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Things are looking pretty good in the Georgia governor’s race.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Democratic powerhouse Stacey Abrams, even with a late start entering the race, is nipping at the heels of Gov. Brian Kemp when it comes to campaign contributions.

Between February and April, Abrams raised $11.7 million, collecting contributions from over 187,000 donors, the AJC reports. And at the end of the reporting period, she claimed over $8 million in the bank.

But, just as the state enters midterms, and after a leaked draft of the U.S. Supreme Court opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade, according to The Washington Post, the Abrams camp temporarily paused fundraising, and instead began raising money for pro-choice groups in the state—The Feminist Women’s Health Center, SisterSong, ARC Southeast, Planned Parenthood Southeast, and others.

RELATED STORY: Stacey Abrams turns tables on Gov. Kemp, files suit to use law he signed for himself in her favor

“This moment demands action, so I will be blunt: The abomination of that leaked opinion is coming to find every one of us,” Abrams wrote in a campaign email. “Women in Georgia and across this country. LGBTQ+ and disabled people. And particularly those of color or low-income. This is a terrifying time for our nation.”

Co-founder of Sister District, Gaby Goldstein, joins The Downballot to discuss what Democrats in the states are doing to protect abortion rights

According to the Associated Press, Kemp has reported $10.7 million in cash on hand, down from $12.7 million as of Jan. 31. Kemp’s had to spend big in the battle against Sen. David Perdue and his other Republican rivals. Abrams has spent over $9 million in TV, radio, and digital ads in the last five months, AJC reports. 

In late April, a federal judge ruled in favor of Abrams to block Georgians First, Kemp’s leadership committee, from raising unlimited money for him until he became the official GOP nominee on May 24. The rule applies equally to Abrams; until the primary is over she is unable to raise money from her leadership committee.

Perdue hasn’t released his financial records, but according to AJC, his last report ended with an underwhelming $1 million in the bank, despite backing from former President Trump.

Meanwhile, in the Sen. Raphael Warnock battle against the assumed GOP nominee and COVID-spray salesman, Herschel Walker in November, in mid-April, the AJC reported that Warnock broke records as he collected $13.6 million in the first quarter of 2022. Walker ended 2021 with around $5 million in the bank.

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Border Patrol agents have not been counting the total number of migrants who’ve died attempting to cross the harsh southern borderlands, the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a new report. Some immigrant rights advocates have estimated that as many as 10,000 migrants have died from exposure and other elements within the last two decades, a number significantly higher than what border officials have stated. The watchdog report confirms the fears of many: they just haven’t been counting them.

“Border Patrol has not collected and recorded, or reported to Congress, complete data on migrant deaths, or disclosed associated data limitations,” the office said. The Tucson sector highlighted in the report is representative of the border agency’s overall negligence.

RELATED STORY: Border Patrol policies kill hundreds of migrants each year—and they were designed to

“Border Patrol sector officials from the four sectors we contacted told us that they coordinate with external entities—such as medical examiners—when remains are discovered,” the report said. But investigators said that a collaborative effort between the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office and humanitarian organization Humane Borders, Inc. recorded higher numbers than border officials in the region.

While investigators highlight the implementation of the Missing Migrant Program in 2017 “to help rescue migrants in distress and reduce migrant deaths along the southwest border,” they note the agency “does not have a plan to evaluate the program overall.” But actions by border agents indicate that while there’s a program to aid distressed immigrants in name, the action has been continued harassment.

Take No More Deaths, a humanitarian organization with one goal: To prevent the agonizing deaths of migrants in the desert, where temperatures commonly rise into the triple digits. But the group has been repeatedly harassed by border agents throughout multiple administrations, most recently last summer. The year prior, the same tactical unit that harassed anti-police violence protesters in Portland helped raid No More Deaths’ humanitarian aid station. 

This escalation began when the organization released shocking footage of grinning border agents destroying jugs of water left for migrants in the desert. Humanitarian workers had said containers were being routinely tampered with by human hands. While racist border vigilante extremists have eagerly confessed to some of the destruction, human rights groups had suspected Border Patrol as well. The footage proved them right.

