Mostly Monday Reads

Posted: October 24, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , , , | 25 Comments

Good Day Sky Dancers!

It’s a strange day in this country when I’m tweeting Bill Kristol quoting Liz Cheney. But here we are. Your vote really counts more than ever. Be sure you have a plan and means to do it!

This sticker is one of my favorites on my file cabinet of stickers by my desk. I have voted yet, but I will walk up Poland Avenue to the old fire station to vote as I usually do. The poll workers there know that I dedicate my vote to my Grandmothers, who could not vote until they were well into their 30s. I believe these wonderful ladies are there because they grew up when voting black meant Jim Crow laws stopped their parents and grandparents.

I’ve never felt closer to being disenfranchised as I do now. New Orleans has been a safe place to exercise all your rights, but Louisiana is quick to halt that. Nothing was more dismaying to me than passing the uptown Women’s Health Center closed down tight.  We cannot take anything for granted anymore.

Vote like your life depends on it because it does!

And nothing says KKK-style voter suppression than this tweet from a Navy Veteran with his grandson asleep in the back seat.

More oldies but goodies from my desk and file cabinet to you!!

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk, sermon, and prayer and saving my life and yours …

This is from Bob Woodward and the Washington Post: “The Trump Tapes: 20 interviews that show why he is an unparalleled danger.”  It’s about what’s at stake. I may not be able to listen to that sing-songy fountain of ignorance, but I will read the transcripts.

In more than 50 years of reporting, I have never disclosed the raw interviews or full transcripts of my work. But after listening again to the 20 interviews I conducted with President Donald Trump during his last year as chief executive, I have decided to take the unusual step of releasing them. I was struck by how Trump pounded in my ears in a way the printed page cannot capture.

In their totality, these interviews offer an unvarnished portrait of Trump. You hear Trump in his own words, in his own voice, during one of the most consequential years in American history: amid Trump’s first impeachment, the coronavirus pandemic and large racial justice protests.

Much has been written about that period, including by me. But “The Trump Tapes,” my forthcoming audiobook of our interviews, is central to understanding Trump as he is poised to seek the presidency again. We spoke in person in the Oval Office and at Mar-a-Lago, as well as on the phone at varying hours of the day. You cannot separate Trump from his voice.

In the summer of 2020, for example, when the pandemic had killed 140,000 people in the United States, Trump told me: “The virus came along. That’s not my fault. That’s China’s fault.”

Voting all the way down the ticket has never been more critical. My mother’s home state of Missouri shows why. This is from the Springfield News-Leader, written by Nurse Trudy Busch Valentine: “Missouri’s extreme abortion ban is un-American.”

As a nurse, I have helped care for people during the most difficult moments of their lives, including women who had just lost pregnancies. But no matter whose bedside I was at, I knew that every patient deserved the same fundamental thing: the freedom to make their own private health care decisions, including decisions about abortion and birth control.

Tragically, here in Missouri, women and families no longer have that freedom. Just six minutes after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Eric Schmitt became the country’s first attorney general to trigger a near-total abortion ban. Missouri’s law is so extreme that it mandates women and girls who become pregnant through rape or incest stay pregnant. That kind of government overreach is un-American and a violation of all Missourians’ right to privacy and freedom.

As a nurse, mother, and grandmother, I know no one chooses to terminate a pregnancy lightly. It is a heartbreaking and personal decision made with no good alternative: rape survivors recovering from trauma, women with pregnancies that could kill them, and families devastated with news that the fetus is not viable. These are people who deserve privacy and compassion during a gut-wrenching, emotional process. The last thing they and their doctors need is fewer choices, the threat of prosecution, and politicians mandating their health care options. And we must remember Schmitt’s extreme abortion ban especially hurts those among us who have the least — people who can’t afford to take off work and who don’t have resources to get to another state.

If politicians like Eric Schmitt can take away our basic freedom to control our own bodies, what right comes next? Do we want to live in a world where politicians can reach into our private lives and dictate our most private decisions?

Women lined up to vote for the first time in New York after the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Underwood Archives/Getty Images

Florida is another state where rights are disappearing daily. This is from The Daily Beast. “Florida Puts Raging MAGA Moms on Book-Banning Council.”

In the name of “curriculum transparency,” Florida’s Republican-controlled state government has appointed several anti-gay and anti-mask conspiracy theorists to take charge of a new effort at public schools: banning books.

This hastily assembled censorship council—tasked with retraining public school librarians to abide by new restrictions—is the latest ploy in Gov. Ron DeSantis’ crusade to upend the state’s education system.

But the council was also staffed under suspicious circumstances, with the state Education Department ignoring its own call for official candidates from local school districts and instead filling most of the slots with right-wing activists who have a history of proposing book bans. One was even nominated by a religious activist with close ties to the DeSantis administration a week before the department publicly called for candidates, according to government emails, hinting at secret coordination between them.

“It calls into question the process that the Florida State Board of Education is trying to implement. It raises significant transparency questions,” said Megan Uzzell at Democracy Forward, which obtained those government emails.

While the “parent workgroup” is only getting started, the Education Department’s recent meeting in Orlando last week revealed how the state is positioning itself to spread those controls from school libraries to teachers’ classrooms.

As the meeting ended, Clinton McCkracken, the head of the Orange County teachers union, made a comment to another parent: “I don’t know what to tell my teachers.”

The recent episode began with an Aug. 12 memo from Education Department senior chancellor Jacob Oliva. The memo called for local school districts to nominate “parents of students in K-12 schools for representation on a workgroup”—one charged with creating mandatory “training” that would guide librarians statewide on how to follow new library censorship rules signed into law by Gov. DeSantis earlier this year. School districts had a week to submit the names of qualified nominees.

The Education Department passed on nearly 100 potentially qualified applicants with relevant experience, records show. In Brevard County alone, it ignored the five submissions made by the bipartisan local school board, including the nomination of a former elementary school assistant principal, the director of Eastern Florida State College’s tutoring centers, and the administrator of a local scholarship fund.

One of the worst Republican Candidates in the country is undoubtedly Doug Mastriano “How did Doug Mastriano publish a PhD-earning thesis that critics allege is full of problems? Critics argue Doug Mastriano received a Ph.D. from the University of New Brunswick under questionable circumstances. The school recently opened an independent review, years after academics began flagging his doctorate-earning thesis; Johanna Chisholm investigates.”

The following two stories are from The Independent.

And it’s not just Mr Mastriano’s work as a historian that’s been called out for allegedly moulding narratives to fit his own personal – and political – persuasions. His pursuit of righting the academic history of Sgt York seemed to presage his own race for the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion.

