MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were stunned by Sen. Tommy Tuberville's (R-AL) utter ignorance about an Alabama Supreme Court decision that could end IVF services......

"In his state, by the way, it's not like [NBC reporter] Dasha [Burns], who did a great job, it wasn't like Dasha was asking him about what happened in the Idaho legislature or in the Nevada legislature or the Oregon Supreme Court," Scarborough said.

"The Supreme Court," Brzezinski added. "He clearly doesn't know what IVF is."

"You know, he had no idea," Scarborough said. "You know, it'd be like Forrest Gump if he got the ball and just ran in circles. He was just running in circles, he was getting dizzy. He was for it, he was for IVF, he was for it, but he needed to read the bill. It's not a bill, it's your state Supreme Court – your state Supreme Court, not a bill."

"This is just another great example, the Republicans' message, think about it," Scarborough added. "Donald Trump [on Thursday] bragged about terminating abortion, he bragged about terminating the right, a 50-year right, in front of a Christian group. At the same time, he is leaking to the New York Times – 'Oh, I'm for a 16-week ban.' At the same time! Then you have poor Tommy Tuberville, poor, poor Tommy running around in circles, going, 'I'm for the ruling that bans IVF, I'm for that ruling, yes, it's good. It's unfortunate, it's unfortunate that women and families can't use IVF, it is fortunate. I'm for it, I'm against it, I need to read the bill – oh, it's a court case? Nobody is talking about it.' It just happened. This is such a nightmare for Republicans politically, they know it."

As we recently discussed, Tuberville is also known for his election denialism, his provocative rhetoric about race, his disparagements of the U.S. military, his difficulties with basic details related to civics and modern American history, and his willingness to give Russia’s Vladimir Putin the benefit of the doubt.

Alas, the list keeps growing. NBC News reported on the coach-turned-politician struggling to share his thoughts on his state’s Supreme Court ruling that embryos must be seen as people.

“Yeah, I was all for it,” Tuberville told reporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday when asked about the Alabama Supreme Court’s Friday ruling that embryos created through in vitro fertilization are considered children under state law. “We need to have more kids. We need to have an opportunity to do that, and I thought this was the right thing to do,” Tuberville said.

When NBC News pressed further, asking about the implications of the ruling, most notably for families trying to have children through IVF, Tuberville said several words, though they weren’t altogether clarifying......

Tuberville acknowledged that he hadn’t read the ruling, and as NBC News’ report added, the Alabaman “appeared to struggle to explain how the decision, which threatens to limit access to IVF treatment, would help more people have children.”
https://twitter.com/BidenHQ/status/1760783335909925116
So, that interview could’ve gone better for the Republican. Perhaps he’d better explain his position in a different interview? HuffPost gave it a try.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said Thursday that he is “all for” the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision that frozen embryos are children. He also said he opposes the effects of the ruling. And that he supports fertility treatments like IVF that are now being denied to women across his state as a result of the court’s ruling. And that he wants to read the legislation more closely before saying more — except there is no legislation.

Semafor also talked to the senator and asked about the real-world effects the state Supreme Court’s decision was having on women who had begun to go IVF treatment in Alabama. “I don’t know enough about how that works,” Tuberville said after endorsing the court’s ruling....

Tuberville hadn’t exactly earned a reputation for competence before this week. His standing is nevertheless a bit worse now

That's when Rubin said she believes one of the justices is writing a dissent and that they have a lot to say.

"Irrespective of where that comes out, the fact we're still here a week after Trump submitted his reply brief, suggests to me that somebody has something to get off their chest that doesn't involve where the majority of the court is on this," Rubin said.

When Menendez asked if a decision could come as soon as Friday, Rubin said it was very possible.

"A lot of miscellaneous orders from the court in recent weeks have come on Fridays," Rubin said. "So I think there is a chance we get it Friday. We also know the court conferences on Friday. Trump's reply brief was announced last Thursday. They could have conferenced it last Friday, meaning that they gather around a table and discuss what they're going to do with this motion. It's possible that they didn't do that last Friday, they do it tomorrow, and we hear from them soon after."

