Rational 360, a high-powered Washington, DC-based strategic communications firm and digital agency, promises to use “innovative” means and a network that extends “deep into the Halls of Congress, the White House, and Fortune 500 boardrooms across the country” to advance the “mission-critical goals” of its clients, a roster of corporations, trade associations, military contractors, policy advocates, and others. The company—one of the many inside-the-Beltway firms that crafts messaging and peddles influence—promotes itself as a purely bipartisan operation, though its top leaders are mostly Democrats with White House experience earned during the Clinton and Obama years. Yet despite these Democratic roots, Rational 360 plays the field, having recently set up a company to help elect Republicans, while also creating an offshoot to assist Democratic campaigns. Moreover, it has advised No Labels, a dark-money and self-professed centrist group that is preparing to possibly run a third-party presidential candidate in 2024 in an effort that could help Donald Trump.

With these activities, Rational 360 looks as if it is trying to profit from all partisan sides—right, left, and middle.

The company was formed in 2009 when Rational PR and the Stevens and Schriefer Group, an advertising outfit, created a firm to pitch large corporate clients. The eight partners at the time included Patrick Dorton, who had been a top aide in the Clinton White House and the chief spokesman for  Arthur Andersen LLP during the accounting firm’s 2002 collapse, which occurred due to its role in the Enron and Worldcom financial scandals. 

Dorton is now the CEO of Rational 360, and the other top officers of the company include notable Democratic veterans. Brian Kaminski, a managing director and co-founder, notes in his company bio that before he joined the firm he “gained communications experience on Capitol Hill in the Office of [Democratic] Senator Barbara Mikulski, in the Office of the First Lady, and at the Democratic National Committee.” Melissa Green, a managing director and senior counsel for the company, was an aide in the Clinton White House and began her career at the political consulting firm of prominent Democrats James Carville and Paul Begala. Joe Lockhart, another managing director, was a press secretary for President Clinton. The firm, true to its bipartisan pitch, also includes officers and staffers with Republican pedigrees.

According to Federal Election Commission data, Rational 360 has done no work for federal candidates or political action committees, except a modest bit of consulting in 2020 for Americans for Tomorrow’s Future, a Republican super PAC, for which it was paid $5,000. But in 2021, it created an offshoot entity to provide digital media services to Democratic candidates—without identifying this group’s link to Rational 360. 

For the first time in US history, UAW members at the Big Three automakers are on strike at the same time. The walkout began when the union’s contract expired early Friday morning.

UAW President Shawn Fain announced the initial strike targets during a Thursday night speech. The short notice is part of a new strategy under which the union is striking at targeted sites, rather than across a company. The goal is to maximize leverage by keeping automakers guessing about when and where workers will withhold their labor.

The initial targets are the General Motors assembly plant in Wentzville, Missouri, the Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) assembly complex in Toledo, Ohio, and part of a Ford assembly plant in Wayne, Michigan. Roughly 13,000 UAW members are striking at those facilities. All three make trucks and SUVs, which have been key to US automakers’ profitability.

The UAW has more than 145,000 members across the Big Three. Fain said on Thursday that the union is prepared for everyone to go on strike if needed—stressing that all options remain on the table.

The UAW and the Big Three remain far apart in their negotiations. The union is pushing for a more than 30 percent increase in pay over the course of the four-year contract. Members also have been fighting for guaranteed cost-of-living adjustments, an end to tiered-pay systems that put new hires at a disadvantage, a return to defined-benefit pension plans, a four-day work week without a reduction in pay, and a right to strike over plant closures. The auto companies have offered to increase pay by between 17.5 and 20 percent, but remained opposed to the UAW’s top demands, Fain said earlier this week.

