Month: April 2022

22 states will immediately react

This piece by Ian Milhiser at Vox lays out the scary details:

Last week, the Oklahoma legislature gave its final approval to legislation banning nearly all abortions in that state — the only exception is for abortions necessary “to save the life of a pregnant woman in a medical emergency.”

The odd thing about this bill, which Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt is expected to sign, is that Oklahoma already has a law on its books banning all abortions, except when “necessary” to preserve the life of the pregnant person undergoing the abortion. The old law has a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison, while the new law increases the maximum penalty to 10 years plus a $100,000 fine.

Two lessons can be gleaned from this effort to make Oklahoma law somewhat more anti-abortion than it already is. Both hinge on the GOP-controlled Supreme Court’s likely impending move to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that established a constitutional right to an abortion. First, nearly half the states in the country will almost immediately permit little to no access to abortion. Second, more states could quickly follow, while states with existing bans could enact even more restrictive laws.

Last December, the Court heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case out of Mississippi that explicitly asks the Court to overrule Roe — and most of the Court’s six Republicans appeared quite eager to do so. Less than two weeks later, the Court handed down a decision in a case out of Texas that permits states to ban abortion completely, as long as they use a needlessly complicated mechanism to enforce the law.

So it is very likely that Roe is in its final days — a decision is expected in late June.

With that context, Oklahoma’s moves are revealing, again, of two things. One is that many states already have existing abortion bans and other restrictions that will roar into life the minute Roe is overruled.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-reproductive rights research group, and to news reports tracking recent anti-abortion legislation, 22 states already have laws on the books that either ban abortion outright or ban it very early in a pregnancy. These aren’t just the so-called “trigger laws,” which are designed to quickly take effect with minimal to no legislative effort if Roe is overturned. Oklahoma and several other states still have abortion bans from before 1973, when Roe was originally handed down, that were never repealed during the half-century in which Roe prevented them from operating. Other states have passed new abortion bans since

The reason these extant bans haven’t been enforced is that anyone charged with violating them would have won in court, because Roe forbids states from banning abortions. Without Roe, however, that would no longer be the case.

The other lesson is that, even in states that already restrict or ban abortion, we are likely to see an arms race among red-state lawmakers to enact broader and more draconian anti-abortion laws. Oklahoma’s Gov. Stitt has said that he will sign any anti-abortion bill that passes the state legislature — and it’s unlikely that he’s alone among Republican governors.

What happens immediately after Roe is overruled?

As mentioned above, 22 states reportedly have laws on the books which impose very strict restrictions on abortion. This includes 18 states that would either ban abortion outright, or ban it only with limited exceptions — such as if the person seeking an abortion could die or face “irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” if their pregnancy is not terminated.

Some, but not all, of these states also permit termination of a pregnancy that results from rape or incest. Meanwhile, some states do not even permit abortions when the person seeking the abortion will be permanently disabled, but won’t die, if they don’t receive an abortion. The bill that recently passed the Oklahoma legislature, for example, only permits an abortion “to save the life of a pregnant woman in a medical emergency.”

Again, these laws are largely dormant right now, because of Roe and subsequent Supreme Court decisions protecting a right to abortion. And some of these laws are “trigger” laws that explicitly do not take effect until Roe is overruled. But these abortion restrictions will come roaring into effect once the Supreme Court gives them the green light, most likely shutting down all abortion clinics in the states with the strictest laws.

The 18 states with near-total bans on the books are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

In some cases, these bans are quite old, and predate Roe v. Wade itself. Wisconsin’s law, which makes performing an abortion a felony punishable by up to six years in prison, is more than 170 years old. It is unlikely to be repealed anytime soon, moreover, because the state’s legislature is gerrymandered to all but ensure that Republicans will control it. And the state’s GOP-controlled supreme court ruled that any new maps must use the old, gerrymandered maps as a baseline.

In other states, however, it is possible that state courts could intervene to restore abortion rights, even if the Supreme Court eliminates the federal constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), for example, recently asked her state’s supreme court to hold that Michiganders have a right to abortion. Democrats control a narrow majority of the seats on that court.

Michigan and Wisconsin are two of four states — the others are Arizona and West Virginia — that reportedly have a pre-Roe abortion ban on the books, but do not have a more recent law banning abortions. There could be additional litigation in all four of these states to determine whether the old law may take effect, though Republicans control the state supreme courts in Arizona, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, so those courts are likely to reinstate the old bans.

Nevertheless, this legal uncertainty might explain why Oklahoma lawmakers decided to pass a new abortion ban despite the fact that the state already had one on the books. As Elizabeth Nash, an expert on state reproductive health policy with Guttmacher, told Vox, it is “much simpler to pass a new ban” than to wait for a state supreme court to rule on the old one.

In a few cases, there will be some lag time between when the Supreme Court overrules Roe, and when the state’s abortion ban takes effect. Idaho’s near-total ban on abortions, for example, takes effect 30 days after Roe is overruled.

In any event, barring intervention by state lawmakers or state courts, nearly all abortions are likely to be illegal in 18 states by the end of this summer — and that’s assuming lawmakers in states that do not have bans on the books do not enact new ones after Roe is overruled. The number of states with near-total abortion bans could rapidly grow.

Additionally, four other states — Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, and South Carolina — have laws on the books banning abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy, according to Guttmacher. That’s before many people know they’re pregnant. (There’s also the unusual case of North Carolina, which once had an abortion ban on the books. But a more recent law appears to have legalized abortion up to the 20th week of pregnancy.)

Some states also have overlapping abortion restrictions. Idaho, for example, has a six-week ban and a “trigger” law that bans nearly all abortions a month after Roe falls. Abortion providers in states with overlapping restrictions would need to comply with all of them — which means that if one of those restrictions is an absolute ban, they would not be allowed to perform abortions.

The arms race

If Roe is overruled, the most immediate impact will be that states are free to restrict or ban abortions if they choose. That means every election that will decide control of a state legislature or governor’s mansion could swiftly become a referendum on abortion.

