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Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson will become U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to sit on the nation’s highest court, Thursday afternoon. The Senate will vote to confirm her for the seat that Justice Stephen Breyer will vacate before the October term begins, after finishing out the spring term.

She will be the first Black woman on the Supreme Court, fulfilling President Joe Biden’s promise as a candidate back in 2020. She will be the first justice who has experience as a public defender. She is the first justice since Thurgood Marshall to have substantial criminal defense experience. She will be just the second justice in history to have served on all three levels of the federal judiciary—District, Circuit, and the Supreme Court. She has spent more time on the bench as a trial court judge than any nominee since 1923.  

In fact, she has more experience on the bench than Justices Thomas, Roberts, Kagan, and Barrett combined had before their confirmations.

Judge Jackson has the quintessential biography for an American success story in public service. She was born in Washington, D.C., in 1970 to two public school teachers. After her birth, the family moved to Miami, Florida, where her father went to law school. She would sit at the kitchen table with him, with her coloring books, while he studied. That, she says, is where her interest in the law was born.

At Miami Palmetto Senior High School, Judge Jackson was a star, but nonetheless, when she told her  guidance counselor that she wanted to go to Harvard, she should not set her “sights so high.” She went to Harvard, where she graduated magna cum laude. She then graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she also served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Judge Jackson’s career has been absolutely impeccable. That, of course, did not stop Republicans from wallowing in the gutter with baseless and vile racist and sexist attacks on her record, a tactic blessed by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The spectacle was so extreme that a majority of Americans polled right after the hearings by Quinnipiac University were appalled by it.

Nonetheless, Judge Jackson will prevail. Justice, just this once, will prevail.

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Donald Trump’s influence is fading in the Republican Party and everyone outside of his die-hard supporters realizes that nothing he says can be trusted or believed, but The Washington Post is trumpeting an exclusive interview with him, giving Trump space to lie some more. Apparently it’s really newsworthy to hear that Trump still blames everyone else for his supporters attacking the U.S Capitol and still insists he didn’t lose fair and square in 2020.

The Post does offer context for some of what Trump lied about and omitted from his accounts, and notes that he “meandered during the interview and stonewalled questions with long answers.” But nothing here is newsworthy. “Liar continues to lie. Man who never admits error continues to insist he was right about everything.”

RELATED STORY: Rep. Mo Brooks says Donald Trump demanded he take part in a coup well after Jan. 6

Trump’s nonsense included insisting that he was just waiting for Speaker Nancy Pelosi to put a stop to the attack on the Capitol by a mob of thousands of his supporters: “I thought it was a shame, and I kept asking why isn’t she doing something about it? Why isn’t Nancy Pelosi doing something about it? And the mayor of D.C. also. The mayor of D.C. and Nancy Pelosi are in charge,” he told the Post. “I hated seeing it. I hated seeing it. And I said, ‘It’s got to be taken care of,’ and I assumed they were taking care of it.”

While the Post notes that responsibility for the Capitol does not lie solely with the speaker of the House and that the Washington, D.C., mayor’s office repeatedly tried and failed to get through to Trump during the attack, it doesn’t mention the phone call that afternoon in which Trump responded to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s plea for Trump to tell the mob to stop attacking by saying, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”

Trump also told the Post he really had wanted to march to the Capitol himself on January 6, but was prevented by the Secret Service. That would have been something else—a violent attack on Congress that the sitting president didn’t just incite through words but physically led to the scene. Of course, since Trump lies, it remains equally likely that he had no desire to do anything more strenuous than he had already done and preferred to go relax at the White House while watching what he’d unleashed from a comfortable seat in a heated room.

He bragged at some length about the size of the crowd at the rally on the Ellipse—the crowd from which the mob of attackers peeled off beginning while he was speaking. “The crowd was far bigger than I even thought. I believe it was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to. I don’t know what that means, but you see very few pictures. They don’t want to show pictures, the fake news doesn’t want to show pictures.” 

A bigger crowd even than the “million, million and a half people” at the 2017 inauguration? Big, if true.

It was a “tremendous crowd” which he really wanted to lead straight to the Capitol, but once it arrived there, someone else should have stopped it from battering down the doors and windows and assaulting the police officers defending the building and the Congress inside.

On the subject of the 2020 election, which the mob was attempting to overturn on January 6, Trump continues to insist that he was robbed by massive voter fraud. (Again, this is news?) In a masterpiece of admitting something in the midst of denying it, he said of Rep. Mo Brooks’ allegations that he has asked Brooks to help him overturn the election since the inauguration of President Joe Biden, “I didn’t ask [Brooks] to do it. He’s in no position to do it. I certainly didn’t ask him to do it. But I believe when you see massive election fraud, I can’t imagine that somebody who won the election based on fraud, that something doesn’t happen? How has it not happened? If you are a bank robber, or you’re a jewelry store robber, and you go into Tiffany’s and you steal their diamonds and get caught, you have to give the diamonds back.”

I didn’t ask him to do a perfectly reasonable, even just, thing that someone should definitely do. Uh huh.

Nothing about Donald Trump has changed over the past 15 months except his position in the world. And his current position means that the media should not be trotting down to Mar-a-Lago to seek out more lies from him. When he speaks at a rally or endorses a candidate? Sure, that’s news—as much as we might look forward to the day when basically nothing he does is worth our attention. But Trump, sitting at Mar-a-Lago drinking a Diet Coke? Let that guy tell his lies to the people wandering the grounds eager for the chance to suck up to him. Let him rant to the guests of weddings held at the property. It’s not worth making an effort to hear what he has to say.

RELATED STORIES:

It’s a family affair: Ivanka Trump appears before Jan. 6 probe

Let’s talk about the Trump White House call logs from Jan. 6

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Here’s a bit of lovely speechifying from one of my favorite film characters, “I’s looking behind us now into history back.” But “time counts, and it keeps counting” and there “ain’t nobody how knows where it’s gonna lead.”

While you’re skimming Google to find Savannah Nix, all of this is just an elaborate way of saying that this morning—43 days into Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine—I’m looking “into history back.” As in, checking out the predictions that media outlets and columnists made before the tanks started to roll. But before we get to the point where Vladimir Putin began to gather forces around Ukraine last fall, here’s a thumbnail sketch of where things have gone over the last couple of decades.  

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine learned quickly that Russia was far too busy dealing with its own internal issues and structural collapse to lend anything like assistance to former Soviet member states. That was underscored in 1995 when Kharkiv was left without drinking water for months after the literal collapse of Soviet-era infrastructure. Both desperate for assistance, and anxious to put some distance between Kyiv and Moscow, Ukraine looked to the West for assistance.

