Attorney General Bill Barr has spent the week using his office (again) for political ends, with just six weeks to go before Election Day, and openly bragging about it.
On Wednesday last week, during a trip to Chicago to talk about “Operation Legend,” Barr took a half-hour to speak to a Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass. Kass published audio of the interview Monday.
“We are going to find ourselves irrevocably committed to a socialist path” if Joe Biden is elected President, Barr said, right after observing that he shouldn’t get involved in politics.
Well, he did, and that wasn’t the only time.
The Democrats’ message, he said in the same interview, “appears to be ‘Biden or no peace’ — the only way this is going to stop is if you put Biden [in office].”
Separately in the interview, and in another purportedly-DOJ-related appearance in Phoenix, Barr falsely said that voting by mail was not a secret process — a message that fits squarely with President Donald Trump’s push to discourage the practice and sow suspicion about election results.
“There’s no more secret vote with mail-in vote,” Barr lied to Kass.
“There’s no more secret vote, there’s no secret vote,” Barr said the next day in Phoenix. “Your name is associated with a particular ballot. The government and the people involved can find out and know how you voted. And it opens up the door to coercion.”
The visit to Phoenix was purportedly planned to announce an update in Operation Crystal Shield, a methamphetamine-focused project. But as The Associated Press noted, “Barr spent the majority of his time answering questions unrelated to the drug busts.”
Among other suits, the Trump campaign has sued the state of Nevada over its plan to mail every active voter a ballot. But it was Barr on Thursday, not the campaign, trashing the idea.
“There’s no more secret vote, there’s no secret vote” with mail-in voting, he said, falsely. “Your name is associated with a particular ballot. The government and the people involved can find out and know how you voted. And it opens up the door to coercion.”
It’s not the first time for Barr. He told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer earlier this month about an outrageous case of widespread fraud that turned out to be bogus.
Red flags abound: The Justice Department is investigating the publication of John Bolton’s book. And Nora Dannehy, a prosecutor on John Durham’s probe into the Russia investigation, recently resigned after showing concern “in recent weeks by what she believed was pressure from Barr — who appointed Durham — to produce results before the election,” the The Hartford Courant reported.
Line prosecutors looking to Barr for reassurance haven’t found it: At an event Wednesday night — in between comparisons of COVID-19 orders to slavery — Barr compared career prosecutors to kindergarteners, and asserted only he was allowed to get political.
Barr wants to distance himself from the Big Lie but I’m not sure why he’s bothering. If he’s worried about his place in history he already blew that with his manipulation of the Mueller Report and instigation of the Durham investigation. His complicity in preparing the ground for The Big Lie will not be overlooked by history either even if he did testify before the January 6th Committee that Trump was crazy, idiotic etc. Like he didn’t know that before?
Trump knew. Trump knows. But he’s got the power to make his followers believe anything.
The hearing has ended and the upshot is that Trump signaled the Big Lie before the election, and on the night of the election he listened to a drunk Rudy Giuliani who told him to declare victory against the advice of everyone else in the White House. The picture is of a man who was told over and over and over again from everyone on his staff and in the administration that the election was not stolen. He carried on with the Giuliani freakshow instead. And, at the end, they pointed out that Trump got a quarter of a billion dollars in fundraising off the Big Lie in the weeks after the election.
Many of these Republicans, including Bill Barr who was featured heavily, didn’t really speak up at the time which hardly speaks well of them. On the other hand, it’s not as if they have anything to gain by speaking up now either. It’s not as if the Big Lie isn’t still believed by the vast majority of Republicans and Trump will attack them mercilessly for saying what they said. They took a big risk by telling the truth.
For those of you at work who are unable to follow the hearing today, I’m posting Marcy Wheeler’s live tweeting here:
Liz Cheney notes that Trump ignored the advice of his campaign and told his voters only to vote in person.
He rejected advice by campaign and followed advice from “apparently inebriated” Rudy to just claim victory.
“Far flung conspiracies with a deceased Venezuelan communist pulling the strings.”
Cheney also notes that hundreds of people have been prosecuted because they believed Trump’s lies, some are serving prison sentences.
One outcome of this hearing COULD BE that more of them get angry at what Trump did to them.
The film, which almost feels like a documentary, catches the aforementioned inebriated Rudy drinking water for his first appearance.
Stepien says that Justin Clark was involved in consultations about what to do about Trump.
