Monthly Archives: May 2022

Adult Fears

May 30, 2022 – 11:02 am

People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don’t yet have a fully adult concept of scary.

– William Gibson

This week’s featured post is “Repeating myself about guns“.

This week everybody was talking about gun violence

This week’s featured post is my confession that I’ve got no new ideas about America’s gun problem. Instead, I review what I’ve written on the topic since 2015. As far as I can see, nothing has changed in the last seven years, other than the list of mass shootings getting longer.

I also can’t report any ideas from others that struck me as new this week. The battle of ideas, such as it is, has been going around in circles for a very long time.

What did seem fresh, though, was the earnestness of emotion that I heard from many people, particularly from folks who aren’t politicians or news-show hosts. To me, the most moving comments came from people who have been successful enough to have people pay attention to them, but used that opportunity to channel what ordinary people are feeling.

One of them was NBA coach Steve Kerr, who on Tuesday couldn’t bring himself to focus on questions about his team’s progress in the playoffs. (They advanced to the finals on Thursday.) Violence is personal for Kerr. He was 18 when his father was gunned down by terrorists in Beirut. This is what he had to say.

The bill he’s talking about, HR-8, is summarized here. It’s hardly an attempt to seize people’s guns. Rather, it just makes it illegal to sell a gun to someone without a background check. Polls indicate that most Americans believe that’s already what the law demands, but it isn’t.

Jimmy Kimmel also had trouble keeping his voice steady. He recorded this statement without an audience.

Video can capture weaselly responses as well. In this clip, Ted Cruz has no answer for a British reporter who asks him why these kinds of shootings happen so much more often in America than anywhere else, and if our lax gun laws have something to do with it. Cruz can only pretend to be offended and storm off, because there’s nothing he can say.

Three years ago, the American Independent listed 13 absurd “causes” for mass shootings that Republicans offer to distract attention from guns. We heard just about the whole list this week as well. None of them answer the question the reporter asked Cruz: What’s special about the United States other than the ease with which people with violent intentions can lay their hands on weapons appropriate for fighting a war?

The lack of any link between shootings and video games, for example, was already clear nine years ago in this chart: If you’re having trouble reading it, the United States is the dot floating high above the field because of its per capita gun-related murders, while the Netherlands and South Korea spend far more per capita on video games.

The Texas Observer does a pretty thorough takedown of Governor Abbott and his finger-pointing at mental illness (which, of course, only exists in the US).

Abbott is simply changing the topic.

The Uvalde shooter did not kill those children with his purported mental health struggles. He did not shoot them with estrangement; he did not murder them with malaise; he did not ravage their little bodies with the inchoate rage of his misguided youth. He killed them with a goddamn assault rifle, and high-capacity magazines, designed for the precise purpose of human annihilation.

Abbott’s interest in mental health lasts just as long as it takes for voters’ attention to shift away from guns. (About four days, according to Princeton Professor Patrick Sharkey.) Just last month, he cut the state’s mental health budget.

Texas ranked last out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia for overall access to mental health care, according to the 2021 State of Mental Health in America report.

Texas could easily start reversing that sorry record by approving ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion, which the Republican legislature still refuses to do.

But if you think pro-gun gaslighting can’t get any worse, I have bad news for you: The problem isn’t guns, says Derek Gilbert, it’s demons. Killing so many children with an AR-15 is so hard, Gilbert improbably claims, that the Uvalde shooter couldn’t have managed it unless he were possessed by a demon who has done this before. (Again, it’s not clear why this demon doesn’t possess people in the Netherlands or South Korea.)

https://www.facebook.com/marlette.cartoons

The police in Uvalde arrived at the school within minutes. (It’s a small town. I saw someone on Twitter claim that nothing is more than five minutes from the school.) But they didn’t enter the room where the shooter was killing children until more than an hour later. Kids were calling 911 while police were just outside the door. The police changed their story many times in the first few days. Whether we have the true story now is anybody’s guess.

and Ukraine

Russia continues to advance slowly into eastern Ukraine. CNBC calls this “a subtle momentum shift in the war”. Some of the pro-Ukraine voices I’ve been following have stopped commenting, which worries me. The Week summarizes speculations in both directions.

As the war drags on, the likelihood of a global food shortage rises. It’s easy to sensationalize that possibility, but The Economist covers it pretty well.

Russia and Ukraine supply 28% of globally traded wheat, 29% of the barley, 15% of the maize and 75% of the sunflower oil. Russia and Ukraine contribute about half the cereals imported by Lebanon and Tunisia; for Libya and Egypt the figure is two-thirds. Ukraine’s food exports provide the calories to feed 400m people. The war is disrupting these supplies because Ukraine has mined its waters to deter an assault, and Russia is blockading the port of Odessa.

Even before the invasion the World Food Programme had warned that 2022 would be a terrible year. China, the largest wheat producer, has said that, after rains delayed planting last year, this crop may be its worst-ever. Now, in addition to the extreme temperatures in India, the world’s second-largest producer, a lack of rain threatens to sap yields in other breadbaskets, from America’s wheat belt to the Beauce region of France. The Horn of Africa is being ravaged by its worst drought in four decades.

If you’re a middle-class-or-higher American, this will be a nuisance but not a crisis. Food prices will increase, but the average American household spends only 10% of its income on food. We could afford to spend more, and we could eat more cheaply without starving. And if the rest of us choose to look out for Americans who are food insecure (always a dubious proposition), they could be fine too.

What will happen in poorer countries, though, is up in the air. The world still produces plenty of calories to feed everybody, if that were a priority. But much of that production goes into producing meat (which delivers calories much less efficiently) or fuel.

and the pandemic

Case numbers, which have been increasing since late March, seem to have leveled off nationally. In the Northeast, where the current surge started a little earlier, cases have started to drift downward. Hospitalizations, a lagging indicator, are still rising nationally, but are headed down in Maine, Vermont, and Rhode Island. Deaths never did take off during this surge, but are running at 374 per day, up somewhat from a low of around 300 a few weeks ago.

At this point, if you are in good health, have no special risk factors, and have gotten all the recommended vaccinations (including boosters), you don’t need to worry that much about dying from Covid. A number of people I know personally have had Covid in the last month or so, and none have been hospitalized for it.

My personal fear at this point centers around long Covid, in which symptoms unpredictably last for months or years.

and you also might be interested in …

The Georgia Republican primary showed the limits of Trump’s influence. Few Republicans have drawn more of the Great Orange One’s wrath than Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. But both won their primaries easily.

My reading of Republican primaries to date is that the GOP base fully supports Trump’s fascism, but is ambivalent about his personal vendettas. I lean towards believing that the party’s 2024 nominee will be a post-Trump fascist, like Ron DeSantis.

Georgia Republicans should be ashamed of themselves for nominating Herschel Walker to run against Senator Raphael Warnock. I don’t know whether to feel sorry for Walker as a victim of cerebral damage from his football career or to fault him for just being stupid. But he has trouble speaking in complete sentences, as his response to the Uvalde shooting demonstrated. He’s also dishonest and prone to violence. I know Republican standards have dropped sharply in the Trump Era. But this far? Really?

One of the themes of Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning was how racism in America has continuously evolved, from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration and beyond. Well, I think I just saw the future of racism in America: anti-racialism, as promoted in the current Atlantic by Reihan Salam of the Koch-funded Manhattan Institute.

Anti-racialism, basically, is an updated version of color-blindness, the idea that if we just stop calling attention to race, everybody will forget about it.

If liberal anti-racism is grounded in the idea that raising the salience of race is essential to achieving racial justice, anti-racialism holds that heightened race consciousness, and the racialization of disparities and differences that would obtain in any culturally plural society, more often than not cuts against fostering integration, civic harmony, and social progress.

One true observation Salam makes is that what we currently have (and are evolving toward) is not white supremacy, strictly speaking, because an increasing number of Asians and Hispanics are finding their way into the formerly all-white “mainstream” of American society.

In The Great Demographic Illusion, Alba underscores that the American mainstream is not coterminous with whiteness. “Just as the white Protestant mainstream that prevailed from colonial times to the middle of the twentieth century evolved through the mass assimilation of Catholic and Jewish ethnics after World War II,” he writes, “the racially defined mainstream of today is changing, at least in some parts of the country, as a result of the inclusion of many nonwhite and mixed Americans.”

Salam recognizes that of course there’s still the problem of “black exceptionalism”, i.e., not even an expanded mainstream has space for Black people.

the intense racial isolation experienced by most Black descendants of enslaved African Americans remains an important social fact

But, well, it sucks to be them. The rest of us should form a broad (or at least broader) multi-racial coalition that pretends race isn’t an issue any more.

and let’s close with something from another universe

The Marvel Cinematic Universe, to be exact. There’s probably no easier piece of music to turn into a fun video than Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk”. But together with this collection of Marvel outtakes, it’s irresistible.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (7)

Repeating myself about guns

May 30, 2022 – 9:09 am
https://theweek.com/political-satire/1013894/the-web

The only change since the last time I covered this issue is that more people have died.

From your cousin on social media to TV talking heads and syndicated columnists, everybody who comments on current events is facing the same conundrum: What do you say when nothing has changed since the last time you spoke out? There are no new insights to offer, no arguments that didn’t prove to be futile last time.

And yet, how can you stay silent? Silence is complacency that can even be interpreted as consent. Ten-year-olds get massacred in a public school? Grandmothers get killed for shopping-while-Black? Asians get shot at a church luncheon? It happens. This is America. Things that don’t happen anywhere else happen here, sometimes one right after another. And in spite of all the other countries that have responded to horrifying mass killings by taking effective action, nothing can be done here. This is America.

This week, I’ve decided to be open about the fact that I have nothing new to say. December 14 will be the tenth anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre of 20 six- and seven-year-olds. April 20 was the 23rd anniversary of Columbine. So I’ve had decades to compose my thoughts on mass shootings and gun control. There’s very little I can write that I haven’t written before.

So rather than repeat everything as if I just thought of it, I’ve decided to post a guide (and partial update) to my previous posts on guns. [1]

My most serious look at America’s gun problem was “How Should We Rewrite the Second Amendment?” in 2019. Google, in its great algorithmic wisdom, recommended that post to people interested in the Second Amendment, netting me more than 18,000 page views and 300 comments, almost all of them negative.

