Month: September 2022

Women and younger voters can prove pundits wrong in November

Will the women who mobilized in reaction to Trump’s election do it again this November? Could it be that a second wave of reserves that didn’t mobilize in 2017 will now in reaction to the Supreme Court’s overturning Roe v. Wade in June?

Michael Tomasky offers a sampling of anecdotes to suggest they might (New Republic):

Item: News5 Cleveland reported in late August that Ohio has seen some 90,000 new registrants since the Dobbs decision. That tracks with a New York Times finding that female voter registrations are up 6.4 percent in the state since Justice Samuel Alito’s draft decision in Dobbs leaked to Politico.

Item: KDKA Pittsburgh reported recently that the voter registration gender gap in Pennsylvania is 12 points, three times the normal gap. More than 60 percent of these registrants are under 25.

Item: Over the weekend, the Houston Chronicle reported that registration is “surging” in Texas among young voters. “It’s not that we’re not seeing a surge from women but that in Texas, we’re somewhat uniquely also seeing a surge from men, particularly younger, more progressive men, who are matching the surge from women,” said Tom Bonier, the CEO of TargetSmart, which works with Democratic candidates.

But contemplating the overwhelming vote to derail efforts to strip abortion from the constitution in Kansas in August, Tomasky wonders if the same independent and Republican women who would vote to protect their abortion rights would vote for Democrats. Of course, most new registrants were not part of the electorate in Kansas. The youngest were not able to vote in 2016 or even in 2020. Registration trends suggest not just motivation but perhaps mobilization.

Suicidality, preeclampsia, sepsis, hemorrhage, ectopic pregnancy, cancer that requires chemotherapy, lupus that requires methotrexate, placental abruption, heart failure—should we keep going?

@TwitterSafety has left this up for nearly 12 hours. Disinformation like this kills. pic.twitter.com/c2TRkNq8RY

— Hayley McMahon, MSPH, CPH (@McMisoprostol) September 13, 2022

To his colleagues’ dismay, Sen. Lindsey Graham made sure on Tuesday to remind women his is the party of forcing rape victims to bear their raspists’ children.

Democrats are making sure voters know Republicans were behind stripping women of their reproductive autonomy and which of their candidates supported both Dobbs and the raft of new state legislation banning abortion. Horror stories of women forced to flee their red states to terminate nonviable pregnancies or forced to risk death before treatment have forced some Republican candidates to strip pro-abortion references from their websites:

What does all this mean? Well, nobody wants to speak too confidently about the Democrats’ chances in November. We all know that the incumbent party tends to lose 25 or so seats in a first-term midterm election. And there’s still inflation to worry about, though in recent weeks it’s seemed to be receding, with gas prices well down from their midsummer highs. And there’s MAGA rage, which only seems to intensify as Donald Trump looks guiltier and guiltier.

But here’s what could happen: The voter rolls in swing states could swell by, oh, 5 percent, let’s say, and that increase would consist almost entirely of voters pissed off by Dobbs. In Ohio, 5 percent would equal about 388,000 new voters. In Pennsylvania, it would mean 436,000. In Florida, 714,000. Almost all of them pro-choice. And since they bothered to register—a lot of them for the first time, presumably—it seems likely that they’ll bother to vote.

And not for extremist lunatics.

Hey, @LindseyGrahamSC… pic.twitter.com/dGf1IKaKvn

— George Hahn (@georgehahn) September 13, 2022

“They want ‘Handmaid’s Tale’. They’re going for Gilead here!” said George Hahn in an angry video tweet on Tuesday. LGBTQ rights are next to go if the GOP wins this fall. Still, he “in my life” will vote Republican to protect their taxes rather than family members and friends. “Are you crazy? What is wrong with you?!”

Tomasky wants to believe sane America will come out to vote in numbers greater than the MAGA ragers and QAnon murderers.