“The practice of destruction of and interference with aid is not the deviant behavior of a few rogue border patrol agents, it is a systemic feature of enforcement practices in the borderlands,” No More Deaths and La Coalición de Derechos Humanos said in the report. Warning: The following footage is disturbing.

It is a fact that harsh immigration policies have helped led to this tragic death toll. The common misconception is that stricter policies make a more secure border, but deterrence policies beginning in the mid-1990s have only killed migrants, by knowingly pushing them into more and more dangerous terrain. “Of course, the U.S. government knew that Prevention Through Deterrence would send people to their deaths,” researcher John Washington told Rewire’s Tina Vasquez in 2016.

“If you look at the strategic plan for Prevention Through Deterrence, it is clearly stated that they were going to use the landscape as an ally,” Washington continued in the report. “Everything that’s outlined implies greater suffering. These are people in charge of the Southwest border, of course they knew that walking for five days in these conditions would kill people.” 

Earlier we noted Border Patrol’s Missing Migrant Program, which is supposed to aid migrants in crisis. Vasquez reported last year that advocates have led their own initiative, with a similar goal of aiding missing migrants. But she said that when advocates have fielded urgent calls to border officials, they have frequently gone ignored.

“In 63% of all distress calls referred to Border Patrol by crisis line volunteers, the agency did not conduct any confirmed search or rescue mobilization whatsoever—this includes 40% of cases where Border Patrol directly refused to take any measures in response to a life-or-death emergency.”

Count Stephen Miller’s anti-asylum Title 42 among failed border policies, experts have said. The policy, which may or may not end at the end of this month depending on a GOP-led lawsuit, has only resulted in higher apprehensions at the border. “That is because under Title 42, individuals who are expelled to Mexico within hours after apprehension can simply try again a second or third time in hopes of getting through.” And sometimes through ways that may cost them their lives.

RELATED STORIES: ‘Ongoing pattern of harassment and surveillance’: CBP is still tormenting humanitarian volunteers

BORTAC unit that terrorized Portland just helped raid a humanitarian medical camp at border

Border Patrol agents are destroying lifesaving jugs of water left for migrants in the desert

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A Black nurse is suing a hospital about 15 miles east of Denver in the city of Aurora after she says she was discriminated against and targeted with a manslaughter charge for doing her job and even going above and beyond what was required of her. DonQuenick Joppy named the Medical Center of Aurora (TMCA); HealthONE, which owns the medical center; and employees at the center, Katie Weihe and Bonnie Andrews, in a lawsuit filed April 22.

Ultimately, the charges Joppy faced in connection with the death of a 94-year-old patient in 2019—“manslaughter, negligent death of an at-risk person and neglect of an at-risk”—were dropped by the Colorado Attorney General’s Office “in the interest of justice,” according to a motion The Denver Post obtained. “It’s wild,” Joppy said in an interview the newspaper cited. “My life has been turned upside down … I never killed anyone. I’m a great nurse.”

RELATED STORY: Don’t forget Elijah McClain: Forced into chokehold, injected for looking ‘sketchy.’ He is dead now

Spelled out in Joppy’s complaint:

1. During her employment with TMCA Ms. Joppy, a Black nurse, was subjected to verbal and nonverbal slights or microagressions designed to marginalize, segregate and undermine her based on stereotypical and harmful views of Black professionals.

2. TMCA unlawfully denied Ms. Joppy training and transfer opportunities, refused to investigate her complaints of race discrimination, placed her on an unwarranted Performance Improvement Plan (“PIP”), isolated her from colleagues, then ultimately terminated her employment because of her race and because she engaged in protected activity.

3. In a final blow to Ms. Joppy, in an effort to have her professional nursing license revoked and end her career, TMCA, Andrews and Weihe, in a “take no prisoners” approach, maliciously caused felony manslaughter charges to be brought against Ms. Joppy for the death of a patient known to have died from natural causes.

