Monday, June 27, 2022

Rule by Judges

The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law.

- Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor
dissent in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health

This week's featured posts are "Three Supreme Court decisions with long-term consequences" and "The January 6 hearings are accomplishing more than you think."

This week everybody was talking about the Supreme Court

Friday's announcement that the reversal-of-Roe that leaked in May is indeed the decision overshadowed all other developments. But it was not the only radical and consequential thing the Court did this week: It blew a hole in the wall between church and state in Carson v Makin, and it further restricted states' power to control guns in NY State Rifle & Piston v Bruen.

I discuss the opinions themselves in the first featured post. Here I want to consider consequences. All three of these decisions look like the first of many: As sweeping as the Dobbs decision is, it sets up a reconsideration of all rights based on a legal doctrine known as substantive due process (which I explained in March): the right to access contraceptives, to marry a person of the same sex or a different race, and for consenting adults to choose their own sexual practices. Carson will make it difficult to deny government funding to religious organizations in a wide variety of settings. Bruen calls a long list of gun regulations into question.


Planned Parenthood provides an interactive map that allows you to see the current abortion restrictions in any state. Abortion is already illegal in the black states, and severely restricted in the dark red states (many of which will probably ban it entirely before long).

Exactly what illegality means is still being worked out in many states. Mother Jones raises a good question: "If Abortion is Illegal, Will Every Miscarriage Be a Potential Crime?" If it is, who is the criminal -- the woman, or just the doctor? What if the abortion takes place in a different state, where it is legal? My social media is full of people in blue states offering to help women come to their state for abortions. Will they be accessories, who dare not show their faces in Texas or Mississippi for fear of arrest?

What if a miscarriage (or a birth defect) results from negligence rather than intent? Is that manslaughter? As Dana Sussman of National Advocates for Pregnant Women puts it: "You can’t add fetuses to the community of individuals who are entitled to constitutional rights without diminishing the rights of the person carrying that fetus."


The impact this decision will have on the midterm elections, or on all future elections, is hard to gauge. In particular, what happens to educated suburban women, the "soccer moms" who supported Bush and Romney but had trouble stomaching Trump? Will they turn out in force and vote Democratic, or will their generally conservative leanings on economic issues keep them voting Republican?


A brief message to pro-choice women: Make sure the men in your life know how seriously you take the Court's decision, and the new laws that it will inspire.

I say this because my 65 years of male experience have taught me something about how men think. A man, even one who ought to know you better than this, is likely to imagine that losing reproductive rights isn't that big a deal to you because (1) you want to have a child anyway; or (2) you're unlikely to get pregnant; or (3) you're past childbearing age. He may not grasp that you take this assault on your rights personally, or be able to imagine why. But he may listen if you tell him. (If he won't listen, you might want to reconsider his role in your life.)


Susan Collins now feels she was "misled" by Brett Kavanaugh and possibly other justices during their confirmation hearings. Of course, everyone in the world was telling her at the time that she was being a gullible fool, but she still doesn't own up to that. I am reminded of her vote for the Trump tax cut, which Mitch McConnell got in exchange for promises that turned out to be worthless. But Collins dismissed criticism of her gullibility as sexist.


I didn't cover this in the featured post, but a fourth important decision limited the consequences police will face if they don't give suspects a Miranda warning before questioning them.

And just this morning, the Court launched another attack on the separation of church and state by siding with a high school football coach who led prayers at the 50-yard-line after games. The coach is, of course, Christian. No one from any other religion would imagine that he had such a right.

and the continuing revelations of the 1-6 hearings

https://www.timesfreepress.com/cartoons/2022/jun/17/perfect-gift/5472/

This week the 1-6 Committee held its fourth [video transcript] and fifth [video transcript] public hearings.

Both were gripping hearings. The fourth hearing centered on Trump's pressure on state and local officials to change the election results. As always, most of the witnesses were Republicans who wanted Trump to win, but wouldn't cheat for him.

Rusty Bowers is the Speaker of the House in Arizona. He testified about how Trump and Rudy Giuliani pressured him to call a special session of the legislature, so that Arizona could decertify its Biden electors. They promised him evidence of massive voter fraud, but never delivered any. Bowers gave an emotional statement about how his Mormon faith teaches that the Constitution is divinely inspired, and that he would never go against the Constitution just "because somebody asked me".

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told the story of the famous phone call where Trump refused to listen to his refutation of Trump's election-fraud claims, and urged him to "find" enough votes for Trump to win the state. His subordinate Gabriel Sterling explained why he publicly warned Trump that "somebody's going to get killed" if he kept pushing his election-fraud deceptions.

But the heart-wrenching moment of the fourth hearing was the testimony of Shaye Moss (supplemented by the taped testimony of her mother), who was a Georgia election worker that Trump targeted falsely as a perpetrator of the "election fraud" that kept him from winning Georgia. Trump had to know, if he bothered to think about it at all, what his followers would do.

