Month: August 2013

The march to war in Syria is just another convulsion by a dying Westphalian system

by David Atkins

As the world marches heedlessly on to the next war, it might be worth remembering what is still happening at the site of our last big war:

A coordinated wave of bombings tore through Shiite Muslim areas in and around the Iraqi capital early Wednesday, killing at least 58 and wounding many more, officials said. The blasts, which came in quick succession, targeted residents out shopping and on their way to work.

The attacks are the latest in a relentless wave of killing that has left thousands dead since April, marking the country’s worst spate of bloodshed since 2008. They raise fears that Iraq is hurtling back toward the brink of a civil war fueled by ethnic and sectarian differences.

Insurgents deployed explosives-laden cars, suicide bombers and other bombs Wednesday and targeted parking lots, outdoor markets and restaurants in predominantly Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, according to officials. A military convoy was also hit south of the capital.

Interventions may be needed on rare occasions to prevent brutal repression and bloodshed, particularly when the victimized side is far too weak to defend itself. But civil wars are a different problem altogether, and even the best planned and best intentions interventions can go horribly wrong.

Iraq is a divided, sectarian mess right now. Syria is far, far worse. It’s hard to see what, beyond a massive and global campaign to literally stop the fighting and extradite the leaders of both sides for trials at the Hague, will work to stop it. Dropping bombs on Assad’s forces in order to help the religious fundamentalist revolutionaries doesn’t seem like a good plan. It seems likelier to lead to more deaths, not fewer, and heightened anger against the West in the bargain.

If ever there was a time to intervene in Syria–and I’m not sure there ever was–but it would have been before now. It would have been back when Assad was the clear perpetrator, back when secular liberals in Syria hadn’t fled or been killed, back before the bloodshed on both sides was so awful that forgiveness and reconciliation seemed impossible. If there was ever a time to act, it would have needed to be credible, global and overwhelming, with an absolute minimum of missile or gunfire.

But, of course, the world wasn’t prepared to do that because everyone was and still is jockeying over oil and shipping interests. Very few people in power around the world care two whits for the plight of the Syrian people being killed. They’re just pawns on a chessboard. The Saudis and much of Europe would like to see Assad gone, but they would rather watch the U.S. do it and then blame us for what they encouraged us to do afterward.

And, of course, the military industrial complex in the United States rarely saw a war it didn’t like. It cares little for the lives of Syrians or for the opinion of the world.

So here we go again, mindlessly and futilely. The governments of China, Russia and United States don’t care about saving Syrian lives any more than they care about stopping climate change. Each nation’s security and bureaucratic apparatus is so invested in doing whatever is in the national interest (read: the interest wealthiest power brokers in each country) that they never stopped to consider that very phrase “national interest” is becoming an antiquated archaism of a dying Westphalian world.

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Human beings need privacy

by digby

I have been assuming that a lot of my visceral loathing of government surveillance (and not just the NSA, but all the public cameras and the general degradation of privacy in our culture) was just a sign of my old age. I simply cannot reconcile myself to the idea that one’s every thought an action should be in the public domain. It’s always struck me that a need for privacy is fundamentally human and that it’s uniquely stressful in some way to live your life entirely out in the open. Still young people seem to be pretty comfortable with this idea in a way that I’m not, so what do I know?

This article about the psychological effects of surveillance sort of backs up my own instincts, however:

While pundits have argued vigorously about the merits and drawbacks of such programs, the voice of science has remained relatively quiet. This is despite the fact that science, alone, can lay claim to a wealth of empirical evidence on the psychological effects of surveillance. Studying that evidence leads to a clear conclusion and a warning: indiscriminate intelligence-gathering presents a grave risk to our mental health, productivity, social cohesion, and ultimately our future.

It goes on to spell out the various psychological and sociological studies that show just what happens to humans when they are subject to constant surveillance. It changes them. The following are the headings for the various ways in which that happens:

Surveillance impairs mental health and performance
Surveillance promotes distrust between the public and the state
Surveillance breeds conformity
Surveillance can actually undermine the influence of authority
Surveillance paves the way to a pedestrian future

The conformity and pedestrian future segments are particularly interesting :

For more than 50 years we’ve known that surveillance encourages conformity to social norms. In a series of classic experiments during the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch showed that conformity is so powerful that individuals will follow the crowd even when the crowd is obviously wrong. A government that engages in mass surveillance cannot claim to value innovation, critical thinking, or originality…

As the world’s governments march toward universal surveillance, their ignorance of psychology is clear at every step. Even in the 2009 House of Lords report “Surveillance: Citizens and the State” – a document that is critical of surveillance – not a single psychologist is interviewed and, in 130 pages, not a single reference is made to decades of psychological research.

