MoJo Wire

Quick hits from the Mother Jones newsroom

  • Carolyn Maloney Gives the Second Worst Performance of Her Career

    August 4, 2022

    Should Joe Biden run for reelection? It’s the question looming over Democrats as the president’s hemorrhaging poll numbers drive fears they’ll be swept away by a red wave this November. 

    But for Carolyn Maloney, who is currently locked in a nasty primary fight against Jerry Nadler, the question of Biden’s reelection has plunged the New York congresswoman into an 11th-hour damage control campaign that somehow manages to get worse with every passing day. 

    The botched clean-up effort started Tuesday during a debate for New York’s 12th congressional district when Maloney was asked whether Biden should run again in 2024. “I don’t believe he’s running for reelection,” Maloney answered, instantly prompting speculation that perhaps she had insidery knowledge of Biden’s thinking on the issue. It was rather frank, particularly when compared to Nadler’s response to the same question: “It’s too early to say,” he said. “It doesn’t serve the purposes of the Democratic Party to deal with that until after the midterms.” The next day, likely sensing that she had screwed up, Maloney stood by her remarks but added that she’d support Biden if he did run.

    That should have been the end of that news cycle but Maloney on Thursday decided to give this performance:

    It’s been a minute since I’ve seen such frightened fealty, wrapped in a groveling non-apology. But I guess that kind of Trump-era relic emerges when you’re battling for your political career. In any event, I was about to call this the most absurd performance of her career but then I remembered this atrocity.

  • Alex Jones’ Lawyers Accidentally Sent the Opposing Counsel a Copy of His Entire Phone

    August 3, 2022

    Bob Daemmrich/Zuma

    Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones just might have the most incompetent lawyers on the planet.

    The red-faced Infowars founder is currently on trial to determine how much his website owes Sandy Hook parents for its defamatory claims that the 2012 school shooting was a hoax. He had previously testified under oath that he had not sent any text messages about Sandy Hook. But, according to an attorney for the Sandy Hook parents, Jones’ own lawyers accidentally sent him proof of the opposite. The video of Jones learning of his lawyers’ mistake is absolutely nuts:

    “Mr. Jones,” the plaintiffs’ attorney Mark Bankston said, “Did you know that 12 days ago, your attorneys messed up and sent me an entire digital copy of your entire cell phone, with every text message you’ve sent for the past two years, and when informed, did not take any steps to identify it as privileged or protect it in any way, and as of two days ago, it fell free and clear into my possession, and that is how I know you lied to me when you said you didn’t have text messages about Sandy Hook. Did you know that?”

    Jones, looking baffled, responded, “See? I told you the truth. This is your Perry Mason moment. I gave them my phone.”

    The attorney continued, asking Jones: “In discovery, you were asked, ‘Do you have Sandy Hook text messages on your phone?’ And you said, ‘No,’ correct? You said that under oath, Mr. Jones, didn’t you?”

    “I mean, if I was mistaken, I was mistaken, but you’ve got the text messages right there,” Jones replied.

    “You know what perjury is, right?” Bankston said, before reminding a dumbstruck Jones that he was free to invoke his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.

    If that’s not enough schadenfreude for you, enjoy this clip of Bankston showing Alex Jones a video of himself on Infowars referring to the jurors selected for that very trial as “extremely blue-collar folks.”

    Buckle up for some The Rehearsal-level discomfort:

    The cherry on top? The January 6 committee is reportedly planning to subpoena Jones’ texts and emails to learn more about the planning behind the attempted insurrection. 

    Did you know that, Mr. Jones?

  • Ruth Bader Ginsburg Showed Us How to Champion Abortion Rights on Live TV, 29 Years Ago

    August 3, 2022

    Ty O'Neil /ZUMA

    On this day in 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was officially confirmed to the Supreme Court.  A trailblazer for women’s rights, it was during Ginsburg’s confirmation hearings that she issued a now iconic speech defending abortion rights. Now 29 years later, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to turn Roe v. Wade, those words carry even greater urgency.

    “It’s a decision that she must make for herself,” Ginsburg said at the time. “And when government makes that decision for her, she’s being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”

    At least 14 states currently have abortion bans in place, including Texas where everyday citizens have also been incentivized to sue people they suspect of helping “facilitate” an abortion. In many states where the procedure is still accessible, conservative lawmakers are actively seeking to restrict that right. But the future of abortion rights is far from a foregone conclusion. In the first post-Roe vote on abortion, Kansas voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected an effort to amend the state constitution to remove abortion rights.

