Month: March 2016

Unspeakably cruel

by digby

I’ve written before about this horrible experience forced on women and their families by zealots who think this is all an abstraction and simply want to make a philosophical point.

Here’s another one:

Daniel and Taylor Mahaffey were 20 weeks pregnant and desperately wanted their child, but when doctors informed them a complication meant the fetus had no chance of survival, they just wanted their baby’s suffering to end. Yet because of their state’s “fetal pain” law, the married Texans say they were forced to endure a stillbirth and wait as their baby slowly died in utero.

The Mahaffeys had begun decorating the nursery in anticipation for the little boy they planned to name Fox, after one of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan.

On Wednesday night, Taylor, 23, felt something abnormal and since their last pregnancy ended in miscarriage, they rushed to the hospital. By the time they got there, Fox’s feet were already pushing through his mother’s cervix. Doctors tried several emergency measures to stop the preterm labor, including putting Taylor on an incline in the hopes that they could perform a cervical cerclage—a procedure in which doctors stitch shut the cervix. Nothing worked. Nothing could save him.
Heartbroken, the Mahaffeys asked about their options. “The only humane thing to do at that point would be to pop the sack, and let little Fox come into this world too early to survive outside,” 29-year-old Daniel Mahaffey wrote Monday, telling his story on Reddit.

The doctors and nurses at St. David’s Medical Center in Austin cried with them, but said because of Texas law HB2, they could not help speed Taylor’s labor. Technically, the baby was healthy and the mother was healthy, so to induce labor would be an abortion, and to do it at this stage in the pregnancy would be illegal.

The Mahaffeys were sent home to wait for their baby to die or for Taylor’s labor to progress. “We cried ourselves to sleep, waiting for him to come,” Daniel said in an interview with The Daily Beast.
They prayed conflicting prayers: for a miracle that might save him and for an end to their baby’s suffering. Daniel worried his wife would hemorrhage while Taylor could feel the baby struggling inside of her, Daniel said. Taylor declined to speak for this article.

When Taylor started bleeding, they went back to the hospital, but with Fox’s heart still beating, doctors couldn’t legally interfere.

“Eventually she was just screaming at them to get the child out of her,” Daniel said.

After four days in and out of the hospital, the bag of waters surrounding their baby burst and Taylor delivered Fox. “One nice thing is we got to hold him,” Daniel said. “That’s the only silver lining.”
Texas is one of 12 states that bans abortions after 20 weeks post fertilization with bills ostensibly based on the wholly unscientific idea that fetuses can feel pain after that period of gestation. (A review of the evidence by the American Medical Association found that “fetal perception of pain is unlikely before the third trimester.”)

This is what comes from superstition, blind zealotry and political cynicism coming together with the power of the state. There is no moral reason to put someone through this. It’s torture.

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Trump’s other exceptions

by digby

You can’t make this stuff up:

Trump said, “I have been called by more Muslims saying what you are doing is a great thing, not a bad thing.”

When pressed by Matthews, Trump added, “I have, actually, believe it or not, I have a lot of friends that are Muslim and they call me. In most cases, they’re very rich Muslims.”

“But do they get into the country?” Matthews then asked.

“Oh, they’ll come in,” Trump responded, later adding that the ban will have exceptions.

by digby

So this is the big news this morning:

Multiple outlets reported Thursday afternoon that Republican frontrunner Donald Trump was meeting with Republican National Committee chairman Reince Preibus after the billionaire recanted the party’s pledge to back the eventual GOP nominee. 

TIME and CBS News confirmed the meeting, citing anonymous sources. 

Asked at a town hall event Tuesday night whether he would still adhere to the RNC’s pledge, Trump replied, “No, I don’t anymore.” 

The RNC pledge was first circulated among GOP candidates in September 2015 as a largely ceremonial party unity gesture when Trump’s insurgent campaign started to gain traction. 

The meeting also comes on the heels of Trump’s comments that if abortion was outlawed, women who got abortions should be punished. He later said that only abortion providers should be punished if abortion was illegal.

The meeting’s over now and at this point nobody knows what happened except Trump said the party would be united.

I’m a little disappointed. The Great Negotiator should have emerged from any meeting with the RNC giving him the nomination by acclamation, amirite? Shouldn’t Preibus have come out and stood behind Trump at a press conference like the newest Trump butler?

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Paul Ryan savior? Not so fast.

by digby

I mentioned the other day that Ryan might be getting a primary challenge from a Tea Party plutocrat and it looks like it’s for real:

Wisconsin businessman Paul Nehlen announced yesterday that he is challenging House Speaker Paul D. Ryan in the Republican primary, saying he’s “had it” with the Speaker betraying conservatives.

“Ted Cruz and Donald Trump have become front-runners in this presidential election cycle because they have dared to communicate an anti-establishment message. They won’t be alone,” Nehlen said. “I will bring the fight straight to one of the most powerful establishment players in Washington, taking him on right here in Paul NehlenWisconsin’s 1st District. Paul Ryan is a career politician. It’s time that career came to an end.”