In the months before and after announcing his candidacy for governor, the GOP hopeful has acted as a megaphone for spreading Donald Trump’s Big Lie, taken to social media to amplify QAnon conspiracy theories and dispersed misinformation about Covid-19 all while sitting as an elected official in Pennsylvania.

Should he win in the November midterms, the election-denying candidate has indicated he also plans to upset the very democratic process that made him a state senator.

 

You may follow live updates on the Trump Crime Organization Trial today. “Trump news – live: Trump Organization trial begins as ex-president rails against ‘puppet for China’ McConnell.  Ex-president faces increasing legal pressure on multiple fronts.”

 

Donald Trump’s business, the Trump Organization, will face trial in New York today on allegations that it helped executives avoid income taxes on their pay. The trial is part of the same case that has ensnared the organization’s CFO, longtime Trump associate Allen Weisselberg.

The trial comes just after he was officially subpoenaed by the January 6 select committee. The former president has been given until 4 November to provide the committee with documents, and it is aiming to take “one or more days of deposition testimony” circa 14 November.

Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney has vowed she will not let him turn his testimony into a “circus”.

Meanwhile, Mr Trump has railed against his favourite target Mitch McConnell, calling the Senate minority leader “old crow” and accusing him of being a “puppet” for China.

I just want them all to go away!  Trump needs to be locked up in a place for the criminally insane, along with most of his followers!

Just Vote them into obscurity!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

 

 

Thursday Reads: Elections are Coming!

Posted: October 20, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , | 21 Comments

Katsushika Hokusai, Peasants in Autumn, 1835-1836, Guimet Museum, Paris, France.

Good Day Sky Dancers!

You have to give Joe Biden credit.  He’s trying to offset the global inflation caused mostly by the remanents of the pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and now the revival of OPEC supply fixing mainly by the Saudis.  Given their actions, you’d almost think the Saudis and the Russians would prefer another US President. Oil companies aren’t helping either. There is usually a fairly constant profit margin between the price of a barrel of oil and the bottom line of U.S. Oil Companies.  Profits appear to be untethered to the basic costs of raw materials. These things are beyond the control of most governments, and if you check current inflation rates in our trading partners, our inflation rate is average.

Joe is trying to stave off a movement towards voting Republican before the midterms, and with good reason.  First, the Republicans are pushing their usual false narrative on oil prices and production. Yesterday, Biden introduced several initiatives along with some facts on oil production. I doubt the Faux news crowd will listen, but it’s squarely aimed at moderate Republicans and independents.

Earlier this year, because of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the price of oil and gas increased dramatically, and I acted decisively at the time.  And thanks in part to those actions, the price of our gas has fallen 30 percent from the summer highs.

Now it’s down about $1.15 a gallon from their peak during the summer, and gas prices have fallen every day in the last week.  Let me repeat: Gas prices have come down, and they continue to come down again.  They’re now down more than 27 cents a gallon in Wisconsin this past week, 27 cents in Oregon, 16 cents in Ohio, 25 cents in Nevada, 17 cents in — in Indiana in just the last 10 days.  And that’s progress.

But they’re not falling fast enough.  Families are hurting.  You’ve heard me say before, but I get it.  I come from a family — if the price of gasoline went up at the gas station, we felt it.  Gas prices hit almost every family in this country, and they squeeze their family budgets.

And when the price of gas goes up, other expenses get cut. That’s why I have been doing everything in my power to reduce gas prices since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine caused these price hikes — these prices to spike and rattled international oil markets.  (Clears throat.)  Excuse me.

I focused on how we can protect American families from that spike and give folks just a little bit of breathing room, as my dad would say.

Today I’m announcing three critical steps that my administration will take to reduce gas prices at the pump.  First, the Department of Energy will release another 15 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, extending our previously announced release through the month of December.

Independent analysis they — excuse me, independent analysts have confirmed that drawdowns from the reserves so far have played a big role in bringing down oil prices — bringing them down.  So, we’re going to continue to responsibly use that national asset.

Right now, the Strategic Pol- — the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is more than half full, with about 400 million barrels of oil.  That’s more than enough for any emergency drawdown.

Claude Monet, Autumn on the Seine at Argenteuil, 1873, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, USA.

The impact may not be immediately felt, and the Saudis could act to offset it by withdrawing more oil from the market. But it certainly is worth a try. Forbes Magazine has some analysis and stylized facts you may want to review. “Oil Inventories Worldwide And Oil Price Trends – Where Do We Stand In Q4 2022?” The analysis explains how the combined forces of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine joined to create this global situation.  It also shows how we should come out of this if OPEC doesn’t collude to lower production and increase prices like it did during the Carter years.

The EIA forecasts an oil price of $93/b in Q4 2022 and $95/b in 2023. The EIA’s forecast projects a supply-demand parity midway through 2023, which it predicts will last for the rest of the year.

At the beginning of the pandemic, consumption was approximately five million barrels lower than the supply. The EIA’s report projects consumption only slightly below production for 2022, at 99.55 million barrels and 100.03 barrels, respectively.

However, it shows a slight reversal of this balance in 2023. The agency forecasts consumption of 101.50 million barrels and production of 101.28 million barrels for 2023.

This means the Biden initiative could speed up parity.  How will oil companies respond?

Secondly, we need to responsibly increase American oil production without delaying or deferring our transition to clean energy.  Let me — let’s debunk some myths here.  My administration has not stopped or slowed U.S. oil production; quite the opposite.  We’re producing 12 million barrels of oil per day.  And by the end of this year, we will be producing 1 million barrels a day, more than the day in which I took office.  In fact, we’re on track for record oil production in 2023.

And today, the United States is the largest producer of oil and petroleum products in the world.  We export more than we import.  And I still heard from oil comp- — and I’ve heard from oil companies that they’re worried that investing in additional oil production today will — will — in case of the — in case demand goes down in the future, and they’re not going to be able to sell their oil products at a competitive price later.

Well, we have a solution for that.  Today, I’m announcing a plan to refill the Strato- — the Strategic Petroleum Res- — Oil Reserve in the years ahead at a profit for taxpayers.  The United States government is going to purchase oil to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve when prices fall to $70 a barrel.  And that means oil companies can invest to ramp up production now, with confidence they’ll be able to sell their oil to us at that price in the future: $70.

Refining and refilling the reserve at $70 a barrel is a good price for companies and it’s a good price for the taxpayers, and it’s critical to our national security.

To put it in context, since March, the average price of oil has been more than $90 a barrel, the highest since 2014.  By selling from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve at the higher price of $90 earlier this year and then refilling it in the future at a lower price, around $70, it will actually make money for the taxpayers, lower the price of gas, and help bolster production, all while totally consistent with my commitment to accelerate to transition to clean energy.

