Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Friday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Republicans' Self-Inflicted Political Nightmare

For decades Republican candidates and office holders rallied against abortion and said they supported the overturning of Roe v. Wade.  I suspect most did so not because they held any deep religious belief against abortion but rather because they sought the votes of evangelicals and Christofascists - some of the most consistent voters in Republican primaries over the last few decades - and/or sought to avoid primary challenges.   Most never believed that Roe would actually be overturned, so these rants and positions seemingly offered a safe means to pander to this voting block while never facing any consequences if Roe were in fact overturned.  When Donald Trump sought the GOP nomination, he made similar promises to a coven of "Christian" extremists and induced them to sell their souls and throw aside any moral standing by promising to appoint justices who would overturn Roe (see today's earlier post).  Trump kept his promise to the Christofascists by his Supreme Court appointments and to the shock of many Republicans (and the public at large) Roe was overturned.  Meanwhile, at the state level, Republicans were packing courts with right wing extremists thereby setting the stage for the state supreme court rulings in Florida and Arizona that have banned virtually almost all abortions.  Christofascists are perhaps thrilled by the effort to go backward in time, but the majority of voters are not - many worry what other rights and protections may soon be eliminated by packed, reactionary courts as hinted by justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito - and Republicans find themselves in a political nightmare of their own creation.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this unplanned consequence:

The problem bedeviling Republicans on abortion right now isn’t leaving the contentious issue to the states. It’s leaving abortion rights in the hands of state supreme courts, which Republicans have carefully remolded in a more conservative direction — one that is now inflicting untold political damage on the party.

The country’s been reminded over the past few years about the critical role that state courts play in overseeing fractious issues, from drawing voting districts to refereeing abortion rights. That’s made state high courts, especially in states where justices are elected, new political battlegrounds, with multimillion-dollar campaigns. In Wisconsin, the battle for control over the state Supreme Court last year cost an eye-popping $51 million and shifted control to liberals for the first time in 15 years.

I have sharply criticized judicial elections, but at least that method gives voters some say in what rights they are granted. What’s happened in recent days in Florida and Arizona is the predictable and intended result of a different and more insidious form of politicization of the judiciary: court-packing by Republican governors.

The effectiveness of that tactic was on vivid display this week in Arizona. For more than a half-century, the state had five Supreme Court justices. Then came Republican Gov. Doug Ducey. In 2016, the Republican-controlled state legislature — over the objections of the sitting justices — expanded the court to seven. As a result, Ducey was able to name five of the seven justices sitting today; the other two were named by his Republican predecessor, Jan Brewer.

Ducey rejected suggestions that he was engaging in court-packing, noting that an independent merit selection panel screens candidates and sends recommendations to him. But as a prescient 2020 Politico Magazine story recounted, Ducey made it a goal to shift the Supreme Court to the right. When the judicial nominating commission rejected the application of Bill Montgomery, a prosecutor allied with former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Ducey replaced the three commissioners who had voted against Montgomery — and proceeded to name Montgomery to the high court.

That effort paid off — or backfired — this week. The court reinstated Arizona’s 1864 abortion law, which prohibits the procedure except to save the life of the mother.

[F]our Ducey appointees were still left — and they voted as a bloc to revive the Civil War-era abortion law. The majority professed to be following a course of judicial restraint. . . . we merely follow our limited constitutional role and duty to interpret the law as written.”

Of course, the “citizens” whose judgment the court respected didn’t include women — they couldn’t vote in 1864. Arizona wouldn’t become a state for another 47 years.

The Arizona court didn’t have to come out this way, even after the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In 2022, as the Supreme Court was considering Dobbs, Arizona passed a new law — it didn’t take effect until after Dobbs was decided — that prohibited abortion, “except in a medical emergency,” after 15 weeks. . . . No “trigger” mechanism, like those adopted in other states, provided that the 1864 law would spring back to life if Roe were overruled.

This isn’t judicial restraint — it’s judicial activism. And now Arizona Republicans are reaping what Ducey and his allies sowed.

The same is happening in Florida, although the goings-on there have received less attention. Like Arizona, all seven justices on the Florida Supreme Court were named by Republican governors, five by Gov. Ron DeSantis. . . .his picks have shifted the court sharply to the right. “A newly constituted, conservative court,” with appointments “I hoped would judge in the mold of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas,” DeSantis wrote in his book.

Hence, the latest pair of abortion rulings this month from the Florida Supreme Court. In one case, the court rejected a challenge to the state’s 15-week abortion law — a decision that effectively allows a new, even stricter six-week ban to go into effect. In the second case, the court permitted a proposed constitutional amendment to protect abortion rights to appear on the November ballot.

This may sound like a split-the-difference approach. Don’t be fooled. In the ballot measure case, three dissenting justices, all appointed by DeSantis, raised the question, not posed by the advocates themselves, of whether and how the Florida constitution protects the rights of fetuses — a claim of “fetal personhood” that came up in the Alabama in vitro fertilization case and that is the next frontier in the legal abortion wars.

