Friday Reads: Anything but Normal!
Posted: June 30, 2023 Filed under: Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Kagan, U.S. Politics | Tags: @repeat1968, John Buss 16 Comments
Before women could Vote. On August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was passed. It took more legal effort to enfranchise indigenous women and women of color.
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
My daughters say “Oh Boomer” to me a lot. It used to be “Oh, Mutherrrr.” Their perpetual disappointment in me has morphed as much as their Grandfather’s Republican party and its adherents have morphed into something quite monstrous. I tell them not to blame me for this mess.
In utero and baby Jean attended ERA rallies all around the Midwest. In utero, developing fetus Jean was blessed by Maya Angelou, Kate Millett, and Bette Friedan. I worked hard in high school and college to change the sexual assault laws in my state and also tried to find ways to bring women of color together with the primarily white feminist movement to ensure we supported all women. (1982-83).
I’ve demonstrated against caging babies, shock and awing Iraq, and for Black Lives Matter. I quit the Republican Party in the 90s, having seen the racist/sexist Pats turn me into a talking point in their culture war. That 1992 Pat Buchanan speech at the Republican convention caused me to register Independent even as I was running as a Republican to stop the future we now have.
Elect me, and you get two for the price of one, Mr. Clinton says of his lawyer-spouse. And what does Hillary believe? Well, Hillary believes that 12-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents, and Hillary has compared marriage and the family as institutions to slavery and life on an Indian reservation.
Well, speak for yourself, Hillary.
This, my friends, is radical feminism. The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.
This is Jim Crow segregation on Independence Day. Free to be you and me separately. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 overturned the remaining Jim Crow laws.
By the time I met Hillary in Minneapolis in 1994, and ever since then, I can say proudly that Hillary speaks for me. Nothing about this Republican Party speaks for most Americans in this country; all you have to do is check any poll on any topic. And yet, they persist by rewriting the laws that used to make us a democratic Republic.
Guys like Robertson and Buchanan also led me to Buddhism, where I could practice compassion. I’m a proud footsoldier in the backlash against the theocratic fascism the Republican party stands for. Communism never has been confirmed or real. Fascism has. “My dad bombed them back to Germany in World War 2. Remember, the last guy in the White House said they were the “very good people” on both sides. He still aspires to be the American Putin.
I listened to an interview with President Biden conducted by Nicole Wallace yesterday on MSNBC. The institutionalist Biden was full of lowkey descriptions of how the Republican Party today is “not the Republican Party of your father.” Today’s Republicans include Congressional inquisitors and corrupt law inventors in the Roberts’ Court. They’re a cult of a wannabe dictator.
We’re watching a rollback of America’s 20th century. We finally get to celebrate both of our Independence Days, and I’m starting to think the Supreme Court will let the South have its Jim Crow laws back by next year. Last year gave women the status of state chattel, and they’re working on making us federal chattel. The states are working hard on erasing the GLBT community. Obergefell is likely on the SCOTUS agenda too. They’re coming for birth control, also.
Much of this backward motion is based on obliterating stare decisis and wrongly interpreting post-Civil War American Constitutional amendments. These amendments, you might remember, were penned by the nascent Republican Party. This isn’t your great-great-grandfather’s Republican Party, either. Having served in the Dubya administration, Nicole Wallace probably knew most of this better than anyone. She reinforced the Biden interpretation of our “not normal” Supreme Court and the Maga Republicans who are into performative running amok but never actually govern.
Alaska wasn’t a state until 1959. The U.S. government actively removed Indigenous children from their tribes until the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978. SCOTUS barely saved the ICWA this year. One of the nine flipped.
This is from the Los Angeles Times. “Opinion: The Supreme Court’s ultimate ‘judicial activism’: striking down affirmative action in college admissions.” This was written by Erwin Chemerinski.
For decades, conservatives have railed against judicial activism, but Thursday’s decision striking down affirmative action by colleges and universities in admissions was the height of conservative judicial activism. The court rejected almost half a century of precedents, overturned decisions made by public and private universities across the country, and ignored the history of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.The experience of California — where affirmative action was eliminated by Proposition 209 in 1996 — shows that it still will be possible to have diversity in higher education, but it will take sustained effort and it will be difficult.
In 1978, in University of California vs. Bakke, Justice Lewis Powell wrote the pivotal opinion and explained that colleges and universities have a compelling interest in having a diverse student body and may use race as one of many factors in admissions decisions to benefit minorities and enhance diversity. The Supreme Court reaffirmed this in 2003 in Grutter vs. Bollinger and again, most recently, in 2016, in Fisher vs. University of Texas, Austin. For decades, universities across the country have based their admissions policies on these holdings.
What changed in a mere seven years? Donald Trump appointed three justices: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. They joined the three conservative dissenters in the Fisher case — John G. Roberts Jr., Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — to overturn 45 years of precedents allowing affirmative action. As they did last year in overruling Roe vs. Wade, the conservatives on the court paid no attention to the principle of stare decisis and following precedent.
Nor did the conservatives on the court pay attention to the judgment of university educators that diversity in the classroom matters in education. I have been a law professor for 43 years and have taught classes that are overwhelmingly white and those with a significant number of minority students. The discussions in the classrooms are vastly different and the educational experience for all students is enhanced when there is diversity.
As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor explained in the Grutter decision, preparing students for our diverse society requires that they experience diversity. But the six conservative justices have now substituted their views and flatly rejected decades of experience of those in higher education.
In 1965, Women got the right to access Birth Control. Roe v Wade was decided in 1973 when I was in high school. However, it took a while longer to wrest my personal credit score back after I got married. I lost mine in 1975, and it would not be restored to me until 1976. Women’s Sports were put on the map with Title 9 in 1972. This enabled me to play on the university men’s soccer team because they had no women’s equivalent at the time. Yup, I played Triple-A men’s soccer in 1975. It was that, or my university lost its funding, and football is a religion in Nebraska.
Women got many civil liberties and rights in the 1970s. My mother got her form of birth control from my aunt, taking her to her doctor while saying you’re not going to get pregnant on your Honeymoon like me. Since Mother was about to be married, she got her first diaphragm. It was a process to make family planning inaccessible to most women. All I had to do was walk into the Student Health building at my University, where birth control pills were readily available to any woman. Will that be the case in 5 years? Justice Thomas is eager to revisit Griswold v Connecticut (1965).
We’re also on our way to removing hard-fought civil liberties for the GLBT Community. We just celebrated Pride Week. The anniversary of Stonewall was also this week. On June 28, 1969, the Stonewall riots started the movement to bring civil liberties and rights to the GLBT community.
Today’s two SCOTUS decision show just how far back in time and how poor six justices are prepared to make us by not letting the President forgive some Student Loans. Today we also saw the rollback of the strides made by the GLBT community and its allies. It’s why polls show people think there’s something wrong with them. There is something very wrong with 6 of them, and I feel for the other 3.
There are live breaking updates today on CNN “SCOTUS blocks Biden’s student loan plan and limits LGBTQ protections in major rulings.” Chief Justice Roberts is on the defensive. He should quit whining.
