Month: August 2019

Whenever someone tries to articulate a rationale for not having a rape or incest exception for their proposed abortion bans, you can be sure that they’ll say something that most people find appalling. Sometimes they’ll argue that nothing happens that isn’t God’s will, which implies that God endorses rape and incest and basically ignores that God wouldn’t have to chastise and instruct human beings if he already knew what we were going to do. But I don’t want to get bogged down in debates about predeterminism.

In other cases, they’ll suggest that pregnancies rarely result from rape so it’s not a problem that’s significant enough to worry about. This is just factually and scientifically wrong, in addition to being callous and non-responsive to people’s concerns.

Another approach is to dismiss the feelings of the prospective mother entirely by stating that it’s not the embryo’s fault that their father is a rapist. This elevates a potential human being over an actual human being, and turns women into little more than vessels who can be impregnated by force and subsequently lose all their rights.

Rep. Steve King recently used this last approach, but he took a little further.

U.S. Rep. Steve King told the Westside Conservative Club Wednesday that humanity might not exist if not for rape and incest throughout human history.

“What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled out anyone who was a product of rape or incest? Would there be any population of the world left if we did that?” he said in Urbandale, Iowa. “Considering all the wars and all the rapes and pillages that happened throughout all these different nations, I know that I can’t say that I was not a part of a product of that.”

Strictly speaking, he is of course correct. Perhaps none of us would be here if there had never been any babies born through rape or incestuous relations. Human history is millions of years old, and the chances of any of us being here are infinitesimally small. Almost anything that can happen has happened to one of our ancestors and even the slightest change in quadrillions of chance events would have prevented us from being among the current occupants of planet Earth.  Yet, just because we wouldn’t be here doesn’t mean that there would be smaller human population. Instead of us, there would be different people.

So, King may be making a defensible point in one respect, but it’s not a profound one.

It’s deeply misguided to argue that there is nothing that happened in the past that you would change because it could potentially prevent you from having lived at all. But even if you want to insist on that non-tampering philosophy out of some abstract sense of self-preservation, it doesn’t mean that we can avoid shaping the future through the decisions we make in our lives. We don’t refuse to make political or moral decisions because it might lead to someone not existing in the indefinite future. Virtually everything we do and don’t do assures that future will be different than it otherwise would be.

What makes King’s remarks special is that he appears to be saying that we all should get down on our knees and thank God that there has plenty of rape and incest throughout human history, and that it is therefore absurd to think that women shouldn’t be forced to carry their rapist’s baby to term.  We could say they same thing about the pandemic flu or the Black Plague or the Holocaust or the institution of slavery. If people hadn’t died prematurely or been pried away from their home countries, they would have married some of our ancestors who would have had children with them instead of with our relatives, and we wouldn’t exist.

Thank God for the Black Plague!

The root of the problem here is that there just isn’t a satisfactory answer to why women should be compelled under law to have rape babies. No matter what angle these anti-choice crusaders choose, they always come off sounding like insensitive lunatics who can’t handle simple logical concepts.

As a political analyst who tries to make informed predictions about the future of American politics, I despaired when I realized that there would be 24 Democratic presidential candidates. It wasn’t just the unprecedented scenario that I found intimidating, although a lack of precedent certainly makes forecasting more like astrology than political science or sociology. The huge number of contestants introduced so many variables that I fretted there would be no way to anticipate how all the pieces would interact and influence each other.

Since I considered it a given that the race would demonstrate a high level of fluidity, my first approach was to look at who I considered to be in the strongest starting position. I quickly identified Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders as the two most likely to succeed candidates and wrote several pieces explaining why they each would be tough to dislodge from the top tier.  Yet, I certainly did not think this would be the end of the story. I expected other candidates to catch fire for a time and then plateau in favor of a new flavor of the week or month. In other words, I predicted support for Biden and Sanders would be persistent and fairly stable, with a high floor. But around them, I expected a constant churn, with the real challenge to be getting fortuitous timing so a candidate surges right before the caucuses and primaries rather than in the relatively meaningless summer of 2019.

