About Those Rights

And then Georgie ran home to his safe space, where he can more comfortably mock people's right to be treated fairly, and to get a commitment to it - in writing.

 By George F. Will - WaPo

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Opinion
50 years later, the bell-bottomed zombie Equal Rights Amendment staggers on

In 1972, a year of disco, hip-hugging bell-bottoms, 36-cents-a-gallon gas and Joe Biden’s first Senate election, Congress sent the Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification. This required the assent of three-quarters of them (38) within seven years. A ratification deadline, which has been an organic part of every amendment submitted to the states for a century, is intended to ensure what the Supreme Court calls a “sufficiently contemporaneous” consensus for constitutional change.

Although the ERA (“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged … on account of sex”) has long been dead as a doornail, it is a useful cadaver. Progressives toiling to resurrect it are expending energy they might otherwise devote to achievable mischief. And they are reminding the nation how aggressively they will traduce constitutional, rule-of-law and democratic norms to achieve their goals, however frivolous.

The ERA rocketed toward ratification: Seven states approved it the first week, 19 within three months, mostly without hearings because it was rightly regarded as a constitutional nullity, a “consciousness-raising” gesture: What would it add to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” for all “persons”? But by 1975, the momentum to clutter the Constitution with pointless verbiage stalled. So, the amendment’s supporters began their now 47-year, ever-more-sophistical campaign to rig the ratification process.

Although decades later they would assert — without evidence, of which there is none from the Constitution’s text or history — that ratification deadlines are unconstitutional, they got Congress to extend the deadline. Congress, whose members are sworn to “support and defend” the Constitution, extended it 39 months — by a simple majority vote. This, even though the deadline was a component of the amendment, which had to pass both houses of Congress with two-thirds majorities. And even though 30 of the 35 states that had ratified it by January 1977 had referred to the seven-year deadline in their ratification resolutions.

Congress, supinely pandering, extended the deadline — but only for states that had not already ratified it. This was to block additional recissions: Four states, having had second (or perhaps first) thoughts, had canceled their ratifications. The 39-month extension expired in 1982, 123 months after the ERA left Congress, having gone longer (65 months) without an additional state’s ratification than it took to get the original 35 (which by then had shrunk to 30).

Since then, the ERA’s advocates of equality for women have insisted on ever-more-elaborate special treatment for the amendment. They have said the clock can never expire on ratification, and no ratification can be rescinded. Baldly declaring the five recissions impermissible, and that all deadlines are illegitimate, between 2017 and 2020 they got three more states to ratify the ERA. So, they said, the 38-state threshold had been reached, and they demanded that the National Archivist declare the Constitution amended. This he declined to do.

The ERA-as-Lazarus project has had unpleasant experiences in the courts, where law is taken seriously. In 2021, a federal district judge (an Obama appointee) held that the seven-year deadline set by Congress half a century ago was valid, so the three states’ make-believe ratifications, 2017-2020, were without legal effect. This brings to 26 the number of federal judges (14 Republican and 12 Democratic appointees) whose message to the ERA resurrectionists has been essentially: You’re kidding, right?

With a tenacity inversely proportional to their credibility, the ERA’s bitter-enders, who of course subscribe to progressivism’s theory of unlimited presidential power, insist that the ERA is “one signature away” — the archivist’s — from becoming the 28th Amendment. They want President Biden to order the archivist to ignore all the legal folderol and paste the ERA into the Constitution. The archivist who spurned the resurrectionists’ demand has retired, but his likely successor seems equally sensible.

At Senate confirmation hearings for Colleen Shogan in September, she was asked by Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio): “If confirmed, would you continue to abide by the January 2020 [Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel] opinion, as your predecessor did?” She said yes, and that a court order would be the only circumstance under which she would certify that the ERA has been ratified. If she means this, the amendment’s fate was settled long ago.

If any of the resurrectionists were just 21 in 1972 when Congress sent the ERA to the states, they are now 71. Their hip-hugging bell-bottoms are dimly remembered embarrassments, like the ERA.

C'mon, George - you're gonna cite “sufficiently contemporaneous” as the central point of your argument?

• It was sufficiently contemporaneous for the Taney court to rule enslaved people have no rights under the constitution, and have no expectation to be treated fairly. 
• It was sufficiently contemporaneous to deny women the right to vote for 50 years after the 15th amendment.
• It was sufficiently contemporaneous to require women to have their husbands' permission to get a credit card, or buy a car, or a house, or or or.
• It was sufficiently contemporaneous to deny native tribes full citizenship for 230 years after ratification of the Constitution.
• It's sufficiently contemporaneous to allow floods of dark money to contaminate the election process, creating coin-operated politicians who serve the interests of SuperPACs and corporate donors instead of actual people.

I guess now it's sufficiently contemporaneous to issue that stupid Dodd decision that pushes us backwards half a century.

Fake lord have mercy - George Will is a ridiculous person.

Their Crystal's On The Fritz

Crystal-gazing.

Finger on the pulse.

Finger in the wind.

Finger down my throat. 

Jennifer Rubin, polling the pollsters. Or trolling them - trolling the trollsters?

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Opinion
4 reasons to be skeptical about election polling

Pollsters should worry that their profession might soon be regarded as more like astrology than political science.

Reasons to take polls with a large grain of salt abound. First, the nagging sense that pollsters are “missing” MAGA voters remains, as was the case during both the 2016 and 2020 elections. In both cycles, pollsters essentially got the Democratic share of the vote right but missed many voters who supported Donald Trump.

Some have suggested that Trump voters are less likely to talk honestly with pollsters than Democratic voters are. Plus, pollsters get responses from only a tiny fraction of calls they place, so voters with the luxury of time and deep interest in politics skew the results.

In 2020, polls gave a false sense of security for many House and Senate Democratic candidates. But that polling failure did not occur in 2018, when Trump was not on the ballot. So is the worry of missing Republican voters valid this time around? It’s a source of serious debate.

