Month: January 2023

GIRL 😭 pic.twitter.com/SIs0fVFH4L

— helena hind (@cynicalzoomer) January 14, 2023

Earlier this week, Tucker Carlson cheered on the House Republicans’ decision to allow smoking in the Capitol again, as you can see above. I know he’s just trying to be cutesy transgressive and own the libs but it’s sick anyway. It appears that this is going to be a new crusade:

Tucker: They hate nicotine. They love THC.. Why do they hate nicotine? Because nicotine frees your mind and thc makes you compliant and passive pic.twitter.com/M73aC2IeWy

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 21, 2023

That’s not just about “freedom” to kill yourself with cancer. He’s portraying it as good for you. Even the vaccine and mask deniers don’t suggest that getting COVID is fun. But hey, why not get everyone using meth or cocaine.? Of course they don’t give other people cancer which I guess Tucker thinks must be one of the “fun” aspects of it. Enjoy your cancer folks!

Is it just me or is he sounding crazier and crazier? I honestly think that the number of people who want to re-introduce smoking cigarettes into our culture is pretty small. Only 12% of population smokes now. Way more people use cannabis.

WTH is this??

This piece in the NY Times discussing the abortion bans is depressingly predictable. Even where there are exceptions written into the law they won’t perform abortions:

Last summer, a Mississippi woman sought an abortion after, she said, a friend had raped her. Her state prohibits most abortions but allows them for rape victims. Yet she could not find a doctor to provide one.

In September, an Indiana woman learned that a fetal defect meant her baby would die shortly after birth, if not sooner. Her state’s abortion ban included an exception for such cases, but she was referred to Illinois or Michigan.

An Ohio woman carrying triplets faced a high risk of dangerous complications, including delivering too early. When she tried to get an abortion in September through Ohio’s exception for patients with a medical need, she was turned away.

The abortion bans enacted in about half the states since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June do not prohibit abortion entirely. Most make exceptions in certain circumstances, commonly to protect the health or life of the patient, or in the case of rape or incest. And as conservative state lawmakers prepare to take up new restrictions on abortion in upcoming legislative sessions, exceptions will be at the heart of the debate.

But in the months since the court’s decision, very few exceptions to these new abortion bans have been granted, a New York Times review of available state data and interviews with dozens of physicians, advocates and lawmakers revealed.

Instead, those with means are traveling to states where abortion is still broadly legal or are obtaining abortion pills at home because the requirements to qualify for exceptions are too steep. Doctors and hospitals are turning away patients, saying that ambiguous laws and the threat of criminal penalties make them unwilling to test the rules.

“Having the legal right on the books to get an abortion and getting one in practice are two distinctly different things,” said Laurie Bertram Roberts, the executive director of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, a group that supports abortion rights.

Stephanie Piper, an advocate for sexual assault victims at the Gulf Coast Center for Nonviolence in Biloxi, Miss., said that she has helped several women who became pregnant as a result of rape to connect with abortion providers outside Mississippi. Emily Kask for The New York Times

An example of that disconnect is in Louisiana, which has exceptions for protecting the life or health of the patient and for deadly birth defects, and has reported zero abortions since its ban took effect. Mississippi, with exceptions for rape and protecting the life of the patient, has reported no more than two. Alabama, Kentucky, Missouri and Texas have exceptions for protecting a patient’s life or health and have reported similarly low abortion figures.

There is no reliable estimate for the number of patients who seek abortions because of sexual assault or pregnancy complications, yet experts say the number is undoubtedly much more than zero. Thousands of women have most likely qualified for exceptions to state abortion bans in the months since Roe was overturned, they say.

A majority of Americans think abortion should be legal in most circumstances, and even those who otherwise oppose abortion generally support exceptions for rape and for health complications. But abortion-rights advocates say legal exceptions do nothing but make abortion bans appear more reasonable than they really are.

Abortion opponents, including those who designed the bans, say the laws are working as intended: Exceptions should be rare. If doctors are not treating patients who qualify, they say, those doctors are to blame for overinterpreting the law.

“We’re not convinced there is a problem,” said James Bopp, the general counsel for the National Right to Life Committee, who writes model legislation for states. “They are just trying to undermine the law in order to have it repealed.”

How about this?

Birth defects kill at least 6,200 babies each year between 20 weeks of pregnancy and early infancy, according to the C.D.C., though this figure does not include pregnancies that end in abortions or miscarriages.

