Month: September 2025

I hadn’t heard this particular argument but it fits so perfectly with the pro-natalist movement Elon Musk endorses. Women need to get their biscuits in the oven and their bins in the bed, as the old saying goes.

The more common argument is this one, explained in this segment about the post-Roe movement on PBS:

• Sarah Varney:But once anti-abortion and conservative legal groups secured a major victory, overturning Roe v. Wade, they shifted their focus beyond abortion, just as social media has brought once fringe ideas about birth control into the public debate.
  
• Woman:Most doctors do not tell us the truth about what can happen to us when we’re on the pill.
  
• Woman:It’s honestly psychotic that our medical system is pretending like you can just temporarily change everybody’s cycle.
  
• Sarah Varney:One of the most influential activists is Lila Rose, founder of the anti-abortion group Live Action.With just over two million subscribers to her social media accounts and YouTube channel, Rose is an icon to many young pro-life activists.
  
• Lila Rose, Founder, Live Action:Contraceptive methods are all massively unhealthy.
  
• Sarah Varney:Rose tells her followers birth control brings all sorts of dangers, health risks, divorce, and encourages a hookup culture, which she says can lead to abortion when contraception fails.To be clear, there is no scientific evidence that using hormonal birth control leads to divorce or encourages sexual promiscuity.
  
• Lila Rose:I think there is a good countermovement happening right now culturally to reject the hookup culture and to reject this promiscuity, laissez-faire attitude about sex, and to say, look, sex is amazing, sex is special. Because it’s amazing and special, it belongs in a lifelong, loving, committed relationship, AKA a marriage, where if there is a child that comes into the world, there’s not this panic, oh, let’s go get an abortion, instead of saying, oh, now we can build our family together.
  […]
  
• Sarah Varney:According to the Food and Drug Administration and major medical associations, hormonal contraception primarily works by stopping a woman’s ovaries from releasing an egg. But some pro-life activists claim that any hormonal birth control could prevent a fertilized egg from reaching the uterus and they consider that an abortifacient.That argument is at the heart of the strategy to outlaw certain contraceptives under state abortion bans, and its leaders are reluctant to talk about it.If abortion is illegal, for instance, in the state of Tennessee, Texas, a bunch of other places from the moment of fertilization, then, therefore, by this logic, there would be vast amounts of birth control that would no longer be legal in the state of Texas or Tennessee.
  
• Lila Rose:Yes, again, if it’s a contraceptive, I don’t think there’s any issue with having it be legal. But if it’s designed as an abortifacient, then it is a problem. It’s an abortion.
  
• Sarah Varney:But if — I guess what I’m saying is, by your logic…
  
• Lila Rose:It’s not my logic. This is just — the birth control pill insert says it itself. So…(Crosstalk)
  
• Sarah Varney:Right. So, by your logic, those forms of birth control would then be illegal, because they would be considered abortifacients.
  
• Lila Rose:Yes, if it’s also designed as an abortifacient, yes.
  
• Sarah Varney:So the IUD, emergency contraception, birth control pills would then be illegal?
  
• Lila Rose:Again, if they’re designed as abortifacients, yes.

Right. Also, I guess the little ladies are so addled and hormonal by their birth control pills that they won’t vote for pussy grabbing cretins like Donald Trump. Gotta fix that.

They’re giving military honors to Ashleigh Babbit and gave her family five million dollars so why not this?

The rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, secured a shocking double victory this year. President Trump granted them clemency for their crimes on his first day back in the White House, and in the months that followed, he allowed his Justice Department to purge many of the federal agents and prosecutors who sought to hold them accountable.

But even though the president has given the rioters their freedom and has taken steps toward satisfying their desire for retribution, they are asking for more. In the past several weeks, the rioters and their lawyers have pushed the Trump administration to pay them restitution for what they believe were unfair prosecutions.

On Thursday, one of the lawyers, Mark McCloskey, said during a public meeting on social media that he had recently met with top officials at the Justice Department and pitched them on a plan to create a special panel that would dole out financial damages to the rioters — much like the arrangement of a special master to award money to the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The panel, which Mr. McCloskey called a “voluntary nonjudicial resolution committee,” would consider rioters’ cases individually, he said, then assign them sums according to harms they had purportedly suffered at the hands of the federal government.

Mr. McCloskey said that he wanted the panel to be overseen by Jeanine Pirro, who runs the federal prosecutors’ office in Washington that took the lead in filing charges against nearly 1,600 rioters who joined in the Capitol attack.

Do not be surprised if they actually do this. I wouldn’t have believed the Air Force would give military honors to a criminal like Babbi, much less give restitution to her family, but here we are.

