Wednesday morning’s arguments in the biggest threat to abortion rights to reach the Supreme Court in nearly 30 years went so badly for Louisiana Solicitor General Elizabeth Murrill, who was defending Louisiana’s restrictive abortion law, that by the end even Chief Justice John Roberts appeared uncomfortable with her arguments.
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These weaknesses in Louisiana’s arguments seemed to trouble Chief Justice Roberts: Twice, Roberts inquired what the “benefits” of such a law were, and he did so in a way that directly contradicted the state’s defense of its law.

The core of the state’s argument, after all, is that its admitting privileges law benefits abortion patients by making abortions safer — and that it does so even though the Supreme Court held in Whole Woman’s Health that a very similar Texas law does not benefit such patients. But Roberts appeared to reject this argument rather explicitly.

“I understand the idea that the impact might be different in different places,” the chief justice told Murrill at one point, “but as far as the benefits of the law, that’s going to be the same in each state, isn’t it?”

The world’s only known albino orangutan has been spotted alive and well in a Borneo rainforest, more than a year after she was released into the wild, conservationists say.

Alba, a blue-eyed primate covered in fuzzy white hair, was taken in 2017 from a cage where she was being kept as a pet by villagers in Indonesia’s section of Borneo, known as Kalimantan.

Alba was released back into the wild in late 2018.

This week, the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation said Alba was spotted as it monitored three other orangutans who were recently released.

Voter Turnout vs. 2016

Virginia +23%
South Carolina +21%
North Carolina +20%
Texas pacing at + 27% Flushed face
Tennessee pacing at + 19%
Maine pacing at +17%
Alabama pacing at +22%
Oklahoma pacing at +16%
Colorado pacing at +12%

We’re coming for you.

During the Ebola outbreak in 2014, Donald Trump repeatedly took to Twitter to attack President Barack Obama’s administration for its public health measures, arguing that all of the medical experts were wrong and that the United States should close its borders to Africa, even though this would prevent doctors from traveling and make matters worse.

Now, in 2020, Trump is facing COVID-19, a far more widely-spread virus, and his administration is facing serious questions about everything from messaging to whether they are following their own containment protocols. But the president, at a rally in North Carolina on Monday, complained that all of these questions are unfair and Democrats are just trying to make him look bad.

Here's Chris Matthews announcing his retirement during the intro to
@hardball
. It was a pretty low-key announcement considering what happened next (he didn't even finish out the show, and apparently didn't give anyone time to prepare to fill the rest of the hour).