Friday Homestead Dispatch

Don’t Get Excited

A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost. —The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner

1.
I was playing music last night so I did not witness live the train wreck that many of you saw and heard. I did catch up this morning and what I saw was, indeed, hard to watch. What I will say is to reiterate what some of my go-to scribes have written, and that is we are voting in November on one agenda over the other. Jay Kuo wrote “What will people remember from last night?” The answer is not surprising: that Biden was halting and seemed old, and that Trump the felon lied and lied and lied. In other words, they will come away with the exact same impressions they already have of the candidates. Our job is to continue to make the case that soft-spoken and old is far better than fascist and criminal. And that remains a battle we can win.

Heather Cox Richardson noted that Fuckleroy used a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them. Since the format established that the CNN journalists running the debate did not challenge anything either candidate said, and Dale’s fact-checking spot came long after the debate ended, the takeaway of the event was a focus on Biden’s age rather than on Trump’s inability to tell the truth or form a coherent thought.

Of far more lasting importance than this one night is the clear evidence that stage performance has trumped substance in political coverage in our era. Nine years after Trump launched his first campaign, the media continues to let him call the shots. 

Read on to regard the damage a Republican agenda will reap on our populace…

2.
Word is starting to get out about the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025. This very minute they are hard at work and salivating over their big plans to totally disrupt the workings of the Federal Government once Fuckleroy is re-elected. I started writing about this in March and I’ll continue to shine light on what these people have in mind for this country until Biden is re-elected. I had posted that Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts had written, “The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.“

And even though the Robed Ones unanimously rejected a lawsuit challenging the FDA's approach to regulate the abortion pill mifepristone, allowing the drug to stay on the market, Project 2025 has proposed multiple ways to get around court rulings by “institutionalizing the post-Dobbs environment,” including directing the FDA to rescind its two-decade old approval of mifepristone. Should there be delays on that front, the coalition urges the interim step of moving to “eliminate dangerous tele-abortion and abortion-by-mail distribution” — essentially having a potential Trump administration do what the Supreme Court might not.

Now Roberts (Heritage Foundation president) is saying, “weaponization of the federal government” has been possible only because of the “deep state of entrenched Leftist bureaucrats.” He said he was proud to support the work of American Accountability Foundation workers “in their fight to hold our government accountable and drain it of bad actors.” That there is some premium-grade horseshit.

Heather Cox Richardson jumped in on Tuesday night writing earlier this month, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to oppose in vitro fertilization (IVF), and today, Representative Matt Rosendale (R-MT) announced he would file an amendment to the 2025 defense appropriations bill stripping it of funding for IVF, saying “the practice of IVF is morally wrong.” Trump (Fuckleroy) advisors behind Project 2025 want to enforce the 1873 Comstock Law to ban medical abortion and contraception nationally. Yesterday the Biden-Harris campaign released a tape in which Jeff Durbin, a Trump (Fuckleroy) ally who is pastor of the Apologia Church in Tempe, Arizona, and the founder and head of End Abortion Now, says that abortion is murder and those who practice it deserve execution: “You forfeit your right to live.” 

On top of all this, AP News reports the Heritage Foundation has donated $100,000 to Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation to dig into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees. Their goal is to post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda — and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings.

McCarthyism on the return. Roy Cohn’s lifeless weenie just became a foot-long dog.

3.
Thom Hartmann writes about the Republican model for the future of our country: Republicans have a very specific economic vision for the future of our country, although they rarely talk about it in plain language: they want to make the rest of America look and function just like Mississippi. Including the racism: that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s called the “Southern Economic Development Model” (SEDM) and has been at the core of GOP economic strategy ever since the days of Ronald Reagan. While they don’t use those words to describe their plan, and neither did the authors of Project 2025, this model is foundational to conservative economic theory and has been since the days of slavery. He goes on to write, Republicans claim that by offering low-cost non-union labor and little to no regulatory oversight to massive corporations, they’re able to “attract business to the region.” This, they promise, will cause (paraphrasing President Kennedy out of context) “a rising tide that lifts all boats.” Somehow, though, the only people who own boats that rise are those of the business owners and senior executives. The permanent economic underclass is key to maintaining this system with its roots in the old plantation system; that’s why Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina have no minimum wage, Georgia’s is $5.15/hour, and most other GOP states use the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour and $2.13/hour for tipped workers.