A new bill has reached the desk of California Gov. Gavin Newsom that would bar the state’s public and charter schools from suspending or expelling students in sixth through twelfth grades for “willful defiance,” a largely undefined violation frequently meted out to students of color. The statewide ban, in force until 2029 once signed by Newsom, builds on the state’s efforts to slowly phase out this form of suspension and expulsion. If it’s enacted, California will be the first state to go from using the practice to banning it outright.

Already, in 2014, California became the first state to pass a partial ban on “willful defiance” suspensions—which are permitted in 25 other states, according to research by Temple University’s Policy Surveillance Program. The 2014 ban, which only applied to students in third grade or younger, was followed by a 2019 bill  that covered fourth and fifth graders permanently and middle schoolers through 2025. Newsom signed that bill, and appears poised to sign the new, broader ban, but his office hasn’t confirmed if or when that’ll happen.

ACLU California Action, which supports the ban, has said that the definition of willful defiance is too “subjective and overly broad,” with some students being suspended for “dancing, dress code violations, or not paying attention in class.” School officials’ judgment of whether a student is “talking back,” another common ground for willful defiance suspensions, can also be shaped by biases. The bill, introduced by State Sen. Nancy Skinner, does not limit other types of suspensions, such as those related to violence.

At an April hearing of the California Senate’s education committee, Skinner pointed to the use of willful defiance suspensions for small infractions like not taking a hat off or smirking at a teacher. The bill encourages teachers and administrators to de-escalate conflict with students and emphasizes that suspensions are a punishment of last resort.

“I completely appreciate a teacher could have a particularly bad day…this kid sets them off,” Skinner said in the hearing. “But we have other alternatives. We don’t need to kick the kid out.”

Federal prosecutors on Thursday charged Hunter Biden with lying about his drug use when he bought a gun in 2018.

The three-count indictment is the latest twist in a series of legal issues for Hunter Biden that could impact the reelection campaign of his father, President Joe Biden. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday announced an impeachment inquiry into President Biden that is based largely on Hunter’s past efforts to profit off of his perceived access to his father.

The new charges against Hunter Biden follow the late June collapse of a plea deal that his lawyers had negotiated with the US attorney in Delaware, David Weiss, under which Biden would have pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor tax crimes, along with a felony gun charge that could have been wiped off his record if he adhered to the deal’s terms. That agreement fell apart when questions from US District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika revealed that prosecutors and Biden’s lawyers had differing understandings of its provisions.

When Attorney General Merrick Garland assumed office in 2021, he left in place Weiss, a Donald Trump appointee, in an effort to avoid the appearance of interference with the ongoing investigations into Hunter Biden. Garland last month gave Weiss special counsel status in an attempt to further ensure his independence. And Weiss has insisted he has faced no pressure from Garland, President Biden, or others to curtail the probe.

Still, congressional Republicans have alleged that Weiss is going easy on the president’s son, and they have touted the disputed accounts of two IRS whistleblowers who claim their investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged tax evasion was limited by political pressure. The notion that Hunter Biden is receiving special protection is a virtual article of faith on the right. Prosecutors on the case have faced threats and harassment from people convinced they are failing to enforce the law, NBC News reported Thursday.

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Plus, David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, has just been released in a new and expanded paperback edition. 

There is an authoritarian danger that threatens American democracy. It is a separate peril from Donald Trump and his tens of millions of rabid supports. It is the right-wing infrastructure that is publicly plotting to undermine the checks and balances of our constitutional order and concentrate unprecedented power in the presidency. Its efforts, if successful and coupled with a Trump (or other GOP) victory in 2024, would place the nation on a path to autocracy.

Trump’s desire to be a strongman ruler are no secret. He has repeatedly uttered statements that reveal a craving to be in total control of the US government. As he mounts a second campaign for the White House, his team has openly discussed his plans to consolidate government power in the White House should he win. The New York Times recently reported that his crew aims “to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.” The Washington Post ran a story in April headlined, “Trump touts authoritarian vision for second term.”