The gist of my essay was that we argue so vociferously about the Second Amendment because it no longer has any recoverable meaning relevant to current issues. From the Supreme Court to that loud guy at the bar, anybody who “interprets” the Second Amendment and “applies” it to today’s world is really just making stuff up. We yell our own particular interpretations so loudly because interpretation is all we have at this point. To the extent that we can discern the “original intent” of the Founders at all, it’s completely tangential to anything happening today.

So I proposed that we replace the Second Amendment with a new amendment to capture what we really want out of guns in this era. The core of my rewrite was:

Congress shall make no law preventing individuals from securing adequate means to defend their homes and persons, or preventing state or local governments from equipping police forces adequate to enforce their laws and ensure public safety.

I gave the federal government explicit permission to regulate interstate transportation and sale of guns, while granting states the power to regulate guns within their borders.

In the face of the pushback, I wrote a sequel the next week to summarize and address my critics’ points. In retrospect, I’m surprised how much good humor I maintained after all that abuse.

https://billingsgazette.com/news/opinion/guest/ask-the-judge-how-the-second-amendment-was-written/article_b11e679d-d42e-5e75-943a-9549c5d06b1d.html
Militiaman

As for what the Constitution doesn’t say about guns, see my 2018 post “Three Misunderstandings about Guns and the Constitution“. In particular, the Second Amendment was never intended to facilitate an armed uprising against the federal government.

The “well-regulated militia” it envisioned was supposed to make a large federal standing army unnecessary, not to fight against one. Militias, in the Founders’ vision, would enable state and local governments to maintain public peace and enforce their laws without begging the feds for help. Because of the militias, the federal army would only be needed in case of war with a foreign power like Britain or Spain, and otherwise would be a tiny force that wouldn’t tempt an unpopular president to stage a coup.

Not a militiaman

One reason why I later proposed rewriting the amendment was that all the ships in the Founders’ harbor sailed long ago. The outcome the Founders wanted to avoid when they wrote the Second Amendment is already here: We do have a large standing army with forts all over the country, as well as various kinds of federal police from the FBI to DEA to Treasury to TSA to ICE. We can still argue about whether any of that was a good idea. But one way or the other, here we are.

In 2016 I observed that “Our gun problem IS a terrorism problem“. Given our lax gun laws, complex 9-11-style plots aren’t necessary. Also in 2016, “The Asterisk in the Bill of Rights” pointed out how Second-Amendment rights really only belong to White people.

But perhaps my best gun post is “Guns are security blankets, not insurance policies” from 2015. This looks at the psychology of the gun issue, building on a tweet from cyberpunk novelist William Gibson:

People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don’t yet have a fully adult concept of scary.

One reason the gun debate goes nowhere is that the two sides aren’t really discussing the same issue. Gun-control advocates are looking at a public-health problem: Guns kill tens of thousands of Americans every year. What can be done to lower that total?

If that’s how you frame the issue, you look at numbers and graphs and examine how reforms have worked in other countries.

https://www.deviantart.com/lordcoyote/art/CLOSET-MONSTER-76953965

But most pro-gun arguments are story-based, because gun advocates are addressing something else entirely: Sometimes a dark fantasy gets stuck in your head and you can’t get it out. What do you do about that? Armed intruders invading your home, your daughter getting raped in the park, roaming street gangs killing people at random — those images can disrupt your peace of mind, no matter what the statistics say about their probability. Some policy change that experts predict would cut rapes in half, for example, doesn’t really help you deal with the what-if in your brain.

That’s what a gun is for. It’s a magical talisman that enables a counter-fantasy you can invoke to dispel whatever dark fantasy might be plaguing you. Home invaders? You’ll win a shoot-out with them. Your daughter? She’ll manage to get the gun out of her backpack and plug the guy before he can take it away and shoot her instead. (And the gun will never haunt her imagination on days when she’s feeling suicidal.) Gangs? You, the neighbors, and your AR-15s will form an impromptu urban warfare platoon to take them out.

Will any of that work in reality? Hardly ever, as ABC demonstrated with this gun-training exercise. But realistic thinking misses the point. If the problem lives in your personal fantasy world, a fantastic solution works just fine.

That’s why even the most common-sense gun reforms get bogged down in improbable scenarios. As in this argument against limiting the size of gun magazines: “Criminals don’t always act alone. It is often necessary to have enough ammunition to hold off multiple assailants.” Often? Would that be “often in the author’s experience” or “often in the author’s dark fantasies”?

We’ve seen that division play out this week. Gun-control advocates are looking at statistics, like how the number of gun deaths in a state correlates with the number of guns.

Meanwhile, the NRA’s mouthpieces float action-movie ideas that may help you overcome your paralyzing my-child-gets-killed-at-school nightmare, but are totally disconnected from reality.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s arm-the-teachers suggestion is a good example. Maybe a teacher with a gun gives his particular school-shooting fantasy a happy ending. But until she retired a few years ago, my sister was an elementary school teacher in the real world. Try as I might, I can’t picture her outshooting an attacker who has an assault rifle, body armor, and the element of surprise.

But maybe Paxton is imagining something more like Kindergarten Cop, where Arnold Schwarzenegger is an LAPD detective who goes undercover as a teacher. No doubt that movie character would fare much better against a shooter than my sister would. Which raises the question: What if we stopped recruiting teachers from wimpy liberal arts colleges and instead hired, say, ex-special-forces operatives (without raising pay, of course)? Or maybe it would be more cost effective to train the kids to defend themselves, in a scenario something like Spy Kids, or maybe Home Alone.

I’m sure that would work. I feel better already.

[1] I’m not the only person to take this approach. The Atlantic is doing the same thing. So is James Fallows. So is cartoonist Nick Anderson.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , | Comments (6)

The Monday Morning Teaser

May 30, 2022 – 8:33 am

Some weeks I get to choose what I write about, and some weeks events choose for me. This week it seems impossible to focus on anything but the Uvalde school shooting and the issues it raises.

But that leads to a challenge: Over the years I’ve written about guns and mass shootings several times. Has the situation changed since then? Have I decided I was wrong? Am I finding new ideas that I hadn’t considered? I went back and read my posts about guns from the last seven years, and decided the answers are no, no, and no.

So should I just rehash it all? Find some clever new spin to put a fresh face on the same ideas I told you several years ago? What about new readers who didn’t see those posts?

What I came up with begins a confession: I have no new ideas here. But I stand by the things I’ve written in the past, which I’m sure a lot of you either missed or have lost track of. (A peculiar kind of egotism is common among writers: We imagine that our readers have total recall of everything we’ve ever posted, including the pieces we’ve forgotten ourselves.) So the featured post links to and summarizes what I’ve written about guns in the past. It should be out shortly.

The weekly summary includes commentary on other people’s responses to the Uvalde shooting, and then covers last week’s primary elections, the apparent turn-around in the Covid surge, updates on the Ukraine War, and a few other things. It should be out around noon EDT.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (2)

Escalation

May 23, 2022 – 11:31 am

Take any horrible thing the right wing is doing, call it X. Go back in time two years and publicly predict: “the right wing is going to do X.” You will be dismissed as a partisan crank. This has been reliably, consistently true throughout the entire right-wing escalation. Still true today.

– David Roberts

This week’s featured post is “A reluctant defense of Bill Cassidy“.

This week everybody was talking about primaries

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/05/19/opinion/our-replacement-theory/

Pennsylvania was last Tuesday, Georgia tomorrow.

The headline result in Pennsylvania was that a radically Trumpy candidate won the Republican primary for governor. State Senator Doug Mastriano attended the January 6 rally — there’s some dispute about how close the violence he got — and still doesn’t recognize Joe Biden’s victory. He introduced a bill for the Pennsylvania legislature to award the state’s 19 electoral votes to Trump, despite Biden getting 80,000 more votes than Trump. Governors have to sign presidential election certifications, so there is serious doubt that a Governor Mastriano would certify a Democratic victory in 2024, no matter what the voters said.

He also supports a complete abortion ban, without exceptions.

What we do know scientifically is that baby in the womb is a distinct individual — it’s not a clump of tissue. The argument, it’s 60-year-old science, is we know that’s a distinct individual with a distinct DNA. That baby deserves a right to life, whether it was conceived in incest, rape or whether there are concerns otherwise for the mom.

He is frequently identified as a Christian nationalist, though I haven’t found any example of him claiming that label explicitly.

Speaking of Christian nationalism, Trump has endorsed Jacky Eubanks for the Michigan legislature. She was interviewed by Michael Voris of the Church Militant digital media service.

“You cannot have a successful society outside of the Christian moral order,” she claimed, insisting that “things like abortion and things like gay marriage are outside the Christian moral order.” Eubanks added: “They lead to chaos and destruction and a culture of death; we’ve abandoned the Christian moral order as a nation and we are reaping that destruction.”

When Voris suggested to Eubanks that her political opponents are likely to paint that as extreme, Eubanks countered: “I don’t see what we believe as extreme at all. We need to return to God’s moral order. That’s not radical. God’s morality is for everybody,” she said. “You cannot have happiness outside of God’s moral order.”

As I recall, there’s a group in Afghanistan that also wants to return to God’s moral order.

John Fetterman easily won the Democratic nomination for the Senate, despite suffering a stroke a few days before the primary. He spent about a week in the hospital, but has been released. He claims to expect a full recovery, but everyone will watching him closely when he starts campaigning again.

On the Republican side, the Senate race is still too close to call. As of Friday, Dr. Oz held a .08% lead over David McCormick. A recount is expected, so the race may not be decided until June 8. It’s been amusing to hear Republicans talking about counting ballots that they considered fraudulent in 2020.

Oz has not, so far, taken Trump’s advice and claimed victory, seeming to trust the election system in a state that the ex-President claimed was corrupt two years ago. Aides to McCormick, who has previously raised doubts about electoral integrity in the state, argue that uncounted absentee ballots — the very outstanding votes that Trump falsely claimed in 2020 were proof of fraud — will put him over the top.

Neither senate primary in Georgia is expected to be close: the Herschel Walker/Raphael Warnock match-up seems set. Likewise, Stacey Abrams seems assured of the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

The Republican side of the state-office primaries has been called “Trump’s revenge tour“. He’s trying to oust Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Rafensperger, the Republican officials who did their jobs in 2020 rather than “find” the votes he needed to win. (Trump’s famous call to pressure Rafensperger is still the subject of an election fraud investigation.) So far it seems not to be working: Kemp held a 32-point lead in a recent poll.

