What’s the point of punishing Trump?

https://www.politico.com/cartoons/2022/06/01/matt-wuerker-cartoons-june-2022-00036472?slide=4

Or Alex Jones? Or Deshaun Watson?

The Info-warrior. Friday, a Texas jury assessed $45.2 million in punitive damages against Alex Jones, on top of the $4.1 million it previously ordered him to pay in ordinary damages. The $49.3 million total would go to Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose 6-year-old son Jesse Lewis was killed in the Sandy Hook massacre. On his widely viewed program Info Wars, Jones repeatedly claimed that the massacre was a hoax designed to give the government an excuse to confiscate guns, that Heslin and Lewis were “crisis actors”, and that their son never existed.

Because a large number of Jones’ fans actually believe the dark fantasies he spins, Heslin and Lewis have not only seen their grief exploited for someone else’s gain, but they’ve been harassed and even in physical danger for the last nine years.

As the linked article makes clear, the total amount Jones ends up paying could go either up or down. He might appeal to get this judgement reduced, but he also faces additional cases brought by other victims of his malicious lies. Or he might wriggle out of accountability by abusing the bankruptcy laws.

Like a lot of people, I take satisfaction from the prospect of Jones paying millions of dollars. I don’t throw the word evil around lightly, but Alex Jones qualifies. He has amassed a huge fortune by slandering people who have already suffered something worse than most of us can imagine. This is purely predatory behavior, and there is no excuse for it.

The quarterback. Last Monday, another punishment was announced (pending appeal): NFL quarterback Deshaun Watson will be suspended for six games. Watson was the target of lawsuits by 24 female massage therapists. Despite playing for a team (the Houston Texans) that had its own massage therapists, Watson arranged private appointments with more than sixty women, 24 of whom claim he tried to pressure them into sexual acts.

Watson sat out all last season (with pay) while the Texans watched the progress of the cases against him and tried to decide what to do with him. (He had demanded a trade before the scandals broke, but his value was hard to determine until the criminal probes concluded.) Ultimately, Watson was not indicted and he has settled all but one of the suits. The Texans then traded him to the Cleveland Browns, who signed him to a five-year $230 million contract. The contract was structured to have a large signing bonus, but a small first-year salary. As a result, he’ll lose only $345K if he misses the six games.

Like a lot of people, I had the exact opposite reaction to this announcement: Really? That’s all? I don’t know what I thought justice would be, but this isn’t it. If the decision stands, Watson will be back on the field for the Browns’ game against Baltimore on October 23. He should barely notice the lack of $345K, and it will be as if nothing ever happened. Come February, his accusers might be watching him in the Super Bowl. [1]

The former president. Meanwhile, the mills of justice grind very slowly in the case of Donald Trump. The House January 6 Committee has put together a compelling case that he did the single worst thing any American president has ever done to the country: He lost an election and tried to stay in power anyway. The January 6 attack on the Capitol was the culmination of a much larger anti-democracy plot, which he set in motion and tried to benefit from.

If he had succeeded, the republic set up by the Founders would effectively have fallen. After ignoring the Constitution and overruling the voters in 2020, why would he ever give up power? And if he should happen to die or retire, why should any future president give up power?

Whether Trump will face any consequences for these actions is still up in the air. Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republican senators refused to hold Trump accountable in his second impeachment trial. A Georgia prosecutor is investigating the former president’s attempts to reverse that state’s 2020 election, and the Department of Justice finally appears to be going up the chain from the January 6 rioters to the plotters whose will they were carrying out.

Will any of that lead to indictments? Convictions? Jail time? It’s still not clear.

The point of punishment. I’m discussing these three men together — Jones, Watson, Trump — because their cases raise a common theme: What is punishment for? How much is enough? Thinking about Jones and Watson, I believe, can give us insight into what we should want for Trump.

As I said above, it’s satisfying to see bad men punished. That’s a very human response. Particularly when evil-doers appear to prosper, it’s easy to convince yourself that anything bad that might happen to them is justified and even good. [2]

At the same time, I believe that the propensity to glory in revenge (whether personal, vicarious, or rooted in some abstract sense of justice) is not humanity’s best feature. At some point we need to let the Past pass, so that we can move ahead unencumbered.

But when is that? When can we say “OK, enough”? [3]

Nixon. Before we think about that, I want to consider one more example: Richard Nixon. President Ford pardoned Nixon about a month after he resigned, and as a result Nixon was never held fully accountable for his crimes. He never went to prison. He never even had to stand trial, so no once-and-for-all judgement about his actions was ever recorded.

At the time (I turned 18 shortly after the pardon, so I got to vote against Ford in 1976), I thought Nixon got off too easily. OK, he had to leave power, but most of us never have much power. If being returned to the ranks of ordinary citizens counts as “punishment”, then presidents really are above the rest of us in a way that I think the Founders never intended.

But as I look back now, I’m willing to cut Ford a little more slack. Even without a trial or prison, Nixon became a cautionary tale in American politics. For decades afterwards, a stain of illegitimacy hovered over everything he did. No American politician wanted to hear his or her actions compared to Nixon’s. His name went unmentioned at Republican conventions. Post-Nixon presidents couldn’t justify their actions by citing Nixon as a precedent.

In retrospect, I think that was a good outcome.

What I want for Trump, Jones, and Watson. What I want for each of them is not some specific punishment. What I want is an outcome that makes them cautionary tales for anyone in a position to offend in similar ways.

I want current and future sports stars to consider their possible actions and think “I don’t want to become another Deshaun Watson.” I want current and future conspiracy-theory entertainers to think, “That might gain me some viewers, but it’s a little too much like Alex Jones.”

And most of all, I want a stain of illegitimacy to fall across everything Donald Trump ever did. I want the adjective “Trumpian” to become a pejorative label that every major American politician tries to deflect, just as no one wanted to be “Nixonian” for the rest of the 20th century. I want the advisors and assistants in all future administrations to consider what happened to Trump’s people and think about what they might be risking.

What kind of punishments would do that?

It’s tempting to see the Nixon example as proof that punishment isn’t necessary at all. But Nixon was a very different case: By the time he left office, his party had already turned against him. He was never again a force in American politics.

By contrast, Trump is actively trying to return to power, and remains a cult figure whose members regard him as a hero.

He won’t go quietly into the Past, so he has to be brought down. I don’t see how that happens without mug shots, a trial, and an orange jumpsuit. The evidence against him needs to be presented in a court where he is not in control, with the result (I hope) that a jury unanimously convicts him of crimes. He needs to go to jail.

His trial and sentencing will be traumatic for the country, but his own actions and lack of remorse make it necessary. There needs to be an outcome whose reality he can’t deny. His followers may continue to claim, against all evidence, that he won the 2020 election. But if he’s in jail they can’t claim that a jury acquitted him.

How much jail time? Revenge says “He tried to overthrow my country’s Constitution and sent his mob to attack my Capitol.” The rest of his life would not be long enough to satisfy my desire for Revenge.

But that’s not an urge I want to indulge. So: how long? Long enough for the country to move on, and for the Republican Party to find new leaders. A four-year political cycle needs to come and go without any expectation that he might participate.

So that’s what I want: four years.

[1] For comparison, Tom Brady served a four-game suspension at the conclusion of the Deflategate saga. The Patriots managed a 3-1 record while he was gone. After he returned, the team continued on to the Super Bowl, where Brady led a historic comeback against the Atlanta Falcons and was named MVP. That game is considered one of the highlights of his career.

[2] I believe this is where the myth of Hell comes from. For many people, the vision of bliss in Heaven would be incomplete without the knowledge that the people who abused them in life are suffering endless torment. My own beliefs about God or the afterlife are uncertain, and waver sometimes from day to day. But one thing I’m certain I don’t believe is that a loving God condemns anyone to eternal suffering.

[3] My detailed analysis is in a sermon I gave in 1999, “Forgiveness“. I stand by it.

August 8, 2022 – 10:11 am Categories: Articles | Comments (21)

Tagged , , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

Two big themes dominated last week: Biden got things done, and punishments were handed out to wrong-doers.

Yesterday, the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which may pale in comparison to the Build Back Better plan the President originally proposed, but is a big deal all the same. The House is expected to follow suit, and so finally Congress is doing something to fight climate change. The drama is no longer centered on executive orders and whether the Supreme Court will sustain them. The third branch of government is weighing in.

This would not be happening if Biden had not won in 2020, or if Georgia hadn’t sent two Democrats to the Senate in 2021. So if you’re tempted not to vote in the fall because elections never make any real difference, think again.

In addition, Republicans relented and let the PACT Act pass, so veterans affected by toxic fumes from burn pits will get their health care paid for. And this is on top of the CHIPS Act that passed last week, not to mention the bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed earlier in Biden’s presidency.

It hasn’t been easy and it hasn’t been everything we wanted or the country needed, but the steamship of American government is finally pointed in the right direction and beginning to chug. We need to vote in November so that it doesn’t stall again.

The week’s other theme was punishment. A jury told Alex Jones to pay nearly $50 million to two parents of a Sandy Hook victim, and an NFL arbitrator handed Deshaun Watson a six-game suspension. I found the Jones verdict satisfying (assuming it gets enforced) and the Watson ruling frustrating. That raised some interesting issues about punishment, which I’ll discuss in this week’s featured post “What’s the Point of Punishing Trump?”. That should be out around 10 EDT.