A second reason for caution: Some pollsters have reacted to their previous errors by overweighting survey results in the opposite direction. It’s unlikely that Republicans have made up their deficit among women, for example, despite what some polls show. Similarly, it’s unlikely that younger voters will show up as a fraction of their proportion in the 2018 or 2020 elections. Polls that show otherwise might be an indication that pollsters have overcompensated.

Third, as early voting becomes increasingly popular, no one knows whether this behavior will affect voting outcomes or whether the past profile of early voters (heavily Democratic) will hold up. There is no doubt that early voting has become easier and more familiar for millions of voters, as the Center for Election Innovation and Research points out in a recent report. David Becker, who leads the center, tells me that “35 states offer every voter the choice to vote early or by mail, and another 11 offer early voting to all voters (requiring an excuse to vote by mail).” While Republicans have certainly tried to restrict voting, he said, doing so might be hard when almost every voter “will still find voting to be familiar, convenient and safe.”

So far, early voting is slightly ahead of the 2018 rate and about 37 percent of 2020’s rate. The Democratic percentage of early voting is higher than it was in 2018 and 2020, but it’s unclear whether this means Democratic turnout as a whole will keep pace.

Finally, Republican pollsters are flooding the zone with partisan polls, which polling averages pick up. Naturally, that means mainstream media outlets are seeing these numbers and concluding that Republicans are gaining steam. But are they?

Tom Bonier, a Democratic strategist and head of the progressive data firm TargetSmart, noted the phenomenon in a recent tweet thread. He argues, for example, that one GOP poll showing Mehmet Oz, Republicans’ Senate nominee in Pennsylvania, up by three points likely underestimated young voters, but “many media outlets reported that Oz had surged into the lead.”

Similarly, in Georgia’s Senate race, Republican nominee Herschel Walker has the edge according to media outlets, despite reports that he paid for abortions previously (which Walker denies). But media reports are likely skewed by the large number of GOP-associated firms with polls showing the Republican ahead. Democratic operative Simon Rosenberg tweets: “A polling aggregator of only independent polls has the election 3.3 pts more Dem than” the RealClearPolitics average.

Perhaps the common media take that Republicans are “surging” is misleading. After all, while the New York Times’s election pundits have argued that Republicans are gaining ground, its own polling shows Democrats leading in three of four critical House races and a batch of Senate races (including Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona). So which is right? The analysis, the polling or neither?

The bottom line is threefold: First, polling is far less predictive than media outlets often portray it to be, largely because we do not know who will turn out. CBS News has wisely provided a range of polling results depending on different turnout models. That seems far more honest and informative.

Second, much of the horserace coverage reliant on polling is crowding out substantive coverage of the races. Outlets should adjust accordingly.

Third, we’ll find out the winner only after the votes are counted (shocking!). But even that won’t tell us whether the polls were “right,” or whether they contributed to a false narrative that drove results.

In the end, the only sane approach to understanding the election is to ignore all the polling noise and focus on what really matters: turning out to vote.

All I want for Christmas is a chance to tell Nate Silver to shove a pinecone up his ass.

(And don't kid yourself, these GOP asshats are going to drag this shit out for quite a while. We'll be lucky to get most of it done by Christmas.)

Today's Oy

Doug Mastriano has gone full Trump, all but barring the press from attending his events, plus this weird kicker where he's shunning press coverage almost altogether. Which seems like an odd choice for a political campaign - since exposure is oxygen - until you see the parlay the campaign is trying to pull off. ie: Getting the wacko message to the MAGA Faithful while keeping it from the general public so as not to "scare the straights".

It's pretty strange, except that it's not. What Mastriano and the other MAGA pimps are doing is following the usual pattern for cults: Taking it to the logical extreme, which is where even good ideas go to die.

Like grandma said: 

"People know you by the crowd you run with - you need to get some better friends."

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Opinion
And on the eighth day, God said: Let Mastriano win Pennsylvania

And, lo, it shall come to pass, on the eighth day of the eleventh month of the Year of our Lord 2022, that Our Heavenly Father shall gather the inhabitants of His Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, from the Sacred City of Filial Love to His Earthly Paradise on the Monongahela, and from all other dwelling places therein; and He shall say, “Riseth up ye and goeth to the polling places; and therein casteth ye thy ballots in such manner that the Heavenly Host doth thunder, ‘Yea, Doug Mastriano, assuredly and verily thou art a cuckoo bird.’ ”

— the Gospel according to nobody in particular

Doug Mastriano is on a mission from God.

The Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania has done any number of things that would doom to Hades the political prospects of any mortal politician: wearing a Confederate uniform, doing business with a white nationalist website, calling Roe v. Wade worse than the Holocaust, associating with militia figures from groups such as the Oath Keepers, appearing at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection, and sharing QAnon conspiracy ideas, anti-Semitic propaganda and anti-Muslim hatred.

But though he walks through the shadow of the valley of defeat, he fears no evil — because he has his very own campaign prophet! Her name is Julie Green, and she personally receives messages directly from God, “sometimes … twice a day,” she says, when He instructs her to turn on certain recordings and then speaks to her through the music’s “frequencies.”

The Good Book tells us a prophet is without honor in her own country, and, sure enough, Green has been removed from YouTube, she complains. (She shares her prophesies instead on Telegram and Donald Trump’s Truth Social.) But Mastriano has raised up Prophet Julie and her gospel — which, it so happens, is all about how Mastriano’s enemies will be turned into pillars of salt.

God, speaking through Green, told Mastriano in February that “I will not forsake you” in the quest “for the great steal to be overturned,” as Eric Hananoki (God bless him) chronicled for the liberal watchdog Media Matters for America. In March, Mastriano’s campaign invited Green to give the opening prayer at a campaign event at which a Mastriano aide welcomed her as “a representative of God.” In April, Mastriano appeared with Green at a conference and posted a photo of himself with her. In May, Green, at the Mastriano campaign’s request, made a custom prophecy video for his followers. In June, Green, claiming she visited Mastriano “several times,” said “we just have a special relationship.”

Praise be. Neither Mastriano nor his prophet responded to my requests for comment.

