Georgia has been forced to let new voters register for the June 20 run-off election in the 6th Congressional District, and Republican candidate Karen Handel is outraged. Outraged enough to try to raise money off of it, anyway, with a fundraising email calling the effort to allow more people to register and vote a “partisan” one, even though it was decided by a George W. Bush-appointed federal judge:

“This is going to boil your blood. Just hours ago, the Democrats won their lawsuit to extend voter registration in Georgia before our election,” she wrote in the email. “This lawsuit should be seen for exactly what it is: A partisan attempt to change the rules in the middle of an election for a nakedly partisan outcome.”

Handel suggested that Democrats were trying to steal the election.

“Friend, I need your immediate support to fight back against the Democrat’s latest trick to deceive this election,” she wrote.  

“The Democrat’s latest trick to deceive this election”? I’d ask what that even means, but I’m pretty sure that making sense is beside the point. It oozes outrage and feeds Handel’s supporters’ sense of entitlement, encouraging them to believe that the only way someone like Jon Ossoff could win is through tricks and deception.

Yet another ad from the Congressional Leadership Fund, meanwhile, is looking to delegitimize Ossoff in a different and even weirder way: San Francisco. The ad features a parade of “San Franciscans” gushing about Ossoff. Sample clip: man with braids stands in front of the sign for Fisherman’s Wharf and flashes a peace sign as he says “We already have Nancy Pelosi as our congresswoman, now you’re going to give us Jon Ossoff as OUR congressMAN.” Truly this is an ad for people who hate the idea of San Francisco so much that they don't need any content beyond people saying the name San Francisco a lot while having long hair. But the message is consistent with Handel’s “trick to deceive this election.”

Can you chip in $3 to help Jon Ossoff win?

On Tuesday, GOP Rep. Raúl Labrador announced that he would run to succeed retiring Idaho Gov. Butch Otter next year. Labrador, who represents half of the state in Congress, is one of D.C.’s most notorious tea party bomb throwers: Labrador was a founder and remains an influential member of the nihilistic House Freedom Caucus. Labrador made the news again a few days ago when he told a town hall that, “Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.” Labrador tried defending himself later, conceding that, while his statement wasn’t “very elegant,” he “was responding to a false notion that the Republican Health Care plan will cause people to die in the streets, which I completely reject.”

Despite his prominent perch in D.C., Labrador seemed stymied in Congress. When Labrador ran for House majority leader in 2014 his bid against California’s Kevin McCarthy went nowhere, with Labrador lacking even the basic contact info for his colleagues. Labrador has spent years raising his profile back home, but it hasn’t always gone well. In 2014, a little while before the majority leader race, Labrador was the chair of a chaotic state party convention that broke into infighting. According to the The Spokesman-Review's Betty Russell, Labrador “ended the convention facing jeers and walkouts from his own party members.” 

The GOP nominee will be heavily favored to hold the governor’s office next year, but Labrador doesn’t have a clear path through the primary. Lt. Gov. Brad Little, who has Otter’s support, kicked off his bid last year. Developer Tommy Ahlquist is also in, and he started running commercials well over a year before the 2018 primary. Ex-state Sen. Russ Fulcher, who lost the 2014 primary to Otter by a surprisingly close 51-44 margin, also wants the job, and it’s possible he’ll peel off some anti-establishment voters Labrador wants.

Workers have been evacuated from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation on Columbia River in Washington State. The emergency seems to have started near the PUREX facility, used for extracting plutonium from spent fuel rods. PUREX was last operated in 1988, but radioactive waste from the processing is still stored on site. The tunnel in question may itself contain items that were used when the plant was operating and which remain contaminated.

The building has been vacant for nearly twenty years, but it remains highly contaminated. Its walls are surrounded by razor wire and barbed wire fences. Several rail cars used to transport the irradiated fuel rods from the Hanford nuclear reactors to the processing canyons are temporarily buried inside a tunnel near PUREX as a result of becoming contaminated.

Those rail cars aren’t just contaminated, they are still loaded with material left over from processing. That tunnel containing the rail cars may be the focus of the current emergency.

A tunnel used to store highly radioactively contaminated waste at the defunct Purex processing plant may have collapsed.

Workers in the immediate area have been evacuated. Many other workers in central Hanford have been told to take shelter indoors as a precaution, including about 1,000 workers at the vitrification plant construction site.

Reports are not currently indicating any release of radioactivity.

Officials detected no release of radiation and no workers were injured, said Randy Bradbury, a spokesman for the Washington state Department of Ecology.