Recent rulings by the newly composed Roberts court have sent a resounding message about its role and the separation of powers. This comes at a time when the Supreme Court has been under intense scrutiny by critics who argue that it is moving the law to the right and overturning precedent simply because of the addition of three justices nominated by a Republican president.
During the last week of the term, the conservative court — bolstered by three nominees of President Donald Trump — issued sweeping 6-3 decisions defining how the country lives its daily life.
In striking down affirmative action, the court overturned another decades-old precedent a year after reversing Roe v. Wade — without explicitly saying so.
In the very last opinion of the term, Chief Justice John Roberts discussed the student loan case at hand, but seemed to be sending a broader message to address recent criticism of the court as going beyond “the proper role of the judiciary.”
He noted that “reasonable minds,” including the three liberals on the bench, could disagree with the analysis of the student loan decision, but he cautioned that “plainly heartfelt disagreement” should not be mistaken as “disparagement.”
“Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country,” he said.
Yes, that was his name, phone number, email address, and website on the inquiry form. But he never sent this form, he said, and at the time it was sent, he was married to a woman. “If somebody’s pulled my information, as some kind of supporting information or documentation, somebody’s falsified that,” Stewart explained. (Stewart’s last name is not included in the filing, so we will be referring to him by his first name throughout this story.)
“I wouldn’t want anybody to … make me a wedding website?” he continued, sounding a bit puzzled but good-natured about the whole thing. “I’m married, I have a child—I’m not really sure where that came from? But somebody’s using false information in a Supreme Court filing document.”
I’m giving two Justices and their dissents the last word for this very long post. You can see Justice Sotomayer’s response to the broadening of protecting Christians from being civil and polite human beings up top.
Then there’s the Court’s newest Justice Jackson. Jackson’s dissent decries affirmative action decision as ‘tragedy for us all’. This is from the Washington Post. It is written by Amy B. Wang.
“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” Jackson wrote in her dissenting opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, one of two cases decided Thursday that centered on affirmative action.
Jackson recused herself from the other, Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, because of her ties to Harvard. Both cases were decided on ideological lines, with the court’s six conservative justices voting in the majority. But Jackson’s dissent received particular attention Thursday for its blistering paragraphs and for its sharp rebuttals from conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s other Black justice.
https://twitter.com/SIfill_/status/1674592067912187906
It is important to say this. Three women stand between us and the past we do not want to repeat. There needs to be a change because there are not enough of them. An African-American woman. A Jewish Woman, An Hispanic Woman. They are on team justice and democracy. They need backup.
One final court case, and I would love to press this because I expect they never expected a Buddhist to say that most of your holidays are holidays that are meaningless to me. Accommodate my religious whims, please! I need to be scheduled on a lunar calendar, please! This is from Reuters. And, of course, we can guess the demographics of the whiny-ass complainer in this lawsuit. “U.S. Supreme Court buoys religious employees who seek accommodations at work.”
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday bolstered the ability of employees to obtain accommodations at work for their religious practices, reviving a lawsuit by an evangelical Christian former mail carrier accusing the Postal Service of discrimination after being disciplined for refusing to show up for work on Sundays.
The 9-0 ruling threw out a lower court’s decision rejecting a claim by Gerald Groff, a former mail carrier in Pennsylvania, that the Postal Service’s actions refusing to exempt him from working on Sundays, when he observes the Sabbath, violated federal anti-discrimination law.
The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, has a track record of expanding religious rights, often siding with Christian plaintiffs.
The Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had found that Groff’s absences placed too much of a hardship on his co-workers and employer. The Supreme Court ordered the 3rd Circuit to reconsider the matter.
Groff’s case centered on a federal anti-discrimination law called Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on religion and other factors including race, sex and national origin.
If we have to endure blue laws again because of these folks, I am absolutely going to have a hissy fit. Well, it looks like I’m having one now, so it will have to be a much bigger one. One of these days, the ACLU will have a case on its hands, and I will be the complainant.
I’m not sure if celebrating Independence Day is in order this year. Maybe we need a Remembrance Day for democracy. I sometimes see this social media question about which band you’d love to go on the road with. There’s my answer. Parliament. I’d love to sit in front of the Supreme Court Building or, better yet, in a few justices’ neighborhoods and sing “Tear the Roof off the Sucker” with Bootsy and George.
“bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. education & free discussion are the antidotes of both.”
Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, August 1, 1816
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thursday Reads
Posted: June 29, 2023 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Donald Trump, SCOTUS | Tags: Affirmative Action, Climate change, excessive heat, iran, jet stream, Mark Milley, military academies, poor air quality, Supreme Court, Trump stolen documents case, Walt Nauta, wildfires 13 Comments
Summer Day or Embrace on the beach, (1904), by Edvard Munch
Good Day!!
There is some Trump investigation news this morning, plus, news just broke that the Supreme Court has gutted Affirmative Action in college admissions.
But before I get to those stories, a few articles about the awful summer weather we are having. Here in New England and across much of the Midwest, we’re having poor air quality because of the Canadian wildfires; and in much of the Southern U.S. people are suffering greatly from excessive heat.
Dangerous air quality and hazy skies persist as smoke from Canada’s raging wildfires drifts south, leaving more than 100 million people under air quality alerts across a dozen states from Minnesota to New York and down to the Carolinas.
Chicago had the worst air quality among major cities in the world early Thursday, according to IQAir. The air in Washington, DC, Minneapolis, Detroit and New York City was among the top 10 most polluted.
Smoke will continue to drift across the Midwest and into the mid-Atlantic and Northeast on Thursday. Forecast models predict a slow improvement beginning Thursday and additional decreases by Friday.
The worst air quality is likely to remain over the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley, with some increase in smoke in states including Washington and New York, but levels are not expected to reach those seen a few weeks ago.
In Canada – which is seeing its worst fire season on record – authorities have also issued air quality alerts across several provinces.
“With no end in sight to the Canadian wildfires and west to northwesterly winds expected to persist from south central Canada into the north central to northeast U.S., poor air quality conditions are likely to continue,” the National Weather Service warned.
The New York Times is providing live updates on the smoke as it works it’s way toward NYC.
The New York Times on the heat: Misery Engulfs the South as Heat Wave Spreads.
Even for Southerners used to spending a lot of time outside, this week’s brutal heat and humidity — which spread from Texas across the Gulf Coast and north into Missouri, Tennessee and Arkansas on Wednesday — are a little much….
An oppressive heat wave that baked Texas and Oklahoma last week, contributing to several deaths, has engulfed much of the southern and central United States, raising the heat index to dangerously high levels from Kansas City to the Florida Keys.
High Summer, 1915, by Edvard Munch
Temperatures will climb up to 20 degrees above normal for much of the region through at least the weekend, reaching the upper 90s or low 100s in many places, with the heat index — a measure of how heat and humidity make the air feel — soaring even higher….
Major cities where the heat index could reach between 110 to 120 degrees over the next few days include Dallas, San Antonio, New Orleans and Nashville, as well as Little Rock, Ark.; Jackson, Miss.; and Montgomery, Ala. “Many areas outside of Texas will experience their most significant heat of the season so far,” a forecast from the National Weather Service said.
Health experts consider a heat index of over 103 degrees dangerous, with a higher risk of cramps, exhaustion and heat stroke, particularly after exercise or long stretches in the sun.
