Commentators are alternatively seeing the French election as a victory for Marine Le Pen, who exceeded her 2017 showing by eight percentage points, or as a death knell for right-wing populism. I’d say it was neither. The results reflected the peculiarity of the times and of French politics.

From TPM Reader SC …

I agree with you on “single point of failure”. I spent most of last year hoping you were right that BBB in some form would pass but also fearing it might not. I put on a pretty good false bravado about it passing; I didn’t fully believe it.

What got my goat was this “trifecta” nonsense.The Democrats NEVER had both houses of Congress. They NEVER had more than nominal control. And therefore it is silly to blame “The Democratic Party” as if it was some monolith. It never was.

I would not say it is surprising that we’ve gotten a lot of emails on this “single point of failure” conversation we’re having. After all, it’s really the central issue about what happened in 2021 and why and what that means for the future of the Democratic party and the country. But even with all that, wow … it’s like a flood of emails. And that’s wonderful. I’m going to be publishing more throughout the day. But I’ve developed a feel over the years for the scale and pace of reader emails and this has really struck a nerve. Not a surprise, no. But still stands out.

From TPM Reader DF …

I appreciate the sentiments of RS and PT regarding the impact of BBB’s failure on Dem morale, but it’s not an excuse for the abject failure of the national Democratic Party to not only launch an effective midterm campaign, but defend themselves and their voters. That’s not a result of BBB; it’s a deliberate decision from Biden’s political team to “lower the temperature” that has filtered down to the national party.

Twitter will be acquired by billionaire Elon Musk, and will become a private company.

From the press release:

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” said Mr. Musk. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”

In the wake of his visit to Kyiv, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III declared that America’s objective in arming Ukraine was to weaken Russia. “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree it cannot do the kind of things it has done in invading Ukraine,” he said. One can privately hope for such an outcome without declaring it publicly as America’s goal.

From TPM Reader JS …

I like Biden. I took shit from my friends for being for him in the primary. We wanted someone who could win and he did win, Trump gone. He took control of Congress. He passed an infrastructure bill, ended a 20 year war, tons of jobs, COVID is over, appointed a great judge to the Supreme Court, and has done more than anyone else outside of Ukraine to turn the tables on the expected Russian victory that I see as either an incipient WW3 or at the very least a flashpoint in the new Authoritarian vs. Liberalism Cold War. I don’t care about the fact he isn’t a great orator. I’m dismissive of claims he’s too old. He’s done a great job if you look at it from an Al Gore debate counting on my finger policy debate way, which I do.

The guy’s got a point.

In what is seemingly a move to troll Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and his administration’s latest effort to censor school children from non-existent “prohibited” material for no discernible reason, a Florida man and atheist activist recently asked some of the state’s largest school districts to ban the Bible from public schools, citing age inappropriate content.

From TPM Reader MB …

“all so that moderate Dems. would have something – anything – to show voters that they deserve to hold onto power.”

This illustrates the reasons for paralysis perfectly.  The party is frozen because there are people vying for control who have wildly different calibrations, perceptions and expectations.  The above quote just completely ignores and dismisses the idea that BIF is something everyone in the party, progressives included, should be able to celebrate and claim credit for (so long as they voted for it, but we’ll get to that).  It’s a victory.  It’s going to help people and our economy.  It is a measurable social good and a demonstrable benefit to society.  Sure, it’s not a unicorn…maybe even looks a little more mule than horse…but it’s still a positive thing. 

I recommend reading Josh Kovensky’s run-down on Russian threats to expand the Ukraine War to the breakaway region of Transnistria. To understand just what this is about you have to have a grip on the geography. So I’m going to momentarily focus on that. But I do so to illustrate a larger point about the state of the Ukraine war.

To start off, Transnistria is another of those breakaway separatist statelets which is recognized by Russia and basically no one else. It’s part of Moldova, another former Soviet successor state couched, landlocked, between Ukraine and Romania. Transnistria is a stretched-out slice of land along Moldova’s border to Ukraine, which is to the east. So to situate ourselves in some ways it mirrors the separatist statelets Russia sponsored along the Russian border in eastern Ukraine. Only in this case the separatist statelet in the eastern part of Moldova borders not Russia but Ukraine.