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Who Didn’t See This Coming?

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 3, 2024

It’s always about control

Amanda Marcotte:

A pair of Texas professors figured out that their female students have sex and, boy, they do not like it. So now the philosophy professor and finance professor are suing for the right to punish their students who, outside of class, have abortions.

“Pregnancy is not a disease, and elective abortions are not ‘health care,'” University of Texas at Austin professor Daniel Bonevac sneers in a federal court filing with professor John Hatfield. Instead, Bonevac writes, because pregnancy is the result of “voluntary and consensual sexual intercourse,” students should not be allowed time off to get abortions. If the students disobey and miss class for abortion care, the filing continues, the professors should be allowed to flunk students. Additionally, Bonevac asserts that he has a right to refuse to employ a teaching assistant who has had an abortion, calling such women “criminals.”

Your hang-ups are showing

The sexual hang-ups of abortion opponents are rarely far from the surface, but even by those low standards, the unjustified male grievance on display in this new Texas lawsuit is a doozy. At issue are federal regulations, called Title IX, first signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1972. They currently bar publicly funded schools from discriminating on the basis of sex or gender. This means that schools cannot penalize students for health care based on sex. As a male student would be granted leave if he had to travel for surgery, so must a female student, the federal statute requires. The two men argue that granting students an excused absence in such cases violates their First Amendment rights.

Even though the plaintiffs suing for the right to flunk female students for abortion include boilerplate arguments in which they feign concern that abortion is “killing,” the legal filing makes it clear that what really outrages Bonevac and Hatfield is that Title IX prevents them from controlling the private lives of students. Along with their anger about abortion, they  grouse about not being allowed to punish students “for being homosexual or transgender.” They also argue they should be able to penalize teaching assistants for “cross-dressing,” by which they appear to mean allowing trans women to wear skirts.

Oh, and they went judge shopping:

Even though Bonevac and Hatfield work in Austin, Texas, they filed their lawsuit 486 miles away in Amarillo, Texas. The reason for this is not mysterious: Donald Trump-appointed judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. The right-wing judge has a long and frankly unhinged history of screeching at top volume about the evils of “sexual revolutionaries.” (Yes, that does sound like a compliment, but he doesn’t mean it as such.) It takes very little to draw Kacsmaryk’s sexualized condemnation. Premarital sex, for instance, makes one a “sexual revolutionary.” Using contraception within marriage also makes one an irredeemable pervert. In his legal writings, Kacsmaryk is very clear that sex is only for procreation within marriage, and anything outside of that should draw legal sanction. He has not weighed in on whether there should be restrictions on what sexual positions are legally permissible within the procreation-only marital sex, but give him time. 

Change is hard, boys. Are you manly enough to handle it?

Daniel Bonevac & John Hatfield

White privilege? Meet white male entitlement. You’re MFEO.

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Sucking Off The Government Teat?

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 3, 2024

When in Babylon….

Government Teat is a piece of digital artwork by Steve Dininno.

“Jesus Is The Answer To All Your Problems,” read the billboard I passed on westbound I-40 on Sunday somewhere between Greensboro and Statesville, North Carolina. Southern Christians especially have a thing for — what is it Donald Trump calls lying? — thruthful hyperbole. Their extravagant promises, their religious puffery, may be well-intended but oversell the product, don’t you think? The larger and louder the claims, even billboard-sized, the more there is a hint that it’s not just you they are trying to convince, but themselves.

A lot of places across the South claim the title “Buckle of the Bible Belt.” Back when Southern Baptists were the political equivalent of Boss Hogg in those towns, a Bible verse that tripped off many tongues came from the book Donald Trump famously referenced like a “walked into a bar” joke: Two Corinthians.

2 Corinthians 6:17 Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you.

Be in the world but not of the world. That was then. This is now (Washington Post):

Billions in taxpayer dollars are being used to pay tuition at religious schools throughout the country, as state voucher programs expand dramatically and the line separating public education and religion fades.

School vouchers can be used at almost any private school, but the vast majority of the money is being directed to religious schools, according to a Washington Post examination of the nation’s largest voucher programs.