So far, I have only gotten half of that right. A look at trends in the Post and Courier-Change Research Poll of South Carolina demonstrates my point. There has been very little variation in the five survey results taken beginning in February. Biden began with a commanding lead and has led in all the polls by an “average of 22 percentage points.” He has lost only one point since the last poll, despite a few gaffes and controversies and less than stellar debate performances. The top six candidates in the poll have remained constant. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have been in a tight race for second place, polling in the mid-to-high teens, with Kamala Harris slightly below them. Pete Buttigieg enjoyed a brief but modest bump that has dissipated, and he really represents the only significant fluctuation that has been seen.  It’s almost as if nothing that has happened since February has had any real influence on the preferences of South Carolina voters, but they do seem to have changed what they prioritize as issues.

While Biden remained in control, voter preferences could change in the six months before South Carolina primary voters go to the polls on Feb. 29.

Consider voter priorities in the wake of recent mass shootings in Texas and Ohio. Gun rights replaced education as the second-most important issue for South Carolina Democratic primary voters in the latest poll. Health care remains the top issue.

What’s most remarkable in my opinion is the failure of lower tier candidates to catch fire. We’re not seeing much rotation or churn near the bottom, as most candidates are registering one percent or less in the results. I’m not sure what explains this, but it bolsters the legitimacy of my first instinct. I felt that Biden and Sanders would begin at the top of the polls and that they would remain there because they both enjoyed a solid and unshakable base of support. Whatever else seems to change, the size of their support seems almost immutable.

Yet, the desire within the Democratic Party to find a new generation of leadership is strong. Two old white career politicians aren’t the answer for many voters, and I expected more of a contest for third or fourth place. It seems that Warren and Harris have seized that territory and no one else can break through. Warren appears to be in the strongest position to supplant Sanders as the main alternative to Biden, and she’s polling ahead of him (by a single point) in South Carolina.

In the RealClearPolitics average of polls, both Warren and Harris have surged ahead of Sanders in Iowa, but Sanders maintains his hold on second place in New Hampshire and Nevada.

For anyone hoping that things will change in the next six months, the lack of movement over the last six months has to be sobering. Biden would be vulnerable if he faced only one significant rival, but facing three he is able to maintain a significant lead. He looks most vulnerable in New Hampshire and Iowa where his lead is in single digits.

In the past, there has been a lot of fluctuation in the polls in the months before the first contest in Iowa and often a lot of movement in the last couple of weeks. That could hold true again, but for now it does look like a four-way race despite there being two dozen people vying for the nomination.

Hello music lovers!

So what do we have this time? Let’s start with the Regrettes. Not familiar with them? They’re worth a listen.

It’ll be eclectic this week. If there is a theme, it’ll be whatever mutated out of the old punk scene.

The bar is open and the jukebox has an unlimited selection. Maybe we’ll have some more tributes to Democratic nomination contenders. Maybe there is still hope for what is broadly thought of as pop music after all (hint…the kids are alright). Stay tuned…

Cheers!

If you haven’t heard what is going on in Kashmir, here’s a primer from Jon Allsop of the Columbia Journalism Review: 

IN EARLY AUGUST, the government of Narendra Modi, India’s recently reelected Hindu-nationalist prime minister, moved troops into the Kashmir Valley, which is majority-Muslim, then cut the region off. The internet and landlines went down; TV channels were taken off the air. Prominent local politicians were detained. Without consultation, Modi revoked the special autonomy Kashmir has long enjoyed under a provision of India’s Constitution, and split the wider Jammu and Kashmir state into two territories subject to governance by New Delhi. Since then, the area has been on lockdown. Yesterday, during the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, the streets were mostly empty, and mosques were mostly closed.

Now, as you may know, I am internet famous in India for calling a right-wing pro-Modi news anchor there an “asshole.”  The whole incident is now caught up in the courts, involving allegations of slander of a sitting member of parliament who was falsely accused of plagiarizing my work.  I find the whole mess endlessly amusing, but it doesn’t really concern me. I’m generally opposed to the style of politics practiced by Narendra Modi’s government but I don’t have any favorites in India. It’s not my business.

