Tag Archives: mother

I Still Don’t Know What Scott Walker Was Talking About on Abortion

Mother Jones

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During Thursday’s debate, Scott Walker took the most extreme position of any candidate on abortion. Not only does he oppose exceptions for rape and incest, he even opposes an exception to save the life of the mother. “I’ve said many a time that that unborn child can be protected,” he said, “and there are many other alternatives that can also protect the life of that mother. That’s been consistently proven.”

Huh? What was that supposed to mean? I was stumped then, and I’m stumped now. So I was happy to see Jonathan Allen’s subhead promising to explain it:

What Scott Walker was talking about when he said there are alternatives to abortion when the woman’s life is in danger

Great! So what was Walker talking about?

He essentially subscribes to the “double effect” doctrine, a well-established line of argument that governs how Catholic leaders think about the definition of abortion — and the desire to preserve the life of the mother and the viability of the fetus.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops, in its “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services,” makes a distinction between procedures designed to terminate a pregnancy to preserve the life of the woman and those for which the termination of the pregnancy is an unintended consequence of treating the woman….That is, the bishops believe intent matters.

Well, I’m still stumped. This Catholic doctrine governs what’s allowed and what isn’t, but it doesn’t say anything about there always being a way to protect the life of both the fetus and the mother.

So I’ll open this up to the floor. Does anyone know what Walker was referring to? What are the “many alternatives” that he claims are available to protect the life of an endangered mother? And who has supposedly consistently proven this? If you know, enlighten us in comments.

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I Still Don’t Know What Scott Walker Was Talking About on Abortion

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2016 and the Fable of the Surge

Mother Jones

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Over at the Atlantic, Peter Beinert writes about the “fallacy of the surge”—the notion that the surge in Iraq won the war, and things have since fallen apart only because President Obama withdrew American troops and left the field wide open for the taking. Thanks to Obama’s gutlessness, goes the story, “Iraq collapsed, ISIS rose, and the Middle East fell apart.” Beinert continues:

For today’s GOP leaders, this story line has squelched the doubts about the Iraq invasion that a decade ago threatened to transform conservative foreign policy. The legend of the surge has become this era’s equivalent of the legend that America was winning in Vietnam until, in the words of Richard Nixon’s former defense secretary Melvin Laird, “Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975.” In the late 1970s, the legend of the congressional cutoff—and it was a legend; Congress reduced but never cut off South Vietnam’s aid—spurred the hawkish revival that helped elect Ronald Reagan. As we approach 2016, the legend of the surge is playing a similar role. Which is why it’s so important to understand that the legend is wrong.

I’ve written about this before on many occasions, so here’s the nutshell version. It’s not that the surge itself was a failure. Gen. David Petraeus did an admirable job of taking advantage of events on the ground, and his strategy really did reduce the violence of the civil war that had broken out. The problem is that all the surge did—all it could do—was give Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki a bit of breathing space to fashion a permanent peace in the form of a political settlement with the Sunni community. He never did that, nor did we ever really put the screws on him to do it. Without that, a relapse into violence was inevitable:

The prime minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, began persecuting the Sunnis—thus laying the groundwork for their embrace of ISIS—long before American troops departed the country. As early as 2007, writes Emma Sky, who advised both Petraeus and his successor, General Ray Odierno, “the U.S. military was frustrated by what they viewed as the schemes of Maliki and his inner circle to actively sabotage our efforts to draw Sunnis out of the insurgency.”

….The tragedy of post-surge Iraq has its roots in America’s failure to make the Iraqi government more inclusive—a failure that began under Bush and deepened under Obama. In 2010, Sunnis, who had largely boycotted Iraq’s 2005 elections, helped give a mixed Shia-Sunni bloc called Iraqiya two more seats in parliament than Maliki’s party won. But the Obama administration helped Maliki retain power. And Obama publicly praised him for “ensuring a strong, prosperous, inclusive, and democratic Iraq” even after he tried to arrest his vice president and other prominent Sunni leaders.

If Republicans want to blame Obama for this, fine. But Bush did the same, so they’d have to accept some of the blame themselves. If we did indeed “lose” Iraq, it was because we never took political reconciliation seriously enough, not because we had too few troops in the country.