He’s Trump’s CURRENT attorney, the one who interacted with Bannon and, presumably, Navarro.
Jason Miller busts Rudy as a drunk.
Looks like the 30 minute delay was to pull the Stepien clips where he answered the questions that Thompson would have asked him. Really quick and great staff work.
Stirewalt declares Joseph Robinette Biden the victor of the 2020 election, then launches into a discussion of how you account for the different ways Republicans and Democrats vote.
You can tell this is the guy who made on-air talent look smart. Why he got fired, of course.
Zoe Lofgren gets the honor of introducing this Billy Barr clip, as if they haven’t clashed in the past.
Billy talked about how for weeks people expected a late surge of Democratic mail-in ballots.
Not included was any question about whether that was why he attacked the mail-in vote for months and months.
Really effective. A clip of Trump saying, “we want all counting to stop” right after being advised that there would be a big surge of Dem votes.
Stepien describes him and Kevin McCarthy advising Trump to encourage mail-in voting.
He describes that you can’t dissuade Trump if he’s made up his mind.
Stirewalt: Our decision desk was the best in the business and I was proud to be a part of it. We had different set of data, we had more research, and we had a great team.
Let me tell you, our poll in AZ was just beautiful.
Again, why he got fired.
Stirewalt: We were able to make the call early, we were able to beat the competition. By the time we realized people were freaking out we were on to calling the next state.
Stirewalt describes that after the election there was no chance–“none”–that Trump could win.
I really hope Stirewalt is enjoying this opportunity to defend his work and his team. He seems to be.
Committee uses this still as he describes how the week wore on and numbers for Trump got worse and worse.
Stepien is stammering a bit in describing how bleak the chances were. 5-10% based on automatic recounts.
Stepien didn’t want to be personally associated with Rudy. “I didn’t mind being characterized as part of Team Normal…. I’ve built up a good reputation for being honest and professional. I didn’t think what was happening was honest or professional.”
Sidney makes her first appearance.
Sidney, explaining that you can’t claim a vote was flipped: You don’t have to see the gun to see that the body on the floor bleeding out was killed by a gun.
Lofgren quotes Sidney, in Dominion lawsuit, stating that no reasonable person would believe her statements were statements of fact.
Barr’s testimony is really helpful in explaining who was sourcing certain stories in November 2020.
Barr says he the @MikeBalsamo1 story was over lunch.
There were two cameras in the interview room with Barr.
Barr says he learned there were 630 precincts in Detroit.
And yes, Barr pointed out that Trump did better in Detroit in 2020 than 2016.
I wish he told him he lost in Kent County, where the GOP spends its time in MI.
Barr describes becoming demoralized bc he came to believe Trump was detached from reality. Trump had no interest in the actual facts.
Makes a joke abt the 2000 Mules movie, laughs.
Sort of like the two of them on Russia.
Alex Cannon describes Navarro asking him questions about Dominion in November. Cannon told him he didn’t believe the Dominion allegations.
Also cited @CISAKrebs. Navarro described Cannon as being an Agent of the Deep State.
Richard Donoghue basically describes whack-a-mole trying to beat back all the conspiracy theories that Trump grasped onto.
Lofgren enters CISA’s report showing no widespread fraud into the record, so I guess @C_C_Krebs gets the last laugh.
BJ Pak talks about the suitcase of ballot video, which Donoghue just described telling Trump was bullshit.
And then Lofgren plays vid of Donoghue explaining telling Trump several times that that specific allegation was false.
Al Schmidt: Not only wasn’t there evidence of 8,000 dead voters in PA, there wasn’t evidence of 8.
Schmidt talks about the threats to his family after Trump blamed him for election loss. Lofgren puts up redacted versions of some of them.
Getting Ben Ginsberg to explain how Trump’s campaign differed from the norm is really impressive.
Ginsberg describes half of Trump’s cases being dismissed at procedural stage. Half being dismissed after presentation of merits.
Lofgren: If litigation stopped on December 14, there would have been no path to continue and no basis to fundraise.
The evidence that Trump knew he had lost, and was still raising funds off it, could be an independent basis to charge Trump and his associates.
$250M raised.
The $$ went to Meadows, Trump Hotels.
Lofgren ends with, “Not only was there the big lie, there was the big rip-off.”
Cheney wishes Stepien the best with the new baby. He’s running campaign of her opponent, Harriet Hageman.
Cheney ends her close with Eric Herschmann stating “Orderly transition.”