We ignore this evidence at our peril. Psychology forewarns us that a future of universal surveillance will be a world bereft of anything sufficiently interesting to spy on – a beige authoritarian landscape in which we lose the ability to relax, innovate, or take risks. A world in which the definition of “appropriate” thought and behaviour becomes so narrow that even the most pedantic norm violations are met with exclusion or punishment. A world in which we may even surrender our very last line of defence – the ability to look back and ask: Why did we do this to ourselves?

The surveillance society naturally results in less creativity, less innovation, less dissent, less freedom. I know it sounds ridiculously hyperbolic, but this strikes me as a potentially huge social change that nobody’s talking about. What kind of a world will it be when people no longer have an inner self, at least an inner self that has any possibility of expression without being revealed to everyone else. What happens when you lose control over your identity, your history, your ability to reinvent yourself and take second chances?

I think it’s insidious. People aren’t meant to be on display all the time. We need our secrets. It’s the government that isn’t supposed to have them, not us.

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There goes the neighborhood

by digby

The nouveau riche have invaded The Hamptons … and the old money is mortified:

But there is no surer sign that the big-spending ways that characterized the pre-financial crisis era have returned to the Hamptons than the blue “Farrell Building” signs multiplying across the pristine landscape here, along with the multimillion-dollar houses they advertise. It is a process some are calling “Farrellization,” and not necessarily happily.

“We’re as busy as we’ve ever been,” said Joe Farrell, the president of Farrell Building, during a recent interview and tour of his $43 million, 17,000-square-foot home here. The estate, called the Sandcastle, features two bowling lanes, a skate ramp, onyx window frames and, just for fun, an A.T.M. regularly restocked with $20,000 in $10 bills.

To spend a day with Mr. Farrell — a local version of Donald Trump, without the history of debt, the lush hair or the insults — is to see just how fully the Hamptons have rebounded, along with the confidence, and the bonuses, of their wealthier summer visitors.

With a customer base composed largely of Wall Street financiers, Mr. Farrell has more than 20 new homes under construction, or slated for construction, at a time, making him the biggest builder here by far. He has plans for more, many of them speculative homes built before they have buyers.

He said the going rate to rent his own home was around $500,000 for just two weeks; last year’s tenants were Jay-Z and Beyoncé. He also helped arrange a $900,000 summer rental for the hedge fund manager Marc Leder, who has since drawn scrutiny from Southampton authorities — and gossip writers — for boisterous parties that draw an endless stream of black S.U.V.’s.
[…]
“I’m concerned that the Farrellization of the Hamptons and the suburbanization of the Hamptons are linked,” said Donna Paul, a Sag Harbor resident and owner of Designer Previews, a company that matches architects and designers with clients seeking to build custom homes. “These are houses being punched out in record time, and that will make the tone and feeling of the Hamptons more generic.”

Paul Goldberger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic who has written extensively about the Hamptons, said Mr. Farrell’s company had spawned a host of imitators matching his architectural look, if not his company’s quality. “If I see one more shiny new gambrel roof, shingled house I’ll scream,” Mr. Goldberger said. “It’s become a hopeless cliché, almost a blight.”

Mr. Farrell said he was simply building what his customers wanted: “Someone’s going to build them. I just happen to be building a lot of them, and people are buying them.

“The criticism also comes from people who already have the house, pool and tennis. Why shouldn’t the next generation or the next guy have the house, pool and tennis?”
[…]
In 2010, he started accelerating the construction of speculative homes. But he said it was last year’s budget deal in Washington to avert the so-called fiscal cliff that truly released the reins.

“It exploded,” he said. “Everybody said, ‘O.K., we can buy,’ and it just really rocketed this year.”

But most of all, he credits the Federal Reserve for the economic stimulus, which he said has helped the wealthy most of all. “The stock market’s flying through the roof and who’s that helping, the middle class? No, I mean that’s the reality,” he said. “Out here, life goes on.”