But this won’t do. As with the Vietnam myth, the fable of the surge is mostly a political construct. Nobody who understands the actual Iraq timeline takes it seriously, but it’s a handy way of attacking Obama, and it plays well with low-information voters who figure that it’s just plain common sense that war is about military force and nothing else. As an added bonus, it plays right into the Republican theme that our military has been hollowed out by Obama and needs a Reaganesque rebuilding.

And the fact that it’s not true? Even moderate Republicans aren’t speaking up to say so. You do know there’s a presidential campaign going on, don’t you?

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2016 and the Fable of the Surge

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Yes, Of Course Donald Trump Is Fueled by the Politics of Resentment

Mother Jones

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Josh Marshall:

Far be it from me to beat up on insular, east coast elites. But the insular, cross-partisan east coast media elite hasn’t grasped how the politics of resentment are fueling Donald Trump’s campaign or why gang ups from Fox News just don’t matter.

I don’t want to beat up on Josh, but seriously: is there anyone who doesn’t already get this? Maybe I’m just reading the wrong people, but among the folks I read this is the conventional wisdom by miles. Trump is basically a more experienced and media-savvy version of Sarah Palin. His appeal is anchored in simple answers, an insistence that politicians are all corrupt idiots, a disdain for political correctness, and an affirmation that ordinary folks are getting screwed.

But this doesn’t mean that gang-ups from Fox News don’t matter. It all depends on how personal the attacks get. If Trump starts to lose the support of the prime-time blowhards with a personal following—Bill, Greta, Sean, etc.—then it becomes a question of who the tea partiers trust more: Donald Trump or Bill O’Reilly? Donald Trump or Sean Hannity? This is a battle Trump can lose, and that’s why it’s in his best interest to cool it on the Fox News front. But it can also do damage to the personal following of the Fox prime-time crew, so it’s in their best interest to cool it too. In other words, let’s call a truce:

And there you have it. The support of Fox News really does matter, and Trump knows it. Likewise, support of Trump matters, and Roger Ailes knows it. Why? Because they’re just different versions of the same thing: media impresarios that feed on the conservative culture of resentment and grievance. Of course they matter to each other.

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Yes, Of Course Donald Trump Is Fueled by the Politics of Resentment

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Is Opposition to Obamacare Finally Dying Down?

Mother Jones

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I missed this when it first got published the day after the Republican debate, but Sarah Kliff says out loud something that was only percolating in the back of my head at the time:

Ten Republican presidential hopefuls took to the debate stage last night to prove their conservative bona fides. They swore they’d unravel President Barack Obama’s legacy. But there was one place they barely went: repealing Obamacare.

….Last night, candidates mentioned Obamacare exactly six times during the course of a two-hour debate. Only one candidate, Scott Walker, uttered the Republican rallying cry: “Repeal Obamacare.” The near-complete absence of Obama’s health overhaul is remarkable.

The rhetorical shift shows a fundamental change in the calculus of Obamacare: It’s one thing to talk about dismantling a theoretical law. It’s another to take away insurance that tens of millions of Americans now receive. And that’s exactly where Republicans are in 2016. So while Obamacare barely made it onto the stage, it might just be the biggest winner of the night.

Kliff goes on to make the case in more detail that repealing Obamacare is fundamentally less attractive than it was four years ago. Back then, it was an abstraction. Today it’s a real live program with millions of enrollees.

Is this really why Obamacare got so little attention in the debate? Maybe. Or maybe Fox News just didn’t bother giving the candidates much of a chance. After all, if you’re looking for conflict, what’s the point of asking about something that every candidate on the stage agrees about? It’s worth noting that the only question specifically about Obamacare went to Donald Trump, and asked him why he had flip-flopped on single-payer health care. And the only question on Medicaid went to John Kasich, one of the few Republican governors to accept Obamacare funding to expand Medicaid coverage. In both cases there was some potential disagreement between the candidates. So Thursday’s debate might not be much of a bellwether about waning interest in Obamacare among Republicans.

Still, I suspect Kliff is onto something. I agree that an actual program with actual enrollees—and one that’s operating pretty successfully—is a trickier target than one that’s slated for the future. For one thing, you can predict anything you want about a program that hasn’t started up yet, but it’s harder to keep up the meme that Obamacare will destroy the economy when it’s pretty plainly not destroying the economy. For another, even a Republican candidate is going to feel a lot of pushback from constituents who are now using the program and want to know what’s going to happen if it goes away and they can’t get insured anymore.

