We’re trying for a strong close to week one of our annual TPM membership drive. I’ve spoken to a number of you who had been planning on signing up or were on the fence and have now taken the plunge during this drive. I totally get this. I have places I want to subscribe to or sign up for and I’ve been meaning to do it for months and still somehow haven’t. So if this is you, please stop what you’re doing for just a minute, like right now. Actually take out your wallet and click this link and sign up. Like this moment. Three minutes later you’ll be back to whatever you were doing before. But please, if this is you, just do it this moment. You’ll feel good about it and, really, Prime and Prime AF, are pretty awesome.

One of the continuing ironies of the current political moment is the extent to which it is now the norm for Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), despite her name, to break with her party on a number of issues, especially to critique Trumpian lines of thinking from the far-right faction.

Today she went after Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), criticizing the QAnon congresswoman for giving fresh air to the stale Kremlin talking points about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Catch up on the latest news on Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court with my latest installment of Judicial Review.

We’re off to a solid start with our annual TPM membership drive. Thank you to everyone who has become a member so far. If you’re on the fence can you make today the day? Maybe you’ve been thinking you would but just take a moment literally right now, click this link, take our your wallet and the whole thing will just take a couple minutes. It means the world to us. And it really sustains this whole operation. Just take that minute right now. Thank you.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss President Zelensky’s address to Congress and a new push from state legislatures to police culture war issues outside of their jurisdictions.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

I’m scrambling between the Ukraine war, this absurd story of Matt Shea and the Ukrainian “orphans” in Poland and our membership drive (please become a member … it’s important!!!). But for a couple days I’ve been meaning to do a short post on the signs that COVID is coming back. Yep, I don’t mean to bum you out. But yeah. Not necessarily another wave. But a rise off the levels we’ve been relieved to have in recent weeks. One sign of this are increasing signals from wastewater analysis around country. They’ve started tipping higher in most of the country. (If you’re not familiar with this it’s what it sounds like: analysis of sewage for COVID levels. A bit icky, yes, but also a fascinating and incredibly important tool since it’s not dependent on testing levels or behavior or symptoms. It’s a critical early warning system.) Numbers have also been going up rapidly in Europe, which is often a precursor for rises in the United States.

I think we’ll have more on this today. But because I was hunting around on this last night I wanted to give you a quick update because it’s a pretty insane story, intersects with a story we’ve been following on and off for years and is directly tied to the war in Ukraine.

Back about four years ago a state legislator from Washington State got in trouble for writing a plan for the mass killing of liberals in order to usher in a theocracy in the United States. He got booted out of Washington electoral politics for being involved with “domestic terrorism.” So, kind of a problem. Here’s one of our many pieces on disgraced former Rep. Matt Shea from 2018. So this week he showed up in Poland with a few dozen alleged orphans from the besieged city of Mariupol in Ukraine which he planned to bring to America to give away for adoption to American families.

Critics agree — the American installment of Canada’s trucker “Freedom Convoy” protests have been, as is often the case on Netflix, a sad adaptation of the original foreign series.

We’re trying to close strong on day two of our annual membership drive. Can you join us? Not just become a member, which we certainly hope you do, but a full member of the two. TPM’s a communal enterprise. Our operation is based on a give and take between journalists and readers, a symbiotic flow of information. So we want you all in. And to help us with that, we really need folks to join. It’s really important. We need more of you. Just click right here. And thank you in advance.

There are a few points I disagree with here. And I think — albeit perhaps indirectly — Joe Biden is very much part of these negotiations, for just the reason TPM Reader PT says: What Russia needs most is relief from sanctions and those are not under the Ukrainian government’s control. There is also a lot of broken glass that won’t be fixed even if all the sanctions were rescinded immediately. Having said all this, if the Ukrainian government said ‘hey we have an agreement that’s good for our country. We need you to drop the sanctions to make it happen,’ I think we’d be hard pressed to say, ‘Sorry, but we’re still too pissed about this.’ And yet the nature of Putin’s government, the depth of its revisionism and more, seems much more menacing than it did a month ago. There’s really no winding back to the clock to December 2021.

Here’s TPM Reader PT

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: The person who’s not involved in the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, and who ought to be, is Joe Biden.

I say this because a big part of what Russia is going to want out of a settlement with Ukraine is the removal of economic sanctions, which is not subject to Ukraine’s control. Ultimately it’s the free world that Russia needs to convince to relax those sanctions. At this point, Joe Biden is the undisputed leader of the free world. Thus it’s Biden that Putin needs to work with on this.