But almost as soon as Vladimir Putin rose to power, he saw that Ukraine was a threat. It wasn’t so much having NATO on the doorstep that bothered the Russian dictator, it was the idea of a functioning democracy with a growing economy that bothered him. After all, many Russians and Ukrainians have close personal and familial links. How was Putin going to keep everyone in Moscow happy with an economy slogging forward under the burden of an authoritarian kleptocracy, if they were always comparing their lives to cousin Sasha’s thriving democracy? 

So Putin set out to end that. He launched a series of programs to bribe Ukrainian officials, promote their own oligarchs, and ensure that levels of corruption pegged the dial. When Ukraine still seemed to be looking West, Putin brought in an expert on destroying democracies around the world, Paul Manafort, and set him loose to create chaos, break agreements with the West, and ink deals that bound Kyiv and Moscow. That included destroying deals that were easing Ukraine toward both the EU and NATO.

By 2014, Ukrainians answered Putin with a resounding “no,” ousting pro-Russian officials in the Maidan Revolution, which is also known inside Ukraine as “the Revolution of Dignity.” Once again Ukraine turned to the West, and overthrew the Yanukovych government promoted by Manafort & Putin, Inc. 

Then Putin replied by invading Crimea and bolstering pro-Russian separatists—many of which were so pro-Russian that they were actually Russian soldiers or members of the FSB—in the Donbas.

That Russia was able to so easily take Crimea and seize areas of eastern Ukraine wasn’t a signal that Russian soldiers were great and Ukrainian soldiers were terrible. It was a result of Russia acting while a political revolution and reformation in Ukraine was still underway. The capture of Crimea was as much about the internal disruption Putin has spent over a decade building, than it was “Little Green Men” dropping in to secure the borders.

Putin was convinced that this action would teach Ukraine a lesson, reverse the Maidan Revolution, and convince Kyiv to beg to be let back into the Russia club. Instead, the 2014 invasion generated a new unity within Ukraine and increased their determination to rebuild connections with the West. Putin responded to this by sending ever more military equipment to the Donbas (if your internal rebels are driving around in tanks provided by your neighbor, are they really your rebels?) and continuing its efforts to fund corruption in Kyiv — efforts that Republicans from Donald Trump to Rudy Giuliani were all to happy to boost. Russia also took a number of provocative steps like seizing the Kerch Strait that were likely designed to test whether the West was still snoozing when it came to mounting a response (Answer: Yes).

Still, the election of Volodomyr Zelenskyy was seen as a big repudiation of any remaining pro-Russia sentiment and a solid middle-finger to Moscow. Efforts to drag Ukraine out of Putin’s corruption and disruption shadow accelerated.

And that … is why is I’m no good at writing a brief thumbnail version of history. Anyway, Ukraine looked West. Putin spent twenty years trying to prevent Ukraine from evolving a functional democracy. Ukraine shrugged off the efforts. Putin invaded. Ukraine resisted. Putin fumed. Fuck you, Vlad.

There.

Since 2014, Russia has teased a second invasion many times when Putin believed that Ukraine’s progress needed to be checked. So when all those Russian forces began gathering around Ukraine in the fall of 2021, it’s understandable that a lot of people seem to have responded with an eye-roll and a “here we go again.” As Foreign Policy explained, Russia wasn’t actually going to invade. It just wanted a better bargaining position. 

Except U.S. intelligence was getting serious signals that this time was different. Unable to cripple Ukraine sufficiently to keep them from evolving into a threat, Putin was going to do the other thing. Crush them.

How did all the experts and analysts respond? It’s not hard to find predictions that Russia would simply roll over Ukraine in The New York Times and other major outlets, or that the West would step back and do nothing. In fact, many of the media forecasts bear an uncanny resemblance to exactly what Moscow was saying. Because transcribing Putin was probably a lot easier than doing any actual analysis.

But there are some surprising nuanced prediction out there that don’t look half bad “in history back.” For example, Defense News didn’t think that Russia was going to go for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but there reasoning for this was pretty much—because Putin would be making a huge mistake.

“… it would be very risky diplomatically and expensive militarily for Moscow. Russia could lose. … The Western response to an all-out invasion could be fierce, including possibly providing airpower to Ukraine to defend Kyiv should Ukraine be losing the battle. It could result in escalation and a major war despite lack of an Article 5 commitment. Putin likely knows this. Therefore, he is probably—hopefully—deterred here.”

He wasn’t. Defense News actually expected Putin to go for something more modest and achievable, like just grabbing a land bridge from Donbas to Crimea through Mariupol, but they get points for the clear signal that a full scale of invasion was simply beyond the limits of what the Russian military could achieve.

There’s also this piece, from The Wall Street Journal, that calls a Ukraine invasion “a trap” for Putin. 

“If Russian aggression toward Ukraine does expand militarily, however, it could spell the end of the authoritarian experiment that Vladimir Putin has fostered for the past two decades. In any scenario, it will also result in a much-diminished Russia.”

That’s a remarkably good call, in an article that also recognizes Putin’s capture of Crimea was done “from a position of weakness” and ties Putin’s threats to Ukraine toward how his own popularity had crashed following the mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis.

There’s also this analysis from Reuters, that predicts a Russian invasion of Ukraine would be “no walkover.” For the same reasons as the Defense News analysis, this leads to the conclusion that it would be “highly unlikely that Putin would contemplate an outright conquest of Ukraine.”

Honestly, while the biggest media outlets were running a lot of news stories that took Russia marching into Kyiv in their parade best as a given, there were no end of sources with analysis that showed exactly why that was unlikely. But there were far more predictions that treated Russia’s ability to invade and conquer Ukraine as a given, but simply didn’t think Putin would do it, because the cost would be so high, and any attempt to take the whole of the country would turn into a long term slog.

“The invasion would not lead to the kind of swift victory Russia won in Georgia in 2008, or could have won over Ukraine in 2014. This would give the West time to react in whatever manner it chose – which, in turn, would make the outcome of the war less predictable and controllable for Russia. However, one can only guess whether Putin believes there is a credible chance of a substantive Western reaction.”

And that’s the point where most of these predictions failed—not in pointing out that Ukraine’s military had vastly improved over 2014, or that Russia’s ability to wage full scale conquest was questionable at best. They failed on the Putin question.

They failed to predict that despite the high probability of failure, despite the enormous cost in men and materiel, and in spite of a staggering long term cost of isolation and sanctions, Putin would push that button. The biggest errors people made weren’t in overestimating the power of the Russian military, it was in underestimating the size of Putin’s ego.

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With so much going on both here in the United States and abroad, it’s easy to let local elections slip from our minds. But they’re as important as ever, as evidenced in a recent election in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Prior to the election, Eau Claire Area School District (ECASD) Board President Tim Nordin told Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) he received a death threat over the district’s inclusive policies.