Republicans used to call themselves the party of normal Americans. They still pretend to be so. But they are not. They are the party of extremist violence. They are the party of authoritarianism. They are the party of the Big Lie. And they are the party of forcing a 12-year-old girl who was raped to deliver that baby and the party of taking away a core right that women have had for a half-century. They will pay a price for this. The army of real normal Americans is coming for them.

Let’s hope.

My one-person effort to grow Democratic Party infrastructure in places thought too infertile for Democrats is fueled in part by women who got off their couches after November 2016 to engage in party politics for the first time in their lives. Novices stepping up to run county committees in rural red places: in Virginia, in Montana, in Indiana. I’ve distributed my modest “cookbook” (below) since 2016 and thought maybe it was time to pass it on. But after Dobbs, I expect another wave of women in under-resourced counties will need help for fighting back.

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The right’s primary ethos

This is the right’s main message guru/grifter who has successfully pushed the idea of torturing trans kids and removing Black history from American education. He’s a nasty piece of work:

Chris Rufo believes that we do not often enough tell underage girls that they are ugly pic.twitter.com/CdiANgOHdF

— Madeline Peltz (@peltzmadeline) September 13, 2022

Tucker says one of our big problems is hatred of beauty and elevation of the ugly and grotesque.

Uhm. Ok.

A very old tactic

They used to burn witches, didn’t they? Well, now they are sacrificing women for their anti-abortion zealots in a new way:

In Wisconsin, a group of doctors and lawyers is trying to come up with guidelines on how to comply with a newly revived 173-year-old law that prohibits abortion except to save the life of a pregnant woman. They face the daunting task of defining all the emergencies and conditions that might result in a pregnant woman’s death, and the fact that doctors could be punished with six years in prison if a prosecutor disagrees that abortion was necessary.

A similar task force at an Arizona hospital recommends having a lawyer on call to help doctors determine whether a woman’s condition threatens her life enough to justify an abortion. Already, the hospital has added questions to its electronic medical forms so they can be used to argue that patients who had abortions would have died without them.

And in Texas, oncologists say they now wait for pregnant women with cancer to get sicker before they treat them, because the standard of care would be to abort the fetus rather than allow treatments that damage it, but a state law allows abortion only “at risk of death.” Some hospitals have established committees to evaluate whether a pregnancy complication is severe enough to justify an abortion.

Two months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to abortion, the medical consequences extend far beyond abortion clinics and women seeking to end unwanted pregnancies. Doctors who never thought of themselves as “abortionists,” to use the language of the court’s decision, say the criminalization of abortion is changing how they treat women who arrive in emergency rooms and on labor and delivery floors with wanted but complicated pregnancies.

During the 50 years of Roe, abortion became the standard of care in many medical situations. Now, laws ban it or make it unavailable in about half the states, usually with exceptions only for rape and incest or to save the life of the pregnant woman. While a few states have attempted to specify conditions that qualify, the laws are generally vague and have failed to account for every possibility. With lawmakers attempting to regulate medical procedures, medical providers say they have to think like lawyers.

“A lot of us go into emergency medicine because of the imperative to take care of every patient — the person without housing and a C.E.O. — and we’re really proud of that ethical obligation to say, ‘Here’s the patient in front of me and I’m going to do everything I can for them,’” said Dr. Alison Haddock, an emergency physician in Houston and chair of the board of the American College of Emergency Physicians. Now, she said, “We’re no longer basing our judgment on the clinical needs of the woman, we’re basing it on what we understand the legal situation to be.”

Physicians would more typically talk to hospital lawyers about guardianship when caring for elderly or psychiatric patients, Dr. Haddock said. Now, when patients arrive with ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages or hemorrhaging — all situations where abortion has been established as standard care — the questions for the lawyers are more pressing: “Do we wait until the fetus is definitely dead, or is mostly dead good enough?” she asked. “If they’re telling us to wait for the condition to be fully emergent, how much bleeding is too much?”

