Jim Jordan Takes His Clown Show on the Road.
Plus: Germany Is Still Adjusting to the New European Reality.
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DENNIS AFTERGUT: Jim Jordan Takes His Clown Show on the Road.
There goes Jim Jordan, the MAGA chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and its āweaponization of governmentā subcommittee, driving his clown car to a new town. Since February, he has hosted hearings that have flopped harder than a distracted trapeze artist. As Francis Wilkinson wrote in the Nation yesterday, Jordan doesnāt āseem able to manufacture a political hit for a new era.ā
Now Jordan has announced that heās packing up the tent and hitting the road: Next week, the committee will be taking a taxpayer-funded field trip to New York. Why New York? To go after Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, whom Donald Trump, in his patented racist style, has called an āanimalā and about whom Trump has screeched that āTHE DEMOCRATS HAVE TOTALLY WEAPONIZED LAW ENFORCEMENT IN OUR COUNTRY . . . TO INTERFERE WITH OUR ALREADY UNDER SIEGE ELECTIONS!ā
The darkness here in attacking law enforcement is unmistakable.
TAMAR JACOBY: WHY UKRAINE FIGHTS.
Kyiv, Ukraine
ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR MEMES circulating on Ukrainian social media in the past year used an image, first popularized on Russian social media, of a grotesque creature with the body of a fish and the snout of a pigāa shvino karas, or pig fish. āA few decades ago, almost all Ukrainian popular culture was derivative of something Russian,ā online meme curator and web developer Bohdan Andrieiev, 32, explained. āBefore independence and for more than a decade afterward, we had no popular culture of our own.ā This has changed dramatically in recent years, culminating in a burst of new Ukrainian creativity since the Russian invasion in February 2022. Social media, meme culture, pop music, and viral jokes have emerged as powerful tools of national solidarityāthe bottom-up, ironic Ukrainian equivalent of old-style totalitarian propaganda.According to Andrieiev, virtually none of this new popular culture draws on Russian sourcesāthatās now widely seen as inappropriate. āBut this is an exception,ā he said, ābecause weāre inverting the reference. Itās like the word āqueer.ā What was a slur is now a badge of pride. Russians call Ukrainians pigs and pig fish and look down on us. But if weāre so pathetic, how come weāre beating them on the battlefield?ā
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WILLIAM NATTRASS: Germany Is Still Adjusting to the New European Reality.
Each U.S. president of the twenty-first centuryāBush, Obama, Trump, and now Bidenāvoiced concern about the lack of seriousness with which Europe treated its own security in the years preceding Russiaās invasion of Ukraine. The European Union is an economic behemoth, but for far too long it has been allowed to outsource its protection to an increasingly frustrated United States. This dependency has now led French President Emmanuel Macron to controversially warn of Europeans becoming āvassalsā amid escalating tensions between the worldās great military powers.
While Macronās statement was hyperbolic, from a European perspective, one bitter positive emerging from the war in Ukraine is a belated realization of the need for greater military self-sufficiency. This is most clearly visible in Germany, where Chancellor Olaf Scholzās lauded announcement of a Zeitenwendeāa major turning pointāin German defense policy just days after Russian tanks first rolled in Ukraine promised to reinvent the countryās military capabilities. The creation of a ā¬100 billion fund for defense renewal suggested Germanyās reluctance to take responsibility for security would soon become a thing of the past.
šØOVERTIMEšØ
Happy Wednesday! Weāve known this since his book launch (whoops!) but Sen. Tim Scott is running for President.
The grill of dreamsā¦ Like JVL is happy to consult on watches, I am a grill guy, so I love this ode to the Weber Genesis from our colleague Addison Del Mastro. My dad has rocked a Genesis since the late 1990s and itās still going strong, even in Clevelandās tough winters.
Find me an Abraham Lassoā¦ At the St. Louis Post-Dispatch our pal Lynn Schmidt writes about her dream candidate.
What ifā¦ The John Birch Society never left?
The highly predictable consequences of Rob Manfredā¦ Teams are now selling beer later. Which is something I asked him about at the Press Club a few years ago, but he dodged the question. Shortening the game and making baseball stadiums more experiential are contradictory, plain and simple.
Breaking news: A legislative body did the right thing! And expelled a member who damaged the integrity of the Arizona House by inviting a conspiratorial realtor who leveled unfounded and bizarre accusations against other members to testify.
Will Dianne Feinstein ever come back? Her absence has cost Democrats on judicial nominees. Some wonder if sheāll ever return to the Senate. Some are calling for her to resign, which is turning into a soft drumbeat.
Yikes. The Philly mayoral debate took a turn.
Meet dril. Extremely jealous of this profile of one of Twitterās most famous users.
Meanwhile, in the āFree State of Floridaā¦ā Jessica Huseman has this deep dive on how conspiracy theories and the āGateway Punditā convinced Florida to leave ERIC, a system designed to help stop voter fraud. Ironic that a guy whose career was made by digital blogging is arguing that you canāt trust digital voting safeguards.
Fox News sanctionedā¦ And Dominion will get another crack at a deposition at Foxās expense.
āReactionary Boycottism.ā Berny Belvedere has coined a new phrase to describe the sort of performative lunacy weāre seeing from the American right. But itās nothing new. Remember the Keurig boycott?
Thereās a reasonā¦ All Christian megahits sound similar. (Which reminds me of this Mike Birbiglia bit.)
Running unopposedā¦ Leads to situations like Missouriās, where theyāre cutting state support for libraries.
āWhat itās like to live in Americaā¦ā You never know when death will come to your doorstep.
Would red flag laws have helped stop the Louisville killer? Analysis from my friend Stephen Gutowski at The Reload.
The slaves of Tromelin islandā¦ How did they survive on a windswept island for years?
Name this band: (Post your replies on Notes!)
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