The pigs had been lying dead in the lab for an hour -- no blood was circulating in their bodies, their hearts were still, their brain waves flat. Then a group of Yale scientists pumped a custom-made solution into the dead pigs' bodies with a device similar to a heart-lung machine. From a report: What happened next adds questions to what science considers the wall between life and death. Although the pigs were not considered conscious in any way, their seemingly dead cells revived. Their hearts began to beat as the solution, which the scientists called OrganEx, circulated in veins and arteries. Cells in their organs, including the heart, liver, kidneys and brain, were functioning again, and the animals never got stiff like a typical dead pig. Other pigs, dead for an hour, were treated with ECMO, a machine that pumped blood through their bodies. They became stiff, their organs swelled and became damaged, their blood vessels collapsed, and they had purple spots on their backs where blood pooled. The group reported its results Wednesday in Nature. The researchers say their goals are to one day increase the supply of human organs for transplant by allowing doctors to obtain viable organs long after death. And, they say, they hope their technology might also be used to prevent severe damage to hearts after a devastating heart attack or brains after a major stroke.
There is nothing inherently political about identity, but conservatives absolutely love to make any identity that isn’t their own a political statement or choice. It’s a demeaning and dangerous perspective, as once something is framed as a choice, it’s a logical conclusion that people can simply choose to change, hide, or conceal themselves in order to avoid discrimination or find acceptance. One major example of this logic in action is the archaic and harmful practice of conversion “therapy,” where folks try to force queer people into being straight and cisgender. In a word, it’s evil.
With this in mind, let’s talk about the latest sad situation out in a public school district in Wisconsin. As reported by local outlet WISN, teachers in the Kettle Moraine School District are now banned from including pronouns in email signatures as well as from displaying LGBTQ+ Pride flags in their classrooms. They’re even banned from wearing rainbow apparel, which sounds like satire but isn’t, per The Advocate.
At a recent school board meeting, Superintendent Stephen Plum categorized Pride flags and Black Lives Matter flags as a means of expressing political identity that could lead to folks being uncomfortable.
“The expectation is that teachers and administration will not have political flags or religious messaging in their classroom or on their person,” Plum said at the meeting. He noted that Back the Badge and Make America Great Again displays are also banned. It makes sense to ban MAGA flags and related items because they’re linked directly to a political campaign. But BLM and Pride flags aren’t tied to a political party or candidate.
This is an important distinction in schools and even when it comes to voting—you might remember we covered an instance of a poll worker in Tennessee being fired after turning someone away for wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt to vote, incorrectly believing it counted as political attire.
“We’re in a world where politics are highlighted,” Plum stated at the July 26 meeting, adding that it puts people in “uncomfortable” positions. He also stated the district isn’t as concerned about students finding this political as it is about their parents.
Someone at the meeting asked if this policy would include religious jewelry, such as wearing a cross necklace, and he said it was fine provided it is discrete.
Board member Jim Romanowski argued against the policy barring political expression, saying students are “fully capable” of using their critical thinking skills to “sort through the noise of partisan politics” and make their own choices, per LGBTQ Nation.
Sadly, this district is far from alone in trying to stomp down on identities and expressions. For example, one teacher in Missouri resigned after he says his school district ordered him to take the Pride flag down from his classroom. An openly bisexual teacher in Michigan quit for the same reason. An openly queer art teacher was fired after allowing students to paint LGBTQ+ Pride flags. Other districts, like one in Utah, are pushing to ban Pride flags in public school classrooms, too.
As of now, the policy in this Wisconsin school district is set to go into effect at the start of the upcoming school year.
90-year-old racist Joe Arpaio appears to be headed for yet another electoral defeat, trailing in the race for Fountain Hills, Arizona mayor. ”The former six-term sheriff of Maricopa County said late Tuesday night that the vote totals so far came from early ballots and that he was awaiting the totals of in-person voting in his bid to unseat two-term Mayor Ginny Dickey,” the Associated Press reported.
He can keep waiting all he wants, but it’s likely not going to go any different than the rest of the races Arpaio has sought, and lost, since getting resoundingly rebuked by Maricopa County voters in 2016. Joe, maybe it’s best to just call it a day.
Arpaio has sought numerous different seats since losing his race by double-digits to Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone. In 2018, he sought the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jeff Flake, ultimately losing the GOP primary to insurrectionist Kelli Ward and Martha McSally, who would later lose to Kyrsten Sinema.
Officials in fact settled with one victim for more than $3 million, the AP said in 2015. “Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio apologizes for inadequate investigations into over 400 sex crimes, including the rape of a 13-year-old girl, from 2004 to 2007.” If he really meant it, he would have resigned from office and never shown his face in public again. But we all know what happened next: continued harassment of Latinos and immigrants, the court order to stop his racist shenanigans, the contempt of court guilty verdict, the pardon from the insurrectionist president.
“Arpaio said he doesn’t worry about his past haunting him in the mayor’s race,” the AP reported on Tuesday. “All that baggage didn’t make a difference, except in 2016. But I had baggage in 2012—big baggage,” Arpaio told the AP. “And I got reelected.” So get that, everyone: it didn’t make any difference, except for when he lost, and has lost in every race since then.
It’s not hard to figure out why Arpaio continues to humiliate himself. Several days ago, Phoenix New Times (which has done phenomenal work over the years reporting on Arpaio’s abuses) noted that the racist former sheriff was charging people $45 each to attend his 90th birthday party, to which he arrived in Cadillac DeVille. “Once inside, attendees didn't think twice about purchasing Inkjet-printed photos of Arpaio's birthday cake for $741.40, plus tax and shipping. None of that money appeared on Arpaio's most recent campaign finance reports,” even though speakers (including the awful Wendy Rogers) made very political speeches.
It’s a fact that Latino and immigrant organizers and activists, through their years-long campaigns, helped bring down this terrible racist of sheriff. He’s remained toxic enough, and washed-out enough, that his subsequent electoral efforts have failed. But clearly, Arpaio knows that as long he’s got one racist sucker (because what other kind of person is still a fan of this man in 2022?) willing to shell out $45 for dry birthday cake, he doesn’t care how many times he loses.
Conspiracy theory peddler Alex Jones admitted in court Wednesday that the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was real, citing his newfound belief after a day of brutal testimony offered in court by the parents of one of the children who was murdered.
Jones is trying to fend off a $150 million defamation lawsuit from the parents of Jesse Lewis, a 6-year-old boy who was shot and killed in the 2012 attack at a school in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty students and six teachers died.
The victims have said Jones’ hoax claims on his Infowars website have turned their lives into a living nightmare where threats, abuse, and harassment plague them daily. Jones, meanwhile, has portrayed himself as a victim of the press, who he argues are hellbent on typecasting him as a loon.
But the press doesn’t need to lift a finger to make Jones look bad.
NBC News reported that in court on Wednesday, Mark Bankston, a lawyer for the parents of the late Jesse Lewis, revealed Jones’ attorney had mistakenly sent a copy of every text Jones has sent for years directly to them. Bankston said he received this 12 days ago.
This prompted the day’s million-dollar question for Jones.
According to Rolling Stone, an anonymous source told the outlet late Wednesday that the Jan. 6 committee is preparing a subpoena for the texts accidentally sent by Alex Jones’ attorney to the attorneys representing the parents of the Sandy Hook shooting victim.
Per a thread from NBC, Bankston also raised the matter of the many emails uncovered where Jones is expressly discussing Sandy Hook. Jones has previously said—under oath—that he was unable to find any on that subject for the court.
Wow. Sandy Hook parents' lawyer is revealing that Alex Jones' lawyers sent him the contents of Jones' phone BY MISTAKE. "12 days ago, your attorneys messed up and sent me a digital copy of every text" Jones has sent for years. "You know what perjury is?" the lawyer asks.
Judge instructing the jury on the entire contents of Alex Jones' phone, which was accidentally handed over from Jones' lawyers to the Sandy Hook parents' lawyers: "What we do know is that it was not properly turned over when it should have been."
NBC reported that Jones appeared “shocked” at the development.
Some of the information in the exposed texts included details on how much Jones’ Infowars program was raking in. In 2018, there were times the show earned $800,000 a day, and after Jones was de-platformed, that rate was on track to just keep increasing.
Jones was booted from Facebook, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube in 2018 in light of his incessant promotion of hatred, his glorifying of violence, and his dehumanizing of various groups, including immigrants, the LGBT community, Muslims, and others.
Jones only yesterday told Judge Gamble he was bankrupt. The verdict on that is still out, and when he made the claim in court yesterday in front of jurors, the judge chastised him.
On Wednesday, Bankston said after Jones was de-platformed, he was on track to make at least $300 million annually. Jones defended the $800,000 days as a fluke that stemmed from a “really good week” at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC.
The waters are growing deep for Jones. The attorney for the Sandy Hook parents have him in a precarious position.
According to NBC, Bankston was heard on a hot mic at recess noting how no one in the courtroom has yet thought about what happens when the trove of texts goes to law enforcement.
That’s a good question, especially in light of his relationship to Jan. 6 and the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Jones sat for a deposition this January and invoked his Fifth Amendment right to more than 100 questions.
As soon as he was done with that, however, he went on his podcast to describe the questions and his responses. He called the Jan. 6 probe “tainted” and slammed investigators.
Analysis from civil rights attorney Andrew Laufer to Daily Kos then seems just as poignant today.
