[Note: As usual, I am going to set down my reactions to the first Republican presidential debate of the 2024 cycle here, before I read anyone else's analysis. Maybe we'll all be in agreement, maybe not. And as always, these quotes were hastily jotted down and might not be word-for-word accurate, so my apologies in advance for any inadvertent errors.]

Overall, tonight's first Republican debate was pretty entertaining, at least to me. These days, the entertainment value of a debate is a lot more important than scoring any kind of ideological points, so I'm using the same scale everyone else will.

There wasn't a whole lot of actual debate about differences in ideology... some, but not a lot. It was instead more of a series of one-on-one shouting matches between two of the candidates. More on those in a moment.

The truly astonishing thing tonight was that Ron DeSantis didn't took almost zero incoming flak. He only really got into it with another candidate once, towards the end, when Nikki Haley took a shot at him almost as an afterthought immediately following a dustup Haley had with Vivek Ramaswamy.

Which brings up the second most astonishing thing tonight. Instead of Ron DeSantis being everyone's punching bag, it was instead Ramaswamy who played this role. I noted ten instances of two candidates getting into it directly (plus a few where the candidates got into things with the crowd, as boos rained down on the stage). Out of those ten, Ramaswamy was involved in eight of them.

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Tomorrow night will be the true kickoff to the Republican presidential primary season, as Fox hosts the first GOP presidential debate. I should mention in advance that I will be doing my usual "snap reactions" column after the debate tomorrow night, so this is my last chance to comment on things beforehand.

I thought I would run down my impressions of all the candidates who qualified for the debate, from what I have seen and heard of them so far. Some have done a better job of getting their faces out there in the media than others, which leaves for plenty of "getting to know you" moments (for me, at any rate) tomorrow night.

Anyway, without further ado -- listed in order of the strength of their polling (which will also determine how close to the center of the stage each candidate gets to stand), here are the Republican candidates who will be on stage for tomorrow night's opening GOP presidential debate:

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It is already conventional wisdom that Donald Trump is going to try to steal all the thunder from the first Republican presidential debate, by counterprogramming with a Tucker Carlson interview (which will assumably air simultaneously with the debate). But I think there's going to be more to it than that -- in fact, it seems incredibly obvious to me, although so far not many others seem to have picked up on it. I think Donald Trump is going to steal the show in a different and perhaps unexpected way -- by turning himself in to be processed at the Atlanta jail either right before or during the debate.

Trump has until Friday at noon to do so. And the people who run the jail have put out an invitation for everyone to come in any time, 24/7. The jail's always open, to put it another way. So Trump could certainly arrange to show up right during primetime. And, really, why wouldn't he?

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Once again, the political week was dominated by news of Donald Trump. And we can all now properly identify Trump as a "twice-impeached, four-times-indicted ex-president." Sadly, the English language stops after "once... twice... thrice..." so there is no (legitimate) snappier way to say that (although we would suggest "quad-indicted," since it does seem to have a ring to it... but we digress...).

Linguistic kidding aside, Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis finally completed Trump's quartet of indictments, adding 13 more felony charges for Trump (who has now been charged with a whopping 91 felony counts in total) as well as plenty of other felonies to go around among his 18 co-defendants. Rather than take a targeted approach by just charging Trump with the easiest-to-prove-in-court charges, Willis swung for the fences and corralled all the wrongdoing within one RICO charge covering everyone. Trump and his campaign and all his legal team and even his thugs on the ground in Georgia are all now accused of being a "racketeering-influenced and corrupt organization." Sounds about right... especially after the news broke that the grand jurors who voted for the indictment have been doxxed online and are now getting threats -- just like you'd expect to see in any mob case. Trump even attempted to tamper with a witness before he even showed up to testify for the grand jury on Monday. The witness was not cowed and did testify, and very late in the evening the indictment was made public.

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Donald Trump has normalized all kinds of bizarre behavior in American politics, but the one that needs a whole lot more attention is his acceptance of the idea that violence can be used to achieve political outcomes in this country. More and more, this is becoming a mainstream idea among his MAGA followers, while his fellow Republicans either say nothing or actively join in the incitements to violence. The media has completely fallen down on the job of pressing politicians to denounce such language and pointedly ask every politician they interview whether they support such a disgraceful concept. This is a dangerous place for our country to be, and it seems like it's only going to get more dangerous over time.

President Joe Biden recently made a trip out West, with a stop in Utah. A man in Utah publicly threatened to shoot Biden with a sniper rifle. The F.B.I. went to arrest him and he reportedly pointed a .357 handgun at them. They shot and killed him. Just this week, a woman in Texas was arrested for threatening to kill the judge in one of Donald Trump's legal cases. These are treated as minor isolated incidents and are mostly ignored by the mainstream media. But they keep happening with regularity.