The Oklahoma legislature’s decision to enact stricter sentences for abortion providers, even though the state already had a law on the books making performing abortions a felony, suggests that Republican lawmakers will likely try to score points with their base by enacting more and more draconian laws.

Already this year, lawmakers in 30 states have introduced at least 82 bills banning at least some kinds of abortions. Some Republican governors have spent years touting their plans to make their state the most anti-abortion state in the nation.

State lawmakers, moreover, aren’t the only officials who are likely to face political pressure to crack down on abortion providers. Prosecutors, especially elected prosecutors, may face pressure to bring charges against doctors who perform abortions, even those that are entirely legal under state law.

Think of a state like Oklahoma, where, in a post-Roe world, abortions will only be legal if necessary to save a patient’s life in a “medical emergency.” Prosecutors could target physicians and force them to provide evidence that a particular abortion was truly necessary to save their patient’s life.

Meanwhile, the mere threat of such prosecutions could lead to unnecessary deaths, as doctors may be unwilling to perform a medically necessary abortion and risk felony charges.

One factor that could mitigate the impact of state-level abortion bans is that more than half of abortions in the United States are medication abortions — in which the patient takes pills to induce a miscarriage rather than undergoing a surgery. States commonly ban a wide range of drugs, such as marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, but that’s hardly prevented people who want to obtain these drugs from doing so. It’s unlikely that state governments will be any more effective at eliminating access to mifepristone, a common abortion drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

It’s also not clear whether the Supreme Court would allow states to ban federally approved drugs, although the current Court’s hostility to abortion rights suggests that they might permit states to do so.

Which brings us to one other looming uncertainty — whether the Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court will go even further, potentially extending abortion bans to blue states.

“Fetal personhood,” and other threats to the right to receive an abortion in a blue state

The conservative position on abortion, at least among conservative Supreme Court justices, has historically been that elected lawmakers should get to decide whether to ban abortions. As Justice Antonin Scalia said in a 2012 interview, “my view is regardless of whether you think prohibiting abortion is good or whether you think prohibiting abortion is bad … the Constitution does not say anything about it.”

But there is an alternative theory, known as “fetal personhood,” which would effectively ban abortions in all 50 states. The idea behind this theory is that fetus has the same legal rights as a person, so if a state prohibits killing people after they are born, it must also prohibit killing a fetus.

We don’t know whether any of the current justices will embrace fetal personhood as the next big fight over the right to an abortion. But we do know that five members of the current Court are willing to manipulate the Constitution and the law in order to achieve anti-abortion results. Hence the Court’s decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson (2021), which established that states can insulate anti-abortion laws from federal judicial review altogether, so long as they draft those laws, as Texas did, so that they can only be enforced by private bounty hunters.

Another uncertain question is whether this Supreme Court will allow anti-abortion states to target individuals who travel to states where abortion is legal in order to receive one, or to target physicians and other individuals who help red-state residents obtain abortions. A bill pending in the Missouri legislature, for example, would make it illegal “to aid or abet, or attempt to aid or abet, an abortion performed or induced on a resident or citizen of Missouri, regardless of where the abortion is or will be performed.”

This bill is unconstitutional, even in a world without Roe v. Wade. Missouri’s jurisdiction does not extend beyond its borders. And states cannot bar US citizens from traveling freely among the 50 states. As the Supreme Court said in Saenz v. Roe (1999), the Constitution “protects the right of a citizen of one State to enter and to leave another State.”

But this right, like all constitutional rights, depends on the courts for its enforcement. So in the most extreme world, a Supreme Court that is determined to limit abortions may not honor the constitutional right to travel if doing so would lead to someone terminating a pregnancy.

Finally, it is possible that, if Republicans control Congress and the White House, they will attempt to enact a nationwide ban on abortion.

If such a bill were to become law, it could scramble the Supreme Court’s ordinary coalitions. Liberal justices have historically supported an expansive role for Congress, which includes the power to regulate and even ban commercial activity such as providing abortions. The Court’s most conservative members, meanwhile, have historically sought to limit Congress’s powers — in ways that would prohibit both modern-day laws such as Obamacare, and potentially even venerable laws such as the federal ban on child labor.

In 2007, in an opinion joined only by Scalia, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that Congress may not have the power to regulate or ban abortions. But it remains to be seen if Thomas would hold to that view if a nationwide abortion ban were on the table. It also remains to be seen whether any of Thomas’s colleagues would join him in an opinion prohibiting a federal abortion ban.

What we do know is that the end of Roe will be just the beginning of a new war over abortion rights. Much of the battle will shift to state legislatures, but Congress and the courts will remain important players. And Republicans, both in elected roles and the judiciary, will likely face considerable pressure to enact more rigid abortion bans.

This is a huge culture war win for the right. The biggest. And they won’t stop there, of course. Assuming the Supremes don’t completely ban abortion, which they might, the battle will immediately commence to do that and the fight will be waged in the 28 states where abortion will remain legal.

They’re coming for LGBT rights next. If a right that has existed for 50 years can be reversed, do you think they won’t try to reverse marriage equality, which isn’t even a decade old?

Big of them, since she did nothing illegal

What a grotesque error:

The murder charge against a woman in Texas in connection with a “self-induced abortion” will be dismissed, a Texas district attorney announced Sunday.

Gocha Allen Ramirez, the district attorney of Starr County, said in a statement that, after reviewing the case, he will file a motion on Monday to dismiss the indictment against the woman, Lizelle Herrera, 26.

“It is my hope that with the dismissal of this case it is made clear that Ms. Herrera did not commit a criminal act under the laws of the state of Texas,” Mr. Ramirez said.

Ms. Herrera was arrested on Friday and detained in Starr County, near the Mexico border, according to a local sheriff’s official. An abortion rights organization, Frontera Fund, said she was released on $500,000 bail on Saturday.

According to the sheriff’s office statement, which was reported Saturday by The Associated Press, Ms. Herrera was indicted on the murder charge after she “intentionally and knowingly” caused the death of an individual by “self-induced abortion.”

Self-managed abortion is any abortion outside of medical care and can include the use of abortion pills. But in dangerous cases, it can include those attempted with supplements, herbs or vitamins; multiple contraceptive pills or emergency contraception pills; or physical trauma.

