We begin today with Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post and her epitaph to the speakership of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

There was a time when most Americans probably couldn’t have told you who the current speaker — say, Carl Albert or John McCormack — was; the job went to an inside operator in what appeared to be a permanent majority. Now, however, the speaker is both well-known and without any job security. Six of the seven who preceded McCarthy were forced by scandal or political setback to relinquish the gavel.

Still, McCarthy’s leadership — if you can call it leadership — was notably rudderless and chaotic. On his watch, the country came to the brink of what could have been a catastrophic default on its debt. His hard-right members regularly humiliated him by blocking vital GOP-backed measures from even coming to a vote on the House floor — among them, recently, one to fund the Pentagon. It was only with the help of Democrats that he managed to muster enough votes Saturday to prevent a government shutdown.

And yet, he continued to try to appease the hard-liners, including by unilaterally opening an impeachment inquiry into President Biden based on allegations — but no evidence — that the president had benefited from the business dealings of his son Hunter.

In a grievance-filled news conference after he announced his decision not to try to get his job back, McCarthy said, with dark humor: “I made history, didn’t I?” Indeed, he has left a mark — a scar on the institution and the office — that will be hard to erase.

David Remnick of The New Yorker writes that in a way, Number 45 is keeping a campaign promise, of sorts, by fomenting even more violence and that we can’t afford to look the other way.

Trump’s reëlection campaign is, by necessity, being conducted as much in and around various courtrooms as it is on traditional podiums. The once and future autocrat has decided to make his legal jeopardy a virtue, to portray himself as the persecuted Everyman standing up to a prosecutorial system riddled with hypocrisy. In August, one day after a federal magistrate judge in Trump’s 2020 election-interference case in Washington warned him not to threaten or intimidate witnesses, he went online to post this: “if you go after me, i’m coming after you!” In New York, the judge in Trump’s civil fraud case, Arthur Engoron, had to issue a gag order after the former President baselessly branded a court clerk as “Schumer’s girlfriend” and added, “How disgraceful! This case should be dismissed immediately!!” Engoron ordered Trump to take down the post, though, of course, the damage was done: the word was out, and the court clerk could expect endless harassment online and worse. [...]

These are not mere anecdotes, “colorful” moments of unscripted temper from a familiar source. (“Just Donald being Donald!”) No, these moments are the essence of Trump and his campaign. In the coming year, you will rarely, if ever, hear discussion of policy from Trump. You will hear expressions of rage and impulse. It is tempting to ignore them, to dismiss them as inconsequential, repetitious, corrosive. They are so painful to listen to, both in their hatefulness and in their frequency, that some have argued the media should ignore them entirely, the better to avoid elevating them. But ignoring them will not make them go away. They are the center of a candidacy that is polling very highly and that threatens so much of what is decent or promising about our politics. Trump’s rage is the inspiration for everything from the Proud Boys to the mailing of pipe bombs to political targets, to say nothing of the deranged behavior of much of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives. In the meantime, the gaggle of Republicans who are ostensibly Trump’s rivals for the nomination barely criticize him. In their moral cowardice, they run for attention, for branding purposes, or, perhaps, for a spot in a new Trump Administration.

Lisa Rubin of MSNBC speculates about the reasons that Number 45 decided to make a physical appearance at the New York State fraud trial when he didn’t have to.

First, he was able to physically show his contempt for — and potentially rattle — witnesses, the judge, prosecutors and New York Attorney General Letitia James herself just by being there. [...]

Second, Trump would have demeaned the trial as a “disgrace” or a “witch hunt” wherever he was. But by attending for a few days, Trump was also able to more credibly spin reporters that all has been going beautifully — whether or not his own lawyers or outside legal experts would concur — because he has been an eyewitness. [...]

Third, by showing up, Trump was able to distract from what actually happened in the courtroom, collapsing the usual split screen of Trump legal coverage, on one hand, and political reporting, on the other, into a single stream. Indeed, he held several impromptu press conferences each trial day where he further attacked his perceived enemies, including James and Engoron, as if a shabby, dimly-lit courthouse hallway were his runway or the White House lawn.

But perhaps most importantly, Trump came to court to play victim and raise money...

Just as former San Francisco Mayor Sen. Dianne Feinstein was lying in state at San Francisco City Hall, Renée Graham of The Boston Globe reminds us that the event that most defined Sen. Feinstein’s political career, Dan White’s 1979 assassinations of San Francisco mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, is very related to today’s white supremacist violence.

Next month marks 45 years since White killed Moscone and Milk. After abruptly resigning from the board, he soon decided he wanted his position back. But Moscone did not plan to reappoint him. In his confession, White claimed that’s what compelled him to go to City Hall and shoot Moscone four times. He then reloaded his gun, went to Milk’s office, and shot him five times.

But to White, the men he killed also personified how the city where he was raised was becoming more liberal and his perception that many like him — white, working-class, and conservative — were being marginalized. His campaign slogan was “Unite and Fight with Dan White.” He denounced those he called “social deviants” and talked about restoring the “old fashioned values that built this country” — a kind of “Make San Francisco Great Again” rallying cry. [...]

There’s a through line from White’s assassinations of Moscone and Milk to the white supremacist violence that today poses this nation’s most potent domestic threat. Even incremental progress in America is met with a backlash, often violent. It happened after the Civil War when, instead of recompense for formerly enslaved Black people, the nation hardened into decades of heightened brutality and laws that kept slavery and racist disenfranchisement intact under other names and means.

Craig Spencer writes for The New York Times about the ways in which the strike now affecting Kaiser Permanente health care system, perhaps the largest in the nation’s history, isn’t all that typical.

The seeds of the Kaiser strike were sown before the pandemic, which certainly aggravated the issues afflicting workers. No matter how this strike ends, the problems at the Kaiser network, which operates in eight states and the District of Columbia, are not unique. Health care workers have already taken to the picket line at hospitals and clinics across the country this year — six of the 19 work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2023 were in health care. Providers commit to serving others. That so many are walking off the job in protest means the conditions are so unsustainable, there’s no option left but to take this action of last resort.

Health care providers have long experienced burnout, a product of working in a system with grueling hours and byzantine approval processes for routine patient care. But in the first year of the pandemic, levels of reported burnout among providers soared into their own epidemic. According to a study by the American Medical Association, over 60 percent of physicians reported feeling burned out in 2021. And now large numbers of health care workers have joined other Americans in the Great Resignation over the past two years.

Finally today, James Palmer writes for Foreign Policy that China, too, is finding friends in the European far right.

This week, a German report from news site T-Online exposed a politician in the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Maximilian Krah, as having extensive ties to a Chinese influence network. Krah is the AfD’s top candidate in next year’s European Parliament elections, running on the party’s Euroskeptic, anti-immigration, and nationalist platform. He is also a longtime defender of Beijing. [...]

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government remains a friend of Beijing, with the foreign minister recently citing “opportunities rather than risks” of working with China. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has kissed the Chinese flag. Former Czech President Milos Zeman, who shifted from the left to the populist right, was so close to Beijing that he appointed Chinese state-linked businessman Ye Jianming as an economic advisor in 2017. Sometimes the focus on individual politicians has backfired on Beijing, leading the political opposition to take up the anti-China cause.

By contrast, far-right parties in Western Europe have a mixed attitude toward China. In France, Marine Le Pen—a leader in the National Rally party—has called for a strategy against China in the Indo-Pacific. Italy under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is withdrawing from China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In Britain, an increasingly far-right-leaning Conservative Party also has a strong anti-China faction. (To some degree, that’s a result of affiliation with U.S. conservatism.)

We begin today with the Texas Observer’s Justin Miller observations of the immediate aftermath of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s acquittal in the Texas state Senate impeachment trial yesterday.

After the final votes were taken, Dan Patrick–who presided over the trial as judge—didn’t waste a second letting his true feelings be known after being largely silent over the preceding three months.

He unleashed a tirade against the House and its Speaker Dade Phelan for the rushed and half-cocked process for impeaching Paxton in the first place. Patrick promised that he would push to pass constitutional amendments in the next session that would reform the state’s impeachment laws. Prior to the trial, Patrick’s campaign received $3 million from the pro-Paxton PAC Defend Texas Liberty.

“The speaker and his team rammed through the first impeachment of a statewide official in Texas in over 100 years while paying no attention to the precedent that the House set in every other impeachment before,” Patrick said. [...]

While Paxton is back in power, his troubles aren’t over. Next month, he’ll finally go to trial on the state securities fraud charges for which he was indicted nearly a decade ago. Then, there’s the federal investigation into him for the very same allegations that brought his impeachment.

Mark Jones writes for the Houston Chronicle that Paxton’s acquittal was all about political calculation.

Paxton’s acquittal underscores a truism in Texas politics today: political power flows through the Republican Party primary in March and May rather than through the November general election. As a result, Republican elected officials, such as these 18 Republican state senators, the governor and the lieutenant governor, are far more attuned to the preferences and priorities of the 1 to 3 million Texans who vote in Republican primary elections than to the preferences and priorities of the state’s 18 million registered voters, or to the evidence that was presented during the impeachment trial.

A Texas Politics Project poll in August showed that, even before the trial began, 47 percent of Texas registered voters believed Ken Paxton took actions that justified removing him from office, compared to 18 percent who believed they did not justify removal and 35 percent who were unsure.

However, Texans who identify as Republican were more mixed in regard to Paxton’s fate in the survey, with 24 percent in favor of removal, 32 percent against and 43 percent unsure. Furthermore, many of the most visible and dynamic activist groups and individuals within the Republican Party mounted a robust and effective campaign, with an assist from Donald Trump, to mobilize the GOP’s activist base to pressure the 18 senators and other Republican elected officials to support acquittal. And, while there was some modest counter-pressure from other Republican groups and elites to convict, or to at least not discard conviction out of hand, it was much more subdued and not nearly as passionate.

Molly Jong-Fast of Vanity Fair writes about the U.S. House caucus of the bullied.

Now, let’s pause and take a moment to remember the last time Republicans impeached a Democratic president. The year was 1998, and a certain House Speaker named Newt Gingrich had decided to impeach a certain president named Bill Clinton over a blow job. (Sure, officially, the charges were perjury and obstruction.) But later that year, during the midterm elections, the GOP’s “out-of-power momentum” was nowhere to be found, having lost the House five seats and gaining zero in the Senate. The impeachment blowback was swift; it was the first midterm since 1934 in which the president’s party actually gained seats in the lower chamber.

Fast-forward to today, and obviously, McCarthy doesn’t seem to have learned anything from that. Why, might you ask? Probably because his lord and savior, Donald J. Trump, wants Biden out of office. And if there’s anything we’ve learned about this cowardly Republican Party, it’s that Donald J. Trump always gets what he wants. “Why aren’t they impeaching Biden?” Trump asked during an Iowa town hall in July. “They impeach me, they indict me, and the Republicans just don’t fight the way,” he echoed during a late-July rally in Erie. “They’re supposed to fight.” In other words, it’s pretty clear that Trump wants his pound of flesh, and if some vulnerable Republicans have to lose their seats, well…sorry, not sorry. [...]