Moss testified about the impact Trump's lies had on her life, including telling about a panicked phone call she got from her grandmother:

I received a call from my grandmother. This woman is my everything. I've never even heard her or seen her cry ever in my life. And she called me screaming at the top of her lungs, like, "Shaye, Shaye, oh my gosh, Shaye." Just freaking me out saying that there are people at her home and they, you know, they knocked on the door and of course she opened it seeing who was there, who it was.

And they just started pushing their way through, claiming that they were coming in to make a citizen's arrest. They needed to find me and my mom. They knew we were there. And she was just, like,screaming and didn't know what to do. And I wasn't there. So, you know, I just felt so helpless and so horrible for her.

Both Shaye and her mother (who also was an election worker and also was targeted by Trump) said that they were still afraid to go out in public, and afraid to let anyone know who they are. It was easy to see the signs of depression in her testimony.

I felt horrible. I felt like it was all my fault, like if I would have never decided to be an elections worker, like, I could have — like, anything else, but that's what I decided to do. And now people are lying and spreading rumors and lies and attacking my mom, I'm her only child, going to my grandmother's house.

I'm her only grandchild. And — and my kid is just — I felt so bad. I — I just felt bad for my mom, and I felt horrible for picking this job and being the one that always wants to help and always there, never missing not one election. I just felt like it was — it was my fault for putting my family in this situation.

The President of the United States did this. We've gotten used to Trump falsely and baselessly attacking political rivals or well-known journalists or even non-political celebrities like LeBron James. But this was him picking out an ordinary American who did nothing wrong, and just ruining her life.

https://robrogers.com/2022/06/24/watergate-at-50/

The fifth hearing centered on the Justice Department, and Trump's effort to get DoJ officials to back up election-fraud claims that they had investigated and knew were lies. This effort culminated in a January 3 meeting at the White House, in which Trump proposed replacing Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen, who wouldn't make false claims on his behalf, with Jeff Clark, who would.

Ultimately it fell apart not because anyone convinced him the scheme was wrong, but because it wouldn't work. The entire DoJ leadership would resign, including Office of Legal Counsel head Steven Engel. Engel warned Trump:

look, all anyone is going to sort of think about when they see this — no one is going to read this letter [that Clark wanted to send to leaders of the Georgia legislature, falsely claiming that the DoJ had found evidence of fraud]

All anyone is going to think is that you went through two attorneys general in two weeks until you found the environmental guy to sign this thing. And so, the story is not going to be that the Department of Justice has found massive corruption that would have changed the result of the election. It's going to be the disaster of Jeff Clark.

Video was shown of the committee asking Clark about these events: He repeatedly pleaded the Fifth and executive privilege (which are contradictory claims; if no crime is involved, the Fifth doesn't apply; if a crime is involved, there's no executive privilege).

And the grand finale of Thursday's session was the list of GOP congresspeople who sought pardons from Trump: Mo Brooks, Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, Louie Gohmert, Scott Perry, and Marjorie Taylor Green.

What did they think they had done, that they would need a pardon for?

https://claytoonz.com/2022/06/24/coupers-and-gropers/

and whether the hearings are changing anything

They're accomplishing more than you think. That's the topic of the second featured post.

and gun legislation

Any other week, this would be a big story. Today, it's hard to find space for it.

Two weeks ago a bipartisan group of senators announced that it had settled on a framework for legislation to do at least something in response to the Uvalde school shooting and the surge of other mass shootings. Last week it looked like the agreement might blow up as they tried to write a bill based on that framework. This week it passed both houses of Congress and is awaiting President Biden's signature.

The bill is simultaneously an accomplishment and a disappointment. Here's what the bill does:

  • requires enhanced background checks for young adults 18-21 to buy a gun, and gives authorities ten days (up from three) to perform the checks;
  • gives states $750 million in incentives to implement red-flag laws, which temporarily take guns away from people a judge deems dangerous;
  • appropriates money for mental health and school safety;
  • extends federal law that stops domestic abusers from buying guns, so that it now covers dating partners as well as spouses, live-in partners, and co-parents;
  • makes certain kinds of interstate gun trafficking a federal crime.

What it doesn't do is ban assault weapons or high-capacity magazines, establish universal background checks on gun purchases, prevent assault-weapon purchases by young adults 18-21, or enact a federal red-flag law.

As small as these steps are, the bill is the first tightening of gun laws since the Clinton administration. The fact that 15 Republican senators and 14 Republican representatives were willing to vote for it -- in spite of heated opposition from the NRA and some wild attacks from Fox News -- is significant. The next few elections will be tests of the gun lobby's power: If these senators are ousted in Republican primaries by pro-gun challengers, this might be the last federal gun-control legislation for another few decades. If they aren't, the NRA's stranglehold on the GOP might be broken.

and you also might be interested in ...

The pandemic keeps chugging along at the level of about 100K new cases per day. Deaths are increasing slightly, running around 350 per day.


The European Union has formally accepted Ukraine as a candidate to join the Union.