According to Nordin, the March 2022 email contained direct threats against Nordin and his family. The anonymous sender threatened to “shoot up” the next school board meeting because it promotes a “horrific, radical transgender agenda.” The sender called themselves “Kill All Marxist Teachers.” Nordin was ultimately reelected, and in fact won the most votes, according to local outlet WEAU. One issue that several people campaigned on, however, included the conservative rallying cry of parental rights. Let’s see how that shook out below.

RELATED: We can’t wait to see how Gov. DeSantis will spin these emails …

First, for a fuller picture of Nordin’s situation. In terms of the email to Nordin, he told WPR he notified Eau Claire police, and they began an investigation. He said he feels confident the threat results from people misconstruing a staff development training that included a slide stressing that parents are not “entitled” to know their children’s identities and that the school’s priority is ultimately to support the student. Conservative media picked it up and ran wild with it, and Nordin feels that’s how he ended up getting such a disturbing threat.

“For some students, in some situations, we have to understand the context of that and know that if they’re not safe and they trust an adult at the school, that might be the only adult that they have to trust in their lives,” Nordin told the outlet, adding that it’s essential to keep kids safe.

Three of the folks who ran but didn’t receive enough votes—Corey Cronrath, Melissa Winter, and Nicole Everson—had joined together to issue a statement saying the guideline had a “blatant disregard” for parental rights. Oh boy.

Cronrath, for example, suggested that the school’s guideline to respect students’ identities and keep them safe was a violation of parental rights.

“The school board doesn’t think parents have the right to know their children’s identity,” Cronrath said according to BluGold Media, adding that the board believes equity is “handing out resources to students based on sexual orientation and skin color.” Cronrath went on to say that this wouldn’t be equity, but rather “resource allocation.”

Per a campaign video posted to YouTube, Cronrath thanks the public school system for his opportunities to eventually join the military and have both his undergraduate degree and medical school paid for. He tells viewers he and his wife eventually moved to Eau Claire after hearing good things about the school district, but chose to pull several of his children because of downtrends in performance.

After talking about how his training as a physician equals being a good school board member (which, hm, okay) he slipped in a reference to the current board’s “perception” of not being “transparent” and “working behind the scenes.” He promised to be “available” and “present” to “stakeholders” like parents. 

According to the outlet, Winter suggested the guideline was a “slippery slope” and assumes that parents do not have the best interest of their child at heart. To which I would say: That’s sometimes true! Sometimes homophobic and transphobic parents, for instance, don’t have their child’s best interest at heart, because they’re acting based on fear, hatred, or misinformation. See: Conversion therapy.

In the bigger picture of the election, incumbent Marquell Johnson was also re-elected to the school board. Stephanie Farrar was elected to the ECASD Board of Education. According to local outlet WQOW, in terms of the city council, Larry Mboga, Joshua Miller, and Charlie Johnson are three new faces elected to serve. Kate Beaton and Roderick Jones were re-elected.

Depending on where you live, it’s easy to feel that local elections in Wisconsin aren’t going to impact your life. But all elections, big and small, really do make a difference, especially for the young people who don’t yet have the right to vote in those areas. This point is especially relevant now when we see how many school boards are pushing anti-trans rhetoric and how many are trying to pull books by and about LGBTQ+ folks and people of color.

Sign the petition: Demand the Senate pass the Equality Act and protect the LGBTQ community from discrimination.

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A handful of Republicans have introduced a bill that would prevent President Biden from taking substantive steps to address the climate crisis. Dubbed the “Real Emergencies Act,” the bill claims it attempts to “clarify the inability of the president to declare national emergencies under the National Emergencies Act, major disasters or emergencies under the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, and public health emergencies under the Public Health Service Act on the premise of climate change, and for other purpose.” What it really does is offer a cheat sheet on lawmakers absolutely loaded with campaign contributions from the very industry that threatens us most. Sen. Shelley Capito of West Virginia, who along with 10 other senators introduced the bill on Wednesday, has netted nearly $1 million from oil and gas and coal mining industry donations since taking office.

Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, who slammed “radical environmentalists” and “leftists” for giving a shit about the future, received just over $100,000 in campaign donations from the mining industry since taking office and more than $750,000 from oil and gas. North Dakota Sen. Kevin Cramer, who flat-out rejects the premise of climate change and recently called on the SEC to abandon its proposed climate risk and emissions rule, received more than $1 million in donations from the oil and gas sector and around $135,000 from mining since taking office. Wyoming Sen. Cynthia Lummis? She’s cleared more than half a million dollars in campaign donations from fossil fuel groups and companies since taking office. Arkansas Sen. John Boozman, who was one of 22 Republicans to sign a letter urging Donald Trump to abandon the Paris Agreement, has made around a quarter of a million dollars from campaign contributions from fossil fuel companies since taking office. And you’ll never guess who else signed that letter: three other lawmakers who also don’t want climate change to be declared an emergency.

Those senators—Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas—have cumulatively made more than $3.6 million from the fossil fuel sector since taking office. That leaves just Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota, Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, and Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma. Their combined total of fossil fuel industry campaign contributions since taking office? Nearly $2.8 million. A companion bill was introduced in the House by Rep. David McKinley of West Virginia, along with 10 co-sponsors who curiously were not named in McKinley’s press release. McKinley is raking in more than his fair share from fossil fuel companies, with oil and gas and mining campaign contributions reaching nearly $1 million.

A quick search for the legislation revealed those 10 lawmakers’ names: Rep. August Pfluger of Texas, Rep. Jake Ellzey of Texas, Rep. Brian Mast of Florida, Rep. Alexander Mooney of West Virginia, Rep. Adrian Smith of Nebraska, Rep. Tom McClintock of California, Rep. Yvette Herrell of New Mexico, Rep. Jefferson Van Drew of New Jersey, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, and Rep. Buddy Carter of Georgia. It’s a bit of a shame that Carter makes the list, as he made some good points during Wednesday’s House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on high gas prices about oil companies profiting from his constituents’ pain at the pump, but Carter also willfully misunderstands climate change and has an abysmal lifetime score of 4% from the League of Conservation Voters. Regardless of how much these lawmakers stand to make and their absurd charge that environmentalists are extremists, climate change is legitimately a crisis—and one that President Biden should take seriously enough to call it what it is. Call on the president to declare climate change an emergency under the National Emergencies Act.

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The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Daniel Donner, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.

Subscribe to our podcast, The Downballot!

Leading Off

● OH-07: Republican Rep. Bob Gibbs said Wednesday that he was ending his re-election bid for Ohio’s 7th Congressional District, a surprising announcement that came well after candidate filing closed and days following the start of early voting for the state’s May 3 primary. The six-term congressman’s abrupt retirement leaves former Trump aide Max Miller as the frontrunner to claim a seat in the Canton area and Akron suburbs that Trump would have carried 54-45. Gibbs’ name will remain on the ballot, but the secretary of state’s office says that any votes cast for him will not be counted.