“Paul Ryan’s embrace of big government spending, his continued support of illegal immigration and imported workers, and his championing of the job-killing trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership betrays me, this district, and this nation,” said Nehlen.

“He’s failed to put America’s security and American jobs first. I’ve had it. We’ve all had it,” said Mr. Nehlen, a successful executive, entrepreneur and inventor who previously donated to Ryan’s campaigns according to reporting by The Washington Times’ S.A. Miller.

As S.A. Miller reported in The Washington Times, the emergence of a viable Republican challenger in the district is the culmination of a months-long recruitment effort by tea party activists who say they were double-crossed by Mr. Ryan when he passed a $2 trillion spending package late last year.

Meanwhile all the GOP establishment types see Ryan as the consensus answer to their little Trump and Cruz problem should it come to that at the convention. Good luck with that.

As the incumbent Speaker of the House it’s highly unlikely that he’ll be ousted in a primary. But as Eric Cantor proved, under the right circumstances anything can happen. As a presidential candidate replacement for Trump and Cruz, the outsider and the anti-establishment extremist, he’s a very poor choice.

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That time Trump followed one of his policies to its logical conclusion

by digby

I wrote up Trump’s comments about punishing women for having abortions for Salon this morning. Weirdly, I’m sort of on Trump’s side on this. He’s unschooled in the byzantine illogic required for a conservative politician to be “pro-life” and simply made the reasonable assumption that if you consider abortion murder and want to make it illegal, then millions of women must be criminals. That didn’t set off any alarm bells because he has no problem with the idea of putting millions of people behind bars as a general principle and doesn’t think much of women as a group anyway.

[T]he official stance that Republicans are supposed to take is that women are victims of abortion and therefore cannot be held responsible for it. Yes, it’s true that women pick up the phone, make the appointment, talk through their decisions with medical professionals, sign paperwork and then either take a pill or let the doctor perform an abortion, but none of this should be taken, in conservative eyes, as evidence that women are the people responsible for the abortion happening. Women are regarded by conservatives as fundamentally incapable of making grown-up decisions. If they choose abortion (and by implication, if they choose sex), it’s because they poor dears were misled.

Yes, the same people that conservatives treat as literally too stupid to understand what making a medical decision entails are then expected to raise children.

If Congress were to pass legislation making abortion illegal and the federal courts upheld this legislation, or any state were permitted to ban abortion under state and federal law, the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman. The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb. My position has not changed – like Ronald Reagan, I am pro-life with exceptions.

Let us unite as a nation and protect the unborn with legislation that would stop all Federal funding for abortion and with a human life amendment making, of course, an exception where the unborn child threatens the life of the mother. Our Judeo-Christian tradition recognizes the right of taking a life in self-defense. But with that one exception, let us look to those others in our land who cry out for children to adopt.

It’s good news week
by Tom Sullivan

Great. It’s 5 a.m. and the headlines this morning prompted a novelty song from the mid-1960s to start playing in my head.

Antarctic ice loss could double expected sea level rise by 2100, study says

From the journal Nature:

Choices that the world makes this century could determine the fate of the massive Antarctic ice sheet. A study published online this week in Nature finds that continued growth in greenhouse-gas emissions over the next several decades could trigger an unstoppable collapse of Antarctica’s ice — raising sea levels by more than a metre by 2100 and more than 15 metres by 2500.

“That is literally remapping how the planet looks from space,” says study co-author Rob DeConto, a geoscientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The good news, he says, is that it projects little or no sea-level rise from Antarctic melt if greenhouse-gas emissions are reduced quickly enough to limit the average global temperature rise to about 2 °C.

See? Good news.

From the New York Times:

New York City is nearly 400 years old; in the worst-case scenario conjured by the research, its chances of surviving another 400 years in anything like its present form would appear to be remote. Miami, New Orleans, London, Venice, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Sydney, Australia, are all just as vulnerable as New York, or more so.

Answer? Have Donald Trump build a wall around Manhattan. A big, beautiful wall.

More good news. The study itself is here.

Of course, a technological breakthrough might stop the melting. Or maybe A.I. could solve it for us. Remember Microsoft’s failed experiment last week with its Twitter chatbot named Tay? Microsoft returned Tay to the lab for regrooving after she went a bit wonky:

Tay launched on 23 March, but less than 24 hours later she was switched off by Microsoft after tweeting publicly about her support for Adolf Hitler, her hatred of Jews, calling feminism “a cancer” and suggesting genocide against Mexicans. Tay also blamed George Bush for the 9/11 terrorist attacks and described President Barack Obama as a “monkey”.

Well, Microsoft brought Tay back online Wednesday (briefly) to learn more from human Twitter users:

The learning experiment, which got a crash-course in racism, Holocaust denial and sexism courtesy of Twitter users, was switched back on overnight and appeared to be operating in a more sensible fashion. Microsoft had previously gone through the bot’s tweets and removed the most offensive and vowed only to bring the experiment back online if the company’s engineers could “better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values”.

However, at one point Tay tweeted about taking drugs, in front of the police, no less.

