Ragazzo on YouTube Live at 2 p.m. ET to talk through what Congress has actually done — and failed to do — this session.
I’m figuring this will end up as a big mistake. You probably know about the big NYT expose about Sen. Roger Marshall’s record as an OB/GYN suing hundreds of his patients over often very small delinquent bills and having a significant number of them arrested. Democrat Adam Hamilton is now running an ad on Youtube which describes one of those cases, a woman named Meischa Zimmerman who was arrested in 2011 and, according to her, handcuffed while eight months pregnant and in front of her two year old child. Marshall just sent Hamilton a cease-and-desist letter calling the ad false and defamatory and demanding it be taken down.
This seems like it will be a textbook case of what has come to be called the “Streisand Effect,” in which the effort to block some kind of publicity or attention simply has the effect of calling more attention to the original issue.
This has gotten very little attention, as far as I can tell. But it sounds quite sleazy and another example of the US government becoming a de facto investment arm of the Trump Corporation/TrumpaNostra. Lukoil, the Russian oil company, put up for sale most of its foreign assets outside of Kazakstan about a year ago. This was in response to new US sanctions. Carlyle Group and a couple other bidders have wanted to purchase these assets but approvals have been stalled in regulatory approvals in Washington. Now a group lead by billionaire financier Todd Boehly is close to securing the deal. Partnering with him are, according to The Financial Times (paywall), a group of “Gulf power brokers with ties to the Trump family” and … the US government itself, in the form of the US International Development Finance Corporation.
TPM has found fairly definitive evidence proving Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) misread text messages when he attempted to corner former special counsel Jack Smith during a congressional hearing on Tuesday.
