According to The Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov, Russian forces in Ukraine are about to capture the first Ukrainian city since the capture of Bakhmut last May. According to him it’s a “direct result of acute ammunition shortage — caused by the U.S. Congress withholding further military aid to Ukraine.”

Pretty rapidly Senate Republicans seem to be falling in line behind Donald Trump’s demand to kill the Senate border deal.

Sen. Mike Rounds now says he’d be no on cloture if Sen. Schumer brings the bill up for a vote this week, as he said he would. For clarity, “no on cloture” is Senate-speak for supporting filibustering the bill, which he’s actually been a supporter of. In other words, he’s leaving open the possibility he might vote for it later after amendments. But that likely means after adding poison pills to scare off Democratic votes. At a minimum GOP Senators are saying, okay nice start. Make it more draconian and we’ll talk.

At least for now it seems like Trump’s demand to kill the bill have made it impossible for it to get to 60 votes. Trump’s got supporters of the compromise lining up to announce they’re against it.

Following up on the post below about this Senate border bill. However this goes I suspect it will go quickly. No one in the Senate wants to get caught out on the losing side of it. With that in mind Politico’s Burgess Everett just reported that Sen. John Thune says he’s “still reviewing the text and I think James Lankford worked as hard as he could to get the best deal under the circumstances.”

There was a helpful article in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend illustrating some of the actual situation in Israel-Palestine. It’s a profile of far-right Kahanist politician Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is one of the two ultra-far-right figures keeping Netanyahu in power. Through the article he pines for the return of Donald Trump who would, Ben-Gvir says, finally give Israel the free hand it needs to encourage the “voluntary” departure of the Gazan population and resettle the strip with Israel settlements.

“Instead of giving us his full backing, Biden is busy with giving humanitarian aid and fuel [to Gaza], which goes to Hamas,” Ben-Gvir told the Journal. “If Trump was in power, the U.S. conduct would be completely different.”

I can’t speak to the methodology. But a study just published in JAMA Internal Medicine calculated that from the time the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision (calculated from July 1st, 2022) and the end of 2023 64,000 pregnancies occurred as a result of rape in the 14 states that immediately implemented near total bans on abortion.

Of those 64,000, 5,500 rape-caused pregnancies took place in states with at least nominal exceptions for rape. As we know, those exceptions can be more nominal than real. But if those are excluded the number comes down to just under 59,000.

These are statistical estimates. So there’s probably some room for quibbling at the margins for the exact numbers. But the scale of pregnancies as a result of rape occurring with no recourse to abortion without traveling to another state is staggering.

I’m going to try to write more about it tomorrow, but this executive order from President Biden targeting violent settlers in the West Bank is a bigger deal than most people realize. It’s also more far-reaching than I think most expected. People who follow this stuff I think can see it. But there are so many other more immediate, high octane things going on that it’s a bit hard for the news to break through.

There’s yet more information out now about the now-mostly-dethroned threesomeer power couple of Christian and Bridget Ziegler. And despite her obvious hypocrisy, I’m compelled to note that Bridget comes off somewhat sympathetically in the new material. Christian, well, a bit less so.

The latest update comes to us from the Florida Trident, which broke the original story and has been first on many of the subsequent details.

Though the new text messages don’t say so specifically they certainly suggest, unsurprisingly, that when it came to threesomes, this wasn’t Christian and Bridget’s first rodeo. Or their last. The first assignation appears to have occurred in February 2021. On February 19th, Christian texted Bridget to “come home, stop, and pick up [the woman] to play again and be crazy.” Bridget was up for it but also concerned that, even though the woman was consenting in a formal sense, she might be too troubled and that sharing her as a sexual partner might be taking advantage of her.