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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Bright Light Of Goodness

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 30, 2024

Sunlight to a vampire

Formerly Twitter observed that there are more images and video of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce hugging and kissing after Sunday’s AFC Championship Game than of the JFK assassination. It’s been nagging at me in a good way.

David Letterman called it “a lovely thing.” He calls Swift “a glowing, bright light of goodness in the world,” and sorely needed.

Fans began calculating travel time, and whether Swift will be able to fly back from her Tokyo show in time to make the Super Bowl. Others noted that during the celebration on the field that Swift stepped aside so Travis Kelce could share a moment alone with his brother Jason. Swift shared warm hugs with Travis’ mother and father and sister. It’s an entire glowing, bright light of family values goodness.

Naturally, the right web is seething and losing what’s left of its mind.

The right’s lunatic fringe is floating insane consipracy theories about the left using Swift to rig the Super Bowl, and Swift planning to endorse Joe Biden at halftime, etc. The entire relationship is fabricated for ratings and political advantage, dontcha know?

User Andrew Nadeau snarked, “I love the idea that liberals conspired to get Taylor Swift to date Travis Kelce and then rigged the playoffs because this somehow abstractly helps Biden. That’s where we shine. We can’t get free healthcare but perfectly execute a Riddler-esque conspiracy to ruin a football game.”

The right’s freakout is about more than Kelce being vaccinated against Covid. It’s about this:

https://x.com/Victorshi2020/status/1752023330096370121?s=20

They’re scared. They should be.

But here’s the thing. Let’s go back to what Anat Shenker-Osorio said last week:

The thing is, people need to see, “Oh, that’s what my kind of a person thinks.” Humans are social creatures. We’re tribal. We want to find cues in our environment that tell us what our category subscribes to.

The left needs (and habitually fails to adopt) powerful symbols to indicate belonging and to provide those on the fence with social proof of what “people like me” think. “The left needs hats,” Anand Giridharadas suggests, a symbol that makes fence-sitters say, “I’ll have what she’s having.”

Shenker-Osorio writes:

As we’ve touched on previously, social proof  — where people think the thing they think people like them think — is real. It’s one of the most persuasive tools in our arsenal. It’s the reason why the MAGA hat is so important and effective, and, conversely, why the green bandana has been so effective in Argentina and across Latin America. We used it in the abortion rights campaign in Argentina, and we used it in Mexico, we used it in Colombia.

But the Swift-Kelce relationship is more than just a symbol without a hat. The contrast between their “bright light of goodness” and the ugliness of what Trump’s MAGA movement represents to the U.S. and to the world could not be more stark. The right sees it plainly and recoils. It makes them seethe. It’s sunlight to a vampire. Swift’s good-girl image and her “lovely thing” relationship has (as I use too often) cut the right over the eye. Go out and work the eye.

Now to find a symbol for it that lefties will actually adopt and share.

Update from Brian Beutler:

There are many things to say about this brewing GOP conspiracy theory, but the most important one is a warning—of the rot that will ultimately consume any party that organizes itself around scheming and rat fucking and propaganda to manipulate voters, in lieu of trying to be decent and likable.

Taylor And Travis Have Turned Republican Minds To Mush

Published by digby on January 29, 2024

It’s all a conspiracy! They are Soros funded, deep state,pizza parlor pedophiles!

As it happens they might want to keep their mouths shut:

Taylor Swift could heavily influence the way that Americans vote in the presidential election – with a fifth of voters saying they’re ‘likely’ to back a candidate she endorses.

The popstar’s stratospheric influence on popular culture may sway the race to the White House, especially as new Gen Z voters join the electorate this year. 

In a poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies for Newsweek, 18 percent of voters say they’re ‘more likely’ or ‘significantly more likely’ to vote for a candidate endorsed by Taylor Swift.

Her sway was more visible with voters under the age of 35. 

This election will see 8 million new voters in the US electorate – and a total of 41 million Gen Z voters, many of whom are influenced by celebrities and social media.