Studies have shown that a majority of patients who discover a deadly birth defect seek an abortion. Physicians say that patients often make this choice to spare the fetus from suffering or their families from drawn-out grief.

The lawyers at Dr. Day’s hospital felt that Indiana’s new law prohibited the methods for the procedure and decided that they could not offer abortions because of the ban’s confusing wording.

“It was messy enough that everyone was appropriately nervous,” Dr. Day said.

A pair of U.S. maps. One shows states with abortion bans with exceptions for fatal birth defects and the other shows states without those exceptions.

Exceptions for fatal birth defects exist in only about a third of abortion bans. Utah, for example, allows exceptions for these abnormalities under its ban, but only if they are “universally lethal.” Physicians say they rarely have such consensus.

In Louisiana, lawmakers attached a list of about two dozen conditions to their exception for fatal defects. But this summer they said they would add at least one more condition, after a woman was denied an abortion because her diagnosis was not listed.

That’s horrifying. So is this:

Most states that prohibit abortion also include an exception for patients facing severe complications, which are estimated to occur in 14 percent of pregnancies. This exception, too, is carefully narrow, and every state law that has it uses almost identical language: “to prevent a serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman.”

Physicians say that they cannot anticipate all of the ways in which pregnancy can go awry and that lawmakers were wrong to assume they could. Requiring doctors to pause their care to seek legal counsel puts patients’ lives at risk, they say.

In September, an Ohio woman carrying triplets faced a complicated pregnancy and delivery. Her doctors worried her health would decline and that none of the three fetuses would survive. She sought what specialists call a multifetal reduction to terminate two of them.

Multifetal reductions are typically recommended for patients carrying triplets or more, because these pregnancies are always at higher risk. The woman’s maternal-fetal medicine specialist, Dr. Ellie Ragsdale, had offered these procedures regularly.

When Ohio’s abortion ban was in effect last fall, Dr. Ellie Ragsdale sought to perform abortion procedures for patients with complicated pregnancies but was advised not to. Amber N. Ford for The New York Times

Dr. Ragsdale thought the Ohio woman was a clearcut case for the state’s health exception, but her hospital’s lawyers thought the threats to the patient’s health were not immediate enough. (The ban has since been blocked in court.)

Dr. Ragsdale’s patient traveled to Michigan for the multifetal reduction. In Indiana, Dr. Day also thought it would be simpler to refer her patient to Michigan or Illinois, rather than try to track down a willing doctor in the state.

Dr. Day said the patient told her she could not afford the travel or medical fees not covered by insurance. She did not hear from the patient again.

“What gets put out to the press is: ‘We have exceptions for fetal abnormalities and we have exceptions for maternal life,’ ” Dr. Day said. “When you get into the nitty-gritty details of it, you actually don’t.”

For all their love of babies they sure don’t care if they suffer, so they. I mean, we know they don’t care about women and their families suffering …

Almost every state ban makes an exception when the pregnancy endangers the patient’s life, but three states — Idaho, North Dakota and Tennessee — have a stricter provision. In those states, the burden is on doctors to prove the patient’s life was in peril. In the other states, the burden would be on prosecutors to prove that it was not.

Tennessee’s ban is the only one of the three not currently blocked by a judge, and anti-abortion advocates have held it up as a model because it is not weakened by exceptions. Now, confused and frightened doctors are asking legislators to change the law.

They knew what they were doing. They want to frighten doctors into not doing abortions under any circumstances because they do not believe there should be exceptions at all. They think women should be forced to give birth under all circumstances even if they will die doing it. That’s obvious. They are no doubt getting their wish.

At the “March for Life” (March for Death?) yesterday the common refrain from the zealots in attendance was that they have to ban medical abortions and ensure that no one can get access to the pills. They also want to ban Plan B because they say they believe it also causes abortion, which isn’t true.

They’re not stopping. But we knew they wouldn’t. They seek a national ban with no exceptions for anything. Let’s not kid ourselves about this.

Where private jet parking is a bitch

Ken Klippenstein from his substack:

No, Davos is not a secret plan to raise a stadium of babies in Matrix-style incubator pods, as some Twitter users supposed — prompting a fact check from Reuters. 

