A new AP poll says that 54% of Americans think President Biden has been “not tough enough” on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. These kinds of public perceptions can be shaped by perceptions of a leader as much as they drive them. So you think Biden is weak as your starting point and therefore you think he’s not being tough enough on Russia rather than the other way around. Also notable, Americans’ hawkishness over Ukraine has dipped a bit from a month ago. But the first, second and third most important thing about this poll is that this is what you get when you’re not reminding Americans every day — and I mean every god-damned day — that the GOP has spent the last 7 years boosting, allying with and even conspiring with Russia.

I want to thank everyone, especially Prime members and Prime AF members, for their patience over the last few days as we’ve worked to resolved a number of technical issues tied to moving TPM over to a new server set up. Your memberships and your support are the bedrock of TPM and our team has worked at a fever pace to resolve what are fairly complex technical issues (for tech folks, basically interweaving authentication and caching). As of last night we believe we’ve resolved the issues with ads showing up for people who shouldn’t be seeing them as well as restoring comments. (Yippee! Appreciate the Congrats.) The remaining issue is some subscribers seeing partial RSS feeds instead of the full post RSS. We believe we will have that resolved too as soon as today, assuming no new unforeseen issues.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) exited an event in Utah on Tuesday so quickly that even his staffer was out of breath.

As you can see here, pre-Jan 6th text from Oath Keepers paramilitaries show they were actually afraid a massive Antifa army of feral Portlanders descending on Washington, D.C. It’s a fascinating prism into the Trump/alt-right/fascist paramilitary world. But we should remember that this is par for the course with coups, fascist takeovers, genocidal violence. It’s how incitement works. You can seldom get large numbers of people to do really bad things without getting them to believe that those people are getting ready to do something similar to them.