Month: July 2022

Bannon’s last strategy

Steve Bannon goes to trial tomorrow. And his position is indefensible. Literally:

The Washington Post reported Saturday that Bannon’s attorney, David Schoen, asked Nichols: “What’s the point of going to trial if there are no defenses?” The Republican-appointed judge simply replied, “Agreed.”

“Obviously everyone’s entitled to a trial, but usually if you go to trial there’s some kind of legal or factual dispute that needs to be resolved,” Randall Eliason, a George Washington University law professor and former federal prosecutor, assessed in comments to the Post.

“The judge’s point is, there aren’t really any here…In those instances, going to trial becomes what prosecutors sometimes call a long guilty plea,” Eliason explained, who speculated that Bannon may want to present himself as a “martyr” for the so-called “Make America Great Again” movement of Trump supporters.

“Maybe it’s just a show to him, one where he can play the MAGA martyr and use it to raise his profile,” the legal expert said. “That’s not a legal reason to go to trial but it may be enough of a reason for him.”

Schoen responded to Eliason’s assessment in a Sunday email to Newsweek.

“Unfortunately, many of the ‘experts’ quoted in the media, while undoubtedly smart and capable folks, do not follow all of the details in the case and do not take the time to contact the lawyers directly involved before commenting. Had this professor done either, he would have learned that as of this week, the judge decided that there is one factual area he is inclined to allow the defense to pursue at trial by way of a defense,” Bannon’s attorney wrote.

“However, if the Professor’s underlying comment is that the judge has eliminated just about all of the defenses in this case, he is correct and that is what led to my comment to the judge that has been quoted, asking what the point is of having a trial with no defenses and Mr. Bannon unable to tell the jury what actually happened,” he added.

The last time someone was convicted for contempt of Congress was nearly five decades ago in 1974, Forbes reported Saturday. That was when G. Gordon Liddy was found guilty in connection to the Watergate scandal that eventually led to the resignation of former President Richard Nixon.

A contempt of Congress case hasn’t even gone to trial at all in nearly 40 years. The last time was under former President Ronald Reagan in 1983, according to Forbes. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official Rita Lavelle was found not guilty in that case. She was, however, later convicted on a separate federal perjury charge related to misappropriation of EPA funds.

If convicted, Bannon could face between 30 days and one year in prison.

Bannon has argued that he could not comply with the subpoena due to executive privilege. But legal experts have contended executive privilege does not apply because it’s not clear Trump ever invoked privilege, and Bannon was also a private citizen, not serving in the administration, at the time of the 2020 election and on January 6, 2021. He officially served in the White House from January to August in 2017.

As I wrote months ago: “Bannon would like nothing more than to have a big show trial and be carted off to jail where he can write his Great Replacement manifesto.” (Too bad “Mein Kampf” is already taken … it’s a helluva title.)

I thought this brief observation by Josh Marshall was worth sharing:

I have deeply ambivalent feelings about these debates about the failures of “the Democratic party.” Most of my commentary over a couple decades has been about trying to push Democrats to take more aggressive and forward-looking strategies for building political power, political.. coalitions, etc. I’m doing that right now. But a huge amount of this debate is advanced by people who see the success of rightwing candidates as prima facie evidence of the failure of Democrats. From one perspective, that’s true. In a binary political system, for one side to win the other has to lose. But at a deeper level a lot of these people don’t want to accept or grapple with the fact that a lot of Americans really want rightist authoritarian government.

It’s not just that the center-left opposition didn’t give them the right and their disappointment in Democrats led them to the right. A lot of them really want rightist authoritarian government.

How you combat that is quite complicated, especially in a country in which those with a consistent/coherent left/liberal politics are usually outnumbered by those with authoritarian/conservative politics. They’re not the majority. But that imbalance makes the center-left political grouping, the Democrats structurally more reliant on more middle of the road/less ideologically consistent voters.

That makes their coalition more unwieldy, less ideologically coherent and consistent. These are all points that anyone deeply immersed in politics knows and ineffective leaders need to stand aside (or in practice be pushed aside) by more effective ones.