High humidity will continue to produce “potentially life-threatening” heat through the rest of the week, the Weather Service said, and nighttime temperatures will offer little respite, staying unseasonably high even while the sun is down.
“That’s substantial because your house isn’t cooling off as much at night,” said Rob Perillo, the chief meteorologist at KATC-TV in Lafayette, La. “When you’re shooting 95 at noon, and it’s above 95 until 7 at night,” he added, “it’s not only hotter, but it’s hotter longer.”
NBC News: Scorching heat and Canada wildfires could be tied to ‘wavy, blocky’ jet stream.
Scientists say a closely watched atmospheric pattern — the jet stream — is behind both the Canadian wildfires and the scorching heat in Texas, raising questions about how it shapes extreme weather events and whether climate change is disrupting its flow.
The jet stream, a ribbon of air that encircles the Northern Hemisphere at high altitudes, drives pressure changes that determine weather across North America. The jet stream’s wavy pattern creates areas of high and low pressure.
In recent months, the jet stream’s patterns trapped and stalled a ridge of high pressure over northern Canada, which caused a heat wave and primed the landscape for the wildfires that later sent smoke pouring into the Midwest and the eastern U.S. Earlier this month, another ridge of high pressure centered over Texas, sending temperatures soaring.
Summer Night’s Dream/The Voice, by Edvard Munch, 1893
More than 100 million people in the U.S. faced either blistering heat or unhealthy air quality Wednesday.
In recent weeks, the jet stream has appeared unusual and disjointed, scientists say. Some researchers think climate change is disrupting its flow and causing it to bake regions in heat longer. They are concerned that changes in the patterns could cause extremes to increase more rapidly than climate models have projected as the world warms.
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, likened visualizations of the jet stream’s appearance in recent weeks to the swirling brushstrokes of a post-impressionist painter.
“I’m honestly at a loss to even characterize the current large-scale planetary wave pattern,” Mann tweeted this month. “Frankly, it looks like a Van Gogh.”
Now that’s an interesting interpretation!
In other news, the right wing Supreme Court has struck again.
Adam Liptak at The New York Times: Supreme Court Strikes Down Race-Based Admissions at Harvard and U.N.C.
In disavowing race as a factor in achieving educational diversity, the court all but ensured that the student population at the campuses of elite institutions will become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino.
Race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, the latest decision by its conservative supermajority on a contentious issue of American life.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the 6-3 majority, said the two programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner” and “involve racial stereotyping,” in a manner that violates the Constitution.
Universities can consider how race has affected an applicant’s life, but he emphasized that students “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor summarized her dissent from the bench — a rare move that signals profound disagreement. The court, she wrote, was “further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society.”
“The devastating impact of this decision cannot be overstated,” she said in her scorching dissent.
The ruling could have far-reaching effects, and not just at the colleges and universities across the country that are expected to revisit their admissions practices. The decision could prompt employers to rethink how they consider race in hiring and it could potentially narrow the pipeline of highly credentialed minority candidates entering the work force.
Read more details at the NYT.
There is exception to the ruling: it doesn’t apply to military academies. I wonder why?
https://twitter.com/themaxburns/status/1674431227670175745?s=20
On to the Trump investigation stories.
ABC News: Top Trump campaign aide identified as key individual in classified docs indictment: Sources.
One of the top advisers on Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign is among the individuals identified but not named by special counsel Jack Smith in his indictment against the former president for allegedly mishandling classified documents after leaving the White House and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
The Mystery of a Summer Night, 1892, by Edvard Munch
Susie Wiles, one of Trump’s most trusted advisers leading his second reelection effort, is the individual singled out in Smith’s indictment as the “PAC Representative” who Trump is alleged to have shown a classified map to in August or September of 2021, sources said.
Trump, in the indictment, is alleged to have shown the classified map of an unidentified country to Wiles while discussing a military operation that Trump said “was not going well,” while adding that he “should not be showing the map” to her and “not to get too close.”
The alleged exchange between Trump and Wiles is the second of two instances detailed by prosecutors in the indictment showing how Trump allegedly disclosed classified information in private meetings after leaving the White House. The first was a July 2021 audio recording, obtained by ABC News earlier this week, in which Trump is heard showing people what he describes as a “secret” and “highly confidential” document relating to Iran.
ABC News has reported the meeting involved people who were helping Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, with his memoir, according to sources. Smith’s team has spoken to the meeting’s attendees, which included the writers helping Meadows with his book and at least two aides to Trump, according to sources….
It does not appear, based on the indictment, that Trump was charged specifically for his retention of either the Iran document or the classified map shown to the person identified as Wiles. Rather, the two instances speak to what Smith’s prosecutors see as Trump’s state of mind in how he handled and sometimes shared classified materials in his possession after leaving the White House, sources said, as well as his alleged efforts to subvert the government’s efforts to get the documents back.
Rolling Stone: Trump Demanded ‘My Documents’ Back Even After His Lawyers Told Him He’d Be Indicted.
LAST MONTH, DONALD Trump’s lawyers told him he was on the cusp of a federal indictment in the classified documents case. But the former president still wanted “my documents” and “my boxes” back, asking some of his lawyers if they could get them from the federal government, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter and two other people briefed on it.
It’s one of many such conversations Trump has had over the past few months, the sources say. In these conversations, Trump also claimed it was “illegal” that he could no longer have the documents seized in the Mar-a-Lago raid. Those materials, Trump insisted, belonged to “me.” Trump has also asked if there are any other possible legal maneuvers or court filings they could try to accomplish this that they hadn’t thought of yet.
For much of his post-presidency, Trump has incorrectly insisted to various aides and confidants that the highly classified documents he continued to hoard were “mine.” In some of these conversations, according to the source with knowledge of the matter, Trump has also mentioned that he’ll get the documents back in 2025 — because he predicts he’ll be president again, and therefore regain unfettered access to the government’s most sensitive secrets.
Summer Night – Inger on the Shore, 1899, by Edvard Munch
Apparently some of Trump’s lawyers have gone along with his claims.
Two sources familiar with the situation tell Rolling Stone that several lawyers — some retained by Trump and others politically aligned with him — have briefed Trump that he is, in their view, entitled to the return of government documents under an obscure part of the Presidential Records Act, specifically 44 USC 2205(3), which asserts that “Presidential records of a former President shall be available to such former President or the former President’s designated representative.”
But experts on classification rules disagree. “Whatever one might say about his Presidential Records Act argument, there’s no argument that it immunizes him from criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act,” Brian Greer, an attorney who served in the CIA’s office of general counsel from 2010 to 2018, tells Rolling Stone. Nor does the act allow a former president to defy a lawful court-ordered subpoena for documents and obstruct justice, as the special counsel alleges Trump did in the indictment, Greer adds.
Hugh Lowell at The Guardian: Trump valet arraignment delayed after losing Florida lawyer over fees dispute.
Donald Trump’s valet charged in the classified documents case had his arraignment on Tuesday delayed for a second time to July by a magistrate judge, after he was forced to abandon his top choice Florida lawyer over a dispute about legal fees, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The valet, Walt Nauta, appeared alongside Trump when the former president pleaded not guilty to 37 criminal charges in federal district court in Miami this month but could not himself enter a plea – a necessary step to start trial preparation – because he lacked local counsel.