    It’s against this backdrop that you should listen to Ginsburg’s words today.

    Correction, August 3: An earlier version of this story misstated 1993 as being 28 years ago. Math is hard.

  • Biden Tests Positive for Covid, Again

    July 30, 2022

    Back to isolation you go, Mr. President.Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Zuma

    President Joe Biden tested positive for Covid again on Saturday morning and will return to isolation, according to a White House physician.

    The president initially contracted the virus on July 21, but had been testing negative since Tuesday, according to his doctor, Kevin O’Connor. Biden says he is not experiencing symptoms.

    O’Connor said the president appears to have a “rebound” case after taking the antiviral drug Paxlovid. About 5 percent of patients who have taken Paxlovid have experienced such rebound cases, according to the White House Covid-19 response coordinator.

    Biden has canceled his planned trips to Delaware and Michigan this week.

  • Crosswalks Aren’t Enough to Keep Cars from Killing

    July 27, 2022

    A "ghost bike" in Brooklyn, New York, marks the spot where a cyclist was killed.Mark Lennihan/AP

    Last week, Michael Weilert, a 13-year-old boy on a bicycle in Parkland, Washington, pressed a button to activate a blinking pedestrian signal, entered the crosswalk, and never made it to the other side of the street.

    The intersection where Michael Weilert was killed

    Google Maps.

    Weilert had the right of way, but one of the crosswalk lights was broken. A driver failed to yield, despite another car stopping at the intersection. The car struck Weilert, killing him.

    Still, officials implied that the victim was responsible. “He all of the sudden appeared in front of her car,” Trooper Robert Reyer of the Washington State Patrol told the News Tribune, “and she [the driver] was unable to stop.”

    Even though the driver failed to yield, she was not ticketed or charged, though the county prosecuting attorney could still press charges in the future. “Charges would only be forwarded if there was a criminal offense, such as being impaired and killing somebody, or driving in a manner that is, basically, reckless,” Reyer said. “We could completely exclude both. There was no impairment, and there was no reckless driving.” 

    As Weilert’s mother has pointed out, failure to yield is, by definition, reckless. She also noted that another driver had already stopped to allow her son to cross. “I can’t imagine knowing that someone is stopped—any car is stopped—at a crosswalk and you wouldn’t stop too. Just that behavior alone…is reckless,” she told local TV station KIRO 7. Now, she’s calling on the state to pass a law requiring crosswalk signs to flash red, so drivers know they need to stop.

    Reyer’s comments—and the lack of repercussions for the driver—are part of a larger infrastructure designed to allow cars to control the roads, even if it means imperiling pedestrians, cyclists, and wheelchair users.

    Seattle Bike Blog points out an effective way to reduce cars’ dominance: Eliminate community roads with multiple lanes of traffic. “Traffic engineers across the world have found that one lane in each direction with turns lanes where appropriate can carry a large number of vehicles per day far more safely,” Tom Fucoloro writes. Traffic engineers already know how to design roads to save lives. They just have to implement those changes.

    On the other side of the country, in Durham, North Carolina, Matt Simpson, a 40-year-old father, was killed in a crosswalk in awfully similar circumstances earlier this month. He was crossing the street—two lanes in either direction—on his bike, with his wife and two children in tow. He had the right of way, too. A driver ran the red light, struck Simpson, and left the scene of the crash. While authorities search for the suspect, safe streets advocates are calling for protected bike lanes and narrower roads that would encourage drivers to reduce speed.

  • Verizon Says Good Riddance to One America News

    July 27, 2022

    Good night, sweet prince.Richard B. Levine/Levine Roberts/Zuma

    Verizon just dealt One America News, former President Trump’s favorite far-right “news” network, a death blow.

    Starting Saturday, Verizon Fios will stop carrying OAN, depriving the cable network’s 3.5 million subscribers of their daily dose of conspiracy-mongering bullshit. The move follows DirecTV’s decision to drop OAN earlier this year, robbing the network of its biggest revenue stream.

