May 6, 2022

Robert Barnes of the Washington Post: "Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. told a crowd of judges and lawyers Thursday that the leak of a Supreme Court draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade is 'absolutely appalling,' but will not affect the final outcome of the court's historic deliberations on the abortion issue. 'Aleak of this sort -- let's assume that's what it is -- is absolutely appalling, and if the people behind it, or person behind it, thinks that it's going to have an effect on our decision process, that's absolutely foolish,' Roberts told the 11th Circuit Judicial Conference meeting here. 'We will go about doing our work as we would in any event, regardless of the leak,' he said." CNN's report is here. MB: Apparently not "absolutely appalling": the content of the opinion itself, which takes away a Constitutional right from millions of American women and their families.

Watch How She Votes, Not What She Says. Felicia Sonmez & Mike DeBonis of the Washington Post: "Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), one of two prominent Republican senators who support abortion rights, said Thursday that she does not support a Democratic measure that would create statutory right to the procedure, arguing that the legislation does not provide sufficient protection to antiabortion health providers. The statement from Collins comes as the Senate is preparing to vote next week on the legislation, known as the Women's Health Protection Act, and as the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, which established a woman's right to an abortion.... The measure appears headed for failure with or without Collins's support, since 60 senators would need to vote 'yes' to overcome a filibuster.... Public polling shows a majority of Americans support the right to abortion in most instances." MB: Could we please stop describing Collins as a "a senator who who supports abortion rights"? No, she doesn't. Thanks, Maine!

** Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times: Women were largely missing from the Roe v. Wade opinion; it was was all about doctors' rights vs. the state's rights: "The decision vindicates the right of the physician to administer medical treatment according to his professional judgment up to the points where important state interests provide compelling justifications for intervention," Justice Harry Blackmun wrote. Greenhouse explains, "The court had yet to build a jurisprudence of sex equality; that came later, in the series of cases that the young Ruth Bader Ginsburg would argue during the remainder of the 1970s." But Alito has no excuse: "Granted that the young Samuel Alito, as a recent Princeton graduate, joined an organization of conservatives who sought to limit the inclusion of women at his alma mater. Granted that he has made clear his desire to overturn Roe since even before his days on the court. It is still astonishing that in 2022 he would use his power to erase the right to abortion without in any way meaningfully acknowledging the impact both on women and on the constitutional understanding of sex equality as it has evolved in the past half-century."

John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times: "If the US Supreme Court goes ahead with the repeal of Roe vs Wade later this year, the fallout will be far-reaching. Abortion would almost certainly become illegal or heavily restricted in 22 states and would be under severe threat in at least four others. As such, 27mn women of childbearing age would have their reproductive rights rolled back by 50 years. By this summer, most of them may find themselves living under broadly the same abortion rules as those in Sierra Leone, Congo-Brazzaville and just 22 other countries worldwide.... The negative socio-economic impacts of unwanted births are well-established.... Women's health is also at stake.... Maternal mortality must rank as one of the US's most shameful statistics.... As is almost invariably the case, when something bad happens in the US, it happens disproportionately to black people and those on low incomes.... The US may claim to be a developed nation, but when it comes to women's health, this could not be further from the truth." ~~~

     ~~~ Via Scott Lemieux in LG&$, who writes, "One of the many lies in the Alito draft opinion is the common Republican canard that proposed Republican bans will make America's policies look more like Europe. Unless this means 'Ireland 25 years ago,' this is a ridiculous claim. The US is about to become an extreme outlier among western liberal democracies."

     ~~~ Marie: Thanks to a friend for the image. Obviously, it's supposed to be a joke. But I suspect the Sam would find nothing wrong with the "logic."

Pam Belluck & Sheryl Stolberg of the New York Times: "If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, the legal and culture wars over abortion ... would increasingly shift to a new front: the use of abortion pills. Medication abortion -- a two-drug combination that can be taken at home or in any location and is authorized for use in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy -- has become more and more prevalent and now accounts for more than half of recent abortions in the United States. If the federal guarantee of abortion rights disappears, medication abortion would likely become an even more sought-after method for terminating a pregnancy -- and the focus of battles between states that ban abortion and those that continue to allow it.... Medication abortion is less expensive and less invasive than surgical abortions.... Many conservative states have already begun passing laws to restrict medication abortion, including banning it earlier than 10 weeks' gestation and requiring patients to visit providers in person despite F.D.A. rules." An AP story is here. (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)