However, Kashmir is a flashpoint between India and Pakistan that could potentially lead to a nuclear war, so I am not indifferent to what takes place there. I don’t pretend to be an expert on Indian politics, but I know enough to realize that a lot of the problem here involves Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. To be more specific, it involves a particular part of Article 370 that is called Article 35A.

Article 35A of the Indian Constitution was an article that empowered the Jammu and Kashmir state’s legislature to define “permanent residents” of the state and provide special rights and privileges to those permanent residents. It was added to the Constitution through a Presidential Order, i.e., The Constitution (Application to Jammu and Kashmir) Order, 1954 – issued by the President of India on 14 May 1954, under Article 370. The state of Jammu and Kashmir defined these privileges to include the ability to purchase land and unmovable property, ability to vote and contest elections, seeking government employment and availing other state benefits such as higher education and health care. Non-permanent residents of the state, even if Indian citizens, were not entitled to these ‘privileges’.

On 5 August 2019, the President of India issued a Presidential Order, whereby all the provisions of the Indian Constitution are to apply to the State without any special provisions. This would imply that the State’s separate Constitution stands abrogated, including the privileges allowed by the Article 35A

Prime Minister Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) included opposition to Article 370 in their 2019 party platform, so its effective revocation shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. Kashmir is overwhelmingly Muslim, which means that a ban on non-residents buying or selling property is essentially a ban on Hindus buying or selling property. This and other exclusive privileges for Kashmiris have a discriminatory effect in the opinion of the BJP. However, this revision extends farther that that into issues of autonomy and self-governance.

If it were possible to make these changes without unrest, it would not have been necessary to arrest Kashmiri political leaders and close down their media outlets. Here’s some reporting from the New York Times.

Ever since Kashmir’s autonomy was suddenly revoked last week, Raja Mohi-ud-din, an editor at one of the few Kashmiri newspapers still operating, has been starting his days extremely early…

…His workers cannot get to the printing press — they live deep in neighborhoods totally cut off.

There is no way to electronically transmit data to the printer — the Indian government has shut down mobile, internet and landline connections…

…On Monday, a week into the lockdown, Indian security forces sealed off main roads, deployed surveillance helicopters, cleared side streets and turned children away from parks. It was Eid al-Adha, one of the holiest days on the Muslim calendar, and most major mosques were ordered shut. Families that usually rejoice with friends found themselves alone and depressed inside their homes.

India is often celebrated as the largest democracy in the world but the Modi government is demonstrating some very undemocratic tendencies. This is actually the point that freshman parliamentarian Mahua Moitra was trying to make in her maiden speech where she accused the government of demonstrating several early warning signs of fascism. For her efforts, she was wrongly accused of stealing from my 2017 critique of the fascist tendencies of the Trump movement. I don’t have any particular affinity for her or her political party, but she came to her conclusions honestly without causing me an injury. The way she was attacked reminded me of how Trump’s critiques are attacked here in America.

I feel some concern for the civil liberties of ordinary Indians and the health of the free press and their democracy, but I’m primarily worried that adventurism in Kashmir could easily escalate into an enormously dangerous situation. As an outsider, it has always been interesting to me that India and Pakistan split along sectarian lines but left one uniformly Muslim country and one pluralistic ecumenical country. It seems an odd and hard to maintain balance, and it seems to be coming to a head now there is a Hindu nationalist government in charge in New Dehli.

When the government moves in force into Kashmir and orders the mosques closed during Eid, that’s a pretty strong indication that India is moving to become the mirror image of Pakistan. No one serious praises whatever passes for democracy and ecumenicalism in Pakistan. It’s not going to be received well in Kashmir nor in the region.

I don’t know enough to assess the degree of danger involved here, but it’s far higher than I would like.

On one level, I understand the support evangelical Christians extend to Donald Trump. Many of the explanations provided to Washington Post reporter Julie Zauzmer appear legitimate so long as I’m willing to grant legitimacy to opinions and beliefs that strike me as reactionary and anti-scientific. I get that some people who see marriage as a sacred institution have trouble accepting same-sex marriage and don’t want to see the White House lit up in rainbow colors. I can empathize with business owners who want to be able to deny service to anyone for any reason. I understand that people want to protect their ability to impart their values to their children without government interference or widespread social or political condemnation. I can see why they saw that Obama administration as a threat and why they see Trump as a defender. But I am not sure that these things really get to the heart of Trump’s standing with evangelicals.