Joppy was terminated on June 4, 2019 after working for the hospital for two years and receiving an Excellence Award from the American Heart Association for performing CPR and saving a patient’s life her first year on the job. She also received a positive performance review for her work from July 1, 2017 to June 30, 2018, according to the suit.

“In spite of the positive performance review, patient care comments and other awards and accolades, Ms. Joppy’s treatment by the overwhelmingly non-Black management in the ICU was racially biased and on many occasions the Charge Nurses would publicly and openly yell at Ms. Joppy undermining her in a humiliating and demeaning manner,” Joppy’s attorney stated in the suit. “None of the non-Black nurses were treated in this manner.”

In the incident that led to Joppy’s termination, she was told to make room in an understaffed intensive care unit for a critically ill patient dying in the hospital’s emergency room, according to the suit. Joppy hadn’t cared for the patient before but she was assigned as his nurse before her shift’s end at 7 AM, her attorney spelled out in the suit.

According to the complaint, when the doctor ordered Joppy verbally to prepare the patient for “versed and morphine” and to assume “end of life” measures, Joppy contacted the respiratory therapist on duty to carry out the doctor’s order.

When the therapist arrived, he told Joppy he was busy and would give her directions for turning off the ventilator, which she followed, according to the suit. The therapist returned later to disconnect the patient’s ventilator, and he died of “septic shock due to pneumonia and bowel infarction; acute renal failure,” according to the death certificate cited in the lawsuit.  

A supervising nurse who, according to the suit, showed animosity to Joppy in the past questioned how she responded in the incident, sparking the hospital’s investigation. It ultimately determined that it was “standard practice for nurses to ensure orders are being followed as received and entered” and “no order was placed into the chart until after the patient had deceased.”

The hospital also claimed Joppy should have waited for the respiratory therapist to disconnect the ventilator, and the medical center even cited as grounds for her termination, “staying after her assigned shift continuing to provide care to the patient unnecessarily”—a common practice of nurses, according to the suit.

Rachel Robinson, a spokesperson for the medical center, tried to dismiss Joppy’s allegations in a statement The Denver Post obtained on Tuesday.

“The lawsuit that has been filed against The Medical Center of Aurora is without merit and is a tactic by a disgruntled former colleague,” she said in the statement.

Jennifer Robinson, Joppy’s attorney, told The Denver Post Joppy has struggled to find stable housing and ceased work as a nurse, although her license is active.

“I took this case on because I thought it was particularly egregious that they would do this to someone’s life,” Robinson said. “She’s pretty much homeless now and hasn’t recovered since all of this happened. Who is going to hire a nurse who has manslaughter charges against her, even if they are dropped? It’s just not cool to treat people this way.”

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In the standard image displayed at the top of a Daily Kos story, on an average browser, there are fewer than 500,000 pixels. The image used for this story contains exactly 1 million pixels, but you’ll have to open it in another page if you want to see them all. And of course, even then you can’t see them all, not really. They’re just a sea of sameness. Just a mass of dark where there could be light. Just points that show nothing where there could be something.

Like the one million people missing from the United States at this moment due to COVID-19.

There is really no way to show you what that loss looks like. No doubt there are, right at this moment, people making a valiant effort to do so. Somewhere shoes or cups or caps or some other items of everyday life are being arranged carefully on a field. Somewhere signs are being made with a scale and resolution that can genuinely provide some sense of what this number looks like when measured in human beings. Those efforts are, of course, symbolic, but that doesn’t mean they are worthless. Done well, such efforts can deliver a profundity and a physicality that the words “one million” simply don’t deliver.

This is a number so large that it falls into that the same well as those we use when describing the universe. These dinosaur fossils are 65 million years old. This galaxy is 10 million light years away. We nod along when told such things, but we don’t grasp them. Not really. Just like we can’t begin to grasp what it means to have one million people absent from the life of the nation. One million voices lost to the conversation. One million … one million.