These plans include altering the rules governing the civil service so that tens of thousands of federal workers—maybe more—would be subject to immediate dismissal by the White House. That would mean that Trump could fire employees at federal agencies who do not pledge their loyalty to Trump—or who question the legality or appropriateness of White House directives. Say, Trump or an underling orders the IRS to audit the tax returns of a political foe and an IRS career official objects, that person could be pink-slipped.

Yet this effort to reshape the US government extends far beyond the fevered fantasies of one failed casino owner and his henchmen and henchwomen. Much of the right-wing establishment—including its leading think tanks and policy shops—are part of the attempt to concentrate federal power in the hands of Trump or another Republican president.

This piece was originally published by Capital & Main.

In January of 2022, Jacklyn Gabel and her co-workers at the Starbucks Coffee location on Mission Street in Santa Cruz began considering the idea of organizing. Four months later, they voted 15-2 to become part of a labor union, Starbucks Workers United.

The goal, Gabel said, was simple: Come together to more effectively bargain on wages, benefits and working conditions.

So how many negotiating sessions has the union held so far with Starbucks?

“None,” Gabel said. “There has never been a bargaining session.”

It was big news when Rudy Giuliani, once hailed as America’s Mayor, was indicted last month by a district attorney in Atlanta for allegedly being part of a criminal enterprise led by Donald Trump that sought to overturn the 2020 election results. Giuliani was back in headlines this week when he lost a defamation suit filed against him by two Georgia election workers whom he had falsely accused of ballot stuffing. Giuliani’s apparent impoverishment, caused by his massive legal bills, and even his alleged drinking have been fodder for reporters. But another major Giuliani development has drawn less attention: An FBI whistleblower filed a statement asserting that Giuliani “may have been compromised” by Russian intelligence while working as a lawyer and adviser to Trump during the 2020 campaign.

That contention is among a host of explosive assertions from Johnathan Buma, an FBI agent who also says that an investigation involving Giuliani’s activities was stymied within the bureau. 

In July, Buma sent the Senate Judiciary Committee a 22-page statement full of eye-popping allegations, and the document leaked and was first reported last month by Insider (after a conservative blogger had posted it online). According to Buma’s account, Giuliani was used as an asset by a Ukrainian oligarch tied to Russian intelligence and other Russian operatives for a disinformation operation that aimed to discredit Joe Biden and boost Trump in the 2020 presidential race. Moreover, Buma says he was the target of retaliation within the bureau for digging into this.

The FBI declined to comment on Buma’s claims.

Buma’s revelations may only be the start. A source familiar with his work tells Mother Jones that other potential FBI whistleblowers who participated in the investigation involving Giuliani have consulted the same lawyer as Buma and might meet with congressional investigators in coming weeks. That attorney, Scott Horton, declined to comment.

The 2024 election cycle looks like it will feature not one, but two late-30s contrarians who got their start rapping about libertarianism on elite college campuses. The first is Vivek Ramaswamy, the self-funder now enjoying a “breakout moment” in a presidential primary completely dominated by Donald Trump. The other is Blake Masters, who is reportedly planning another run for US Senate in Arizona after losing to Sen. Mark Kelly by five points in 2022. 

Masters’ reasons for running again are not altogether obvious. His hard-right Senate campaign last year, which was bankrolled by his mentor and former boss Peter Thiel, defined how Republicans squandered the 2022 midterms by nominating candidates far out of step with voters. Masters called abortion “genocide,” repeatedly responded to news about gay people by saying “not everything has to be gay,” and published unsettling clips of himself shooting guns in the desert. The campaign deeply disturbed former close friends from his private day school and Stanford, who didn’t recognize the man they saw in the ominous videos. (Masters said he was inspired by the aesthetics of Terrence Malick, a director best known for a film about a sociopathic killing spree.)