And there’s another tidbit of evidence on this front. A couple of weeks ago CNN released a poll that asked voters what their most important issue was. Among Republicans, only 14 percent said health care. They’re far more concerned about the economy and the nexus of terrorism and foreign policy. Democrats, conversely, ranked health care very highly. This suggests that Democrats are now more committed to keeping Obamacare than Republicans are to getting rid of it.

I might be reading this wrong, and I wouldn’t want to draw any firm conclusions from a campaign that still has many months to run. Still, my sense is that Obamacare just isn’t getting as much attention from Republicans as it used to. Sure, they all want to repeal it, but their talking points are starting to sound very pro forma. Scott Walker and Jeb Bush mentioned it during the debate, for example, but only as part of a laundry list of stuff they’d do to improve the economy.

We’ll see. It will certainly get more attention during the general election, when it becomes a serious point of contention. But my guess is that it just doesn’t have the juice it used to. It’s working OK. The economy hasn’t collapsed. The budget hasn’t exploded. It’s helping actual people. And although they’ll never admit it publicly, most Republicans candidates know that repealing it takes more than the stroke of a pen. It’s a lot harder than they make it sound.

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Is Opposition to Obamacare Finally Dying Down?

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Hillary Clinton Threads the Needle on College Tuition Plan

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton plans to offer a major proposal to deal with skyrocketing student debt:

With Americans shouldering $1.2 trillion in student loan debt, and about eight million of them in default, Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday will propose major new spending by the federal government that would help undergraduates pay tuition at public colleges without needing loans.

….Under the plan, which was outlined by Clinton advisers on Sunday, about $175 billion in grants would go to states that guarantee that students would not have to take out loans to cover tuition at four-year public colleges and universities. In return for the money, states would have to end budget cuts to increase spending over time on higher education, while also working to slow the growth of tuition, though the plan does not require states to cap it.

….Her plan does not go as far as some liberal advocacy groups would like, because she still expects families to make a “realistic” contribution to cover some tuition costs — through savings or loans — while students would contribute based on wages from 10 hours of work per week. In contrast Mr. O’Malley proposed “an aggressive goal — to give every student and their family the opportunity to go to college debt-free,” said Lis Smith, his deputy campaign manager.

Hillary is Hillary, so I’m sure when this is announced it will be accompanied by a detailed policy paper that makes a very good case for how it can work. My initial reaction is that it sounds kind of complicated, and I wonder if this kind of incentive can really keep states from finding ways to spend less and less on higher education. Will tuition costs go down only to be replaced by ever-increasing “fees”?

At the same time, this is pretty carefully crafted to appeal to multiple constituencies. It will appeal to middle-class voters by guaranteeing that tuition costs at state universities will be kept to a reasonable level. But it will also appeal to low-income voters with little chance of sending their kids to college. They probably wonder why taxpayers should subsidize a free education for mostly middle-income kids who are going to use that education to make more money after they graduate. Clinton has threaded this needle by insisting that families still have to contribute and students should work at least part-time.

I doubt this will become a major campaign issue. However, it will cost $350 billion over ten years, and Democrats have to be careful about how many programs like this they propose. Once you put a price tag on them, Republicans can start adding up the damages and asking where the money will come from. In this case, Clinton says it will come from effectively raising taxes on the rich, but that can only go so far. If she has very many more of these programs to announce, eventually middle-class families will have to shoulder some of the bill. That’s catnip for Republicans.

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Hillary Clinton Threads the Needle on College Tuition Plan

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A Two-Word Review of the New "Fantastic Four" Film

Mother Jones

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Wow, awful.

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A Two-Word Review of the New "Fantastic Four" Film

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Will Wherevergate Finally Sink Donald Trump?

Mother Jones

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Our story so far: In Thursday’s debate, Fox host Megyn Kelly asked Donald Trump why he was so fond of insulting women. Trump answered that he had just been kidding around. “I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness,” he said. “And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either.”

That didn’t go over too well, but Trump seemed like he’d probably survive it. Unfortunately, Trump being Trump, he couldn’t leave bad enough alone. In the spin room after the debate he started attacking Kelly and boo-hooing about how she had treated him worse than the other candidates. Then, showing the restraint he’s famous for, he followed this up with a series of increasingly unhinged tweets about Kelly throughout the night and into the early morning. Finally, during a CNN interview on Friday night, he said this:

You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her….wherever.

