A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Meet Michael Peroutka, one of the two candidates on the ballot for Maryland attorney general in the state’s GOP primary today. As TPM alum Cameron Joseph reports for Vice, Peroutka was a board member for the neo-Confederate League of the South until 2014, believes public education is “the 10th plank in the Communist Manifesto,” and at one point he declared that he was “still angry” that Maryland wasn’t allowed to secede from the union during the Civil War.
The GOP appears to be selecting only the best candidates. IF we Democrats can’t defeat these utterly broken losers… Flying Spaghetti Monster save our nation.
Rusty Bowers remains a proud member of the republican party even though he clearly knows it has transformed itself into a fascist cult (not much of a transformation, really). The cult will not tolerate integrity or independent thought. His 30 seconds are up.
The Russian president’s three-way talks with Iran’s Ebrahim Raisi and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will be presented by the Kremlin as a sign of Putin’s continuing influence in the region, after the recent visit to the Middle East by the US president, Joe Biden.
Erdoğan will be seeking a signal from Putin that he is willing to lift the Russian naval blockade preventing Ukrainian grain leaving Black Sea ports. The EU has given undertakings that it is not seeking to sanction Russian food, shipping or fertilisers, but Putin has been avoiding Turkish calls to hold a joint meeting in Turkey with Ukraine on the subject.
Turkey, a Nato member, has a special responsibility under the 1936 Montreux convention for naval traffic entering the Black Sea. It is proposing that Russia allows the Ukrainian grain ships to leave Odesa on designated routes so long as checks are made that the vessels are not carrying arms.
Putin will be looking to use the talks to bolster regional opposition to any US-proposed defence pacts between Gulf states and Israel, an idea that some in Washington see as a necessary bulwark if Iran was to go ahead with its nuclear programme. Russia is a party to the nuclear talks that are stalled in Vienna due to a US refusal to lift sanctions on the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The US says these sanctions were not imposed due to the nuclear deal, but due to the IRGC’s malign activities across the region.
The talks may also touch on Iran’s long experience of circumventing US sanctions, and whether there is a room for cooperation between Moscow and Tehran on defeating US measures. The long term vision is for the two countries to reduce dependence on the dollar for trading, but in the short term there may be discussions over Russia buying Iranian drones for use in Ukraine.
he was “still angry” that Maryland wasn’t allowed to secede from the union during the Civil War.
He has a point. I think the only path to survival for the Left and Right is a two nation solution. Already the GOP is planning on making the final two years of Biden’s term a wasted landscape of destruction and zero legislation passed. We’re doomed to decades of internecine political chaos. Meanwhile the Earth roasts, women bleed out during miscarriages, leaving the house risks being the victim of a mass shooting, and if you’re female, gay, trans, Muslim or black you’re most assuredly on the path to permanent second class citizenship.
There desperately needs to be a separate group of states where all the above is the norm, because it’s what they want and deserve, based on those they elect to lead them. 50 states. Two nations. Has to happen, or all 50 of us go down in flames together.
Lots of conservatives don’t like what they see America becoming and want to fight back against it. Candidates who take extreme positions are both signaling tribal loyalty and showing that they are prepared to fight against the liberalization of the U.S. These candidates can get away with assuming wacky positions because the U.S. is a wealthy nation. A whole host of things would have to go wrong before everything starts falling apart.
‘Systemic risk’ is especially low on the local level. This allows irresponsible local candidates to promote all manner of extreme and destructive policies, confident that the (overall) political and economic systems will hold no matter what they do. Of course, the cumulative effect of this extremely toxic, but GOP candidates are now like aspiring stand up comics who feel their only chance to break into the big time is through increasingly edgy acts. As long as this behavior is rewarded by GOP primary voters and the conservative media ecosystem, I don’t see it slowing down.
I’m reminded, for no particular reason, that Russia has been helping to fund the Scottish Separatist Movement in Great Britain for the better part of two decades, now.