Axios reports that Mastriano’s associations with people such as Green have “raised eyebrows” in Republican circles. But Green is just one of many self-proclaimed prophets who have been predicting Trump’s political resurrection. In the MAGA age, they’ve reportedly got quite a following among Pentecostal and charismatic Christians. It’s one more sign (from on high?) of a movement gone bonkers.

Blending Old Testament fire and brimstone with insurrectionist invective, Green serves up endless jeremiads against opponents of God’s “son” Trump, as Hananoki detailed.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “will be visited by the Angel of Death for her crimes against my nation. … She loves to drink the little children’s blood. … Yes, a true witch she really is.”

God, speaking through Green, disclosed that elites have done “human sacrifices” and “manipulated even the weather.” Arizona’s Republican Gov. Doug Ducey sold his “soul to the devil” and “treason will be written on you for all eternity.” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) “formulated plans to throw out [Trump] from his rightful position as president. … You will pay with your life.”

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), too, will have her life “taken from you by the Angel of Death.” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) will face “eternity in the Lake of Fire.” Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) “stood alongside the Red Dragon.” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) “will reap what you have sown in this hour of judgment, saith the Lord of Hosts.” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is “a snake in the grass” who “infiltrated my nation, and that is the last thing you will ever do.” President Biden, Green proclaims, “has already been judged and is no longer alive.”

Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and others are due to meet similar ends, according to God’s word — as told to Green.

Will Green’s many prophecies come to pass?

Well, that depends. Will the good people of Pennsylvania succumb to conspiracy lunacy masquerading as scripture? Or will they, and voters everywhere, decide that this is just one more sign that the false prophets of MAGA have gone entirely too far?

God willing, voters will know them by their fruits.

Fading Threat

I hope I'm not just hoping it'll be OK. I hope I'm not just thinking people will come to their senses and realize the fantasies of the MAGA rubes are unsustainable, and that they don't really want to shit-can democracy in favor of politics-by-brute-force.

I hope Americans' short attention span can be extended enough for us to see we really don't want to model our system after China or Russia, and that we really don't want the mechanism of transferring power to make us look like Afghanistan or Iraq.

Paradoxically, the passing of time puts distance between Jan6 and where we are now, and I think maybe, instead of forgetting about the unpleasantness and getting back to a comfotably numb status quo ante, more people are coming to understand that democracy is not something we have unless it's something we do, and it's a helluva lot better to get together and vote every once in a while than it is to drop bombs on each other.

The weird thing I think way too many of the MAGA gang are being deliberately blinded to is that while the US was born of bloody violent revolution, the founders immediately set about putting together a system that would prevent us from ever having to go through that shit again - we could make things more to our liking without shooting each other and burning down each other's barns, if we could just muster the courage to insist that we ourselves honor our commitment to forming that more perfect union.

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Opinion
Why I’ve stopped fearing America is headed for civil war

Five years ago, I began to worry about a new American civil war breaking out. Despite a recent spate of books and columns that warn such a conflict may be approaching, I am less concerned by that prospect now.

Back then, I wrote in a series of articles and online discussions for Foreign Policy that I expected to see widespread political violence accompanied by efforts in some states to undermine the authority and abilities of the federal government. At an annual lunch of national security experts in Austin, I posed the question of possible civil war and got a consensus of about a one-third chance of such a situation breaking.

Specifically, I worried that there would be a spate of assassination attempts against politicians and judges. I thought we might see courthouses and other federal buildings bombed. I also expected that in some states, right-wing organizations, heavily influenced by white nationalism, would hold conventions to discuss how to defy enforcement of federal laws they disliked, such as those dealing with voting rights. Some governors might vow to fire any state employee complying with unwanted federal orders. And I thought it likely that “nullification juries” would start cropping up, refusing to convict right-wingers committing mayhem, such as attacking election officials, no matter what evidence there was.

We still may see such catastrophes, of course. Our country remains deeply divided. We have a Supreme Court packed with reactionaries. Many right-wingers appear comfortable with threatening violence if things don’t go their way, and a large minority of the members of Congress seems unconcerned with such talk. I continue to worry especially about political assassinations, because all that takes is one deranged person and a gun — and our country unfortunately has many of both.

And yet, for all that, I am less pessimistic than I was back then.

Oddly enough, the main things that give me hope arise from former president Donald Trump’s attack on the electoral process, culminating in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. At the time I feared that the unprecedented insurrection was the beginning of a sustained war on American democracy.

Yet nothing much happened. Rather, with the executive branch crippled and the legislative branch divided, the judicial branch of the federal government held the line. Again and again, both federal and state courts rejected claims of election fraud. Now those who alleged fraud without substantial evidence are themselves being investigated. Hundreds of people who invaded the Capitol, attacked police and threatened lawmakers were tracked down and charged with crimes. It was as if the American system had been subjected to a stress test and, albeit a bit wobbly, passed.

Moreover, the Capitol invaders turned out to lack the courage of their convictions. Having broken the law, they shied away from the consequences. Unlike the civil rights activists of the 1960s, they did not proudly march into jails, certain of the rightness of their cause, eager to use the moment to explain what they had done and why. They lacked the essentials that gave the civil rights movement and others sustainability: training, discipline and a strategy for the long term.

More recently, the House select committee examining how Jan. 6 came to pass has established a factual record that cannot be denied. While unfortunately not truly bipartisan, it also shows part of the legislative branch of the federal government finally awakening and responding to the attack that branch suffered. The Justice Department’s slow but steady pursuit of Jan. 6 perpetrators “at any level” targets those who thought they could speak or act without repercussions. And the American people are paying attention. A recent NBC News poll found that “threats to democracy” topped the list of pressing issues facing the nation.

Yes, we still have a long way to go. There are no signs of a national reconciliation in the offing. Some Trump followers no doubt will be elected to Congress and to state offices this fall, and control of both houses of Congress is uncertain.

But it is beginning to feel to me like the wave of hard right — not “conservative” — reaction has crested. As we saw in the recent vote in Kansas, the Supreme Court’s ruling against abortion has awakened many women, and some men, to the dangers of letting that court go wildly out of step with the American people.