Gibbs used his statement to express his anger at the state Supreme Court, which is not scheduled to rule on the fate of the new GOP-drawn congressional map until well after the primary. “It is irresponsible to effectively confirm the congressional map for this election cycle seven days before voting begins,” said the incumbent, “especially in the Seventh Congressional District, where almost 90 percent of the electorate is new and nearly two-thirds is an area primarily from another district, foreign to any expectations or connection to the current Seventh District.” To put it another way, a mere 9% of the residents of the new 7th are already Gibbs’ constituents, so he would have been campaigning in largely unfamiliar turf.

Miller, by contrast, began the cycle by running against Rep. Anthony Gonzalez in a primary for the old 16th District, which makes up 65% of the new 7th. Miller, who was one of Trump’s favorite aides (an unnamed source told Politico that the two “had … kind of a unique ‘bro’ relationship”) received his old boss’ backing last year against Gonzalez, who voted for impeachment and later decided to retire.

Miller ended up taking on Gibbs, who was far more loyal to the MAGA movement, after redistricting led them to seek the same seat, and Trump’s spokesperson said last month that the endorsement carried over to Miller’s new campaign. Miller last year also filed a defamation lawsuit against his ex-girlfriend, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, after she accused him of physically attacking her in 2020.

Gibbs himself got his start in elected office in 2002 when he won a seat in the Ohio state House, and he won a promotion six years later to the state Senate. Gibbs in 2009 set his sights on challenging Democratic Rep. Zack Space in the now-defunct 18th Congressional District, a historically red area in the eastern part of the state that had favored John McCain 52-45, but he had to get past seven fellow Republicans in the following year’s primary first.

Gibbs (who happened to share a name with the Obama White House’s first press secretary), had the support of the party establishment, including House Minority Leader John Boehner, and he benefited after tea party activists failed to back a single alternative. The state senator ultimately beat 2008 nominee Fred Dailey, who had lost to Space 60-40, in a 20.9-20.7 squeaker, though it took another month to confirm Gibbs’ 156-vote victory.

The general election turned out to be a far easier contest for Gibbs in what was rapidly turning into a GOP wave year. Space went on the offensive early by portraying his opponent as a tax hiker and a supporter of free trade agreements, but Gibbs ended up unseating him in a 54-40 landslide. Redistricting two years later left the freshman congressman with a new district, now numbered the 7th, that was largely unfamiliar to him, but unlike in 2022, he faced no serious intra-party opposition in this red constituency. Democrats in 2018 hoped that well-funded Navy veteran Ken Harbaugh could give Gibbs a serious fight, but the incumbent decisively turned him back 59-41.

The Downballot

● On this week’s episode of The Downballot, we’re joined by Ali Lapp, the founder of the House Majority PAC—the largest super PAC devoted to helping Democrats win House races nationwide. Lapp discusses HMP’s role in the broader Democratic ecosystem, how the organization decides which districts to target, and promising research showing the positive impacts of a new ad touting Democrats’ record on the economy.

Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also recap elections this week in California and Wisconsin; explain why Republicans are finally turning on Madison Cawthorn (it’s not really about cocaine and orgies); pick apart a huge blunder that led to the first attack ad in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary for Senate getting yanked off the air the very day it debuted; and provide updates on international elections in Hungary and France. You can listen to The Downballot on all major podcast platforms, and you’ll find a transcript right here by noon Eastern Time.

1Q Fundraising

● AL-Sen: The first half of Army veteran Mike Durant’s ad details his near-death experience during the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia, with the narrator declaring, “Mike Durant was saved by his brothers. His life spared by the grace of God.” The spot then abruptly changes tone as the voice says the GOP primary candidate “believes the unborn deserve the same.”

● GA-Sen: Banking executive Latham Saddler is using his opening spot to contrast his service in the military with GOP primary frontrunner Herschel Walker’s time as a football star. Saddler begins by acknowledging, “Herschel Walker was my childhood sports hero,” before continuing, “I also wore a uniform: I ran on the battlefield as a Navy SEAL.” He concludes that he’s in the race “so that you can choose between a war fighter and a celebrity.”

● NC-Sen: The Republican firm Cygnal, which did not identify a client, has a new general election survey that finds GOP Rep. Ted Budd leading Democrat Cheri Beasley 45-43 as former Gov. Pat McCrory ties her 41-41.

● NH-Sen: The NH Journal’s Michael Graham writes that many GOP insiders believe that two-time New York Senate nominee Wendy Long will join the Republican primary to challenge Democratic incumbent Maggie Hassan, though there’s no word from her. Long earned just over one-quarter of the vote back in the Empire State against Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer in 2012 and 2016, respectively, and she’s since moved to New Hampshire. Those showings didn’t impress many people except perhaps off-and-on Trump advisor Corey Lewandowski, who has claimed with “100%” certainty that an unnamed woman will join the primary to take on Hassan.

Graham adds that Vikram Mansharamani, who is an author and lecturer at Harvard, “has been making media appearances and is reportedly speaking with potential campaign strategists and advisors,” though he also hasn’t said anything about his 2022 plans. The filing deadline isn’t until June 10.

● OH-Sen: Venture capitalist J.D. Vance’s allies at Protect Ohio Values PAC have released a new poll from Fabrizio Lee & Associates that shows an 18-18-18 deadlock between Vance, state Treasurer Josh Mandel, and businessman Mike Gibbons in the May 3 GOP primary, with former state party chair Jane Timken at 9%. The firm warned back in January that Vance’s numbers were in a “precipitous decline,” but they’re now crediting the PAC’s ad campaign with propelling him forward.

Timken, for her part, has dropped a Moore Information survey that finds Gibbons leading Mandel 20-16, with her just behind at 15%; state Sen. Matt Dolan takes 13%, while Vance brings up the rear with 10%.  

● PA-Sen: TV personality Mehmet Oz has publicized a survey from Basswood Research that shows him edging out former hedge fund manager David McCormick 25-22 in the May 17 GOP primary, with former Ambassador to Denmark Carla Sands at 13%. Oz released the poll on Trump’s disastrous Truth Social platform, which may make him its most prolific user by default.

Governors

● MI-Gov: Wealthy businessman Perry Johnson’s new spot for the August GOP primary blames Democratic incumbent Gretchen Whitmer, Joe Biden, and the state’s former governor, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, for high gas prices. The narrator goes after Whitmer for wanting to close Enbridge Line 5, which The Washington Post explains is “a 69-year old petroleum pipeline that runs under the Great Lakes” that is in danger of spillage.

● PA-Gov: The very first negative TV ad of next month’s packed GOP primary comes from former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain, who manages to fit in attacks on wealthy businessman Dave White, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, and former Rep. Lou Barletta into just 30 seconds. The spot does not mention state Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman or any of McSwain’s other four opponents.