Too many people, looking at a bleak political reality want to believe that it was obvious how to avoid it, or it could easily have been avoided because of a thing out there called “the Democrats.” The reality is the Democratic party is a mix of issue organizations outsider demographic/cultural/ethnic groups, labor and various political entrepreneurs most of whom run their own mini-political machines.

At the end of the day the Democratic party is just a conglomeration of the people in the country who have broadly center-left politics. It’s us. And it’s up to our collective ability to organize, strategize, vote, advocate to build a better country.

Originally tweeted by Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) on July 17, 2022.

Word…

I said earlier that many Republicans delude themselves that most of the country agrees with them. Many Democrats do the same thing. It’s not just a failure of “messaging.” The other side has a completely different worldview that no amount of messaging can smooth over and blaming it all on the party’s leadership as a failure of proper strategy, as if people just need to hear the magic words, is missing the point. Of course Democrats must be held accountable and fresh blood with new ideas must be allowed to flourish. But kidding yourself about the structural impediments and the rigid nature of the opposition won’t get you very far.

They are addicted to lying

Uh huh. Here’s what she really believes and it’s clear as day:

She isn’t just some rando on twitter. She is a writer for national review and a member of the Ethics and Public Policy Center “D.C.’s premier institute working to apply the riches of the Judeo-Christian tradition to contemporary questions of law, culture, and politics.”

Here’s reality:

A woman with a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy sought emergency care at the University of Michigan Hospital after a doctor in her home state worried that the presence of a fetal heartbeat meant treatingher might run afoul of new restrictions on abortion.

At one Kansas City, Mo., hospital,administrators temporarily required “pharmacist approval” before dispensing medications used to stop postpartum hemorrhages, because they can also be also used for abortions.

And in Wisconsin, a woman bled formore than 10 days from an incomplete miscarriage after emergency room staffwould not remove the fetal tissueamid a confusing legal landscape that has roiled obstetric care.

In the three weeks of turmoil since the Supreme Court overturnedthe constitutional right to abortion, many physicians and patients have been navigating a new reality in which the standard of care for incomplete miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies and other common complications is being scrutinized, delayed — even denied — jeopardizing maternal health, according to the accounts of doctors in multiple states where new laws have gone into effect.

While state abortion bans typically carve out exceptions when a woman’s life is endangered, the laws can be murky, prompting some obstetricians to consult lawyers and hospital ethics committees on decisions around routine care.

“People are running scared,” said Mae Winchester, a specialist in maternal-fetal medicine in Ohio who, days after the state’s new restrictions went into effect, sought legal advice before she performed an abortion on a pregnant woman with a uterine infection. “There’s a lot of unknowns still left out there.”

The need to intervene in a pregnancy with the same medication or surgical procedure used in elective abortions is not unusual.

As many as 30 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, the spontaneous demise of a fetus, commonly because of chromosomal abnormalities. The methods of managing a miscarriage are the same as for abortion, using a combination of drugs — mifepristone and misoprostol — or a brief surgery known as dilation and curettage, or D&C, to dilate the cervix and scrape tissue from the uterus. Left untreated, some miscarriages resolve naturally; others lead to complications such as infection or profuse bleeding.

“It’s important for people to realize early pregnancy failure is common,” said Rashmi Kudesia, a fertility specialist in Houston.

Doctors in Texas— where since last September abortion has been illegal after the detection of fetal cardiac activity, around six weeks of pregnancy —report that pharmacists have begun questioning patients about miscarriage medications, suspecting they may be used instead for abortions.

“It is traumatizing to stand in a pharmacy and have to tell them publicly that you are having a miscarriage, that there is not a heartbeat,” Kudesia said.

Is there any question that these people have made the choice to save embryos and fetuses and let the birthing vessels suffer and die? I don’t think so. That is what they are saying.

Nothing. Obviously.