The real Davos conspiracy is hiding in plain sight and it’s pretty much the kind of pro-business agenda you’d expect from a bunch of billionaire Fortune 500 CEOs, heads of state and central bankers meeting at a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. A recent article on the World Economic Forum’s website about “the Davos Agenda” gives you the basic idea: “We desperately need to disrupt our approach to retirement saving.” People are living longer, you see, so they’ll “want to work past mandatory retirement age…while others will need to work longer to remain financially resilient in later life.” 

Uh-huh. Let me translate:

“We the uber-wealthy desperately need to de-finance national safety net programs like Social Security so we can keep older people (“human resources”) working longer at unsatisfying, low-paying jobs where we treat them like shit so we can become even more uber-wealthy. Pay them so little that they have to work, perhaps until they drop, just to pay bills and eat.”

Klippenstein writes, “In other words, grandma’s going to have to go back to work.” But Davos will say so in “the bloodless, euphemistic language that is the province of economists.”

“That’s the real Davos agenda: business friendly proposals so banal that even the most insidious ones pass without notice.”

Except one need not jet into Davos to hear those. Listen to Republicans and read the Wall Street Journal.

♫Oh, Mexico | It sounds so simple, I just got to go

CNN:

Elizabeth Holmes made an “attempt to flee the country” by booking a one-way ticket to Mexico departing in January 2022, shortly after the Theranos founder was convicted of fraud, prosecutors alleged in a new court filing Friday.

Holmes was convicted last January of defrauding investors while running the failed blood testing startup Theranos. In November, she was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison. She has appealed her conviction and does not start her prison sentence until this spring, a waiting period that prosecutors described as “generous” and due to her being pregnant.

Prosecutors argue that Holmes should start her prison term sooner than the scheduled April 27, 2023 because she remains a flight risk. Especially since she “has the means to act on that incentive.”

Holmes’ attorneys claim she bought the ticket in advance of the conviction she thought she’d avoid. She had a wedding to attend in Mexico.

“There are not two systems of justice – one for the wealthy and one for the poor – there is one criminal justice system in this country,” prosecutors stated in the filing. They argue that “under that system, the time has come” for Holmes to answer for her crimes.

Arguing that we have just one system of justice sounds more aspirational than operational these days. We won’t have that more perfect union until we practice equal justice.

Watch this space for what happens with Donald Trump and his co-conspirators. Equal justice for all in this country is as contested a concept as ever.

Honestly, I’d love for Trump to try fleeing the country.

Zooborns has collected animal web cams from around the world. It’s an everyday soother.
Here are just a handful of them. There are many more at this link!

https://youtu.be/JJqXeRFsLjE

They’re doing it again

If you’ve been watching the recent febrile reporting about the Biden documents you can be forgiven if you felt like you’ve seen this movie before. You have. The Washington Post published a story yesterday about the Biden documents case that pretty much explained and exonerated the administration’s handling of the matter. It also said that it doesn’t matter because it looks bad and everyone’s talking about it so it’s very bad, possibly fatal, for Biden.

Ironically, the only thing that might spare him is the plethora of legal issues plaguing Trump and the fact that his document scandal is arguably much worse. On the other hand, I’m already seeing “we know Trump is a corrupt scumbag, we expect more from Biden” so who knows?

How does this sort of thing happen? I wrote this about the Clinton email scandal when it first surfaced in March of 2015:

Cokie’s Law renewed by acclamation

As we rush headlong into the first  of what are sure to be many “Clinton Records Scandals” (it’s a perennial) I just thought I’d remind everyone of one thing: Cokie’s Law, in which she proved that truth and facts are rarely the issue when it comes to arcane Clinton scandals:

“At this point,it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.”

Once people are talking about it, they believe it’s a legitimate news story. So they publish stories that imply something or other “doesn’t pass the smell test”, the news media get weirdly excited about it, convey that to the people and then we’re off to the races.

Liberals are all aflutter this morning over this e-mail scandal. They have no idea if it’s true or what specifically is wrong with it other than it allegedly “shows bad judgment” but they are very upset. Moreover, I have no idea why I’m supposed to be so shocked, appalled that it’s time to run for the hills and beg Jim Webb to come to the rescue. But that’s what I’m hearing. And it’s as predictable as the sun. Maybe there’s something truly nefarious going on. I’m open to believing it. But at this point what I see is that Villager hysterical impulse asserting itself once again.