Two weeks later, Nauta remains without a lawyer admitted to practice in the southern district of Florida after the person at the top of the shortlist drawn up by Nauta’s defense team decided he needed to charge higher fees to represent him the night before the arraignment, the people said.
The previously unreported dispute over fees in effect meant Nauta could not retain the person as his Florida lawyer, the people said, even though he would be paid by Trump’s political action committee Save America, which has also been paying the fees of his lead lawyer, Stanley Woodward.
The reason for the rate hike was not clear, but at least one Florida lawyer who had seriously considered representing Nauta decided several days ago that the reputational and legal risks of working with Trump’s co-defendant in the documents case were too great.
Susan Glasser at The New Yorker: Why Donald Trump Was So Mad at Mark Milley That He Confessed to a Crime.
With the sounds of papers rustling in the background, Trump is heard complaining about General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “He said that I wanted to attack Iran—isn’t it amazing?” Trump told his visitors, who included book advisers to his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows. A few days earlier, I had reported about Milley’s concerns in the final months of Trump’s Presidency that Trump might provoke a military conflict with Iran as part of his effort to remain in power, despite losing the 2020 election. This, Milley told others, was one of the “nightmare scenarios” that he was working to prevent. At Bedminster, Trump apparently brandished the Pentagon’s attack plan—which he claimed had been presented to him by Milley. “This totally wins my case,” Trump said. “You know, except, like, it is highly confidential.” He added, “See, as President, I could have declassified it; now I can’t, but this is classified. . . . it’s so cool.” The tape ends with a line that was not included in the federal indictment: Trump asking, “Bring some Cokes in, please?” The whole exchange was happening, in other words, not in some top-secret facility, but with someone standing by to fetch drinks, in Trump’s office, right near the pool at his country club.
Summer Night on the Beach, Edvard Munch
To legal observers and, indeed, to pretty much anyone who could hear, the audiotape sounded like an admission of guilt. But this is Trump, a serial liar for whom an obvious defense presents itself: that he was not telling the truth to his visitors when he claimed to be showing them secret papers. And, sure enough, by Tuesday, Trump told reporters on his way back from a New Hampshire campaign appearance, “It was bravado, if you want to know the truth”—bravado here being a Trump synonym for “bullshitting.” This is the 2023 equivalent of dismissing the “Access Hollywood” tape as mere “locker-room talk” that had nothing to do with Trump’s actual behavior toward women. He even suggested that the papers he is heard shuffling through were just “building plans.” For Trump, it’s better to be a liar than a convict.
The damning evidence against Trump would not exist if not for his rift with Mark Milley, a remarkable feud between the Commander-in-Chief and the nation’s top general that had been a secret backdrop to the public drama that played out after the 2020 election. At the time the tape was made, in the summer of 2021, Trump was apoplectic that Milley’s fears about him were becoming public. Two recently published books—one by the journalists Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker of the Post, and the other by Michael Bender, then of the Wall Street Journal—had reported new details about Milley’s efforts, including regular “land the plane” phone calls with Meadows, the White House chief of staff, to prevent Trump from drawing the military into his quest to overturn the 2020 election. Milley was even quoted fretting about Trump and his supporters staging a “Reichstag moment”—a fear that seemed eerily prescient on January 6, 2021, when a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, seeking to block congressional certification of Trump’s defeat. Trump, in turn, publicly denounced Milley and said that he had only picked him as chairman in 2018 to spite James Mattis, his soon-to-quit Defense Secretary at the time.
Glasser, as always, is long-winded, so you’ll need to read more at The New Yorker to get the full story about Trump’s rage at Milley. Milley was afraid that Trump might try to attack Iran after he lost the election. Basically, Milley told the truth about him, and Trump never likes people who do that.
Legendary journalist Bob Woodward tore into former President Donald Trump in an interview on CNN Wednesday evening, calling him the largest threat to national security he had ever seen from any U.S. government official.
This comes amid the release of an audio tape of Trump boasting to patrons of his New Jersey golf club about possessing highly classified defense information about an attack on Iran — which he now denies — and reporting that he was motivated to do so by anger at Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley for working to constrain his post-2020 election impulses.
“Bob, you’ve interviewed the former president a lot,” said anchor Anderson Cooper. “We’ve discussed your own tape of him. What stands out to you about this latest recording?”
“Well, it really shows that Donald Trump is an alarming, dangerous threat to national security,” said Woodward, who helped expose the Watergate scandal decades ago and has recently been caught up in a legal battle with Trump over White House transcripts. “In the book, ‘Peril’ that I did with Robert Costa, we recount two National Security Council meetings where Trump, not General Milley or the Defense Department, was agitating for a possible attack on Iran. And he is pushing it. And General Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the number one military man in the country, is telling Trump, you don’t want a war. If you start a war, you’re going to get into a conflict that you can’t get out of.”
“You see him in this reporting that we did from these meetings from notes, that it is the generals who say, no, no, no,” Woodward continued. “And Trump says, well — in one of the meetings the Iranians have enough to make two nuclear bombs, and he’s worried about that and thinking that maybe they should consider an attack. And these contingency plans are most sensitive documents in the government because what they do is they outline in a crisis how we might attack Iran, what the casualties would be, how many ships would be sunk, how long it might take. And that’s something you can’t treat casually, as Trump has.”
That’s it for me. What stories have caught your interest today?
Mostly Monday Reads: Surprise! The Supreme Court backs Voting Rights again!
Posted: June 26, 2023 Filed under: U.S. Politics | Tags: Alito Corrupt and Partisan, Heatwave, Secret Service testimony 10 Comments
Gustave Courbet, The Young Ladies on the Bank of the Seine, 1856, Musée du Petit Palais, Paris, France.
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Our summer has pushed me beyond the point of being too hot to move. I’m just trying to stave off heat exhaustion with water, fans, and the absence of sunlight. I’ve never appreciated clouds like this before. The radar showing rain all around us is one big tease. It’s to the point where it doesn’t cool down at night. I am. Therefore, I sweat.
Louisiana made it to the news today for its attempts to gerrymander congressional districts from our once purple state into Maga red. The Supreme Court, following a previous decision in Alabama, has decided that the Voting Rights Act does exist in a meaningful way despite Chief Justice Robert Robert’s. This is from NBC News, as reported by Lawrence Hurley. “Supreme Court paves the way for Louisiana congressional districts to be redrawn. The decision was expected in light of the court’s affirming a key part of the Voting Rights Act in a similar case from Alabama.”
The Supreme Court on Monday dismissed Louisiana’s appeal seeking to prevent the state’s congressional map from being redrawn over claims that it unlawfully dilutes the influence of Black voters.
The move via a brief unsigned order was expected after the Supreme Court’s ruling on June 8that buttressed a key part of the landmark Voting Rights Act in a similar case concerning congressional districts in Alabama.
The court order noted that the case should be resolved in lower courts “in advance of the 2024 congressional elections in Louisiana.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Alabama case could lead to a new map being drawn in Louisiana in which Black voters would have a chance to elect their preferred representative in two of the state’s six congressional districts instead of one.