There does seem to be a bottom: Madison Cawthorn lost the Republican primary to defend his House seat.

A Republican candidate for governor in Colorado proposes that the state adopt its own version of the Electoral College for gubernatorial elections, one that would boost the power of rural counties and diminish urban centers like Denver.

Under Lopez’s plan, [the 2018] governor’s race would have been a runaway win for Republicans, who lost the actual race by double-digits when each vote was weighted equally.

Right now, anybody who predicts Republicans will actually do such a thing would be dismissed as a partisan crank, in accordance with the David Roberts’ principle stated at the top.

and replacement theory

https://www.ajc.com/opinion/mike-luckovich-blog/522-mike-luckovich/AMU7VGO7IZB5ZNQQEMVA5YXKYQ/

When I started writing last week’s featured post, I thought the point I was making — that White Replacement Theory was becoming central to the Republican message — was not necessarily original, but wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. Apparently, though, I was one of a number of people having the same thought at the same time.

Rolling Stone’s Talia Lavin got there a day ahead of me, and also with a sense of I’m-just-figuring-this-out:

Once you understand an obsession with racial composition and white fertility to be the driving engine of Republican politics, a number of seemingly disparate movements begin to fit together into an ugly whole. Some aspects are obvious: The anti-immigrant movement that has seen U.S. refugee admissions at historic lows and asylum seekers marooned in purgatorial camps in Mexico continues to dominate the right-wing airwaves. Historic levels of gerrymandering are ensuring that a diversifying populace remains beholden to the views of a white minority — alongside openly antidemocratic restrictions on voting and changes in election administration.

Other aspects are more veiled, but no less vitriolic. Years of fearmongering about transgender rights, and in particular their influence on youth, are linked to fears of waning fertility: anti-trans demagogues like Abigail Shrier describe trans bodies as “maimed and sterile,” and, as such, a chief motivation for the legion of anti-trans laws passed by state legislatures is the future fertility of trans children born female. The violent antifeminism of a far-right movement that sees women principally as vessels for breeding a new white generation expresses itself in a fixation on a return to “traditional” gender roles. And the culmination of generations of right-wing activism, which will secure the “domestic supply of infants,” as Justice Samuel Alito memorably put it, is poised to arrive in the form of the dissolution of Roe v. Wade. Payton Gendron, and those like him, are listening: like Brenton Tarrant, the mass shooter at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, Gendron opened his manifesto with a screed on the supposedly apocalyptic consequences of “sub-replacement fertility rates” among white women.

Kathleen Belew in the NYT:

Immigration is a problem because immigrants will outbreed the white population. Abortion is a problem because white babies will be aborted. L.G.B.T.Q. rights and feminism will take women from the home and decrease the white birthrate. Integration, intermarriage and even the presence of Black people distant from a white community — an issue apparently of keen interest in the Buffalo attack — are seen as a threat to the white birthrate through the threat of miscegenation.

Matt Schlapp, the head of the Conservative Political Action Conference, also sees the connection between replacement and abortion:

If you say there is a population problem in a country, but you’re killing millions of your own people through legalized abortion every year, if that were to be reduced, some of that problem is solved,. You have millions of people who can take many of these jobs. How come no one brings that up? If you’re worried about this quote-unquote replacement, why don’t we start there? Start with allowing our own people to live.

Like me, Ryan Cooper rejected the isolated-crazy-guy explanation of the Buffalo shooting:

the alleged shooter was just taking the conservative “replacement” rhetoric seriously. If one really believes that the white race is the foundation of American society (a disgusting lie in its own right), and that wealthy Jews and liberals are conspiring to drown that race in a tide of bestial subhuman immigrants, then mass murder is a logical conclusion

Vox’ Zack Beauchamp looks at Hungary, where Replacement Theory has become the governing ideology. In that context, the connection between racism and anti-feminism becomes clear: If the white race (or the Hungarian ethnicity) is in danger of diminishing to extinction, then its women have to be induced to have more children. Similarly, non-childbearing LGBTQ relationships threaten the race’s survival.

The Guardian reports on the CPAC conference held in Budapest this weekend. (Try to imagine US Democrats holding a conference in Havana.)

Viktor Orbán spoke on Thursday. American speakers have included Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson, Ted Cruz, Rick Scott, Ken Paxton, and Kristi Noem, all building up to a climactic video speech by Donald Trump.

The conference also hosted Zsolt Bayer

a notorious Hungarian racist who has called Jews “stinking excrement”, referred to Roma as “animals” and used racial epithets to describe Black people

Birds of a feather.

The editorial board of the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison challenged Senator Ron Johnson to “renounce replacement theory”.

Debating immigration policy is fine. The United States has adjusted its flow of newcomers for 2½ centuries, creating a “melting pot” of people and cultures that defines the American experience.

But granting any credence to the racist and absurd “great replacement theory” should disqualify politicians from public office.

The editorial notes that many of Johnson’s past statements have “sounded eerily similar to the theory’s proponents”.

He told a conservative radio host in Minneapolis last month: “I’ve got to believe [Democrats] want to change the makeup of the electorate.”

The editorial brings Johnson back to the reality of his home state:

Wisconsin needs more immigrants — not for any political purposes, but because our population is graying fast and doesn’t have enough young people to take over the jobs of retirees, much less fill the new positions that growing businesses create. Wisconsin is suffering a workforce shortage, something a manufacturer such as Johnson should understand. The birth rate is declining, and the working-age population fell in every Wisconsin county except Dane and Eau Claire from 2007 to 2017. That’s an enormous challenge to Wisconsin’s economy.

Those needed immigrants may choose to favor the political party that helped them “find freedom and opportunity in America”, but

Many Cuban and Vietnamese Americans favor Republicans. It’s difficult to predict how the immigrants of today might vote tomorrow.

Especially if Republicans stop fanning racial prejudice against them.

I’m in the middle of reading The Rising Tide of Color, a 1920 book that is sometimes cited as the origin of Replacement Theory. It’s available for free at Project Gutenberg, but you need a strong stomach to read it, because it’s unapologetically racist in a way you seldom see today. It’s reminding me that some large number of Americans once viewed world history the same way Hitler did, as a story whose main characters are the various races. (Tom Buchanan speaks approvingly of a very similar book in 1925’s The Great Gatsby.)

A too-obvious-to-state assumption in RToC is that of course you identify with your (presumably white, preferably Nordic) race. A future in which your descendants aren’t white, but rather are some darker-skinned mixed race, represents a catastrophic defeat. The defeat isn’t that you won’t have descendants, but that they won’t be white.

I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that point of view. The only similar identification I can find in myself concerns culture: I am filled with a profound sense of loss if I envision a future where no one performs Shakespeare or reads Plato or studies geometry texts descended from Euclid. But a future where no one is white doesn’t bother me.

and abortion

States continue to tee up ever more restrictive abortion laws in anticipation of the Supreme Court overturning Roe next month.

Oklahoma is banning abortions after “fertilization”. The law, HB 4327, is sweeping, but is also better thought out than some. They’ve explicitly avoided some obvious sticking points.

Abortion … does not include the use, prescription, administration, procuring, or selling of Plan B, morning-after pills, or any other type of contraception or emergency contraception.

It also includes specific exemptions for abortions that save a woman’s life, or remove a dead fetus or an ectopic pregnancy. It kinda-sorta has a rape/incest exception, but only if the crime “has been reported to law enforcement”.

HB4327 gets around criminalizing IVF clinics (which also kill lots of fertilized ova) by stipulating that such killing only counts as “abortion” if it is done

with the purpose to terminate the pregnancy of a woman

So the point seems to be to control pregnant women, not to save “human life” as the Religious Right defines it. No pregnancy, no abortion.

The same is true of a 2019 Alabama law, which was blocked at the time, but may be enforced if Roe is overturned.

While defining “life” on the basis of a fetus’ location in relation to a woman’s womb may seem like a legislative oversight, the bill was actually written with specific language to ensure this application of the law.

During the bill’s legislative debate, a Democratic state Senator inquired as to  how the law would impact labs that discard fertilized eggs at an in vitro fertilization clinic. Republican state Senator and sponsor of the bill Clyde Chambliss, responded that, “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.”

The Oklahoma law’s enforcement is through Texas-style private lawsuits. If you know that somebody performed an abortion or helped a woman get one, you can sue them for $10,000 (unless somebody else has already collected from them for that abortion). If you live in Oklahoma, you can sue in your own county, even if none of the relevant events happened there and it’s inconvenient for the people you’re suing.

If the abortion hasn’t happened yet, you can sue for an injunction to stop it.

Tennessee has criminalized getting abortion drugs through the mail.

The Archbishop of San Fransisco has banned Speaker Nancy Pelosi from receiving communion because of her support for a bill to codify abortion rights.

I’ll be blunt about this: The archbishop is using his religion as a Trojan horse for his politics.

Pelosi has not performed an abortion, gotten one herself (as far as we know), or encouraged anyone else to get one. What she has tried to do is to protect a woman’s right to make decisions about her own pregnancy. What that woman decides should be on her, not on Pelosi.

Compare abortion to, say, guns. No one is refused communion for selling guns, or making them, or keeping them legal. In the church’s view, sins committed with those guns belong to whoever pulls the trigger, not to people further up the causal chain. Why is abortion different? Because of politics.

and the crypto crash

In retrospect, we should have known the crypto-currency boom was ending when we saw the Super Bowl ads. BitCoin was already down to $40,000, from its November peak of $65,000, and yet

Digital funny money was everywhere during the Super Bowl, without even attempting to explain what the hell crypto is. Though, in some cases, like the eToro “social investing” site, it’s just as easy to parade out some Doge and “to the moon” memes, which is basically the same as explaining how stupid this stuff is. If they explained it, they couldn’t advertise it.

It was all a little too reminiscent of the dot-com bubble two decades before.

It’s hard to pinpoint a tipping point on something like the dot-com bubble — the tippy-top of the Dow’s chart was thrust upward and pulled back down by more than just tech stocks — but Super Bowl XXXIV, which had over a dozen ads for startups, many of which the broader public had never heard of, might be it.

