Opinion

It was a perfect setup for Donald Trump.

After he lost the 2020 presidential race to Joe Biden, Trump set about filing lawsuits across the nation. Trump was asking the courts to overturn the election, claiming it had been stolen from him.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins still wants voters to believe she is pro-choice. During the hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Collins defended her decision to vote for the Federalist Society-linked judge by claiming to believe his assurances to her that he had no plan to overturn Roe v. Wade. In the three and a half years since, there's been a raging debate over whether she said that because she's stupid, or just a liar that knows she can't win in Maine without maintaining the illusion that she's a moderate Republican.

So she continues to insist on Kavanaugh's pro-Roe credentials, even after he cast an anti-Roe vote in 2020 with the minority of the court. Facing down a genuinely pro-choice Democratic challenger in 2020, Collins voted against confirming Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Observers noted, however, that she could get away with it because Barrett had enough votes to get confirmed anyway. Then after a draft opinion from the Supreme Court was leaked, showing that her beloved Kavanaugh was once again voting to overturn Roe, Collins insisted that it was "completely inconsistent" with what Kavanaugh told her in meetings prior to his confirmation.

Jahnke is program coordinator with the Crawford Stewardship Project and a Crawford County resident. He was among dozens of local folks disappointed but not necessarily shocked that the permit was granted. The permit will allow A.V. Roth to establish a hog farrowing operation of about 3,000 animal units on a ridge near the Kickapoo River in the area of southwest Wisconsin known as the Driftless Region. Combined with another Roth facility nearby, it will be the largest of its kind in the state. (One ‘animal unit’ in CAFO regulations is equivalent to one 1,000-pound cow or about two-and-a-half sows.)

About 2,000 sows will be housed in the new facility, creating a lot of new piglets that will need to be fattened and then killed and cut up in processing facilities. That, said Jahnke, means more Wisconsin hog CAFOS are on the way.

Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, a long-time opponent of abortion rights, has been hoping to see the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade — and it appears that he is going to get his wish.

The Republican senator and hardcore social conservative reiterated his anti-abortion views during a May 10 speech on the Senate floor, arguing that if the eggs of sea turtles enjoy legal protection, there is no reason why abortion should be legal. And he is being brutally mocked on social media for his ridiculous analogy.

"God grant it was not an apparition of the devil," Hans Luther reportedly responded to his son Martin's claim that a voice from heaven had called Martin to be a monk. Luther's father proposed an alternative scenario: Satan, not God, was responsible for Martin's (poor) decision.

That story sprang to mind when I read that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene had argued in a recent interview, and then clumsily tried to explain away in an official statement, that "Satan's controlling the church." The evidence she gave for such satanic control? Christian groups who provide aid to undocumented immigrants.

Though it took more than a century as well as countless lives lost to white supremacy, the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act is now US law.

It has been widely hailed as an important piece of symbolism.

Florida Senator Rick Scott, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has released a plan which says, honestly and clearly, exactly what Republicans want to do to the poor.

It’s this plan that Joe Biden highlighted Tuesday in setting up a contrast between the Democratic agenda and the Republicans’.

So much depends on the opinions of respectable white people. As long as they tolerate fascism while ambivalent toward liberal democracy, the Republicans will always have the advantage above and beyond the structural advantages they already enjoy. What is it going to take?

What is it going to take for respectable white people to understand that the Republicans, their paramilitaries and their justices on the Supreme Court are ensnaring whole classes of people in expanding rings of social control? It began with immigrants. It’s going to end with – I don’t know. But when states enact laws regulating marital sex, respectable white people will ask: “How the f*ck did this happen?”

In 1972, not long before the decision in Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to determine whether the death penalty violated the Eighth Amendment ban against cruel and unusual punishment.

The death penalty had been around for more than three centuries in North America by the time the court was asked to review it. However, there hadn’t been an execution in the United States for five years preceding 1972.

Trump unleashed what has become a million US Covid deaths, a war in Ukraine, and an attempted coup against the United States, all while coarsening our politics and ratcheting up hate. And now racist, rightwing politicians who disdain democracy are imitating him all across the nation.

What is the impact of all this on America and Americans, and when will he be held to account?

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, recently tweeted: "We now have evidence to support the story of the worst presidential political offense against the Union in American history."

OK, good. Bring it. Please.

The beginning of May before midterm elections signals the official start of primary season and the kickoff of fall campaigns. Because midterms are usually referendums on a president’s performance, the conventional view now is that Democrats are in deep trouble because Biden’s approval ratings are in the cellar.

But the conventional view doesn’t account for the Trump factor, which gives Democrats a fighting chance of keeping one or both chambers.