So my message to oil companies is: You’re sittng on record profits, and you’re — and we’re giving you more certainty.  So you can act now to increase oil production now.

Pierre Bonnard, Autumn View, 1912

Biden also focused on Abortion rights in a speech on Tuesday. This is from CNN. “Biden promises abortion rights law as Democrats try to rally voters.”  More stories of women with pregnancies going wrong in states where abortion is illegal are reaching the press. These stories show how the Republican goal of restricting abortion in all states puts women’s lives in danger.

 

President Joe Biden on Tuesday made a major promise on a push to put abortion rights into law as his party looks to seize on the politically divisive issue in the final push ahead of the midterm elections.

At an abortion-rights-focused speech at a Democratic National Committee event on Tuesday, Biden said that if Democrats elect more senators and keep control of the House in the midterms then he’d make abortion a top issue.

“The court got Roe right nearly 50 years ago and I believe the Congress should codify Roe, once and for all,” Biden said.

He then implored voters to elect more Democrats in order to make sure that bill could pass.

“If we do that, here’s the promise I make to you and the American people: The first bill I will send to the Congress will be to codify Roe v. Wade. And when Congress passes it, I’ll sign it in January, 50 years after Roe was first decided the law of the land,” Biden added.

Dating back to the 2020 campaign, Biden has called for codifying Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed a federal constitutional right to abortion. The Supreme Court overturned it earlier this year, transforming access to reproductive health care in the country. It is unclear how politically effective such a promise of prioritizing such a bill will be, given that Democrats have an intensely tough battle in November to keep both the Senate and House.

Trump’s legal problems, and the Republican silence, should continue to drive folks toward the Democratic candidates.  However, the focus may still be more on the economy than anything else. Democracy is on the ballot.  We need to shout that everywhere.   Here’s the most damning court opinion handed to Trump to date.

This is from today’s New York Times. “Judge Says Trump Signed Statement With Data His Lawyers Told Him Was False. The determination came in a decision by a federal judge that John Eastman, a lawyer for the former president, had to turn more of his emails over to the House Jan. 6 committee.”

Former President Donald J. Trump signed a document swearing under oath that information in a Georgia lawsuit he filed challenging the results of the 2020 election was true even though his own lawyers had told him it was false, a federal judge wrote on Wednesday.

The accusation came in a ruling by the judge, David O. Carter, ordering John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who strategized with the former president about overturning the election, to hand over 33 more emails to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Judge Carter, who serves with the Federal District Court for the Central District of California, determined that the emails contained possible evidence of criminal behavior.

“The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public,” Judge Carter wrote. He added in a footnote that the suit contained language saying Mr. Trump was relying on information provided to him by others.

The committee has fought for months to get access to hundreds of Mr. Eastman’s emails, viewing him as the intellectual architect of plans to subvert the 2020 election, including Mr. Trump’s effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to block or delay congressional certification of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6, 2021. Repeatedly, the panel has argued that a “crime-fraud exception” pierces the typical attorney-client privilege that often protects communications between lawyers and clients.

The emails in question, which were dated between Nov. 3, 2020, and Jan. 20, 2021, came from Mr. Eastman’s account at Chapman University, where he once served as a law school dean.

Judge Carter wrote on Wednesday that the crime-fraud exception applied to a number of the emails related to Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman’s “efforts to delay or disrupt the Jan. 6 vote” and “their knowing misrepresentation of voter fraud numbers in Georgia when seeking to overturn the election results in federal court.”

Judge Carter found four emails that “demonstrate an effort by President Trump and his attorneys to press false claims in federal court for the purpose of delaying the Jan. 6 vote.”

In one of them, Mr. Trump’s lawyers advised him that simply having a challenge to the election pending in front of the Supreme Court could be enough to delay the final tally of Electoral College votes from Georgia.

“This email,” Judge Carter wrote, “read in context with other documents in this review, make clear that President Trump filed certain lawsuits not to obtain legal relief, but to disrupt or delay the Jan. 6 congressional proceedings through the courts.”

I can’t see how this doesn’t lead to some type of DOJ action.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has found more congressional intrigue related to January 6th.  “Texts from Loeffler’s phone shed light on activities ahead of Jan. 6 and 2021 runoff.”

Tricia Raffensperger’s text message,six days after the 2020 elections, was as blistering as it was direct.

Hours after Kelly Loeffler, then Georgia’s junior U.S. senator, called for her husband, Brad, to resign from his post as secretary of state in a bid to appease then-President Donald Trump, the typically measured grandmother made clear exactly how she felt about Loeffler.

“Never did I think you were the kind of person to unleash such hate and fury on someone in political office of the same party,” Tricia Raffensperger wrote, noting that her family is under siege “because you didn’t have the decency or good manners to come and talk to my husband with any questions you may have had.”

“I hold you personally responsible,” she added, “for anything that happens to any of my family, from my husband, children and grandchildren.”

Vincent van Gogh, Appel Orchard with Lime Tree Behind the Mensingh Inn in Zweeloo (Coevorden), 1881, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands.

You may read the texts at the link.

As Trump’s plan to overturn the election on Jan. 6 unfolded, Loeffler came under increasing pressure from her Georgia colleagues, Republican activists and some of her own aides to join in.

One of the most ardent voices who sought to enlist Loeffler was then-Congresswoman-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene.

A month before the conservative firebrand was sworn into the U.S. House, Greene asked Loeffler to talk “about a plan we are developing on how to vote on the electoral college votes on Jan 6th.”

“I need a Senator!” Greene wrote on Dec. 2, 2020, “And I think this is a major help for you to win on the 5th!!”

I have office hours at the top of the hour, so I’m off to do that!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Mostly Monday Reads: Season of the Switch

Posted: October 17, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: | 19 Comments

Good Day Sky Dancers!

I’m listening to Rachel Maddow’s new podcast series “Ultra.”  “Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra is the all-but-forgotten true story of good, old-fashioned American extremism getting supercharged by proximity to power. When extremist elected officials get caught plotting against America with the violent ultra-right, this is the story of the lengths they will go to cover their tracks.”  It’s about the last time we had to deal with American NAZIs embedded in every public institution.

Vanity Fair has an interview with Maddow and a brief description of the first two podcasts.

It’s a history lesson worth taking given the fragile state of American democracy in 2022, menaced by increasingly visible far-right extremists, politicians with authoritarian tendencies, and riots in the halls of Congress. “I think it is a healthy impulse,” Maddow told me, “to look back at World War II—where the feel-good history is that all Americans were united against Hitler, and it was always inevitable that we were gonna get in the war and kick their butt—to be willing to look back at that time and the more nuanced truth of it, which is that a lot of Americans not only didn’t want us in the war, they thought if we were gonna be in the war, we should be on the other side.”

