There’s been quite a lot of coverage in recent weeks of Republican anti-abortion diehards running away from their positions in light of the Dobbs backlash. There’s been particular attention to Arizona senate candidate Blake Masters who scrubbed the portion of his site focused on abortion. But until today I hadn’t seen just how total a change he now claims to embrace all while still claiming not to have changed his position at all.

As my colleague Kaila Philo reported earlier today, Secret Service Assistant Director Tony Ornato retired from the agency this week, leaving plenty of unanswered questions in his wake. The DHS inspector general’s office had reportedly been trying to get him to sit for an interview about matters related to the missing texts scandal; it’s unclear, now, whether that will happen.

There are two layers to recent intrigue surrounding Ornato. His role in whatever tf was going on with the missing Secret Service texts is, of course, one. But secondly, Ornato’s standing as a character of interest to the Jan. 6 committee increased 10-fold after Cassidy Hutchinson gave astonishing public testimony earlier this summer.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union, who presided over its failed reform and subsequent collapse, has died at the age of 91. An immensely, immensely consequential life.

TPM Reader LS from Georgia …

Just to let you know I called Jon Ossoff’s office (Atlanta and DC), and got through. I guess nothing has changed. They said he supports The Women’s Health Protection Act, but won’t say what he would do regarding the filibuster. I explained I had 2 daughters with essentially no rights in Georgia. That we are unlikely to ever have 60 votes. But you know they are just taking the message.

Yesterday Rolling Stone published an article about President Trump and French President Macron. The ex-President has reportedly bragged that he had “intelligence” on Macron’s sex life. And these brags seems to coincide with documents seized from the ex-President’s estate which, according to the search inventory, contained a dossier of information about the French President. I’ve been particularly interested in this because a French expat fellow reader of ours has been focusing my attention recently on how the French far-right rumor mill went to town on this subject in 2017 when Macron was first elected. The French far-right and Trumpworld are all part of the same far-right, authoritarian, revisionist world, often more or less openly allied to Russia. People immersed in the world of French politics and the French far-right perked up immediately when they saw that item on the search inventory.

He was several days late to the party, but the former president appears to have finally gotten wind of some remarks that Mark Zuckerberg made during a Joe Rogan podcast that had conservatives up in arms last week.