[…]

Trump has weighed in on the romance of Taylor and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, and made his own predictions of the tryst.

‘I wish the best for both of them. I hope they enjoy their life, maybe together, maybe not — most likely not,’ Trump said in a candid response during an interview with the Daily Caller.

I don’t know if she’s planing to endorse Biden but they will certainly be happy if she does:

Biden aides are drafting wish lists of potential surrogates, including elected officials, social media influencers and the endorsement of their wildest dreams: the global superstar Taylor Swift…

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a top Biden surrogate, all but begged Ms. Swift to become more involved in Mr. Biden’s campaign when he spoke to reporters after a Republican primary debate in September.

“Taylor Swift stands tall and unique,” he said. “What she was able to accomplish just in getting young people activated to consider that they have a voice and that they should have a choice in the next election, I think, is profoundly powerful.”

The chatter around Ms. Swift and the potential of reaching her 279 million Instagram followers reached such intensity that the Biden team urged applicants in a job posting for a social media position not to describe their Taylor Swift strategy — the campaign had enough suggestions already. One idea that has been tossed around, a bit in jest: sending the president to a stop on Ms. Swift’s Eras Tour.

Couldn’t hurt. Seriously.

I think Taylor’s political clout is overstated in that poll but even a fraction of that could be meaningful. With the right going after her the way they are she might feel compelled to get a lot more involved than they want her to.

I mean…

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. They are going batshit crazy over these two celebrities. They’re terrified.

I’ll just leave this one here without comment:

They Don’t Work And We Love Them!

Published by digby on January 29, 2024

This is what happens when you have a demagogue who has the ability to convince half the country that up is down and black is white. They get rewarded over and over again for fucking everything up.

And he wants to do it again. I mentioned yesterday that Trump’s big economic agenda item is: more Chinese tariffs, big ones. He has no reason other than that they are very bad people and they are laughing at us. So, more tariffs. That’s all he knows.

This Must Be Bad News For Biden, Right?

Published by digby on January 29, 2024

Trump says America is failing and the economy is crashing. He couldn’t be more wrong:

The European economy, hobbled by unfamiliar weakness in Germany, is barely growing. China is struggling to recapture its sizzle. And Japan continues to disappoint.

But in the United States, it’s a different story. Here, despite lingering consumer angst over inflation, the surprisingly strong economy is outperforming all of its major trading partners.

Since 2020, the United States has powered through a once-in-a-century pandemic, the highest inflation in 40 years and fallout from two foreign wars. Now, after posting faster annual growth last year than in 2022, the U.S. economy is quashing fears of a recession while offering lessons for future crisis-fighting.

“The U.S. has really come out of this into a place of strength and is moving forward like covid never happened,” said Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist who now runs an eponymous consulting firm. “We earned this; it wasn’t just a fluke.”

On Friday, President Biden hailed fresh government data showing that annual inflation over the second half of 2023 fell back to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target. Coupled with Thursday’s news that the economy grew by 3.1 percent over the past 12 months, the Commerce Department report showed that the United States appears to have achieved an economic soft landing.

The recovery from the pandemic challenged long-standing economic beliefs, such as the idea of an inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation. (As one rose, the other was expected to fall.) Expressed in what economists call the Phillips curve, this nostrum proved nearly useless in explaining the economy’s recent behavior.

Washington’s success in reviving the economy also suggests a new approach to future downturns, one that relies more on the government’s power of the purse and less on the Federal Reserve’s control of the cost of credit.

“Putting money in people’s hands vs. moving around interest rates, which is monetary policy, fiscal policy is going to be stronger,” Sahm said. “We cannot go into the next crisis being, like, ‘Oh, the Fed’s got this.’”

Hello, I’d like you to meet my friend John Maynard Keynes, he’d like to have a word….

Consumers are spending eagerly, which is turbo charging the economy. Yes, everyone’s whining constantly about how terrible the economy is but they sure are enjoying their new cars and nice vacations. When asked they admit that their own financial situation is great it’s just everyone else’s that’s bad. Where do you think they got that idea?