And Thompson ends the hearing by quoting rioters repeating Trump’s false claims. “I don’t want to say what we’re doing is right, but if the election is being stolen, what is it going to take?”
If anyone thought that the Jan. 6 committee was going to confine itself to exposing the actions Donald Trump and his accomplices undertook to overturn the election of 2020, today’s public hearing will set them straight. The committee is going straight after the Big Lie itself.
While a scheduled appearance by Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien today was canceled “due to a family emergency,” his lawyer will still make a statement on the record. Meanwhile, former Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt, GOP election lawyer Ben Ginsberg, former U.S. Attorney for North Georgia B.J. Pak, who abruptly quit his position in Atlanta during Trump’s quest to overturn the election, and former Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt are all set to testify today. All of them will testify about the truth of the 2020 election — and Trump’s knowledge of that truth. Every one of them is a Republican.
It is a smart strategy to tell this story through Republicans. It should quell some of the mistrust that’s been sown by Trump and his allies over the fact that the committee only has two GOP members after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy refused to agree to the bipartisan independent commission and pulled all of his members from the committee when he was not allowed to put Trump’s personal henchmen on the panel. Republicans have since sought to smear committee Vice Chairman Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinsinger of Illinois, both Republicans, as traitors and sell-outs. So whatever credibility the two had to persuade rank and file Republicans is gone. Independents probably don’t know what to think.
Having something on the record from both an important Trump campaign insider about what Trump was told about the election results and a respected Republican election lawyer like Ginsberg testify about the integrity of the vote is harder to ignore. Stirewalt worked for Fox News, the flagship Trump network, and was fired for calling the election for Biden after Trump and his rabid fans had a fit over it. He can testify to the accuracy of the data they used to call the election. Trump forced Pak to resign when he found no evidence of massive voter fraud in Georgia, and Schmidt was the lone Republican on the Philadelphia election board and was hounded out of the job when he attested to the integrity of the vote count. Both of them can testify that there was no voter fraud in their jurisdictions.
I’m sure Trump will say they are all Republicans In Name Only and not to be believed, but for at least a few GOP voters it must be a little bit difficult to buy that all of these Republicans are liars.
Politico recently reported on a study done by researchers at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin who interviewed 56 people who believed the election was stolen to get an idea why they think so. Perhaps surprisingly, they found that quite a few were not stuck in “tightly sealed, right-wing echo chambers,” and a majority “did not seem to subscribe to multiple conspiracy theories.” Instead, some believed that Trump’s rally sizes indicated that he couldn’t have lost the election and that the “visuals” they saw on election night in which the vote count changed as more votes were tallied was suspicious. Further, Trump’s portrayal of himself as a victim made them believe that “actors on the left would go to extreme and illegal lengths to see that he was out of office.” The researchers suggest that the news media should change the way they report election results but I think that misses the point: Trump primed them to doubt the election results long before it was held.
Trump is the one who made the case that rally sizes indicate that he couldn’t possibly have lost the election. (This is silly, of course, because the campaign happened during the pandemic and Joe Biden made the prudent decision not to hold super spreader events and kill his own voters.) And a week before the election, Jonathan Swan of Axios reported that Trump was telling associates that he planned to declare victory on election night if it looked like he was “ahead” knowing that mail-in votes, which they expected would be heavily Democratic, would be counted later. Trump told Swan:
“I think it’s a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election. I think it’s a terrible thing when states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over.” He continued: “I think it’s terrible that we can’t know the results of an election the night of the election. … We’re going to go in the night of, as soon as that election’s over, we’re going in with our lawyers. We don’t want to have Pennsylvania, where you have a political governor, a very partisan guy. … We don’t want to be in a position where he’s allowed, every day, to watch ballots come in. See if we can only find 10,000 more ballots.”
(That last quote is rich considering that he’s the guy who called up the Georgia Secretary of State and asked him to “find” 11,780 votes.)
Trump and his henchmen were preparing to challenge the validity of the election and suggest that vote that were counted later we illegitimate from the very beginning. Those Republican voters may not know why they were suspicious, but if they had been listening to Trump for months leading up to the election it’s not hard to figure it out.
