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Good morning and Happy Tuesday! I’m awfully glad to see you all after a much-needed week off.
I woke up this morning rip-roaring to eviscerate FIFA’s capitulation to Donald Trump (again) over the Flo Balogun red card, but Ol’ Reliable Graham Platner made that impossible. Let’s discuss.
First off, kudos to Politico for publishing the account of the sexual assault allegations against Platner. I don’t know if the victim, who also talked to the NYT for last month’s exposé on Platner, kept back the allegations of SA then or if the Times decided not to move forward with that part of the story, but it appears that Politico did their due diligence in attempting to verify the details of the story.
A woman who dated Maine U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.
The woman, a 41-year-old Maine resident named Jenny Racicot, detailed the alleged incident to POLITICO in three interviews over the past two weeks. POLITICO also spoke with a man Racicot dated and confided in the years after the alleged incident, and reviewed documents, including emails between Racicot and her therapist and messages between Racicot and an acquaintance whom she warned against getting involved with Platner years before he ran for office.
If you recall the NYT’s story about Platner, they included allegations from a past girlfriend who recounted a story of the Maine Senate candidate coming to her home, drunk, after she asked him not to. This is the same woman who is now accusing Platner of SA.
Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner, who is now the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.
“I remember him grabbing my pelvis and being really forceful of me,” she said. “I remember the specific moment where I thought to myself, like, ‘This is no longer my choice.’”
Platner denied the allegations.
“These allegations are troubling, serious, and false. Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically untrue,” he said in a statement.
After the NYT piece broke, many women (myself included) suspected that a story like this would come out sooner or later. Those who study harm reduction will tell you that women learn early to recognize patterns of behavior when it comes to dangerous men. In that same piece, Platner was accused by multiple women of a lack of respect for the entire gender, as well as physical violence that amounts to a crime in any jurisdiction.
Mr. Platner could be rough with her, Ms. Fifield said, particularly when they were drinking, leaving her shaken and sometimes afraid. In the interviews, Ms. Fifield grappled with how to process her experiences. She was quick to note that he “never hit me, he never punched me.”
But she said he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.
During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was “calm.” Eventually, Ms. Fifield said, she fell asleep and left the next morning.
Platner is now facing multiple withdrawn endorsements (Planned Parenthood, Ro Khanna, VoteVets, Ruben Gallego) and calls to drop out (Elizabeth Warren, Maine Democratic Party, and the PAC linked to Chuck Schumer). As of right now, Bernie Sanders has said nothing. Stephen King, on the other hand, is still digging.
It brings me no pleasure to have to share this, Stephen.
And, of course, we still have the thousands of men who are claiming that anything is better than Susan Collins, even a man who allegedly raped and abused women, though they continue to complain about the Epstein Files. Make it make sense.
I feel like I’ve made all these points before, so I won’t belabor them again, BUT.
Imagine the arrogance it takes to make your first run for office for UNITED STATES SENATE, knowing your exes have these kinds of stories about you. And, I guess, believing you can just deny them and everyone will believe you.
It takes incredible courage for a woman to come forward against a powerful abuser, especially one with the weight of the Democratic Party behind him. No one does this for funsies.
I have never told anyone the name of my rapist, and I don’t plan to, but if I found out he was running for office, I would run directly to a media outlet to expose him. Some things are bigger than one person.
This should have been over when the Nazi tattoo was discovered. I can’t believe people fell for his “I didn’t know!” schtick.
If you still don’t understand why women don’t come forward, check out the comments under any story about Platner.
In the absence of a voting record to rely on, I believe that how a person treats a group is often indicative of how they will vote, no matter what they say.
Platner says he’s taking some time to “reflect” on his path forward, but he’s cooked. Maine has until July 13 to replace him on the ballot. All of this could have been avoided if the pod bros and “progressive” dudes who got behind him, despite a rushed and bargain-basement vetting, had just listened to women in the first place. After I finished writing this, the Washington Examiner reported that Platner is dropping out of the race, but I’ve yet to see it reported anywhere else.
I also think it’s telling that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who normally backs the same candidates as Sanders does, never endorsed Platner. Political field vision is an incredible asset. Maybe she should be in charge of the Democratic Party.
Anyway, listening to women from the beginning could have saved Maine Democrats a lot of pain and a last-minute scramble to replace Platner on the ballot. By the way, Act Blue has been refusing to refund my one-time donation to Platner since the tattoo was revealed.
In other news: Mitch McConnell is probably dead; AI continues to contribute to the downfall of America; Egg producers are getting off easy for scamming us all, and The High Note.
Here we go.