“Having to consult a lawyer in an emergent situation is a whole new ballgame,” she said.

This 15 week ban that Lindsey Graham is proposing would only make this happen in all 50 states instead of just those with far right legislatures and courts.

The title of Lindsey Graham’s abortion ban — the “Protecting Pain-Capable Unborn Children from Late-Term Abortions Act” — is a messaging mishmash, even as the overall message (ban all abortions) is evident from the circumstances.

On the one hand, the term “late-term abortion,” as opposed to the right-wing preferred “partial birth abortion,” is an attempt to mainstream it. But 15 weeks isn’t “late term” in any scenario.

The “pain-capable” part is clearly aimed at the base; for years they’ve linked abortion bans to claims that the fetus experiences pain.

I think also the Senate GOP is nervous about the base, because the base is mad that even some Senate GOPers are considering the Respect for Marriage Act. Both bills have to be viewed together to understand dynamics here.

But the bottom line here is that the GOP wants a national abortion ban, knows it needs to propose one to satisfy the base, knows it is deeply unpopular with everyone else, and is going to mishmash message it in hope of confusing people.

Don’t be confused. And also:

In general, treat stories that claim GOP is tempering its extremism (say, on abortion or LGBTQ rights) for the midterms with great skepticism.

— Sarah Posner (@sarahposner) September 13, 2022

Regarding the nervousness:

Previously:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/christian-right-same-sex-marriage-senate-roe

Originally tweeted by Sarah Posner (@sarahposner) on September 13, 2022.

Peter Navarro slashes and burns

Talk about a tell-all. Yikes:

Donald Trump’s top trade adviser—tariff-loving right-wing economist Peter Navarro—has harsh words for many of his former White House colleagues, writing in his upcoming MAGA loyalist memoir that three of Trump’s chiefs of staff were among the worst top White House staffers in history and calling Trump’s agency leaders a “Cabinet of Clowns.”

“You should normally expect a murderer’s row of highly polished media killers in the cabinet secretary pool,” Navarro writes, according to an excerpt exclusively obtained by The Daily Beast. “Regrettably, this was just not so in Trump Land.”

“Ever the media hound, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin got the most airtime,” Navarro continues. “It was never a good thing.”

Navarro says Mnuchin ”spoke like a robot”—“often with an uncomfortable nervous tic around the corners of his mouth”—and asserts that Trump’s Treasury Secretary was an “uncomfortable cross between cringeworthy and a Wall Street hack.”

Navarro, who was indicted for refusing to cooperate with the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, has never been shy when it comes to taking swipes, both within Trumpworld and at those aligned against the former president. Since leaving the White House, Navarro has found a MAGA perch alongside Steve Bannon, frequently appearing on Bannon’s War Room podcast to call out the dreaded “RINOs” and Trumpworld “grifters.”

Now Navarro is releasing a new book, Taking Back Trump’s America, chock-full of score-settling and name-calling.

In the chapter obtained by The Daily Beast, Navarro calls out the “always punctilious” former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, as well as FDA Commissioner Steve Hahn, Centers for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield, and National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins.

Navarro said Hahn, Redfield, and Collins “would each throw POTUS under the bus even faster than Azar—as would other key officials like the insufferably pompous [former assistant secretary for Health] Brett Giroir and of course, the king of stepping on White House messaging, Saint Fauci,” referring to National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci.

But Navarro reserves some of his most severe criticism for Trump’s “Motley Crue of Chiefs.”

“The first chief Reince Priebus was just the wrong, small, and inexperienced man for a very big job,” Navarro writes.

He then lays into Trump’s second chief of staff, John Kelly. “From a media perspective, this was like recruiting a trucker to drive a Formula One car,” Navarro says. “Or maybe like using a chainsaw for open heart surgery.”

Navarro goes on to say Kelly was “brutally and simply incapable of messaging anything to the press.”