“You don’t have to be under oath in order to be held criminally liable regarding information contained in a statement. If he makes any incriminating statement under any circumstance, he can be held criminally liable for it,” Laufer said in January.
Two weeks ago, Jones’ ex-wife Kelly Jones came out publicly on Twitter, saying she had “insider info” relevant to the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation.
Enlarge / AMD's EPYC server processors are benefitting from Intel's delays. (credit: AMD)
Earnings reports for tech companies this quarter have been mixed at best. Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and others have managed to eke out a little growth, while the likes of Meta and Nintendo shrank a little, and most companies' projections for the next quarter are also less-than-optimistic.
One company that has been hit particularly hard is Intel, which saw its revenues decline from $19.6 billion in Q2 of 2021 to $15.3 billion in 2022. The company's earnings presentation (PDF) showed weakness across the board for a variety of reasons: weaker demand for consumer PCs, money invested in getting the Arc dedicated graphics products off the ground, and "competitive pressure" in the server CPU market.
That competitor is AMD, whose EPYC line of server processors was just one bright spot in a record quarter for the company. Revenue increased from $3.9 billion in Q2 of 2021 to $6.6 billion this year, with $673 million of that additional revenue coming from EPYC processor sales and the company's data center division. This is a big deal for AMD, which had some success with its Opteron server CPUs in the mid-2000s but had mostly ceded that ground to Intel throughout the 2010s.
The AZ GOP has lost its fucking mind. Hopefully the rest of the electorate will restore some sanity
Well, the results are mostly in from the hellscape of the Arizona Republican primaries and we now have our answer. Arizona Republican voters want fascism, and they want it bad. The unbelievably odious Blake Masters—a Peter Thiel-funded racist conspiracy peddler who's gone all-in on "great replacement" theories that claim immigration is a plot to weaken the power of white people, a man who said after recent mass murders that gun violence was caused by "Black people," a pro-insurrection turd of a person with no redeeming qualities whatsoever—will challenge incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly.
The good news is that this probably animates non-delusional, non-fascist Arizonians to get to the polls to vote in November rather than abide having a Tucker Carlson clone represent them in the Senate. The bad news is that Arizona Republican voters really had an unambiguous vote here, a vote for or against an anti-American, pro-insurrection election hoax promoter with views you'd normally hear only from your most racist uncle—and they went for the fascist. Of course they did.
Nobody in so-called conservatism gets to say, "Oh, the conspiracy-addled racism is an outlier position." Republicans keep campaigning on it, and the base keeps voting for it. State Attorney General Mark Brnovich, running against Masters, couldn't muster even 20% of the vote. Brnovich was punished by the state's fascist base for not helping Donald Trump spread election hoaxes used to justify a coup attempt. He was punished for not assisting in an act of sedition.
That was a theme for Arizona Republicans. Republican Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers testified to the House committee investigating Trump's coup, again making it clear that Trump and his allies were simply lying about an election he lost. For refusing to support a treasonous conspiracy, Republican voters booted him from office, because Arizona Republican voters are ... pro-sedition.
They weren't "confused." They weren't taken in. They backed Team Sedition, they still back Team Sedition, and they're still purging the party of anyone who isn't a democracy-contemptuous fascist.
White nationalist Rep. Paul Gosar walked away with two-thirds of the vote in his own primary. Gosar's congressional behavior has been so odious that he's been stripped of committee assignments and, at this point, has been reduced to ever-blabbering congressional paperweight. But his voters find the "white nationalist" part more important than the "functionally useless" part.
Were voters confused on what Gosar stands for? Not even a little. Arizona Republicans want the conspiracy theories, the performative cruelty, and the fascism-laced, militia-adjacent white supremacy. That's the Republican base now.
It keeps going. Supporter of All Possible Election Hoaxes Kari Lake appears to be squeaking out a win against Republican primary opponent Karrin Taylor Robson in the race to take on Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs. Lake has made a name for herself, as with the others, by propping up Donald Trump's treasonous election hoaxes. Lake spent her campaign promising that she'd respond to those hoaxes by eliminating mail voting, by throwing out all the tabulation machines—basically, by making it difficult to cast a vote and nearly impossible to count them.
Lake spent recent days vowing that if she didn't win her election, that just meant that "fraud" happened yet again, which she said "we" were "already detecting," thanks to her "cyber folks." Lake was also losing in the early results last evening before overtaking her opponent in later counts.
What's this? The votes flipped during the night? Does that mean Kari Lake is the beneficiary of fraud?
She's not confessing to that, of course, because she's just a dime-a-dozen conspiracy crank who lies for a living. She already said that she'd call "fraud" if she didn't win and wouldn't make a peep if she did, so there you go. Again: Arizona conservatives voted for this. The more someone lies, the more they like 'em. The more laws someone promises to do away with in order to achieve a Great Trumpian Future, the more Arizona Republicans purr with pleasure.
That brings us to the last act of brazen fascism of the desert evening. That bozo. You know the one. The fake-ass Arizona pseudo-cowboy who fled to the state after he botched everything in his life it was possible to botch back in Michigan.
Oh, Mark Finchem. I suppose a state that would willingly send Paul Gosar back to the House despite Gosar's family repeatedly pleading with voters to stop voting for the crank would have no problem with the almost cartoonishly hollow Finchem. Finchem is an election conspiracy theorist and ... not much else. He will now be the Republican nominee for secretary of state, after running on promises very similar to Lake's because there's basically no election conspiracy you can throw at him that he won't nod his head to and champion from that day forward. (He also seems the most likely candidate to end up in a federal prison if he wins in November and actually starts making good on his promises. Just a hunch.)
If elected, both Lake and Finchem have expressed a willingness to overturn elections in the manner Donald Trump attempted. Trump wanted state Republicans to simply declare that the election results were invalid because unspecified, invisible "fraud" happened and therefore, state Republican officials would simply declare that the Republican won.
The Arizona Republican base loves that idea. A seditious conspiracy to topple America is what most animated them in each of these races. It wasn't a minor part of a candidate's platform that Republican voters begrudgingly overlooked; in race after race, they voted for those promising to do the most damage to American elections in service of reining in "immigrants" and "Black people" and other enemies.
This is the part where nearly any national news report would bend over backwards to portray the Republican base that voted for these crooks and conspiracy promoters as Good People, despite having no evidence that any of them are Good People and a lot of evidence that they are sedition-backing hoax-loving racist bags of spite who know what each candidate stands for, go to the polls, and vote for the people promising to hurt or overturn elections that don't go the Republican way.
There is no need for this. It is selling a hoax. The evidence that Arizona Republicans do not want fascism is as anecdotal as the Trump camp's claims of ballots being smuggled into election centers in pizza boxes or repairmen's trucks. That does not mean that the whole state is irredeemable—most Arizona residents didn't vote for these people. But the Republicans who came out to vote were unambiguous in voting for the hoax promoters and the people promising they would refuse to acknowledge future Republican election losses if they could invent a reason not to.
The Arizona Republican Party has, like the Republican parties in many other states, been so captured by anti-democracy hacks and hoaxers that there is no room for anyone not on Team Sedition. It cannot be fixed, but the Americans who back it need to be humiliated into oblivion. Believing lies for the sake of a mail-order meat salesman you once saw on television, or backing a white nationalist who tells you that non-white immigrants are coming into the country due to a plot by global elites to dilute good American whiteness: This is a failure of a movement. It is simply cowardice, lashing out. It is a fascist movement inventing enemies to justify cruelties that they have been itching to do for decades, and now see as tantalizingly close.
In Arizona, that turns November into a referendum. There's no reasoning with people who don't care whether their politicians lie to them about matters as big as democracy itself. They can only be beaten. It's up to all the voters in the state who cannot stomach America's fascist turn to reject the Republican base's choices, as Kansas voters rejected Republican theocratic whims there. The only way to stop this movement of fascist hoax-promoters is to tear the movement to pieces in the voting booths so there're no scraps large enough to be recovered.
What an evening it was to be a Kansas voter! Thanks to the hard work of Kansas organizations like the Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, Kansas Voter Empowerment Project, and Kansas Democratic candidates and activists, Kansas voted down the anti-choice constitutional amendment in an overwhelming, 18-point trouncing. The message this sends to the Republican party in Kansas, as well as nationally, is a terrifying one, as the party has bet big on the anti-choice proposal being so wildly popular that it would help them in going into the fall.
Not only was the constitutional amendment unpopular, but it leads to big questions about the basic narrative inside of the statehouse, where, for years, I have sat through speech after speech telling the gallery that Kansas was an anti-choice state, and that Democratic candidates would “pay the price” for being on the side of abortion rights.
As I watched the results come in, it was the rural, small counties choosing to vote in nearly even odds—or sometimes easily for Vote No—that sent a clear legislative message: Get your hands off of our bodies. This wasn’t just a rejection of a constitutional amendment; this defeat also rejected any mandate Republicans have claimed to push the anti-choice agenda in the statehouse.
While the Value Them Both amendment went down in flames, other races in Kansas are going to have a high cost for Republicans. Kansas activists proved that, rather than avoid discussing abortion in the post-Roe world, you have to lean into it, state your case, and turn out voters who have not been present.
For Kansas Governor
Republican Candidate Derek Schmidt was widely assumed to be the presumptive nominee after Sam Brownback’s LG Jeff Colyer dropped out of the race. Before the primary, Derek Schmidt took his stance in favor of the Yes campaign on Value Them Both. On primary day, strange things happened.
Both of these are bad news for the current attorney general, who now has to travel the road with someone he wishes he could just avoid.