The weekly summary will discuss legislation, the stunning victory for abortion rights in Kansas, the weirdness of the late-pandemic economy, and a few other things, before closing by celebrating a voice that could make a grocery list sound interesting. I’ll try to get that out a little after noon.

August 8, 2022 – 8:42 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (2)

Kosher Legislation

Eventually is not OK. Tell someone with cancer that’s been fighting this for years that eventually they’ll get the help that they’ve earned. That is not an acceptable answer. It is despicable to continue to use America’s men and women who are fighting for this country as political pawns for anger you have about separate issues. This bill is utterly and completely focused on veterans’ issues. There is no pork in it. It is a kosher bill.

– Jon Stewart, responding to the claim that the PACT Act will pass eventually

This week’s featured post is “A Week When Congress Mattered“.

This week everybody was talking about important legislation

The featured post covers the CHIPS Act, which passed last week; the Honor Our PACT Act, which Republicans blocked in the Senate; and the Inflation Reduction Act, which came back from the dead last week and now just needs Senator Sinema to sign on.

and a third party

https://www.anselm.edu/new-hampshire-institute-politics/blog/voting-america-democrat-or-republican-or-neither

Some moderate, Trump-rejecting Republicans and Democrat Andrew Yang announced a new political party this week, calling it Forward.

I think this effort is doomed, for reasons spelled out by NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie. A winner-take-all method of election, like the one that prevails in most the US, favors a two-party system. There’s no way to form a coalition after the election, as parties do in proportional-representation parliamentary systems, so there’s a strong incentive to form a majority coalition before the election. Typically that results in two coalitions battling to see which can command a majority.

Third parties, then, are temporary phenomena in America. They arise primarily when both of the existing parties have agreed to ignore some contentious issue. In the 1840s, for example, Democrats and Whigs both tried to downplay the slavery issue, which split both of them regionally. The Republican Party arose because there was effectively no way to vote against slavery. The Whigs then broke apart, the Civil War was fought, and Republicans took the Whigs’ place in the two-party system. (If you’re wondering how we got from there to here, where Republicans are the white-supremacy party, I explained that in 2012.)

Most third parties never even make a splash. The few that do usually get co-opted by one of the major parties. For example, when the Democrats in 1948 embraced the previously Republican issue of civil rights, the Dixiecrats gave worried Whites an anti-civil-rights option. That led to George Wallace’s American Independent Party in 1968, whose issues eventually got co-opted into the Republican Party by Nixon’s “southern strategy”.

The typical thought pattern of a third-party voter is “Neither major party offers any hope on my issue, so I don’t care which one of them wins.” That’s why third parties usually emerge on the extremes. If Donald Trump had lost the Republican nomination in 2016 to another John-McCain-style neo-conservative who would probably support the same foreign interventions as Hillary Clinton, an America First Party could have made a significant run. If Democrats continue to spin their wheels on climate change, a Green Party is a possibility. Either of those movements would probably fail at first, while simultaneously wrecking the chances of the major party closest to it, so the faction that spins off really needs to have hit that I-don’t-care-any-more point.

Like Bouie, I don’t see how to make that work in the center. Picture it: “I am so committed to my sensible middle-of-the-road agenda that it makes no difference to me whether America gets ‘woke’ or goes fascist.” Who thinks like like that?

The only way a centrist third party can succeed in our current system is with some non-partisan national hero at the top, like a Dwight Eisenhower fresh off of winning World War II. But Andrew Yang and Christine Todd Whitman can’t fill those shoes.

The other way a third party works is if we change the system first, say by instituting ranked-choice voting, as Alaska and Maine have. Why shouldn’t John Kasich have offered a centrist-Republican third option in 2016, if his Hillary-fearing voters could have listed Trump as their second choice?

The Forward platform resembles what Matt Yglesias promotes as “popularism”: focusing on the popular parts of your party’s message rather than the unpopular parts. David Roberts explains why that’s not likely to work:

Every proposal for a third party in the US ends up amounting to the same thing: a dream of center-left policy without all the nasty politics. It’s just a bunch of [very serious people] thinking, “hey, *we* won’t talk about defunding the police or pronouns, so the right will leave us alone.”

In other words, it takes the right’s bad-faith characterization of the left as its starting point. Of course, if such a party ever became a threat, the right could just as easily smear it! Then I guess the VSPs would start pining for a fourth.

The right’s entire raison d’être is to make being on the side fighting for fairness & justice *unpleasant*, to associate it with marxism or pedophilia or whatever. Third party wankers think they can escape this dynamic by being theatrically Reasonable, but they are deluded.

and tomorrow’s votes

According the Kansas Supreme Court, that state’s constitution currently contains a right to privacy that prevents the legislature from banning abortion. There’s a provision on tomorrow’s ballot that would change that, setting up a possible abortion ban (which the very Republican legislature would almost certainly pass).

This is the first time actual voters have gotten to weigh in on abortion since the Supreme Court junked a federal right to abortion in June. You’d expect a conservative state like Kansas to pass it, but the polling is unclear.

Also, it’s a confusing situation: The legislature scheduled this vote to coincide with a primary, when turnout is low. Initially that was assumed to favor anti-abortion voters, but abortion-rights voters may be more motivated than the legislature expected.

Plus, a Yes vote is a vote against abortion rights, while a No vote is a vote for abortion rights. Some number of voters are going to get that backwards.

The other state to watch is Missouri, where the GOP Senate primary tests just how much scandal the MAGA electorate is willing to write off. Former Governor Eric Greitens resigned in 2018 to avoid impeachment, assailed by charges of sexual assault on his mistress as well as various campaign finance violations.

Charges were eventually dropped and he escaped going to trial, but the claims are still out there. In addition, his ex-wife has accused him of domestic violence.

But Mr. Greitens has adopted the Trump guide to making vileness and suspected criminality work for you: Brace up, double down and bray that any and all allegations are just part of — all together now! — a political witch hunt.

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Greitens is a political grievance peddler. Also like Mr. Trump, he saves his most concentrated bile for fellow Republicans. One of the most puerile ads of the midterms thus far has been Mr. Greitens’s “RINO hunting” spot, in which he leads a group of armed men in tactical gear as they storm a lovely little suburban home in search of G.O.P. heretics.

Greitens was the front-runner until big money got behind an ad campaign highlighting the ex-wife’s claims. That seems to have brought him down, but he’s still close enough that it’s not a foregone conclusion that he’ll lose.

Multiple polls show the former governor’s support slipping, dropping him behind a couple of his opponents. The state’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, appears to have taken the lead. He, too, is an election-denying Trump suck-up. But at this point the G.O.P. is operating on a curve; simply weeding out those alleged to be abusers and other possible criminals can feel like a major achievement.

We’ll see what happens tomorrow.

and the DoJ’s 1-6 investigation

With Congress’ 1-6 hearings on hiatus, attention shifts to the Department of Justice. From the beginning, pundits have been skeptical of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s stomach for indicting the political actors behind the insurrection. Sure, DoJ might prosecute rioters by the hundreds and get convictions for trespassing and so forth, but would investigators ever start to climb the pyramid?

It looks like they are. The federal grand jury has been interviewing aides to Mike Pence, and asking them questions about conversations with Trump. DoJ also seems to be looking into Trump’s fake-elector scheme.

DoJ investigations are supposed to make as few waves as possible until indictments come down, and to vanish without a trace if there is no crime to indict. So you need experienced tea-leaf-readers to interpret the signs. My favorites are the folks at Lawfare.

you also might be interested in …

The Biden administration has been trying to get Russia to accept a prisoner swap for WNBA star Brittney Griner and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, but so far it’s not working.

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1015537/the-trade

She’s black and female and in trouble with Russia, so course we know what side Trump will come down on: Biden shouldn’t try to get her out at all, because she’s “spoiled” and “loaded up with drugs”. (To me, that sounds like a good description of Don Jr.)

[The Russians] don’t like drugs. And she got caught. And now, we’re supposed to get her out — and she makes, you know, a lot of money.

Griner makes the WNBA max salary of $227K, less than what Bill Russell was making in the 1960s. That’s not a lot of money for somebody who is (1) at the top of her profession and (2) expecting the short career of a professional athlete. The reason she (and other WNBA stars) go overseas during the off-season is to supplement their income.

The Celebrity Net Worth web site estimates her entire fortune at $5 million. It takes Steph Curry about ten games to earn that much.

The Juice Media has a project it calls “honest government ads”. Here’s one for the Supreme Court.

Amanda Marcotte points out the similarities between Republican reactions to mass shootings and to horror stories from their abortion bans: Blame the victims, claim liberals have manufactured the story, and blatantly gaslight about what their laws actually say.

This is all in line with what I was pointing out two weeks ago: It’s an article of faith that conservative policies have no victims. If some obvious victim begins to get attention, that story has to be knocked down by any means necessary.

Michelle Goldberg makes a similar point:

Members of the anti-abortion movement, including [Alexandra] DeSanctis, often claim that abortion is never medically necessary. If they can’t bear to look clearly at the world they’ve made, maybe it’s because then they’d have to admit that what they’ve been saying has never been true.

Welcome to the world, George Jetson, who (according to a Warner Brothers wiki was born yesterday. Other sources have his birthday as August 27, but there’s general agreement he’s born in 2022.

