Opinion

It must be love.

Ron DeSantis has a major man-crush on Clarence Thomas, calling him our “greatest living justice and one of the greatest public servants in America.”

As right-wing legislators are restricting access to the ballot for millions across the country, the nation’s most severe attack on our sacred freedom to vote is happening right here in Arizona. Last week, Gov. Doug Ducey signed House Bill 2492, a bill that could potentially purge hundreds of thousands of Arizonans from the voter rolls and deny them the right to vote. This bill is one of several anti-democracy bills being pushed into law by Republican lawmakers in Arizona — and this phenomenon is neither new nor surprising.

Arizona has long been a battleground for democracy. As we witnessed first-hand in Arizona in 2020, fringe right-wing activists increasingly show up at polling sites in Black, Latino, and Native neighborhoods to intimidate voters without cause or authority. Fringe right-wing activists showed up and formed a 75-foot line outside of these polling sites to check ballots and scare off voters, without authority. The fact remains that these right-wingers have been further enabled by the likes of Donald Trump and Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, both of whom spread the false gospel of Trump’s “Big Lie.”

The midterm election campaigns are in full swing and we know this because there is a ton of new polling coming out every week. If you are a Republican you are enjoying them immensely. If you're a Democrat, not so much.

So far the consensus is that this will be a typical midterm election which means that the party in the White House is likely to lose seats. It's not written in stone, of course. The post-Trump political world remains volatile and world events have a way of changing the predictable electoral trajectory. From the looks of the polling, the country is still in a bad mood. Two years of dealing with the pandemic has taken its toll both socially and economically. Inflation is biting, even with strong wage growth. And for half the country, the assault on democracy engineered by Donald Trump and the Republicans feels like a dangerous threshold has been crossed while the other half thinks the election was stolen from the rightful winner. The culture is raging again at home while we are witnessing yet another horrific war, this time in Europe, and the whole world is holding its breath in the hopes that it ends quickly.

At least a dozen times in the past week I’ve heard American TV commentators wonder out loud how it is that average Russians don’t believe the horrors their government has inflicted on Ukraine and its people.

The most common story is of Ukrainian refugees or people under bombardment who’ve tried to tell friends or relatives back in Russia what’s going on and gotten a disbelieving response.

Gun control activist Fred Guttenberg offered Blackburn some perspective.

Other Twitter users – including parents – fired back at Blackburn, whose complaint can be easily dismantled under some light scrutiny:

There was so much to say about Senator Ted Cruz after his bizarre line of questions at the Senate confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson last week. Many, for good reason, focused on how the episode showed that Cruz has transitioned from an "unctuous asshole" to an aggressively deranged demagogue. As Ed Kilgore pointed out in The Intelligencer, during the hearings Cruz outdid himself "with the most disgraceful display of thuggish senatorial behavior I've personally seen in my many years of watching the upper chamber."

This article first appeared in Salon.

The word "miscalculation" has been thrown around a lot to describe Vladimir Putin's attempt to annex Ukraine, but perhaps his biggest miscalculation lay in thinking he could do it using tanks as his primary weapon. It's clear as the sixth week of the war begins that his apparent plan was to send a column of tanks rumbling into Kyiv, blow up a few things, send Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his government scampering away in fear, declare victory, install a puppet president and go home. Evidence that his plan was a strategic, tactical and political failure is showing on your television screens around the clock. If there is one image that will symbolize forever this war, it will be a blown-up Russian tank, its treads sagging and its turret tilted, rusting by the side of the road in Ukraine.

This article first appeared in Salon.

You remember I interviewed Michelle B. Young. We talked about how the Democrats actually did not “strand” Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson during Senate confirmation hearings for her being the next justice.

During our chat, Michelle shared a video clip of Jane Elliott, a well-known white anti-racist teacher. Michelle said the video clip illustrated her belief that Republicans' “issues” are not issues at all.

If you’ve consumed any news media lately, you’re probably worried democracy is getting strangled by Trumpist-Republican sectarians.

You’re right.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has shown no inclination to heed calls for his recusal on Capitol riot and 2020 election cases -- despite the activist involvement of his wife Virginia Thomas in support of overturning President Joe Biden’s victory.

But if Thomas becomes afflicted with an unexpected case of conscience, there’s one noted judicial philosopher to whom he can turn for advice: former President Donald Trump.

A spectre is haunting Vladimir Putin — the spectre of Vladimir Lenin. Upon recognizing the “independence” of Donetsk and Lugansk, the Russian president clarified who is to be blamed for the whole mess: “modern Ukraine was entirely created by… communist Russia… Lenin and his associates did it in a very rude way towards Russia itself – by separating, tearing away from it part of its own historical territories. Of course, no one asked about [it] to the millions of people who lived there.”

Of course, now, more than a century later, we are fortunate that Russia is helmed by someone who knows exactly what the millions of Ukrainians want – and how to make their wish come true. Putin may well owe his mindreading skills to Lenin’s successor, Josef Stalin, who took great pains to rectify false consciousness, often by relieving the said bearers of their fallacious lives. Putin has spoken favorably of Stalin before, but his recent Lenin lambasting amid the onslaught on Ukraine points to one of the bloodiest spats between the two Soviet founders: self-determination.

If you’ve been paying any attention to the news the last few years, you might be just a tad concerned about maintaining our democracy and what seems to be a conservative fascist threat.

For many, the threat became clear on January 6, 2021. Others have been concerned since Donald Trump took office. Others still since Mitch McConnell essentially stole a Supreme Court seat.

Putin’s attack on Ukraine is producing a series of crises which are going to, in all probability, bring a period of great pain and instability to the world and to America in the near future.

Republicans are already working to exploit it.