This is not to say Masters had no fans. Last year, I reported that Masters had once written an email to his vegetarian coop at Stanford in which he called democracy “that miserably peculiar American diety [sic].” In another, he recommended an article that advocated for “the abdication of democracy” and replacing it with a world in which the masses accepted a “natural order” led by a “voluntarily acknowledged ‘natural’ elite—a nobilitas naturalis.” 

A poster named Pedro Gonzalez responded to those revelations on Twitter by writing, “This actually makes Blake Masters look great.” Less than a year later, it was reported that Gonzalez, who’d become one of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ biggest boosters online, had sent countless racist and antisemitic text messages. (A representative sample: “whites themselves are too cucked to preserve their own civilizations.”) 

Another Masters fan was Nate Hochman, the twentysomething DeSantis staffer who was fired after it came out that he’d secretly made a pro-DeSantis video featuring the sonnenrad symbol used by Nazis and neo-Nazis. Yet another supporter was Curtis Yarvin, the self-identified absolute monarchist blogger who gave the first and only campaign donation of his life to Masters.

A progressive congressional delegation has just returned from a historic trip to Latin America, where they met with three recently elected left-wing administrations in Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. Organized by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the group aimed to redefine the United States’ relationship with the region, and begin to repair (many) past wrongs.

Ocasio-Cortez was joined by Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.) , Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), and Misty Rebik, Senator Bernie Sanders’s chief of staff.

Casar, the son of Mexican immigrants and a former labor organizer who was elected to the house in 2022, spoke with Mother Jones about his experience joining the delegation, and how the US needs to change its engagement with Latin America to address common goals of combating climate change, lifting up working people, and protecting democracy.

This is a different congressional delegation than has been sent to Latin America in the past. Could you talk about how you got involved? And how this group was a change of pace from our past relations with left-wing Latin American movements and governments?

This was a different kind of trip. Not only because it was all Latino members of Congress that went, not only because we were able to have almost all of our meetings in Spanish or Portuguese—but because it was entirely progressive members of Congress meeting with our newly elected progressive counterparts in Latin America. And in almost every meeting, Latin American leaders expressed how different of a delegation this was. Because instead of having conversations based on Cold War militarism—instead of having meetings that ignore past US interventionism in Latin America— our conversations were based on listening and mutual respect. I think that’s what was so important.

Hurricane Idalia struck Florida 190 miles north of Tampa on Wednesday as a Category 3 storm, a classification that causes “devastating” damage, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. With 125-mile-per-hour winds upon landfall, it fell just short of the Category 4 metric.

This region of Florida hasn’t seen such strong wind gusts and storm surges in more than 125 years. Many roads are flooded, with water levels up to at least 8 feet. 

“We have multiple trees down, debris in the roads, do not come,” posted the fire and rescue department of Cedar Key, an island connected to the mainland by bridges. There, water levels are at least 6.5 feet high. “We have propane tanks blowing up all over the island.”

“Our entire downtown is submerged,” one local resident, Michael Bobbitt, wrote on Facebook. “Houses everywhere are submerged.”

Elsewhere in the sunshine state, fallen trees have hit gas lines, and hundreds of thousands of people are without electricity as of Wednesday afternoon.

Yanet Candelario could feel her body grow tense as she remembered some of her experiences during the 13 months she spent at the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. A dual citizen of Canada and Cuba, holding a placard that asked, “Why is Biden Siding With a Private Prison Co.?” she had joined dozens of other advocates outside the Clarkson S. Fisher Federal Building and United States Courthouse in Trenton, New Jersey, to demand the closure of the state’s oldest and last remaining immigrant prison. “I remembered the toxicity and the pain I saw in that place,” Candelario says. She had been sent to the detention center after returning from a trip to Panama in 2016, while her application for lawful permanent status was pending. “It’s a place of destruction, really,” she adds. 

Today the facility houses an average of about 160 migrants a day—both men and women—and is run by CoreCivic on a contract with US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that was set to expire on August 31. The future of the detention center has been under litigation for several months. On August 14, US District Court Judge Robert Kirsch heard arguments in a case about a 2021 state law signed by Gov. Phil Murphy that barred public and private entities from entering, renewing, or extending contracts with ICE to detain immigrants.