Many details of the indictment remained unclear on Sunday, including whether Ms. Herrera was accused of having the abortion or aiding one, or how far along the pregnancy had been.

The indictment came months after the Texas Legislature passed several restrictions on abortion. But Mr. Ramirez said that “in reviewing applicable Texas law, it is clear that Ms. Herrera cannot and should not be prosecuted for the allegation against her.”

He also acknowledged that “the events leading up to this indictment have taken a toll on Ms. Herrera and her family. To ignore this fact would be shortsighted.”

Mr. Ramirez and Ms. Herrera’s lawyer, Calixtro Villarreal, did not respond to requests for comment.

It was not immediately known what statute Ms. Herrera was being indicted under. An abortion ban that took effect in Texas in September, known as S.B. 8, prohibits abortion after six weeks but leaves enforcement to civilians, offering them rewards of at least $10,000 for successful lawsuits against anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion.

The Texas Legislature then enacted another law, S.B. 4, which establishes a criminal violation — a state felony punishable by a $10,000 fine and up to two years in prison — for providing medical abortion pills after 49 days of pregnancy, or for providers who fail to comply with a series of new regulations and procedures. That law also exempts pregnant women from prosecution.

Don’t kid yourself, this is where it’s heading. Despite the “pro-life” movements insistence that they do not hold women responsible there is no logic to the idea that abortion is murder but the woman who has one is not a murderer, unless she is forced to do it against her will. At some point they are going to come to a reckoning on that and I’m afraid it’s not going to go well. After all, the whole point of this is to punish women. (We know they don’t really care about murder and they don’t care about children. After all, most of them are just fine with rampant gun violence. )

The details of this case are still obscure but from what I understand she came to a hospital for care after doing some kind of at home abortion and was turned in to the police by someone in there and they threw her in jail with a $500,000 bail. For two weeks. I assume more information will be forthcoming but I find it very difficult to believe there is a good explanation.

But there aren’t any emails involved so I doubt this will be considered a real scandal.

It wasn’t enough for Jared and Ivanka to make hundreds of millions while they were in office they couldn’t wait more than six month before getting their $2 billion payment from the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia for all the work he did for them:

Six months after leaving the White House, Jared Kushner secured a $2 billion investment from a fund led by the Saudi crown prince, a close ally during the Trump administration, despite objections from the fund’s advisers about the merits of the deal.

A panel that screens investments for the main Saudi sovereign wealth fund cited concerns about the proposed deal with Mr. Kushner’s newly formed private equity firm, Affinity Partners, previously undisclosed documents show.

Those objections included: “the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management”; the possibility that the kingdom would be responsible for “the bulk of the investment and risk”; due diligence on the fledgling firm’s operations that found them “unsatisfactory in all aspects”; a proposed asset management fee that “seems excessive”; and “public relations risks” from Mr. Kushner’s prior role as a senior adviser to his father-in-law, former President Donald J. Trump, according to minutes of the panel’s meeting last June 30.

But days later the full board of the $620 billion Public Investment Fund — led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler and a beneficiary of Mr. Kushner’s support when he worked as a White House adviser — overruled the panel.

Ethics experts say that such a deal creates the appearance of potential payback for Mr. Kushner’s actions in the White House — or of a bid for future favor if Mr. Trump seeks and wins another presidential term in 2024.

Mr. Kushner played a leading role inside the Trump administration defending Crown Prince Mohammed after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that he had approved the 2018 killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi columnist for The Washington Post and resident of Virginia who had criticized the kingdom’s rulers.

The Saudi fund agreed to invest twice as much and on more generous terms with Mr. Kushner than it did at about the same time with former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin — who was also starting a new fund — even though Mr. Mnuchin had a record as a successful investor before entering government, the documents show. The amount of the investment in his firm, Liberty Strategic Capital — $1 billion — has not been previously disclosed.

A spokesman for Mr. Kushner’s firm said of its relationship with the Saudi Public Investment Fund, “Affinity, like many other top investment firms, is proud to have PIF and other leading organizations that have careful screening criteria, as investors.”

A spokesman for the Saudi fund declined to comment on its investment process. If any additional discussions about the deal took place, they were not reflected in the documents and correspondence obtained by The New York Times.

The Times reported last fall that Mr. Kushner had been seeking a Saudi investment. Now, the internal fund records and correspondence obtained by The Times show the outcome, scale and timing of his firm’s deal as well as the debate it aroused. Those documents and other filings indicate that at this point Mr. Kushner’s venture depends primarily on the Saudi money.

Mr. Kushner planned to raise up to $7 billion in all, according to a document prepared last summer for the Saudi fund’s board. But so far he appears to have signed up few other major investors.

In its most recent public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, dated March 31, Mr. Kushner’s firm reported that its main fund had $2.5 billion under management, almost entirely from investors based overseas. Most of that appears to be the $2 billion from Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi documents obtained by The Times say that in return for its investment, the Saudi fund would receive a stake of at least 28 percent in Mr. Kushner’s main investment vehicle.

Unbelievable. I’ll let Judd Legum comment:

Let's be very clear:

Jared Kushner used his position in the White House to advance Saudi interests, including making sure Saudi wouldn’t be held accountable for the brutal murder of a US-based journalist

And now he’s cashing in

TO THE TUNE OF 2 BILLION DOLLARS

Six months after leaving the White House, Jared Kushner secured a $2 billion investment from a fund led by the Saudi crown prince, a close ally during the Trump administration, despite objections from the fund’s advisers about the merits of the deal. https://t.co/FDlmrzvYdw pic.twitter.com/OHfyPVHsHN

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 10, 2022

Let’s get real: No one interested in MAKING MONEY would hand Jared Kushner $2 billion

This is political payback and a hedge on Trump retaking the White House in 2024

It’s pure corruption

Kushner has no experience in private equity! He’s best known for almost bankrupting his family business by purchasing a $1.8 billion office tower on 5th Avenue.

He was bailed out in 2018 by a firm with extensive ties to the Qatari government

https://popular.info/p/jared-kushners-tower-from-hell?s=w

Originally tweeted by Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) on April 10, 2022.