Guess who?

Remember when the Teamsters endorsed Trump in 2024 and its president appeared at the GOP convention even though Joe Biden had literally saved their pension plan? How about when the UAW president recently endorsed Trump’s tariffs regime despite Biden walking their picket line and the union seemingly understanding the larger stakes in the 2024 election?

Yeah, we can count unions as another institution that’s turned into a bunch of cowards in the face of Trump’s power grab. Eric Loomis wrote about this in the NY Times today. I’ve included a gift link.

This is a most unfortunate Labor Day for labor. The labor movement has taken it on the chin repeatedly in the last several decades, but President Trump is the most ruthlessly antilabor president since before the Great Depression.

If the labor movement does not fight harder than it has since Mr. Trump regained the presidency, its future will be dire.

Mr. Trump and his administration have unilaterally stripped collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers. At the Department of Veterans Affairs alone, 400,000 workers, or 2.8 percent of America’s unionized workers, have lost their collective bargaining rights because of an executive order that will eventually affect more than one million federal workers. Mr. Trump ushered in Labor Day weekend on Thursday by continuing his assault of federal unions, adding the Patent Office, NASA and the National Weather Service to his list of targeted agencies.

Despite this assault on their very existence, we have barely heard a peep from unions. Where is organized labor in the public fight to maintain union jobs, stop the stripping of the safety net and lead the fight for democracy? Other than some statements and angry speeches, the movement has been muted.

If the labor movement wants to fight for its survival, it must return to mass mobilization tactics, reminding Americans that their rights come through working together — not through supporting a president who talks about helping American workers while slashing worker safety regulations, supporting tariffs that raise the cost of consumer goods and stripping workers of their legal rights to contracts.

All this is happening at a time when Americans’ approval of unions is the highest it has been since the mid-1960s.

It’s the vibe, baby, the vibe. Like so many Americans a whole lot of union members are worried about eggs and transgender girls in sports and nothing else matters.

Seriously, is you read the whole piece the litany of destruction of union jobs just in these first few months of Trump’s reign is staggering. And unions are not exactly leading the resistance, which they should be.

Why aren’t they? Well, I have to guess it’s the same reason all the institutions are failing. They either don’t see the danger, don’t think they have any power, or really do think Trump will be good for them.

As Loomis says, there has never been a more important role for unions than now:

To survive the Trump onslaught, organized labor must rise to the moment. First, it must go outside of union protocol by calling out labor leaders such as Mr. O’Brien. Until unionists take back the narrative of resistance, many in the larger liberal coalition will think that unions are much more supportive of Mr. Trump than they actually are.

Second, unions must get their own members engaged in issues that interact with politics. That includes much more political education, not just around candidates at election time but also on issues that matter now. For decades, many unions have shied away from discussing divisive issues (such as immigration) with their members. For some, this is a realistic response to the fact that unions means less than other political beliefs to many members. But when unions talk to their members about politics only at election time, it leads to a disconnect between rhetoric and action that causes many members to tune out.

Third, unions must step into the vacuum that millions of Americans feel when it comes to their economic lives. The hopelessness many people feel on economic issues — like the shuttering of factories and inflation — has led to working-class support for Mr. Trump. But it has also led to a surge in support for unions in this country. Most people believe the system is broken and are looking for someone to fix it. Unions can provide that leadership.

Let’s hope they step up before it’s too late.

If the ruling that came down from the appeals court last week holds, he’ll have to give that $115 billion back.

Also:

Today alone, the White House has claimed:
-$8 trillion in new tariff revenue.
-$4 trillion in net deficit reduction.
-$5 trillion in new business investment.
-Hundreds of thousands of jobs from these investments.
-Record low gas prices.

Each claim is completely, 100%, made-up. https://t.co/NlwUbz5bIp

— Jessica Riedl 🧀 🇺🇦 (@JessicaBRiedl) September 1, 2025

This is bad:

The navigation system of a plane carrying Ursula von der Leyen was disrupted due to suspected Russian interference, the European Commission said.

A spokesperson said the “GPS jamming” happened while the Commission president was about to arrive in southern Bulgaria on Sunday, but she still landed safely.

They added: “We have received information from the Bulgarian authorities that they suspect that this was due to blatant interference by Russia.”

The Financial Times, citing unnamed officials, reported that von der Leyen’s plane had to land at Plovdiv Airport with the pilots using paper maps.

Trump, who hasn’t spoken to the press or seen close-up since last week at this time, is supposedly golfing in Virginia. (For some unknown reason he stayed in DC for the long weekend which is virtually unprecedented.) He has had nothing to say.