Vouchers, government money that covers education costs for families outside the public schools, vary by state but offer up to $16,000 per student per year, and in many casesfully cover the cost of tuition at private schools. In some schools, a large share of the student body is benefiting from a voucher, meaning a significant portion of the school’s funding is coming directly from the government.

There was a time when church entanglement with government was a bad thing. It was a threat evangelicals avoided. Tax exemption was their legal separation between church and state. (Enter “Bob Jones University” in the search bar at the left.) Now government is just another of the world’s Seven Mountains to be coopted, and “come out from among them, and be ye separate” another biblical principle to elide. (Enter Seven Mountains mandate” in the search bar at the left.) The relativism charge “principled” conservatives flung at the left for decades was just a leading example of projection. When in Babylon, eh?

In just five states with expansive programs, more than 700,000 students benefited from vouchers this school year.(Those same states had a total of about 935,000 private school students in 2021, the most recent year for which data are available.) An additional 200,000 were subsidized in the rest of the country, according to tracking by EdChoice, a voucher advocacy group. That suggests a substantial share of about 4.7 million students attending private school nationwide are benefiting from vouchers — a number that is expected to grow.

The programs, popular with conservatives, are rapidly growing in GOP-run states, with a total of 28 states plus D.C. operating some sort of voucher system.Eight states created or expanded voucher programs last year, and this year, Alabama, Georgia and Missouri have approved or expanded voucher-type programs. Some recently enacted plans are just starting to take effect or will be phased in over the next few years.

“There are really two Americas,” Matt Taibbi wrote in Griftopia (2011), For the grifter class, government is “a tool for making money,” while “in everybody-else land, the government is something to be avoided.” America’s churches once inhabited everybody-else land. Now they’ve relocated to Griftopia. (Enter “the Big Enchilada” in the search bar at the left.) Where there’s money to be made, principles, biblical and others, are relative.

And while you’re thinking about how school vouchers are defunding our public schools, don’t forget about tax credit scholarships. Not technically vouchers, they are an even stealthier way for churches and private schools to, conservatives once self-righteously condemned, “suck off the governmnent teat.”

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Question Of The Week

Published by digby on June 2, 2024

He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The story was taken down for one day on twitter and put back up the next day. He’s full of shit like all Trump sycophants. Not to mention the fact that Hunter Biden was not running for president in 2020 or now.

It is interesting that he couldn’t really answer the question, though. Why is this case ok (whether you buy the silly election interference argument or not) while the Trump case is totally unjustified? MAGA voters don’t require logic or consistency or it’s meaningless for them. But if there are any independents out there who really are on the fence about the Trump charges, the hypocrisy among the Trump henchment might make them wonder just a little bit.

The Hunter trial begins this week and it’s a little bit heartbreaking. He’s a screwed up guy who had a drug problem. Who among us doesn’t know someone or have a family member who’s been through something like this?

And unlike Trump he really is being treated differently than anyone else would be treated having been accused of the same crime. This first trial concerns lying on a form to buy a gun in which he said he was not using drugs. Usually such things are only used to try criminals who have used the gun in the course of a crime which, of course, he did not. He’s also facing charges in California for failing to pay taxes which also wouldn’t usually have been tried since he has long since paid them with interest and penalties. Be that as it may, the trials are going forward and I have little doubt that the right wing media is going to give them all the attention they failed to pay to the Trump hush money case, the point being to make Joe Biden break down and start crying on camera.

As for the Mainstream media, here’s how the NY Times headline writers see it:

FFS. I don’t know about you, but I won’t vote for either Donald Trump or Hunter Biden for president.

There Are Some Persuadable Voters

Published by digby on June 2, 2024

Not many, but a few

The New York Times went out into the wild to see if voters care about the fact that the Republicans are voting for a wealthy, white, hugely powerful convicted felon for president. They found that the Maga cult still loves him and the normal people still hate him but there are a few undecided/independent voters who might be swayed:

[O]n the margins, with the remaining undecided voters, having a felon as the Republican Party’s standard-bearer could make the decision to pick Mr. Trump harder, maybe a lot harder.