He then takes aim at Mick Mulvaney, Kelly’s successor. Navarro spends time noting that Trump never officially gave Mulvaney the full title, always appending “acting” to his chief of staff position as a “little dig that the Boss liked to stick into Mick so he never got comfortable in the job.”

“The more Mick begged, the more permanent his ‘acting chief’ status would become,” Navarro continues.

Navarro then claims—without a shred of self-reflection—that the problem with Mulvaney from a media messaging standpoint was that ”God blessed this smug Mick with an overabundance of both arrogance and hubris.”

Navarro specifically points to Mulvaney’s October 2019 press conference when he tried to move the media past Trump’s alleged quid pro quo with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“Get over it,” Mulvaney said during the press conference. “There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy.”

Trump never really did “get over it” himself. The president made Mulvaney issue a statement later that day saying there was “absolutely no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election.” And after the episode, Mulvaney’s days in the White House were numbered.

True to the loyalist version of events that Navarro presents, he never actually spells out what Mulvaney said during that Oct. 17, 2019, press conference. He simply includes a paragraph from “one newspaper” that never mentions Ukraine or Trump’s solicitation of an investigation into his chief political rival, Joe Biden.

Either way, Navarro writes, ”that single press conference was the beginning of the end for Mulvaney even as it underscored yet again the inability of the White House to dominate the news cycle.”

Responding to the claims made by Navarro’s book, Mulvaney went on the attack.

“Peter Navarro used an imaginary friend to justify many of his economic hypotheses,” Mulvaney told The Daily Beast, referring to a character that appeared in one of Navarro’s old books as his “imaginary” friend. “No one, including Donald Trump, takes him as a serious commentator on, well, anything.”

A Trump spokesperson didn’t return The Daily Beast’s request regarding that statement.

But Navarro fired back, telling The Daily Beast: “Read Taking Back Trump’s America for the truth about this ungrateful idiot and you decide.”

“Mulvaney never should’ve been allowed in the Trump White House much less been designated chief of staff,” he continued. “He was opposed to much of what Trump stands for. He is now cashing in on CBS for his Trump celebrity and sticking knives in Trump’s back. It’s all so shameful.”

Informed of Navarro’s comments, Mulvaney got the last word.

“The only people who take Peter seriously are those who read his book,” he told The Daily Beast. “And no one read his book.”

While it’s clear there’s no love lost between Navarro and Mulvaney, Navarro’s roughest—if not most generic—criticism is reserved for Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

Navarro says Meadows earned the “distinction” of being named “the worst chief of staff in history” by the leading scholar on that subject, Chris Whipple.

“To this,” Navarro says of that ranking, “I will again say my three favorite words I learned from the Washington Swamp: ‘I don’t disagree.’”

Still, Navarro says the title of worst chief of staff is “probably more of a dead heat between Meadows, Mulvaney, and Kelly.”

“Note to Reince,” Navarro continues, “I think you would have turned out to be the best of the bunch if the Boss had only given you a bit more time to prove yourself.”

Meadows declined to comment. A Mnuchin spokesperson and Kelly didn’t return The Daily Beast’s request, and Azar and Priebus couldn’t be reached for comment.

This is a man who wants to burn every bridge he has. It would be refreshing if his complaints weren’t all so mindless and self-serving. I confess that I am enjoying the circular firing squad though.

The economy, that is.

The U.S. economy is in a strange place right now. Job growth is slowing, but demand for workers is strong. Inflation is high (but not as high as last spring). Consumers are spending more in some areas, but cutting back in others. Job openings are high but falling, while layoffs are low and … well, it depends what indicator you watch.

This is one snapshot of where the economy stands, based on an analysis of how various indicators compare with their historical levels and whether they’ve been getting better or worse in recent months.

There is no universally accepted definition of a “good” number of jobs or rate of wage growth, which means the exact placement of the various measures is somewhat subjective. Still, the patterns are revealing: The indicators are concentrated in the lower right-hand quadrant, meaning most of the economy is doing well, but slowing down.