In the race for Kansas Attorney General
Returning for another bite at the apple is the statewide loser of the 2018 campaign for governor, who turned over the seat to Laura Kelly. If you haven’t guessed, that man is Kris Kobach, a polarizing figure in Kansas—even among Republicans. Kobach is seen as someone who spent freely, lost tons of money for the state, and had no victories while repeatedly being shut down in the courts.
Kansas Republican leadership worked hard on behalf of Kellie Warren, who they thought could beat him, but in a 3-way divided race, she couldn’t overcome Kobach, and now Kansas Republicans are sending the weakest possible candidate into the fall, and Derek Schmidt will run into Kobach again and again and again in every parade, every county fair, and every event until election day, which will make trying to pivot remotely back to the center a difficulty.
Sharice Davids comes out a big winner
For a supposed hard red state, Kansas is the only state in the union that has elected three women as governor, and all three of them were Democrats. We are the only state currently represented by a Native American woman in congress. Kansas Republicans redrew Sharice David’s district in hopes they could oust her this year, but the results from the primary look god awful for the Republicans.
Amanda Adkins, who lost to Sharice Davids in 2020, is back again, and in her primary, she also faced off against an also-ran. Her campaign, built on the slogan: “Believe. Build” talked extensively to rural communities about being in favor of the constitutional amendment.
Adkins has offered a faith-based policy idea, hoping it attracts the smaller counties now in her district, and she was open that she would 100% back the constitutional amendment. In Johnson County, Kansas, the largest county of the state and the majority of the congressional district, Vote No prevailed with 59% of the total vote, an 89,293 vote advantage. Not counting the portions of Democratic-friendly Wyandotte county still within the Kansas congressional third district, this margin is huge and outstrips all votes possible in the Republican-added counties. This ties the strong Vote Yes position of Adkins simply did not sell.
We aren’t done in Kansas.
November is coming. With Kris Kobach on the trail and Republican candidates who bet big on a Vote Yes win on the ballot, Kansas is giving hope not just to voters nationally, but to Democratic faithful here at home. There isn’t time to celebrate just yet. I’ll let you know about that once we re-elect a governor, a congresswoman, and several office holders.
Abortion was literally, directly on the ballot in Kansas on Tuesday, and voters overwhelmingly rejected the effort to open the door to an abortion ban. But abortion will also be on the ballot when voters go to the polls in November. Which means it’s worth a reminder of what Republican senators and Senate candidates were saying in the first flush of Republican triumph over the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
Rep. Ted Budd, the Republican Senate nominee in North Carolina, was jubilant, calling Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization an “historic victory for the millions of Americans who believe that every life is precious and deserves protection. And it is a victory for the millions of unborn children who may now realize the most fundamental of all human rights, the right to life.” Budd also gestured at the possibility of future action, saying, “As a conscience-driven pro-life advocate, I will continue to support protections for unborn children everywhere.”
When the draft opinion leaked, Pennsylvania Republican nominee Dr. Mehmet Oz celebrated it, tweeting, “The Court is right. Roe was wrongly decided. Abortion laws should be left up to the American people and their elected representatives. I look forward to supporting pro-life legislation that saves innocent lives in the U.S. Senate.”
J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee in Ohio, hailed “a great day” that was ushering in a “new phase of the pro-life movement.” He, too, suggested that he would support federal legislation restricting or banning abortion.
Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin called Dobbs “a victory for life and for those who have fought for decades to protect the unborn.”
Herschel Walker, the Georgia Republican Senate nominee, initially responded to Dobbs by saying, “I stand for life and Raphael Warnock stands for abortion.” But close to a month later, after the state started moving forward on its own abortion ban, Walker wanted to change the subject, telling reporters who asked him about it, “You’re going to bring up things that people are not concerned about.” Then again, the ever-consistent and coherent Walker also said, “There’s not a national ban on abortion right now and I think that’s a problem.”
In Arizona, Republican Senate nominee Blake Masters tweeted that Dobbs was “a huge victory for children across this country.” That’s no surprise: Masters had previously called for a federal abortion ban, saying, “The federal government needs to step in and say, 'We recognize life here and no state can permit abortion.’” Masters has also said the courts should overturnGriswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court decision affirming the right to contraception.
These are the candidates the Republican Party is trying to elect to the Senate in some of the key battleground states this year. They celebrate the end of Roe v. Wade and in many cases have explicitly said they would support a federal abortion ban. When voters look at their ballots and see these names, they should know what a vote for Oz or Walker or Vance or Masters or Johnson or Budd would mean.
A government watchdog group that pursued records from the Defense Department and U.S. Army six days after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has newly revealed, according to court records, that the Pentagon “wiped” phones belonging to top Defense officials, including those who oversaw the national security response to the insurrection.
The fruits of American Oversight’s investigation, sparked by it's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request—which is now more than a year old—were first reported by CNN on Tuesday.
The Washington, D.C.-based group has pursued Jan. 6-related communications from a battery of Trump administration officials including former President Donald Trump himself, former Vice President Mike Pence, former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, former acting Secretary of Defense Kashyap “Kash” Patel, and former U.S. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, among others.
The Defense Department now disturbingly joins the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security as yet another agency that has failed to preserve critical records related to Jan. 6.
It was this March when American Oversight first learned from the Defense Department and U.S. Army attorneys that officials who had received a government-issued phone had it wiped once they ended their employment.
The Pentagon billed this as standard policy.
“DOD and Army conveyed to plaintiff that when an employee separates from DOD or Army he or she turns in the government-issued phone, and the phone is wiped. For those custodians no longer with the agency, the text messages were not preserved and therefore could not be searched, although it is possible that particular text messages could have been saved into other records systems such as email,” court filings state.
Heather Sawyer, who serves as the executive director at American Oversight, has now called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to conduct an investigation into the missing messages. This is particularly urgent, she argued, in light of the ongoing issue of missing Jan. 6 messages at the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security.
“The apparent deletion of records from January 6th by multiple agencies bolsters the need for a cross-agency investigation into the possible destruction of federal records,” Sawyer wrote.
In addition to Miller, Patel, and McCarthy, Jan. 6 texts were also sought from former Defense Department General Counsel Paul Ney and former General Counsel James McPherson.
Ney’s phone was wiped on Jan. 20, 2021, his last day and the day former President Donald Trump was inaugurated. Patel’s phone was wiped on Jan. 22, and Miller’s phone was wiped on Feb. 2.
Former Army Secretary McCarthy and General Counsel McPherson’s phones were wiped too; McCarthy left his post on Jan. 19, 2021, and McPherson departed the next day.
Ney told CNN on Tuesday he did not personally wipe his phone before he turned it in, or ever, that he could recall.
“When I turned the phone in, I did not know what was going to be done with that device nor do I know what actually was done with that device after I turned it in. If DoD represented in litigation that the device was wiped after I left DoD on Inauguration Day, I believe that is very likely what happened and when it happened, but I do not know why,” Ney said.
Records have also been requested from the Director of Army Staff Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt and Army Chief of Staff James McConville. Both Piatt and McConville are currently working at the department, so the messages on their devices should still be in place. A review of their devices has been ongoing since September of last year and according to American Oversight, a response is anticipated next month.
“There’s no indication yet that either phone has been wiped and we’re hoping with an additional search we will be able to turn up more records,” Dara Silvestre, a spokesperson for American Oversight, told Daily Kos on Wednesday.
Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who chairs the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, called on Garland to investigate the missing texts at the Department of Homeland Security and Secret Service last week.
On Monday, top Democrats in the House of Representatives Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Bennie Thompson called on Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari to recuse himself from a current probe into missing Secret Service text messages from Jan. 6. If he recused, the investigation would go to the Department of Justice.
Cuffari told the committee last month the messages were erased as part of a pre-planned device reset. That reset went forward despite multiple requests from Congress that personnel retain information on their devices in the wake of the Capitol attack.
Widespread reporting has suggested that Cuffari, a Trump appointee, actually learned that the text messages were deleted in May 2021, a full seven months before the time he told members of the select committee he first learned of the “lost” messages.
Cuffari also appears to have delayed notifying members of Congress about missing messages belonging to Chad Wolf, the former acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and his deputy, Ken Cuccinelli. Maloney and Thompson—who also chairs the Jan. 6 committee—have requested transcribed interviews with key Department of Homeland Security officials, including Thomas Kait, Cuffari’s deputy. Records obtained by Maloney and Thompson so far appear to indicate that Kait may have toned down language in an internal memo that originally stressed the importance of retaining records pursuant to Cuffari’s investigation of the Department of Homeland Security response to Jan. 6. Fellow Deputy Inspector General Kristen Fredricks has also been asked to meet with Maloney and Thompson. They chair the House Oversight and Reform Committee and House Homeland Security Committee, respectively.
The missing messages are important to sort out because they could offer significant insight into the security delays and lapses that played out on Jan. 6. This would be especially helpful when it comes to Miller.
Miller told the select committee investigating the insurrection that Trump “never” gave a direct order to have 10,000 National Guard troops deployed for Jan. 6.
However, when he appeared on Fox News a month earlier and wasn’t under oath, he said Trump did order troops.
Miller’s tenure under Trump started just after Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump fired Miller’s predecessor, Mark Esper, by tweet on Nov. 9.
Esper and Trump’s relationship had soured, according to Esper, in the wake of the national racial justice protests for George Floyd. Esper told The Washington Postthe final straw came when Trump “duped” him and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley into escorting him, with a bevy of other officials, to “examine” damage done to a church near Lafayette Park, just across the street from the White House.