In addition, the events of the past few years, most notably the pandemic and some natural disasters, have reminded many Americans that there is a place for good and effective government, especially in providing the basic societal needs of public health, public safety, air and water quality, and roads and other forms of transportation. That revived appreciation is one more reason I think the danger of civil war is receding.

So, while the patient is not yet healthy, I see some signs that the fever is breaking and the prognosis is improving.

Poodling

I guess they're saying they missed the speech?

Or maybe - as is too often the case with the WaPo editorial board - they just chose to miss the whole point.

Allow me a moment to translate:

"Yes yes, someone has spiked all the tires, and we can't get where we're going unless we change them out, and I suppose Mr Biden is getting it done, but does he have to get so sweaty and dirty? And maybe if he had just asked a bit more politely, those scalawag vandals would be on their way to the police right now to confess their atrocious behavior. Tut tut goodness gracious sakes alive. Are there any more of those delightful crab puffs? Cook does those so divinely..."

Stoopid fuckin' Press Poodles.

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Opinion
Democracy is in danger. Biden should invoke patriotism, not partisanship, to make that point.

It is a depressing reflection of the dangerous political situation in which the nation finds itself that President Biden felt compelled to deliver a prime-time address decrying political violence and election denialism and calling on Americans “to unite behind the single purpose of defending our democracy.” Indeed, democracy is under assault in the United States. Rallying to its defense is an urgent task, and it does the nation no service to pretend that this is a problem of bipartisan dimensions. The leader of one party peddled the false belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, sought to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, incited his adherents to storm the Capitol, and continues to stir anger and unrest. As Mr. Biden put it in Philadelphia on Thursday night, “Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.”

The difficult, perhaps insurmountable, challenge that Mr. Biden confronted — just eight weeks before midterm elections that will determine the future course of his presidency — was how to convey the message of defending democracy in a way that summons patriotism rather than partisanship. Here, as much as we agree with the president about the urgency of the issue, is where he fell short, too often sounding more like a Democrat than a democrat. You don’t persuade people by scolding or demeaning them, but that’s how the president’s speech landed for many conservatives of goodwill.

Mr. Biden was wrong to conflate upholding the rule of law with his own partisan agenda, which he called “the work of democracy.” You can be for democracy but against the president’s policy proposals to use government to lower prescription-drug prices and combat climate change. “MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards, backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love,” Mr. Biden proclaimed. But many conservatives — not just “MAGA forces” — agree with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. It was disappointing that Mr. Biden chose to omit that the infrastructure, gun-control and burn-pits legislation he praised had passed with Republican votes. Pointing this out would actually have strengthened his effort to draw a contrast between “MAGA Republicans” and “mainstream Republicans.”

Moreover, Mr. Biden’s clarion call for democracy would carry more credibility if he were willing to call out his own party for its cynical effort to elevate some of the same “MAGA Republicans” he now warns will destroy democracy if they prevail in the general election. During the primaries, Democrats spent tens of millions helping dangerous election deniers defeat better-funded “mainstream Republicans,” including in Pennsylvania, where Mr. Biden, not coincidentally, chose to speak.

We offer these critiques of the president because we agree with him about the stakes involved. Mr. Trump announced during a radio interview just hours before Mr. Biden’s speech that, if he becomes president again, he will issue full pardons and a government apology to the Jan. 6 rioters. Mr. Trump also revealed that he met with Jan. 6 defendants in his office this week and that he is “financially supporting” some insurrectionists. “What they’ve done to these people is disgraceful,” Mr. Trump said. What’s truly disgraceful, and what formed the backdrop for Mr. Biden’s speech, is this: Mr. Trump’s continuing contempt for the rule of law; the complicit silence of the supposed leaders of his party, such as House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy; and the real threat that Mr. Trump could again be his party’s nominee in 2024.

A Little Privacy Please

I don't know how you read some amendments to the US Constitution and not come away with the idea that privacy is at the center of the debate over what rights we do and don't have here in USAmerica Inc.

A1: My private thoughts are my own and the government can go suck eggs.

A3: I get to decide who does and who doesn't stay in my own private housing.

A4: My person and my place and my stuff are private and nobody else's business.

A5: I'll keep my answers to myself so the government can't use my words against me.

A6: Government can't strip me of my privacy without due process.

A10: Information about me belongs to me.

NYT - Opinion by Alex Kingsbury: (pay wall)

We’re About to Find Out What Happens When Privacy Is All but Gone

Whenever I see one of those billboards that read: “Privacy. That’s iPhone,” I’m overcome by the urge to cast my own iPhone into a river. Of lava.

That’s not because the iPhone is any better or worse than other smartphones when it comes to digital privacy. (I’d take an iPhone over an Android phone in a second; I enjoy the illusion of control over my digital life as much as the next person.)

What’s infuriating is the idea that carrying around the most sophisticated tracking and monitoring device ever forged by the hand of man is consistent with any understanding of privacy. It’s not. At least not with any conception of privacy our species had pre-iPhone.

Reconciling the idea of privacy with our digital world demands embracing a profound cognitive dissonance. To exist in 2022 is to be surveilled, tracked, tagged and monitored — most often for profit. Short of going off the grid, there’s no way around it.

Consider just last week: Apple released a surprise software update for its iPhones, iPads and Macs meant to remove vulnerabilities the company says may have been exploited by sophisticated hackers. The week before that, a former Google engineer discovered that Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, was using a piece of code to track users of the Facebook and Instagram apps across the internet without their knowledge. In Greece, the prime minister and his government have been consumed by a widening scandal in which they are accused of spying on the smartphones of an opposition leader and a journalist.

And this month Amazon announced that it was creating a show called “Ring Nation” — a sort of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” made up of footage recorded by the company’s Ring doorbells. These video doorbells, sold by Amazon and other companies, are now watching millions of American homes, and they are often used by police departments as, effectively, surveillance networks. All in the name of fighting crime, of course.

Step back, and what we’re looking at is a world where privacy simply doesn’t exist anymore. Instead of talking about old notions of privacy, and how to defend or get back to that ideal state, we should start talking about what comes next.