Even in the best of times, it can be hard to get a handle on what’s happening in an economy with 150 million workers and $20 trillion worth of annual output. And these are far from the best of times. The pandemic and its ripple effects are continuing to disrupt global supply chains and keeping millions of Americans out of work. The war in Ukraine has pushed up gas and food prices, and added a new source of uncertainty. The Federal Reserve is trying to beat back the fastest inflation in decades — and threatening to cause a recession in the process.

By one common definition, the United States is already in a recession, because gross domestic product has declined for two consecutive quarters. Most economists consider that definition too simplistic, and prefer to look at a broader array of indicators across a variety of categories. They also say that to understand how the economy is doing, it is important to consider both levels and rates of change. It matters, for example, not only whether unemployment is low or high, but also whether it is rising or falling.

It also helps to consider the latest data in historical context. The graphics below show how this economic moment compares with recessions of the past 40 years, using the end of the second quarter as a benchmark. In most cases, the latest numbers don’t look much like the recessions of the past, although many show signs of a slowdown.

This is all very weird and I don’t think anyone knows exactly which way things are going to go. The Fed is pushing the the country into recession with its interest rate hikes in order to tame inflation so if I had to guess, that’s probably where it’s headed. But so far, the economy is still going in every direction at once so who knows?

It turns out that when the world economy is turned upside down by a global crisis weird things happen and it takes a while for things to go back to normal. Who could have guessed?

I feel sorry for the normal people down there…

This is nuts:

A decidedly dangerous normalization of lunacy took the form of a name on a sign-up sheet for poll watchers at a meeting of the Sarasota County Republicans late last week.

Michael Flynn.

Flynn is nationally known as a retired general who has championed the Big Lie about the 2020 election, at one point urging military action to overturn it. He is also known for having been convicted of lying to the FBI while he was briefly President Trump’s national security advisor and for having subsequently received a presidential pardon. He has ascribed to various ”deep state” conspiracy theories.

On Thursday evening, Flynn was one of several dozen new members of the local Republican executive committee elected by voice vote at the Morgan Family Community Center in Northport, Florida.

As if that were not scary enough, they also elected James Hoel, a local leader of the Proud Boys.

Hoel and fellow Proud Boy Nicholas Radovich were active in the Aug. 23 Sarasota County School Board election that saw a longstanding 3-2 liberal majority become a 4-1 conspiracy minority. Radovich showed up at the victory party in a Proud Boys hat and T-shirt and flashed a white power sign during a group picture. The one re-elected incumbent conservative, Bridget Ziegler, subsequently denounced the Proud Boys as a “menace.”

Ziegler was present at the election of the new Republican executive committee members, but neither she nor anybody else was heard to voice an objection to a supposed menace being among them.

“It was not discussed at all,” local Republican activist Conni Brunni told The Daily Beast after the meeting. “They were all sworn in.”

Brunni described the atmosphere at the meeting as “so awesome.”

“The energy in that room was completely electric,” she said.

The county GOP leadership apparently did not want to risk a furor such as the one that followed the white power sign flashed in the giddy group photo at last month’s school board victory party.

“They wouldn’t let us take a picture,” Brunni reported.

But several people at the meeting posed for photos with Flynn that were subsequently posted on the Facebook page for Sarasota Watchdogs, which is associated with Hoel and the Proud Boys.

“Congratulations to all the new Sarasota Republican Executive Club members!” the Sarasota Watchdog page said. “This is local action at its best! For the first time in a long time, families are involved and excited! Please message us for an application to get involved at the October meeting! Fighting for our freedoms in Florida…we will hold the line! Prayers and love to each of the 50 plus new members.”

I’d certainly feel comfortable voting in a place that’s being “watched” by Proud Boys. I mean, why not? They’re just patriotic … terrorists. It’s fine. This is all fine.