There are excellent reasons to oppose Hillary Clinton. She has a long history of DLC centrism, mixed with a record of hawkishness both as a Senator and as Secretary of State. If people oppose her on the merits I cannot argue with them. But this scandal mongering has always been a facile and tawdry way for Villagers to express their belief in their own sense of moral superiority by complaining about “the Clintons’ characters.” (In his case being “undisciplined” and in her case being a soulless “control freak.”) It’s always about some Shakespearean flaw rather than the policies, mostly because this is what the Village press corps really wants to talk about. Politics are boring. And I might actually believe some of it except for the fact that aside from those furtive blowjobs in a hallway, none of the so-called evidence they presented to prove it ever panned out.

I don’t think the country is in good enough shape right now to afford that shallow, faux muckraking. Perhaps Clinton really did sell America’s national security to foreign leaders to feather her own nest. I hope the proof emerges quickly, if that’s the case. But Villager handwringing over how it doesn’t really matter if it’s true or not because “it’s out there” and it “exposes her character”, is cheap and shallow journalistic masturbation. What these scandals inevitably reveal is the character of the American press corps more than anything else.

Update: Andrea Mitchell said this morning that  it turns out that Colin Powell did the same thing but it was different because this all feeds into a “narrative” that the Clintons are secretive.

Chris Cillizza agreed that it plays into the notion that the Clintons “operate under their own set of rules” and are “very political” and are surrounded by “enablers.” Also too it was different for Powell because he wasn’t a “defacto nominee”.

Ruth Marcus agreed that this all feeds into the pre-existing narrative.

Update II: The new MSNBC news show with Thomas Roberts teases the story and announces that they are featuring the Artist who painted the “shadow of Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress” in the official Bill Clinton portrait.

Shoot me now.

Update III: Michael Tomasky did some actual journalism:

It looks bad for Hillary Clinton—again. This New York Times story alleging that she might have violated federal rules by using a personal email account instead of an official government one for her communications seems to raise all the old questions about Clintonian corner-cutting and is sure to make Democrats flail their arms and cry, “Oh God, this again?”

But let’s hold on a second. A close reading of the Times piece reveals one potential big hole in the case. I’m not saying the Times is wrong here. It’s still a foggy situation. I am, however, saying this: You have to know how to read these things, and if you do know how to read them, there’s a big question here that could—potentially—exonerate Clinton to some or maybe even a considerable extent.

The article says that there were “new” regulations that Clinton was supposed to abide by. It notes that one past secretary of state, Colin Powell, who served from 2001 to 2005, sometimes used his personal email account “before the new regulations went into effect.”

So, a key question would seem to be this: When did the new regulations go into effect? If 2007 or 2008, then Clinton would appear to be in direct violation of them, depending on what precisely they said. If later, it gets a little murkier.

Oddly, the Times article doesn’t say. It doesn’t pin the new regs down to a specific date or even year.

Now, I know enough about reporting to know how this works. If you’ve got an airtight case, then you lay it all out there. You include the date. Indeed you emphasize the date, you put it high up in your story. The fact that it’s not in there is a little fishy.

Well, this might be the explanation: The new regs apparently weren’t fully implemented by State until a year and half after Clinton left State.

Here’s the timeline: Clinton left the State Department on February 1, 2013. Back in 2011, President Obama had signed a memorandum directing the update of federal records management. But the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) didn’t issue the relevant guidance, declaring that email records of senior government officials are permanent federal records, until August 2013. Then, in September 2013, NARA issued guidance on personal email use.

Not that it matters. “It’s out there.” And besides, it’s “feeding the narrative”. Waddaya gonna do?

As Tomasky adds:

[T]his seems like a good time to remember another pattern of behavior: namely, that of the Times. I remember clear as a bell reading that initial Jeff Gerth story on Whitewater back in March 1992. It seemed devastating. It took many millions of dollars and many years and many phony allegations before important parts of Gerth’s reporting were debunked. But they were. The Clintons did nothing wrong on Whitewater except to be naïve enough to let themselves by chiseled by Jim McDougal.

If they had done something wrong, with all the prosecutorial firepower thrown at them by a prosecutor (Ken Starr) who clearly hated them, don’t you think they’d have been indicted? Of course they would have been. But Starr couldn’t turn anything up on Whitewater and was about to close down his investigation empty-handed until he got wind of a gal named Monica.

So that’s a pattern too. The Times, for those with short memories, has never loved the Clintons. Remember Howell Raines and his ceaseless, thundering editorials against them. And today, it smells like the Times may have been rolled by the Republican staff of the Benghazi panel. And hey, great work by them and Chairman Trey Gowdy to use the nation’s leading liberal newspaper in this way.