Let’s call it Wherevergate. This was a pretty obvious allusion to Kelly being unable to control her anger because she was having her period. Then things got weird.

(That’s right. Things weren’t really weird yet. So far this is all pretty normal in Trumpland.)

Anyway, Erick Erickson—tea party activist extraordinaire and founder of the influential RedState blog—got wind of Trump’s “wherever” comment and decided he was unhappy about it. Now, this is weird, because Erickson is not exactly famous for either his restraint or his sympathy for women’s tender feelings. He once called retiring Supreme Court justice David Souter a “goat fucking child molester”; called Michelle Obama a “Marxist harpy wife”; and lashed out at feminists during the 2008 campaign by calling a statement from the New York chapter of NOW the “latest salvo fired from the thighs of ugly nags.”

In other words, Erickson is not the shy and retiring type. But he eventually apologized for those comments and apparently decided to turn over a new leaf. “I’ve definitely had to grow up over time,” he told Howard Kurtz in 2010. So when he heard Trump’s remark about Kelly, he decided enough was enough. If he was going to grow up, then by God, everyone had to grow up. Trump hadn’t, so Erickson called up Trump’s campaign manager late on Friday and disinvited Trump from this weekend’s big RedState shindig in Atlanta. “I think there is a line of decency that even a non-professional politician can cross,” he told the Washington Post. “Suggesting that a female journalist asking you a hostile question is hormone related, I think, is one of those lines.”

Needless to say, The Donald didn’t take this lying down. Erickson’s decision, he said, was “another example of weakness through being politically correct….Blame Erick Erickson, your weak and pathetic leader.” Was that enough? Of course not. “Not only is Erick a total loser,” he said in a statement released Saturday, “he has a history of supporting establishment losers in failed campaigns so it is an honor to be disinvited from his event.”

Oh, and his “wherever” comment? Trump said he was referring to Kelly’s nose. “Only a deviant would think anything else.”

Roger that. So far, Erickson’s acolytes are apparently divided about the whole thing. Some are glad to see Trump’s back, others think Erickson has fallen into the pit of lefty political correctness. Stay tuned for more.

In any case, after all the inflammatory stuff Trump has said over the past couple of months, this appears to be the comment that’s finally going to cause him some real trouble. Go figure. Carly Fiorina immediately tweeted, “Mr Trump: There. Is. No. Excuse.” Lindsey Graham criticized Trump too, while other Republican candidates were more circumspect. So far, anyway. But I suspect this will turn into a feeding frenzy before long. Republicans are still spooked about the whole War on Women thing, and they’re none too happy about Trump taking on a Fox News host either. I think we can expect the Sunday talk shows this week to be all Trump all the time.

So that’s that, though I’m sure this post will be out of date almost as soon as I publish it. I just thought you’d all like to know what had happened while you were snoozing away the weekend.

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Will Wherevergate Finally Sink Donald Trump?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 7 August 2015

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As promised, Hilbert and Hopper are taking the week off. So meet Tatiana, recently adopted by my sister’s friend Pat. She goes by Tati and she’s about a year old. Her collar features a skull-and-crossbones motif, but its fierceness is undermined by the hearts at the end of the bones and the flowers in between each skull. Plus it’s pink. Bluebeard would be rolling in his grave. But I’m informed that this is a fashion statement, and who am I to argue?

In any case, Tati doesn’t seem especially fierce—though I gather that a couple of catnip mice have recently met their match. She is also considerably more energetic than Pat’s beloved old cat, who passed away recently. I can sympathize with that: we’ve got two of the tireless little furballs. They’ll be back next Friday.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 7 August 2015

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Will the Economy Help Democrats or Republicans More Next Year?

Mother Jones

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Paul Krugman notes that there wasn’t much talk about the economy in last night’s debate. Why not?

The chart shows private-sector job gains after two recessions — the 2001 recession, and the 2007-2009 Great Recession — ended, in thousands. You can argue that the economy should have bounced back more strongly from the deeper slump; on the other hand, 2008 was a huge financial crisis, which tends to leave a bad hangover.

