Month: August 2015

But we “can’t afford” food stamps or

by digby

The newest one, the USS Gerald R Ford, which is set to join the fleet next year, cost 13 billion dollars to build. Because we just didn’t have enough of them before.

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The Donald’s Fascist Family Values

by digby

This piece by Corey Robin nails the philosophical underpinnings of the right’s willingness to embrace deportation even of American kids:

On Meet the Press this morning:

Donald Trump would reverse President Obama’s executive orders on immigration and deport all undocumented immigrants from the U.S. as president, he said in an exclusive interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd. 

“We’re going to keep the families together, but they have to go,” he said in the interview, which aired in full on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday. 

Pressed on what he’d do if the immigrants in question had nowhere to return to, Trump reiterated: “They have to go.”

What is it about these voices calling for national purification via the elimination of alien elements that makes them think they can soften the blow by promising to kick out parents along with their children? Trump is hardly the first.

In 1942, as the Vichy regime began handing over the foreign-born Jews of France to the Nazis, it made the decision to deport their children (about six thousand) with them. Mostly, it seems, to fulfill the Nazis’ quotas—but also, Vichy proclaimed, to keep the families together.

At the time, Robert Brasillach wrote, “We must separate from the Jews en bloc and not keep any little ones.” Defending that position from his prison cell, after the liberation of France had begun, he explained: “I even wrote that women must not be separated from children and that we must arrive at a human solution to the problem.” A month later, he doubled-down on the notion that family values might somehow soften his fascism:

I am an anti-Semite, history has taught me the horrors of the Jewish dictatorship, but that families have so often been separated, children cast aside, deportations organized that could only have been legitimate if they hadn’t had as their goal—hidden from us—death, pure and simple, strikes me, and has always struck me, as unacceptable. This is not how we’ll solve the Jewish problem.

Deportations are acceptable, then, if they do not have as their goal the extermination of the Jews, and if they do not break up families. That is how we humanitarians solve the Jewish problem.

(And long before Vichy, there was slaveholder Thomas Dew contemplating the pragmatics of emancipation in the South: “If our slaves are ever to be sent away in any systematic manner, humanity demands that they should be carried in families.”)

Message: “They care”

Read on for more fun fascist family values.

Unsafe, illegal abortions that kill women: feature or bug?

by digby

How many more women have to die?

Seven million women a year in the developing world are treated in healthcare facilities for complications following unsafe abortion, finds a study published today (19 August) in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology (BJOG).

Every day, approximately 800 women die from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Unsafe abortion accounts for 8 – 15% of maternal deaths and remains one of the leading causes of maternal mortality worldwide.[1] However, these figures do not take into account the number of women who are surviving but need hospital treatment.

This study, conducted by the Guttmacher Institute in the US, used data from official health statistics and scientific studies from 26 countries in the developing world to calculate the number of women attending hospital for treatment following an unsafe abortion. Data were adjusted to take into account women receiving treatment in the private sector and to exclude those who needed treatment after miscarriage.

Results found that the highest rate of treatment after unsafe abortion was in Pakistan, with rates of 14.6 per 1000 women aged between 15 and 44. The lowest treatment rate was found in Brazil with 2.4 per 1000 women.

The results indicate that the regional rate is highest in Asia (excluding Eastern Asia) at 8.2 per 1000 women (4.6 million women per year), driven largely by high rates in South-Central Asia. It is followed by Africa, with an average regional rate of 6.7 (around 1.6 million women per year), and Latin America and the Caribbean, with a regional rate of 5.3 (757 000 women per year).

In addition to the health burden for women, treatment for complications from unsafe abortion also results in substantial costs to both women, their families and healthcare systems. An estimated $232 million is spent each year by healthcare systems on post-abortion care in the developing world.

