Alex Pareene suspects that right-wingers "might start trying to do voter fraud on a mass scale." And if you're tempted to respond that they kind of already have -- the notorious Interstate Crosscheck database helped right-wing politicians de-register Black and Brown voters for years, after all -- we're talking actual voter fraud here, the kind of which former Republican House Rep./Trump Administration hack Mark Meadows now stands accused after all the accusations of "voter fraud" he's leveled. Add in all the stories of actual voter fraud you've heard, which all seem to come from the right (Mr. Pareene tabulates only a few of them!), and you can see where one might be concerned.
Carl Beijer at Jacobin reminds us that "Critical Race Theory Is the Right’s Latest Obsession" but "They’ll Have a New One Soon." Seriously, it's like right-wingers have this Lazy Susan of outrages and just as even other right-wingers tell them to STFU about it, they just give it a spin and see where it stops. But Mr. Beijer also reminds us that right-wingers love telling us about "a relatively obscure text or theory that, we are told, lays out the secret governing plans and doctrines of the anarchomarxistliberaldemocrat conspiracy." Eventually, you have to explain why you keep losing to the anarchomarxistliberaldemocrat conspiracy, so you have to keep "discovering" new "secret texts." How long before they get to these books?
The Biden Administration sacks the two members of our President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition -- Herschel Walker and Mehmet Oz -- who are running for Senate. Mr. Oz wrote a bunch of stupid crap about it, neglecting to mention that the Hatch Act actually prevents government employees from using their position to campaign for public office. Maybe the aforementioned two individuals can prove in court that no one cares about the Council and therefore couldn't possibly have used it to promote their campaigns! And I'm sure they'll try, but in the meantime, they'll just whine about being "canceled."
Uh oh: Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) might have a primary challenger this year, and someone apparently using a computer in the Missouri capitol building has repeatedly scrubbed any mention of sexual assault allegations from this challenger's Wikipedia page. Mainstream media organs reported on both these accusations, in case you thought maybe some liberal rando added them to his page to begin with. Then the challenger's spokeshack called Wikipedia "an unregulated, unedited, largely unsourced mass of information that is often inaccurate because anyone can post almost anything," which smells of desperation, as any ad hominem attack does. Sadly, Ms. Bush has two other primary challengers, though perhaps they'll split the Anyone But Bush vote.
Paul Krugman says high inflation will come down, perhaps not for the "soft landing" our Federal Reserve envisions, but still a soft enough landing that won't result in near-11% unemployment. Why? Because the inflation that finally died in the early '80s was "self-perpetuating inflation" -- "(e)veryone was raising prices in anticipation of everyone else raising prices," and wages were going up a lot faster back then, too, for the same reason; today folks simply don't anticipate inflation will just go up and up and up, and they plan accordingly, and if enough powerful people plan accordingly, inflation will come down. Probably not in time for Democrats to brag about it in midterm ads, if they're even so inclined, but I'll take the word of the Nobel Prize-winning economist over any self-interested cable news pundit or social media "influencer" you can name.
Finally, Vlad the Bad has finally come out and said that everyone wants to "cancel" him, just like everyone wants to cancel Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling! (Ms. Rowling, for her part, distanced herself from Mr. Putin's remarks right quick.) The article reminds us that being worth over $1 billion, as Ms. Rowling is, isn't exactly like being "canceled," nor is being the dictator of one of the most powerful nations on the planet. Good Russian citizens might "cancel" Mr. Putin eventually, but in the meantime, remember what all this is: drama, which is what right-wingers do best.
UPDATE. A reader has convinced me that "hater of transgender folk" is a bridge too far when describing J.K. Rowling, and though I still suspect her, I've excised the phrase from the above paragraph.
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