    As my colleague Ross Choma wrote at the time:

    From the beginning, the network has positioned itself far to the right of even Fox News, regularly featuring pundits who aren’t welcome on other channels and aggressively promoting stories involving conspiracy theories, including the Seth Rich conspiracy, COVID denialism, and anti-vaccine disinformation. OAN cemented its position as former president Donald Trump’s favorite network after the 2020 election by continuing to question the election results well after Fox and other major news networks declared Joe Biden the winner.

    Soon, OAN will be available only to a few hundred thousand subscribers to smaller cable providers and streaming providers—which still strikes me as a hell of a lot of people to be consuming this stuff.

    Verizon told the Daily Beast that it was dropping OAN because the network refused to agree to a new contract. But Dan Ball, host of the OAN program “Real America,” said on-air that Verizon had told his bosses, “We don’t think you’re a credible news organization, so we’re dropping you.” Only in the Bizarro World of OAN would the network’s patent lack of credibility be easier to admit than its refusal to agree to a contract. And only in the Bizarro World of OAN would Ball imply that he and his colleagues are pillars of journalistic integrity. “For any of you liberal activists online over at the Beast or Media Matters or all those stupid-ass liberal rags online that’s gonna take this segment, try to twist it, and say I’m out there, pleading for this, begging for that, blah blah blah,” he said, “do me a favor, will you folks please act like journalists for one damn minute?”

    I’m sorry, what?

    OAN’s Alison Steinberg had another final message: “If you’re watching this, and you’re laughing and scoffing because you think that you’re immune to what’s coming, you just wait. Enjoy your freedoms while you’ve still got ’em.”

  • Nancy Pelosi’s Proposed Taiwan Trip Is a Bad Idea, Even If She Doesn’t Go

    July 27, 2022

    Patrick Semansky/AP

    Nancy Pelosi wants to visit Taiwan, which, if you know almost anything about the current state of US-China relations, is about the last thing Joe Biden’s administration wants. 

    Any US move regarding Taiwan is fraught with tension, due in part to the island’s unique diplomatic status. China has long considered Taiwan a breakaway territory—a position the United States purposefully does not accept or dispute. Though the United States continues to sell Taiwan weapons and send informal delegations to its leaders, few high-ranking US officials have visited the island since 1979, when Jimmy Carter officially recognized China’s Communist government for the first time.  

    Asked about Pelosi’s plan for a visit, Biden flatly said last week, “The military thinks it’s not a good idea right now.” Behind closed doors, his administration has “been working to spell out the potential risks of a visit in meetings with Pelosi and her team,” CNN reported. 

    Pelosi, who has long been critical of China’s repressive government, would be the first House speaker to visit Taiwan since Newt Gingrich, who himself urged Pelosi to go in a Fox News appearance this week. “She cannot allow the Chinese communist dictatorship to think that it can bully an American Speaker of the House,” he said. “And frankly, she ought to tell the Pentagon and the State Department to shut up.”

    The Biden administration certainly is not a fan of any move that may provoke China this summer, as Chinese leader Xi Jinping prepares for a momentous Party gathering in the fall that will likely cement him as leader for life. Facing domestic backlash over China’s controversial “zero Covid” strategy, “appealing to raw patriotism, particularly over Taiwan” might help Xi shore up support, the Associated Press explained. 

    Party mouthpieces have already suggested as much. Zhao Lijian, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson (and the subject of this great New York Times Magazine profile), said if Pelosi goes through with the visit, “China will take firm and resolute measures to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the US will be responsible for all of the serious consequences.” 

    What does that mean? Most likely, some display of force. Hu Xijin, another influential Party propagandist, took to Twitter to suggest that Chinese aircraft “accompany Pelosi’s plane” into Taiwanese airspace. 

    No matter the chatter from Beijing’s newly assertive diplomats, Pelosi’s visit would be pockmarked with trouble. If she goes through with it, Biden, who is set to speak to Xi this week, will have to navigate another diplomatic fracas at a time when Xi is emboldened to act aggressively toward the United States for domestic reasons. If she cancels the trip, China succeeds at its effort to isolate Taiwan and can keep stigmatizing outreach from other countries looking to do business there. 

    There is no easy option here and, as US-China relations grow worse, bad options will often be the only ones available. Lev Nachman, a fellow at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, laid out the calculus well:

    The only inevitable aspect of this entire standoff is that Taiwan looks to be increasingly under threat of invasion. The New York Times reported Monday that Biden officials expect China “to move against” the island in the “next year and a half.” If that is the case, it may help if the top Democrat in the House and the Democrat in the White House got on the same page. 

