(1) I believe that Democrats wanted Platner as the Maine senatorial candidate rather than Mills. After all, the money poured into his campaign, not hers; the reason she gave for quitting was lack of money, which doesn’t seem to have bothered him.

If that’s the case, then why, with all his weaknesses, did they support him over her? I think the answer is rather simple: he polled better against Collins., and they want to win at all costs. Among other things, they are betting that youth will be the draw, because Collins is also old (as is Mills), and that they can cover up or rationalize away the more “problematic” things Platner has said and done. These are people who kept seeing phantom “dog whistles” of Nazism in people like Musk, but have no problem whatsoever with the glaring evidence of an actual Nazi tattoo if it’s on a Democrat.

Platner could indeed win the election. This video shows why; Platner’s message here is exactly and precisely what Democrats want. Who or what Platner himself might be is not even an issue for many people, if his election would bring this about:

Graham Platner wants to “shut this White House down."

He offers a preview of a Dem-controlled Senate:

“I want the Trump administration not to function, because everyone in the White House is being hauled under subpoena in front of a Senate committee, day after day after day." pic.twitter.com/vDc1lqFpym

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) May 1, 2026

(2) There is a SCOTUS feud, in which Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has been going her own way, sometimes even in regard to her fellow liberal justices:

The Supreme Court cleared the way Monday for Louisiana to redraw a hotly contested congressional map that the court ruled days earlier was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, a highly technical decision that nevertheless sparked a bitter back-and-forth between three conservatives and a member of the court’s liberal wing.

The brief order dealt with a question about when the Supreme Court’s blockbuster decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act took effect in Louisiana. The state is quickly gearing up to redraw its maps ahead of this year’s midterm elections and suspended its US House primaries following the high court’s ruling Wednesday.

More notable than the decision itself, which was widely expected, was the tension it exposed in brief writings by Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a liberal.

Writing in dissent, Jackson said the post-decision “developments have a strong political undercurrent.” And she suggested that the court should have stayed on the sidelines “to avoid the appearance of partiality.”

Translation: in order to avoid a result that might help the Republicans, the Court should not order its own ruling implemented, but instead keep in place a system that favors the Democrats.

And of course Jackson herself is not the least bit politically partisan.

More:

Alito snapped back at Jackson’s dissent, describing her points as “trivial at best” and “baseless and insulting.”

“The dissent goes on to claim that our decision represents an unprincipled use of power,” Alito wrote in a brief concurrence joined by conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. “That is a ground­less and utterly irresponsible charge.”

No one else signed on to Jackson’s dissent. Sotomayor and Kagan appear to be giving her a wide berth.

(3) Another day, another shooter near the White House:

The suspect has been identified as Michael Marx, 45, law enforcement officials tell NBC News.

Marx, as of Tuesday morning, remained hospitalized with multiple gunshot wounds, which aren’t considered life-threatening, reported. …

The incident occurred as President Donald Trump took the stage inside of the White House’s East Room for a Small Business Summit. And authorities sent the press into the briefing room for safety precautions while areas were placed under lockdown.

The Secret Service said the shooting took place at 15th Street Southwest and Independence Avenue after plainclothes agents at about 3:30 p.m. spotted, then confronted a “suspicious individual that appeared to have a firearm “and confronted him, said Secret Service Deputy Director Matthew Quinn.

(4) There’s another Democrat who wants Trump murdered, and this time he’s been arrested:

Raymond Eugene Chandler III, of Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, was arrested Friday for allegedly leaving a series of menacing voicemails for a member of Congress, in which he threatened to slit the throats of both the lawmaker and his daughter if he did not kill President Donald Trump.

According to Pittsburgh’s Action News 4, Chandler is facing charges of “Influencing, Impeding or Retaliating Against a Federal Official by Threatening a Family Member and by Threatening a Federal Official,” and “Influencing, Impeding or Retaliating against a Federal Official by Threat.”

The court documents were unsealed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. Although the documents do not identify the lawmaker, the suspect refers to him as “Senator” in the second voicemail …

Who is Raymond Chandler (and by the way, I wonder whether he was named after the writer of detective stories)? Why, he seems to have been running for the Senate himself. You can read his chilling messages at the link, but here’s a bit of one:

You’re probably getting quite used to my voice. Sir, I’m calling this evening because what I want you to do is I want you to take a firearm. I want you to put it in your hand. I want you to walk into the Oval Office. I want you to put that firearm to the President’s head, and I want you to pull the trigger and I want you to kill him. I am petitioning you, Senator for redress of grievances. My redress of grievances is that this president is awful . . . He’s a liar among all liars. He’s a great deceiver. He’s the antichrist. I want you to walk into the Oval Office with a gun in your hand. I want you to put it to his temple, and I want you to pull the trigger. That is what I want you to do as my agent.

(5) Speaking of the antichrist, there’s Tucker Carlson doing just that. Carlson demonstrates his m.o. in a NY Times interview, and it’s not pretty. But he lies with such utter conviction that I think that, like the most accomplished of liars, he actually achieves the trick of willing himself to believe his own lies:

The Times and the left are having a moment with Carlson:

Why is the New York Times so eager to sit down with Carlson for two hours? His closest media friends were out on X over the weekend — in the face of scoffing over that clip of him being called out as a bald-faced liar — to demand that people “watch the whole interview,” as if I’m about devote 110 minutes of my life to this exercise in cynicism. (Reading the partial transcript was bad enough.) What these supporters don’t want to admit is that there is a reason Carlson was given the opportunity to speak at length at the New York Times: He is of use to them ideologically.

Most of the voices on the right that the Times has given elevated coverage to, from Carlson to Marjorie Taylor Greene to Nick Fuentes, share a special characteristic: They are members of a “new right” antisemitic fringe, the faction most enraged by Trump’s preference for Israel over Hamas and Iran in the Middle East. A cynical man might suggest that the Times seeks to craft a political narrative for its readers wherein the Republican Party is safely cast as forever captive to culturally scary hard-right lunatics. An even more despairingly cynical man might suggest that the Times subconsciously realizes that the “anti-Zionism” of the modern right-wing fringe holds a surprisingly comfortable mirror up to the views of their own readers.

(6) The accused Palisades arsonist fancies himself as a Mangione RobinHood-esque type.