Nobody cheated. They are secure:

The expanded use of drop boxes for mailed ballots during the 2020 election did not lead to any widespread problems, according to an Associated Press survey of state election officials across the U.S. that revealed no cases of fraud, vandalism or theft that could have affected the results.

The findings from both Republican- and Democratic-controlled states run contrary to claims made by former President Donald Trump and his allies who have intensely criticized their use and falsely claimed they were a target for fraud.

Drop boxes are considered by many election officials to be safe and secure, and have been used to varying degrees by states across the political spectrum. Yet conspiracy theories and efforts by Republicans to eliminate or restrict them since the 2020 election persist. This month, the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that drop boxes are not allowed under state law and can no longer be widely used.

Drop boxes also are a focal point of the film “2,000 Mules,” which used a flawed analysis of cellphone location data and ballot drop box surveillance footage to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 presidential election.

In response to the legislation and conspiracy theories surrounding drop boxes, the AP sent a survey in May to the top elections office in each state seeking information about whether the boxes were tied to fraudulent votes or stolen ballots, or whether the boxes and the ballots they contained were damaged.

All but five states responded to the questions.

None of the election offices in states that allowed the use of drop boxes in 2020 reported any instances in which the boxes were connected to voter fraud or stolen ballots. Likewise, none reported incidents in which the boxes or ballots were damaged to the extent that election results would have been affected.

A previous AP investigation found far too few cases of potential voter fraud in the six battleground states where Trump disputed his loss to President Joe Biden to affect the outcome.

A number of states — including Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas — said they do not allow the use of drop boxes. Some had not allowed them before the 2020 election, when the coronavirus pandemic prompted wider use of mailed ballots. In states where they are used, secretaries of state or election commissioners may not be aware of every incident involving a drop box if it was not reported to their office by a county or other local jurisdiction.

Drop boxes have been a mainstay in states with extensive mail voting for years and had not raised any alarms. They were used widely in 2020 as election officials sought to provide alternative ways to cast ballots with the COVID-19 outbreak creating concerns about in-person voting. The boxes also gave voters a direct method for submitting their ballots, rather than sending them through the U.S. Postal Service and worrying about delivery delays.

Starting months before the 2020 presidential election, Trump and his allies have made a series of unfounded claims suggesting that drop boxes open the door to voter fraud. Republican state lawmakers, as part of their push to add new voting restrictions, have in turn placed rules around when and where the boxes could be accessed.

Arizona Assistant Secretary of State Allie Bones said drop boxes are “safe and secure” and might even be considered more secure than Postal Service mailboxes. She said bipartisan teams in the state collect ballots from the drop boxes and take them directly to secure election facilities, following so-called chain-of-custody protocols.

“Not to say that there’s anything wrong with USPS, and I think they do a great job as well, but the hysteria around ballot drop boxes I think is just a made-up thing to create doubt and fear,” Bones said.

Arizona has had robust mail-in voting for years that includes the use of drop boxes, and in the AP survey, the state reported no damage, stolen ballots or fraud associated with them in 2020. Nevertheless, Trump-aligned lawmakers in the state pushed for legislation that would ban drop boxes, but were stymied by Democrats and several Republicans who disagreed with the strategy.

Utah is a state controlled by Republicans that also has widespread use of mailed ballots and no limits on the number of drop boxes a county can deploy. Jackson Murphy, spokesman for Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who is the state’s top election official, said in the AP survey that Henderson encourages counties to make secure drop boxes accessible to voters.

Of the states responding to the survey, 15 indicated that drop boxes were in use before 2020 and 22 have no limits on how many can be used in this fall’s election. At least five states take the extra step of setting a minimum number of drop boxes required.

Republican-led Florida and North Dakota and Democratic-led New York did not respond. Montana and Virginia did, but did not answer the survey questions related to the 2020 election.

Last year, five states added new restrictions to ballot drop boxes, according to research by the Voting Rights Lab. That included Georgia, where President Joe Biden won a narrow victory and where drop boxes were allowed under an emergency rule prompted by the pandemic.

