Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Remember the 10 year old girl who had to travel to Indiana for an abortion? And they tried to prosecute the doctor who helped her? Well:

 Indiana’s attorney general has dropped a lawsuit that accused the state’s largest hospital system of violating patient privacy laws when a doctor told a newspaper that a 10-year-old Ohio girl had traveled to Indiana for an abortion.

A federal judge last week approved Attorney General Todd Rokita’s request to dismiss his lawsuit, which the Republican had filed last year against Indiana University Health and IU Healthcare Associates, The Indianapolis Star reported.

The suit accused the hospital system of violating HIPAA, the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and a state law, for not protecting patient information in the case of a 10-year-old rape victim who traveled to Indiana to receive abortion drugs.

Dr. Caitlin Bernard ‘s attorneys later that she shared no personally identifiable information about the girl, and no such details were reported in the Star’s story on July 1, 2022, but it became a flashpoint in the abortion debate days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade that June.

A federal judge in Indianapolis initially granted IU Health’s motion to dismiss the case in June, prompting Rokita to file an amended complaint in July. His office then sought the case’s dismissal last week, writing that the state’s initial complaints have been satisfied by actions IU Health has taken since The Star first reported on the girl’s case.

These actions include continuing to train employees not to talk about patients in public spaces and informing employees that if they are contacted by a reporter, they must inform the public relations or communications departments before responding, Rokita’s dismissal motion said.

“We are pleased the information this office sought over two years ago has finally been provided and the necessary steps have been taken to accurately and consistently train their workforce to protect patients and their health care workers,” Rokita said Monday in a statement.

However, IU Health said it has always had such practices in place, and it’s disheartened by the claim that these were corrective actions made in response to Rokita’s suit.

[…]

Indiana’s medical licensing board reprimanded Bernard in May 2023, saying she didn’t abide by privacy laws by talking publicly about the girl’s treatment.

It was far short of the medical license suspension Rokita’s office sought, and IU Health’s own internal investigation found that Bernard did not violate privacy laws.

The Indiana Supreme Court, meanwhile, reprimanded Rokita and fined him $250 for making statements about Bernard that violated rules of professional conduct for attorneys.

Rokita is a terrible person. But at least he seems to be smart enough to have figured out hat he wasn’t going to win this one. Nonetheless, they did manage to sully the reputation of this compassionate doctor who helped this poor child which is grotesque and disgusting. But that’s just how they roll.

BY the way, Indiana may still be a throwback state but there are others that are fighting this at the ballot box. Here are two more:
Missouri and Arizona join six states that are voting on abortion rights in the upcoming presidential election.

On Tuesday, Missouri state officials greenlit a ballot initiative, allowing residents to determine the fate of the state’s total abortion ban. On Monday, Arizona officials said they received enough petition signatures to put an abortion ballot measure before voters this November.

The ballot measures in question allow voters to decide if the right to an abortion should be enshrined in the states’ constitutions.

More than two years after Roe v. Wade was overturned, 14 states have passed total abortion bans while others have moved to protect reproductive rights at the state level. Missouri is one of several states that passed a total ban on abortion. Arizona passed a law in 2022 that bans abortion after 15 weeks.

In states that allow voter-driven ballot measures, abortion rights groups have used the tool to push back against restrictions.

Dawn Penich, a spokesperson for the organizers of Arizona’s abortion ballot measure recently told USA TODAY, “A very broad majority supports this issue, and that’s whether we were in rural communities or cities, whether we were in largely red, conservative districts or more progressive areas of the state.”

Trump says the issue is no longer salient. I don’t think so.