We continue to learn that there are dead-enders from every ultra-right group in American history that just raise up new generations. I was always amazed that there were still people fighting the Civil War.  They’ve joined the NAZIs and other groups like White Christian Nationalists again.  They found a charismatic (sic)  actor in Trump, and they’re ready to go all in.  The weapons that have this time are deadlier.  This includes high-power guns, media of their own, and access to a worldwide web of hate and deceit.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is the stern milkmaid face of the women drawn to right-wing causes. They feel they will be rewarded for turning on women’s rights. They should’ve learned the lesson of Phyliss Schafly, who was dropped like a hot potato by the Reagan men of the right wing after she managed to tank the ERA.  Marjorie has all the crassness of a Trump. She couldn’t form a more perfect opposite to Schafly, who was all about white gloves and beauty salon femininity.

We know she played a role in the insurrection. We know she continues to spew the same hateful nonsense that all the MAGA people spew. Here’s a new addition to the news on her.  Fifteen hours ago, Hunter Walker wrote this on his substack:  “Here Are All Of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s January 6 Text Messages With Mark Meadows.” I saw clips from her debate performance on Sunday Night. She was everything you’d expect from a MAGA performance artist. Walker begins by exclaiming she had nothing to do with the January Insurrection. But, the J6 committee may disagree.  This is the moment.

I never thought I’d see anything more insane done in a debate than the one I watched where Republican Herschel Walker flashed a prop badge but there it is.  She touts every conspiracy meme ever created.

In “The Breach,” a book I co-wrote with Denver Riggleman, a former Republican congressman and adviser to the committee, we detailed how Meadows’ text messages were acquired. We also described how Riggleman and other committee investigators identified the people who were texting with Meadows with a high degree of confidence. The identification of Greene was based on this work. For this story, I kept all of the original spelling and grammar as it appeared in the text log apart from changing tokens that seemed to replace apostrophes.

…

In April, CNN first published some of Greene’s text messages with Meadows including this exchange.

One of the messages that was first reported by CNN came from Greene on January 6 as the violence was underway. In it, she urged Meadows to have Trump “calm people.”

“Mark I was just told there is an active shooter on the first floor of the Capitol Please tell the President to calm people This isn’t the way to solve anything,” Greene wrote.

According to the log that text was sent at 2:28 pm. Trump did not make any public attempt to quell the violence until an hour and 49 minutes later.

An hour and twenty four minutes after making an appeal for calm. Greene texted Meadows a new conspiracy theory.

“Mark we don’t think these attackers are our people,” she wrote. “We think they are Antifa. Dressed like Trump supporters.”

In “The Breach,” we noted how Greene was one of several Trump allies who promoted this idea in the aftermath of the violence. There has been no credible evidence of any largescale involvement in the attack by left wing activists.

Greene repeated that idea in a lengthy message to Meadows dated the morning of January 7, 2021:

“Yesterday was a terrible day. We tried everything we could in our objection to the 6 states. I’m sorry nothing worked. I don’t think that President Trump caused the attack on the Capitol. It’s not his fault. Antifa was mixed in the crowed and instigated it, and sadly people followed. But when people try everything and no one listens and nothing works, I guess they think they have no other choice. Absolutely no excuse and I fully denounce all of it, but after shut downs all year and a stolen election, people are saying that they have no other choice. I defended Trump last night on Newsmax. He has been the greatest President. I will continue to defend him. And you if anyone attacks you. I hope you are ok. I feel badly for everyone.”

Meadows evidently appreciated her thoughts.

“Thanks Marjorie,” he wrote.

In writing for The Bulwark, Sarah Longwell has this to proffer: “The End of the Good Republicans. Say goodnight: The party’s over.”

Ben Sasse is retiring from the Senate at the youthful age of 50. We know why. Politicians who thought they could wait out Trump now see the writing on the wall.

The party’s over.

For years we watched the GOP defenestrations: Will Hurd, Jeff Flake, George W. Bush, the memory of John McCain, Paul Ryan, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and any other Republican who stood up to Donald Trump—or even just opposed Trump’s attempted coup. Some fell on their swords. Some were tossed aside involuntarily. The result was the same.

Simultaneously, we watched the progress on the other side of the spectrum as normie Republican moderates such as Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, Ronna Romney McDaniel, and J.D. Vance became unquestioning Trump maximalists.

What these two dynamics proved was a simple fact: In the Republican party as it is currently constituted, political power emanates completely and totally from Donald Trump.

With vanishingly few exceptions, a Republican cannot be openly opposed to Trump on any grounds—even on simple matters of fact, such as who won the 2020 election—and retain political power. Some especially skillful Republicans have managed to advance by being generally positive, but largely silent, about some aspects of Trump. But the Republicans who have advanced most are those who broadcast, in the most vehement and submissive modes possible, their total subservience—not just to the MAGA agenda, but to Trump the man. In all policies, ideas, facts, and forms.

The end result of this truth is that it has driven the Good Republican—that rare animal who was supposed to be the post-Trump future of the GOP—to near extinction.

She provides examples of DeSantis, Youngkin, and others, along with brief and toe-curling evidence. We continue to see little blowback for any actions these Republicans have taken that are immoral at best and illegal at worst.  Today, the Justice Department recommended a six-month sentence for Steven Bannon’s refusal to meet his obligations when served with a congressional subpoena.

This is from the NBC news link provided above. It’s reported by Rebecca Shabad.

The Department of Justice asked a federal judge Monday to sentence former Trump adviser Steve Bannon to six months in prison and a fine of $200,000 for contempt of Congress.

In a 24-page sentencing memorandum filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, prosecutors called Bannon’s refusal to comply with a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee a “sustained, bad-faith contempt of Congress.”

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol repeatedly sought documents and testimony from Bannon but he “flouted the Committee’s authority and ignored the subpoena’s demands,” prosecutors said.

“To this day the Defendant has not produced a single document to the Committee or appeared for testimony,” they added.

Bannon is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday, exactly a year after he was held in contempt by the House.

The memo said that Bannon, who served as an adviser to former President Donald Trump, “deserves severe punishment” for his actions.

American Nazism and Madison Square Garden
 (The National WWII Museum, New Orleans)

The results of elections continue to show up in Supreme Court Rulings.  This is also from NBC. “Supreme Court declines to consider overturning racist ‘Insular Cases.’  The justices rejected a case seeking birthright citizenship for American Samoans.”

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to consider whether American Samoans have full U.S. citizenship at birth, a dispute that would have given the justices the opportunity to repudiate past rulings suffused with racist language that helped determine that those in U.S. territories would not have the same rights as other Americans.