Herschel Walker stories just get weirder and weirder. Somebody found a tape of him claiming his mulitiple personality disorder isn't a mental illness. He offers this interesting theological notion:

Do our Lord Jesus Christ have a mental illness because he said he’s the father, the son and the Holy Spirit? To me, those are 3 different personalities.

I thought I had heard every possible explanation of the Trinity, but that one is new to me. Georgia Republicans must be so proud, particularly the Christian ones.


I don't like to read too much into what are obviously slips of the tongue, because we all have them, and a harsh standard of judgment would hurt everybody. But this is hard to ignore: Appearing with President Trump Saturday in Mendon, Illinois -- not far from where I grew up; the rally was at the county fairgrounds, where I remember seeing a talent show and a tractor pull and eating cotton candy -- Rep. Mary Miller said:

I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday.

Apparently she meant to say "right to life", not "white life". But according to NBC, the crowd -- which had no way of knowing that something different was in her script -- cheered. "Victory for white life" sounded good to them.


Q appears to be back.

and let's close with something musical

Here's proof that anything is musical if you have an ear for it. The Floppotron 3.0 orchestra uses 512 floppy disk drives, 16 hard drives, and four flatbed scanners to play the Imperial March from Star Wars. Somebody had to hear all those noises and imagine what could be done with them.

Monday, June 20, 2022

Lingering Dishonor

Tonight I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.

- Rep. Liz Cheney

This week's featured posts are "Will the Great Salt Lake stay great?" and "The hearings, week two".

This week everybody was talking about the continuing 1-6 hearings

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1014486/killing-principles

This was covered in the second featured post.


This week we saw that the Big Lie is alive and well, and screwing up current elections. New Mexico held a primary on June 7, but Otero County refused to certify results for the state to total up.

The all-Republican [county] commission had refused on Monday to certify the results -- citing concerns about Dominion voting machines and questions about a handful of individual votes in this month's primary.

Friday, the commission voted 2-1 to submit to a court order that they certify results. The one dissenting vote was from a commissioner who has been sentenced to 14 days jail time for trespassing on the Capitol grounds during the 1-6 riot.

Controversies over Dominion voting machines are perhaps the most thoroughly debunked of all Trump's election-fraud lies. Not even Fox News and Newsmax make the claim any more. Hand recounts in numerous states have failed to find higher-than-normal discrepancies in final vote totals, ending the controversy for all people who live in the real world.


Republican Rep. James Comer promised an OAN interviewer that when Republicans get control of the House in 2023, they will take revenge by holding "Hunter Biden hearings". The idea here seems to be that this will make Democrats sorry they investigated 1-6 and demonstrated Trump's criminality.

Here's what he doesn't get: Democrats aren't a personality cult the way Republicans are.

In particular, we aren't dedicated to protecting each other from learning the truth about Joe Biden or his family. If it turns out that Hunter Biden really did commit crimes (which I don't think has been established yet), by all means he should be investigated, prosecuted, convicted, and go to jail. I believe that would make his father sad, but keeping Joe Biden happy is not a high priority for me or for most Democrats, certainly not the way that keeping Donald Trump happy is a priority for Republicans.

and "both sides do it" distractions

Right-wing media and politicians like Marco Rubio have started calling for the Justice Department to take action against a pro-choice "terrorist" group, Jane's Revenge. You can expect JR to become the new antifa. Night after night, Fox News will cast it as a violent left-wing conspiracy that the authorities supposedly ignore while targeting "patriotic" right-wing groups like the Proud Boys.

The problem with this framing is simple: So far there's little indication that Jane's Revenge is much more than a viral meme. (Similarly, antifa is much less than right-wing media makes it out to be. It appears to be a handful of local groups with no national coordination.) So if you graffiti some anti-choice institution ("You Do Not Have the Right to Determine How Others Live" painted on a Catholic Church, for example), your action will become part of a 50-incident list of "Attacks on Churches, Pro-Life Organizations, Property, and People Since the Dobbs Leak" that Rubio will tie to Jane's Revenge. And as the meme catches on, you may even decide to sign your graffiti as "Jane's Revenge", or attach that name to a threatening letter you post online. But that doesn't mean you belong to any group -- or even that there is a group to belong to.

A small percentage of the "attacks" on Rubio's list do involve real or attempted property damage, and those are crimes that should be investigated and punished like comparable property crimes, most of which never get federal attention. But I doubt that his list would impress anybody who has worked at an abortion clinic, where hostile graffiti is just another Tuesday, and people occasionally get killed. (My church suffered an "attack" a few years ago: Our "Black Lives Matter" sign was defaced, as were the signs of at least 50 other churches. We never heard from Rubio.)

None of this "left-wing terrorism" bears any resemblance to right-wing terrorism, which regularly kills people, or to the Proud Boys' or Oath Keepers' participation in Trump's coup attempt.