Now BitCoin is around $30,000, and the other crypto-currencies are doing even worse. The so-called “stable coins” have proven to be anything but stable. Non-fungible tokens, which were supposed to be a way to invest in art without actually owning anything physical, are plunging.

There are two ways to look at this:

  • Every new market has its ups and downs. The crash of 1929 wasn’t the end of stock investing.
  • From the beginning, crypto was an illusion. It only seemed to make sense because it was techy, and nobody understood tech anyway.

I’m in the second camp. I’ve never owned any crypto-currency or NFT, on the general principle that if you don’t understand it, you shouldn’t invest in it. A number of articles have come out lately making the point that there was never a there there. Current Affairs interviewed crypto-skeptic Nicholas Weaver. Vox’s Emily Stewart wants to believe the hype, but “I have a hard time telling myself a coherent story about all of this” after she debunks just about everything crypto is supposed to be good for.

and the war in Ukraine

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1013656/vlads-mistake

Sweden and Finland applied for NATO membership. Turkey is objecting. The issues: Sweden suspended weapons sales to Turkey after its Syria invasion, and both countries have taken in Kurdish refugees that Turkey classifies as terrorists.

President Biden signed a bill authorizing another $40 billion in aid to Ukraine. The NYT has a table describing what’s in it.

Masha Gessen describes what it’s like to work for Russian news media.

CNN talks to a Russian officer who resigned after participating in the invasion of Ukraine. Because this is a “special military operation” rather than a war, resignation is an option.

The German news site Deutsche Welle provides (in English) an informative 15-minute look at the Russian economy. Interesting macro-economic note: The ruble has recovered from its post-invasion crash, and is now higher than it was in February — but that’s not the good news for Russia that it appears to be. Imports have crashed as more and more countries/businesses refuse to sell to Russia. That gives the country a trade surplus, which boosts the currency. But a lack of Western retail goods is depressing consumers, while lack of Western parts is working through the supply chain, hurting production.

Mitt Romney on the suggestion that Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling should make us back away from Ukraine.

Failing to continue to support Ukraine would be like paying the cannibal to eat us last.

you also might be interested in …

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1013732/the-strategic-reserve

After endlessly demanding that Biden do something about the infant formula shortage, nearly all House Republicans voted against doing something. Meanwhile, Biden is airlifting formula from Europe, and has invoked the Defense Production Act to help get American production back up.

Every week, it seems, I could write a post called “January 6 was worse than you thought”. This week we found out that Ginni/Clarence Thomas’ corruption was worse than we thought. In 2020, Ginni was lobbying Arizona Republican legislators to ignore the voters and appoint their own slate to the Electoral College, invoking a fringe legal theory that her husband would undoubtedly have to rule on when it reached the Supreme Court.

And it turns out that Rep. Barry Loudermilk really did give Capitol tours the day before the January 6 insurrection, in spite of his previous denials.

Yes, there’s a new virus circulating: monkey pox. But it doesn’t seem nearly as contagious as Covid.

On his wannabee-Twitter platform Truth Social, former President Trump “retruthed” somebody else’s “truth” calling for civil war. Rep. Adam Kinzinger posted on actual Twitter:

Any of my fellow Republicans wanna speak out now? Or are we just wanting to get through “just one more election first…?”

and let’s close with some AI art

This week a Facebook friend shared images generated by putting Beatles’ lyrics into the Wombo app. I couldn’t resist doing something similar, so here’s what I got from “Buying a stairway to Heaven”.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (9)

A reluctant defense of Bill Cassidy

May 23, 2022 – 9:22 am

No, he didn’t say that Black women’s deaths don’t count.

Here’s a pattern I complain about a lot: Some prominent Democrat says something that the conservative media paraphrases in a hostile way, making the statement sound much more ridiculous or offensive than it really was. That paraphrase then gets treated as if it were the actual quote, and a game of telephone proceeds from there, with each paraphrase more offensive (and further from reality) than the previous one.

Deplorables. That’s what happened, for example, when Hillary Clinton used the phrase “basket of deplorables” to describe the “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” forces that had united under the Trump banner in 2016. Conservative media quickly turned that into a declaration that Trump supporters were deplorable in and of themselves, without reference to racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, or Islamophobia.

The distortion started with the first news stories. The Washington Standard’s headline read: “Hillary Clinton: ‘Trump Supporters’ are a ‘Basket of Deplorables’”

At a fundraiser on Friday, Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton lashed out at her opponent GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and his supporters. She called those supporting Trump a “basket of deplorables.”

The article included a Trump spokesman’s response:

What’s truly deplorable isn’t just that Hillary Clinton made an inexcusable mistake in front of wealthy donors and reporters happened to be around to catch it, it’s that Clinton revealed just how little she thinks of the hard-working men and women of America.

By now it’s a universal belief among Trumpists: Hillary called them deplorable, for no reason at all. What’s more, Hillary was just saying the quiet part out loud; Democrats in general look down on “the hard-working men and women of America”.

Inventing the internet. Something similar happened in 1999 when Al Gore replied to a question from Wolf Blitzer about what separated him from his primary rival Bill Bradley:

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

Before long, that quote morphed into Gore saying “I invented the internet.“

Snopes summarized the context:

The vice president was not claiming that he “invented” the Internet in the sense of having thought up, designed, or implemented it, but rather asserting that he was one of the visionaries responsible for helping to bring it into being by fostering its development in an economic and legislative sense.

The claim that Gore was actually trying to take credit for the “invention” of the Internet was plainly just derisive political posturing that arose out of a close presidential campaign. If, for example, Dwight Eisenhower had said in the mid-1960s that he, while president, “took the initiative in creating the Interstate Highway System,” he would not have been the subject of dozens and dozens of editorials lampooning him for claiming he “invented” the concept of highways or implying that he personally went out and dug ditches across the country to help build the roadway. Everyone would have understood that Eisenhower meant he was a driving force behind the legislation that created the highway system, and this was the very same concept Al Gore was expressing about himself with interview remarks about the Internet.

But this also has become an article of faith on the Right: Gore made an absurd claim that undermines claims he has made on other issues, like climate change.

Democracy. Those are two of the most prominent examples, but lesser ones pop up on a regular basis. In the 2020 campaign, Fox played telephone with a Biden quote until eventually Lou Dobbs did this with it:

Joe Biden says the police are “the enemy.” Those are his words, “the enemy.”

But that was a paraphrase of a paraphrase, not “his words”. Conservatives have also spread doctored videos of Biden to either distort his views or make him look senile.

I hate stuff like that, not just because it treats public figures unfairly, but because it undermines democracy. The archetypal vision of democracy is of the public having a conversation that eventually arrives at some combination of compromise and consensus. Once such a conversation has established a public will, elected representatives can carry out that will.

But that whole vision comes apart if the public conversation centers on things that never happened, or devolves into flame wars started by insults that were never said.

That happens a lot these days, and for the most part I blame the Right. Some large part of their rhetoric is about “open borders”, when in fact we don’t have open borders and no Democrat is proposing that we should. Or about a mythical “stolen election”. Or public schools “grooming” children for pedophiles, or teaching White children to be ashamed of their race, when there is little reason to believe anyone is doing that.

Wouldn’t it be great if political campaigns could revolve around things that are real, rather than issues that have been invented to raise anger?

But if that’s what we want, we have to model it. In some arenas turnabout is fair play. But here, their abuse of democracy shouldn’t give us license to abuse it too. Personally, I’d like to save democracy, not win the ground where its corpse lies.

And that brings me to Bill Cassidy.

What did he say? Maybe you’ve seen the headlines: “Maternal death rate isn’t as bad if you don’t count Black women, GOP senator says” in Business Insider, “Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy: Our Maternal Death Rates Are Only Bad If You Count Black Women” in Vanity Fair, and many others. This weekend my social-media feed was full of comments from people who took those articles’ hostile paraphrases as quotes and reacted from there.

But did he actually say those things? You don’t have to take anybody’s word for it; the whole virtual interview is on YouTube. It’s just under half an hour, but the abortion/maternal-health portion is in the first nine-and-a-half minutes.

It’s important to set the stage: Senator Cassidy, a doctor himself, is being interviewed by Politico reporter Sarah Owermohle under the auspices of Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health. This is not a campaign rally or other political event. Both Cassidy and Owermohle appear to be in their homes, but the virtual site of the conversation is Harvard.

Owermohle begins by asking about the leaked Supreme Court opinion reversing Roe, and Cassidy minimizes its impact, as if the 15-week ban at the center of the Dobbs case is the end of the story: Abortion will still be available up to that point, women will still be able to go to liberal states to get abortions, and abortion drugs will be available through the mail.

So fundamentally, the first month or two, not much would change, except for the location of where the abortion would take place.

Now, Cassidy surely knows that far stricter bans are being passed in states like Oklahoma and Tennessee, and that they will undoubtedly stand if Justice Alito’s opinion prevails. So he’s being disingenuous, but I have to admit that this is well within the bounds of normal political spin.

Owermohle then asks if Cassidy would support a federal ban on abortion, and Cassidy dodges. He says something that would argue against it:

I’m a federalist, and I think that states should be allowed to make decisions by the tenets of democracy.

But he doesn’t actually say he wouldn’t vote for a federal ban. Similarly, he argues that a national abortion ban would never get the 60 votes needed to overcome a Senate filibuster, but says nothing about the pressure Republicans would be under to scrap the filibuster if they had a majority. So this response is slippery, but again, within the normal bounds of American politics.

Owermohle asks about next steps for the pro-life movement after Roe is overturned, probably looking for Cassidy to say something about birth control, but instead Cassidy shifts the discussion to maternal health.

I truly think we need to support the mom when the child is in utero, and to support the mom afterwards, to give her everything she needs so that she can feel comfortable bringing the baby to term [and either giving the child up for adoption or raising it herself], to support that continuum of life from within the womb to without the womb.

To her credit, Owermohle doesn’t take Cassidy’s expression of concern for pregnant women at face value, and asks a polite but challenging follow-up. She notes that Louisiana “ranks very high on maternal deaths” and asks what needs to be done to improve that.

This is the section that leads to the headlines.

[In] Louisiana, about a third of our population is African American. African Americans have a higher incidence of maternal mortality. So if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as would otherwise appear.

