Rachel Maddow notices that a remarkably high percentage of Trump’s endorsees are alleged spouse abusers.

Republicans want you to know that the last guy was just ACCUSED of killing his wife; he hasn’t been convicted. Yet.

Andrew was first arrested on March 26, just hours after state authorities found Nikki’s body submerged in a nearby creek, and Boone County Superior Court Judge Matthew C. Kincaid found probable cause for a murder charge against him two days later.

Authorities say they began investigating Nikki’s disappearance on March 25 when she ‘did not report for work.’

She and Andrew’s three children – one of whom is from Andrew’s previous marriage — tried repeatedly to contact her, according to the Lebanon Reporter, but her purse and phone were still at the house.

Andrew told the sheriff’s deputies – who found him with scratches on the neck – that they had gotten into a fight after she discovered that he was having an affair, and she was probably at her sister’s house, FOX 59 reports.

One of their children also told police that Nikki routinely left the house when she was upset, and Andrew had admitted to hitting Nikki in the past.

But when police found blood in the couple’s master bedroom and bathroom – and discovered that Nikki had filed for divorce from Andrew on March 17 – they called in the Indiana State Police to lead the investigation. …

… ‘During the course of the investigation, detectives were able to determine that during the course of a domestic dispute, 39-year-old Andrew N. Wilhoite, Elizabeth’s husband had allegedly struck her in the head with a blunt object, causing her to lose consciousness,’ they said in a statement following his arrest.

‘He then placed her into a vehicle and drove to a nearby creek where he dumped her body,’ they alleged.

Court documents obtained by Law and Order also show that Andrew allegedly admitted to state authorities that he killed his wife.

He said that she attacked him when she learned he was having an affair, and he struck her in the face with a gallon-sized concrete flower pot, according to a probable cause affidavit.

Then when she fell to the ground, Andrew allegedly said he threw her into a truck, took her to a bridge and threw her over the side. He then allegedly tossed the flower pot along the side of US Route 52 as he brought a load of corn into town.

Multitasking is good. Maybe he should put that in his campaign lit. Oh, and there’s also this —

Nikki had just finished receiving chemotherapy for an undisclosed type of cancer, which she posted about on her Facebook page, as she shared how her hair had fallen out.

What a prince. But we’re not done. I thought of this after seeing this headline today.

This is from Talking Points Memo. Read at TPM or watch it here:

Daines on Abortion: Why do we have laws in place to protect the eggs of a sea turtle or the eggs of eagles… pic.twitter.com/yr0dM7aaAs

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 10, 2022

I can’t even.

There is very little Democrats in Washington will be able to do to save abortion rights, unless by some miracle they keep the House and increase their Senate majority in the midterms. Kate Riga at TPM argues that even if the Dems could pass a law that codifies Roe nationwide, the current SCOTUS might very well overturn it if challenged, and Republicans could revoke the law next time they control the White House and Congress.

This is all true, but if it comes to pass that such a bill becomes possible, Democrats should pass it anyway. And here is why.

One of the biggest reasons legal abortion is vulnerable is that hardly anyone actually understands what Roe allows and does not allow. In any discussion group about abortion, the pro-criminalizers will still argue that Roe allows women to abort for any reason at all points of gestation, which it does not. They tell each other lurid stories about healthy infants born alive and left to die or killed right before birth. Most of them have only a hazy idea about how pregnancy/gestation progresses and don’t understand, for example, that a fetus at 20 weeks’ gestation will not survive birth no matter what anyone does to save it. They also tend to be very naive about what can go wrong with fetal development and pregnancies that make therapeutic abortion the  humane, and sometimes the life-saving, alternative.

If we assume that most voters are not anti-abortion fanatics and are persuadable that a complete ban is a bad idea, the first thing that has to be done is simplify the issue. And the first thing to simplify: Nobody is pushing to make elective abortion legal throughout the entire 38-40 weeks of a full-term pregnancy. That absolutely has to be clarified.

One of my long-time gripes about NARAL and a lot of Democratic politicians is that they don’t try to educate the public about these issues. See, for example, How Democrats Need to Talk About Abortion and Why I Don’t Give Money to NARAL, both from 2019.