Just last weekend, 31 members of Patriot Front were arrested on their way to violently disrupt a Pride event in Idaho. Reportedly, the 31 came from 11 states and only one was from Idaho. That's what an interstate terrorist group looks like.

So far, Senator Rubio hasn't written to Merrick Garland to complain about them.

and the Senate gun compromise

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1014481/a-start-and-a-finish

Last week a bipartisan group of senators announced they had compromised on a framework for legislation. But it started to come undone this week when they got down to writing a bill.

The major sticking points? Funding for red flag laws and what to do about the "boyfriend loophole." Both issues present a number of thorny challenges for negotiators, but the "boyfriend loophole" specifically has been cited as a considerable roadblock.

Currently, you can't buy guns if you've been convicted of domestic violence against a spouse, a live-in partner, or the mother of your child. Democrats want to extend that prohibition to less well defined dating relationships. Republicans agreed in principle, but defining the exact bounds of "boyfriend" is giving them heartburn. After all, violent men who like guns are pretty much the core of the Republican Party.

It's had to argue, though, that extending the loophole wouldn't have a big effect on mass shootings. Men who commit such crimes usually start out smaller, by abusing either animals or women who are in their power.


Mass killings of children get the most media attention, but apparently no one of any age is safe from the epidemic of gun violence. Thursday evening, a 70-year-old man went to a potluck dinner at an Episcopal church in Alabama and killed three even older diners before being hit with a chair by another man in his 70s.

If I had to choose the American denomination least likely to be either the victims or perpetrators of violence, I might well have picked the Episcopalians. Historically upscale and stereotypically "nice people" (sometimes to a fault), Episcopalians tend to be theologically and politically liberal but ritually conservative. They are closely related to the Church of England, whose niceness comedian Eddie Izzard lampooned in his "Cake or Death" routine, which seems a bit less funny today.

and Juneteenth

By the calendar it was yesterday (June 19); the federal day-off-work is today.

Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 when a Union general announced that the slaves of Texas were free. That makes it a bittersweet holiday, because the Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect on January 1, 1863, more than two years earlier. General Lee had surrendered at Appomattox more than two months before. And even after Juneteenth, the proclaimed "absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves" was a long time in coming. Some would say it still hasn't arrived.

In short, Juneteenth reminds us that there's a big difference between having rights on paper and having rights that the ruling institutions can or will enforce in practice.

but we're not paying enough attention to environmental disasters in progress

That's the topic of the first featured post, about the shrinking of the Great Salt Lake.

The other big recent environmental news story is about too much water rather than too little: the flooding of Yellowstone.

and you also might be interested in ...

https://manmartin.blogspot.com/

The Texas Republican Party went off the deep end this week, approving a platform

declaring that President Joe Biden “was not legitimately elected” and rebuking Sen. John Cornyn for taking part in bipartisan gun talks. They also voted on a platform that declares homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice” and calls for Texas schoolchildren “to learn about the humanity of the preborn child.”

It also calls for repealing the 16th Amendment (which allows a national income tax), abolishing the Federal Reserve, and holding a referendum on whether Texas should secede from the Union.

Here's hoping Governor Abbott doesn't duck a debate with Beto O'Rourke, so Beto can ask him about his party's platform point by point.


If you're in my generation and want to feel old, meditate on this: Paul McCartney turned 80 this week. "When I'm 64" is but a distant memory for him now. Two days before the big day, he performed at Met Life Stadium in New Jersey, and was joined on stage by New Jersey icons Bruce Springsteen (a mere 72), and young whippersnapper Jon Bon Jovi (60).


French President Macron's party lost its majority in the lower house of Parliament. It's still the largest party, but will have to find allies to accomplish anything. France's government may become as logjammed as the US.

and let's close with something over the top

Apparently in Denmark, the only thing cooler than riding the bus is driving one.

Monday, June 13, 2022

Never Leave

Prior to these hearings, Republicans tried to claim that tonight was going to be a nothingburger. They were wrong. ... It was such a juicy burger that Fox News knew that even their viewers would be tempted to take a bite. Which is why -- and this is true -- for the first hour of his show opposite the hearings, Tucker Carlson took no commercial breaks. [Neither did Sean Hannity.] Do you understand what that means? Fox News is willing to lose money to keep their viewers from flipping over and accidentally learning information. ... But I'm not surprised. That's the first rule of any cult: Never leave the compound.

- Stephen Colbert

This week's featured post is "The 1-6 hearings begin."

This week everybody was talking about the 1-6 hearing

https://claytoonz.com/2022/06/11/checked-out-princess/

If you only get one thing out of these hearings, it should be a response you can give to anybody on social media who thinks Trump really won the 2020 election: "Not even Ivanka believes that."

I cover the first hearing in the featured post. The second hearing is going on as I write this, but I'm writing rather than watching, so I'll have to cover it next week.