Listen to Mark Sumner talk about the pandemic on Daily Kos’ The Brief

This doesn’t seem the time to review the awful decisions that brought us here. Everyone is far too aware of the lies, the distortion, and the sheer indifference. The downplaying of the threat. The false promises of a miracle cure. The long, deliberate effort to undermine the advice of those who saw what was coming.

Instead, try another form of memorial. Spend one minute and imagine it was you. If you’re young, imagine what impact your loss would have to your parents, your siblings, your friends, your coworkers. If you’re older, imagine your absence in the lives of your children or what it would mean to your partner. Take one minute and imagine a you-shaped hole, not just in the events of today, but every day to come. Forever.

Then multiply that by one million.

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On Jan. 6, after the mob receded from the Capitol, Oath Keeper Wiliam Todd Wilson sat in a hotel room less than a mile away and listened as Elmer Rhodes attempted to call someone who he thought could connect him to then-President Donald Trump.

After a violent, failed day, the leader of their extremist network implored this individual to tell Trump that groups like theirs were on the ready to forcibly stop the nation’s transfer of power. 

Related story: Seditious Oath Keeper cries as judge accepts another guilty plea from extremist network

This is the account of William Wilson, the leader of the Oath Keeper’s North Carolina division. On Wednesday, he pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy and obstruction of an official proceeding for his part in what Department of Justice prosecutors have described as a well-orchestrated, fully weaponized conspiracy. 

Oath Keeper William Todd Wi… by Daily Kos

Rhodes has pleaded not guilty and awaits trial. Around him meanwhile, his former compatriots are turning their backs to seek reduced sentences at an increasing clip. Wison’s plea marks the third Oath Keeper to flip and subsequently up the ante on Rhodes who is facing possible decades in prison should a jury convict. 

According to the 45-year-old Wilson, during the call with someone appearing to serve as a Trump intermediary—the individual was not named in court records—Rhodes was left flat.

He would not be patched through to Trump. Wilson recalled that an apparently tense Rhodes turned to his fellow Oath Keepers gathered at the Phoenix Hotel and remarked: “I just want to fight.”

Wilson’s guilty plea is added to those entered by fellow Oath Keepers Joshua James of Alabama and Brian Ulrich of Georgia in the seditious conspiracy case. Wilson, however, was not indicted by a federal grand jury first, unlike James and Ulrich. Instead, he flipped voluntarily. This is a strong indicator that Wilson has been cooperating with the Justice Department for some time.

Statement of Offense Willia… by Daily Kos

Wilson was one of many Oath Keepers from neighboring states who arrived in D.C. in advance of Jan. 6 and prepared to lay siege.

Christine Pelosi talks about the Supreme Court’s leaked decision on Roe v. Wade, and what Democrats are doing now, on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast

He arrived in Vienna, Virginia, on Jan. 5 and stowed weapons at the Hilton Garden Inn Hotel including an AR-15-type rifle, a pistol, ammunition, and body armor. Wilson also carried a pocket knife and chemical irritants like pepper spray and brought along a large wooden stick he intended to use as a weapon. 

When coming to Washington, he traveled with Rhodes. During the rioting, Wilson has admitted to charges that he plowed through the west side of the Capitol only to force open the Rotunda doors and usher in a column of Oath Keepers to join the fray. 

The Justice Department argues that this moment had been in the works since right after the 2020 election. Enraged over Trump’s lies about rampant fraud in the results, Rhodes, his indictment noted, wanted Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.

If he did, the Oath Keepers would have a series of “quick reaction force” teams lined up in nearby hotels with weapons to aid him. 

Between Jan. 4 and Jan. 6 alone, Wilson said he and Rhodes spoke dozens of times with their co-conspirators to finalize their plans. As Wilson made the drive, he texted members of a “DC Op Jan. 6 21” encrypted channel. 

“It’s going to hit the fan tonight!” he wrote. 

In fact, it would take a few more hours yet. 