One of the things a national abortion law could do, if done right, is to clarify real-world abortion practices by setting up one nationwide standard insteads of a patchwork of state laws, many of which are under perpetual legal challenge. I am willing to bet that most voters don’t know what laws regulating abortions are on the books in their states unless their state’s abortion laws have been in the news recently.

And if Democrats want to stick to the text of the Women’s Health Protection Act passed last year, I would change one thing, which is to set a firmer gestational limit for elective abortion rather than rely on “the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider” that a fetus is or isn’t viable.

Most Americans think abortion should be legal in at least some circumstances (although claims I keep hearing that 70 percent of Americans support Roe v. Wade don’t match the polls I see, which say it’s more like 55-60 percent), and I believe that if the “some circumstances” issue were clarified, a lot of the acrimony and ambivalence would go away. The opposition to legal abortion would be limited to the hard-core anti-abortion fanatics, which polls suggest are less than 20 percent of voters, possibly a lot less.

It’s understandable why many courts and medical people don’t want to draw a bright line regarding gestation, because there’s always a certain amount of guesswork involved, both in determining precise gestational age of a particular fetus and in determining which might have a long-shot chance at survival outside the womb and which don’t. But I think that setting a firm gestational limit for elective abortion somewhere would put an end to a lot of opposition. There already are such limits in some states, but most voters don’t realize that.

The medical literature has been pretty much in the same place on this issue for decades, saying that the lowest possible threshold of viability is somewhere between 22-24 weeks, but “Current recommendations suggest babies born at 24 weeks of gestation should normally receive active intervention while babies born at 23 weeks of gestation should be discussed with parents regarding whether such intervention is appropriate,” it says here. In other words, even if the very early infants survive, their quality of life could be highly compromised, and decisions probably need to be made on a case by case basis.

Some of the confusion about gestational limits comes about because sometimes the count begins at the last menstrual period, not when the pregnancy actually began, which would usually be about two weeks later. Everybody needs to get on the same page about when gestation begins.

As a practical matter, even in the U.S. 90 percent of elective abortions are performed by the 12th week of gestation, which is way, way before viability. According to this very good article by Kaiser Family Foundation, 1.2 percent of abortions in the U.S. occur after 21 weeks gestation, and many of those are performed because of  “medical concerns such as fetal anomalies or maternal life endangerment.” And it needs to be made clear that in these circumstances the law needs to butt out. Gestational limits are strictly for elective abortions.

According to KFF, the single biggest reason women delay getting an elective abortion that long is that they either needed time to scrape the money together or were hassling with insurance coverage. A few didn’t realize they were pregnant until they were pretty far along. Some had trouble understanding how to get an abortion or how to get transportation to a far-away clinic. Some delayed because their boyfriend/husband disagreed.

For a lot of reasons, the longer an abortion is delayed the more expensive and time-consuming it is, so it becomes more and more burdensome for poor women who have to delay the procedure to raise money.

Still, if the money barrier were taken away, that 1.2 percent would be even smaller. Several western European countries have a 12-week gestational limit for elective abortion, and this seems workable for them, but in every case women can get a first-trimester abortion in just about any medical facility, and that abortion is paid for by taxpayer-supported national health care. They don’t have to delay for financial reasons.

If there were, say, a national 23-week gestational limit for elective abortion, the criminalizers would fight to lower it. And then the discussion should include getting rid of the Hyde Amendment. We can reduce the gestational limit only if Medicaid pays for abortions. But having one national law, one standard, putting everyone on the same page, might make such negotiation possible.

And yes, there would be a few women who fall through the cracks and won’t realize they are pregnant until too late. “A few studies have estimated that one in 400 or 500 women are 20 weeks, or about 5 months, into their pregnancy before they realize they are pregnant. One in 2,500 women make it all the way to labor before they understand they’re going to have a baby,” it says here.

The criminalizers will never be happy if even one woman is allowed to abort for any reason. But I suspect the post-Roe period is going to open some eyes, and those ambivalent about abortion might realize that an absolute ban isn’t the way to go.

And of course, if Republicans control the House next year, there will be no such law. I’m just speculating, just in case.

“Rolling back abortion rights is rare in democracies and is a sign of democratic backsliding,” this lady says, and I believe her. Among the dumber arguments some righties are making today is that overturning Roe puts the abortion issue back in the hands of democracy.  Paul Waldman effectively shreds that claim.