Shifts from Cook’s Biden vs. Trump polls in May to their Harris vs. Trump polls in late July/early August (full field):

AZ: D+8 shift
GA: D+4 shift
MI: D+5 shift
NV: D+3 shift
NC: D+10 (!) shift
PA: D+8 shift
WI: D+5 shift https://t.co/j7LTiAFz2b

— Adam Carlson (@admcrlsn) August 14, 2024

And following up yesterday’s producer inflation report, here’s the consumer report:

Corporate capitalism too

Sociologist Jessica Calarco (“Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net“) believes that one reason we cannot have nice things, The Ink explains, is “because Americans have been sold a manufactured ideology of personal responsibility, bolstered by the work of neoliberal economists, and for the most part accept it as tradition — even though it’s largely an invention of 20th-century business interests and crafted as part of the backlash to the New Deal.”

That system is not just propped up by cheap labor, but by women’s labors specifically:

The situation persists largely because women have been forced to make up for the lack of real social policy. Whether that’s to do with a conservative vision of women’s roles being as homemakers, helpmeets, and mothers or our reliance on poor women, women of color, and immigrant (and undocumented immigrant women) to fill the low-paid jobs in child and elder care that make American society possible, it’s women who do the devalued and relentlessly taxing work that can’t be made profitable in the market.

The country is still imprisoned in an ideology, says Calarco, “explicitly manufactured to persuade us that we didn’t need a social safety net.” That system of thought was disrupted by the need for women to work manufacturing jobs during WWII. We provided low-cost childcare so they could. But that support did not hold. Free-market fundamentalism had better PR (market fundamentalism propaganda).

But rather than think, “Okay. So how do we restructure our economy to make it so that everyone who wants to have a paid job can do so,” we instead shuttered those childcare centers. We pushed women out of the workforce. We told them to go back home, told them it was their patriotic duty to give those jobs back to men because we didn’t want to expand the economy, and we didn’t want to continue paying for these kinds of social safety net programs. Meanwhile, many European countries used what they learned from those kinds of models during the war to build these national childcare programs that they still have today or to build national healthcare, to put in place universal paid family leave.

[…]

One of the core reasons that we haven’t pushed back is that we’ve relied on women to fill in these gaps instead. The unpaid and underpaid labor that women do to fill in the gaps in our social safety net and in our economy makes us complacent, makes us feel as though we don’t maybe actually need a social safety net because we’re doing well enough with the minimal social safety net that we do have. And yet at the same time, this is crushing women. They’re the default caregivers for children, for the sick, and for the elderly. They’re the ones who fill the lowest-paid jobs in our economy. 70 percent of our lowest-wage jobs are held by women. 

And to your point that we need government to do this, there are jobs that are often too labor-intensive to be highly profitable. They just don’t work in a market model. Things like childcare, things like customer service, things like home healthcare, K-12 teaching, which we do fund with some government support, but not at a sufficient level to make that job as valued and as sustainable as it should be.

But any product or service the government might provide on a not-for-profit basis that the private sector might provide at a profit (even if only in theory) is an abomination, a crime against capitalism. That’s a big No from free market fundamentalists.

Plus, we socialize children to see themselves in roles defined by gendered hierarchy and sexist myths. It’s a way of thinking so baked into the culture, like structural racism, as to be all but invisible.

I know it well. Longtime readers may recall my decades-old take on capitalism:

We think we invented capitalism. Yet there have been “capitalist acts between consenting adults”* since before Hammurabi. We don’t call one capitalist enterprise the world’s oldest profession for nothing. There’s a restaurant in China that has been in operation for nearly 1000 years. And pubs in England that have been in business for 900. All without being incorporated in Delaware or the Cayman Islands.

Corporate capitalism is a different animal, an invasive species, actually, and merely one model for organizing a capitalist enterprise. There are others. But corporate capitalism’s success and ubiquity convince us that there is no alternative. It is the water we swim in but cannot see.

Look around where you sit right now. There is likely nothing from the chair on which you sit to the screen on which you read this to the materials of the building around you that were not manufactured by a modern corporation. This artificial lifeform, a soulless creation possessing only appetite and instinct, has created a system in which the people no longer govern. They are ruled by those who would make serfs of us again, telling us only by their being kings can the rest of us flourish. Instead of holding corporate capitalism’s leash, humans wear the collar.

“We are not fated to live this way,” historian Steve Fraser once told Bill Moyers.