Even Republicans who used to have a modicum of common sense seem sick with the impeachment bug. Take Colorado’s Ken Buck, who was previously anti-impeachment, who told NBC’s Sahil Kapur that an impeachment inquiry was “a good idea.” Buck has recently been threatened by the possibility of a primary challenge—and has also been a frequent target of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s. “I really don’t see how we can have a member of the Judiciary that is flat out refusing to impeach,” she recently said of Buck. “It seems like, can he even be trusted to do his job at this point?” If Buck and McCarthy can be bullied into being pro impeachment by Republicans like Gaetz and Greene, could they also be bullied into allowing a government shutdown?

British political commentator Eliot Wilson writes for The Hill that the sheer pace of impeachments, threats of impeachments, and filing for impeachments indicates that impeachment, itself, has become a partisan weapon indicating instability in government.

Next month marks 25 years since the House of Representatives approved a resolution authorizing the Judiciary Committee to examine potential grounds for Clinton’s impeachment. Since then, however, impeachment has started to become a quotidian and partisan weapon. President Trump made history by being impeached twice, in 2019 and 2021, while the loose cannon that is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene filed articles of impeachment against President Biden the day after his inauguration. The notion was aired again after the fall of Kabul in August 2021, and Speaker Kevin McCarthy just launched an impeachment inquiry related to Biden’s relationship with his wayward son, Hunter.

This is symptomatic of a breakdown of faith in the political system. This breakdown has happened gradually, and some will point to Watergate and Nixon as the origin point, but the arrival of Donald Trump catalyzed the process. His banishment of truth and facts from any political importance was a transformation: it reduced the venerable institutions of the United States to mere context, the backdrop to an utterly transactional style of politics.

Under those circumstances — the declaration that no holds were barred, that winning was the only thing that mattered — impeachment becomes just another weapon. It is foolish, weak and frankly naïve to hold it in any special regard, an instrument for grave emergencies. Everything is an emergency, and yet everything is ephemeral. So if a party thinks it can gain advantage over its enemies by reaching for articles of impeachment, then it will do so, because that is what you do to win.

I agree with Mr. Wilson’s conclusion that impeachments have become simply another tool of political partisanship but I would place blame at the feet of Newt Gingrich or Gerald Ford.

It’s also why I was in favor of Speaker Nancy Pelosi taking “impeachment off the table” during the 110th Congress.

Jeanne Whalen and Lauren Kaori Gurley of The Washington Post reports that UAW leaders have returned to the bargaining table but remain far apart from an agreement with the Big Three automakers.

The union and companies remain far apart on pay and benefits in their weeks-long contract negotiations, with the union demanding a 36 percent wage increase over four years. On Saturday, Stellantis, the parent company of Jeep and Chrysler, said it is offering a 21 percent cumulative wage increase over the course of a new contract, a proposal it made Thursday, before the strike started. Ford and GM have offered raises of 20 percent.

The UAW continues to keep its strike plans secret. When asked Friday night whether it might strike at more plants, UAW President Shawn Fain said that depended on the outcome of negotiations. [...]

The UAW president has called the companies’ wage offers inadequate after years of sharp inflation and fat corporate profits. He also points to the large pay increases the auto CEOs received during the course of the autoworkers’ just-expired contract, which was signed in 2019.

Sarah Kessler, Ephrat Livni, and Michael J. de la Merced of The New York Times write about the A.I. concerns that underlie many of the unions that have been or are on strike.

Unions aren’t just fighting for an inflation-beating wage boost. They also are campaigning for job security at a time when workers increasingly fear that shifts to new technologies, like electric vehicles and artificial intelligence, threaten their job, and tech bosses themselves say this gloomy outlook is inevitable. [...]

Concern over disruptive technologies are seen on the picket lines.The Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, fear studios are embracing A.I. tools to generate scripts or copy the performances of actors. “If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble,” Fran Drescher, president of SAG-AFTRA, warned in July. “We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines.”

The U.A.W., meanwhile, is concerned that the industry’s shift to electric vehicles will require fewer workers, and that many of the jobs needed will be in battery factories, most of which are not unionized.

Giving workers a voice in the use of technology has taken on new urgency, said Thomas Kochan, an emeritus professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, who has been studying the future of work since the 1980s: “Generative A.I. in particular has just exploded on the scene in a way that’s going to make this one of the most controversial and one of the most important workplace issues of our time.”

Finally today, Dominic Rushe of the Guardian thinks that it’s not simply political partisanship causing widespread pessimism about the American economy.

Americans are deeply divided on the economy. The Harris poll shows over half (53%) of Americans believe the economy is getting worse. Some 72% of Republicans share that view compared with 32% of Democrats. But the unhappiness runs deep on both sides. Only a third of Democrats believe that the economy is getting better.

Even when Americans say they are doing OK financially, they believe the economy is in trouble. According to the Federal Reserve’s annual survey of economic wellbeing, 73% of households said that they were “at least doing OK financially” at the end of 2022. In 2019, that figure was 75% of households. But back then, 50% said the national economy was good or excellent. By 2022, that number had fallen to just 18%. [...]

Partisanship explains much of the seeming disconnect between economic data and sentiment. But not all of it. Large forces are reshaping the US economy and may explain the nation’s vertigo.

Many low-wage workers, have been living with that fear of falling for a long time.

Have the best possible day everyone!

We begin today with Heather Digby Parton of Salon saying that Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s pursuit of a formal impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden is, ultimately, a pursuit of Donald Trump’s revenge.

This is payback as anyone with eyes can see. And Trump is no doubt thrilled that they are going after Biden for the same stale lie that got him impeached the first time. The so-called investigation revolves around the disproved nonsense about then Vice President Biden demanding the Ukrainians fire a prosecutor to help his son's business in Ukraine. The timeline doesn't line up any better now than it did when Trump was trying to sell it to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in his "perfect phone call." Maybe he thinks that having an impeachment tying Biden to the case will prove him innocent of wrongdoing and lead to the "expungement" of his impeachment. (McCarthy has said that he's all for it even though expungement isn't a thing.)

But it has some other utility for the Republicans.

Trump instinctively projects his own shortcomings and problems on his enemies and then attacks them which is what he's doing with the "Biden Crime Family" thing. I don't know what specific psychology is at work, but it serves a tactical purpose for him and his allies by muddying the water and contributing to the widespread cynicism in American life that leads people to think everyone is corrupt and there's nothing to be done about it.

It's already worked to some degree in this case. According to a recent CNN poll, "61% say they think that Biden had at least some involvement in Hunter Biden's business dealings, with 42% saying they think he acted illegally, and 18% saying that his actions were unethical but not illegal."

There is literally no evidence of any of that. Well played, Republicans, well played.

Ryan Tarinelli of Roll Call says that the Congressional impeachment inquiry may ultimately serve to weaken the power of Congress.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy signed off on the inquiry with much less context and specifics than in previous impeachment efforts, which ultimately could give the public a reason to dismiss them as political and weaken the legislative branch’s powerful tool to keep a president in check, the legal experts said. [...]

“This behavior by Republican House members is just astoundingly self-destructive of the prerogatives of the institution that they serve,” said Bowman. “Because it, of course, devalues impeachment as a meaningful tool to deal with genuine presidential misconduct.”

More broadly, lawmakers could run the risk of denigrating the legitimacy of their own customary demands for information if they start playing games with congressional power to compel information from the president and the administration, Bowman said.

That can “create a situation where presidents of both parties just throw up their hands and say, ‘Look, these guys never operate in good faith, and we’re just going to refuse any subpoenas that they send us,’” he said.

Jim Newell of Slate says there’s no real choice between a short-term funding resolution and an impeachment inquiry: The Freedom Caucus really truly wants both.

Scott Perry, in taking questions, said the impeachment inquiry has “nothing to do with the debt, the deficit, the outrageous spending, the inflation that’s crushing American families—those are two separate issues, and they should be dealt with separately.”

Bob Good, arguably the most unwavering of McCarthy’s antagonists, said the inquiry announcement had “zero” effect on their demands for the spending bill. North Carolina Rep. Dan Bishop described the inquiry as “irrelevant” to the spending fight.

Is there a way that the two could, arguably, be linked? The specific lever McCarthy would have is to argue that if the government shuts down, so too do the committee impeachment investigations. He’s floated it already, telling Fox News in August that “if we shut down, all the government shuts it down—investigation and everything else.” [...]

Impeachment, in short, is not the One Neat Trick to Keep the Government Open. There is no binkie here. To fund the government—whether it’s before or after the shutdown deadline—McCarthy is going to have to put a bill on the floor that doesn’t pass muster with the Freedom Caucus, because it will need to pass a Democratic Senate and be signed by a Democratic president. And yes, that will likely prompt some of those openly threatening to put McCarthy’s speakership up to another vote to go through with it. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who gave a separate floor speech Tuesday putting McCarthy on notice, told reporters that he would move to vacate the chair if McCarthy puts any short-term spending bill on the floor, according to Bloomberg.

Aaron Blake of The Washington Post sees Senator Mitt Romney’s declining to run for another Senate term as a concession that the demagogues have won.

The move is a familiar one — a prominent Republican gathering the courage to arrest his party’s drift toward Trumpism and then, when the next election comes around, heading for the exits.

But rarely has such an exit been so consequential for that segment of the party. And rarely has it come with the degree of resignation Romney expressed.

Unlike other Trump critics who have opted to retire, Romney appeared to have had more than a fighting chance, had he opted to run again. Utah is an unusual state, deeply conservative but also with a large vein of Trump skepticism coursing through that conservatism. And Romney’s personal brand there — dating to his stewardship of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics — clearly gave him latitude that other Republicans have not enjoyed.

[...]

In an interview with longtime Washington Post politics correspondent Dan Balz, Romney played down the idea that he would get involved in supporting a 2024 candidate who is running against Trump. The reason: It would be counterproductive.

Jeanna Smialek of The New York Times writes that the latest rise in inflation makes it more likely the Fed will increase interest rates by the end of the year.

The Consumer Price Index rose 3.7 percent in the year through August, the report showed. That was both faster than the 3.2 percent July reading and slightly quicker than what economists had expected.

After the removal of food and fuel costs, which are volatile, a core price index slowed on an annual basis but increased faster than economists expected on a monthly basis — rising 0.3 percent, compared with 0.2 percent in both June and July. That pickup came as a range of services, including car insurance and airfares, became more costly. The monthly reading matters because economists monitor it to get a sense of inflation’s momentum, and the acceleration in August was the first in six months.

Fed policymakers have been careful to avoid declaring victory over rapid inflation even as price increases have cooled notably this summer, providing some breathing room for consumers, who have been struggling to keep pace with relentlessly heftier bills. The fresh figures underscored the reason for the Fed’s reticence: Inflation may be decelerating, but the process of fully reining it in remains a bumpy one.

Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post illustrates how much Trump underestimated Fulton County DA Fani Willis.

Her written filings have been tightly argued — the result, no doubt, of months of preparation. Among her most effective arguments: the Hatch Act, which prohibits White House officials’ political conduct while on duty, means that Meadows’s admittedly campaign-related actions were outside the scope of his official duties.

When, over her objections, the special grand jury’s vote tallies for 39 people were released (a terrible injustice to those who were not charged), the public could see that rather than pursue every possible defendant, Willis exercised appropriate discretion. For example, much as some of his critics would have liked to see Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) in the dock, she apparently came to the conclusion that there was insufficient evidence of criminality and/or that the speech or debate clause would make prosecution too difficult. [...]

Willis still faces a host of challenges. Having charged 19 people, she faces the prospect of a single ungainly trial or, more likely, a series of expensive, time-consuming trials that allow those tried later to see the prosecution’s full case. Meadows will appeal his removal case. Other litigants, despite Meadows’s failed bid, will still try to remove and then appeal when their efforts get rebuffed. And no trial, least of all one involving high-profile politicians, is a slam dunk. Even a win at trial can be overturned on appeal.

Well, so did nearly every pundit, to be perfectly honest.

Charles Blow of The New York Times looks at the case of the little girl that survived the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Church in Birmingham and wonders what America owes Sarah Collins Rudolph.

Shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Congress established a victims’ compensation fund for individuals who were injured or relatives of individuals who were killed in the attacks. It was budgeted at $5.12 billion total for the 2002, 2003 and 2004 fiscal years.

Victims’ families and survivors of the 2015 murders at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C., sued the federal government, charging that the F.B.I.’s background check system failed to prevent the shooter, a self-proclaimed white nationalist who wanted to start a race war, from buying a gun. He, too, was a terrorist. The case was settled for $88 million.

One Fund Boston was established after the terrorist Boston Marathon bombing, and it raised nearly $80 million from more than 200,000 donors to be paid to the survivors and the families of those killed by the bombing. [...]

This raises a very real question: What does America owe the victims of the country’s past racial terror?

Andy Taylor of The Washington Post reports that Kim Jung Un’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin also demonstrates a grim reality for Russian forces in Ukraine.

Analysts have described Russian artillery units in particular as surprisingly skilled, a counterbalance to some of the more chaotic areas of Moscow’s army. A recent analysis by Britain’s Royal United Services Institute found that artillery units were particularly adept at the trial-and-error task of homing in on targets, sometimes able to accurately hit their mark within three minutes — “essentially the limit of what is physically possible,” given the time it takes to fire.

But this heavy use of artillery comes at a cost. Recent Western estimates suggest that Russia fired 11 million rounds in Ukraine last year. Jack Watling, senior research fellow for land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, told my colleagues that there were estimates that it would fire 7 million more this year. At that rate of expenditure, production alone can hardly keep up.

Accounts from Western officials suggest that while Russia has impressively boosted its military production, its capacity for artillery production is not higher than 2 million a year. From within the Russian military, there have been numerous angry accounts of shortages: The late Wagner boss Yevgeniy Prigozhin had complained of “shell hunger” on the front near the eastern city of Bakhmut, with his troops receiving only 800 of the 80,000 shells it needed per day, by his account. [...]

The Soviet Union once provided weapons to countries around the world that it sought to influence, creating client states that would be reliant on it for weaponry. In many ways now, the situation is reversed, with Moscow forced to ask the weaker countries it once supplied for help.

Finally today, Kelly M. McFarland, Chester C. Crocker, and Ryan Conner write for War on the Rocks about how American diplomacy will need to change after the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine called for a reevaluation of what we thought we knew about the current state of international affairs. In our recent report from Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy we broke down the emerging dynamics into three broad categories. First are those that were previously known but have now been cast in sharper focus. These include the rise of a new non-aligned movement, the limits of Western sanctions, economic regionalization, and an increase in cross-border challenges such as food insecurity. Second are the trends that revealed Russia’s aggression and the world’s reaction. These include the collective investment in security organizations such as NATO and Russia’s slipping grasp on its traditional area of influence. And the final set of trends is best described as black swan events, or those that are hard to predict or understand but will present significant strategic challenges.

Common to all these issues is a global diffusion of power. Middle powers are asserting greater agency relative to major powers, such as the United States, China, and Russia. For Washington, this does not make middle powers adversaries to work against, but rather vital partners in addressing geopolitical challenges. These powers speak with louder voices —though not necessarily in unison — and it is incumbent upon the United States to engage with what they are saying.

Everyone have the best possible day!

We began today with Yuriko Schumacher and James Barragán of the Texas Tribune as an indictment-drenched summer continues with headlines moving today from Atlanta to Austin as the impeachment trial of suspended Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton begins. 

The Senate gallery will be open to the public daily, beginning at 8 a.m., with tickets distributed for the morning session on a first-come, first-served basis starting at 7:30 a.m. on the Capitol’s third floor. Tickets for the afternoon session will be distributed 45 minutes before the gallery reopens. The trial also will be livestreamed on the Texas Senate’s website and at texastribune.org.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick will act as judge. Senators, serving as jurors, will consider 16 of 20 articles of impeachment. The Senate previously voted to delay consideration of the other four. Paxton’s wife, Sen. Angela Paxton, will sit as a member of the court but will not vote on any decisions or participate in private deliberations.

The trial will begin with the court clerk reading aloud the 16 articles. Paxton, who was ordered to appear in person, or his lawyer will plead guilty or not guilty to each article. On the first day of the trial, some witnesses are also ordered to appear outside the front door of the Senate chamber at 11 a.m.

Jim Henson of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin did some comprehensive polling of Paxton’s favorability that shows that even given the “parallels” between the legal circumstances of Paxton and Trump, Paxton is nowhere near as popular as Number 45 with Texas Republicans.

2. Erosion in public assessments of Paxton is evident in his job approval ratings, including among groups that are relatively more supportive of his position in the impeachment and trial. We delved in depth into this topic in the post accompanying the release of the poll. Paxton’s net job approval ratings (the difference between shares approving and disapproving) among all voters fell from an already low -11 in June to -19 in August. Among Republicans, it fell from +32 in June (51% approve/19% disapprove) to + 23 in August (46/23), and among conservatives, from +23 in June (50/27) to +14 in August (46/32). Among rural voters, his net approval plummeted from net +25 in December 2022 (53/28) to net +3 in June 2023 (36/33), then to net -1 in August (35/36). [...]

5. While there exists a history of political connections between Paxton and former President Donald Trump and even parallels between the pair’s legal and ethical jeopardy, support for Paxton among his Republican constituents lacks the persistence of the incredibly durable support Republicans maintain for Trump. Paxton does not enjoy the unwavering support in Texas that has been a hallmark of the space Trump occupies among his following in Texas. An look the trend in Paxton’s job approval ratings among Texas Republicans, and in Trump's job approval numbers during his turbulent presidency as well as his favorability ratings since his reluctant exit from the White House illustrate how sharply Paxton’s ratings have suffered from his impeachment in late May (from 73% in December 2022 to 46% in August 2023), while Trump’s numbers have remained remarkably consistent, despite some evidence of erosion in his favorability ratings between June 2021 and August 2023 (from 86% to 79%).

Chris Smith of Vanity Fair thinks that in spite of the latest pundit buzz (and President Joe Biden’s Labor Day speech in Philadelphia yesterday), Biden will continue, by and large, to not attack Trump’s legal woes.

For Biden, the attempt to stay above the fray is a relatively easy choice. His brand is all about returning Washington to functioning normally, and the contrast he wants to draw is that he, unlike Trump, is a believer in the nonpartisan dispensing of justice. “I think the president has been clear on the issues that underlie all of these indictments, like the issues of democracy, of the rule of law, of having an independent justice department,” a Biden insider says. “The irony of people being like, Why won’t the president comment on the indictments? Part of what Trump is indicted for is weaponizing the Justice Department! And people want us, in some sense, to do the same thing? Why would we do that? Our guy stands for the opposite of that.” The ongoing federal investigation of the president’s son is also a disincentive: Biden commenting on the cases against Trump while Hunter Biden is still under scrutiny by a special counsel would give oxygen to Republican what-about-ism.

Beyond the White House, though, the prevailing silence is more nuanced and somewhat harder to understand. Six Senate Democrats have a solid reason: Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Joe Manchin (West Virginia), and Jon Tester (Montana) are running for reelection in states Trump won in 2020; Tammy Baldwin (Wisconsin), Bob Casey (Pennsylvania), and Jacky Rosen (Nevada) are running in states Trump barely lost. Bashing the former president could be counterproductive for them; better to focus their campaigns on local issues as they try to win over independents. But then there’s Hakeem Jeffries, House Democrats’ leader, whose job in the minority could arguably be entirely centered on attacking Trump’s candidacy and legal troubles. He, too, has been careful in his comments. “The Trump indictment and the facts that will continue to emerge from the legal process speak for themselves,” Jeffries told CNN in June. [...]

In both the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 midterms, impatient Democrats and pundits worried that Biden was waiting too long to get his act together or that he was emphasizing the wrong messages. Yet selling “the soul of America” worked for Biden three years ago and talking about the general threat to democracy resonated with voters last fall, as Democrats exceeded dismal expectations. “He was widely criticized for not focusing on the economy, for talking about democracy and reproductive rights,” the Biden insider says of the midterms. “And he was proven right.”

In 2008, Barack Obama was elected POTUS primarily because the American electorate trusted him with the mandate of getting us out of Iraq and restoring a good economy.

In 2020, Joe Biden’s mandate was that he not be Donald Trump.

Basically, be a good steward of the country and, more importantly, do what you were elected to office to do.

Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker reminds us not to repeat the mistakes of President Gerald Ford, this time in a matter I just learned of today.

In early August, 1975, President Gerald Ford granted amnesty to a polarizing figure whose actions had posed a grave threat to American democracy. The man in question was not Richard Nixon, whom Ford had pardoned eleven months earlier, but General Robert E. Lee. After the Civil War, the prospect of prosecution had loomed over former members of the Confederacy. In 1865, President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation that absolved most of them but excluded, among others, Confederate leaders and those who held property worth more than twenty thousand dollars. Three years later, Johnson, who felt that it was simply time to move on, issued another proclamation, which expanded the pardon to include the men, such as Lee, who had organized and led the rebellion. Still, having renounced their U.S. citizenship and taken up arms against the government, they were required to swear an oath of allegiance and make a formal request to regain their rights. Lee’s application was lost—one theory holds that Secretary of State William H. Seward gave Lee’s paperwork to a friend as a souvenir—and he died, in 1870, a man without a country.

When Ford reinstated Lee as an American citizen, albeit a dead one, he stretched the truth to the point of prevarication. Lee’s character, Ford remarked, had been “an example to succeeding generations” and the reinstatement was therefore “an event in which every American can take pride.” Nixon’s pardon was far more controversial, but it followed a similar logic. Speaking to Bob Woodward, in the late nineties, Ford explained that Watergate had become such a debacle that there was no hope of making progress on any domestic or foreign-policy issue until it was resolved. He was, in his telling, motivated by concern for the nation’s fate, not Nixon’s. Despite the scale and the destructiveness of his predecessor’s actions, he argued, it was time for the nation to move on.