In a bit of hopeful news, the researchers did find that some of these people might be open to new information. One said “a lot of people were expressing uncertainty as they were sharing their thoughts with me, and they were saying that this felt so complicated to them.” Respondents also didn’t feel as if they had anyone they could trust to help them sort out the questions they still had but were interested in learning more, researchers noted. If a few of them take the initiative to tune in to the hearing today, they aren’t going to see a typical partisan food fight but rather a sober inquiry featuring cooperating Republican witnesses laying out the facts. And what they will learn is that Donald Trump’s story about the stolen election is a Big Lie and everything else that happened was a fraud to illegitimately hold on to power.
The committee starting with Trump’s lies about the stolen election is necessary to understand everything that came next. He was laying the groundwork long before even one vote was cast. Trump knew he would never concede no matter what. In fact, he told us so all the way back in 2016. Why would we have ever thought otherwise?
March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C. did not go entirely as planned. Parkland school shooting parent Fred Guttenberg reports:
(1,) I need to address and incident that happened at yesterday's March in DC. During the moment of silence, somebody started yelling and charged the stage. As he was restrained by security, a speaker fell over and created a loud pop, which sounded like a gun firing. The crowd
(3,5) been injured. As Erica was speaking, I was in the crowd and could see how traumatized people were. The kids there, many of whom have experienced gun violence, were having PTSD. As I observed the trauma in the crowd, I asked the March organizers to allow me on stage
I was there and GREATLY appreciate what you did. I was far out and first heard yelling then people dropping to the ground at the front, then screaming and running away. It was frightening and I saw many young kids and even grown adults shaking and crying. It helped to hear you pic.twitter.com/nilUbX8haP
— 🇺🇦Vic the Vet👩🏻⚕️🐶🐱🐭 (@GoodTroubleVic) June 12, 2022
Instead of limiting access to guns or reducing the supply, we’re relying on Three Stooges logic: more guns and security drills and equipment for stopping murderers wielding them.
Or we could just ban assault weapons and keep some people from acquiring guns altogether…pic.twitter.com/C0oHRnsf4j
“Or we could just ban assault weapons and keep some people from acquiring guns altogether,” says twitter phenomenon Rex Chapman.
In a sane country, yes. What’s happened to the one we had?
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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com
Make the Jan. 6 hearings memorable for the House committee: Light up their phones
“I am just an old country lawyer.” — Sen. Sam Ervin Jr. (D-N.C.) * “A cancer growing on the presidency.” — former White House counsel John Dean III “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” — Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.)
The hottest TV show in the summer of 1973 was the U.S. Senate’s version of the popular quiz show “Truth or Consequences.”
In place of Bob Barker, the host was Senate Watergate Committee Chairman Samuel Ervin Jr. (D-N.C.), who grilled witnesses in his folksy style, quipping, “I am just an old country lawyer, and I don’t know the finer ways to do it. I just have to do it my way.”
Instead of trivia, the participants were asked about their knowledge of the 1972 break-in and phone-bugging at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate office building in D.C.
The televised hearings started out slowly and built an audience. Beatle John Lennon and wife Yoko Ono were among the spectators.
“The Senate Watergate investigation is proving a television-viewing phenomenon,” columnist Jack Anderson wrote. A.C. Nielsen reported that an estimated three out of four of the nation’s homes watched at least part of the hearings. The drama-filled inquiry outdrew popular daytime soap operas. “I watched the Watergate hearings for three days before I realized it wasn’t the ‘Secret Storm,’ ” wrote humor columnist Erma Bombeck.
As the TV references suggest, most of the hearings were during the day (emphasis mine)”
Nixon, at an Aug. 22 news conference, downplayed the hearings as “water under the bridge.” Republican Senate leader Robert J. Dole of Kansas called for closing down the televised inquiry, contending that “the people want the hearings off the screen.” An Ervin spokesman countered that 90 percent of the 14,000 letters the panel had received since Nixon’s news conference favored continuing the inquiry.
Need I remind you of the pressure the panel will get from hostile RW media and Trumpers? They need backup. Supportive feedback matters:
Now, the last Democratic congressman who represented me was a Blue Dog. I know. But still a Democrat (80 percent of the time). Ahead of one important vote, I called his local office, told them what I thought, and asked the office manager how her calls were running.
Right wingers were lighting up the phones. Ten to one conservative-to-liberal, she said with an exasperated sigh, asking, “Where are the Democrats?!”
If your district representative sits on the committee, contact her/him. Or call here:
The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol
Longworth House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Phone: (202) 225-7800
Or support the committee via FB message: https://www.facebook.com/January6thCmte
Today’s lineup:
Responding: Yes, this is a loaded line-up. It may be far more newsworthy than Thursday was.
Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com
This is from a New Yorker article a couple of years ago discussing a study that looked at the idea that women supposedly are harmed by abortions and have terrible regrets.
Over three years, a team of researchers, led by a demographer named Diana Greene Foster, at the University of California, San Francisco, recruited 1,132 women from the waiting rooms of thirty abortion clinics in twenty-one states. Some of the women would go on to have abortions, but others would be turned away, because they had missed the fetal gestational limit set by the clinic. Foster and her colleagues decided to compare the women in the two groups—those who received the abortion they sought and those who were compelled to carry their unwanted pregnancy to term—on a variety of measures over time, interviewing them twice a year for up to five years.
The study is important, in part, because of its ingenious design. It included only women whose pregnancies were unwanted enough that they were actively seeking an abortion, which meant the researchers were not making the mistake that some previous studies of unplanned conceptions had—“lumping the happy surprises in with the total disasters,” as Foster puts it. In terms of age, race, income level, and health status, the two groups of women closely resembled each other, as well as abortion patients nationwide. (Foster refers to the study’s participants as women because, to her knowledge, there were no trans men or non-binary people among them.) Seventy per cent of the women who were denied abortions at the first clinic where they sought them carried the unwanted pregnancies to term. Others miscarried or were able to obtain late abortions elsewhere, and Foster and her colleagues followed the trajectories of those in the latter group as well.
While you might guess that those who were turned away had messier lives—after all, they were getting to the clinic later than the seemingly more proactive women who made the deadline—that did not turn out to be the case. Some of the women who got their abortions (half of the total participants) did so just under the wire; among the women in the study who were denied abortions (a quarter of the total), some had missed the limit by a matter of only a few days. (The remaining quarter terminated their pregnancies in the first trimester, which is when ninety per cent of abortions in the United States occur.) The women who were denied abortions were on average more likely to live below the poverty line than the women who managed to get them. (One of the main reasons that people seek abortions later in pregnancy is the need to raise money to pay for the procedure and for travel expenses.) But, in general, Foster writes, the two groups “were remarkably similar at the first interview. Their lives diverged thereafter in ways that were directly attributable to whether they received an abortion.”
Over the past several years, findings from the Turnaway Study have come out in scholarly journals and, on a few occasions, gotten splashy media coverage. Now Foster has published a patiently expository precis of all the findings in a new book, “The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion.” The over-all impression it leaves is that abortion, far from harming most women, helps them in measurable ways. Moreover, when people assess what will happen in their lives if they have to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, they are quite often proven right. That might seem like an obvious point, but much of contemporary anti-abortion legislation is predicated on the idea that competent adults can’t really know what’s at stake in deciding whether to bear a child or not. Instead, they must be subjected to waiting periods to think it over (as though they can’t be trusted to have done so already), presented with (often misleading) information about the supposed medical risks and emotional fallout of the procedure, and obliged to look at ultrasounds of the embryo or fetus. And such scans are often framed, with breathtaking disingenuousness, as a right extended to people—what the legal scholar Carol Sanger calls “the right to be persuaded against exercising the right you came in with.”
Maybe the first and most fundamental question for a study like this to consider is how women feel afterward about their decisions to have an abortion. In the Turnaway Study, over ninety-five per cent of the women who received an abortion and did an interview five years out said that it had been the right choice for them. It’s possible that the women who remained in the study that long were disproportionately inclined to see things that way—maybe if you were feeling shame or remorse about an abortion you’d be less up for talking about it every six months in a phone interview with a researcher. (Foster suggests that people experiencing regrets might actually be more inclined to participate, but, to me, the first scenario makes more psychological sense.) Still, ninety-five per cent is a striking figure. And it’s especially salient, again, in light of anti-choice arguments, which often stress the notion that many of the quarter to third of all American women who have an abortion will be wracked with guilt about their decision. (That’s an awful lot of abject contrition.) You can pick at the study for its retention rate—and some critics, particularly on the anti-abortion side, have. Nine hundred and fifty-six of the original thousand-plus women who were recruited did the first interview. Fifty-eight per cent of them did the final interview. But, as Foster pointed out in an e-mail to me, on average, the women in the study completed an impressive 8.4 of the eleven interviews, and some of the data in the study—death records and credit reports—cover all 1,132 women who were originally enrolled.