The size of the economy, adjusted for inflation, regained its pre-pandemic peak in early 2021. Through the end of September, it was more than 7 percent larger than before the pandemic. That was more than twice Japan’s gain and far better than Germany’s anemic 0.3 percent increase, according to British Parliament data.

For most Americans, the growth paid off in the form of higher wages. Over the four years through September, the most recent comparison available, U.S. wages — after inflation — grew 2.8 percent.

“The U.S. has seen a particularly strong GDP recovery, and inflation has cooled sooner and more quickly than in other large, advanced economies. And the increase in real wages is unique to our country’s recovery,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said in a Chicago speech last week.

That should count for something, don’t you think? Or are we so far gone that we’re going to reward Orange Julius Caesar and his henchmen?

Trump Needs The Border To Be Chaos

Published by digby on January 29, 2024

So he can say “I alone can fix it.”

The Republicans have a problem. They had hoped to rope in Independents and GOP moderates by insisting that the economy is so bad that America simply must elect a Republican to fix it. it’s worked in the past at times but the reality is that Democrats tend to fix the economy after Republicans break it and in this case it’s not looking like it’s going to be a winning electoral issue for them;. So they’re banking on the border, one of their perennial scaremongering tactics to get them over the line this time.

Trump is saying it out loud:

This bill is actually a very Republican friendly bill without any concessions to the Democrats which will make it a no-go among many of them. And we know they want the issue for the election. But as Greg Sargent points out, there is more to it than that:

I think it’s no accident that Trump and MAGA are trying to sink this deal even as Trump and Miller are loudly advertising plans for an extraordinarily cruel and draconian second-term crackdown. This includes the mass removals of millions of undocumented immigrants settled here, commencing on Day One; and dramatically scaled up “camps” to detain enormous amounts of asylum-seekers, who would be subject to appalling new limits that would go farther than the GOP bill does. Trump is openly flaunting this agenda’s white nationalist aspirations.

The spectacle of border disorder along with Congress doing nothing in response is the essential combination that Trump, Miller, and MAGA Republicans need. Images of serious destabilization being met with parliamentary sclerosis might create the opening for them to persuade swing voters—especially those who aren’t ideologically opposed to immigration—to accept maximal ethnonationalist savagery, packaged as “border security,” as the only “solution” that will “work.”

The last thing you want is for those swing voters to see that you don’t need to open up concentration camps to get the border under control or that Biden is able to pass bipartisan legislation. That would be bad. So they absolutely need to show the congress as totally impotent to solve the problem so they can sell his strongman act as the only answer. It’s diabolical.

Nikki And The Donors

Published by digby on January 29, 2024

Nikki Haley may not have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the Republican nomination but she’s decided she’s not going to go quietly. She’s not only needling Trump constantly about his mental fitness, she’s taken on the RNC for their servile move to prematurely declare Trump the “presumptive nominee.” In her town halls in South Carolina she’s become downright feisty:

I suspect it’s the laughing at him that bothers him the most although I doubt it’s the first time a woman has done so.

You have to wonder what might have been if Haley and the others had gone after Trump this way from the beginning. I always assumed he would win the nomination but they didn’t have to make it so easy for him. Who knows, if they had jumped on him hard in those days after the 2022 loss when many in the party were saying they were getting tired of losing and blaming his disastrous endorsements, maybe one of them could have made a real run for it.

In the end, trying so hard not to alienate him and his followers didn’t work anyway. But better late than never and and I have to admit that I find it fascinating to watch yet another rising star in the GOP self-immolate on the alter of Donald Trump’s MAGA party.

I don’t expect Haley to pull a Liz Cheney. She’s really not that bothered by the authoritarian turn of the Republican Party. She just wants to be president and would be happy to follow most of the MAGA agenda just with a little less rhetorical unpleasantness. I’d guess you wouldn’t see her telling Republican governors to defy the federal government as Trump just did but she would almost certainly enact the same draconian immigration policies.