Late last month, Donald Trump, the twice-impeached, serially indicted former President of the United States, arrived at a courthouse in Atlanta, Georgia, to face charges stemming from his alleged attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. By then, the spectacle of a former President being indicted had gone from unprecedented to old hat. In addition to the sprawling Georgia case, grand juries have returned indictments against Trump in a business-fraud case brought by District Attorney Alvin Bragg, in New York, and in two federal cases brought by Jack Smith, a special counsel for the Department of Justice: the first, in Florida, relates to the mishandling of classified materials, and the second, in Washington, D.C., to election interference. (Trump has pleaded not guilty in all of them.) The most damning charges appear in the election cases, which concern Trump’s attempts to retain the Presidency after being voted out of office. Those attempts, of course, culminated in the January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol—the most significant threat to the peaceful transition of power since the conflict at the center of Robert E. Lee’s forfeited citizenship.

Alex Seitz-Wald of NBC News wonders whatever happened to relatively quiet summer months on the political front.

By tradition, business would largely halt for what Thomas Jefferson dubbed the “sickly months” of late summer in a capital city supposedly (but not actually) built on a swamp. “No good legislation ever comes out of Washington after June,” quipped Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vice president John Nance Garner.

And the August of an off-off year like this one — when there’s neither a presidential nor a midterm election in the fall — should have been as quiet as politics gets. But even the quiet moments of American politics these days can be cacophonous. [...]

This August also saw the indictment and arrest of a former president (twice), a racially charged mass shooting, a racially charged brawlnear a Mississippi riverboat, an active shooter scare at the U.S. Capitol, a police raid on a small-town newspaper amid a national debate on press freedom, the ongoing Hollywood actor and writer strike and the first GOP presidential debate of the 2024 election.

“It used to be that even the most addled political junkies got to dry out in August,” said Liam Donovan, a lobbyist and former GOP campaign operative. “But between the new season of Law & Order: MAGA and Trump’s would-be challengers desperate to gain traction via the debate stage, this year offers even less of a respite than usual.”

Cathy Young of The Bulwark offers some interesting and informed speculation about what the death (?) of Yevgeny Prigozhin reveals about Putin’s Russia.

Prigozhin’s rebellion brought with it new revelations. Among other things, it showed how weak Putin’s vaunted domestic support in Russia really was. No one took to the streets in defense of the government when it faced a serious enough threat to make the president and other top officials flee Moscow. When Prigozhin and his men took over Rostov-on-Don, the locals cheered. The Wagner rebels’ sojourn in Rostov also left a visual that provides a striking metaphor for the state of Russia in 2023: a tank stuck in the entrance gates of a circus.

Another unexpected truth bomb came from Putin himself. The Kremlin autocrat was evidently so piqued by his “chef’s” betrayal that he publicly confirmedsomething investigative reporters such as those at Bellingcat had long said and Russian officialdom had long denied: that the Wagner group was not a “private military company” but an outfit fully funded by the state, to the tune of nearly $1 billion in just the past year. (In other words, Wagner was the Kremlin’s instrument for what Bellingcat called “deniable black ops.”)

In turn, former Russian faux president and current deputy national security chief Dmitry Medvedev was sufficiently spooked by the rebellion not only to hightail it to Turkey but to also make a de facto admission that Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling was a bluff. “In the history of the human race there has never been a situation where the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons was controlled by bandits,” Medvedev told the Russian news agency TASS. “Such a crisis will obviously not be limited to a single country. The world will be brought to the brink of annihilation.” Never mind that Medvedev himself had been the Kremlin’s point man for threats of nuclear apocalypse if Russia were thwarted in its quest to destroy the “Nazi” regime in Kyiv. Indeed, he made such a threat again ten days after the rebellion. At that point, one could legitimately ask whether “bandits” were currently in charge of Russia’s nuclear arsenal—or whether Medvedev’s panicked outcry during the aborted coup shows that he knows the current Russian leadership won’t risk an apocalypse.

Edward Wong and Julian Barnes of The New York Times report that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will travel next month to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Mr. Putin wants Mr. Kim to agree to send Russia artillery shells and antitank missiles, and Mr. Kim would like Russia to provide North Korea with advanced technology for satellites and nuclear-powered submarines, the officials said. Mr. Kim is also seeking food aid for his impoverished nation.

Both leaders would be on the campus of Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok to attend the Eastern Economic Forum, which is scheduled to run Sept. 10 to 13, according to the officials. Mr. Kim also plans to visit Pier 33, where naval ships from Russia’s Pacific fleet dock, they said. North Korea celebrates the anniversary of its founding on Sept. 9.

On Wednesday, the White House warned that Mr. Putin and Mr. Kim had exchanged letters discussing a possible arms deal, citing declassified intelligence. A White House spokesman, John F. Kirby, said high-level talks on military cooperation between the two nations were “actively advancing.” U.S. officials declined to give more details on the state of personal ties between the leaders, who are considered adversaries of the United States.

Finally today, Annabelle Dickson and Eleni Correa of POLITICO Europe report that Britain’s Labour Party leader Keir Starmer has moved the Labour Party back to the center in anticipation of next year’s general election.

The Labour Party chief sent the soft-left wing of his party into full retreat on Monday with a dramatic shadow Cabinet reshuffle that rewarded a string of MPs on his party’s right flank.

It marked the final stage of a three-year project which has seen Starmer take ruthless grip of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing party and drag it steadily back to the center ground, echoing the 1990s modernization led by Tony Blair and pal Peter Mandelson. [...]

With Labour commanding an 18-point poll lead over the ruling Conservatives ahead of next year’s general election, Starmer’s picks for his top team are a clear indication of who will hold high office if he wins power.

We begin today with Vinson Cunningham of The New Yorker reading of Number 45’s mugshot.

Just look at the impenitent subject: the deep furrow between his eyebrows and the one that contours his cheek seem to want to connect and form a kind of scar in shadow. One thing that the picture makes plain—not for the first time, but in a definitive way that won’t soon be forgotten—is how many of Trump’s cues are cribbed directly and consciously from the cinematic literature of romanticized criminals. Trump’s the kind of guy who thinks Scorsese movies are straightforward celebrations of tough guys on the come-up; here’s how you make it in America if you’ve got enough guff and a high tolerance for trouble. He seems to have styled himself, for a long time now, after the “goodfellas,” let some of their leering rhythms slip into his facial bearing and his speech. (His actual ties to the Mob, which he has denied, in its palsying days in eighties and nineties New York and New Jersey have been a rich field of speculation, but that’s a topic for another day.) This mug shot’s been a long time coming—it is, perhaps, the point toward which the entire asymptote of Trump’s life has bowed. He might be angry in the mug shot; he may well be scared. But he damn sure doesn’t look surprised. Nobody is.

Far from surprise: can there be any doubt that, hours before his surrender, before the camera ever flashed, Trump stood in front of some gold-framed mirror and practiced this lipless pout? He knows better than anybody that his supporters—who still make up the formidable majority of the Republican primary electorate—will take this picture and make it a banner. He’s a gossipy seventy-seven-year-old man who allegedly makes weird, lusty comments about his daughter, dances like a windup toy whenever he hears the song “Macho Man,” and still, in the autumn of his life, needlessly lies about his weight whenever he gets a chance. (In Georgia, when he gave himself up, Trump—whose form was reportedly filled out in advance by aides—was listed as six-three and two hundred and fifteen pounds; if this were true, he’d be the same weight and an inch taller than Lamar Jackson, the über-athletic Baltimore Ravens quarterback, who looks like a contemporary update of Michelangelo’s David.) Still, displaying a pathology that feels libidinal in deep origin, his supporters, throughout the past eight years, have tended to insist on a vision of Trump as a somewhat hunky fighting figure, ready to re-tame the American frontier and take the country back from his enemies on behalf of the “forgotten man.” Trump has incorporated this veneration into his idea of himself, reminding audiences everywhere that he is fighting for them, has been striped by a whip meant for their backs, is on the front line, taking oncoming fire to secure their freedom.

Snopes listed the claim as true! Both claims are now listed as official records now.

Jeffrey Bellin and Adam Gershowitz of Slate write that all of Trump’s various federal and state prosecutors need to avoid any and all violations of the Supreme Court’s Brady rule.

So how do the Trump prosecutors avoid committing a Brady violation? Well, the first step is to know the types of circumstances in which they happen.

Prosecutors commit Brady violations in three common situations: First, some prosecutors intentionally hide evidence. Second, prosecutors commit Brady violations because they don’t understand the law and inadvertently fail to disclose required evidence. Third, prosecutors fail to turn over evidence held by other members of the “prosecution team,” such as police officers who work outside the prosecutor’s office.

The first two scenarios seem unlikely in the Trump cases. The whole world is watching, so it would be absurd for special counsel Jack Smith and the other prosecutors to intentionally hide evidence. And it seems doubtful that these prosecutors, knowing the stakes, would make a legal mistake about their discovery obligations, rather than simply erring on the side of disclosure.

The third scenario—turning over all evidence held by the prosecution team—is the trouble spot. The Brady doctrine provides that prosecutors must turn over evidence not just from their own files but also from the files of everyone on the prosecution team, even if the prosecutors have personally never laid eyes on the evidence.

Susan B. Glasser of The New Yorker lot some of the veterans of the Republican clown car that was on stage for last Wednesday night’s debate.

Watching these hopelessly outmatched candidates, I kept thinking back to one of the great lines from last summer’s January 6th hearings in the House of Representatives. Trump’s former campaign manager, Bill Stepien, described how, after the 2020 election, he and others had been part of “Team Normal,” those who tried and failed to convince Trump that he had really lost the election, only to find themselves pushed aside in favor of Team Crazy, whose members, led by Rudy Giuliani, aided and abetted Trump’s lies about the “rigged election.” The Republican debate stage in Milwaukee this week was filled with candidates who came from what passes for Team Normal in today’s G.O.P., figures such as Trump’s former Vice-President, Pence; Trump’s former U.N. Ambassador Haley; and Trump’s former friend and adviser Christie.

All three of them built their careers as governors in the pre-Trump Republican Party: Pence and Haley in the reliably red states of Indiana and South Carolina, respectively; Christie in Democratic New Jersey, a point he emphasized—to little avail—in his debate-stage pitch for Republicans to go for a candidate who knows how to win a competitive race in unfriendly territory. But, just like Stepien and the rest of Team Normal, they all eventually sold out to Trump. In this, they represent the very considerable part of the Republican Party that knew supporting Trump was a disaster back in 2016 and, yet, when it came time for the general election and divvying up the spoils of power that followed his unlikely victory, they did it anyway.

