Semi-Regular Political Linkspam: Well that was a lot.

I was mostly offline for a few days last week -- Wednesday through Friday. It turned out those were some pretty eventful days to be offline.

• Montana's probably-failed vote by mail bill is mostly notable for the state Republican party's opposition letter, in which they straight-up said that they opposed it because it made it too easy for Democrats to vote. They aren't even pretending to make it about voter fraud anymore, are they?


• This New Yorker article builds a compelling and terrifying case for how the White House halted the US House investigation into the Russian election shenanigans with the active help of US Rep Devin Nunes, chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Democrats are making louder and louder calls for an independent investigation like the 9/11 Commission; it's pretty obvious that we're never getting to the bottom of this otherwise.


• This Twitter thread is a good explanation of how the GOP broke the ACA by refusing to fund the risk corridor (in which the federal government would help insurers with the cost of covering higher-risk patients). It also links to an article explaining what the risk corridor is and how it was supposed to work, as well as detailing the problems with it now. It's hard not to think that the GOP purposefully made the ACA worse to drive public opinion toward getting rid of it.


• Of course, we all know how well that worked out. We need to keep wary -- there's no doubt that Paul Ryan will try to kill the ACA again. But for now, we all live to fight another day.


• The other big story last week was the Neil Gorsuch Supreme Court nomination. The Democrats are, as usual, weighing whether to fight or cave. Myself, I don't particularly care about Gorsuch or his politics; the person who deserves the first committee hearing and up-or-down vote is Merrick Garland. That Supreme Court seat is stolen, and I will never feel differently, and I am perhaps angrier at the Democratic party for letting the GOP get away with it than I am about anything else they've ever done, up to and including the loss of the 2016 presidential election. The Democrats need to consider that rolling over on Gorsuch will demoralize their unusually energized base. Can they afford to do that, when a victory in 2018 depends so heavily on voter turnout? Time will tell, but I still hope the Democrats stand their ground on this one.


• Here's an article on "blue lies" -- lies that are meant to reassure a group while being obviously false to people outside that group -- and how they might explain the rise of Trump. I think it explains a lot of other political phenomena, too; Bernie Bros come to mind, and climate change deniers.


• Men Just Don't Trust Women, and This Is a Problem: A thoughtful article by Damon Young looks at the ways in which men don't trust women to speak their emotional truth, and how this wreaks havoc not just in relationships, but throughout public life.


• In news that surprises no one, the cuts in the White House budget bring the most pain to the people they purportedly "help" by cutting taxes. Newsflash, GOP: most of the people helped by government social programs aren't the ones who make enough money to be paying a lot of taxes.


• This article on liberal transphobia was a hard read, but an important one, especially in the wake of the controversy sparked by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and her comments about trans women. It's not always an easy issue for cis women to confront, but we need to get better at it. I also recommend Raquel Willis's response to Adichie. I want to make it clear that I admire so much of Adichie's work and think she is an important voice for the feminist community to support, but she got it very wrong here, especially in her attempts to respond to the criticism.


• For the "actors who were born to play their characters" file, Chris Evans lays out his feelings about the Trump presidency in an Esquire interview. Also, in case you missed it, it's worth checking out his Twitter fight with David Duke.

Today's fun is politics-related, but I couldn't not include a link to the best hashtag of recent weeks, #GOPDND, which re-envisions GOP politics as the worst Dungeons and Dragons campaign ever. The Mary Sue has a good roundup.