That reality is becoming clearer to Americans after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, which eliminated the federal right to abortion. They now understand that their phone location data, internet searches and purchase history are all fair game for the police — especially in states that do not protect abortion rights, and where women can be hunted down for their health care choices. If the courts once defended the right to have an abortion as part of a broader right to privacy, by vaporizing that right, the Roberts court shattered many of Americans’ conceptions of privacy as well.

In 2019, Times Opinion investigated the location tracking industry. Whistleblowers gave us a data set that included millions of pings from individual cellphones around daily commutes, churches and mosques, abortion clinics, the Pentagon, even the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. “If the government ordered Americans to continuously provide such precise, real-time information about themselves, there would be a revolt,” the editorial board wrote.

Yet despite years of talk, Congress is no closer to passing robust privacy legislation than it was two decades ago when the idea first came up. Even their baby steps aren’t encouraging. Two bills in the current session aim to roll back some of this mass monitoring around abortion and reproductive health in particular, although neither one is likely to pass.

One, the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, would prevent law enforcement and government agencies from purchasing location data and other sensitive information from data brokers. Another, the My Body, My Data Act, would forbid tech companies to keep, use or share some personal health information absent written consent. Neither bill would prevent police officers with a court order from getting such information.

Some tech companies, like Google, have announced voluntary measures to protect some user data around reproductive health care. A group of hundreds of Google employees is circulating a petition to strengthen privacy protections for users who look for information about abortion through its search engine.

But even if those bills pass and some tech companies take more steps, there are simply too many tech companies, government entities, data brokers, internet service providers and others tracking everything we do.

Protecting digital privacy is not in the interest of the government, and voters don’t seem to care much about privacy at all. Nor is it in the interest of tech companies, which sell user private data for a profit to advertisers. There are too many cameras, cell towers and inscrutable artificial intelligence engines in operation to live an unobserved life.

For years, privacy advocates, who foresaw the contours of the surveilled world we now live in, warned that privacy was a necessary prerequisite for democracy, human rights and a flourishing of the human spirit. We’re about to find out what happens when that privacy has all but vanished.

Charles Blow Gets It

Charles Blow points up a few glaringly obvious glitches in the Liz Cheney Worship Hour, and I acknowledge and concur with all of them.

But he goes on to highlight the real problem - the GOP itself. And I'm absolutely on board with that one too.

BTW - this is something Blue Gal and Driftglass have been talking about for a very long time. 

NYT: (pay wall)

Opinion - Republicans Are America’s Problem

Tuesday’s primary in Wyoming delivered Liz Cheney a resounding defeat. She is one of the few Republicans in Congress willing to resist Donald Trump’s election lies, and Republican voters punished her for it.

First, let me say, I have no intention of contributing to the hagiography of Liz Cheney. She is a rock-ribbed Republican who supported Trump’s legislative positions 93 percent of the time. It is on the insurrection and election lies where she diverged.

In a way, she is the Elvis of politics: She took something — in this case a position — that others had held all along and made it cross over. She mainstreamed a political principle that many liberals had held all along.

Excuse me if I temper my enthusiasm for a person who presents herself as a great champion of democracy but votes against the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Situational morality is better than none, I suppose, but I see it for what it is, and I am minimally moved.

However, her loss does crystallize something for us that many had already known: that the bar to clear in the modern Republican Party isn’t being sufficiently conservative but rather being sufficiently obedient to Donald Trump and his quest to deny and destroy democracy.

We must stop thinking it hyperbolic to say that the Republican Party itself is now a threat to our democracy. I understand the queasiness about labeling many of our fellow Americans in that way. I understand that it sounds extreme and overreaching.

But how else are we to describe what we are seeing?

Of the 10 Republicans in the House who voted to impeach Donald Trump for his role in fomenting the insurrection, four didn’t seek re-election and four lost their primaries. Only two have advanced to the general election, and those two were running in states that allow voters to vote in any primary, regardless of their party affiliation.

Polls have consistently shown that only a small fraction of Republicans believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected. He was, of course. (That fact apparently can’t be repeated often enough.)

And in fact, according to a Washington Post analysis published this week, in battleground states, nearly two-thirds of the Republican nominees for the state and federal offices with sway over elections believe the last election was stolen.

This is only getting worse. Last month, a CNN poll found that Republicans are now less likely to believe that democracy is under attack than they were earlier in the year, before the Jan. 6 committee began unveiling its explosive revelations. Thirty-three percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said the party should be very accepting of candidates who say the election was stolen; 39 percent more said the party should be somewhat accepting of those candidates.

Furthermore, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll published in January found that the percentage of Republicans who say that violence against the government can sometimes be justified had climbed to 40 percent, compared with just 23 percent of Democrats. It should also be noted that 40 percent of white people said that violence could be justified compared with just 18 percent of Black people.

We have to stop saying that all these people are duped and led astray, that they are somehow under the spell of Trump and programmed by Fox News.

Propaganda and disinformation are real and insidious, but I believe that to a large degree, Republicans’ radicalization is willful.

Republicans have searched for multiple election cycles for the right vehicle and packaging for their white nationalism, religious nationalism, nativism, craven capitalism and sexism.

There was a time when they believed that it would need to be packaged in politeness — compassionate conservatism — and the party would eventually recommend a more moderate approach intended to branch out and broaden its appeal — in its autopsy after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss.

But Trump offered them an alternative, and they took it: Instead of running away from their bigotries, intolerances and oppression, they would run headlong into them. They would unapologetically embrace them.

This, to many Republicans, felt good. They no longer needed to hide. They could live their truths, no matter how reprehensible. They could come out of the closet, wrapped in their cruelty.

But the only way to make this strategy work and viable, since neither party dominates American life, was to back a strategy of minority rule and to disavow democracy.

A Pew Research Center poll found that between 2018 and 2021, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents gradually came to support more voting restrictions.

In a December NPR/Ipsos poll, a majority of Democrats, independents and Republicans all thought that American democracy, and America itself, was in crisis, but no group believed it more than Republicans.

But this is a scenario in which different people look at the same issue from different directions and interpret it differently.