Neither men nor women.

There is much more at The Ink.

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WTFness at the NYT

The spouse’s sharp eyes picked out a detail in a New York Times account of Ukraine’s surprise counterattack last week that sent its forces over the border into Russia:

Ukrainian troops sliced easily through a thinly defended border, pushing tens of miles into Russia and shifting the narrative of the war after a glum year in which Ukraine had struggled, often in vain, to hold back Russian advances across its eastern front.

By Monday, Ukraine’s commanding general had told President Volodymyr Zelensky that his troops held 390 square miles of territory in Russia’s southeastern Kursk region. Two dozen settlements were overrun.

You take some of our land, Vlad? Fine, we’ll take some of yours.

But that account from Monday is not what raised the wife’s ire. It was the story in Tuesday’s The Morning briefing by German Lopez on what Ukraine hoped to gain from the incursion: to “divert Russian troops from strategic locations,” to improve Ukrainian morale, to impress Washington, and “to shore up support abroad“:

Kyiv has relied on aid from Western nations to defend itself. But voters in those countries are no longer as enthusiastic about supplying Ukraine with weapons. Some leaders, including Donald Trump, have suggested they want to cut off the aid. A battlefield victory against Russia, even if it’s not strategically important, could get skittish supporters back on board.

“Some leaders, including Donald Trump”? And Trump is the leader of what?

Which leaders want to cut off aid?

Whose voters are “no longer as enthusiastic”?

An Eurobarometer poll released in early January showed 74 percent support for EU aid to Ukraine. An IPSOS/Euronews poll of almost 26,000 from 18 European countries released in early February found “36% of Europeans want aid to Ukraine to be a priority of the next European parliament. Another 36% see it as important but not a priority while it is a secondary issue for the remaining 27% of respondents.” Yes, Germany planned to cut its aid budget for Ukraine in mid-July when it appeared Trump was headed to victory, just days before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race.

Yet despite far-right opposition to continuing aid to Ukraine, European Union governments voted overwhelmingly in July to continue support. Last week, the EU approved “the first regular payment to Ukraine of 4.2 billion euros ($4.58 billion) of the 50 billion euros the EU has set aside as financial support for Kyiv.”

WTF is going on at The Times?

“It’s an attempt to give Russia somewhat of a shock,” Times national security reporter, Eric Schmitt, told Lopez of the counterattack. Ukraine might want to use the territory to bargain for concessions:

To do that, Ukraine would have to actually keep what it takes. Given how overburdened its military is already, that may not be possible. And if Ukraine suffered heavy losses trying to hold foreign terrain, the incursion would amount to a disaster. “It’s a huge gamble on the part of the Ukrainians,” Eric said.

But Ukraine also has to plan for eventual negotiations with Russia. Trump has suggested that if he wins this year’s election, he will force Ukraine to work out a peace deal with Russia. That would likely require Ukraine to give up most or all of the territory that Russia currently holds.

That’s two references to Donald Trump and to what he might do as president regarding dropping aid to Ukraine in a 700-word Times story. No mention of Joe Biden, the actual president of the United States, or to VP Kamala Harris who for now looks on trajectory to rout Trump in November.

Again, WTF is going on at The Times?

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Doing real American stuff

Just watch it:

This is insane. These aren't just line cops. This is the police chief of a town that straddles a major highway in and out of Nashville completely lost to Q-Anon obsession and insanity. These guys have been using federal databases to investigate political campaigns and private… https://t.co/wOV3E6uHSq

— Fred Wellman (@FPWellman) August 13, 2024

As Tom Nichols said on twitter:

This is what I meant when I said democracy will collapse in small pockets here and there in the country instead of all at once. Imagine this police dept but without the state’s TBI, or DOJ, or a federal government willing to step in. That’s a view of the future.