Whatever. Let’s hear some more about Hunter Biden’s laptop because I’m sure that’s much more corrupt than anything Ivanka’s beloved Jared could do.

By the way, reporters, the next time you see Kushner please give him our thanks for the $6.00 gas and congratulate him on being able to blame Joe Biden for it. Well played.

Finland and Sweden poised to join NATO

Sad trombone (Reuters):

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a “massive strategic blunder” that could result in an expansion of Nato as early as this summer, officials have claimed.

According to the Times [of London], US officials reportedly confirmed that membership of the alliance for Sweden and Finland was “a topic of conversation” during talks between Western foreign ministers last week attended by representatives of both Nordic countries.

It is thought the two nations could launch a bid for Nato membership in the coming months in the wake of Russia’s widely condemned military assault.

Finland -which shares an 830-mile land border with Russia – is expected to apply for Nato membership by June, with Sweden potentially poised to follow soon after.

One former Finnish prime minister told CNN the move to join “was pretty much a done deal on the 24th of February, when Russia invaded.”

More unintended consequences for Putin of his ill-advised, failed invasion: Sweden and Finland to join NATO.

Putin thought he was Peter the Great, but turned out to be Donald Trump.

— Amy Siskind 🏳️‍🌈 (@Amy_Siskind) April 11, 2022

Let’s hope Putin is a loser, too.

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How a fringe, far-right faction convinces us it is bigger than it is

“Democrats need to make more noise,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D) of Hawaii told Greg Sargent last week. “We have to scream from the rooftops, because this is a battle for the free world now.”

The occasion was Schatz giving Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley the Senate equivalent of a dressing-down in a floor speech last week for, writes Sargent, his “bottomless levels of bad faith” and “ludicrous grandstanding.” Democrats have yet to adjust to the fact that Republicans are no longer in office to govern. They are there to attract eyeballs and clicks.

“I have built my staff around comms rather than legislation,” Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) wrote to his new Republican colleagues in Jan 2021. It could hardly be plainer.

Depraved

Right-wing talk radio is built on attracting ears. They’ve taken Orwell’s two minutes and drawn out the daily hate to fill hours, days and weeks. Why? Because it sells Snapple and juices the Republican base. Newt Gingrich formalized demonizing opponents in the 1990s with his infamous GOPAC memo, Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.

Democrats still bring letter openers to gun fights. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell last week virtually promised not to allow confirmation hearings for any Biden Supreme Court nominees if Republicans take back the Senate next year. What did Democrats say about that? Buehler?

Sargent responds:

Yet we don’t hear enough from Democrats putting down hard emotional markers indicating that at moments like these, something is deeply amiss, and something unusually absurd and depraved is happening.

[…]

McConnell perhaps instinctively knows little noise from Democrats will break through to their voters, or alert the middle that something this unusual happened at all. Meanwhile, the vast right-wing media apparatus will keep up the drumbeat of wildly inflated hysteria about the threat of radical Democratic rule, which means threats like these will only energize Republicans more:

Things that are not real:

Dem pedos
Open borders
Antifa
Dem voter fraud
CRT

Most of the conversation Republicans are having with their voters is about things which aren’t real.

It’s really incredible.

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) April 8, 2022

That tweet is from Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who has long argued for a new focus on sheer amplification to avoid getting drowned out by the noise of the right.

Create “social proof”

Get loud or go home. Perhaps Schatz read this Dave Roberts thread from March 5. You should right now:

Lunchtime thread:

I’ve been thinking about the “Freedom Convoy” & social proof. As news-literate folks are likely aware, the convoy — which disrupted Canada for weeks & is heading toward the US — is, to a first approximation, bullshit. washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/…

By bullshit I mean: it doesn’t represent truckers, or “the working class.” It represents a familiar, small far-right faction. It is a demonstration of how the right — the RW base, RW billionaires, & RW media — works together to make this faction *appear* large. 

You know how they say, when you encounter a mountain lion in the wild, you’re supposed to try to appear large? Stand up tall, raise your hands over your head, jump around, shout? Same basic principle here: use big trucks, aggressive tactics, & friendly media to appear large. 

The main goal is not any particular policy outcome. The main goal, articulated or not, is to provide what sociologists call “social proof.” Social proof is a way of signaling that particular beliefs or preferences are widely held, that they have social presence & significance. 

Legendarily, if you look at opinion polls, even in the ’50s, they show that most Americans were open to racial integration. But people didn’t really know that *other* people were open to it, because existing voices/institutions/practices were explicitly racist. 

One important function of civil rights protests, etc. was to provide social proof – to signal to quiet integrationists that they weren’t alone, that integration was a legitimate & widely held preference. The point was to render it safe for people to “come out” as integrationists. 

Social proof is also behind the contemporary push for “representation” in media. When you see gay people (or Muslims/single women/trans youth — pick your marginalized group) in culture, it signals that those groups are legitimate, part of the fabric, welcome out in the open. 

It is campaign common wisdom that “signs don’t vote.” Campaign signs are costly, bulky, and not effective marketing. But perhaps that depends on what you are selling.

Doug Jones’ 2017 Senate campaign in Alabama insisted anyone who wanted a sign had to provide their name, address, phone number and email. They gave strict orders that signs go in their front yards and nowhere else. Their strategy was to give Republican neighbors who hadn’t voted for a Democrat in decades … the permission to. Social proof.

I wrote ahead of the 2020 election, “A wealthy Bernie supporter here was so unnerved by the presence of Trump signs (in the absence of Clinton’s) that he himself printed and fabricated thousands of 1/4-size ‘Clinton 2016’ signs. Democrats snatched them up in days.” County roads were awash in Trump signs.

I’m not arguing for more campaign spending on yard signs. I’m arguing that people respond to social proof. Even over-savvy lefties. Maybe we should pay more attention to providing it. And not just for convincing voters.

Relatively malleable

Roberts continues (emphasis mine):

The right is incredibly good at using social proof — quite simply, *getting attention* — to exaggerate the size of the RW base & the prevalence of its views. (See: the Tea Party.) Reactionary views/people have representation in news media wildly out of scale w/ their numbers. 