God love ’em. They don’t even try to hide it.

But hey, at least this guy really is building something. The rest of these people are living on inheritances and paper profits. Just like the good old days.

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On fighting the last war over the last war

by digby

Shorter Jonathan Chait: Being skeptical of US government intervention in Syria is just like being skeptical of US government intervention in health care. (I’m not even being snarky. That’s what he said.)

I notice that on twitter Yglesias and Klein unsurprisingly aren’t particularly enamored of Chait’s argument. When he gets mad at liberals for being squishy on this sort of thing he tends to get a bit churlish. In today’s scolding he claims that young liberals are always fighting the Iraq war and it’s very annoying to him to have to deal with it. They are intellectually confused, at best, while he is apparently a clear thinker who judges each circumstance purely on the merits.

I can’t help but recall that in Chait’s Iraq war (kinda sorta) mea culpa a few months back he wrote this:

The Gulf War took place during my freshman year in college. It was the first major American war since Vietnam, and the legacy of Vietnam cast a heavy shadow — the news was filled with dire warnings of bloody warfare, tens of thousands of U.S. deaths, uprisings across the Middle East. None of it happened. And again, through the nineties, the United States intervened in the Balkans twice under Bill Clinton, saving countless lives and disproving the fears of the skeptics, which had grown weaker but remained.

These events had conditioned me to trust the hawks, or at least, the better informed hawks. They also conditioned me unconsciously to regard wars through this frame, as relatively fast attacks without a heavy occupation phase. People tend to think the next war will be somewhat like the last. That is a failing I will try to avoid again.
It may be true that my formative experiences left an imprint so deep it can’t be covered over. I try to guard against that.

And yet, in spite of all this careful “guarding” every intervention turns out to be one worth doing. It’s quite remarkable, what with him being so thoughtful and introspective and all while Matt Yglesias etc are blindly adhering to the callow beliefs of their youth, “conditioned” as they are to trusting the doves.

As he concluded in his admittedly graceless Iraq mea culpa:

My reading of history is that sweeping, myopic responses to major recent events usually spawn errors of their own. The people demanding apologies today will find themselves being asked to supply apologies of their own tomorrow.

Yes, it’s a good thing the Iraq war hawks have all learned their lesson. If only the doves could follow suit.

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Chart ‘o the day: Middle east ties and enemies

by digby

Lest anyone think that the current situation in Syria is an uncomplicated one (and I’m sure nobody does) this chart is helpful in showing exactly just how complicated it is:

Oh, what a tangled web …

As for the moral complications, I think this piece by Paul Waldman gets to the heart of it:

Why do we have this international consensus saying that while it’s bad for someone like Assad to bomb a neighborhood full of civilians and kill all the men, women, and children therein, it’s worse for him to kill that same number of civilians by means of poison gas than by means of “conventional” munitions that merely tear their bodies to pieces? Indeed, we act as though killing, say, a hundred people with poison gas is worse than killing a thousand or ten thousand people with conventional weapons. After all, the Obama administration (not to mention the rest of the world) reacted to Assad murdering 100,000 people by expressing its deep consternation and trying to figure out how to help without getting involved. But only now that he has apparently used some kind of lethal gas in an attack that accounted for less than one percent of all the civilians he has killed are we finally ready to unleash our own military.

Part of the reason is that we set up this international norm almost a century ago after World War I, and in the years since it’s been solidified with formal treaties like the Chemical Weapons Convention and a general, unquestioned consensus that chemical weapons are particularly awful. Nobody’s out there making the case that it’s OK to use them, and when they are used, the people responsible always deny it. It doesn’t much matter whether the norm is perfectly rational; it exists, and it affects the decisions states and individuals make.

But the White House isn’t saying they’re obligated by the Chemical Weapons Convention to act against Assad’s government. They’re presenting it as a moral imperative, a product of our collective horror at what Assad did. Perhaps that’s true, and Obama is taking action now not because he genuinely thinks Assad’s latest war crime is worse than those that came before it. But the real issue is that he made this “red line” threat, and now he has to follow through on it lest he lose credibility. Either the upcoming military action is a consequence of the chemical-weapon taboo. This isn’t a repeat of Iraq, where “weapons of mass destruction” was a pretext to justify the invasion George W. Bush and his advisors so desperately wanted. It’s pretty obvious that few in the administration are happy about this new campaign, but they feel they have little choice.

