They just don’t want their friends covering the cost

Darrell Lucus of the Daily Kos community reported that the South Carolina governor has signed a bill that will ban almost all abortions in the state. It is called a “heartbeat” law because it bans abortion if an embryo heartbeat is detected. It mean abortion is banned after about the 6th week of pregnancy. That is usually before a woman knows she is pregnant. To detect a heartbeat that early requires a test that is horribly invasive. Of course, the bill will be blocked by the nearest court and suits were filed before the governor’s signature was dry. But the purpose of this bill is to be appealed before the Supreme Court, which has already signaled it would look more kindly on such laws. As part of the reporting Lucus discussed his own journey away from the pro-life movement. A big thing that drove him away was how invasive these laws were.

But seeing such horribly invasive measures being peddled by newly empowered Republicans made me realize that what passed for leadership in the pro-life movement was taking its supporters for a ride. These so-called leaders didn’t really give a damn for the well-being of women at all. These invasive laws proved that the ultimate goal of the pro-life movement is to destroy the right to privacy.

This is where I disagree – slightly – with Lucus. Yes, they don’t care for the well-being of women. Yes, a goal is to destroy a woman’s right to privacy. But that isn’t the ultimate goal. That ultimate goal is to uphold and enforce male supremacy. That supremacy includes many ways to oppress women, including removing their right to privacy. It also includes subjecting them to horribly invasive procedures (which are about a lot more than no privacy), and even forcing them to go through the discomfort of pregnancy and the pain of giving birth, then perhaps spending 20 years of her life taking care of a child. This far from an exhaustive list. Hunter of Kos discussed the danger of shutting off a person’s water during a pandemic.

A newly emerged virus proves to be both explosively contagious and deadly to a significant number of those infected by it. We are immediately told that the very best ways to keep the virus from spreading are rigorous hand-washing routines and no more face-touching. Gotta keep clean. And then we shut off the water in people's houses and tell them good luck with that!

Hunter quoted a study by Cornell University and Food & Water Watch that links water shutoffs with COVID-19 deaths. One of the examples in the study is Michigan. In March of 2020 Gov. Gretchen Whitmer put a moratorium on water shutoffs. In October the state Supreme Court nullified those orders. The number of cases in the state hit a new high in November. The state legislature reinstated some of the orders, including the water shutoff moratorium, and the cases per day dropped. This reminds me of why my friend and debate partner complains about confusing correlation with causation. Was it indeed water shutoffs that caused the spike? Or was it the broad package of measures, or maybe one other measure in particular, the governor put in place and the legislature convinced the Supremes to nullify? Hunter wrote:

By controlling for other factors such as testing rates, mask mandates, and "other state policies," the authors were able to estimate how many of those new cases could be attributed to water shutoffs, and therefore estimate how things might have looked different if Michigan and all the other states did not order suspension of water shutoffs during the crisis.

I haven’t read the report and I would probably stumble over the explanation of “controlling for other factors.” So I can’t say they actually banished the confusion of correlation and causation. Even so it sounds tough to do. Does depriving a household of water during a pandemic contribute to illness and death. I’m sure it does. However, I’m suspicious that they were able to put numbers to it. There has been a great deal of online discussion of Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida. He’s been an ardent supporter of the nasty guy and doing a very good job of being a nasty person himself. Gaetz is in the spotlight for perhaps having sex with women not his wife and one of them underage. There’s also talk about him showing pictures of nude women around his office and perhaps he’s even running a sex trafficking ring for the benefit of other young male GOP representatives. I don’t know how much is true (I’ve started avoiding the articles). The GOP will deal with him. Or not. However, the story has prompted commentary that I think is worth sharing. Mark Sumner of Kos wrote about the GOP response so far, which has been either to support Gaetz or say something vaguely in opposition.

They think this—ignoring sexual harassment, sexual assault, sex trafficking, and every other action that degrades and abuses women—is a strength of their party. When Republicans see Democrats moving quickly to condemn behavior by Democratic officials, at either the state or federal level, they regard it as a weakness. The truth is that, until recently, both parties have been the parties of wealthy white men behaving badly. But in the last several decades, the parties have gone in decidedly different directions. As the Democratic Party has become more diverse, both in its members and its representatives, it has become more sensitive to just how wrong many of the things that were always permitted by those privileged by race, wealth, and power really are. Democrats now move swiftly to address these issues, because they’re important. And if that sometimes means erring on the side of those who say they’ve been victims, that’s okay. The system certainly erred on the other side long enough. What changed for Republicans in response is that they stopped even pretending to care. They’ve become the party that overtly defends sexual assault, whether it happens in Kavanaugh’s home or the studios at Fox News. They’re the party that shares nude pictures of women on the House floor, and doesn’t care who knows it.