In the featured post I mentioned the WSJ's opinion that Trump is morally but not criminally responsible for the 1-6 insurrection. Arkansas' Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson is taking that line as well.

and Ukraine

Russian forces continue to advance slowly into eastern Ukraine, with high casualties on both sides. From the outside, it's hard to tell who can keep this up longer.

and the pandemic

Two trends are fighting each other, so national case numbers are more-or-less flat, as a continuing decline in the Northeast is canceled out by increases in other regions. Hospitalizations are bending upwards, and deaths have been bouncing around in a 250-400 daily range for nearly two months.

and Senate compromises

Bipartisan committees of senators have reached compromises in two areas: mass shootings and revising the Electoral Count Act that Trump tried to abuse on 1-6.

The mass-shooting compromise gives credibility (probably more than they deserve) to Republican talking points about mental health and school vulnerability as causes. Vox summarizes:

The framework itself is heavy on mental health interventions, like setting aside funding for in-school mental health and support services, as well as telehealth services for individuals and families in mental health crisis. It also calls for a national expansion of community mental health services for children and families. ... [A]lthough the framework is thin on details, it suggests investing in “programs to help institute safety measures in and around primary and secondary schools, support school violence prevention efforts and provide training to school personnel and students.”

But there is some gun control included as well. One carefully worded part of the framework:

Provides resources to states and tribes to create and administer laws that help ensure deadly weapons are kept out of the hands of individuals whom a court has determined to be a significant danger to themselves or others, consistent with state and federal due process and constitutional protections.

It also may close the "boyfriend loophole" in an existing law that prevents gun ownership by people under restraining orders for domestic violence, and also enhance background checks for gun purchasers under 21 years old.

Everything depends on the final wording, which remains to be worked out. Any of the ten Republicans involved in the negotiations could torpedo a bill, since all ten would be needed to break a filibuster.


According to Susan Collins, the group negotiating to revise the Electoral Count Act

has already drafted language that would make clear that the vice president's role is ministerial in the process of counting Electoral College votes. The new language also raises the threshold for triggering a challenge to a state's slate from one member in each chamber to 20% of the members in each body. There would be a majority vote for sustaining an objection.

and you also might be interested in ...

The May consumer price index came in higher than expected: Inflation is running at 8.6%. Many economists had been theorizing that the peak inflation rate had been reached in March. But apparently not.

Obviously, this is an issue that drives down Biden's approval numbers, but it's not clear what he can do, what he should have done in the past, or what Republicans would do differently. Inflation would probably be lower if the American Rescue Plan hadn't passed, but unemployment would be considerably higher. I doubt that would be a win for the country.

Inflation is happening around the world, and is worse in many other countries than it is here.

Some Republicans want to blame Build Back Better or even the Green New Deal for inflation, but it's hard to see how that's possible, since neither of them passed Congress.


https://theweek.com/political-satire/1014212/the-gop-will-help

In view of the attempted right-wing coup being exposed by the 1-6 Committee hearings, the ongoing rash of mass shootings caused by our insane gun culture, and the pandemic that has already killed a million Americans, it makes perfect sense that Republicans would want to focus on ... kids going to drag shows.

Yep, that's this week's outrage, and public officials like Ron DeSantis are talking about siccing child protective services on parents who allow such a thing.

Because apparently seeing men dress like women will do some kind of permanent damage to a minor. I can't quite imagine what, but probably my imagination has been stunted by my childhood trauma of seeing Flip Wilson's Geraldine character, Corporal Klinger in MASH, and various Monty Python men-dressed-as-women skits. An earlier generation of American youth had to recover from seeing Milton Berle in a dress, as well as Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot.

It's a miracle the Republic has survived.

A related outrage I forgot to mention last week: Right-thinking folks are boycotting Pizza Hut because the Hut's Book-It program (to encourage children to read more) endorsed the book Big Wig, about a boy who creates a drag character. I personally favor local pizza places, so I've been unofficially boycotting the national chains for many years. But if you find yourself ready to flip a coin between chain pizzerias, you might want to give the Hut an edge.

A question to meditate on: Unless they go bare-chested at the beach, women dressing like men is hardly ever a big moral issue, and a kids' book about a girl creating a hyper-masculine fantasy character wouldn't be worth national attention. Why is that? Extra credit if your answer also accounts for the Hebrew Bible (a.k.a. Old Testament), which denounces gay men but doesn't mention lesbians.


A guy was arrested Wednesday for plotting to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. It's kind of a bizarre story: He called 911 on himself, and gave the police his description. He was arrested with multiple weapons. As motive, he cited both the Court's pending decision to reverse Roe v Wade and the possibility that Kavanaugh might vote to loosen gun laws.


My IRL friend Abby Hafer has published an article fleshing out one of the strongest arguments for abortion rights: The law should not be able to commandeer parts of one person's body, even to save the life of another person. In "Do pregnant women have fewer rights than the dead?" she points out that not even a corpse can be forced to donate a kidney or liver unless permission was granted before death.

