Saturday Stew
The political potpourri....
Good day.
FYI: Thanks to a Twitter-Substack spat, I can’t embed Tweets in this newsletter now, so sports highlights and cute animal videos are on hold.
I’ve read all the latest Biden/Trump/DeSantis stories – and found none of them worth delaying your Saturday with.
There’s stuff going on with China, Iran, and Israel – all both fast-moving and/but incremental, so I won’t cover them here.
On Clarence Thomas, there’s the opposing Ruth Marcus view and the Wall Street Journal ed board view, but neither really moves the ball – and read together, they produce stalemate.
So, in conclusion, here are four evolving stories and my current sense of things, all via the Associated Press:
1.Abortion:
Access to the most commonly used method of abortion in the U.S. plunged into uncertainty Friday following conflicting court rulings over the legality of the abortion medication mifepristone that has been widely available for more than 20 years.
For now, the drug the Food and Drug Administration approved in 2000 appeared to remain at least immediately available in the wake of two separate rulings that were issued in quick succession by federal judges in Texas and Washington.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, ordered a hold on federal approval of mifepristone in a decision that overruled decades of scientific approval. But that decision came at nearly the same time that U.S. District Judge Thomas O. Rice, an Obama appointee, essentially ordered the opposite and directed U.S. authorities not to make any changes that would restrict access to the drug in at least 17 states where Democrats sued in an effort to protect availability.
HALPERIN SAYS: Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling can be seen as shocking, surprising, neither, or both, but the upcoming test for the Supreme Court’s pro-life majority is going to be a doozy.
2. Tennessee:
Tennessee has become a new front in the battle for the future of American democracy after Republicans expelled two Black lawmakers from the state Legislature for their part in a protest urging passage of gun-control measures.
HALPERIN SAYS: The quick decision to send Vice President Harris to Tennessee and to have President Biden seek to meet with the targeted Democratic representatives put in sharp relief the White House’s perception that the combustible mix of guns, race, and democracy works very much in favor of Team Blue; this is another contretemps on which Democrats have a plan, passion, unity, and Dominant Media backing – and Republicans have a lot of explaining to do.
The Justice Department has launched an investigation into the possible release of Pentagon documents that were posted on several social media sites and appear to detail U.S. and NATO aid to Ukraine, but may have been altered or used as part of a misinformation campaign.
The documents, which were posted on sites such as Twitter, are labeled secret and resemble routine updates that the U.S. military’s Joint Staff would produce daily but not distribute publicly. They are dated ranging from Feb. 23 to March 1, and provide what appears to be details on the progress of weapons and equipment going into Ukraine with more precise timelines and amounts than the U.S. generally provides publicly.
HALPERIN SAYS: There is something odd going on here, but the investigative journalism required to explain what is happening will likely not bear fruit until we get past the weekend.
4. Evan Gershkovich:
Jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has been charged with espionage in Russia and has entered a formal denial, two Russian news agencies reported Friday.
The state news agency Tass and the Interfax news agency said a law enforcement source informed them that Russia’s Federal Security Service, known as the FSB, had officially charged the American journalist.
The news outlets didn’t say in what form Gershkovich was formally charged or when it happened, but generally suspects are presented a paper outlining the accusations.
HALPERIN SAYS: Because this involves a journalist who works for one of the most powerful news organizations on the planet, this is not a clean test of how most effectively to free up a detainee, but the full-court press by the Journal to leverage its influence for massive publicity from the media and political figures is a distinctive deviation from the standard way such takings are handled (typically with quiet diplomacy intended not to elevate the value of the hostage). It will be wonderful if the public pressure brings Evan home, but most Americans who are seized don’t have the kind of institutional backing and megaphones he does, making this less a case study and more of a one-off.
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