Oscar Cisneros, 50, who described himself as an independent voter, said that while he supported Mr. Biden in 2020, he had been put off more recently by the president’s age and apparent slip-ups, and that he was undecided about whom to vote for in the fall. But now, he said, Mr. Trump had added to his baggage.

“It gives you a different point of view: How can you be a president if you’re being found guilty of hush money?” asked Mr. Cisneros, who works for the City of Phoenix. “OK, dude, you’re guilty. I don’t know if I want you up there.”

The conviction could only help shore up Mr. Biden’s left flank, which had been wavering amid criticism over his handling of Israel’s war in Gaza, launched after the deadly Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, and other progressive priorities.

Camille Williams, 31, and Alison Thurston, 33, friends in Philadelphia, both freely admitted that they were not big fans of Mr. Biden, but Mr. Trump’s conviction had, for them, underscored just how unfit the former president was to return to the White House.

“I do feel like it shows that it is important for us to vote, the fact that our other option is a felon,” Ms. Thurston said, adding that if Trump’s federal indictment in a separate criminal case — in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election — was brought to trial, it “would push me even more.”

[…]

But undecided voters are out there. In New York Times/Siena College battleground polls in October, about 7 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters said they would vote for Mr. Biden if Mr. Trump were found guilty in an unspecified criminal trial.

More recently, a Marquette Law School poll taken during the hush-money trial found that a modest lead for Mr. Trump among registered voters nationwide became a four-point lead for Mr. Biden if Mr. Trump were found guilty.

Those questions were asked when a conviction remained a hypothetical, and voters might react differently now that it is a reality. But either way voters must come to terms with the choice between an unpopular incumbent and the country’s first former president to be convicted of a crime. And it is still early, with more legal shoes to drop for Mr. Trump.

This is especially interesting:

A number of young Trump supporters who were interviewed scoffed at the conviction, calling the entire trial a charade. They then admitted that they probably would not vote in November.

Black voters, especially Black men, have slipped away from Mr. Biden over the last four years, but 27 percent of Black voters who backed Mr. Trump told pollsters from The New York Times and Siena College before the verdict that a conviction would flip them to Mr. Biden, compared with just 5 percent of white respondents who said that.

Daryl Jones, 49, who is Black, made it clear that he remained a fan of Mr. Trump’s as he cut hair at the busy Universal Barber Shop in Des Moines on Thursday evening. Yet when it came to the former president’s convictions, Mr. Jones was resolute.

“Well, you do the crime, you’ve got to do the time,” he said. “So, at the same time, if he’s wrong, he’s wrong. And he was wrong.”

Kourtney Thomas, 31, a coordinator at a Racine homeless shelter, was conflicted. In a lengthy conversation in the city’s downtown, she was visibly torn. She favors abortion rights, she said, and did not like how Mr. Trump had approached L.G.B.T.Q. issues in his term in office. She liked the former president’s much tougher policies at the border, however, an issue she said the current president had badly fumbled.

As the conversation swung back to Mr. Trump’s convictions, Ms. Thomas showed she understood chapter and verse what the former president had been convicted of, and she expressed anger at the way that the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., Fani T. Willis, a Black woman like her, had been treated by Mr. Trump and his allies as she pursued her efforts to prosecute the former president for subverting the 2020 election. She is leaning toward Mr. Biden.

“No one is above the law,” Ms. Thomas concluded. “He should go to jail.

This is just anecdotal, of course. Who knows if it will add up to anything? And time may very well make this seem like the proverbial old news and nobody will care anymore. If Democrats are smart they will find a way to fold this into the broader message about abuse of power, hostility to democracy, the Big Lie, fraud, sexual assault etc. The list is long and they should not shrink from laying it out.

Is Everyone Perfectly Comfortable With This?

Published by digby on June 2, 2024

There must be some Republicans left out there who think this is going too far. (Right? ) I can’t imagine my father (who I’m sure would have loved Trump) not wincing at this. It’s just not how right wingers of a certain age and experience saw the world. (Not that they didn’t think the hippies and the “minorities” weren’t a huge problem but they never thought that Russia and China weren’t worse.)