To the former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, among others, it seemed “unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.” In a 2007 abortion-case ruling, he wrote that “severe depression and loss of esteem can follow.” It can, but the epidemiologists, psychologists, statisticians, and other researchers who evaluated the Turnaway Study found it was not likely. “Some events do cause lifetime damage”—childhood abuse is one of them—“but abortion is not common among these,” Foster writes. In the short term, the women who were denied abortions had worse mental health—higher anxiety and lower self-esteem. In the longer run, the researchers found “no long-term differences between women who receive and women who are denied an abortion in depression, anxiety, PTSD, self-esteem, life satisfaction, drug abuse, or alcohol abuse.” Abortion didn’t weigh heavily in determining mental health one way or the other. Foster and her co-authors note, in an earlier article, that “relief remained the most commonly felt emotion” among women who got the abortions they sought. That relief persisted, but its intensity dissipated over time.
Other positive impacts were more lasting. Women in the study who received the abortion they sought were more likely to be in a relationship they described as “very good.” (After two years, the figure was forty-seven per cent, vs. twenty-eight per cent for the women turned away.) If they had been involved with a physically abusive man at the time of the unwanted pregnancy, they were less likely to still be experiencing violence, for the simple reason that they were less likely to be in contact with him. (Several of the participants interviewed for the book talk about not wanting to be tethered to a terrible partner by having a child together.) Women who got the abortion were more likely to become pregnant intentionally in the next five years than women who did not. They were less likely to be on public assistance and to report that they did not have enough money to pay for food, housing, and transportation. When they had children at home already, those children were less likely to be living in poverty. Based on self-reports, their physical health was somewhat better. Two of the women in the study who were denied abortions died from childbirth-related complications; none of the women who received abortions died as a result. That is in keeping with other data attesting to the general safety of abortion. One of Foster’s colleagues, Ushma Upadhyay, analyzed complications after abortions in California’s state Medicaid program, for example, and found that they occurred in two per cent of the cases—a lower percentage than for wisdom-tooth extraction (seven per cent) and certainly for childbirth (twenty-nine per cent). Indeed, maternal mortality has been rising in the U.S.—it’s now more than twice as high as it was in 1987, and has risen even more steeply for Black women, due, in part, to racial disparities in prenatal care and the quality of hospitals where women deliver.
Yet, as Foster points out, many of the new state laws restricting abortion suggest that it is a uniquely dangerous procedure, one for which layers of regulation must be concocted, allegedly to protect women. The Louisiana law that the Supreme Court struck down last Monday imposed just such a rule—namely, a requirement that doctors performing abortions hold admitting privileges at a hospital no more than thirty miles away. As Justice Stephen Breyer’s majority opinion noted, “The evidence shows, among other things, that the fact that hospital admissions for abortion are vanishingly rare means that, unless they also maintain active OB/GYN practices, abortion providers in Louisiana are unlikely to have any recent in-hospital experience.” Since hospitals often require such experience in order to issue admitting privileges, abortion providers would be caught in a Catch-22, unable to obtain the privileges because, on actual medical grounds, they didn’t need them. The result of such a law, had it gone into effect, would have been exactly what was intended: a drastic reduction in the number of doctors legally offering abortions in the state.
The study also found, unsurprisingly that the women who were turned away loved their child. Thank goodness. But, significantly, those who had abortions didn’t have any regrets either.
None of that changes the fundamental principle of human autonomy: people have to be able to make their own decisions in matters that profoundly and intimately affect their own bodies and the course of their lives. Regret and ambivalence, the ways that one decision necessarily precludes others, are inextricable facts of life, and they are also fluid and personal. Guessing the extent to which individuals may feel such emotions, hypothetically, in the future, is not a basis for legislative bans and restrictions.
This story about women suffering under the new abortion ban in Poland is just horrifying:
It was shortly before 11 p.m. when Izabela Sajbor realized the doctors were prepared to let her die.
Her doctor had already told her that her fetus had severe abnormalities and would almost certainly die in the womb. If it made it to term, life expectancy was a year, at most. At 22 weeks pregnant, Ms. Sajbor had been admitted to a hospital after her water broke prematurely.
She knew that there was a short window to induce birth or surgically remove the fetus to avert infection and potentially fatal sepsis. But even as she developed a fever, vomited and convulsed on the floor, it seemed to be the baby’s heartbeat that the doctors were most concerned about.