Republicans are the threat to our democracy because their own preferred form of democracy — one that excludes and suppresses, giving Republicans a fighting chance of maintaining control — is in danger.

For modern Republicans, democracy only works — and is only worth it — when and if they win.

The GOP Trinity

CRUELTY

IMMISERATION

DEATH

The Cost Of Resistance

... is always less than the ultimate cost of appeasement.

The GOP has become an abusive partner, and the rest of us are playing the role of the spouse and the kids who are trying to figure out what to do about being stuck in a shitty situation with someone we used to know as "good people", but now has become an aggressive monster who's triggered and moved to violence by even the slightest inconvenience or complaint.

And as a reminder: Trump has not remade the GOP in his own image - he is the perfect reflection of what the Republican Party has been morphing into for decades.

Michelle Goldberg, NYT: (pay wall)

The Absurd Argument Against Making Trump Obey the Law

It took many accidents, catastrophes, misjudgments and mistakes for Donald Trump to win the presidency in 2016. Two particularly important errors came from James Comey, then the head of the F.B.I., who was excessively worried about what Trump’s supporters would think of the resolution of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

First, in July 2016, Comey broke protocol to give a news conference in which he criticized Clinton even while announcing that she’d committed no crime. He reportedly did this because he wanted to protect the reputation of the F.B.I. from inevitable right-wing claims that the investigation had been shut down for political reasons.

Then, on Oct. 28, just days before the election, Comey broke protocol again, telling Congress that the Clinton investigation had been reopened because of emails found on the laptop of the former congressman Anthony Weiner. The Justice Department generally discourages filing charges or taking “overt investigative steps” close to an election if they might influence the result. Comey disregarded this because, once again, he dreaded a right-wing freakout once news of the reopened investigation emerged.

“The prospect of oversight hearings, led by restive Republicans investigating an F.B.I. ‘cover-up,’ made everyone uneasy,” The New Yorker reported. In Comey’s memoir, he admitted fearing that concealing the new stage of the investigation — which ended up yielding nothing — would make Clinton, who he assumed would win, seem “illegitimate.” (He didn’t, of course, feel similarly compelled to make public the investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia.)

Comey’s attempts to pre-empt a conservative firestorm blew up in his face. He helped put Trump in the White House, where Trump did generational damage to the rule of law and led us to a place where prominent Republicans are calling for abolishing the F.B.I.

This should be a lesson about the futility of shaping law enforcement decisions around the sensitivities of Trump’s base. Yet after the F.B.I. executed a search warrant at Trump’s beachfront estate this week, some intelligent people have questioned the wisdom of subjecting the former president to the normal operation of the law because of the effect it will have on his most febrile admirers.

Andrew Yang, one of the founders of a new centrist third party, tweeted about the “millions of Americans who will see this as unjust persecution.” Damon Linker, usually one of the more sensible centrist thinkers, wrote, “Rather than healing the country’s civic wounds, the effort to punish Trump will only deepen them.”

The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta described feeling “nauseous” watching coverage of the raid. “What we must acknowledge — even those of us who believe Trump has committed crimes, in some cases brazenly so, and deserves full prosecution under the law — is that bringing him to justice could have some awful consequences,” he wrote.

In some sense, Alberta’s words are obviously true; Trumpists are already issuing death threats against the judge who signed off on the warrant, and a Shabbat service at his synagogue was reportedly canceled because of the security risk. On Thursday, an armed man tried to breach an F.B.I. field office in Ohio, and The New York Times reported that he appears to have attended a pro-Trump rally in Washington the night before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The former president relishes his ability to stir up a mob; it’s part of what makes him so dangerous.

We already know, however, that the failure to bring Trump to justice — for his company’s alleged financial chicanery and his alleged sexual assault, for obstructing Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation and turning the presidency into a squalid influence-peddling operation, for trying to steal an election and encouraging an insurrection — has been disastrous.

What has strengthened Trump has not been prosecution but impunity, an impunity that some of those who stormed the Capitol thought, erroneously, applied to them as well. Trump’s mystique is built on his defiance of rules that bind everyone else. He is reportedly motivated to run for president again in part because the office will protect him from prosecution. If we don’t want the presidency to license crime sprees, we should allow presidents to be indicted, not accept some dubious norm that ex-presidents shouldn’t be.

We do not know the scope of the investigation that led a judge to authorize the search of Mar-a-Lago, though it reportedly involves classified documents that Trump failed to turn over to the government even after being subpoenaed. More could be revealed soon: Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Thursday that the Justice Department had filed a motion in court to unseal the search warrant.

It should go without saying that Trump and his followers, who howled “Lock her up!” about Clinton, do not believe that it is wrong for the Justice Department to pursue a probe against a presidential contender over the improper handling of classified material. What they believe is that it is wrong to pursue a case against Trump, who bonds with his acolytes through a shared sense of aggrieved victimization.

The question is how much deference the rest of us should give to this belief. No doubt, Trump’s most inflamed fans might act out in horrifying ways; many are heavily armed and speak lustily about civil war. To let this dictate the workings of justice is to accept an insurrectionists’ veto. The far right is constantly threatening violence if it doesn’t get its way. Does anyone truly believe that giving in to its blackmail will make it less aggressive?

It was Trump himself who signed a law making the removal and retention of classified documents a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Those who think that it would be too socially disruptive to apply such a statute to him should specify which laws they believe the former president is and is not obliged to obey. And those in charge of enforcing our laws should remember that the caterwauling of the Trump camp is designed to intimidate them and such intimidation helped him become president in the first place.

Trump shouldn’t be prosecuted because of politics, but he also shouldn’t be spared because of them. The only relevant question is whether he committed a crime, not what crimes his devotees might commit if he’s held to account.

Qult45

Stochastic terrorism is a real thing, and it's one of the main weapons in the Daddy State arsenal.

So I don't have much sympathy for the rubes who've been suckered by a charismatic cult leader, but there's something to what Ms Rosenberg has to say here - something worth noting about how we need to be watchful so we're not helping to embolden these idiots, and making things worse inadvertently.

That said, I still have to lean towards "get your heads outa your asses, guys - then we can talk."