If this were a different time, a viewer of Wednesday’s debate might have concluded that it was not a bad night for Team Normal. Haley and Christie delivered several of the more memorable zingers while making impassioned cases for decidedly normal causes, such as supporting Ukraine, a free country aligned with the U.S., over Vladimir Putin’s murderous dictatorship, as Haley put it, or choosing to protect the Constitution over terminating it, as Christie put it. Both took especial glee in going after Ramaswamy, a Trump for the millennial set so automatic in his Trumpier-than-thou responses to any question that Christie lampooned him as a sort of ChatGPT version of a Republican candidate. It was a good dig but also perhaps unintentionally revealing: ChatGPT might very well come up with a Trumpist candidate who sounds a lot like this one.

Patrick Svitek of the Texas Tribune reports that pressure continues to mount on Texas senators ahead of the impeachment trial of now-suspended Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Paxton’s allies are singling out a half dozen senators for lobbying. A mysterious entity is airing TV ads and sending out mailers targeting certain senators. And an influential establishment group, as well as former Gov. Rick Perry, are urging senators to oppose efforts to effectively stop the trial before it starts.

“Anyone that votes against Ken Paxton in this impeachment is risking their entire political career and we will make sure that is the case,” Jonathan Stickland, who runs the pro-Paxton Defend Texas Liberty PAC, said Thursday in a media appearance.

The high-stakes trial of Texas’ top legal official is scheduled to start Sept. 5. It comes after the House impeached Paxton in May, accusing him of a yearslong pattern of misconduct and lawbreaking centered on his relationship with Nate Paul, an Austin real-estate investor and Paxton campaign donor. Paxton, a Republican in his third term, was immediately suspended from office, and the trial will determine whether he will be permanently removed.

Philipp Sandner of Deutsche Welle looks into how the death of Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin may impact several wars taking place in Africa.

For Ryan Cummings, Director at Signal Risk, Centre for Strategies and International Studies, it seems that Wagner's operations in Africa will "continue as they have been doing for the past few months or even years in certain contexts."

Cummings told DW that the future of the mercenary group in Africa remains intact. "If you look at the structure of the Wagner group in countries such as the Central African Republic, Mali, Sudan and Libya, there is no immediate indication that there has been a compromise in the relation between the country commanders and the Putin administration."

Even though Prizgozhin is no longer in the picture or commanding Wagner, Cummings stressed that they have continued their operations without significant disruption.

Cummings said he would be very surprised if Russia's President Vladimir Putin were to take control of the Wagner Group. "If anything, there could be some leadership changes at the top of the movement, if that has not already occurred — there might be an assimilation of Wagner:"

Finally today, Juan Arias of El País in English writes about the crisis within Brazil’s military leadership as a result of the failed coup attempt against Brazil’s incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro.

The parliamentary investigations into the failed coup, and the revelations by the Military Police on the plot hatched by Bolsonaro to prevent Lula’s victory, have made the Army high command nervous at the same time as placing the new administration in an uncomfortable position.

It should also be noted that the military leadership is caught between a decline in popular credibility and the need to punish those possibly responsible within the Army for the attempt to overturn the result of the 2022 elections.

This climate of mutual distrust between the government and the military led Lula, on the eve of his international trip for the BRICS meeting in Johannesburg, to convene an urgent meeting with the commanders of the three branches of the Armed Forces. As the columnist Miriam Leitao, who was tortured during the dictatorship, wrote in O Globo: “Only a country in crisis holds a meeting, on a Saturday, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., in the presidential palace between the military commanders and the president.”

Skilled in political and union negotiations, Lula took advantage of the meeting to talk about the budget increase for a military that finds itself at a precipice, as on this occasion, it is not only facing a sharp drop in public opinion, but also the displeasure of Bolsonaro’s followers, as revealed in the polls, for not having adhered to the threatened military coup.

Have the best possible day everyone!

We begin today with a CNN exclusive of the audio recording of Number 45 possessing and disseminating “information respecting the national defense.” 

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo adds his commentary on the Trump audio recording.

It’s about as it was described in the indictment. But hearing it does make it come alive in a different way. He’s so guilty as sin it really does beggar belief. He says it’s highly classified; that it would be cool if he could declassify it now but he can’t because he’s no longer President; and he’s showing it to just random people. The recording makes clear that he’s entirely aware of every link in the chain of criminality. You can listen to it here.

I’m certainly not willing to exonerate Trump of eventual plans to share or sell or profit, literally or figuratively for disclosing the contents of these documents to others. I just resist those theories because they’re too literal, too limited. The conversation caught on tape here captures a lot of why he held on to this stuff.

It meant he still had juice, had secrets he could hold over people. He could reward people or punish them. [...]

Now, the factual premise here is silly. The US maintains war plans for wars with lots of countries. And not just the obvious ones. I remember hearing once that the US maintained plans on the shelves for invasions of Canada and the UK well into the 20th century. Whether that particular anecdote is accurate, the general point is: of course we have plans for a war with Iran. I bet we have several – one for a strike to destroy the nuclear research infrastructure, probably another to destroy the Iranian military and a big one for invading and occupying the country. If that’s what Trump is referring to that means nothing about what Milley wanted to do. But the point is that Trump thinks it does. And he thinks this is a big gotcha against Milley.

Trump’s childish bragging about being able to possess top secret and classified bragging was conveyed in a way that even reading a transcript of the conversation was not. And it was a joke to all the people in that room at that time.

“It’s so cool.”

Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post ridicules the efforts of Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Elsie Stefanik (R-NY) to “expunge” Number 45’s impeachments from the record.

Last week, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) introduced resolutions to “expunge” former president Donald Trump’s two impeachments, “as if such Articles of Impeachment had never passed the full House of Representatives.” Incredibly, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — whose job is to be the adult in the room — said Friday that he supports this initiative, which actual adults can see is ridiculous and obviously futile.

The aim appears to be to allow Trump, the likely GOP presidential nominee in next year’s election, to claim that despite the events we all witnessed, he was never impeached at all. That lie can then become part of the fake historical record he sells to his supporters.

Sounds ridiculous on its face.

Even if such an “expungement” were theoretically possible, how do they propose to “expunge” the records of the 116th and 117th Congresses?

The House of Representatives of this 118th Congress  simply likes to waste The People’s time and money with performative BS.

Fabiola Santiago of the Miami Herald looks at the entry of not one, not two, but three— and possibly four— variations of “Florida Man” in the Republican 2024 presidential primaries.

In the crowded field of 2024 Republican presidential candidates, our forcibly adopted resident Trump, our cruel Jacksonville-born DeSantis, and Miami native son Suarez are standouts, if not for their policy points, then at least for the gumption of thinking themselves worthy.

And, as they travel around the country selling themselves through ads and appearances, the GOP primary is starting to feel like a referendum on the Sunshine State.

And now, there may be a fourth Floridian running — Sen. Rick Scott, who despite two Tea Party terms as governor is still seen as a carpetbagger.

We’re in trouble, America.

Olivia Beavers of POLITICO looks at efforts of the Freedom Caucus to possibly expel Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The right-flank group took up Greene’s status amid an internal push, first reported by POLITICO, to consider purging members who are inactive or at odds with the Freedom Caucus. Greene’s close alliance with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and her accompanying criticism of colleagues in the group, has put her on the opposite side of a bloc that made its name opposing GOP leadership.

While her formal status in the conservative group remains in limbo, the 8 a.m. Friday vote — which sources said ended with a consensus against her — points to, at least, continued strong anti-Greene sentiment.

A spokesperson for Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry (R-Pa.) declined to comment on the group’s vote as well as the official status of Greene’s membership. Perry said in an interview last week that he had denied requests to remove members from the group of roughly 35 House Republicans. A spokesperson for Greene did not respond to a request for comment.

Heather Digby Parton of Salon looks at the attempts of Republican presidential candidates to further stigmatize mental illness.

Speaking from the stage of the 2023 National Rifle Association (NRA) convention, the now broken-up White House hopefuls Donald Trump and Mike Pence made their point clear: Mass shootings are a mental health problem, not a gun problem. This display of stigmatization is most commonly seen following tragic events, like the unparalleled number of mass shootings we've endured. It is an unrelated tool of distraction. Experts have said that not only are most people with mental illness not violent, but they are also far more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators.[...]

So, what could this all mean for the landscape of mental health if a GOP candidate secures the White House next year? Well, there's a blueprint of sorts already on tap in Florida. Trump-contending Governor Ron DeSantis's wife, Casey DeSantis, recently announced a mental health campaign in Florida schools. Amidst the onslaught of other stigmatizing interventions Florida schools are enduring, First Lady DeSantis's campaign is "rejecting the term mental health and replacing it with resiliency," despite the widely accepted cultural abandonment of using the racially trope-heavy word "resilience." [...]

The targeting of mental health as a scapegoat at the highest levels of political power has a trickle-down effect on individuals. For someone with no pre-existing mental health conditions, public blaming can invoke the onset of a mental health condition, Dr. Torres-Mackie said. Furthermore, this public display not only furthers the stigma while acting as a barrier between individuals and treatment but it also simultaneously prevents further funding for structural mental health change.

Chris Geidner writes for his “LawDork” newsletter about the upcoming week of very important decisions at the scandal-plagued U.S. Supreme Court.

Although we don’t know that the Supreme Court is going to finish releasing decisions this week, that is the normal expectation since Friday is the end of June and the 10 cases (and 8 topics) remaining, while including many high-profile cases, could fairly reasonably all be released this week.

That would mean that we will know the outcome in the Harvard and UNC race-conscious admissions cases, the state and individual borrowers’ challenges to the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness program, the “independent state legislature” scheme case, the case asking whether religious adherents whose business involves speech are exempted from state nondiscrimination laws, and the case establishing the accommodations that religious adherents can get under Title VII all by noon Friday. [...]

Earlier in the year — certainly, at the beginning of the term last fall — it appeared that we were facing an out-of-control, reactionary court. And we’re still getting some of those decisions — I imagine we will this week as well.

But, there is something else happening. It’s not quite clear yet precisely what it is, and we really do need to see how the full term winds up before making any real assessments, but I think that we are seeing that the attention focused on the court matters.

Viola Gienger of JustSecurity tries to makes sense of the information coming out of Russia about the “coup” attempt of Wagner Group Chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin against the Russian government.

The shifting scenarios and statements, interspersed by long silences, and the notorious unreliability of any information emanating from Putin’s camp or from Prigozhin highlight the difficulty of discerning what’s really going on behind the scenes – or even knowing where those scenes are playing out. Prigozhin didn’t say where he was – is he indeed in Belarus? If so, under what circumstances? A generally reliable Russian media outlet today was reporting that camps were being built in Belarus, supposedly to hold detained Wagner forces. Or did Prigozhin escape the Kremlin’s clutches and go into hiding somewhere else, waiting to record a message until he had “proper communications” that could not be geolocated? (Prigozhin’s company had explained his absence yesterday by saying he would “answer questions when he will have access to proper communications,” possibly suggesting he may be concerned for his safety or perhaps in custody.) Likewise, the Shoigu video was undated and not independently confirmed.

