Anti-missile system operating against Iranian drones,seen near Ashkelon, Israel on April 13, 2024
Iran has launched a swarm of missile and drone strikes on Israel from Iranian territory, marking a significant military escalation between the two nations. Israel and Iran have been engaged in a so-called shadow war for decades, with Iranian proxies like Hezbollah rocketing Israel from Lebanon and Syria, and Israel retaliating by launching air strikes on Hezbollah missile sites. Israel has also launched strikes on Iranian targets in other countries, most recently an airstrike on part of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, which killed several top Iranian “advisers” to its military, including Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior officer in Iran’s Quds Force, an espionage and paramilitary arm of Iran’s army.
After the strike on part of its embassy in Damascus on April 2, Iran announced that it would retaliate against Israel. Tonight, that retaliation began at just before 2 a.m. Israeli time, as Iran launched what appears to be a sustained missile attack on Jerusalem. CNN and MSNBC are showing images of multiple explosions in the skies over Jerusalem. It’s hard to make out what’s happening, but it looks like Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense system is hitting multiple Iranian missiles, causing showers of missile shrapnel, some of it on fire, to cascade down on Jerusalem and the surrounding area.
Israel has scrambled its fighter jets, which are circling above Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and some of the fighters appear to be engaging Iranian targets, which could include Iranian cruise missiles flying at relatively low altitude and Iranian ballistic missiles arcing down from high altitudes. Air raid sirens have sounded all over the Jerusalem area sending Israelis into air raid shelters.
Iran announced earlier that they have also launched a drone attack on Israel. Drones fly much slower than cruise and ballistic missiles, so they are not expected to reach Israeli airspace until later. The United States has announced that our military forces have shot down some of the Iranian drones, probably from U.S. military sites in northern Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. It is about 1,000 miles from the areas of western Iran where its missile bases may be located to eastern Israel, such as Jerusalem.
Israel just announced that Iran launched more than 200 missiles of various kinds at Israel. Iran has apparently launched its missiles in a coordinated fashion, so that they arrived in Israel airspace in a swarm. It takes about two hours for a cruise missile to travel from Iran to Israel, but only 12 minutes for a ballistic missile to fly the same distance. From what I could see on CNN, it appeared that Iran had succeeded in achieving its aims of swarming Israel’s Iron Dome air defense. Israel has not announced how many Iranian missiles got through its defenses, but an IDF spokesman said Israel intercepted “the vast majority” of Iran’s missiles.
There have been no reports of Hezbollah launching its missiles on targets in Israel in coordination with the Iranian attack. However, Hezbollah announced earlier this evening that its forces had launched missiles at an Israeli barracks in the Golan Heights at about midnight Israel time. Hezbollah is known to have thousands of ground-to-ground missiles along the border with Israel. Their missiles can reach Haifa and other cities in northern Israel. Israel has part of its Iron Dome missile defense system defending northern Israel, but Hezbollah has enough ground-to-ground missiles that it, too, could launch a swarm attack on Israel.
Israel has closed its Ben Gurion Airport and other airports in the country and banned gatherings of more than 1,000 citizens. Israel put a deadline of 48 hours on the closures, but that could change. Airspace in Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq is closed, according to Flightradar24, a website that tracks flights of aircraft around the world in real time.
President Biden met tonight with his national security team in the White House Situation Room. Biden put out a statement that U.S. support for Israel is “ironclad.”
The danger of an attack of this size anywhere in the Middle East, but especially by Iran on Israel, is that hostilities could spread rapidly around the region. There is a possibility that Israel will launch a missile or air attack on targets in Iran, including its missile launch sites and command and control centers. That has not happened yet, however.
Air raid sirens have gone silent in Israel at this hour, according to the New York Times.
At a rally in Pennsylvania tonight, Donald Trump announced his support for Israel, claiming it was under attack “because we show great weakness.”
Trump provided no explanation how “weakness” in the United States could affect the actions of the Iranian regime in Tehran, 6,300 miles away, or what that “weakness” might consist of. House Republicans have held up for months the passage of a bill that would fund support for our ally, Ukraine, which is running out of ammunition and other supplies in its war against Russian aggression. The bill is being held up in part on the orders of Trump himself, who has told aides he does not want President Biden to have a legislative victory during the campaign for president.
There’s showing some weakness for you.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.
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President Joe Biden
Barack Obama got it right. He refused to be held captive to his party's left wing. He adopted a strenuous policy of border enforcement, even as some Latino activists threatened to withhold their support for him. He had tense relations with Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, but when anti-Israel protesters interrupted a Biden fundraiser over the Gaza conflict, Obama reprimanded them: "Here's the thing, you can't just talk and not listen." And the hall broke into applause.
Should Biden worry about keeping members of the Democrats' perpetually unhappy left on his team come November? Not to the extent that it costs broader public support — or goes against U.S. interests. The far left's power comes not in its big numbers but in its members' ability to bully Democrats into taking positions that cost them elections.
It's happened time and again. During the 2000 presidential campaign, prominent leftists urged followers to vote for spoiler Ralph Nader instead of the moderate Democrat Al Gore. A handful of Nader votes in Florida delivered the presidency to George W. Bush. In 2016, Bernie Sanders and many followers slashed the tires under Hillary Clinton's campaign, thus helping elect Donald Trump, who had cleverly egged them on.
