... until you remember #8 on Umberto Eco's 14 Characteristics Of Fascism
The enemy is both strong and weak.
“By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
Showing posts with label daddy state. Show all posts
Showing posts with label daddy state. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 25, 2022
Observable Daddy State
Monday, October 24, 2022
Quickie
Inflation is all right here in American, and it's all Biden's fault.
But COVID - that's world-wide and not a problem here at all.
Thursday, October 20, 2022
Political Dodge Ball
Matt Schlapp goes on Ari Melber's show to try out the new GOP bullshit talking points.
- Biden was sworn in as president because Democrats committed fraud, but no - I'm not saying the election was stolen.
- The GOP's What-About bullshit du jour: Vandalism during the BLM protests of 2020 was just as bad as MAGA sedition on Jan6.
Tuesday, October 18, 2022
Overheard
It's appalling to think millions of Americans are OK with the prospect of living under Daddy State rule as long as they can save 50 cents-a-gallon on gasoline.
Saturday, October 08, 2022
IOKIYAR
The law is my sword, but not your shield
The law is my shield, but not your sword
(pay wall)
To clarify, I meant ban abortion except for Republican politicians
Ah! I see the confusion! Did I say total abortion ban? I apologize. I did mean “total,” of course, for you. But I intended it to be implied that the law would not be binding to all. I thought that would be audible — as most of my remarks are these days — as a kind of dog whistle?
All the particularly deserving were to be exempt from the ban — no, not children, necessarily; I think forced birth might be a powerful growth experience for them. No, not those for whom it is medically necessary, although I certainly would like voters to feel that probably the law was not a death sentence, whether or not that’s true. Victims of rape, or incest? No, no, I meant: Republican politicians.
I understand your confusion. You think that because I am invoking a value, I believe in it for myself. Actually myself is the last person who should have to be bothered by it! And if you have any questions, please consult my T-shirt, which has a little arrow pointing at my chin and says “I’m With The In-Group The Law Protects But Does Not Bind.” No, I don’t have any more of those (they sold out almost immediately!), but I have lots of “I’m With The Out-Group The Law Binds But Does Not Protect.” What size do you wear?
Do not come to me with my own logic and reasoning and ask me to apply it to myself or my candidates of choice, as though I were of the sort who is bound by law! Law is for other people! You saw me complaining about state secrets being shared, or files being improperly stored, and thought you could repeat my own words back to me as a “gotcha,” when I seemed to fall short in the same way? No chance! I cannot be gotten!
Don’t you understand? To me, everything is permitted! Judging myself by my own standards sounds, frankly, exhausting and impossible.
Do not think for a fraction of a second, though, that I will offer you any of the same leniency. I’m sorry, but you simply don’t have the leeway, given that you have to uphold your values and mine — and some other ones you probably didn’t even know I have you upholding!
Hypocrisy? For this to be hypocrisy, I would have to profess one thing and do another. So let me take this opportunity to apologize: If I have appeared to profess anything other than the raw desire for power, that was not my intention. If I at any point seemed to espouse values, that was a huge misunderstanding. I am very, very sorry!
See? No hypocrisy here! What a relief! Now, back to this ban. And, next, if we’re lucky, my plan to seize control of elections so I can weed out the votes with which I disagree. Remember, if I do it, it’s solving voter fraud, not committing it! Then, will I show my intense concern for the deficit by making it bigger, with tax cuts? Who knows! I am hypocrisy-proof and free as the wind!
Wednesday, October 05, 2022
Today's Problem
Hershel Walker's Abortion Controversy
Yeah, I get it - it's a joke. But even the vaccine thing would be ignored. The rubes are conditioned to accept, and to rationalize, and even to embrace whatever horror or contradiction comes from the candidate they've been instructed to support.
Daddy State Awareness
BASICS:
- The Daddy State lies as a means of demonstrating their power.
- The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject of the lies.
- Lying about everything is a way to condition us - to make us accept the premise that they can do anything they want.
- THEIR GOAL IS TO DICTATE REALITY TO US.
Tuesday, September 13, 2022
Today's GOP
Because they can just make shit up, and they can count on anyone with a living thinking brain in his head to spend way too much time digging up facts to disprove the assertion, which the Daddy Stater will dismiss out of hand, because he made it all up in the first place, and because you created a vacuum when you went off to dig up the facts, which he has filled with 10 more boat loads of shit that he just made up.
Lying is the point of the exercise for the Daddy State.
The Daddy State Basics:
The Daddy State lies as a means of demonstrating their power.
The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject of the lies.
Lying about everything is a way to condition us - to make us accept their premise that they can do anything they want.
THE GOAL IS
TO DICTATE REALITY TO US
(pay wall)
Opinion
As the midterms near, Republicans finalize their nihilism agenda
The midterm elections are just 57 days away — time for Republicans to bring out the big words.
Tech billionaire and GOP megadonor Peter Thiel posed a question to the nattering nabobs of the Republican Party at a conservative conference on Sunday. “Should we maybe have more of a positive agenda?” he asked, complaining, “We’re leaning way too far into pure nihilistic negation.”
My first reaction upon hearing Thiel’s admonition is that it’s going to go right over Kevin McCarthy’s head. Accused of “nihilistic negation,” the House GOP leader is liable to respond: “But I haven’t said anything bad about Egypt!”
Still, Thiel’s criticism is spot on, and he gets points for consistency. While most of the party has been engaged in an everything-sucks, destroy-the-system campaign that is as dishonest as it is relentless, candidates bankrolled by Thiel have indeed been coming up with new ideas. They’ve floated enacting a federal “personhood” law (which would ban abortion even in cases of rape), privatizing Social Security and even replacing American democracy with something like a monarchy.
Come to think of it, maybe that’s why most Republicans favor pure nihilistic negation.
Likewise, the head of the National Republican Senate Committee, Sen. Rick Scott (Fla.), offered his version of a positive agenda earlier this year, but Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) quickly smacked him down for proposing a tax hike on half of Americans and a phaseout of Social Security and Medicare. The two have been in a simmering dispute ever since.
After much hemming and hawing, McCarthy is reportedly planning to come out with an agenda next week. He’s expected to offer a “Commitment to America,” which is a knockoff of the GOP’s 1994 “Contract With America.” Yet early signs are that it will accentuate the negative, too. (One commitment: “put an end to ‘Build Back Better.’ ”)
For a clear indication of Republicans’ plans for the final eight weeks of the campaign, don’t watch McCarthy’s mouth. Watch where his money is going.
