Just between you and me: We’re launching a really critical fundraising drive tomorrow. So please keep an eye out.

Just a quick update on the situation in Ukraine. We appear to be seeing the first probing actions of Ukraine’s long awaited counteroffensive. But two other big things have happened over the last 18 hours which I wanted to note. One is either the collapse or sabotage of a dam in the eastern part of occupied Ukraine, which has caused a vast flood surge through the region. There are competing explanations and accusations over what and how it happened. The other is a news story. The Washington Post is reporting new circumstantial but pretty strong evidence that Ukraine was behind the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines last year.

As evidence mounts that Gov. Ron DeSantis was behind the latest migrant trafficking stunt in Sacramento, Bexar County (San Antonio) Sheriff Javier Salazar is recommending criminal charges in last year’s trafficking of migrants from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard.

It probably goes without saying if you think about it. But it’s worth saying it out loud in any case. Aside from Trump, all of the people running for President in the GOP primary, with the semi-exception of Ron DeSantis, aren’t actually running for President. Normally, long shot entrants at least think they have some chance or they have some plan for career advancement by making a solid showing. But in this race, every candidate is in that category. And not just random mayors or people who’ve been out of politics for years. But senators, big-state governors and more. The thinking seems to be: “I’ll have some name recognition for 2028. And who knows? He might die and then I’ll have a campaign already in place! Why not?”

I mentioned over the weekend that we have another example of migrants being hoodwinked into getting on a plane and then sent somewhere they didn’t know they were going to. Just like when Ron DeSantis did it last year with those folks he sent to Martha’s Vineyard, the aim is to “own the libs” and use vulnerable people for a partisan political stunt. I didn’t want to get ahead of the facts yesterday. But as one might have expected we now have the first indications it was DeSantis behind it again.

You’ve probably heard about The Atlantic article which has painted a devastating picture of network CEO Chris Licht and the state of the network on his watch. (CNN has had some time slots where Newsmax has managed to beat it of late.) There are several moving parts to this story. After what turned out to be a woefully mismanaged acquisition by AT&T, CNN and its parent Time Warner were picked up cheap by Discovery, a cable news heavyweight known for producing cheap shows with solid viewership. That was a bad sign for CNN and HBO — both in their in own spheres premium properties. The results for CNN, judged in viewership, have been abysmal. But for all the grief Licht is getting, this is fundamentally a failure not of execution but of strategy.

Put simply, the theory behind the current revamp of CNN is the network got “too liberal” and gave on-air hosts too much leeway for personal commentary and advocacy. But did CNN get “too liberal”? Or did the national political environment become so polarized and so knocked off the kilter of democratic norms that news coverage forced some level of confrontational stance? We’re back to the old problem of whether to prioritize “balance” or “accuracy.” Which of those two is more important shapes everything about how you approach journalism.

We have another mystery on our hands. Someone bused more than a dozen migrants from El Paso into New Mexico and then put them on a private jet which flew them to Sacramento. They were then dropped off in front of a Catholic church with no pre-arrangement or warning. Like the the DeSantis/Martha’s Vineyard stunt last year the migrants were apparently lured or tricked into getting on the plane. California authorities are now trying to get to the bottom of who was behind it.

“The stage was decorated with a swastika and a picture of Hitler. The speakers started ranting. There were only 15 of us, but we went into action. We … threw some of them out the windows … Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out. We chased them and beat them up … We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults.”

— Meyer Lansky, gangster, remembering breaking up meetings of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund in Yorkville on New York’s Upper East Side in the 1930s.

This morning I was reading this Slate article by Rick Hasen and Dahlia Lithwick on newly released papers which seem to show the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist held on to his segregationist views well into his time as chief justice. (For background, as a SCOTUS clerk in 1952, Rehnquist wrote a memo explicitly defending the constitutionality of Plessy v Ferguson and the segregationist system that was built up on it. He later played a key role in organized voter suppression efforts in Arizona in the 1960s.) Hasen and Lithwick tie Rehnquist to the current Court majority’s view that the 14th Amendment is essentially a warrant for color blindness in the law.

The 14th Amendment particularly has implications which were very much by design that go beyond the fate of post-war ex-slaves. It essentially creates a thing we now take for granted, the status of citizen of the United States. It also has implications beyond things the architects of the amendment could have conceived of. But there are certainly concrete things that are totally clear about it and the other Civil War amendments if you spend even some basic time understanding why they were created, what they mean and what they meant to accomplish. Reading Hasen’s and Lithwick’s piece was helpful, reminding me of this by showing the bust-up collision between the actual Civil War amendments and the theoretical latticework that gets promoted in Federalist Society world and in some ways (albeit often in a much more benign form) in law schools generally. In the latter case, there’s nothing wrong with theory. It has its place. It’s necessary if your aim is not simply historical understanding of the amendments but some level of application to present-day realities.

Today Marjorie Taylor Greene announced on Twitter that at her request Speaker Kevin McCarthy is providing unrestricted access to Jan. 6 surveillance tapes to discredited journalist John Solomon, a Jan. 6 conspiracy theorist named Julie Kelly and another unnamed party.