It’s hard to say that one mass shooting is worse than the next — other than in the brutal metric of body counts. They’re all different flavors of the same horror. But the news out of this afternoon’s shooting in Buffalo is particularly sobering, shocking, enraging. One of the ten dead was a retired cop working as a security guard at the grocery store. He engaged the shooter and shot him. But it didn’t stop him because the shooter was wearing body armor. That little detail is the one that just stopped me in my tracks.

Police appear certain that the shooting, allegedly by an 18 year old from out of town, was racially motivated, though they haven’t yet discussed the evidence that makes it so clear. Eleven of the thirteen who were shot are Black. Two are white.

You can never understand national politics without understanding the elite mores of Washington, DC. People toss around the word “elite.” But here I mean it in a more specific sense of the mix of journalists, staffers, elected officials, lobbyists, activists and more who have power in and essentially run the political town of Washington, DC. (The actual place where most of the population lives is a different thing.) As I’ve written in various contexts over the years that strata of the city remains heavily wired for the GOP, even though there are lots of people from that world who certainly aren’t conservatives and by definition many are Democrats. I wanted to flag something to you that kind of captures it.

Biden is thinking about and asking the right question: “[Putin] is a very, very, very calculating man. And the problem I worry about now is that he doesn’t have a way out right now, and I’m trying to figure out what we do about that.”

The quote is courtesy of this piece by Friend of TPM Olivier Knox.

According to a new Monmouth Poll, abortion (25%) is now tied with the economy (26%) as the most important issue in the midterms.

Republicans are falling over each other to tell us as clearly as they can that the reversal of Roe is a massive electoral liability. You have longtime “pro-life” diehards running towards TV cameras insisting the whole thing is totally no big deal. In fact, you’ll barely notice anything happened. Lots of states will still have abortion. Abortions will be so easy to get you’ll be getting abortions right and left. Or at least that seems to be what virtually every Republican senator is saying.

Sen. Ron Johnson’s comments on abortion today are revealing. He has the yikes quote: Abortion “might be a little messy for some people” post-Roe. But the real takeaway is his other comment, suggesting that the whole thing is no big deal because women will still be able to cross the border to Illinois and get an abortion there. That tells you very clearly that he doesn’t want to run on opposition to abortion in his state when it really matters — not just a hypothetical about what judges might do in the future or the options for women in deep red states. It’s an issue that can be used to pry that Senate seat right out of his hands.

I got this note from TPM Reader BF and I thought I’d share it with you and also share some thoughts of my own.

It would seem that trail of leaks out of the Roberts Court have not only continued but evolved into a de facto comms policy. Politico published a new story overnight which reports that in fact none of the four Justices who initially sided with Alito have changed their position and that no dissenting opinions have yet been circulated. The details are interesting (if entirely unsurprising). But what’s most notable is the continued leaking. There’s no new draft given to the Politico reporters. But we have a continued flow of information about the internal deliberations.

My post from last night has spurred some very intense responses. I don’t agree with them. In fact, they tend to confirm in my mind the points I was trying to make in my original post. But I thought I would share them with you to give a flavor of them and let you make up your own mind.

Susan Collins called the cops to investigate “defacement of public property” after an unknown person wrote a message in chalk on the sidewalk near her home asking her to codify Roe.