I’m a believer in taboos against violence and I’ll take whatever I can get. In my mind the more of these taboos the better. But it gets a little bit dicey when the solution to enforcing a taboo against violence is … a different kind of violence. It’s a very difficult moral question. (And the dilemma is exacerbated by the moral hypocrisy of nations which violate their own taboos without any consequences.)

And as for the practical complications and basic questions of fact, well there are many. This discussion touches on a couple of them:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In the video above, from MSNBC on Monday, Ed Husain of the Council on Foreign Relations urged a cautious approach to intervention in Syria. He said it was crucial not to act without certainty that Assad — and not al Qaeda or rebel forces, which have also been accused of using chemical weapons — was responsible for the attack. 

Despite the ongoing investigation, there isn’t clear proof that Assad is responsible for the attacks, though U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was all but certain Monday that the Syrian government was responsible. In some of the strongest terms to come from the Obama administration thus far, Kerry accused Assad’s regime of the “indiscriminate slaughter of civilians” and promised to hold the Syrian government accountable for a “moral obscenity.” 

Husain also sought to reframe the debate over the U.S. feeling obligated to lead the charge on any potential intervention, and questioned what the benefit of an intervention would be. “The Europeans have a responsibility to act here, the Arab nations do and Turkey does,” he says. “The responsibility to act doesn’t mean that it always has to be the U.S. I think we’re encouraging a culture in the Middle East of dependency on the United States every time there’s a conflict there and there are other global players that have a responsibility to burden some of that.” 

Husain, later in the show, questioned what a bombing would accomplish, and wondered why Assad would launch a chemical weapon attack in an area he already controlled. “Short of a U.S. invasion, short of U.S. troops on the ground, you’re not going to separate fighting factions inside of Syria,” he said. “Why would Assad want to use chemical weapons in the northeastern suburbs of Damascas — Damascus that’s under his control — to kill only, forgive me for being so cold, about 1,000 people, whereas he’s killed 5,000 people every month for 16 months without chemical weapons? So why now?”

I do not get the sense that most of the administration is anxious to move on this although Kerry’s bellicose squalling yesterday had a not of febrile excitement that doesn’t bode well. But I’ve got that feeling of deja vu all over again — the train is rolling out of the station and picking up speed. I don’t know what’s going to stop it.

 Also too, this: Architect of Syria War Plan Doubts Surgical Strikes Will Work

Update: An argument for intervention, by John Judis

Because wimmin just don’t make the grade…

Depressing:

Ezra Klein points out that not only has Obama appointed fewer women than Clinton did two decades ago, he has no excuse for not appointing a lot more:

When the Clinton administration promised a cabinet that “looked like America,” it had a tough job in front of it. When Bill Clinton took office, no White House had ever given more than 18 percent of cabinet-level positions to women. Women were also far less likely to serve as members of Congress or governors than they are today. That meant the Clinton administration’s search for qualified female candidates was harder. But administration officials found them.

The Obama administration’s job is easier. The Clinton administration’s success appointing more women to cabinet-level (and sub-cabinet level) positions should’ve made it easier for the Obama administration to build on their numbers. The success women have had getting elected to Congress and to governorships should’ve further helped matters. And, by and large, it did.

When the Obama administration went looking for a new Secretary of Defense, Under Secretary Michelle Flournoy, who got her start in Clinton’s Pentagon, was right there. When they went looking for a new Treasury Secretary, Under Secretary Lael Brainard, another Clinton vet, was an obvious choice. Now that they’re looking for a Fed chair, Vice Chair Janet Yellen seems like the obvious choice. Anyone want to guess where Yellen got her start?

The reason the Obama administration’s record appointing women is worse than the Clinton administration’s record is that the Obama administration keeps choosing not to appoint qualified women. Administration officials passed over Flournoy for ex-Sen. Chuck Hagel. They passed over Brainard for Jack Lew. They passed over acting Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank — yes, she served under Clinton, too — for CEA chair. It looks likely that they’ll pass over Yellen for Larry Summers.