Once they breached the barricades on Jan. 6, Wilson said he and Rhodes, and others steadily advanced through a chaotic scene. Rhodes told the group they were “in the midst of a ‘civil war” and moving in a stack formation, the Oath Keepers attempted to force their way deeper inside the building. Wilson, at times, filmed the assault. 

When it was over, and Wilson, Rhodes, and other co-conspirators found themselves back at the Phoenix Hotel, the inability to connect with Trump directly seemed to fill the ringleader with a new rage. 

In an encrypted Signal chat seized by prosecutors, Rhodes warned that “patriots entering their own Capitol to send a message to the traitors is NOTHING compared to what’s coming.” [Emphasis original]

After meeting for dinner to discuss the longer fight ahead—what Rhodes allegedly said was going to be akin to the American Revolutionary War—the Oath Keepers agreed to destroy any incriminating evidence and scrub their devices. They went their separate ways. 

Weeks later, after Wilson had returned to North Carolina, he told prosecutors he chucked his phone into the ocean. 

At present, Rhodes and nine other defendants charged with seditious conspiracy have pleaded not guilty. But they are far from the only Oath Keepers involved or charged with crimes connected to Jan. 6. There is another group of seven Oath Keepers and their affiliates also poised to face trial for conspiracy. The Rhodes group goes to trial in July; the second group is expected to go to trial in the fall.

Rhodes has maintained that Oath Keepers who were in D.C. on Jan. 6 and charged with violence went off-script. He has argued that they were there if Trump invoked the Insurrection Act, but also to provide security details to Trump’s associates like Roger Stone. 

Related Story: Oath Keeper: I was ready to protect Trump by force

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Boy, did the Republicans of the House Judiciary Committee own the libs in the wake of the leak showing the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

“Still trying to find the word ‘abortion’ in the Constitution,” the committee Republicans tweeted. Quite the devastating argument … if you’ve never read the Constitution.

RELATED STORY: Top Republican talking point on leaked Supreme Court draft is one for the ages

Twitter users were quick to respond with a long, long list of other things that aren’t in the Constitution. Among them:

• Woman or women
• God, Jesus, Christ, Christian, or Bible
• Marriage
• Family or child
• Filibuster
• Nine. Or for that matter any specified number of Supreme Court justices.
• Corporations or corporate personhood
• Student loans
• Police

The list goes on. Some users also pointed to places where the Constitution specifically said that it was not a full and complete list of all rights, starting with the entire Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

But that’s not all:

Whether the House Judiciary Republicans were trying to get attention by making a completely ludicrous statement or were counting on their followers not knowing a damn thing about the Constitution—and both things are equally possible, as is some combination of the two—it’s nonetheless a telling attempt. Being completely dishonest is their only option here. 

On the other hand, at least this tweet wasn’t trying to downplay an actual insurrection by claiming that a leaked document is The Real Insurrection.

Contribute now to support abortion funds providing financial assistance to people seeking abortion care.

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Alito cites racist eugenics theory to support overturn of Roe v. Wade

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It doesn’t take the keenest observer to realize that the U.S. Supreme Court’s inclination to reverse Roe v. Wade was just the tip of the iceberg.

If the leaked draft opinion from Justice Samuel Alito told us anything, it was that the conservative majority could absolutely pave the way for the loss of other significant and established rulings: same-sex marriage, interracial marriage, and literally any right not explicitly granted in the Constitution by name. And who but Texas Gov. Greg Abbott would step up to seize the worst possible opening.

In an interview on The Joe Pags Show, Abbott said he would consider challenging a Supreme Court decision ensuring that all children have a right to public education—regardless of immigration status, the Austin American-Statesman reports.

RELATED STORY: Texas conservatives have gone rogue, paying Big Lie lackeys to investigate citizens for voter fraud

“Texas already long ago sued the federal government about having to incur the costs of the education program, in a case called Plyler versus Doe,” Abbott told conservative radio host Joe “Pags” Pagliarulo during a phone interview. “And the Supreme Court ruled against us on the issue. … I think we will resurrect that case and challenge this issue again because the expenses are extraordinary and the times are different than when Plyler versus Doe was issued many decades ago.”