While Prigozhin’s rebellion was indeed the most serious challenge yet to Putin’s more than two decades in power and  exposes “real cracks” – as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it yesterday – in Russia’s leadership structures, predictions that Putin has been significantly weakened should be taken with a measure of caution. It’s still early, and there are many potential theories about what has happened and what is to come. Beware also comparisons to Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev – he was far weaker throughout his tenure than Putin ever was.

The Russian independent media source Meduza summarizes some of the items found in Prigozhin’s St Petersburg offices.

On June 24, when Wagner forces were still en route to Moscow, the news publication Fontanka wrote that the authorities raided founder Yevgeny Prigozhin’s office in St. Petersburg (reportedly located at the Trezzini Hotel). Reporters say officials recovered the following items:

• five kilograms (11 pounds) of gold,
• cash in U.S. dollars,
• six pistols,
• five kilograms (11 pounds) of a white powder, and
• several passports with photographs of Prigozhin but under different names.

Ukrainian journalist Natalyia Gumenyuk writes for Vanity Fair about the Ukrainian reaction to last weekend’s events in Russia.

Ukrainians, watching from the sidelines, tried to get a handle on the turn of events. Many of us in the media, as well as in the legal and the human rights communities, lacked truly trusted sources in Russia. Instead, we talked to émigré political analysts as well as reporters investigating the Russian military. And from what we gathered, it started to look like a page out of Shakespeare or Le Carré: The very person who was considered to be “the president’s man” had gotten out of control. And not from a position of strength. He seemed to realize, instead, that his own days might be numbered. So he went rogue.

Some contend that the Wagner Group—during the first phase of the war in eastern Ukraine—had been brought in to help Russian forces that had supposedly lost control of the center. Prigozhin’s men reportedly turned their firepower on local warlords, and Prigozhin, according to some experts who’ve followed this power play at close range, could have been reading the tea leaves—fearing not just for his eroding power in the region but also fearing for his life.

Whatever the motivations behind Prigozhin’s insurrection and his sudden redirection, Ukrainians on the street were not talking to military analysts. They were calling it as they saw it. And they were generally of two minds. First, many wished Prigozhin good luck. Their rationale was simple: “Let them eat each other.” Even so, it was morally impossible for most Ukrainians to root for the commander of the division that continued to call for more ammunition to kill more Ukrainians, and whose people were responsible for brutal murders of countless Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war. Likewise, the Ukrainian leadership found itself tweeting more about the weakness of Putin’s regime rather than cheering on Prigozhin.

Rachel Chason, John Hudson, and Greg Miller write for The Washington Post about the Wagner Group’s African operations post-Russian coup attempt.

In the Central African Republic and Mali, where Wagner has its biggest presence on the continent, residents said WhatsApp group chats and weekend conversations in the African nations were dominated by speculation about the fallout in their countries.

“Everyone is scared,” said a political analyst in Bamako, the capital of Mali, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid about the tense situation. “Everyone knows that what happens in Russia will affect us.”

Officials and experts said it is too soon to know whether Wagner will retreat from Africa, or whether Prigozhin will be permitted to continue running the organization’s sprawling operations beyond Russia. For now, the group’s mercenaries were still visible at checkpoints and other security installations in Africa, according to witnesses and media reports.

Serge Djorie, the Central African Republic’s communications minister, did not respond to requests for an interview but sent a statement blaming Western media for causing “unnecessary friction.”

Mathieu von Rohr of Der Spiegel notes that for dictators, things are not always as they seem and Russian President Vladimir Putin is no exception to the rule.

We begin today with Kevin Mahnken of the education blog The 74 and his reporting that from 2020-2023, math and reading assessment scores plummeted to levels not seen in decades.

Wednesday’s publication of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — America’s most prominent benchmark of learning, typically referred to as the Nation’s Report Card — shows the average 13-year-old’s understanding of math plummeting back to levels last seen in the 1990s; struggling readers scored lower than they did in 1971, when the test was first administered. Gaps in performance between children of different backgrounds, already huge during the Bush and Obama presidencies, have stretched to still-greater magnitudes.

The bad tidings are, in a sense, predictable: Beginning in 2022, successive updates from NAEP have laid bare the consequences of prolonged school closures and spottily delivered virtual instruction. Only last month, disappointing results on the exam’s history and civics component led to a fresh round of headlines about the pandemic’s ugly hangover.

But the latest release, highlighting “long-term trends” that extend back to the 1970s, widens the aperture on the nation’s profound academic slump. In doing so, it serves as a complement to the 2020 iteration of the same test, which showed that the math and English skills of 13-year-olds had noticeably eroded even before the emergence of COVID-19.

A.O. Scott of The New York Times writes a long form essay wondering why do many Americans seem so afraid of reading.

The reading crisis reverberates at the higher reaches of the educational system too. As corporate management models and zealous state legislatures refashion the academy into a gated outpost of the gig economy, the humanities have lost their luster for undergraduates. According to reports in The New Yorker and elsewhere, fewer and fewer students are majoring in English, and many of those who do (along with their teachers) have turned away from canonical works of literature toward contemporary writing and pop culture. Is anyone reading “Paradise Lost” anymore? Are you?

Beyond the educational sphere lie technological perils familiar and new: engines of distraction like streaming (what we used to call TV) and TikTok; the post-literate alphabets of emojis and acronyms; the dark enchantments of generative A.I. While we binge and scroll and D.M., the robots, who are doing more and more of our writing, may also be taking over our reading.

There is so much to worry about. A quintessentially human activity is being outsourced to machines that don’t care about phonics or politics or beauty or truth. A precious domain of imaginative and intellectual freedom is menaced by crude authoritarian politics. Exposure to the wrong words is corrupting our children, who aren’t even learning how to decipher the right ones. Our attention spans have been chopped up and commodified, sold off piecemeal to platforms and algorithms. We’re too busy, too lazy, too preoccupied to lose ourselves in books.

I’ll admit that I haven’t read John Milton’s Paradise Lost in decades. I think that given the times we live in and Mr. Scott’s subject matter, I would think that Milton’s more obscure work Areopagitica is just as important to read considering that the essay deals with free speech and is cited in four Supreme Court cases.

(FTR, the most discussed literary work in Mr. Scott’s essay is Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave so I sense that he has something of an expansive view of “the canon.”)

Mary Ellen McIntire of Roll Call writes about the vote to censure Adam Schiff in the House and that it seems to be a prelude for a whole lot of attempted impeaching of President Biden and other members of the Biden administration.

Schiff is the 25th House member ever censured, and the first since 2010.

The vote came as some House Republicans were preparing to force votes on the impeachment of President Joe Biden and potentially other members of his administration. After the censure vote, the Rules Committee met and approved a rule to refer a Biden impeachment resolution to the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees. The full House would have to vote on that rule for the referral to take place.

The censure vote was 213-209, with six members voting present. Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna offered the resolution to censure the former House Intelligence Committee chairman, who Republicans say unfairly targeted Trump. The resolution argues that Schiff abused his power as the ranking member and chair of the panel and falsely spread allegations about Trump’s 2016 campaign colluding with Russia.

You can talk about this sideshow if you wish, lol. I swear, no couth whatever.

The bulk of Richard V. Reeves essay for the Brookings Institution is about the plight of Black men but I want to comment on the opening of the essay which deals with his godson’s new pair of glasses.

A few years back, I was delighted to see my godson wearing glasses. It makes me feel better to know others are aging too. Judge me if you like. “Don’t feel too bad, Dwight,” I said with faux sympathy. “It happens to all of us in the end.” Dwight laughed. “Oh no,” he said, “these are clear lenses. I just do more business when I’m wearing them.” Dwight sells cars for a living. I was confused. How does wearing unnecessary glasses help him sell more cars? “White people especially are just more relaxed around me when I wear them,” he explained.

Dwight is six foot five. He is also Black. It turns out that this is a common tactic for defusing white fear of Black masculinity. When I mentioned Dwight’s story in a focus group of Black men, two of them took off their glasses, explaining, “Yeah, me too.” In fact, I have yet to find a Black American who is unaware of it, but very few white people who are. Defense attorneys certainly know about it, often asking their Black clients to put on glasses. They call it the “nerd defense.” One study found that glasses generated a more favorable perception of Black male defendants but made no difference for white defendants.

I’ll turn 56 years old next month. I’ve worn glasses for over 50 of those years. Throughout much of my 20’s, I noticed that I was generally better received by society as a Black man than other Black men that I knew, even by cops, but I did not know why.

Finally, at some point in my 30’s, I figured out that the Black “nerd with glasses” thing was real. Plus I don’t drive. Plus I happen to be obviously gay.

Implicit biases that kinda sorta work in my favor. Sometimes.

Ellen Nakashima of The Washington Post explains the reasons for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the United States.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in Washington this week, with the full pomp and circumstance of a state visit that comes on the heels of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s tense trip to China, followed by President Biden’s comments on Tuesday calling Xi Jinping a “dictator.”

Neither Biden nor Modi would frame their engagement as primarily being about containing the China challenge, but the subtext is plain. Rather, officials say, it is about lifting up a rising power — the world’s largest democracy, if an imperfect one — and showcasing the momentum in the relationship based on a set of shared interests.

“This visit is not about China,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in an interview with reporters this week. “But the question of China’s role in the military domain, the technology domain, the economic domain will be on the agenda.”

C. Raja Mohan writes for Foreign Policy that the United States has been working on improved relations with India for at least a couple of decades.

The United States has been drifting in this direction for quite some time. If Sino-U.S. bonhomie peaked in 2000 with then-U.S. President Bill Clinton’s visit to Beijing, his successors have all sought to recalibrate assumptions about Beijing’s benign rise. George W. Bush began his time in office with clear recognition of the need to counter China in Asia but was distracted by the 9/11 attacks and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Barack Obama took the shift a step further, outlining a security “pivot to Asia,” but the presumed need to cooperate with China on economic and climate issues limited its implementation. Donald Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy outlined the centrality of the Chinese challenge. Biden, in turn, doubled down on the China threat and articulated a more systematic U.S. response.

All presidents since Clinton signaled a strong desire for deeper strategic ties to India as part of the effort to restructure U.S. foreign and security policy toward Asia. Modi’s state visit to Washington this week is just the latest step in steadily growing U.S.-India relations, a process that has accelerated under Biden. [...]

Handwringing in the Indian political class prevented New Delhi from seizing the new opportunities with Washington under Bush, but Modi has now stepped forward to build a substantive strategic partnership. Put simply, the imperatives of a stronger U.S.-India partnership have been evident for more than two decades. The delay on the Indian side was about sorting out lingering suspicions about the United States. Today, Modi says there is “unprecedented trust” between the two nations’ leaders.

Peter Baker and Mujib Mashal of The New York Times explain why the Biden Administration is showering attention on Modi in spite of Modi’s authoritarian tendencies.