Her bellicose foreign policy sounds different but in the end, she and Trump would end up in the same place. Trump would be manipulated into it because he’s too ignorant of the issues to know which end is up and she would get there because she’s a full-fledged right wing hawk. She wouldn’t make a fool of herself on the world stage with Trump’s dramatic flair but she seems to see herself as the second coming of Margaret Thatcher so you could certainly expect fireworks.

Her domestic agenda would almost certainly be the same and because she’s not crude and boorish about it she’d probably succeed in weakening the opposition by dividing the Democratic party. She won’t succeed in cutting Social Security and medicare as she obviously longs to do but benefactors would be pleased that she had it back on the agenda and precluded any talk of expanding benefits.

Nikki Haley is a member of the Republican Party and it is the MAGA party now, a far right wing, populist, authoritarian, Christian nationalist party. She isn’t bucking that trend in any substantial way so if she blows up her political future by opposing Donald Trump it will only be because she’s insulted their Dear Leader, an unpardonable sin, not because she opposes what he stands for.

Her benefactors in the Koch Network are just like her, which is undoubtedly why they chose to back her. They were of the libertarian bent, all about corporate greed, low taxes, exploitation of labor, deregulation, all of which has been achieved through manipulation of voters through culture war issues, primarily racism and grievance over status. She is on board with all of that. They don’t like Trump because he makes the right look bad and ultimately weakens them, not because they care much about the specifics of his agenda, such as it is. The question is if he can win.

CNN reported that the Koch Network’s Americans for Prosperity Action told their top donors over the weekend that backing Haley was the right decision because she is the last candidate standing against Trump which, considering the obvious hand writing on the wall, is hardly the validation they might want it to be. But they have a back up plan: flip the Senate which they see as vital with a Trump nomination in order to maintain their influence. According to Puck, the network’s internal polling shows that “Trump is a disaster at the top of the ticket, and so he either must be defeated in the primary, or they need to make a major down-ballot investment to prevent a Democratic sweep.”

They aren’t the only ones. This week another groups of major Republican donors associated with American Opportunity Alliance, which includes billionaires Paul Singer, Ken Griffin, the Ricketts family and others will be meeting with representatives of the Haley and Trump campaigns to hear their pitches. Puck reports that while this group has historically been anti-Trump they are accommodating themselves to the inevitability of his nomination. Some were at pains to mention that “Trump delivered for the Wall Street community. ‘It was kind of fun when he won,’ one said.” Yeah. Fun.

Haley and Trump, meanwhile, are chasing these big money donors all over the country. Trump believes they’ll all come to kiss the ring before long, begging for his dispensation and he’s probably right. He’s holding a huge fundraiser at Mar-a-lago next month which features an exclusive dinner for those who want to contribute more than the $100,000 limit.

Haley has at least one big silicon valley supporter, a bitcoin guy named  Tim Draper, who even wrote a Haley campaign song. (Please listen to it. You won’t regret it.) Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ good buddy Harlan Crow is a big supporter of No Labels, the group potentially running a third party ticket but his wife is a Haley fan who is holding fundraisers with other rich billionaire wives.

What this all shows is that these people have way too much money. They are cavalierly throwing millions away on Haley’s doomed campaign and Donald Trump, the self described billionaire who has an army of marks who are happy to send the self-described billionaire half their social security checks whenever he asks. It’s really nothing more than a game to them. These mega-donors are just having “fun” while the country burns.

Salon

“So I don’t want women to vote …”

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 29, 2024

Yeah, it’s a cult

https://x.com/piper4missouri/status/1751974737637433746?s=20

Keeping up with five social media accounts after Musk bought Twitter is a pain. It’s worse (for those of a certain age) than juggling VHS and Betamax tapes until the market sorts out which format becomes the popular default. Plus, WordPress does not cleanly allow pasting in video from Mastodon, Threads or Blue Sky. So for now, I’m still following “X” even if I’m not supplying content for Musk’s right-wing platform. Ironically, there is still content there that pushes back against white nationalism.