Remember, Cassidy is a doctor who thinks he’s talking to the Harvard School of Public Health, so he is assuming a sophisticated audience. In that context, he’s not arguing to ignore the deaths of Black women, he’s reframing the problem: The right question, he is claiming, isn’t why so many new mothers die in Louisiana, it’s why so many new African American mothers die nationwide. That interpretation is clear if you continue the quote:

I say that not to minimize the issue, but to focus the issue as to where it [sh]ould be. For whatever reason, people of color have a higher incidence of maternal mortality.

Does he leave “whatever reason” as an unfathomable mystery, say “Sucks to be them”, and move on? No. He talks about remedies.

Now, there’s different things we can do about that. I have something called the Connected MOMS Act.

The target of this act is a pregnant woman dependent on public transit who lives 20 miles or more from her doctor. “So you’d like a better way to monitor her than asking her to come to the doctor’s office every two weeks.” The plan calls for remote blood-pressure monitoring and a few other innovations that could spot complications from a distance.

We also have the maternal health improvements grant, which again is to promote studies of this issue as well as to look at potential remedies, if you will, if there’s racial bias that is discovered in how health care is delivered.

So we’ve got a couple things that we’re floating out there trying to take care of this issue, because it is an issue for us in Louisiana as well as for folks nationwide.

I want to point out how far out on a limb he has gone, from the point of view of the far-right Republican base: Cassidy is allowing the possibility that studies could show racial bias in health care. I think it’s obvious that such bias exists and that honest studies will find it, but the Republican base voter doesn’t want to hear that. If such a possibility were raised in a school textbook, it would be “critical race theory”.

So is Cassidy saying: “Don’t bother to count Black women”? No, he’s not. I haven’t read the two pieces of legislation he’s talking about, so it’s possible they don’t do as much as he says. Or maybe the bills include other objectionable provisions that make their passage impossible or counterproductive. I can’t judge that. But at the very least he is paying lip service to the idea that Black lives do matter.

And that’s the exact opposite of what he’s being accused of.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged | Comments (13)

The Monday Morning Teaser

May 23, 2022 – 8:27 am

This week I have to do something distasteful: defend the integrity of the information system by standing up for somebody I don’t like. In this case it’s Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who took a lot of heat this week for apparently saying that Black women shouldn’t count when you total up maternal deaths.

Except he didn’t actually say anything like that. I am constantly pointing out instances where Democrats are being attacked for things they didn’t really say, but I firmly believe the answer to this problem isn’t to launch similarly false attacks on Republicans. So in this morning’s featured post I’m defending Cassidy. I sincerely doubt that he’ll ever return the favor by defending some unfairly attacked politician I like, but that’s not the point. I want the public debate to be about true things, so I have to discipline my own side, not just the other side.

Anyway, “A reluctant defense of Bill Cassidy” should post before much longer.

The weekly summary will talk about last week’s Pennsylvania primary and tomorrow’s Georgia primary, the abortion laws states are cuing up in anticipation of the Supreme Court overturning Roe, the crypto crash, Ukraine, monkey pox, and a few other things. It should be out before noon EDT.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)

Dystopia Now

May 16, 2022 – 12:32 pm

That which is a sin within a certain set of religious beliefs is to be made a crime for all.

– Margaret Atwood, “I invented Gilead. The Supreme Court is making it real.“

This week’s featured post is “White replacement is MAGA’s unified field theory“.

This week everybody we tried not to talk about our one million dead

If you’d told anybody at the beginning of this pandemic that one million Americans would die in it, their almost certain reaction would have been that we should do whatever we can to avoid that outcome. But we didn’t.

It was the Trump administration, so of course the existence and seriousness of the disease turned into a political issue, and the country polarized into those who wanted to do what we could and those who wanted to ignore the whole thing and get on with life.

The one thing Trump did right was support vaccine development, and once he got into office Biden pushed every way he could to get the country vaccinated. But the political polarization got in the way, as well as the by-then well established networks of medical disinformation. So almost a year and a half after vaccines were approved, only 78% have received any vaccination at all, 66% are considered fully vaccinated, and a mere 31% have gotten a vaccine booster. (I got my second booster a week ago. I’ve been fortunate; none of the four shots have led to any adverse reaction beyond a little soreness at the site of the injection.)

Mask mandates are gone almost everywhere, and voluntary mask usage is way down. (I still wear one when I’m indoors in public.) It’s like we’ve all given up.

As the virus evolves, the vaccines no longer do that good a job of preventing infection, but they’re still very effective at preventing serious illness or death.

Right now, cases are surging: The 90K reported cases is almost certainly an undercount. I personally know people who tested positive at home, had only minor symptoms, and quarantined until they got better. Their cases never made it into the official statistics.

Deaths are harder to ignore, so the numbers are more accurate. They’re staying down; they’ve been in the 300s per day for more than three weeks. Hospitalizations are up, but only 21% in the last two weeks.

so instead we talked about the shooting in Buffalo

The featured post is about the Buffalo race massacre on Saturday, how it resembles past race massacres, and the White Replacement Theory that has motivated all of them.

The Buffalo shooting overshadowed another shooting: six people got shot in a church in California.

and Russia’s bad week

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1013456/russias-bees-nest

Putin’s original plan, I imagine, was for his stunning military success in Ukraine to set NATO on its heels. The old Warsaw Pact countries and once-Soviet Baltic republics would tremble with fear, doubting that the US or Germany had the resolve to stand by them in a crisis. Conquest of Ukraine might be the hammer-blow that shattered the European alliance.

Instead, Ukraine has exposed the weakness of the Russian military machine, NATO has banded more tightly together, and the NATO countries have provided the Ukrainians with billions in advanced weaponry.

And now Finland and Sweden, which had no plans to join NATO before Putin’s Ukraine invasion, are about to apply for membership. Finland’s president and prime minister announced their intention to apply Thursday, and Sweden is expected to apply sometime this week. Accepting new members requires unanimous approval from the existing members (which makes sense, considering that everyone will be obligated to defend the new members once they join), and Turkey is expressing doubts; but most speculation is that Erdogan is looking to get some concessions, not that he really wants to block the new members.

The first Russian offensive had to retreat from Kyiv, and now the second is pulling back from Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv.

Another military failure this week happened Tuesday, when Ukrainian artillery destroyed a pontoon bridge Russian forces were using to cross the Siverskyi Donets river in eastern Ukraine. Reports seem to show an entire battalion wiped out, including dozens of tanks and other vehicles. Retired Australian Major General Mick Ryan did a tweetstorm on military river crossings in general and this disastrous one in particular.

Saturday, as their colleague Rand Paul delayed President Biden’s Ukraine aid package, Republican senators visited Kyiv, producing this photo op for Moscow Mitch and his buddies.

Folks on Twitter competed to caption the photo. The hands-down winner is Amy Berg: “This is the closest Russian operatives have gotten to Zelensky since the invasion started.”

Berg’s caption is a little unfair, given the mostly bipartisan support Ukraine has received in Congress so far. But the Sharpie-writing is on the wall, and Ukraine’s fight for survival will soon become a partisan issue. Back in March, only three GOP congresspeople refused to stand up to Russian aggression.

Little by little, however, with each proposal, a few more Republicans would sign up: eight Republicans opposed suspending trade privileges for Russia in mid-March; 17 Republicans opposed a resolution supporting Moldova, whose leaders fear their Ukraine-bordering nation could be Putin’s next target; 19 opposed a similar resolution in support for Georgia.

Then, on April 27, 55 House Republicans opposed legislation to build secure telecommunications networks in Ukraine and neighboring nations. Finally, on Tuesday,, 57 Republicans opposed President Biden’s request for $40 billion in weapons and humanitarian aid

Friday, Trump came out against the $40 billion. Who knows? He may yet get to build Trump Tower Moscow.

The WaPo points out that we’re experiencing mission creep in Ukraine. Originally, we were aiding the Ukrainians in hope that Russia wouldn’t take over the whole country. Now our rhetoric has shifted towards a Ukrainian victory.

and reactions to the prospect of losing abortion rights

https://www.michiganradio.org/commentary/2022-05-06/auchters-art-a-ruined-talking-point

The Senate failed to pass a bill codifying abortion rights at the federal level. The bill got 49 votes, with Joe Manchin and all Republicans voting against it.

The featured post covers the link between abortion (especially Senator Daines’ weird comparison to sea turtles and eagles) and White Replacement Theory. Fear for the future of the white race justifies the push towards a Handmaid’s Tale dystopia. (A fertility crisis was the presenting problem in the novel, if you remember.) We need to take away women’s rights, the theory goes, because White women are not doing their job. Recall the advice once given to British women with unappealing husbands: “Close your eyes and think of England.”

This 2019 Onion article isn’t a joke any more: “Abused 12-Year-Old Alabama Girl Doesn’t Think She Can Handle Being A Mom On Top Of Everything Else“.

The Republicans’ most effective talking point against the Democrats’ codify-Roe bill concerns third-trimester abortions, which anti-abortion activists describe as “partial birth” abortions.

These abortions poll badly, largely because the public has been sold a false picture of them. It’s important to understand two things about late-term abortions.

  • They’re rare. In 2019, the CDC tabulated 4882 US abortions after 21 weeks of gestation, out of 491,901 total abortions, or less than 1%. An study from 2018 estimated that only about 160 happened after 28 weeks.
  • Each one is a special case, often involving unforeseen medical problems that either threaten the health of the pregnant woman or presage some hellish future for the fetus after birth.

NPR recounts the example of Dana Weinstein, whose doctors told her that her fetus’ brain was not developing properly:

“[We were told] that our baby would have seizures 70% of the time — that was a best-case scenario; that when we delivered her, that we’d need to have a resuscitation order in place because she would most likely seize to death,” Weinstein said.

Almost a decade later, Weinstein and her husband are the parents of three active children — a boy and two girls. She’s 48, living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and working for a nonprofit.

She still tears up when she talks about that diagnosis and the difficult decisions that surrounded it. Fearing a short and painful life for their baby, Weinstein and her husband chose to travel to Boulder, Colo., to end the pregnancy, at one of the few clinics in the country that offer third-trimester abortions.

Weinstein has been speaking publicly about her experience for years. But she decided to tell her story again recently, amid renewed national debate over decisions like hers.