The right does this with protests like the convoy, but also by using its giant coordinated media machine to force RW tropes & arguments into the mainstream, though volume & repetition. Look how it spun the CRT controversy out of nothing into a ubiquitous national issue.

What I think the right understands on an instinctive level is that most ordinary people don’t have settled views or priorities, certainly not on political issues. They have ambivalent, contradictory views that can be easily pushed one direction or the other through exposure. 

So rather than thinking all these parents had pre-existing views on CRT or systemic racism, it’s more accurate to think they had bits & pieces, intuitions & scraps of info, that could be *shaped & directed* into something coherent through social proof. 

But — and this is super, super important — all those parents also had *other* bits & pieces & intuitions & scraps of info that could have been shaped & directed into *different* coherent views. Most non-political-obsessive people are relatively malleable. 

What happened is, the right reached them with a coordinated set of “facts” & anecdotes; it signaled to them with school board meeting protests & parent lawsuits; it provided them with copious social proof. And the left just didn’t. Instead it just sputtered defensively. 

The left’s utter incompetence at providing this kind of social proof is among my many ongoing sources of angst. But I’ve been thinking about it recently in a particularly acute way, because of what’s going on in Russia. 

One way of interpreting this episode is as a rather obvious, on-the-nose lesson about the dangers of fossil fuel dependence. It’s a pretty natural way of seeing it! The world is hamstrung in responding to Russia’s aggression because

Russia has it by the balls. Russia has the world by the balls because of its copious natural gas production. To the extent the world uses less gas, it frees itself of Russia’s grip & can do far more to push back against its aggression. This isn’t a complicated message. It’s quite intuitive! 

But the *logic* of the argument is not going to make the argument. This is a classic, textbook case where we need some social proof. We need to signal to Americans that this intuitive response is correct, that other people are thinking it, that it’s legitimate & urgent. 

So — and here, at long last, we arrive at my point — where’s that social proof? Where’s the equivalent of the trucker convoy? Where are people doing the work to make this view *appear large*, through being loud, imposing, & aggressive, demanding attention? 

I see environmental groups … issuing press releases. I see left scholars writing polite op-eds in mainstream publications.

I see a reporter confronting Psaki w/ quotes from the American Petroleum Inst., forcing her on the defensive. Where’s the journalist w/ counter-quotes? 

Herd mentality

We know this: “Politicians tend to vastly overestimate just how conservative their constituents really are.” Roberts argues it is because the right is better at generating noise and attention. The right puffs itself up to look bigger and more threatening than it is. And thereby convinces politicians to give it what it wants and to balk when it is the left asking.

An ordinary American, with the ordinary brew of vague & contradictory intuitions & factoids, is looking for social proof. What’s the right way to think about & respond to this? What do “we” think? Where’s the herd heading? 

And as always, always, always, most social proof is coming from the right. Fossil fuel interests are loud & aggressive. RW media is loud & aggressive. The left & supporters of clean energy are on the defensive, sputtering yet again, in what should be their moment. 

This is already obnoxiously long & I need to go walk the dogs. I’ll just conclude by saying: picture the equivalent of the trucker convoy … but for accelerating decarbonization. For passing the f’ing BBB. For preserving democracy & holding seditionists accountable. 

It’s difficult to imagine, isn’t it? For some reason the left just doesn’t do that stuff any more. All the theatricality, the demands for attention, the rebellious wild energy, is on the right. Dems now just come off as the boring, lecturing establishment. 

Anyway. The left, especially the grassroots left, needs to think a lot more about social proof. One great place to start would be signaling that Russia’s invasion demonstrates the intense need to accelerate decarbonization & pass the BBB’s climate provisions. </fin>

A massively successful Women’s March makes our presence felt for a couple of days. What should we be doing to keep that going month after month? We don’t have to be assholes to draw attention. But we do have to be as smart and creative as we think we are.

(h/t DJ)

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

Do we just not care?

I overheard a conversation yesterday that really depressed me. I was waiting on line and a couple of younger women, probably in their mid-20s were talking about how glad they are not to be wearing masks anymore. (I was wearing one, as I still do when I’m waiting around for periods of time indoors close up with strangers.) Anyway, one of them casually said that it was probably a good thing that COVID came along when it did because it means that the baby boomers would all be dead sooner. The other one laughed and they moved on.

I was often a horrible person when I was young too so I don’t blame them that much for their lack of empathy. But it made me feel terrible anyway. Then I read this and it is a beautiful discussion of this very subject:

“Covid-19 need no longer control our lives,” President Biden announced in the State of the Union address, speaking to a room of unmasked though back-room-tested members of Congress. He then offered, magnanimously: “If you’re immunocompromised or have some other vulnerability, we have treatments and free high-quality masks. We’re leaving no one behind or ignoring anyone’s needs as we move forward.”

But that’s not exactly true. Throughout the pandemic, immunocompromised Americans at higher risk for serious illness from Covid, or those who, like me, live with vulnerable family members we are desperate to protect, have often found ourselves feeling like an unfortunate parenthetical. We are acknowledged, but easily forgotten.

The pandemic isn’t over and yet, as another subvariant spreads, there is little real regard for those whose ability to participate in society hinges on the behavior of everyone else. We have all suffered from isolation, indisputably. But the rush to roll back precautions appears to abandon some to remain isolated forever.

It seems no one knows what it would look like to do otherwise. That’s in no small part because society has rarely taken the most vulnerable into account when it comes to how daily life is navigated. Not during this pandemic, and certainly not before it. The greatest good for the greatest number invariably implies the existence of an expendable few.

Ever since I moved to the precarious side of society (my 13-year-old daughter received a liver transplant as part of her cancer treatment in March 2020), I have been thinking about what we owe the vulnerable. I constantly wonder: Was I truly aware of such precarity before I found myself here? Who would I have been had I continued a life lived only among the well?

