Dear Readers,

On Friday, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) told WISN-AM's Jay Weber that he had no intention in running for U.S. Senate in 2024. Instead, Gallagher told Weber, he would focus all of his attention in Congress on the growing tensions with China. 

If I were Gallagher, my attentions would be abroad, too.

At home, Gallagher's ambitions may have been easily thwarted by the less sane of his own political party. As former Fond du Lac County Republican Party Chairman Rohn Bishop said on Twitter, "Trump would come out against Gallagher, and he wouldn't win the primary."

A recent poll by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling firm, bears this out. It found Gallagher trailing former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke in a hypothetical race for Senate by 20 percentage points.

From the poll conducted June 5 and June 6:

Q15  If the Republican candidates for US Senate next year were Sheriff David Clarke, Mike Gallagher, Eric Hovde, and Tom Tiffany, who would you vote for?

Sheriff David Clarke ........................................ 40%

Mike Gallagher................................................ 20%

Eric Hovde ...................................................... 3%

Tom Tiffany ..................................................... 10%

Not sure .......................................................... 27%

Yes, it's very early, and yes, Clarke may not run. And I'll even note that the poll uses Clarke's former job title without mentioning Gallagher and Tiffany are congressmen. But it does show that while Gallagher was the favorite candidate of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, he was not the runaway favorite among Wisconsin Republicans despite his higher profile.

Wisconsin Republicans who don't remember what Gallagher said on January 6, 2021, about the pro-Trump violent takeover of the Capitol would have been reminded of that and what Gallagher said later about not supporting a Trump candidacy. While Gallagher has often been frustrating with his refusal to vote for impeachment of Trump, he has been a Trump critic at times.

“If Mike got in, everybody would know that’s the total package,” Brian Schimming, the state’s Republican party chair, told Politico. Well, not everybody.

When Trump campaigns in Wisconsin next year in advance of the presidential primary (which he is leading) and then in advance of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, it's hardly likely he would agree with Schimming.

Instead, it's more likely the anointed Trump candidate would have the same success in the Wisconsin Senate primary as GOP gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels had after he embraced Trumpism in 2022. 

And when Republicans lose to Sen. Tammy Baldwin -yet again- in 2024, will they blame themselves or will they resort to blaming vote fraud?

James Wigderson, Waukesha, June 11, 2023

Bonus content!

Look, Donald Trump is guilty. Guilty, guilty, guilty. And anyone who is in denial about Trump's guilt either hasn't read the indictment or is lying.

Even National Review is saying in an editorial, "... it is impossible to read the indictment against Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case and not be appalled at the way he handled classified documents as an ex-president, and responded to the attempt by federal authorities to reclaim them."

So when Wisconsin Republican officials go to their scripts for defending Trump, notice the number of them who will claim they didn't read the indictment or hear the audio recordings of Trump admitting guilt.

My advice to Republican officials and talking heads who want to pretend to be deaf and blind - far better to pretend you're mute, too. That way you won't sound like idiots. Unfortunately, it's too late for many of them. It's a good thing that they're free of shame, too.

More old movie news: "The French Connection" is now politically correct. As National Review reported:

Savvy viewers have noticed that The French Connection, the 1971 crime drama, has been stealth edited on streaming platforms to remove a few seconds in which Gene Hackman’s classic character Popeye Doyle uses a racial slur. The film was acquired by Disney in 2019 as part of the takeover of Twenty-First Century Fox, but the studio has made no comment on the change — which also applies to the version being shown by the Criterion Channel. 

"The French Connection" is a historically significant film and represents a change in movie  making styles. The main character, Popeye Doyle, is not supposed to be lovable. He is supposed to be representative of police detectives dealing with an almost dystopian 1970s New York City. Changing Doyle to make the film more palatable to modern audiences is vandalism of a work of art.

I would just add, you would think that in this age of Black Lives Matters that a film portraying a cop who isn't politically correct about race would be a welcome moment of realism.

Final Bonus Content!!!

On the Reason website, Ilya Somin explains why the Hillary Clinton and President Joe Biden cases are different than the Donald Trump secret document case.

A final possible variant of the banana republic charge is that, due to political bias, Trump is being charged for an offense that Joe Biden is being allowed to get away with. Biden, too, retained classified documents after leaving office (as vice president under Barack Obama).  So far, however, the evidence suggests that Biden did not take them deliberately, and (unlike Trump) he turned them over as soon as it became clear he had them. But Biden is under investigation by a special counsel, too (Former Trump US attorney appointee Robert Hur). If it turns out his conduct was in fact similar to Trump's, then by all means indict him, as well! Hur has every incentive to uncover such evidence, and to not spare Biden if he finds that the latter committed offenses similar to Trump's.

If Hur does find comparable evidence against Biden, it may not be possible to prosecute him while he is still president, given Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. Perhaps this policy is wrong (I have reservations about it, myself). But Trump supporters are not well-positioned to complain about it, given they were happy to see it shield Trump himself while he was in office.

Similar points apply to attempts to draw parallels between Trump's conduct and Hillary Clinton's use of an illicit e-mail server when she was Secretary of State. Although reprehensible, her conduct was was less bad than Trump's. Among other differences, she  misplaced the relevant classified information at a time when she was still in office (and therefore entitled to have it). Trump, by contrast, took classified documents on his way out the door, when leaving office. Unlike with Trump, there is no evidence Hillary Clinton revealed any classified information to third parties. Moreover, when the server was discovered by authorities, she turned it over to them, instead of trying to stonewall, as Trump did.

Perhaps Clinton should still have been prosecuted; her actions were certainly reprehensible. But it's not a double standard to conclude she should not have been, yet simultaneously support an indictment for Trump's more serious offenses. And if you think Clinton should have been prosecuted (or at least investigated further), much of the blame for the failure to pursue the issue falls on the Trump administration, which could have done so during their four years in office.

Heath Mayo has a Twitter thread also explaining the differences between Hillary Clinton's handling of secrets and Trump's intentional theft of secret documents. Well worth reading.