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Mitch McConnell is probably dead
I love this new thing Republicans are doing, where they’re against working from home but in favor of not showing up to work for weeks or months on end, without an explanation. Anyway, no one has seen Mitch McConnell since he was reportedly found unconscious and admitted to the hospital on June 14. His staff won’t even confirm if he’s conscious.
Emergency responders the morning the Kentucky Republican was hospitalized reported performing CPR on an unconscious individual undergoing cardiac arrest at the senator’s Washington address, according to recordings of dispatcher calls that were widely reported by news outlets last week and obtained by The New York Times. The recordings do not name Mr. McConnell as the individual.
Recordings of emergency dispatcher radio communications logged between 8:36 a.m. and 8:43 a.m. that Sunday indicate that dispatchers initially called for medics to respond to a report of an “unconscious” individual at Mr. McConnell’s Washington address. Six minutes later, a worker with the city’s Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department responded, asking that his supervisor be informed of “CPR in progress.”
While both John Thune (R-SD) and John Barrasso (R-WY) said they had spoken to McConnell since his collapse, Laura Loomer (LOL) is now telling everyone that he’s brain-dead, which, if true, calls their stories into question.
McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, flew to China just days after he was hospitalized, which is a weird move when your husband has been (allegedly) revived via CPR at 84 years old.
Whatever his status, it’s pretty clear that McConnell isn’t coming back, and the GOP is trying to keep whatever’s going on with him under wraps as long as possible. If they manage to hold out until August 4, there’s no need for a special election in Kentucky.
AI continues to ruin everything
In honor of AI actress Tilly Norwood getting a “movie deal” (spoiler alert: we will never see this movie), I want to share this op-ed explaining how AI is contributing to the country's downfall.
We are witnessing one of the largest peacetime mobilizations of capital in modern American history. Topping $1 trillion annually by next year, the artificial intelligence buildout is expected to rival or surpass previous technological booms at their peaks — rail, electrification and the internet revolution.
Many economists believe that at a time of rising inflation, a weakening job market and global unrest, this boom is keeping the U.S. economy afloat. “A recession tied to the balloon of A.I.,” is how PJ Vogt, a popular podcaster, describes the perspective. Look more closely, however, and the picture changes. A.I. is vacuuming up so much of our land, talent, semiconductor chips, building materials and, above all, so much of our money that it is beginning to crowd out the rest of the economy.
In other words, A.I. isn’t merely compensating for the weakness in the rest of the economy. It is, at least in part, causing it.
Preach. I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how people are supposed to not starve if/when AI takes all our jobs.
The money flowing to A.I. is bypassing some of our country’s highest priorities.
Start with housing. New homes that could ease the affordability crisis aren’t getting built, as land that could be used for houses is sold instead to data center developers. Consider Prince William County in Northern Virginia, a region that suffers from an estimated shortage of more than 75,000 homes. A residential developer who had purchased land there for just over $50 million, with plans to build homes, ultimately sold a portion of that land to Amazon for $700 million.
Land costs are higher — at times more than 17 times as high as they were even three years ago in pockets near Dallas. Scott Finfer, a local residential land developer, told The Wall Street Journal that for home builders, “there’s no possible way you can make those numbers work.” The financiers who help decide how much new housing gets built and where it goes are shifting their money away from homes and into the data center rush.
All of this, of course, ignores the biggest problem: AI doesn’t work the way the tech bros want us to think it does. I’ve gotten used to adding “-ai” to the end of my searches to get rid of the AI results, but on the rare occasion that I don’t, I’m shocked by how often AI is flat-out wrong. We are on the verge of the collapse of the tulip market here.
Egg producers are jerks
Hey, remember when the price of eggs went through the roof last Spring for no discernible reason? It turns out, egg producers were using Trump’s tariff war and the avian flu as an excuse to jack up their prices.
Investigators said the companies conspired from June 2022 to March 2025 to limit the production of eggs so they would not meet demand and then placed a high volume of bids with the Egg Clearinghouse Inc., a national egg exchange, to drive up prices.
State and federal prosecutors argued that the companies’ actions prompted the market research company Urner Barry to increase its daily price quotations for eggs, which often determine how much grocery stores and restaurants pay for eggs.
Executives from the egg suppliers discussed the scheme over emails and text messages, the lawsuit said.
Huh. I had no idea we had a “national egg exchange.”
Don’t worry, though! The DOJ is on it, and I’m sure egg producers will be forced to compensate their customers fairly for this egregious wrong.
Oh.
Egg producers made over $1 billion in profits. They will repay $3.3 million. That’s $1.1 million per egg producer.
What’s the incentive not to do this kind of thing, again?
The High Note
Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.
Please enjoy this absolutely laughable take by Kevin McCarthy:
And, because that wasn’t really a “high note,” here’s the Punch Brothers doing Woody Guthrie.
Hey, survive and advance out there today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down.