“There is always a sense that this is a very tiny minority of the population and that you are asking an unreasonable number of people to make a sacrifice for a very small group,” said Dr. Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, an infectious disease specialist at Emory University. “When you look at the definitions of what makes someone more vulnerable to Covid,” she explained, it is a significant proportion of the population “that we essentially are failing to offer protections to.”

Estimates suggest about 3 percent to 4 percent of Americans are immunosuppressed. Some fall into the same category as my daughter, who takes daily drugs to tamp down her immune system. Cancer patients often have their immune systems temporarily wiped out during chemotherapy. Others have conditions or diseases, autoimmune and otherwise, that alter their ability to fight infection. In all, somewhere north of seven million people, not counting their loved ones, fall into this woolly space. And that number doesn’t include children younger than 5 who are not yet vaccine eligible, though they fare better than adults on average. (During the Omicron surge, the United States reported the highest numbers of hospitalizations for children under 5 since the pandemic began.) To be sure, there have been a few hopeful studies showing our loved ones would survive Covid, but none of us want to be part of the experiment to see if that bears out.

I understand that in the big picture, we are not so many; accommodating us can feel onerous. But this is only one way to see the problem. What if we also calculated the benefits of teaching empathy and inclusion?

In other words: What if we could see this time as an opportunity for a correction? Covid broadened the scope and definition of vulnerability, allowing everyone, however briefly, to viscerally understand the need to protect one another. We worried over our aging parents, our asthmatic selves. We were “all in it together,” clapping each night for the brave frontline workers. What if we applied that understanding going forward? What if we no longer thought of the world as so blithely divisible? Instead of a return to how life was, unconscious of those who are unable to accompany us, why not situation-specific considerations for different populations?

In practical terms that could mean, say, that the family of a child undergoing chemotherapy might ask her classmates and teachers to don masks to protect her against Covid (and other diseases like flu), without having to sue the school to comply. Offices might create masked spaces or offer on-site testing and flexible work arrangements. Restaurants would continue to protect the staffs by asking patrons to present vaccine cards and not show up ill.

Returning to what once was is not possible for all; we need, instead, a new normal, one that recognizes that everyone deserves the chance to participate in daily life. As the philosopher Martha Nussbaum suggested to me, we might start by simply asking the vulnerable what they need.

Thirteen orchestras nationally, including the Chicago Symphony and the Boston Symphony, have done just that. Led by WolfBrown, a research and consulting firm, the Audience Outlook Monitor Covid-19 Study is a continuing effort to gauge what allows audiences to feel comfortable enough to return. (Orchestras often have older audiences, who can be at higher risk.) So far, most patrons say they still want masks in place, though the numbers are trending downward. A survey conducted by Theatre Washington, an umbrella organization working with Washington, D.C., theater organizations, also found a preference for keeping masks on.

“Arts groups are really good about accessibility,” WolfBrown’s managing principal, Alan Brown, told me. “They have been doing that for a long time for people with various disabilities and abilities.” Still, right now, he said, the focus is more on filling seats than long-term changes. “The notion of accessibility has changed and our sector has yet to really figure a response,” he added.

Couldn’t some performances simply remain protected, even if mask requirements fall? I don’t mean special, one-off performances. I mean that we might require masks for some performances for the foreseeable future or designate specific areas of the theater for compromised individuals, offering inclusivity in perpetuity.

After all, it is not as though Covid has disappeared. The BA.2 variant is on the rise. Just as mask mandates fell, the White House announced that money has dried up for free testing and vaccination for the uninsured and for the purchase and distribution of monoclonal antibodies, a treatment for Covid-19 that is still not readily available.

Thus we are dismantling the safety nets, even as the United States sees around 600 deaths a day from Covid. While those at highest risk are the unvaccinated, “when you look at the metrics of what determines when we should be scaling back these protections,” said Dr. Titanji, the infectious disease expert, “are we focusing on the right groups in determining what is acceptable in terms of how much excess death we are willing to tolerate? Because essentially these excess deaths are happening disproportionately among the groups of people who are the most vulnerable in society.”

Dr. Dorry Segev, director of the Center for Surgical and Transplant Applied Research at New York University, notes we can’t really compartmentalize the problem, thinking it’s only a risk for some. That’s because variants can incubate in the bodies of those who cannot fight off infection, and to those, we know, we are all potentially vulnerable.

If a society catered to the whole population, then a decision to continue funding for free testing, vaccines and masks would be viewed more holistically. And if we don’t want to push, at minimum, seven million Americans and their family members to consider avoiding flights and theaters and schools and trains, then we have to think creatively. In this scenario, we would have to be far more practical and far less political and also willing to experience some minor discomfort for the sake of others.

What would it mean to actually confront this choice as a society?

I asked Martha Nussbaum about her focus on society and vulnerability in her work. What she is calling for, she told me via email, is “for a society that as a matter of basic justice and rights protects our vulnerability in many ways.” This would mean expanding comprehensive health insurance and crime prevention, and addressing discrimination and unsafe work environments. “We ought at this moment to take stock of our nation, asking where we are and what we have achieved, and where we have failed,” Dr. Nussbaum said.

I keep thinking of failures — of education, of empathy, of imagination. It is a time, Alice MacLachlan, a professor of philosophy at York University in Toronto, wrote to me, when we might also notice the carelessness, fear and arrogance that accompany our relationship to wellness and illness. Carelessness about how our choices affect others. Fear we might ourselves become unwell. Arrogance in our surety that we will never fall on that side of the ledger.

In my life, I sometimes sense a distancing from others that ranges from pity — a murmur of that poor family, they’ve gone through so much — to active avoidance. To be unwell is to be other. Woebegone. I am not you. The empathy gap gives general society a skewed idea of what it means to be or become vulnerable, and how close we all live to it.

“One of the tenets of ableism is that it combines the idea of strength with not being sick, and that you let sickness happen to you if you are weak,” said Steven Thrasher, an assistant professor at Northwestern University and the author of the coming book “The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide.” “And it’s a shame that this pandemic has not created a better sense that we are all vulnerable.”

I know everyone is fed up. I wonder whether it is unfair for me to insist others care. I am a special request. I am a problem. I like the rules. The more the world opens up, the more cornered I feel. I do not want us to return to isolation.