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1015535/woke-democrats

Bill Russell died at age 88. He was arguably the greatest winner in sports history. In his 13-year NBA career, his Boston Celtics won 11 championships. He also won two NCAA championships at the University of San Francisco, and an Olympic gold medal with the US national team in 1956.

Also dead at 89 is Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura on the original Star Trek series. Her character wasn’t as central to the show as the Kirk/Spock/McCoy triad, so her importance is easy to overlook these days, when we’re used to seeing black actors in all sorts of roles. In 2016, a 50th anniversary retrospective noted:

Those of us who weren’t alive at the time probably can’t grasp how groundbreaking the character of Lieutenant Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols, was for audiences of the day. She was one of the first black women on TV not portrayed as a servant. … Nichols played her part in Star Trek’s most famous milestone – what is widely considered the first inter-racial kiss on American television. It wasn’t, in fact – Nancy Sinatra smooched Sammy Davis Jr on TV the year before, to name but one instance – but the moment was so iconic and definitive that it deserves credit.

and let’s close with a science-meets-horror moment

The researchers are calling it “necrobiotics“, which sounds like it ought to be the study of the living dead. Talk about high concept: the movie just seems to write itself. They’re manipulating dead spiders to grab things. What could possibly go wrong?

It turns out that after spiders die, their corpses are basically hydraulic devices. If you can suppress your urge to run out of the room, it’s actually pretty cool.

August 1, 2022 – 12:39 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

A Week When Congress Mattered

Three important bills and what happened to them.

Most of the time in America, it’s hard to believe that the Founders intended Congress to be the center of our government. Today, our political conversation spends weeks at a time focused on what the Supreme Court did or might do, what the President did or might do, or how one of them will respond to the other’s latest move.

But wait — isn’t there a third branch? What ever happened to it?

When we talk about Congress at all, it’s usually because they’re investigating some scandal or pseudo-scandal in the executive branch. Or because the Senate is confirming a new judge. Or Congress is the backdrop where the Fed chair makes headlines by commenting on the economy or interest rates.

Of course, members of Congress can become a topic of discussion if they tweet something outrageous or share a platform with Nazis or embarrass our country in some other way. When Republicans control one house or the other, Congress occasionally manufactures a news-making event out of nothing: a government shutdown or a debt-ceiling crisis. The world would be puttering along just fine if Congress weren’t standing on an important life-line and threatening to shoot itself in the foot.

Every now and then, congressional coverage is about legislation, but the bill in question is only symbolic: The House may be voting to codify Roe (i.e. respond to the Supreme Court) or ban assault weapons or protect voting rights (again, in response to the Supreme Court letting states violate rights previously established), but its members rest secure in the knowledge that a Senate filibuster will prevent any of that from becoming law. The point isn’t to accomplish something for the country, but to get one party or the other on the record, so that their votes can be issues in the next election.

In short, we’re used to viewing Congress through a veil of Shakespearean cynicism: Its doings may be full of sound and fury, but ultimately they signify nothing.

To the country’s great surprise, though, this week was different: Congress was in the headlines for three pieces of legislation, all of which matter to people in the non-political world and stand a real chance of becoming law: One bill passed and is on President Biden’s desk. One bill that looked like a slam-dunk failed. And one that seemed dead came back to life.

The bill that Congress passed is the CHIPS Act, which subsidizes American high-tech manufacturing in an attempt to bring the semiconductor industry back to the United States. (Currently, the US imports its most advanced computer chips from Taiwan, a supply chain that China might be able to interrupt.) Promoted as a move to stay competitive with China, the bill spends $52 billion directly, and also includes a tax credit for certain kinds of investments.

The bill is aimed at the future, and won’t do much to solve the immediate chip shortage, which is hampering a variety of American industries. Vox summarizes:

The bulk of the CHIPS Act is a $39 billion fund that will subsidize companies that expand or build new semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the US. The Commerce Department will determine which companies receive the funding, which will be disbursed over five years. More than $10 billion is allocated to semiconductor research, and there’s also some support for workforce development and collaboration with other countries. The bill also includes an extensive investment tax credit that could be worth an additional $24 billion.

https://claytoonz.com/2022/07/30/toast-our-troops/

The bill that unexpectedly failed was PACT. The point of this bill is to expand VA care to veterans whose illnesses may have been caused by exposure to toxic fumes from burn pits during foreign deployments. Wikipedia says:

Burn pits were used as a waste disposal method by the United States Armed Forces during the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the War in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War, but have since been terminated due to the toxic fumes that posed health risks to nearby soldiers. Currently, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) requires veterans to prove that their illness is directly related to burn pits.

From 2007 to 2020, the VA denied 78 percent of disability claims by veterans that were alleged to have been caused by burn pits. The Honoring our PACT Act would remove the requirement that veterans prove that burn pits caused their illness and retroactively pay veterans who did not receive care for their illnesses after claiming disability caused by burn pits. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the cost of the Act would be $300 billion from 2022 to 2032.

This was supposed to be a done deal. The House passed the bill in March. With only minor changes, the Senate passed the bill 84-14 in June. It then went back to the House, where “technical problems were discovered in the language of the bill”. The House made the needed technical changes and passed the bill again. Because the bill wasn’t identical to the one the Senate passed, it went back to the Senate, where passage should have been a formality. But instead Republicans blocked it.

“Why?” you might ask. Well, for reasons that have nothing to do with the bill itself, but rather with the other two bills. Democrats intend to avoid the Senate filibuster by passing the third bill, the Inflation Reduction Act (see below), via reconciliation. They can do that without any Republican votes, if they get all 50 Democratic votes. (That’s why an individual Democrat like Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema has so much power.)

Passing a bill without Republican votes is a horrible miscarriage of democracy — at least if you listen to Republicans. (Of course, they passed the Trump tax cuts via reconciliation, and tried to repeal ObamaCare via reconciliation, both without the votes of any Democratic senators. But that’s fine, because that was them. When Democrats do it, it’s unthinkably awful.)

As usual when Republicans aren’t getting their way, they took hostages. McConnell promised that there would be no bipartisan CHIPS Act if Democrats went ahead with a reconciliation bill. 17 Republican senators apparently believe that the CHIPS Act is good for America — that’s why they voted for it. But they were willing to torpedo something good for America if Democrats didn’t do what they wanted. (God forbid senators should just vote for what they think is good and against what they think is bad.)

But when Joe Manchin blew up what was left of the reconciliation bill two weeks ago, Republicans decided they didn’t need a hostage any more. So the CHIPS bill passed.

And then Manchin and Schumer announced they had come to an agreement. Someone had to be punished for tricking Mitch McConnell (who is always such a straight shooter himself, right?), and the only whipping boy at hand was PACT. So McConnell blocked it. (For technical reasons, PACT doesn’t qualify as a reconciliation bill, so 41 Republican votes was enough to stop it.)

Veterans were outraged, as they should be. Veterans’ healthcare shouldn’t be collateral damage in a dispute that has nothing to do with them. Nothing should, but especially not that. (Various Republicans have given a variety of bogus reasons for blocking the bill. But nothing that they’re talking about has changed since the same senators supported the bill in June.)

Fortunately, veterans have a celebrity speaking up for them: Jon Stewart, who has been championing these sorts of issues for a long time. (Before PACT, he nagged Congress until it fully funded the September 11 Victims Compensation Fund for first responders whose health problems traced back to working in the ruins of the Twin Towers.)

Partly due to Stewart’s ability to draw attention and channel outrage, the optics of this are terrible for Republicans, especially with the fall elections approaching. So I expect them to come back from the August recess looking to fix their blunder. I hope Chuck Schumer just takes the win and gets this done.

The bill that came back from the dead was the Inflation Reduction Act, a smaller and re-jiggered version of President Biden’s Build Back Better plan.

Build Back Better started out as a massive $3.5 trillion initiative that addressed a wide range of issues, from tax policy to healthcare to infrastructure to immigration to climate change. No Republican in Congress has ever supported it, so from the beginning, the only way to pass it was to get almost every Democrat in the House to support it, and then to squeeze it to fit the arcane rules of the reconciliation process in the Senate. If that happened, then Democrats could pass it if all 50 Democratic senators supported it and Vice President Harris broke the tie.

That need for unanimity gives every Democratic senator a veto. Most Democrats have seen the bill as a chance to prove to reluctant voters (especially young voters) that Democratic control of Congress actually matters, and that important things can get done if you vote. (Conversely, the best weapon Republicans have to suppress the youth vote in the midterm elections is “It doesn’t matter. Congress never accomplishes anything anyway.”) So they’ve been easy to convince. All along, though, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia have been more difficult.

Most of the attention has gone to Manchin, who represents a state that Donald Trump carried more than 2-to-1 in 2020. So Manchin wins his elections almost entirely on his own, rather than because he represents the Democratic Party. When he runs again in 2024, “He saved Joe Biden’s agenda” is likely to appear in an attack ad against him, rather than an ad in his favor. So he has been understandably careful about what he agrees to.