Plyler v. Doe was a 1982 landmark decision making it unconstitutional to deny any student a free public education, whether the student is undocumented or not.

“By a 5-4 vote, the Court found that any resources which might be saved from excluding undocumented children from public schools were far outweighed by the harms imposed on society at large from denying them an education,” the American Immigration Council website reads. 

But for Republican lawmakers such as Abbott, going after the rights of undocumented students to have an education isn’t really the point for the GOP. The point is to go after public education in general. Conservatives are using buzzwords such as “CRT,” “grooming,” and “social-emotional learning” in an attempt to dismantle public education in favor of vouchers for charter schools, religious schools, or private schools.

Conservatives are taking many of their policy cues on schools from a small southern Michigan Christian school called Hillsdale College. It is quite literally at the epicenter of book banning movements, anti-vaxxer and CRT communities, climate-science deniers, and Republican legislation.

Hillsdale College offers school boards and right-wing policymakers a template for conservative curriculums and attacks on liberalism. The institution espouses that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a hoax and that, according to outstanding reporting from Salon, Russian president Vladimir Putin is a “hero to populist conservatives around the world.”

Reversing Roe v. Wade is an attack on reproductive rights, but more than that it’s a gateway drug for a conservative, rigid, and uneducated nation under extremist minority rule.

As for Roe’s reversal as a bellwether for more challenges? Columnist with The Washington Post, Megan McArdle, dismissed any notion that the landmark civil rights decision Loving v. Virginia could be next, tweeting: “Similarly, it is not 1950. In Georgia, 13-14% of Atlanta and Augusta couples are now interracial! Even in the Deep South, outlawing interracial marriage would be a lift… But also, is Clarence Thomas going to vote to let states outlaw his marriage?”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that “gay marriage” and “civil rights” might be next up on the Court’s reversals.

The day after the leak went public, Laurence Tribe, a legal scholar tweeted that if Roe is overturned, the next “predictable” steps would be a “roll back rights to contraception, same-sex marriage, sexual privacy, and the full array of textually unenumerated rights long taken for granted.”

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When the Supreme Court formally overturns Roe v. Wade, abortion will be banned in Louisiana thanks to a 2006 trigger law putting such a ban in place as soon as the court allowed. But that’s not enough for some Louisiana Republicans—they’re pushing a bill that would not just criminalize abortion but treat it as homicide.

The state House Appropriations Committee moved the bill forward on a 7-2 vote despite one of the lawmakers voting in favor admitting that it was unconstitutional, and despite the imminent Supreme Court decision allowing Louisiana’s trigger law to go into effect. “We can’t wait on the Supreme Court,” said the bill’s author, despite the fact that the wait for the Supreme Court is likely to be a matter of weeks.

RELATED STORY: From contraception to LGBTQ rights—Alito’s draft opinion on Roe opens the floodgates

For years, people warning that Republicans really did want to overturn Roe v. Wade and that Republicans really did want to criminalize abortion have been mocked as partisans dishonestly seeking advantage or condescended to as alarmist, but here we go: The Supreme Court is poised to allow states to ban abortion, and Republicans in one state are moving forward with a bill that would allow abortion providers and their patients to be prosecuted for murder.

Co-founder of Sister District, Gaby Goldstein, joins The Downballot to discuss what Democrats in the states are doing to protect abortion rights

A bill criminalizing abortion in this way could also criminalize in vitro fertilization and some forms of birth control—already, many of the people most loudly opposed to abortion describe some forms of contraception, including IUDs and emergency contraceptives, as abortifacients. And even if miscarriage is not technically criminalized, in a world where abortion is a crime, miscarriage will become a highly suspicious event, particularly for already vulnerable people.

