The Spectator

White House officials confirmed Tuesday that defense secretary Lloyd Austin kept his prostate cancer diagnosis to himself for a month before informing the White House, adding further scrutiny to Austin’s recent failure to inform Biden or the National Security Council that he was in the ICU for several days. Austin, who oversees a department tasked with deterring conflict, received his diagnosis in December, according to a statement from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center officials.

Stop us if you’ve heard this before: a Republican speaker of the House is facing ire from the Freedom Caucus that is mad about a deal he’s cutting with Democrats, who run almost the entire government.2024 picked up right where 2023 left off, with the narrow GOP House majority stuck between a Freedom Caucus-shaped rock and a hard place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. With at least a partial government shutdown looming, Speaker Mike Johnson’s proposed budget deal strikes many as almost exactly what former speaker Kevin McCarthy’s intra-party foes used as their alleged final straw against him. The Freedom Caucus, which went from loving Johnson to comparing him to John Boehner in slightly over a month, called Johnson’s $1.

DC Council member Charles Allen is facing a recall effort from fed-up citizens as carjackings in the nation’s capital nearly doubled last year while violent crime rose by 39 percent. Murders hit their highest level in two decades in 2023.  The campaign to recall Allen is being led by Jennifer Squires, a former federal government worker who says she voted for Allen previously but found herself troubled by the councilman’s attempts at so-called criminal justice reform. Allen was behind the attempts to revise DC’s criminal code last year. His changes would have eliminated nearly all mandatory minimums and lowered some mandatory maximums, including for carjackings.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have lost the support of Charlemagne Tha God, host of the culturally influential hip-hip radio show The Breakfast Club. Charlamagne, who endorsed the Democratic ticket in 2020, told Politico that he has no plans to repeat his mistake in 2024.  “I’ve learned my lesson from doing that. Once they got in the White House, [Harris] … kind of disappeared,” Charlamagne said. “‘Damn, you told us to vote for [them].’ Do you know how many people say that to me all the time?” Why does it matter? The Breakfast Club boasts 8 million listeners a month and Charlamagne is a well-respected voice in the black community, particularly among young, progressive listeners. Charlamagne’s defection feels like a long time coming.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s 2024 presidential campaign is imploding spectacularly. His first mistake was waiting too long to announce his intention to run while traveling the country for a “book tour,” which allowed former president Donald Trump to sully his name unanswered for weeks. Then when he did jump in, he made his announcement on a glitchy, botched Twitter Space with Elon Musk. In the months that followed, DeSantis struggled to adopt a clear strategy and seemed uncomfortable with the basic prospect of running a national campaign, perhaps best exemplified by an anecdote from 2018 when an advisor told him to write “LIKABLE” at the top of his debate notepad.

The Colorado Supreme Court issued a ruling Tuesday night that barred Donald Trump from appearing on the primary ballot in the 2024 election, a shock move that even NBC News described as a “political gift” to the former president. In a 4-3 decision, the court ruled that Trump engaged in an insurrection and is thus disqualified for running for office under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment contains a clause that states anyone who takes an oath “as an officer of the United States” and engages in “insurrection or rebellion” cannot hold civil or military office in the US. The section was written with the intention of barring Confederate leaders from returning to public office.

Few politicians have managed to surprise the country the way Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman has in the past few months. Fetterman proclaimed on the campaign trail, while running against Republican Mehmet Oz, that he is not just a Democrat, but a “proud progressive”. The junior senator, though, insisted in an NBC News interview on Friday that he is not a progressive and that voters shouldn’t be surprised when he breaks from the party line. Indeed, he has recently taken several high-profile policy positions that suggest an independent streak that brings him closer to Senate colleagues Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin than the left-wing “Squad”.

The stakes were high this week as Congress’s dairy big cow-culation to allow whole milk back in cafeterias loomed. When push came to shove, Republicans and Democrats set aside their beef to allow kids the freedom to drink as they please. The broadly bipartisan bill, the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act, passed the House by a 330-99 vote — reversing Michelle Obama’s crazy push to ban whole milk from school lunches. “I am udderly in favor of whole milk,” Nebraska congressman Don Bacon told me, milking this vote for all it’s worth.

January The government stopped a Gender Recognition Bill passed by the Scottish parliament becoming law. Isla Bryson, now a transgender woman, was convicted of having raped two women; the 31-year-old was sent to a women’s prison, then transferred to one for men. A Met Police officer, David Carrick, aged 48, pleaded guilty to 24 charges of rape. Nadhim Zahawi was sacked as Conservative party chairman. Strikes by railway workers, Underground drivers, ambulance drivers, nurses and hospital doctors continued on and off all year. Ukraine struck a building in Donetsk housing Russian forces. A Russian missile destroyed a block of flats at Dnipro. Jacinda Ardern suddenly resigned as prime minister of New Zealand.