Opinion

Nothing speaks more to how the modern GOP is centered around tickling the racist lizard brains of white conservative Boomers than the sudden reemergence of the term "crack pipe." The actual crack epidemic wound down literally decades ago, back when Donald Trump was still divorcing his first wife. But the audience for Republican propaganda is still stuck in the 1980s, the last time many of them had a full head of hair, and so here we are, with the term "crack pipe" suddenly exploding all over social media, search algorithms, and, because this really is the worst timeline, a grossly named federal bill.

The situation, which I regret even having to write about, is as idiotic as it is disturbing. As Jon Skolnik reported for Salon, Health and Human Services was planning on passing out a paltry "$30 million to nonprofit groups nationwide as part of a plan to reduce drug-related harm," mainly by preventing opioid overdoses. The opioid epidemic is affecting rural white communities as much as anyone else, making it impossible to turn into a racist moral panic. So instead, Republicans seized on a minor provision allowing clinics to provide "safe smoking kits," which can be used for many different drugs, including opioids. But, because of racism, the right-wing press ran with the outdated term "crack pipe," and, in case you are too dense to hear the dog whistle, most even insisted that the provision was there to "advance racial equity," which is a flat out lie.

The Republicans are about to win a major battle in their war on electric vehicles, this time with the second largest vehicle fleet in America owned by the US Postal Service. It’s an outrageous story that most Americans don’t know a thing about.

To understand what’s going on with the Post Office right now, you first must know the backstory that, it seems, most media outlets aren’t interested in discussing. It’s an issue that’s hitting millions of Americans right now.

It's been quite a week for Donald Trump and his henchmen. The House Jan. 6 committee finally subpoenaed his former trade adviser, Peter Navarro, who has been telling anyone who will listen about his plot to overturn the election. It was reported that Trump's former lawyer Rudy Giuliani, last seen on "The Masked Singer," called a Michigan prosecutor shortly after the 2020 election and asked him to turn over voting machines in one county to Trump's team. And the National Archives has reportedly sent a referral to the Department of Justice regarding all the White House documents Trump absconded with and shipped to Mar-a-Lago, some of which were reportedly marked as classified or top secret. Oh, and it turns out there were major gaps (of more than 15 minutes) in the White House presidential call records on Jan. 6 and that Trump at least sometimes tried to flush documents down a White House toilet.

Taking the last items first, let's stipulate that Trump's non-compliance with the Presidential Records Act has been known for some time. It was previously reported that he routinely tore up documents and his staff had to rifle through the trash and tape them back together. He refused to use a secure phone and half his staff, including his daughter, used personal email accounts. Trump was even alleged to have eaten documents at one point. This new story, reported by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman in her forthcoming book "Confidence Man," that plumbers were repeatedly called to service a toilet in the White House which had become clogged with papers that "someone" had tried to flush, is entirely in keeping with all the reports about Trump's refusal to adhere to laws about record keeping.

This week, we learned that Donald Trump liked to eat presidential paperwork. A former aide told MSNBC that she saw him masticating memos.

Now we hear that the White House toilets periodically clogged with official records which, legally, should have gone to the National Archives Records Administration (NARA).

This week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases on affirmative action, signaling a strong likelihood it will be ruled unconstitutional.

Race-conscious admissions have gone through a lot of constitutional review with cases in 2003 and 2016 upholding the consideration of race in college admissions, as long as a quota system isn’t used.

If you’re not a lawyer or a legal nerd like me, you probably don’t pay much attention to the dissenting opinions in Supreme Court cases. After all, only the majority opinion actually affects law.

Dissenting opinions not only serve to show that a legal decision is controversial, but can provide important legal arguments for later challenges or ultimately overturn the decision. They’re not legal precedent but they are legal arguments of importance from a recognized authority on constitutional law.

It’s time to get back to normal. That’s what we’re hearing from some of the shrillest voices in the press and pundit corps along with governors of some of the largest states in the union.

And what does normal look like?

I recently watched hundreds of videos from the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Many of the stark moments from the attack on the U.S. Capitol are well-known — the battle at the west terrace tunnel, the shooting of rioter Ashli Babbitt, the desecration of the Senate chamber.

If you're sensing a bit of déjà vu, just remember David Byrne's 1980s classic and realize that what you think may be "Once in a Lifetime" is actually the same as it ever was.

It appears, at least in Eastern Europe, that the world is reliving a Cold War scenario; a rerun, or at the very least a reboot.

Donald Trump's 2018 defense of his older daughter may incriminate him in his latest scandals over the National Archives recovering official documents from Mar-a-Lago and flushed papers allegedly clogging the White House sewer pipes when he was president.

In 2018, after it was revealed White House advisor Ivanka Trump used private email to conduct official government business, her father was asked how that differed from Hillary Clinton's private email server, which was a major Trump talking point in the 2016 election.

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman's new book claims, among other things, that former President Donald Trump had to call in an engineer to handle the White House toilets. It was allegedly because he was trying to destroy documents using his personal toilet.

The news harkens back to a 2019 speech where Trump ranted about how terrible toilets are and how it takes him so many times to flush. It's unclear how far back Trump was flushing documents, but it certainly puts his frustration with low-flow toilets into new light.

Our own Sen. Ron Johnson, who is running for re-election in one of the most high profile Senate races in the country, is a fascinating example of GOP wingnuttery.

Johnson became famous for downplaying the Jan. 6 insurrection even before the RNC declared that the rioting cop killers in the Capitol were merely practicing “legitimate political discourse.” He organized press conferences to warn people that getting vaccinated could have dire health consequences and has spent much of the pandemic touting the merits of horse dewormer and other unproven COVID remedies.

Nevertheless, that’s what we’re seeing from many Ohio Republican Statehouse politicians confronted with the possibility they may have to finally actually compete in competitive elections.

The childish temper tantrum being thrown by Ohio politicians upset they’ve been stopped from cheating their way into reelection with rigged districts is sadly completely unsurprising.