(On the Left, I often see people attributing his position to corruption, to having coal industry donors, and to having coal interests himself. Similarly, the Senate’s inability to pass significant climate legislation gets attributed to “the Democrats” not really wanting to do so, because of donors and whatnot. I don’t see any reason to go there. Manchin represents a poor state with substantial fossil fuel resources. He needs to get votes from people who are skeptical about climate change, and are particularly skeptical that the Democratic Party wants to solve their problems. And “the Democrats” haven’t been able to pass a bill because they need 50 people to be unanimous, which is hard. Remember when the Republicans tried to repeal ObamaCare? They had 52 senators, but they couldn’t get 50 of them to agree on any particular proposal.)

https://www.realtriv.com/sellouts.html

For a year and a half, Manchin has been hard to please. The bill kept getting whittled down to fit what he claimed to want, but the goalposts would always move again before an agreement got made. (In his defense, the issue that he said he was worried about — inflation — kept turning out to be worse than previously anticipated.) Two weeks ago, it looked like he had ended any hope of getting a bill done in this session of Congress. And if Democrats lose either house of Congress in the fall, as seems likely (especially if they can’t generate more accomplishments to run on), it might be a long time before they’ll get another shot.

From the beginning, I’ve been debating whether Manchin was serious, or was just stringing President Biden along. (Moderate Republicans played a similar game with President Obama about ObamaCare. They kept hinting that their votes were available, but then never getting to Yes.) If he was serious, I figured, then eventually he would agree to something. Two weeks ago, I concluded that he was not serious and had never been serious.

But then Wednesday, Manchin and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced an agreement, which they dubbed the Inflation Control Act. Vox sums up what the bill includes:

  • $739 billion in revenue increases and $433 in new spending, leaving more than $300 billion for deficit reduction over ten years.
  • $370 billion of the spending addresses climate change. Most of the money goes for renewable energy and electric vehicles. The bill also includes a new penalty to discourage methane leaks.
  • The cap on the cost of ObamaCare insurance policies (adopted as part of Covid legislation in 2021) is extended for another three years.
  • Medicare is finally allowed to save money by negotiating the price of at least some drugs.
  • The IRS will get more money to help it catch rich people who cheat on their taxes.
  • Loopholes will close so that corporations pay at least a 15% tax rate.

The wild card in this is the other renegade Democrat, Kyrsten Sinema. She’s the last veto standing, and she might use that power to either get something that she wants or to scuttle the deal entirely. We should find out this week.

August 1, 2022 – 10:00 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

When you consider how much power the Constitution theoretically gives Congress, it’s amazing how seldom that body is the focus of our national political conversation. When we do talk about Congress, it’s usually because Congress is investigating somebody else (as in the 1-6 hearings) or because it’s taking some symbolic vote that won’t actually change anything (like all the progressive legislation that gets through the House but predictably dies in the Senate).

This week, though, the focus was on Congress legislating, believe it or not. The CHIPs bill passed. Joe Manchin finally agreed to a climate reconciliation bill, which now is all lined up to pass (assuming Kyrsten Sinema doesn’t torpedo it). And a bill that looked like a slam dunk, the PACT Act to provide healthcare to veterans suffering the effects of toxic burn pit fumes, unexpectedly got blocked by Republicans in the Senate — apparently as a temper tantrum about the Manchin-Schumer deal. That was a huge self-inflicted wound on the GOP, and I think the pressure to reverse it will be irresistible once the August recess ends.

The opportunity to focus on meaningful legislation is so novel that I have to make that the featured post this week. “A Week When Congress Mattered” should appear around 10 or so EDT.

The weekly summary will also cover tomorrow’s primaries, including the referendum on abortion in Kansas. Also, why I think the newly announced centrist Forward Party is doomed. With the 1-6 Committee in recess, attention has shifted to the DoJ’s investigation, which might be aiming higher than it has sometimes appeared. WNBA star Britteny Griner is still on trial in Russia, and NBA legend Bill Russell died at the age of 89. How the Right’s tactics for avoiding the unfortunate results of their abortion policies resemble their tactics for avoiding the unfortunate results of their gun policy. Plus a few other things. I’ll aim to get that out around noon.

August 1, 2022 – 8:40 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

No Ambiguity

In our hearing tonight, you saw an American President faced with a stark and unmistakable choice between right and wrong. There was no ambiguity. No nuance. Donald Trump made a purposeful choice to violate his oath of office, to ignore the ongoing violence against law enforcement, to threaten our constitutional order. There is no way to excuse that behavior. It was indefensible.

– Liz Cheney, 7-21-2022

This week’s featured post is “Trump doesn’t have a side of the 1-6 story“.

This week everybody was talking about the final summer 1-6 committee hearing

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=589953199165168&set=a.202597147900777

Thursday’s prime-time hearing [video, transcript] focused on the three hours between when Trump told his supporters to march to the Capitol and when he asked them to go home.

In between, he sat in the Oval Office dining room watching the riot unfold on Fox News and doing nothing to stop it. He could have asked the rioters to go home sooner, and he could have mobilized federal resources to support the Capitol Police resisting the attack. Many of his staffers urged him to do one or the other, but he refused.

Instead, he tweeted more incitement to those who wanted to hang Vice President Pence, and called Republicans in Congress urging them to further delay the counting the electoral votes. It seems clear that his primary goal that day was to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s victory, and the riot was just one of his tools for achieving that purpose. He didn’t stop the riot because he wanted it to succeed.

Some of the most striking evidence presented concerned Vice President Pence’s safety. Audio and video of Pence’s Secret Service detail trying to move him from his office in the Capitol to a more secure location showed just how tense the situation was.

In addition, an anonymous White House security official (whose voice was disguised), told about listening to the Secret Service radio chatter.

Members of the V.P. detail at this time were starting to fear for their own lives. There was a lot of yelling—a lot of very personal calls over the radio. It was very disturbing. I don’t like talking about it. There were calls to say goodbye to family members. For whatever reason on the ground, the V.P. detail thought that this was about to get very ugly.

The comic relief in the hearing was video of Josh Hawley pumping his fist to encourage the 1-6 mob, but then later running through the Capitol to get away from them. The clip got one of the few audible laughs we’ve heard in these hearings. His home-state Kansas City Star proclaimed Senator Hawley “a laughingstock” and quoted this tweet:

From now on, if political reporters ask Josh Hawley if he’s planning to run, he’s going to have to ask them to clarify.

Hawley has a book coming out next May: “Manhood: the Masculine Virtues America Needs“. When I first heard that, I thought it was a joke. It’s not, or at least not an intentional one.

https://claytoonz.com/2022/07/22/run-josh-run/

The mystery of the missing Secret Service text messages from January 6 is looking worse and worse. The Service is claiming they innocently deleted the messages as part of a system upgrade, but that’s hard to credit. I upgraded computer this year, and I managed not to delete my files. The Secret Service, meanwhile, is an agency responsible for investigating cybercrimes. Basic data hygiene shouldn’t be beyond them.

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1015349/the-secret-services-really-good-job

The Service is also connected to another 1-6 mystery: Why was Mike Pence so reluctant to get in the car when agents wanted to take him to a safer place?

Mr Pence then reportedly outright refused to get into the vehicle, saying his security detail would ignore his demand not to leave the building and would instead “take off” against his wishes.

“I’m not getting in the car, Tim,” Mr Pence replied. “I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving the car. If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car.”

This is speculative to the point of being a conspiracy theory, but what if the two are connected? Maybe the agents’ text messages say something about their plans for Pence.

Beaux of the Fifth Column doesn’t expect the hearings to turn Trump supporters into liberals, but he does suggest the lesson they should learn from what has been presented: Trump conned them with his whole stolen-election grift, and Trump’s people have been laughing at them this whole time. Now they need to look at their 2022 candidates, and sort out which ones were also fooled by Trump, and which ones were in on the con.

Steve Bannon was found guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress. He called no witnesses, and the jury deliberated for two-and-a-half hours.

I wonder what they talked about. “Should we hang around for lunch? Anybody know what they’re feeding us?” They needed to answer two questions: Did Bannon receive a lawful subpoena? Did he defy it? The answers were clearly yes.

He’ll be sentenced in October, possibly for as long as two years. He’s planning to appeal. His only hope is a purely partisan intervention by the Supreme Court’s Republican majority.

Peter Navarro has also been charged with contempt of Congress; his trial is due to start November 17. Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino have also been cited by Congress for contempt, but the Justice Department has not pressed charges.

The Murdoch Empire seems to have turned on Trump. This week both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post spoke out against him.

and abortion

A leading Republican candidate for governor of Michigan is clear about her position:

Asked … about a hypothetical situation in which a 14-year-old girl became pregnant as a result of sexual abuse by a family member, Dixon said, “Perfect example.” She went on, “Because I know people who are the product. A life is a life for me. That’s how it is. That is for me, that is my feeling.” 

“A life is a life” doesn’t seem to apply to the 14-year-old, whose life might be thrown considerably off-track.

The NYT has been staying on this theme: Life-of-the-mother exceptions to state abortion bans are not all they’re made out to be. Yes, they allow abortions if a pregnant woman is in danger of immediate death. But they don’t cover the situation where death is merely a probable consequence of carrying a fetus to term, or even of waiting to see how things develop.

Case in point: pregnant women with cancer.

[Rachel Brown] had always said she would never have an abortion. But the choices she faced were wrenching. If she had the chemotherapy that she needed to prevent the spread of her cancer, she could harm her baby. If she didn’t have it, the cancer could spread and kill her. She had two children, ages 2 and 11, who could lose their mother.

… Ms. Brown’s first visit was with a surgical oncologist who, she said, “made it clear that my life would be in danger if I kept my pregnancy because I wouldn’t be able to be treated until the second trimester.” He told her that if she waited for those months passed, her cancer could spread to distant organs and would become fatal.

