Terry H. Schwadron, DCReport @ RawStory

Not to worry, we always have Mitch McConnell to tell us what to swallow politically.

This week, the Senate Republican leader told donors and party faithful there will be no Republican legislative agenda to share with voters before next year’s midterms elections, say participants in private sessions.

As Axios explained, in every midterm cycle there are party donors and workers who want a positive, this-is-what-we-want outline to unify its candidates....

Inevitably, this week, we started to see the news media backing off – even adjusting their files – over stories published about the so-called Steele dossier a couple of years ago. The effect is to force renewed thinking about links between Donald Trump and Russia.

The reason for reconsideration about what was said at the time is the recent indictment of Igor Danchenko, a Russian analyst facing charges of lying to the FBI over information he supplied for the dossier by former British intelligence Christopher Steele and the FBI that was used as justification for initial inquiries into the all-things-Russia links with the Donald Trump 2016 campaign.

There are two truths here: First, the press was careful to say that large portions of the dossier were unverified. And the case outlined by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III showed lots of contact between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.

The 39-page grand jury indictment of Danchenko for making false statements was the result of more than two years of investigation by a special counsel, John H. Durham. The indictment – there has been no trial yet – is being hailed among conservatives as definitive in defending Trump from any eventual conclusions about the degree to which The Former Guy colluded, cooperated or otherwise was open to arrangements with the Russians. ...

Just in case you may have been led to believe that the pending U.S. Supreme Court challenge from Mississippi is a singular, heartfelt moral argument over abortion, a legal brief filed in the case last week attempts to broaden the challenge to an attack on same-sex marriage and LGBTQ rights as well.

Indeed, the argument from the guy who designed the recent Texas law that has all but banned abortions in that state is a broadside against judges making any decision not specifically in black ink of the Constitution.

The author of the brief is Jonathan Mitchell, a one-time clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, the former Texas Solicitor General and conservative attorney, who argues in the abortion case brief that not only is Roe v. Wade unconstitutional, but that the cases underscoring LGBTQ rights are "as lawless as Roe" and should be eliminated.
...

The preliminary win to advance Joe Biden's huge social services spending bill is being depicted as a parliamentary victory for Speaker Nancy Pelosi over a small group of would-be Democratic spoilers. A day or more later, what looks more the case are two things:

• While the specifics did show Pelosi's legislative skill, the important, if narrow victory here is for an aggressive agenda to help a lot of people – despite unanimous objection from Republicans. There is way too much focus on the mechanics involved.
• The same things that prompted a fissure between "progressives" and a group of nine "moderates" among Democrats did not disappear, and we will see them resurface as the bill itself gets real. The full expectation is that the final spending number will be less than $3.5 trillion first described, to ensure that there are the votes for even one-party passage.

It's our American obsession with winning rather than focusing on the basics.

As The New York Times summarized, "For now, the deal that Ms. Pelosi struck amounted to a precarious détente for Democrats that did nothing to resolve tensions between the moderate and liberal flanks or end the jockeying for political leverage."...

For a few moments, I wondered if the Republican opposition, which is so reveling in the discomfort that Joe Biden's decision-making on Afghanistan has evoked, actually was expressing concern about the fate of myriad Afghans who helped the American and coalition cause.

Naturally, a certain hypocrisy in messaging from the Right took only another day to kick in.

The heart-breaking images of those who helped repel terrorism in Afghanistan for 20 years realistically reflect the near impossibility of removing the anti-terrorists in large numbers....