This is what they do. David Roberts put it well in this twitter thread about that Washington Post story yesterday:

This WaPo piece on But His Documents is an absolute classic of the form. It describes two things: 1) the Biden administration has done everything right, by the law, above board, with an abundance of caution; nonetheless, 2) it’s a political shitshow.

Accusations are flying all over the place, a special counsel has been appointed, and Biden advisors have their hair on fire. What’s interesting is how the article explains (or doesn’t) how we went from 1 to 2.

At key junctures, the story is described as effectively advancing itself. The admin’s hyper-caution “yielded a political firestorm & repeated accusations of obfuscation.” Elsewhere, “the approach would end up prompting accusations.” The admin prompted & yielded its own shitstorm?

Take a step back and ask yourself: what is the missing causal link between 1) the Biden administration doing everything right and 2) a political shitstorm happening regardless?

It’s the media. The ghost haunting the story. The invisible presence.

One of the cardinal unwritten rules of objective, voice-from-nowhere political journalism is that the media itself, its role in making the story, must must be rendered invisible. The media is a transparent eyeball. It does not choose or shape, merely respond & report.

That the sheer tonnage of coverage might have had a role in generating hysteria and overreaction is never mentioned as a possibility. That it is a Major Scandal almost purely because the media has chosen to cover it as a Major Scandal is not on the table. The media is nowhere.👻

It is a running theme through the media’s coverage of every over-hyped right-wing pseudo-scandal in memory (and there are so many): its resolute denial of its own agency.

Originally tweeted by David Roberts (@drvolts) on January 20, 2023.

That’s about it. They pimp the phony scandal and they shrug their shoulders and insist they have to report on it because everyone is talking about it.

I doubt most readers here ever watch Fox News. Why would you? But it’s not a bad idea to know what’s going on over there. It’s literally nuts. Here’s some of what they broadcast just this week:

Here are some other definitely real stories you might have missed this week if you don't watch Fox News:https://t.co/x0B7ByWAVH

— Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) January 20, 2023

If you *do* watch Fox News, you might have missed this story.https://t.co/vGqeNblSdA

— Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) January 20, 2023

But then again, the ~lamestream~ media failed to acknowledge that a a government shutdown could be good, actually.https://t.co/pZpRvA1PSh

— Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) January 20, 2023

That’s just a small window into the atrocities the network spews out to the public on an hourly basis. `

Here’s a doozy:

Former Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren, who Gov. Ron DeSantis had suspended, will remain out of office since a federal judge on Friday ruled that he does not have the power to reinstate the prosecutor — despite ruling that the removal violated the First Amendment and Florida Constitution.

In an order dismissing the case, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle wrote that federal law prevents him from returning elected prosecutor Andrew Warren to office in a lawsuit that centered on state law.

DeSantis suspended Warren last year over the elected prosecutor’s signing of statements that said he would not pursue criminal charges against seekers or providers of abortion or gender transition treatments, as well as policies about not charging people with some minor crimes.

Warren — a twice-elected, Democratic state attorney in Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa — sued the governor in federal court to get his job back.

In testimony, Warren argued that he was suspended over his personal political positions on abortion and transgender issues. He said his office applied prosecutorial discretion over whether to bring charges in all cases, considering public safety and other matters.
Judge Hinkle’s decision largely sides with Warren’s arguments but finds that the case is effectively a state matter that cannot be resolved by a federal judge.

“Florida Governor Ron DeSantis suspended elected State Attorney Andrew H. Warren, ostensibly on the ground that Mr. Warren had blanket policies not to prosecute certain kinds of cases. The allegation was false,” Hinkle wrote. “Mr. Warren’s well-established policy, followed in every case by every prosecutor in the office, was to exercise prosecutorial discretion at every stage of every case.”

He added: “But the Eleventh Amendment prohibits a federal court from awarding declaratory or injunctive relief of the kind at issue against a state official based only on a violation of state law.”

The governor had accused Warren of incompetence and neglect of duty, arguing that the prosecutor was picking and choosing which laws to enforce, citing in his executive order the non-prosecution of crimes such as “trespassing at a business location, disorderly conduct, disorderly intoxication, and prostitution.”

The suspension positioned DeSantis, a potential 2024 GOP presidential candidate, at the forefront of a wave of Republican opposition to progressive prosecutors who exercise discretion over whether to charge people with what they deem to be low-level offenses.

