#^d 2019-05-20 #^h Weekend Roundup
Ran a day late on this one, partly because I went long on the intro, but also because I found so many links in my early trawl through the usual sources I wasn't able to finish my rounds, then found even more when I tried to wrap up. I'm sure it's always the case that an extra day or two to let the words settle and go back and restructure would be useful, but I've rarely felt that more than this week.
Abortion became a much hotter political issue last week, with the passage and signing of a law in Alabama which criminalizes abortion in all cases except when it is necessary to save the life of the woman, with doctors risking prison terms of up to 99 years if their call on life-saving is disputed. Much focus on this particular law centers on the lack of any exclusion for rape and incest, which most people agree would be reasonable grounds for abortion. (As Phil Freeman tweeted: "Your first mistake was assuming old white men in Alabama were against rape and incest.") But the Alabama law is just one of many state laws Republicans have been pushing lately, all aimed at relitigating Roe v. Wade in the Trump-packed Supreme Court. (E.g., The "heartbeat" bills that could ban almost all abortions, passed in four states including Ohio and Georgia, and coming soon in Missouri; still more draconian bills are in the works, such as A Texas bill would allow the death penalty for patients who get abortions.)
I'll start this off by quoting from a Facebook post by a relative of mine in Arkansas, Marianne Cowan Pyeatt, offering an unvarnished glimpse of what anti-abortion Republicans are telling themselves:
All of a sudden we are supposed to believe that millions and millions of aborted babies are the result of rape and not just a lack of responsibility to use birth control or face the consequences if you can't even be adult enough to take precautions. We all know that the reason they can't make exceptions for rape is because every women would lie and claim to be raped to get an abortion. There are morning after pills for real rape victims or they can give the child away. No one says they have to keep them. And the fact that this is even being debated is because all the people who did very little for decades when they could forget what was going on in those clinics are suddenly facing a world where full-term babies can be murdered at birth. YOU stupid liberals have taken it SO FAR that no decent person can ignore it any longer. And we aren't so stupid as to believe that only abortion of a baby could "save the mother's life" in medical emergencies . . . we know delivery is many, many times faster. At that point, if it dies, at least you tried and the mother is "saved" from her life-threatening condition with no murder involved. I find it hilarious that in insisting on that last frontier of killing babies right up to birth has finally given people the resolve to take a stand and right a wrong.
One thing this shows is that the fight over abortion rights is being fought at the margins, with both sides seeking maximalist positions, although there is nothing symmetrical about the conflict. There is only one fanatical side to this issue: those who, like Marianne here, want to ban all abortions. No one on the opposite side -- and I am about as opposite as anyone gets -- wants to terminate all pregnancies. Rather, we understand that pregnancy is a complicated issue that affects women in many different ways, and that there are some circumstances where some women feel they would be better off with an abortion. We believe that this should be a free and responsible choice, and to make this a real choice for all women requires that we isolate it from the encumbrances of government regulation and economic pressure.
I've long thought that conservatives and libertarians should be strong supporters of abortion rights. Libertarians cherish freedom, and freedom is the ability to make free choices -- among which one of the most important is whether to bear and raise children. Not everyone who wants children is able to have them, but safe abortion at least makes it possible to choose not to have children. As for conservatives, they always stress the responsibilities parenthood infers. It would be perverse if they did not allow those who felt themselves unable to assume the responsibility of raising children the option of not having them. Indeed, in the past have sometimes wanted to impose limits on the fertility of those they deemed unfit to raise children (e.g., the forced sterilization of the eugenics movement). Consequently, the hard turn of Republicans against free access to abortion and birth control has always struck me as bad faith: a political ploy, initially to capture votes of Catholics and Southern Baptists, who had traditionally voted Democratic. I first noticed this in Bob Dole's 1972 Senate campaign, and I never forgave him for politicizing the issue. (He was being challenged by William Roy, a ob/gyn who had occasionally performed abortions, which were legal in Kansas well before Roe v. Wade. Until that time Kansas Democrats were more likely to be anti-abortion than Republicans. Using abortion as a partisan tactic may have started with Nixon's 1972 "silent majority"/"southern strategy." It was especially successful in Missouri. See How abortion became a partisan issue in America.)
Abortion rights are desirable if there are any circumstances where abortion is a reasonable choice. Most people recognize rape and incest as valid reasons, as well as the health of the woman and/or the fetus. Beyond that there arise lots of possible economic and psychological concerns, which can only really be answered by the woman (with the advice of anyone she chooses to consult). We generally, if not always consistently, recognize that our freedom is rooted in a right to privacy. Since a decision to terminate has no broader repercussions, there is no good reason for the government to get involved. (One might argue that a decision not to terminate might concern the state, in that it would wind up paying for the child's education and health care, but no one who supports abortion rights is seeking that sort of oversight. China's "one child" policy is an example, but no one here is arguing for the state to enforce such a thing.)