In granting Mr. Modi a coveted state visit, complete with a star-studded gala dinner, Mr. Biden will shower attention on a leader presiding over democratic backsliding in the world’s most populous nation. Mr. Modi’s government has cracked down on dissent and hounded opponents in a way that has raised fears of an authoritarian turn not seen since India’s slip into dictatorship in the 1970s.

Yet Mr. Biden has concluded, much as his predecessors did, that he needs India despite concerns over human rights just as he believes he needs Saudi Arabia, the Philippines and other countries that are either outright autocracies or do not fit into the category of ideal democracies. At a time of confrontation with Russia and an uneasy standoff with China, Mr. Biden is being forced to accept the flaws of America’s friends.

Two and a half years into his administration, the democracy-versus-autocracy framework has, therefore, become something of a geopolitical straitjacket for Mr. Biden, one that conveys little of the subtleties his foreign policy actually envisions yet virtually guarantees criticism every time he shakes hands with a counterpart who does not pass the George Washington test. Even some of his top advisers privately view the construct as too black-and-white in a world of grays.

Joanna Klimowicz and Ekaterina Lemonjava write for Gazeta Wyborcza (translated by Katarzyna Skiba of World Crunch) that the conflict at Poland’s border with Belarus over Belarusian Alexander Lukashenko’s flooding of selected EU countries with migrants is getting increasingly tense.

Polish authorities are arming themselves in preparation for provocations and hybrid attacks from the Belarusian border. Inhabitants along the border fear that the zone may be closed once again. And refugees, stuck between two armies, are fighting to survive.

From the beginning of this week, activists from various aid groups have noted greater numbers of troops, checkpoints, and air patrols, especially in the area surrounding the Białowieża forest, a national park located between the two countries.

This past weekend, Piotr Czaban, a journalist and activist from Podlaskie Volunteer Humanitarian Rescue, told Gazeta Wyborczaabout the route. Only 15 kilometers ahead of Hajnówka, a Polish border town, the police are stopping and checking every vehicle, whether they are entering or leaving the area, searching the insides and the trunks.

He said he didn’t remember such strict controls since a state of emergency was declared in September 2021, excluding journalists, humanitarian workers, and non-residents from entering the area.

Finally today, Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review interviews Italian journalist Mattia Ferraresi about the media legacy of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

ALLSOP: You mentioned favorable coverage. After Berlusconi decided to jump into electoral politics, how did he use his media properties to maintain, harness, and wield his power?

FERRARESI: There’s two different things. He tended, throughout his political career, to try to lobby and to bend the laws in order to take advantage of, and profit more from, his media empire. That’s one big topic, in terms of the relationship between the media tycoon and the politician. Then there’s a different theme, which is how much he used his TV properties in order to promote himself directly, and to have favorable coverage. I think that’s undeniably true; he for sure exploited them. But was it like a North Korean-type propaganda machine, a Russian-type propaganda machine? No. We have many, many examples of heavily critical news programs within the Berlusconi media ecosystem. I’m not denying that, at the same time, there were specific programs that were used in a way that tended to praise Berlusconi. But the whole theory—which has been a big theory in Italy—that essentially Berlusconi, through his TV stations, sort of brainwashed Italian people so that they would vote for him despite him being what he was? I don’t buy it.

I’ve found it interesting that in the Berlusconi coverage, Italian and non-Italian media have been taking note of the differences between Trump and Berlusconi.

Have the best possible day everyone!

We begin today with Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel of The New York Times reporting that Republicans are targeting academic researchers that study disinformation.

The effort has encumbered its targets with expansive requests for information and, in some cases, subpoenas — demanding notes, emails and other information related to social media companies and the government dating back to 2015. Complying has consumed time and resources and already affected the groups’ ability to do research and raise money, according to several people involved.

They and others warned that the campaign undermined the fight against disinformation in American society when the problem is, by most accounts, on the rise — and when another presidential election is around the corner. Many of those behind the Republican effort had also joined former President Donald J. Trump in falsely challenging the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. [...]

Targets include Stanford, Clemson and New York Universities and the University of Washington; the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund and the National Conference on Citizenship, all nonpartisan, nongovernmental organizations in Washington; the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco; and Graphika, a company that researches disinformation online.

Paul Wallis of Digital Journal writes about what the targeting of disinformation specialists says about the GOP.

Should someone point out that this was the same election that appointed the current Congress to office, and their own votes might also be invalid? You’d have to be able to read and write to understand that. [...]

Anti-vax propaganda isn’t disinformation because someone getting paid to promote anti-vax says so. The people voted with their jabs, but this very dead horse is still being flogged. [...]

The First Amendment specifically allows a free press. Therefore the GOP is allowed to publish any drivel it likes. In practice, everyone is allowed to call it whatever they want under the First Amendment. So the attacks on the researchers, which can’t achieve anything anyway, must be a great move. This is at least in theory an attack on the First Amendment rights of the researchers.  

Attacking disinformation research is also a clear admission that the Republicans depend on disinformation campaigns to get attention, let alone votes. The GOP and facts haven’t been on speaking terms for years. Disinformation is the only option.

Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov wrote a small tweetstorm about podcaster Joe Rogan’s challenge to debate Peter Hotez about vaccines.

Emily Flitter of The New York Times reports on the ways in which local political officials and the wealthy seek revenge on small-town newspapers.

In most of the country, state and local laws require public announcements — about town meetings, elections, land sales and dozens of other routine occurrences — to be published in old-fashioned, print-and-ink newspapers, as well as online, so that citizens are aware of matters of public note. The payments for publishing these notices are among the steadiest sources of revenue left for local papers.

Sometimes, though, public officials revoke the contracts in an effort to punish their hometown newspapers for aggressive coverage of local politics.

Such retaliation is not new, but it appears to be occurring more frequently now, when terms like “fake news” have become part of the popular lexicon.

In recent years, newspapers in Colorado, North Carolina, New Jersey and California, as well as New York, have been stripped of their contracts for public notices after publishing articles critical of their local governments. Some states, like Florida, are going even further, revoking the requirement that such notices have to appear in newspapers.

Flux publisher Matthew Sheffield rotes a long tweet storm about Confederate Christianty.

Mr. Sheffield’s long tweetstorm can be read here.

Mr. Sheffield’s tweetstorm led me to Rich Logis blistering June 6 column for Salon about how and why the mainstream media continually props up the GOP.

First, the press intellectualizes salvaging the GOP. Sure, there is a place for intellectual takes on the Republican Party, the conservative movement and our two-party system (which we've always had and always will). But a healthier two-party system will only arise after the GOP is mercy-killed. There are myriad opinions among progressives, liberals, moderates, independents, center-left and even center-right Americans as to what should be done with the GOP. It's nearly impossible to get 10 to concur, much less 100-plus million. This endless "what to do?" cycle probably partly explains why centrist and left-of-center media is so concerned with the "who will save the GOP?" question. [...]

I immersed myself in the MAGA/Trump cult from 2015 to 2022, and congregated with Republican primary voters on a near-daily basis. I was a right-wing pundit. And I now wish I could have all 221 million seconds back. I sincerely adhered to many of the mythologies most GOP base voters adhere to, centered on  gays, sex and marriage; male Caucasian paranoia; Christian theocracy; the evil of Barack Obama; racial and ethnic animus; the sacredness of guns and the demonic nature of COVID vaccines.

I am not convinced that most GOP politicians actually believe the trauma-based conspiracies and mythologies they peddle, but they know that the party's base voters are addicted to them. This dependency on fighting imaginary phantasms — which are  responsible for eroding our "values" and "culture" by making America browner, less Christian, more constitutionally equal and ever less heterosexual — is what unites GOP base voters. The trauma shapes the right's identity politics, brought to them, oftentimes, by affluent Ivy League-educated Republican leaders.

EJ Montini of the Arizona Republic points out that it was the Democratic governor Katie Hobbs that vetoed “nanny state” legislation passed by the Republican-controlled Arizona legislature.

For generations Republicans have railed against Democrats for trying to create a “nanny state,” the kind of place where the government, not individuals, controls just about every aspect of our lives.

But here’s the thing.

It’s a lie.

If anything, just the opposite is true.

And no place proves it better than Arizona, where the Republican-controlled Legislature passed bill after bill that would have replaced free choice with government mandates. And the only thing that prevented it from happening was Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’ 100-plus vetoes of “nanny state” legislation.

William Melhado of Texas Tribune reports that Texas state Senator Angela Paxton will attend the impeachment trial of her husband, suspended Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

After weeks of speculation, state Sen. Angela Paxton announced late Monday that she will attend the impeachment trial of her husband, suspended Attorney General Ken Paxton, the McKinney Republican said in a statement issued late Monday.

“Each time I was elected, I took an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of this great state, and Texas law compels each member of the Senate to attend when the Senate meets as a court of impeachment, Sen. Paxton’s announcement stated. “As a member of the Senate, I hold these obligations sacred and I will carry out my duties, not because it is easy, but because the Constitution demands it and because my constituents deserve it.”

Ken Paxton faces 20 articles of impeachment as a result of a months-long investigation by the House General Investigating Committee. Those articles that included accusations of bribery, retaliating against whistleblowers and obstruction of justice. As a result, the suspended attorney general will face a trial in the Senate by Aug. 28 where the upper chamber’s 31 members will act as jurors in the decision to remove one of the state’s top elected Republicans from office.

Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux of FiveThirtyEight analyzes data on the number of abortions that have been performed since the Dobbs decision.

New estimates provided exclusively to FiveThirtyEight by #WeCount — a national research project led by the Society of Family Planning, a nonprofit that supports research on abortion and contraception — indicate that there were 24,290 fewer legal abortions between July 2022 and March 2023, compared to a pre-Dobbs baseline.1 These people might have remained pregnant or obtained an abortion outside the legal system, which would not be captured in #WeCount’s data.

But the overall decline in abortions is just one part of the story. #WeCount’s estimates, which were collected by contacting every abortion clinic in the country multiple times over a period of twelve months, shows the Dobbs ruling has created intense turmoil for tens of thousands of Americans across the country. There were an estimated 93,575 fewer legal abortions in states that banned or severely restricted abortion for at least one week in the nine-month period after Dobbs.2 The number of legal abortions in states where abortion remained mostly available did rise by 69,285 in the same period, signaling that many people did travel and successfully obtain an abortion within the U.S. health care system. “But a significant number of people are trapped and can’t get out of places like Texas,” said Caitlin Myers, a professor of economics at Middlebury College who studies abortion policy and reviewed the #WeCount data at FiveThirtyEight’s request. “And for the people who are traveling, we’re talking about enormous distances. Some people are likely getting delayed into the second trimester.” With more bans on the horizon in big states like Florida — and abortion clinics and funds struggling to keep up in other states — abortion access seems likely to erode further in the second year after Dobbs.

Finally today, Nels Abbey of Guardian reminds Britons that they were warned about former prime minister Boris Johnson.

Had Britain “heard” the screams of caution from Black people about the racism and, therefore, unsuitability for office of Boris Johnson, there is a good chance Britain would not be “feeling” the pain and shame of demise we are right now.