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We know it is not at all alliterative, but it seems the time has come for a three-dot Wednesday. We speak, of course, in honor of the undisputed king of all three-dot journalism, the late, great Herb Caen of San Francisco. It's the format Caen was the master of... where you just string together a whole bunch of little news or commentary snippets... without a whole lot of connection... into some sort of narrative column... using ellipses (three dots) to tie the whole thing loosely together. OK, that last sentence was a bit much, even we admit, so we'll try to only use the format in traditional Caen fashion from now on. Everybody ready? Then here we go...

...Donald Trump's fourth indictment in Atlanta, Georgia, may wind up being the best television of all of them (to date, at least). There are a few reasons for this, but the main one is that this time we'll have cameras inside the courtroom, so we'll all get to see every grimace and scowl on Trump's face as a judge tells him what the deal is. We'll hear Trump plead: "Not guilty," and we'll be able to watch the entire thing live from beginning to end. Which will (to political geeks like yours truly) certainly be some "must-see TV"... which will actually be true from the get-go... because...

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The Georgia indictment handed down last night (which charges Donald Trump and 18 co-conspirators with 41 felony counts) is, in a word, breathtaking. It is 98 pages long, and it covers a wide-ranging conspiracy to defraud the voters of Georgia and overturn a free and fair election, with the ultimate goal of handing the state to the candidate who had lost. Unlike the federal election case against Trump, this one is all-encompassing, due to the nature of the Racketeering Influenced and Criminal Organization (RICO) charges (where a "big picture" of criminal activity is required). Also unlike the federal case, the biggest co-conspirators were charged with Trump, which includes (just to name a few prominent ones): Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, Jeff Clark, and Sidney Powell. Or, to put it another way, this is the case we've all been waiting for. And by "everyone," I mean of course those of us who were and still are horrified that a sitting president would try to steal an American presidential election that he had clearly lost.

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It's another one of those days where what I write may be wildly out of date by the time I post it, I should begin by stating. Everyone in the political world is watching Atlanta right now (the hashtag "#IndictmentWatch" is trending on what used to be called Twitter), to see whether Donald Trump will be indicted at some point today or whether we'll all have to wait until tomorrow for it to be unveiled. The biggest development (outside of rampant speculation) came when the judge who will be handling any such indictment did not clear his courtroom (of journalists) at 5:00 P.M. today, indicating that the grand jury may work late and produce an indictment at some point this evening.

Plenty of witnesses either have already been presented to this grand jury, or else are awaiting their turn to testify in the courthouse. This was somewhat of a surprise to the media, who all expected these witnesses to appear tomorrow, and this is what gave rise to the anticipation that charges could appear sometime today.

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The biggest political news of the past week came from Ohio, where the voters resoundingly rejected a stealth plan by the Republicans to kill an abortion ballot measure that will appear on November's ballot. By a 57-43 margin, the voters sent a loud "No!" to the GOP, who were trying to change the rules in the middle of the game. This will have national reverberations, especially after Buckeye voters return in a few months to enshrine abortion rights in their state's constitution.

This was merely the latest in an unbroken series of victories for those fighting for women's rights at the state level. These have included ballot measures that either directly addressed abortion or stealthily sidled up to it as well as a state supreme court race in Wisconsin -- and in all of them the forced-birth side lost. Badly.

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Sooner or later, America is going to have to have a rational debate over abortion. When the Supreme Court tossed out Roe v. Wade, it opened the door to any state setting pretty much any restrictions on abortion they chose to. Some of these are Draconian in nature, while others are slightly more reasonable. On the other side of the divide, blue states are enshrining the right to an abortion in their state's laws or constitution. These generally mirror the protections in Roe, with some alterations in some cases. But the real end goal for both sides is going to be a national abortion law, to finally legally codify what rights all American women actually have over their own bodies. Nothing short is going to work, since much like in the Civil Rights era some states are always going to go to the extremes -- on what is essentially a very basic human right. If the states refuse to uphold basic human rights, the federal government is going to have to step in and do so.

Politically, this is going to be very hard to do. It would probably require a modification of the Senate's filibuster rules to allow bills on basic constitutional rights to join budget bills in only needing a simple majority to pass the Senate. It will also likely require a trifecta of one party or the other simultaneously holding control of the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the White House. Even then it's not assured, though.

Whenever this debate is finally joined, we're all going to have to start speaking about things in more precise language -- and that definitely includes the media. Right now a sort of shorthand is being used which obscures what various restrictions on abortion actually mean. So I'll begin with a definition of terms.

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