Regardless of how cynical Republican leaders were when they jumped on the anti-abortion bandwagon, they learned to love it because it dovetailed with the prejudices and fears they exploited (Jason Stanley has a handy list, in his recent book, How Fascism Works), while doing little to detract from their main objective: making the rich richer, and building a political machine to keep the riches coming. (Thomas Frank, in his 2004 book What's the Matter With Kansas?, tried to expose their two-faced cynicism, but he wound up only agitating the anti-abortion mobsters into demanding more results for their votes.) Marianne's post is full of such prejudices, even while she tries to paper over others. But while the first line refers to the Alabama law, she'd rather turn the tables by accusing "stupid liberals" of wanting to kill babies the instant before birth. That would be a symmetrically opposite point of view, but even if legal it's not a real something anyone would do.
Some links on the Alabama law and the assault on abortion rights:
Zeeshan Aleem: Trump and top Republicans distance themselves from Alabama's controversial abortion law. I take this as evidence it's polling very badly. Trump has never put much thought into abortion, and probably doesn't care, as strange as that seems given how much impact he has had on the issue. Back in 2016, he was asked whether women who sought abortions should be prosecuted, and he guessed they should. That was one of the very few instances where he took back a statement -- something he never did when criticized for sympathizing with Nazis and other racists, or spouting his own racist slurs on immigrants and "shithole countries." Those are things he has deep convictions about. Anti-abortion is just something he has to play along with because the base expects it.
Jane Coaston: Why some anti-abortion conservatives think Alabama's abortion law goes too far.
Elizabeth Dias/Sabrina Tavernise/Alan Blinder: 'This is a wave': inside the network of anti-abortion activists winning across the country.
Ruth Graham: Why the anti-abortion movement stopped making allowances for rape and incest.
Sarah Jones: Abortion is morally good:
Were I still Evangelical, and still longed to end abortion, I'd have many reasons to celebrate. When your enemies pick up your arguments and tolerate your allies in their midst, you can be relatively confident that you've achieved the social and political dominance that you've worked toward for years. Milano and the DCCC have walked directly into a trap that abortion opponents set for them, and they don't even seem to realize what they've done. Anything less but the prioritization of women over the pregnancies they carry cedes ground the left cannot afford to lose.
Katherine Kelaidis: I'm an anti-abortion Christian. But Alabama's ban will do more harm than good.
Lili Loofbourow: The GOP has its final anti-abortion victory in sight: "Stripping voter rights. Rigging the Supreme Court. Dull procedural tricks. It's all paying off at once."
Anna North, who also wrote the three articles linked above:
Elizabeth Warren just announced her abortion platform. It's aggressive. This is all good, and I can think of a few more details. Abortion is a civil right, and it's long been recognized that it is the prerogative of federal law to protect the people against state and local laws that undermine civil rights. Beyond that, I'd like to see the Veterans Administration offer abortions at their facilities everywhere. I also think that it should be understood that anyone who claims "abortion is murder" is practicing hate speech. I don't see any way to ban that, but it should be disparaged.
Alabama just passed a near-total ban on abortion: "Though likely to be challenged in court, it's the strictest anti-abortion law in the country."
Renee Bracey Sherman: Recent abortion bans will impact poor people and people of color most.
Rickie Solinger: Alabama's near-total abortion ban is the ultimate elevation of the "unborn" over women.
Jeffrey Toobin: The abortion fight and the pretense of precedent.
Rachel Withers: Most Alabama voters don't support their state's exemption-free abortion ban.
Some scattered links this week:
Alexia Fernández Campbell: Farmers are losing patience with Trump's trade war.
John Cassidy:
More questions than answers about Boeing, the 737 Max, and the FAA: "Boeing bears a lot of responsibility for the two recent 737 Max plane crashes, and it is now facing numerous inquiries, but the Federal Aviation Administration is also culpable."
The stock market intrudes on the alternate reality of Trump's trade war. Not that the stock market, which basically measures corporate profits, is a useful guide to how this affects American consumers, let alone workers.
Patrick Cockburn: Trump is making the same US mistake in the Middle East yet again.
Helene Cooper/Edward Wong: Skeptical US allies resist Trump's new claims of threats from Iran. Meanwhile, the lame-brains in the Trump administration get carried away: see Eric Schmitt/Julian E Barnes: White House reviews military plans against Iran, in echoes of Iraq War. They're talking about deploying 120,000 troops, which seems like a lot but is actually the same number they used in 2003 to do such a bang-up job in Iraq -- a country about one-third the size of Iran (both in area and in population). For more details, see Fred Kaplan: War with Iran wouldn't be like Iraq: "It would be worse."
