As the Iranian capital Tehran reels from twin terrorist attacks that have left 12 dead and dozens injured, the American president has released a strange statement of condolences: “We grieve and pray for the innocent victims of the terrorist attacks in Iran, and for the Iranian people, who are going through such challenging times. We underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote.”

Trump has long taken a hardline stance against Iran, which only intensified during his first foreign trip last month, when he met with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman. In Riyadh, Trump gave a speech were he essentially endorsed the Saudi governments view that Iran is the principle instigator of instability and terrorism in the region. He said Iran is “responsible for so much instability in the region,” adding, “For decades, Iran has fueled the fires of sectarian conflict and terror. It is a government that speaks openly of mass murder, vowing the destruction of Israel, death to America, and ruin for many leaders and nations in this room.”

Trump’s response Wednesday to the Tehran attack is in keeping with this position, but intensifies it. Not only is it an exercise in victim-blaming, but it also carries the implied threat that it’s open season on Iran. It’s easy to imagine American allies in the region reading the statement and thinking they have a green light to foment political violence in Iran. After all, didn’t the American president say Iran was asking for it?

“The Status of Black Women in the United States,” released on Wednesday by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance, the Novo Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, is the latest evidence that economic justice is an essential plank of any anti-racist platform. 

Some choice conclusions from the report: 

Black women vote at comparatively high rates and had a higher voting rate than all other groups of men and women during the last two presidential elections.

Black women remain underrepresented at every level of federal and state political office in the United States.

Voter identification laws have been found to disproportionately reduce Black voter turnout in multiple states, potentially due to the fact that fewer Blacks possess the specific forms of identification required by these laws compared with other racial and ethnic groups.

Black women’s median annual earnings ($34,000 for those who work full-time, year-round) lag behind most women’s and men’s earnings in the United States.

Union representation boosts Black women’s earnings and reduces gaps in earnings between Black women and other workers; Black women represented by a union earn an average of $192.10, or 32.2 percent, more per week than Black women in nonunion jobs. In the South, where right-to-work laws are twice as common as the rest of the country, unionized Black women experience an even greater union advantage and earn 34.5 percent more than their non-union counterparts.

About 28 percent (27.7 percent) of employed Black women work in service occupations, the occupational group with the lowest wages. Jobs in this broad occupational group often lack important benefits such as paid sick days.

There are a few important observations to glean from this data. First, given the structural forces against them, it’s obvious that hard work isn’t enough to pull black women up the economic ladder. Second, black women benefit from strong unions. And third, black women are disproportionately likely to benefit from a higher minimum wage. This is not news to black women, obviously: People of color are leading the fight for livable wages.  

The report’s authors offer a few potential solutions: a higher minimum wage, the expansion of Medicaid, and the elimination of right-to-work and voter ID laws. Those are reasonable recommendations, and the Democratic Party should embrace them, along with a renewed commitment to strengthening the country’s embattled unions.

A diverse coalition of Republicans and Democrats in the Kansas state legislature voted on Tuesday to roll back Governor Sam Brownback’s sweeping 2012 tax cuts, overriding his veto. After five disastrous years, Brownback’s historically ambitious plan to make real every Norquistian’s sweetest fantasy has been beaten back to the regressive hell from whence it came.

In 2011, Brownback assumed office with the goal of turning the state into a petri dish for some of the most extreme tax policies in the nation. The conservative-dominated state legislature lined up behind him and, with the passage of the largest tax cut in state history, immediately began to wean the government off income taxes. The expectation was that newly unburdened corporations and the rich would usher the state into a new era of unprecedented economic growth. He called his plan the “march to zero,” a reference to his ultimate aspiration to eliminate the income tax altogether. It turned out to be more like a sprint to bankruptcy.

The economy sank like a rock. Kansas plunged into a full-fledged crisis, and by 2016 was staring at a budget shortfall of $350 million, with projected shortfalls approaching $1 billion by 2019. But instead of raising taxes high enough to actually pay for things, Brownback doubled down and slashed education funding so severely that the state Supreme Court ruled (twice!) that funding levels were unconstitutionally low.

Brownback’s failed experiment offers a chilling glimpse at how conservatives might govern at the federal level if left unchallenged. And the prospect is certifiably apocalyptic. If it wasn’t already clear, massive tax cuts for the wealthy are not, as Brownback said, “like a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the ... economy.” Any time a Republican proposes a similarly regressive tax plan, the rest of us can simply respond with, “Remember Kansas.”

The paper’s editorial board weighed in on Virginia’s gubernatorial race on Tuesday, backing Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam, the choice of his state’s political establishment, over former Representative Tom Perriello, who’s favored by a host of national Democratic leaders, especially on the party’s progressive wing.

Though the Post called both candidates “competent, accomplished and astute,” the newspaper praised Northam for “his experience, temperament and, especially, his chances of success in the face of likely Republican control of one or both houses of the state legislature for the foreseeable future.”

His aw-shucks country-doctor affect notwithstanding, Mr. Northam is a shrewd politician whose decade in office — six years as a state senator, and now as lieutenant governor — has made him highly regarded in Richmond, including among Republican lawmakers, who tried to recruit him to switch parties in 2009. If any Democratic governor can nudge GOP majorities in his direction, it’s Mr. Northam. That matters in a state where governors, barred from running for consecutive terms, have one brief shot at getting things done.

Reminding readers of Northam’s coziness with Republicans is, as Perriello’s communications director argued on Twitter, unlikely to persuade fence-sitting Democrats eager to resist President Donald Trump and his GOP allies. (The coziness is longstanding; Northam voted twice for President George W. Bush.) Neither should most Democrats be frightened by what the Post derides as Perriello’s “soak-the-rich tax plan, which would finance two years of debt-free community college and other programs.” They should ask themselves which candidate is better prepared to channel the energy of the anti-Trump resistance into governance.

There’s also a centrist case for a candidate like Perriello. He might be left of Northam on some issues, but Daily Beast special correspondent Michael Tomasky wrote on Tuesday that “Perriello is about as close to a synthesis of the Hillary and Bernie wings as the Democratic Party is going to get.” Perriello plausibly calls himself a “pragmatic populist.” “He’s a diplomat, not a fiery agitator; he’s a Hillary Clinton admirer and a man with a pragmatically centrist voting record,” FiveThirtyEight’s Clare Malone wrote in March. “Even Perriello’s core brand of populism is different from Sanders’s— it’s a more subdued, intellectualized of-the-people-ism.”

Northam and his allies feel confident heading into Tuesday. He’s ahead in fundraising, and in some—but not all—polls. Perriello needs all the help he can get, and the Post’s editorial, in being so unpersuasive, just might provide the bump he’s hoping for.

The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for an audacious terrorist attack in Tehran, Iran, that has left at least 12 people dead and 42 wounded. This was an assault not only on civilians, but on two pillars of the state itself: the national parliament and the shrine of Ayatollah Khomeini, who founded the Islamic Republic in the 1979 revolution. It is the first time that ISIS, a Sunni group whose ostensible goal is to carve out a caliphate in Iraq and Syria, has carried out an attack on Iranian soil.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are already blaming Saudi Arabia, a country that has been a source of funding for ISIS and other Sunni terrorist groups throughout the region. Whether the Saudis were directly involved in the attack is unknown, but it hardly matters, since Iran will view it as Saudi aggression. Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which have long jostled for supremacy in the Middle East, are in danger of rapidly escalating.

These developments are the latest aftershock from what is increasingly being seen as a seismic disruption to the balance of power in the Middle East: Trump’s bear hug of Saudi Arabia last month, which gave the kingdom a green light to take action against its enemies. Just this week, Saudi Arabia, joined by its Sunni allies, cut off ties to Qatar, an important American ally that is home to a large American military base. Trump responded by encouraging the Saudis even further, tweeting that the alienation of Qatar “will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!” (Qatar indeed supports terrorist groups—including ISIS—part of its battle for regional influence with Saudi Arabia.)

The Revolutionary Guards, for their part, are stressing the Trump-Saudi connection. “This terrorist attack happened only a week after the meeting between the U.S. president and the backward leaders [in Saudi Arabia] who support terrorists. The fact that Islamic State has claimed responsibility proves that they were involved in the brutal attack,” they said in a statement. Wedding the U.S. and Saudi Arabia works in the Guards’ favor, since they are a hardline element that opposes the 2015 nuclear deal that Iran’s more moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, reached with Barack Obama. Trump himself has promised to rip up the agreement, which Saudi Arabia also opposes.