Yet the anti-abortion lobby feels that [a pregnant woman] must donate her entire body, and not for her own good. She is being required to make this sacrifice of her own organs and tissues without her consent, in order to help someone else, even though our society does not require this at any other time, from any other kind of person.

Poland is an example of what can happen when anti-abortion radicals get their way. The NYT tells the story of Izabela Sajbor, who died of sepsis after her water broke prematurely, and doctors refused to intervene for fear of killing her fetus. Shortly before dying, Sajbor wrote something that echoes Abby's point:

They cannot help as long as the fetus is alive thanks to the anti-abortion law. A woman is like an incubator.

and let's close with something to make us all feel smarter by comparison

People under pressure tend to say stupid things -- like when they're on TV, a clock is running, and a game show host is looking at them expectantly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7ghDhpCLKM

Monday, June 6, 2022

Gung-ho

You don't have to be that gung-ho on trans rights to realize that a world where girls' genitals need to be inspected before they can play any sport is worse for girls than a world where once in a while there's a trans girl on a girls' team.

- Evan Urquhart

This week's featured post is "America's guns have changed in my lifetime."

This week everybody was talking still talking about guns

Because the mass shootings won't stop. A gunman killed four at a hospital in Tulsa on Wednesday. Three died and 11 were wounded in a multi-party shoot-out in Philadelphia Saturday. Three died Sunday morning in a shooting in Saginaw. Also on Sunday, three died and 17 were injured in a shooting near a bar in Chattanooga.

The Senate is under pressure to "do something", but if anything gets done, it will be small. Perhaps there will be some expansion of red-flag laws that prevent some criminals and mentally ill people from buying guns, perhaps an expansion of federal background checks that would still leave loopholes. But no universal background checks, no assault weapon ban, nothing remotely on the scale of the problem.


This week's featured post examines my own history with guns, and concludes that the apparently stable level of gun-ownership in America over the decades has masked a huge increase in the destructive potential of our civilian arsenal.

Yes, I grew up in a gun-owning household. But no, the guns (and the gun culture) of America in the 1960s and 70s bears no resemblance to what we see today.


https://theweek.com/political-satire/1014141/modern-weaponry

In discussions of the Second Amendment, gun advocates often ignore the phrase "well regulated Militia", and gun-control advocates correspondingly call attention to it. But both sides usually forget that the Constitution uses the word "Militia" elsewhere, so the word is not an impenetrable mystery to be interpreted however we see fit. The constitutional context paints a pretty clear idea what the Founders meant a militia to be.

Article I, section 8 gives Congress the power "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions; To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States"

Article II, section 2 says that the President "shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States".

So it's clear that self-appointed groups of guys playing war games in the woods are NOT militias in the constitutional sense. They are not organized, armed, and disciplined by Congress, and they picture themselves BEING the insurrection, not responding to a call from Congress to submit to the command of the President and put down an insurrection.

The only organizations today that fit the constitutional uses of "Militia" are National Guard units.


Michael Fanone, a 20-year DC policeman who testified about the 1-6 riot and now works for CNN, explains why the AR-15 should be banned.

If banning them outright seems like too extreme a solution to be politically palatable, here's another option: Reclassify semi-automatic rifles as Class 3 firearms.

That would mean that someone wanting to purchase an AR-15 would have to go through a background check, fingerprinting and review by an official from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives -- a process that takes anywhere from 12 to 16 months. And since Class 3 weapons can't be purchased by anyone younger than 21, it would solve the issue of emotionally unstable 18-year-olds buying them.

A Class 3 firearm reclassification would also make those who are approved to purchase these weapons subject to an annual check that they are complying with federal regulations regarding secure storage of the firearm, and to confirm their licensing and other paperwork is up to date. All of these hoops and hurdles are sure to reduce the civilian demand for these weapons.


in his Substack blog, Michael Sifry discusses the role of money in making the gun-control movement "a monoculture" that employs only the most vanilla tactics.

Faced with the same confluence of events that we had in 2018, even worse since now we’re reeling from the racist massacre in Buffalo along with the insanity in Texas, all the wings of today’s “stay on message” gun violence prevention lobby, from the youngest to the oldest, are not just singing from the same songbook, they’re following the same theory of change: trying to convert momentary public attention into successful lobbying of legislators, plus calling occasional big marches and walkouts aimed at converting attention into the successful lobbying of legislators. To be followed by the inevitable electioneering for candidates who are almost all Democrats. When media attention fades, as it will, this lobby has no plans to create attention on its own beyond “vote harder.” ...

It's as if we’re living in the 1950s and the only groups leading the charge for civil rights are the NAACP and the Urban League, and the only strategy they’re willing to try is polite protest and lobbying.


A Florida school-shooting survivor asked Marco Rubio if he would reject NRA contributions. The question got a standing ovation. Rubio could not say yes. "That is the wrong way to look," he explained.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

but we need to shift the focus to January 6

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1014040/the-depp-dinosaurs

The House committee's televised hearings start Thursday evening. I'm getting disturbed that I'm not hearing more buzz about that. We're going to see in detail the story of how an American president almost overthrew democracy so that he could stay in power. It's a big deal.

