Or, at least, something to keep in mind Josh Marshall makes an observation I haven’t seen anyone else make and while it may not prove to be prophetic it’s certainly worth considering. He starts off by noting that while we’ve known for quite some time that the GOP congress is nota serious governing party, this congress has taken it to an entirely new level. As he says, it’s been on “longrunning shutdown drama” and is now only able to function at all with the GOP Speaker running the chamber with Democratic votes, courting his own ouster every single day. More than a few powerful and well-known GOP Reps are retiring, some walking away mid term. But there’s a lot more: Then you’ve got the seemingly unrelated Trump takeover of the RNC. Let’s set aside the very important issues of corruption, cronyism and creeping strong-manism. There’s every sign that Trump and his family are going to steer significant amounts of the RNC’s money into a legal slush fund for Trump and his various co-defendants. It’s hard to imagine this won’t further depress giving to the RNC. Some donors won’t care.
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Stoneham Mass.; February 29, 2024 – Visitors to Stone Zoo will notice a fuzzy new face in the prehensile-tailed porcupine habitat. On February 22, Prickles, a prehensile-tailed porcupine, gave birth to a porcupette. The baby is the fourth offspring for Prickles, age 10, and dad, Shadow, age 11. The latest prickly addition, who weighed just under 1 pound at birth, is settling in well in the Windows to the Wild space. The baby received its first medical exam on February 23 and appeared bright, healthy and alert. As with any new birth, the veterinary and animal care teams are closely monitoring the mother and baby. The porcupette has been gaining weight, and will continue to be weighed every day during the first month to make sure there is continued healthy weight gain. “We’re excited to welcome another porcupine to the zoo family, and to report that they are all doing great. We’ve observed the porcupette grip branches with its prehensile tail, which is an excellent sign of a strong, healthy baby,” says Pete Costello, the Assistant Curator at Stone Zoo.
On casting stones at patients in distress Consider where the American Taliban wants to take this country. For anyone who missed it, this clip below is the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina. He may sound like he is a member of the lunatic fringe, but he is not. Mark Robinson is just shoutier. The lunatic fringe right has gone mainstream. In fact, they’ve made it to the U.S. Supreme Court several times already. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern comment on Tuesday’s oral arguments in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM). They write: In public, the plaintiffs in this case—a group of doctors and dentists seeking to ban medication abortion—have long claimed they object to ending “unborn life” by finishing an “incomplete or failed” abortion at the hospital. But in court, they went much further.
“That’s because you don’t have a criminal mind” Back in my table-waiting days, a customer who had just signed his credit card receipt asked for the carbon copies (yes, that long ago). Noticing the quizzical look on my face, he explained it was because of reports of thieves dumpster-diving for credit card numbers. That never would have occurred to me, I told him. “That’s because you don’t have a criminal mind,” the customer smiled. On that, Ed Kilgore considers what steps Donald Trump took to steal the 2020 election. Several tactics he used four years ago are now “off the table.” But considering he would not admit defeat in 2020 and what he demonstrated he was capable of, what else might he try if he loses a 2024 reelection effort premised on keeping himself out of prison? “Rolling Stone is reporting that the Biden campaign is examining a ‘comically long’ list of ‘nightmare scenarios’ that might develop. To be forewarned is to be forearmed, to a considerable extent,” Kilgore writes.
Trump has “envoys” going around the world: After an anti-corruption crusader unexpectedly won last year’s presidential election in Guatemala, democracy teetered on the edgein the Central American country. Amid law enforcementraids on election offices and threats of violence, the Biden administration worked feverishly to lay the groundwork for a peaceful transfer of power. But not Richard Grenell, a former diplomat and intelligence official in Donald Trump’s administration, who arrived in Guatemala in January, days before the new president was to be sworn in — and threw his support behind aright-wing campaign to undermine the election. Grenell met with a hard-line group that sued to block the inauguration. The group thanked him for his “visit and trust.”He defended Guatemalan officials who had seized ballot boxes in an effort to overturn a vote declared “free and fair” by the United States and international observers,and he attacked the U.S. State Department’s sanctions against hundreds of anti-democratic actors. “They are trying to intimidate conservatives in Guatemala,” Grenell said in a television interview.
The judges didn’t buy his defense of the coup attempt David Kurtz at TPM: With the Jan. 6 case against Donald Trump ground to a halt and the no real prospect of the Georgia RICO case against him reaching a verdict before November, yesterday’s ruling against Trump co-defendant John Eastman in California may be the closest we get to a taste of a Jan. 6 verdict before Election Day. In recommending that Eastman be disbarred for his role in the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, a state judge issued a blistering ruling that treated the autocoup with the historic seriousness it deserves. It came after a full evidentiary record was developed over months and extensive legal argument, like a full-blown trial. Eastman plans to appeal, and ultimately the state Supreme Court will decide whether he’ll be disbarred, but in the meantime he is suspended from practicing law.
Merchan hit him with a gag order. Not that he cares. But maybe someone should look into a straight jacket. Update:
Those of you who’ve been reading me for 20 years know how I have felt about Joe Lieberman. I’ll just leave this here:
The Very Stable Genius at work.
Is the insurrectionist-in-chief melting? Good does not always triumph. Bad guys don’t always get their comeuppance. Despite all the stories we’ve heard since childhood. Ask a conservative. The world is not fair. Ask Donald Trump. Nobody knows more about unfairness than he does. Our bias toward expecting justice to be done, eventually, and the arc of the moral universe bending toward it, eventually, makes it hard for us to conceive that the former president may exit this life without receiving what he justly deserves. He might. Or his comeuppance might arrive outside the criminal justice system. Simon Rosenberg urges his Hopium readers to do more and worry less: “Donate to and join the Biden-Harris campaign” and “Make an early investment in North Carolina.” Biden has gained ground on Trump in six new polls. But the only polls that really count are the ones open on Election Day.