This situation is exceptional, but not freakishly so. The article claims that about one in a thousand pregnant women gets diagnosed with cancer (often breast cancer). Given that millions of babies are born in the US each year, that means thousands of women face this decision. Or at least they did face it, before state governments began deciding for them that they must risk their lives.

Similar considerations apply to pregnant women prone to blood clots or at risk of stroke or heart attack. They may not be facing death at this particular moment, but waiting for a crisis might mean intervening too late to save them.

Some women, no doubt, want a child so badly that they would choose to accept such a risk. But that should be their decision, not the government’s.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/cartoon-by-rob-rogers/

A political science professor at Indiana University calls out IU leadership for its timidity in defending Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the woman who became a target for Indiana’s attorney general when she performed an abortion on the pregnant 10-year-old who came to her from Ohio, where the abortion was illegal. Bernard is an assistant professor at the IU School of Health.

President Whitten and Dean Hess especially ought to be ashamed of themselves for their cowardly silence. Indiana University is a public university, not an extension of the state’s Republican administration or the attorney general’s far-right, anti-abortion agenda. If it stands for anything, it is the freedom of its faculty and professional staff to do their jobs without being attacked for doing so.

and the pandemic

Numbers have definitely turned upwards in the last few weeks. For a long time deaths in the US had stayed in the 300s per day. Now they’re averaging 444.

President Biden tested positive for Covid Friday. He seems to be doing fine, which is a credit to the effect of vaccination. President Trump, if you remember, got very seriously ill in the days before vaccines.

and fascists being as outrageous as possible

Before getting angry, consider that these folks are trying very hard to make people like us angry. So if you’re in a bad mood already, I recommend skipping this section.

The quotes below are from the Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit in Tampa this weekend. Turning Point USA claims it’s mission is “to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote freedom”, but it has basically become a Young Fascists organization. Recognizing the similarity (and possibly looking to recruit), local neo-Nazi groups showed up outside the conference. But TPUSA did at least find it necessary to officially denounce them. And I have to confess that the far right is so bizarre these days that it’s hard to tell whether someone is attempting to parody them. (I mean, is the guy carrying a “DeSantis Country” flag next to the guy with a swastika flag really a DeSantis supporter? He could be, but who can say for sure?)

https://www.cltampa.com/tampa/photos-neo-nazis-gather-outside-turning-point-usa-summit-at-tampa-convention-center/Slideshow/13849084/13850127

Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz won the prize for provoking the most social-media backlash with this gem:

Why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having abortions? … Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb.

Because, of course, only women Gaetz finds attractive are entitled to have opinions or constitutional rights. (This quote is reminiscent of Trump defending himself against charges of sexual assault by claiming that his accusers were too ugly to assault, as if that ever stopped anybody.) Gaetz also went on an anti-Hunter-Biden rant, inspiring the crowd to chant “Lock him up!” Meanwhile, Gaetz himself is under investigation for sex trafficking and sex with a minor. Las Vegas should offer odds on whether Hunter or Matt sees the inside of a prison cell first.

Marjorie Taylor Greene labeled herself a “Christian nationalist”, because that always turns out well, particularly for Jews and Muslims, and even the occasional liberal Christian. “I think that’s what the Republican Party needs to be about,” she said.

Rick Scott used the classic Nazi technique of accusing opponents of your own sins.

In their new socialist America, everyone will obey, and no one will be allowed to complain. … The modern Left in America are the modern day version of book burners.

His state of Florida is where math books are banned from the schools for political reasons, and teachers are ordered to remove rainbow flags from their classrooms. The state’s largest school district currently has no sexual education curriculum, because the board has rejected all the texts.

Ted Cruz informed the crowd “I’m Ted Cruz, and my pronoun is Kiss My Ass.” I hope people start using that preferred pronoun to refer to Kiss My Ass. It’s the respectful thing to do.

Trump Jr. gave such an unhinged (and possibly drug-fueled) speech that liberals didn’t even bother to argue with whatever he was trying to say. Instead, Molly Jong-Fast asks “Is he OK?” I suspect the answer is no.

Donald Trump easily won the 2024 presidential straw poll with 79%, followed by Ron DeSantis with 19%. Mike Pence and other would-be contenders definitely need to worry about their lack of fascist appeal.

and you also might be interested in …

https://jensorensen.com/2022/07/21/polarization-both-sidesism-cartoon/

Cities across Europe have been setting heat records. Large chunks of the US have been pretty hot too.

Somebody tried to stab Rep. Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor of New York. The guy has been arrested and charged. President Biden immediately denounced the attack. “Violence has absolutely no place in our society or our politics.” I completely agree.

A note to the Republicans still making excuses for the January 6 rioters: See how easy that is? You can Just Say No to violence.

One thing the Speaker of the House can do without support in the Senate is force the other party to go on the record. This week Speaker Pelosi held votes on two of four bills that passed the House, but will probably die in the Senate:

  • The Women’s Health Protection Act, which codifies into law abortion rights that were constitutional rights before the Dobbs decision. In particular, no state can restrict abortion prior to fetal viability. This passed the House on July 15 with no Republican votes.
  • The Ensuring Access to Abortion Act, which ensures that “no person acting under state law could prevent, restrict, or otherwise retaliate against a person traveling across state lines for lawful abortion services.” This also passed on July 15, with three Republican votes and 205 votes against.
  • The Right to Contraception Act, which passed Thursday with eight Republican votes and 195 against. This codifies the right to use contraception, which is currently protected by the Supreme Court’s Griswold decision. That precedent is shaky now because it rests on the same legal base as Roe v Wade.
  • The Respect for Marriage Act, which codifies the right to same-sex and interracial marriage. These rights also are currently backed by Supreme Court precedents that the current Court might overturn. This passed Tuesday with 157 Republicans voting against it.

Expect to hear about these votes again in the fall campaign. These are all bills with substantial popular support, but they offend a small-but-influential sliver of the Republican electorate. Many Republicans would like to soft-pedal their position on such issues, but Pelosi forced them to vote Yes or No.

and let’s close with something squirrelly

Every photographer needs a theme. Geert Weggen’s theme is squirrels. I’m not sure how much he stages, how much he photoshops, and how much he captures in the wild, but the images are both amusing and amazing.

https://geertweggen.com/
July 25, 2022 – 12:06 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

Trump doesn’t have a side of the 1-6 story

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1015269/the-wild-things

Before you complain about the 1-6 hearings being “one-sided”, you might want to ask Trump what his side of the story is.

As the January 6 Committee wraps up its public hearings until September, it’s time to assess what we’ve learned and where we are. Using primarily testimony from people inside Trump’s orbit (and occasionally inside his family), the Committee has put together a compelling narrative of how the January 6 riot happened. The key points are:

  • Trump lost the election.
  • His own experts, in his campaign as well as his appointees in the government, knew that his claims of widespread election fraud were false, and told him so on numerous occasions. This was not a matter of debate among administration officials. Every official in a position to investigate came to the same conclusion.
  • Trump tried everything he could think of to stay in power in spite of the voters. At every level, he tried to influence and intimidate Republican officials to change the results in his favor.
  • He pressured Justice Department leaders to lie about the conclusions of their investigations and back his false claims of election fraud.
  • He promoted a series of dubious legal theories, ranging from the unlikely to the absurd, that would give various intermediate entities (state legislatures, Congress, the Vice President) the authority to reverse the will of the voters and keep him in power. Again, the experts within his own administration unanimously told him that these theories had no merit.
  • He encouraged Republicans in seven states to assemble false slates of electors, and to submit fake electoral-vote totals to Congress. He then pressured Vice President Pence to count those phony votes, or to illegally refuse to count the votes of legitimate electors because their slate was “disputed”.
  • When it became clear that key departments within his administration — Justice, Homeland Security, Defense — would not abuse their powers to cooperate with his schemes, he called for a massive rally on January 6, promising it would be “wild”.
  • On January 6 itself, Trump knew that some members of his audience were armed when he told them to go to the Capitol.
  • Although a march to the Capitol was not announced in advance (even in drafts of Trump’s speech), right-wing militia groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys knew it was coming. Before Trump started speaking, they were already preparing to breach the Capitol’s defenses and spearhead the mob Trump would send their way.
  • He intended to go to the Capitol himself, with his armed Secret Service detail, but the Secret Service refused to take him there. Instead, they returned him to the White House.
  • For three hours as the attack unfolded, he sat in the Oval Office dining room watching Fox News. The official White House records from that period are blank — no phone records, no photographs. During that time, virtually his entire staff pleaded for him to do something to stop the riot. But he made no effort to interfere with the attack, either by asking the mob to go home, or by mobilizing federal resources to aid the Capitol Police. Such orders, when they finally came, were given by Vice President Pence.
  • He knew that the mob was already angry with the vice president when he tweeted “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution”. He never called Pence to make sure he was safe. Meanwhile, members of Pence’s Secret Service detail were sending messages to their families in case they died.
  • Although the White House call record for those three hours is blank, President Trump was calling Republican congressmen, urging them to continue the work of the mob by delaying further the counting of electoral votes.
  • Only when the tide had already turned, and law enforcement was beginning to regain control of the situation, did Trump ask the rioters to go home. In that video message, he repeated the false stolen-election claims that had inflamed the mob, and told the rioters “We love you. You’re very special.”

If Trump supporters are forced to comment on this narrative, they nearly always say, “That’s just the Democrats’ version. The hearings don’t present Trump’s side of the story.”