“I just don’t understand why and how this is so front and center in the national debate,” Weinstein said. “I would have given anything to have been able to help our baby live if she could have lived. But she was going to be incapable of that.”

Under the bills anti-abortion activists want to pass on the state level, Weinstein would have been forced to give birth and watch her daughter die painfully.

When you look at such real examples rather than hypotheticals, their messy complexity points out why these decisions have to be made case-by-case, by the people who are actually involved, and not by legislators dealing in abstractions or bureaucrats crafting one-size-fits-all rules.

Pete Buttigieg expressed things well in a 2019 Fox News town hall.

So, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a woman in that situation. If it’s that late in your pregnancy, that means almost by definition you’ve been expecting to carry it to term.

We’re talking about women who have perhaps chosen the name, women who have purchased the crib, families that then get the most devastating medical news of their lifetime, something about the health or the life of the mother that forces them to make an impossible, unthinkable choice.

That decision is not going to be made any better, medically or morally, because the government is dictating how that decision should be made.

Clarence Thomas says the leak of Alito’s draft opinion “changes the institution fundamentally. You begin looking over your shoulder.” @PopeHat seems not to have forgotten Anita Hill:

Yeah, imagine being constantly afraid a coworker would do something inappropriate

and primaries

Fascinating race on the Democratic side in Pennsylvania, which votes tomorrow. Rep. Conor Lamb is a model of the kind of Democrat party leaders like to run in swing states: “a congenial, manicured candidate straight from Hollywood central casting who could appeal to voters turned off by Trump while still wary of the party that opposed the 45th president”. Ex-military, a former prosecutor with moderate positions on wedge issues, he won his seat in Congress in a swing district special election in early 2018, and then held the seat in the 2018 fall election and in 2020.

But the polls say he’s losing badly to Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, who takes more liberal positions on issues, but also is more of a character. One voter says he “has the ‘it factor’. I find him lovable.” Six-foot nine, wandering around in a Carhartt hoody and gym shorts, Fetterman says what he believes in very blunt, simple terms, and isn’t afraid to campaign in rural areas where Democratic candidates are seldom seen.

According to the longstanding right/left view of American politics, Lamb should be the better general-election candidate because he’s closer to the center on issues. But Fetterman has the common touch. The two candidates’ messages to swing voters are very different: Lamb isn’t crazy (like the Republican candidates are) and doesn’t take positions at odds with White working-class values (as Fetterman sometimes does). But Fetterman wants those voters to say, “He doesn’t always agree with me, but he gets me.”

I’d like to think that approach works. (It’s more-or-less what Jon Tester does. His views look centrist to Democrats nationally, but he’s way left-of-center for Montana.) I guess we’ll see in November.

As if all that wasn’t interesting enough, Fetterman suffered a stroke Friday. His campaign claims he is on his way to a full recovery. In a video taken in the hospital, Fetterman speaks clearly, but lets his wife do the bulk of the talking. (They’re cute together. She takes credit for making him get his symptoms checked out. “Because I was right, as always.”)

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that it wanted to make endorsements on the Republican side of tomorrow’s primary, but “we can’t” because so many Republican candidates aren’t “operating in the same reality” where the Inquirer lives. In particular, they had a hard time getting Republican candidates to admit that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election.

How do you find points of agreement when you can’t reach common ground on facts so basic that they could be used in a field sobriety test?

Case in point, on the national level: Third-ranking House Republican Elise Stefanik. (Remember? She replaced Liz Cheney as the token woman in the GOP leadership team when Cheney decided to be honest about January 6.) These days her whole Twitter feed is about the baby-formula shortage, and one tweet begins

The White House, House Dems, & usual pedo grifters are so out of touch with the American people

This is where the GOP has gotten: Members of leadership can associate the President and Democrats in general with pedophilia, without the slightest justification. Because, like, facts — who needs them?

BTW, about that baby formula shortage. One major cause is one of the Trump administration’s proudest achievements: the United States Canada Mexico Agreement. Remember? USCMA replaced that horrible NAFTA deal with an almost-identical deal that was great because it had Trump fairy dust sprinkled on it.

Jim Wright explains:

Three (or four, depending on your point of view) American companies control 90% of the global infant formula market, chief among them is Abbott Nutrition. When a Chinese company announced it was investing in a Canadian manufacturing facility to make powdered baby formula from excess Canadian skim milk powder (Canada makes a lot of butter, so they have a lot of leftover skim milk), Abbott and the US diary industry spent millions lobbying congress to change the trade rules — claiming increased Canadian production of formula would “negatively impact U.S. dairy trade and jobs.”

… And so, when the Trump Administration backed by a Republican congress wrote and implemented the USCMA to replace NAFTA, they imposed new regulations restricting commercial importation of baby formula from Canada

… So when Abbott contaminated its production line and was forced into a massive recall, well, for Americans, there just ISN’T any other place to get infant formula. And you can thank the dairy industry, and their lackies in Congress (and, yes, the [Trump] White House) for that.

Wright points out that you can import Canadian formula for personal use, but you might get into trouble if you resell it for a profit.

But whatever caused the shortage, Stefanik and Fox News have a piece of the solution: The US government should starve the immigrant babies in its custody.

The most charitable way to look at this argument is that the Republican politicians and Fox hosts making it don’t really want Biden to starve migrant babies to death – they are just cynically using the specter of fed migrant babies to anger desperate American parents for political gain and ratings.

and some other things you might be interested in …

On second thought, maybe Elon Musk won’t buy Twitter. Or maybe he will.

https://jensorensen.com/2022/05/04/what-does-the-billionaire-think/

This weekend it got hot in Texas. Who could have foreseen such a thing? Not the people who manage the state’s power grid. Friday, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas put out a statement asking people to turn their thermostats up to 78 and avoid running major appliances.

Industry groups of all sorts frequently sponsor studies about the cost of government regulations. Well, this is the cost of not having government regulations. In the free market, it’s always tempting not to prepare for unlikely scenarios. If they don’t happen, your quarterly numbers look better and your stock goes up. And by the time luck runs out, maybe you’ll have sold your shares or moved on to your next job.

Think you’ve worked for your company too long? This guy just turned 100, and he’s still with the company he joined when he was 15.

Fox News is furious at new White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre because in 2020 she called the network racist.

That’s known as “telling it like it is”. Fox would rather she be “politically correct” and spare its viewers’ sensitive feelings.

Remember John Durham and his assignment to investigate the people who had the temerity to investigate Donald Trump for colluding with Russia? Well, he’s still on that job — his investigation has already lasted more than a year longer than Bob Mueller’s.

And today he’s finally bringing a case to trial: He charges that lawyer Michael Sussman lied to the FBI when he brought the FBI information about suspicious internet traffic between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, which is owned by Russia. Not that he lied about the traffic; no, he’s supposed to have lied by claiming he wasn’t giving them the data on behalf of a client.

If you really care, Marcy Wheeler analyzes what a thin reed this indictment rests on. And TPM’s Josh Kovensky summarizes its significance:

If Durham secures a win, it’s not clear what would come next.

As Harry Sandick, a former federal prosecutor, told me, the case that Durham made against Sussmann doesn’t quite match up with traditional up-the-chain prosecutions, in which lower-level defendants flip on higher-ups.

“It seems to me less like a logical first step in an up-the-chain prosecution, and more like an attempt by a prosecutor to justify a tremendous amount of time and expense in an investigation,” he said.

and let’s close with puppies

It’s been a hard week. We deserve some puppies. These 11 golden retrievers are just one of 210 puppy photos from Bored Panda.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (0)

White replacement is MAGA’s unified field theory

May 16, 2022 – 11:10 am
https://theconversation.com/we-cannot-deny-the-violence-of-white-supremacy-any-more-86139

Republicans used to unite around the interests of the rich. Now they unite around a conspiracy theory that has repeatedly inspired mass shootings.

This weekend, we learned all over again that ideas have consequences. When people believe terrible ideas, they do terrible things.

The idea this time is White Replacement Theory: A conspiracy of Jews and liberals is trying to “replace” Whites as the dominant race in America and Europe by bringing in as many non-white immigrants as possible, by encouraging Black people to breed quickly, by diluting the white race through interbreeding, and by depressing white birth rates. The ultimate goal is the extinction of the white race, an outcome also known as white genocide. [1]

If someone really believed such a theory, what might they do? We found out Saturday:

18-year-old Payton Gendron parked his car in front of the entrance to a Tops Supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. Exiting the car wearing metal armor and holding an assault rifle, he shot and killed a female employee in front of the store, and a man packing groceries into the trunk of his car. After entering the store, he murdered the store’s guard, and by the end of his killing spree, he had shot 13 people, killing 10 of them.

Eleven of the people he shot were Black, and two were white. As the manifesto he left behind makes clear, this was fully intentional. The first listed goal in his manifesto was to “kill as many blacks as possible”.

Gendron lives in rural New York state, but (according to the manifesto he posted online) drove three hours to find a zip code with a large black population. So he wasn’t seeking revenge against particular Black people that he blamed for his real or imagined problems. He was striking a blow for the white race.

Surely now people will see … Sunday, Pete Buttigieg tweeted:

It should not be hard, especially today, for every elected official and media personality in America—left, right, and center—to unequivocally condemn white nationalism, “replacement theory,” and all that comes with it.

That might seem like a small thing to ask. After all, the Buffalo shooting feels like the kind of horrifying crime that should scare everybody straight. Sure, a news-channel entertainer like Tucker Carlson might pimp WRT to juice his ratings, a politician like Donald Trump might motivate his base by hyperbolically describing immigration as an “invasion“, and countless ignorant folks on social media might pass on these ideas to justify the racism they’ve carried all their lives. But Payton Gendron has shown us that this isn’t a game. When crazy ideas are thrown around loosely, crazy people latch onto them and do terrible things. Surely everyone will realize that now, and everything will change.

That feeling should last for at least another day or two. Enjoy it.

Because we’ve been here before, and nothing changed. We were here when Dylann Roof, 21, killed nine Black Christians during a Bible study class at the Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston (a city he also picked because of the large number of Black people living there). And when Patrick Crusius, also 21, drove from his Dallas suburb to a WalMart in El Paso, where he tried to shoot as many Mexicans as possible; he ended up murdering 23 people of various races and nationalities and injuring 23 more. John Earnest,19, hoped to kill as many Jews as possible in Poway, California, but he wasn’t very good at it; he only murdered one and wounded three others before his gun jammed. Robert Bowers, in his 40s, also went after Jews, killing 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Those were all White Replacement Theory massacres. We know because the killers were only too happy to explain their actions. Posting a manifesto has become a standard part of a WRT massacre.