The McCarthy-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund, the main super PAC for House Republicans, has pledged to spend $162 million on the airwaves in ads this year in the handful of contested House races.
Over the past month, the fund has posted 35 ads on its YouTube channel that focus on the November elections. Of these, only one is positive. The rest? Pure nihilistic negation.
“Carl Marlinga made his living representing sexual predators. Now he wants to represent you,” announces one ad, in Michigan, targeting a Democrat who worked as a judge, prosecutor and criminal-defense lawyer.
“His first big job? Working for a senator who was indicted for bribery,” proclaims another ad, in California, attacking Democrat Adam Gray, who wasn’t implicated in any crime as a young legislative director for a state senator.
Another, attacking Democrat Hillary Scholten in Michigan, claims she “dismissed the destruction and praised the rioters” after violence at a racial-justice protest. The ad concludes: “She’s with them, not us.” The ad cites a Facebook post of Scholten’s from May 31, 2020, that said precisely the opposite: “I’m pleading with those who take to the streets to make that effort peaceful and to not resort to violence and destruction.”
Many of the ads are no more than Trump-style name-calling. “Weak.” “Crooked.” “Self-serving.” “The worst kind of politician.”
“Vote Against Jahana Hayes: Completely Delusional” is the name of an ad in which several (apparently White) voters are shown a clip of (Black) Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.). They comment: “Insulting. … Completely delusional. … It’s laughable.”
One refers to Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) as “clueless Katie” — three times in 30 seconds.
“Tony Vargas Isn’t Just Liberal, He’s Crazy Liberal” is the title of one attacking a Democratic challenger in Nebraska. It calls him “crazy liberal” twice.
In Pennsylvania, Democratic challenger Chris DeLuzio is identified as a “Radical Socialist Professor.”
Some at least focus on issues before Congress, in a manner of speaking. Several attack Democratic lawmakers for supporting covid-relief legislation last year, though it is identified only as “a bill that gave millions to golf courses, ski slopes and luxury resorts” and sending “checks to inmates like the Boston Marathon bomber.” The Congressional Leadership Fund repeats the debunked claim that the IRS is “targeting people making under $75,000” with audits. The usual labels recur: “socialist green new deal,” “no borders” and “defund the police.”
In all, I learned a great deal in those 35 ads about the reckless, disastrous, out-of-touch, extremist Democratic agenda. But not once in those 17½ minutes of nihilistic negation did I hear anything that might approximate an alternative.
Thursday, September 08, 2022
Both Sides Don't
It is a little odd that he's not more adamant about it - like he's only recently heard about these rabid idiots, and he's not quite made up his mind yet.
Opinion
The hidden danger posed by a MAGA takeover of the House
With Republicans favored to win the House, you’re already hearing a mind-numbing refrain: Once in the majority, Republicans plan to pursue “retribution” against President Biden and Democrats. How? By launching all kinds of investigations as payback on Donald Trump’s behalf.
This idea is already getting reproduced uncritically by major news organizations. The result is to create the impression that Republicans are merely telegraphing plans for some conventional political tit-for-tat.
But that obfuscates what is more likely the real story: Republicans are pre-fabricating a fake rationale to abuse their investigative powers in a way that isn’t remotely comparable to anything Democrats are doing. Such GOP spin deserves much more serious skepticism.
This reality is pressed on us by a new report in the New York Times that documents just how extreme some of this cycle’s House GOP candidates are.
As the Times notes, any GOP majority will probably be narrower than appeared likely earlier this year. A slim majority — plus the fact that the Trump-loyal America First Caucus is likely to grow — means GOP leaders will struggle to control their ranks. The Times hints at government shutdowns, debt-ceiling defaults and impeachments of everyone from the president down to (who knows?) even the aide who oversees the White House Easter egg hunt.
But the threat of a MAGA House takeover is even worse than this. That’s because a MAGA-fied House will have another, underdiscussed tactic at its disposal: using its fiscal and investigative powers to try to defund or hobble any and all investigations and prosecutions involving Trump.
How might this work? Here’s one way: A GOP majority could reinstate an obscure House rule permitting Republicans to use spending bills to zero out salaries of specific federal officials, or nix blocks of federal employees, functionally killing specific programs.
For instance, it might attempt to kill the salary of Attorney General Merrick Garland. Or it could try to defund — or cancel — any ongoing law enforcement investigations of Trump.
We need to distinguish this tactic from defunding the FBI, which GOP members such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia have demanded. In a more MAGA-fied House, that effort might find support, but most Republicans probably wouldn’t back a wholesale dismantling of federal law enforcement.
By contrast, a more targeted attempt to defund specific officials or investigations could be harder for voters to understand and thus more politically inviting for Republicans.
“It is likely that they would use this process to block investigations and prosecutions of Trump,” congressional scholar Norm Ornstein told me. Indeed, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) recently floated exactly this idea. It’s being talked about. It’s real.
Obviously, such an effort would be opposed by the White House and the Senate (if Democrats keep it). But a faction of House Republicans could threaten to shut down the government while demanding those targeted cuts protecting Trump, Ornstein says.
Even worse, they could use debt-ceiling fights to try to leverage those Trump-protecting cuts. “They could say, ‘We’ll let this whole country go into default unless you stop all these probes of Trump,’” Ornstein told me.
This becomes harder to avoid when you look at GOP candidates likely to win House seats. As the Times details, they include numerous people who are already vowing to use their powers to continue contesting Trump’s 2020 loss with sham investigations, among other tactics.
Here’s another threat: Such Republicans might try to influence the 2024 election. If a corrupt GOP governor were to take over a swing state — say, Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — and were to certify electors for Trump or an imitator in defiance of the popular vote, a House GOP majority in thrall to Trump could count those electors. Without reform of the Electoral Count Act, that would mean chaos.
A lot will turn on whether as speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) would defy the Trumpist bloc and seek majorities with Democrats. Ornstein’s view: “McCarthy won’t do anything to block or counter the crazies.”
There will be a strong temptation to treat these threats as the tea party redux. While crazed opposition to President Barack Obama drove that era’s chaos, it was aimed at discernible policy goals such as repealing Obamacare or forcing spending cuts. This time will be different.