Jen McGowan tweeted:

I keep being super angry about this whole Matt Gaetz thing and think I’ve finally figured out why. No one saw sharing nude pictures of women at work as anything more than a detail to a larger story. They still don’t.

Sarah Kendzior tweeted (and assured us the list is just a few – she couldn’t fit them all on one tweet).

Pedophiles ARE corrupting the federal government and have been for decades. Epstein, Maxwell, Craig Spence, Denny Hastert, Roy Cohn, George Nader, etc. Trump was accused in court of raping a 13-year-old. That's not what QAnon gets wrong and denying it makes the situation worse.

Several who commented on Kendzior’s tweet said variations of something I read, but don’t have a link for. QAnon is out to save victims from sex traffickers on the left. But when actual sex traffickers on the right are revealed they are silent. Georgia Logothetis, in a pundit roundup column for Kos, quoted James Downie of The Washington Post, discussing what the GOP thinks of Biden’s infrastructure plans:

Remember, whenever the Trump administration launched one of its many ill-fated “infrastructure weeks,” Republicans rarely balked at the price tags — not because those proposals were always funded but because they didn’t make the wealthy and big business pay more of their fair share. So if Biden does sit down with Republicans to talk about paying for an infrastructure package, everyone in the room should be clear on one thing: Republicans don’t really care if this bill — or any other Democratic bill — is paid for. They just don’t want their friends covering the cost. The good news for Democrats is that view is a loser with voters.

A couple days ago I discussed an episode of Gaslit Nation. Just after that I found the Twitter feed for TrumpFile (documenting the crimes of Donald Trump) does a summary thread. I might try that in the future. Here is the thread for the episode I just discussed, though the link is to the middle (see below). One nice thing about it is the addition of pictures, which the original audio podcast doesn’t have. I discussed this bit of the episode, though I didn’t quote the whole block. It is something Andrea Chalupa said. It looks better and more understandable when quoted this way:

Republicans are tough on poor people. Republicans are tough on communities of color. Republicans are tough on LGBTQ people. Republicans are tough on women. They are not tough on crime.

Alec Karakatsanis, founder and director of Civil Rights Corps, tweeted a thread:

The U.S. has 570,000 people who are homeless each night, but 17 million vacant homes. How does this connect to police budgets?

Seventeen million vacant homes? I’m not saying the data is wrong, though I have a couple questions: (1) Where are they? Are they near where the homeless are? (2) In the real estate boom over the last year why haven’t these homes been sold? But back to the story.

A huge portion of what police do is arrest people who are homeless. In Portland, for example, the *majority* of police arrests are for human beings who are homeless, and a *vast majority* of those are for things police call "nonviolent." It is a choice by elite bureaucrats who control the police to arrest, cage, control, and brutalize people without houses instead of helping them get permanent safe shelter. Why? This is a key point: many banks, real estate investors, etc... own a lot of vacant properties. Their wealth depends on a society that prefers to have people suffer on the street than guaranteed a stable place to flourish. The barrel of a police officer's gun and metal chains around people's wrists is the only way that our society can have 30 times more vacant homes than homeless people. Only the threat of imminent force makes this possible. ... The need to exhibit overwhelming increasingly militarized force to control the very poorest people from threatening property wealth of the very richest is one of the main functions of police and, therefore, one of the main reasons it is so hard to reduce police budgets.

LegoCSWoman is a series of Lego sets commemorating women in early Computer Science. This link is to a tweet with a photo with Betty Holberton (I think) at a computer console with the same scene recreated in Lego right beside it. The tweet says:

70 years ago this week, UNIVAC — the first computer widely used for commercial purposes — was first contracted for use by @uscensusbureau. Women including Grace Hopper and Betty Holberton played key roles in its development.

I linked to the feed and saw a promotion of the other kits in the series of Computer Science Women. That first tweet linked to the Lego site describing the women. They are Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Betty Hoberton, Jean Jennings Bartik, Gladys West, and Annie Easley. It looks like a definition of making it is being represented in Lego.