Chas Danner:
Justin Amash becomes first GOP lawmaker to say Trump should be impeached, and will probably be the only one for a long time (although sometimes I wonder if Trump isn't just baiting the Democrats to impeach him, thinking he'll get a re-election bounce like Clinton did). PS: David Beavers: Romney: GOP congressman's call for impeachment 'a courageous statement', although Romney stopped short of exhibiting any courage of his own.
Trump wants to make war criminals great again. Also: Ed Kilgore reminds us that Nixon pardoned Lt. William Calley, the officer in charge of the My Lai massacre: Will Trump go Nixonian with clemency for war criminals? On the other hand, then and now the real war criminals never even get charged. They go on to have lucrative careers, like Henry Kissinger did. Also: Dave Phillips: Trump may be preparing pardons for servicemen accused of war crimes.
David Dayen: The secret vote that could wipe away consumer rights.
Isabel Debre/Raphael Satter: Facebook busts Israel-based campaign to disrupt elections.
Sydney Ember: 'I did my best to stop American foreign policy': Bernie Sanders on the 1980s.
Nicholas Fandos/Maggie Haberman: House panel investigates obstruction claims against Trump lawyers.
David A Farenthold/Jonathan O'Connell: Trump's prized Doral resort is in steep decline, according to company documents, showing his business problems are mounting.
John Feffer: Bolton in Wonderland: "The only upside to Bolton's dangerous aggression toward Iran is that it may put him too far out in front of Trump."
Elaine Frantz: America's long, rich history of pretending systemic racism doesn't exist.
Conor Friedersdorf: America needs a permanent anti-war movement: "Public apathy toward relatively small-scale military actions makes war with Iran more likely." Actually, most cities have anti-war organizations, but they don't get enough support, especially as we're swamped with domestic crises and more attention is paid to conventional politics (because Republicans are so bad more people in their desperation support Democrats).
Tara Golshan: Elizabeth Warren's new policy rollout targets Pentagon corruption.
Umair Irfan: Fossil fuels are underpriced by a whopping $5.2 trillion: "We can't take on climate change without properly pricing coal, oil, and natural gas. But it's a huge political challenge."
Matthew Karnitschnig: Austrian government collapses over Russia scandal.
Ezra Klein: Countervailing powers: the forgotten economic idea Democrats need to rediscover. Klein is right that hardly anyone uses the term these days, but I grew up with it, and still refer to it often. I'm not sure where I got the idea, but Klein starts with John Kenneth Galbraith's 1952 book, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power. The idea is to build up multiple sources of power to work against the abuses that follow from concentrations of wealth and power. (The maxim I learned alongside this was "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.") Klein also cites a recent book, Tim Wu's The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.
Andy Kroll: Springtime for autocrats: "How Trump just legitimized one of Europe's most anti-democratic leaders." Hungary's Viktor Orbán visits the White House.
Anatoly Kurmanev: Venezuela's collapse is the worst outside of war in decades, economists say.
Mark Landler/Maggie Haberman/Eric Schmitt: Trump tells Pentagon chief he does not want war with Iran. This was the story which led Steven Colbert to exclaim, "I hope this doesn't get taken out of context, but thank God Donald Trump is president." Before I give Trump any credit on this score, I want to see him fire John Bolton, and tweet about how Bolton's been subverting his efforts to get along peacefully with the world. Even then, the fact that he hired Bolton never boded well.
Eric Levitz:
German Lopez: The House just passed a sweeping LGBTQ rights bill.
Madeline Marshall: Why prescription drugs cost more in America: Video. Also a link to Sarah Kliff: The true story of America's sky-high prescription drug prices.
Barbara McQuade: William Barr delivers chilling message to FBI for Trump. "If you come at the king, you best not miss"?
David Miliband: On refugees, the Trump administration is competent and malevolent.
Rani Molla: President Trump's new immigration proposal would be terrible for tech.
Casey Newton: Trump's social media bias reporting project is a data collection tool in disguise: "Instead of cracking down on violent extremism, the government is collecting email addresses."
James Petras: United States and Venezuela: a historical background.
Thomas Powers: The fog of ambition: Review of George Packer: Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century.
Robert Reich: The Trump economy is hurting most Americans. Statistics won't fool voters.