….Now, am I claiming that Obama caused all that job creation? No — policy was pretty much hamstrung from 2010 on….Recovery should have been much faster, and I believe that there is still more slack than the unemployment rate suggests. But if President Romney were presiding over this economy, Republicans would be hailing it as the second coming of Ronald Reagan. Instead, they’re trying to talk about something else.

How is the economy going to play in the 2016 campaign? It’s a bit of a mystery at two different levels:

There’s the poli-sci model level, where the state of the economy is a background factor that affects the vote. A good economy helps the party in power, a bad economy helps the party out of power. Right now, though, the economy is in the middle: not bad, but not great. Next year, when we start plugging numbers into the models, they’re probably going to show a tight race.
Then there’s the campaign level, where candidates actively offer economic proposals (and criticisms) that they think will resonate with voters. Hillary Clinton will have a hard time here, since “it could have been worse” is not a winning slogan. Nor is “Republicans would be crowing if they had done it.” But it’s going to be hard to brag on the economy when it’s only in modestly good shape.

If Jeb Bush is the nominee, he’ll be blathering about 4 percent growth and claiming that anyone who says that’s impossible is just a defeatist who’s given up on America. Unfortunately, a lot of voters will probably believe him, because voters generally believe anything a candidate says. And Hillary won’t be able to fight back much, since it really would make her look like a defeatist. Luckily, “4 percent growth” is a fairly abstract concept to most people, and probably isn’t a great campaign slogan in the first place.

In the end, I suspect the economy will be in one of those middle states where it’s just not that big a deal in the campaign and won’t help either candidate much. Instead, the big campaign issues are going to be more specific: stuff like Obamacare, Common Core, ISIS, Clinton/Bush Derangement Syndrome, etc. Unless something big happens over the next 12 months, it’s going to be one of those grind-it-out campaigns based on small-ball issues, foreign policy, and GOTV mechanics. Lotsa fun, no?

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Will the Economy Help Democrats or Republicans More Next Year?

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Donald Trump and Bill Clinton Collide in Best Conspiracy Story Ever

Mother Jones

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Oh man, this is the best Clinton conspiracy story ever. Except apparently it’s true:

Former president Bill Clinton had a private telephone conversation in late spring with Donald Trump at the same time that the billionaire investor and reality-television star was nearing a decision to run for the White House, according to associates of both men. Four Trump allies and one Clinton associate familiar with the exchange said that Clinton encouraged Trump’s efforts to play a larger role in the Republican Party and offered his own views of the political landscape.

….The tone of the call was informal, and Clinton never urged Trump to run, the four people said. Rather, they said, Clinton sounded curious about Trump’s moves toward a presidential bid and told Trump that he was striking a chord with frustrated conservatives and was a rising force on the right.

One person with knowledge of Clinton’s end of the call said the former president was upbeat and encouraging during the conversation, which occurred as Trump was speaking out about GOP politics and his prescriptions for the nation.

Conservative heads must be exploding right about now. Is the Trump candidacy just a devious Clinton scheme to screw up the Republican primaries? It’s just the kind of thing a Clinton would do, after all. Did Bill know that Trump would confirm every horrible stereotype of conservative intolerance that moderates have of the GOP, thus ensuring a Hillary win in November? Or was it really just a casual call and Trump is still the real deal? Or…or…maybe the whole thing is yet another Trump PR stunt? Or maybe Bill has a mole inside the Trump campaign? OMG, OMG, OMG.

Anyway, the most fascinating thing about this is not the fact of the phone call itself, but the fact that four Trump allies spilled the beans to the Post reporters. That’s not just one loose-lipped nitwit. It’s as if Trump wanted this to get out. But why? And why the timing right before the first debate? Does Trump want to make sure he gets asked about this?

And how does this affect Trump’s candidacy? Does it make him less attractive to tea partiers, since he was consorting with the devil a few months ago? Or is it a net positive, because it makes him more attractive to moderates, who figure maybe Trump is OK if Bill Clinton encouraged him to “play a larger role”?

I dunno. I just want to know what conservative Trump supporters are thinking about this. I don’t see anything yet at Red State or The Corner or Hot Air or Power Line or Breitbart. Maybe they just haven’t caught up. Or maybe they don’t trust the reporting of the hated mainstream media in the first place. Stay tuned.

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Donald Trump and Bill Clinton Collide in Best Conspiracy Story Ever

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