The threats of chaos won’t be about realizing fiscal priorities in any meaningful sense; they will more likely be cultishly devoted to preserving one man’s absolute impunity. A sizable bloc of House Republicans may well see it as a higher mission to put Trump beyond the reach of accountability and above the law.
With the House Jan. 6 select committee, Democrats are running a legitimate congressional investigation into Trump’s incitement of a mob assault on the U.S. seat of government. The Justice Department search warrant for Mar-a-Lago followed lawful processes and was approved by a judge.
If and when GOP plans in response come into sharper focus, let’s not uncritically describe this as “revenge” or “retribution.” Such words take it as given that GOP conduct will be in some meaningful sense retaliatory for — or even equivalent to — those actions, as if everything is political all the way down, and we can’t ever distinguish between good-faith government conduct and flagrant bad-faith abuses of power.
There’s no reason to capitulate in advance to that framing.
(pay wall)
Opinion
The hidden danger posed by a MAGA takeover of the House
With Republicans favored to win the House, you’re already hearing a mind-numbing refrain: Once in the majority, Republicans plan to pursue “retribution” against President Biden and Democrats. How? By launching all kinds of investigations as payback on Donald Trump’s behalf.
This idea is already getting reproduced uncritically by major news organizations. The result is to create the impression that Republicans are merely telegraphing plans for some conventional political tit-for-tat.
But that obfuscates what is more likely the real story: Republicans are pre-fabricating a fake rationale to abuse their investigative powers in a way that isn’t remotely comparable to anything Democrats are doing. Such GOP spin deserves much more serious skepticism.
This reality is pressed on us by a new report in the New York Times that documents just how extreme some of this cycle’s House GOP candidates are.
As the Times notes, any GOP majority will probably be narrower than appeared likely earlier this year. A slim majority — plus the fact that the Trump-loyal America First Caucus is likely to grow — means GOP leaders will struggle to control their ranks. The Times hints at government shutdowns, debt-ceiling defaults and impeachments of everyone from the president down to (who knows?) even the aide who oversees the White House Easter egg hunt.
But the threat of a MAGA House takeover is even worse than this. That’s because a MAGA-fied House will have another, underdiscussed tactic at its disposal: using its fiscal and investigative powers to try to defund or hobble any and all investigations and prosecutions involving Trump.
How might this work? Here’s one way: A GOP majority could reinstate an obscure House rule permitting Republicans to use spending bills to zero out salaries of specific federal officials, or nix blocks of federal employees, functionally killing specific programs.
For instance, it might attempt to kill the salary of Attorney General Merrick Garland. Or it could try to defund — or cancel — any ongoing law enforcement investigations of Trump.
We need to distinguish this tactic from defunding the FBI, which GOP members such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia have demanded. In a more MAGA-fied House, that effort might find support, but most Republicans probably wouldn’t back a wholesale dismantling of federal law enforcement.
By contrast, a more targeted attempt to defund specific officials or investigations could be harder for voters to understand and thus more politically inviting for Republicans.
“It is likely that they would use this process to block investigations and prosecutions of Trump,” congressional scholar Norm Ornstein told me. Indeed, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) recently floated exactly this idea. It’s being talked about. It’s real.
Obviously, such an effort would be opposed by the White House and the Senate (if Democrats keep it). But a faction of House Republicans could threaten to shut down the government while demanding those targeted cuts protecting Trump, Ornstein says.
Even worse, they could use debt-ceiling fights to try to leverage those Trump-protecting cuts. “They could say, ‘We’ll let this whole country go into default unless you stop all these probes of Trump,’” Ornstein told me.
This becomes harder to avoid when you look at GOP candidates likely to win House seats. As the Times details, they include numerous people who are already vowing to use their powers to continue contesting Trump’s 2020 loss with sham investigations, among other tactics.
Here’s another threat: Such Republicans might try to influence the 2024 election. If a corrupt GOP governor were to take over a swing state — say, Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — and were to certify electors for Trump or an imitator in defiance of the popular vote, a House GOP majority in thrall to Trump could count those electors. Without reform of the Electoral Count Act, that would mean chaos.
A lot will turn on whether as speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) would defy the Trumpist bloc and seek majorities with Democrats. Ornstein’s view: “McCarthy won’t do anything to block or counter the crazies.”
There will be a strong temptation to treat these threats as the tea party redux. While crazed opposition to President Barack Obama drove that era’s chaos, it was aimed at discernible policy goals such as repealing Obamacare or forcing spending cuts. This time will be different.
The threats of chaos won’t be about realizing fiscal priorities in any meaningful sense; they will more likely be cultishly devoted to preserving one man’s absolute impunity. A sizable bloc of House Republicans may well see it as a higher mission to put Trump beyond the reach of accountability and above the law.
With the House Jan. 6 select committee, Democrats are running a legitimate congressional investigation into Trump’s incitement of a mob assault on the U.S. seat of government. The Justice Department search warrant for Mar-a-Lago followed lawful processes and was approved by a judge.
If and when GOP plans in response come into sharper focus, let’s not uncritically describe this as “revenge” or “retribution.” Such words take it as given that GOP conduct will be in some meaningful sense retaliatory for — or even equivalent to — those actions, as if everything is political all the way down, and we can’t ever distinguish between good-faith government conduct and flagrant bad-faith abuses of power.
There’s no reason to capitulate in advance to that framing.
Today's Yikes
And remember how Trump has been whining about "Biden's politicized DOJ", which lines up very neatly with:
Daddy State Awareness, Rule 1
Every accusation is a confession
Also - don't ever forget what a slimy ball of partly congealed pig snot Bill Barr is.
(pay wall)
Trump Pushed Officials to Prosecute His Critics, Ex-U.S. Attorney Says
Geoffrey S. Berman, who headed the Manhattan office, says in a book the Justice Department pushed cases, against John Kerry and others, to help Mr. Trump.
A book by a former top federal prosecutor offers new details about how the Justice Department under President Donald J. Trump sought to use the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan to support Mr. Trump politically and pursue his critics — even pushing the office to open a criminal investigation of former secretary of state John Kerry.
The prosecutor, Geoffrey S. Berman, was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York for two and a half years until June 2020, when Mr. Trump fired him after he refused a request to resign by Attorney General William P. Barr, who sought to replace him with an administration ally.
