Admittedly it was without those delicious atmospherics. But the substance was pretty close. Donald Trump now owes the state of New York $454 million. To appeal the verdict and to pause the state’s efforts to collect the judgment during that appeal, Trump has to post a $454 million bond. Today Trump’s lawyers went into court and asked the judge to accept a $100 million bond in lieu of the $454 million. They said that $100 million was as much as Trump could come up with. If the judge rejected the plea, “properties would likely need to be sold to raise capital under exigent circumstances.” In other words, Trump would have to sell off property at fire-sale prices and suffer harm that could not be undone if he gets the judgment thrown out on appeal.

Associate Justice Anil Singh denied Trump’s request.

Here’s a good HuffPost piece from TPM alum Igor Bobic. They went to what we might call “IVF Sad” Republicans and asked them about passing a federal law to protect IVF from extremists like those on the Alabama Supreme Court. “IVF Sad” Republicans are Republicans who are discomfited by having to ban IVF or at least don’t want to get caught supporting banning IVF but also have to admit that they agree with the judge who banned it.

Marco Rubio, a senator who is an emerging leader in the movement says: “Unfortunately, you have to create multiple embryos [with IVF], and some of those are not used, then you’re now in a quandary.”

This doesn’t significantly change the picture from what I noted before. But something I at least hadn’t figured on is showing up in the numbers. There’s a significant difference between the breakdown of the primary day and the early/mail vote. The gist is that the primary day vote is significantly better for “uncommitted” and the early/mail vote better for Biden. The net effect of this is that Biden seems to be adding to his margins now since the primary day vote was in most cases getting counted first. So for instance, Dearborn (which is the heart of the state’s Arab-American community) had been like 75% for uncommitted. But now it’s at roughly 55% to 41% as the early votes get counted.

The actual vote totals and percentages are coming into focus. So there’s a lot of pivoting to what they mean. As of this moment President Biden has about 80% of the vote and uncommitted has 14%. That’s been pretty consistent for a while. But there are major differences by county and towns and cities here. So the results might be bouncier than normal as more votes come in. I noted one numbers guy I follow closely who pointed to 17% as a threshold based on historical comparisons for “uncommitted.” As the results have come in there’s been a lot of shifting among “uncommitted” supporters from percentages to raw vote totals. The raw numbers are high. But overall turnout is really high too. So you can kind of play this either way you want. Raw votes go up with turnout. That’s elementary. Percentages are the key metric. Or you can say that raw votes matter since raw votes will be the margin in the general. The truth is that you simply can’t make linear comparisons like that.