There have been WRT massacres in other countries as well. In New Zealand Brenton Tarrant attacked two mosques, killing 51 people. In Norway Anders Breivik’s murder spree was at the youth camp of Norway’s Labor Party; he killed 77 people in all, most of them White teens who were growing up liberal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/15/us/replacement-theory-shooting-tucker-carlson.html

If conservative promoters of WRT were going to be scared straight, it would have happened by now. It might have happened after Charlottesville, when only Heather Heyer died, but the nation saw the spectacle of violent white supremacists marching down the streets chanting “Jews will not replace us.“

Remember? Then-president Trump responded by telling us that there were very fine people on both sides.

Nudges and dog whistles. Elected Republicans and Fox News hosts never explicitly tell anyone to go kill Blacks or Hispanics or Jews. But they do regularly say things that, if taken seriously, would logically result in race massacres. Why, for example, did Patrick Crusius take military weaponry to the biggest city on the US/Mexican border? Because he believed his country was being “invaded” by Mexicans, just as President Trump was saying.

When an army of foreigners invades your country, what can a heroic young man do other than go to the border and kill them? That’s what Ukrainians are doing now, and we all praise them for it.

The nudges these young men get from high-profile Republicans rarely mention race explicitly, but the meaning is not hard to decode.

In just the past year, Republican luminaries like Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and Georgia congressman, and Elise Stefanik, the center-right New York congresswoman turned Trump acolyte (and third-ranking House Republican), have echoed replacement theory. Appearing on Fox, Mr. Gingrich declared that leftists were attempting to “drown” out “classic Americans.”

Would it surprise you to discover that some interpret “classic Americans” as “White people”?

Similarly, Tucker Carlson seldom talks about white and black in antagonistic terms. Instead, he looks into the camera and says “you” and “them”, leaving those terms open for his almost-entirely-white audience to interpret as they see fit. [2] But occasionally he almost comes right out with it.

He was more explicit in a video posted on Fox News’s YouTube account in September. Carlson said President Biden was encouraging immigration “to change the racial mix of the country, … to reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here, and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the Third World.”

His Fox News colleague Laura Ingraham

told viewers in 2018 that Democrats “want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever-increasing number of chain migrants.” During a monologue on her program last year, she called immigration an “insurrection [that] seeks to overthrow everything we love about America by defaming it, silencing it, and even prosecuting it.

In her ads, Rep. Stefanik repeats the “insurrection” theme.

Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION. Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.

She is no doubt aware that false conspiracy theories on the internet claim millions of illegal immigrants are already voting. By describing a path to citizenship (which doesn’t yet exist and would take years to walk) as an “INSURRECTION”, she justifies violence, like the violent attempt to keep President Trump in power after the voters rejected him in 2020.

Again, what would a heroic young White man logically do if he bought what Stefanik is selling? Someone is plotting an “insurrection” to “overthrow” his people. Is registering to vote or sending in $20 really an adequate response to that challenge?

The underground root system. Coincidentally, I was already planning to write something about WRT before Saturday, because this week it had shown up in an odd place: the Senate debate over codifying abortion rights through legislation. Republican Senator Steve Daines from Montana made a somewhat curious argument against that bill:

Why do we have laws in place that protect the eggs of a sea turtle or the eggs of eagles? Because when you destroy an egg, you’re killing a pre-born baby sea turtle or a pre-born baby eagle. Yet when it comes to a pre-born human baby rather than a sea turtle, that baby will be stripped of all protections in all 50 states under the Democrats’ bill we will be voting on tomorrow.

Most of the commenters on my social media feeds were mystified: What do sea turtles and eagles have to do with anything? Daines seemed to be talking in wild non sequiturs — unless you could fill in his unstated connection.

White replacement is the Rosetta Stone here: If laws protect sea turtle eggs and eagle eggs (I haven’t checked whether Daines was making that up), it’s because those species are endangered. You know what else is endangered? The white race, because White women are failing to reproduce at replacement rate. That is, in fact, why American women’s rights need to be taken away: because they’re not doing their primary job. They’re aborting their fetuses rather than producing the healthy White babies the race needs to avoid extinction.

Abortion isn’t the only issue with a hidden connection to WRT, as Gendron spelled out in his manifesto.

Gendron also argues that Jews are behind the movement for transgender inclusivity, supposedly sponsoring transgender summer camps for “Scandinavian style whites”.

Likewise, accepting same-sex relationships lowers the birth rate of Gingrich’s “classic Americans”. And then there’s the demoralizing effect of critical race theory.

The section ends by blaming Jews for creating “infighting” between people and races. The example Gendron’s manifesto provides is that “Jews are spreading ideas such as Critical Race Theory and white shame/guilt to brainwash Whites into hating themselves and their people”.

From the outside, the issues that motivate the MAGA wing of the GOP seem like an incoherent mess. But white replacement is an underground root system that connects them all.

What’s more, WRT explains the intensity of the MAGA movement, which otherwise is also a mystery. How can a bland figure like Joe Biden incite the kind of hatred and panic we’ve seen? Why would the prospect of a Biden administration be so scary that people styling themselves as “patriots” would invade the Capitol and threaten to hang the vice president rather than permit an orderly transfer of power?

And no matter how many revelations come out about the crimes of the Trump administration and the threat to democracy it posed, why are only a handful of Republicans ready to make a clean break with him?

Because the perceived alternative is racial extinction. Otherwise it makes no sense.

Historically, American political parties have gone into the wilderness for a period of time after a disastrous administration. That’s where the GOP should be post-Trump, but it is being held together by white anxiety about the demographic trends. WRT channels that anxiety into positions on issues and energy for campaigns. And that’s why Republicans can’t walk away from it, even though it regularly and predictably leads to race massacres.

[1] I refuse to go down the rabbit hole of arguing that this is false. I’ll leave that to Farhad Manjoo and Chris Hayes. I will point out one thing: No matter how lily-white you may appear to be today, chances are your people met exactly the same kind of suspicion and hostility when they came to America. My people, the Germans, started arriving in large numbers in the 1700s, and Ben Franklin worried that we were so different we would never assimilate into the Pennsylvania colony. Hence the origin of the Pennsylvania Dutch (i.e., “Deutsch”).

[2] More than a year ago, Charles Blow pointed out something Carlson skips over:

[R]evealingly, he is admitting that Republicans do not and will not appeal to new citizens who are immigrants.

There’s no racial essence that predestines groups of people to vote a certain way. Black voters, for example, were loyal Republicans until FDR started to win them over in the 1930s. In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower still got nearly 40% of the Black vote, compared to the 8% Trump got in 2016.

If Republicans would abandon race-baiting and try to win over immigrants of all races and ethnicities, they might succeed. Demography is not destiny.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Tagged , , | Comments (15)

The Monday Morning Teaser

May 16, 2022 – 8:52 am

Saturday we had yet another race massacre, this one in Buffalo. We don’t have to debate about the killer’s motives, because posting a manifesto about “white replacement” or “white genocide” has become a standard part of such killing sprees.

The mainstream media tends not to point out this trend, instead focusing on “troubled” young men with “mental health” issues. But it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the real issue is much simpler: The killers believe what Republicans are telling them.

I started putting this together after the El Paso shooting in 2019. I can’t say whether or not Robert Crusius was mentally ill when he targeted Hispanics at a WalMart, because his actions made perfect sense if you took seriously what Trump had been saying over and over: Mexicans are invading our country. If your country is being invaded, isn’t the most obvious response to take military gear to the border and kill the invaders? What’s mentally ill about that?

Same thing here. Payton Gendron has been told time and again that there’s a plot to take America away from the white race, and that this plot will eventually result in racial extinction. If he believes that, what’s the logical response?

High-profile people like Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Elise Stefanik may not explicitly tell people to go out and kill Blacks or Hispanics or Jews, but how does anything less deal with the problem they describe?

This would be a perfect time for Republicans to purge their ranks, to openly reject white replacement theory and the people who promote it. But they won’t, because WRT is the underground root system that connects all their issues. Without white replacement, the MAGA playbook is an incoherent mess.

Today’s featured post will flesh out that argument. I’m still working on it, so it’s hard to predict when it will appear.

That leaves a lot for the weekly summary to cover: America has had its one-millionth Covid death. Russia had a very bad week, both in Ukraine and diplomatically. Women (and the men who care about them) continued to react to the prospect of the Supreme Court taking their rights away. There’s an important primary in Pennsylvania tomorrow. John Durham’s endless political witch hunt is finally bringing someone to court this week. Texas got hot this weekend — who could have imagined? — and the electrical grid strained to cope.

The schedule is out the window today. Things will post when I get them done.

By weeklysift | Posted in Morning tease | Comments (4)

Deny and Disparage, Pervert and Betray

May 9, 2022 – 11:56 am

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

– U.S. Constitution, Ninth Amendment

To use a history of discrimination to deny people their constitutional rights is a perversion of logic and a betrayal of justice. … Women are indeed missing from the Constitution. That’s a problem to remedy, not a precedent to honor.

– Jill Lepore, “Of course the Constitution has nothing to say about abortion“

This week’s featured posts are “What Alito Wrote” and “Who’s to blame for overturning Roe?“

This week everybody was talking about overturning Roe v Wade

“For Mother’s Day, my mom would like the activism of her youth not to be for nothing.“

One featured post goes through what Justice Alito’s draft opinion says. Another lists the people to blame for this finally happening, assuming it does. Here I’m going to discuss the politics of the decision.

Republicans have been oddly silent about the approaching culmination of their decades-long effort to overturn Roe. At a rally in Pennsylvania Friday, Donald Trump talked for almost 90 minutes and mentioned abortion only in passing.