Dr Susheela Singh from the Guttmacher Institute and lead author of the study, said:

“We already know that around 22 million unsafe abortions take place each year, resulting in the death of at least 22,000 women[2]. Our study provides further evidence about the number of women who suffer injury as a result of complications due to unsafe abortion, often leading to chronic disability. These statistics represent only part of the problem as they do not include women who need care but do not visit health facilities.

I’m fairly sure that most “pro-life” people are happy to have these women suffer terrible pain and long term health consequences — or death — for having abortions.  They won’t admit this, instead pretending that women are little mentally disabled children who have no idea what they’re doing, but it’s fairly obvious in the way they speak of women in other contexts that they actually believe that women have plenty of agency and they routinely use it for evil ends. (Damn that Eve and her dastardly manipulations…)

What this study shows is that no matter how repressively religious a society is, no matter how terrible the social and legal consequences, no matter how overtly patriarchal the system, women will get abortions if they believe they need them and many suffer dire health consequences as a result.

Women have always had abortions, they always will. The only question is whether they are required to put their lives and health in danger to do it.

This is how it was in America before abortion was legal:

In 1963, domestic violence prompted Gerri Santoro to leave her husband, and she and her daughters returned to her childhood home. She took a job at Mansfield State Training School, where she met another employee, Clyde Dixon. The two began an extramarital affair — Dixon was also married — and Santoro became pregnant as a result.

When Sam Santoro announced he was coming from California to visit his daughters, Gerri Santoro feared for her life.[2] On June 8, 1964, six-and-a-half months into her pregnancy, she and Dixon checked into a motel in Norwich, Connecticut, under aliases. Their intent was to perform a self-induced abortion, using surgical instruments and a textbook, which Dixon had obtained from a co-worker at the Mansfield school. However, when Santoro began to hemorrhage, Dixon fled the motel. She died, at age 28, and her body was found the following morning by a maid.

Dixon was apprehended three days later. He was charged with manslaughter and “conspiracy to commit abortion” and sentenced to a year-and-a-day in prison. Police officers who worked on the case called this term “negligible”

This is the world they are consigning us back to, don’t think they aren’t. It’s the world millions of women around the world have never left.

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Hating on the teachers again

by digby

I just cannot get over how perfectly normal it is for Republicans to talk about teachers as if they’re dirt:

Teachers. You know, the people you entrust to instruct and care for your little children day in and day out?  Those are the people these alleged leaders choose to go after as if they are enemies of the state.

Doesn’t that freak you out a little bit? It does me. There’s something very sinister about targeting this group for derision, social ostracism and outright insults.

Kasich should be a little bit more careful. The last time he went after public employees he got his clock cleaned by the voters. Of course he made the mistake of including firefighters — a mostly male profession — in his crusade and they just won’t stand for it. Teachers, on the other hand, are now perfectly acceptable punching bags for the Republican party.

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How does it feel to have your words twisted to say the opposite of what you believe?

by digby

Ohio anti-abortion zealots can find out here:

Very clever … 

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Birthright for dummies


by digby

This came from the DNC but I think it’s worth sharing just so everyone understands that this birthright citizenship flap isn’t just some temporary primary red meat issue. They are absolutely committed to it:

I particularly like Walker’s promise that he will “end it” as president. I’m sure it will be “on the first day” as well, just like war with Iran and everything else he’s promising.  Somebody needs to remind Walker that the president doesn’t have the power to unilaterally change the constitution. He’s confused.

Update:

Even O’Reilly is coming in for criticism on this:

The Poors: Leaded and unleaded
by Tom Sullivan

Once again, our vigilant T-party politicians are on the alert for the theoretical possibility of crimes by the Poors. Courtesy of Charlie Pierce comes the next wave of imaginary dirty tricks perpetrated by the Poors on honest, decent Americans. Landlords, in this case:

Holt is Maryland’s secretary of housing, community and development, and he is wise to the ways of America’s crafty poor people. Holt is seeking to “relax” Maryland’s lead-poisoning law in order to take the jackboot of regulation off the necks of the state’s landlords. And nothing gets by Kenneth Holt.