HCR also chimed in with another part of the individualist myth that has met reality is that cutting taxes and slashing business regulation would boost the economy. Yesterday the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget compared the $8.4 trillion debt approved by Trump to the $4.3 trillion approved by Biden. It estimated Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and corporations cost $4.8 trillion, which as Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote pointed out, is more than the $4.3 trillion cost of Biden’s “Infrastructure bill, Inflation Reduction Act, American Rescue Plan, CHIPs [and Science Act], PACT [expanding health benefits to veterans exposed to toxic substances and burn pits], student debt forgiveness, and funding the IRS COMBINED.” Under Trump, Congress also passed $3.6 trillion in COVID relief. 

You can check out the Economic Policy Institute’s report on the evolution of the Southern economic development strategy rooted in racism and economic exploitation here.

4.
Most of you may have considered that the next president will likely have the chance to fill two vacancies on the Supreme Court. A big deal as the conservative robed ones have justified the reversal of settled law in the case of Roe v Wade two years ago. And we can’t forget that Citizens United, a decision in 2010 that has allowed for unlimited election spending by corporations and labor unions, and the creation of Super Pacs, barely passed with a 5-4 majority. The justices who voted with the majority assumed that independent spending cannot be corrupt and that the spending would be transparent, but both assumptions have proven to be incorrect.

Now Justice Clarence “Botnpadefore” Thomas has suggested that the robed ones “should reconsider” its past rulings codifying rights to contraception access, same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage.

Here is one GIANT reason to vote blue, folks. Even if other justices are not currently on board with Thomas, and by declining to explicitly repudiate Thomas’ stance, his conservative colleagues provided fodder to the court’s liberal members and left-leaning critics to warn that more overrulings of precedent are on the way.

President Biden said, “Roe recognized the fundamental right to privacy that has served as a basis for so many more rights that we’ve come to take for granted, that are ingrained in the fabric of this country. The right to make the best decisions for your health. The right to use birth control. A married couple in the privacy of their bedroom, for God’s sake. The right to marry the person you love.” Doddering and old he may be but this is what he believes and what his administration has put into action.

And because of the reversal of Roe v Wade, abortion rights are a daily struggle in the land of the free. The Associated Press reports that the analysis out of Johns Hopkins University is the latest research to find higher infant mortality rates in states with abortion restrictions. The researchers looked at how many infants died before their first birthday after Texas adopted its abortion ban in September 2021. They compared infant deaths in Texas to those in 28 states—some also with restrictions. The researchers calculated that there were 216 more deaths in Texas than expected between March and December the next year. In Texas, the 2022 mortality rate for infants went up 8% to 5.75 per 1,000 births, compared to a 2% increase in the rest of the U.S., according to the study in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. Among causes of deaths, birth defects showed a 23% increase, compared to a decrease of about 3% in the rest of the U.S. The Texas law blocks abortions after the detection of cardiac activity, usually five or six weeks into pregnancy, well before tests are done to detect fetal abnormalities.

Doctors across the country are feeling the stress of these barbaric laws. Hiral Tipirneni, an ER doctor in Glendale, AZ, said, “As physicians we’ve taken an oath to care for our patients and ensure their best outcomes and do no harm. These bans directly oppose our oaths and the standards of science-based, data-driven medical care.” He went on to say that Arizona’s anti-abortion laws undermine the work of doctors, who are dedicated to helping their patients stay safe.