The reason they’re restraining their urge to crow is obvious: Yes, the GOP has accomplished something, but it’s not something the American people want. (How they managed that in a country widely regarded as a democracy is discussed in one of the featured posts.) For decades, people who favor at least some level of abortion rights have greatly outnumbered those who don’t, but anti-abortion voters have been more fervent. Many on the Right considered a politician who wanted to preserve Roe unacceptable, a baby-killer. But on the Left, abortion was somewhere in the middle of a laundry list of issues. Republican politicians talked endlessly about ending abortion, but for most swing voters life went on as before. The upshot was that, in spite of the polls, standing against abortion might win you more votes than it lost you.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/350804/americans-opposed-overturning-roe-wade.aspx

Now that it’s actually happening, though, things are getting real. Parents in about half the states have to wonder: “What happens if my daughter gets pregnant?” Will she have to drop out of college to raise her rapist’s baby? Will she marry that guy she never should have gone out with in the first place? Can she really go through nine months of pregnancy and then give the child away? What if there are major birth defects? What if the pregnancy endangers her life? What if she gets desperate enough to seek out an illegal abortion, and then something goes wrong?

Younger women are realizing that their lives are no longer their own. A failure of birth control can wreck all their plans for the future. Married couples can no longer decide not to have children (as my wife and I did), and be confident their decision will stick.

All along, abortion has been a deal-breaking issue for the religious Right. Now it’s becoming a deal-breaker across the board.

But polls on abortion vary wildly, depending on how you ask the question. Asking about preserving Roe, as Gallup has in the graph above, is basically a proxy for maintaining the status quo, whatever it is. People who don’t understand exactly what Roe means are really saying, “I can live with things the way they are.”

Other polls get different results, though, because most Americans’ views on abortion are complicated. Practically no one (including a lot of people who will tell you otherwise, I suspect) really believes that an IUD commits murder when it prevents a newly fertilized ovum from implanting in the uterus, or that a clump of cells sitting in an IVF clinic’s freezer is a “baby”. A similarly small number are comfortable with the idea of a healthy woman aborting a healthy fetus that is only a few days away from a normal birth. Most of us sympathize with a woman who wanted a baby but whose life will be in danger if she carries her fetus to term. We have less sympathy for one who just couldn’t be bothered to use birth control.

So the answers you’ll get depend largely on the examples people imagine when they hear your question. Most women who get an abortion don’t publicize it, so until now the Right has largely been free to paint whatever picture it wants, especially to captive audiences like Evangelical congregations. But as more and more women are forced to bear children against their will, or start dying from illegal abortions, the real situation will be harder to hide. “What ever happened to Jenny?” you ask, remembering the bright ten-year-old you taught in Sunday school. And then someone tells you.

Based on little more than intuition, I suspect a large majority of Americans could accept this general framework, which is not terribly different from the status quo:

  • The moral value of life in the womb increases with time. A newly fertilized ovum evokes little empathy, a ready-to-be-born fetus a great deal.
  • Before the abortion option is closed off, a woman deserves a fair chance to discover that she is pregnant, to consider her situation, and to discuss the matter with people she trusts.
  • Given the growing significance of the fetus, the woman has a responsibility to make a timely decision.
  • She should be allowed to reconsider if significant new information becomes available about her own health or her potential child’s quality of life.

My own preference would be to keep the government out of the decision entirely, but I could live with this kind of compromise.

NPR’s “7 persistent claims about abortion, fact-checked” is essential to having an intelligent discussion of this issue. The part I found most surprising was the graph of abortions per 1,000 women of child-bearing age: The number of abortions did rise sharply between 1973 and 1980, but has been declining ever since. Today, there are fewer per capita abortions than in 1973.

The reason, if you chase their link to data from the Guttmacher Institute, is fewer pregnancies, presumably leading to fewer unwanted pregnancies. This is consistent with the abortion-prevention strategy that has been so successful in the Netherlands: Don’t drive abortion underground by banning it, but make contraception readily available and teach everyone how to use it. (That is, of course, the polar opposite of what the Religious Right wants to do in America. I have to suspect that they don’t really care about fetuses; they just want to control women’s sexuality.)

One of the more bizarre takes on the end of Roe came from the NYT’s Ross Douthat:

Worth noting that in the 50 yrs since Roe, men have become less likely to find a spouse, less likely father kids or live with the kids they father, and less likely to participate in the workforce.

Equally worth noting is that in less than two decades after Roe was decided, America won the Cold War.

If Ross thinks he can beat me in a non-sequitur contest, he needs to think again.

Because they don’t want to accept responsibility for the consequences of what they’ve done, Republican politicians want the national discussion to be about whoever leaked the Alito’s draft. The leak certainly violates normal court procedure, and deserves to get somebody fired or even disbarred. But unless you work at the Court, the leak’s significance doesn’t compare with being forced by law to carry a fetus to term.

In the cartoon below, Nick Anderson pokes at the hypocrisy of cheering a leak when an enemy of America does it to favor a presidential candidate (and potentially put the next president in his debt), but being outraged by the much less serious leak of Alito’s draft. (I would also point to the “Climategate” leak, where illegal hacking was just fine when it provided fodder for climate-change denial.)

If you do care about the leak, which I mostly don’t, the most solid theory I’ve heard is that there were actually three leaks: a conservative leaking the result to the Wall Street Journal, a leak to Politico of which justices voted which way, and then a liberal leaking Alito’s draft opinion to Politico.

and primary elections

Tuesday got us into primary election season. In Ohio, J. D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, won a tight race for the Republican senate nomination with 32% of the vote. Vance’s win showed both the power and the limits of a Trump endorsement. 32% is not that impressive, but second-place Josh Mandel (24%) claimed to be even Trumpier than Vance. Matt Dolan, a non-Trump but not anti-Trump Republican, got only 23%.

Meanwhile, Democrats united around Tim Ryan (70%), who faces an uphill race in what is increasingly a red state.

and the pandemic

The numbers keep getting worse: new cases are up 50% in the last two weeks. Hospitalizations are up 21%. And the longest-lagging statistic — deaths — has turned upward as well, up 1%.

I would expect this wave to turn around first in the Northeast, because it started there earlier. But so far it hasn’t.

I also wonder how accurate these new-case numbers are, now that we have access to home tests. I think many people test positive, have mild symptoms, and just wait it out at home. Their cases never get into the statistics.

and Esper’s book

Trump’s final Defense Secretary Mark Esper has book coming out, titled A Sacred Oath. In it, he relates a number of anecdotes about President Trump that make him appear even more unfit for office than we already thought he was.

  • Trump proposed shooting missiles at drug labs in Mexico and denying we did it. “No one would know it was us,” Trump improbably suggested. Maybe it was one of those other missile-shooting countries.
  • In response to the George Floyd protests of police brutality that erupted in D.C., Trump wanted to put 10,000 troops on the streets. About the protesters, he asked: “Can’t you just shoot them?”

Esper also tells about bizarre suggestions from Trump advisor Stephen Miller, who wanted 250,000 troops sent to the southern border to meet refugee caravans, and proposed mutilating the corpse of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

What Esper doesn’t say is that he ever went to Vice President Pence and offered his support in invoking the 25th Amendment, which to me seems like the most rational response to his experiences. When NPR asked him why he didn’t resign, he said that he feared some “uber loyalist” would get his job and do the bad things he was stopping Trump from doing.

I am reminded of what James Comey wrote three years ago:

[Trump’s] outrageous conduct convinces you that you simply must stay, to preserve and protect the people and institutions and values you hold dear. Along with Republican members of Congress, you tell yourself you are too important for this nation to lose, especially now. …

Of course, to stay, you must be seen as on his team, so you make further compromises. You use his language, praise his leadership, tout his commitment to values.

And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.

I have not read Esper’s book, but I suspect a better title would be How Trump Ate My Soul. It would probably also sell better.

and you also might be interested in …

The Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine continues, but we’re also hearing about Ukrainain counter-offensives. It’s hard to know who’s winning.

Many suspected that Putin would use the annual commemoration of the Russian victory over Nazi Germany to make some major announcement about the war, but he seems not to have.

Anonymous American “senior defense officials” have been taking some credit for Ukrainian successes. American intelligence helped sink the Moskva, and also has helped target Russian generals.

I share Josh Marshall’s trepidation about this:

What I take from these leaks is that there is a specific message the U.S. is trying to send the Russians. They have decided that these leaks are the best way to send that message. I’ve heard it suggested that the message is somehow connected to the May 9th Victory Day celebrations which many fear will be the pivot point for Putin declaring a national mobilization and expansion of the conflict. I have no idea whether that’s true. But this isn’t loose lips. It’s not bragging. It’s strategic and intentional. This is clearly a specific message being sent. I wish I knew what that was. Because on its face it seems like a very bad idea.

Student loan forgiveness is a topic that rings a lot of people’s bells, both positively and negatively. On the one hand, it’s crazy that getting an education costs students so much, and that we expect them to go into debt to cover it. The nation needs educated people, and the benefits go well beyond the students themselves. (When I go to my doctor, for example, I hope she got a good education.) Forgiving debt would be a way of acknowledging the mistake we’ve been making in the way we structure our educational system.

On the other hand, the issue seems almost tailor-made for the conservative politics of envy: Somebody who is already better off than you (because they went to college) is going to get a benefit you’re not getting.

The easiest target for envy is someone who is just slightly better off than you (or someone slightly worse off who might be gaining on you). Corporate welfare and trillion-dollar tax cuts for the ultra-rich seem abstract, but the idea that your cousin who went to college is going to get some debt forgiven, or that you could have gotten debt forgiven if you’d just waited longer to pay it off — it boils people’s blood.

Personally, I know that I got my education cheap, because I graduated from high school in the 1970s. Government contributed a lot more of a university’s budget in those days, so my parents were able to cover my state-university expenses without me taking on debt. In grad school, I got a fellowship from the NSF. So again, no debt.

Primarily, that’s not some virtue of mine, it’s the luck of when I was born. So I don’t begrudge student debt forgiveness now.

https://claytoonz.com/2022/04/30/trust-fund-fairies/

This farewell exchange between Fox News’ Peter Doocy and press-secretary-about-to-leave Jen Psaki reminds me of the old kind of politics, when competition didn’t imply personal animosity. Reporters didn’t used to be part of that political game, but the game was played like this.

and let’s close with something photogenic

Apple has an annual contest for macro photography. My favorite of the winners is this photo of strawberries dropped into a carbonated beverage.

Though I also like this close-up look at sea glass.

By weeklysift | Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (6)