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!

We begin today with the first of two big stories starting with Tony Romm, Theodoric Meyer, Leigh Ann Caldwell, and Mariana Sotomayor of The Washington Post reporting that a tentative deal has been reached regarding the debt ceiling between Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden.

The agreement offers Congress a road map for averting a fiscal crisis: It preserves the country’s ability to borrow money into 2025, resets the budgets at a broad swath of federal agencies and institutes new work requirements on some Americans who receive federal nutrition assistance known as food stamps.

The full details were not immediately clear Saturday night, as lawmakers had yet to introduce any legislative text. But it arrives more than four months after Republicans assumed control of the House in January and plotted a strategy to leverage the debt ceiling to achieve their policy agenda — ignoring repeated warnings that their brinkmanship could plunge the country into a recession.

The fate of the deal now rests in the hands of a restive Congress, where Democrats and Republicans began raising objections hours before their leaders struck their bargain. The blowback underscores the difficult task Biden and McCarthy face to muscle any legislation through the pitfall-prone, narrowly divided House and Senate with roughly a week to spare.

The other big story yesterday was the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton becoming the first Attorney General in United States history to be impeached. The Editorial Board of the Houston Chronicle says that Republicans in the Texas House shouldn’t give themselves too much of a pat on the back.

After slightly more than four hours of debate, the final bipartisan vote – 121 to impeach, 23 in opposition – was both shocking and almost anti-climactic. Shocking that the GOP itself finally collared the long-indicted Paxton after tolerating his blatant misdeeds for years; anticlimactic that the splash of green that lit up the voting board left no doubt about the outcome. (Texas Republicans on Saturday showed what their national counterparts could have done a couple of years ago had they had the fortitude under similar circumstances,) [...]

On Saturday afternoon, Paxton’s fellow Republicans did the right thing, and yet they can’t take too much credit. They’ve known for years what Paxton was up to, and yet they were happy to look the other way while his scandalous behavior embarrassed his fellow Texans.

We’re glad he’s gone, and yet we have to acknowledge that we Texans have much to answer for. We elected the man, then re-elected him twice more, despite the fact that his opponents in the Republican primary – former Land Commissioner George P. Bush and former state Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman – were credible candidates and would have been capable AGs. For citizens of a self-governing democracy, that’s called dereliction of duty.

I wasn’t surprised that Paxton was impeached but I was surprised at the number of Republican representatives that voted for impeach. 

Paxton is from Collier County in TX.

Christopher Hooks of Texas Monthly look at a lot of different aspects of what led to Paxton’s impeachment and Paxton’s chances of surviving a trial in the Texas state Senate.

Paxton has survived so long in part because of his ability to frame his opposition as a liberal mob, and to frame himself as the nation’s foremost warrior for conservative values. That view still has real support among the Republican base. On Thursday night, right-wing representative Steve Toth, from the Woodlands, recorded a live stream in which he said Paxton’s impeachment would set back the conservative cause and let the Biden administration, which Paxton sues regularly, off the hook at a critical moment in the nation’s history. That’s still a pretty common sentiment among conservatives.  

It’s also exactly backward, 100 percent wrong. As attorney general, Paxton has two responsibilities to perform for his party. He can take the fight to the Democrats in the White House and big Texas cities, and he can prosecute criminals to win positive headlines. But he’s extremely bad at both of those things. He can’t even keep the office of the attorney general staffed anymore. After he fired the whistleblowers, he had to bring in whomever would agree to work for him. As the AP reported, one of those B-team legal experts was quietly fired after he intentionally showed child pornography at a meeting.

Patrick Svitek of the Texas Tribune looks at who Texas Gov. Greg Abbott might consider to replace Paxton.

Abbott himself is a former attorney general, preceding Paxton in the seat. And he has built deep connections in the conservative legal world and is known to lean on former aides for high-profile appointments.

He’s named five Republicans to the state Supreme Court during his tenure: Jimmy Blacklock, Rebeca Huddle, Jane Bland, Brett Busby and Evan Young. Blacklock served as general counsel for Abbott prior to moving to the court.

If Abbott chooses to temporarily place someone in Paxton’s seat, he faces all kinds of considerations, including whether to pick someone who would be just a placeholder until the next election.

The list of people interested in the job may include Paxton’s 2022 primary opponents: former Land Commissioner George P. Bush, former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman and former U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert of Tyler. Former state Rep. Matt Krause, R-Tyler, also briefly entered the race, but he dropped out after Gohmert entered the race.

Jim Rutenberg, Michael Schmidt, and Jeremy Peters of The New York Times write about Fox News overlooking warning sign after warning sign its case against Dominion Voting Systems.

In the month since the settlement, Fox has refused to comment in detail on the case or the many subsequent setbacks. That has left a string of unanswered questions: Why did the company not settle earlier and avoid the release of private emails and texts from executives and hosts? How did one of the most potentially prejudicial pieces of evidence — a text from Mr. Carlson about race and violence — escape high-level notice until the eve of the trial? How did Fox’s pretrial assessment so spectacularly miss the mark?

Repeatedly, Fox executives overlooked warning signs about the damage they and their network would sustain, The Times found. They also failed to recognize how far their cable news networks, Fox News and Fox Business, had strayed into defamatory territory by promoting President Donald J. Trump’s election conspiracy theories — the central issue in the case. (Fox maintains it did not defame Dominion.)

When pretrial rulings went against the company, Fox did not pursue a settlement in any real way. Executives were then caught flat-footed as Dominion’s court filings included internal Fox messages that made clear how the company chased a Trump-loving audience that preferred his election lies — the same lies that helped feed the Jan. 6 Capitol riots — to the truth.

Toby Helm of the Guardian writes about new polling that shows that a majority of Britain wants to forge closer ties with the European Union.

Even in those constituencies that recorded the highest votes to leave the EU in 2016, more than twice as many voters now believe the best route forward is to move in the opposite direction – and forge closer ties with Brussels.

The survey of more than 10,000 voters, for the internationalist campaign group Best for Britain, accompanied by detailed MRP (multilevel regression and poststratification) analysis based on new constituency boundaries, will provide sobering reading for Rishi Sunak, who backed Brexit as a route to greater economic success.

The poll by Focaldata found that three times as many adults (63%) now believe Brexit has created more problems than it has solved, compared with just 21% who believe it has solved more than it has created.

Erdoğan, who since 2003 has served first as prime minister and then as head of state, has the clear upper hand in what has been a highly polarizing contest, taking place against the backdrop of the devastation caused by the huge earthquake Turkey suffered in February.

“Erdoğan’s incumbency advantages allowed him to get ahead in the first round and the same advantages will help him get to the finishing line,” said Soner Çağaptay, director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The main theme of the tight race has been the country’s economic troubles due to Erdoğan’s unorthodox policies that led to high inflation and a plunging currency.

[...]

The president won the first round vote with 49.5 percent and 27 million votes — 2.5 million more than his rival. The coalition headed by his AK party also secured control of Turkey’s parliament.

Have the best possible day everyone!