Michelle Goldberg writes that The Death of Roe Is Going to Tear America Apart. I believe her, too. Most righties have no idea what they are about to unleash.

Righties — I refuse to call them “conservatives” — have become so extreme, so cut off from humanity, that they cannot even fake not being sociopaths. They are preparing to make abortion illegal in all circumstances, no exceptions. The raped 12-year-old should just suck it up and give birth, already. They are preparing to make it illegal to send medical abortion meds through the mail. They are writing laws that would stop women from crossing state lines to get abortions elsewhere. They are, in short, behaving like the monsters they are.

And women will die. Women will die all kinds of ways. They’ll die of back-alley abortions. They’ll die because they couldn’t get abortions to save their lives. I don’t expect large numbers of deaths (although I could be wrong), but there will be gut-wrenching deaths.

It’s often said that the beginning of the end of abortion bans in Ireland was the death of Savita Halappanavar, who died from sepsis in 2012 after her request for an abortion was denied on legal grounds.

After Savita presented at Galway University Hospital in severe pain, a doctor examined her and told the couple that “the cervix was fully dilated, amniotic fluid was leaking and unfortunately, the baby wouldn’t survive.”

The doctor, according to Praveen, said it would be over in a few hours, but the fetal heartbeat continued for three more days.

“Savita was really in agony,” Praveen said. “She was very upset, but she accepted she was losing the baby.

She was at only 17 weeks’ gestation, so there was no possible way to save the fetus. Even so, the hospital staff understood that Irish law required that nothing could be done until the fetal heartbeat stopped on its own, which took three days. As soon as the heartbeat could not be detected the contents of her womb were removed, but she died of sepsis a few hours later, in spite of the antibiotics they were pumping into her.

The case shocked Ireland, and a series of reforms were enacted as a result. Since 2018, elective abortion is legal in Ireland to 12 weeks’ gestation, and there are considerable exceptions after that. Back in 2018 I explained why the 12 week gestation limit is workable in Europe but not here. As Katha Pollitt explained in The Nation:

Here’s what’s really different about Western Europe: in France, you can get an abortion at any public hospital and it’s paid for by the government. In Germany, you can get one at a hospital or a doctor’s office, and health plans will pay for it for low-income women. In Sweden, abortion is free through eighteen weeks.

Using tax money to pay for abortions is a nonstarter for righties in the U.S. So here we are.

Women are going to be prosecuted for having abortions. They’re going to be investigated after miscarriages. Indeed, a lot of women may avoid seeking medical care after miscarriages. We know this is true because it’s been true in other countries where abortion is illegal and prosecuted. And it’s happened here already.

Back to Michelle Goldberg:

The right won’t be content to watch liberal states try to undermine abortion bans. As the draft of a forthcoming article in The Columbia Law Review puts it, “overturning Roe and Casey will create a novel world of complicated, interjurisdictional legal conflicts over abortion. Instead of creating stability and certainty, it will lead to profound confusion because advocates on all sides of the abortion controversy will not stop at state borders in their efforts to apply their policies as broadly as possible.”

The fiction they’ve pushed for years is that they just want the abortion question to be decided by the states. That makes it more democratic, see. An intellectually dishonest twit writing in WaPo today tries to make that argument — “The promise of a post-Roe democratization of abortion policy is that the representative institutions of each state can identify policies consistent with the views of its residents.” The states’ rights crowd used to make the same argument for desegregation.

But in truth they aren’t going to leave it at that. Indiana and Missouri won’t be content to allow Illinois to keep abortion legal, I can promise you. Senate Republicans are already pushing for a nationwide ban.

Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said he expects a push for federal abortion restrictions.

“Just take my state of North Dakota. Having a North Dakota child killed in the womb in Fargo versus Moorhead, Minnesota, you know, on the other side of the Red River — I don’t find a lot of solace in that just because it didn’t happen in my state,” Cramer said. “I think you could expect that pro-life activists would push for federal protections. I mean, I wouldn’t take that off the table.”

Related — here’s your ideal Republican candidate, who just won a primary in Indiana —

A Lebanon man accused of killing his wife in March and dumping her body in a creek is among the candidates to advance in a local election after Indiana’s primaries Tuesday.

