This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
When Sandra Day O’Connor stepped down from the U.S. Supreme Court in 2006, she was the last justice to have served as an elected legislator. She previously was a member of the Arizona state Senate and later its majority leader.
Continue reading “Sandra Day O’Connor’s Experience As A Legislator Guided Her Consensus-Building Work On The Supreme Court”This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
As fanfare blares, female sprinters at the starting line suspiciously eye a man in a wig. A hulking, goateed wrestler slams a woman half his size to the mat. An ominous voice-over intones that women’s sports are being “trans-formed.”
Continue reading “Right Wingers’ ‘Anti-Woke’ Alternative To Disney Has Finally Arrived”The woman who was arrested after allegedly attempting to burn down Martin Luther King Jr.’s childhood home appears to have posted about the imprisoned leader of a controversial conspiracy-fueled Black supremacist sect in the hours leading up to the incident.
Continue reading “Suspect In MLK Home Arson Posted About ‘Cult’ Leader”The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals cast Donald Trump as a “significant and imminent threat” to the functioning of his Jan. 6 trial in a unanimous ruling that largely kept the overwhelming GOP frontrunner gagged.
Continue reading “Appeals Court Modifies Trump Gag Order But Keeps Him On A Very Tight Leash”You’ve almost certainly now seen or heard about the congressional hearing with elite university presidents (Harvard, Penn, MIT) coldly arguing the need for context and invoking technical criteria when asked whether it would violate the university’s code of conduct to call for the extermination of Jews. The viral clip is genuinely jarring.
When I watched it I found myself asking not why are these administrators such terrible anti-Semites but how did you three possibly find yourself in this situation giving these answers?
Let’s start with some important stage-setting. First, the clip was posted by Rep. Elise Stefanik, a consistently odious and mendacious weasel who represents a district in Upstate New York. Stefanik is very much that person you’ll see melodramatically huffing and puffing in a congressional hearing demanding yes or no answers to gotcha questions that don’t have yes or no answers. And yet here … well, even for a weasel with gotcha questions, she seemed to have gotten them.
Continue reading “About That University President’s Viral Video”Kate chats with TPM’s Josh Marshall and Hunter Walker, along with journalist and lawyer Luppe Luppen, to discuss Walker and Luppen’s upcoming book about the future of the Democratic party.
Belaboring The Point is now on YouTube! Check out the latest video episode of the podcast here.
Continue reading “Listen To This: Democrats In Fragile Array”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
After a Texas state judge issued a restraining order to allow a woman to get an abortion under one of the state’s very narrow exceptions to its abortion ban, Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) issued a statement threatening health care providers who complied with the court order:
The 31-year-old woman who is 20 weeks pregnant faces a risk of not being able to bear children again if she carries the fetus to term. The fetus was diagnosed with a fatal condition.
It’s a landmark case in the post-Dobbs landscape:
The case is believed to be among the first attempts in the nation to seek a court-approved abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year and allowed states to enact their own abortion restrictions.
The case showcases how exceptions to abortion bans are hard to invoke, difficult to navigate, and by the nature of their ambiguity give very little legal cover to doctors and hospitals.
Paxton exploits those difficulties by threatening to prosecute anyone who helps the plaintiff in the case. Note that chilling last line from his statement: “The TRO will expire long before the statue of limitations for violating Texas’ abortion laws expires.”
A fantastic bit of reporting from Texas Monthly on how the Texas Historic Commission was pressured into removing books about slavery from the gifts shops of two slave plantation historic sites it oversees.
Donald Trump is trying to turn the Classified Information Procedures Act on its head in the Mar-a-Lago case. If U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon lets him do so, it will probably be the first appeal Special Counsel Jack Smith makes in the criminal case. Stay tuned.
Former Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, a key architect of Trump’s 2020 fake electors scheme is reportedly cooperating with investigators in multiple jurisdictions after pleading guilty in the Georgia RICO case.
Add Wisconsin to the list of state attorneys general launching criminal probes of Trump’s 2020 fake electors scheme, according to CNN.
A new challenge to Trump’s eligibility for the presidency under the Disqualification Clause has been filed directly with the Oregon Supreme Court.
A new but expected federal indictment in California charges Hunter Biden with nine counts of tax-related crimes. It is a brutal indictment: graphic, humiliating, and no-holds barred. It alleges that Biden used the monies that he should have paid in taxes to instead lead a profligate lifestyle, and then proceeds to describe that lifestyle in minute and embarrassing detail.
