Tag: wapo

It’s the Leaks

Perhaps we can get ahead of the “forget the impact of overturning Roe, it’s the leaking of the draft decision that matters” nonsense like this:

The release of the 98-page document is unprecedented in the court’s modern history: Early drafts of opinions have virtually never leaked before the final decision is announced, and never in such a consequential case. And early drafts of opinions often change by the time the decision from the court is announced.

Michael D. Shear and Adam Liptak writing in the Times of New York

if we actually bother to point out that this characterization is categorically false. Thirty seconds of Googling would net you this highly relevant bit of information that the Post somehow managed to find and print:

…it is not true that rulings have never been given to journalists before the announcement of the decision by the court. In fact, the result in Roe v. Wade itself was leaked by a Supreme Court clerk to a Time magazine reporter in January 1973. The issue of Time, with an article titled “The Sexes: Abortion on Demand,” appeared on newsstands hours before the decision was announced by Justice Harry Blackmun.

James B. Robenalt, Washington Post

We knew this decision was coming and we know that birth control is next. Codifying into law national bans on both would be planks in the GOP platform if they bothered with such documents anymore. This almost makes one think there’s a reason they don’t put out platforms anymore.

As it stands, the GOP is out there every day messaging against Griswold as being of a piece with Roe in the “wrongly decided” department of GOP jurisprudence i.e. “privacy for me but not for thee.” With a functioning Democrat party you might be able to message against that because, last time I checked, access to birth control both in and out of marriage is a pretty popular thing. Access to “safe, legal, and rare” style of regulated abortion is also a 70/30 “for” proposition. But our Establishment Democrat is still not sure they should do anything about being characterized daily as part of an organized pedophilia cult that likely drinks baby blood. This is why they fail.

The Current Crisis, Writ Small

The absolute absence of any urgency among establishment Democrats is evident all over the map today. Both are regional dust-ups that paint a much wider story, the first in Idaho where a Political Science professor by the name of Scott Yenor made some extremely dumb-assed comments:

Our culture is steeped with feminism. It teaches young boys and girls that they are motivated by much the same things and want much the same things. Thus, girls are told to become as independent as boys are said to be. […] They are more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be. […] Young men must be respectable and responsible to inspire young women to be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children. […] Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade.

So, a dumb-ass. Fine. Becca Savransky, author of the linked article, reached out to State Senator Melissa Wintrow, a Boise Democrat and the former director of the Boise State Women’s Center. She apparently called the remarks “dehumanizing,” which is a good start. Then she proceed to say:

We’re not going back to the 1950s, I don’t know what everybody is so afraid of. Let’s drop our weapons. Let people be who they want to be.

Unfortunately, she’s wrong about two things here and missed an opportunity. People like Scott Yenor, the current GOP leadership, and all the many Trump voting GOPers out there aren’t after a return to the 1950s. They want a return to the 1850s. Back when Black people and women knew their place and, when they didn’t, could be and were shown their place. That’s who everybody should be afraid of and it’s not an academic issue to mull over a good whiskey anymore. It’s facing us at the national political level right now and every day until the 2022 midterms. Problem is, most folks don’t even hear much about that because it’s not stated when the microphones are turned on for some “Democratic response” to absolute bile like Yenor all the way up the chain to the extremely similar bile coming from people in actual power or who, you know, were either planning or directly involved in attempting and/or abetting violent insurrection against these United States in January of this year.

Second example, this one from Georgia, where there may be some troubling lack of Democratic voter engagement. Yes, just a drawn out race for mayor of Atlanta, but buried in the story is this bombshell:

Next year, the [Democratic Party] machine is going to be up and running at the fullest extent of its power, and you are going to see all this money flowing into Georgia

Antonio Brown, Atlanta City Council member

Always “next year” with establishment Democrats. Instead of screaming about election access and voting rights, you can always hear them saying “We only need to show up and work when it’s the big election cycles for the top offices,” regardless of vast recent evidence to the contrary. Compare and contrast that attitude with the GOP, currently and aggressively taking control of county election boards in red states across the country (you’ll recall those as the election boards that refused to throw the election to Trump regardless of vote count in 2020), rewriting election laws in every state they can (to make it easier to disregard vote counts when the GOP candidate loses), limiting access to voting in every state they can (including Georgia, where we see in this article that turnout is down, at least in part due to restrictions placed on vote-by-mail and early voting), and blocking any attempts to reform any part of creating guarantees for voting access, controls for the drawing of equitable voting districts, and broad standards for state and local election certification at the federal level.

But it is, of course, perfectly fine for the Democrats to take a long rest and really only bother to wind that old machine up for the really big races. No trouble with that approach at all.

This is why they fail.

How long has [the VA] been a problem? Decades. How long have politicians been talking about it? Decades.” Fiorina said she would gather 10 or 12 veterans in a room, including the gentleman from the third row, and ask what they want. Fiorina would then vet this plan via telephone poll, asking Americans to “press one for yes on your smartphone, two for no. You know how to solve these problems, so I’m going to ask you.