From the Baltimore Sun:

Kenneth C. Holt, secretary of Housing, Community and Development, told an audience at the Maryland Association of Counties summer convention here that a mother could just put a lead fishing weight in her child’s mouth, then take the child in for testing and a landlord would be liable for providing the child with housing until the age of 18.

Pressed afterward, Holt said he had no evidence of this happening but said a developer had told him it was possible. “This is an anecdotal story that was described to me as something that could possibly happen,” Holt said.

Thank heavens these public servants are always on high alert for the possibility of widespread voter fraud (or was it the widespread possibility?) and other dangers for which they never seem to produce evidence. Bigfoot might steal their Wheat Thins. The Poors might counterfeit the governor’s power bill.
Prisoners might hide tiny revolvers in their beards. “Just because we haven’t found the example doesn’t mean they aren’t there” was good enough to argue last year before the Supreme Court.

Pierce continues:

Republican audiences are perfectly willing to buy the notion that clever moms are having their children suck on lead weights to stick it to their landlords and get something for nothing. Within the Republican Party, there is a relentless search for solutions to problems that do not exist, and an equally relentless search for suckers in the general public.

Monorail. Monorail. Monorail.

Let’s play “which one’s the sociopath?”

by digby

Guess who said this?

“Makes me want to throw up. Makes me want to throw up when I hear that putting these two guys to death for what they did to that family is somehow outside of the standards of decency.”

That was noted “moderate” Lindsay Graham shrieking about the Connecticut Supreme Court decision to abolish the death penalty resulting in the reduction of death sentences to life in prison with no possibility of parole for two infamous murderers.

He went on:

If this doesn’t cry out for the death penalty nothing ever would and I don’t think you’re an indecent society when you take two men who broke into a family’s home, tortured two young girls, raped them, burned them alive — I don’t think that makes us indecent that they would be administered the death penalty.

And on:

“It is such an outrage to me. I don’t know how the judges can live with themselves, but the law is the law. You know if I’m president of the United States, under my administration, my Attorney General – we’re going to prosecute people like this to the fullest extent of the law. I doubt if there’s any federal jurisdiction in a case like this, but it would be worth looking at.”

Aaaaand on:

“What kind of legal training have they had. What upbringing has allowed to arrive at the conclusion that those two people, killing them through the judicial system that imposes the death penalty somehow makes us an indecent society.”

I can’t imagine why anyone would think a society led by hysterical, bloodthirsty freaks like Graham is indecent.

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Trump the poet

by digby

I just …

Illegal camping as a capital crime

by digby

I have written about this case before. The good news is that it will at least see the inside of courtroom:

The two New Mexico police officers who fatally shot a 36-year-old homeless man in 2014 as he appeared to surrender after an hours-long standoff will face trial for second-degree murder, a judge ruled on Tuesday.

Pro Tem Judge Neil Candelaria found probable cause for Albuquerque police Officer Dominique Perez and former police Det. Keith Sandy to stand trial for second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter after the local district attorney asked the court to consider charges earlier this year, KRQE reported.

Prosecutors had brought an “open murder” charge against the two officers, allowing the court to consider whether enough evidence existed to support a trial on a variety of charges.
If convicted of second-degree murder, the two men face up to 15 years in prison.

The shooting took place March 2014 in the foothills outside Albuquerque. Boyd, a 38-year-old homeless man with schizophrenia, was camping when police found him with a knife. A standoff was captured on police helmet cameras, and the video appeared to show officers fatally shooting Boyd as he surrendered.

You can see the video here. It’s horrific. But what I wanted to draw attention to is the defense:

“As a police officer, Keith [Sandy] not only had the right, but the duty, to defend his fellow officer from a mentally unstable, violent man wielding two knives,” Sandy’s lawyer, Sam Bregman, said .

Except he was surrendering and there was no danger. But they say they “felt” there was.

And what was the heinous crime he was suspected of committing that required them to deploy paramilitary tactics you say? He was camping illegally.

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