The narrator begins by declaring that White, who is a former member of the Delaware County Council, “is a career politician who voted to raise property taxes.” She then goes after Mastriano for supporting what she calls “the unconstitutional mail-in voting law,” which passed in 2019 before Trump and his allies started to wage war on vote-by-mail: The Philadelphia Inquirer explains that a state judge ruled the legislation unconstitutional earlier this year, but that the state Supreme Court has stayed the decision.

Finally, the narrator argues Barletta “supported higher gas taxes and approved Obama’s budgets.” The rest of the commercial touts McSwain as a “Trump-appointed prosecutor” who has “never run for office and will permanently cut the gas tax.”

House

● CA-22 (special): Former Assembly Minority Leader Connie Conway took first place in Tuesday’s special all-party primary to succeed her fellow Republican, former Rep. Devin Nunes, but she may need to wait a while to learn the identity of her opponent in the June 7 general election. (Whether Nunes will still have his gig running Trump’s disastrous social media platform by June is a separate question.) With 64,000 votes counted Conway leads with 35%, while Democrat Lourin Hubbard, who is an official at the California Department of Water Resources, is in second with 20%; just behind with 15% each are GOP businessman Matt Stoll and another Democrat, Marine veteran Eric Garcia.

It is not clear how many votes are left to tabulate, but the Los Angeles Times says that any mail-in ballots postmarked by Tuesday have until April 12 to arrive. Neither Conway nor Hubbard are running for a full term in Congress anywhere, while Stoll and Garcia are challenging Democratic Rep. Jim Costa in the new 21st District.

● CO-07: State Sen. Brittany Pettersen, who already had the backing of retiring Rep. Ed Perlmutter and the rest of the state’s Democratic delegation, will have the June Democratic primary to herself following her decisive win against minor opposition at Tuesday’s party convention.

Colorado, as we’ve written before, allows candidates to advance to the primary either by turning in the requisite number of signatures or by taking at least 30% of the vote at their party convention, and no other Democratic contenders successfully pursued either route. Republicans, who are the underdogs in a seat that Biden would have carried 56-42, have not yet held their party gathering yet.

● CO-08: State Rep. Yadira Caraveo became the sole Democratic contender for this new swing seat on Tuesday, while at least four Republicans will be competing in the June party primary. Caraveo took 71% of the delegate votes at her party’s convention (also known as the party assembly), while Adams County Commissioner Chaz Tedesco fell just short of the 30% he needed to appear on the primary ballot. Tedesco, like Caraveo, had originally planned to both collect signatures and take part in the assembly, but because he failed to turn in enough petitions ahead of last month’s deadline, his showing Tuesday marked the end of his campaign.  

On the other side, Weld County Commissioner Lori Saine was the only major candidate to compete at Team Red’s assembly on Saturday, and her easy victory earned her the top spot on the June ballot. Republican conventions often favor extreme contenders, and Saine offered just that with a video where she declared she “ran to expose, stop, and destroy the anti-family, anti-America, anti-God agenda” the Democrats presented; she also used her message to decry “weak, whiney moderates” in the GOP.

Unlike Caraveo, though, Saine’s convention win doesn’t ensure her the nomination. That’s because state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer, Thornton Mayor Jan Kulmann, and retired Army Green Beret Tyler Allcorn previously turned in the requisite 1,500 signatures they needed to make the ballot, so they did not need to take part in the assembly. A fifth Republican, business owner Jewels Gray, is still waiting to hear from election officials if she submitted enough petitions to make the ballot after she failed to win 30% of the vote at the convention. Biden would have carried this new seat, which includes Denver’s northern suburbs, 51-46.

● FL-22: Commercial airline pilot Curtis Calabrese announced this week that he would join the August Democratic primary to succeed retiring Rep. Ted Deutch. Calabrese, who is a first-time candidate, will take on Broward County Commissioner Jared Moskowitz, who had the field to himself up until now. Calabrese, who would be the state’s first openly gay member of Congress, served as a Navy combat aviator before working for the FAA, including as a labor official. Florida Politics writes it was in that capacity that he made several media appearances, including on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” to explain how the 2018-2019 government shutdown was impacting him and his colleagues.

● GA-07: Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath has earned the support of the American Federation of Government Employees for next month’s primary against fellow incumbent Carolyn Bourdeaux.

● IL-15: Politico reports that the anti-tax Club for Growth is spending $400,000 on an ad campaign touting Mary Miller ahead of her June Republican primary showdown against fellow Rep. Rodney Davis. The commercial reminds viewers that Miller is Trump’s choice and pledges she’ll “never compromise on election integrity.”

● NJ-02: Monday was the filing deadline for New Jersey’s June 7 primary, and the state has a list of contenders for the U.S. House available here.

Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew won a competitive re-election campaign in 2020 the year after he defected from the Democratic Party, and the state’s new congressional map extended Trump’s margin of victory in this South Jersey shore seat from 51-48 to 52-47. Civil rights attorney Tim Alexander has the backing of the local Democratic establishment and faces no serious intra-party opposition, but he struggled to raise money during 2021.

● NJ-03: Redistricting transformed Democratic Rep. Andy Kim’s South Jersey seat from a constituency Trump narrowly carried to one that Biden would have won 56-42, though it’s possible this district could still be in play in a tough year for Team Blue. The most serious Republican contender appears to be wealthy yacht manufacturer Robert Healey, who is also a former punk rock singer.

● NJ-05: Rep. Josh Gottheimer, who is one of the most prominent moderate Democrats in the House, got some welcome news when filing closed and he learned he had no primary opposition in this North Jersey constituency. Five Republicans, though, are competing here even though the new map extended Biden’s margin from 52-47 to 56-43.

The most prominent challenger appears to be Marine veteran Nick De Gregorio, who has the influential GOP party endorsement in populous Bergen County. (We explain the importance of county party endorsements in New Jersey here.) Also in the mix are 2020 nominee Frank Pallotta, who lost to Gottheimer 53-46, and businessman Fred Schneiderman, who recently began airing his opening TV ad.

● NJ-06: Longtime Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone faces his first notable Republican opposition in some time in the form of Monmouth County Commissioner Sue Kiley, but she’s still very much the underdog in a seat that would have backed Biden 59-40. (Redistricting even made this seat, which includes northern Middlesex County and the northern Jersey Shore, slightly bluer.) A few other Republicans are also in including former RNC staffer Tom Toomey and Rik Mehta, who was Team Red’s doomed 2020 Senate nominee.

● NJ-07: Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski is defending a North Jersey seat where redistricting shrunk Biden’s margin of victory from 54-44 to 51-47, and he’s likely to face a familiar opponent in the fall. Former state Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean Jr. is running again after losing to Malinowski just 51-49 in 2020, and he has the influential party endorsement in all six of the district’s counties. Kean’s most notable intra-party foe is Assemblyman Erik Peterson, but there are five other candidates, including Fredon Mayor John Flora and 2021 gubernatorial candidate Phil Rizzo, who could split whatever anti-Kean vote there is.