Vice President Harris was never as flawed as her critics made her out to be. From the onset of her term, she maintained a rigorous and effective diplomatic travel schedule and bolstered President Biden’s fight for voting rights. Unlike Biden, she never got ahead of the president on policy. Unlike former vice president Dan Quayle, she never made a late-night-comedy-worthy gaffe. And she has avoided her predecessor’s cringeworthy fawning.

Some defenders pointed to her eagerness in taking on seemingly impossible tasks (e.g., stemming the tide of Central American migrants); others argued the first woman of color in the job attracted disproportionate criticism. Whatever the cause, she has received harsh and sometimes petty media coverage, which too often simply regurgitated Republican attacks.,,,,,

In particular, she has excelled in her role as Biden defender and prosecutor of the case against four-times indicted former president Donald Trump. She launched a succinct and compelling indictment of special counsel Robert K. Hur’s lapse in prosecutorial judgment. “As a former prosecutor,” she declared Hur’s comments about Biden’s age and memory “gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate.”

Moreover, she explained that during the interview in the days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Biden spent “countless hours” with his national security team. She recalled that Biden was “on top of it all, asking questions and requiring that America’s military and intelligence community and diplomatic community would figure out and know: How many people were dead? How many are Americans? How many hostages? Is the situation stable?” She stressed that he remained “in front of it all, coordinating and directing leaders who are in charge of America’s national security — not to mention our allies around the globe — for days and, up until now, months.”

She concluded that “the way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and, clearly, politically motivated — gratuitous … We should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity than what we saw.” Her delivery was crisp, her tone appropriately indignant and her eyewitness account of Biden’s actual performance the single most effective rebuttal to the age issue......

That said, her work as the tip of the campaign’s spear on critical issues such as abortion and her fiery prosecution of the case against Trump will be gauged by her reception internationally and at home with voters critical to the Biden-Harris victory. So far, she is hitting her marks.

Team Trump repeatedly crowed that Cohen was the AG’s star witness in the civil fraud trial — and a disappointing, lying one at that. But as my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin wrote this week, Judge Arthur Engoron concluded that Cohen, despite his own criminal history, was a comfortable, credible witness who told the truth.

Meanwhile, the judge characterized Weisselberg, who was both witness and defendant, as evasive and strangely forgetful — and his testimony as “highly unreliable,” due to a $2 million severance agreement with the Trump Organization signed on the eve of his sentencing in yet another Trump fraud case. Under that agreement, as Engoron noted, “he was not permitted to cooperate voluntarily with any law enforcement agency adverse to the Trump Organization, including the Attorney General’s Office.”

And both assessments bode well for the Manhattan DA. Because as much as Trump’s lawyers tried to inflate Cohen’s role in the civil fraud trial, his testimony will be far more central in Bragg’s upcoming criminal prosecution. After all, the statement of facts that accompanied Bragg’s indictment not only details how Trump allegedly directed Cohen’s payoff of adult film star Stormy Daniels, but it also describes alleged conversations involving Cohen, Trump and Weisselberg in which they devised — and Trump agreed to — the repayment arrangement and the false classification of those payments as “legal expenses” in Trump Organization records.

Now, with Judge Engoron’s endorsement of his credibility, Cohen is poised to provide significant testimony for the DA in the trial starting next month. Weisselberg, on the other hand, seems increasingly unlikely to get anywhere near the witness stand. Not only was he found liable on all seven claims in the AG’s civil fraud case, but The New York Times has reported that Weisselberg has been in plea negotiations with the DA’s office over his alleged perjury during that trial. That could mean we’d see Weisselberg plead guilty for the second time in two years to a felony prosecuted by the Manhattan DA — and earn a perjury conviction — near the beginning of Trump’s trial.

The one-two punch of Cohen’s successful testimony in the civil fraud trial and Weisselberg’s mounting misfortunes present some tough choices for Team Trump. What will they do? Watch this space.