It has been obvious for some time that this administration is only tepidly interested in advancing women’s equality, at least to the extent that it might cost them something to do it. The president only wants to work closely with people with whom he feels “comfortable” (whatever that means) and very few women seem to fit that bill for some reason. Odd.

It’s a huge missed opportunity. It takes time and effort for a party to build a bench and it’s a terrible shame to waste any chance to advance equality. And when some people make the argument that Obama had such big problems to deal with that he couldn’t put that goal before solving them, it just makes the loyalty to Larry Summers all the more understandable. After all, the idea that women just aren’t quite smart enough or strong enough or savvy enough to get the job done is one of the views for which Summers is best known.

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The Iraq supergroup reunion

by digby

If you weren’t skeptical about intervention in Syria before, this should make you think twice:

Dear Mr. President:

Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has once again violated your red line, using chemical weapons to kill as many as 1,400 people in the suburbs of Damascus. You have said that large-scale use of chemical weapons in Syria would implicate “core national interests,” including “making sure that weapons of mass destruction are not proliferating, as well as needing to protect our allies [and] our bases in the region.” The world—including Iran, North Korea, and other potential aggressors who seek or possess weapons of mass of destruction—is now watching to see how you respond.

We urge you to respond decisively by imposing meaningful consequences on the Assad regime. At a minimum, the United States, along with willing allies and partners, should use standoff weapons and airpower to target the Syrian dictatorship’s military units that were involved in the recent large-scale use of chemical weapons. It should also provide vetted moderate elements of Syria’s armed opposition with the military support required to identify and strike regime units armed with chemical weapons.

Moreover, the United States and other willing nations should consider direct military strikes against the pillars of the Assad regime. The objectives should be not only to ensure that Assad’s chemical weapons no longer threaten America, our allies in the region or the Syrian people, but also to deter or destroy the Assad regime’s airpower and other conventional military means of committing atrocities against civilian non-combatants. At the same time, the United States should accelerate efforts to vet, train, and arm moderate elements of Syria’s armed opposition, with the goal of empowering them to prevail against both the Assad regime and the growing presence of Al Qaeda-affiliated and other extremist rebel factions in the country.

Left unanswered, the Assad regime’s mounting attacks with chemical weapons will show the world that America’s red lines are only empty threats. It is a dangerous and destabilizing message that will surely come to haunt us—one that will certainly embolden Iran’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons capability despite your repeated warnings that doing so is unacceptable. It is therefore time for the United States to take meaningful and decisive actions to stem the Assad regime’s relentless aggression, and help shape and influence the foundations for the post-Assad Syria that you have said is inevitable.

Sincerely,

Ammar Abdulhamid
Elliott Abrams
Dr. Fouad Ajami
Dr. Michael Auslin
Gary Bauer
Paul Berman
Max Boot
Ellen Bork
Ambassador L. Paul Bremer
Matthew R. J. Brodsky
Dr. Eliot A. Cohen
Senator Norm Coleman
Ambassador William Courtney
Seth Cropsey
James S. Denton
Paula A. DeSutter
Larry Diamond
Dr. Paula J. Dobriansky
Thomas Donnelly
Dr. Michael Doran
Mark Dubowitz
Dr. Colin Dueck
Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt
Ambassador Eric S. Edelman
Reuel Marc Gerecht
Abe Greenwald
Christopher J. Griffin
John P. Hannah
Bruce Pitcairn Jackson
Ash Jain
Dr. Kenneth Jensen
Allison Johnson
Dr. Robert G. Joseph
Dr. Robert Kagan
Lawrence F. Kaplan
Jamie Kirchick
Irina Krasovskaya
Dr. William Kristol
Bernard-Henri Levy
Dr. Robert J. Lieber
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman
Tod Lindberg
Dr. Thomas G. Mahnken
Dr. Michael Makovsky
Ann Marlowe
Dr. Clifford D. May
Dr. Alan Mendoza
Dr. Joshua Muravchik
Governor Tim Pawlenty
Martin Peretz
Danielle Pletka
Dr. David Pollock
Arch Puddington
Karl Rove
Randy Scheunemann
Dan Senor
Ambassador John Shattuck
Lee Smith
Henry D. Sokolski
James Traub
Ambassador Mark D. Wallace
Michael Weiss
Leon Wieseltier
Khawla Yusuf
Robert Zarate
Dr. Radwan Ziadeh

I’m not sure why Ken Adelman and Frank Gaffney aren’t on board, but perhaps they’re pushing for a full scale invasion.