Trump ran stronger with conservative Christians than either John McCain or Mitt Romney, and I can see a partial explanation for that. McCain famously denounced the Christian Right back in 2000 after his failed primary bid for president. Romney comes from a rival proselytizing faith. Trump isn’t an evangelical so he’s not a true member of the team, but at least he’s not an enemy or a competitor. Yet, why did he do better than George W. Bush who actually was a member of the team?

Trump is transparently a fraud, and this very much includes his ludicrous professions of personal faith. His relationship with evangelicals in completely cynical and transactional and not many right-wing Christians are unaware of the true nature of this arrangement. They used to tell us it was important to them that Dubya restored dignity to the office of the presidency, but although they continually profess personal discomfort with Trump’s personal morals and much of his behavior, they say they’ll take the bad in order to get the good.

What I suspect is that Trump’s popularity with the Christian Right is actually tied to his behavior, and his policies are comparatively less important.

Consider that Barack and Michelle Obama are model church-going Christian parents who appear to have a happy monogamous relationship. They’re generally honest, and spectacularly honest for a political family. The values they emphasize are consistent with biblical injunctions against theft and dishonesty, as well as biblical exhortations toward charity and care for the poor. They want us to do unto others and we would have them do unto us. But if these types of considerations are important to evangelicals, they appear to be negotiable when it comes to Trump.

If they like Trump, as some say, because he’s reducing the number of abortions in the country, it’s hard to see how his policies on reproductive freedom are different from any other Republican presidential candidate of recent vintage. The same is true for the kinds of judges he is appointing. I think what distinguishes Trump and makes him an evangelical champion is actually his habit of insulting and demeaning his enemies, because Trump’s enemies are frequently the same people who evangelicals see as the enemy. In other words, he’s popular precisely because he’s a bully:

Interviews with 50 evangelical Christians in three battleground states — Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — help explain why. In conversation, evangelical voters paint the portrait of the Trump they see: a president who acts like a bully but is fighting for them. A president who sees America like they do, a menacing place where white Christians feel mocked and threatened for their beliefs. A president who’s against abortion and gay rights and who has the economy humming to boot.

“You’ve just got to accept the bad with the good,” [Defense Department employee Rickey] Halbert said.

I don’t need to have any personal respect for some of their beliefs to accept that many “white Christians feel mocked and threatened” for holding them. I can understand why they enjoy having the world’s most powerful man mock and threaten right back at those they fear and resent. What I find harder to accept is that they’ll take this help when it comes tied to a man whose entire life has mocked and disrespected the values of the Christian faith.

I would think that biblical literalists would be particularly unforgiving of Trump’s disrespect for the sanctity of marriage. They would not approve of the way that he defrauds vulnerable people out of their money by offering bogus services or refusing to honor contracts with small businessmen. They might even object to the way he seeks to deny asylum to those in need.  When it comes to the Ten Commandments, Trump is in comical violation, as all he does is covet and build idols and bear false witness and commit adultery. He takes the Lord’s name in vain quite a bit, too.

It’s not perplexing to me that Christians have a multitude of beliefs that don’t all come together as a uniform and internally logical system. But I do notice what is negotiable and what is not. With evangelicals, not much is supposed to be negotiable, but it turns out that the truth is almost the complete opposite. You can be the worst, most disrespectful person towards the actual tenets of the faith so long as you insult and belittle the people who don’t share the faith.

I’m not one to say what Christians should and should not believe or how they should feel, but we pretty much teach our children not to behave like Trump. We don’t need our leaders and representatives to be saints, but if we’re saying we’re concerned about other people’s personal morals, a good place to start is with having a leader who exemplifies what we want to impart to our children: be honest, be kind, be humble, help those in need, set a good example. The Obamas would be popular with evangelicals if these were the things that were most important to them. Instead, their number one priority is having someone willing to lie and be mean working on their behalf.