Georgia Republicans say their changes have resulted in drop boxes being a permanent option for voters, requiring all counties to have at least one. But the legislation, which includes a formula of one box per 100,000 registered voters, means fewer will be available in the state’s most populous communities compared with 2020.

Iowa lawmakers last year approved legislation to limit drop boxes to one per county. Previously, state law did not say how many drop boxes counties could use. This year, Louisiana, Missouri and South Carolina have passed laws effectively prohibiting drop boxes, according to the Voting Rights Lab, which researches state election law changes.

Along with incidents recorded in news reports, the AP survey found a handful of cases in 2020 in which drop boxes were damaged.

Officials in Washington state said there were instances when drop boxes were hit by vehicles, but that no ballot tampering had been reported. Massachusetts election officials said one box was damaged by arson in October 2020 but that most of the ballots inside were still legible enough for voters to be identified, notified and sent replacements.

A drop box also was set on fire in Los Angeles County in 2020, but a local election official said the vast majority of the ballots that were damaged were able to be recovered and voters provided new ballots. Another drop box in California was temporarily closed because of a wildfire.

“The irony is they were put in place to respond to a problem with the post office and make sure people had a secure way of returning their ballots,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat. “And so there’s no actual legitimate concern except for, again, potential external threats or people who have been radicalized through misinformation to try to tamper with drop boxes to make a point.”

North Carolina provides an example of how deep-seated the misinformation has become. The state does not allow drop boxes and did not use them during the 2020 election.

“And despite that fact, people are still claiming drop box fraud must have occurred in North Carolina,” said Patrick Gannon, public information director for the State Board of Elections. “You can’t make this up. Oh wait. Yes, you can.”

In Wisconsin, Republicans had supported the use of drop boxes before Trump seized on mailed ballots as part of his unsubstantiated claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling that found ballot drop boxes were not allowed under state law also said no one other than the voter can return their ballot in person to a local clerk’s office or alternate site.

Some voters said they were frustrated by the ruling.

Kelly O’Keefe Boettcher of Milwaukee said she cast her ballot in a drop box in 2020 because of safety concerns during the pandemic and is upset that they’ll no longer be an option for her or for voters who are less able to get to the polls.

“Drop boxes are accessible; they are egalitarian,” she said. “To watch them go, I feel, people can say it’s not voter suppression. But it is.”

Wisconsin state Rep. Tim Ramthun, a Republican candidate for governor, reintroduced a resolution this past week for the GOP-controlled Legislature to decertify Biden’s victory there, adding the state Supreme Court ruling on drop boxes as one reason to do so. Trump also renewed his calls for decertification in Wisconsin, citing the ruling.

According to the AP survey, the Wisconsin Elections Commission said it is not aware of any cases in 2020 in which drop boxes were damaged, had submitted ballots stolen or destroyed, or were used for fraudulent ballots.

“Isn’t a mailbox a secure place to put a letter?” asked Dave Wanninger, who with his wife used a ballot drop box in a Milwaukee public library in 2020. “Why would a drop box be any different?”

This is just painfully stupid. It’s not even that it will particularly help Republicans, although it might on the margins. The truth is that people in both parties use drop boxes. This is just another way of calling the voting system into question so they can whine like a bunch of 3 year olds whenever they lose an election, soothing themselves with the fantasy that most people really agree with them and the only way they can lose is if Democrats cheat. Naturally, they are the ones cheating.

This is intensely frustrating but par for the course. We are a very dumb culture and we’re getting dumber by the day.

When it comes down to it, it’s all Manchin’s fault

With an assist from Kyrsten Sinema:

Senator Bernie Sanders on Senator Joe Manchins rejection of Democrats climate bill: "[Manchin] is intentionally sabotaging the president's agenda, what the American people want, what a majority of us in the Democratic caucus want."