Louisiana. Rick Rojas of the New York Times: "The State Legislature in Louisiana advanced a proposal this week that would classify abortion as homicide, going further than anti-abortion measures in other states by making it possible for prosecutors to bring criminal cases against women who end a pregnancy. The measure was approved, 7 to 2, by a committee in the State House of Representatives, energized by a leaked draft of an opinion indicating that a majority of Supreme Court justices would vote in favor of overturning the constitutional right to abortion.... The bill defines personhood as beginning from the moment of fertilization." MB: The people who voted this bill out of committee hate of girls and young women. They hate the careless young women who blithely have sex without protection; they hate the prudent women whose birth control failed; they hate the girls who were victims of rape. In a moral universe, the bill's sponsors are on a par with the rapists. And Sam & the Dancing Alitos.

Marie: Many observers of Sam's opinion have concentrated on other right-to-privacy decisions that the confederate Supremes might overturn: Griswold, Loving, Lawrence, Obergefell, etc. But wait! There's more: ~~~

~~~ Texas. The River to Hell Runs Through It. So Greggers Opens the Floodgates. David Goodman of the New York Times: "With the Supreme Court signaling a willingness to reverse decades-old precedents like the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said on Thursday that he would seek to overturn a 1982 court decision that obligated public schools to educate all children, including undocumented immigrants. Mr. Abbott's comments opened a new front in his campaign to use his powers as governor to harden Texas against unauthorized migration. And they demonstrated just how expansively some conservatives are thinking when it comes to the kinds of changes to American life that the court's emboldened conservative majority may be willing to allow."

The New York Times' live updates of developments Friday in Russia's war on Ukraine are here: "Ukrainian soldiers went on the offensive against Russian forces in northeast Ukraine on Friday, seeking to drive them back from outside two key cities, as the grueling battle for control over territory in the east increasingly turns into a brutal war of attrition, with neither side able to score a major breakthrough in the fighting.... In the ruined city of Mariupol, where fighting continued to rage, an evacuation convoy was dispatched again on Friday to the Azovstal steel plant, where about 200 civilians are still believed to be trapped underground, along with the last Ukrainian soldiers defending the city.... The top U.N. rights official told a meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Thursday that scores of cases had been documented in which Russian forces targeted civilian Ukrainian men. Jill Biden, the first lady, was en route late Thursday to Eastern Europe, where she will visit with refugees displaced by the war and tour the Slovakian border with Ukraine, according to her office." ~~~

     ~~~ The Washington Post's live updates for Friday are here: "Heavy fighting continues at the besieged Azovstal Iron and Steel Works in Mariupol, where Russian forces are intensifying their attack. The United Nations Secretary General António Guterres confirmed nearly 500 civilians had been evacuated from the plant and its surroundings in recent days as a U.N. aid convoy is due to arrive in the shattered port city Friday. In his nightly video address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian shelling of the steel plant was not stopping.... Ukraine is 'putting up a very stiff resistance,' though Russian forces are making incremental progress in Donbas, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters Thursday."

Helene Cooper, et al., of the New York Times: "The United States provided intelligence that helped Ukrainian forces locate and strike the flagship of Russia's Black Sea fleet last month, another sign that the administration is easing its self-imposed limitations on how far it will go in helping Ukraine fight Russia, U.S. officials said. The targeting help, which contributed to the eventual sinking of the flagship, the Moskva, is part of a continuing classified effort by the Biden administration to provide real-time battlefield intelligence to Ukraine. That intelligence also includes sharing anticipated Russian troop movements, gleaned from a recent American assessment of Moscow's battle plan for the fighting in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, the officials said." The NBC News story is here.

Andrew Roth of the Guardian: "Vladimir Putin has apologised to the Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, for his foreign minister's claims that Adolf Hitler had Jewish blood, Israel has said. Bennett said he had accepted the apology from Putin, a rare concession from the Kremlin leader and a strong rebuke of his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov. Putin may have feared that Israel could change its neutral stance on Russia's invasion and join in sanctions and provisions of lethal aid to Ukraine. Lavrov claimed this week in an interview that Hitler 'had Jewish blood' and that 'the most rabid antisemites tend to be Jews'. The incendiary remarks sparked outrage in Israel."

Hiding a Super-Yacht Is Hard to Do. Annabelle Timsit & Timothy Bella of the Washington Post: "The $300 million superyacht owned by Russian oligarch Suleyman Kerimov was seized Thursday by Fijian authorities on behalf of the United States as part of the ongoing efforts to sanction and punish Russia's elite in response to the invasion of Ukraine. The Justice Department announced that Fiji executed a seizure warrant on the Amadea, a 348-foot-long luxury vessel that authorities say was 'subject to forfeiture based on probable cause of violations of U.S. law.' Kerimov, one of Russia's wealthiest individuals, who built his fortune in gold mining and is a political ally of ... Vladimir Putin's, has been identified by the U.S. Treasury Department as an official of the government of the Russian Federation and a member of the Russian Federation Council."