I’ve heard various responses to this point, all of which are true as far as they go:

But there is a more fundamental answer that I seldom hear: Trump doesn’t have a side of the story to tell.

I know that sounds crazy: We’re often told that every story has at least two sides. But Trump has had every opportunity to tell his side of the story, and he has offered us nothing. If he wants to get his version out, he has immediate access to the vast resources of right-wing media, including Fox News, which I’m sure would love to be running shadow hearings orchestrated by his followers.

But in the last year and a half, Trump and his loyalists have made literally no positive contribution to the public record of the Capitol riot. From the beginning, Trump’s position has been consistent: No one should talk about January 6. No one should investigate it. No one should testify about it. (Josh Marshall comments on what Jim Jordan et al might have added to the hearings: “The point is to find out what happened … not to have a public presentation of findings along with another group making fart sounds and jeering and generally trying to throw the presentation or testimony off track.”)

Such comments on the hearings as Trump and his people have made are entirely negative: This event never happened, that witness shouldn’t be trusted, this testimony is hearsay, and so on.

But what did happen, Mr. Trump?

Crickets.

Well, that’s not entirely true: TrumpWorld does occasionally offer some transparent gaslighting about January 6, like when Trump described the mob that injured 150 police officers as “loving“, or Republican Congressman Andrew Clyde compared the Capitol invasion to “a normal tourist visit“, or the Republican National Committee characterized mob violence as “legitimate political discourse“.

But if any of the points in the Committee’s narrative are false, it shouldn’t be hard to assemble an alternative narrative and flesh it out with evidence. Did some investigator inside Trump’s Departments of Justice or Homeland Security (and not just amateur yahoos like Sidney Powell and the My Pillow guy) find evidence of the kind of widespread fraud that could have turned the election? (And not just a handful of people submitting false ballots, many of them for Trump?) Was there a faction — or even one person — inside DoJ’s Office of Legal Counsel or the White House Counsel’s office who supported Trump’s Pence-can-decide-what-votes-to-count theory? Can Trump tell us about any call he made to send help to the Capitol Police, and get the person he called to back him up? What’s the innocent explanation of how the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys knew ahead of time that a mob was coming to storm the Capitol?

Tell us about it. That would constitute another side of the story.

Or Trump could discuss his intentions. When he told the mob that he would go with them to the Capitol, did he mean it? Where exactly was he planning to go? What was he planning to do when he got there? Why didn’t he tell his supporters to go home sooner?

Other Trumpists could also tell us interesting facts, if they were so inclined. We know Roger Stone spent a lot of time with right-wing militia leaders prior to January 6. Maybe he could tell his side of that story (rather than pleading the Fifth in response to every question). Steve Bannon seems to have been tipped off about the riot. (“All hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” he said on his January 5 podcast. “It’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen.”) I’d love to discover how he knew, but he’d rather go to jail than talk about 1-6 under oath.

Mike Flynn retweeted a call for then-president Trump to declare martial law and hold a new election, and called for similar actions himself in public speeches. Other Trump officials have testified that Flynn wanted Trump to order the military to seize voting machines. Maybe he could tell us what he had in mind, rather than pleading the Fifth to a basic civics question like “Do you believe in the peaceful transition of power in the United States of America?”

Those accounts could turn into another side of the story. But it’s not the 1-6 Committee that’s preventing you from hearing such a narrative. It’s Trump.

So if you’re still a Trump supporter in spite of the evidence accumulated and presented by the Committee so far, your problem isn’t that Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney are suppressing Trump’s side of the story.

Your problem is that Trump doesn’t have a side.

July 25, 2022 – 9:24 am Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Thursday was the final 1-6 Committee hearing of the summer. The weekly summary will link to a complete video and transcript, plus summarizing the main points.

I thought this was a good time to take a step back and reflect on the larger picture. In particular, I wanted to answer the objection that the hearings are “one-sided”, because no one on the committee is representing Trump. I summarize that objection’s flaw in the featured post “Trump doesn’t have a side of the 1-6 story”, which should be out shortly.

From the very beginning, the effort of Trump and his allies hasn’t been to tell his side of the 1-6 story, but to prevent any discussion of the incident at all. Mitch McConnell blocked the proposal for a bipartisan commission, and Kevin McCarthy pulled his nominees off the House committee in an attempt to discredit it. Fox News has been refusing to air the hearings. Many of Trump’s closest allies have refused to testify, and Steven Bannon seems ready to go to jail rather than tell his “side” of the story.

People who complain about not hearing Trump’s “side” during the hearings should instead be asking Trump what his side is.

The weekly summary will also discuss the further response to the Dobbs decision, the bizarre speeches at the Young Fascists Turning Point USA conference this weekend, the House’s attempt to codify rights before the Supreme Court takes them away, the European heat wave, and a few other things. It should be out a little before noon EDT.

July 25, 2022 – 8:40 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

To Bind or Protect?

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

– Frank Wilhoit

This week’s featured post is “No Victims Allowed“.

This week everybody was talking about January 6

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=598169388321160&set=pb.100043843133639.-2207520000..

The public hearings will return to prime time on Thursday, with a “minute by minute” recreation of what Trump was doing (and not doing) while the Capitol was under attack.

Last Tuesday’s hearing [video transcript] centered on the decision to call a mob to Washington, and who some of the key organizers were. Vox lists the key takeaways from the hearing.

I had not previously made the connection between the “unhinged” White House meeting of December 18 — when Rudy, Sid Powell, Flynn and “the Overstock guy” urged Trump to have the military seize voting machines — and Trump’s “will be wild” announcement of the January 6 demonstration that he tweeted only hours later. In context, it looks like Cipollone et al convinced him that martial-law tactics wouldn’t work, so he moved on to the riot plan.

The other detail that struck me: Even though the call to march to the Capitol was only added to Trump’s speech at the last minute, lots of people seemed to know it would be there.

As one organizer texted a conservative journalist on January 5, “Trump is supposed to order us to capitol at the end of his speech, but we will see.” Another organizer texted that the plans had been kept under wraps to keep it a surprise: “It can also not get out about the march because I will be in trouble with the national park service and all the agencies but POTUS is going to just call for it ‘unexpectedly.’”

That starts to sound like conspiracy.

Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony continues to pick up corroboration. None of the TrumpWorld sources who supposedly were going to dispute her account have gone on the record. Meanwhile,

a Metropolitan Police Department officer corroborated details of Hutchinson’s account and recounted what was seen to committee investigators.

Rep. Raskin:

[Pat] Cipollone has corroborated almost everything that we’ve learned from the prior hearings. I certainly did not hear him contradict Cassidy Hutchinson. … He had the opportunity to say whatever he wanted to say, so I didn’t see any contradiction there.

The Committee continues to warn Trump about witness tampering. It’s a simple crime that is not that hard to prove — kind of like Al Capone’s tax evasion.

Part of putting together an account of Trump’s behavior during the 1-6 riot involves looking at Secret Service text messages. But it turns out that some texts were deleted as part of a “device-replacement program”. We’ll see if that’s really as suspicious as it sounds. The committee says it will try to “reconstruct” the deleted messages.

The most amusing take on the Secret-Service-text-deletion story is that it vindicates Major Biden, who had to leave the White House because he kept biting agents. Maybe he had sniffed out that some of them weren’t good boys.

https://news.knowyourmeme.com/news/major-biden-vindicated-secret-service-agents-deleted-january-6th-texts-so-disgraced-presidential-dog-may-have-had-reason-to-bite-them

Steve Bannon’s trial starts today. He tried to delay or derail it every possible way, but it’s happening. Also, the Trump-appointed judge is not allowing the spurious defenses that Bannon pledged would turn the trial into a “misdemeanor from Hell”. “What’s the point in going to trial here if there are no defenses?” his lawyer asked.

Other investigations also seem to be picking up steam. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has sent “target letters” to a number of Georgia Republians

informing them they could be indicted for their role in a scheme to appoint alternate electors pledged to the former president despite Joe Biden’s victory in the state

Target letters are typically used to invite lower-level members of a conspiracy to come in and make a deal to testify against higher-level conspirators.

Willis has already subpoenaed Senator Lindsey Graham and Rudy Giuliani.

DoJ reportedly is also looking at the fake electors, possibly because it would be easy to make a case: People signed their names to false documents and sent them to the National Archives.

and more Manchin sabotage

Early on, I was inclined to give Joe Manchin the benefit of the doubt: He represents a conservative state, and is entitled to vote his worldview just like any other senator. If Biden’s Build Back Better plan doesn’t make sense to him, he shouldn’t vote for it.

And in a 50-50 Senate, each Democrat is in a position to hold out for whatever deal they want. That’s how politics is, and if people don’t like it they should elect a few more liberal Democratic senators to take Manchin’s veto away.

What’s been driving me nuts, though, is that Manchin doesn’t seem to be negotiating in good faith. Negotiations that have no reason to take more than a few weeks instead stretch into many months, and then at the end there’s no deal. If there was nothing he could agree to, why didn’t he just say so early on?

This week the climate portion of Build Back Better fell apart.

Sen. Joe Manchin appears to have torpedoed a cornerstone of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda, telling Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer Thursday evening that he won’t support moving forward on proposed tax hikes on wealthy Americans and corporations that would pay for a package of climate change and energy policies, at least not right away, this according to two aides familiar with the matter.