Says Manchin shouldn't be taken seriously. pic.twitter.com/Ji5n0DHWaE

— Moshe Schwartz (@YWNReporter) July 17, 2022

It’s infuriating but true. A 50-50 Senate was always going to be a problem. In a closely divided Senate there are always some divas who need special attention. But Manchin’s capricious game-playing over and over again is unique. I’ve never seen such bad faith:

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday blasted Sen. Joe Manchin for what he called “sabotaging” President Joe Biden’s agenda by rejecting Democrats’ party-line spending bill last week.

“He has sabotaged the president’s agenda,” Sanders (I-Vt.) said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Last week, Manchin shot down Democrats’ proposed energy and climate investments being part of the budget reconciliation bill. The West Virginia Democrat on Friday denied reports that he had walked away from the climate and energy investments under the spending bill and that he instead wanted to see July inflation figures before considering the legislation.

Manchin’s reluctance to pass the bill after months of negotiations has infuriated Democrats who contend the spending bill is desperately needed to fight climate change.

Sanders on Sunday did not hold back his frustration, claiming that “people like Manchin” are “intentionally sabotaging the president’s agenda, what the American people want, what a majority of us in the Democratic caucus want.”

“The problem was that we continued to talk to Manchin like he was serious; he was not,” Sanders said. “This is a guy who’s a major recipient of fossil fuel money, a guy who has received campaign contributions from 25 Republican billionaires.”

The Vermont senator called Manchin’s focus on inflation amid negotiations over the spending bill “nonsense.” He suggested Manchin doesn’t represent the people of West Virginia, who Sanders said largely want to expand Medicare coverage and think the wealthiest should be paying their fair share of taxes.

“In my humble opinion, Manchin represents the very wealthiest people in this country, not working families in West Virginia or America,” Sanders said.

Young voters wouldn’t support Biden or Trump in 2024

Who can blame them, younger Americans who feel politics is hopelessly broken and elected officials too old and out of touch?

Alexandra Chadwick, 22, voted in 2020 to oust Donald Trump. In supporting Joe Biden, she hoped he could hold off attacks on abortion, promote saner gun laws and address the climate crisis. Disillusioned now, she sees Democratic leaders as lacking what it will take to do so (New York Times):

“How are you going to accurately lead your country if your mind is still stuck 50, 60 or 70 years ago?” Ms. Chadwick, a customer service representative in Rialto, Calif., said of the many septuagenarian leaders at the helm of her party. “It’s not the same, and people aren’t the same, and your old ideas aren’t going to work as well anymore.”

A different one percent

That critique sounds familiar. Few groups are as discontented as the young, recent polling finds:

A survey from The New York Times and Siena College found that just 1 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds strongly approve of the way Mr. Biden is handling his job. And 94 percent of Democrats under 30 said they wanted another candidate to run two years from now. Of all age groups, young voters were most likely to say they wouldn’t vote for either Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump in a hypothetical 2024 rematch.

The numbers are a clear warning for Democrats as they struggle to ward off a drubbing in the November midterm elections. Young people, long among the least reliable part of the party’s coalition, marched for gun control, rallied against Mr. Trump and helped fuel a Democratic wave in the 2018 midterm elections. They still side with Democrats on issues that are only rising in prominence.

But four years on, many feel disengaged and deflated, with only 32 percent saying they are “almost certain” to vote in November, according to the poll. Nearly half said they did not think their vote made a difference.

No one ever asks people to clarify what they mean by “a difference.” There are plenty of contests each election that hang on a single vote, a handful of votes, and recounts. But electoral victories are not the kind of difference young people seek.

John Della Volpe of the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics observes that “every single one” (doubtful) of those serving in Congress today have “seen America at its best…. That is something that Gen Z has not had.”

“Make no mistake, our best days still lie ahead,” President Joe Biden tweeted on July Fourth. With a Supreme Court that just rolled back women’s rights by 50 years, that reassurance rings hollow.

People under 30 need a reason to believe and representatives that reflect their experiences. Chadwick sums up the appeal of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 32 of New York, with one word: “relatability.”