For your amusement then, here are three posts that appeared in this order, one after the other, in my feed this morning. Starting with this guy below: “Fact, we would not have one Democrat president in the last 50 years if women couldn’t vote. So I don’t want women to vote …”

https://twitter.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1751661128206225886?s=20

First Trump. Now His Party.

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 29, 2024

As Putin smiles

As a child of the 1960s, I hate sounding like a Cold Warrior here, but c’mon.

Moscow is gleeful. As gleeful as Stephen Miller pondering loading immigrants onto rail cars. As gleeful as a cheering MAGA rally at the idea of police shooting looters and brown-skinned migrants. Russian operatives had to get their hand dirty to help Donald Trump win election in 2016. Since then, MAGA Republicans have internalized Vladimir Putin’s thirst for the kind of chaos and insurrection that might tear apart the U.S.

https://x.com/adnashmyash/status/1751647410290311325?s=20

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is pleased to toss more fuel on the fire. The Supreme Court vacated an appeals court decision that allowed Texas to deny federal officials from accessing a portion of the Texas border with Mexico. In response, writes Jonathan Last:

… the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, responded that the Supreme Court’s order “allows Biden to continue his illegal effort to aid the foreign invasion of America.” Which is a perfectly normal statement for an officer of the court to make, I guess?

It’s not clear what Texas Republicans think they are doing. Are they trying to trigger the libs? Or hurt Biden? Or help Trump? Whatever the case, what they are actually doing is putting in motion the most serious conflict between federal and state power since the integration standoff at Little Rock in 1954.

And Texas Republicans seem to think that such a constitutional crisis would be a good thing.

America’s foreign adversaries do as well.

https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1751784927929024705?s=20

And Republican social media is right there with them.

https://www.threads.net/@seth.abramson/post/C2q7O7lg23l

The post above from the Republican National Committee provoked this response from Seth Abramson:

Crazy that I even need to say this, but not a *scintilla*—not an iota, not a morsel, not a soupçon, not a scrap, not a particle, not a whit, not a pixel, not a bit—of the Trump-Russia collusion scandal has been debunked or proven a hoax, and in fact everything ever written about it in major media, New York Times-bestselling books like the Proof Trilogy and US intelligence reports has turned out to be correct. Donald Trump and his inner circle colluded with Russia in almost every way imaginable.

Now collusion is unnecessary. Like Trump lackeys knowing to do what Donald wants without his giving a direct order, the GOP is doing what the Russians want without needing any more reinforcement than Moscow cheering them on.

Yes, They Are Going After Women For Miscarrying

Published by digby on January 28, 2024

CBS reports:

When Brittany Watts woke up at her Warren, Ohio, home on Sept. 22, 2023, she knew she was miscarrying. 

Her 22-week-old fetus had been declared nonviable by doctors several days prior. Bleeding and in pain, she spent a total of 19 hours in the hospital over a span of two days, begging to be induced.

But an ethics group at Mercy Health – St. Joseph Warren Hospital had concerns about Ohio’s abortion laws and how they applied to Watts’ case, ultimately resulting in hours of delayed care. 

Watts, frustrated with the lengthy wait times, said she left the hospital both days against medical advice. She said she miscarried alone in her own bathroom.

When Watts returned to Mercy Health for medical care following the miscarriage she says a nurse rubbed her back and told her everything would be okay before calling the police at the direction of the hospital’s risk management team and asking them to go to her home to find the fetus.

As Watts recovered in her hospital bed, officers from the Warren City Police Department searched her home. They eventually found the fetus, lodged in the traps of the toilet. 

Watts was charged with abuse of a corpse – a felony charge that was ultimately dismissed earlier this month after an Ohio grand jury declined to indict her.

CBS News reviewed more than 600 pages of medical records as well as 911 transcripts and police records to understand what happened, and why Watts believes doctors, police and the state of Ohio failed her.