Joe Romm: Bezos offers absurd and hypocritical reason for his massive space plan: He thinks we have to sustain economic growth indefinitely, even beyond the carrying capacity of Earth, which can only be done by escaping into space. Which I suppose means he can't imagine post-capitalism, even though there are dozens of books on the subject, and dozens more on sustainable economies. Maybe he should drop in on a local book store? His scheme would be deemed so crackpot he could never get funding from government let alone banks, but seeing as he's on track to become Earth's first trillionaire, we're tempted to take him seriously. That is an irony of capitalism: sometimes a blessing, sometimes a farce.
Brian M Rosenthal: 'They were conned': how reckless loans devastated a generation of taxi drivers. Or what happens when you allow a secondary market for a limited number of licenses.
Aaron Rupar:
Trump gives up the game he's playing with Congress during Fox News interview: "Trump admits he's relying on the courts -- not Congress -- to change policy."
Trump's reckless "treason" accusation against the FBI, explained.
Trump pardons billionaire fraudster who wrote glowing book about him: Conrad Black, "a former media mogul and business partner," convicted for fraud and obstruction of justice, author of a 2016 piece "Trump is the good guy," the pardon citing his "tremendous contributions to business, as well as to political and historical thought." Also pardoned at the same time, Patrick Nolan. (See Aaron Blake: The very political pattern of Trump's pardons.) The latter article has a number of examples, notably Dinesh D'Souza, convicted for campaign finance fraud, author of a number of awful books and films, inventor of the "angry Kenyan" Obama theory.
Richard Silverstein:
Matt Taibbi: The liberal embrace of war: "American interventionists learned a lesson from Iraq: pre-empt the debate. Now everyone is for regime change." He seems to have jumped the gun here, for while the liberal media heads he cites (e.g., Rachel Maddow) readily echoed the Bolton line on Venezuela and Iran, actual Democratic politicians have been less eager to topple foreign regimes. Jonathan Chait points this out: Taibbi's 'liberal embrace of war' screed cites zero liberals embracing war. I'd score that one for Chait, although I don't fault Taibbi's worries about Democrats enabling Republican warmongering. As for the "liberal" media, also see: James North: US mainstream media is contributing to rising risk of war with Iran. Nor is Chait above concocting his own shady, twisted titles: Bernie Sanders wants to destroy the best schools poor urban kids have. He means charter schools, which only succeed (relatively) in places where public schools have been grossly neglected (partly by politicians moving funds to charter schools). For more on Sanders' plan, see Dylan Scott: Bernie Sanders rolls out education plan that cracks down on charter schools; also Nikhil Goyal: Bernie's plan to save public schools.
Alex Ward:
Matthew Yglesias:
An expert's 7 principles for solving America's housing crisis.
The raging controversy over Ronald Sullivan, Harvey Weinstein, and Harvard, explained.
Bernie Sanders and AOC's plan to crack down on high-interest loans, explained: They call it the Stop Loan Sharks Act, by capping interest on things like credit cards at 15% (still sounds high to me).
Trump's puzzling trade war with China, sort of explained: Useful survey of Trump's side of the tariff war, credits Trump with more smarts than the evidence suggests: "Precisely because the trade war is an inherently lose-lose situation, any possible resolution of it is a win." But that assumes that the trade war will end some day, and that everyone will have forgotten about the costs of starting it.
Joe Biden's surprisingly controversial claim that Trump is an aberration, explained. Cites some critiques:
Peter Beinart: Unlike his rivals, Biden sees Trump as an aberration.
Mehdi Hasan: Joe Biden won't blame the Republicans for Trump. That should disqualify him.
Jamil Smith: We need a disunity ticket: "No, a Biden-Romney union would not bring this country together."
Michael Tomasky: Someone tell Joe Biden it's not 1973 anymore, the Republican Party now belongs to Trump.
There's an interesting chart here showing that only a quarter of Clinton's ads primarily centered on policy, "a much lower number than any previous 21st-century campaign." That slack was made up by attacking Trump personally, trying to isolate him from the Republican Party, which not only didn't do Clinton much good, it also didn't help Democrats down ticket. Compare that to 2018, when Democrats focused on policy issues (like health care).
Li Zhou:
Kamala Harris wants public defenders to get paid as much as prosecutors.
The disaster aid fight shows just how unprepared Congress is to deal with the effects of climate change. As an engineer, one of my core beliefs is that it's much cheaper and much more effective to prevent faults than to repair and compensate for disasters. But despite the title, that isn't the core problem here. (Even if it were, some natural disasters are way beyond our power to prevent. And while there is no doubt that climate change increases the number and severity of disasters, there is no quick and easy solution to that, either.) The immediate problem is that at the same time we're being hit with more and more disasters, Republicans have decided they don't want to pay for disaster relief, largely because it runs counter to their belief that government shouldn't involve itself in helping people (at least not Puerto Ricans).