A copy of Mr. Berman’s book, “Holding the Line,” was obtained by The New York Times before its scheduled publication Tuesday.
The book paints a picture of Justice Department officials motivated by partisan concerns in pursuing investigations or blocking them; in weighing how forthright to be in court filings; and in shopping investigations to other prosecutors’ offices when the Southern District declined to act.
The book contains accounts of how department officials tried to have allusions to Mr. Trump scrubbed from charging papers for Michael D. Cohen, his former personal lawyer, and how the attorney general later tried to have his conviction reversed. It tells of pressure to pursue Mr. Kerry, who had angered Mr. Trump by attempting to preserve the nuclear deal he had negotiated with Iran.
And in September 2018, Mr. Berman writes, two months before the November midterms, a senior department official called Mr. Berman’s deputy, cited the Southern District’s recent prosecutions of two prominent Trump loyalists, and bluntly asserted that the office, which had been investigating Gregory B. Craig, a powerful Democratic lawyer, should charge him — and should do so before Election Day.
“It’s time for you guys to even things out,” the official said, according to Mr. Berman.
The book comes as Mr. Trump and his supporters have accused the Biden administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland of using the Justice Department as a weapon after a judge authorized FBI agents to search his Florida house for missing classified records. Mr. Trump, who is a likely presidential candidate in 2024, has suggested without evidence that President Biden is playing a role in that investigation.
However, Mr. Berman’s book says that during Mr. Trump’s presidency, department officials made “overtly political” demands, choosing targets that would directly further Mr. Trump’s desires for revenge and advantage. Mr. Berman wrote that the pressure was clearly inspired by the president’s openly professed wants.
In the book, Mr. Berman, who as U.S. attorney did not give news interviews, offers new details about the high-profile prosecutions of defendants like Mr. Cohen; Chris Collins, a Republican congressman from New York; Michael Avenatti, the celebrity attorney and Trump antagonist; and Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier.
He says there were cases his office pursued without pressure from Washington, but in others, he makes clear his greatest challenges did not always have to do with the law.
“Throughout my tenure as U.S. attorney,” Mr. Berman, 62, writes, “Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining — in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired.”
“I walked this tightrope for two and a half years,” writes Mr. Berman, who is now in private practice. “Eventually, the rope snapped.”
Mr. Berman, who in the book describes himself as a Rockefeller Republican, had been a federal prosecutor in the Manhattan office from 1990 to 1994, and went on to become a co-managing partner of the New Jersey office of the law firm Greenberg Traurig.
During the 2016 presidential primary season, Mr. Berman volunteered for Mr. Trump’s campaign and later for his transition committee. Originally believing he might be named U.S. attorney for New Jersey, he was instead tapped to lead the Southern District, the most prestigious prosecutor’s office outside Washington. It handles Wall Street crime, international terrorism, political corruption and complex frauds.
Mr. Berman met briefly with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office in June 2017, where the president did most of the talking, he writes. Mr. Berman, a Princeton resident, said he would need to move into the city. Mr. Trump recommended he live in downtown Manhattan, near the Southern District’s offices, ahead of what could be a dicey confirmation hearing.
“Make it a rental,” Mr. Trump said.
In March 2018, some two months after Mr. Berman assumed the post, the Justice Department, then headed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, referred to the Southern District the investigation of Mr. Craig.
The allegations focused on whether Mr. Craig, a White House counsel under President Barack Obama, had concealed work he had done years earlier for the government of Ukraine in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and whether he had lied to the Justice Department when questioned about it.
After months of investigation, the Southern District and Justice Department met with Mr. Craig’s lawyers, who made a presentation on his behalf. After his lawyers left and prosecutors voiced their opinions, Mr. Berman said he believed Mr. Craig was innocent of the FARA charge and so a jury would be unlikely to convict him on a false statement count.
A short time later, around mid-September, Mr. Berman writes, his deputy, Robert S. Khuzami, walked into his office and said he had just gotten a call from Edward O’Callaghan, the principal associate deputy attorney general, a political appointee. Mr. O’Callaghan, the book says, asked that the office “even things out” by charging Mr. Craig before Election Day.
In that conversation, Mr. Berman writes, Mr. O’Callaghan kept reminding Mr. Khuzami that the Southern District had just prosecuted Representative Collins and Mr. Cohen.
Mr. O’Callaghan said in a brief interview Wednesday that he had not read the book, but after being told by The Times of the statements attributed to him, called them “categorically false.”
Mr. Berman says he ignored the edict.
In mid-December, after a thorough investigation, Mr. Berman informed the department that his office was declining to prosecute Mr. Craig. He writes that he soon learned that the department had “peddled” the case to the U.S. attorney in Washington, where Mr. Craig was eventually indicted and tried on a single count of making false statements.
On Sept. 4, 2019, Mr. Craig was acquitted by the jury in less than five hours.
One of his lawyers, William W. Taylor III, said after the trial that the department had “hounded” his client “without any evidence and without any purpose.”
Mr. Berman writes: “The verdict felt like justice. Greg Craig should never have been prosecuted.”
One case Mr. Berman says his office had to fight to keep alive was the 2018 prosecution of Mr. Cohen, the president’s former lawyer. That August, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations over payments he arranged before the 2016 election, to keep two women from disclosing affairs they said they had with Mr. Trump. Mr. Berman did not participate in the investigation, because he had volunteered for the campaign. But he was later briefed on interference in the case.
Before the plea, Mr. Berman writes, as his office was preparing a charging document detailing the crimes, a Justice Department official badgered his deputy, Mr. Khuzami, without success, to remove all references to a person identified as “Individual-1.” It was Mr. Trump.
In the months after Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea, Mr. Berman writes, the Southern District continued to pursue investigations related to possible campaign finance violations, apparently by others in Mr. Trump’s orbit.
But after Mr. Barr became attorney general in February 2019, Mr. Berman writes, he tried to kill the investigations and suggested that Mr. Cohen’s conviction on campaign finance charges be reversed, even though six months had passed since Mr. Cohen had entered his guilty plea.
In late February, he writes, Mr. Barr summoned the Southern District deputy, Mr. Khuzami, who was overseeing the inquiry, to challenge the legal basis for Mr. Cohen’s plea and “the reasoning behind pursuing similar campaign finance charges against other individuals.”