Julian Zelizer, a CNN analyst, addresses the problem:

It is not uncommon to hear people ask what we need to do to get young people more engaged in politics. As a university professor, this is the sort of query that often comes my way. Do the schools need to include more civic education? Should there be some sort of national service program? Can foundations provide grants and fellowships for young Americans who want to devote their lives to public service?

These questions are important, but we also need to look at what our political system does wrong. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that many younger Americans look at Washington and state capitals with a sense of grave disappointment. After all, they have experienced firsthand a growing climate crisis, racial injustice, the breakdown of democratic institutions and norms, gender inequity and widespread economic insecurity — issues that have been much discussed but rarely addressed.

Many of these young people have also grown up participating in active shooter drills at school. Unlike the famous duck-and-cover drills of the 1950s meant to prepare kids for a nuclear war that never happened, this country has witnessed the persistent drumbeat of school shootings. Can we really blame young people for feeling disillusioned with the US political system that allows this to continue?

Americans have seen roadblocks to progress before, says Zelizer, citing institutional gridlock and Southern opposition during the Kennedy and early Johnson administrations. Yet young people dissatisfied with the Vietnam War and inspired by the Civil Rights movement moved the needle.

What Zelizer forgets is that those 1960s activists had the economic springboard of the postwar economy and Cold War investments in education and technology supporting their political activism. Except for the legacy of lowering the voting age to 18, those foundations are eroded today. Potential voters under 30 are sucking wind financially with little hope of near-term improvement and little reason to expect the gerontocracy running D.C. has their backs. Plus the entrenched campaign-industrial complex polices the gates restricting access for most aspiring game-changers.

Don’t blame the young for not participating. Give them a reason to.

At the same time, the graphic above shows how much youthful political power is going unused (your state similar). It poses a chicken-and-egg problem. Are young people disempowered because politics is broken or is politics broken because they are not closing their fingers around the unused power just waiting for them?

Perhaps if they knew?

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Women will die

Already the post-Dobbs horror stories are mounting. That’s what happens when religious zealots write laws. Either in Afghanistan or in the United States:

A sexual assault survivor chooses sterilization so that if she is ever attacked again, she won’t be forced to give birth to a rapist’s baby. An obstetrician delays inducing a miscarriage until a woman with severe pregnancy complications seems “sick enough.” A lupus patient must stop taking medication that controls her illness because it can also cause miscarriages.

Abortion restrictions in a number of states and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade are having profound repercussions in reproductive medicine as well as in other areas of medical care.

Physicians have begun denying immediate medical care to pregnant women in medical emergencies. An Ohio clinic last week had two such cases involving ectopic pregnancies, conditions in which the embryo implants outside the womb and will not survive and can threaten the life of the woman.

Dr. Jessian Munoz, an OB-GYN in San Antonio, Texas, tells ABC News these decisions were once clear cut. Not now. Under Texas law, doctors must decide if a woman is “sick enough” to be treated legally:

Munoz said he faced an awful predicament with a recent patient who had started to miscarry and developed a dangerous womb infection. The fetus still had signs of a heartbeat, so an immediate abortion — the usual standard of care — would have been illegal under Texas law.

“We physically watched her get sicker and sicker and sicker” until the fetal heartbeat stopped the next day, “and then we could intervene,’’ he said. The patient developed complications, required surgery, lost multiple liters of blood and had to be put on a breathing machine “all because we were essentially 24 hours behind.’’

In a study published this month in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, doctors at two Texas hospitals cited the cases of 28 women less than 23 weeks pregnant who were treated for dangerous pregnancies. The doctors noted that all of the women had recommended abortions delayed by nine days because fetal heart activity was detected. Of those, nearly 60% developed severe complications — nearly double the number of complications experienced by patients in other states who had immediate therapeutic abortions. Of eight live births among the Texas cases, seven died within hours. The eighth, born at 24 weeks, had severe complications including brain bleeding, a heart defect, lung disease and intestinal and liver problems.

Seeking sterilization

Abortion opponents have sought to overturn Roe v. Wade for decades. Yet among the current impulses behind the conservative Christian push for banning abortion are demographic and political changes in the U.S. — the browning of America — plus replacement theory and an obsession with birth rates. With white women are not having enough babies.