On Tuesday, Judge Kirsch issued a ruling siding with CoreCivic. “The result of any one of New Jersey’s neighboring states passing a comparable law—let alone an ensuing domino effect to other states—would result in nothing short of chaos,” he wrote, adding that “the statute is a dagger aimed at the heart of the federal government’s immigration enforcement mission and operations.” The ruling paves the way for ICE and CoreCivic to renew their contract and for immigrants to continue being detained in the Elizabeth Detention Facility.

We are disappointed with today’s ruling, which we view as interfering with NJ’s right to protect its residents. Private detention facilities threaten the public health and safety of New Jerseyans, including when used for immigration purposes. We will be appealing this decision.

— Attorney General Matt Platkin (@NewJerseyOAG) August 29, 2023

On June 14, 1862, the New York Times published an editorial titled “The Mystery of Negrophilism.” The essay questioned the origins of white Americans’ “extraordinary interest in the negro” and called the “passion for the American negro” an “entirely abnormal…phenomenon.” During the Antebellum period, Southerners pathologized Northern whites’ intolerable friendliness—their “liking negroes”—as “negrophilism.” They chided abolitionists as “negro-maniacs” obsessed with “negro interest.” It was untenable for citizens of a slaveholding nation to harbor human affection toward enslaved descendants of Africa—a continent, the author wrote (purportedly quoting then–Secretary of State William Seward), that “nature had fortified against civilization.” White enslavers positioned enslaved Black people as chattel partly by excluding them from the emotional bonds that facilitate civil society.

“Negrophile” sentiment had the power to make Black suffering legible and, as a result, Black American humanity legible too. In the white South, where Black flesh demarcated a non-human species, negrophilia was a deleterious liberal ideology that reimagined the natural (white) order of the world. For White Americans to espouse sympathy towards un-sympathizable Blacks, and acknowledge their suffering, was to blaspheme against a long-held doctrine that justified chattel slavery by excluding Black people from fellow feeling: Black suffering is permissible because it is deserved. The South’s paranoia around negrophilism spurred violent inquisitions that snuffed out traces of “negrophile” doctrines like abolition from the crevices of Southern life. Negrophiles were prosecuted, flogged, and ostracized. Negrophile educators were exiled from schools, and “negrophile books” were banned throughout the South or sent to the pyre.

Contemporary supporters of so-called “woke” doctrines have endured the same treatment—but referring to white Americans as negrophiles is unacceptable by today’s social standards, which forbid any suggestion of the “N-word.” The right has supplanted the epithet with what it now derides as “wokeness,” reviving the Southern notion of negrophilia as a righteous fixation on race. As a pejorative, “woke” isn’t too distant from its predecessors: race agitator, nigger-lover, negrophile. A “woke” white person—a negrophile—threatens to indoctrinate fellow whites into liberal obsession with racism. The irony was captured in 1962 by a self-proclaimed “negrophile”: “One wonders whether this term in either its genteel or vulgar form would ever be applied to another human being except by somebody who was, perhaps, subconsciously, a negrophobe.”

Frantz Fanon, a psychologist from the French Antilles, described negrophobia in his Black Skin, White Masks as “a neurosis characterized by the anxious fear” of Black people or, by extension, of Blackness at large. “In the phobic, affect has a priority that defies all rational thinking,” Fanon writes, “For the object, naturally, need not be there. It is enough that somewhere it exists: It is a possibility.” As Fanon suggests, negrophobia is irrational; it must be tirelessly manufactured.

Conservatives’ fanaticism around “wokeness” also has no anchor in logic, no real definition, and must also be fabricated ad nauseam. Like the southern phobia around negrophilism, the phobia of wokeness is malicious, yet sensible—for the anti-woke, who are paranoid that a society saturated with racial sympathy would turn on a “negro axis.” The possibility of a Black sociopolitical orientation, as Fanon said, causes “fear and revulsion.”