His office was ordered to pause all investigative steps, Mr. Berman writes. “Not a single document in our possession could be reviewed,” he says. Mr. Barr assigned the department’s Office of Legal Counsel to study the issue.
Mr. Berman says his office submitted memos to the department in support of its position, and top prosecutors met with officials in Washington, including Mr. Barr, to press the case.
In late April, with the case effectively stalled, Audrey Strauss, who had succeeded Mr. Khuzami as Mr. Berman’s deputy, finally persuaded Mr. Barr there was no basis to dismiss any charges against Mr. Cohen and that the investigations should be completed, Mr. Berman writes. The inquiry eventually ended without additional charges.
Mr. Barr did not respond to a request for comment.
After the September 2019 acquittal of Gregory Craig, Mr. Berman writes, he hoped the verdict would ease pressure on the Southern District “to prosecute yet another enemy of the president” — Mr. Kerry.
“That was naïve on my part,” Mr. Berman says.
Mr. Kerry, a Vietnam War veteran and a former longtime Massachusetts senator, was secretary of state under President Obama, a role in which he led the lengthy negotiations that produced the Iran nuclear accord — that administration’s signature foreign policy achievement. Mr. Trump, during his presidential campaign, called the deal “insane” and a “disaster.”
On May 7, 2018, Mr. Trump tweeted about Mr. Kerry’s “possibly illegal Shadow Diplomacy” — an apparent reference to reports of Mr. Kerry having conversations as a private citizen with Iranian and other officials.
Mr. Trump tweeted another attack on Mr. Kerry the next day — the same day Mr. Trump announced the United States was withdrawing from the accord.
On May 9, Mr. Berman writes, Justice Department officials told his office that it would be responsible for an investigation into Mr. Kerry’s Iran-related conduct. The F.B.I. would join the inquiry.
The focus was on the Logan Act, a rarely invoked 1799 statute barring private citizens from unauthorized negotiations with foreign governments, which has been criticized as unconstitutionally vague. Mr. Berman notes that no one has ever been successfully prosecuted under the law.
But, as he puts it, “The conduct that had annoyed the president was now a priority of the Department of Justice.”
Although Mr. Berman says he does not know what prompted the Justice Department to seek a Kerry investigation, “No one needed to talk with Trump to know what he wanted. You could read his tweets.”
Mr. Berman writes that Mr. Kerry did not learn of the investigation and it never leaked into the news media.
Mr. Trump, meanwhile, kept tweeting. “Iran is being given VERY BAD advice by @JohnKerry,” he tweeted on the morning of April 22, 2019. “Big violation of Logan Act?”
That afternoon, Mr. Berman says, one of the co-chiefs of the Southern District’s national security unit got a call from a Justice Department official, asking why the office was delaying seeking an order to review “header information,” such as the date, recipients and senders of Mr. Kerry’s electronic communications. A more senior official pressed the issue again the next day with Southern District officials.
Mr. Berman writes that the pattern was “clear — and outrageous.” He said that the investigation began after Mr. Trump started tweeting “his displeasure about Kerry,” and a new tweet 11 months later prompted further prodding.
“And they were asking us, basically, what’s taking so long? Why aren’t you going harder and faster at this enemy of the president? There was no other way for me to look at it,” Mr. Berman writes.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Berman says that after an investigation of roughly a year, his office told the Justice Department that it would not prosecute Mr. Kerry.
A short time later, on Sept. 19, 2019, Mr. Berman writes, a senior adviser to the attorney general called to say that Mr. Barr expected to take the Kerry case to another U.S. attorney’s office, this time in Maryland.
That office reached the same conclusion as the Southern District had, Mr. Berman writes, “and the Kerry investigation just quietly died — as it should have.”
Tuesday, August 16, 2022
Rising Heat
Political Climate Change isn't any less real or less dangerous than the other kind.
MSNBC - Trump threatened AG Garland
Let's be clear. Trump did not try to get with Garland to ask him how he (Trump) could help cool things down.
Daddy State Awareness - Rule 3
Every prediction of some dire consequence is a threat.
Either they intend to do some shitty thing, or cause some shitty thing to happen - or it's a signal that they’re already doing it or causing it - in an attempt to coerce us into doing what they want.
Thursday, August 04, 2022
The Daddy State Shows Up
Crapo is saying we can expect to be punished by employers and bankers and Wall Street crooks for demanding tax equity.
Daddy State Awareness, rule 3:
Every prediction of some dire consequence is a threat.
Either they intend to do some shitty thing, or cause some shitty thing to happen in an attempt to coerce us into doing what they want.
Saturday, July 23, 2022
It Gets Worse
Please take all of this, strap it to a cinder block, and shove the whole thing up your ass.
Your pal,
Mike
PS)
WaPo: (pay wall)
South Carolina bill outlaws websites that tell how to get an abortion
More states could follow, setting up a battle over the future of online speech across the country.
Shortly after the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the right to abortion in June, South Carolina state senators introduced legislation that would make it illegal to “aid, abet or conspire with someone” to obtain an abortion.
The bill aims to block more than abortion: Provisions would outlaw providing information over the internet or phone about how to obtain an abortion. It would also make it illegal to host a website or “[provide] an internet service” with information that is “reasonably likely to be used for an abortion” and directed at pregnant people in the state.
Legal scholars say the proposal is likely a harbinger of other state measures, which may restrict communication and speech as they seek to curtail abortion. The June proposal, S. 1373, is modeled off a blueprint created by the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), an antiabortion group, and designed to be replicated by lawmakers across the country.
As the fall of Roe v. Wade triggers a flood of new legislation, an adjacent battleground is emerging over the future of internet freedoms and privacy in states across the country — one, experts say, that could have a chilling impact on First Amendment-protected speech.
“These are not going to be one-offs,” said Michele Goodwin, the director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy at the University of California at Irvine Law School. “These are going to be laws that spread like wildfire through states that have shown hostility to abortion.”
Goodwin called the South Carolina bill “unconstitutional.” But she warned it’s unclear how courts might respond after “turning a blind eye” to antiabortion laws even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe.
Many conservative states’ legislative sessions ended before the Supreme Court’s decision, and won’t resume until next year, making South Carolina’s bill an anomaly. But some tech lobbyists say the industry needs to be proactive and prepared to fight bills with communications restrictions that may have complicated ramifications for companies.