A group of American Samoans challenging the current law, in which people from the group of islands in the Pacific Ocean are considered U.S. “nationals” at birth but not citizens, say it is a vestige of racist policies toward territories. They say that the Justice Department, in defending the law, and an appeals court, in upholding it, relied upon the so-called “Insular Cases,” a series of long-criticized early 20th century Supreme Court rulings. The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case means the lower court ruling remains in place.

The challenge was brought by three American Samoans who live in Utah: John Fitisemanu, Pale Tuli, and Rosavita Tuli, as well as the Southern Utah Pacific Island Coalition, an advocacy group based in Utah.

“The subordinate, inferior non-citizen National status relegates American Samoans to second-class participation in the Republic,” the challengers’ lawyers say in court papers. They note for example, that U.S. nationals cannot run for president or serve in Congress. If living in a state, they cannot vote and are barred from certain occupations.

U.S. nationals can live and work anywhere within the United States and can travel under a U.S. passport, although the challengers’ lawyers note that their passports include a statement saying “NOT A UNITED STATES CITIZEN,” which they say carries a stigma. U.S. nationals can apply for full U.S. citizenship via an expedited process.

We’ve finally found out the Republican Platform’s one policy suggestion!  Now, don’t be too surprised! This is from Jeff Stein at The Washington Post.  “GOP wants to push to extend Trump tax cuts after midterm elections.” So much for a balanced budget approach!   I keep hearing from my two Senators they are absolutely concerned about inflation!  It seems not so much!

Republicans plan to push to extend key parts of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts if they take control of Congress in this fall’s elections, aiming to force President Biden to codify trillions of dollars worth of lower taxes touted by his predecessor.

With Democrats likely to lose control of the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate, Republicans are preparing to advance legislation that would make permanent the GOP’s 2017 changes to the tax rates paid by individuals. Republican officials will also push for scrapping some of the law’s specific tax increases on corporations that were designed to offset the cost of their enormous overall cut to the corporate tax rate.

Many economists say the GOP’s plans to expand the tax cuts flies against their promises to fight inflation and reduce the federal deficit, which have emerged as central themes of their 2022 midterm campaign rhetoric. Tax cuts boost inflation just like new spending, because they increase economic demand and throw it out of balance with supply. But Republicans say they believe these efforts would put Biden in a political bind, requiring him to choose between vetoing the tax cuts — giving the GOP an attack line in the 2024 presidential election — or allowing Republicans to win on one of their central legislative agenda items.

https://twitter.com/SoberMoney1/status/1582060190194872321

Boebert denies shooting the dog.

So, the Trump news is pretty outrageous for today.   Carol D. Leonnig writes this for the Washington Post: “Trump charged Secret Service ‘exorbitant’ rates at his hotels, records show.”  Please make him go away!

Former president Donald Trump’s company charged the Secret Service as much as five times more than the government rate for agents to stay overnight at Trump hotels while protecting him and his family, according to expense records newly obtained by Congress.

The records show that in 40 cases the Trump Organization billed the Secret Service far higher amounts than the approved government rate — in one case charging agents $1,185 a night to stay at the Trump International Hotel in D.C. The new billing documents, according to a congressional committee’s review, show that U.S. taxpayers paid the president’s company at least $1.4 million for Secret Service agents’ stays at Trump properties for his and his family’s protection.

“The exorbitant rates charged to the Secret Service and agents’ frequent stays at Trump-owned properties raise significant concerns about the former President’s self-dealing and may have resulted in a taxpayer-funded windfall for former President Trump’s struggling businesses,” Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) wrote to Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle.

Former N.J Governor Chris Christie has broken from the Trump Circle  He said this in an ABC interview as reported by The Hill.

“I think it’s much more likely they’re a trophy that he walks around and says, ‘Look, I’ve got this. I’ve got this classified document or that,’ because remember something, he can’t believe he’s not president,” Christie said.

“He can’t believe he still doesn’t get these documents, and he needs to display to everybody down at Mar-a-Lago or up in Bedminster during the summer he still has some of those trappings. The replica Resolute Desk in Mar-a-Lago and all the rest of those things are things that are assuaging, you know, his disappointment and his disbelief that he’s not the president anymore.”

The more I read and see, the more I realize that the Republicans and their elected officials are anything but a political party.  The path was charted when Ronald Reagan said this at his inaugural address.

“Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”

Anyone with that attitude should not be in political office.  They should be in jail with all those MAGAs supporting a violent insurrection against the United States of America.  They should be there for life.

So, that’s it for me!  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Finally Friday Reads: J6 Committee Finale

Posted: October 14, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , | 14 Comments

Good Day Sky Dancers!

I admit to needing my support dog Temple and her support Kitty Kristal to get through the last of the January 6 Committee’s hearings.  Cassiday Hutchinson’s testimony continues to frame the narrative of how Trump planned and carried out his attempted insurrection. Over 30 of Trump’s cronies testified simply by exercising their fifth amendment right.  That was one of two clips that really was irritating. The second was a series of statements made by Trump that made his weird cadence so obvious it hurt my ears worse than country music.   The scene stealer for the day was Leader Pelosi, whose daughter was filming a documentary and captured the senate and house leadership in their hidey-hole at Fort McNair.

BB pointed out the presence of Republican Louisiana Congressman Steve “Sleazy” Scalise because I was so fixated on watching Senate Minority Leader McConnell’s expression.  It’s significant for several reasons.  First, he was standing behind McConnell while Leader Pelosi was trying to figure out how to get the Virginian and Maryland National Guard to the Capitol. You could tell it was early in the insurrection because as she spoke to the Governor of Virginia, you could see the mob breaking windows to surge into the Capitol building on a TV screen in the room.

The second reason it’s very important is that Scalise and other Republicans insisted that Pelosi tried to slow down the call to get the Guard a little over a year later. At the same time, we know the only person ignoring that duty was Trump himself.

This is the same guy who once called himself David Duke without the baggage.  Steve appears to forget that Italians and Sicilians weren’t considered white in this country for a long time.  He even forgets they did field work alongside black Americans in Louisiana. They kept to themselves and spoke their native language for a long time.  One of the largest lynchings in New Orleans happened to eleven Italian men who were in the wrong place at the wrong time in 1891.  Every time I remember his self-appellation, I remember that not so long ago, the likes of David Duke would’ve been happy to lynch him.

Colored figures of the birds of the British Islands / issued by Lord Lilford.. London :R. H. Porter,1885-1897

Today’s Republicans are genuinely unable to speak the truth. Senator Liz Cheney of Wyoming is now telling everyone who will listen to vote a straight Democratic ticket rather than lose our democracy.  She didn’t make it through the republican congressional primary in Wyoming.  Cheney and Adam Kinzinger will be out of Congress after the elections.  Kinzinger and Cheney will no longer be able to sit on the Committee should it continue after the elections.