“I don’t want any other woman to go through what I had to go through,” Watts told CBS News in an exclusive interview.

Watts is a 34 year old medical receptionist who started leaking fluid 21 weeks into her pregnancy and it was determined that the fetus was not viable. Over the next four days she was tortured by the medical profession in her hometown because they couldn’t decide if they could induce her pregnancy to expel the non-viable fetus. It got worse and worse:

Watts arrived at Mercy Health – St. Joseph Warren Hospital at 8:28 a.m. local time. At 12:57 p.m., according to records, her doctor had requested an “inpatient consult to ethics.”

Records show that around the same time, a different doctor at the hospital examined Watts, and confirmed she had an abruption and premature rupture of membrane. Her white blood cell count was more than twice what it had been in the past, doctors said, and she needed immediate treatment before she found herself “on death’s door.”

“Because of this, mom is at great risk if she completely abruption in terms of hemorrhaging and dying. It does not make sense to me to wait till mom has bleeding to death before we deliver a nonviable pregnancy despite the fact that there is a heartbeat,” the doctor wrote.

He continued, “I feel we would be endangering the mother by waiting for hemorrhage and/or sepsis or her to stop to the fetal heartbeat.”

According to medical documents, staff at Mercy Health – St. Joseph Warren Hospital had also become concerned about Watts’ use of the phrase “abortion.” 

A note from the clinical ethics committee consultation, issued around 3:30 p.m. local time, reads in part, “Extensive conversation with [REDACTED] re: staff concerns about Brittany’s verbalization to staff that she wishes to terminate the pregnancy and continues to mention she feels strongly that she is getting or consenting to an abortion. To clarify, ethics supports induction of this patient if it is the professional judgment of the physicians that Brittany is at high risk of bleeding and or serious infection that could lead to death. To be clear with Brittany, if induction occurs, there should be a well documented conversation with her (informed consent) that the procedure is only to prevent harm to her, and is not intended to terminate a potentially viable pregnancy.”

Ohio law bans abortions after 22 weeks, with exceptions for life-saving care. Watts, according to records, was 21 weeks and six days pregnant.

They took forever and didn’t tell her what was going on so Watts decided to go home and wait it out as is her right as a human being.

On Sept. 22, just before 6 a.m. local time, Watts said she felt something happening.

“I get up, and I go to the bathroom. I sit down on the toilet and I’m just, I’m doubled over. And then that’s when I hear ‘splash.'”

Watts looked down, and saw the toilet was filled to the brim with blood and tissue. She immediately began cleaning herself up – using disinfecting wipes and her shower to wash off the blood.

“I tried to make an appearance of the bathroom being clean. I grabbed a plunger because the toilet was kind of to the top,” she said. “I grabbed a bucket and I just tried to scoop out water and tissue and all the matter. And then I take the bucket outside and I dump the bucket.”

“All while thinking, ‘Wow, did that really just happen?’ in my mind. I’m like, ‘No, this is a dream. I’m dreaming.’ But it really happened. Like I’m really awake right now. This is really what life is like now.”

After cleaning up, Watts tried to go about her day. She went to a previously scheduled hair appointment, but as the hairdresser began perming her hair, she noticed Watts was uncomfortable and expressed concern for her health. Watts told her she was “just menstruating,” but the hairdresser insisted that she see a doctor and arranged a ride to the hospital.

When she arrived, Watts was given immediate medical attention. She was given an IV – dehydrated after losing so much blood. 

“The nurse comes in and she’s rubbing my back and talking to me and saying, ‘Everything’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay,'” Watts said. “Little do I know, there’s a police officer that comes into the room a short time later. And I’m wondering, ‘Why is a police officer coming in here? I don’t recall doing anything wrong.’ And little do I know the nurse comforting me and saying that everything was gonna be okay was the one who called police.”

What a horrible person. She didn’t need to call the police. And, according to Watts she lied on top of it. I would guess she’s a right wing freak.

“She says the baby’s in her backyard in a bucket,” the nurse told the dispatcher. “And I need to have someone go find this baby or direct me on what I need to do.”

