According to statements that Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials have made on state-run media, there are three goals for the “special military action” in Ukraine.

One is to secure all of Donetsk and Luhansk oblast and bring them into Russia. The idea that either will be an independent “people’s republic,” or that there might be some kind of referendum to determine their fate is now old hat. They’ll just be part of Russia. And like it.

Welcome to Thursday. The GOP continues moving forward with its only policy platform: taking away Americans’ rights. In the case of LGBTQ+ Americans, they are doing this by way of attacking children. Because the only “life” they are “pro” is contained to just the gestation period of fetuses, they are also proceeding with their policy of taking away more than 50% of our population’s rights to bodily autonomy.

Remember last year when House GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy suddenly turned against the bipartisan Jan. 6 commission he had deputized one of his own members to negotiate?

Right. Now McCarthy is among five sitting Republican House members who have been subpoenaed by the select committee investigating Jan.

Republicans at all levels of government have made book bans a recent rallying cry. Under the guise of fighting critical race theory (CRT), conservatives have lit hysteria under their voting base by convincing them that “inappropriate” books are going to invade their child’s brain. In reality, these books are more often than not by or about LGBTQ+ and/or people of color, with a handful of white, cisgender, heterosexual writers thrown in too.

With the U.S. Supreme Court poised to overrule Roe v. Wade, things are about to get very brutal for abortion rights at the state level.

Twenty-two states already have laws on their books to ban abortion after a ruling becomes final, and this week Louisiana legislators are considering a bill to make abortion a crime, charging those who have one with murder.

Every new document describing Trump adviser John Eastman’s efforts to erase the 2020 United States presidential election seems more outrageous than the last; the latest release is of an email to a Pennsylvania Republican advising state lawmakers to simply declare that a certain percentage of votes would be “discarded” to account for unproven Republican-claimed fraud.

The fact that 24 hours later we’re still waiting for confirmation of Ukrainian forces at Ternova is certainly concerning, but then, it took at least that long to confirm that Ukraine had recaptured Staryi Saltiv. It’s almost as if the Ukrainian troops at the vanguard of assaults in the Kharkiv area have been told to not immediately send video clips and photographs—conveniently geolocated—of their every move.

Michael Flynn served in the Trump administration for approximately as long as it takes Donald Trump’s languorous, M.C. Escher-like grotesquerie of a colon to pass a Happy Meal. He was our country’s national security adviser for about three weeks in early 2017, during which time he did his level best to make Vladimir Putin’s dewiest wet dreams come true.