“If tech sits out this debate, services are going to be held liable for providing basic reproductive health care for women,” said Adam Kovacevich, the founder and CEO of Chamber of Progress, which receives funding from companies including Google and Facebook.
Tech companies could soon be navigating a disparate patchwork of state laws, caught in the middle of a political tug of war between red states and blue states. Democrats are already considering new data privacy proposals to protect reproductive health data and other digital trails that could be used to prosecute people seeking abortion. Meanwhile, Republican states could attempt to preserve and collect that same data, which has been used as key evidence in cases against pregnant women.
Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, said the First Amendment and Section 230, a bill that shields internet providers and tech companies from liability for the posts, photos and videos people share on their sites, provide a strong defense in many instances for websites and providers facing lawsuits over hosting information about abortion access.
But individuals could face liability for aiding and abetting people in accessing a criminalized procedure if they send messages about how to obtain an abortion or otherwise break the law.
For the NRLC, which wrote the model legislation, limiting communication is a key part of the strategy to aggressively enforce laws restricting abortion. “The whole criminal enterprise needs to be dealt with to effectively prevent criminal activity,” Jim Bopp, the group’s general counsel, wrote in a July 4 memo, comparing the group’s efforts to fighting organized crime.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Bopp said that the group has refined its blueprint for states since the South Carolina bill was introduced last month. The restrictions on websites and internet hosts in the July model bill language would only apply when the information is likely to be used “for an unlawful abortion in this state,” he said, not abortions generally, as the South Carolina bill says.
The group “tried to be very careful in vetting this so it doesn’t impinge on First Amendment rights,” he added. He said the provision was intended to limit the trafficking of abortion-inducing drugs, which throughout the interview he compared to the trafficking of fentanyl.
Yet there’s broad uncertainty about how courts would interpret such bills, which might lead to companies and websites taking down information about abortions for fear of lawsuits.
“The legal ambiguity works in favor of regulators,” Goldman said. “They can suppress a lot of constitutionally protected speech just because of fear of liability.”
Democrats are expected to respond to the conservative states’ with their own regulatory efforts, largely focused on protecting sensitive data. California State Assembly member Mia Bonta introduced legislation earlier this year that would protect people from law enforcement requests from other states to turn over information that would identify people seeking an abortion.
A staffer in Bonta’s office said she introduced the legislation amid concerns that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe. Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California approached her with the concept of the legislation. The bill will have a hearing in August, and Bonta’s staff is working on amendments to strengthen the legislation in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.
“Just because the Supreme Court has decided to strip us of the fundamental right to choose what [to do] with our bodies, doesn’t mean California will stand back and allow others to use our systems to obtain information to hurt people who are exercising a fundamental right here in California,” Bonta said.
Democrats in Congress have also introduced the “My Body, My Data Act,” which would create new privacy protections for reproductive health data. The bill has little chance of becoming law in a narrowly divided Congress, but Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), the legislation’s architect, previously told The Post that she wants states to replicate the bill.
Privacy and tech advocacy groups are trying to gear up for the post-Dobbs battles. The Center for Democracy and Technology on Tuesday announced a new task force focused on protecting reproductive health information, which convened academics, civil rights groups and privacy organizations.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group, expressed support for the California privacy bill and is reviewing the South Carolina legislation. Hayley Tsukayama, a senior legislative activist at EFF and a former Post reporter, said the South Carolina bill has “serious problems.”
She’s anticipating that tech companies and their trade associations will be ramping up their lobbying efforts at the state level, especially early next year, when many states resume their legislative calendars.
“For tech companies and for folks interested in digital rights, it’s going to be a wild ride in the next few years,” she said.
Saturday, July 16, 2022
Today's Daddy Stater
Republican Who Pushed 2020 Election Fraud Claims Accused of Election Fraud
Representative Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee to be New York's governor, has been accused of ballot petition fraud and may not be able to have his name appear on the Independence Party line on the November ballot.
Following the 2020 election, Zeldin supported former President Donald Trump's claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent although no evidence has emerged corroborating the allegations. The GOP congressman voted against the certification of President Joe Biden's electoral votes in Arizona and Pennsylvania on January 6.
"This debate is necessary because rogue election officials, secretaries of state and courts circumvented state election laws," Zeldin argued at the time.
Now, the New York State Board of Elections has invalidated nearly 13,000 signatures on petitions for Zeldin to appear on the Independence Party line on the ballot, the Times Union reported. That decision came after it was alleged by Andrew Kolstee, secretary of the state's Libertarian Party, that some 11,000 of Zeldin's signatures were merely copies of other pages.
The Republican needed 45,000 signatures to appear on the third party ballot line. Although he submitted 52,000 signatures, with 13,000 ruled invalid by the Board of Elections, he will be unlikely to appear as an Independence Party candidate.
City & State reported that the Board of Elections would not comment on whether the signatures were deemed to be copied fraudulently, citing pending litigation. The magazine reported that its staff had reviewed the signatures and allegations by Kolstee, noting that "page after page" was "without a single valid signature."
While petition signature fraud is different than voter fraud, which Trump alleged had occurred in 2020, it is considered a form of election fraud according to the conservative Heritage Foundation. The right-wing organization describes "ballot petition fraud," which is defined as "forging the signatures of registered voters on the ballot petitions that must be filed with election officials in some states for a candidate or issue to be listed on the official ballot," as a "type" of election fraud.
"Republicans talk a lot about election integrity, but the Zeldin campaign attempted to fly under the radar and submit over 11,000 fraudulent signatures in an attempt to get a third line on the ballot," Kolstee said, the Times Union reported.
Newsweek reached out to Zeldin's campaign and congressional office for comment.
Katie Vincentz, a spokeswoman for the Zeldin's campaign, told the Times Union if an error had occurred, it was due to the heavy workload volunteers had.
"All five statewide candidates, scores of legislative and local candidates and a massive amount of each campaigns' volunteers collected tens of thousands of signatures from throughout New York," Vincentz said.
"Being nearly an entirely grassroots effort, we haven't reviewed all of the petitions nor the specific objections associated with them. In the final few days leading up to the filing deadline, tens of thousands of signatures from all over the state had to be immediately turned into the Board of Elections. While the Zeldin for New York campaign is not aware of photocopies, we certainly didn't make any photo copies," she added, according to the Times Union.
