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Beyond that, there's not much we actually know -- given that it's only 48 hours since the Gianforte choke-slam on Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs took place.

It remains to be seen how -- and whether -- Republican views on Gianforte change. There's no question that some Gianforte voters actually backed him because of the confrontation. And that the public's attention span is very, very short -- and we tend to think we will never forget things that we forget the following day.

Those two factors are what House Republicans are banking on. That the audio of Gianforte slamming Jacobs to the ground -- and even the possibility that he will be convicted of a misdemeanor -- will recede in peoples' memory as long as the Montana Republican keeps his mouth shut.

Source: GOP candidate 'body slammed' reporter 01:47

They're probably right. Interest in the race is already fading due to the fact that the frontrunner, Gianforte, won. And Montana is out of the way enough -- in terms of the national conversation -- that without a major next development, it won't likely stay in the national news.

For Democrats, the path forward is also uncertain. A victory in Montana would have been evidence of the anti-Trump movement Democrats insist is sweeping the country. And, given that the national party and its aligned super PACs spent millions on the race, they clearly believed it was a winnable proposition. (The Montana secretary of state's office also says that as a federally elected official, Gianforte can't be recalled.)

Sadly, the fact that Gianforte's assault happened on a reporter also makes it more likely to disappear as a major issue since reporters are about as popular as foot fungus. (Sidebar: For people who cheered Gianforte's slam of Jacobs, ask yourself this: Do you think it's a good thing societally for a reporter to get beaten up for doing his job? How about one human treating another one that way?)

Gianforte will be seated. And, at the moment, it's hard to see Republicans even considering forcing him to resign (or even consider it). The likeliest outcome is that Gianforte will come to Washington and then recede into the backbenches of Congress -- never to be heard from again. And his conduct will have no real-world consequences.

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Greg Gianforte won. Now what do Republicans do? - CNN

Trumps negative media coverage is being driven not by Democrats but by law-enforcement sources and pissed-off Republicans.

CNN analysts discuss President Donald Trumps comments on the necessity for the US Civil War. (Screengrab / CNN)

Last week, when CNN reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had left a couple of meetings with Russian officials off his application for a security clearance, Representative Jeff Duncan (R-SC) falsely claimed that the broadcaster had later retracted the story. In a Facebook post, Duncan, who is not known for having the keenest intellect on Capitol Hill, wrote, The media was never this critical to President Obama, the recent Harvard study proves that the media has applied a completely different standard to President Trump.

Duncan, like many on the right, sees a recent study of the mainstream coverage of Trumps first 100 days in office released by Harvards Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy as solid proof that the media treat Trump unfairly. It looked at news reports in the print editions of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, the main newscasts of CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC, and three European news outlets, and found that 80 percent of Trumps coverage by those outlets was negativesignificantly higher than the shares for Barack Obama (41 percent negative), George W. Bush (57 percent), and Bill Clinton (60 percent) at this point in their presidencies. Conservative publications greeted the report with headlines like Harvard Study Confirms Media Bias Against Trump and Harvard Report: There Is A Huge Anti-Trump Bias In Corporate Media.

The obvious response is that the vast majority of stories about famine, natural disasters, and genital warts are negative, and that doesnt imply a bias on the part of those writing them. Trumps young presidency has been a train wreck, his White House has been mired in largely self-inflicted scandals, and his legislative agenda has so far gotten nowhere in Congress. And Trump, unlike his predecessors, has a penchant for impulsively tweeting dubious claims and inflammatory nonsense. The study also found that the sheer volume of Trump coveragehe was the subject of four of every 10 news stories in the outlets studieddwarfs that of previous administrations.

But thats not the real story. The real story is that Trumps negative coverage is being driven not by liberals or Democrats but by law-enforcement sources and pissed-off Republicans.

Its important to understand the studys methodology. According to its author, Harvard scholar Thomas Patterson, Tone is judged from the perspective of the actor, the actor being, in this case, Donald Trump. A story is coded as negative when the actor is criticized directlyfor example when Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer told a reporter, Eleven weeks into his administration, we have seen nothing from President Trump on infrastructure, on trade, or on any other serious job-creating initiativeor when an event, trend, or development reflects unfavorably on the actor. So negative stories are either stories that quote someone griping about Trump, or stories about developments that cast a negative light on his performance.