Carly Fiorina, wowing us with The Leadership. Rising star, everyone. Deepest GOP bench in a generation or more. To lower taxes, press one!

“Context” is not a safe word that makes all your other horse-shit statements disappear. And horse-shit is the context in which Richard Cohen has, for all these years, wallowed. It is horse-shit to claim that store owners are right to discriminate against black males. It is horse-shit to claim Trayvon Martin was wearing the uniform of criminals. It is horse-shit to subject your young female co-workers to “a hostile work environment.” It is horse-shit to expend precious newsprint lamenting the days when slovenly old dudes had their pick of 20-year-old women. It is horse-shit to defend a rapist on the run because you like The Pianist. And it is horse-shit for Katharine Weymouth, the Post’s publisher, to praise a column with the kind of factual error that would embarrass a j-school student.

Richard Cohen’s unfortunate career is the proper context to understand his column today and the wide outrage that’s greeted it. We are being told that Cohen finds it “hurtful” to be called racist. I am sorry that people on the Internet have hurt Richard Cohen’s feelings. I find it “hurtful” that Cohen endorses the police profiling my son. I find it eternally “hurtful” that the police, following that same logic, killed one of my friends. I find it hurtful to tell my students that, even in this modern age, vending horse-shit is still an esteemed and lucrative profession.

Ta-Nehisi Coates puts Richard Cohen and a lot of other bullshit into crystalline context in 245 words. That, ladies and gentlemen, is writing.

Real Reason W Lays Low

Bombshell in the Michael Lewis Vanity Fair profile of Barack Obama; not only did he slightly move Churchill, he’s changed the rug. Yes, THE Rug. The Washington Post’s Peter Baker profiled it thusly back in ought-six:

Bush seems fixated on his [Oval Office] rug. Virtually all visitors to the Oval Office find him regaling them about how it was chosen and what it represents. Turns out, he always says, the first decision any president makes is what carpet he wants in his office. As a take-charge leader, he then explains, he of course made a command decision – he delegated the decision to Laura Bush, who chose a yellow sunbeam design.

[…]

Sometimes Bush describes [The Rug] as a metaphor for leadership. Sometimes he relates how Russian President Vladimir Putin admired the carpet. Sometimes he seems most taken by the lighting qualities.

Though no one will ever be sure, Bush presumably filled out most of Decision Points with his thoughts on the subject; however, he did succinctly summarize The Rug (and its place in history) in the same 2006 WP piece:

“The interesting thing about this rug and why I like it in here is ‘cause I told Laura one thing. I said, ‘Look, I can’t pick the colors and all that. But make it say ‘optimistic person.’”

And just what did Obama choose to replace this with?

[Obama] ordered a new oval rug [for the Oval Office] inscribed with his favorite brief quotations from people he admires. “I had a bunch of quotes that didn’t fit [on the rug],” he admitted. One quote that did fit, I saw, was a favorite of Martin Luther King Jr.’s: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

To echo George Will, “if the Republican Party cannot win in this environment, it has to get out of politics and find another business. ”

Perhaps his raw, slightly unkempt suit balances out Romney’s snazzier, controlled appearance. Ryan’s Midwestern sensibilities and baggy pants may appeal to swing voters who think cuff links are wasteful expenditures. The man believes in trimming budgets, not pant legs.

Katherine Boyle delivering what must be the finest non-Onion sourced political quotation ever written. The Washington Post, everyone. Cannot imagine why that’s an industry in bad decline. Just a tough environment out there for Serious People; it’s not the content at all. No way.
Source: Washington Post

Romney won’t have 60 votes in the Senate. But if he has 51, he can use the budget reconciliation process, which is filibuster-proof, to get rid of the law’s spending.

Ezra Klein reflects on President Romney’s potential chances and methods should he try repealing the ACA.
I’m not sure when, if ever, the DC Commentariat will get this through their heads: the next time the GOP holds the Presidency and a non-supermajority in the Senate, the filibuster will be eliminated approximately 30 seconds into the new Congress. Period, the end, carve it in stone.
Reconciliation won’t even be an issue with ACA repeal. It will be a simple majority vote, no filibusters allowed because there aren’t any allowed for any reason. Same with the functional elimination of Medicare, Social Security, and all the other Glibertarian wonders that await us under the Ryan budget plan when and if Romney wins. There’s simply no other way to get their preferred policies through, and the next time they have control of these levers of power they will get their policies through, no matter what it takes. Eliminating the filibuster will be among the more minor procedural changes and will be lost in the shuffle that heralds the end of the New Deal and basically all of the legislative 20th century.
Those are the stakes. Just when, exactly, will anyone in DC realize it? Sometime six to eight years after it all transpires, apparently. I’m assuming David Brooks already has an editorial in the can praising the end of filibusters. For Democrats, anyway.

Even more reason to do nothing. The joy of gridlock will hike capital gains taxes up to 25% in the absence of any actions on the part of Congress. Barring anything actually, you know, happening in the Congress, Mitt and other Masters of the Universe will finally see something approaching a reasonable tax rate. Very Serious People will tell you otherwise, but for the next few years gridlock is decidedly Our Friend.