TPM Readers will be familiar with this argument which I made in a series of posts last month. But this is the Democrats’ best strategy for turning the tide in the midterms and saving abortion rights in the United States. I wrote it up for The New York Times.

I got invited to go on a podcast about Bob Dylan in which the guest chooses one Dylan song to discuss and that’s the basis of the episode. The podcast is called Pod Dylan. I demurred for a while because I really couldn’t figure out how to pick a single song. But eventually it kind of came to me in a moment of clarity. So we recorded it this week. And it came out today. If you’re interested, here’s the video version of the episode after the jump.

I’ve been working on a column about abortion politics. And as part of pulling that together, I’ve been sifting through recent polling data, especially surveys taken after the release of the Alito draft opinion. As is often the case, polling data on abortion can seem scattered and inconsistent, in large part because responses turn so closely on subtle differences in wording and framing. I’ll get to that in a moment. But looking at all these numbers really confirmed me in thinking that this is a powerful midterm issue for Democrats but … it won’t activate itself. It’s going to take specific actions to activate it for its full potential.

In Kentucky today Mitch McConnell said there can only be a deal on guns if it doesn’t do anything on guns but rather focuses on the “real issues” of mental health and school safety. So it seems we’re getting to the end of the standard Republican cooling off period in which Republicans make sounds about moving on gun legislation until the initial shock of the latest child massacre has worn off and they can go back to “no.” But I wanted to address a question that has come up in many of your emails in recent days about a notional bipartisan Senate deal on guns.

It’s hard to know what there is bad enough to say about the John Durham probe, which just saw its cause celebre indictment of lawyer Michael Sussmann drop kicked to eternity in a rapid acquittal. This was a corrupt effort from the git-go. Durham’s own deputy, who had worked with or for him for decades, felt obliged to resign because of pressure to produce meritless indictments to save Trump’s bacon in the dying days of his presidency.

I wanted to update you on recent developments in Ukraine. As I hinted at a week or two ago, we’re now seeing signs of limited but steady Russian progress against the Ukrainian military. That in turn has spawned a series of articles asking whether Russia is now “winning” the war after months in which the Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion seemed to go from success to success. The question is one of perspective. So it’s worth getting into some details about the last three-plus months.

With the one time frontrunners both now removed from the ballot, a new poll shows that the new leader in the Michigan GOP gubernatorial primary is Ryan Kelley, a man recorded in multiple videos as literally part of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6th, 2021. It’s not much of a lead. He’s currently pulling 19% support in what is now clearly a highly unsettled race. He’s followed by Kevin Rinke at 15% and Tudor Dixon — the candidate now backed by the DeVos family — at 9%.

TPM Reader JT flagged this Uvalde/mass shooting editorial from The National Review. I found it notable for two very different reasons. The first is that the editorial states with a clarity, both horrifying and admirable, what we have been discussing over recent days: for pro-gun advocates child massacres are simply the very unfortunate price of being free. Here’s the key text: “We must reiterate that the Second Amendment protects a foundational individual right and that, however heartbreaking the behavior of their heinous criminals might be, free countries do not wantonly limit foundational individual rights that are, in well over 99 percent of cases, exercised by law-abiding citizens.”

The New York Times has a very informative and powerful visual timeline of the 78 minutes it took police in Uvalde, Texas to storm that elementary school classroom. That’s the whole post. Go look at it.

In my previous post I got at one of the evolutions of the gun issue over the last decade. There’s another, over a considerably longer period, which seldom gets discussed but is, I believe, extremely important. As strange as it may seem today, one of the biggest supporters of restrictive gun laws used to be police unions. On its face this is hardly surprising. A central feature of the state is that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. That state sanctioned violence is primarily exercised by the police. Who wants to be outgunned? Police unions as a consistent supporter of gun laws remained the case as recently as the Clinton era. But that has shifted markedly over the last twenty to thirty years.