Hanford was constructed during the Manhattan Project and was the source for plutonium used in the first nuclear bomb.

John Oliver used the power of television Sunday to defend net neutrality, again. The result, like the first time he did it three years ago, was a flood of comments to the FCC's creaky website which then crashed. That happened again this weekend, immediately following Oliver's call to action.

What's different this time is the FCC's response. It's claiming that the site went down because it was targeted by multiple distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

"Beginning on Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDos). These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host. These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC. While the comment system remained up and running the entire time, these DDoS events tied up the servers and prevented them from responding to people attempting to submit comments. We have worked with our commercial partners to address this situation and will continue to monitor developments going forward."

“Oh, yeah?” says the internet community? Show us your work.

As Recode reporter Tony Romm pointed out, this statement raises a lot more questions than it answers. What is the "analysis" that apparently proves the crash came from a coordinated attack, and not from Oliver's segment? How did those performing that "analysis" figure this out? For outside observers, it's tough to say exactly what’s going on: A DDoS and a crash due to an innocent increase in traffic would both likely look fairly similar for the user. What differentiates a website crashing due to genuine traffic from a DDoS attack is that DDoS typically involves a hacker commanding a "botnet"—an army of malware infected devices—to flood a website with traffic, clogging it with requests until it becomes inaccessible to the public.

On Monday, the Trump–Russia story deepened with multiple revelations about Michael Flynn. First came the news that just two days after the election, President Barack Obama warned Donald Trump against hiring Michael Flynn as national security adviser. That warning punches a huge hole in the “Michael Flynn was Obama’s fault” narrative that the Trump regime has been attempting to build. Despite the fact that Obama canned Flynn from his position at Defense, Trump has been in full Pontius Pilate mode when it comes to the man he embraced as a foreign policy adviser and surrogate, made national security adviser, and short listed for vice-president. 

At mid-day, Sean Spicer stated that Trump didn’t take President Obama seriously, putting the warning down to personal dislike. Because apparently Spicer thinks it acceptable that the president might “jest” about who should fill a critical security function.

In the afternoon, we were graced by the arresting testimony from former acting attorney general Sally Yates. Yates made it clear that far from a quick “heads up” on Flynn, she met twice with White House counsel Don McGahn to provide a detailed, thorough analysis of what Flynn had done and the risk it generated. Yates focused on how Flynn’s behavior opened the national security adviser to outside control, and exposed the nation to danger through both the potential release of classified information and spread of propaganda.

The end result of the day’s testimony and statements should be utterly bruising for Trump. He got a warning face to face from the president. He ignored it. He got a detailed, documented, in-depth presentation from the acting attorney general. He ignored it.

But neither of those incidents is as damaging as the third item: Sean Spicer’s excuse. That excuse speaks directly to Trump’s own judgement—or complete lack of the same. For Trump, everything is personal. He’s unable to make a decision based on facts or ability. It’s all about “who said good things about me.” And he assumes the rest of the world works the same way. In showing that he was willing to dismiss a threat to the nation because he frames everything as a personal manner, Donald Trump showcases his position as the easiest man on the planet to control.

Kushner knows how to do it.

Tuesday's White House briefing will commence at 1:30 PM ET, at which point the press corps will pummel Sean Spicer for his inference that former acting Attorney General Sally Yates gave the White House a casual "heads up" about national security adviser Michael Flynn.

And by "heads up," Spicey apparently meant she talked to Donald Trump's White House counsel three times, explaining that Flynn was "compromised" and could be "blackmailed" by a subversive foreign power that had directed a targeted attack on our elections, otherwise known as Russia.

As Spicey explained on February 14, the day after Flynn resigned:

Just to be clear, the acting Attorney General informed the White House Counsel that they wanted to give a “heads up” to us on some comments that may have seemed in conflict with what he had sent the Vice President out in particular.  The White House Counsel informed the President immediately. The President asked him to conduct a review of whether there was a legal situation there. That was immediately determined that there wasn’t.  

1. Just to be clear, there was an 18-day gap between when Yates first informed the White House that a potential Russian mole had daily access to the nation's most sensitive intelligence and when he exited the White House. Eighteen Days. Explain that, please, Spicey. Thanks, in advance!

2. Since Spicer has repeatedly blamed Flynn's security clearance through the Department of Defense on the Obama administration, why didn't the Trump White House require Flynn to get a higher clearance through the CIA? We learned Monday that clearance had never been given granted to Flynn. As Bush/Obama alum James Clapper explained during Monday’s hearing:

The vetting process for either a political appointee or someone working in the White House is far, far more invasive and far, far more thorough than a standard [Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information] clearance process.

