Ignore Hillary Clinton at your own peril

Our «Discovery» protagonist was never going to have it easy. The start of her last run solidifies her greatness

Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, the right-wing fraudsters who orchestrated a robocall campaign targeting Black voters in seven states during the 2020 election, have agreed to pay $1.25 million in a settlement with New York Attorney General Letitia James.  “The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, and it belongs to everyone. We will not allow anyone to threaten that right,” James said in a statement on the settlement. “Wohl and Burkman orchestrated a depraved and disinformation-ridden campaign to intimidate Black voters in an attempt to sway the election in favor of their preferred candidate.”  The pair was found liable by a federal judge in New York in 2023 for the robocalling scheme. According to a consent decree the two signed, Wohl and Burkman must “refrain from knowingly creating, sponsoring, or transmitting any robocall or other Mass Communication that would intimidate or deter voters from voting by any method in any election.” The decree remains in place for eight years.

Arizona Republicans got just what they wanted Tuesday when the state’s Supreme Court upheld a 160-year-old abortion ban—enacted before the state was even a state—that criminalizes abortions and mandates prison sentences for providers. That ruling cements the state as a battleground in the 2024 election and is making life a lot tougher for the Republican candidates who made their careers in part by carrying water for the anti-abortion movement. Rep. David Schweikert is one of the most vulnerable, up for reelection in a district that narrowly voted for President Joe Biden in 2020. Schweikert is a six-time co-sponsor of the radical Life at Conception Act. That’s the legislation that would ban all abortions and does not exclude IVF treatments in defining a “person” as “each and every member of the species homo sapiens at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization.”  In 2022, Schweikert applauded the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, saying he was «pleased» that the decision “reaffirms the right to life.” He’s not so pleased now. 

Cartoon by Pedro Molina. Campaign Action

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene welcomed Republicans back to work Tuesday with a five-page broadside attack on Speaker Mike Johnson, making sure everyone knows that she’s serious about her threat to try to oust him. Greene’s trying to foment more anger and division, and in one sense it’s working. The problem for her is that she’s made herself the target, as House members are sick of her constant political stunts. Johnson has presided over “a complete and total surrender to, if not complete and total lockstep with, the Democrats’ agenda that has angered our Republican base so much and given them very little reason to vote for a Republican House majority” Greene wrote. “As a matter of fact, if we win the House this fall, it will only be because President Trump is on the ballot, not because we have earned it.” Plenty of Republicans, however, aren’t buying it.

A GOP minority outreach center in suburban Atlanta that was once devoted to artificially creating buzz, giving people the shaft, and taking an unusually keen interest in what happens in other people’s bedrooms is now a sex shop. In other words, the building is chock-full of phony penises—much as it was when its previous tenants occupied the space. According to a new report in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Republicans opened the center with high hopes, knowing they needed to shore up their support in Georgia, a formerly ruby-red state that President Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020. But they’ve given up trying to reason with people and have now simply ceded the space to dicks—just as the rest of the Republican Party has done over the past eight years or so.

Elon Musk's social media platform is apparently changing any mention of Twitter to X on the mobile version of the app.

Biden administration officials are still unclear on the definition of «woman» and may want to check in with Idaho.

More than two months after it was released, the Apple Vision Pro, a mixed-reality headset, is causing some users neck pain, headaches and black eyes.

President Biden said Wednesday he «stands by» his commitment to American workers in opposing a planned acquisition of Pittsburgh-based U.S. steel by a Japanese company, a stance Mr. Biden reiterated in a press conference with Japan's prime minister.

Former White House chief of staff Ron Klain thinks his former boss, President Biden, spends too much time talking about bridges and not enough on the cost of living.

Finland and Sweden have reportedly added a big arms stockpile to NATO Read Full Article at RT.com

Moscow says it has conducted high-precision strikes on an ammunition depot and foreign mercenary base in Ukraine’s Kharkov Region Read Full Article at RT.com

The new initiative will allow the bloc to support Kiev in a “more coordinated manner,” Radoslaw Sikorski said Read Full Article at RT.com

Denis Kapustin leads an anti-Kremlin volunteer militia which is responsible for multiple attacks on Russian villages Read Full Article at RT.com

London has no national plan for defense despite renewed threats of armed conflict, the outlet said Read Full Article at RT.com

Trump shared links to posts attacking Judge Juan Merchan's daughter days after expanded gag order

The President also reached out to chef José Andrés «to convey my deepest condolences for the deaths»

How Trump’s petty vindictiveness makes the media worse

Former president says special counsel should be «sanctioned or censured» for pushing back on Trump-appointed judge

Living in this bizarre reality augments the dissonance at work in HBO's limited series starring Kate Winslet

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet. We begin today with Rex Huppke of USA Today asserting that the shoe salesman cares about nothing and no one but himself. Let’s be clear about several things. Trump doesn’t care about the U.S.-Mexico border or immigrants in general. He doesn’t care about [murder victim Ruby] Garcia or her family in Michigan. And he definitely doesn’t care about you. (Yes, even you, MAGA fans. You're his marks, not his friends.) Donald Trump cares about Donald Trump, and that is all. If claiming he had spoken with a grieving family helps Trump spook voters into thinking he alone can protect them from an imagined wave of criminal immigrants, then that’s good for Trump, and quite literally nothing else matters. [...] I didn’t hear Trump, between his xenophobic rants, saying he would address the ease with which violent men can obtain firearms. I didn’t hear him mention how, according to the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety, an average of 70 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner each month. Trump was silent on the fact that, according to the Emory University School of Medicine, 5.3 million women are victims of intimate-partner violence each year. He didn’t mention those things because he doesn’t care about them, and he doesn’t care about them because those issues don’t help him.

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The Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, and Stephen Wolf, with additional contributions from the Daily Kos Elections team. Subscribe to The Downballot, our weekly podcast x Embedded Content Leading Off ● NV-Sen: Republican Jeff Gunter, who served as Donald Trump's ambassador to Iceland, announced Tuesday evening that he was launching a $3.3 million advertising campaign in his quest to upset Army veteran Sam Brown in Nevada's June 11 GOP primary. The NRSC-backed Brown has been the frontrunner to take on Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen ever since launching his campaign last summer, but both Gunter and Democrats are hoping this new offensive will complicate Brown's path to the nomination. The GOP primary also includes Jim Marchant, an election conspiracy theorist who lost a tight 2022 general election for secretary of state, as well as 10 minor candidates.