  • At Least There’s Joni Mitchell

    July 25, 2022

    Unequivocally good things don’t tend to happen these days. Moments so impervious to the horrors of modern-day living that they manage to break the sense that everything sucks. But such an event arrived when Joni Mitchell appeared at the Newport Folk Festival this weekend for her first full set in over two decades. 

    As you may recall, Mitchell has dealt with a series of illnesses in her later years, most notably a 2015 brain aneurysm. Her ability to perform has slowed. But the artist Brandi Carlile has stuck with her and, on Sunday, turned her concert into a Mitchell spectacle. (You can read more about their friendship here.)

    It’s rare to see anyone, let alone Mitchell, completely in their element, beaming and present, basking in whatever joy comes with knowing you’ve lived an extraordinary life. So please enjoy this performance of my personal favorite, “Both Sides Now.”

  • Jackie Robinson Made the Hall of Fame 60 Years Ago. His First Year in the Big Leagues Was Hell.

    July 23, 2022

    Diamond Images/Getty

    Sixty years ago today, Brooklyn Dodgers superstar Jackie Robinson, who’d broken baseball’s color barrier just 15 years earlier, was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. In his induction speech in Cooperstown, New York, Robinson singled three people for helping him make it through that hellish first year with the Dodgers: team president and general manager Branch Rickey, his mother, Mallie, and his wife, Rachel.

    “I want to thank all of the people throughout this country who were just so wonderful during those trying days,” he added. “I appreciate it at no end. It’s the greatest honor any person could have and I only hope that I’ll be able to live up to this tremendously fine honor.”

    Robinson’s impressive play on the field speaks for itself: He was the National League’s most valuable player in 1949, and he helped lead the Dodgers to the World Series title in 1955. But he did that in the face of at-times viciously racist taunts from opposing players and fans who deeply wanted baseball’s first Black player in the modern era to fail, and to fail publicly.

    As Robinson wrote in Jackie Robinson: My Own Story, published in 1948, Rachel Robinson had warned him about his temper heading into that first spring training in 1947. “Because I was a Negro, I knew I had to remain calm all the time,” he wrote. “My wife also knew it, and she kept drilling the admonition into my mind. I guess she half-believed I was hot-headed, because she had been present several times when I had encountered discrimination and had seen me get so angry that I had almost blown up.”

    Robinson went on to describe what he calls “the first racial ‘incident,'” in a three-game series against the Philadelphia Phillies in Brooklyn that April:

    The Phillies, led by their very able manager, Ben Chapman, are great bench-riders. The first time I stepped up to the plate, they opened up full blast. “Hey, you black Nigger,” I heard one of them yell. “Why don’t you go back where you came from?” Then I heard another one shout: “Yeah, pretty soon you’ll want to eat and sleep with white ball players!” As the jockeying continued on this level, I almost lost my head. I started to drop my bat and go over and take a sock at one of them. 

    Robinson elaborated in a later autobiography, 1978’s I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography:

    For one wild and rage-crazed minute I thought, “To hell with Mr. Rickey’s noble experiment.” It’s clear it won’t succeed…I thought what a glorious, cleansing thing it would be to let go. To hell with the image of the patient Black freak I was supposed to create. I could throw down my bat, stride over to that Phillies dugout, grab one of those white sons of bitches and smash his teeth in with my despised Black fist. Then I could walk away from it all.

    Of course, he didn’t stomp over to the Phillies dugout and start a brawl. As he wrote in his first book, “I remembered Branch Rickey’s warning me of what I’d have to take without losing my temper. So I pretended I didn’t hear them. I gritted my teeth and vented some of my anger on a solid single.” 

    Robinson faced dozens of incidents like this through his first year in the big leagues. But by the end of 1947, he was baseball’s rookie of the year, and the Dodgers won the pennant.

  • The WHO Just Declared Monkeypox a Public Health Emergency

    July 23, 2022

    Hollie Adams/Getty

    The World Health Organization declared the monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern on Saturday, with WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu citing a “clear risk of further international spread.”