If Biden were not a notorious substance abuser during the key period of his profligacy, it would be hard to have sympathy for him. As it is, it’s painful to read the unsympathetic account of prosecutors.
This story is so effing complicated: addiction, a president’s son who is a target of the previous president under whom the case was initiated, all the political dynamics up to and including the looming bogus impeachment of Biden’s father, roots in the impeachment of the previous president for extorting Ukraine for Biden dirt, the plea deal that blew up leading to this new batch of charges, separate federal gun charges in Delaware … so much here.
To go deeper, Marcy Wheeler is probably following all this closer than anyone else.
Police have reportedly recovered the cellphone video recorded by Florida GOP Chair Christian Ziegler of the sexual encounter with the woman who alleged he raped her after his wife was a no-show for a planned threesome.
Fair warning that the description by the Florida Center for Government Accountability, relying on accounts of the video provided by two anonymous sources, is graphic:
Inside the apartment, Ziegler made a cell phone video of the sex act while she was bent over a piece of furniture in the bedroom, according to sources.
The video of the sex act is brief in duration and the victim can be heard telling Ziegler to climax in her mouth rather than on her new shirt, the sources said.
The new report suggests that the video may actually be more helpful than harmful to Ziegler, who has denied raping the victim and said the sex was consensual, but the nonprofit news outlet hasn’t see the recording itself, so a lot is riding on the accounts provided by the two unnamed sources. I should also note that the alleged victim told police that she had been home on her day off drinking tequila all day, another factor in assessing consent.
A simply horrific incident in North Dakota this week when a sheriff’s deputy was killed while trying to stop a fleeing car driven by Sen. Kevin Cramer’s 42-year-old son, who was going through a mental health crisis:
Ian Cramer, of Bismarck, was traveling over 100 mph and already had two flat tires when he slammed head-on into Deputy Paul Martin’s squad car on Wednesday, pushing it “directly into Martin’s person and launching him for about 100 feet,” according to charging documents. Martin, 53, was killed.
Ian Cramer is expected to make his first court appearance today on charges that include manslaughter, fleeing a police officer, and reckless endangerment.
Cole Brauer is a 29-year-old badass who is the youngest and only female competitor in the ongoing Global Solo Challenge, a nonstop single-handed sailing race circumnavigating the globe. She’s aiming to become the first American woman to race solo around the world.
On top of all that, she’s been cranking out super engaging content since she started the race in Spain on Oct. 29. She rounded the Cape of Good Hope on Dec. 3. When last I checked this morning, she was cruising along at 8 knots in the Indian Ocean about 1,000 miles south of Madagascar.
It’s not all fun and games out there. Earlier this week, she posted footage of herself getting thrown across the cabin and bruising her ribs in particularly rough seas. A week or so ago, the boat broached when the autopilot failed. But there are also days like this.
Enjoy your weekend!
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We have a new development in the case of the Zieglers, the power couple from the Superfreak faction of the Florida GOP. Initial reports noted that Christian Ziegler claimed he had videotaped the sexual encounter which his unnamed accuser later alleged was rape. He said he taped it; deleted it; then finally uploaded it to Google Drive. A kind of odd chain of events. But that was his story. The first reports said police hadn’t been able to find it.
Now they’ve found it.
Continue reading “Folks, They Found the Tape”A man who has filed to run in 2024 for the seat held, up until last Friday, by ex-Rep. George Santos (R-NY) was found guilty of crimes related to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol this week.
Continue reading “Of Course A Guy Running For Santos’ Seat Is A Jan 6-er”If you’ve been watching Donald Trump since he left the White House, there’s nothing new under the sun. Over the course of his presidency Trump was consistently horrible. But he got more experience in how to make good on his desires and impulses over the course of his presidency. That culminated in the events of January 6th 2021. The progression has continued out of office with every new addition of legal peril stoking a more adamant demand for revenge. Unlike in his first term, there are now a stable of Trump organizations and think tanks preparing not so much to put his plans into effect as to devise plans and policies that map on to his inchoate impulses and targets for retribution. What was latent in his rhetoric and threats is now explicit. Staid MSM publications have now dared to use the F-word — “fascist” — to describe his rhetoric.
Continue reading “The Campaign Is Upon Us”