Microsoft's sexist racist Twitter bot @TayandYou is BACK in fine form pic.twitter.com/nbc69x3LEd— Josh Butler (@JoshButler) March 30, 2016

Tay then began repeating the same tweet over and over until engineers made her account private, effectively taking her offline again. Microsoft told the IBTimesUK, “Tay remains offline while we make adjustments. As part of testing, she was inadvertently activated on twitter for a brief period of time.” Maybe Tay will learn enough from contact with humans to keep New York from drowning from the actions of humans.

The border patrol goes political

by digby

Well, this is good news:

The National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) is throwing its support behind Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, its first-ever presidential endorsement.

“The NBPC has had a longstanding practice of not endorsing presidential candidates in the primaries,” the organization said in a statement on Wednesday. “We will not, however, shy away from voicing our opinions as it pertains to border security and the men and women of the United States Border Patrol.”

The group said that if the borders are not secured, communities will “continue to suffer at the hands of gangs, cartels and violent criminals preying on the innocent.”
They praised Trump’s stance on immigration and said he could change the nation’s policies.

“Unlike his opponents, Donald Trump is not a career politician, he is an outsider who has created thousands of jobs, pledged to bring about aggressive pro-American change, and who is completely independent of special interests,” the statement continued. “We don’t need a person who has the perfect Washington-approved tone, and certainly NOT another establishment politician in the W.H.

“Indeed, the fact that people are more upset about Mr. Trump’s tone than about the destruction wrought by open borders tells us everything we need to know about the corruption in Washington,” the group added.

The union also hailed Trump for not being politically correct or “subservient” to foreign countries and special interests and said he was responsible for making illegal immigration a key issue in the race.

“Mr. Trump is correct when he says immigration wouldn’t be at the forefront of this presidential campaign if months ago he hadn’t made some bold and necessary statements,” the statement reads.

“And when the withering media storm ensued he did not back down one iota. That tells you the measure of a man. When the so-called experts said he was too brash and outspoken, and that he would fade away, they were proven wrong. We are confident they will be proven wrong again in November when he becomes President of the United States.”

What a great group of public servants. Very professional. Awfully proud to be paying their salaries.

by digby

It’s only the beginning:

Police said the girl was peppered-sprayed in the crowd by a non-law enforcement person. Hundreds of anti-Trump protesters and supporters had gathered outside the Holiday Inn Express in southern Wisconsin, where Trump was holding his maiden rally in the state ahead of Tuesday’s primary. 

In video posted on social media of the tense scene, the teen appears to be arguing with a middle-aged man and shoves or punches him before the pepper spray is deployed by a second man. The girl appears to hold a sign that accuses Trump of supporting white supremacy. She is standing next to another young woman holding a Black Lives Matter sign. Others in the crowd could be heard chanting, “All lives matter.” 

Police said they are reviewing several videos taken at the scene and have spoken to several eyewitnesses. The young woman told officers she was groped by a man before pushing him away, police said in a statement.

I’m sure Trump will say she was asking for it by protesting in the first place.

This is one of the men the police are looking for. He wants to make America great again.

Even the supposedly sane ones are clueless

by digby

Here’s your GOP mainstream alternative to Trump, which says everything you need to know about the mainstream. This stuff is considered benign and normal. Not it’s not as crudely misogynistic as Trump, but it’s the kind of everyday demeaning bullshit women put up with all the time in the workplace and sadly, in politics.

At a CNN town hall on Tuesday in Milwaukee, Charlotte Rasmussen from Butler, Wisconsin, asked Kasich whom he would choose as his vice president were he the GOP’s nominee.

“Are you available? You look great tonight,” he said to her in response.

It’s hard to imagine him saying a similar thing to a male questioner.

Kasich has previously attracted headlines for his comments to and about women at campaign events. When a female student raised her hand to ask him a question in October, he said, “I don’t have any tickets for, you know, Taylor Swift or anything.” His routine of asking women “Have you ever been on a diet?” to explain his views on balancing budgets came to an end after it attracted negative headlines in November.

He’s said that he was elected to office with the help of women who “left their kitchens” to campaign for him and noted in 2012 that “it’s not easy to be a spouse of an elected official … they’re at home doing the laundry.”

Kasich also conflated his party’s outreach to Latino voters with tipping hotel maids last year.

Comments aside, Kasich didn’t show much respect for women when he signed a bill defunding Planned Parenthood in February. Nearly half of Ohio’s abortion clinics have closed since he was elected in 2011.

Marcy Stech, the communications director at EMILY’s List, a group that elects women to office who are pro-abortion rights, said Republicans lose another female voter “every time John Kasich opens his mouth.”

“He’s the king of tone-deaf slights toward women — which still pale in comparison to his destructive, anti-woman record in Ohio,” she said. “The worst part? He’s supposed to be the sane one in this election.”

He’s just a regular old sexist jerk. Which I guess makes him a loveable coot we needn’t worry about. But his views on abortion, while not quite as ignorant as Trumps, are just as vile. He just signed a bill this month banning all state funds for Planned Parenthood.

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Tweet o’ the Day

by digby

Referring to this, of course.

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