Yet there are early signs that the Dobbs decision could be counterproductive for that goal:

Dr. Tyler Handcock, an Austin OB-GYN, said his clinic has heard from hundreds of patients seeking sterilization since the Supreme Court’s June 24 decision. Many choose this route because they fear long-acting birth control or other contraceptives could also become targets, he said.

His clinic scheduled a July 9 group counseling session to handle the surge, and every one of the 20 patients who showed up to hear about the risks and ramifications of fallopian tube-removal made an appointment to have the surgery.

Some physicians are reluctant to perform the surgery on young women with many reproductive years left, fearing they will change their minds later. Handcock said he heard from one 28-year-old woman who said six OB-GYNs declined to sterilize her.

Handcock said the choice should be up to patients.

Be careful what you wish for, the dog who caught the car, etc.

In Afghanistan. Taliban officials insist their rigid interpretation of Islamic law is behind their decrees. No woman may receive health services now unless accompanied by a mahram, a male chaperone:

In the southern province of Ghazni, a 42-year-old midwife said the Taliban have been preventing doctors from examining women without a mahram present since November 2021. (We are not identifying Afghans who spoke to us by name to protect their safety.) 

“When the Taliban understood the two women were not accompanied by men, they forced them out of the clinic and beat them with the butts of their rifles,” she said, citing a recent example. They had brought a sick infant in for a checkup.

“Doctors are also scared of treating female patients,” a government worker told Human Rights Watch.

Echoes of that now in the U.S,

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They simply do not care about the people who are already living, especially the pregnant ones

Can they not understand how incredibly complicated these decisions are? How grotesque it is to think they are in a position to dictate them to others?

Kaitlyn was near the beginning of her second trimester last October when she boarded a plane from Texas to Kansas. On her return home a few days later, she was no longer pregnant, and the 34-year-old wanted to do little more than cry in her own bed. Being in public was a struggle, let alone standing in line and going through airport security.

She had flown to Kansas for an abortion that was outlawed in her home state, though she and her doctor considered it medically appropriate. Scans had shown the fetus inside her had a lethal form of skeletal dysplasia. If it survived childbirth, which was extremely unlikely, doctors expected the newborn to soon suffocate from under-developed lungs. The baby’s bones would be so brittle, they would break just from being held.

Kaitlyn and her husband got the news shortly after Texas passed a highly restrictive abortion law, banning the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy except in medical emergencies. Her own doctor was so afraid of being sued, he didn’t bring up the possibility of ending the pregnancy. But if Kaitlyn didn’t have the ability to travel for an abortion, she doesn’t know if she would have survived.

“The psychological burden would have been so high and I would have been so hormonal and emotional, I don’t know what could have happened,” she told STAT, which agreed to use only her first name because she fears repercussions for those who helped her if she’s identified. Kaitlyn had postpartum depression before, after she gave birth to her first son. The prospect of carrying a fetus that was destined for suffering and death was unfathomable. “I don’t know if I could have got up and gone to work with that baby inside of me for seven months,” she said. “I could see suicide being an option.”

Texas’s exception permitting abortion in medical emergencies likely wouldn’t apply to a circumstance like Katilyn’s, where death isn’t imminent. After the Supreme Court’s impending abortion ruling, whether it repeals Roe v. Wade outright or stops just short of that, several states are expected to pass laws that allow abortion only to save a pregnant person’s life. Some 22 states are certain to ban abortion following a repeal of Roe, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health think tank, and a further four are highly likely to follow, with exemptions granted in limited medical emergencies.

Another one:

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

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

On Wednesday night, Taylor, 23, felt something abnormal and since their last pregnancy ended in miscarriage, they rushed to the hospital. By the time they got there, Fox’s feet were already pushing through his mother’s cervix. Doctors tried several emergency measures to stop the preterm labor, including putting Taylor on an incline in the hopes that they could perform a cervical cerclage—a procedure in which doctors stitch shut the cervix. Nothing worked. Nothing could save him.