Many of the disrupters waving Palestinian flags feel genuine despair at the Gaza horror. They have much company in this. But a lot of what they're after is attention. Getting pats on the head on social media is more important than helping defeat Donald Trump.
Exactly what was the point of pro-Palestinian demonstrators' disrupting an Easter Vigil mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral other than to get on the news? They know where the cameras are.
Come November, the hard left may deprive Biden of some needed votes. How much wiser to concentrate on Nikki Haley Republicans in the battlegrounds where moderate Republicans reside. And the Biden campaign is reportedly doing that.
According to a February Quinnipiac poll, 37% of Republican-leaning voters who supported Haley said they'd vote for Biden. That doesn't include the percentage of Republicans who would simply sit out an election that has Trump on the ballot.
Biden can't emphasize enough his support for the border enforcement bill that Trump had killed precisely because it would have worked, thus depriving him of a potent campaign issue. Any notion that this stance would turn off Latino voters is belied by polls showing Trump actually gaining some support among them as well as Blacks. And that's despite Trump's talking about mass deportations.
Perhaps Blacks and Latinos want different things from their political leaders than having their identities massaged. Other polls show illegal immigration — as well as crime — rank high on the list of these voters' concerns.
No surprise there. Poorly controlled borders intensify competition for workers without college degrees. These jobs are in construction, manufacturing, restaurants and hotels, retail — positions that are heavily occupied by people of color.
Contained in Obama's message to the anti-Israel left was the reality that the conflict in Gaza is complicated. But when you get down to the Squad level on the left, the problem isn't so much what many believe as their lack of depth in understanding the issues.
Trump Republicans can't help but love them. Here are would-be Democrats helping a candidate who, as president, introduced a ban on Muslims even entering the country — and says he would restore it in a second term.
Haley voters could well be the key to a Biden victory, especially if the president doesn't torment them with woke nonsense. Biden needs to keep Democrats united as is politically doable while getting the never-Trump Republicans to actually cast a vote — if not whole-heartedly for him, at least for the democracy.
Reprinted with permission from Creators.
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Donald Trump
A long-promised Donald Trump statement on abortion has finally been released. As expected, it was vague and pleased few. The former president both bragged about his appointment of three Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, and stopped short of endorsing a national abortion ban, instead pledging to leave the decision up to the states.
While it may anger the faction of his party endorsing a national ban, the statement proves the almost certain Republican Party presidential nominee, as transactional and self-serving as ever, can read the polls and the political winds.
Remember, this is the man with a history of declaring himself “pro-choice,” “pro-life” and in favor of punishing women who seek abortions. I’m not sure what he truly believes, but it’s clear from his dancing around the issue that he knows he could pay a price for the GOP’s anti-abortion rights stance in November.
But maybe dealing in contradictions won’t hurt him and his party as much as Trump believes and Democrats hope.
It may not make perfect sense, but a certain voting pattern has been happening lately. Citizens in red states surprise observers when they lean blue on the issue of reproductive and abortion rights, yet continue to reelect the politicians who support those bans.
Ohio has proven that two things could be true at once: Democrat Tim Ryan, Ohioan through and through, could experience defeat in a 2022 Senate race at the hands of Donald Trump-endorsed Republican J.D. Vance, who just a few years ago was tagged as an elitist leaving behind background and family with his best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy.” This was after calling Trump an “idiot” in 2016.
And those same voters could troop to the ballot box in November 2023 to make sure a right to abortion is enshrined in the state’s constitution — after earlier rejecting a state GOP attempt to make it more difficult to win that right.
Vance was shaken by that result last year, writing “we need to understand why we lost this battle so we can win the war.”
But in spite of the surprise Ohio voters handed Republicans, incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is still facing a tough reelection race in the fall. That’s despite his working-class credibility across the state, a record of accomplishments that have benefited Ohio and endorsements from groups such as the 100,000-member Ohio State Building and Construction Trades Council. Brown criticizes free-trade agreements, even those coming from his own party, when he says they hurt his constituents.
His GOP opponent, wealthy businessman Bernie Moreno, may have no experience and a background many voters are still filling in, but he has something much more important — a Donald Trump endorsement.
In a state that voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 by a comfortable margin, that may be more than enough. The fact that Ohio voters have proven to be on board with a Democrat’s record and his party’s stand on the issue of reproductive rights is fighting a growing partisan divide that sees a lot less ticket-splitting.
Inside Elections rates both Brown’s race and that of established Montana Sen. Jon Tester, another Democratic incumbent in a red state, as Toss-ups.
Democrats see abortion rights giving them a fighting chance in states they’ve recently seen as lost causes. It wasn’t that long ago (2008 and 2012, in fact) that the party won both Ohio and even, yes, Florida. With an abortion rights initiative on the Sunshine State’s ballot in November, Democrats have even been dreaming of a resurgence in the land of Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump.
It will take more than dreams in a time when party is also identity.
I admit I was surprised the first time I saw someone at a Trump rally years ago wearing a T-shirtthat read: “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.” But today, with Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin, siding with the strongman against U.S. generals and NATO allies, is it so surprising that traditional hawkish, national security views have been upended by the strongman who is the head of the GOP?
Does it work the other way around? We’re about to see in my home state of Maryland, where the very popular Republican former governor in that usually Democratic state, Larry Hogan, is looking strong as he runs for the U.S. Senate. Democrats haven’t even chosen his opponent yet. But will voters in a state that soundly rejected Trump vote for a politician they may like but may not trust once he gets to D.C. on issues such as abortion?
This dynamic may be tested most in states that, unlike Ohio or Maryland, are not so branded with one party in its political representation. Following the slew of red-state laws limiting abortion, will voting reveal more ambivalence on the issue than state legislatures believed?
One that could be a test case is Arizona, which President Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020, and was looking tight in early 2024 polls. With the state’s Republican, very conservative high court this week upholding an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions, the upcoming U.S. Senate race, likely between Republican Kari Lake and Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, has gotten especially interesting.
Lake has followed the lead of her favorite politician, running away from a law she once praised. Arizona organizers say they already have enough signatures for a ballot measure to enshrine abortion in the state’s constitution.
Whether abortion rights will be the issue to cause voters to question party loyalty up and down the ballot is a question the fall elections could answer.
Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.
The Pew Research Center released polling this week that casts serious doubt on recent surveys showing Donald Trump making significant gains among Black and Latino voters.
The Pew survey suggested majorities of Latino, Black, and Asian voters continue to largely favor the Democratic Party. The results show very little change among Black and Latino Americans since the early 1990s, while white voters remain almost exactly as aligned with the Republican Party as they were in the early ‘90s.
"Not much 'racial realignment' in these Pew numbers," Vanderbilt political science professor John Sides tweeted, attaching a series of Pew graphs tracking party alignment over three decades.
On Latinos specifically, Pew’s 2023 data showing Democrats with a 61 percent to 35 percent edge seemed to counter recentNew York Times/Siena polling showing Trump with a 46 percent to 40 percent edge over Biden—6 points above George W. Bush's 40 percent share of the Latino vote in 2004, the high-water mark for Republicans.
Pew puts considerable effort into surveying the U.S. Latino population, and some political analysts consider it the gold standard on Latino polling. The differences in outcomes between the Pew and Times polls are due to a number of variables, including the fact that Pew asked about party affiliation while the Times polled Trump-Biden support.
But another factor—and a potential cautionary tale about polling Latinos—might be differences in the way the polls were conducted. In the fine print of its graph, Pew explains why its data for Latino voters only dates back to the mid-aughts while information for its other three demographic graphs date back to the 1990s.
"Data for Hispanic voters shown only for years with interviews in English and Spanish," the text reads. In other words, the polling organization didn't view polling of Latinos conducted in English as sufficiently representative, even if the sample sizes were technically large enough.
The Times poll conducted just three percent of its interviews of self-identified Latino voters in Spanish—a fact that UCLA political science professor, Democratic pollster, and Biden campaign adviser Matt Barreto currently highlights in his pinned tweet.
"Let's look at their brilliant Latino methodology: 97 percent English," Barreto tweeted incredulously last month, when the poll was released. Barreto added emphatically that Trump's 6-point advantage in the Times survey "does not match ANY actual bilingual large-n polling of Latinos. ZERO CHANCE. Are people frustrated? Yes. Is Trump +6. ZERO CHANCE."
Even the Times piece detailing the poll's findings among Latino voters warned, "For a subgroup that size, the margin of error is 10 percentage points."
But if Barreto's tweet sounds urgent, it's because Biden's share of Latino voters matters. Latinos, who now account for roughly 15 percent of eligible voters, can be difference-makers in 2024. That is particularly true in a swing state like Arizona, where Latinos are expected to account for around one-quarter of voters this year.
There's good reason to question polling suggesting such a dramatic shift among a group of voters who present unique challenges to pollsters.
As Republican political consultant and Lincoln Project co-founder Mike Madrid tweeted, Pew's "numbers are much more in line with where Hispanics will likely end up. Lower for GOP than most current polls but high historically."
Trump's big purge of old-school and more moderate Republicans, such as supporters of his primary rival Nikki Haley, has also put more pressure on him to overperform among groups that typically haven't favored Republicans—including Latinos.
The smartest reporting out there on the topic of Trump's potential gains with minority voters this cycle comes from CNN analyst and The Atlantic senior editor Ronald Brownstein, who has been at the forefront of tracking demographic trends since coining the term "the blue wall" in 2009.
As Brownstein points out, one underreported trend in this cycle's polling is Biden's relative strength among white voters. In most state and national polls, Biden is "matching or even exceeding" his winning 2020 share of the white vote.
So with Biden and Trump running roughly even in national polling now, Biden's continued strength with white voters puts the onus on Trump to win over a historically high share of voting groups that don't typically lean Republican.
As Brownstein tweeted, "Trump's gains w/Black & Hispanic voters have drawn justified attn. But w/little notice, Biden is matching or beating his 2020 # w/Whites in most ntl & state polls. That means to win,Trump may need to hold more minority votes than any GOP nominee in 60+ yrs."
That's going to be a tall order, particularly among Latinos, given the full-court press the Biden campaign rolled out last week with its new targeted outreach strategy, "Latinos con Biden-Harris."
The conventional wisdom over the past few months has been that Biden is in trouble because he's bleeding support among Latinos (and potentially Black voters, too).
But with current polling showing Biden and Trump relatively evenly matched at this stage of the contest, it's entirely plausible for the Biden campaign to woo back some voters who are more naturally predisposed to voting for Democrats, as the Pew polling suggested.
As Democratic strategist Joe Trippi recently explained on his podcast, “That Trippi Show,” "We don't have to gain back 20 points with Blacks, we don't have to gain back 20 points with Latinos, or with young people. If we're in a dead heat when we've lost 20 points with all those folks across the board, you get 2 points, 3 points, 4 points of them back, and Trump is dead."
It's another case of: We'd much rather be us than them.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
Rep. Matt Gaetz
Even though the US Department of Justice declined to pursue criminal charges against Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) last year, the House Ethics Committee is still investigating him. And a new profile suggests that investigation may soon intensify.
Earlier this week, The Atlantic's Elaine Godfrey reported that, according to several of her sources, the Florida Republican sent explicit photos and videos of women to some of his colleagues in Congress. One video was allegedly of a young woman hula hooping while naked.
"Matt sent this to me, and you’re missing out," one unnamed Gaetz aide said, telling Godfrey that he watched the video from the back of a fan along with another member of Congress.
According to Godfrey, Gaetz has a longtime habit of "bragging about his sexual conquests" that supposedly includes showing nude photos of women to his friends. One of Gaetz's longtime friends, Erin Scot, recalled a time when she met up with Gaetz at a wedding in 2009 — prior to him launching his political career — and wanted to show him a photo of her girlfriend (Scot came out as lesbian to Gaetz when they were young, and she noted that she felt comfortable with him when he appeared unfazed at the news).
"[Scot] says that later, at the bar, Gaetz passed around an image of his own: a cellphone photo of a recent hookup, staring up topless from his bed," Godfrey wrote.
The far-right congressman allegedly took his public boasting about his hookups to a higher level after being elected to the Florida legislature in 2010. Godfrey wrote that Gaetz and several Republican lawmakers are reported to have devised a "points" system in which participants scored one point for sleeping with a lobbyist, three points for hooking up with a lawmaker and six points for a married legislator. The Washington Post reported in 2021 that Gaetz voted against a Florida bill to criminalize "revenge porn," which involves the sharing of explicit photos without the consent of the subject.
"Gaetz and his friends all played the game, at least three people confirmed to me, although none could tell me exactly where Gaetz stood on the scoreboard. (Gaetz has denied creating, having knowledge of, or participating in the game.)," Godfrey reported.
A source Godfrey described as a "former Republican lawmaker" corroborated other claims about Gaetz's propensity to share unsolicited details about his sex life. That source said Gaetz "used to walk around the cloakroom showing people porno of him and his latest girlfriend.
"He’d show me a video, and I’d say, 'That’s great, Matt.’ Like, what kind of a reaction do you want?" The source said.
And while Gaetz was once a close adviser to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, reportedly being the reason former President Donald Trump endorsed DeSantis' candidacy for his first term in 2018, he has since fallen out of favor with the Sunshine State's governor. Political consultant Peter Schorch told Godfrey that Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis "hated all the sex stories that came out" about Gaetz and that the congressman was to be considered "persona non grata."
The House Ethics Committee's probe into Gaetz is ongoing, and will ultimately product a report that could recommend an official censure motion or even expulsion, as it did with former Rep. George Santos (R-NY). Gaetz continues to deny all of the allegations the committee is investigating.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
Former GOP official Michaelah Montgomery, left, with Donald Trump at Atlanta Chick-fil-A
As Donald Trump continues to try to make inroads with Black voters, his allegedly spontaneous viral visit to an Atlanta Chick-fil-A on Wednesday came at just the right time for the indicted ex-president as the patrons and staff, mostly young Black women, appeared to gush over him.
Fox News went wild over the encounter, calling it a “surprise visit.”
Video showed Trump casually declaring in the middle of the restaurant, with his arms opened wide, “Let me give you a hug,” and a young woman running over into his arms.
“Fox & Friends” co-host Lawrence Jones the next morning called it, “such an organic moment because you had all these people that obviously knew the president was there but were Trump supporters as well. Minorities.”
Jones then painted the stark “contrast” between President Joe Biden’s State Dinner with the Prime Minister of Japan on Wednesday evening, and the ex-president who just happened to walk into a Chick-fil-A and ordered 30 milkshakes. Jones appeared agitated by the Biden State Dinner, saying, “You got the current president, the ‘smoozing,’ State Dinner, you got the Clinton – why does another former president have to do a State Dinner with the current president? I think that’s strange.”
But it had not taken long for some to say it seemed staged.
“The odds of Trump walking into a Chick-Fil-A in a big city like Atlanta, and every single customer in there just happening to be a supporter, are infinitesimally small. The whole thing was obviously staged to ensure that only his supporters were inside,” observed the social media account for The Palmer Report just hours after the Chick-fil-A visit took place.
MeidasTouch Network on Friday reports, “Trump’s Viral Hug At Chick-fil-A Was With a MAGA Operative,” and notes the woman Trump supposedly spontaneously hugged, Michaelah Montgomery “is a ‘political consultant’ and former Georgia GOP intern.”
Former CNN commentator Keith Boykin, the co-founder of the National Black Justice Coalition, wrote: “I knew it! Trump’s Chick-fil-A stop was a staged photo op with Black Republican supporters. Michaelah Montgomery, the Black woman who told Trump that ‘we support you,’ actually runs a conservative group and worked with Candace Owens’s Blexit Foundation.”
Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of MeidasTouch, explained, “Just like his fake union rally & lie about calling Ruby Garcia’s family, the Trump excursion to Chick-fil-A was a staged op with a political consultant who has done work with the GOP, Charlie Kirk & Candace Owens’ orgs.” Linking to their report, Filipkowski, an attorney and former Republican calls it a “pattern of fraud.”
The liberal PAC PatriotTakes reposted a Trump campaign video, added screenshots, and wrote, “These Trump photo ops are pre-staged with supporters prior to his arrival.”
Despite all this evidence, Friday afternoon Fox News continued to hype the two-day old “viral” event, with host John Roberts telling viewers, “That was a true retail politics moment there. Biden goes in to get ice cream, he grabs himself a double scoop and walks out. Trump goes in and buys everyone lunch.”
Watch the videos above or at this link.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
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Donald Trump just hates the issue of abortion. It’s messy. It’s nasty. It deals with women’s stuff down there, the part he has always just wanted to grab and then brag about. The big problem with abortion for Trump has been that that he has never wanted to take a position on it. When he said he would appoint justices to the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe v. Wade, all he wanted to do was take the votes of the MAGA masses and move on.
The stickiness of abortion as an issue has never been as clear as it is right now with the Alabama Supreme Court essentially declaring that life begins at conception and applying that principle to IVF, and the Arizona Supreme Court concluding that they’re happy breathing life into an anti-abortion law that was written before Arizona was even a state.
The Arizona law was like those some states, mainly in the South, have on the books that make adultery illegal or forbid women or Black people from signing contracts or holding a bank account. The Republicans are like, yeah, sure, we know those ancient statutes are still around, but we’d rather just ignore them and move on, because we’re only trying to turn the clock back to the 1950’s, not the 1860’s.
But these two Supreme Courts blew the lid off the pro-life movement’s decades-long wish to seem reasonable and exposed the anti-abortion movement for what it has always been. It’s why they came up with the name “pro-life” rather than “anti-abortion.” They were trying to make it seem like they didn’t just want to ban women from getting an abortion; what really concerned them were the babies.
But even that was a lie. Babies, once they are born, never interested them. They want women either on the birthing table or at the sink scrubbing those pots and pans. In Texas, the desire to control women was so strong that the legislature wrote a law turning women’s neighbors into spies and giving them the power to sue women who had abortions as well as any person who helped or enabled women to abort a pregnancy after six weeks.
Watching the Republican Party, and especially its Maximum Leader, Donald Trump, try to tap dance around these two state Supreme Courts is providing us with some welcome opportunities for schadenfreude. You almost have to feel sorry for the poor fools serving on the Supreme Court of Alabama, with nine Republican justices either elected or appointed by Republican Governor Kay Ivey. They have got to be sitting there today thinking, wait a minute! What just happened? I just did what my party expected me to do, in fact, what they put me on the court to do! And now they’re getting roasted for it.
The analogy that pundits have seized to describe the current moment for Republicans is the proverbial dog who caught the proverbial car. What does the dog do now? Well, it turns out that what the dog does is look wildly around for a way to dislodge the car from its jaws, the car being the Dobbs decision and its rapid fall-out around the nation, all those anti-abortion laws that sprang to life in state after state, some of them truly draconian. The stories of women’s lives being endangered by the new anti-abortion laws have proliferated, including the one about the 10 year old girl in Ohio who was raped and had to travel out of state for an abortion because Ohio didn’t have an exception for rape or incest, even for a little girl.
All those Republican legislators and governors are sitting there today patting themselves on the back congratulating each other because they did what they were elected to do. And now comes the scrambling, not to fix the ugly laws they passed, but to repair the damage they know they’re going to suffer at the ballot box.
Donald Trump, bless his black heart, is leading the way. Look at this nonsense he posted on Truth Social today:
Trump is so panicked, so afraid of actually taking a position that would have any real meaning and effect, he is reprising his wishful thinking that the whole thing has been solved by the return of control of laws on abortion to the states. Well, here’s a state, asshole, and it’s a battleground state, Arizona, and what’s he calling for as a “remedy?” Exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother which aren’t in the 1864 nightmare of a law the Arizona Supreme Court just put back on the books. Boy, that’ll get it done, huh?
This kind of reshuffling of the deck of cards isn’t going to work, especially with an amendment enshrining the right to abortion in the Arizona constitution expected to be on the November ballot…along with the name of Donald Trump, the dog trying to get that damn car out of his mouth who is running for president.
If you want to see some professional-level reshuffling, allow me to recommend the David French op-ed published in the New York Times on Thursday. Here we have one of the preeminent pro-life intellectuals lamenting the fact that his movement doesn’t have a political party to call its own anymore, because Alabama Republicans quickly did an about-face on IVF after the Supreme Court shut it down in that state. Of course, legalizing IVF necessitates the destruction of fertilized embryos, which are, according to French, unborn children, and “the unborn child must not be intentionally killed.”
French, of course, is supposed to be one of the New York Times' “reasonable” conservatives, in this case, the “reasonable” pro-life one, who assures us elsewhere in his thousand-plus-word lament that he has been pro-life for “my entire adult life,” and defends his movement against charges that what it’s doing is seeking to control women’s lives, French assures us he has “never seen a desire for subjugation and control” in the pro-life movement.
Well, thank goodness for that. We all feel so much better now.
What French and the rest of them are doing is backing and filling now that the nation’s Supreme Court and the supreme courts of two states have dug the gigantic abyss they’re staring into. They’re trying to say, gee, we didn’t mean for this whole thing to go that far! We thought we’d throw these exceptions into the anti-abortion laws and that would take care of it for us! We didn’t know there would be this stuff like women going into sepsis! What the hell is sepsis, anyway?
This is what happens when men write laws about women’s bodies they don’t understand any better than the Chief Pussy-Grabber does. The thing that for decades they had treated like a simple issue to garner votes has turned out to be more complicated than they thought. If you want every embryo to be a little person, there are consequences, and as they discovered in Alabama, consequences demand compromises. As David French now whines, compromises are not pure and simple, they involve moral choices you once thought were easy and clean and now discover are messy and icky.
The dogs who caught the car are not happy. Boo fucking hoo.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.
Sean Hannity urged Arizona Republicans to repeal the near-total abortion ban a court imposed on the swing state in order to contain the political damage to Donald Trump and the GOP. Hours later, after they refused to do so, he deceived his Fox News viewers by blaming Democrats.
Republicans are reeling after the Arizona Supreme Court jolted the national and state political environment on Tuesday by restoring an 1864 state law banning abortion in nearly all cases. Trump, who took credit for overturning Roe v. Wade’s constitutional protections for abortion and said on Monday before the ruling that states “will” determine abortion law, subsequently claimed on Wednesday that the court had gone too far. Kari Lake, the leading GOP candidate for U.S. Senate in Arizona, and other Republicans in tough races are walking back their past positions to condemn the ruling.
Hannity waited until after Trump spoke out to take a position on the ruling, finally responding on Wednesday night with the ludicrous suggestion that Arizona Democrats were deliberately sabotaging efforts to repeal the law for partisan gain.
“Trump opposes the law and this ruling,” he said. “And you know what? Arizona’s governor is a Democrat. The state’s attorney general is a Democrat. The state legislature is almost evenly divided. If Democrats — you want to get rid of the law, well, you have a chance right now to get rid of it. And I would advise you, get rid of it!”
The Fox host concluded, “They would rather use it as a political tool ahead of November.”
Hannity’s statement that “the state legislature is almost evenly divided” is almost comically deceptive. Republicans have majorities in both the state House and the state Senate, and earlier that day, Arizona’s GOP lawmakers blocked Democratic efforts to roll back the law in each chamber. Arizona House Speaker Ben Toma, a Republican currently facing a competitive primary, told Axios “that he wouldn't support a repeal and wouldn't permit a vote on it.”
Hannity knows that Republicans control the fate of the state’s 1864 abortion ban. Speaking on his radio show Wednesday afternoon, he urged Arizona’s Republican officials to “change the law now.”
SEAN HANNITY (HOST): There's a lot to get into. Although, honestly, it's — it's more simple than people think. And I know the media, the mob, and everybody in between is just freaking out over this Arizona Supreme Court decision, which literally goes back to a 160-year-old near-total abortion ban without exceptions for rape, incest, mother's life, any of that. It was even before Arizona was a state. And there's no Republican that supports this, but that's what — Whoopi Goldberg says Republicans want to bring slavery back following the decision. I'm like, OK. Here we go. The demagoging never ends. The lying, the distortion, the misinformation, the propaganda. This is what needs to happen. This is my message for all of you elected state Republican leaders out there in Arizona. Get your act together. Change the law now, and that means every Republican has to stay united, and you better understand where the people in this country are on the issue of abortion. Putting aside over 50% of abortions are now done with the pill, put that aside. And what you need to do is follow the Dobbs decision, 15 weeks, follow the first-trimester decision, whatever it is. And then you've got to force your Democratic governor, Hobbs, to sign a bill that says no late-term abortions, no abortions based on gender or race. I talked to Arizona — former Arizona AG Brnovich. He had some great ideas. You know, find a point of where a viability restriction would be palpable to the overwhelming number of people in your state, and stand up and do your job and get it done now.
“This is my message for all of you elected state Republican leaders out there in Arizona,” Hannity said. “Get your act together. Change the law now, and that means every Republican has to stay united, and you better understand where the people in this country are on the issue of abortion.”
But it turns out that when your political movement treats abortion as murder and calls for banning it “from the moment of conception,” some people who actually believe that — rather than pretending to so Republicans can win elections and cut taxes for rich people — won’t play along.
