Mostly Monday Reads: Republican Culture Wars and Greed threaten democracy

@Repeat1968 has high expectations for the Foghorn/Leghorn performance artist in the Senate from the Gret State of Lousyana. Oh, wait!

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Wow!  The Monday news streams show just how out of whack things have gotten.  Corruption and Theocratic Fascism are just out-of-control at all levels of government.   Today’s corruption story goes right to the heart of my expertise and that of my youngest daughter, who works the derivatives market daily for an investment company.  Not many knew that an obscure pipeline in Virginia was at the heart of the recent Budget/Debt negotiations. It came out of the blue for just about everyone but insiders to the deal itself.

This is from Forbes.  Somebody knew something when no one else did and went long on the stock of Equitrans Midstream Corp. This is probably a company that anyone that doesn’t closely follow the oil and gas industry would’ve never heard about. “Debt-ceiling deal wildly profitable for mystery trader, raising suspicions of insider trading.” 

On Wall Street, analysts had mostly expected vague promises on energy permits to be included in a bill to raise the US debt ceiling. Yet, options trading suggests something bigger may have been in the offing.

On May 24 — several days before an agreement was announced — a huge bullish bet was made on Equitrans Midstream Corp., data compiled by Bloomberg show. The company is deeply involved in the long-delayed Mountain Valley Pipeline. The wager involved snapping up 100,000 call options on the firm’s stock.

It proved prescient and wildly profitable within just a few days.

On May 27, White House and Republican lawmakers reached a deal that would give the long-delayed Mountain Valley Pipeline the final approvals needed to complete the project.

Throughout April and much of May, negotiators from the White House and Congress went back and forth on broad-stroke parameters of an agreement. Almost until the very end, the details were closely held and in flux. Doubts lingered over whether a deal would be reached before the US was scheduled to run out of money in early June.

The legislation, which was signed into law by President Joe Biden on Saturday, forced action on permits for the project. On paper, the bet appears to have earned $7.5 million through Friday. It has some asking whether more than skill and luck played a role.

“My questions are: Who’s the trader? How sophisticated are they? And what are their connections to the government?” said Donald Sherman, chief counsel at the ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. He added the bet raises the specter of whether the parameters of the debt deal had somehow leaked out ahead of time.

Digging into whether a trade is improperly based on confidential information is notoriously difficult, especially when it involves market-moving news from inside the government. The rules are also rife with gray areas and ambiguities.

Officials, including members of Congress, are barred from trading on confidential information they learned in their position. But if, for example, someone overhears a Congressional staffer loudly mention a piece of information on the train, they’re likely in the clear.

There’s just so much weirdness going on in Republican-led legislation that really interferes with the civil liberties of the entire country that it’s hard to know where to start.  This shocking article is from Tessa Stuart, writing for The Rolling Stone. “The Real Reason Republicans Want to Give Tax Breaks for Embryos. “Wisconsin lawmakers are trying to “clarify” the state’s 1849 abortion ban in a bid to make the wildly unpopular and anachronistic law palatable to modern voters.”  What about all the frozen embryos stored in deep freeze?

REPUBLICANS IN THE Wisconsin legislature introduced a package of bills this week to “clarify” the state’s abortion ban, 174 years after it became law. The 1849 ban, which criminalizes abortion  in every circumstance, except to save the pregnant person’s life, went back into effect last June after 50 years of obsolescence.

It’s a deeply unpopular law: By margins of 2 to 1, voters said it should be repealed in every single county where the question was on the ballot this April. (In a statewide judicial election held the same day, the pro-choice candidate — who, it is widely assumed, will vote to strike the ban down when it is challenged at the state Supreme Court next term — won by 11 points.)

But Republicans in Wisconsin can’t seem to grasp this obvious truth. Rather than repeal the 1849 ban, as Democrats have proposed, a group of GOP lawmakers — led by 32-year old Sen. Romaine Quinn — touted a total of four bills they hope will make the pre-Civil War law more palatable to modern Wisconsinites. Included in the package is an offer that has become trendy among antiabortion ideologues: tax breaks for embryos.

LRB-2486 would allow parents to claim an exemption on their tax returns for “unborn children for whom a fetal heartbeat has been detected.” Co-sponsor Rep. Donna Rozar made the proposal’s intent crystal clear: The bill, she said, “recognizes an unborn child as a distinct human being prior to birth by allowing the child to be claimed as a dependent.” The point isn’t to support Wisconsin families — the point is to change the definition of when life begins as part of an effort to enshrine in Wisconsin law the dangerous and dehumanizing concept of “fetal personhood.”

It’s all part of an effort to extend Constitutional rights to fertilized eggs — a legal theory that simultaneously revokes the rights of the individuals carrying those pregnancies.