Manchin cites fears about inflation, but since the spending is balanced against taxes, and won’t drive up the deficit, it’s not clear why the bill should be inflationary.

Meanwhile, new climate anomalies keep popping up. Europe is seeing wildfires in France and Spain, and England is set to break 40 degrees Centigrade (104 Fahrenheit) for the first time ever.

and abortion

The featured post discusses the pregnant Ohio 10-year-old who had to leave the state for an abortion.

I don’t think this story is a one-timer. Abortion is fundamentally a more complicated decision than conservatives picture, and their simplistic bans are going to lead to a long series of I-didn’t-mean-that cases.

The Biden administration is insisting that hospitals have to provide abortions in emergency situations, even if state law bans them.

[HHS Secretary Xavier] Becerra said the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act pre-empts state laws that restrict abortion access in emergency situations. … Although most of the state abortion bans make exceptions for when the woman’s life is in danger, U.S. health officials worry that wary doctors could wait too long to treat ectopic pregnancies and complications from miscarriages while awaiting legal guidance.

Texas, meanwhile, appears to be holding out for a hospital’s right to let a woman die.

Texas on Thursday asked a federal court to block the Biden administration’s requirement that physicians and hospitals provide abortions in medical emergencies.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, argued that federal law does not confer a right to an abortion.

Dov Fox is a law professor and the director of University of San Diego’s Center for Health Law Policy and Bioethics. In a NYT column, he raises the issue of doctors who perform illegal abortions for reasons of conscience.

The American legal regime that governs medical conscience is broken. While conscientious providers find virtually no refuge in the conscience clauses that are codified in almost every state, refusers are protected almost categorically. And just about all of these conscience laws are reserved for denials of care.

It’s not hard to imagine what a conscience-based abortion would look like: Even if the state has a life-of-the-mother exception in its abortion ban, the doctor may draw that line in a different place than the legislature does. A doctor said this to ABC News:

When I see patients, for instance, who have a major cardiac problem, a lot of the time they have a risk of a major cardiac event of up to 15% to 25%, even up to 50%. At the moment they’re fine. But as they get further into pregnancy, that’s going to put their life more and more at risk.

So do I have to wait until they’re on death’s doorstep, or can I intervene at that point to prevent more harm and more damage to them?

The NYT is covering the Kansas referendum on abortion. A Yes vote amends the state constitution to allow the legislature to restrict or ban abortion. The Republican legislature has scheduled the vote to coincide with the August 2 primary election, which has a lower turnout than a November election. The amendment is also confusingly worded. It doesn’t sound like what they’d do if they thought the electorate was solidly behind them.

The whole process smacks not so much of returning power to the people as of showing contempt for them and for the democratic process, a trend that is becoming standard operating procedure throughout much of the G.O.P.

and you also might be interested in …

Remember what a to-do it was last week, when protesters came to a restaurant Justice Kavanaugh was eating at, but there was no interaction, no one was harmed, and nothing was damaged?

A source told Politico that Kavanaugh did not actually see or hear the protestors in question during his dinner at Morton’s, though he did reportedly leave the restaurant before dessert.

What? No dessert? Is this Nazi Germany or something?

My comment was:

Any time liberal protesters inconvenience a conservative official, it’s going to get national attention. (Generally, conservative protesters have to shoot somebody to get similar coverage.)

Well, Saturday an armed man was arrested outside Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s home in Seattle. He was armed, and was yelling that she should “go back to India” because he was going to kill her. The story just didn’t seem to take off like the Kavanaugh story did, even though the threat seems far more serious.

Maybe if he’d actually shot her, that would get Kavanaugh-level attention.

The New Yorker has an enlightening article about LGBT children’s books. Often the issues that children bring up in a book discussion are not the ones that adults anticipate. The article also makes a distinction between “didactic” queer stories (which are suppose to teach children that difference is OK) and “just-are” queer stories (in which gay or trans people are just characters in a story about something else).

Ron DeSantis types assume that the presence of LGBTQ characters makes a story “sexual”, when kids don’t read that into the text at all.

Several prominent Republicans — former senators, former judges, etc. — have put out a report debunking the various stolen-election theories Trump supporters have put forward. It’s called Lost, Not Stolen, and it goes through the claims state by state.

If you’ve been following this stuff closely, you won’t find anything new. I already knew, for example, that when the Cyber Ninjas were hired by Arizona’s Republican legislature to “audit” the state’s 2020 election results, Biden’s lead actually grew in their recount. And that when a committee in Michigan’s Republican state senate investigated their state’s election, they found “no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters”.

But the report is significant for two reasons

  • This isn’t Democrats saying Biden won and Trump lost, it’s Republicans.
  • The report is encyclopedic, so it addresses the whattabout-this/whattabout-that tactic of Trumpists, where refuting one conspiracy theory just causes them to raise another.

A committee of the Texas House has put out its report on the Uvalde school shooting. The Texas Tribune summarizes:

No one was able to stop the gunman from carrying out the deadliest school shooting in Texas history, in part because of “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” by nearly everyone involved who was in a position of power

Police from various jurisdictions, from the school district to the state to the Border Patrol, descended on Uvalde, but nobody took charge of the 376 officers.

The report speculates that the shooter had never fired a gun until the day of the massacre.

and let’s close with something cosmic

I like to close with something you haven’t seen before, and often the closing is some set of spectacular photos. This week, though, the most spectacular photos (maybe ever) were headline news: The first returns from the James Webb Space Telescope.

July 18, 2022 – 11:48 am Categories: Articles, Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

No Victims Allowed

Right-wing policies have obvious victims, but right-wing voters can’t be allowed to notice them. This week, reports of a pregnant 10-year-old brought out the full arsenal of denial.

In the TV version of Westworld, the robots — or “hosts” in the corporate vernacular of the eponymous wild-west theme park — aren’t supposed to realize that they are manufactured pieces of an inauthentic environment. During each post-repair reactivation cycle, they are asked: “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” If the answer seems to be drifting towards “yes”, more tinkering is needed.

“Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?“

Fail-safes are built into their programming. Evidence of the world beyond the park, or of their own artificiality, isn’t supposed to register. “That doesn’t look like anything to me,” says one host as she examines a color photograph anachronistically dropped by a “guest”. Much later, another host says the same line while holding his own blueprints [spoiler].

No victims. The political fantasy world of American conservatives has similar safeguards. Conservative policies have certain obvious victims, people whose undeserved hell stems directly from those policies. But the voters who support those policies are not supposed to notice.

Kids who go hungry or become homeless when social programs are cut? Neighbors of poorly regulated industrial sites who develop bizarre cancers? Communities destroyed by climate-change-induced wildfires? They don’t look like anything, do they? Conservative policies work out best for everybody, other than a few corrupt and power-hungry Democratic politicians, or lazy people of color who want to sponge off the hard work of real Americans (or, conversely, to steal their crappiest jobs). Why would you ever question the nature of that reality?

Usually, right-wing media filters narrative-busting facts out of the news stream before they can disturb right-wing voters’ peace of mind. Has the January 6 Committee proved beyond the shadow of doubt that Trump knew his “stolen election” claims were lies? Fox News will protect its viewers from seeing that evidence. Does the Biden administration have the best job-creation record in the history of the modern presidency? Are vaccinated-and-boosted Americans 17 times less likely to die of Covid than unvaccinated Americans? Does right-wing political violence kill many, many more people than left-wing political violence? Do countries with national health care have lower expenses and higher life expectancies than the US? Nobody wants to hear that stuff; just leave it out.

School shootings. Every few weeks, though, something happens that is too big for the filter to handle, like a school shooting. The connection to policy couldn’t be clearer: Children are dead because the shooter had easy access to weapons that should only exist on a battlefield. Democrats would like to ban or restrict or control such weapons, but conservatives have blocked restrictions, and have even pushed to make such weapons more ubiquitous.

Republican lawmakers and judges have innocent blood on their hands.

That’s when you can see the conservative bubble’s immune system in its purest form. Some parts of it will tell you the apparent victims aren’t real. Those well-spoken kids from Parkland, the ones who survived their harrowing experience and became anti-gun activists? The reason they’re so articulate isn’t that Marjory Stoneman Douglas High did a good job educating them, it’s that they are “crisis actors” who weren’t present for the shooting at all. Similarly, the Sandy Hook parents didn’t really lose any children, they just participated in a “FEMA drill to promote gun control” [scroll down three pages to see text].

Nothing to concern yourself about. If those victims evoked a feeling of empathy, you can turn it off, because (like the hosts at Westworld) they’re just characters in a story, and not people at all.

Or maybe the events that disturb you are “false flag operations“. Remember the Las Vegas shooting, where one guy killed 60 concert-goers and wounded hundreds of others with multiple bump-stock-enhanced AR-15s? It wasn’t the kind of thing that’s bound to happen occasionally in a country with more guns than people. No, it was “the Islamic State and Antifa” carrying out a false-flag conspiracy “scripted by deep-state Democrats and their Islamic allies”. And the guy who responded to Trump’s “invasion” rhetoric by killing as many Hispanics as possible at a WalMart in El Paso? Antifa. Gotta be antifa.

The very act of connecting horrible events to conservative policies is itself illegitimate. Noting the clear cause-and-effect is “politicizing tragedy“. (Framing mass shootings as “tragedies” is an additional sleight-of-hand: Tragedies arise from inexorable Fate rather than human choices.) Learning from the Uvalde shooting that 18-year-olds should not be able to buy assault weapons is “politicizing” the deaths of children. Discussing gun policy “too soon” after a shooting disrespects the dead. (Oddly, though, it was never too soon to blame President Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal for the deaths of 13 Marines. That could start immediately.)