It’s well documented that Donald Trump Jr loves JD Vance and was instrumental in getting him on the ticket. They are two peas in a pod in so many ways, even beyond the beards. Junior is less intellectually able but that’s not saying much. But JD apparently respects him anyway. A new fact check on JDs lies about Kamala Harris indicate that some of them come directly from Junior. For instance:

“She has said things like, ‘it’s reasonable not to have children over climate change.’ I think that’s the exact opposite message we should be sending to our young families.”

— Vance, interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Aug. 11

✅

Follow Fact-checking politiciansFollow

This is false. Vance made this comment as he tried to explain 2021 remarks that Harris was one of those “childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives and they want to make the rest of country miserable, too.” (Harris has two stepchildren.) To Bash, he said: “I criticized Kamala Harris for being part of a set of ideas that exists in American leadership that is anti-family. I never, Dana, criticized people for not having kids. I criticized people for being anti-child.”

That’s when he offered the claim that Harris once said “it’s reasonable not to have children over climate change.”

There is zero evidence thatHarris said that. Instead, Vance appears to be channeling a misleading Facebook post by Donald Trump Jr.

“WATCH: Resurfaced video shows Kamala Harris suggesting that young people should not have children due to climate change,” TrumpJr. wrote on July 27. “She calls climate anxiety ‘the fear of the future and the unknown of whether it makes sense for you to even think about having children.’”

Trump Jr. clipped a small section and then mischaracterized it. Here’s the full statement, made at an event at a community college in Reading, Pa., on Sept. 19.

Because young people — and, in particular, young voters — said, “We are going to direct and decide what is the direction of our country.” … Because young people said, “We’re not leaving it to other people to decide how we’re dealing with the climate crisis” —

You know, I’ve heard young leaders talk with me about a term they’ve coined called “climate anxiety.” Right? Which is fear of — of the future and the unknown of whether it makes sense for you to even think about having children, whether it makes sense for you to think about aspiring to buy a home because what will this climate be?

But because people voted, we have been able to put in place over a trillion dollars in investment in our country around things like climate resilience and adaptation, around focusing on issues like environmental justice.

In sum, she was characterizing “climate anxiety” and noted the Biden administration was taking steps to mitigate it.

That he said this in response to his fatuous “childless cat ladies” comment that has gotten him into so much trouble makes it all the more absurd.

Vance’s latest persona, the one that was so impressive to Trump when he spotted him on Tucker Carlson’s show bootlicking like a champ, was largely formed by following the likes of Trump Jr online and then cultivating them as he launched his political career. They are not very bright so it’s not hard to do.

The question is how bright Vance really is that he made the bet that being closely associated with Trump and MAGA are great career moves? I’d say it was a bad one that Vance will struggle to shake off when he makes his next shape shift.

He’s their role model

This piece by Josh Kovensky at Talking Points memo is a must read if you hope to understand where the right is going — with or without Trump:

The American right’s love affair with Hungary seemingly knows no bounds. Hungarian officials appear at GOP events; CPAC has a Budapest event. Hungarian President Viktor Orbán met with Donald Trump last month, and earned a dilatory shoutout from the Republican candidate at the RNC, where Trump called Hungary a “strong country, run by very powerful, tough leaders — a tough guy.”

But if the strength is the draw, then how did Orbán become a strongman? What is it about Orbán that right-wingers are supporting when they say that they like what he’s done in Hungary?

TPM spoke with Zsuzsanna Szelényi, a former Hungarian MP who recently wrote a book, Tainted Democracy, about Orbán’s rise to power and the crackdown that followed. Szelényi was once a member of Orbán’s political party, Fidesz, in the early 1990s, before leaving as the party grew more conservative, and eventually founding her own opposition party in 2012. She knew Orban during his entry into politics in the early 1990s, and has followed his ascent as a political actor in Hungary.

Szelényi told TPM that Orbán, during his rise, shared a key focus with the modern American right: significant, structural changes to politics and the functioning of government to accrue, and retain, power. In her telling of the rise of Orbánism, that manifests as a focus on “money, ideology, and votes” — changing the judiciary, press laws, and campaign laws in order to stay in power.

