“Lyin' Ted” Cruz is actually in re-election trouble in a state that should be a gimme for Republicans: Texas. And now the Republican Senate, desperate to save its majority from “shipwreck,” is being forced to devote resources to prop up one of its most irredeemable members. The Washington Post's Sean Sullivan writes:

The sudden cooperation underscores how much the GOP fears losing Texas. The shock waves are being felt well beyond the state, as its several expensive media markets could force the party to spend money there that it will have to subtract from GOP hopefuls in other battlegrounds.

“Other campaigns are going to be shorted due to the lackluster nature of the campaign,” said one White House official, speaking of the Cruz operation.

Every dollar spent in Texas is a dollar not spent somewhere else, like Nevada, Arizona, Missouri, Florida, etc. And it’s all to save Cruz, who has called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar from the Senate floor, and pretty much nailed it in 2016 when he accused then-candidate Donald Trump of being a "pathological liar." Cruz also famously riled up the House crazies into a frothy lather in 2013, producing a government shutdown that almost no one in the Senate caucus but him wanted

Former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt racked up as much as $300,000 in personal legal debts in 2017, according to a financial disclosure released by the agency Wednesday.

The disclosure indicates Pruitt owed between $100,001 and $250,000 to Crowe & Dunlevy, an Oklahoma City-based firm, at the end of last year. He also owed between $15,001 and $50,000 to Oklahoma law firm Riggs Abney Neal Turpen.

Pruitt’s disclosure covered only calendar year 2017, before many of the ethics scandals that drove him out of office came to light in spring 2018.

The disclosure does not specify what specific issues those law firms worked on for Pruitt. He faced several investigations related to his EPA work, and the Oklahoma Bar Association was investigating him on an ethics complaint as well, a inquiry that was dismissed in July, a few weeks after Pruitt resigned from EPA.

Pruitt has also retained Cleta Mitchell, a D.C.-based attorney at Foley & Lardner, as well as Paul Rauser, co-founder of the firm Aegis Law Group, neither of whom is listed on Pruitt's 2017 disclosure. Pruitt also launched a legal defense fund, contributions to which will have to be disclosed on his 2018 financial disclosure if they were made when he was still EPA administrator.

On Tuesday, though, Trump went too far for Rosselló.

Despite the official estimate just in the last few days raising the excess death toll near 3,000, Trump hailed the Puerto Rico response as an “incredible unsung success.” (The Post's Philip Bump runs through all the reasons this claim strains credulity.) Trump even invited reporters to verify his claims with Rosselló. “If you ask the governor, he'll tell you what a great job” the administration did, he said.

But Rosselló ... decided to go in a different direction. Here's his statement:
https://twitter.com/markknoller/status/1039671963889938435

Roses are red, violets are blue, Debra Messing and Susan Sarandon are feuding about leftist politics again — what’s new with you? After Sarandon told Variety that the only highlight of Donald Trump’s administration is that his policies have unintentionally inspired women and people of color to run for office, Debra Messing took her to task in a Twitter thread.

“STFU SUSAN,” Messing wrote Wednesday afternoon. “Oh yes, PLEASE let’s give Trump CREDIT. I mean how else are you able to walk out on the street.”

https://twitter.com/DebraMessing/status/1039918630962487296

See for yourself: our long national nightmare — Sarandon and Messing not talking about politics — is over!
https://twitter.com/DebraMessing/status/1039918634435395584

But Trump is not winning the war when it comes to whether people trust him over the mainstream media. According to the most recent Quinnipiac poll, the percentage of Americans who trust Trump over the mainstream media has dropped four percentage points since the last time the poll was done at the beginning of the summer. Only 30 percent of people trust the president over the mainstream media, the lowest number over the past 10 months....

Even a number of groups that Trump won trust him less than they do the mainstream media.

— More than half (54 percent) of independents — a group Trump won in 2016 that has since soured on him — trust the media more than they do the president. Twenty-seven percent of independents trust Trump over the mainstream media.

— Half of men (51 percent) trust the media over Trump. Only about a third (32 percent) of men trust the commander in chief over the media.

— Nearly half (49 percent) of white people trust the media over Trump. Thirty-eight percent trust the president more.

But no one distrusts the president more than black people. Eight percent of black people trust Trump more than the media.