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Why a Trump indictment will matter so little to most of his Christian supporters
Why a Trump indictment will matter so little to most of his Christian supporters, Robert P. Jones, Religion News Service
Consider just a few of the public revelations and remarks by Trump since 2016 and how little they affected white evangelicals' loyalty to him.

As we anticipate the potential indictment of a former president, the data suggests that even such an unprecedented event would have little impact on the support for Trump by white evangelical Protestants and other conservative white Christians.
Trump Puts His Legal Peril at Center of First Big Rally for 2024
Trump Puts His Legal Peril at Center of First Big Rally for 2024, Michael C. Bender and Shane Goldmacher, The New York Times
Facing a potential indictment, the former president devoted much of his speech in Waco, Texas, to criticizing the justice system, though his attacks were less personal and caustic than in recent days.

The speech underscored how Mr. Trump tends to frame the nation’s broader political stakes heavily around whatever issues personally affect him the most. Last year, he sought to make his lies about fraud in his 2020 election defeat the most pressing issue of the midterms. On Saturday, he called the “weaponization of our justice system” the “central issue of our time.”
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How Pro Wrestling Explains Today’s GOP
How Pro Wrestling Explains Today’s GOP, Michael Kruse, POLITICO
The battle between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump could split the party with surprising results, argues the author of a new book on Vince McMahon.

“Wrestling,” writes [author Josie] Riesman, “has metastasized into the broader world, especially since the inauguration of the 45th president. There’s little difference between Trumpism and Vince’s neokayfabe, each with their infinite and indistinguishable layers of irony and sincerity. Each philosophy approaches life with one goal: to remake reality in such a way as to defeat one’s enemies and sate one’s insecurities.”

Perhaps even more apropos, Riesman offers a fresh way to consider current dramas, especially within the Republican Party, including the most compelling conflict — Trump versus Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Many observers of politics tend to think about candidates who are at odds in terms of lanes, but at this point it might be more useful, Riesman suggests, to think in terms of roles: heroes and villains — in industry lingo, faces and heels — and the fluidity of such positioning within the twists and turns of storylines that can see similar combatants giving rise to new contestants and surprising results….

Kruse: It pays to be the heel just as much or maybe even more than it pays to be “the face.”

Riesman: Oh, I would say much more. Being the face [the good guy] doesn’t pay because you’re always going to have another side that reflexively hates you. You’re not going to win over the other side. Whereas if you’re a heel, you have one side loving you, and the other side you’re profiting off their hatred. It’s the only way to actually make it now.
Why Fig Leaves Cover the Private Parts of Classical Sculptures6
Why Fig Leaves Cover the Private Parts of Classical Sculptures, Alexxa Gotthardt, Artsy
Consider the fig leaf: a little piece of foliage that’s shielded the genitals of famous biblical figures and nude sculptures for centuries. It’s a plant that’s become synonymous with sin, sex, and censorship. And in large part, we have art history—and the artists determined to portray nudity even when it was considered taboo—to thank for that.

Take Michelangelo’s famous sculpture David (1501–04), a muscular, starkly naked depiction of its namesake biblical hero. The work scandalized the artist’s fellow Florentines and the Catholic clergy when unveiled in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria in 1504. Soon after, the figure’s sculpted phallus was girdled with a garland of bronze fig leaves by authorities.

60 years later, just months before Michelangelo’s death, the Catholic Church issued an edict demanding that “figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting…lust.” The clergy began a crusade to camouflage the pensises and pubic hair visible in artworks across Italy. Their coverups of choice? Loincloths, foliage, and—most often—fig leaves. It has became known as the “Fig Leaf Campaign,” one of history’s most significant acts of art censorship.
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Comer’s ‘oversight’ is focused on phony scandals
Comer’s ‘oversight’ is focused on phony scandals, Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post
Put in charge of a committee that Republicans have historically used to fan conspiracies and put their opponents on defense, Comer has gotten flak from his own side for failing to come up with much useful to his party. Voters are unimpressed and want the committee to get back to real issues. And Democrats have mocked his loony claims on everything from the Chinese balloon to the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Outside right-wing media, these “scandals” don’t have much (such as facts) to recommend them. But a good deal of the problem lies with Comer.
A Defense of the Ukrainian Defense of Bakhmut
A Defense of the Ukrainian Defense of Bakhmut, Phillips P. O'Brien, Substack
The line hardly moves--a Culmination?

Well, here we are back for another discussion of what is happening in Bakhmut. I hope this will be the last for a while, but considering the fascinating change in tone over the last week about what is/has happening/happened there, I thought it would be worth returning again to why I have always given the Ukrainian government/military the benefit of the doubt with their Bakhmut strategy, and why I believe that had they listened to those who were saying it was now a bad place to fight and should pull out, it would most likely have been extremely counterproductive.

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