The state of the legal challenges to laws banning gender-affirming care is, and will continue to be, confusing. The latest example is particularly striking. Last Friday, there were two major rulings. In Texas, a judge blocked a ban on gender-affirming healthcare, then her decision was paused by the state’s attorney general’s office. In Missouri, a judge ruled that a ban on care could go into effect.

These concurrent decisions add to the mounting anxiety for transgender youth and their loved ones across the country as legal battles are fought. While some hope that courts can halt these bans, it has been unclear what will happen next—and state-by-state decisions could vary. The ban on care in Missouri goes into effect today. Texas will soon follow.

“The courts told the transgender community, parents of gender-expansive youth, and the entire LGBTQ+ community that we do not exist, that we do not have the right to make our own medical decisions or the right to bodily autonomy,” Aro Royston, the board secretary for Missouri LGBTQ advocacy group PROMO, said in a statement following the ruling.

More than a third of transgender youth ages 13 to 17 live in states that have passed bans on gender-affirming care. The first three months of 2023 saw more bills introduced that attacked access than the last six years combined. Judges in some states, like Florida, Georgia, and Indiana, have blocked aspects of these laws or halted the whole measure. Several other states have laws that are not yet in effect or have “grandfather” clauses that could wear off soon.  

Last week’s rulings show how confusing things will be as laws are litigated. In Texas, following district court Judge Maria Cantú Hexsel’s decision to halt the ban, the state attorney general’s office filed an appeal with the Texas Supreme Court, a move that automatically pauses the injunction. This means the Texas ban will go into effect in a few days. It will ban care for transgender youth, revoke the licenses of physicians who continue providing care, and cut off access to care for adolescent minors already receiving treatment. According to Judge Hexsel, the law “interferes with Texas families’ private decisions and strips Texas parents…of the right to seek, direct, and provide medical care for their children.”  

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Refugees and migrants in Greece are facing off against the “two great injustices of our times”, Amnesty International has said, as it linked wildfires and scant access to legal migration routes to the deaths of 19 people believed to be asylum seekers.

As wildfires continue to rage across swathes of Greece, authorities in the country said they were working to identify the charred remains of 18 people found this week in the dense forests that straddle the country’s north-eastern border with Turkey.

Given there were no reports of missing people in the area, officials said it was possible the victims, who include two children, were asylum seekers who had entered the country irregularly. One day earlier, the body of another person believed to be an asylum seeker was found in the same area.

In recent days the fires have ripped through an area that had increasingly become a crossing point for thousands of refugees and migrants, Amnesty International said in a statement. Their arrival on EU soil had been “systematically” met with “forced returns at the border, denial of the right to seek asylum and violence”, it added.

Donald Trump’s mugshot has powered a historic fundraising blitz for the former president.

Trump’s campaign says it has raised $7.1 million since he was processed at an Atlanta jail on Thursday night for attempting to overturn the Georgia election, according to figures first reported by Politico. On Friday, Trump raised $4.18 million—more than any other day of his campaign.

The fundraising haul has been fueled in part by the campaign’s sale of mugshot-adorned T-shirts, mugs, and more that read, “NEVER SURRENDER.”

Following his arrest on Thursday, Trump returned to X, formerly known as Twitter, for the first time in more than two years, posting his mugshot and directing supporters to his campaign website. “What has taken place is a travesty of justice and ELECTION INTERFERENCE,” the site claims. He asked his supporters donate to the campaign to “evict Crooked Joe Biden from the White House and SAVE AMERICA during this dark chapter in our nation’s history.”