Andrew Wilhoite, who’s suspected of fatally striking his wife with a gallon-sized concrete flower pot, secured a spot Tuesday as one of three Republican candidates in the race for a seat on the Clinton Township Board.

The 40-year-old has been incarcerated in the Boone County Jail since March after police said he told investigators he threw a concrete flower pot at his wife, Nikki Wilhoite, the night before and dropped her body over the side of a bridge.

Hey, it was only a wife. Nobody important.

The Inquisition — I mean, the Supreme Court — has dropped the big one, albeit prematurely. Chief Justice Roberts confirmed that the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade is indeed authentic, but it may not be final.

The Right is on the warpath vowing to prosecute whoever leaked the opinion, but it’s not clear to me that there is any law covering leaking Supreme Court opinions. It says here that if the leaker is someone with legitimate access to the documents, then there is no crime to prosecute.

It’s interesting, though, that Republican politicians immediately seized on the leak rather than the opinion itself as a source of controversy. For example, Josh Hawley: “The left continues its assault on the Supreme Court with an unprecedented breach of confidentiality, clearly meant to intimidate. The Justices mustn’t give in to this attempt to corrupt the process. Stay strong.”

We don’t know who leaked the bleeping opinion. It might have been Alito himself, for all we know. And why the leak is a cause of intimidation isn’t clear to me. Whatever is happening now is what would have happened if the opinion had been released officially. In some ways, in fact, the leakage dampers the bombshell nature of the decision just a bit. It was an advantage for the conservatives to leak it. Now the right-wing noise machine will be screaming about the leak and hope people don’t notice that the Supreme Court is about to declare that women are cows.

At Slate, Jeremy Stahl points out the pros and cons of who benefits most from the leak, and like me he sees a bigger advantage to the Right than the Left. “It turns attention away from the monumental—and likely to be deeply unpopular—ruling itself, and toward what conservatives are portraying as a dastardly and corrupt breaking of the norms.” It was a smart tactical move, in other words.

(Update: This is from emptywheel—

CNN’s report suggests this leak more likely came from Roberts’ chambers than the most likely other source, Stephen Breyer’s. The most logical explanation for the leak is that Roberts is trying to get his colleagues to adopt a less radical opinion. And if that’s the purpose, it might have the desired effect, both by making it clear what a shit-show the original Alito opinion will set off, but also by exposing the opinion itself to the ridicule and contempt it, as written, deserves.

So there’s that.)

What happens next is that very soon abortion will be completely illegal in large parts of the South and Midwest, and probably other places. I expect the most conservative states to not make allowances for rape, incest, and maybe not even the health of the mother. Right wingers have argued for years that abortion is never medically necessary to save the woman, which is seriously not true. Right-wing state legislators will be tripping all over each other bragging about how draconian they can be against fertile women. 

Also note that the arguments Alito made in the leaked decision arguably could pave the way for overturning Griswold v. Connecticut (governments can’t ban contraception) and Obergefell v. Hodges (legalizing same sex marriage).

So yeah, this is serious, but not unexpected.

I’ve been predicting for years that if Roe is ever overturned, Republicans will be sorry. So now I guess we’ll find out if I was right. Historically, promises/threats to end abortion have been very good at turning out the Right but not the Left. Greg Sargent writes today,

During the 2021 gubernatorial race in Virginia, Democrats poured millions of dollars into ads highlighting the GOP candidate’s opposition to abortion. Democrats also raised the possibility that the Supreme Court might gut abortion rights, a message directed right at the Virginia suburbs.

Instead, schools dominated, and Glenn Youngkin became governor. The idea that abortion rights might be gutted in Virginia likely seemed far-fetched to many voters, as the court hadn’t acted yet and Democrats were on track to keep control of the state Senate.

Polls taken earlier this year show that the U.S. public supports Roe by huge majorities. It’s not even close. But how strongly do they support it? We’ll soon see.

So we’ll see what happens. Best case, the overturning of Roe v. Wade combined with whatever comes out in the June public January 6 hearings could cause Republicans to lose some elections. Worst case, Republicans take back Congress next year and spend the next two years investigating Hunter Biden and passing laws to ban abortion and same sex marriage nationwide, which Joe Biden will veto, but that’s all that will get done. Oh, and they’ll probably pass some more tax cuts for rich people that rich people don’t need. That’s a given.

