I’m still trying to understand the precise details of this. But Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) just announced that he will introduce a national abortion ban bill in the Senate tomorrow. The news just surfaced a short time ago. And I’m still seeing conflicting reports as to whether his bill is a ban at 15 weeks or 20 weeks. The first report was from TPM alum Alice Ollstein.

Over the last couple weeks we’ve seen write-ups pointing to the possibility or probability that polls in 2022 will underestimate Republican strength just as they did in 2020. Now Nate Cohn has one in The New York Times. Cohn’s analysis is particularly interesting to me since he’s been a fairly consistent skeptic of polls in recent cycles in terms of their ability to accurately gauge the strength of the Trump coalition. G. Elliott Morris had a similar write-up in The Economist last week. Philip Bump kicked the tires on Morris’s claims in the Post. While they break down the numbers, the gist is pretty straight-forward: If you take the polling error from 2016 and 2020 and plug it into our current polls you go from Dems being in a strong position for holding and even expanding their senate majority to more like a 50-50 odds of holding the chamber at all. On the House, a GOP majority and maybe a significant one is basically a given.

A friend of mine pointed out to me this tweet from the head of Leonard Leo’s new “Honest Elections” outfit, the one that was recently given more than a billion dollars. He’s referring to the “independent legislature theory” the right is now trying to push in a case before the Supreme Court.

I have noted a number of times over the last 18 months that we are in the midst of a vast contest and drama which includes not only multiple events unfolding in the United States but abroad as well. I’m usually talking about a broad struggle between civic democracies and nationalist authoritarianism. There’s another dimension of this unfolding now in Ukraine, where there has been a series of rapid battlefield advances by the Ukrainian army, of which you’ve no doubt seen news.

I’m still trying to understand whether we’re likely to see new fronts stabilize after Ukraine reconquered land over the last week, or whether the Ukrainian army has built up such momentum that it can continue this run of battlefield victories, reclaiming large amounts of territory. Regardless, we’re now heading toward winter, which will not only change the nature of the conflict on the ground but bring the energy part of the equation to the fore.

The Michigan Supreme Court has ruled 5-2 that the proposed abortion rights measure will appear on the state’s ballot in November. This is good news for all Democratic candidates in the state, since it will literally put robust abortion rights protections on the ballot in the state. That will almost certainly mean robust protections in the state going forward. It will likely also bring marginal Democratic candidates to victory with the tide of voters who turn out to vote for the amendment.

But it’s a very important development in a more general way.

There’s so much news today besides the impending news out of the United Kingdom that I just wanted to hit big points briefly because there’s no way to delve into all of it at once.

In this week’s podcast, Kate Riga and I talked about the on-going talent purge at CNN. We’ve discussed this before. CNN is under new Republican management and the top shareholder has announced his intention to make the network less “liberal” and more “centrist.” There are both ideological and business drivers, which I discussed last week. But I want to dig into the mechanics, which seem to be getting short shrift in the media discussion. Two rungs down the ladder from the top corporate boss is CNN boss Chris Licht. The game plan may come from on high (i.e., Trump donor billionaire John Malone) but Licht is the implementer. So far Brian Stelter and John Harwood have been axed and the rumor mill is now fixated on Brianna Keilar, a CNN host deemed “too liberal” or too critical of Trump for the new “centrist” CNN.

In response to last night’s Post revelation about documents found at Trump’s villa, I said that the most likely foreign countries whose defense secrets were found there were the United Kingdom, France and Israel. This was guesswork and a process elimination. But a few of you have written to tell me you suspect it’s Iran. I don’t think so. But the information we have to go on is so minuscule that almost anything is possible. Let me explain.

The Washington Post just published a story with two notable details. One is merely atmospheric. Some of the documents recovered from Trump’s Florida villa were so highly classified that none of the people involved in the investigation were allowed to look at them. “Only the president, some members of his Cabinet or a near-Cabinet-level official could authorize other government officials to know details of these special-access programs,” says the Post.