What in the world? I don’t know what to think about this story but it might be the weirdest tale I’ve heard in a long time. According to the Washington Post, the trove of classified documents that were recently discovered on the Discord social media platform were posted by a young man who works in a military facility for a bunch of teenagers for no discernible reason other than to show off for them. It’s truly bizarre. Here’s a brief rundown by CNN. The person behind a massive leak of classified US military documents worked on a military base and posted sensitive national security secrets in an online group of acquaintances, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. The Post reporting, which CNN could not independently verify, covers new ground in identifying the supposed leaker of highly classified documents – including some that paint a pessimistic US view of the war in Ukraine – and provides the first known details about who may be behind a major national security breach that has rocked Washington in recent days.
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That’s what I call a very stable genius. Late night tantrum: I know this sounds like one of those Tom Friedman taxicab stories, but I swear it’s true. I was visiting a rural Walmart not too long ago and overheard a group standing around talking politics. And one of them said about Biden, “we’ve got to get rid of that idiot in the White House. All he ever does is whine and brag…” You think they don’t live in Bizarro World?
Republicans are twisting themselves into pretzels talking about abortion There are some who do have their rationale at the ready, however: A Nebraska Republican state senator argued Wednesday for a six-week abortion ban by claiming there are too many foreigners living in the state, invoking a racist conspiracy theory. Since Roe v. Wadewas overturned, abortion is allowed in Nebraska up to 21 weeks and six days of pregnancy. But on Wednesday, the Senate began debating a bill that would ban abortion after six weeks, before many people even know they are pregnant. Senator Steve Erdman decided that the best argument in favor of the ban was the “great replacement theory,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center defines as a “racist conspiracy narrative [that] falsely asserts there is an active, ongoing, and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries.” “Our state population has not grown except by those foreigners who have moved here or refugees who have been placed here,” Erdman told the chamber.
I was standing on the street in the rain, speaking to a few dozen people, without a sound system. Remarkably this is captured brilliantly just on an inexpensive phone camera, and my words have already reached several thousand. Good people cannot just give up and do nothing. We have to continue to try to do […]
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This is the most exciting time in the history of vaccines. It took many, momentous, sequential discoveries over at least 3-4 decades to get here. That we were able to get Covid vaccines in 10 months from sequencing the virus with over 70,000 participants in randomized trials and 95% efficacy vs symptomatic infections (and hospitalizations and deaths) is all too often taken for granted. I had never thought that would have been possible, but now I understand how it was achieved. It has been exhilarating to see all the work from many labs around the world culminate in such a rapid succession of success stories, with many more to come. That’s fantastic news. Unfortunately, there is a large movement gaining steam in America to ban vaccines. The proponents are ignorant and delusional but they have powerful friends. Imagine what could happen if the new rule that the federal judge in Texas just pulled out of his hat in the abortion pill case stands. It would mean that courts could decide that vaccines are dangerous and … ban them. Don’t think it couldn’t happen.
Thomas Edsall has a long piece on the radicalization of the GOP. This is the point most people don;t want to admit: Theda Skocpol, a professor of political science and sociology at Harvard, contended that many of the developments in states controlled by Republicans are a result of careful, long-term planning by conservative strategists, particularly those in the Federalist Society, who are developing tools to build what she called “minority authoritarianism” within the context of a nominally democratic system of government. Skocpol outlined her thinking in an email: These organized, richly resourced actors, she wrote, Skocpol did not pull her punches: There are a number of factors that confirm Skocpol’s analysis. First and foremost, the Republican Party’s commitment to democratic values and procedures has been steadily eroding over the past two decades — and the momentum has accelerated. The brakes on extremism are failing, with Donald Trump gaining strength in his bid for renomination and the continuing shift to the right in states like Tennessee and Ohio.
Their plans come together The conservative base may be driven by what it “knows” in its gut, as Stephen Colbert’s alter ego once observed, but conservatism’s real movers are far more strategic. The left, not so much, despite pretensions to the contrary. Thomas B. Edsall asked several authors and academicians how strategists of the right pursue their ends and by what means. Theda Skocpol, a Harvard professor of political science and sociology, tell him what we see today in the states is the result of careful, long-term planning and organizing by the right’s strategists, particularly the Federalist Society, to produce “minority authoritarianism” inside a nominally democratic government. Their base may dream of establishing a Christian nationalist theocracy, but for the right’s brain trust, turning the U.S. into a right-wing demockracy will do: That harkens back to the infamous 1983 Cato paper, Achieving a “Leninist” Strategy. The authors argued for a long-term, divide-and-conquer strategy for undermining support for Social Security using incremental changes to move the public toward private accounts.
Big Pharma has feels for mifepristone Corporations are not people, my friends. They have no feelings, only appetites and strong instincts for self-preservation. In that way, they are primitively animal-ish the way A.I. simulates thought. But damned if they aren’t territorial, too. David Dayen considers Big Pharma’s reaction to the potential banning of mifepristone: The pharmaceutical industry is very upset. Right-wing federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling overturning the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of abortion medication mifepristone could severely damage companies’ ability to develop and market prescription drugs. Companies could spend a fortune getting a drug approved, only to see the courts take issue with the process, and the money washed down the drain. To them, it’s the worst thing a court ruling can be: bad for business. That’s why Big Pharma is speaking out.
The last few years have seen a new round of vigilante killings in America, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the civil rights movement. And under a new interpretation of the meaning of self-defense, many are getting away with it. Recall a few years back when an armed man named George Zimmerman down in Florida thought a young Black kid named Trayvon Martin looked suspicious so he jumped him and when the startled teenager fought back, Zimmerman shot and killed the boy. He said he felt threatened and was only defending himself. The jury acquitted him. More recently, a young white man named Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of murder charges in Kenosha, Wisconsin when he waded into a protest armed with an AR-15 and killed two unarmed men, wounding a third. Rittenhouse may have been the one armed with a semi-automatic rifle but he said he felt threatened by the protesters so he opened fire. The jury found that to be a reasonable reaction. This interpretation of self-defense exists partly because the right has legalized carrying loaded firearms in public which makes any public confrontation potentially lethal.
Nikki Haley tonight in Iowa spoke at length about the 2015 Charleston church shooting and her push to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state Capitol — a defining moment in her governorship that she has largely avoided talking about on the campaign trail. Haley said of her push to remove the Confederate flag: “Half of the state saw the flag as heritage and service, the other half saw it as slavery and hate. My job as governor wasn't to judge either side. My job was to bring out the best in them to get them to see a way forward.” Haley argued after the mass shooting of nine African Americans by a white supremacist that the “national media came in, they wanted to make it about racism, they wanted to make it about gun control, they wanted to make about the death penalty.” “The goal was, how do you hold the state together and not let that happen?…This was on the heels of Ferguson, you knew that everything was about to fall apart. And we basically, rather than falling into fear, we turned toward God and we made sure we came together as a state.” Originally tweeted by Kate Sullivan (@KateSullivanDC) on April 12, 2023.