As the NBC affiliate in Miami reported, that’s not quite what’s happening.

The Florida Department of Health released a letter Tuesday from Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo emphasizing how contagious measles is and how effective the MMR vaccine is in preventing the disease, but Ladapo did not urge parents to immunize their children.

The letter did note the protections that come with vaccinations, but it didn't take the obvious, affirmative step of actually pushing local families to do the responsible thing.

Dr. Aileen Marty, an infectious disease expert at Florida International University, referencing Ladapo’s statement, told the local NBC outlet, “The letter doesn’t explicitly say we need to get more people vaccinated, and that is a key point that families need to know.”....

Making matters worse is the frequency with which “scientific nonsense” has become the norm in Florida’s surgeon general’s office. Revisiting our earlier coverage, Ladapo has rejected vaccination guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and faced accusations about misleading the public. He’s embarrassed professional colleagues with his antics and urged the public not to trust scientists, physicians, and other public health officials.

Despite the seriousness of the pandemic, Ladapo also questioned the efficacy of Covid vaccines, denounced vaccine requirements, referenced unsubstantiated conspiracy theories to argue against the vaccines, and encouraged Floridians to “stick with their intuition,” as opposed to following the guidance of those who actually know what they’re talking about.

We’re occasionally reminded, however, that his misjudgments are not limited to Covid.

The Washington Post reported this week, for example, that the Republican, during his term, was “obsessed” with involving the U.S. military in border enforcement, and he intends to follow through on his “unfinished business” if given the opportunity.

Trump pledges that as president he would immediately launch “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” As a model, he points to an Eisenhower-era program known as “Operation Wetback,” using a derogatory slur for Mexican migrants. The operation used military tactics to round up and remove migrant workers, sometimes transporting them in dangerous conditions that led to some deaths. Former administration officials and policy experts said staging an even larger operation today would face a bottleneck in detention space — a problem that Trump adviser Stephen Miller and other allies have proposed addressing by building mass deportation camps.

The likely GOP nominee’s political operation hasn’t denied any of this. On the contrary, a Trump campaign spokesperson told the Post that the Republican would “marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation in American history.”.....

In other words, if voters reward Trump with a second term, he intends to use local police departments to track down undocumented immigrants, many of whom would then be housed in mass deportation camps.

“Mass detention camps, attempts to deny children born here citizenship, uprooting families with mass deportations — this is the horrifying reality that awaits the American people if Donald Trump is allowed anywhere near the Oval Office again,” President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign said in November. “These extreme, racist, cruel policies dreamed up by him and his henchman Stephen Miller are meant to stoke fear and divide us, betting a scared and divided nation is how he wins this election.”

At this point, it’s clear what House Republicans should say. Members such as House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer could begin by apologizing for their role in this debacle. They could then announce that they’ve decided to wrap up their pointless and evidence-free impeachment crusade, recommitting themselves to a more constructive, reality-based approach to governing......

Alas, that’s decidedly not what the impeachment crusaders had to say after their case collapsed. The Hill reported:

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) is brushing aside the indictment of the FBI informant at the center of the GOP’s allegations against President Biden, arguing the source’s arrest “doesn’t change the fundamental facts” of the Republican case against the president.

.....Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, noted via social media that the “only remaining question” is whether GOP lawmakers “were witting or unwitting agents” of the Russian government.

In other words, did Jordan, Comer, and their colleagues accidentally rely on foreign disinformation, or did Republicans knowingly rely on foreign disinformation?

The New York Democrat made related comments to CNN’s Anderson Cooper this week, arguing that his far-right colleagues “wittingly or unwittingly ... have been acting as an agent or an asset of Russian intelligence.” Goldman added that the evidence now suggests that Republicans “are willing to be used as assets of Russian intelligence,” concluding that “the real danger” in Congress is members “operating at the behest of Russian intelligence and Vladimir Putin.”

I don’t imagine we’ve heard the last of this.