And heres a key point, as it relates to that first category: Republican voices, wrote Patterson, accounted for 80 percent of what newsmakers said about the Trump presidency, compared to only 6 percent for Democrats and 3 percent for those involved in anti-Trump protests. So the coverage has not featured a bunch of liberals complaining about TrumpDemocrats and those engaged with the anti-Trump resistance were few and far between. The fact that Trump has received more negative coverage than his predecessor is hardly surprising, the report says. The early days of his presidency have been marked by far more missteps and miss-hits, often self-inflicted, than any presidency in memory, perhaps ever.

Stories about events that reflect poorly on the White House have in large part been driven by leaks (a fact that infuriates Trump and his supporters). We cant know the ideological breakdown of the people speaking to reporters anonymously, but we do know that Trumps own staffpeople close to himhave been the source of a number of negative stories, and we know, thanks to White House leaks, that Trumps staff often leaks information to the press because, as the very conservative Erick Erickson reported, sometimes the president will not take advice. Sometimes the president treats suggestions as criticism. More often than not, the president is vastly more interested in what the media says about him than what his advisers in his employ say to him. According to Erickson, who personally knows an ardent Trump supporter in Trumps orbit who was the source of one such leak, White House staff have ample incentive to leak to the press when they believe the president needs to pay attention or be admonished. Just think for a moment how often youve read a story in which an anonymous source criticizing the president is identified as a current or former supporter or adviser or donor.

THE STAKES ARE HIGHER NOW THAN EVER. GET THE NATION IN YOUR INBOX.

Law-enforcement and intelligence agencies have been the other big source of leaks. Theyre not all right-wingers, of course, and their motives for leaking include, depending on how you look at it, either revenge for Trumps many assaults on the intelligence community, or a principled defense of institutions they see as vital to our national security. Neither of those things represents ideological bias.

One might certainly argue that many of the Republicans who dominate the public discourse about Trump were hostile towards his presidency from the beginning. Prominent #NeverTrump conservatives like Ana Navarro, Stuart Stevens, David Frum are easy to find on cable TV and social media. But when a reporter doing her best to cover the president fairly sees similar criticisms coming from both the left and the right, when her story reflects those views, its not a matter of bias. Thats how he said-she said journalism, for all its obvious flaws, has always worked.

Ironically, the Shorenstein study did find significant bias at one media outlet: Fox News was a lone outlier in that almost half of its Trump coverage was positive. Looking back at 100 days marked by chaos and failure, its hard to imagine what a truly fair and balanced news outlet possibly could have covered in order to run so many positive segments.

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Conservatives Complain That Republicans Have a Liberal Bias - The Nation.

Left, by John M. Hurley/The Boston Globe; Right, by Paul Marotta/WireImage, both from Getty Images.

Forty-eight years after she gave the commencement speech as a 21-year-old graduate at Wellesley College, Hillary Clinton returned to her alma mater to give the commencement address to the graduating class of 2017 on Friday. In her comments, Clinton did not hold back when it came to criticizing the current occupant of the White House, per The New York Times, calling the current political situation a con.

And Republicansthough now in control of three branches of government and in no way affected by Clinton anymorewent, predictably, crazy. Upon hearing Clintons speech, Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement Friday that Clintons speech was a stark reminder why [she] lost in 2016. She claimed that Clinton was lashing out with the same partisan talking points.

In her speech, Clinton compared 1969, the tumultuous year in which she graduatedwith the country deep in the thick of the Vietnam Warto the countrys current worrying political state. Without mentioning Donald Trumps name, she compared him to Richard Nixon, which is a parallel many have been making since the president fired former F.B.I. Director James Comey.

We were asking urgent questions about whether women, people of color, religious minorities, immigrants would ever be treated with dignity and respect, Clinton said. And by the way, we were furious about the past presidential election of a man whose presidency would eventually end in disgrace with his impeachment for obstruction of justice.

She went on to remind students of the specific challenges they are facing today, getting in her digs toward Washington where she could.

And heres what that means to you, the class of 2017. You are graduating at a time when there is a full-fledged assault on truth and reason . . . Drumming up rampant fear about undocumented immigrants, Muslims, minorities, the poor . . . And to top it off, it is shrouded in a trillion-dollar mathematical lie. Let's call it what it is. It's a con.

She finished her speech by encouraging students to break the rules of the game, and even alluded to her own challenges on the 2016 campaign trail:

They may even call you a nasty woman. Some may take a slightly more sophisticated approach and say your elite education means you are out of teach with real people. In other words, sit down and shut up. Now, in my experience, that's the last thing you should ever tell a Wellesley graduate.