    The WHO issued its declaration despite its emergency committee—charged with deciding on the emergency status—failing to reach a consensus.

    The monkeypox virus has spread mostly among men who have sex with men. Still, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has cautioned that people can contract the virus—which causes symptoms like a pimple-like rash, fever, headache, and chills—if they come in close contact with someone with monkeypox. So far, 2,891 cases have been confirmed in the United States, and more than 16,000 around the world. 

    In a throwback to the early Covid-19 era, experts have been discouraged by how slow the vaccination and testing processes have gone in the United States. As my colleague Jackie Mogensen wrote earlier this month:

    First, there’s the vaccine: As CNN reported on Thursday, there are approximately 1.5 million people who are eligible to receive Jynneos, a vaccine that protects against monkeypox and smallpox. So far, more than 132,000 doses have been distributed, according to data from the US Department of Health and Human Services, but health officials on the ground say it hasn’t been enough. “We got an allotment of 200 vaccines,” Dr. David Holland, the chief clinical officer of the Fulton County, Georgia, Board of Health, told CNN, “and the appointments for that went in about an hour and a half.”

    Similarly, New York Mayor Eric Adams has also said the city hasn’t received enough vaccine doses, even as it reportedly makes up about a third of all monkeypox cases nationwide. “While we appreciate the approximately 7,000 vaccine doses that have been sent to New York City thus far, and the approximately 14,500 vaccine doses we expect to receive by the end of the week, we urgently need far more to slow [the] spread and protect at risk populations,” Adams wrote in a letter to President Joe Biden on Monday. “Within less than 10 minutes of releasing new appointments for our vaccine clinics last week, all appointments were taken.”

    Obtaining monkeypox treatments and tests has also been a headache for local health officials. On Friday, the Washington Post reported that in order to prescribe the antiviral Tpoxx to patients, doctors say they must fill out dozens of pages of paperwork per patient. “There’s a ton of paperwork, there’s a ton of assessments that are required, there’s a tremendous amount that one has to do to be able to administer this drug to someone,” Roy Gulick, a New York City physician told the Post.

    HHS says it now has delivered more than 191,000 vaccine doses to states and city health departments, and that the federal government will have access to 6.9 million doses by the middle of 2023.

  • Josh Hawley, Caught Running Away From the Jan. 6 Mob, Says He Won’t Run From Liberal Critics

    July 23, 2022

    Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP

    Sen. Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican who infamously pumped his fist at the pre-riot Capitol crowd on the morning of January 6, said in an appearance at a conservative conference Friday night that he didn’t regret his actions—and that he wouldn’t “run” from a fight with his political foes. It was an unusual choice of words for a man who, in a primetime hearing just a day earlier, was revealed to have run away from the very mob that he had helped incite.

    “And I just want to say to all of those liberals out there and the liberal media, just in case you haven’t gotten the message yet: I do not regret it. And I am not backing down,” Hawley told a cheering crowd at Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit in Tampa, Florida. “I’m not gonna apologize, I’m not gonna cower, I’m not gonna run from you, I’m not gonna bend the knee.”

    In case you’ve forgotten, here’s Hawley’s January 6 highlight reel: 

    And as my colleague Tim Murphy wrote on Thursday:

    That broken form is the gait of a man finally reaping what he sowed. Was all of this a little gratuitous? I mean, sure. The committee has shown a knack for getting in a few extra punches on occasion. But it’s also sort of perfect—a postscript to the earlier image that completes the little parable: The Republican Party, or most of it anyway championed a dangerous movement it never truly controlled. Even those who are delusional enough to think they might some day lead it have been running from its wrath all along.

  • Fearing for Their Lives, Pence Security Team Called Family Members to Say Goodbye

    July 21, 2022

    As Donald Trump watched live coverage of the attack on the US Capitol, Secret Service agents protecting Mike Pence on January 6 feared for their lives and called family members to say goodbye.

    The dramatic new details—revealed by an anonymous security official and aired during Thursday’s prime-time hearing— underscore the serious threat posed by the pro-Trump mob, as the former president refused to call off the violence. The committee on Thursday also presented chilling radio chatter of Pence’s security detail from that day, as they panicked over the vanishing window to escape the violence as the rioters advanced.

    “If we lose any more time, we may lose the ability to leave,” an agent is heard saying. “If we are going to leave, we need to do it now.”