“My life is in danger,” she wrote in a string of distressed text messages to her mother and husband that was shared with The New York Times by her family’s lawyer.
“They cannot help as long as the fetus is alive thanks to the anti-abortion law,” she wrote only hours before she died. “A woman is like an incubator.”
Abortion has seized the United States’ attention anew with the prospect that, as early as this month, the Supreme Court could overturn Roe v. Wade, the decision that has made the procedure terminating a pregnancy legal for nearly 50 years. If Roe is overturned, half of American women stand to lose legal access to abortion.
Poland offers a glimpse of a country where abortion is already practically out of reach even in the gravest circumstances. It has long been a showcase of the volatility and vicissitudes of the abortion battles — and how the lives of women and their doctors are tossed about on shifting social and political tides.
This is what the anti-abortion zealots are going for. Remember, to them, women are considered heroes if they give up their lives for the fetus.
I wrote this seven years ago:
Here’s just one example of how they are framing this:
When Elizabeth Joice found out she was pregnant, she was overcome with joy because doctors told her she would never be able to have children. But doctors then told her that she would be forced to make a decision to take the live of her unborn baby to begin cancer treatment or put her own life in danger by forgoing it.
Joice pondered whether she should join a club of other courageous women who decided to protect their unborn babies. Ultimately, saving her baby was an easy decision.
“Having a kid was one of the most important things in the world to her,” her husband Max told The Post at the time. “She said, ‘If we terminate the pregnancy and it turns out I can’t have a baby [later], I’ll be devastated. She knew this might be her only chance.”
Ultimately, Liz was only able to spend seven weeks with her daughter before she passed away.
“A courageous woman who decided to protect her unborn baby” — by choosing to die. That was her choice and her right, of course. But it’s a choice these people don’t want anyone else to have the right to make. Indeed, they are fetishizing the deaths of women like this as medieval martyrs.
The committee announced that Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, is among the witnesses scheduled to testify at a hearing Monday that focuses on Trump’s effort to spread his lies about a stolen election. Stepien was subpoenaed for his public testimony.
As the hearings unfold, Rep. Adam Schiff said he would like the department to “investigate any credible allegation of criminal activity on the part of Donald Trump.” Schiff, D-Calif., who also leads the House Intelligence Committee, said that ”there are certain actions, parts of these different lines of effort to overturn the election that I don’t see evidence the Justice Department is investigating.”
He would have a better idea if there is evidence the DOJ is investigating than we do. So that’s disturbing. But sadly, not surprising. The DOJ was right on top of Hillary Clinton’s emails and the head of the FBI even destroyed her campaign with his public pronouncements about the investigation. But that was Clinton. This is Trump and all he’s accused of is trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power and stage a coup. It’s probably not worth them taking the chance of right wing disapprobation.
I hope no one is getting their hopes up about Trump ever being held accountable for anything. They are placing the responsibility on the voters, many of whom are being brainwashed daily by right wing propaganda and foreign interference, not to mention manipulation of the actual voting systems. I don’t think the leaders of the Department of Justice think any of this falls within their purview.
It’s not about NATO, it’s about Russian imperial expansion
I don’t know why it’s so hard for people to believe what he’s saying, but he keeps saying it:
President Vladimir Putin has compared himself to Peter the Great, saying he shares the 18th-century czar’s goal of returning “Russian lands” to a greater empire.
Speaking after visiting an exhibition to celebrate the 350th anniversary of Peter’s birth on Thursday, Putin drew a parallel to his invasion of Ukraine.
“Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them,” he said, according to a translation from Reuters. “He did not take anything from them, he returned [them].”
Referring to the Ukraine invasion he said: “Apparently, it also fell to us to return [what is Russia’s] and strengthen [the country]. And if we proceed from the fact that these basic values form the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in solving the tasks that we face.”
Peter the First, or Peter the Great, is credited with expanding Russia into an empire and a major European power. He is also remembered for ending the supremacy of the Swedish navy in the Baltic region and expanding Russia’s borders with the seizure of Swedish land and several Baltic countries. The city named in his honor, St Petersburg, was founded on captured Swedish land. It is also Putin’s hometown.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has raised fears that Putin is intent not only on claiming its neighbor and former Soviet republic, but potentially has his eye on Poland, Finland and the Baltics, among others.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said in a tweet that Putin’s comments showed his imperialistic ambitions and that the invasion was an attempted “bloody seizure.”
