How Baby Formula Shortage Turned Into Racist Attack On Immigrants

Elon Musk ... John Durham ... Rand Paul
UNITED STATES - NOVEMBER 05: Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Fla., prepares for an interview in the U.S. Capitol ahead of a possible House vote on the Build Back Better Act and the infrastructure bill on Friday, November 5, 2021... UNITED STATES - NOVEMBER 05: Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Fla., prepares for an interview in the U.S. Capitol ahead of a possible House vote on the Build Back Better Act and the infrastructure bill on Friday, November 5, 2021. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images) MORE LESS
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A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Just Add Water And Presto!

Just like that you can turn the baby formula shortage into a … racist attack on immigrants?

It played out quickly Thursday. The “credit” for the bank shot from baby formula shortage to xenophobic attack on immigrants to blaming Biden for it all appears to belong to Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL). Well played, well played.

But she wasn’t alone.

  • The NYPost was ON IT: “Border detention center looks stocked with baby formula despite shortage”
  • It gets 4 Pinocchios from the WaPo factchecker.

Louisiana Ditches Proposal To Charge Women Who Get Abortions With Murder

Even staunch anti-abortion groups like Louisiana Right to Life, the Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the National Right to Life Committee opposed the measure.

Hate To See This Guy Flail

TPM: “RonJon Distances Self From Own Anti-Abortion Position”

Josh and Kate Contemplate A Post-Roe World

Don’t miss the latest episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast.

Elon Musk Toys With Twitter

Coverage Fail

The tropes of American campaign and election coverage were bad enough before one of the major U.S. political parties became a safe haven for revanchist neo-fascist insurrectionists:

The Long Tail Of Trump Scandal

A new investigative front has opened on the Trump White House’s handling of classified materials and presidential records that ended up at Mar-A-Lago post-presidency.

New Wrinkle In Durham’s Bogus Prosecution

Trump-era Special Counsel John Durham is kicking open a new can of worms around Justice Department policy on journalists ahead of next week’s trial of DC lawyer Michael Sussmann:

Russia Pulls Back From Kharkiv

After focusing much of its firepower on Ukraine’s second-largest city in the initial stages of the invasion, Russia is now withdrawing troops from around Kharkiv, which is only about 30 miles from the Russian border.

Must Read

WaPo: “For Palestinian journalists, a colleague’s death hits close to home”

ICYMI

The NYT’s David A. Fahrenthold talks about his latest story on a UN financial scandal.

But … It’s The Harvard Of The South?

WaPo: “Duke student’s graduation speech mirrors some language in Harvard address”

Rand Paul Does The Usual Rand Pauling

The junior senator from Kentucky singlehandedly held up the $40 billion Ukrainian aid bill, forcing a series of procedural steps that will slow but not ultimately block passage in the Senate.

Off The Charts

A Great Plains haboob stirred up by 100+ mph thunderstorm winds raced across the Upper Midwest Thursday:

Where yesterday’s event fits in:

Feeling Apocalyptic

My bedtime reading is David Wallace-Wells’ ‘The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming“:

Many perceive global warming as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries. In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades. Which means we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on climate than in all the centuries–all the millennia–that came before.

Feeling Small

IN SPACE – MAY 12: In this handout photo provided by NASA, The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration has created a single image (top frame) of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short, by combining images extracted from the EHT observations.  The main image was produced by averaging together thousands of images created using different computational methods all of which accurately fit the EHT data. This averaged image retains features more commonly seen in the varied images, and suppresses features that appear infrequently.  The images can also be clustered into four groups based on similar features. An averaged, representative image for each of the four clusters is shown in the bottom row. Three of the clusters show a ring structure but, with differently distributed brightness around the ring. The fourth cluster contains images that also fit the data but do not appear ring-like.   The bar graphs show the relative number of images belonging to each cluster. Thousands of images fell into each of the first three clusters, while the fourth and smallest cluster contains only hundreds of images. The heights of the bars indicate the relative “weights,” or contributions, of each cluster to the averaged image at top.  In addition to other facilities, the EHT network of radio observatories that made this image possible includes the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) in the Atacama Desert in Chile, co-owned and co-operated by ESO is a partner on behalf of its member states in Europe. (Photo by NASA Via Getty Images)

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