Jay Jacobs, the chair of the state Democratic Party, slammed Zeldin over the allegedly fraudulent signatures.
"Let's not forget: Lee Zeldin was one of the many far-right Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election under the guise of election fraud," Jacobs told City & State.
Zeldin is already widely expected to lose the 2022 election to incumbent Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul. New York has been a Democrat-majority state for many years, and a June poll by WNYT-TV/SurveyUSA showed the Republican candidate trailing Hochul by 24 points.
Trump's claims of widespread election fraud have been consistently debunked, including by top officials from his own administration. Former Attorney General William Barr, who was widely viewed as one of Trump's most loyal Cabinet members, has said repeatedly that the allegations were "bulls**t."
"I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has lost contact with—he's become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff," Barr testified before the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Thursday, July 14, 2022
Jan6 Stuff
Rep Jamie Raskin's ( D-MD08 ) closing statement 07-12-2022
Federalist #1 - Alexander Hamilton:
Among the most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter may readily be distinguished the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the offices they hold under the State establishments; and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies than from its union under one government.
- snip -
A torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose. To judge from the conduct of the opposite parties, we shall be led to conclude that they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives. An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.
Among the most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter may readily be distinguished the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the offices they hold under the State establishments; and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies than from its union under one government.
- snip -
A torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose. To judge from the conduct of the opposite parties, we shall be led to conclude that they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives. An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.
Republicans have spent decades shit-talking government. And of course we need to be vigilant, and maintain a healthy skepticism when it comes to how we regard political power, but one of the truly shitty things that's been going on is the turning upside down of fairly simple ideas like "patriotism".
That's a word that should mean we stand up for the form of our government, for the principles of good self-governance that tries to organize around "the best for the most, but equity for all".
But it's been co-opted and bastardized. It's come to mean it's OK to take political power by force because all government is bad, and anyone who defends democratic traditions and institutions must be an evil big gubmint deep state race-betraying mongrel who lights puppies on fire and throws them onto your grandma's porch because they wanna take her house away from her and give it to a bunch of criminal immigrants so they can steal your job that doesn't even exist anymore because the mill was shut down and moved to Bangladesh 15 years ago by the people who paid for all this political advertising propaganda.
And if you're confused by all that, then good - that's what we want. We have to keep you off balance and uncertain, because eventually you'll want nothing more than the "stability" of being ruled by a system of powerful elites that we've been telling you is the problem this whole time.
Still confused? Well, maybe you're just not smart enough or good enough to understand, so obviously, you need us to be in charge for a while longer.
Tuesday, July 12, 2022
Jan6 Stuff
A lot of folks are wondering why these bozos recorded their plotting and planning. Some of these goons went so far as to have documentarians follow them around with video cameras to catch every move.
Stop wondering. This is one of the hallmarks of authoritarianism, and it fits very well with Timothy Snyder's list of things we need to watch out for ("On Tyranny"):
Obeying in advance
Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. Individuals think ahead about what a repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked.
Trump will never give anyone a direct order to commit some crime for him. But every member of the cult knows he wants all manner of fuckery to happen. And they know they'll be rewarded in some way for it. So they hatch all kinds of weird schemes, and they need to have their valiant efforts documented so they can show the boss what good little devotees they've been.
There's a reason we know so much about the horrendous events that occurred under regimes like Pol Pot and Sadam and Hitler, et al. The Daddy State always develops a very good bureaucracy to keep track of the shit they do - they have to be able to show the boss.
Rachel Maddow: (thru about 20:40)
BTW - These assholes had hand grenades!?!
BTW 2 - "I don't fucking care that they have weapons - they're not here to hurt me..."
This is a guy who's always yammering about "false flag" and "AnitFa in disguise". Why is he not at all concerned that one of "his people" is in fact not one of his people and is in fact there to hurt hm? This is of course also part-n-parcel of the Daddy State bullshit about taking your fantasy version of reality and twisting it and smash-fitting it, so it serves your immediate political need.
Friday, July 08, 2022
Today's GOP Fuckery
When Greg Abbott signed the Texas bill criminalizing abortion - and monetizing the enforcement provisions by essentially deputizing every vigilante schmuck with a hankerin' to play Wyatt Earp while putting $10,000 in his pocket - he was asked about not making provisions for rape and incest.
10-year-old rape victim apparently not among Ohio Gov. DeWine’s ‘most vulnerable’ needing protection
Gov. Mike DeWine spends a lot of time jawing about his concern for protecting the “most vulnerable” Ohioans whenever he signs a draconian law attacking the bodily autonomy of others.
But as we learned this week, a 10-year-old Ohio rape victim was forced to travel to Indiana for an abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned national abortion rights, and within hours
On Monday three days after the Supreme Court issued its groundbreaking decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, took a call from a colleague, a child abuse doctor in Ohio.
Hours after the Supreme Court action, the Buckeye state had outlawed any abortion after six weeks. Now this doctor had a 10-year-old patient in the office who was six weeks and three days pregnant.
Could Bernard help?
Though Indiana lawmakers are poised to further restrict or ban abortion in mere weeks with a special session July 25, for now, the procedure still is legal there. And so, the Star reported, the girl soon was on her way to Indiana to Bernard’s care.
Asked Wednesday about the law he signed preventing this 10-year-old rape victim from having a choice over her pregnancy in Ohio, DeWine could only stutter and stammer through a political hack non-answer:
Everyone knows that the rape of a 10-year-old is horrible. That’s not the question.
The question is for DeWine to explain why he thinks he is justified in creating law to force child rape victims to carry pregnancies from their rapists. On that subject, DeWine’s silence rang loud.
DeWine would inflict the emotional and physical violence of forced birth-giving on child rape victims, but won’t take responsibility for his own actions.
This is a most disgusting form of cowardice.
Either DeWine has the courage of his convictions and explains why children must undergo this suffering he’s causing; or he’s a coward.
From his answer, it’s apparent he’s so unconcerned — while this has made national and international news all week — he hasn’t bothered to seek out the facts of the case.
Compare his current posture to the rhetoric DeWine deployed when he signed the law that caused this situation:
“The essential function of government is to protect the most vulnerable among us, those who don’t have a voice,” DeWine said.