The good news is that Putin has assured him that he just “wants his shit back” as Pete Hegseth memorably said. And that’s just a piece of Europe, not the whole thing. So that’s good.

Meanwhile:

What a gang of mindless amateurs in Washington accomplished in Beijing:

— Philip Gourevitch (@pgourevitch.bsky.social) 2025-09-01T12:09:31.896Z

He really has brought the world together. Against us.

Losers who cheat on their country

Mike Nelson, a retired Army Special Forces officer, writes at The Atlantic about the MAGAish fascination with the Confederacy and The Lost Cause:

Many Americans have ancestors who took up for bad causes. My children are descendants, on their maternal side, of two great-grandfathers who fought in Normandy on D-Day. One landed on Utah Beach. The other was already present as a soldier in the German army. I hope my kids never feel obliged to make excuses for the latter’s cause.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is scratching that itch. He is returning a Confederate memorial sculpture to Arlington National Cemetery.

Hegseth’s move is one of several by the Trump administration to bring Confederate commemorations back. On Thursday, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon is returning a portrait of Robert E. Lee to West Point. The Pentagon has reinstated old base names—in defiance of a law, enacted in 2021 over Donald Trump’s veto, that required their removal—by identifying honorable but previously obscure veterans who share a surname with rebel generals such as Lee and George Pickett. A statue of the Confederate general Albert Pike, pulled down during the 2020 George Floyd protests, is being reinstalled in Washington, D.C., by the National Park Service.

As The Washington Post reported it on August 7:

A Confederate memorial removed from Arlington National Cemetery in 2023 will be reinstalled, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday. The sculpture had been removed as part of a congressionally mandated effort to rid military bases and sites of Confederate names and images.

[…]

“I’m proud to announce that Moses Ezekiel’s beautiful and historic sculpture — often referred to as “The Reconciliation Monument” — will be rightfully be returned to Arlington National Cemetery near his burial site,” Hegseth posted on X, referring to the memorial’s creator. “It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history — we honor it.”

The sculpture is another United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) monument erected to retcon the Civil War “as something other than bloody treason by an entire region of the country to prevent the future I saw at a northern Virginia Waffle House.”

The 32-foot bronze statue commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy was unveiled at a ceremony presided over by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914, almost 50 years after the Civil War ended. Its supporters said it was dedicated in part to promote reconciliation between the North and the South. But critics said the memorial glorified the Southern cause and glossed over slavery, with elements such as a frieze showing an enslaved Black man following his owner and an enslaved woman — described on the cemetery’s website as a “mammy” — holding the baby of a Confederate officer.

As Nelson sees it, the sculpture was removed in 2023 “as part of the Biden administration’s larger effort to remove memorials that glorified the Confederate cause and to rechristen bases whose names lionized traitors to the United States.” Hegseth trivializes the “300,000 members of the military that Hegseth leads … in his efforts to score political points against the left.”

It’s a bizarre obsession lost causes like Hegseth and Trump have with the Confederacy.

“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL,” Hegseth’s boss, President Donald Trump, posted on his Truth Social platform on August 19. Everything “is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.” Yet days earlier, Hegseth declared his intent to celebrate the past by reinstalling a monument to the failure of South’s treasonous effort to dissolve the very union Trump wants lionized. Trump himself ordered Confederate monuments restored back in March.

But perhaps more to the point of the right’s ongoing affair with insurrection is Stuart Stevens’s (“It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump”) brilliant tweet. One hundred sixty years after the retconned “War of Northern Aggression,” what motivates men like Trump and Hegseth to engage in masturbatory fantasies about cheating on their country? And for Trump to pardon nearly 1,600 Jan. 6 rioters for going all the way?

The former Republican strategist explains:

The question of “Why is the administration so keen on the Confederate side” is a companion question to “Why do men go to strip clubs?”

I think we know the answers to both.

* * * * *

Have you fought dicktatorship today?

50501 – Labor Day events
May Day Strong Labor Day Events
No King’s One Million Rising movement
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink – Search on Labor Day events near you
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Let’s talk about articulating principles

A good friend sent along a Friday Daily Kos post by iLuvReading about Gen Z podcaster Luke Beasley’s trip to Ukraine.

In the video below, Beasley, 23, reflects on seeing the best and worst of humanity near the front lines over his two days there. He witnessed what Vladimir Putin and Russian forces are inflicting on the Ukrainian people. The random attacks seem aimed at demoralizing the populous and draining their will to fight. Back in Kiev, Beasley witnessed the aftermath of a drone attack and delivers a Ukrainian version of “Why We Fight.”

