It’s easy to get whiplash from the crash abortion litigation in America, but there are continued indications that Republican cruelty is backfiring in a big way. 
 

• As part of his ongoing “Live from Criminal Indictment” 2024 presidential campaign, disgraced former president Donald Trump has been holding a series of meetings with figures from the religious (evangelical Christian) right, the faction that definitively delivered him the 2016 election. Trump wants to remind them that he put three anti-choice justices on the Supreme Court (who lied about believing that Roe was settled precedent) that directly led to the Dobbs ruling last June. But many hardcore anti-choice evangelical leaders are pressing for commitments that go far beyond what Trump himself supports (not that he has any real morals or ideological commitments, but you know what I mean) and more importantly, what he knows is politically viable in a general election.
   

• According to multiple sources who have been present at these meetings, Trump has warned that Republicans will risk “losing big” unless they shift their own messaging on abortion to emphasize “exceptions” to bans such as in cases of rape, incest, or mortal danger. Trump has reportedly been complaining to his inner circle for several weeks that the GOP is “getting killed on abortion.” It’s not dissimilar to very public statements made by high-profile Republicans like RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel and even Wicked Witch of the Wasps’ Nest Ann Coulter after the anti-choice Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Dan Kelly lost to his liberal opponent by a glaring 10 points.
   

• Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued a temporary order on Friday (very briefly) blocking restrictions on the abortion drug mifepristone from taking effect after a Trump-appointed circuit-court judges issued their own order dramatically limiting access to it nationwide this week. Alito instructed challengers to file their briefings by noon on Tuesday. So the Fifth Circuit order won’t go into effect until SCOTUS has been fully briefed. If Republican justices uphold the lower-court order, the restrictions will take effect on Wednesday. If they stay the ruling, the mifepristone ban will not take effect at all, and the litigation on the “merits” (using that word very loosely) will continue. Alito handled this because he is the justice assigned to emergency matters from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

So where does that leave us?
 

• A recent nationwide analysis showed that by the time all of the bans from state legislatures take effect, one-quarter of American women of reproductive age could have to travel more than 200 miles to obtain a legal abortion. Under the most far-reaching, extreme scenarios, that number could easily rise to nearly half of American women. The ability to obtain a legal abortion in post-Roe America now depends not only on an individual’s state laws, but the laws in that person’s surrounding states as well. 
   

• Late Thursday night, Mario Kart Mussolini, aka Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), signed the strictest statewide abortion ban in the country into law, making the procedure completely illegal after just six weeks, before most women even know that they’re pregnant. But when he gave a speech at Jerry Falwell’s ultraconservative evangelical Liberty University on Friday, he made no mention of it. This reflects the tension between GOP politicians who have either supported or been pressured to embrace the tightest bans possible (and done so), and the knowledge that abortion has been a deciding factor in dozens of Democratic victories in general elections up and down the ballot since the Dobbs decision. 

The fight is far from over. It’s clear that a loud, small minority of this country wants to see abortion banned completely with no exceptions at the federal level, and they’re calling the shots in the GOP at the current moment, to their own detriment. We can’t control the rulings of far-right nightmare judges, but it’s clear time and again that the majority of Americans support safe and legal abortion, and they will eventually have their say.

Get ready to be transported back to 1973 New York City with Stiffed, the new podcast from Crooked Media and iHeartRadio. In this eight-part series, host Jennifer Romolini takes you on a wild ride through the rise and fall of Viva, the erotic magazine for women  started by porn king publisher Bob Guccione  that rocked the publishing world. With a team of feminist writers and editors behind it, Viva in its original form had full frontal male nudity, a fashion section run by Anna Wintor, and cover stars like Bianca Jagger, but were they doomed to fail from the beginning? Check out the first 4 episodes of Stiffed right now. 
 

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Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard serviceman who was taken into FBI custody on Thursday for leaking hundreds of highly classified national-security documents to show off to his buddies on Discord, apparently had a very active and easily traceable digital fingerprint. He often talked about God (Christian God, that is) in the hilariously titled Discord channel “Thug Shaker Central” in between sharing his love of guns and racist memes. According to a member of the Discord, he also expressed opposition to many of the priorities of the U.S. government and the military “since it was run by the elite politicians.” But it also cannot be thoroughly emphasized enough that his motivation to leak the documents was apparently not moral or political, but rather his personal bravado and being a 21-year-old with way too much security clearance. Teixeira made his initial appearance in federal court today, and Boston’s top federal national-security prosecutor Nadine Pellegrini requested that he be detained pending trial. A detention hearing was set for Wednesday.

A senior official at the Federal Reserve said that there has been little progress on inflation after over a year and that more interest rate hikes are needed. Or, you know, they could suggest something else like appropriately taxing record corporate profits instead of continuing to punish average Americans.

The Montana legislature became the first state to unilaterally ban TikTok on nearly all devices in the state. The teens are gonna be so mad!

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) will sign a bill on Friday that will allow split juries to recommend the death penalty in the state of Florida, requiring only an 8-4 vote instead of a unanimous one. Because apparently it wasn’t easy enough to kill people in “the most pro-life state”!

France’s Constitutional Council has approved a wildly unpopular plan to raise the national retirement age from 62 to 64 after, three months of mass protests over the Macron government’s decision. 

Minneapolis became the first city in the nation to okay the Muslim call to prayer five times per day, year round, amending the city’s noise ordinance to allow calls at dawn and late in the  evening. 

The Argentinian economy is buckling under crushing 103 percent inflation. Is that high?

British intelligence has assessed that Ukrainian troops have been forced to withdraw from parts of the city of Bakhmut after a Russian missile strike killed eight people and injured 21 more in eastern Ukraine today. Earlier this week, Ukrainian military commanders rejected the claim by Russian leaders that its forces now controlled 80 percent of the city, but it’s clear that the Kremlin has been injecting new resources into its long-sought effort to capture Bakhmut as part of a larger aim to capture more territory in the Donbas region of Ukraine. Bakhmut was home to around 70,000 people before the war, and has been the Kremlin’s main target in its winter offensive.

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Money has poured into the Tennessee Democratic Party and to local Dem candidates after the expulsion then reinstatement of state Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson for protesting against lax gun laws on the House floor after a school shooting. 

President Biden continues to enjoy his victory tour of Ireland with this WWE-style entrance to a crowd of thousands.