I have a much easier time respecting the Christian Right’s religious views than their political decisions, so I guess they’ll love it if the president singles me out for mockery.

After people complained about seeing the above sign in Katy, Texas, the Boyert Shooting Center released the following unapologetic press statement:

“We have friends and family who are teachers and our way of reaching out and saying thank you is by offering a summer long promotion of discounted training courses, firearms and accessories. A lot of Texans are not aware, but it is now legal to conceal carry in some colleges, and for teachers in certain school districts to conceal carry as well. We are wrapping up the program that we have been running since the beginning of June, with a huge sale to benefit everyone.”

Despite the fact that Texas is preparing to turn blue, it is still often hard to believe that it’s part of the same country that I live in. Here in the suburbs of Philadelphia, very few people can see how it benefits “everyone” to market guns to schoolteachers. Laws that make it possible for teachers to conceal carry into our children’s classrooms seem just as dangerous as leaving your gun on the coffee table for any child to pick up and play with. The sign, the sale, the law, the gun shops reaction, all of it, just seems completely insane.

 

 

It’s not just the wolves, grizzly bears, and bald eagles that we almost drove to extinction in this country. As Lisa Friedman reports in the New York Times, we have come close to wiping out many types of fauna and flora that were only saved by deliberate government intervention.

Ever since President Richard M. Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act into law, it has been the most essential piece of United States legislation for protecting fish, plants and wildlife, and acted as a safety net for species on the brink of extinction. The peregrine falcon, the humpback whale, the Tennessee purple coneflower and the Florida manatee all likely would have disappeared without it, scientists say.

Obviously, if it didn’t cost anyone to preserve habitats and regulate hunting, then we’d try to save everything. But there’s always some landowner somewhere who is inconvenienced by the rules and regulations we put in place to preserve the biodiversity of the country. Sometimes, they have a legitimate complaint, and there’s a process for that.

The Republicans cater to the folks who chafe at government constraints on how they can use and develop their land, and that would not have to be a bad thing if they limited themselves to being advocates for an interest group that deserves representation. What they do instead is just malicious.

The Trump administration on Monday announced that it would change the way the Endangered Species Act is applied, significantly weakening the nation’s bedrock conservation law credited with rescuing the bald eagle, the grizzly bear and the American alligator from extinction.

The changes could clear the way for new mining, oil and gas drilling, and development in areas where protected species live. The new rules will make it harder to consider the effects of climate change on wildlife when deciding whether a given species warrants protection. They would most likely shrink critical habitats and, for the first time, allow economic factors to be taken into account when making determinations.

This isn’t an example of looking out for ranchers who need some relief from a poorly thought through regulation. This isn’t a case-by-case exercise of discretion or some advocacy for the little guy who is unduly impacted in unintentional ways. It’s a flat giveaway to the large mining and timber corporations and land developers that comes at the expense of the very survival of plants and animals.

The environmental groups are predictably appalled, but they have a good reason to feel that way.

One of the most controversial changes modifies longstanding language that prohibits the consideration of economic factors when deciding whether a species should be protected.

Under the current law, such determinations must be made solely based on science, “without reference to possible economic or other impacts of determination.”

“There can be economic costs to protecting endangered species,” said Drew Caputo, vice president of litigation for lands, wildlife and oceans at Earthjustice, an environmental law organization. But, he said, “If we make decisions based on short-term economic costs, we’re going to have a whole lot more extinct species.”

Again, this isn’t about finding some compromise or mitigation or an improved appeals or exemption process for small-time operators whose livelihoods are put at potentially avoidable risk. This is a big wet kiss to major corporations. There were economic reasons to shoot bison, wolves, and grizzlies almost to the point of extinction. There is also some tradeoff to restricting land use. This is simply a way for the administration to help big donors get around the Endangered Species Act without actually convincing Congress to change the law.

It’s wrong and if properly explained will not be popular. It could be exploited politically by the Democrats even in areas of the country where the Endangered Species Act is least popular, like the Mountain West. I certainly hope they will make the effort because this is not your ordinary kind of bad policy. It will lead to extinctions, and that’s something a future administration can’t fix.

