President Joe Biden arrived in Uvalde, Texas today to pay his respects to the victims of the latest school shooting that didn’t have to happen. This time, 19 grade school students and two teachers died.
The horror of what happened in Uvalde continues to get worse with each new detail, but what is clear is that the fictions Texans relied on to “harden” their schools while still allowing guns to flow freely were just that: fictions.
The death toll in the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting now stands at 19 elementary school children and two teachers, with at least 17 others injured. The state’s Republican leaders immediately launched into defenses that tried to push blame onto everything other than their own efforts to reduce even the flimsiest hurdles standing between Texas mass murderers and weapons of war. The National Rifle Association is still planning to hold its convention in Houston this weekend.
It happened again. At least 18 elementary school children and one teacher are dead in a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. All victims were killed by an 18-year-old gunman who is now also dead.
The National Rifle Association’s annual meeting is in Houston, Texas, on Friday. Both Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and seditionist Donald Trump will be speaking.
It’s been a day of Republican politicians being just gawdawful, even compared to the normal gawdawful. Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy’s defense of his state’s horrific maternal death rates—with a claim that the rate wouldn’t be as bad if you just excluded his state’s Black residents—might be one for the record books.
Far-right conspiracy crank Dinesh D’Souza is back with yet another conspiracy theory to promote, and if you haven’t heard much about the Republican propagandist’s newest film, it’s because it is extremely, unfathomably stupid. 2000 Mules achieved a level of stupidity so stupid that D’Souza can’t even get Fox News to jump in with the usual publicity boost. It’s a train wreck.
Republicanism is rapidly merging with all manner of domestic extremism, and a new study paints a grim picture of just where things stand. As the Supreme Court’s new conservative wing sets its sights on unraveling federal abortion protections, support for abortion rights remains steadfast among Americans not pushed into lifetime judicial positions by Republican nihilists. Republicans continue to support lowering taxes on the wealthy while ratcheting taxes up for the non-wealthy, but Sen.
In the news today: More movement in the probe of the Jan. 6 insurrection, with the Justice Department now asking for copies of what the House congressional committee has pried out of witnesses. Calls to expand the Supreme Court keep growing. Oh, and a professional anti-abortion activist told Congress under oath that our electrical grid was powered by burning fetuses. So yeah, it does seem like civilization is on its last legs here.
Primary elections in multiple states have begun to shake out what the November elections will look like, and we now know for certain that Rep. Madison Cawthorn won’t be in Congress come next January. Republican voters handed him his own primary loss after he publicly asserted earlier this year that his fellow national Republicans were having drug orgies.
What Cawthorn was not booted for was his vocal support for the nullification of an American election.
Today in encroaching fascism, the United States Supreme Court asserted that checking the wrong box on a form is sufficient reason for deportation.
After a domestic terrorist citing neo-Nazi and white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theories killed 10 Americans in a Buffalo supermarket, Republicans are reacting angrily today to widespread criticism over their promotion of those same conspiracies in their own advertisements and rhetoric.
Once again, the conspiracy theories promoted by Fox News and Republican elected officials have resulted in an act of racist domestic terrorism.
New York Rep. Elise Stefanik was catapulted to a top House Republican leadership position after Republicans purged Rep. Liz Cheney from the role as punishment for speaking out against Donald Trump’s violent attempted coup.
Every new document describing Trump adviser John Eastman’s efforts to erase the 2020 United States presidential election seems more outrageous than the last; the latest release is of an email to a Pennsylvania Republican advising state lawmakers to simply declare that a certain percentage of votes would be “discarded” to account for unproven Republican-claimed fraud.
The United States Senate leaped to unanimous action after the leak of Alito’s draft opinion erasing federal abortion rights. Not to protect those rights, mind you, or to do anything else to begin to repair a Supreme Court that has been so stacked with far-right ideologues that it no longer bears any resemblance to the social fabric of the nation itself; the Senate instead swiftly acted to allow Supreme Court justices to use court officers to protect their families as well.
As state Republican elected officials waste no time in their efforts to kill off not just abortion rights, but even the right to use contraception, attempts by strategy-minded Republicans to get their party to temper such extremism for the sake of upcoming midterm elections aren’t going very far. Republicans know what they want: a rollback of the entire civil rights era. The leaked Alito draft opinion rejecting Roe v.