Trump had one of those days yesterday after the January 6 Committee unanimously issued a subpoena for his appearance at the end of that hearing.  Earlier in the morning, SCOTUS denied “Trump’s request to allow a special master in the Mar-a-Lago case to review classified documents.”   This op-ed is written by Jeff Greenfield for Politico.

It was essentially two-and-a-half hours of leadup to the final moment of the Jan. 6 hearing. Donald Trump, in the words of Vice Chair Liz Cheney, had a “premeditated plan to declare the election was fraudulent and stolen before Election Day”; he knew he had lost and fed his base endless lies about it; he welcomed a siege of the Capitol and did nothing to stop it. And because, in Cheney’s words, the “cause of Jan. 6th was one man… his state of mind, his intent, his motivations…,” his testimony was required.

With that, the committee unanimously voted to subpoena the former president, ensuring the day’s headline news.

It is almost surely a symbolic act. The odds that Trump will enthusiastically appear to make his case is roughly equivalent to Herschel Walker’s admittance into Mensa, and the committee’s writ will expire by year’s end, long before a court fight over the subpoena would be resolved. While it may make for full employment for cable news legal experts, it also has the potential to overshadow the most striking revelations from today’s hearing — that the Secret Service had days of advance knowledge about the potential for violence at the Capitol, as well as the steely resolve of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who reached out for help in combatting the violence as it was happening. (Her conduct also makes a strong case that age is not necessarily a disabling quality in a leader.)

I still believe the actions of Nancy Pelosi were a big deal in the hearing presentation. This is especially true given the events unfolding around her.  It truly should put down the old adage that women do not have the “steely resolve” to be leaders under pressure.

Still, the unsigned SCOTUS decision is likely a bigger blow to Trump in the long run.

… the U.S. Supreme Court turned down Trump’s request to allow a special master in the Mar-a-Lago case to review classified documents. The unsigned order involved a relatively narrow dispute, but the lack of any dissents suggests that the court may not give Trump the protection he will seek from the Justice Department, should it end up indicting Trump for violating one or more federal laws. For all of the legal landmines in Trump’s path — breaking Georgia’s laws on election interference, a possible contempt citation if he refuses to comply with today’s subpoena — the Mar-a-Lago case remains the most damaging to Trump, especially considering that at different times, he has more or less acknowledged breaking one or more of the laws regarding federal documents.

The Republicans are trying to make hay with the bad news on inflation.  This inflation is due to the Saudi manipulation of the oil market and the Putin invasion of Ukraine.  The worst inflation resides in the core elements of oil, gas, and food.  This is a worldwide problem, meaning none came from us or any policy. This was the third thing that Greenfield spoke to if you’re interested.

Meanwhile, Trump only appears to have one condition to testify before the Committee.  This is via The Daily Beast’s  Zachary Petrizzo.

After the Jan. 6 committee unanimously voted in favor of subpoenaing former President Donald Trump, he’s been telling those in his orbit he’s not opposed to the idea. “The former president has been telling aides he favors doing so, so long as he gets to do so live, according to a person familiar with his discussions,” The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman reported on Thursday evening. “However, it is unclear whether the committee would accept such a demand.” Not everyone in Trump’s circle is convinced that him testifying would be a wise idea, however. “He should not,” a Trump adviser who speaks regularly with the former president told The Daily Beast on Thursday evening. A Trump spokesperson didn’t immediately return The Daily Beast’s request for comment. Taking to Truth Social, Trump said he will share his response to the subpoena Friday morning, while claiming the committee is “a giant scam, presided over by a group of Radical Left losers, and two failed Republicans.”

Trump did “lash out” this morning.  This is from The Hill.

Former President Trump on Thursday dismissed a House committee’s vote to subpoena him for testimony about the events of Jan. 6, 2021, as a publicity stunt.

“Why didn’t the Unselect Committee ask me to testify months ago?” Trump posted on Truth Social shortly after the House panel investigating the Capitol riots on Jan. 6 voted to subpoena him.

“Why did they wait until the very end, the final moments of their last meeting? Because the Committee is a total ‘BUST’ that has only served to further divide our Country which, by the way, is doing very badly – A laughing stock all over the World?” Trump continued.

He’s so predictable!

An illustration of the largest flower in the world.   Its name is Rafflesia Arnoldii, and it grows in the rainforests of the Philippines.

This is the other story that was big news for me.  NBC News reports, “FBI official was warned after Jan. 6 that some in the bureau were ‘sympathetic’ to the Capitol rioters. “There are definitely varying degrees of enthusiasm from agents across the country,” a source told NBC News.”

A week after the Jan. 6 attack, an email landed in a top FBI official’s inbox expressing concern that some bureau employees might not be particularly motivated to help bring to justice the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol and threatened lawmakers’ lives.

“There’s no good way to say it, so I’ll just be direct: from my first-hand and second-hand information from conversations since January 6th there is, at best, a sizable percentage of the employee population that felt sympathetic to the group that stormed the Capitol,” and that it was no different than the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, the person wrote in an email to Paul Abbate, who is now the No. 2 official at the bureau. “Several also lamented that the only reason this violent activity is getting more attention is because of ‘political correctness.’”

The email, recently disclosed publicly in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, reflects an issue that’s been hanging over the Jan. 6 investigation since it began: the notion that there are some in the bureau who weren’t, and aren’t, particularly driven to bring cases against the Capitol rioters.

The content of the full email, which includes a reference to “my first unit,” coupled with the fact that Abbate replied suggests that the sender, whose name is redacted, was likely someone plugged into the bureau or a former agent. The email was labeled external, indicating it was not sent from an active bureau account.

“I literally had to explain to an agent from a ‘blue state’ office the difference between opportunists burning and looting during protests that stemmed legitimate grievance to police brutality vs. an insurgent mob whose purpose was to prevent the execution of democratic processes at the behest of a sitting president,” the person wrote to Abbate. “One is a smattering of criminals, the other is an organized group of domestic terrorists.”

The person also wrote that an official in one FBI office in a “red state” said that more than 70% of that office’s counterterrorism squad and about three-quarters of its agent population disagreed with the violence, “but could understand where the frustration was coming from.”

In his response, Abbate wrote: “Thank you [redacted] for sharing everything below.”

Chrysanthemes Dautomne flower, Charles Antoine Lemaire
Illustrations extracted from Illustration horticole
Published 1854-1896

Christopher Wray has some explaining to do.  And so does the Secret Service, according to this article in The Daily Beast. David Rothkopf writes, “ The Jan. 6 Committee Gave Us Some Bad News About the Secret ServiceRather than presiding over an intelligence failure, they actually actively enabled the insurrection to take place, with some among their ranks content to look the other way.”