If the deal collapses, we now have a sense of how Iran’s enemies might respond. It won’t be pretty.

According to new research released by the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute, families living in rural areas and small towns benefit more from Medicaid than those in metropolitan areas. The biggest disparity is among children: Nearly half of kids living in rural areas (45 percent) are insured through Medicaid, versus 38 percent in cities. Adults living in rural areas also benefited the most in the states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, with the uninsurance rate dropping by 11 percent, compared to 9 percent in metropolitan areas.

As has been widely covered, in the 2016 election, rural areas swung hard for Trump, who campaigned on protecting Medicaid, a promise that was promptly reversed in the House-passed Trumpcare bill that would cut more than $800 billion from the program. The Georgetown report shows the extent to which Medicaid is a lifeline to these rural communities. According to a post by Joan Alker, one of the report’s authors, “One of the reasons that rural areas and small towns rely on Medicaid more is because the overall poverty rates are higher and the types of jobs there, such as agriculture or small businesses, are less likely to offer insurance.”

Unsurprisingly, a large number of Trump voters oppose cuts to the program. According to polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a majority of Trump voters want to keep Medicaid spending the same, and less than a quarter would opt to decrease spending. Disagreement over Medicaid (to burn or to pillage) is already fracturing Senate Republicans, some of whom have pretty much given up the idea of passing a bill. “It’s more likely to fail than not,” Senator Lindsey Graham told the Wall Street Journal.

Any of the cuts to Medicaid currently being considered by Republicans would be disastrous for the rural voters who supported Trump. It would behoove the Democrats to keep driving that fact home.

Just one day before James Comey is to testify to the Senate Intelligence Committee about Trump and the FBI’s Russia investigation, Trump tweeted on Wednesday that he has picked a Comey replacement:

Trump’s announcement raised some eyebrows because Wray, a former federal prosecutor, was also Governor Chris Christie’s lawyer in his Bridgegate scandal. But for the most part Wray is viewed as “a safe, mainstream pick,” as The New York Times put it, and his nomination is “likely to allay the fears of F.B.I. agents who worried that Mr. Trump would try to weaken or politicize the F.B.I.”

The main wrinkle is that Trump’s announcement is apparently intended to preempt Comey’s eagerly anticipated testimony, which is expected to shed light on how Trump attempted to sway the FBI’s investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Nominating a stand-up guy to replace Comey is an implicit argument that Trump is not the type to interfere in the FBI’s work.

Senator Mark Warner told CBS News that the announcement was also intended to shift the news cycle away from the Russia scandal:

As Warner noted, Trump has asked top government officials, including Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, to get involved in the Russia probe on his behalf. “The nation’s top intelligence official told associates in March that President Trump asked him if he could intervene with then-FBI Director James B. Comey to get the bureau to back off its focus on former national security adviser Michael Flynn in its Russia probe,” The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.

Both Coats and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers reportedly declined to publicly deny evidence of coordination between Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian government. Both men are set to testify to the Intelligence Committee on Wednesday.

The New York Times is reporting that the relationship between Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions is under great strain. The president is reportedly angry that Sessions recused himself from overseeing the investigation, a move that took Trump by surprise and that he felt was unnecessary, and Trump’s grousing has gotten to Sessions. “Sessions offered to resign in recent weeks as he told President Trump he needed the freedom to do his job, according to two people who were briefed on the discussion,” says the Times. “The president turned down the offer, but on Tuesday, the White House declined to say whether Mr. Trump still had confidence in his attorney general.”

This story overlaps with a separate report that fired FBI Director James Comey, while he still had his position, told Sessions that he didn’t want to be left alone with the president. Comey’s request came in response to Trump allegedly urging him to drop the FBI’s investigation of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

Taken together, these reports demonstrate that the Russia investigation is the major wellspring of discord in the White House. The fraying of the Trump-Sessions relationship is particularly notable because Sessions is ideologically sympathetic to Trump. He was one of the first elected Republican officials to support Trump during the campaign, and the two men share a passion for nationalism infused with white identity politics. But Russia divides even the closest of allies.

Moments ago, the president said of his son-in-law:

And here’s what he said to the FBI director on January 23:

We all know how that love affair ended.