I suppose that the fact that Max Boot, Cliff May and Elliot Abrams are signatories doesn’t automatically make it a daft idea. But it sure puts a thumb on the scales.

The Weekly Standard considers all those people to be “experts”, by the way. And it’s right. They are experts in one particular thing which one would have thought they’d be embarrassed to admit after that little bobble back in 2003.

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Cutting firefighting budgets in a time of climate change. Brilliant.

by David Atkins

The forest around Yosemite has been going up in flames for over a week, and the fire is still only 20% contained after burning through 150,000 acres.

But the tinderbox forest isn’t the only thing that has gone up in smoke. The state and federal firefighting budget has as well, due in part to the sequestration budget cuts. The L.A. Times editorial board had some choice words about that:

Sequestration is bad policy for many reasons, but if lawmakers are foolish enough to engage in it, they should at least recognize that firefighting is a basic public safety service that should be exempt. Since 1960, there have been only six years during which wildfires burned more than 8 million acres, and all of those occurred since 2004, according to the National Interagency Fire Center…

States and municipalities also must change some of their policies, particularly those that have allowed too much construction abutting wild lands. The agencies that allow this dangerous sprawl aren’t generally the ones that pay for it. When fire breaks out on open land, it’s usually the federal government’s responsibility to fight the blaze in order to protect the homes, and to provide disaster aid afterward. Given the predictions of longer, more disastrous fire seasons to come, that’s an unsustainable equation.

All but the most ardent libertarians agree that firefighting must be part of the greater social compact that our taxes pay for. Those in the reality-based community also know that forest fires will become increasingly dangerous and more frequent so long as the planet continues to suffer warming due to CO2 emissions.

Cutting firefighting budgets in this context is political malpractice on a grand scale.

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QOTD: HuffPost Hill

by digby

Via email:

In the annals of things Americans do to exacerbate problems in the Muslim world, this one falls somewhere between “Naming the Afghanistan invasion ‘Operation Infinite Justice'” and “George W. Bush.”

That’s the punchline, but the NY Times story comes close to beating it:

“But now anti-American sentiment is being stoked by an outpouring of dubious pronouncements from both state and private news media. Anti-Americanism has even been given the ultimate imprimatur of state tolerance: billboards. One next door to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for instance, shows President Obama with a beard like those worn by the Brotherhood…The origin of the idea of a terrorist-friendly America is opaque. Many cite money given to the Brotherhood, but what they are referring to is the $1.5 billion in American aid to the government of Egypt…Many Egyptians refer to YouTube clips played repeatedly by the pro-military news media, quoting Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, who recently equated giving $1.5 billion in aid to the Morsi government with support for terrorists.”

Considering the stakes for the Egyptian people, it’s not actually all that funny, is it?

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Burn the heretics!

by digby

Well, just the ones in the California State Senate. Look at what they’ve gone and done now:

It would be easier for California women to get abortions under a bill the state Senate approved today.

Assembly Bill 154 expands the types of medical providers that can offer abortions by allowing nurse practitioners, certified nurse-midwives and physician assistants to perform the procedure during the first trimester of pregnancy.

The bill by Assemblywoman Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, cleared the Senate on a vote of 25-11. Supporters, all Democrats, argued that the policy is necessary because remote parts of California do not have many doctors, requiring women who seek an abortion to travel for hours.

“The growing shortage of abortion providers creates a significant barrier for women,” said Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, D-Santa Barbara.

Opponents, mostly Republicans, said the proposal puts women at risk.

“It is a leveling down of health care for women,” said Sen. Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber. “The individuals here do not have the training, do not have the experience…. that doctors do.”

Yes, it’s all about the women getting the proper professional care. That’s why the right wingers want to send them those medical voodoo operations knows as “crisis pregnancy centers” where their heads will be filled with nonsense about how they’re going to die of cancer from an abortion.

It’s refreshing to see that in one state they are actually trying to see that women can exercise their constitutional and universal human rights by expanding access not restricting it. Who knows if it will pass, but it’s great to see it in the mix. This is sorely needed everywhere and maybe the old saw “where California goes, so goes the nation” is back in style.

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