Zelensky helps Russia advance to the rear

Ukraine’s counteroffensive involved planning advice from American and British intelligence officials, the New York Times explains this morning based on multiple interviews, some of them anonymous because of the security of the military planning.

President Volodymyr Zelensky hoped to demonstrate his forces’ ability to push back Russian forces in the south and to reclaim Kherson. But as planning advanced, his generals and American advisers believed the plan too costly. They sought advice from the Americans and British. Any move would have to come before the first snows gave Russia more economic leverage via its energy supplies:

One critical moment this summer came during a war game with U.S. and Ukrainian officials aimed at testing the success of a broad offensive across the south. The exercise, reported earlier by CNN, suggested such an offensive would fail. Armed with the American skepticism, Ukrainian military officials went back to Mr. Zelensky.

“We did do some modeling and some tabletop exercises,” Colin Kahl, the Pentagon’s policy chief, said in a telephone interview. “That set of exercises suggested that certain avenues for a counteroffensive were likely to be more successful than others. We provided that advice, and then the Ukrainians internalized that and made their own decision.”

The stakes were huge. Ukraine needed to demonstrate that this was not going to become just another frozen conflict, and that it could retake territory, for the morale of its people and to shore up support of the West.

Throughout August, at the behest of Ukrainians, U.S. officials stepped up feeds of intelligence about the position of Russian forces, highlighting weaknesses in the Russian lines. The intelligence also indicated that Moscow would struggle to quickly reinforce its troops in northeast Ukraine or move troops from the south, even if it detected Ukrainian preparations for the counteroffensive.

NEW: #Ukraine has inflicted a major operational defeat on #Russia, recapturing almost all of #Kharkiv Oblast in a rapid counter-offensive. Ukraine has turned the tide in its favor, but the current counter-offensive will not end the war. /1

Our latest: https://t.co/zAXz3Q6urT pic.twitter.com/ZzGRXIvIAG

— Institute for the Study of War (@TheStudyofWar) September 12, 2022

Key to success was U.S. armaments required for the plan:

Ukraine, a former Soviet republic that had used older Soviet weapons, exhausted most of its own ammunition. Learning how to use new weapons systems in the middle of the war is difficult. But so far the risky move has proved successful. More than 800,000 rounds of 155-millimeter artillery shells, for instance, have been sent to Kyiv, helping fuel its current offensives. The United States alone has committed more than $14.5 billion in military aid since the war started in February.

Before the counteroffensive, Ukraine’s armed forces sent the United States a detailed list of weapons they needed to make the plan successful, according to the Ukrainian officer.

Specific weapons, like the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, are having an outsize effect on the battlefield. The satellite-guided rockets fired by these launch vehicles, called GMLRS, each contain a warhead with 200 pounds of explosives and have been used in recent weeks by Ukrainian forces to destroy more than 400 Russian arms depots, command posts and other targets, American officials said.

Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assessed that deploying these systems — Ukraininans needed time to train with them — mean Russia is “having great difficulty resupplying their forces and replacing their combat losses.”

Russians have crumbled before advancing Ukrainian forces since Friday.

The Washington Post Editorial Board writes:

What unfolded on the battlefield of Kharkiv oblast in recent days was a remarkable turning point in Ukraine’s desperate battle to resist Russia’s invasion. A more agile force chased a lumbering army into retreat. The war is not over by any means, but the counteroffensive in Kharkiv has exposed anew Russian President Vladimir Putin’s catastrophic miscalculations that Ukraine would collapse, that it would surrender, that it would be steamrolled by Russia’s massive armor. Not so.

Russia apparently figured the next battle would be for Kherson, to the south, and redeployed forces in that direction, only to be surprised when Ukraine struck to the north in Kharkiv. In a matter of days, Ukrainian forces have taken control of almost all of Kharkiv oblast, rolling back months of Russian occupation and advances. The scenes described by Post correspondents include Russian soldiers dropping their rifles and fleeing on stolen bicycles, disguised as locals, abandoning armor and uniforms.