So why was Flynn ever allowed to be sitting in the situation room in the first place?

That’s just really just the tip of the iceberg, but they are two of the biggest questions the press corps will be flogging Sean Spicer with today.

The House is home on recess this week, and most House Republicans are running scared from their constituents’ anger over Trumpcare. A few Republicans are trying to have it both ways—giving the impression of meeting with the public while tightly controlling who can talk to them and how. But even that isn’t working out so well for them, as New York’s Elise Stefanik and Iowa’s Rod Blum discovered Monday.

Blum went from walking out on an interview with a local television news reporter straight into a town hall “where most of the prescreened audience screamed at him,” the Washington Post’s Ed O’Keefe reports.

“This bill, Trumpcare — whatever you want to call it — is about the individual market only,” he said. “That’s 12,000 people in my district. Twelve thousand people in my district. So if you’re in the group health insurance program through your employers, if you’re getting your insurance through the group health insurance, nothing changes.”

“That’s not true! That’s not true!” people screamed from the bleachers, waving the red sheets.

“If you’re getting your insurance through Medicare, nothing’s going to change. Nothing’s going to change,” Blum said. “If you’re currently getting your health insurance through Medicaid nothing’s going to –”

The crowd drowned him out as he finished his sentence.

In Plattsburgh, New York, Elise Stefanik appeared before an audience of only 100 as she was taped by a local PBS station. But despite the small audience and more formal setting, with a reporter moderating the event and trying to keep the audience in check, she still faced overt anger.

Trumpcare is no longer polling in the teens now that it's been passed out of the House and the regular crowd of gullible reactionaries have been subject to an onslaught of lies from Republicans. The same 30 percent crowd that has always reliably come home to Republicans, no matter how awful what they're doing gets, is now tepidly behind Trumpcare. The problem for Republicans, though, is that's still less than one-third of the voting population, and that third is pretty squishy.

Thirty-one percent of Americans favor the American Health Care Act, which narrowly passed the Republican-controlled House last Thursday. Forty-four percent oppose the bill, which would repeal much of the current health care law. Another 25 percent are unsure.

As was the case during the GOP’s failed attempt to pass the bill in March, Americans are more likely to be intensely opposed than even modestly supportive. Just 8 percent say they favor the bill strongly, with 34 percent strongly opposed.

Americans say, 39 percent to 26 percent, that the AHCA would likely be worse, not better, than the current health care law. Just 14 percent believe the AHCA would make things better for them personally, while 27 percent say it would make things worse. A near-majority, 49 percent, say they don’t expect the bill to affect them very much, or that they aren’t sure what effect it would have.

Nina Simone might have captured it best in one of her protest anthems from the civil rights movement: “Alabama’s gotten me so upset. Tennessee’s made me lose my rest. But everybody knows about Mississippi g*ddam.” Sadly, Mississippi’s progress beyond the days of racial turmoil so wonderfully captured through the outrage in Simone’s song is incredibly slow. Madison County, Mississippi, is one of the most segregated places in the country. It’s also the site of a new lawsuit which contends that the sheriff’s department uses police enforcement to enforce segregation and violate the civil rights of black residents. 

The Madison County Sheriff’s Department (MCSD) “has implemented a coordinated top-down program of methodically targeting Black individuals for suspicionless searches and seizures,” the suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and pro-bono lawyers from Simpson Thacher & Bartlett says. The suit names 10 individual plaintiffs but seeks injunctive relief on behalf of “thousands of victims” of the county’s policies.

The roadblocks and checkpoints MCSD allegedly maintains are not like the random DUI stops many motorists have encountered here and there. Plainclothes deputies typically wait in unmarked cars, giving the stops an ambush feel at odds with the sirens-and-orange-cones officialdom of a typical checkpoint.

What’s more, the complaint says, the department locates these camouflaged identification inspections in and around the few communities in Madison County where there is a concentrated black population.

One resident named in the suit reports that he has been stopped more than 20 times in the past year alone. Others claim that unconstitutional stops, search, and seizures are just a routine part of life traveling to and from home. Additionally, beyond routine street and sidewalk stops, there have been claims of illegal searches in residents’ homes and even physical violence.

There's one thing to never lose sight of in the swirling debate over Trumpcare: it's all about the massive tax cuts for the wealthy. Every story about the machinations of the Republican Congress and White House on gutting Obamacare and Medicaid has to be viewed through that lens. Like this ACLU post detailing all the ways the bill would hurt the disabled.