My daughter, for her part, thinks that I am overly concerned, that I, too, should relax and return to “normal” life. She doesn’t see me, behind the scenes, desperately arranging the parts of the world within my reach to try to allow her to remain in it.

What I’d like is a society that really sees her and her sister. A world where we are not a dismissible percentage, but people who add value and are thus worth considering and accounting for. I want society to welcome us to participate. Until now, I have been too exhausted to be solutions-oriented. We have just been trying so hard to survive. We shouldn’t have to be alone, worrying about this, scrambling for answers.

“The irony is, if we made vulnerability less stigmatized, less isolated, less shameful and invisible,” Dr. MacLachlan wrote to me, “we might be less afraid of it. This is an opportunity given to us by the pandemic that we are throwing away.”

Old people too, are apparently expendable.

In Utah!

You can’t make this stuff up. Seriously, how do these people get driver’s licenses or find their way to the grocery store?

For Salt Lake County Republicans, warnings of voter fraud came from inside the party on Saturday. The vote to nominate a GOP candidate for Salt Lake County Clerk was marred when a pair of delegates were caught attempting to vote more than once, with one extra vote making it into a ballot box at Saturday’s county nominating convention.

The extra vote did not impact the outcome, as Goud Maragani easily won the nod from delegates over Nancy Lord. After the two cheaters were caught, the remaining delegates voted to expel them from their positions within the party. Republican officials said they planned to press charges, but it’s unclear what laws may have been broken since Saturday’s vote was conducted as part of a private organization and not a governmental entity.

Saturday’s attempted ballot box stuffing at the Republican convention was more election fraud than has been proven in Utah’s entire 2020 election.

The irony of the situation was undeniable, given how tightly the Salt Lake County GOP has embraced former President Donald Trump’s false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election. It was at the center of Maragani’s successful pitch to delegates and other candidates spoke on the issue up when it was their turn to address the convention. Party chair Chris Null broached the topic, teasing a forthcoming report from the party.

“We put together an election integrity committee, and they put together a report that we’ll be releasing very soon. There are some significant problems with our current mail-in voting system,” Null said.

Even Rep. Burgess Owens got in on the action, playing footsie with the “stop the steal” crowd, and going as far as comparing the 2020 election to historic attacks on the country.

“After events like The Alamo, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 and 2020 is when people start to wake up. Once we see we’re at war, we wake up,” Owens said.

It’s become clear that these people are all suffering from some kind of mass hysteria.

And now the Republicans are in the dark

Speaking of the January 6th Committee, can we just talk about what an idiot Kevin McCarthy is? Not that we didn’t know that. He’s screwed the pooch over and over again and its a testament to just how degraded the GOP has become that he’s the best they can do. When Mitch checks out of the Senate there won’t be anyone with any brains left. (Not that they matters to their voters. They prefer their leaders to be blithering fools.)

One by one, Republicans eviscerated the work of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, each one bemoaning the fact that the chief congressional security officials had not been subpoenaed to examine that day’s security lapses. Not interviewing these key officials was proof, they suggested, that the committee was just out to score political points against Republicans.

Finally, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) shut down that line of debate on Wednesday with some information these Republicans did not seem to know. “We have in fact interviewed precisely the people they set up as a test for the validity of our investigation,” Raskin said.

Those top security officials “didn’t need a subpoena” to testify about that horrible day’s events, Raskin said. “They came voluntarily.”

The moment served as a reminder for Republicans that they have no insight into this powerful committee’s inner workings.

Without knowing precisely what the committee is doing and who it is talking to, Republicans have struggled to prepare lines of defense for former president Donald Trump. Even more important to their own personal interests, dozens of GOP lawmakers are left in the dark about what evidence the committee has collected involving their own contacts with Trump and his senior advisers in the run up to, and during, the attack on the Capitol.

Republicans have refrained from second-guessing House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), publicly supporting his decision to pull out entirely from the Jan. 6 panel’s work once House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) rejected two of his initial five choices for the committee. Pelosi broke all precedent in that move, as the majority and minority party have traditionally always picked their own slates for congressional committees.

McCarthy’s picks included three members who voted against certifying President Biden’s victory: Reps. Jim Banks (Ind.), Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Troy E. Nehls (Tex.). His other two picks — Rep. Kelly Armstrong (N.D.) and Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) — voted to certify Biden’s clear victory.Advertisement

Pelosi rejected Jordan and Banks without ever giving a full explanation. Jordan has publicly discussed that he was in contact with Trump on Jan. 6 and, some believe, should be a fact witness in the probe, not an investigator.

In their places, Pelosi selected two GOP exiles who broke sharply against Trump, Reps. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), giving the committee a bipartisan veneer.

McCarthy then decided none of his chosen members would serve on the committee.

“Could you have made an argument that we should have submitted a second set of names? Possibly,” said Armstrong. But replacing the two staunch conservatives aligned with Trump would have set a bad precedent that silenced conservative voters, she said.

“I think what you are really doing is you are allowing the majority to silence entire constituencies,” Armstrong said.

This was after the GOP refused to go along with the Select Committee that had been worked out between Republicans and Democrats which would have given the GOP members equal power and was required to end by last year! They just couldn’t take yes for an answer, one of those patented Tea Party moves that ensures they never get anything they really want.

But hey, Trump’s theme song is “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and it’s clear he’s all they think they need.

They think it might be seen as partisan. Lol.

The Washington Post reports:

The leaders of the House committee investigating the Capitol attack have grown divided over whether to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department of former President Donald J. Trump, even though they have concluded that they have enough evidence to do so, people involved in the discussions said.

The debate centers on whether making a referral — a largely symbolic act — would backfire by politically tainting the Justice Department’s expanding investigation into the Jan. 6 assault and what led up to it.

Since last summer, a team of former federal prosecutors working for the committee has focused on documenting the attack and the preceding efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to reverse his defeat in the 2020 election. The panel plans to issue a detailed report on its findings, but in recent months it has regularly signaled that it was also weighing a criminal referral that would pressure Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to open a criminal investigation into Mr. Trump.