Protesters were cleared from the park and were pepper sprayed and accosted by police minutes before Trump took the walk to the church, held up a Bible, took a photo, and left.
In a report published last June, Mark Greenblatt, the Trump-appointed inspector general for the Interior Department, said federal police did not clear the square of protesters so Trump could pose for a photo. The use of force on protesters was not addressed, but Greenblatt said there were already plans underway early that morning to cordon off the area with antiscale fencing.
Miller hadn’t been on the job long when Jan. 6 happened, but his role that day was important. A report by the Defense Department inspector general in November noted how Miller was apprehensive about having National Guard stationed at the Capitol in the runup to Jan. 6. With talk of military intervention in the transfer of power floating around in the press, he was concerned about the optics.
He ended up authorizing the Army to use a quick reaction force team made of National Guard on Jan. 4, but only as a last resort and under very restricted conditions.
Since Jan. 6, questions have steadily expanded around the chain of command on Jan. 6 and why there were such gross delays to provide backup to police officers who were outnumbered by the thousands. Many of the delays have been chalked up to confusion and bad communication.
But those details are murky and hotly contested by officials on and off the record.
The Pentagon was cleared of any wrongdoing in its response to Jan. 6 by its inspector general, Sean O’Donnell, in November 2021. O’Donnell was appointed by Trump and still currently serves in the role. The report’s conclusions were challenged by Col. Earl Matthews, a lawyer for the D.C. chapter of the National Guard.
Matthews singled out Piatt and Charles Flynn, then the deputy chief of staff for operations.
Piatt and Flynn—who is also the brother to Trump’s disgraced National Security Adviser Michael Flynn—refused requests for help from the Guard on Jan. 6, Matthews said, because they feared how troops around the Capitol might look.
“LTGs Piatt and Flynn stated that the optics of having uniformed military personnel deployed to the U.S. Capitol would not be good,” Matthews wrote in a scathing report.
He also called both Flynn and Piatt “unmitigated liars” in regard to their respective testimonies before Congress about Jan. 6.
Flynn, like Piatt, still serves in an official capacity. Flynn is commanding general of the U.S. Army Pacific.
The Jan. 6 committee has been analyzing the National Guard response as a part of its greater investigation. During its public hearings, the committee presented a wealth of testimony from White House officials, including Milley, who said Trump never gave an order to deploy the Guard even as calls for help were pouring in.
It was Pence who told then-Defense Secretary Chris Miller, unequivocally, to “clear the Capitol” during an intense phone call on Jan. 6.
There is no record that Trump ever called anyone, at any agency, to ask for help on Jan. 6
“There were two or three calls with Vice President Pence,” Milley told the select committee last month. “It was very animated and he issued very explicit, very direct, unambiguous orders. There was no question about that [...] He was very animated, very direct, very firm, and to Secretary Miller, [he said] get the military down there, get the Guard down here, put down this situation, etc.”
Milley recalled speaking with Meadows on Jan. 6 as well. Meadows was anxious about Pence appearing to be in control.
Milley recalled Meadows telling him: “We have to kill the narrative that the vice president is making all the decisions. We need to establish the narrative that the president is still in charge and things are steady or stable or that sort of thing.
“I immediately interpreted that as politics, politics, politics. Red flag for me, but no action. But I remember it distinctly,” Milley said.
the taliban wants their religion to trump everything. It's a huge problem
In what many consider the first case of its kind, a veteran Minnesota pharmacist went on trial Monday after allegedly refusing to dispense the morning-after pill to a woman due to his own personal beliefs on abortion and contraception. According to NBC News, the woman, a mother of five, filed a civil lawsuit against the pharmacist for violating her civil rights by refusing to fill her prescription for emergency contraception.
The woman, identified as Andrea Anderson, is seeking unspecified damages. She wants an injunction requiring Badeaux and the pharmacy he works for to follow state law, which prohibits discrimination based on sex, including on issues related to pregnancy and childbirth.
The incident took place in 2019 when Anderson sought emergency contraceptive after a condom broke during sex. While Anderson “acted quickly” the pharmacist on duty, George Badeaux, refused to fill Anderson’s prescription, claiming it would violate his "beliefs," the complaint said.
Badeaux has been working at the McGregor Thrifty White pharmacy for several decades, NBC News noted. According to the complaint, he not only refused to give Anderson her medication but warned her of trying to fill the prescription at other local pharmacies. Under state law, Badeaux is required to tell Anderson where else she could try but he refused to do so.
“She acted quickly because any delay in obtaining emergency contraception increases the risk of pregnancy,” the civil complaint states. “Badeaux informed her that there would be another pharmacist working the next day, who might be willing to fill the medication but that he could not guarantee that they would help.”
According to the Star Tribune, Badeaux has refused to dispense contraceptive drugs three other times in his career. Court documents note that his objection to dispensing the Plan B was because it could possibly prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the wall of the uterus.
He claimed providing the contraceptive would prevent "the new DNA, the new life, from being able to continue to live and grow. It is similar to removing all care from a newborn child by throwing it out the backdoor into the woods," the Star Tribune reported.
But what’s worse is that when Anderson sought to get the prescription filled at a CVS in a neighboring town, that pharmacist too denied filling the prescription. According to the complaint, Anderson ended up traveling more than 100 miles round trip, “while a massive snowstorm was headed to central Minnesota” to get the prescription filled at Walgreens in a different town.
Badeaux’s trial began with jury selection Monday, a week after the U.S. House passed a bill that would guarantee the right to contraception under federal law.
According to the Star Tribune, the case could result in a precedent since it seems to be the first case in which a woman was refused contraceptives and could result in similar cases being brought up in other states that have sex-discrimination laws covering reproductive issues. The case has taken nearly three years to reach trial with several legal fillings in place.
The outlet also noted that this filing is different than others since it is filed under the state's Human Rights Act. As a result, during the pretrial order, Aitkin County District Judge David Hermerding ruled that Badeaux cannot raise federal constitutional issues such as freedom of religion at the trial, the Star Tribue reported.
"The issue for the jury is not defendant's constitutional rights," the judge wrote. "It is whether he deliberately misled, obfuscated and blocked Ms. Anderson's path to obtaining Ella." He added that Badeaux would be allowed to explain his religious beliefs to the jury "but not in such a manner as to confuse the jury into thinking this is a religious freedom contest."
Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) are hubs of false advertising, anti-abortion organizations that try to trick people into thinking they’re clinics offering abortion or abortion referrals—when in reality, they offer drugstore pregnancy tests and pressure to continue the pregnancy. They’re about to get much, much more sophisticated in that mission.
One Corpus Christi CPC is planning a massive expansion to a 20,000-square-foot facility with a coffee shop, thrift store, and “a ‘man cave’ with a pool table, where men will be approached by a certified marriage counselor as they wait for the women they impregnated,” The Washington Post reports. (Are you vomiting yet?)
Part of the mission seems to be getting gauzy write-ups in which Jana Pinson, the executive director of the Pregnancy Center of the Coastal Bend, says, “Post-Roe needs to have prenatal. We’re taking care of the whole woman.” Unspoken at the end of “the whole woman” is “who we’re trying to pressure and manipulate into carrying a pregnancy and having a child she may not want, despite the known long-term poor outcomes for those who want and are unable to obtain abortions.”
It’s only very late in the more than 3,000-word piece that we get to see who Pinson really, really is, when she says, “I’ve seen a lot of 13-year-olds do phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal. It doesn’t have to be a negative thing.” Child rape leading to pregnancy doesn’t have to be negative, she says. That seems like information that could have come early on in the piece.
To be fair, the Post does describe the extent of the lies Pinson, a former marketing executive, has been honing to draw in what she calls “AMs,” short for “abortion-minded” people concerned they’re pregnant. Thanks to Pinson’s spending on Google ads, “whenever someone in Corpus Christi searches for phrases like ‘need an abortion’ or ‘abortion cost Texas,’ the Pregnancy Center of the Coastal Bendis regularly the first item on the list.”
Crisis pregnancy centers sometimes deny that they intentionally try to mislead people into believing that they provide abortion services. Pinson has gone hard in the opposite direction: “Patients who visit the center’s homepage today can click on ‘I Want An Abortion,’ which directs to a page that says: ‘CONFIDENTIAL ABORTION CONSULTATION—NO COST TO YOU.’ There are detailed descriptions of both surgical and medication abortions, estimated costs, and several buttons that allow you to schedule an appointment.”
The new anti-abortion palace Pinson is planning to use to lie to and manipulate people will be funded largely by the state of Texas, which in 2021 passed $100 million in funding for crisis pregnancy centers.
The collapse in cryptocurrencies is easing supply of the most sought after watches on the second-hand market, depressing prices for hard-to get-Patek Philippe and Rolex models. From a report: The supply of trophy watches such as the Rolex Daytona or Patek Nautilus 5711A "is now much larger," online-watch trading platform Chrono24 said in an emailed statement. The recent swoon in cryptocurrency valuations "has directly impacted pricing of luxury watches from brands like Rolex and Patek Philippe," said the company, which is based in Karlsruhe, Germany, and has more than half a million watches listed for sale on its website. The price decline for the most sought after models is the latest indication that the once soaring second-hand luxury watch market is starting to lose pace. Surging valuations for crypto currencies had minted a new class of luxury buyers, leading to an unprecedented price increase for models particularly from brands like Rolex, Audemars Piguet and Patek. Now that many digital tokens have been hammered, these consumers are going into reverse.