The haul demonstrates Trump’s success in turning his four indictments into fundraising ammo. Over the past three weeks, during which Trump was indicted in Washington, DC, on charges related to his role in the January 6 riot and arrested in Georgia on charges of attempting to subvert the election, the campaign has brought in nearly $20 million—more than half of what it raised during Trump’s first seven months in the 2024 race.

Donald Trump now faces two indictments and 17 charges related to his role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and in both cases, prosecutors are aiming to try the former president before the 2024 vote. But according to some conservative legal scholars, these criminal proceedings may be beside the point when considering whether Trump should be eligible to hold the presidency at all. 

In The Atlantic this weekend, former federal judge J. Michael Luttig and professor of constitutional law Laurence H. Tribe chimed in with their version of an argument continuing to gain traction among legal scholars that the Fourteenth Amendment excludes Trump from holding office again at any level. According to Luttig and Tribe, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Section 3 bars any person who has previously taken an oath to support the Constitution in an official capacity and who later “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution from holding an official office again. 

So maybe, if you were to, say, take an inaugural oath to protect the Constitution, and then later take steps like demanding the Georgia Secretary of State “find” the votes to win you the election, or file bogus lawsuits to try and overturn the results, or attempt to obstruct Congress from certifying the results from said election, or lie repeatedly and knowingly to the American people about the results, you can’t be president again? Tribe and Luttig encourage all of us, “regardless of partisan leaning,” to consider these sentences from Section 3 ourselves:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

This argument isn’t just coming from the left. It’s notable that Luttig is considered a conservative legal scholar. He was a corporate attorney, and was later appointed to the federal bench by George Bush Sr. before returning to corporate law. The same argument he makes about Section 3 is supported by legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen in a forthcoming article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. As Tribe and Luttig point out in The Atlantic, “Baude and Paulsen are two of the most prominent conservative constitutional scholars in America, and both are affiliated with the Federalist Society, making it more difficult for them to be dismissed as political partisans.”

Until last week, no study had ever been published that tested period products—tampons, pads, discs, cups, and underwear—using human blood. A team of four women just changed that. 

On August 7, Dr. Bethany Samuelson Bannow and a group at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland released a study to test saturation and capacity levels in menstrual products in hopes of better understanding how to diagnose heavy menstrual bleeding, or HMB, which impacts millions of Americans.

Why had it taken so long to test a product made to contain human blood with human blood? “I think with women’s health, including menstrual health, we’ve been a little bit behind the eight ball,” Dr. Bannow told me. “They didn’t even require women to be included in NIH studies until 1993. I think that that’s telling of what we prioritize as a society.”

Providers trying to diagnose HMB depend on self-reporting, which can be subjective with people falling prey to myths and miseducation. A patient experiencing pain, fatigue, or other related symptoms will come in and ask: Is this normal? To tell if the bleeding is excessive, doctors try to ascertain how many period products are used per hour. But measurement is imperfect. Menstruators change out products for tons of reasons; and products may claim they can sustain a certain amount of “flow,” but their actual capacity is different. That is what Dr. Bannow hoped to make clear in her testing.

The team took 21 different products and saturated or filled them with expired human-packed red blood cells. This isn’t an exact match to menstrual blood—which has clots and secretions—but it’s a lot closer than salty water. In their research, they found that how the companies were labeling the boxes did not match up with their results. The majority of menstrual products reported that they had greater capacity than the testing found.

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Please check it out.

In yet another historic indictment, Donald Trump was charged by an Atlanta prosecutor with essentially being a mob boss.

With this expansive set of charges that accuses Trump and 18 others of mounting a wide-ranging and illegal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election—emphasizing actions taken to fraudulently reverse the results in Georgia—Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis declared Trump the head of a “criminal enterprise.” The first of 41 counts in the indictment alleges Trump and his co-conspirators violated the state’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a law that has been used by local and federal prosecutors—including defendant Rudy Giuliani, when he was a US attorney in the 1980s—to pursue Mafia chieftains who were often able to insulate themselves from the criminal deeds of their henchmen. Given Trump’s past ties with mobsters—a significant piece of his biography that has often been overlooked—the use of RICO has an especially sharp resonance.