On the other hand, maybe they’ve been so indoctrinated and brainwashed that they no longer have any patriotism left at all.

I assume that most of you don’t watch Fox and probably don’t want to watch a whole interview with Dear Leader in any case. (If you do, you can see it on Youtube here and here.) The torrent of lies is unbelievable.

There are a few other highlights worth watching. He seems very stressed to me and looks drawn. I guess that’s understandable. He’s under a lot of stress. But he’s no Ironman, that’s for sure.

And you may notice that for some reason there are a lot of jump cuts and edits. Hmmm.

Maybe he shouldn’t have fucked a porn star and a playmate.

Permission Structure

Published by digby on June 2, 2024

A sports talk guy offers some doubters a way out by making it safe to say that the world isn’t coming to an end under Biden:

Trump supporters have echoed [Trump’s] grievances about the trial being unfair, causing Colin Cowherd to push back on the Republican nominee continuously attempting to sell the public on the world being out to get him.

“He’s trying to sell me an America that doesn’t exist,” Cowherd said on his latest podcast episode for The Volume. “I don’t see crime, I’m not stumbling over homeless people. I see happy people. Dodger Stadium is full, leads Major League Baseball in attendance. Laker games are full. NFL games are full. People have money in their pocket. LAX is packed, I just saw record airline revenue over the weekend. I’m constantly being sold an America by Donald Trump of ‘crime rates are skyrocketing.’ No, they’re actually not. Starting in 2023 they have plummeted coast to coast…you can’t keep selling me on how bad the country I live in is, because it’s not bad for me and my friends.”

Cowherd proceeded to label Trump a “con-artist,” noting it’s never a good look when a person who surrounds themselves with convicted felons is found guilty of a crime.

“Donald Trump is now a felon,” Cowherd said. “His campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his National Security Adviser, his Trade Advisor, his Foreign Policy Adviser, his campaign fixer and his company CFO. They’re all felons. Judged by the company you keep. It’s a cabal of convicts.”

“If everybody in your social circle is a felon, I don’t think it’s rigged,” Cowherd continued. “I don’t think the world’s against you. And to get people to agree on anything, 34 counts? 0 for 34? That’s a batting slump even the New York Mets could be impressed with. O for 34. When you’re constantly trying to sell me on an America that I don’t see…Trump’s entire gameplan is ‘The country is in a free fall.’ Maybe in the Trump-centric neighborhoods it is.”

That’s a significant flip for Cowherd, who less than two years ago predicted a “red wave” before the 2022 midterm elections, writing, “Don’t mess with people’s kids.” But in the ensuing months and years after the red wave that wasn’t, Cowherd appears to like what he’s seeing from America, particularly in the blue cities where he spends most of his time, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Cowherd pushed back on the notion that he’s out of touch as a national sports host and business owner of a $100 million company by declaring he has friends and family in diverse financial situations, living in various parts of Los Angeles.

“Stop trying to sell me on ‘everything’s rigged, the country’s falling into the sea, the economy’s terrible,’

Cowherd added. “The America I live in is imperfect. But compared to the rest of the world, I think we’re doing okay.”

This is meaningful. Nobody likes inflation. But compared to the rest of the world we’re doing pretty well. The obvious examples of a country generally doing well economically are all around us. If people like this start noticing and saying so, it may make a few other people notice as well — and realize they are getting tired of all the pessimism and negativity.

He Didn’t Say “Lock Her Up?”

Published by digby on June 2, 2024

He mostly just stood there nodding and smugly smiling when they chanted (as they did at Every Single Rally since 2016) but he slipped from time to time because he couldn’t help it.

I always wondered if that would ever blow back on him. He should be confronted with it in every single interview. Even the MAGAs might be a little embarrassed.

How about the future?

Glenn Beck: “Do you regret not ‘locking her up.’ And if you’re president again, will you lock people up?”

Donald Trump: “The answer is you have no choice, because they’re doing it to us.” — Aug. 29, 2023

Context: Trump appeared on Beck’s show amid his mounting legal troubles, with Beck harkening back to the informal slogan of the 2016 Trump campaign, “Lock Her Up!,” referring to then-rival Hillary Clinton. Trump claimed he was being victimized and said of his political and legal antagonists “these are sick people; these are evil people.”