Arizona’s abortion ban is entirely the fault of Republicans. All six U.S. Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe and open the door to such policies were appointed under a Republican president, including three Trump nominees confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate. GOP governors appointed every member of the Arizona Supreme Court, which was expanded by Republicans in 2016.
But the political consequences of their actions are devastating for the GOP, so the party’s candidates are running away from them while propagandists like Hannity try to deceive the public about who is to blame.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.
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Instead Of Fixing Harsh Abortion Law, Arizona Republicans Flee State House
Ben Toma
On Wednesday, Donald Trump said the Arizona Supreme Court ruling that restored an 1864 ban on all abortions “went too far.” Even Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake, an anti-abortion zealot, begged Gov. Katie Hobbs for help and asked the state legislature to pass “an immediate common sense solution.”
But that same evening, when Republicans in the Arizona Legislature had a chance to address the 1864 law, they used another option—they ran for the exits. GOP lawmakers ignored votes to suspend the archaic law and instead voted to take a recess. Twice.
Republicans aren’t taking immediate action. They’re not even taking less-than-immediate action. Their reaction to efforts to repeal the 1864 ban was to get out of town for the next week.
As AZ Mirror reports, Republican state Rep. Matt Gress made a motion to suspend the House rules and allow an immediate vote on a bill to repeal the 1864 law that was slipped in between a ban on prizefighting and just ahead of a regulation setting the age of consent at 10. But instead of taking the immediate action that Trump, Lake, and so many others in the party called for in public, the Republican-controlled legislature had an alternative proposal: a call for a short recess.
When Republicans returned from their break, Democrats in the House again tried to get a vote scheduled, with state Rep. Stephanie Stahl Hamilton arguing that leaving the archaic law on the books meant that “people will die.” Instead, Republicans once again voted to take a break—this time shutting down the Arizona House until April 17.
The fact that calls for blocking the law didn’t get the kind of action some national figures claimed they wanted should not be a surprise. Both Arizona House Speaker Ben Toma and Senate President Warren Peterson are supporters of the 1864 law. Toma and Peterson provided an amicus brief in favor of restoring the Civil War-era legislation.
That brief called for the state Supreme Court to vacate a decision blocking the implementation of the law, saying, “the Court should vacate the Court of Appeals’ opinion, and give effect to all of Arizona’s laws restricting abortion”—including the 1864 ban.
Toma and Peterson claimed their reason for submitting the brief was “to articulate the perspective of the legislative branch.” So it’s no surprise that instead of moving to repeal the 1864 law, Republicans in Arizona’s Legislature chose to duck and run.
That schism between national Republican figures’ public proclamations and Republican legislators’ actions on the front line perfectly captures the overall GOP position on abortion: They don’t have a clue about how to pull themselves out of the hole they’ve spent 50 years digging.
Increasingly harsh anti-abortion rhetoric has been at the core of the Republican Party for decades. Abortion has been the issue the GOP has leaned on for turnout in many states, and anti-abortion activists have been used as ground troops for Republican efforts.
Those activists believe that life begins at conception—a concept now at the heart of a lot of Republican abortion legislation. For those who share this belief, the Arizona ruling, and even the Alabama ruling against in-vitro fertilization, are considered “wins.”
However, while those activists may be a big deal in the Republican base, they are a small and shrinking minority of the general public. Support for abortion rights has continued to grow since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade. As the 2024 election looms, the abortion issue could result in Democratic gains in state after state, especially those with statewide referendums or constitutional amendments protecting the right to an abortion on the ballot.
Arizona and Florida are likely to be two of those states. Losing either of those states would be a disaster for Republicans, and every time a story like the ruling that restored the 1864 law makes the news the odds of a blue tide driven by a demand for securing abortion rights becomes greater. Republicans must fix this, and fix it fast, before it becomes the dominant issue in November. They know that. This is why Donald Trump is making statements that seem to contradict themselves by the day.
Republicans have reached a point where they’re willing to offend those anti-abortion activists if it will just make this issue go away.
They really do need to fix this. Only … they don’t know how.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
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Rep. James Comer
The GOP-led House Oversight Committee's effort to impeach President Joe Biden is effectively over after its chairman, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), failed to find any smoking gun evidence directly tying Biden to any crime. Now, a Washington-based ethics watchdog group is accusing Comer of capitalizing on his unsuccessful impeachment saga.
In an official letter to the Office of Congressional Ethics, a nonprofit anti-corruption group is now requesting an update on whether the Kentucky Republican followed the law and requested prior approval for a book deal currently being negotiated with publishers.
"Throughout his entire investigation, Representative Comer has used his role as Chairman of the House Oversight Committee for personal and political gain. He has been a frequent guest on conservative news channels pushing conspiracy theories and lies about his investigation and has used this impeachment inquiry to fundraise for his campaign," read the letter from Congressional Integrity Project executive director Kyle Herrig. "The new reporting about a potential book deal is troubling as it appears Representative Comer is planning on using his unique position as Oversight Chair to turn a profit."
Herrig noted in his letter that under House Rule 25, members of Congress have to first have any members receive authorization from the Ethics Committee before they can reap financial rewards from copyright royalties like those for a typical book publishing contract.