~~~ Zolan Kanno-Youngs & Michael Shear of the New York Times: "President Biden on Thursday selected Karine Jean-Pierre, the principal deputy press secretary, to replace Jen Psaki as the top White House spokeswoman, making her the first Black woman to hold one of the most high-profile jobs in American politics. Ms. Jean-Pierre, who worked on Mr. Biden's campaign and has had a long career in Democratic communications, will become the president's second White House press secretary.... Ms. Psaki's last day as press secretary will be May 13. She is expected to take an on-air role with MSNBC.... After noting that her successor will be the first Black woman and openly gay person to serve as press secretary, Ms. Psaki said that Ms. Jean-Pierre 'will give a voice to so many.'" CNN's report is here. ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Oh, I think Jean-Pierre will be able to handle the White House press corps: ~~~

Hot Head, Cold Feet. Luke Broadwater of the New York Times: "Rudolph W. Giuliani, who helped lead ... Donald J. Trump's effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election..., on Thursday abruptly pulled out of a scheduled Friday interview with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol after the panel refused to let him record the session. Mr. Giuliani has been negotiating with the panel about testifying for months, and had finally reached an agreement to speak about matters other than his conversations with Mr. Trump or any other topic he believes is covered by attorney-client privilege, said his lawyer, Robert J. Costello. Mr. Giuliani's sudden withdrawal threatens what could have been a major breakthrough for the investigation.... Tim Mulvey, a spokesman for the committee, said the panel would consider enforcement actions against Mr. Giuliani if he does not change course and comply with the committee's subpoena."

Alan Feuer of the New York Times: "Prominent Republicans -- including ... Donald J. Trump -- have for months promoted a conspiracy theory that an Arizona man named Ray Epps was a federal informant who helped to instigate the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The claims, made in congressional hearing rooms, on Fox News and at Mr. Trump's political rallies, have largely been based on a video taken just before violence erupted at the Capitol, showing Mr. Epps at the barricades outside the building whispering into the ear of a man named Ryan Samsel. Within moments of the brief exchange, Mr. Samsel, a Pennsylvania barber, can be seen moving forward and confronting the police in what amounted to the tipping point of the riot.... Many Republicans have ... pushed the notion that because Mr. Epps has not been arrested, he must have been working for the government. But for more than a year..., federal authorities have had information -- from both [Mr. Epps] and Mr. Samsel -- suggesting that he was not a government agent and did not encourage the younger man to engage with the police that day." There's more. Read on.

Rachel Weiner of the Washington Post: "An Iowa man who brought his teenage son to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, admitted he was among a group that assaulted D.C. police officer Michael Fanone, who suffered a heart attack and traumatic brain injury defending Congress from the pro-Trump mob. Kyle Young, 38, pleaded guilty Thursday in D.C. federal court to one count of assaulting a police officer, which carries a sentence of up to eight years in prison; prosecutors say the guidelines call for at least five."