The Secret Service has too many secrets. The Federal Bureau of Investigation requires a thorough investigation.

These are among the most striking conclusions that emerged Thursday from the last public meeting of Congress’s Jan. 6 committee. Laying out its meticulously crafted case against former President Donald Trump for leading an insurrection against the government he had sworn an oath to protect, the committee made it clear that there were many targets that warranted further investigation. Not least of these were the two law enforcement agencies that had long prided themselves on being among the U.S. government’s most shining examples of integrity and service.

…

The real culmination of the inquiry must be left to the Sphinx-like Department of Justice, whose silence might reveal its commitment to the secrecy that should surround an historically significant investigation. Or that silence might be followed by inaction. We just cannot know at this point, even though the Jan. 6 committee’s revelations made it clear that inaction in the face of the evidence that exists would be one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in U.S. history and would set a dangerous precedent, leaving our entire system at risk.

But there were other disturbing threads that emerged from the congressional inquiry that themselves appeared to require their own independent inquiry. Several of these concern the seeming existence of what might be called the “dark state.” This is not the conspiracy theory fantasy spun by the far right about a “deep state” permanent government that was foiling the will of the people: That was always such a stalking horse, a concept that would enable MAGA officials to root out public servants who placed fealty to the Constitution ahead of loyalty to a political party. Rather it was a real loose alliance among Trump allies in the government who were willing to set aside the rule of law in the service of Trump himself.

At the core of this movement were officials within key government agencies—including the Department of Homeland Security and within it the Secret Service, the FBI, the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice and the intelligence community—who had been placed in positions of responsibility because they could be counted upon to bend the rules for Trump.

That’s a lot to read and think about, so I’ll leave BB to pick up what breaks as the day goes on tomorrow.  You can also share articles and thoughts below.  I found it a very emotionally exhausting day.  What have they done to our democracy based on diversity and rights?

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Mostly Monday Reads: My Body, My Choice

Posted: October 10, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , | 31 Comments

Good Day Sky Dancers!

Happy Indigenous Peoples Day! 

Many of you know that my oldest daughter is an Ob/Gyn.  She’s practicing in a Seattle suburb with the kind of hospitals available to most folks in rich suburbs.  She delivers a lot of babies. She’s also in Washington State, which means the state has a Constitution that respects a woman’s right to decide about her health. However, before she landed there, she practiced in a small hospital closer to the Canadian border in Mt Vernon, WA. The hospital was sold. Her partners there had moved from Georgia to Washington because they were appalled by the idea that they had to have a “room” in the hospital where “God can’t see.”  It was where medically necessary abortions happened because it was a Catholic hospital.  She was glad to escape the coming of that reality.

I had a high-risk pregnancy with her little sister.  She was placenta previa.  I had a friend who lost a baby and nearly died over complications as they rushed her on a helicopter from North Platte to Omaha. You can bleed to death. I delivered my youngest about a month early.  Eleven days before she was born, I started bleeding and drove myself to my nice Methodist hospital with my Jewish Neonatologist and Children’s hospital across the street.  We came out of that successfully, but the stress of that pregnancy later had me dealing with inoperable 4th stage leiomyosarcoma of the cervix. I still believe I’m the only one known to be cured of this. My nice Episcopalian doctor in the Med school that my daughter later attended found the right chemo to almost kill me but definitely get rid of cancer.

liberaljane.com ·Artist creating art about bodily autonomy and reproductive justice. Follow me online at @LiberalJane!

My insurance company was determined to send me to the local Catholic hospital to deliver.  At that point, my husband was a VIP of that very Catholic-heavy insurance company and went to the claims person with my instructions.  I told him we’d pay to go to Methodist if he didn’t get the situation changed.  He was a VP, so he carried more weight than most.  They decided that my condition required special attention since the only neonatologist in Omaha at the time was at Methodist.  As you read this, realize the privilege I had getting through all of this.  My oldest daughter would later do her residency under that same neonatologist. I delivered both my kids at Methodist Hospital In Omaha.

Why I was so fussy is a story of me while I was still in grad school and a friend was doing his rotation in Ob/Gyn at the Catholic Med School. He attended a woman whose developing fetus had fetal encephalopathy. Let me explain that condition.

Neonatal encephalopathy (NE) is a complex disease of the newborn characterized by an altered level of consciousness, seizures, poor tone, an inability to initiate or maintain respiration (1) and is associated with multi organ dysfunction (2). The incidence of NE is estimated at 3 per 1,000 live births

The baby had no higher brain functions. It only had a brain stem and therefore had no sentience, nor would it ever have sentience. It would either die in the womb or after birth within a few horrid days or weeks of suffering.  A priest came to guilt trip the woman into carrying to term, delivering, etc., so they could baptize what didn’t even have brain activity.  He added that then the baby could be harvested.  This horrified me.  It was a pure view of a woman as a container with no feelings or moral agency.  You can see why I wanted to avoid a Catholic Hospital at all costs.

So, this brings me to this Washington Post article today, which is highly relevant to women in rural areas, poor women, and women of color.  My daughter lived close to a reservation up in Washington upstate.  She is dedicated to serving all women.  She and her doulas spent a lot of time with the indigenous women to ensure they had healthy pregnancies and delivery options.  She felt that her ability to practice with the new hospital ownership would severely limit her from fulfilling her duties and oath as a board-certified surgeon and OB/GYN.  “Spread of Catholic hospitals limits reproductive care across the U.S.. Religious doctrine restricts access to abortion and birth control and limits treatment options for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies.”

The Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion is revealing the growing influence of Catholic health systems and their restrictions on reproductive services including birth control and abortion — even in the diminishing number of states where the procedure remains legal.

Catholic systems now control about 1 in 7 U.S. hospital beds, requiring religious doctrine to guide treatment, often to the surprise of patients. Their ascendancy has broad implications for the evolving national battle over reproductive rights beyond abortion, as bans against it take hold in more than a dozen Republican-led states.

The Catholic health-care facilities follow directives from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops that prohibit treatment it deems “immoral”: sterilization including vasectomies, postpartum tubal ligations and contraception, as well as abortion. Those policies can limit treatment options for obstetric care during miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies, particularly in the presence of a fetal heartbeat.