WaPo: (pay wall)

Opinion
The horror of people willing to die for Donald Trump

On Thursday afternoon, a man whom authorities have identified as Ricky Shiffer was shot and killed in a stand-off with police officers after he allegedly tried to break into a FBI office in Cincinnati. Reports suggest that he may have been motivated by a strong devotion to former president Donald Trump and by anger at the FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

On Thursday evening, The Post reported that according to sources, the search at Mar-a-Lago was aimed in part at recovering “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons.” Trump’s response? A post on Truth Social, the platform he founded, declaring, “Nuclear weapons issue is a Hoax,” and a false suggestion that “Barack Hussein Obama” had done something similar.

But whatever we may learn about Shiffer’s motivations and the results of the FBI search, one thing is clear: The number of people who have died seemingly in service of an idol as unworthy as Donald Trump is tragic.

It’s one thing for Trump to relieve his followers of their money for dubious causes. (The former president has raked in millions of dollars ostensibly dedicated to political work, when in reality what money has been spent has gone to Trump’s personal expenses, according to Post sources.)

And goodness knows, Trump isn’t the only person whose acolytes behave wretchedly. Die-hard Johnny Depp fans and the stans who enlisted in rapper Kanye West’s online war against actor Pete Davidson are proof that nasty crusades of all types will never lack for recruits.

But it’s different when people start dying.

Four of Trump’s supporters died at the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol: Ashli Babbit, who was shot while trying to climb through a broken window; Kevin Greeson, who suffered a fatal heart attack; Benjamin Philips, who succumbed to a stroke; and Rosanne Boyland, whose official cause of death was “acute amphetamine intoxication,” but who was caught up in a crush of bodies on the Capitol grounds. Christopher Stanton Georgia died by suicide later that month after he was arrested on unlawful entry charges stemming from Jan. 6; he pleaded not guilty before his death.

Now comes the death of Shiffer, who was also apparently at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The Post's View: After the Mar-a-Lago search, horrific violence follows reckless rhetoric

Some might be tempted to create distance from these tragedies through mockery, or by treating Trump’s devotees as oddities.

That impulse — to disparage or dismiss the weird and extreme — seems to undergird a 2020 New York Times profile of a widowed farmer in India who adopted Trump as a personal deity, then collapsed and died after taking to his room and refusing to eat when Trump tested positive for covid-19. It’s also the sentiment behind so much snide social-media chatter. For instance: “some dude woke up today and decided to commit suicide by cop bc the former host of celebrity apprentice wasnt allowed to keep the top secret documents he stole from the white house.”

It's easy to scoff. But this sort of commentary ignores the sadness running through so many of these stories.

Ashli Babbitt was looking for meaning because her military career had stalled out, and her pool company was failing. The QAnon conspiracy theory — which presents Trump as a bulwark against a secret cabal of powerful pedophiles — gave Rosanne Boyland purpose and a framework for understanding the world as she struggled with addiction.

The absurdity and maliciousness of the cause for which these people have died only compounds the horror of their deaths. How is it that no one, no institution, could offer something more substantive than the manifest hollowness of Trump and Trumpism?

An essential part of Trump’s malign magic is its impermeability. Suggest that his followers deserve better — whether that is an actual infrastructure package or a leader who appeals to their best qualities rather than their basest — and you’re accused of exhibiting the very contempt that made Trump attractive in the first place. Suggest Trump is scamming his followers, and you’re a tool of the deep state. According to Trump and his many enablers, there is no evidence that isn’t planted or manufactured, no moral act that is disqualifying, no act for which Trump himself can be held responsible.

Even the people who seek to martyr themselves in Trump’s defense can be redefined and reinterpreted through this corrupt logic: On social media, Trump fans aren’t celebrating Shiffer as a Trumpist patriot. They’re dismissing him as a false flag planted to paint the FBI in a flattering light.

Those of us who live outside the boundaries of this mad realm may be tempted to count ourselves lucky. Still, we should be concerned for the residents of Trumpland for their own safety. And if that’s not enough, we should care because the people who die for Donald Trump may someday take others with them.

Today's Opinion

There's no contradiction in having a hard head and a soft heart.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Opinion
Josh Hawley’s problem with masculinity

Ever since the Jan. 6 committee showed that video of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) running from the insurrectionist mob he’d earlier encouraged with a fist in the air, we’ve all had a good laugh at his expense. I mean, who doesn’t like a manhood-obsessed hypocrite getting a well-deserved public comeuppance?

But as clownish as Hawley comes across, we dismiss him at our own risk. He is selling a vision of masculinity to White America that has much more to do with prejudice than manliness. It’s an old story — but a successful one, and one that’s poised to catch on. Stopping that from happening will require offering an alternative, with better examples of what being a man really means.

During a recent interview, Jason Kander, an Afghanistan War veteran who in 2018 stepped away from rising success in the Democratic Party to tend to his mental health, broke down his fellow Missourian’s plan. Hawley, he said, “is positioning himself, and therefore his movement — his far-right, White-guy movement — as, ‘If you’re a man, then you believe in these things.’” These things, you could probably guess, are archconservative values such as the patriarchy, opposition to women’s bodily autonomy, support exclusively for heterosexual marriage, an aversion to labor organizing. In other words, as Kander told me via email later, Hawley is “making manhood synonymous with conservatism.”

The pitch holds natural appeal for older White men who already hew to traditional morals. But what about the younger White men who, as Kander says, watch Ultimate Fighting but still like their LGBTQ co-workers and have friends who have had abortions? Hawley figures he can woo them too, so long as they share one potent trait with the older group: racial resentment. This vision of masculinity is as much about being White as it is about being a man.

Jonathan Metzl, author of “Dying of Whiteness,” says Hawley’s harping on masculinity is a new version of an old game. “There has been a crisis of White masculinity since the ’50s, and every decade it gets rearticulated through similar themes. This crisis casts White men as victims against competition by women and non-White men in the labor market,” Metzl wrote in an email. “But Trump, the NRA, Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson and others have brought White male anxiety into the mainstream with the message that we are going to fight back as aggressively as possible. And, of course, casting yourself as a victim then obviates recognition of how you are in many cases the aggressor.”