Fox News still hasn't committed to covering Thursday night's hearing.

I can already predict the Republican response: It's all just a rehash of the second impeachment hearings. But it's not. Those hearings happened mere weeks after the insurrection, and spent most of their time recounting what happened at the Capitol on 1-6 itself.

The Committee now knows a great deal more about Trump's conspiracy to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election. They have sources inside the Trump White House, and can trace the plot through the fake electors and the attempt to induce Vice President Pence to break his oath of office. We'll hear just how many people told Trump explicitly that his stolen-election narrative was bullshit, and that his scheme to disrupt counting the electoral votes was illegal. I expect the hearings to reveal connections between the White House and the right-wing paramilitary groups that planned the Capitol assault. We'll find out if Republican congressmen were involved. We'll hear from executive-branch officials who Trump tried to pressure to go along with the plot, and get testimony about how Trump responded as events unfolded on January 6.


One indication that the Committee has the goods on Trump is just how hard his people have tried to obstruct its investigation.

Friday, Trump economic advisor (and proponent of the election-nullifying plot he called "the Green Bay sweep") Peter Navarro was arrested for contempt of Congress. He's pretty obviously guilty: He was subpoenaed by the 1-6 committee and just blew them off. He has tried to claim that executive privilege prevents him from testifying. However, it didn't prevent him from writing about the same topics in his book or discussing them on television. It isn't the world that's not supposed to know, just Congress.

"In any event, you must appear to assert any executive privilege objections on a question-by-question basis during the deposition," the committee wrote.

Navarro seems deeply offended about being treated like a criminal just because he broke the law.

“Who are these people,” Navarro said. “This is not America. I mean, I was a distinguished public servant for four years and nobody ever questioned my ethics. And they’re treating me in this fashion.”

Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert railed against the deep injustice of enforcing the laws Republicans break:

It actually puts an exclamation point on the fact that we have a two-tiered justice system. If you’re a Republican, you can’t even lie to Congress or lie to an FBI agent or they’re coming after you. They’re gonna bury you. They’re gonna put you in the D.C. jail and terrorize and torture you and not live up to the Constitution there.

Josh Marshall couldn't resist getting snarky:

you murder one person and suddenly ev'body's like LAW LAW LAW


Remember: the Benghazi Committee was precisely the kind of partisan witch hunt Republicans claim the 1-6 Committee is. But Hillary Clinton testified to them for 11 hours, because she was confident she had answers for all their questions. Trump and his people, on the other hand, know that they're guilty, so they want to prevent the American people from finding out what they did.

Can you imagine Trump showing up for hours of testimony under oath? He knows he couldn't go five minutes without either babbling or committing perjury.

meanwhile, the pandemic continues

The trends of the past few weeks continue: Case numbers are drifting downwards, particularly in the Northeast. (In my Massachusetts county, new cases per day per 100K were running in the high 50s a few weeks ago; it's 35 now.) Hospitalizations are well below their January peaks and deaths (now around 270 per day) never really did spike during this wave.

To put the death number in perspective, compare to the flu:

According to data collected by the CDC from 2010 to 2020, the agency estimates that the flu has caused 12,000–52,000 deaths annually.

Dividing by 365 gets you to 33-142 deaths per day. So right now Covid deaths are running about double the rate of a bad flu year. (That's assuming we could maintain this rate for a whole year. If deaths shoot up again in the fall and winter, we'll be much higher than double a flu death-rate.)

In Atlantic, Yasmin Tayag examines how this wave feels different from previous ones: It's a much longer but shallower wave.

The recent omicron variants have gotten better at evading the vaccines' protections against infection, but deaths among the fully vaccinated-and-boosted are still rare. I've noticed this in my own social circle, which is almost entirely vaccinated: More people I know have gotten sick lately, but none seriously.

and the Ukraine War

It's been 100 days since the Russian invasion began. Russian forces occupy about a fifth of the country, mostly in the east. The Russian offensive in the east has turned into a war of attrition, with each side making claims that the battle is turning in its favor.

It gets harder and harder to imagine how this war might end. Neither side is likely to give up, and there is no obvious settlement that both could accept.

Meanwhile, a debate is rising about America's and NATO's long-term commitment. The NYT's Ross Douthat expresses one side of that debate:

[G]iven the state of the war right now, the more likely near-future scenario is one where Russian collapse remains a pleasant fancy, the conflict becomes stalemated and frozen, and we have to put our Ukrainian policy on a sustainable footing without removing Putin’s regime or dismantling the Russian empire. ... [I]f Kyiv and Moscow are headed for a multiyear or even multi-decade frozen conflict, we will need to push Ukraine toward its most realistic rather than its most ambitious military strategy.