Liberal Jane Illustration

I should also mention that after my youngest was delivered via Caesarian, I had one of those “immoral” sterilizations.  I was okay with two daughters and never wanted to go through that again.  That surgery was unnecessary just 9 months later. I had a radical Werthein’s hysterectomy.  They took everything plus the surrounding lymph nodes.  My cancer, at one point, had spread to the lymph nodes.  It was, fortunately, not in my bones.  My reproductive organs showed dysplasia.  This experience sent my oldest daughter in fifth grade to ask what she needed to do to become a doctor. My two years of challenges brought her to the profession. She never backed off from that goal other than her first goal was to get rid of cancer.  I would never wish any of this or the surrounding decisions to be made by anyone but the woman with the support of her healthcare givers, and I mean NO ONE. It was my decision to make and no one else’s. I even asked my Doctor if I might require an abortion at some point but was reassured that it probably wouldn’t be necessary.

Anyone who has seen what the Catholic Bishops think about women and pregnancy should be horrified by this article.

“The directives are not just a collection of dos and don’ts,” said John F. Brehany, executive vice president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center and a longtime consultant to the conference of bishops. “They are a distillation of the moral teachings of the Catholic Church as they apply to modern health care.” As such, he said, any facility that identifies as Catholic must abide by them.

The role of Catholic doctrine in U.S. health care has expanded during a years-long push to acquire smaller institutions — a reflection of consolidation in the hospital industry, as financially challenged community hospitals and independent physicians join bigger systems to gain access to electronic health records and other economies of scale. Acquisition by a Catholic health system has, at times, kept a town’s only hospital from closing.

I would never want to live under this regime of “religion,” although I support our religious freedom laws that give everyone there right to practice their beliefs in their life and way. This headline also comes from the Washington Post. “Jewish women sue over Kentucky abortion laws, citing religious freedom.”

Three Jewish women in Kentucky have filed a lawsuit arguing that a set of state laws that ban most abortions violate their religious rights.

The lawsuit, filed in Jefferson Circuit Court in Louisville, is the third such suit brought by Jewish  organizations or individuals since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the right to an abortion in its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In all three suits — the first in Florida, the second in Indiana — the Jewish plaintiffs claim their state is infringing on their religious freedom by imposing a Christian understanding of when life begins.

Under current Kentucky laws, life begins at the moment of fertilization. Another law bans abortion after six weeks when cardiac activity is first detected.

Abortion will be on the ballot next month when Kentuckians decide the fate of a proposed constitutional amendment that would eliminate the right to abortion in the state.

Some Florida clerics also seek court relief from the state’s intrusive abortion laws.

The five separate lawsuits https://tmsnrt.rs/3BBEdIr, filed in Miami-Dade County, claim the state’s ban curtails the clergy members’ ability to counsel congregants about abortion in accordance with their faiths, since Florida law prohibits counseling or encouraging a crime.

The plaintiffs are three rabbis, a United Church of Christ reverend, a Unitarian Universalist minister, an Episcopal Church priest and a Buddhist lama. They asked the court to declare that the state’s abortion law violates Florida and U.S. constitutional protections for freedom of speech and religion.

They also claim the abortion ban violates a Florida religious freedom law that prohibits the government from “substantially burdening” the exercise of religion, unless there is a compelling state interest that cannot be met with fewer restrictions.

We’re even having our own version of “abortion on the ballot” with an uptown State Senate seat in contention.

As New Orleans Democrats, state Reps. Mandie Landry and Royce Duplessis agree on plenty – including the firmly held view that women should have the right to an abortion.

And those views have jumped to the forefront of a closely contested race as the two vie to become the next senator representing Uptown and surrounding neighborhoods.

Landry and Duplessis – whose nearly identical voting records place them among the most progressive members of the conservative-dominated Legislature – are competing in a special election Nov. 8 to fill the seat Karen Carter Peterson vacated in April. Peterson resigned in advance of pleading guilty in federal court to defrauding campaign contributors.

Beginning with her announcement in May, Landry has centered her campaign on abortion rights, attempting to capitalize on anger at the U.S. Supreme Court for ending a woman’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy, and the state Legislature’s decision to ban the procedure in Louisiana without exceptions.

Speaking to a group of female students at Tulane Wednesday night, Landry emphasized that she is the only legislator who has defended abortion rights as an attorney and detailed her deep knowledge of abortion law.

“There’s five women in the state Senate, and they’re all anti-choice,” Landry said as the nine students nodded knowingly. “They file a lot of the terrible bills.”

On their Instagram, artist Madeline Horwath’s stickers are being sold to benefit Yellowhammer Fund, funding abortion in Alabama, Mississippi, and the Deep South. (image courtesy the artist)

Yes. Women in Louisiana in the State Senate work hard for the patriarchy in Louisiana.  But back to our main article. The expense of maintaining a hospital and providing healthcare to a community increasingly transfers the right to make decisions on reproductive health, making them unavailable.

In Schenectady, N.Y., Ellis Medicine is in talks with the multistate Catholic giant Trinity Health. Last month, in Quad Cities, Iowa, Genesis Health System signed a letter of intent to enter a partnership with MercyOne, also part of Trinity Health. And this semester, Oberlin College had to find a new provider to prescribe contraceptives after outsourcing student health services to a Catholic system that would not provide them.

In rural northeast Connecticut, residents are protesting the prospect of their 128-year-old hospital becoming part of a Catholic system and thepotential impact on reproductive services.

“It would be very troubling to see cutbacks in a state like Connecticut,” said Ian McDonald, a stonemason who opposes the proposed deal between Day Kimball Healthcare in Putnam and Massachusetts-based Covenant Health.

Kyle Kramer, chief executive of Day Kimball Healthcare, said the proposed affiliation with Covenant Health wouldrescue the financially challenged 104-bed hospital.

“Obviously it has connotations,” Kramer said of the proposed move to faith-based ownership. The Catholic directives would “provide guidance,” he said in an interview, while insisting that “theservices that we have provided in the past are the same services that we will continue to provide in the future.”

Kramer did not answer questions in a follow-up email about how contraception and elective sterilizations could continue to be provided under Catholic doctrine if their primary purpose is for birth control. Nor did he specify how emergency obstetric care that could result in terminating a pregnancy might be affected.

Covenant Health spokeswoman Karen Sullivan said in an email that as part of the regulatory process, the Catholic health system is drafting a public response to questions by the state’s Oct. 23 deadline. The system, she said, is committed to “ensuring that the Ethical and Religious Directives are applied thoughtfully and with empathy, compassion and respect for every person we serve.”

Please notice that a woman has been used to Dickwash the patriarchal bullshit.  This wonderful piece was written by   and

Oh, I have one more something to say before I wrap everything up today.

I haven’t done this for a few years because I’ve been able to cover the $100 annual fee to keep the blog up and running. Social Security thinks I make too much money side-teaching and has pulled my check for two months. So, if you can donate to keep the shop open, please donate to me at Venmo (@dakinikat) or CashAp ($Dakinikat6520, or Zelle (dakinikat). I’d appreciate it!

What’s on your reading or blogging list today?

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