But “one counteroffensive does not make a victory,” both the Post and other observers remind. It’s not anywhere near over. What Vladimir Putin cannot take, he will break, someone yesterday commented.

Still, a rout by any other name….

Ukraine’s “tractor troops” are busily repurposing captured/abandoned Russian armor.

https://youtu.be/aT6PGkgZ2wI

Watching Russians fleeing for their lives (above; and likely losing them) is not funny as suggested by the music attached to the video. But the video suggests panic in retreat. Good.

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As fellow Republicans duck and cover, Graham doubles down

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has lost that loving feeling. With Graham’s liege lord, Donald Trump, both out of office and the D.C. spotlight, as well as on legal hard times that threaten actual hard time, Graham must miss that reflected orange glow. He needs to grab back a little press attention.

Other Republicans are sheltering from fallout from the Dobbs decision cancelling Roe v. Wade and abortion access. (Remember Republican howls about cancel culture?) Voter backlash against an abortion ban in Kansas this summer put them on notice that even in red states opposing abortion rights could be a political job-killer. Voter registration among women is surging in battleground states.

Meanwhile, Graham is leaning into banning abortion (Forbes):

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is set to unveil a new bill Tuesday that aims to restrict abortion access nationwide, a politically risky move that comes as the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and a spate of near-total abortion bans in several Republican-controlled states appear to have galvanized Democratic voters ahead of the November midterms.

In an email sent out to reporters, Graham’s office said he will hold a press conference at the U.S. Capitol with anti-abortion leaders to announce the “Protecting Pain-Capable Unborn Children from Late-Term Abortions Act.”

According to the Washington Post, the bill is expected to propose a 15-week nationwide abortion ban, but its unclear if there will be any exceptions for victims of rape or incest or to save the mother’s life.

NEW: A push by Republicans to pass the most extreme antiabortion measures is faltering in some state legislatures + on Cap Hill, as the GOP is forced to reckon with a growing public backlash on abortion.

w/ @katemshepherd @rachel_roubein @MariannaReports https://t.co/aQ4oTwWnZv

— Caroline Kitchener (@CAKitchener) September 10, 2022

Graham’s proposal is D.O.A. in a Democrat-controlled Senate. Not even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will kill the filibuster to pass anti-abortion measures should he regain control in January after the 2022 elections. President Joe Biden would veto it.

“If Graham’s bill is as advertised, we should be clear that this is actually a blue state abortion ban,” tweeted TPM’s Josh Marshall. “The vast majority of red states already have bans stricter than this one. So the point here is really only to overrule the laws of blue states that protect abortion rights.”

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes called Graham’s proposal “a gift to Democrats.”

Republicans would like to shift the national conversation away from Dobbs and Team Trump’s mounting legal troubles related to Jan. 6 and stolen national security secrets. Maybe it’s just me, but Graham’s proposed legislation is not the way to do it.

Forbes again:

61%. That is the percentage of Americans who want states to guarantee access to abortion, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll last month. The poll also notes that 65% of Americans disapprove of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Yeah. Good luck with that, Lindsey (Political Wire):

Tom Bonier: “In my 28 years analyzing elections, I’ve never seen anything like what’s happened in the past two months in American politics: Women are registering to vote in numbers I’ve never witnessed. I’ve run out of superlatives to describe how different this moment is, especially in light of the cycles of tragedy and eventual resignation of recent years. This is a moment to throw old political assumptions out the window and to consider that Democrats could buck historic trends this cycle…”

“With over two months until Election Day, uncertainty abounds. Election prognostication relies heavily on past precedent. Yet there is no precedent for an election centered around the removal of a constitutional right affirmed a half-century before. Every poll we consume over the closing weeks of this election will rely on a likely voter model for which we have no benchmark.”