● NJ-08: Democratic leaders responded to Rep. Albio Sires’ retirement announcement in December by immediately consolidating behind Port Authority Commissioner Robert Menendez Jr., who is the son and namesake of New Jersey’s senior U.S. senator. Four other Democrats are running in this safely blue seat in the Jersey City area, but there’s no indication that any of them are capable of giving Menendez a serious fight.

● NJ-11: The state’s new congressional map augmented Biden’s margin in this North Jersey seat from 53-46 all the way up to 58-41, but five Republicans are still hoping that Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill is vulnerable. The frontrunner looks like Morris County Commissioner Tayfun Selen, who sports important GOP county party endorsements; also in the race are Army veteran Toby Anderson and former prosecutor Paul DeGroot.

● OR-06: Gov. Kate Brown announced Wednesday that she was endorsing state Rep. Andrea Salinas in the crowded May 17 Democratic primary for this new seat.

● TX-34 (special): Former Cameron County Commissioner Dan Sanchez announced Wednesday that he was entering the June special all-party primary with endorsements from former Democratic Rep. Filemon Vela and 15th District Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, who is Team Blue’s nominee for a full term in the new version of the 34th.

Attorneys General

● MD-AG: Former Judge Katie Curran O’Malley has picked up the support of former Sen. Barbara Mikulski, who served from 1987 until 2017, for the July Democratic primary for this open seat. Rep. Anthony Brown, meanwhile, has received endorsements from 32BJ SEIU, which represents property service workers, and 1199SEIU, which is for health care employees: Maryland Matters writes that these groups represent a total of 30,000 Marylanders.

Legislatures

● Special Elections: We have a recap of Tuesday’s all-party primary in Georgia followed by a preview of a rare Thursday contest in New York:

GA HD-45: A runoff will take place May 3 between Republican Mitch Kaye and Democrat Dustin McCormick for the final months of former GOP state Rep. Matt Dollar’s term. Kaye led McCormick 42-40, while the balance went to two other Republicans. Kaye is not running for a full term, while McCormick faces no intra-party opposition in the regular May primary to take on Republican state Rep. Sharon Cooper in the new version of HD-45.

NY AD-20: We have a special election in Nassau County to succeed Republican Melissa Miller, who resigned in February after she was appointed to the Hempstead Town Board, in a seat Trump carried 52-47 in 2020. The GOP is fielding Cedarhurst Deputy Mayor Eric Ari Brown while the Democratic nominee is David Lobl, a former advisor to Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Mayors

● Milwaukee, WI Mayor: Acting Mayor Cavalier Johnson decisively won Tuesday’s special election to succeed his fellow Democrat, Tom Barrett, by beating conservative Bob Donovan 72-28. Johnson, who made history as the first Black person elected to lead Milwaukee, will be up for a full four-year term in 2024. He could also be in office for quite a long time to come, as Johnson is now only the fifth person elected to this post since 1945.

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We begin today with Harvard Law Professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin writing for CNN that while Judge Jackson’s all but certain ascension to the United States Supreme Court is a cause for celebration, the nation’s educational institutions are failing to nurture many possible future SCOTUS justices.

During her confirmation hearings, Jackson acknowledged the dramatic changes in our country over the past 60 years that facilitated her own ascent. Without the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s ban on race- and sex-based discrimination in education and employment, Jackson’s chances of attaining the sterling educational and legal credentials that helped prepare her for a US Supreme Court nomination would have been slim to none. Even with the Civil Rights Act in place, it took years of lawsuits and protests to pry open the doors of predominantly White universities and elite sectors of the legal profession for Black Americans.

But while there is certainly cause to celebrate the change that Jackson’s confirmation to the court symbolizes, that celebration is not enough. We must also question whether American institutions are doing what they must to ensure that all students – including the many people of color and young women and girls who will be inspired by Jackson’s ascent – have a real chance to achieve their full potential.

Sadly, our educational institutions still fail to nurture the talents of many American children. State-mandated racial segregation and sex discrimination are illegal today. But the likelihood of success in American K-12 and post-secondary schools still relies heavily on factors beyond an individual’s control – often correlated with race and gender in ways that reinforce the effects of past, then-lawful discrimination.

Renée Graham of the Boston Globe says that you can call the Senate vote to confirm Judge Jackson to the Supreme Court a lot of things but don’t dare call it bipartisanship.

Jackson becoming the Supreme Court’s 116th associate justice is a foregone conclusion. Yet when those final votes are counted, the Biden administration will tout as a victory that the first Black woman on the nation’s highest court was confirmed by a bipartisan vote. While true by a fragile sliver, it’s an empty flex for President Biden and his fellow Democrats.

This isn’t a boost for bipartisanship. What it represents is evidence of a party so poisoned by its own ideologies that most Republicans, including every GOP member of the Judiciary Committee, denied their support to the most qualified Supreme Court nominee in decades.[…]

Jackson, a longtime federal judge, is one of the most popular Supreme Court nominees in recent history. In a Gallup poll, 58 percent said the Senate should vote for her confirmation. After Republicans turned Jackson’s hearing last week into a conspiracy theory Twitter thread, 72 percent in a Marquette Law School national survey said they would vote for her if they were senators, up from 64 percent.[…]

So whatever you call this, don’t call it bipartisanship. That lets craven Republicans off the hook. They should instead be tarred by their own hypocrisy. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said there’s “no question” that Jackson is qualified for the high court, but he won’t vote to put her there. Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska praised Jackson’s “impeccable credentials and a deep knowledge of the law,” but he opposes her confirmation.

Jonathan Leader Maynard writes for JustSecurity limning the fine legal distinctions between “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” and “genocide.” all of which may be applicable to the actions of the Russian military in Ukraine.

What exactly do we know, at this stage, about the nature of the violence committed by Russian forces against Ukrainian civilians? As a scholar of genocide and armed conflict, I am wary of expressing absolute confidence in any claim about violence while it is still ongoing. When we are inside the “fog of war” it is extremely difficult to piece together a reliable picture of events occurring along combat fronts or in occupied territories. Nevertheless, it is increasingly clear that the Russian military has committed serious atrocity crimes in Ukraine involving both a) the indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas, including via cluster munitions; and b) targeted killings and rapes of civilians by Russian forces. On the Ukrainian side, there is some evidence of much more limited law-of-war violations by Ukrainian troops such as the mistreatment of Russian prisoners of war, but Ukrainian authorities have denounced such violations, said any such actions must cease, and are currently investigating the allegations.

Contrary to the apologists for such abuses, these sorts of atrocities are not simply an inevitable part of war. Studies have shown that states directly target civilians in roughly 1/5 to 1/3 of all armed conflicts – an unacceptably high figure, but one which highlights how most states, most of the time, make serious attempts to respect the legal principles of distinction and non-combatant immunity.

Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall notes that the world is not at all unified on the question of what to do with regard to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

China, the world’s largest country by population, is the most visible example, trying to balance its interest in a “no limits” strategic alliance with Russia with not getting tarred by Russia’s bad acting. The issue of Taiwan is also central to the equation for China. But it’s not just China. Brazil has basically stayed on the sidelines, in part likely due to President Bolsonaro’s already pro-Russia stance. So has South Africa. Remember that South Africa is run by a party which still has among its old guard many who were either educated or trained in the Soviet Union. In recent years India has taken the first steps toward an alliance bringing together powers on either side of China as a counterbalance to China’s growth and ambitions — the so-called “Quad” of democratic states. But India too has been highly resistant to joining the condemnations and sanctions against Russia. In the case of India, the driver is at least in part the long military-to-military and weapons-sales relationship between the Soviet Union/Russia and India. Russia has also agreed to sell lots of oil to India at undermarket prices.

You’ll notice here that these are the so-called BRIC or BRICS countries. In each case there are particular drivers but the underlying and likely more driving factor is simply not wanting to get drawn into a squabble that looks to largely be about Europe and the United States. It’s not their fight and a unipolar world or one driven by the concerns of the U.S. and the EU isn’t in their interests.

Then there are the big oil producing states of the Persian Gulf. They are united with Russia in the OPEC+ group and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have both been using post-COVID inflation and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to squeeze the United States to back their policies toward Yemen and Iran.

A 10-reporter team writes for Der Spiegel that Germany may have to prepare for a worse case scenario if supplies of natural gas from Russia are halted.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany has been facing a situation that had previously been considered unfathomable. Europe’s largest industrialized nation may soon have to ration its energy supplies, essentially throttling the economy. The gas is still flowing, but many are afraid they won’t be able to rely on it for much longer. At the latest since the Kremlin announced that Russia would only accept payment in rubles for its energy exports, there has been a mood of alarm among politicians and the business community. Revelations over the weekend that the Russian military may have committed ghastly war crimes in towns under its occupation have intensified that alarms and redoubled calls for a suspension of energy imports from Russia.

German Economics Minister Robert Habeck declared the early warning stage of the emergency plan. The step primarily aimed at speeding up preparations in government agencies and companies.

How well Germany manages this emergency will determine whether the country can defend its competitiveness – or lose hundreds of thousands of jobs, as leading trade unionists have warned in recent days.

Even Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post misses former President Barack Obama

The Obama years were filled with strife, controversy and partisanship. But looking back, it’s clear what will be remembered. It won’t be Sarah Palin’s infamous “death panels” myth or even the dreadful rollout of the Healthcare.gov website. What will matter are the things that helped Americans survive a financial crash (for example, saving the car industry and stabilizing the financial industry) and gain health-care coverage. Destruction and chaos might generate temporary fervor among voters, but it’s building something sustainable that defines a politician.

“We didn’t get everything we wanted,” Obama said at the White House event announcing an expansion of the Affordable Care Act. “That wasn’t a reason not to do it.” That seemed to be a message not only for members of his party still reeling from their failure to pass the gigantic Build Back Better agenda, but also voters. Big, complex problems are not solved perfectly, immediately and permanently. Expectations cannot be too high, or moments of incremental progress will become occasions for grief. […]

Obama also reminded the country of something fundamental yet often derided in these cynical and careerist times. “We’re not supposed to do this just to occupy a seat or to hang on to power,” he said. “We’re supposed to do this because it’s a making a difference in the lives of the people who sent us here.” Courage. Principle. These are foreign concepts to the entire GOP, with exceptions you can count on one hand.

Oh.

Paul Krugman of The New York Times writes that we may not have had a “Great Resignation” after all.

For some time, many people, myself included, have been telling a story about this situation that goes by the name of the Great Resignation. That tale goes like this: The Covid pandemic caused many Americans to reconsider whether they really wanted or needed to keep working. Fear of infection or lack of child care kept some workers home, where they discovered that the financial rewards of their jobs weren’t enough to compensate for the costs of commuting and the unpleasantness of their work environment. Older workers, forced into unemployment, decided that they might as well take early retirement. And so on.

Well, when my information changes, I change my mind — a line often but dubiously attributed to John Maynard Keynes, but whatever. And the past few months of data have pretty much destroyed the Great Resignation narrative.

Have large numbers of Americans dropped out of the labor force — that is, they are neither working nor actively seeking work? To answer this question, you need to look at age-adjusted data; falling labor force participation because a growing number of Americans are over 65 isn’t meaningful in this context. So economists often look at the labor force participation of Americans in their prime working years: 25 to 54. And guess what? This participation rate has surged recently. It’s still slightly below its level on the eve of the pandemic, but it’s back to 2019 levels, which hardly looks like a Great Resignation…

David C. Grabowski, Marilyn Rantz, and Jasmine L. Travers of STATnews detail some proposals for improving the inadequate state of nursing home care in the United States.

About 1.3 million Americans live in the country’s 15,000 nursing homes, where they are cared for by roughly 3 million staff members. As we write this, nearly 170,000 nursing home residents are estimated to have died from Covid-19. Many, many more were isolated from family and friends during the 20-month lockdown. Bed sores, severe weight loss, depression, and mental and functional decline have spiked among nursing home residents. And nurses, certified nurse aides, and others who work in these facilities, putting their own lives at risk, have worked in the most challenging of conditions without adequate pay or support.

Sadly, the care of nursing home residents and support for those providing that care have been long-standing issues. As we heard from a daughter and caregiver of two parents with dementia who needed nursing home care, “The pandemic has lifted the veil on what has been an invisible social ill for decades.”

President Biden recommended several reforms for nursing homes during his State of the Union address. These included minimum staffing standards, increased oversight, and better financial transparency. Although these provide a start, much more comprehensive and system-level action is necessary to transform this care in the United States.

Finally today, Clare Watson writes for Nature that contracting a COVID-19 infection may increase one’s risk for contracting diabetes.

Al-Aly and Yan Xie, an epidemiologist also at the VA St Louis Healthcare System, looked at the medical records of more than 180,000 people who had survived for longer than a month after catching COVID-19. They compared these with records from two groups, each of which comprised around four million people without SARS-CoV-2 infection who had used the VA health-care system, either before or during the pandemic. The pair previously used a similar method to show that COVID-19 increases the risk of kidney disease3, heart failure and stroke4.

The latest analysis found that people who had had COVID-19 were about 40% more likely to develop diabetes up to a year later than were veterans in the control groups. That meant that for every 1,000 people studied in each group, roughly 13 more individuals in the COVID-19 group were diagnosed with diabetes. Almost all cases detected were type 2 diabetes, in which the body becomes resistant to or doesn’t produce enough insulin.