One of the unintended consequences of Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine is that it has exposed how weak the Russian military is. Over the past couple of months I can’t tell you how many analyses I’ve read pointing out the massive incompetence revealed by the invasion of Ukraine. Here’s one from a couple of weeks ago, from the New Yorker. The speaker is Joel Rayburn, a retired Army colonel and former U.S. special envoy for Syria.

They have a lot of systemic and institutional weaknesses that had been masked because they had not operated on this scale in a really visible way, at least not for quite a while. You’d have to go back to their invasion of Georgia, in 2008, to find something approaching the scale that they’re operating at now. And that one didn’t go well. They were showing the same kind of problems back then: this disunity of command; logistical weaknesses; poorly trained, poorly motivated, poorly led troops; very poor quality of officer corps; very poor quality of campaign design and ability to plan. They also have very poor integration within and among the armed services, including the synchronization of air and ground operations.

Rayburn goes on to say that after Georgia, the Russian military announced a massive reorganization of the military to address these problems. And they seemed more effective in Syria and in some other military actions, but these were much smaller actions. “But then when they had to scale it up to an operation that was, let’s say, forty times the size, then all of these weaknesses came out and they’ve been pretty shocking.”

The whole analysis is interesting, but Rayburn says that what he sees is more than just miscalculation. Russia just plain doesn’t have the military capability to invade Ukraine as it is trying to do. And apparently military experts in the West didn’t realize that until they saw how the Russian military has bumbled around in Ukraine. Things that Russia was supposed to have spent a lot of money improving turned out not to have been improved, and Rayburn suspects that a lot of Russia’s military budget has been eaten up by corruption.

And, Rayburn says, as badly as Russians are doing against Ukrainians, if they had tried to take on just one NATO power, they would have been wiped out fairly quickly.

The problem with Russian weakness is that it accounts for why troops in Ukraine have fallen back on commiting atrocities against civilians. It’s all they can do. They have no direction, and Russian military discipline is obviously a joke.

In mid-March there were reports that the heads of Russian intelligence services had been arrested and several of their locations raided by the Federal Protective Service (the successor to the KGB). Obviously, Putin was unhappy with their results. But one wonders how Russian intelligence gathering could possibly have improved since then. Probably, it hasn’t. Ukraine, on the other hand, has benefited from help from the U.S. This is from the Sydney Morning Herald, April 28:

America helped foil Moscow’s efforts to take Kyiv and repelled its advances elsewhere by sharing such detailed intelligence that Ukraine knew exactly when and where Russian bombs would fall, it has emerged.

In an unprecedented information-sharing operation, US spy agencies divulged the co-ordinates of Russian forces and aircraft to Ukrainian troops, allowing them to pre-empt attacks.

And then there is the celebrated Russian cyberwar capability. It turns out that freelance hackers have been shredding Russian cyber security and “liberating” huge amounts of Russian data. See Hacktivists Stoke Pandemonium Amid Russia’s War in Ukraine at Wired and Russia Is Losing a War Againsts Hackers Stealing Huge Amounts of Data at the Intercept. However, there are concerns that Ukraine-supporting freelance hackers could do as much harm as good; for example, by accidentally exposing western intelligence operations.

One thing the smart people on the teevee have said all along is that Putin will not accept a defeat. One, Russian leaders who are defeated tend to be deposed. And two, Putin is all about showing the world how strong he is. It’s his entire purpose. He is not going to accept defeat even if he is defeated. For that reason, IMO there’s a real possibility that he will resort to nuclear weapons. See Putin is inching towards his nukes, threatening to annihilate the world if he fails to capture Ukraine, says foreign affairs expert. But you can find smart people declaring Putin wouldn’t use nukes, along with those who say he could.

There is new reporting also saying that the war in Ukraine could turn into a years-long conflict that just goes on and on without resolution. And that’s because no credible diplomatic track exists that Russia would accept, other than “Russia wins.” But Russia appears to be using up resources, and conscripts, with remarkable speed, while Ukraine is being assisted by several countries. The only thing that might keep the war going is if China begins shipping arms to Russia. A month ago there was a flurry of news reports saying that China might send economic or other aid to Russia. There’s been little in the news about China’s support of Russia since then, though, and I’m hoping that Xi Jinping will not want to get his country entangled in Putin’s blunder.