Dumb President* News. Maggie Haberman of the New York Times: "... Donald J. Trump in 2020 asked Mark T. Esper, his defense secretary, about the possibility of launching missiles into Mexico to 'destroy the drug labs' and wipe out the cartels, maintaining that the United States' involvement in a strike against its southern neighbor could be kept secret, Mr. Esper recounts in his upcoming memoir. Those remarkable discussions were among several moments that Mr. Esper described in the book, 'A Sacred Oath,' as leaving him all but speechless.... Mr. Esper, the last Senate-confirmed defense secretary under Mr. Trump, also had concerns about speculation that the president might misuse the military around Election Day by, for instance, having soldiers seize ballot boxes. He warned subordinates to be on alert for unusual calls from the White House in the lead-up to the election.... Pressed on his view of Mr. Trump, Mr. Esper --who strained throughout the book to be fair to the man who fired him while also calling out his increasingly erratic behavior after his first impeachment trial ended in February 2020 -- said carefully but bluntly, 'He is an unprincipled person who, given his self-interest, should not be in the position of public service.'... ~~~

~~~ "In October 2019, after members of the national security team assembled in the Situation Room to watch a feed of the raid that killed the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, [Stephen] Miller proposed securing Mr. al-Baghdadi's head, dipping it in pig's blood and parading it around to warn other terrorists, Mr. Esper writes. That would be a 'war crime,' Mr. Esper shot back. Mr. Miller flatly denied the episode and called Mr. Esper 'a moron.'" CNN has a summary story here. ~~~

~~~ Dumb Presidential* Advisor News. CBS News: "Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper says he personally killed a 'ridiculous' plan from White House adviser Stephen Miller to deploy 250,000 troops to the southern border as a migrant caravan approached. Esper, who writes about the moment in his upcoming book, 'A Sacred Oath,' says he initially thought Miller was joking when he asked for the troops while waiting in the Oval Office.... 'And then I turn around and I look at him and these -- and these deadpan eyes. Clearly, he is not joking.'" With video.

Beyond the Beltway

South Carolina. "Dumb Crook News.” Johnny Diaz of the New York Times: "On Feb. 25, 2021, a man got in a taxi in Hartsville, S.C., and asked to be driven to a bank. The cab pulled up to the drive-through window, where the passenger handed the driver an envelope to pass to the teller through the pneumatic tube system, prosecutors said. The teller inside read the note, which demanded 'all money from all drawers' and threatened 'to kill and/or blow up the bank,' the authorities said in a statement. Frightened, the teller activated an alarm. When the police arrived, they found the passenger, Angel Luis Masdeu, in the taxi's back seat and arrested him." Tuesday, Judge Sherri A. Lydon, of the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina sentenced the Dumb Crook to six years in federal prison. In fairness to the Dumb Crook, it's not easy to rob a bank when the lobby is closed because of the pandemic.

News Lede

CNBC: "The U.S. economy added slightly more jobs than expected in April amid an increasingly tight labor market and despite surging inflation and fears of a growth slowdown, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. Nonfarm payrolls grew by 428,000 for the month, a bit above the Dow Jones estimate of 400,000. The unemployment rate was 3.6%, slightly higher than the estimate for 3.5%. The April total was identical to the downwardly revised count for March. There also was some better news on the inflation front: Average hourly earnings continued to grow, but at a 0.3% level for the month that was a bit below the 0.4% estimate. On a year-over-year basis, earnings were up 5.5%, about the same as in March but still below the pace of inflation."

Comments

[P.D. Pepe]

From January 6–2019
As I was reading David Leonhardt's very excellent piece what flashed through my mind were the early scenes of "A Handmaid's Tale", the series we just finished watching last night. Before Trump, if I had seen this series, I would have enjoyed it as pure fiction, but since what we are now experiencing in this country–– experiences we never thought possible––it sends chills through me. All the salient points that Leonhardt spells out re: reasons for getting rid of Trump presents once again of how we let this guy off the hook from the get-go. Corruption and deceit coming at us in small increments that were criticized but ignored by those that had cards in the game. It's like anything else that we patch up, cover up, until it spills over and drowns us. I applaud loudly for those like Leonhardt to take up the cudgel and wham it in the public sphere.

"The unrelenting chaos that Trump creates can sometimes obscure the big picture. But the big picture is simple: The United States has never had a president as demonstrably unfit for the office as Trump. And it’s becoming clear that 2019 is likely to be dominated by a single question: What are we going to do about it?"

P.S. Apropos of the mention of the THT series, Catherine Rampell wrote a piece in the Wash Po citing the demographic time bomb that could hit America: fewer babies are being born here ( Japan has a bigger problem with this). It's hard for an economy to grow with fewer workers, and as people age and retire they depend on younger workers to continue in the work force.
We need immigrants just as we needed them decades ago. But since we are preventing them in large part from becoming a part of us, better warn our young females to get ready to don a red cloak and a white headdress. Babies on demand––just like Comcast.