In the Alabama case, the Supreme Court unexpectedly upheld a lower court ruling that said the Republican-drawn map in that state discriminated against Black voters by making it difficult for them to vote for candidates of their choosing.
Philip Sutton, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’, 1988, Thd Potteries Museum & Art
Rick Hasen at Election Law Blog offered this analysis.
The Court had initially agreed to hear this case finding a voting rights violation in the failure to draw another majority-minority district in Louisiana, but now dismisses the cert. grant as improvidently granted after the Court’s decision in Milligan last week.
Now watch Louisiana try to run out the clock under Purcell despite the court’s order that things be resolved in advance of 2024. And you can bet that judges on the most conservative appeals court in the country may be skeptical of a voting rights remedy despite the ringing endorsement of such remedies by the Court last week in Milligan.
We’rWe’refident that MAGA Supreme AG Jeff Landry will do just that.
Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post writes, “A “ear after Dobbs, the pro-choice movement has never been stronger.” ” Let’sope so!
It’s not just polls that reveal the shift. In the 2022 midterms, numerous Democrats in swing seats leaned into the abortion issue and won. And a pro-choice judge notched a double-digit win in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race in April. Ballot propositions protecting abortion rights have won in all contests since Dobbs. At a time when Republicans are struggling to hold on to women and suburban voters, the abortion issue may substantially affect voting patterns for years to come.
House Democrats’ Pro-Choice Caucus and every House Democratic leader, including former speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), held a news conference Friday highlighting their effort to force an up-or-down vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act that would enshrine Roe in federal law. Democrats, who have 210 votes from their side for the discharge petition, challenged Republicans to come up with the eight additional votes needed to force a vote. Calling Dobbs part of the “Supreme Court hall of shame,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) excoriated the court, saying it had “restricted and limited and undermined freedom for women all across America.” A number of Democrats spoke passionately about the suffering inflicted on women by what they called a “corrupt” Supreme Court filled with “right-wing co-conspirators.”
Friday’s speakers decried the assault on personal “freedom,” a value Democrats appear more than ready to embrace as Republicans ban abortions, ban books and target the LGBTQ+ community. Women’s suffering and humiliation are motivating Democrats to accuse Republicans of turning women into second-class citizens. For years, many Democrats avoided even using the word “abortion”; now, they’re putting abortion in the larger context of freedom, dignity and self-determination.
Kondracki, Henry; Summer: Miles and His Kite;
According to Julia Ansley of NBC News, “Five or six Secret Service agents have testified before Jan. 6 grand jury, sources say. It is not known what the agents’ proximity to Trump was on Jan. 6 or what information they may have provided to the grand jury.”
Roughly five or six agents have appeared, the sources said, in compliance with subpoenas they received. It is not known what the agents’ proximity to Trump was on Jan. 6 or what information they may have provided to the grand jury.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the events of Jan. 6 is separate from his probe that led to Trump’s recent indictment in Florida for the handling of classified documents. Sources told NBC News that about 24 Secret Service agents appeared before the grand jury that considered that case in Washington before the case moved to Florida.
A spokeswoman for the Secret Service declined to comment.
While the exact content of their subpoenas and appearances is not known, Secret Service agents who were close to Trump on Jan. 6 may be able to confirm, deny or provide more details on a story first told by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson to the now-defunct Jan. 6 committee in Congress.
Józef Chełmoński, Indian Summer, 1875
Lisa Needham from Public Notice writes about “The Breathtaking hypocrisy of Alito”,” referring to him as “a Fox News talking head masquerading as a Supreme Court justice.” The corruption is strong in this one. Alito’s WSJ piece was an affront to anyone who appreciates the truth.
This isn’t the first time Alito sought out a media audience that would be receptive to his claims. Alito is carving a very Trumpian path for himself these days — inherently combative, outraged that anyone could have the audacity to question his decisions, and carefully enclosed in a right-wing media bubble. Imagine the endless howls if Justice Sonia Sotomayor ran to MSNBC to do a media hit every time someone questioned her integrity or one of the court’s decisions. That’s essentially what Alito is doing here.
Well, that’s about it. Considering last week, this is a relatively slow news day. Take care this weekend, and avoid the heat if you’re in the South. Texas may set records and appears to be stuck in a building heatwave. I just hope they don’t send it our way.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: June 24, 2023 Filed under: cat art, caturday | Tags: insurrection in Russia, Russia, Sergei Shoigu, Vladimir Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhen 11 Comments
The Merchant’s Wife at Tea, by Boris Kustodiev
Happy Caturday!!
All hell has broken loose in Russia, and I’m not a good judge of what is happening, although it’s certainly interesting to watch events as they happen. It does look as though Putin is getting weaker. Yevgeny Prigozhin, formerly known as “Putin’s Chef,” who is the leader of the Wagner Group, a private mercenary organization, is challenging Putin’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and top general Valery Gerasimov over the way the Ukraine war is going.
It’s important to note that Prigozhin is not a good guy. He was in charge of the Internet Research Agency, which led the disinformation campaign to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election and put Trump in the White House.
I’ve been watching TV and reading knowledgeable people on Twitter off and on since late last night when Dakinikat called and got me to pay attention. I was sort of hibernating yesterday and sure enough, something big happened while I was escaping reality. Anyway, I’ll post some of what Russia experts are saying at the moment. Obviously, this is a fast-moving story. In fact, MSNBC is reporting right now that mercenary forces are marching toward Moscow and Putin has ordered makeshift truck blockades of roads into the city.
One interesting thing I’ve seen on Twitter is the number of former Republicans who are expressing relief that Biden is in the White House now and not Donald Trump.
This is from Russia expert Tom Nichols, who posted a primer at The Atlantic last night: A Crisis Erupts in Russia.
A simmering political feud in Russia has exploded into a crisis. The head of a Russian mercenary army fighting in Ukraine alongside Moscow’s official military forces has declared war against the Russian ministry of defense, claiming that Russia’s war in Ukraine was all the result of a giant plot by defense bureaucrats to mislead Russian President Vladimir Putin into a pointless conflict.
‘A Girl With Kittens’ (1895) by Ivan Gorokhov (1863-1934)
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, also claims that Russian government forces struck his men and inflicted numerous casualties. The Russian Defense Ministry denies any involvement with the strike, but Prigozhin has gone, literally, on the warpath, claiming that he will march into the southern Russian city of Rostov and onward if necessary to topple the corrupt officials leading the Russian Defense Ministry and military high command. He is asking Russian police and military forces to stand aside while he gets “justice” for his troops.
The Russian government, which has long welcomed Prigozhin’s assistance in conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, has apparently had enough of all this, especially now that Prigozhin is dismantling the Kremlin’s rationalizations for the war—and by extension, making Putin look like a fool or a liar or both. The Russian security service has opened a criminal case against Prigozhin for instigating a coup and issued a warrant for his arrest, something they could do only with Putin’s approval.
As for why this is happening, Nichols writes:
Think of this conflict not as a contest between the Russian state and a mercenary group, but as a falling-out among gangsters, a kind of Mafia war.
A government doing a lot of bad things in the world can make great use of a cadre of hardened and nasty mercenaries, and Prigozhin has been making his bones for years as a tough guy leading other tough guys, ultranationalist patriots who care more about Mother Russia than the supposedly lazy and corrupt bureaucrats in Moscow do. The Ministry of Defense, meanwhile, is led by a political survivor named Sergei Shoigu, who has managed to stay in the Kremlin in one capacity or another since 1991. Shoigu never served in the Soviet or Russian military, yet affects the dress and mannerisms of a martinet.
Prigozhin and Shoigu, both personally close to Putin, have good reason to hate each other. Shoigu’s forces have been humiliated in Ukraine, shown up both by the Ukrainians and by Prigozhin’s mercenaries (a point Prigozhin hammers home every chance he gets). Prigozhin claims that Shoigu has withheld ammunition and supplies from Wagner, which is probably true; a defense minister is going to take care of his own forceto displace Shoigu or move up somehow in the Moscow power structure. But Shoigu is no rookie, and a Russian Defense Ministry edict was about to go into force requiring all mercenaries to sign up with the Russian military, which would place them under Shoigu’s control.s first. The two men have a lot of bad blood between them, and Prigozhin might have been hoping to displace Shoigu or move up somehow in the Moscow power structure. But Shoigu is no rookie, and a Russian Defense Ministry edict was about to go into force requiring all mercenaries to sign up with the Russian military, which would place them under Shoigu’s control.
Read more at The Atlantic. If you can’t get past the paywall, try emptying your cache. They allow a couple of free articles.
Also from the Atlantic, by Anne Applebaum: Russia Slides Into Civil War. Is Putin facing his Czar Nicholas II moment?
The hall of mirrors that Vladimir Putin has built around himself and within his country is so complex, and so multilayered, that on the eve of a genuine insurrection in Russia, I doubt very much if the Russian president himself believed it could be real.
‘Tête-à-tête’ (1868) by Vladimir Makovsky (1846-1920)
Certainly the rest of us still can’t know, less than a day after this mutiny began, the true motives of the key players, and especially not of the central figure, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group. Prigozhin, whose fighters have taken part in brutal conflicts all over Africa and the Middle East—in Syria, Sudan, Libya, the Central African Republic—claims to command 25,000 men in Ukraine. In a statement yesterday afternoon, he accused the Russian army of killing “an enormous amount” of his mercenaries in a bombing raid on his base. Then he called for an armed rebellion, vowing to topple Russian military leaders.
Prigozhin has been lobbing insults at Russia’s military leadership for many weeks, mocking Sergei Shoigu, the Russian minister of defense, as lazy, and describing the chief of the general staff as prone to “paranoid tantrums.” Yesterday, he broke with the official narrative and directly blamed them, and their oligarch friends, for launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ukraine did not provoke Russia on February 24, he said: Instead, Russian elites had been pillaging the territories of the Donbas they’ve occupied since 2014, and became greedy for more. His message was clear: The Russian military launched a pointless war, ran it incompetently, and killed tens of thousands of Russian soldiers unnecessarily….
Up until the moment it started, when actual Wagner vehicles were spotted on the road from Ukraine to Rostov, a Russian city a couple of miles from the border (and actual Wagner soldiers were spotted buying coffee in a Rostov fast-food restaurant formerly known as McDonald’s), it seemed impossible. But once they appeared in the city—once Prigozhin posted a video of himself in the courtyard of the Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov—and once they seemed poised to take control of Voronezh, a city between Rostov and Moscow, theories began to multiply….
But the Kremlin may not have very good information either. Only a month ago, Putin was praising Prigozhin and Wagner for the “liberation” of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, after one of the longest, most drawn-out battles in modern military history. Today’s insurrection was, by contrast, better planned and executed: Bakhmut took nearly 11 months, but Prigozihin got to Rostov and Voronezh in less than 11 hours, helped along by commanders and soldiers who appeared to be waiting for him to arrive.
There’s more speculation at the link. Again, try emptying your cache to get by the paywall. I was able to get these two free articles this morning.
Some background from Max Seddon at The Financial Times: ‘He went nuts’: how Putin’s caterer served a dish of high treason.
When they first appeared in 2014 to fight covertly in Ukraine, the masked militiamen of Russia’s Wagner group epitomised how Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin had mastered a new, underhand form of warfare.
‘Girl In Front of a Mirror’ (1848) by Filipp Budkin (1806-1850)
But after Wagner paramilitaries took control of at least one Russian city on Saturday and began a “march of justice” on Moscow, the blowback from nine years of war in Ukraine threatened the very foundations of Putin’s state — with a problem of his own making.
After months of lurid public infighting, the conflict between Yevgeny Prigozhin’s paramilitaries and the Russian defence ministry has boiled over into the first coup attempt in Russia in three decades.
Although Putin appeared shocked by his former caterer Prigozhin’s “treason” during a stern five-minute address to the nation, the chaos indicated how years of covert warfare, poor governance and corruption had created the greatest threat to his rule in 24 years….
The roots of Prigozhin’s revolt date back to 2014 when Prigozhin set up Wagner as a way for Russia to disguise its involvement in a slow-burning war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. The group helped keep eastern Ukraine under Russian proxy control and, as its mission expanded, gave Russia plausible deniability for sorties as far away as Syria and Mozambique.
Seddon provides quite a bit more background on the conflict between Prigozhin and Putin. Read that at the link if you’re interested. On what’s happening now, Seddon writes:
The exact circumstances leading to the uprising remain unclear. One person close to the FSB said Russia’s security forces had spent the past several days preparing for some kind of assault, suggesting Prigozhin had learnt of the plan and had decided to go out all guns blazing. “This isn’t out of nowhere and it didn’t come as a surprise,” the person said.
Another former senior Kremlin official said the conflict with the army had driven Prigozhin — a former criminal who is said to revel in publicly executing deserters — to even further extremes.
“He went nuts, flew into a rage and went too far. He added too much salt and pepper,” the former official said. “What else do you expect from a chef?”
An important trigger for Prigozhin’s uprising appears to have been Putin’s decision to back the defence ministry’s attempts to bring Wagner to heel.
Read more insights on Prigozhin’s state of mind at The Financial Times.
‘Morning Tea’ by Vladimir Makovsky (1846-1920)
Yaroslav Trofimov at The Wall Street Journal writes about what’s happening now: Russia’s Putin Orders Military to Crush Wagner Power Grab, Calls It Treason.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Saturday he ordered his military to act against the Wagner paramilitary group that seized the southern Russian city of Rostov, describing its actions as treason that put the country’s survival in peril.
As Wagner columns moved toward Moscow Saturday, they were attacked by Russian aircraft in the Voronezh region, some 300 miles south of the capital. Videos from the area showed the city of Voronezh’s main fuel depot ablaze, a Ka-52 helicopter destroying a vehicle, and another helicopter narrowly escaping a Wagner antiaircraft missile. A Russian plane was also shot down.
The crisis unfolding in Russia represents the most serious challenge to Putin’s 23-year rule—a direct consequence of the strains put on Russian society and armed forces by the war that he unleashed against Ukraine in February last year.
If the Wagner insurrection isn’t put down swiftly, the strife could significantly undermine Russia’s front-line troops in Ukraine just as Kyiv carries out a Western-backed offensive to reclaim occupied lands. The uprising exposes the fault lines that have already emerged in Russian society and challenges Putin’s strategy of waging a long war against Ukraine in the hopes that Western political will to support Kyiv would eventually collapse.
Wagner troops, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, earlier in the day took over the main military headquarters for southern Russia, in Rostov, and other installations there, encountering virtually no resistance from the regular armed forces. After that, Wagner sent columns of troops northward toward Moscow, as the Russian army rushed to cut off highways and defend the capital city. Moving past Voronezh, Wagner’s tanks and troop carriers were seen by Saturday lunchtime crossing the Lipetsk region, where authorities called on residents to remain indoors.
While Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the Russian president remained in the Kremlin, flight-monitoring services showed that at least two special flight-squadron aircraft used by Russia’s top leadership left the capital for St. Petersburg on Saturday. Russian troops started preparing fortifications on approaches to Moscow.
Read more at the WSJ. I didn’t encounter a paywall when I used the link at Memeorandum.
‘Her Favorite’ (1905) by Nikolai Bodarevsky (1850-1921)
The Guardian is posting live updates here.
2 hours ago:
The governor of Russia’s Lipetsk province says the Wagner mercenary group has entered the region, AP reports.
The Lipetsk region is about 360km (225 miles) south of Moscow and much closer to the capital than Rostov-on-Don, where Wagner forces appeared during the night.
3 minutes ago:
The Moscow region has suspended mass events outdoors and at educational institutions until 1 July, authorities have announced.
This follows the mayor of Moscow urging residents to refrain from travelling around the capital.
31 minutes ago:
Former Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, said on Saturday that Russia will not allow the Wagner mutiny led by Yevgeny Prigozhin to turn into a coup or a global crisis, Russia’s state news agency TASS reports.
Answering questions from journalists, Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, said the whole world would be on the brink of catastrophe if Russian nuclear weapons fell into the hands of Wagner.
“The history of mankind hasn’t yet seen the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons under control by bandits,” Medvedev said. “Such a crisis will not be limited by just one country’s borders, the world will be put on the brink of destruction.”
He added: “We won’t allow such a turn of events.”
The New York Times is also providing live updates here.
I’m going to end there and get this posted. This could get even more interesting.
Finally Friday Reads: Of Harpies, Hags, and Magical Vaginas
Posted: June 23, 2023 Filed under: just because | Tags: @repeat1968, Amy Coney Barrett, anti abortion rights legislation, Corrupt Supreme Court Justices, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, John Buss, Randy Rainbow, Samuel Alito 23 Comments
Harpy. A hybrid monster formed of a vulture with the head (and sometimes the torso) of a woman.
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
We’re all aware of the ongoing chaos created by the U.S. Supreme Court and its many unprecedented decisions. The majority of people have no confidence in them. ProPublica has shown how corrupt many are, having been bribed and brought in as pets to right-wing billionaires active in the Federal Society. We can see the blood on their hands just one year after their bizarre decision with Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade. They’re clearly paid henchmen to rid their overlords of inconvenient people.
We’ve recently determined that many men in Congress and state legislatures creating this legislature don’t even understand women’s bodies or reproduction. Yet, here they are, inflicting us with the Middle-Age religious ideology of the Dark Ages. This article from the Guardian is 8 years old but still stands up, as evidenced by the chaos and ignorance that rules the Dobbs Decision. “Women’s bodies can’t perform magic. Someone, please tell Republicans. One congressman this week thought that if women swallow pills, they end up in their vaginas. The GOP still knows nothing about female anatomy.” This was written by Jessica Valenti.
Do Republican men think women are mythical creatures, like unicorns or fairies? It’s the only explanation I can come up with to make sense of the party’s continued insistence that women’s bodies can perform feats of absolute magic.
On Monday, during testimony on a state bill that would ban doctors from using telemedicine to prescribe abortion pills, Idaho Republican Rep Vito Barbieri asked a testifying physician if pregnant women could swallow small cameras so that doctors could “determine what the situation is”.
Dr Julie Madsen – who I imagine must have been suppressing the eyeroll of a lifetime – responded that it couldn’t be done because “when you swallow a pill it would not end up in the vagina.”
Barbieri now says the question was a rhetorical one (that’s the ticket!) but his gaffe reminds us all about just how little Republicans understand about women’s bodies. Though, again, I’m honored that they think we hold such awesome abilities. After all, who could forget then-Rep Todd Akin’s assertion that women who were “legitimately” raped would not get pregnant because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Like a superpower! Or Rush Limbaugh’s belief that women’s bodies are so all-powerful that we actually require a birth control pill every time we have sex to keep from getting pregnant. But it doesn’t stop there.
Conservatives apparently also think that women are so magic as to almost be immortal – you see, they don’t believe that abortion are ever necessary to save a woman’s life or protect her health. They’re so sure of this, in fact, that they’ve been willing to bet our lives on it. It was just four years ago that House Republicans proposed to pass a bill that would have made it legal for hospitals to deny life-saving abortions to women who needed them and even deny them transfer to another hospital willing to perform the procedure. Maybe they just think we have nine lives?
Republicans must think we’re magic – how else do they think we can possibly have all these kids (since we’re not supposed to need or want or get abortions) with no paid maternity leave, no subsidized child care, no livable minimum wage and a culture that thinks we’re supposed to grin and bear it?
Shockingly, all the fairy tale tales conservatives have told themselves about women’s bodies and abilities hasn’t done the Republicans any favors around election time. And despite trainings for Republican candidates to learn how to talk about gender without saying something idiotic about rape or vaginas, Republican men continue to think stupid things about women and women continue to not vote for them.
So please, keep it up, guys. Talk more about what our vaginas can do, or how getting pregnant after rape is a “gift from god”. The more we watch as men who lack basic knowledge of biology and the human reproductive system make laws about what we can do with our own bodies, the more I believe that maybe women really are magic. We take care of our families as Republicans insist we’re “strong” enough to do with less. We battle back against archaic laws and dinosaur politicians. We do things a lot more impressive than swallowing a pill and having it migrate to our vaginas. That’s just weird.
Dracopopodis, from “Historia animalium” by Konrad Gesner, 1551/1558
So now, knowledge about women’s reproductive systems cannot be taught in Medical School or practiced even in extreme emergencies. This is from The New Republic and is written by Tori Otten. “Ob-Gyns Say More People Are Dying Since Dobbs Overturned Right to Abortion. A new KFF poll finds health professionals are incredibly concerned about the restrictions on abortion.”
Health professionals say that maternal mortality has skyrocketed in the year since Roe v. Wade was overturned, a new survey from KFF found, a sign of how harmful abortion bans are.
The Supreme Court rattled the country when it rolled back the nationwide right to abortion on June 24, 2022. In the year since then, Republican-led states have cracked down on abortion access, imposing confusing restrictions or outright bans on the procedure. Many in the GOP argue that they are not limiting access to medically necessary procedures, but instead are saving lives.
KFF surveyed nearly 600 ob-gyns nationwide from March to May, and found that 68 percent say the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision worsened their ability to respond to pregnancy-related emergencies. The survey also found that 64 percent of ob-gyns “believe that the Dobbs decision has worsened pregnancy-related mortality” and 70 percent believe the ruling increased racial and ethnic inequities in maternal health.
Three old hags surround a basket of newborn babies with bats in the distance. Etching by F. Goya, 1796/98.
What’s the response of Republican candidates for the Presidency? Well, Mike Pence takes it to infinity and beyond. This is from Politico Playbook: “Mike Pence’s plan to go further on abortion.” How farther can this go?
PENCE LEANS IN ON ABORTION POLITICS — Tomorrow marks one year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, revoking the constitutional right to abortion it established. And ever since, Republicans have been twisting themselves in knots over how to handle the fallout.
Trump avoids talking about the matter almost entirely. Florida Gov. RON DeSANTIS signed a six-week abortion ban in the middle of the night in April and has barely spoken about it since. Sen. TIM SCOTT (R-S.C.) originally waffled on whether he’d support a nationwide abortion ban. And former South Carolina Gov. NIKKI HALEY has been vague about how she’d handle the issue as president.
Then there’s MIKE PENCE.
More than any other Republican candidate, the former VP has staked his pitch to voters on his unabashed restrictionist stance.
While some Republicans — including Trump and former New Jersey Gov. CHRIS CHRISTIE — say that in a post-Roe America, abortion policy should be left up to the states, Pence has endorsed a nationwide ban on the medical procedure at 15 weeks of gestation.
While some Republicans say the party shouldn’t weigh in on banning widely used abortion drugs, Pence’s 501(c)(4) group Advancing American Freedom has filed an amicus brief supporting a challenge to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, the most widely used abortion pill.
And this weekend, while Pence will be among a parade of 2024 hopefuls addressing evangelical conservatives at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference in Washington (more on that below), he is the only candidate who’ll also speak at the Students for Life rally on the National Mall, in addition to being the only candidate invited to address a nationwide Susan B. Anthony List call for activists commemorating the end of Roe.
Yesterday, we caught up with Pence to talk about the one-year anniversary of the Dobbs ruling. We wanted to know how he squares his own position with the political reality that abortion restrictions are consistently unpopular in polls and whether he’s worried that opposition will blow back on him and the GOP at the ballot box.
The upshot: not a bit. And he thinks Republican candidates need to stop running scared from the issue and embrace it head on. Listen to excerpts in Playbook Daily Briefing
HOW PENCE SEES IT: The GOP, Pence said, faces a choice, “whether or not we’re going to continue to be a party grounded in the conservative principles that have won not only the White House, but won majorities over the last 50 years again and again — or whether our party is going to shy away from those core traditional principles.”
As for him? “For me, for our campaign, we’re going to stand where we’ve always stood, and that is stand without apology for the right to life,” he said.
In our interview, Pence flatly rejected the conventional wisdom in Washington that Republicans suffered in the midterms because of Dobbs blowback. Those who lost, he said, had a “common denominator” that “has not to do with the issue of abortion.”
“Rather, where candidates were focused on the past — focused on relitigating the past — we did not fare well,” Pence said, a veiled reference to Republicans parroting the false claim that Trump won the 2020 election.
PENCE VS. THE FIELD: His unabashed stance on abortion is one way Pence differentiates himself from the rest of the GOP’s 2024 field. And he’s certainly not shy about drawing that contrast, particularly vis-a-vis Trump.
Winged Sphinx
Most Democratic strategists see this as a winning discussion, given current polling on the types of people likely to vote in the General Election. This is from NBC News. “Poll: 61% of voters disapprove of Supreme Court decision overturning Roe. On the anniversary of the Dobbs decision, 53% say abortion access nationwide has become too difficult, a new NBC News poll finds.”
On the anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, 6 in 10 voters remain opposed to the court’s removing federal protection of the right to abortion, according to results from a new national NBC News poll.
Nearly 80% of female voters ages 18-49, two-thirds of suburban women, 60% of independents and even a third of Republican voters say they disapprove.
Women have no desire to be the property of politicians, let alone the crazy ones cited in the Guardian article who can’t even figure out their reproductive systems.
And, again, let’s state that all of this is because of a group of “corrupt and shady” SCOTUS appointees who all happen to be Republican so far. Alito, Grand Inquisitor of the Dobbs Debacle, is turning out to be corrupt, arrogant, and still thoroughly repulsive.
A harpy in Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum Historia, Bologna, 1642.
If you haven’t read about all the free fishing trips Alito got already, Joyce Vance’s substack is an excellent place to go.
You should read the full piece in ProPublica for yourself, but it’s lengthy, so we’ll hit the high notes here tonight in case you need to save it for the weekend. Suffice it to say, this reporting dramatically increases concerns about the Court’s legitimacy. My friend and colleague Barb McQuade put it best: “Pro tip: If you’re a Supreme Court justice, don’t take free trips, even when the seat on the billionaire’s private plane would ‘otherwise go unoccupied.’ Normal people don’t get free fishing trips to Alaska. It is not your winning personality that makes you different.”
And now, for the next entry in the most corrupt SCOTUS evah! Wait that would be Clarence Thomas. He’s been at the grifting game a long time. However, even this newbie might catch up. This is from the Salon Link below.
This is reported by Tatyana Tandanpolie. This is actually a twofer. Two hyper-zealots with a need for a good life and a crusader’s need for blood.
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has personal ties to a leader of the legal clinic under the Notre Dame initiative that funded Justice Samuel Alito’s July 2022 speaking trip to Rome, CNN reports.
Just months after she was sworn in at the Supreme Court in 2020, Barrett, who had left her judgeship and job as a Notre Dame law professor, sold her private home in South Bend, Indiana, to a recently hired Notre Dame professor who was assuming a leadership role at the Religious Liberty Initiative, according to records discovered by the left-leaning non-profit watchdog group Accountable.US.
The initiative’s legal clinic has curried favor with the Supreme Court since its founding in 2020 and filed at least nine “friend-of-the-court” amicus briefs in religious liberty cases before the Court. Alito joined the majority in deciding in favor of the initiative’s conservative positions in several of those cases, including the one that reversed Roe v. Wade, and others on issues of school prayer and COVID-19 restrictions on churches.
Neither Barrett’s real estate transaction nor Alito’s trip to Italy to deliver a keynote at a gala violated the court’s ethics rules, several experts told CNN.
“It raises a question – not so much of corruption as such, but of whether disclosures, our current system of disclosures, is adequate to the task,” Kathleen Clark, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis Law School who specializes in government ethics, told the outlet.
Barrett sold the home to Brendan Wilson, then a Washington D.C.-based lawyer, for $905,000, a transaction that she was not required to disclose on her annual financial forms. Federal regulations exclude sales of the “personal residence of the filer and the filer’s spouse” from financial matters judges are mandated to disclose.
I don’t think Republicans know what “public service” is supposed to be about. They seem to believe that the public should service them, and then they become overlords of the public’s access to civil liberties. All of this is funded by billionaire nutters and actual taxpayers.
Okay, I just couldn’t resist posting this. Tech Dudes and the Maga Hags go at it big time. I guess infighting among the enemy is a good sport. Oh, to be a fly around the Supreme Court Building now. I could use a little bit of Alito v Thomas right now fighting for the belt of least guilty amongst us.
Have a great weekend!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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