    Earlier in the hearing, the committee presented testimony from then-White House counsel Pat Cipollone that he had repeatedly urged Trump to make a forceful statement condemning the rioters as the violence escalated. The damning accounts add to the mountain of evidence that Trump delayed stepping in, putting Pence—and Secret Service members—under serious threat of being killed.

  • Almost Every House Republican Just Voted Against Protecting the Right to Contraception

    July 21, 2022

    AP

    Following the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade, most Republicans stayed quiet. Others were quick to dismiss the “catastrophizing” that after Roe’s fall, other privacy rights long popular with the American public—including gay marriage and access to contraception—would soon be at risk. Well, lo and behold, it turns out those fears were justified; a bill seeking to codify the right to contraception, one of the most “morally acceptable issues” in the country, was almost unanimously rejected by Republicans in the House today. 

    Take a look at the 228-195 vote. Only eight Republicans joined Democrats in favor of the Right to Contraception Act, which seeks to enshrine the right to birth control without government restriction. The bill now goes to the Senate where it’s unlikely to get the support of the 10 Republicans needed in order to overcome the filibuster. Together, the measure and its all-but-certain demise stand as further confirmation that Roe’s end is just the beginning of the GOP’s extremist agenda.

    Such efforts to create an unequal society and destroy cherished rights shouldn’t come as any surprise. Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion striking down Roe, has authored numerous opinions going after these rights. And recently, as my colleague Pema Levy explained, Justice Clarence Thomas outlined two strategies for ending marriage equality:

    Thomas has laid out two paths to achieve his social agenda. One, as the public quickly took note of, is to boldly overturn the cases that recognized the constitutional right to same-sex marriage and struck down bans on sodomy and contraception. This would allow state legislatures to prohibit these things outright. Thomas’ other strategy is more subtle, but it, too, would erode some of the rights we take for granted today, particularly marriage equality. Importantly, Thomas is not making an either/or proposition here; it’s clear that he wants to pursue both paths.

    The GOP’s goals to radically change American life have been in motion for some time now. Votes like today just make it official.

  • President Biden Has Covid

    July 21, 2022

    Yuri Gripas/CNP/Zuma

    President Biden, 79, tested positive for Covid Thursday morning, the White House said in a statement.

    Biden is experiencing “very mild symptoms” and has begun taking the antiviral drug Paxlovid, according to Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. He has a dry cough and runny nose but no fever.

  • 16 Lawmakers, Including AOC, Arrested in SCOTUS Abortion Protest

    July 19, 2022

    Tom Williams/Getty

    Nearly a month after Roe was overturned, House Democrats finally gave us the type of civil disobedience that such a crisis warrants.

    Today, 16 Democratic members of Congress—including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Andy Levin (Mich.), and Alma Adams (N.C.)—were arrested for blocking traffic during an abortion rights protest in front of the Supreme Court.

    Acts of civil disobedience are, by definition, attempts to gain attention. They can also be cathartic. Finally, we’re seeing legislators as outraged as many felt on the day of the Dobbs decision. 

    Conservatives, though, have already begun nitpicking the legislators’ performances, including accusing Ocasio-Cortez of pretending to be handcuffed. A video shows the congresswoman being escorted away from the protest by police. She holds her hands behind her back before raising her right fist in a gesture of political resistance. How can the New York Post proclaim that “AOC fakes being handcuffed” when she makes a deliberate gesture showing that she is not?

    Ultimately, AOC and her colleagues likely expected the derision from the right. And they got want they wanted in the end: widespread publicity of the symbolic shackling of reproductive rights by a rogue Supreme Court. Good.

  • How Many of Joe Manchin’s “Energy Sector” Donors Does It Take to Screw In an Apocalypse?

