The Kentucky Republican says he's genuinely undecided on whether to back Brett Kavanaugh. His vote could be decisive.

By Burgess Everett @ Politico.com, July 23

[....] “I am honestly undecided. I am very concerned about his position on privacy and the Fourth Amendment. This is not a small deal for me. This is a big deal,” Paul said in an interview last week. “Kavanaugh’s position is basically that national security trumps privacy. And he said it very strongly and explicitly. And that worries me.” [....]

Mayhaps middle and left of the punditry and media spectrum should lay off saying mean things about the crazy Senator for a little while? Talk about how handsome he is or something? And so principled, what a brave man, etc.

By Emily Birnbaum @ TheHill.com, 07/23/18 03:34 PM EDT

[....] The witnesses, who Mueller's team submitted for immunity last week and whose identities were not released publicly until Monday, are James Brennan, Donna Duggan, Conor O'Brien, Cindy Laporta and Dennis Raico, according to Talking Points Memo.

Each of the witnesses are connected to financial institutions, according to The Washington Post's Rachel Weiner. 

Two expected witnesses in the case, Washington lobbyists Tony Podesta and Vin Weber, whose firms allegedly participated in a public relations campaign for Ukraine with Manafort, are not among the immunized witness, Talking Points Memo reported.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis granted them immunity to speak freely while testifying about Manafort [....]

Satirical cartoonist, Mr. Fish, has fans from both ends of the political spectrum.

“In order to exhibit yourself as a leftist it seems now, all you have to do is maybe scissor up the plastic six-pack rings that you have and send them out into the ocean. Or you can use your reusable shopping bags and fill them with factory farm foods and put them in your SUV, and you’re an environmentalist,” says Fish. “Even on the other end, if you want to be seen as pro-American just demonstrate real discomfort around Hispanic people. People brand themselves with these concepts of who they are and what they are without any demonstration that goes deeper than fashion.” 

Russia provided additional details Friday of what it said were agreements made at the presidential summit in Helsinki this week, shaping a narrative of the meeting with no confirmation or alternative account from the Trump administration.

Not surprisingly, the Russian story line tended to favor the Kremlin’s own policy prescriptions, at times contradicting stated administration strategy.

The viciousness, toxic partisan anger and intellectual dishonesty are at all-time highs.

Analysis @ NYTimes.com, July 20

[....] After nearly nine years and 187,000 tweets, I have used Twitter enough to know that it no longer works well for me. I will re-engage eventually, but in a different way.

Maggie Haberman✔@maggieNYT

With exception of breaking news and my own stories, taking a break from this platform. No reason or prompt other than that it’s not really helping the discourse.

6:37 PM - Jul 15, 2018

Twitter has stopped being a place where I could learn things I didn’t know, glean information that was free from errors about a breaking news story or engage in a discussion and be reasonably confident that people’s criticisms were in good faith [....]

By Bernie Becker @ Morning Tax @ Politico.com, July 20

THE TAX RETURNS … RETURN? It’s not like Democrats have ever stopped wanting to get President Donald Trump’s tax returns out in the open, but Chuck Rettig’s nomination to be IRS commissioner sure seems to have brought that issue back to the forefront.

Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday generally praised Rettig as a solid choice to be IRS chief — before they all voted against him, as a protest of the Trump administration’s decision to stop having the IRS collect names and addresses of big donors to all sorts of political nonprofits.

Those Democrats also escalated their push for Trump’s tax records, tying the president’s recent meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia to a disclosure decision they said could funnel more anonymous foreign money into the U.S. political system, Pro Tax’s Aaron Lorenzo notes.

So what does it all mean? Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat at Finance, said he would try to talk to Rettig as quickly as he could about both the nonprofit disclosure issue and Trump’s tax returns [....]