And this isn’t a case where the one fringe Republican who all the other Republicans kind of wish would go away introduced a bill that everyone is ignoring. This passed out of committee and it wasn’t even close.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the leaked Supreme Court draft striking down Roe, Republicans are still trying to portray people worried about what comes next as dishonest or hysterical or both. The National Republican Senatorial Committee is circulating a memo, obtained by Axios, calling on Republicans to “Forcefully refute Democrat lies regarding GOP positions on abortion and women’s health care.” Those so-called lies? That Republicans want to take away contraception. That Republicans want to take away mammograms. That Republicans want to “throw doctors and women in jail.”

And yet. In addition to this Louisiana bill calling for doctors and women to be thrown in jail for one of the most serious crimes there is, just a couple months ago, all three Republicans running for Michigan attorney general said that Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court opinion striking down bans on contraceptives for married people, was wrongly decided. As for mammograms, it’s not a common claim in the context of abortion that Republicans are trying to take them away, and while Republicans aren’t yet specifically targeting them, that would fall under the more general category of Republicans making any and all health care difficult to obtain. The Affordable Care Act requires most insurance plans to cover mammograms and other preventive care with no out-of-pocket costs for the patient, and we know Republicans feel about the Affordable Care Act.

This is the next step. Probably all the people who said that Roe wasn’t really in any danger will also line up to say that criminalizing abortion isn’t really going to happen. But this week, we know how to assess their judgment of what’s possible.

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The image above is from Russia’s practice for the upcoming May 9 parade. For weeks, Russian troops have been marching around the town, showing off their parade uniforms and driving some cleaned up, and hopefully decently maintained, vehicles along the streets, prepared to bring Moscow some of that military pomp so beloved of Soviet leaders and Donald Trump. This particular group is being lead by a new T-90M tank. It’s a 2017 update of Russia’s latest in-production tank.

The most notable upgrade to the T-90M is that it carries a new generation of Explosive Reactive Armor (ERA) that’s designed to stop incoming missiles and shells in their tracks. Its armor was specifically designed with the promise that it would stop anti-tank weapons, and even survive multiple incoming weapons striking at the same time. And you can see exactly how well that worked in practice by checking out the T-90M below.

As far as anyone is aware, the number of T-90Ms sent to Ukraine so far would be one. The number still in operation would be zero. Overall, Russia has managed to roll out about 20 of the T-90M upgrades, but the remaining ones are apparently being held close to Moscow at the moment. After all, they’re needed for critical parade duty.

The same goes for Russia’s T-14 Armata. This angular next generation tank has been appearing in Moscow’s May 9 parades since 2015. However, to date it seems that fewer than a dozen have actually rolled off the line, with changes still being made and reported issues with multiple systems. A couple of them have at least been allowed to get dirty.

If a T-14 shows up in Ukraine, don’t take it as a sign that Russia has confidence in its super tank. Take it as a sign of desperation.

After all, Russia is just four days away from a parade where it expected to celebrate its easy victory over Ukraine. Vladimir Putin fully believed that he would be standing in the bleachers, saluting the victors of the in Battle of Kyiv, maybe with a few acolytes from his new Ukrainian puppet government looking on for good measure. Even when it became clear that the parade was not going to feature Volodomyr Zelenskyy being dragged along in chains, there was still the hope that sticking all of Russia’s forces into the Donbas would allow them to overwhelm Ukraine, and push to the borders of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in time for the parade to start. Only … nope. 

That’s okay. They could always bring in Belarus to drag Ukrainian forces to the west. Or how about a referendum in Kherson that would form a new “people’s republic?” Or an attack from Transnistria? Or Azovstal! They could at least finish off Azovstal and celebrate May 9 by declaring that Mariupol, so beautifully remodeled by Russian artillery, was eager to join up. Azovstal, yes!

On Monday, Russian forces resumed hitting the Azovstal complex with both artillery and hundreds of dumb bombs dropped by strategic bombers. Russian ships in the Sea of Azov joined in, blasting the site with massive shells.