“The exercise of a ‘right’ to an abortion literally results in a devastating infringement on the right of another person: the right to live,” wrote Justice Renatha Francis. “And our Florida Constitution recognizes that ‘life’ is a ‘basic right’ for ‘all natural persons.’

[A] fourth DeSantis appointee who ruled to allow the ballot measure to go forward, Chief Justice Carlos G. Muñiz, raised the question of fetal rights at oral argument, and an ominous footnote in the majority opinion noted that the “constitutional status of a preborn child … presents complex and unsettled questions.”

In other words, don’t count on us upholding your ballot measure even if it does get the required 60 percent vote. So much for letting the people decide.

More Friday Male Beauty

 

Archaic Abortion Bans: Donald Trump Is Responsible

In June, 2016, Donald Trump met with leading far right wing evangelical "leaders" and Christofascists and promised them the moon if they would rally their sheep-like, gullible and poorly informed followers to his standard.  Top on the list of these religious extremists was overturning Roe v. Wade and Trump promised to appoint right wing ideologues to the U.S. Supreme Court who would overturn the almost 50 year legal precedent.  Trump's nominees, Gorsuch, Kavanagh, and Coney-Barrett - all of whom lied and committed perjury during their confirmation hearings when asked about Roe and Supreme Court precedents - delivered on Trump's promise to the religious extremists and Roe was overturned. Abortion was not the only item on the wish list of the Christofascists and Christian Taliban members at the June 2016 gathering.  Also on the list were turning back LGBT rights, restricting contraception, and broad licenses for Christian extremists to discriminate and exemptions from non-discrimination and public accommodation laws. Trump's regime sought to undermine regulations protecting LGBT Americans and several Supreme Court rulings have favored Christian extremists and eroded the separation of church and state. Now, women and girls across numerous states are finding their access to reproductive health care wiped away as Republican controlled legislatures and state courts are running wild and pushing their states backward in time to the 1800's. In the wake of the fruits of the end of Roe, Trump is lying - as always - and contorting himself in an effort to avoid responsibility for the elimination of women's rights for which he and his court nominees and other Republicans are responsible.  A piece in The New Yorker rightly underscores that Trump is responsible and how, with luck, he and his GOP prostitutes and sycophants will be held accountable.  Here are highlights:

Just about everyone knows that Donald Trump was for abortion before he was against it. But what, exactly, is the position of the formerly “very pro-choice” ex-President now that his four years in the White House resulted in what might be termed catastrophic success for the anti-abortion movement? That, it turns out, is one of the harder questions to answer so far in 2024. Trump, whose only ideology is opportunism, has been predictably all over the map on the repeal of Roe v. Wade. To right-wing audiences, he frequently and loudly brags about being the author of Roe’s destruction. Bragging is his happy place; of course he cannot resist taking credit for a historic accomplishment. “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade,” he exulted on social media in May of last year. “I did it and I am proud to have done it,” he said on a Fox News town hall earlier this year.

On Monday, in a video meant to explain his post-Roe position, Trump repeated this claim. “I was proudly the person responsible,” he said. The problem for Trump is that this is a losing position with voters—millions of whom have gone to the polls, in red states such as Kansas and in battlegrounds such as Michigan, to keep abortion legal in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, which allows individual states to set abortion policy.

Which is why, in his video, he seems like a man running for cover that simply isn’t there. Several times in the four-and-a-half-minute statement, Trump invokes the concept of states’ rights as if it’s a magic incantation, offering him free passage out of a political mess. . . . This position, however, has so far succeeded mostly in angering all sides.

Whatever the explanation for his mish-mash of a statement, there was no doubt a certain amount of Schadenfreude in watching Trump squirm after all the mayhem he’s caused. The video, which featured a jittery Trump speaking to the camera in front of the Mar-a-Lago fireplace, was marked by abrupt edits suggesting that it had required many, many takes to shoot. . . . . The whole production exuded a certain cry-for-help vibe: Perhaps Trump was panicking over the thought that his great victory in ending Roe could actually prove to be the one winning issue that Joe Biden has against him in their rematch?

Two recent court decisions, which bookended Trump’s video, underscored the former President’s bind so completely that they might as well have been ordered up by Biden’s campaign. Last Monday in Florida and this Tuesday in Arizona, state Supreme Courts ruled to allow highly restrictive abortion laws to take effect, even as voters in both states are expected to vote this fall on referendums that would reinstate reproductive rights.

Abortion in 2024 is, in fact, a real crisis affecting real people. And it’s because of him. Where’s the moderation in an abortion strategy that lets Arizona reinstate a near-total abortion ban that was passed back in 1864, before Arizona was even a state? How is this a let-the-people-decide outcome at a time when close to sixty per cent of Arizona voters believe abortion should be always or mostly legal?