Ugh. Prima donna makes sure that the entire fucking country has to wait on her bullshit whims.
Senate Democrats will probably start a climactic series of votes on their party-line energy, tax and health care bill this week with very little public indication of where Sen. Kyrsten Sinema stands. They’re willing to risk it.
While all of Washington waits on the Arizona Democrat, her previous treatment of high-profile issues shows she's unlikely to make any statement about how she sees the deal written by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer — at least until it's on the floor. If the past is prologue, she'll also be a wild card on amendments that Republicans may offer in a bid to alter the bill on the Senate floor during votes later this week.
At the center of the Sinematic intrigue is Manchin’s push to narrow a loophole known as carried interest that some investors use to lower their tax rates, a shrinking that she opposes.A mask-clad Manchin spoke to Sinema on the Senate floor for roughly 10 minutes on Tuesday afternoon, animatedly waving his hands during the hushed discussion. He summed it up as a “nice talk” afterward and said “she’ll make a good decision based on facts, and I’m relying on that.”
Still, the carried interest tax provision was not in December's more expensive version of the Democrats-only bill that Sinema had generally signed off on. And its inclusion is a main factor in Sinema’s public neutrality about a bill 49 of her colleagues are expected to support.
Still, the party is moving forward with the expectation that the bill will pass without a single GOP vote, taking advantage of strict rules that let Democrats sidestep a filibuster, even as much of the road ahead is still under construction.
“I’m going to approach it from the positive side and just say I anticipate Sen. Sinema will be on board,” said Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.).
Schumer said he’s in touch with Sinema along with the rest of the caucus. He credited Manchin with the carried interest provision’s inclusion: "Sen. Manchin thought it was strong and it has broad support in our caucus."
On Tuesday afternoon, the West Virginian wouldn’t exactly say whether he’d be willing to remove it to get Sinema’s vote, adding that “everyone’s still talking.” He also defended the provision as instilling a “fairness to the system.”
Sinema’s Arizona Democratic colleague, Sen. Mark Kelly, declined to address his own conversations with Sinema but touted the bill’s health care and climate provisions. He said his constituents are focused on the drought and wildfires in Arizona and prescription drug prices.
“We have an incredible opportunity here to fix this problem,” Kelly said. “I want to see us get something across the finish line.”
Sinema’s swing-vote status was evident by the parade of senators looking to chat with her on Tuesday as she presided over the chamber. Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Kelly, Rand Paul (R-Ky.), John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Chris Coons (D-Del.) all chatted with Sinema ahead of Manchin’s visit with her.
The Manchin-Schumer legislation would impose a 15 percent minimum tax on large corporations, increase IRS enforcement and lower prescription drug prices to bring in an estimated $739 billion in revenue. It also spends $369 billion on energy and climate, extends Obamacare subsidies through 2024 and sends $300 billion to deficit reduction.
Overall, it's much smaller than Democrats’ previous party-line proposals from last year, but significantly larger than the health care-focused package the party thought it was getting just last week.
Sinema is reluctant to publicly endorse the bill in part because it has not been OK'd by the chamber's nonpartisan parliamentarian and may still change. After hearing from both Republicans and Democrats alike, the Senate’s rules referee will ultimately weigh in on whether provisions of the bill can enjoy protections from a GOP filibuster that are afforded by this year's budget process.
And the bill is still evolving behind the scenes. Schumer indicated Democrats will try to add legislation addressing sky-high insulin costs. And in an interview, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) said his party will attempt to attach his legislation to cap insulin costs at $35.
“My bill to cap the cost of insulin will be in the reconciliation bill,” Warnock said.
But Republicans think they will be able to make a case that the Georgian's plan runs afoul of the Senate’s budget rules, which would trigger a vote at a 60-vote threshold. That could still be a useful political exercise for Democrats, challenging Republicans to vote on the floor to block the insulin provision.
Warnock is up for reelection this fall, and Democrats are eager to emphasize their fight to lower drug prices on the campaign trail. Asked what he's hearing about carried interest in Arizona, fellow incumbent Kelly responded that he's hearing a lot about high drug prices.
The Senate is expected to move to the bill later this week; a vote to proceed to it will be the first test of support among all 50 Democratic caucus members. After that comes 20 hours of debate and then an unlimited "vote-a-rama" on amendments, all of which require just a simple majority to pass.
That chaotic free-for-all will offer Sinema, as well as every other senator, an opportunity to change the bill, though Republicans will probably offer the bulk of amendments.
Days after Manchin blindsided most colleagues by cutting his deal with Schumer, GOP senators are racking their brains behind the scenes to see if they can foul it up. Republicans are hopeful that Sinema will vote with them on a handful of amendments and then resist efforts by Democratic leaders to wipe those changes from the legislation at the end of the vote-a-rama.
Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said he’s been talking to Sinema about why he opposes the legislation and added that she's “analyzing it, keeps her own counsel … and usually comes to her own decisions, pretty independent of any pressure she might get from either side.”
One possible GOP amendment would scuttle the carried interest language in the legislation, which brings in $14 billion in revenue of the $739 billion total in the package. Thune said Sinema is taking a “pretty hard stand” against that portion of the bill.
“I certainly am for that and I’m sure we will [try]. I think that’s one that’s got a good chance if we’re voting for it. Although who knows, [Democrats] may strip it out before they get it there if she objects enough,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.). “I never cease being amazed at how little they include her.”
Marianne LeVine and Anthony Adragna contributed to this report.
Wave Swell Energy's remarkable UniWave 200 is a sea platform that uses an artificial blowhole formation to create air pressure changes that drive a turbine and feed energy back to shore. After a year of testing, the company reports excellent results. New Atlas reports: As we've discussed before, the UniWave system is a floating device that can be towed to any coastal location and connected to the local energy grid. It's designed so that wave swells force water into a specially designed concrete chamber, pressurizing the air in the chamber and forcing it through an outlet valve. Then as the water recedes, it generates a powerful vacuum, which sucks air in through a turbine at the top and generates electricity that's fed into the grid via a cable. As a result, it draws energy from the entire column of water that enters its chamber, a fact the team says makes it more efficient than wave energy devices that only harvest energy from the surface or the sea floor.
[...] A 200-kW test platform was installed last year off King Island, facing the notoriously rough seas of Bass Strait, which separates the island state of Tasmania from the mainland of Australia. There, it's been contributing reliable clean energy to the island's microgrid around the clock for a full 12 months. The WSE team has made a few live tweaks to the design during operation, improving its performance beyond original expectations. "We set out to prove that Wave Swell's wave energy converter technology could supply electricity to a grid in a range of wave conditions, and we have done that," said WSE CEO Paul Geason in a press release. "One key achievement has been to deliver real-world results in Tasmanian ocean conditions to complement the AMC test modeling. In some instances, the performance of our technology in the ocean has exceeded expectations due to the lessons we've learnt through the project, technological improvements and the refinements we have made over the course of the year." "Our team is excited to have achieved a rate of conversion from wave power to electricity at an average of 45 to 50% in a wide range of wave conditions," he continues. "This is a vast improvement on past devices and shows that the moment has arrived for wave power to sit alongside wind, solar and energy storage as part of a modern energy mix."
The King Island platform will remain in place at least until the end of 2022, and the company is now gearing up to go into production. "Having proven our device can survive the toughest conditions the Southern Ocean and Bass Strait can throw at it, and deliver grid compliant electricity, our priority now shifts to commercializing the technology," said Gleason. "For Wave Swell this means ensuring the market embraces the WSE technology and units are deployed to deliver utility scale clean electricity to mainland grids around the world."
Why are we not surprised that some anonymous anti-choice group sent out a confusing text to voters in Kansas to get them to vote “yes” on a measure that, if passed, would rewrite the Kansas state constitution to make abortion illegal? This comes as Kansans face one of the most important votes in the nation today—the first reproductive rights vote since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.
The text read: “Women in KS are losing their choice on reproductive rights. Voting YES on the amendment will give women a choice. Vote YES to protect women’s health.”
Currently, abortion is legal in Kansas up to 22 weeks’ gestation—one of the only states in the region where that is still the case. In 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that bodily autonomy extended to abortion rights.
“Regulation of abortion. Because Kansans value both women and children, the constitution of the state of Kansas does not require government funding of abortion and does not create or secure a right to abortion. To the extent permitted by the constitution of the United States, the people, through their elected state representatives and state senators, may pass laws regarding abortion, including, but not limited to, laws that account for circumstances of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, or circumstances of necessity to save the life of the mother.”
And despite what many Kansas lawmakers have said, a “yes” vote would ban abortion.
On the other hand, a “no” vote would protect a pregnant person’s right to an abortion, and the state’s current constitution would not change—keeping abortion legal in the state, despite the fall of Roe.
One voter to receive the misleading text was former Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. In a statement sent to the Star on Monday, Sebelius said:
“This misleading text shouldn’t surprise anyone. The anti-choice movement has been lying to the voters of Kansas for decades. … This act of desperation won’t stop the voters of Kansas from protecting their constitutional rights and freedom by voting NO tomorrow.”
The Star reports that none of the state’s significant anti-abortion groups have admitted to sending the text. President of Operation Rescue, Troy Newman, alleged that “There’s a lot of people trying to confuse people on both sides, I guess.”