The New York Times ran a piece earlier this month on women who have had to travel for an abortion or other essential healthcare. Actually the article is divided into four topics; Abortion Pill Ruling, Tracking Abortion Bans, Mapping Abortion Travel, and Debate Shifts to Pregnancy.

Out-of-state travel for abortions — either to have a procedure or obtain abortion pills — more than doubled in 2023 compared with 2019, and made up nearly a fifth of recorded abortions.

Amy Hagstrom Miller, the founder of Whole Woman’s Health, which runs clinics in Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico and Virginia, said “Abortion is one of the most common procedures in medicine. We’re having people travel hundreds or thousands of miles for a procedure that typically takes less than 10 minutes and can be done in a doctor’s office setting. Nobody does that for any other medical procedure.” Many traveling patients faced multiday trips, lost income and child care costs. Some patients were unable to travel. Earlier research found that in the first half of 2023, almost a quarter of women living in states with near-total bans — who may have otherwise sought an abortion — did not get one.

In Arizona, Democratic Party Chairwoman Yolanda Bejarano said during a Monday morning news conference, “Trump and his MAGA loyalists will not stop until every state in our union lives under a full-scale abortion ban, and the only that we can stop it is if we turn out at the polls and vote for Democrats.” She also said Arizonans face attacks on abortion access from Republicans at both the federal and state level. Republicans hold a razor-thin majority in the Arizona legislature and have spent the last several years passing increasingly restrictive abortion laws, including a 15-week gestational ban that is currently in effect. “Arizonans deserve access to every form of reproductive health care, and the right to access that care solely belongs to us. MAGA Republicans are on the record wanting to ban abortion and Arizonans will remember that in November.”

And in the robed ruling yesterday morning that allows Idaho patients to obtain emergency abortions for now, but sidestepped ruling on whether Idaho’s strict abortion law conflicts with federal law, I agree with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson that it is not a victory for pregnant patients. She said the court had the opportunity “to bring clarity and certainty to this tragic situation, and we have squandered it. While this court dawdles and the country waits, pregnant people experiencing emergency medical conditions remain in a precarious position, as their doctors are kept in the dark about what the law requires. And for as long as we refuse to declare what the law requires, pregnant patients in Idaho Texas, and elsewhere will be paying the price because we owe them — and the nation — an answer to the straightforward pre-emption question presented in these cases, I respectfully dissent.”

This is the Christian Nationalist agenda. This is the Republican agenda. If all eligible voters actually voted, we could wipe this country clean of these prudish moralists and hypocrites. Democracy is hard work.

5.
As Biden and Fuckleroy will both ‘age out’ after this year’s election, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is looking like a natural contender. After serving more than a decade in the Michigan Legislature, Whitmer was elected to the governorship in 2018. She became a national figure during the pandemic, when right-wing media and Republican officials, including Trump, railed against her lockdown measures as extreme government overreach. (Whitmer blames Trump’s rhetoric for inspiring a 2020 kidnapping and assassination plot against her.)

But it was what Whitmer did in 2022 that really cemented her as a political force: With the help of legislative redistricting and a reproductive-rights ballot initiative, she gave Democrats a trifecta, winning re-election and flipping control of both the State House and Senate to her party for the first time in nearly 40 years. She has leveraged that majority to enact a progressive wish list of policies, including basic but meaningful gun-control legislation and a new clean-energy plan, and she’s pushing for universal pre-K and free community college.

Check out the New York Times interview here for more insight about this woman who is also co-chair of Biden’s re-election campaign.

6.
In a bit of refreshing news for a change, Inside Climate News selects 10 Fellows specializing in climate environment and justice reporting as part of a program designed to hone its participants’ writing and reporting skills and deepen their subject matter expertise related to climate change and attribution science, environmental justice, renewable energy, and conservation and regulatory issues at the federal, state and local levels. We need some young idealists about now.

7.
And no newsletter is complete without mentioning Peter Lorre.

And now…