If a 10-year-old rape victim does not rank among Ohio’s most vulnerable, I shudder to imagine DeWine’s conception of vulnerability.
This is just the beginning. This was one example that came within days of the Supreme Court’s ruling and the enactment of Ohio Republicans’ law.
Over the coming years, there will be many more. We will report on each story we can, and they will all be heartbreaking to read, I’m sure, and devastating to everyday Ohioans’ lives.
This is what happens when long-standing freedoms are ripped away from Americans by extremist politicians and politically motivated, activist courts.
This is what happens when politicians choose to be blind to the nuances and complexity of life, and instead stake out radical, absolutist positions, and then give those positions the power of law.
Ohio Republicans are planning to move legislation next that will ban nearly all abortions, again with no exceptions for rape or incest.
The sponsor says she has the votes in the General Assembly as well as the “full support” of DeWine.
State Rep. Jean Schmidt doesn’t know yet, she said, whether they will make this new, even more extreme law before or after the November General Election. She’s called forced pregnancy for rape victims “an opportunity.”
Ohio Republicans and Mike DeWine may be fine with making our state an example of heartless cruelty before the eyes of the nation and the world.
I think it’s sick and monstrous.
But that’s the law they made and threaten to make worse, so they don’t get to shirk responsibility and accountability for their actions.
Each heartbreaking story of suffering and pain falls squarely on their heads.
He side-stepped the question, and pivoted straight into feigning an angry rant about the terribleness of rape and how he was going to put a stop to rape in Texas and it's the rapists committing rape who need to be stopped before they can rape the rape victims who are raped and raped and raped.
And suddenly the question about forcing a woman to bear a child against her will, having been forced to get impregnated against her will is completely lost in the shuffle.
MIke DeWine tried to pull the same shit in Ohio.
Gov. Mike DeWine spends a lot of time jawing about his concern for protecting the “most vulnerable” Ohioans whenever he signs a draconian law attacking the bodily autonomy of others.
But as we learned this week, a 10-year-old Ohio rape victim was forced to travel to Indiana for an abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned national abortion rights, and within hours
On Monday three days after the Supreme Court issued its groundbreaking decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, took a call from a colleague, a child abuse doctor in Ohio.
Hours after the Supreme Court action, the Buckeye state had outlawed any abortion after six weeks. Now this doctor had a 10-year-old patient in the office who was six weeks and three days pregnant.
Could Bernard help?
Though Indiana lawmakers are poised to further restrict or ban abortion in mere weeks with a special session July 25, for now, the procedure still is legal there. And so, the Star reported, the girl soon was on her way to Indiana to Bernard’s care.
Asked Wednesday about the law he signed preventing this 10-year-old rape victim from having a choice over her pregnancy in Ohio, DeWine could only stutter and stammer through a political hack non-answer:
“Yeah, first of all, I have no more information than you do or anybody does. Reading in the, in the paper, it came came as you know, from a story out of, out of Indiana from, from a doctor over there. This is a horrible, horrible tragedy, you know, for a 10-year-old to be assaulted, 10-year-old to be raped, you know, as a father and grandfather, it just, it’s just gut-wrenching to even, even, even think about it. I assume that the doctor has reported this. I assume that if she was treated at an emergency room, you know, these are all mandatory reporters. So I’m assuming that this has been referred to children’s services, I assume has also been referred to local whatever the local law enforcement agency is. We have out there a, obviously a rapist. We have someone who is dangerous and we have someone who should be picked up and locked up forever. And again, I don’t, not knowing all the facts of the case, I’m just assuming that that process has has in fact, has in fact, been been followed. [sic]”
Everyone knows that the rape of a 10-year-old is horrible. That’s not the question.
The question is for DeWine to explain why he thinks he is justified in creating law to force child rape victims to carry pregnancies from their rapists. On that subject, DeWine’s silence rang loud.
DeWine would inflict the emotional and physical violence of forced birth-giving on child rape victims, but won’t take responsibility for his own actions.
This is a most disgusting form of cowardice.
Either DeWine has the courage of his convictions and explains why children must undergo this suffering he’s causing; or he’s a coward.
From his answer, it’s apparent he’s so unconcerned — while this has made national and international news all week — he hasn’t bothered to seek out the facts of the case.
Compare his current posture to the rhetoric DeWine deployed when he signed the law that caused this situation:
“The essential function of government is to protect the most vulnerable among us, those who don’t have a voice,” DeWine said.
If a 10-year-old rape victim does not rank among Ohio’s most vulnerable, I shudder to imagine DeWine’s conception of vulnerability.
This is just the beginning. This was one example that came within days of the Supreme Court’s ruling and the enactment of Ohio Republicans’ law.
Over the coming years, there will be many more. We will report on each story we can, and they will all be heartbreaking to read, I’m sure, and devastating to everyday Ohioans’ lives.
This is what happens when long-standing freedoms are ripped away from Americans by extremist politicians and politically motivated, activist courts.
This is what happens when politicians choose to be blind to the nuances and complexity of life, and instead stake out radical, absolutist positions, and then give those positions the power of law.
Ohio Republicans are planning to move legislation next that will ban nearly all abortions, again with no exceptions for rape or incest.
The sponsor says she has the votes in the General Assembly as well as the “full support” of DeWine.
State Rep. Jean Schmidt doesn’t know yet, she said, whether they will make this new, even more extreme law before or after the November General Election. She’s called forced pregnancy for rape victims “an opportunity.”
Ohio Republicans and Mike DeWine may be fine with making our state an example of heartless cruelty before the eyes of the nation and the world.
I think it’s sick and monstrous.
But that’s the law they made and threaten to make worse, so they don’t get to shirk responsibility and accountability for their actions.
Each heartbreaking story of suffering and pain falls squarely on their heads.
And isn't it weird - but no, not weird at all - that Republicans always come down on the side of retribution.
No matter what happens, their first inclination is to punish. Everybody gets punished for everything - the perp and victim and everybody else - punishing everybody means nobody can criticize us for playing favorites.
I think that grows out of Daddy State Awareness, Rule 6:
Total criminalization: if we're all guilty, then you can't hold me responsible without the risk of exposing your own culpability.
So it follows that if everybody's guilty of something, then everybody can be punished at any time for any reason. Or for no reason at all.
And if punishment is the order of the day, then everybody is under threat at all times, which makes everybody a little less likely to step outa line.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)