Wisconsin Republicans aren’t the first to try this: Georgia’s Department of Revenue announced in August “any unborn child with a detectable human heartbeat” could be claimed as a dependent on state tax returns. The representative behind Georgia’s LIFE Act, which created the tax break, later admitted in a leaked video that the credit was all part of a gambit to get the Supreme Court to recognize fetal personhood: “We’re going to take this to the highest court in the land.”

The consequences of a ruling recognizing fetal personhood are difficult to overstate: The moment that an embryo is recognized as a person with rights, virtually any behavior that poses any kind of risk to a pregnancy can be criminalized or litigated. In one infamous case, an Alabama woman was charged with manslaughter for losing her pregnancy after she was shot in the stomach by another person. (That case was dismissed after a public outcry.) In another instance, a court allowed a woman who was hit by a car while seven months pregnant to be sued by her future child for negligence because she failed to use “a designated crosswalk.”

Wisconsin Republicans apparently think bodily autonomy comes pretty cheap: the credit they’re offering is $1,000. That’s one-third of the tax break you can get in Georgia, in case you’re comparison shopping dystopian hellscapes.

Also included in the package of bills is $1 million in funding for crisis pregnancy centers, $5 million in funding to support state adoption programs, and language to clarify that the 1849 ban does not apply to “a medical procedure or treatment designed or intended to prevent the death of a pregnant woman.” Dr. Kristin Lyerly, an OB-GYN who stopped practicing in Wisconsin when the ban went into effect and a plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging the law, says the new language would do little to alleviate the burden on healthcare providers.

“Imagine if you had chest pain, and you went to the emergency department, and your doctors said, ‘Yes, I know exactly what to do to take care of you, but the Wisconsin legislature has enacted some laws that could potentially put me in jail for doing the things that I know to be medically correct, let me call a lawyer before I take care of you,’” Lyerly says. “Now replace ‘chest pain’ with ‘vaginal bleeding.’ It is exactly the same thing. Our legislature is preventing doctors from taking care of Wisconsinites, from providing evidence-based, appropriate, standard-of-care medicine, and threatening to throw us in jail.”

It remains unclear if the new proposal has sufficient support to advance through both houses of the Wisconsin legislature. A previous proposal, floated in March, that would have added exceptions for rape and incest to the 1849 law failed to advance to a vote on the Senate floor. (“Discussion on this specific proposal is unnecessary,” Republican Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu said at the time.) But there is reason to believe this proposal might be viewed differently: The most prominent anti abortion groups in the state — Wisconsin Family Action, Pro-Life Wisconsin, Wisconsin Right to Life and the Catholic Conference — all of whom opposed the rape and incest exceptions, have announced support for the package.

If Republicans in Wisconsin truly wanted to support mothers, there is an existing proposal they could throw their weight behind: a bill that would expand Medicaid coverage for new mothers for up to one year. Today, Wisconsin is one of only a handful of states that kicks new moms off of public health care coverage just 60 days after giving birth. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has repeatedly pushed for a 12-month extension — a proposal that was rejected by Republicans in the legislature twice before. But expansion is particularly critical in Wisconsin now that the 1849 law is back in effect: Multiple studies have shown that the rate of maternal mortality spikes in states with abortion bans.

“More moms die in the postpartum period than when they’re pregnant or during the time of delivery. The postpartum period is a really important time for moms to be able to get medical care,” Lyerly says. Republican lawmakers, Lyerly says, “are not making logical decisions. All of the decisions that they are making are so political and so divisive — and not in the best interests of Wisconsinites and Wisconsin families.”

Ron DeSantis is so unlikeable and failing with the press so badly, that his wife, Casey, is stepping in to make him more human.  We should have a vote-off.  Who is more lizard-like Ted Cruz or Ron? Rumor has it that Casey sees herself as Jackie O.  I wish I could stop right there, but it wouldn’t be me if I didn’t jump down that rabbit hole.  This is from The Daily Beast as opined by Katie Baker.  “Casey DeSantis Is the Walmart Melania. She’d better hope that pleather is pudding-proof.”

The First Lady of Florida showed up on the campaign trail in Iowa this weekend wearing a ghastly black leather jacket—American flag on front, an alligator and the silhouette of her state on the back, with the sneering words, “Where Woke Goes to Die”—that brought to mind nothing so much as the racks of a Red State big-bin store where it would be retailing for $24.99.

To be fair, Casey DeSantis wore the bomber to a charity biker rally and I’m sure the campaign intended it to be a viral moment, like Melania Trump’s infamous “I Really Don’t Care” coat that the former First Lady donned to check out the border crisis.