Can you still call something a conspiracy theory if it’s printed in the New York Times as straight news? When respectable reporters investigate how Russia goes about promoting fascism in the West, they come up with things that sound like they’d be a decent fit for Glenn Beck or Alex Jones, provided only that the culprits were on the left.

The central target of these manipulations from abroad — and the chief instrument of the Swedish nationalists’ success — is the country’s increasingly popular, and virulently anti-immigrant, digital echo chamber.

A New York Times examination of its content, personnel and traffic patterns illustrates how foreign state and nonstate actors have helped to give viral momentum to a clutch of Swedish far-right web sites.

Russian and Western entities that traffic in disinformation, including an Islamaphobic think tank whose former chairman is now Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, have been crucial linkers to the Swedish sites, helping to spread their message to susceptible Swedes.

At least six Swedish sites have received financial backing through advertising revenue from a Russian- and Ukrainian-owned auto-parts business based in Berlin, whose online sales network oddly contains buried digital links to a range of far-right and other socially divisive content.

Writers and editors for the Swedish sites have been befriended by the Kremlin. And in one strange Rube Goldbergian chain of events, a frequent German contributor to one Swedish site has been implicated in the financing of a bombing in Ukraine, in a suspected Russian false-flag operation.

It’s still hard to believe that Russia, a country which has based its positive self-image so strongly on their heroic and victorious battle against the Nazis, has decided to do everything it can to revitalize white nationalist principles in Europe and America. But that’s the direction Vladimir Putin has taken the country, and he’s so far succeeded in installing sympathizers in the most powerful positions in Italy, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. The effort in Sweden is being duplicated in most other European countries.

He has captured the White House and is presently in the process of remolding the Republican Party in his image.

Yet, people like me who have been warning about this since 2015 are not taken as seriously as we should be. This is as serious as a heart attack.

Here’s something that inspires zero confidence:

Attorney General William P. Barr said in a statement that he had asked the inspector general for the Justice Department to open an investigation “into the circumstances of Mr. [Jeffrey] Epstein’s death.”

How does the most obvious suicide risk in the country get taken off suicide watch and wind up dead in his prison cell within days?  According to the New York Times, it couldn’t have happened without the say-so of the prison psychologist.

Inmates can only be removed from the watch when the program coordinator, who is generally the chief psychologist at the facility, deems they are no longer at imminent risk for suicide, according a 2007 Bureau of Prison document outlining suicide prevention policies. The inmates cannot be removed from the watch without a face-to-face evaluation.

To take an inmate off suicide watch a “post-watch report” needs to be completed, which includes an analysis of how the inmate’s circumstances have changed and why that merits removal from the watch.

Under Bureau of Prison regulations, the government’s jails and prisons must have one or more rooms designed for housing an inmate on suicide watch, and the rooms must allow staff members to control the inmate without comprising their ability to observe and protect him. Every prison facility is required to have a suicide prevention program.

Suicide prevention cells must provide an “unobstructed view of the inmate” and “may not have fixtures or architectural features that would easily allow self-injury,” according to a Bureau of Prisons policy.

If I were investigating this, I would be so far up the “program coordinator’s” financial ass that they couldn’t spend a nickel for the next five years without me knowing about it.  Epstein had already tried to kill himself once (assuming that wasn’t a murder attempt) and had been on suicide watch for that reason. There should be “post-watch report” that explains which “circumstances” changed making the world’s most notorious child sex trafficker to the rich, noble and famous less inclined to off himself. In the best case scenario, this administrator made the worst judgment call in recorded history. It will truly suck to be them, even if Attorney General William Barr is about the last person I’d trust to get to the bottom of this.

Kind of amazing and coincidental that Epstein managed to hang himself while all alone in his cell on the very night that new names were released by the court.

They better keep Ghislaine Maxwell in bubble wrap because she is now the lone carrier of the warld’s most dangerous secrets.

 

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting with a new painting of FDR’s house. The photo that I’m using (my own from a recent visit) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas.

I started with my usual grid and pencil sketch. I actually had time to add a small amount of blue paint.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.