The nurse told the dispatcher she believed the bucket was near Watts’ trash.

“Oh, I’m going to be sick,” the dispatcher responded. “Did she say if the baby was alive or not?”

“She said she didn’t wanna look,” the nurse said. “She said she didn’t want the baby, and she didn’t look.”

Watts told CBS News she never said that she didn’t want her baby.

“I said I did not want to look. I never said I didn’t want my baby. I would have never said something like that. It just makes me so angry that somebody would put those type of words in my mouth to make me seem so callous. And so, so hateful.”

So the cops came to the house with a warrant. They looked at the bucket and didn’t find anything and then searched deeply into the toilet and came up with fetal remains. They arrested Watts for “abuse of a corpse” a felony that carries up to a year in prison.

Ohio law defines “abuse of a corpse” as the treating of a human corpse in a way that would outrage reasonable family or community sensibilities.

Her attorney says it’s a very rare charge and that she struggled to understand why police were involved at all given that the corpse in question was fetal remains.

“In the course of representing her, I was met time and time again with, ‘You can’t flush a fetus,'” Timko said. “And I would say, ‘What do you want her to do with it?’ To which there’s no response.”

Of course there is no response because what they really wanted was to punish her for failing to take her non-viable fetus to term, come what may.

Watts says the Warren City Prosecutor’s Office accused her in court of disregarding the fetus and simply going on about her day, citing her hair appointment.

“What do you want me to do in that situation?” Watts said, referring to the prosecutor’s argument. “Don’t you go about your day? I mean, yes, you seek medical attention, but miscarriages happen all the time. Whether you’re at home, whether you’re at work, whether you’re out in the general public, or at the store, you never know when things like this are going to happen. So who are you to say that I went on about my day? You don’t know what I did. You don’t know where I was. You just know that I went and got my hair done, but do you know where I was after that? No. You don’t.”

How dare they. She had a miscarriage and they do happen all the time. Apparently, a woman who has one is required to call the coroner, give a statement to the police, enter into a formal period of mourning and hold a full scale funeral every time they have one.

The Grand Jury declined to recommend indictment, thank God. But it should never, ever have come to that. These people are fanatics and there are millions of them all over the country who are searching for any way to punish pregnant women regardless of the circumstances. Of course miscarriages are now suspect. And birth control is on the agenda as well. They want as many women available for their ritual sacrifice as possible.

If they have to further undermine the democratic process to get that done, so be it:

Legislative efforts in Missouri and Mississippi are attempting to prevent voters from having a say over abortion rights, building on anti-abortion strategies seen in other states, including last year in Ohio.

Democrats and abortion rights advocates say the efforts are evidence that Republican lawmakers and abortion opponents are trying to undercut democratic processes meant to give voters a direct role in forming state laws.

“They’re scared of the people and their voices, so their response is to prevent their voices from being heard,” said Laurie Bertram Roberts, executive director of Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund. “There’s nothing democratic about that, and it’s the same blueprint we’ve seen in Ohio and all these other states, again and again.”

Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, voters in seven states have either protected abortion rights or defeated attempts to curtail them in statewide votes. Democrats have pledged to make the issue a central campaign topic this year for races up and down the ballot.

A proposal passed Wednesday by the Mississippi House would ban residents from placing abortion initiatives on the statewide ballot. Mississippi has among the toughest abortion restrictions in the country, with the procedure banned except to save the life of the woman or in cases of rape or incest.

In response to the bill, Democratic Rep. Cheikh Taylor said direct democracy “shouldn’t include terms and conditions.”

“Don’t let anyone tell you this is just about abortion,” Taylor said. “This is about a Republican Party who thinks they know what’s best for you better than you know what’s best for you. This is about control. So much for liberty and limited government.”

There is no better illustration of the authoritarian, Christian nationalist agenda of the GOP than this issue. And you’d better believe that giving this inch means they’ll take a mile. It won’t stop at abortion.