At the beginning of his own book, “Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD,” Kander also touches on manhood. “It wasn’t like I’d grown up with a sense that being a man meant being tough or flinty or eating a lot of meat,” he writes. Kander knew his parents “didn’t want their sons to commit to the leathery Clint Eastwood archetype. I knew that being a man meant being dependable, taking care of your people, and going where you’re needed.”

Kander’s memoir isn’t meant to be a manhood manual. Yet in writing openly about dealing with the trauma that had him contemplating suicide, and giving space to his wife, Diana, to write about how everything affected her, Kander incidentally presents a refreshing version of masculinity, one that views vulnerability as a virtue on the endless journey to being the best man one can be for one’s family and community.

This is the opposite of what Hawley hawks. He has bemoaned what he calls “the left’s assault on the masculine virtues” and how this “crisis for men … [is] a crisis for the republic.” These wrongheaded themes will no doubt be the foundation of his forthcoming book, “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.”

The jokes write themselves. “This is like me writing a cookbook. ... I don’t know how to cook,” Kander said.

But when you have a huge group of people desperate to learn how to cook — people who feel as though their self-worth depends on cooking exactly the right way — they’re going to latch on to whatever cookbook comes their way. Hawley may be a clown, but he’s clever, too. He knows White men feel they’re facing a crisis, and he plans to give them an answer. Coincidentally, that answer just so happens to serve Hawley’s own interests, ambitions and even 2024 presidential run.

Masculinity should never be about exclusion or intolerance, nor displays of unyielding strength. Some of the best men I’ve known have had generous hearts that reinforced firm values and high expectations. Through their examples, I’ve learned more about what it means to be a man than anything Hawley could possibly present in a few hundred pages. Every man deserves a similar model. Because if you’re turning to Hawley for a how-to on manhood, you’re doing it all wrong.

Today's Poodling

I hate this Press Poodle crap:

"Democrats always promise to make it happen, yet they still haven’t succeeded."

That phrasing is dishonest.

Democrats keep bringing it up, but Republicans keep blocking it.

The Dems are trying to do something that 80% of us want done, but Republicans block it every time, and they don't even have to try to justify their obstruction because they can count on the Press Poodles never to hold them accountable for it.

Press Poodles, please add the following to your Style Books:

Democrats are not responsible for the lousy behavior of the GOP.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Opinion

If GOP senators don’t fear this vote, what could possibly scare them?

Fear is a part of every elected official’s life. To keep their jobs, they must worry about whether something they do or say will anger their constituents. Many a bill has died because officeholders thought, “If I vote for this, my opponent in the next election will wrap it around my neck.”

But how do we square that universal fact of representative democracy with the struggle Democrats have had passing legislation that would reduce the cost of prescription drugs?

Or more precisely, why is it that Democrats are laboring to pass such a bill, while Republicans don’t fear opposing it?

Under current law, Medicare is barred from negotiating prices for prescription medicines; drug companies set the price, and Medicare must take it or leave it. Polls have long found that allowing Medicare to negotiate better prices is absurdly popular, with support sometimes exceeding 80 percent.

Democrats always promise to make it happen, yet they still haven’t succeeded.

Now Democrats are gearing up to vote for a new plan along these lines as part of an upcoming reconciliation package that will probably include extended Affordable Care Act subsidies as well. Democrats are anticipating passing this with no Republican votes.

The current plan would allow Medicare to begin negotiating drug prices and would cap the amount any senior pays for medicine at $2,000 a year. It would offer extra help to low-income seniors and forbid drug companies from raising prices on existing drugs beyond the rate of inflation.

But the bill has real limitations. It wouldn’t go into effect until 2026, and at first it would allow negotiation on only 10 of the most expensive drugs; the list would expand to 20 drugs in 2029. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a longtime supporter of price negotiation, called it “a weak proposal.”

Even so, the pharmaceutical lobby is working hard to kill it. And one would think they’d have to offer powerful inducements for a legislator to risk getting pummeled relentlessly on an issue so important to voters, particularly to older voters who turn out at high rates.

Yet there are no indications Republicans will support the bill. Democrats seem genuinely flummoxed by the GOP’s willingness to stand against this proposal.

“This is the most straightforwardly popular thing we are doing, and we are being unanimously opposed by Republicans,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told us. “The attack ads write themselves.”

“This isn’t an issue with a ton of nuance,” Schatz added. “It’s about whether you want people on Medicare to go broke or not.”

But clearly, Republicans don’t agree.

Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, shed light on why Republicans might not fear this vote: They can argue that Medicare Part D costs far less than expected because of vigorous competition among drug companies for the business of seniors.

“If you say, ‘Drug prices are too high, do you think government should do something to lower them,’ it’s a no-brainer answer,” Ayres said.

But, said Ayres, Republicans can instead say: “Private sector competition has been successful at lowering drug prices without the deleterious effects of government price controls. Do you really think it’s better if a bunch of bureaucrats step in?”

“Government negotiation really means government price-setting,” Ayres said, noting that Republicans have tested these arguments over the years.

So put yourself in the mind of a Republican senator confronting such a proposal. As a believer in free markets, you probably have a philosophical objection to any government action that cuts into corporate profits.

And maybe you can tell yourself you won’t pay for opposing this bill; legislation is complicated, and most voters don’t pay much attention to it. You can toss around some of those anti-government arguments during floor debate. And perhaps by the time you’re up for reelection, everyone will have forgotten about it anyway.

You may also believe — not without reason — that Democrats aren’t very good at making Republicans pay for taking unpopular stances. There are lots of unpopular things Republicans do — cutting taxes for the wealthy, opposing action on climate change, trying to make abortion illegal — and much of the time, it doesn’t seem to affect Election Day.

Which suggests there’s a fundamental weakness in our system. We don’t want legislators beholden to the latest poll; we elect them to represent us, yes, but also to exercise judgment and be guided by their conscience. But when there’s something the public so clearly wants, and it’s so hard to get done, what does that say about our democracy?