Discussing other kinds of policy issues after a shooting is fine: mental health, video games, broken families, reinstating school prayer. The NRA’s politicians toss those topics into the post-shooting conversation the way radar-evading aircraft scatter reflective chaff. It’s never “too soon” to raise one of these issues, because (unlike guns) they’re not “political”. You can also propose “solutions” like armed teachers and schools with prison-like security, but not gun control.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/paralyzed-by-inaction/

The pregnant 10-year-old and Ohio’s laws. This week, though, we saw the clearest right-wing denial operation yet: the pregnant Ohio 10-year-old who had to leave the state to get an abortion.

Inside the conservative information bubble, the abortion issue is about healthy women with healthy fetuses who conceived their babies in wantonness and are killing them out of selfishness. If they didn’t want to raise a child, they shouldn’t have been so promiscuous. As right-wing mega-donor Foster Friess put it in 2012: “Back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.” More recently, Republican Congressman Greg Murphy of North Carolina defended the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe with this gaslighting tweet: “No one forces anyone to have sex.“

So how did a 10-year-old get pregnant? Did she consent? Does that question even make sense? I mean, reasonable people can argue about exactly where to draw the age-of-consent line, and some teen-age girls are closer to adulthood than others born on the same day. But ten?

So it’s rape. I don’t need to know the details.

Somehow, her body managed to ovulate. But was it capable of carrying a fetus to term and giving birth without suffering long-term damage? What about psychological trauma? And after birth, what then? Would she be old enough to decide whether to keep the child, or would that choice be taken away from her too?

Then we come to Ohio’s “heartbeat law“, which was passed by the legislature and signed by Governor Mike DeWine in 2019. It blocks abortions after “cardiac activity” can be detected, which is said to happen at about six weeks. (“Cardiac activity” is a deceptive term, and intentionally so. No six-week fetus has a beating heart. To be blunt, the anti-abortion movement is full of liars. You shouldn’t believe what they say about heartbeats, fetal pain, risks related to abortion, post-abortion regret, or pretty much anything.)

At first courts blocked the law, because it blatantly contradicted the Roe/Casey interpretation of the constitutional right to privacy. But then the Dobbs decision reversed Roe, and that same evening Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced that the heartbeat bill was once again in force.

When the girl, whose name thankfully has not been released (we’ll see how long that lasts), showed up in the office of a child-abuse doctor, she was six weeks and three days pregnant. (I’m amazed she responded that quickly. A pregnancy that early is sometimes hard for an adult woman to spot, much less a girl with a strong temptation to think “This can’t be happening.”)

That doctor called a colleague in Indiana (which probably won’t get around to banning abortion until a special session of the legislature starts next Monday), and a non-surgical abortion was performed in Indianapolis.

Media firestorm. The Ohio girl quickly became a symbol of the heartlessness of abortion bans. Abortion bans aren’t just about “saving babies”, who would all live to be cute and fat and happy if only their mothers weren’t so self-centered. The bans also have victims.

Sometimes abortion bans inflict hellish experiences on women and girls who have no good options. Sometimes the baby survives only to live in terrible pain for a few months before dying anyway. Some women are not going to get the best treatment for their miscarriages, because that treatment can look like an abortion.

And the Ohio girl is not unique; such cases will come up again. Similar but less extreme cases come up every day.

In Ohio alone, 52 girls under 15 received an abortion in 2020 — an average of one every week, according to the state Department of Health.

Abortion decisions are complicated, and each pregnant woman or girl who doesn’t want to become a mother has a unique story. That’s why I believe the decision should be left to the people involved rather than mandated by law.

In this particular case, the girl got an abortion before a long list of worse things could happen. But to a certain extent, that’s just the luck of timing. Indiana hasn’t gotten around to passing a heartbeat bill (or some even stricter ban) yet. Republicans haven’t managed to ban abortion nationwide — but they’d like to.

So it’s perfectly fair to ask anti-abortion zealots, like Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, how she would like such cases handled. The question is not some kind of trap. And there are reasonable ways, short of supporting reproductive rights, to respond to the pregnant-10-year-old story. I can think of two off the top of my head.

  • Anti-abortion politicians could make a more-good-than-harm argument. Sure, if we ban abortion, some 10-year-olds are just going to have to try to carry their rapists’ babies to term. Some women with difficult pregnancies will probably die because the law will keep doctors from intervening until it’s too late. Some women will die from unsafe illegal abortions. But think of all the babies we’re saving!
  • They could admit that abortion is a complicated issue, and start crafting a longer list of exceptions to the bans, acknowledging that the life of the fetus is not the only consideration.

Either option, though, would involve admitting that abortion bans have victims. And Republicans can’t do that.

The counterattack. Instead, they unleashed the full arsenal of denial. The story first appeared on July 1, and for a while the filter held: Just don’t mention the story and it will eventually pass. But then President Biden referenced it on July 8, so something more was called for. That same day, PJ Media began casting doubt.

There are major problems and inconsistencies with this story that no one in Big Media noticed or cared about. First, where is the police report or the social services investigation into the rape of the child? Who will be held accountable for child rape and why isn’t that an issue in any of the reporting? I was unable to find any verified police investigation connected to this story. Another troubling fact is the source of this claim is one person: Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an abortionist and activist who is all over the media advocating for more abortions and unrestricted abortions.

Last Monday, the 11th, AG Yost went on Jesse Watters’ Fox News show to imply that the story couldn’t be true because his office hadn’t heard about it. “We don’t know who the originating doctor in Ohio was — if they even exist.” If any local police were investigating such a case, he claimed, he’d know about it, because that’s how well plugged-in he is.

The next day he went further.

Yost doubled down on that in an interview with the USA TODAY Network Ohio bureau on Tuesday, saying that the more time passed before confirmation made it “more likely that this is a fabrication.”

That opened the floodgates. With no new evidence beyond Yost’s statements, Tucker Carlson said definitively that the story was false.

Why did the Biden administration – speaking of lying – repeat a story about a 10-year-old child who got pregnant and then got an abortion or was not allowed to get an abortion when it turns out the story was not true.

The Wall Street Journal described the story as “fanciful” and “unlikely”, apparently because it concerned a victim “no one can identify” (as if the 10-year-old’s identity should be out there). It didn’t say the word “lie”, but attacked Biden for repeating an unverified story.

All kinds of fanciful tales travel far on social media these days, but you don’t expect them to get a hearing at the White House.

(I have a hard time not laughing out loud at that statement. Before January 20, 2021, just about every presidential speech contained “fanciful tales” about Covid miracle cures or immigrant crime or election fraud. But now that a Democrat is in the White House again, the WSJ has rediscovered its high standards for presidential truthfulness.)

Jonathan Turley wrote an article for the NY Post that was originally headlined (and promoted on Twitter as) “Activist Tale of a 10-year-old Rape Victim’s Abortion Looks Like a Lie” before somebody toned it down for the print edition.

Newsmax host Chris Salcedo labeled Dr. Bernard “a pro-abortion sicko” and called for her license to be suspended, while Ohio congressman Jim Jordan agreed that the story “looks like it may just be completely made up”. (Appearing on Fox Wednesday, Indiana’s attorney general announced an investigation into Dr. Bernard, who appears to have done nothing wrong. Her picture has been displayed on television, and according to a colleague, “The local police have been alerted to concerns for her physical safety.”)

At this point, everybody in the world is at fault except the people who passed Ohio’s monstrous abortion law and the Supreme Court that turned their monster loose on the world. Joe Biden, the “left-wing media”, Dr. Bernard — they’re the villains of the story. But think about it: Independent of whether this particular incident could be verified or not, these basic facts are undeniable:

  • Girls as young as 10 sometimes do get pregnant.
  • Many red-state abortion bans that are either already in place or pending in the legislature would force those children to carry their fetuses to term, unless and until that effort was about to kill them.

Those two facts by themselves should have lent credibility to the Ohio story: There was no need to make up such a tale, because it was bound to happen eventually; all you had to do is wait.

Truth can’t break through. Wednesday, the story turned out to be true. A 27-year-old man confessed to the rape, which had been reported to local police on June 22. DNA tests were underway. (I guess AG Yost isn’t as well plugged in to local law enforcement as he thinks.) Dr. Bernard filled out the appropriate paperwork. None of the things conservatives had been going on and on about had any basis in fact.

But none of them have apologized for their mistakes. Attorney General Yost’s response to the arrest did not even acknowledge the total irresponsibility of his previous statements:

We rejoice anytime a child rapist is taken off the streets.

But anyway, now that we know the story is true, can we finally talk about forcing 10-year-olds to have their rapists’ babies? No, no, of course not.

You see, the confessed rapist is Hispanic, so now this is the story:

Columbus police detective Jeffrey Huhn testified during Wednesday’s hearing that law enforcement does not believe that Fuentes is in the country legally.

Instantly, right-wing media has gone from outrage at the Left inventing the rape story to outrage at the illegal immigrants who are raping our children.

Why would Ohio try to force a 10-year-old to have her rapist’s baby? Conservatives will never, ever discuss that question, because even entering such a conversation might cause them to question the nature of their reality.

July 18, 2022 – 9:13 am Categories: Articles | Comments (9)

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