    July 17, 2022

    Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly via ZUMA Press

    On Friday, reports emerged that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-Wv.) torpedoed another climate change proposal and nixed Democrats’ plan to tax the rich. It’s the end of months of negotiations and the final death knell for the Biden agenda. Even centrists like Jonathan Chait in New York have said that Biden’s agenda has now, officially, failed.  After, I found myself reading a Politico summation of the Senator slash coal magnate‘s donors. It’s a lot of companies from the “energy sector.” That includes “donations from executives at Georgia Power, including the utility’s CFO Aaron Abramovitz, and from Dominion Energy CEO Robert Blue”; a maximum donation from “Energy services firm Concord Energy CEO Matthew Flavingave”; maximum donations from Southern Company Gas CEO Kim Greene and Harvest Midstream CEO Jason Rebrook”; a few thousand from “Southern Company’s chair and CEO Chris Cummiskey” and “three other company executives.” It goes on from there: thousands and thousands from gas, oil, energy types. Remeber: Sixty-five percent of Americans support increased climate change action by the government; sixty-four percent of Americans want to tax the very rich, including a majority of Republicans. After looking at the donations I happened to read a bit of political theorist Sheldon Wolin. He has a theory of “inverted totalitarianism.” Wolin’s theory posits that we’re turning into a  thinly veiled, autocratic “managed democracy,” in which people hold less and less power, as elite individuals and institutions gain more and more. Wolin’s argument is wide-ranging and comprehensive but as I was skimming through an essay he wrote on it, I found a couple of fun passages:

    Inverted totalitarianism, in contrast, while exploiting the authority and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of ‘private’ governance represented by the modern business corporation. The result is not a system of codetermination by equal partners who retain their distinctive identities but rather a system that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power.

    Fascinating. This too:

    Thee emergence of the corporation marked the presence of private power on a scale and in numbers hitherto unknown, the concentration of private power unconnected to a citizen body.

    Similarly, from our friend Wolin:

    At the same time that [World War II] halted the momentum of political and social democracy, it enlarged the scale of an increasingly open cohabitation between the corporation and the state. That partnership became ever closer during the era of the Cold War (l947-1993). Corporate economic power became the basis of power on which the state relied, as its own ambitions, like those of giant corporations, became more expansive, more global, and, at intervals, more bellicose. Together the state and corporation became the main sponsors and coordinators of the powers represented by science and technology.

    Check it all out here in full, if you have time. 

    Anyway, that’s my morning reading. Feels like there’s overlap, but I might just be projecting.

  • The House Just Passed Two Bills to Protect Access to Abortion

    July 15, 2022

    Abortion rights demonstrators gather near the Washington Monument during a nationwide rally in support of abortion rights in Washington, D.C., on May 14, 2022. Yasin Ozturk/Getty

    Exactly three weeks after the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, the House of Representatives passed two bills aimed at protecting the right to abortion in the United States. Neither of the bills advanced on Friday is likely to succeed in the Senate.

    One of the bills, the Women’s Health Protection Act, passed 219 to 210 with one Texas Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar, voting with all House Republicans against the measure. The bill, which would legally grant medical professionals the ability to provide abortions to patients, passed in the House in September, but has been blocked in the Senate.

    The other measure, the Ensuring Access to Abortion Act, passed 223 to 205, would allow residents to cross state lines to seek an abortion. Three Republican House members—Reps. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, and Fred Upton of Michigan—voted with Democrats in favor of the bill. 

    Although both bills appear doomed in the split Senate, they come at a time that marks just the beginning of a long battle ahead for many pro-choice health care workers, lawyers, and activists in the US. For a full breakdown of the future of abortion, don’t miss our recent reporting package in partnership with Rewire News Group: “Where Do We Go From Here?“

  • Republicans Respond to 10-Year-Old’s Abortion Case By Targeting Immigrants

    July 15, 2022

    Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee.J. Scott Applewhite/AP

    A 10-year-old-girl was raped and became pregnant as a result of that violence. That child, six weeks and three days into an unwanted pregnancy, then had to travel from Ohio to neighboring Indiana to receive abortion care after a six-week ban went into effect in her state following the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Two weeks after the story made headlines, a Columbus man, who is reportedly undocumented, was arrested and charged with the girl’s rape. Meanwhile, the Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita threatened the doctor who provided the abortion with criminal charges, even though it has since come to light that she complied with required reporting to the state. 

    It’s hard to think of a case that better encapsulates—and warns about—the devastating impact of doing away with a constitutional right to abortion and restricting access to reproductive care. But Republicans took a different perspective, eagerly running with claims that a very real, very sad story was a fabricated lie. And when that didn’t hold water, they switched to a favorite form of demagoguery: hating on immigrants. 