Clintons speech, though it ends on an encouraging note, is also a clear sign that she does not intend to stay silent during this Republican era. As she made clear by launching political action organization Onward Together earlier this month, Clinton is planting herself firmly in the Trump resistance. Resist, persist, enlist has become her motto, which is only going to anger staunch anti-Hillary Republicans further.

As Rebecca Traister mentions in her New York magazine profile published Friday, Clinton is slowly moving on from her heartbreaking election year. Clinton herself is one of these awakened women, Traister writes, comparing the former presidential candidate to the millions of women fighting back at the current administration.

But it has taken some time for Clinton to reach this point in her election recovery. As she said in her speech, long walks in the woods and closet organizing has helped her build up her resilience to whatever vitriol the Republicans sling her way. And a little Chardonnay helped, too, she added. Take note, graduates. This is the Trump era; youll need all the liquid courage you can get.

Giving a keynote address during the 28th Annual Professional Business Women of California conference in San Francisco. (March 28, 2017)

Accepting the Champion for Girls award at the Girls Inc. New York Luncheon. (March 7, 2017)

Attending the Oscar de la Renta Forever Stamp dedication ceremony at Grand Central Terminal. (February 16, 2017)

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Giving a keynote address during the 28th Annual Professional Business Women of California conference in San Francisco. (March 28, 2017)

From A.P./Rex/Shutterstock.

Accepting the Champion for Girls award at the Girls Inc. New York Luncheon. (March 7, 2017)

By Mike Coppola/Getty Images.

Attending the Oscar de la Renta Forever Stamp dedication ceremony at Grand Central Terminal. (February 16, 2017)

By Janet Mayer/Splash News.

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Hillary Clinton Is Still Driving Republicans Crazy - Vanity Fair

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McConnell May Have Been Right: It May Be Too Hard to Replace Obamacare New York Times The many meetings Republicans held to discuss a Senate health care bill have exposed deep fissures within the party that are almost as large as the differences between Republicans and Democrats. Elements of a bill that passed the House this month have ... Senate Republicans Are Pretending the AHCA Simply Doesn't ExistSlate Magazine Republicans Reckon With a Rushed Health-Care VoteThe Atlantic More Proof Republicans Are Just Lying About TrumpcareThe Nation. Washington Post (blog) -Philly.com -The New Yorker -Congressional Budget Office all 1,810 news articles »

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McConnell May Have Been Right: It May Be Too Hard to Replace Obamacare - New York Times

WASHINGTON - There are few things that strike more fear into the heart of a member of Congress than the word redistricting.

That proved particularly true this week among Texas Republicansin Washington, thanks to a recent court ruling that came about just as talk was increasing in Austin that Gov. Greg Abbott may call a special session.Some Texas Republicans in Congress hope that any upcoming special session will include redrawing the state's 36 congressional districts as part of its agenda.

The message coming out of Austin thus far: not going to happen.

Several congressional Republicans told the Tribune theywant Abbott to call a special session to redraw the Congressional lines. They believe such a maneuverwould put theirallies in the state legislature in the driver's seat, circumventing Republicans' worst fear:that a panel of federal judges will draw a less favorable map of its own.

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I cant speak for my whole delegation but Ive already reached out to some of my friends back in the legislatureI said, Give me a holler,'"said U.S. Rep.Randy WeberR-Friendswood, on his hopes for a special session.

My thought is, if the legislature doesnt [redraw the map], then the court is going to drop the map, which I think is way outside their constitutional purview, he added.

The problem with that strategy? Austin has no appetite for it largely, state Republicans argue, because it would make no legal sense in the latest battle of the state's campaign to preserve its current maps.

Abbott has rebuffed the delegation calls for a special session, according to a Republican member of the Congressional delegation.And Texas Attorney General Ken Paxtonon Thursday filed alegal advisory resolving any questions about where the state's leadership stand: "TheState does not intend to undertake redistricting in a special session," it said.

In March, a three-judge panel in San Antonio ruled Texas lawmakers in 2011 purposefully discriminated against blacks and Latinos in drawing the state's congressional map. They flagged particular violations in the 23rd Congressional District, represented by Will Hurd, R-Helotes; the 27th, represented byBlake Farenthold, R-Corpus Christi; and the 35th, represented byLloyd Doggett, D-Austin.