Atlantic's Anne Applebaum the other:

The West should not aim to offer Putin an off-ramp; our goal, our endgame, should be defeat. In fact, the only solution that offers some hope of long-term stability in Europe is rapid defeat, or even, to borrow Macron’s phrase, humiliation. In truth, the Russian president not only has to stop fighting the war; he has to conclude that the war was a terrible mistake, one that can never be repeated. More to the point, the people around him—leaders of the army, the security services, the business community—have to conclude exactly the same thing.

... Only failure can persuade the Russians themselves to question the sense and purpose of a colonial ideology that has repeatedly impoverished and ruined their own economy and society, as well as those of their neighbors, for decades. Yet another frozen conflict, yet another temporary holding pattern, yet another face-saving compromise will not end the pattern of Russian aggression or bring permanent peace.

and you also might be interested in ...

Dr. Oz will be the GOP's Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, after David McCormick conceded in the photo-finish primary. Oz got just over 31% in a multi-candidate race and won by less than 1,000 votes out of 1.2 million.

The Democratic candidate, John Fetterman, is still recovering from a stroke suffered just before the primary, which appears to have been caused by an underlying heart condition. He is said to be walking several miles a day.


Elon Musk buying Twitter still isn't a done deal.


A couple of Republican conspiracy theories blew up this week.

A jury took only six hours to acquit Michael Sussman of lying to the FBI. After three years of investigating the origin of the Trump/Russia investigation, this was Special Counsel John Durham's first indictment, and it was a pretty flimsy one. The main point of the indictment seems to have been to fan pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the Clintons, not to get a conviction.

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1014074/the-verdict

Another long-running conspiracy theory has been the "unmasking" of Michael Flynn. WaPo's Aaron Blake summarizes the theory:

The idea was that Obama administration officials deliberately targeted Donald Trump associates — and particularly Flynn — by requesting the disclosure of their names in intelligence reports before Trump took office, doing so for political purposes. This fed into long-running allegations of the government “spying” on Trump, who chose Flynn as his national security adviser.

The Trump Justice Department investigated that claim and found nothing. BuzzFeed released the previously classified report (by then-US Attorney John Bash) last Monday:

“My review has uncovered no evidence that senior Executive Branch officials sought the disclosure of” the identities of US individuals “in disseminated intelligence reports for political purposes or other inappropriate reasons during the 2016 presidential-election period or the ensuing presidential-transition period,” Bash’s report says.

In particular, unmasking had nothing to do with the scandal that eventually got Flynn convicted of lying to the FBI (which Trump pardoned him for).

A central focus of the probe was the leak showing that Flynn had been in communication with then–Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak prior to Trump’s inauguration, and whether Flynn’s involvement was revealed through an unmasking request from a government official.

But Bash’s review of unmasked intelligence reports about the calls found that the FBI did not in fact disseminate any that contained Flynn’s information, and that a single unmasked report that did contain Flynn’s information did not describe the calls between him and Kislyak. “For that reason, the public disclosure of the communications could not have resulted from an unmasking request,” Bash’s report concludes.

Both of these attempts to come up with a nefarious origin story for the Trump/Russia investigation ignore the fact that there were perfectly good reasons to investigate, and that the public still has not heard the full story of what went on between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Let me summarize at the highest level:

No innocent explanation of these facts has ever been offered.


Ron DeSantis continues his Orban-like tactics to use government power to punish corporations that don't support him. This time the target is the Tampa Bay Rays, who recently spoke out against gun violence and made a contribution to a gun-control organization.


Ohio's legislature has passed the "Save Women's Sports Act", which bans transgender girls from playing sports in public schools. Reason summarizes:

So, to be very clear here, no evidence is needed that a particular athlete is trans or not a biological female in order to demand that she prove her sex. The athlete must then go to a physician and either subject herself to a physical inspection of her sexual organs or arrange for hormone or genetic tests. And no, the bill does not fund the costs of such tests. ... News 5 in Cleveland notes that there is currently only a single trans female student competing in high school sports in Ohio.

Evan Urquhart comments:

You don't have to be that gung-ho on trans rights to realize that a world where girls' genitals need to be inspected before they can play any sport is worse for girls than a world where once in a while there's a trans girl on a girls' team.


Yes, Marjorie Taylor Greene really did say "peach tree dish". But it was funnier when Sarah Silverman said it to Conan O'Brien in 2010.


Brynn Tannehill reports that her friend's husband is a retired police officer who does police trainings. He finds that young officers are soaked in right-wing propaganda, to the point that they just don't believe FBI statistics about right-wing domestic terrorism.

Follow up. Spoke with his wife last night. The first responders also didn't believe that police were attacked on January 6th. Or if they were, it was Antifa. These are the people that will be propping up our post-democracy government. They're true believers. We're f****d.

and let's close with something religious

George Carlin seems to be having a comeback lately, in spite of having been dead since 2008. The streaming channels I subscribe to keep recommending his videos, and he's been coming up more often on my social media feeds. In addition to just being funny, Carlin generally gave you something to think about, like this attempt to edit the ten commandments down to a more manageable list.