Historically, controversial ballot measures have been written to confuse. Remember California Proposition 8? Informally known as Prop 8, the bill was intended to ban same-sex marriage. But it was written so that a “yes” vote supported marriage solely between a man and a woman, while a “no” vote opposed the amendment that would define marriage as one man and one woman. So voting “yes” appeared to the casual follower of news to mean “yes, I support same-sex marriage.” A “Vote NO on H8” campaign had to be pushed to clarify the misleading language for voters who wanted marriage equality in the state.
As for the Kansas vote today, the misleading text messages do not violate the state’s campaign laws, but they do baffle voters.
Cindy Novelo, 64, called the texts “shameful,” and she reported to her local election office and the American Civil Liberties Union. “It was so clear. It was very clear, and people are looking for clarity. That it was so clear and completely false was just over the top,” she told The Star.
Hope for a quick vote on the Respect for Marriage Act in the U.S. Senate this week has faded, but U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin said over the weekend that she has 10 Republican senators willing to vote for the measure and believes that vote could take place in September.
The U.S. House passed the Respect for Marriage Act on July 19, by a vote of 267 to 157, just one day after Rep. Jerrold Nadler introduced it. Even though only three Republicans voted for the Equality Act in the House last year, and only two Republicans voted for an LGBTQI+ Data Inclusion Act in June, 47 Republicans voted for the Respect for Marriage Act.
Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, points to polling that shows 55 percent of Republicans support marriage equality. A poll in June indicated that 72 percent of registered voters opposed the idea of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning a decision that enabled same-sex couples to marry.
Baldwin told a Wisconsin media outlet July 29 that she has five Republicans publicly committed: Senators Susan Collins (of Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Rob Portman (Ohio), Thom Tillis (North Carolina), and Ron Johnson (Wisconsin). “Five additional members have indicated they are leaning in support,”
But popular support for legislation has not translated into bipartisan votes on other LGBT legislation. Nearly that same percentage in another poll said they would favor laws protecting LGBT people against discrimination in jobs, housing, and public accommodations, yet only 3 conservative Republicans voted for the Equality Act.
Nor are all 47 in tight mid-term elections this year. Only 17 had single digit margins of victory in 2020. Of the 27 who were scored by the Human Rights Campaign’s rating of their votes on LGBT issues, 20 scored between zero and 11.
U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin told National Public Radio that she thinks same- sex marriage is more acceptable now because “it’s now part of most people’s everyday reality to know somebody who has married in order to provide legal protections for their family.” Until recently, she hoped the Senate would vote before August 8, when Congress takes its summer recess. And she has emphasized that the Respect for Marriage Act has become critical because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision overturning Roe v. Wade has “implicated” other decisions based on similar grounds.
Among those cases is Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 opinion striking down state bans on marriage licenses for same-sex couples.
Baldwin, the U.S. Senate’s first openly LGBT senator, is leading the charge to get the Senate to vote on the Respect for Marriage bill. With the Senate split 50-50 between Democratic votes and Republican votes, she needs all 50 Democrats and at least 10 Republicans to agree to break the inevitable Republican filibuster that would ensue with any attempt to bring the Respect for Marriage to the floor.
Baldwin told a Wisconsin media outlet July 29 that she has five Republicans publicly committed: Senators Susan Collins (of Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Rob Portman (Ohio), Thom Tillis (North Carolina), and Ron Johnson (Wisconsin). “Five additional members have indicated they are leaning in support,” said Baldwin, “but I think because of how crowded the [Senate] calendar is for next week, which is our last week before the August recess, and in light of the fact that we can’t have any absences — we need everybody there, and we have a few members with COVID– this is probably going to be a vote that occurs, what I would hope would be early September.”
Meanwhile, it’s not clear that some recalcitrant Democrats –like Joe Manchin of West Virginia—are on board. Senator Collins told The Hill newspaper that Manchin’s recent agreements to go along with Democratic bills on climate change might cause the Respect for Marriage bill to lose Republican votes.
But openly bisexual Senator Kyrsten Sinema is supporting the bill.
What Respect for Marriage Act says
Baldwin introduced the Respect for Marriage Act (S. 29) in the Senate on July 18, along with U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine). The House bill, H.R. 8404, was introduced the same day and is slightly longer.
Both bills have language to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a federal law that barred federal recognition of same-sex marriages. That law was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 via U.S. v. Windsor.
Both bills also include language to makes it clear that a marriage validly obtained in one state shall be recognized by the federal government and by other states.
Neither bill says that all states must issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Charles Moran, president of the national Log Cabin Republican group, said he thinks the House bill got 47 Republican votes because “the GOP is calling the Democrats bluff on this issue and that’s why we saw 47 yes votes.”
“The antics of [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and Nadler, in dropping this bill with less than 24 hours notice before a full floor vote, no committee hearings, etc. rankled a lot of GOP members…and some voted no as a protest to that style of governance…not because of their opposition to gay marriage,” said Moran. I believe that if I had an additional 24 hours to whip votes, we could have gotten 70+ yes votes. If I had 48 hours? Probably 100 yes votes.’
But Moran said he also thinks the 47 Republican votes are a reflection of the huge differences between the Equality Act and the Respect for Marriage Act.
“The Respect for Marriage Act was a clean bill. The Equality Act is messy, [and] tramples over a lot of things like religious freedom that GOP’ers won’t go along with,” said Moran.
Some ultra conservatives affiliated with religious groups say they believe the Respect for Marriage bill is an attack on them. In a July 26 letter to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, representatives of Alliance Defending Freedom and 79 other anti-LGBT and conservative religious groups write that the Respect for Marriage bill is an attempt to silence people who believe marriage can be only one man and one woman.
The system for getting donated kidneys, livers and hearts to desperately ill patients relies on out-of-date technology that has crashed for hours at a time and has never been audited by federal officials for security weaknesses or other serious flaws, according to a confidential government review obtained by The Washington Post. From the report: The mechanics of the entire transplant system must be overhauled, the review concluded, citing aged software, periodic system failures, mistakes in programming and over-reliance on manual input of data. In its review, completed 18 months ago, the White House's U.S. Digital Service recommended that the government "break up the current monopoly" that the United Network for Organ Sharing, the nonprofit agency that operates the transplant system, has held for 36 years. It pushed for separating the contract for technology that powers the network from UNOS's policy responsibilities, such as deciding how to weigh considerations for transplant eligibility.
About 106,000 people are on the waiting list for organs, the vast majority of them seeking kidneys, according to UNOS. An average of 22 people die each day waiting for organs. In 2021, 41,354 organs were transplanted, a record. UNOS is overseen by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), but that agency has little authority to regulate transplant activity. Its attempts to reform the transplant system have been rejected by UNOS, the report found. Yet HRSA continues to pay UNOS about $6.5 million annually toward its annual operating costs of about $64 million, most of which comes from patient fees. "In order to properly and equitably support the critical needs of these patients, the ecosystem needs to be vastly restructured," a team of engineers from the Digital Service wrote in the Jan. 5, 2021, report for HRSA, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.
If only AZ had the capacity to feel shame. However, since Sinema exists, we have to assume no such capacity exists.
There is something about the desert southwest that breeds conspiracy theories. Maybe it's a result of uranium mining. Maybe there's something in the water. My own theory is that it is the heat, and the heat alone. When the heat tops 110 degrees and stays there for days or weeks, I expect we will someday find out that it slow-cooks the human brain like the chunk of meat that it is. After 10 years of living in the California or Arizona or Nevada desert, your brain begins to resemble a flame-broiled Whopper, and that's where the conspiracy theories come from. They come from the little charred bits around the edges. Go to any small desert town, one small enough that you'll never see 10 people inside the same stores at the same time, and you can be assured of quickly stumbling on a crank who will tell you anything with a straight face.
That is where alien sightings come from. It's where cloudy-eyed mutterers pick over scraps left by prospectors a hundred years back, after those prospectors had their own brains charbroiled and ran off to parts unknown. It is how you end up with clown motels.
Anyway, what all of that is leading up to is the news that the Arizona primaries will be decided on Tuesday, and it now seems an absolute certainty that no matter what the vote totals end up being, the day will only set the state up for a new round of hingeless conspiracy ranting that will likely last until ... God only knows. There's no obvious half-life on election crankery. The Arizona Republican primaries have been an absolute car wreck, because the Arizona Republican Party has been pumping out crank after crank after crank for a decade now and there’re few left in the party who even remember what pretending at normalcy looked like, back when you didn't necessarily have to be weird beyond belief to vote for a Republican slate.
At least two Republican candidates are already vowing that if they lose their primary races on Tuesday, it is because ElEKtiON FRaUd happened and their Republican opponents were in on it.
Gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, an absolute crackpot in the best of times, is already preparing the groundwork for her possible loss. That doesn't mean a personal acknowledgement that her own relentless election conspiracies (she doesn't think Joe Biden is the legitimate American president) may have turned off voters who do not want Arizona to be thought of as a clown motel the size of an entire state, but yet another conspiracy theory. The Washington Post reports on those new claims:
"We’re already detecting some fraud," Lake told a rally crowd. And "we’ve got cyber folks working with us." And "I’m hoping that we have the sheriffs that will do something about it."
Ah, yes, the cyber folks. Defenders of elections everywhere, warriors of the spreadsheets, susser-outers of errata and arcana. There is always the possibility that space aliens, China, or an underground conspiracy run from unseen basements under Walmart stores is looking to foil Lake's bid to turn Arizona into a fascist circus in which every elephant has a gun and future elections are literally impossible for the state to even pull off.