The chance of developing diabetes rose with increasing severity of COVID-19. People who were hospitalized or admitted to intensive care had roughly triple the risk compared with control individuals who did not have COVID-19.

Even people who had mild infections and no previous risk factors for diabetes had increased odds of developing the chronic condition, says Al-Aly. Of the people with COVID-19 who avoided hospitalization, an extra 8 people out of every 1,000 studied had developed diabetes a year later compared with people who were not infected. People with a high body-mass index, a measure of obesity — and a considerable risk factor for type 2 diabetes — had more than double the risk of developing diabetes after a SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Everyone have a great day!

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The atrocities committed by Russian troops in Bucha have resulted in world fury. They may not, however, be an outlier. Journalists and Ukrainian officials have little to no knowledge of what is going on in the areas of Ukraine that remain under Russian occupation, but claims that Ukrainian citizens are being forcibly deported to Russia (a possible move to “cleanse” Ukrainian cities of their current Ukrainian inhabitants) are numerous, and in Mariupol, officials are claiming that Russia is using the “mobile crematorium” units spotted prior to the war to collect and burn the bodies of possibly tens of thousands of civilians. It would not be out of character for Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s government to issue such orders, and we have already seen that Russian military units retreating from Kyiv appeared to be more dedicated to looting than they were to combat. The urgency of forcing a Russian retreat escalates with each passing day.

Russian military leaders continue to show remarkable incompetence, and new signs suggest their indifference extends to their own troops. Many of their Kyiv-area units were shredded by Ukrainian defenders, but are now apparently being redeployed east in that tattered state. The 4th Guards Tank Division, a supposedly elite Russian unit, got so thoroughly thrashed that less than half of it appears to remain—but they, too are being redeployed to the new frontlines. It may be an act of desperation, as Russia launches a new “suicidal” run to cut off Ukrainian defenders in Donetsk before eastern Europe’s spring rains turn the whole region into a muddy bog. Or it may simply be that there’s nobody left in Putin’s hollowed-out military who knows how to do anything but bomb civilians and steal washing machines.

We began the war with American military experts expressing astonishment at the utter inability of the famed Russian army to supply its own troops, coordinate their movements, or even secure their communications. None of those things have seen improvement as the war goes on, and now the very forces that found their Kyiv assault unsustainable due to the damage done to their supply lines and frontline forces are now limping, wounded, toward a Russian operation that appears to be premised on doing the very same thing.

Here at home, Republican senators are doing what Republican senators do best: nothing. Led by Rand Paul, they’re blocking steeper sanctions against Putin and Russia; in the House, 63 House Republicans even voted against a resolution expressing support for NATO and its backing of democratic principles. You can pretend that it’s weird for the party that supported Trump’s international extortion and hoax-premised attempted coup to be uncomfortable with steep punishments of governments that use violence to upend democracies, but that’s because you’re imagining the Republican Party as it was a generation ago—before Fox News made both propaganda and fascist aspirations central to the conservative movement.

Today’s news:

• ‘The Russians have turned our whole city into a death camp’
• Spring rains are coming, as Russia is increasingly desperate to show progress
• Bringing a Switchblade to a tank fight
• Senate Republican death cult kicks back in gear, aligning with Putin and COVID-19
• A Ukrainian news slowdown does not mean peace
• Not a gaffe: 63% of Americans agree Putin ‘cannot remain in power’

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The former Border Patrol agent who in August 2019 pleaded guilty after intentionally hitting a Guatemalan man with his truck and then lying about it to investigators used text messages to call migrants “disgusting subhuman shit unworthy of being kindling for a fire” and “mindless murdering savages.” Not only did Matthew Bowen’s attorney seek to block these sort of messages from court, he defended his client’s racism by claiming “use of such words is commonplace in the Tucson, Arizona sector.” What an argument.

So does anyone outside of these agents and their defenders truly believe they should be allowed to use encrypted apps that have capability to automatically erase messages? No, but it’s happening anyway—and under federal contract.

RELATED STORY: Border agent who complained about ‘murdering savages’ pleads guilty to hitting migrant with truck

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is facing at least two inquiries into the agency’s use of the Amazon-owned Wickr app, “known for its ability to automatically delete messages,” NBC News reports. Last October, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) issued a letter to CBP’s Senior Agency Official for Records Management expressing concern “about the use of this messaging application as it has the capability to auto-delete messages after a specified period of time has passed.”

Then this week, watchdog organization CREW filed a lawsuit after CBP failed to respond to a records request into the app. 

“CBP has a notorious record of human rights abuses and exposed texts from CBP agents show an environment of racism and cruelty within the agency,” the organization said. “It is alarming, then, that CBP has a $900,000 contract with an encrypted messaging platform where agents could easily destroy all traces of problematic behavior or messages that corroborate reports of abuse with just the swipe of a finger. And from a legal standpoint, any use of the auto-burn function may also violate recordkeeping laws.”

Vice reported an initial $700,000 payment in April 2021, followed by a second contract worth $900,000 the following September. A CBP spokesperson claims that Wickr has only been used in “several small-scale pilots,” and that the department is using a version of the app that “allows for organizations to appoint administrators who can control messaging settings on the platform, including those regarding deletion,” NBC News reported.

But the spokesperson “declined to specify” further details, and CBP has an established history of protecting agents from accountability over their abuses.

This secrecy around the use of the app was also noted in NARA’s October letter, which said that the record-keeping agency became aware of CBP’s use of Wickr, along with WhatsApp, only through media reporting and an inspector general probe into U.S. border officials’ targeting of the so-called migrant caravan back in 2018. “In light of the information in the OIG report, NARA is concerned about agency-wide deployment of a messaging application that has this functionality without appropriate policies and procedures governing its use,” NARA said in the letter.

“Under Trump, White House Senior Advisor and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner came under fire for his routine use of unofficial messaging apps like Signal and Whatsapp, which also have similar auto-burn features, to conduct official business, and his failure to provide assurances that those records would be preserved,” CREW said. More recently, we found out about hours of missing phone logs on the day of the Jan. 6 coup attempt. 

CREW said that while President Biden “reversed a late-term Trump policy that would have allowed Kushner to preserve records by screenshot and has made some strides in committing to a more robust era of transparency,” CBP is a whole other issue.

“CBP, like ICE and other agencies DHS oversees, has an abysmal track record when it comes to complying with record-keeping laws,” CREW senior counsel Nikhel Sus said in the NBC News report. “This has had real consequences for accountability by impeding investigations and oversight of the agency’s activities. The agency’s use of Wickr, a messaging app with ‘auto-delete’ features, certainly raises red flags.” 

RELATED STORIES: 

U.S. has paid $60M to settle wrongful detention, assault, death claims at hands of border agents

Tactical agents harassed dozens of U.S. citizens at border over so-called migrant ‘caravan’

Far-right vigilante militias on U.S.–Mexico border enjoy a cozy relationship with Border Patrol