But now, with the Justice Department appearing to ramp up a wide-ranging investigation, some Democrats are questioning whether there is any need to make a referral — and whether doing so would saddle a criminal case with further partisan baggage at a time when Mr. Trump is openly flirting with running again in 2024.

The shift in the committee’s perspective on making a referral was prompted in part by a ruling two weeks ago by Judge David O. Carter of the Federal District Court for Central California. Deciding a civil case in which the committee had sought access to more than 100 emails written by John C. Eastman, a lawyer who advised Mr. Trump on efforts to derail certification of the Electoral College outcome, Judge Carter found that it was “more likely than not” that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman had committed federal crimes.

The ruling led some committee and staff members to argue that even though they felt they had amassed enough evidence to justify calling for a prosecution for obstructing a congressional proceeding and conspiring to defraud the American people, the judge’s decision would carry far greater weight with Mr. Garland than any referral letter they could write, according to people with knowledge of the conversations.

The members and aides who were reluctant to support a referral contended that making one would create the appearance that Mr. Garland was investigating Mr. Trump at the behest of a Democratic Congress and that if the committee could avoid that perception it should, the people said.

I hate to break the news but any criminal indictment is going to be seen as partisan regardless. They are already saying that the judge who made the fining earlier is a hack because he’s a Clinton appointee from California, which might as well be Beijing as far s they’re concerned.

Will it happen? Who knows? Here’s a piece from the Guardian in which former DOJ officials discuss the pitfalls and possibilities:

The attorney general, Merrick Garland, is facing more political pressure to move faster and expand the US Department of Justice’s investigation into the January 6 Capitol attack and charge Donald Trump and some of his former top aides.

With mounting evidence from the January 6 House panel, court rulings and news reports that Trump engaged in a criminal conspiracy in his aggressive drive to thwart Joe Biden’s election win in 2020, Garland and his staff face an almost unique decision: whether to charge a former US president.

Ex-justice officials caution, however, that while there’s growing evidence of criminal conduct by Trump to obstruct Congress from certifying Biden’s win on January 6 and defraud the government, building a strong case to prove Trump’s corrupt intent – a necessary element to convict him – probably requires more evidence and time.

In an important speech in January this year, Garland said he would hold “all January 6 perpetrators, at any level” accountable, if they were present at the Capitol that day or not, who were responsible for this “assault on our democracy”, which suggested to some ex-prosecutors that Trump and some allies were in his sights.

But rising pressures on Garland to move faster with a clearer focus on Trump and his top allies have come from Democrats on the House panel investigating the Capitol attack.

Those concerns were underscored this past week when the House sent a criminal referral to the justice department charging contempt of Congress by two Trump aides, trade adviser Peter Navarro and communications chief Dan Scavino, who refused to cooperate after being subpoenaed.

“We are upholding our responsibility, the Department of Justice must do the same,” panel member Adam Schiff said. Likewise, Congresswoman Elaine Luria urged Garland to “do your job so we can do ours.”

About four months ago, the House sent a criminal contempt of Congress referral to the justice department for the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, but so far he has not been indicted.

Some former top DoJ officials and prosecutors, however, say Garland is moving correctly and expeditiously in pursuing all criminal conduct to overturn Biden’s election in its sprawling January 6 inquiry.

“When people (including many lawyers) criticize the DoJ for not more clearly centering the January 6 investigation on Trump, they are expressing impatience rather than a clear understanding of the trajectory of the investigation,” the former justice inspector general Michael Bromwich told the Guardian.

“DoJ is methodically building the case from the bottom up. It is almost surely the most complex criminal investigation in the nation’s history, involving the most prosecutors, the most investigators, the most digital evidence – and the most defendants,” he added.

Bromwich added that “people view the scores of ongoing criminal prosecutions of participants in the January 6 insurrection as somehow separate from the investigation of Trump. They are not. He is the subject of the investigation at the top of the pyramid. People need to carefully watch what is happening, not react based on their impatience.”

The department’s investigation is the biggest one ever. More than 750 people have been charged so far with federal crimes, and about 250 have pleaded guilty.

Still, concerns about the pace of the investigation – and why charges have not been filed against Trump – have been spurred in part by a few revelations over the last couple of months.

Last month, for instance, federal judge David Carter in a crucial court ruling involving a central Trump legal adviser, John Eastman, stated that Trump “more likely than not” broke the law in his weeks-long drive to stop Biden from taking office.

“Dr Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history,” Carter wrote in a civil case which resulted in an order for Eastman to release more than 100 emails he had withheld from the House panel.

Similarly, the January 6 select committee made a 61-page court filing on 2 March that implicated Trump in a “criminal conspiracy” to block Congress from certifying Biden’s win.

On another legal front that could implicate Trump and some top allies, the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, revealed in January that the DoJ was starting a criminal investigation into a sprawling scheme – reportedly spearheaded by Trump’s ex-lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Trump campaign aides – to replace legitimate electors for Biden with false ones pledged to Trump in seven states that Biden won.

Further, the Washington Post reported late last month that the DoJ had begun looking into the funding and organizing of the January 6 “Save America” rally in Washington involving some Trump allies. Trump repeated his false claims at the rally that the election was stolen.

“We won this election, and we won it by a landslide,” Trump falsely told the cheering crowd. “You don’t concede, when there’s theft involved,” he said, urging the large crowd to “fight like hell”, shortly before the Capitol attack by hundreds of his supporters that led to 140 injured police and several deaths.

NYT Edition

https://twitter.com/JamesFallows/status/1512841222699859969

Can you see the problem here? I knew that you could:

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1512842269572927494

Trump Jr plotted to overturn the election even before it was obvious that his father had lost. But it’s not as big a deal as Anthony Weiner’s laptop.

And, by the way, Hunter Biden’s lap top is going to end up being the “missing billing records” (that weren’t actually missing) of Biden’s Whiteater. Just wait. You want a convoluted smear campaign? It’s on the way if the Republicans take back the House. And the media is already crumbling under the pressure from the right to cover it. (Well, actually they’re eager to cover it because it features all kinds of dirty dirty and they just love that.)