    The Columbus police arrested 27-year-old local resident Gershon Fuentes after he confessed to raping the child on at least two occasions, according to the Columbus Dispatch. As I wrote earlier this week:

    The case was first reported by the Indianapolis Star in a July 1 article quoting Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist. She said she had learned from a colleague in Ohio about a 10-year-old who was six weeks and three days pregnant. Ohio’s law bans abortions after six weeks with no exceptions for rape or incest.

    The story immediately went viral. And it led to appalling responses. South Dakota’s Governor Kristi Noem suggested a child in a similar situation in her state might be forced to carry the baby to term.

    The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board cast doubt on the existence of the girl. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said it was “likely that this is a fabrication,” only to issue a statement after news of the arrest broke saying “we rejoice anytime a child rapist is taken off the streets.” 

    Rep. Jim Jordan was quick to refer to the case as “another lie,” but by Wednesday he had deleted the post and declared that Fuentes “should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”  When asked about the deleted tweet, Jordan said he had done so because “we learned that this illegal alien did this heinous crime.” Asserting that he had never doubted the girl, Jordan went on to say: “I doubted Joe Biden, which is usually a smart thing to do.” 

    Jordan wasn’t alone in trying to weaponize the apparent immigration status of the suspected rapist as a way to divert attention from the searing child tragedy at hand. “Where’s the conversation about an illegal person doing this?” Rep. Roger Williams of Texas said. “How do you defend this? How do you defend this guy who came over illegally, and we’ve got 5 million of them over here?” 

    One of the most extreme responses came from Jim Bopp, an Indiana lawyer and general counsel for the National Right to Life who crafted model legislation ahead of the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade and paving the way for stricter abortion bans. “She would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child,” Bopp told Politico. “The bill does propose exceptions for rape and incest, in my model, because that is a pro-life position, but it’s not our ideal position. We don’t think, as heart-wrenching as those circumstances are, we don’t think we should devalue the life of the baby because of the sins of the father.”

    Other Republicans, however, appear to be less sure about how they feel or even surprised that a 10-year-old could, biologically, get pregnant. “I’m amazed a 10-year-old got pregnant. … You really wrestle with that,” said Rep. Bob Gibbs of Ohio, according to NBC News. “That’s a tough one.” Arizona’s Rep. Debbie Lesko said, “I don’t think I was even able to have children when I was 10 years old” and acknowledged that she struggled with the “moral question” of the case.

  • Republicans Doubted a 10-Year-Old Had to Travel for an Abortion. A Man Has Just Been Charged With Her Rape.

    July 13, 2022

    Abortion rights advocates gather and march outside the Hamilton County Courthouse in Cincinnati, Ohio.Jason Whitman/NurPhoto/AP

    An Ohio man has been charged with the rape of a 10-year-old girl whose story became international news after she had to travel to Indiana to receive an abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning of Roe v. Wade. The news reaffirms the tragic consequences of what happens when states, like Ohio, enact strict abortion bans.

    The police arrested 27-year-old Columbus resident Gershon Fuentes on Tuesday after he confessed to raping the child at least on two occasions, according to the Columbus Dispatch. Fuentes is being held in the Franklin County jail on a $2 million bond.

    The case was first reported by the Indianapolis Star in a July 1 article quoting Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist. She said she had learned from a colleague in Ohio about a 10-year-old who was six weeks and three days pregnant. Ohio’s law bans abortions after six weeks with no exceptions for rape or incest. 

    The story immediately went viral. And it led to appalling responses. South Dakota’s Governor Kristi Noem suggested a child in a similar situation in her state might be forced to carry the baby to term. The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board cast doubt on the existence of the girl.

    Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said it was “likely that this is a fabrication,” only to issue a statement after news of the arrest broke saying “we rejoice anytime a child rapist is taken off the streets.” 

    Last week, President Joe Biden mentioned the case when signing an executive order to protect abortion rights. “She was forced to have to travel out of the state to Indiana to seek to terminate the pregnancy and maybe save her life,” Biden said. “Ten years old—10 years old—raped, six weeks pregnant, already traumatized, was forced to travel to another state.” A 10-year-old girl, he added, shouldn’t “be forced to give birth to a rapist’s child.”

    The Columbus Dispatch reports that the Franklin County Children Services referred the girl’s case to the Columbus police on June 22 and that DNA material obtained at the Indianapolis clinic where she underwent the abortion on June 30 is being tested against samples from Fuentes.