In the story of race in Britain, Johnson may be as deserving of his own special chapter as Enoch Powell. And a fascinatingly complex chapter it would be. It is hard to conceive of anyone who has seemingly done more to decimate antiracism movements and relegitimise racism in Britain (for his own political gain) but simultaneously just as hard to name anyone who did more for high-level political diversity – once seen as a vital measure of racial progress. Powell gave a speech; Johnson gave power and the respectability of diversity to racism. [...]

Indeed, a cursory study of his time as editor of the Spectator suggests an apparent disdain for, obsession with and envy or fear of Black people in particular. He did not write but he published at least one patently, eye-wateringly racist pseudoscientific article suggesting Black people had low IQs. Another piece published under his editorship described Jamaican immigrants (ie descendants of Africans enslaved by Britain) as “ludicrously self-satisfied, macho, lupine-gaited, gold-chained-and-front-toothed predators of the slums, with the bodies of giants and the mind of a pea”. Another dismissed the idea of disaffected Black youth as politically correct cover for “black thugs, sons of black thugs and grandsons of black thugs”. The piece contained the bigotry bat-signal “boy, oh boy, was Enoch – God rest his soul – ever right!”

Far from making him a pariah, his early catalogue of racist waffle, written by or apparently sanctioned by him, helped to propel Johnson to success.

We begin today with Jennifer Scholtes of POLITICO and the efforts of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to corral House support for his tentative agreement with President Joe Biden to raise the debt limit and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) efforts to block the agreement from even coming to the House floor for a vote.

With a passage vote set for Wednesday, a few Republicans have suggested using the Rules Committee to block the 99-page package from making it to the floor. And Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) further hinted at that strategy Monday afternoon.

The Texas Republican said on Twitter that an “explicit” agreement was made during private negotiations in January to elect McCarthy to the speakership: No bill could get to the floor without “unanimous” Republican support on the Rules Committee, on which Roy serves.

Any holdups like a delay in teeing up House floor debate would cost leaders precious time in clearing the bill through both chambers before the expected deadline for maxing out the nation’s borrowing authority. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s latest forecast pegs that X-date as June 5, now just a week away.

Republicans working to rally support for the bill are already casting doubt on Roy’s claim of a secret promise.

Timothy Puko of The Washington Post reports that one of the Democratic compromises in the Biden-McCarthy debt ceiling agreement will permit the building of a controversial gas pipeline.

President Biden and House Republicans have agreed to expedite permitting for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a project that is key to the West Virginia delegation as the president and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) seek to woo lawmakers across the capital.

Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.). has previously demanded White House support for the project in exchange for his vote, and other Republicans, including West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, praised the pipeline provisions included in the legislation.

It is another White House concession to Manchin, who has long championed the 303-mile pipeline, which would carry West Virginia shale gas to the East Coast but has been tripped up by dozens of environmental violations and a slew of court fights. Environmentalists have fought the project since its inception, and the new provisions aims to block them from challenging almost all government approvals for the line to cut across federal forests and dozens of waterways in Appalachia’s hilly, wet terrain.

More on the environmental issues involving the Mountain Valley Pipeline from Jake Bolster of Inside Climate News.

On May 15, the U.S. Forest Service issued its “record of decision” to allow the construction of the pipeline, a much contested 303.5-mile project which, if completed, would transport fracked gas from northwestern West Virginia to southern Virginia, through a 3.5-mile corridor of the forest. [...]

For the last eight years, many local landowners along the pipeline’s route in Virginia and West Virginia have expressed concerns about the construction on the grounds that it is dangerous, infringes on the environmental justice rights of several low-income and majority-minority communities in both states and would impede the region’s transition to renewable energy.

“The most impacted people are already dealing with a number of environmental hazards across the route,” said Chisholm.

He referenced, as one example, a map made by one of the organizations under POWHR’s umbrella of the “blast zones” along the pipeline; it shows parcels of land at risk of being impacted by an explosion should, for instance, materials that make up the pipeline degrade due to prolonged exposure to the elements. Several of these regions fall in environmental justice communities in southern Virginia.

Adam Liptak of The New York Times says that the U.S. Supreme Court might choose to hear a case involving affirmative action in elite high school admissions.

In the coming weeks, the Supreme Court is very likely to forbid colleges and universities to use race as a factor in admissions decisions. Indeed, when the cases challenging the admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were argued in October, some justices were already looking at the next question on the horizon: whether admissions officers may promote racial diversity by using race-neutral criteria.

“Your position,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh told a lawyer for the challengers, “will put a lot of pressure going forward, if it’s accepted, on what qualifies as race neutral in the first place.”

That question grew more concrete last week, when a divided three-judge panel of a federal appeals court allowed an elite public high school in Alexandria, Va., to revise its admissions policy by, among other things, eliminating standardized tests and setting aside spots for the top students at every public middle school in the area.

[...]

It is a decent bet that the Supreme Court will agree to hear an appeal in that case and use it to answer questions left open in its coming decisions on the admissions practices of Harvard and U.N.C.

Kate McGee and Matthew Watkins of Texas Tribune cover much of the Texas Republican infighting that culminated, in part, with the impeachment of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

When Patrick laid out his 30 legislative priorities in the Senate before the start of the session, he called them the “strongest, most conservative agenda ever.” On it were bills that would prevent transgender college students from playing on sports teams that correspond to their gender identities, ban gender-affirming medical care for trans youth and prohibit minors from attending drag shows.

Phelan offered a different set of priorities, such as expanding Medicaid for new mothers and exempting sales tax for items like diapers and tampons. He threw support behind bills that required tech companies to give parents access to a minor’s privacy and account settings and would limit the collection of a minor’s data. He sought to bolster school safety and overhaul how the state funds its community colleges.

[...]

House Republicans wanted to lower by half the state’s cap on how much a home’s taxable value can grow each year and extend that benefit to businesses — an idea Senate Republicans rejected. The banner idea Senate GOP tax-cut writers proposed was to boost the state’s homestead exemption on school district taxes — or the chunk of a home’s value that can’t be taxed to pay for public schools.

Disagreements started to play out on television and social media.

Oh please, spare me the Dade Phelan [EXPLETIVE DELETED]; Phelan may be more “moderate” on a few issues but he never met a voter suppression bill that he didn’t like and I would assume that also includes the bill which would allow theTexas Secretary of State to take over Harris County elections.

Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

Texas Republicans wound down their regular legislative session Sunday by changing election policies for a single populous Democratic stronghold but not other parts of the state.

The measure gives the secretary of state under certain conditions the power to run elections in Harris County, home to Houston and 4.8 million residents. It follows a bill approved days earlier that shifts the oversight of elections from its appointed elections administrator to the county clerk and county assessor.

Patrick Svitek and Renzo Downey, also of The Texas Tribune, report that the articles of impeachment against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton have been delivered to the Texas State Senate, impeachment managers have been chosen, and the Senate trial of Paxton will begin no later than August 28.

The Texas Senate agreed Monday to start its trial of impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton no later than Aug. 28, shortly after the House named 12 members to prosecute the case. [...]

On Monday evening, the Senate unanimously adopted a resolution that laid out an initial timeline for the next steps. The Senate appointed a seven-member committee that will prepare recommendations on the rules of procedure for the trial and then present them to the full Senate on June 20. And then Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick can pick a date “not later than” Aug. 28 on which the chamber will convene as a court of impeachment. [...]

Earlier Monday, the House announced a Republican-majority board of managers to handle the prosecution, made up of seven Republicans and five Democrats. The group immediately left the House chamber to deliver the 20 articles of impeachment to the Senate.

Samuel Okiror of the Guardian reports that Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni has signed the “harshest anti-LGBTQ bill” in the world into law.

Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, has signed into law the world’s harshest anti-LGBTQ+ bill, which allows the death penalty for homosexual acts.

The move immediately drew condemnation from many Ugandans as well as widespread international outrage. The UK government said it was appalled by the “deeply discriminatory” bill, which it said will “damage Uganda’s international reputation”.

US President Joe Biden decried the act as “shameful” and “tragic violation of universal human rights”. He said Washington was considering “sanctions and restriction of entry into the United States against anyone involved in serious human rights abuses” – a suggestion that Ugandan officials may face repercussions.

Sure, American evangelicals are partly responsible. I’m not excusing the people who are in power in Uganda, though.

Guy Delauney and Kathryn Armstrong of BBC News report that NATO peacekeepers were injured in a clash involving Kosovo Serbs and ethnic Albanians in northern Kosovo.

The crisis dates back to April when Kosovo Serbs boycotted local elections, allowing ethnic Albanians to take control of local councils with a turnout of less than four per cent.

Both the EU and US have criticised the Kosovan authorities for destabilising the situation in north Kosovo, and warned against any actions that could inflame ethnic tensions there.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in February 2008, after years of strained relations between its Serb and mainly Albanian inhabitants.

[...]

While ethnic Albanians make up more than 90% of the population in Kosovo as a whole, Serbs form the majority of the population in the northern region.

Ragip Soylu of Middle East Eye says that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan may have won reelection but quite a few serious problems remain.

With his win secure, Erdogan addressed some of the things he plans to do in the near future. Yet, amid the celebrations, he nonetheless faces significant challenges, including: addressing the economic crisis, finding solutions for the refugee crisis, and securing victory in the upcoming municipal elections in 10 months' time.

That's just on the domestic front. As for foreign policy, Turkey's western allies are urging Erdogan to ratify Sweden's Nato membership before a summit in Vilnius on 11 July, an issue linked to Turkey's need for F-16 warplanes.

Middle East Eye takes a look at five of Erdogan's most pressing challenges...

Finally today, we have a pair of dueling editorials that function as the latest salvos fired in the eternal war between Michigan and Ohio. 

First, Nancy Kaffer of The Detroit Free Press reports on the regrettable sighting of Ohio tourism signage in downtown Detroit!

This latest encroachment seems particularly aggressive and disrespectful, which, frankly, is about what you expect from Ohio. But the more I learned about this ad campaign, the more I wondered — is there more to this story?

The Buckeyes want it to seem like we fired the first shot. Classic Ohio, right? An article in the Columbus Dispatch points to a 2022 column by my colleague Carol Cain describing the latest round of Pure Michigan advertising, displayed in places like Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton and Toledo. This is a thin rationale, Ohio, and one I am prepared to quickly dismiss. At the Detroit Free Press, we don't blame the victim. [...]

We talk a lot here in Michigan about our state's population loss, but Ohio experiences the same phenomenon — and Michigan, it turns out, is a popular destination for Buckeyes.

Amelia Robinson, representing that state to the south, responds in The Columbus Dispatch.

If only Ohio lawmakers would stop proposing and passing laws that make this wonderful state more dangerous and less attractive and inclusive.

That would prove that we are in fact the heart of it all as our new/ old tourism slogan claims.

We would need far fewer billboards if that happened, and Gov. Gretchen (Big Gretch if you're nasty) would finally have to start paying rent.

And there you have it...the war continues...

Have the best possible day, everyone!