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A speech to remember

And I’m sure we will. It’s that good:

Zelensky to Russia, tonight… pic.twitter.com/6Hgot3zKhY

— Christo Grozev (@christogrozev) September 11, 2022

Pretty damned inspiring. And from what I understand, it was done completely off the cuff.

The DOJ is serving many Trumpers with subpoenas

From the NY Times this afternoon:

The Justice Department has issued about 40 subpoenas over the past week seeking information about the actions of former President Donald J. Trump and his associates related to the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, according to people familiar with the situation.

Two top Trump advisers, Boris Epshteyn and Mike Roman, had their phones seized as evidence, those people said.

The department’s actions represent a substantial escalation of a slow-simmer investigation two months before the midterm elections, coinciding with a separate inquiry into Mr. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive documents at his residence in Florida, Mar-a-Lago.

Among those the department has contacted since Wednesday are people who are close to the former president and have played significant roles in his post-White House life.

Those receiving the subpoenas included Dan Scavino, Mr. Trump’s former social media director who rose from working at a Trump-owned golf course to one of his most loyal aides and has remained an adviser since Mr. Trump left office. Stanley Woodward, one of Mr. Scavino’s lawyers, declined to comment.

The Justice Department also executed search warrants to seize electronic devices from people involved in the so-called fake electors effort in swing states, including Mr. Epshteyn, a longtime Trump adviser, and Mr. Roman, a campaign strategist, according to people familiar with the events. Federal agents made the seizures last week, the people said.

Mr. Epshteyn and Mr. Roman did not respond to requests for comment.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

Bernard Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner who promoted baseless claims of voter fraud alongside his friend Rudolph W. Giuliani, was issued a subpoena by prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, his lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, said on Monday. Mr. Parlatore said his client had initially offered to grant an interview voluntarily.

The subpoenas seek information in connection with the plan to submit slates of electors pledged to Mr. Trump from swing states that were won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the 2020 election. Mr. Trump and his allies promoted the idea that competing slates of electors would justify blocking or delaying certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.

In a new line of inquiry, some of the subpoenas also seek information into the activities of the Save America political action committee, the main political fund-raising conduit for Mr. Trump since he left office.

For months, associates of Mr. Trump have received subpoenas related to other aspects of the investigations into his efforts to cling to power. But the fact that the Justice Department is now seeking information related to fund-raising comes as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has raised questions about money Mr. Trump solicited under the premise of fighting election fraud.

The new subpoenas were issued for a wide variety of people around Mr. Trump, from low-level aides to his most senior advisers.

The Justice Department has spent more than a year focused on investigating hundreds of rioters who were on the ground at the Capitol on Jan. 6. But this spring, they started issuing grand jury subpoenas to people like Ali Alexander, a prominent organizer with the pro-Trump Stop the Steal group, who helped plan the march to the Capitol after Mr. Trump gave a speech that day at the Ellipse near the White House.

While it remains unclear how many subpoenas had been issued in that early round, the information they sought was broad.

According to one subpoena obtained by The New York Times, they asked for any records or communications from people who organized, spoke at or provided security for Mr. Trump’s rally at the Ellipse. They also requested information about any members of the executive and legislative branches who may have taken part in planning or executing the rally, or tried to “obstruct, influence, impede or delay” the certification of the presidential election.

By early summer, the grand jury investigation had taken another turn as several subpoenas were issued to state lawmakers and state Republican officials allied with Mr. Trump who took part in a plan to create fake slates of pro-Trump electors in several key swing states that were actually won by Mr. Biden.

Something’s happening with the January 6 investigation and the “Stop the Steal” grift but I don’t think we know exactly what it is. A whole lot of people have been subpoenaed that’s for sure.

If I didn’t know better I’d think it was serious enough (along with the Mar-a-lago stolen docs case) that Trump felt compelled to call a meeting of the five families today:

like an extra scene from Goodfellas or something https://t.co/seOcDRigYN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 12, 2022