Heartbroken, the Mahaffeys asked about their options. “The only humane thing to do at that point would be to pop the sack, and let little Fox come into this world too early to survive outside,” 29-year-old Daniel Mahaffey wrote Monday, telling his story on Reddit.

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

The Mahaffeys were sent home to wait for their baby to die or for Taylor’s labor to progress. “We cried ourselves to sleep, waiting for him to come,” Daniel said in an interview with The Daily Beast.

They prayed conflicting prayers: for a miracle that might save him and for an end to their baby’s suffering. Daniel worried his wife would hemorrhage while Taylor could feel the baby struggling inside of her, Daniel said. Taylor declined to speak for this article.

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

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

After four days in and out of the hospital, the bag of waters surrounding their baby burst and Taylor delivered Fox. “One nice thing is we got to hold him,” Daniel said. “That’s the only silver lining.”

Texas is one of 12 states that bans abortions after 20 weeks post fertilization with bills ostensibly based on the wholly unscientific idea that fetuses can feel pain after that period of gestation. (A review of the evidence by the American Medical Association found that “fetal perception of pain is unlikely before the third trimester.”)

These ghouls think it makes sense for every single pregnancy to be subject to the whims of yahoo bureaucrats and religious fanatics in every state who thinks this is their choice. It’s a nightmare.

That really is the question

Ed Kilgore asks one of the big lingering questions about January 6th. What did Trump see happening at the Capitol on January 6th when he sent in the mob?

So what was the idea? Trump knew the votes weren’t there for his backers in Congress to reject Biden electors (it would have required a majority vote in both Democratic-controlled chambers). Pence wouldn’t play ball. And even if the rioters temporarily halted the count of electoral votes (as they did), Trump knew they would soon resume (as they also did, that very evening).

That leaves two possibilities, both of them damning: (1) Trump planned to use the violence to assert some sort of emergency powers that would have more definitively halted the congressional proceedings and/or kept him in office past January 20, or (2) Trump simply incited violence for the sheer disruptive hell of it without a scintilla of a strategy.

I think there are some other possibilities. He knew there were armed militants in the crowd and thought they might actually take Mike Pence hostage (or worse), thereby delaying the count. I wouldn’t put it past him. But now that we know he really did want to go down to the Capitol himself — and that Rudy had told Meadows he planned to go in and “stand next to the Senators and look strong” — it’s also possible that he thought such a show of strength with a huge crowd outside chanting would change Pence’s mind and that the congressional Republicans would back him up. He’s delusional. As I have mentioned dozens of times, when Pence said he didn’t have the authority to overturn the election, he did gesture to the crowd outside the White House on January 5th, and ask him, “what if these people say you do?”

But Kilgore may be right that he just incited the violence for the sheer, disruptive hell of it and sat back to see what would happen. I am also reminded of this from just before the election in 2018:

Days before the election, the president appeared to admit for the first time that Republicans might lose the House. “It could happen,” Trump said. “And you know what you do? My whole life, you know what I say? ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll just figure it out.’” Trump said.

He may very well have had no idea what would happened when he sicced the mob on the Capitol. He just assumed he’d figure it out. He’s been winging it his whole life and it’s worked out for his so far.

He lied

Jonathan Lemire has a new book out in which he reminds us about that ridiculous assertion by Bannon. No one in their right mind believed him, of course. Lemire writes:

The chief strategist told me that Trump ‘was not looking to win a news cycle, he was looking to win a news moment, a news second.’

“An at-times shell-shocked Bannon would relay to aides that ‘Trump would say anything, he would lie about anything to win that moment, to win whatever exchange he was having at that moment.’

“Entire campaign proposals had to be written on the fly, policy plans reverse engineered, teams of aides immediately mobilised to meet whatever floated through Trump’s head in that moment to defend his record, put down a reporter, or change a chyron on CNN.”

Bannon sees this as a tremendous asset for his own project, which is to destroy the world, What better instrument could you ask for?