Russian propaganda, he suggested to soldiers, claims Ukrainian soldiers don’t know why they’re fighting. Or that this is Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s war. Or Joe Biden’s fault.

Some would laugh and tell him that they are fighting for their freedom and for their country. When Russians occupy towns, they torture, kill and rape people, they told Beasley. “And so we are fighting for our families. We are fighting for their physical safety and their futures.”

And that, Beasley believes, should make Americans hopeful. In the face of pain, death, and relentless onslaught, Ukrainians are still motivated to stand up for principles. 

But more than that, “Many of them said we are fighting for what America stands for. We want to be more like America than Russia.” If only more Americans did.

America is failing their own principles under Donald Trump’s leadership, Beasley observes. “But at our best, it’s exactly right. We should be aligning with principles, the very principles that Ukrainian soldiers and civilians have articulated multiple times throughout this trip.”

Political narrowcasting

Democrats should be aligning with principles too, more than policies and “kitchen table issues,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.

Markos Moulitsas wrote a 2005 Daily Kos post, “The curse of the single issue groups.” The occasion was people insisting that choice was a core principle of the Democratic Party.

No, he argues, not to dismiss defending choice as good policy. He argued that single issue groups had hijacked the party “for their pet causes” instead of for championing universal principles. (I think of sidelining principles to run on a suite of issues as political narrowcasting.)

“So suddenly, Democrats are the party of abortion, of gun control, of spottend owls [sic], of labor, of trial lawyers, etc, etc., et-frickin’-cetera,” Markos complained. “We don’t stand for any ideals, we stand for specific causes. We don’t have a core philosophy, we have a list with boxes to check off.”

Since defeating Jim Crow, embracing equal rights and broadening the franchise, Democrats have had trouble voicing a core philosophy. Or broad principles like a right to privacy or to bodily autonomy, etc., without reducing them to specific policies, issues, or groups of competing marginalized people. As each group fought to gain a voice and greater political equality since the 1960s, Democrats became identified with the times’ loudest voices. Democrats might instead have portrayed each group’s historical struggles and liberation as an expression of deeper principles and values in which the party firmly believes. Say, in equal justice under law and basic fairness. Instead, we’ve made minority allies avatars of principles we fail to mention because we assume those are self-evident.

The behavior is not unlike Democrats passing legislation that lifts all Americans and then not promoting the hell out of what they’ve done so voters actually credit them for it. We incorrectly assume good policies speak for themselves. Donald Trump adds his name to pandemic recovery checks.

Markos wrote 20 years ago:

Problem is, abortion and choice aren’t core principles of the Democratic Party. Rather, things like a Right to Privacy are. And from a Right to Privacy certain things flow — abortion rights, access to contraceptives, opposition to the Patriot Act, and freedom to worship the gods of our own choosing, or none at all.

Another example of a core Democratic principle — equality under the law. And from that principle stem civil rights, gender equity, and gay rights. It’s not that those individual issues aren’t important, of course they are. It’s just that they are just that — individual issues. A party has to stand for something bigger than the sum of its parts.

We’ve forgotten that. Ukrainians under fire have not.

In meetings, I hear our principles acknowledged when people recite the Pledge of Allegiance and someone at the end shouts ALL! But it’s not a principle people identify with the Democratic Party. People see instead a bickering coalition of interest groups jockeying for political product placement. Fail to mention each and every one at every event and be accused of throwing the unmentioned under the bus.

When Black Americans took center stage during the Civil Rights Era, Democrats were perceived as the party of Blacks. Decades later, we were the party of LGBTQ people. Lately, because Democrats include all people in ALL, we are the party whose central focus appears to be trans people. It is something with which our opponents are more than pleased to tag us to “other” us.

Political narrowcasting makes it harder for people who are not [fill in the blank] to identify with Democrats, and easier for many from the dominant culture to back Trump because he centered them in his campaigns. They don’t see the Democratic Party as their advocates or as people who stand for a vision of America that includes them. Because they don’t know what Democrats stand for, just whom we stand with. Or don’t.

That’s contributed to Democrats’ falling poll numbers and independent voter registrations spiking. If we could figure out how to place our principles at the center of painting a beautiful tomorrow, we might pull our beloved country out of the fire.

But then, a lot of the greater “us” in the meantime have rejected American principles  wholesale. So I don’t know anymore.

(h/t BF)

* * * * *

Have you fought dicktatorship today?

50501 – Labor Day events
May Day Strong Labor Day Events
No King’s One Million Rising movement
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink – Search on Labor Day events near you
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense