-Laura Ingraham, defending guns from pot smokers

The resolution of Russia’s war against Ukraine may depend on whether Ukrainian soldiers can resist invading forces in the east long enough for stepped-up reinforcements from the west to arrive.

• The fight over control of the Donbas has become the kind of conventional modern warfare that Russia wanted to fight, where whoever has the most heavy weaponry that can kill the most enemy forces across large distances stands the best chance in any given standoff. According to Donbas-based reporter Christopher Miller, “Right now, Russia appears to have the upper hand.”
   
• What does that look like in practice? It means Ukrainian and invading soldiers are dying in large numbers, but Russian forces keep slowly advancing the frontlines. In Sieverdonetsk, a city in the Luhansk region, it means Ukrainian forces have retreated to areas west of the city, which was already 70 percent under Russian control. 
   
• It also means fresh hell for Ukrainian civilians. The head of the Luhansk regional military government told Miller that Russian forces have carpet-bombed cities in the area, forcing soldiers to contemplate strategic withdrawal from the areas. The Ukrainian military contends that Russian soldiers are dressing in Ukrainian uniform and testing locals with questions about the positioning of Russian forces, then kidnapping those who offer up information.

More help is on the way, though.

• President Biden confirmed in a New York Times op-ed that the U.S. will shortly send Ukraine medium-range advanced rocket systems, which will allow them to precisely target enemy positions at a range of up to 50 miles. Reuters reports the U.S. will provide Ukraine with drones that can deploy Hellfire missiles. A senior official told reporters the U.S. had received assurances that Ukrainian forces wouldn’t use the new equipment to strike targets within Russia. Biden reiterated that the U.S would not seek Vladimir Putin’s “ouster” and added, We are not encouraging or enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders.”
   
• The U.S. has conducted offensive cyberoperations in support of Ukraine, according to NSA Director Paul Nakasone. On top of U.S. assistance, the U.K. has sought U.S. permission to arm Ukraine with a similar mid-range rocket system, and Germany will provide Ukraine with air-defense missiles. 

 U.S. officials reportedly view Russian gains in Donbas as “incremental” and believe invading forces aren’t poised for a “breakout” capture of the region, which means Ukraine should receive these new capabilities before it’s too late. A great deal depends on them being right.

Why coffee? The world is unpredictable. The news is the news. We can’t control what we’ll see when we take a deep breath, unlock our phones, and discover what the algorithm has in store for us. But we are in charge of our morning routines. And why not start the day with really good coffee, sourced in a sustainable and ethical way, with very cool packaging, and that comes from your pals at Crooked Media with a pledge to donate to Register Her to help register millions of women across America to vote? Why not? Tell us why not. You can’t. It’s a good idea.

Sign up today to be the first to sip at crooked.com/coffee.

Remember a few months ago when a federal judge opined that some of the materials Donald Trump’s top coup lawyer, John Eastman, wanted to withhold from the January 6 committee contained evidence of felonies both men committed? Well, the main document in question is now public. It’s a memo from one of their underlings advising them against “allowing the Electoral Count Act to operate by its terms” and instead to have Vice President Mike Pence assert “the constitutional responsibility not just to open the votes, but to count them—including making judgments about what to do if there are conflicting votes.” By total coincidence, this is the same crew that immediately thereafter set about organizing a fraudulent slate of electors, to provide Pence the pretext for violating the law governing the peaceful transition of power. Seems pretty crime-y. By sheer coincidence, the RNC wants to distance itself from Trump’s election lies during the public-hearing phase of the trial.

• A Virginia jury found that Amber Heard defamed Johnny Depp by accusing him of physical abuse, but also found that Johnny Depp’s lawyer defamed Amber Heard by calling her abuse allegations a hoax, in the most Brain Genious verdict of all time. Heard will have to pay Depp over $10 million, and receive $2 million in compensatory damages of her own, if the verdict stands.

• There’s been a mass shooting at a hospital in Tulsa, OK, but details are still too scarce and fluid to report anything definitive about it. America…

• Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin quietly swore school district police chief Pete Arredondo into his new office as city councilmember, a week after Arredondo issued his now-infamous order not to engage the mass shooter who killed 19 children and two teachers while officers did nothing.
   
• The Uvalde school district called the cops in to deny reporters access to headquarters and threaten them with criminal citations if they didn’t leave.
   
• Sheryl Sandberg has announced that she’ll from Meta (it’s Facebook, let’s be honest) this fall, after a flawless 14 year run during which nothing could possibleye go wrong. 
   
• Reps. Pat Fallon (R-TX), and John Rutherford (R-FL) seem to have serially violated the law requiring House members to report their security trades, to the tune of hundreds of trades valued at several million dollars combined.
   
• Nothing to see here, just the official Arizona Republican Party, and its official leader, calling journalists domestic terrorists. 
   
• This sure looks illegal as hell. 
   
• Someone keeps targeting New Hampshire Public Radio journalists with threats and vandalism. 
   
• A judge tossed Sarah Palin’s motion for a new libel suit against the New York Times, citing the small technical matter of her failure to provide “even a speck” of evidence that the paper defamed her.

When Republicans don’t think anyone’s listening, they aren’t shy about their election-stealing plans. In official training meetings recorded over the course of the past year, Republicans outlined a scheme to, in effect, make the smooth administration of elections and the fair counting of votes impossible in key Democratic strongholds like Detroit, MI, either to create pretexts for overturning elections or even simply win on rigged initial counts. The idea is to install Trump loyalists and Big Lie conspiracy theorists—the trainees—as poll workers, and provide them a hotline to a national network of GOP lawyers and Republican district attorneys, in the hope of creating real-time chaos or even obtaining lawless orders to cease vote counting altogether. If Democrats have convened strategy sessions to discuss how to head off this kind of sabotage, I’d like someone to leak videotapes of them, too.

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NASA will release its first photographs and spectrographic data from the historic Webb space observatory in July. 

New York Mayor Eric Adam’s zoning plan would create new housing across the city and facilitate cleaner buildings and cars. 

Beijing appears to be getting back to normal as COVID-19 cases have dropped. 

People who drink coffee (sweetened, or unsweetened) are at a lower death risk than coffee teetotalers (coffeetotalers).