From Judge Hinkle’s ruling:

“The Governor violated the First Amendment by considering Mr. Warren’s speech on matters of public concern—the four FJP policies save one sentence—as motivating factors in the decision to suspend him.

The Governor violated the First Amendment by considering Mr. Warren’s association with the Democratic Party and alleged association with Mr. Soros as motivating factors in the decision. But the Governor would have made the same decision anyway, even without considering these things. The First Amendment violations were not essential to the outcome and so do not entitle Mr. Warren to relief in this action.

The suspension also violated the Florida Constitution, and that violation did affect the outcome. But the Eleventh Amendment prohibits a federal court from awarding declaratory or injunctive relief of the kind at issue against a state official based only on a violation of state law.”

You have to love this from DeSantis’ office. It would make George Santos proud:

“Today the judge upheld his decision to suspend Andrew Warren from office for neglect of duty and incompetence. Another win for Governor DeSantis and the people of Hillsborough County.”

That’s a lie. The judge actually found the opposite. The reason he was not reinstated is because of a technicality, something the wingnuts usually condemn. DeSantis is just as dishonestly grandiose as Trump.

This is another example of right wing authoritarianism and if DeSantis gains national power (and with the help of the right wing judiciary) he could really do some damage. This prosecutor was elected on a local level by the people of Florida. DeSantis didn’t like what he said about possibly not prosecuting abortion cases and decided that he had the sole power to decide which cases should be brought in all cases. (Either that or he thinks prosecutors are required to try every case that’s brought before them no matter what the evidence, which is literally insane.) It’s a major power play.

The Florida laboratory of democracy is building a Frankenstein’s monster and it’s a constitution killer. The fact that it screams “freedom!!!” all the time doesn’t change that.

Not bloody likely

There was a time in American life when it was considered bad manners to talk about politics or religion at the dinner table. There were good reasons for that — those subjects tend to get people upset and angry and that’s always rough on digestion. But I doubt it was ever something that was practiced much because when people aren’t gossiping or talking about work, politics and religion are the most likely topics whether we like it or not. Still, I don’t think the merging of religion into partisan politics has ever been quite as thorough as it’s been in the past 40 years or so.

Sure you can go back in history and see many examples of religious leaders being politically influential from Cotton Mather to Brigham Young to Martin Luther King Jr. And various religious movements have been deeply involved in social reforms forever. But the emergence of the Christian Right under the auspices of organizations like the Moral Majority led by the Reverend Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition was explicitly formed as a faction of the Republican Party for the purpose of electing officials who would carry out their political agenda. That was unusual and it has been wildly successful.

Ironically, the first evangelical president was a Democrat. Jimmy Carter wore his religion on his sleeve – not that it did him any good with the burgeoning conservative evangelical political movement. In 1980, when Carter ran for re-election, two-thirds of white evangelicals voted for the twice-married, un-churched, matinee idol, Ronald Reagan. It was clear even then that the Christian Right was very serious about enshrining their socially conservative beliefs into law and they weren’t picky about how they got it done. Until then religion had operated more or less outside the ugly sausage-making of politics and government, then the Christian Right dove in head first.

That movement became one of the most, if not the most, dominant political movements of our time. It completely co-opted the GOP, forcing their agenda as a requirement for office and ensuring that their demands cannot be ignored. In a few decades, they managed to get a religious right majority seated on the Supreme Court and even have an active lobbying effort to sway the justices.

Throughout this era, the Democrats spent massive amounts of money and energy trying to win this group over to their side under the belief that since they adhere to the teachings of Jesus Christ that they must see the altruistic ethos of progressivism as a strong component of their beliefs. But for forty years they have been rudely rebuffed, just as Jimmy Carter was.

For quite some time there was what I like to call a Religion Industrial Complex whose mission was to scold Democrats for that failure and advise them that all they needed to do was adopt social conservatism and they would win every election. They didn’t say it that way, of course. They talked about “outreach” a lot and advised that their politicians should seek “common ground.” And abortion was always at the center of it. Back in 2004 columnist Melinda Henneberger wrote:

“The Democrats are likely to lose the Catholic vote in November—and John Kerry could well lose the election as a result. It’s about abortion, stupid. And ‘choice,’ make no mistake, is killing the Democratic Party.”