It’s an example of illiberalism that’s drawn American conservatives to Hungary — especially in the years after Trump won the 2016 election. And though both the American right and Orban’s Hungary have an interest in ostentatious culture warring, the focus on trying to realign the constitutional and legal systems to stay in power while remaining flexible on policy that is the deeper parallel.

If all that sounds familiar to you, you aren’t alone.

There are big differences between Hungary and America, obviously, not the least of which is the fact that Hungary is a very small country which makes such things far easier to manage. But the main difference is that the U.S. is a mature democracy while Hungary is fairly new having just emerged in the 1990s after the Soviet collapse. They had a much easier playing field.

The article goes on to show how they managed over a period of years to define for themselves their “illiberal democracy” as Orban calls it. Perhaps most interesting is that while the right wing legal and political establishment may be studying Orban’s model today, when he was first coming up he studied right wing think tank policy ideas. It’s a mutual admiration society.

Read the whole thing if you have time. Trump is sui generis but the establishment that supports him is not. They are part of a well-financed, global right wing movement that seeks to corrupt democratic institutions to ensure they can stay in power despite their lack of any popular mandate.

When asked why he dropped out:

Ultimately, Biden said, he wanted to make sure former President Donald Trump, whom he described as a “genuine danger to American security,” loses in November.

“The critical issue for me still — it’s not a joke — maintaining this democracy,” he said. “I thought it was important. Because, although it’s a great honor being president, I think I have an obligation to the country to do what [is] the most important thing you can do, and that is, we must, we must, we must defeat Trump.”

Trump couldn’t even admit he legitimately lost in 2020. The difference in character is monumental. And I genuinely believe that’s why he’s so disoriented right now. He simply can’t imagine doing anything out of obligation to the country.

I was fortunate not to listen to that”interview” last night (two hours of Trump and Musk is more than even I can take) but it certainly sounds like a typical Trump ramble so I don’t think I missed much. The Trump campaign didn’t like that statement at all:

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung lashed out the Harris-Walz campaign Monday with an obscene public statement accusing staffers of being “f—ing cowards.”

Cheung posted his foul-mouthed message on X in response to a statement from the Democratic campaign trashing Trump’s softball interview with Elon Musk. “All these statements, yet nobody ever puts their name on them,” Cheung wrote. “F—ing cowards.”

You no doubt remember that Musk previously supported Ron DeSantis who chose to make his campaign announcement on X which also had technical issues as Trump’s appearance did last night. (You’d think Musk would have avoided that last night…) Trump responded to that debacle this way:

In May 2023, DeSantis launched his ill-fated bid for president in a Twitter Space with Musk that also went awry thanks to technical hitches—an unmitigated disaster the Harris campaign recalled while trolling Trump on Monday night. On Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform, the account for the Harris campaign “ReTruthed” a post Trump wrote last year mocking DeSantis.

“Wow! The DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER!” Trump wrote at the time. “His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!”

Live by the troll, die by the troll.

Also: For some reason Trump was slurring and lisping throughout this weird thing. What’s up with that?

I’ve written before that I suspect this ongoing discontent with “the economy” actually stood in for something else:

Amazingly, Harris has eliminated Trump’s lead as voters’ trusted candidate when it comes to the economy — just one example of how her entrance to the presidential race has left Trump floundering. pic.twitter.com/LwFsejPvid

— Steven Rattner (@SteveRattner) August 12, 2024

It was the age thing. That’s all it was.

Oh, and by the way, inflation numbers came in today lower than expected. Sorry Donnie:

Whatever that panic was last week seems to have been a bit …. uhm premature.

Update:

How about this?

Why is Harris gaining?… One big reason: Trump consistently led Biden when it came to voters top issue. Not anymore.

Harris is up 2 pts (within the MOE) over Trump in the Great Lake battleground states on voters' top issue. A major 12 pt turn around for Dems from June. pic.twitter.com/Kop8zoOhzW

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) August 12, 2024

All that’s changed is that one of the old guys withdrew.