In April, the same judges concluded the 2011 Texas Legislature intentionally diluted the clout of minority voters statewide in drawing a state House districts.

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With the 2018 elections looming, lawyers representing Texas and opponents are scheduled to return to San Antonio in July for a five-day trial concerning the states next set of maps.

For most of the state's current legislative session, Republicans in Austin have been reluctant to publicly discuss the court's scoldings let alone contemplate offering new maps.

State Rep. Cindy Burkett, a Sunnyvale Republican who chairs the House Committee on Redistricting, for instance, refused to call any hearings during the legislative session whether to probe the impact of the rulings or to discuss any of the seven bills, now dead, referred to her panel. (The committee hasnt met since 2013.)

That was despite loud calls from Democrats to try to fix the maps during the regular session, which ends on Monday.

State Rep. Eric Johnson, a Dallas Democrat and the committee's vice chair, said Wednesday he hadnt heard any talk about a special session for redistricting. Calling one would show bad faith that judges weren't likely to take seriously, he said.

The time to do this was now, when were in Austin and have a committee in place, he said. Not at the eleventh hour.

Nevertheless, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling earlier this week set off special session speculation among Texans in Washington.

The justices struck downtwo U.S. House districts in North Carolina, ruling that statelawmakers illegally packed African-American voters into them and minimized their statewide influence.

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The decision, some experts say, could affect political cartography in every statehouse particularly in the American south. It prompted the judges presiding over the Texas case to quickly ask the state whether it was willing to call a special session to redraw the Texas map.

To be sure, the Congressional delegation would like to keep the current lines. But its calls for a special session are rooted in fears that the map will not hold up in court.

And even those fears are not uniform within the delegation itself.

One attorney will tell you one thing, another attorney will tell you something different, said U.S. Rep.Bill Flores, R-Bryan. "Theres more confusion than consensus.

Even as a tax code overhaul and the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 elections dominated the news in Washington this week, it was redistricting that absorbed many of the Texans. But the Texas GOP delegation concerns are evolving into a national worry.

As President Donald Trumps approval ratings flag, control of the U.S. House increasingly appears up for grabs in the 2018 midterms. Republicans are counting every seat on the map, and the fear is that a newly drawn Texas seat will put even more seats into play.

According to onemember, a frantic callwas put out andGOP members of Congressfrom Texasmet at the Republican National Committee on Tuesday night for a presentation of an Armageddon map. Republican attorneys and at least one party official showed many in the delegation a potentialworst-case scenario if the 2018 Texas map isdrawn by the three-judge panel. This potential map could jeopardize as many as a half-dozen Texas GOP incumbents and create ripple effects on the lines of many others.

The presentation did much to deeply rattle several Republican delegation members, according to people who attended the meeting. The RNC declined repeated attempts to respond to requests for comment.

But some sources within the delegation emerged from the Tuesday night meeting dubious of the frantic tone.

Regardless, submitting a new map now would do nothing to bolster the state's position in court, Paxton's Thursday filing suggested.

The states lawyers argue for the status quo: That any court rulings on the 2011 boundaries should have no bearing on the coming elections because those maps were never used. Recent Texas elections have involved boundaries that the court quickly drew ahead of the 2012 election and the 2013 Legislature adopted.

Yet the states legal opponents argue lawmakers swift adoption of the temporary 2013 maps should not insulate them from what they call lingering discrimination created by the state's 2011 redistricting effort.

Additionally, Paxton states, "there is no reason to doubt" that any new Texas-drawn map would draw additional legal challenges ahead of the 2018 elections.

While the Texas Republicans in Congress are debating their next moves, the state'scongressional Democratsare mostly blas about the litigation. They have little control over the process and not much to lose, given that the current map so heavily favors House Republicans.

Among Democratic members of Congress who are most intimately involved with the partys efforts to take back control of the U.S. House, their ambitions for a new Texas map are far more scaled back than the GOPs worst fears. In the most bullish of Democratic conversations, those members suggested a gain of two or three Texas seats would be a good night for their party.

Doggett is the Democrat who's most likely to see changes to his own 35th District. Thelongtime Democrat frequently finds himself perpetually drawn into new districts. He shrugged off the whole notion that his lines could change once again.

Ill run wherever I have to run, he said.

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Fearing 2018 losses, Texas Republicans in Congress want special ... - Texas Tribune