Opinion

The Senate is back from recess, and legislators are facing down a daunting to-do list to complete before the November election, including passing appropriations bill and confirming more of President Joe Biden's judicial nominees. Additionally, there's now increasing pressure to make time for a vote on the Respect for Marriage Act, which would offer limited protection to bolster previous Supreme Court decisions legalizing interracial and same-sex marriage in the face of this summer's blockbuster decision from the court striking down Roe v. Wade's landmark legalization of abortion.

The bill was passed in the House earlier this summer in response to the court's unprecedented move of taking away a right once granted. Such a move on its own would have raised fears that the court would next overturn other decisions that granted rights like same-sex marriage and birth control, but Justice Clarence Thomas erased any lingering doubts that such things are next on the religious right's wish list by explicitly inviting lawsuits challenging those previous decisions.

They were warned. Ohio Republican lawmakers and Gov. Mike DeWine were warned time and again that their abortion ban was cruel and would lead to heartbreaking situations of unimaginable pain and anguish for many people.

They were warned that their abortion ban set a stage of legal nightmares for doctors and personal nightmares for patients. They were warned that pregnancy is complicated and comes with inherent dangers that radical, extremist lawmaking would make infinitely worse.

Armie Hammer had a promising career ahead of him. In 2010, he attracted attention for his portrayal of the Winklevoss twins in David Fincher's "The Social Network" and in 2012, he won over young hearts as Prince Andrew Alcott in the fantasy Snow White retelling "Mirror Mirror." A few years later — following a string of forgettable roles and box-office bombs — he reclaimed his princely crown with Luca Guadagnino's acclaimed drama "Call Me By Your Name."

But all that fame came crashing down in 2021, when Hammer faced numerous allegations of rape, abuse, violence and even a lurid interest in cannibalism. An investigation led by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) ensued and subsequently, Hammer was dropped from multiple upcoming projects. For the time being, Hollywood's ex-Golden Boy is living a private life, working as a timeshare salesman in the Cayman Islands.

I don’t think Georgia is prepared for what’s coming its way.

I don’t know how it could be, not with the most important and controversial trial in American history looming in its not-too-distant future.

Comedian Kathy Griffin recently received a rash of grief for insinuating in a tweet that the Republicans want to start a civil war. But it is actual Republicans who have floated that possibility – not Griffin. So what would that entail? What would that future look like?

For those who are pondering how to use their vote this fall, it's time to take a look at what kind of future we will face should those who call themselves "Trump Patriots" succeed, either through the ballot box, violence or both.

Comedian Kathy Griffin recently received a rash of grief for insinuating in a tweet that the Republicans want to start a civil war. But it is actual Republicans who have floated that possibility – not Griffin. So what would that entail? What would that future look like?

For those who are pondering how to use their vote this fall, it's time to take a look at what kind of future we will face should those who call themselves "Trump Patriots" succeed, either through the ballot box, violence or both.

That the GOP has abandoned democracy is by now conventional wisdom. Less well-known – their policymaking is broken, too.

Consider the decision to attack Social Security in an election year.

After years and years of birtherism, calls to “lock her up,” antisemitic dogwhistles, delegitimizing everything the broad left does as “communism,” refusing to accept election results, stealing elections and plain-old racism and sexism – after all this, it seems that a line has been crossed and respectful discourse is no longer possible.

What was the final straw?

At first blush, the right's new war on children's hospitals is most reminiscent of the tactics that have been used to harass abortion providers for decades. As Taylor Lorenz, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Peter Jamison reported over the weekend for the Washington Post, "Children's hospitals across the U.S. are facing growing threats of violence" from crazed right-wingers, like fans of the virulently queerphobic Twitter account Libs of TikTok, run by a woman named Chaya Raichik. Raichik keeps pointing her unhinged audience at various pediatric care facilities, resulting in "a flood of online harassment and phoned-in threats" at doctors and hospital staff.

Abortion providers and their allies will immediately see the connection to the throngs of anti-choice militants that gather around family planning clinics to bully patients. Like anti-choice activists, the people attacking children's hospitals are inserting themselves into the very personal decisions of total strangers. With anti-choicers, they're asserting that their religious beliefs about a woman's duty to breed trumps the right of bodily autonomy of patients. With those attacking children's hospitals, right-wingers are all wound up because they heard trans children are getting treatment, and they believe their opposition to trans identities should trump the child's right to gender-affirming care.

When the FBI's search warrant was served on Donald Trump's beach club in early August, I don't think anyone could have guessed that there would be such a mountain of classified material among the boxes of government documents he stole from the government when he flounced out of town, pouting like a 4-year-old, on Inauguration Day 2021. But the hair on the back of the neck stood up when we later learned that they were looking for nuclear intelligence documents.

Trump pooh-poohed the report, of course, posting on his social media site, "nuclear weapons issue is a Hoax, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was a Hoax, two Impeachments were a Hoax, the Mueller investigation was a Hoax, and much more. Same sleazy people involved." Of course, this was hardly reassuring since none of those were hoaxes. But not much more was said about the issue — until Tuesday night when the Washington Post reported that the FBI had, in fact, found "a document describing a foreign government's military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities." This would be one of the nation's most tightly kept secrets.