They did not The tiny red trickle last November was a coincidence, apparently. They’re all-in on the forced pregnancy thing. The Republican National Committee passed a resolution Monday urging party members at both the state and federal levels to pass the most aggressive anti-abortion legislation possible in the run-up to 2024. It specifically points to heartbeat bills, which usually translate as six-week gestational bans — before most women know that they’re pregnant — and “fetal pain” legislation, premised on the anti-abortion myth that embryos and fetuses can feel pain far before they’ve developed the structures that would allow them to. The resolution also blames Republicans’ historically weak midterms performance on candidates failing to push their anti-abortion bona fides hard enough. You read that right. They didn’t press their out of the mainstream, anti-abortion beliefs hard enough which evidently led to people voting for Democrats instead? Actually, they clearly believe they failed on turnout which is incorrect.
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apparently … I confess that I find this a little bit hard to understand. Why have they decided that it’s worth pursuing now? But fine. He’s a crook, go after the crimes: The Manhattan district attorney’s office on Monday will begin presenting evidence to a grand jury about Donald J. Trump’s role in paying hush money to a porn star during his 2016 presidential campaign, laying the groundwork for potential criminal charges against the former president in the coming months, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The grand jury was recently impaneled, and witness testimony will soon begin, a clear signal that the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, is nearing a decision about whether to charge Mr. Trump. On Monday, one of the witnesses was seen with his lawyer entering the building in Lower Manhattan where the grand jury is sitting. The witness, David Pecker, is the former publisher of The National Enquirer, the tabloid that helped broker the deal with the porn star, Stormy Daniels.
That what budget talks are for Josh Marshall makes an important point about the reasons the Democrats cannot negotiate around raising the debt ceiling. It’s not that they won’t ever negotiate. It’s that they can’t negotiate with people who think they can hold the world economy hostage in order to get their way: No one — not the White House or any Democrats on Capitol Hill — is saying they won’t negotiate the federal budget or how much the country should be spending on this or that priority or how much debt the country should take on. Kevin McCarthy is right when he says, albeit disingenuously: you can’t say you won’t negotiate. That’s what democratic governance is. That’s true. In the last Congress Democrats’ had a tenuous but complete control of Congress as well as the White House. Now Republicans hold the House by an equally tenuous but real margin. By definition, that means fiscal policy will move in the Republican direction during the next two years. That’s the democratic process. The extent of the shift is what negotiation is about. Each side has its own set of tools at its disposal.
I’ve said this many times: Republicans who know that Trump is a liability are basically just hoping that he goes to jail or dies because that’s the only thing that will shake loose the base (and there’s no guarantee that an indictment or jail term would do that either.) McKay Coppins in the Atlantic takes a look at that pathetically weak position: Press them hard enough, and most Republican officials—even the ones with MAGA hats in their closets and Mar-a-Lago selfies in their Twitter avatar—will privately admit that Donald Trump has become a problem. He’s presided over three abysmal election cycles since he took office, he is more unstable than ever, and yet he returned to the campaign trail this past weekend, declaring that he is “angry” and determined to win the GOP presidential nomination again in 2024. Aside from his most blinkered loyalists, virtually everyone in the party agrees: It’s time to move on from Trump. But ask them how they plan to do that, and the discussion quickly veers into the realm of hopeful hypotheticals. Maybe he’ll get indicted and his legal problems will overwhelm him.
The question is what will? McKay Coppins presents a gallery of Republican donors and operatives eager to see Donald Trump gone before he can do more harm to the Republican Party. What’s left of it anyway. They just lack the guts to take on Trump and his (proven violent) cult members frontally. Their strategy is to hope Trump, 76, just dies. As his mother did at at 88 and his father at 93. Plying him with hamburgers and fried chicken may be a sounder plan. Former Michigan Republican congressman Peter Meijer “termed this strategy actuarial arbitrage.” Other Republicans hope indictments will take Trump out of the picture. Not a good plan either (The Atlantic): Michael Cohen, who served for years as Trump’s personal attorney and now hosts a podcast atoning for that sin titled Mea Culpa, grudgingly told me that his former boss would easily weaponize any criminal charges brought against him. The deep-state Democrats are at it again—the campaign emails write themselves. “Donald will use the indictment to continue his fundraising grift,” Cohen told me. They are hoping for a deus ex machina to appear.
The helpless and their power-ups Why do people believe what they do? Why are conspiracy theories so attractive? Slate’s John Ehrenreich examines the persistence of the Wuhan lab leak theory behind the emergence of COVID-19. Yes, “Running Man” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.)* is one of the first to suggest it. But in the end, why did the story take off on the right when most scientists find the disease’s animal origin more plausible? For one, Ehrenreich suggests, the lab leak theory plays into the right-wing distrust of “experts” and elites. Plus: People also generally prefer simple, straightforward stories that give them a sense of control over complex ones filled with ambiguity and complexity that foster a sense of helplessness. The lab-leak story is simple. Short version: Someone in a lab in China doing research on deadly viruses screwed up. The actions to take are clear: Blame China. Demand reparations. Tighten up regulation of laboratories doing research on disease-causing microbes. Bar gain-of-function research that alters viruses to make them more deadly.
At the heart of any resolution of the war in Ukraine is the issue of the Crimean Tatars. Maria Romanenko explains how a play, part of the UK/Ukraine season of culture, explores their subjugation and resistance
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Very, very sick I’m not talking about COVID patients. I’m talking about COVID deniers: A Midvale plastic surgeon and three other Utahns were indicted on conspiracy charges last week after prosecutors say they dumped nearly 2,000 doses of COVID vaccine down a drain, distributed fake vaccination cards — and, at the request of some parents, injected children with saline to convince the young patients that they had been vaccinated. Dr. Michael Kirk Moore Jr., 58, allegedly ran the scheme out of the Plastic Surgery Institute of Utah, located at 7535 Union Park Ave., along with two other institute employees — Kari Dee Burgoyne and Sandra Flores. Moore’s third codefendant, Kristen Andersen, is his neighbor, court documents state. Andersen and Moore were both members of an unnamed private organization “seeking to ‘liberate’ the medical profession from government and industry conflicts of interest,” court documents state.
I don’t know if you’ve heard about the latest Republican “economic proposal” to abolish the IRS but the details are simply stunning. It’s going to get bottled up in committee most likely because even some of the loons are nervous about it. If you want to see the caliber of “policy” coming from these loons, check this out from the American Prospect: During the negotiations for the recent election of Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as Speaker of the House, one of the demands of the extremist Freedom Caucus was for a vote on the so-called Fair Tax proposal. This would abolish the IRS along with all existing federal taxes, and replace them with a 30 percent national sales tax. The bill is a political dead letter. Not only could it never possibly pass the Senate, let alone be signed by President Biden—Axios reports that he will deliver a big speech Thursday lambasting the idea—but McCarthy himself recently came out against the plan. It might not even make it out of committee in the House.