Actually, the Christian right is killing religion in America, bleeding it slowly for quite some time although few seemed to notice.

As FiveThirtyEight pointed out a few years back, during this period of conservative Christian dominance the country has been growing much less religious and studies have found that this is mainly a result of public distaste for the GOP’s merging of religious social conservatism with politics. And nothing has exposed the moral bankruptcy of the Christian Right more than its ecstatic embrace of the lying libertine Donald Trump. They have been among his most fervent admirers, accounting for the single largest bloc of support in the GOP. But a survey of 1,000 US adults conducted back in 2021 found that half of Americans believe evangelical leaders’ support of Trump hurt the church’s credibility and 25% say that the church’s embrace of Trump soured them on participating in religion. They may have won some battles but they’re losing the war.

The New York Times reported this week that some conservative evangelical leaders were starting to hedge on supporting Trump in 2024. Big-time Trump supporter Pastor Robert Jeffress appeared publicly with former Vice President Mike Pence last week, prompting Trump to go on the attack. He appeared with commentator David Brody on the Christian Broadcasting Network and said that such behavior is disloyal after all he’s done for them. And he blamed them for the GOP’s 2022 midterm losses, suggesting that once they got what they wanted they didn’t bother to turn out.

This was not well received by some of the leaders who clearly think that they can do better with a new face like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or maybe former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Ohio evangelical activist Bob Vander Plaats complained, “you’re not going to gain any traction by throwing the most loyal base under the bus and shifting blame.” The one Christian Right leader the Times quoted agreeing with Trump is the experienced, longtime political operative, Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, who thinks Trump is right that the Republicans didn’t go on offense and attack the Democrats as abortion extremists — and that until they do, they’ll be in trouble on that issue and in trouble at the ballot box. 

I won’t be surprised if they all end up back in the fold one way or the other. The Times notes that after Trump slammed Jeffers for meeting with Pence, the Pastor went out of his way to smooth those ruffled orange feathers. He explained that while he previously indicated that he would remain neutral, it was only because Trump had not asked for his endorsement which he anticipated he would give because he “is most likely going to be the 2024 nominee.” He knows his flock and realized that they would not like anyone dissing their favorite president.

But that won’t stop the rest of what is shaping up to be a crowded GOP primary field from trying to pry them out of Trump’s clutches. They will all go out of their way to make the one pitch that gets them out to the polls: they must confirm that conservative Christians are under siege from everyone else in the country, all of whom are trying to destroy everything they care about.

Republicans for the last 40 years have basically run on that message and Religious Right voters voted in lockstep with their leaders all that time. But nobody did it quite like Trump. He spoke their language of grievance and resentment in ways that sent a tingle up their legs and they fell in love. There is no evidence they’re ready to abandon him for a boring mainstream politician. They finally got what they wanted: a bad boy.

Salon

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has rejected a College Board request to approve an African-American Studies course in his state on the grounds that the course violates state law, according to a report. The Advanced Placement (AP) program, of which a pilot has been launched, was reportedly rejected by DeSantis’ administration in a letter to the College Board from the Florida Department of Education’s Office of Articulation. The rejection letter dated Jan. 12 said “as presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value,” according to National Review.

We can be sure that if they come back with a curriculum that features nothing but screenings of “Gone With the Wind”, and that one clip of Martin Luther King saying “content of their character” it might be approved. Maybe. Surely they aren’t racists who just don’t think African American history in general “lacks educational value.” They just want to make sure that white students aren’t uncomfortable and that the story is told properly — with happy slaves and generous masters celebrating on the 4th of July together.

By the way, it’s not as if AP History doesn’t have other courses that deviate from the standard AP American history course I took in high school:

– AP European History
– AP Art History
– AP Japanese Language & Culture
– AP German Language & Culture
– AP Italian Language & Culture
– AP Spanish Language & Culture

Are AP classes currently offered. It’s crazy how AP African-American studies made the chopping block in FL. 🤔

— Shevrin “Shev” Jones (@ShevrinJones) January 19, 2023

Gosh, I sure hope no little white snowflakes are uncomfortable with any of those subjects either. I could imagine the Japanese and Spanish ones might run afoul of that ruling. And lord knows what unacceptable images might come up in the Art class.

Let’s just admit that none of these people will be happy until public schools either teach nothing but the John Birch Society Handbook, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Bible or they are to be closed down permanently with the money going to special Republican Party academies where they will be taught football, and target shooting, period.