Taking an Ax to Medicaid: According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the AHCA slashes $839 billion from Medicaid over the next 10 years. […] Federal dollars have allowed states to expand services to people with disabilities and address the needs of people with disabilities on waiting lists. Through “per capita caps,” the AHCA dramatically slashes future federal funding for Medicaid, limiting the ability of states to respond to the needs of their residents.

Taking Our Lives and Our Freedom: For people with disabilities, Medicaid is more than just health insurance — it’s the main financing source for services like personal care attendants to help people get dressed, eat, and use the bathroom. These supports keep people with disabilities out of nursing homes and institutions. […]

Ending the Medicaid Expansion: The AHCA would end Medicaid expansion in 2020, forcing states to kick millions of people off of coverage and out of care. […]

Pre-Existing Condition Discrimination Is Back: Thanks to last-minute changes in the bill, states can waive Obamacare’s protections against pre-existing condition discrimination. […]

Annual and Lifetime Caps Are Back: The AHCA permits the resumption of annual and lifetime caps on coverage in states that waive essential health benefits and in large employer-provided plans, affecting more than 100 million Americans.

Talk about dystopia. People with severe disabilities that are now supported by Medicaid services, allowing them to participate in full, public lives will become shut-ins, reliant on family and charity for their care. Education and employment opportunities for many will be a thing of the past. States are going to have to decide whether they put limited resources into keeping children healthy, or providing long-term care to the disabled elderly. And more people will become disabled because they won't have access to regular, preventive care.

All that to give more tax cuts to the very rich. Republicans made a very clear decision here about which lives to value more, and let me tell you, it's not ours.

The House GOP vote to strip millions of people of their health care was politically toxic and the Republican running for Montana's at-large seat knows it, which is exactly why his campaign lied to Montanans about his real feelings. A spokesman for Republican Greg Gianforte claimed late last week that the candidate didn't have enough information about the healthcare bill to weigh in on whether he would have voted for it. But that wasn't exactly what Gianforte told Washington lobbyists privately the same day, writes the New York Times.

During a private conference call with Republican-leaning lobbyists in Washington, Mr. Gianforte offered a more supportive view of the health bill. Making the case for the “national significance” of the Montana election on May 25, Mr. Gianforte said: “The votes in the House are going to determine whether we get tax reform done, sounds like we just passed a health care thing, which I’m thankful for, sounds like we’re starting to repeal and replace.”

Yeah, thank goodness we're moving forward with stripping health care from millions of America's most vulnerable so we can get on with cutting taxes for rich people—like you and me!  

Asked to reconcile Mr. Gianforte’s public and private statements, his campaign manager said the candidate was only “thankful” the process of repealing the law was underway.

“He would not have voted for the bill because he didn’t know what was in it,” said Brock Lowrance, the aide, noting that the Congressional Budget Office has not yet offered a fiscal analysis of the measure.

Not knowing what was in the legislation certainly didn't stop House Republicans from passing it in the first place. Regardless, sounds like Gianforte is much more interested in the tax cuts, health care is just incidental. Wonder if that’s how Montanans feel about it.

In Monday’s testimony, former acting Attorney General Sally Yates was carefully precise and scrupulously correct about any information that was either classified or pertinent to an open investigation. However, there is another public official whose actions are the exact opposite.

Perhaps [FBI Director James Comey]’s most surprising revelation was that Huma Abedin — Weiner’s wife and a top Clinton deputy — had made “a regular practice” of forwarding “hundreds and thousands” of Clinton messages to her husband, “some of which contain classified information.” Comey testified that Abedin had done this so that the disgraced former congressman could print them out for her boss. (Weiner’s laptop was seized after he came under criminal investigation for sex crimes, following a media report about his online relationship with a teenager.)

Comey painted this scenario as part of his explanation of why had had to issue a letter to Congress concerning the state of the investigation, even though he admitted knowing that the letter would become public almost immediately, and could be seen as interfering in the election. The “forwarding tens of thousands of emails” scenario—some of which Comey insisted were classified—not only served to justify the letter to Congress, but gave Senate Republicans renewed speculation over how this might ensnare Abedin, or even Clinton.

Only there’s an issue with the whole story.

FBI officials have privately acknowledged that Comey misstated what Abedin did and what the FBI investigators found. On Monday, the FBI was said to be preparing to correct the record by sending a letter to Congress later this week. But that plan now appears on hold, with the bureau undecided about what to do.

The tens of thousands of emails that were supposedly forwarded by Abedin? Make that more like “a handful.” And how many of that handful were classified? Make that none.