Red sashes and red ties

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 2, 2024

An “imprecise analogy”?

Republicans from the Red Tie Brigade appeared at the Trump trial in New York in May.

“Mad Carolinians,” Samuel Wiley Crawford, 31, called the populace of antibellum Charleston, South Carolina in a letter to his brother after Abraham Lincoln’s election. Even the children were caught up in secessionist fervor, he wrote, and perhaps the women more so than the men, Erik Larson recounts in “The Demon of Unrest.”

Larson sees parallels in the events of January 6, 2021:

Planters who had been wearing ordinary clothing one day turned up the next in elaborate uniforms, red sashes glaring—their “soldier’s toggery,” as Mary [Boykin Chesnut] put it. With so much tension in the city, she wrote, the atmosphere was “phosphorescent.” The streets were full of soldiers in uniform marching and singing; at night she heard the heavy rumble of ammunition wagons moving over cobbled streets—no one could sleep. 

Ken Silverstein at The New Republic cites another passage unearthed by Larson in his book “In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin.” A diplomatic cable sent from Berlin to the State Department in June 1933 described the atmosphere in the German city under the recently installed Nazi regime:

“Wherever one goes in Germany one sees people drilling, from children of five and six on, up to those well into middle age. A psychology is being developed that the whole world is against Germany and that it lies defenseless before the world.”

“With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere. Others are exalted and in a frame of mind that knows no reason. The majority are woefully ignorant and unprepared for the tasks which they have to carry through every day. Those men in the party and in responsible positions who are really worth-while, and there are quite a number of these, are powerless because they have to follow the orders of superiors who are suffering from the abnormal psychology prevailing in the country.”

Silverstein recalled the dispatch in the context of the atmosphere in “excerpts from a private WhatsApp group chat established last December” by Erik Prince of Blackwater fame, called Off Leash. “Not all of the group’s members are conspiracy theorists,” Silverstein offers. The more serious members mean “the group can’t be dismissed as merely a collection of harmless cranks.” But the “Bomb the hell out of them” character of some discussions on international relations gives one pause. Plus, the rah-rah for the return of Donald Trump to the White House and the vanquishing of his (and their) enemies.

“It’s Trump or Revolution!” insisted one member. “You mean Trump AND Revolution,” wrote another, a right-leaning Canadian businessman.

With the Democratic Party captured by Islamic terrorists, Marxists, globalists, and other foreign and domestic evildoers, the U.S. was “being destroyed from within,” warned [a former Republican House staffer], whose fears were shared by many among the Off Leash crew.

Silverstein cautions:

Comparing the contemporary United States to Nazi Germany is an admittedly imprecise analogy. Nevertheless, it’s impossible not to be alarmed by the crypto-fascist, off the leash views expressed by Trump’s allies in the group chat about exterminating their foreign and domestic enemies and needing to “find the will to levy the toll.” However imprecise the comparison, as a model political capital, Berlin 1933 is far more compatible with the worldview of Off Leash participants than Washington 2024, and in the event they and like-minded associates gain power in the U.S. or elsewhere, they’ll be pushing backward in that general direction.

And if Nazi Germany is an imprecise analogy, perhaps the domestic one Larson sees in the pre-Civil War South in the aftermath of January 6. Red sashes then. Red ties now.

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And You Call Yourselves Americans?

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 2, 2024

Just asking questions

Fort Moultrie — Sullivan’s Island (SC) 2012. Photo by Ron Cogswell via Flickr (CC BY 2.0 DEED).

Are you a “conservative” who supports a multiply convicted felon for president, for leader of the free world?

Are you a “believer” who talks big about family values but votes for an amoral, lying, cheating, adulterous huckster?

Are you a “law and order” voter who excuses people convicted of assaulting police and destroying government property during the sacking of the U.S. Capitol as political prisoners?

Are you a “freedom-lover” who calls your neighbors communists while slavishly following a fascistic, wannabe dictator who threatens to execute opponents?

Yeah, thought so.

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