The message on Melania’s coat, like the one-time model herself, was sphinxlike. Was it a sign to the outside that Melania dreamed of escaping her boorish husband, the stuff of a thousand Resistance Twitter fever memes? Was it the physical manifestation of the Trumps’ casual cruelty? After all, Melania was flying down to where the administration locked up little kids in cages and tore them from the arms of their desperate parents. Did it mean nothing at all, like her spox insisted—maybe like Melania herself, a cipher whose eyes seem to betray an inner emptiness, like the infinite refraction of mirrored light off of all those gold-plated Trump Tower bathroom fixtures?

By contrast, Casey DeSantis’ coat is just like her husband Ron DeSantis’ campaign: Crude. Grasping. Saying the ugly part out loud. Whereas Trump would wink-wink at the fascists—who can forget his dog whistle to the “very fine people on both sides” at Charlottesville—DeSantis wants to peel off Trump’s base by being even more explicit about who he intends to target. You can see it right there on his wife’s jacket: DeSantis’ Florida is where the woke go to die—and a lot of other people die as well.

Florida under DeSantis has had one of the highest COVID death rates in the nation, even as he’s exulted in his anti-mask policies. And as the governor whips up anti-LGBT sentiment and bans books on race, Casey’s jacket and its message of death also bring to mind the horrific Pulse nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, not to mention the state’s shameful history of Jim Crow-era lynch mobs and the Rosewood massacre. But of course, DeSantis and his cronies want to prevent kids from learning about any of that by censoring their library books and AP curricula.

The jacket, then, is a warning: Watch out, America.

It’s hard to say one is reading too much into a coat that’s so explicit—and anyways, as The New York Timesnoted in a fawning profile, Casey DeSantis is definitely trying to make a political statement with what she wears, with her aspirations of “Camelot-meets-Mar-a-Lago.” But while Casey may be trying to position herself after Jackie Kennedy (good luck) and even Melania, if this weekend is any indication, she’s falling far short. It doesn’t matter how many times she wears that ice-blue Badgley Mischka cape-dress. The DeSantis’ will never be Camelot. Jackie and JFK symbolized the opposite of vulgar pettiness—they embodied youth, energy, a commitment to moral progress in the struggle for Civil Rights, a country fresh with idealism. Not an America that was obsessed with banning books about male seahorses and rainbows, or nuking the latest Disney movie.

We could also poll to see which media outlet wreaks bothersiderism all over its pages and the screen. It’s a tie between Jack Tapper’s fact-free zone interview with Nikki Haley and the New York Times’s surreal coverage.  Both will give you the icks.  Mark Jacobs, former editor of the Chicago Sun-Times characterized it thusly.

The New York Times gives Nikki Haley an embarrassing smooch today for her “reasoned manner”even though Haley blamed trans athletes for causing teen girls’ suicidal thoughts, an outrageous and fact-free accusation. 1/3 https://nytimes.com/2023/06/05/us/politics/nikki-haley-townhall-cnn.html

Suicide rates of teen girls and bi and gay children are high beyond the pale and should not be minimized or used for political fodder.  This is from a February article in the New York Times discussing the real statistics. “Teen Girls Report Record Levels of Sadness, C.D.C. Finds.  Adolescent girls reported high rates of sadness, suicidal thoughts, and sexual violence, as did teenagers who identified as gay or bisexual.”

Nearly three in five teenage girls felt persistent sadness in 2021, double the rate of boys, and one in three girls seriously considered attempting suicide, according to data released on Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The findings, based on surveys given to teenagers across the country, also showed high levels of violence, depression and suicidal thoughts among lesbian, gay and bisexual youth. More than one in five of these students reported attempting suicide in the year before the survey, the agency found.

The rates of sadness are the highest reported in a decade, reflecting a long-brewing national tragedy only made worse by the isolation and stress of the pandemic.

“I think there’s really no question what this data is telling us,” said Dr. Kathleen Ethier, head of the C.D.C.’s adolescent and school health program. “Young people are telling us that they are in crisis.”

…

But about 57 percent of girls and 69 percent of gay, lesbian or bisexual teenagers reported feeling sadness every day for at least two weeks during the previous year. And 14 percent of girls, up from 12 percent in 2011, said they had been forced to have sex at some point in their lives, as did 20 percent of gay, lesbian or bisexual adolescents.

“When we’re looking at experiences of violence, girls are experiencing almost every type of violence more than boys,” said Dr. Ethier of the C.D.C. Researchers should be studying not only the increase in reports of violence, she said, but its causes: “We need to talk about what’s happening with teenage boys that might be leading them to perpetrate sexual violence.”

The researchers also analyzed the data by race and ethnicity, finding that Black and Hispanic students were more likely to report skipping school because of concerns about violence. White students, however, were more likely to report experiencing sexual violence.

And this is the last sentence in this article. “The 2021 survey asked about students’ sexual orientation but did not ask about their gender identity, so data on risk factors for transgender students is not available.”

Haley also weasel-worded her way through drastic abortion restrictions.  This observation is from Digby.

I want to emphasize what my Ob/Gyn Dr. Daughter repeatedly tells me.  There is no such thing as abortion after the point of viability.  It’s a delivery. Successful or unsuccessful delivery depends on all kinds of factors.   Haley obviously should be fact-checked, and I find none of this even slightly reasonable.  So, I’ll just give the Bronx Cheer to  Jack Tapper for not ‘veering into fact check-in’ and the New York Times’s Trip Gabriel for finding anything she said ‘reasonable’.

The Tennesee anti-choice law took the fertility of one woman last week.  “Tennessee mother forced to undergo emergency hysterectomy after being denied life-saving abortion.  Mayron Hollis was desperate to have a life-saving abortion. But due to Tennessee’s abortion laws, doctors feared they would end up in prison if they carried out the procedure”  This is from The Guardian. 

A Tennessee woman has been left infertile after being forced to undergo an emergency hysterectomy when doctors refused her an abortion.

Mayron Hollis, 32, learned she was pregnant soon after giving birth to her first daughter Zoe in February last year.

But her excitement at becoming a mother again soon turned into a battle for survival when she said she was denied a medically necessary abortion by doctors in the state after Roe vs Wade was overturned.

According to ProPublica, obsetricians at Vanderbilt University Medical Center grew concerned last August when she was eleven weeks pregnant after the embryo became implanted in scar tissue from the birth of her first child by caesarean section.

They feared that the ectopic pregnancy could rupture her uterus at any moment, which could lead to excessive bleeding and even death, according to the National Institute of Health.

But on the day of her treatment, 24 August last year, Tennessee was hours away from enacting one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, which would see any doctor who terminated a pregnancy imprisoned for up to 15 years.

The trigger ban automatically went into effect after women’s federally protected abortion rights were overturned by the Supreme Court last June.

Ms Hollis told ABC News that doctors did not explain to her prior to 24 August that she only had a narrow window to receive the life-saving abortion.

A lack of clarity from the state lawmakers who passed the bill meant that doctors, institutions and even criminal attorneys were unsure if the abortion might end up in a prosecution, ProPublica reported.

We’ve found a lot of Democratic candidates that don’t seem to fit their party affiliation recently.  They generally get a lot of attention from Republicans, and that’s your first warning.  Tech Weirdos Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk have jumped on the RFK jr campaign bus. Seems they all love Bitcoin and hate vaccines. It’s a weird news day when I keep having to quote from Fortune.  Here’s one from The Daily Beast too.

Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey has endorsed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for president, posting video of a Fox News segment with anchor Harris Faulkner from last week in which the 2024 candidate said he could beat the top contenders in the race. The videoshows Kennedy claiming that internal polling reveals that he is “stronger against both the Republican candidates than Joe Biden.” It was reposted on Twitter by Dorsey with the comment: “He can and will.” When questioned by a Twitter user if Dorsey was endorsing or simply predicting the Democrat’s win, Dorsey replied, “Both.” He claimed RFK Jr.’s voice—Kennedy has a lifelong neurological disorder called spasmodic dysphonia that affects the voice and speech—was his “super power and set him apart.” Dorsey agreed with another Twitter user that the Democratic National Committee “would never allow” RFK Jr. to win the nomination but argued: “True but they seem to be more irrelevant by the day,” while adding “all the more reason” to back him as candidate. Kennedy is set to appear in a Twitter Spaces chat Monday with Elon Musk. Dorsey replied at the time of Musk’s invitation: “This would be great.”

I’m not sure how much I can take of this. But this is some expected news.  No profit-seeking corporation wants to be associated with the trash Elon Musk keeps bringing to the Twitter Party.   Again, from the New York Times. “Twitter’s U.S. Ad Sales Plunge 59% as Woes Continue .”

Twitter’s ad sales staff is concerned that advertisers may be spooked by a rise in hate speech and pornography on the social network, as well as more ads featuring online gambling and marijuana products, the people said. The company has forecast that its U.S. ad revenue this month will be down at least 56 percent each week compared with a year ago, according to one internal document.

I just find it extremely hard to use now.  It also freezes continually. It’s basically gone back to AOL 1990s style.

Well, today, I will celebrate Pride Month with virtual Mike Pence.  I’ll also spend time wondering how I managed to fit both my daughters into one blog post. I will mention I worry seriously about the U.S.A. my two granddaughters will inherit from us.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?