"As Representative Comer continues to hold hearings and attempts to build the case to impeach President Biden, the American people deserve to know the extent to which he is benefiting financially," the letter continued. "It is clear already that he has a political motive to impeach the President and it should be revealed if he has a financial motive as well."
The New Republic reported that Comer has admitted that actual articles of impeachment are not likely from his committee, and that the most Republicans could expect would be a criminal referral to the Department of Justice. And while DOJ special counsel David Weiss is already investigating Biden's son, Hunter, for alleged tax-related crimes, an additional indictment of Biden himself is unlikely to emerge from any referral by the Oversight Committee.
"Recent reporting revealed that Representative Comer has been in talks with at least one publisher regarding a book on his impeachment inquiry into President Biden," Herrig wrote in his letter, adding that "Representative Comer and his Republican colleagues have spent the past 15 months relentlessly investigating the president and his family and failed to find any evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden let alone anything impeachable."
Comer's attempt to have Biden impeached was largely based on allegations within an FBI informant report in which Biden and his son were said to have solicited $10 million in bribes from the Ukrainian government. However, the author of that report, 43-year-old Alexander Smirnov, was later indicted for lying to the FBI about those allegations.
Smirnov was also subsequently indicted for attempting to flee prosecution. The disgraced former FBI informant was alleged to have had contact with "high-ranking" members of Russian intelligence agencies who sought to sow disinformation ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Former Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), who left Congress last month after a surprise early retirement announcement, admitted Smirnov's indictment essentially rendered the GOP's efforts to impeach Biden fruitless.
"We were warned at the time that we received the document outlining this witness' testimony — we were warned that the credibility of this statement was not known," Buck told CNN host Caitlan Collins. "And yet, people — my colleagues — went out and talked to the public about how this was credible, and how it was damning. And how it proved President Biden's — at the time, Vice President Biden's — complicity in receiving bribes. It appears to absolutely be false and to really undercut the nature of the charges."
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
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Mike Rogers
Former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) is running in the Republican US Senate primary on his longtime relationship with the Mitten State and his local roots. But a staffer for his Democratic rival just unearthed evidence showing his ties to a state decidedly much further away from his target constituency.
In a Monday tweet, Rogers — who represented Michigan's Eighth Congressional District between 2001 and 2015 — wrote, "I'm proud to be born and raised right here in Michigan. And I will be proud to serve my home in the US Senate." This prompted Austin Cook, the communications director for Democratic US Senate candidate Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), to tweet a screenshot of Rogers' voter registration record that shows a Florida ZIP code and a voter status of "active."
"Fun fact: @MikeRogersForMI is literally registered to vote in Florida right now," Cook wrote, tagging Rogers' official campaign account.
According to Newsweek, Rogers is currently living at his sister-in-law's home in Brighton, Michigan while a home he bought in West Lake Township is undergoing renovations. Michigan Advance reported that Rogers' official residence was a home in Cape Coral, Florida prior to him announcing his candidacy for the US Senate.
The Constitution dictates that in order to run for US Senate, a candidate must be a US citizen for at least nine years, be at least 30 years old, and be a legal resident of the state they seek to represent at the time of election. This means that even as a current Florida resident, Rogers could still represent Michigan in the US Senate if his residency in the Mitten State is established prior to the first Tuesday in November. Being a registered voter at his West Lake Township home would ostensibly meet the Constitution's residency requirements.
However, proving his authentic status as a Michigander may be more difficult to do between now and the time voters cast their ballots if Rogers was indeed a full-time Florida resident until recently. A 4,751 square-foot five-bedroom, four-bathroom house in Cape Coral valued on Zillow at nearly $1.7 million matches the address shown on Rogers' voter registration in Florida. And according to Lee County, Florida property assessment records, that home is in the name of Rogers, his wife, and their family trust. Rogers has not yet publicly clarified whether he is still a full-time Florida resident, which is required to be an actively registered voter in the Sunshine State.
Determining whether Rogers claimed the Cape Coral home as his primary residence could be confirmed by flood insurance claim records. Cape Coral was in the direct path of Hurricane Ian in 2022, which was Florida's most costly storm in history. Ian was also the third-costliest storm in US history according to the National Hurricane Center, causing more than 150 direct and indirect deaths and more than $112 billion in total property damage.
The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which is the federal program that underwrites all flood insurance claims in the US, pays replacement cash value (RCV) in claims where the affected property is the insured's principal residence. In cases where a home is a secondary residence, the NFIP instead pays actual cash value (ACV), which is a lesser amount. If Rogers qualified for an RCV claim, that would mean he told the federal government that the Cape Coral house was his principal residence at the time of the flood.
AlterNet has reached out to the Rogers campaign via email to see if his Cape Coral home was damaged by Hurricane Ian, and if it was, if the adjuster assigned to his claim recommended an ACV or RCV payment. This article will be updated in the event Rogers' campaign responds.
Rogers has been endorsed by former President Donald Trump in the Michigan US Senate Republican primary. He's running against Peter Meijer, a scion of the wealthy Meijer family known for their nationwide grocery store chain. Meijer notably voted to impeach Trump following the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, though he has since softened his tone in regard to the former president.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