Amid mountingevidence of a large number of deaths following the targeting of civilian sites since the Ukraine invasion began on Feb. 24, Russia has sought to justify its “special military operation” as a way of protecting Russian-speaking Ukrainians and to root out “Nazi” elements in Ukraine’s armed forces.
“Putin has been tearing off a lot of masks — what he’s revealing rather consistently is Russia’s new imperial ambitions,” said Rory Finnin, associate professor of Ukraine studies at Cambridge University.
“Russia’s war against Ukraine is now clearly a war of imperial conquest,” he added.
The Kremlin’s expansion plan involves either seizing territory and replacing populations, as in the Ukrainian cities of Kherson and Mariupol, or by toppling democratic regimes to create “vassal states,” Finnin said.
Putin is obsessed with the idea of returning historic borders. Perhaps this map could help deter him? pic.twitter.com/dDCpiOEnL1
— Business Ukraine mag (@Biz_Ukraine_Mag) June 11, 2022
There hasn’t been as much talk about this as some of the other stuff from last Thursday’s hearings but I think it’s really important. His cabinet talked about removing him from office. Why? Because he was acting like a lunatic.
When Representative Liz Cheney asserted at the House Jan. 6 hearing on Thursday that Trump administration cabinet members weighed invoking the constitutional process to remove President Donald J. Trump from office after the attack on the Capitol by his supporters, she did not immediately provide details or evidence.
But as the federal government convulsed in the hours and days after the deadly riot, a range of cabinet officials weighed their options, and consulted one another about how to steady the administration and ensure a peaceful transition to a new presidency.
Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state at the time, and Steven Mnuchin, then the Treasury secretary, discussed the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would have required the vice president and the majority of the cabinet to agree that the president could no longer fulfill his duties to begin a complex process of removal from office.
Their discussion was reported by Jonathan Karl of ABC News in his book “Betrayal,” and described to The New York Times by a person briefed on the discussion. Mr. Pompeo has denied the exchange took place, and Mr. Mnuchin has declined to comment.
Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trump’s education secretary, told USA Today this week that she raised with Vice President Mike Pence whether the cabinet should consider the 25th Amendment. But Mr. Pence, she said, “made it very clear that he was not going to go in that direction.”
She decided to resign. So did Matt Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser.
Eugene Scalia, then the labor secretary, discussed with colleagues right after the attack the need to steady the administration, according to three people familiar with the conversations.
Mr. Scalia called an aide to Mr. Pence, they said, to say that he was uncomfortable with Mr. Trump functioning without something of a check on him in that moment, and that there needed to be more involvement from the cabinet. Mr. Pence’s team did not want to make such a move.
Mr. Scalia also had a conversation with Mr. Pompeo, which Mr. Pompeo shared with multiple people, in which Mr. Scalia suggested that someone should talk to Mr. Trump about the need do something to restore confidence in the government and a peaceful transition of power. In Mr. Pompeo’s rendering of that conversation, disputed by others, Mr. Scalia also suggested that someone should talk to Mr. Trump about resigning.
Mr. Pompeo replied sarcastically by asking how Mr. Scalia imagined that conversation with Mr. Trump would go.
Mr. Scalia and Mr. Pompeo, through an aide, declined to comment.
The reference by Ms. Cheney, a Wyoming Republican and the vice chairwoman of the House Jan. 6 committee, to the 25th Amendment being under consideration by cabinet members was one of the most striking assertions in the panel’s two-hour hearing. In the first of six planned public hearings, the committee presented a detailed case against Mr. Trump and the rioters who stormed the Capitol and delayed the congressional certification of the Electoral College results.
The panel has signaled that it plans to use the discussions about the 25th Amendment to show not only the chaos that Mr. Trump set off by helping stoke the riot but how little confidence those around him had in his ability to be president.
“You will hear about members of the Trump cabinet discussing the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment, and replacing the president of the United States,” Ms. Cheney said as she read her opening statement at the hearing. “Multiple members of President Trump’s own cabinet resigned immediately after Jan. 6.”
I wonder how someone like Mike Pompeo will react to this? He’s running and in a normal world there would be an advantage to him for being sane in the face of Trump’s behavior. But like all the rest he is a coward and won’t even think about going out on a limb an risk alienating any members of Trump’s rabid cult. So, I assume he will say it’s all a lie. Still, this is pretty well documented and I assume the committee has testimony under oath. Not that he will care, of course.