The invocation of "the sheriffs" is particularly ominous. Lake is suggesting that if she doesn't win the election, the "constitutional sheriffs" who have allied with election fraudsters will start seizing machines and ballots and not give any of them back, claiming the election itself was a criminal enterprise.
Another Trumpite competitor, Michigan transplant self-made into big-buckle desert cowboy Mark Finchem, is running for secretary of state—that is, he wants to be the person responsible for running every election after November's. Finchem is a militia crank who participated in the Jan. 6 coup attempt, is a vigorous election conspiracy theorist on Trump's behalf, appears to have no few to no beliefs that are not centered around conspiracy theories, appears to be running a campaign that's mostly a slush fund for one particular Republican consulting firm, appears to have literally no redeeming qualities or accomplishments whatsoever in his ex-family and ex-professional life, and in a better country would have no public role greater than "town hall audience crank #3" or "aspirational catheter spokesperson."
Finchem was able to gain Trump's backing, thanks to the whole "conspiracy-crank participant in an attempted coup" thing, must best fellow Republican Beau Lane and two others in Tuesday's primaries. It may be a tall order, but he, too, is already certain that if he doesn't win it's because the conspiracies against him and Trump are just that powerful. Lane "is a Democrat Plant," Finchem asserts on Twitter.
Well, sure, it could be that. Or it could be that Finchem would call the surrounding saguaro cacti Democrat plants if he thought one was gesturing rudely in his direction.
Really now, aren't there catheters that need selling?
Arizona, mind you, is a beautiful state. Parts of it, anyway. Yuma is hell's own waiting room and Phoenix, whatever its past charms might have been, is at this point a too-extended piece of performance art, a case study in "what if we transplanted the worst of modern suburbia into the world's largest air fryer?" The parts that are nice we'll keep to ourselves—and it doesn't matter anyway, now that even entering the state puts you at risk of law enforcement officers with skin color charts taped to their windshields, legislators for whom clown motel proprietor would be an almost-unthinkable step up in careers, and a parade of white nationalists, militia-adjacent revolutionaries, bellowing con artists, and straight-up fascists all vie to turn the state into Kafkaesque fever dream.
Whatever it is that's turning the state's Republican Party into an all-conspiracy, all-the-time carnival of American losers needs to be discovered, analyzed, and treated right quick, though. State politics is only going to get more intense as water becomes scarcer, and if all it takes to send the whole state Republican Party around the bend is one election in which the golf course blowhard couldn't muster a pandemic-riddled win, how long will it be before the Lakes, the Finchems, and the Masterses have staked out their own corners of the state as heavily armed fiefdoms "independent" from the rest of government because they said so, that's why?
Buckle in, because no matter how Tuesday's elections turn out, Republicans are going to call them "rigged." That is, after all, what most of their campaigns are based around.
Sen. Lindsey Graham is challenging a subpoena to testify before a Fulton County, Georgia, special grand jury investigating attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the state. Graham’s legal objections to the subpoena basically boil down to “Suck it, I’m a U.S. senator,” although, of course, more legal verbiage is involved.
The investigation is being conducted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, seeking answers on whether Donald Trump or any of his allies broke the law as they tried to get the results of the election reversed. Graham made at least two phone calls to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger or his staff, asking them to take another look at absentee ballots “to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for former President Donald Trump,” Willis wrote in a court filing.
According to an answering court filing by Graham’s lawyers, he “was engaged in quintessentially legislative factfinding—both to help him form election-related legislation, including in his role as then-Chair of the Judiciary Committee, and to help inform his vote to certify the election.”
Yeah, sure. He just so happened to be engaged in quintessentially legislative fact-finding in one of the closest states, which involved contacting the exact same state official Trump called in an effort to pressure to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.”
The U.S. Constitution, Graham’s lawyers say, “provides absolute protection against inquiry into Senator Graham’s legislative acts.” Or, they want the court to agree, his coup attempts disguised as legislative acts. That’s not all, though. “Sovereign immunity,” they say, prohibits a local prosecutor from summoning a U.S. senator “to face a state ad hoc investigatory body”—or, in translation, “Our client is more important than you.” They also argue that Willis hasn’t shown “the ‘extraordinary circumstances’ necessary to order a high-ranking federal official to testify.”
This is the “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM??? I AM A UNITED STATES SENATOR” of legal filings combined with the strenuous whitewashing of a coup attempt into a non-extraordinary circumstance of simple legislative fact-finding.
Rep. Jody Hice has similarly tried to get out of his subpoena to testify in Willis’ investigation, with a federal judge rejecting his attempt to quash the subpoena. Graham’s subpoena calls on him to appear on Aug. 23, so he’s asking the judge for an expedited decision.
heaven forbid history actually present the facts as they happen. OK has a lot to be ashamed about
Yes, it’s true Republicans are attacking reproductive rights. Yes, the GOP refuses to ban assault rifles, acknowledge climate change is real, or give sick veterans the funding they need to have healthy lives. But one of the most underhanded and insidious attacks from the GOP is on public education, particularly the party’s bans on teaching the accurate history of our nation.
The latest example took place on July 28, when the Oklahoma State Board of Education voted 4-2 to downgrade the accreditation of Tulsa Public Schools after a teacher alleged that the district’s training materials “shame white people.”
According to The Washington Post, the decision to give the Tulsa district an “accredited with warning” rating followed an August 2021 implicit bias training that it deemed violated Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt’s HB 1775. The legislation, signed on May 2021, prohibits certain training or “any orientation or requirement that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or a bias on the basis of race or sex.” In other words, anything that could be twisted to become the right wing’s scariest boogeyman: critical race theory.
For the record, critical race theory is a legal concept that contextualizes the law and American history to reveal the inherent racism of many American legal structures. It is taught only in graduate-level courses and has not ever, in all of American history, been taught to K-12 students. However, the right has adopted the phrase to encompass any teachings of race or bias, which eliminates honest curricula covering most of American history and almost all civil rights movements.
The Post reports that Tulsa isn’t the only district to get downgraded:
The board also demoted another district, Mustang Public Schools near Oklahoma City, to “accredited with warning” after it was self-reported that a teacher had violated House Bill 1775 by using an exercise that made students uncomfortable on account of their race or sex.
All four board members who voted to downgrade were appointed by Stitt.
According to the Oklahoman, school board member Estela Hernandez said, “‘Accredited with warning’ is sufficient in this case because we need to send a message.”
"The intent of the lesson from the teacher was to show that each student has different experiences in life… It was also discussed how important it is to treat others with kindness and respect since people never really know what other people are going through."
The Tulsa Public Schools demotion came amid a 20-minute implicit bias training.
According to Public Radio Tulsa, a teacher identified as Amy Cook was in the training and afterward complained that the materials “specifically shame white people for past offenses in history, and state that all are implicitly racially biased by nature.”
Cook is a Republican candidate for the state’s 34th District.
On Cook’s website, she describes herself as a parent, teacher, and Christian. She says that it’s when she began teaching that she started to see “the spiritually damaging programs, liberal brainwashing, and political indoctrination being slipped” into schools. And as a Christian, she “could not remain silent. … When the LGBTQ national mandate was forced on my students under the guise of SeXXX Education in a 2-week class, I boycotted it and alerted all my students' parents. It was successfully taken away from most of the students' young eyes,” she writes.
“I continue to model my Faith in God openly in my classroom, because amidst all the confusion I know where they will find true wisdom, strength, and love. Although I strictly teach science lessons and not indoctrination of unrelated subjects, it is easy for my students to see where I stand, by the love I show them every day.”
In October 2021, the ACLU, ACLU of Oklahoma, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and several other student-led and educational organizations filed a lawsuit challenging HB 1775.
The state is one of eight others in the nation that have passed similar laws, censoring classroom conversations around race and gender.
“All young people deserve to learn an inclusive and accurate history in schools, free from censorship or discrimination,” said Emerson Sykes, staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “HB 1775 is so poorly drafted—in places, it is literally indecipherable—that districts and teachers have no way of knowing what concepts and ideas are prohibited. The bill was intended to inflame a political reaction, not further a legitimate educational interest. These infirmities in the law are all the more troubling because the bill applies to public colleges and universities, where the First Amendment is especially protective of academic freedom.”
Mark Finchem — a poster child for election deniers following the 2020 election — is inching closer to becoming the chief election official in one of the most tightly divided battleground states in the country.
Finchem, an Arizona state lawmaker, is running with former President Donald Trump’s endorsement in Tuesday’s Republican primary for secretary of state there. He has support from a coalition of other like-minded candidates running to be election administrators in their own states, which has gained traction in several other close 2020 swing states. And Finchem has a significant edge in a rare public poll of the secretary of state race published Friday.
Should he win on Tuesday, Finchem will become the latest member of the “America First Secretary of State Coalition” to secure the Republican nomination in a key battleground, putting them a general election win away from running the 2024 presidential vote in their states — four years after working to subvert President Joe Biden’s election win and falsely claiming the vote was marred. The coalition’s founder, Jim Marchant, is the Republican nominee in Nevada, while Kristina Karamo is the de-facto GOP pick in Michigan. And in Pennsylvania, where the governor picks the state’s chief election official, coalition member Doug Mastriano is the GOP candidate.
In Arizona, where GOP state legislators have embraced Trump’s fictions and financed investigations into the 2020 vote count, Trump supporters are “gunning for secretary of state,” said Mike Noble, the chief of research and managing partner at the Arizona-based polling firm OH Predictive Insights. “[It] is definitely one they have really put a priority on.”