A new Supreme Court leak appeared on Sunday, and this one is definitely from the conservative wing of the court. The Washington Post described its sources as “three conservatives close to the court” and “a person close to the court’s most conservative members.
There’s now another big leak from The United States Supreme Court, and this one’s being unapologetically linked to the court’s conservative wing. The Washington Post has a new story in which multiple sources describe how Chief Justice John Roberts was planning to further carve away at Roe v. Wade by giving the court’s approval to the Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks, but wanted to dodge overturning Roe completely.
With the leaked news that the Supreme Court has the votes to erase federal abortion rights, allowing states to push forward whatever new bans they might desire, Republican states are wasting no time in writing up even more extreme legislation. In Louisiana, that means a new bill criminalizing abortion and charging women who obtain abortions with murder. Republican senators continue the tradition of lying flat-out about their own declared policy stances.
The now-telegraphed likely end of federal abortion rights in the United States continues to send the Republican politicians who have plotted that end for decades scurrying for cover; abortion rights remain overwhelmingly popular in this country, despite decades of demonization efforts by far-right theocrats, and the party must now turn its ample hoax-crafting powers on inventing reasons the public should not blame them for the very outcome that Senate Republicans and state lawmakers have
The Supreme Court leak of the draft opinion meant to erase abortion rights in this country rocked Washington, D.C., and the rest of the country, but for two different reasons. Most of the public strongly supports abortion rights and public fury is already rising as Americans learn of the planned decision and its Alito-written justification; most Republican lawmakers are in an absolute froth over the opinion being leaked before the Supreme Court revealed it publicly.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a small congressional delegation to Ukraine on Saturday, the details of which were not publicized until she had again left the country. Pelosi, Rep. Adam Schiff and others met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in yet another show of support towards Ukrainians currently fighting for their nation’s continued existence.
The situation on the ground remains as it was; few Russian gains, but continued Russian atrocities.
Your day probably hasn’t been weird enough, so let’s fix that right now with a quote from an ex-President of These United States.
“I wanted to have people be ready because we were put on alert that they were going to do fruit,” said Donald J. Trump, previously in charge of this nation’s nuclear arsenal.
The situation on the ground in Ukraine continues to see only small changes, with Russian forces continuing to stage small attacks as Ukrainian defenders publicize equipment captures behind Russia’s frontlines. Russian state television continues to be apoplectic in their fury over … the rest of the world existing, for the most part.
The “major” Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine continues, producing minor Russian territorial gains as a “senior U.S. defense official” warns that Russia is still continuing to add to its forces in the region. 42 towns were captured by Russia on Thursday, according to Ukrainian officials.
Despite that, Ukraine’s government sounds the most optimistic of the two.
With the ubiquity of smartphones, the on-the-ground details of Russia’s war against Ukraine have been more closely documented than any war. The footage is omnipresent, even allowing independent observers to make detailed catalogs of destroyed equipment. The movement of Russian troops is being tracked by satellite, as well as by pinging electronic devices they have stolen and taken with them. We can hear individual conversations between Russian soldiers and their families.
After a day filled with mostly rumor and confusion, we finally know a bit more about how the newest of Russia’s major offensives is unfolding. It is a major attack; it is not the sort of highly coordinated and overwhelming campaign that Russia still insists it could pull off but which outside experts now believe is beyond the nation’s command competence. But it is a major threat, and Russia has been able to take some new ground already.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy today publicly announced that Russia’s long-expected Donbas offensive has now begun, with Russia boosting offensive operations throughout eastern Ukraine. What precisely that means is not yet clear; while Russian missile and artillery strikes have escalated in the past few days, the details on Russian ground assaults aren’t yet known.
In a Kyiv interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy again vowed that Ukraine wouldn’t be negotiating away territory in exchange for a Russian end to the war. Zelenskyy dismissed the idea not out of bluster, but for a more fundamental reason: There’s no evidence that Russia would abide by any such agreement.
“I don’t trust the Russian military and Russian leadership.
Russia’s state-owned news agency has now confirmed that the Russian warship Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, has sunk. The heavily damaged ship reportedly sank during an attempt to tow it back to port. Russia is being less forthcoming about the fate of the crew, thought to number over 500, the number claimed to have been successfully evacuated is far less.