[P.D. Pepe]

And Greenhouse ends with this:

"In the wake of the mortifying breach that the leak represents, there has been much talk of the Supreme Court’s “legitimacy.” The court has a problem, no doubt, one that barriers of unscalable height around its building won’t solve. But if a half-century of progress toward a more equal society, painstakingly achieved across many fronts by many actors, can be so easily jettisoned with the wave of a few judicial hands, the problem to worry about isn’t the court’s. It’s democracy’s. It’s ours."

[Ken Winkes]

The WaPo Doerr Stanford gift article prompted some interesting comments, some of which paralleled my own thoughts, but I didn't see any that got to what interests me most about this large transfer of financial resources and others like it.

We are fond of saying that budgets are plans of action, that they set out our priorities, saying as clearly as anything what we consider important.

But if money is supposed to in any way at all represents effort and accomplishment, it is by its nature often guaranteed to miss much if not all of its purported point, as it often does.

For venture capitalists like Doerr, the primary purpose of money is to accumulate more of itself. That is its object, not some real world accomplishment. It's a numbers game only, whose "winners" are determined by the pile the chips they manage to stack next to their seat at the table, and there is a great gap, a huge disconnect between the chips themselves and whatever effects their movement might have on the world most of us inhabit.

That gap means that when it comes to meeting and solving real world problems much of the energy those chips apply is either unintentional, misdirected or dissipated.

Take the Doerr's gift. I know nothing of them, as people, and what they set out to do, but as venture capitalists, the levers they pulled to amass their fortune had little directly to do with the daily life of most people. In that sense, the financial world, the world they lived in, is a world apart from mine.

Now they wish to use their wealth to attack a real problem. I may applaud their intent, but have real doubts about how effective their gift might be.

There are words and there are deeds. Doerr has words. He has written a book on the climate crisis. And now he's tossed more than a billion dollars at the problem. That might be called a deed...but it's just money.

And money, despite the old saw about putting your money where your mouth is, is not a deed. The way it' directed is a symbol, maybe, of an intent, but the actions it prompts are still by their nature at least one step removed from their aim.

Now there will be people hired, buildings built, equipment purchased, conferences held, noise generated, articles written, energy (much of it fossil fuel generated) consumed and all the while the world and CA will be getting hotter and potable water scarcer.

I think of Archimedes.

Time and again we edge up to a problem, talk about it, say we've got to do something, eventually direct money at it and are once again surprised that even after spending all that money the problem remains or has gotten worse.

Turns out that because it's often far removed from any intended aim other than accumulating more of itself, money alone makes a very poor lever.

[P.D. Pepe]

Ken: I often think what people did before money became a currency. Ole Ollie done exchange his apples from his orchard for bread made from the wheat that the family down the road harvested." Before money was invented, people bartered for goods and services. It wasn't until about 5,000 years ago that the Mesopotamian people created the shekel, which is considered the first known form of currency. Gold and silver coins date back to around 650 to 600 B.C. when stamped coins were used to pay armies."

"Turns out that because it's often far removed from any intended aim other than accumulating more of itself, money alone makes a very poor lever." you got that right!!!!!

[RAS]

"Absolutely appalling" pretty well sums up the Roberts Court. Gutting voting rights, allowing unlimited dark money corruption, giving the thumbs up to gerrymandering and to most forms of voter suppression. Shadow dockets, and Muslim bans and so much else. And now being the first SC to take away rights from it's citizens. Appalling indeed.

[RAS]

Another appalling thing is Alito's argument that women and their allies can use their political power, voting and running for office, to implement the reproductive policies they want. Alito's court has allowed voter suppression as long as they don't say out loud that it's racist. They have approved Republican gerrymandering no matter how bad that denies voters that right to choose their representatives. The Senate heavily favors small and conservative states' power. So after putting all of these thumbs on the scales Alito says you women are free to try and get your policies passed in this rigged game.

[Jeanne]

Yes, RAS. Summed it all up nicely. The Supreme Court ain’t.

[Ken Winkes]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/06/clarence-thomas-abortion-supreme-court-leak/

Laugh of the Day?

Thomas expresses worry that respect for institutions is eroding....says the headline.

Wonder if'n he's talked to his wife?