Finchem does face significant opposition in the primary, including from Beau Lane, a businessman endorsed by GOP Gov. Doug Ducey. But if the latest polling is any guide, Arizona Republicans are poised to elevate someone who has relentlessly sought to undermine confidence in state elections as their pick to run future elections.
Finchem has been one of the chief proponents of election conspiracy theories since the 2020 election. He was a significant booster of the GOP-led review of all of the ballots cast in 2020 in Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest county, which was strongly opposed by the Republican-dominated county government and a bipartisan cast of election officials. Finchem also advocates the fanciful plan of “decertifying” the 2020 election results in Arizona, which has no basis in the law, and he counts others who worked to undermine American elections among his prominent supporters, including Michael Flynn, Jenna Ellis and Mike Lindell.
Finchem has charged ahead in the lone series of public polling from OH Predictive Insights. The group’s surveys over the last year have had Finchem in the lead but never getting above the mid-teens.
But in their final poll on the eve of the primary, Finchem stormed ahead, leading the field with 32 percent, compared to 11 percent for his closest rival in Lane. The Trump-backed candidates in the Republican primaries for governor and Senate, Kari Lake and Blake Masters, respectively, also had double-digit leads in the survey.
“Trump's recent visit to Arizona really helped increase the awareness” of his endorsed candidates, Noble said, but particularly of the secretary of state’s race.
Finchem’s biggest challenger for the nomination is believed to be Lane, an advertising executive. Two state lawmakers — Michelle Ugenti-Rita and Shawnna Bolick — were in the high single digits in the OHPI poll, with a plurality of 41 percent still undecided.
Lane hails from the business wing of the state party. He launched his campaign touting the endorsement of dozens of business leaders in the state. And in July, he scored the endorsement of outgoing Ducey, the term-limited governor, who praised him for his integrity and “competence in [his] ability to actually do the job they seek.”
“I think the governor recognizes the importance of having someone who could actually be governor in addition to being secretary of state,” said Daniel Scarpinato, a veteran consultant and former top Ducey aide who is on Lane’s campaign team. “I think he sees Beau as being a mainstream conservative who could effectively execute our elections without politicizing it.”
Finchem has derided Lane as a “Democrat plant” on his Telegram channel, and has claimed that internal polls have shown him up over the advertising exec. But supporters of Finchem have shown at least some concern about the rest of the field potentially splitting the vote.
Trump put out a statement days before the ballot request deadline in the state, reinforcing his endorsement of Finchem as “the kind of fighter we need to turn Arizona and our Country around.” The former president also attacked one of Finchem’s opponents in his statement — but went after Ugenti-Rita as “a weak ‘Never Trumper’ RINO” without mentioning Lane.
Lane and Finchem have been the only two candidates with notable advertising expenditures on the airwaves, according to data from the ad tracking firm AdImpact. Lane’s campaign has spent roughly $423,000 on TV and radio advertising, edging out the roughly $256,000 that Finchem has spent there. (Finchem also has about $79,000 in digital advertising.)
Lane’s most recent spot has been a contrast spot, attacking Finchem for once supporting the National Popular Vote Compact — “if he had it his way, Hillary Clinton would have been our president” — while playing up his background as a “business guy.” Finchem’s ad, meanwhile, features Trump praising him and boosting his role with the election review in the state.
But the combined spending of well under $1 million between the two men is merely a drop in the bucket compared to the tidal wave of political advertising that Arizonans are currently subjected to. Over $93 million has already been spent on radio and television ads in Arizona this year — headlined by the competitive Republican gubernatorial and Senate primaries.
“It is a low-information race, which is kind of unfortunate because it is an important position,” said Scarpinato. “Because you have so many competitive races, more than we’ve really seen in a generation in Arizona, you have a lot of people undecided and that is leaving some of these downballot races wide open.”
It is also the second major primary in the state that pits Ducey against Trump, who have publicly feuded since the 2020 election. In the governor’s race, Ducey has backed former state board of regents member Karrin Taylor Robson, while Trump has thrown his support behind Lake, a former TV anchor.
The Arizona secretary of state race is expected to be among the most competitive election administrator elections this year. And it will be an open race, with current Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs the frontrunner for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.
The Democratic primary is a faceoff between Adrian Fontes, the former top election official for Maricopa County, and state House Minority Leader Reginald Bolding.
That primary has quietly become acrimonious between the two men. The political arm of a nonprofit founded by Bolding called Our Voice Our Vote has helped boost his campaign, leading to charges of self-dealing from Fontes’ camp. (Bolding told the Arizona Republic that he and his wife have walled themselves off from the political operation of the nonprofit.) And Fontes blamed Bolding’s apparatus for airing an overdue tax bill, which he said was inadvertent.
The race will also test the saliency of the election conspiracy theories that have been so potent in Arizona. Finchem and Lake have worked together in the past: The two filed a joint lawsuit looking to block the use of ballot tabulators in the state, a common target for unfounded claims about the security of American elections.
Barring a blowout in a statewide primary, there’s a strong chance that the winner of the election won’t be known on Tuesday night — the exact situation that Trump took advantage of in 2020 to discredit his loss.
Both Finchem and Lake have signaled they are more than willing to follow the former president’s lead with their own campaigns. In a joint Q&A at a late June fundraiser, which was first reported by Axios Phoenix, both candidates suggested that they would challenge a loss.
"Ain't gonna be no concession speech coming from this guy,” Finchem said. “I'm going to demand a 100 percent hand count if there's the slightest hint that there's an impropriety.”
This European travel map by Benjamin Td shows how far you can travel in five hours, given a station location. Just hover over the map, and you see the areas, or isochrones that are reachable in five hours, assuming 20 minutes for interchanges.
The project is based on data from Deutsch Bahn, and was inspired by a more dotty map by Julius Tens. It reminds me of Tom Carden’s (now Flash-retired) travel time map from 2008.
I wonder what this would look like for the United States, but I am also a little scared to know.
In any sane world, a bunch of theocrats lying would be its own scandal, but these weasels will say anything for their own power
Abortion ban proponents really want—maybe need—for us to believe that their bans are “only” preventing abortion, not affecting care for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. And that their bans are not preventing abortions for people who anyone but the most extreme would agree should have access to abortion—like, say, a 10-year-old rape victim. But they are increasingly being confronted with pesky, pesky facts, and they’re struggling. Poor dears. Break out the tiny violins, but also be ready to confront their disinformation campaign. Because, of course, rather than changing the laws, they’re trying to convince the public that abortion bans don’t do what they do.
We saw it when Catherine Glenn Foster, the head of Americans United for Life, insisted that the abortion that a 10-year-old had didn't count. Somehow wasn’t an abortion. She told Congress that the pregnancy “would probably impact [the child’s] life and so, therefore, it would fall under any exception and would not be an abortion. Meanwhile, doctors are holding off treating miscarriages until they pose an immediate threat to the life of the pregnant person, out of fear of the laws groups like Americans United for Life have gotten passed.
It’s not just Foster, though. The attorney general of Ohio and the president of Ohio Right to Life both insisted that the 10-year-old did not need to leave Ohio for an abortion, even though the state’s law says that she did. Proponents of forced birth cannot afford for the public to see clearly what their laws are doing.
Erin Morrow Hawley, an anti-abortion lawyer for Alliance Defending Freedom (and wife of Sen. Josh Hawley), told Congress it was “misinformation” to suggest that abortion bans would affect ectopic pregnancies.
“There have been social media posts suggesting that women won’t get treated for an ectopic pregnancy because doctors might be afraid of performing the procedure, but that’s absolutely false,” she said. “Treatment for an ectopic pregnancy is not, in fact, an abortion.” Whatever the relationship of ectopic pregnancy treatment to abortion, it is absolutely a fact that, in some cases, doctors have been afraid to treat ectopic pregnancies, which pose an imminent threat of rupture and hemorrhage. In one Texas case, for instance, a hospital told a doctor not to treat an ectopic pregnancy until it ruptured.
Should abortion bans affect ectopic pregnancy treatment? Maybe not, but because these laws create an atmosphere of fear for doctors and hospitals and don't explicitly spell out that ectopic pregnancy treatment is allowed, there will be cases where it is denied, and that could be fatal.
Similarly, forced-birth proponents want the public to believe that miscarriage care won’t be affected. Someone having a miscarriage, after all, is an object of sympathy. Hearing that an abortion ban forced her to continue carrying a non-viable pregnancy until her health was actively at risk isn’t a very good look for the abortion ban and its backers. But rather than acknowledge that their laws have these consequences, they try to convince us it’s not happening, often by accusing the people telling these stories of spreading misinformation.
Abortion ban backers should have two choices: They could change their laws to explicitly say that treatment of ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage was allowed, or they could admit that this is worth it to them, that they prefer to endanger the lives of pregnant people rather than to change their laws. Unfortunately, they’re going to refuse to change the laws and keep up the claim that what’s happening—the hospitals and doctors blocking care for people at medical risk until the risk turns into a deadly emergency—isn’t happening, that it’s all some pro-abortion lie.
Whether they’re claiming a pregnant 10-year-old rape victim doesn’t exist right up until her rapist is charged with the crime or claiming that ectopic pregnancy treatment and miscarriage treatment aren’t being compromised, extremist anti-abortion voices are lying to us about what their laws are doing. Do not let them get away with it.