Before the smoke had even cleared, Russian forces attempted to storm the Azovstal complex, entering its maze of tunnels and chambers to root out the unknown number of remaining Ukrainian fighters from their positions deep underground. Throughout the day, there were reports of hand to hand fighting, and “bloody conflict.” On the surface, structures were blasted with explosives and set on fire in an attempt to burn every building remaining on the site to the ground.

For three days now, that fight has continued above ground and underground. Russian sources insisted on Monday that Azovstal was in “its final hours.” But they’ve said that before.

With four more days remaining, it’s entirely possible that Putin will get the only peace he wants in Mariupol in time for his parade: the peace of the grave. After all, there is always gas that could be used against the defenders still evading his forces underground. There is always all that rubble available to block all the potential exits. If Putin wants everyone in the complex dead—including the forces that are not part of the Azov regiment, including the wounded who were not allowed to leave the hospital on the site, and including the civilians still trapped there—he can almost certainly have it.

On May 9, it’s almost certain that some selected “victors of Mariupol”—or some nice, tall, appropriately photogenic roleplayers—are going to join Putin’s parade. And that really would be  appropriate. They can celebrate the butchery of Bucha, the 600 women and children who died in the basement of Mariupol’s theater, the thousands of civilians buried in still-undiscovered mass graves, and the tens of thousands of Ukrainians being enslaved in Russian labor camps a continent away from their homes. They can celebrate the destruction. They can celebrate rape. They can celebrate a second Holodomor.

It’s really the only appropriate theme.

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With the leaked decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and send our country back to the era where we burned witches at the stake for staring at people, a famous old stand-up bit by the late, great, George Carlin is doing the rounds again. It’s a piece about the “pro-life” movement, aka the “anti-abortion” movement, the Christian conservative movement that has continued on in our country for decades and has now successfully dragged our society’s discourse back hundreds of years. Carlin takes on all of the language used and how just the smallest bit of analysis exposes how incoherent, how hypocritical, and ultimately, how clearly false all of the right’s rhetoric around abortion really is.

Carlin talks about the right-wing concept of “conception of life.” How the “fertilized egg” is supposedly a child. After riffing on how problematic and untrue that is, Carlin makes the point that the majority of a person’s “fertilized eggs” end up being flushed out during the menstrual cycle, “So basically what these anti-abortion people are telling us is that any woman who’s had more than one period is a serial killer.” He also reminds everyone that Catholics are some of abortion’s biggest opponents, and also one of the biggest opponents of homosexuals and homosexuality. “Well who has less abortions than homosexuals? Leave these fucking people alone for Christ’s sakes. Here is an entire class of people guaranteed never to have an abortion and the Catholics and Christians are just tossing them aside—you’d think they’d make natural allies.”

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Carlin pokes a bit more at the hypocrisy of the church in this regard, and then zeroes in on the phraseology used by the so-called “pro-life” movement. Specifically, Carlin wants to understand the term “sanctity of life.”

CARLIN: Well I mean, life is sacred? Who said so? God? Hey, if you read history you realize that God is one of the leading causes of death. Has been for thousands of years.

In fact, Carlin argues, so many different religions have used “God” to justify killing others that killing might be considered part of His brand. But beyond all of that, beyond the preaching about the “sanctity of life,” Carlin wants to know: Where do we practice what we preach? Which brings us back to the anti-abortionists:

CARLIN: Boy these conservatives are really something aren’t they? They’re all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn, but once you’re born you’re on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that they don’t want to know about you. They don’t want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no daycare, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you’re pre-born you’re fine. If you’re preschool you’re fucked!

Then Carlin moves on to when conservatives remember you’re alive: when you get to military age and they can send you off to kill and be killed. “These people aren’t pro-life, they’re killing doctors. What kind of pro-life is that? They’ll do anything they can to save a fetus but if it grows up to be a doctor they just might have to kill it.” And finally, Carlin, at his greatest, synthesizes it down to the essence: “They’re not pro-life. You know what they are? They’re anti-woman.”

You can watch the entire eight-minute chunk below. Enjoy.

Warning: some bad language and adult content.