When Trump ran for president in 2016, I was one of the few reporters who examined his shady record of organized crime connections—particularly his history of making false or contradictory statements about these relations. As I noted then, “when asked about his links to the mob, Trump has repeatedly made false comments and has contradicted himself—to such a degree it seems he has flat-out lied about these relationships, even when he was under oath.” I detailed several of these instances—which have even greater relevance now that Trump is the lead defendant in a RICO case. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane.

* In 2007, Trump sued journalist Tim O’Brien for libel—asking for $5 billion in damages—after O’Brien in his book TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald reported that Trump was no billionaire and only worth between $100 million and $250 million. That book referenced an already established fact: that in the early 1980s Trump began his casino empire in Atlantic City, New Jersey, by leasing property owned by Kenneth Shapiro and Daniel Sullivan. Shapiro, O’Brien wrote, was a “street-level gangster with close ties to the Philadelphia mob,” and Sullivan was a “Mafia associate, FBI informant and labor negotiator.” (Trump also had obtained Sullivan’s assistance when he had trouble with undocumented Polish workers who were demolishing the Bonwit Teller building in Manhattan to make way for Trump Tower.)

This story was originally published by the  Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Joe Biden’s landmark climate legislation has been “disappointing” and failed to deliver protections to car industry workers confronted by the transition to electric vehicles, according to the head of the US’s leading autoworkers union, which has pointedly withheld is endorsement of the president for next year’s election.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed by Biden a year ago this week, has bestowed huge incentives to car companies to manufacture electric vehicles without any accompanying guarantees over worker pay and conditions, Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW), told the Guardian.

“So far it’s been disappointing. If the IRA continues to bring sweatshops and a continued race to the bottom it will be a tragedy,” Fain said.

“This is our generation’s defining moment with electric vehicles. The government should invest in US manufacturing but money can’t go to companies with no strings attached. Labor needs a seat at the table. There should be labor standards built in, this is the future of the car industry at stake.”

Earlier this spring, the Supreme Court hit pause on a controversial ruling in a massive anti-abortion lawsuit with the potential to eliminate nationwide access to the most common method of abortion. The case, brought by anti-abortion organizations and doctors, challenged the FDA’s two-decade-old approval of mifepristone, a pill used in medication abortion.

In April, a far-right federal district court judge in Texas had sided with the anti-abortion doctors, issuing an unprecedented order to suspend mifepristone’s approval. But before his decision could take effect, the Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to step in and pause the order while it went through appeals. The Court agreed.

On Wednesday afternoon, the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued its decision on the appeal, meaning the case is one step closer to reaching the Supreme Court. The Fifth Circuit ruled that the anti-abortion doctors had waited too long to challenge mifepristone’s FDA 2000 approval—and it also found that the FDA had acted improperly in 2016 and 2021, when it relaxed some rules around how mifepristone can be prescribed. 

The Fifth Circuit’s decision contains bad news for parties on both sides of the case. But because of the Supreme Court’s prior order, the ruling doesn’t have much practical effect—at least for now. “This opinion changes nothing on the ground whatsoever,” says Drexel University law professor David Cohen. “Mifepristone is available the same way today as it was yesterday.”

The next stop for the lawsuit is still the Supreme Court. If SCOTUS takes the case, the justices would have the final word on mifepristone—upholding or invalidating the FDA’s approval, or throwing out the challenge altogether for procedural reasons. “They could do whatever they want,” says Mary Ziegler, a reproductive law expert at the University of California, Davis. According to Ziegler, the court could use the case as an opportunity to weigh in on the Comstock Act, a 19th century anti-obscenity law that abortion-rights opponents are trying to use to ban abortion nationwide. Their claim is that the old law, which makes it a crime to mail any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion,” can be enforced.