Whoever told Trump that “states’ rights” was a safe way out of the abortion fight must have been hiding out in a Southern golf club since 1954, with the TV turned off.

Call it the abortion-news paradox: in the post-Roe era, every crazy court decision, every extremist vote by a Republican-controlled state legislature, may help the Democrats politically in the upcoming election, but it’s terrible in the meantime for the millions of women and girls who are affected. By the Biden campaign’s reckoning, one in three American women are already living in states where abortion is banned in some form—“with more on the way.”

Until the Arizona court decision, signs were discouraging for Biden in a battleground state that he won by less than eleven thousand votes in 2020; now Republican strategists are moaning about an “earthquake” and a “shock to the Republican body politic” so terrible for their party that it will “definitely give Biden a leg up going into the election.” “That movement you feel under your feet?” the liberal columnist Laurie Roberts wrote in the Arizona Republic. “That’s one of America’s key battleground states swinging blue.”

Soon after Trump’s confusing announcement, the Biden team rolled out a powerful new ad. It features a young couple in Texas, Josh and Amanda, recounting how, because of a restrictive state law that, post-Dobbs, prompted a hospital to refuse her necessary medical care, Amanda nearly died from sepsis after suffering a miscarriage. The one-minute spot is intimate and devastating. At the end, a simple tagline appears, as the screen fades to black over the sound of Amanda crying: “Trump did this.”

Another ad, turned around quickly after the Arizona court ruling, features Biden himself blaming Trump for taking away women’s “fundamental freedom to control their own bodies” and placing women’s lives in danger as a result. If Trump returns to the White House, Biden asks, “What freedom will you lose next?” He ends the spot—part of a seven-figure ad buy in the state focussing on abortion—by looking into the camera. “I will fight like hell to get your freedom back,” he promises.

If Biden wins in November, I have little doubt that we will look back on the events of this week in Arizona as one of the reasons why.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

It Is Time to Repeal The Comstock Act

Were he living today, Anthony Comstock, for whom the 1873 Comstock Act is named, would be the darling of Christofascists and evangelical extremist who want to outlaw anything that departs from their Bronze Age derived dogma.   Comstock was all for banning and burning offending books and sought to impose his puritanical beliefs on all of society - just like today's scamvangelists and right wing pastors.  In the wake of Arizona's insane Supreme Court ruling this week resurrecting an 1864 law banning abortion and would be Trump 2.0 regime players scheming to use the Comstock Act to ban abortions - and perhaps much, much more - the GOP game plan to breath new life into reactionary statutes still on the books (although heretofore unenforced) to accomplish what they cannot otherwise accomplish through legislation on a national level has been fully exposed. Indeed, the GOP seemingly wants to move America backward in time to when women could not vote and were deemed chattel property of their husbands.   Given the broad scope of the language of the Comstock Act, gays, book publishers and many others should be very fearful of how the antiquated law could be used against them.  An editorial in the Washington Post makes the case for repealing the Comstock now before it can be used by the right for draconian and misogynistic purposes.  Here are excerpts:

Prudish even by the standards of the Victorian Age, Anthony Comstock ranks as one of the more bizarre and destructive figures in U.S. history. The founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1873, Comstock boasted of hounding women to suicide by pursuing their prosecution for selling contraceptive pills or assisting abortions. As a federal postal inspector, he once raided an art gallery selling nude paintings, including a reproduction of the “Birth of Venus,” which a court ordered seized. He saw newspapers, magazines and novels as satanic influences for promoting “evil reading” and encouraged destruction of books.

He lobbied for an 1873 federal law that makes it a felony to mail any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion,” or even any advice on how or where to get an abortion or contraception. Later judicial interpretation prompted removal of the Comstock Act’s prohibition on mailing contraception, but its purported ban on abortion-related supplies is still on the books. Americans were reminded of this astonishing — and troubling — fact at Tuesday’s Supreme Court oral argument over efforts by antiabortion doctors to rescind Food and Drug Administration rules allowing the distribution of mifepristone, used for medical abortions.

During the hearing, Erin Hawley, counsel for the antiabortion doctors, claimed the FDA had ignored the “plain text” of the Comstock Act when it permanently removed a requirement women get mifepristone pills in-person last year. Ms. Hawley got apparent support in this contention from Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Though the justices seemed likely to back the FDA for other reasons, the emergence of the Comstock Act from legal dormancy could foreshadow more conservative attempts to use it against reproductive freedom — in a post-Roe world where nearly two-thirds of all abortions are now carried out by medication. It should never come to that: Congress needs to repeal the law.

Democrats should lead that effort while they still control the Senate and the White House. And they should do so despite understandable fears that trying, and failing, to repeal the law could paradoxically reinforce its validity. It’s a fight worth having. Let House Republicans refuse to consider a bill, or the Senate GOP filibuster one, and explain to voters why they oppose eliminating even the theoretical chance people could get up to five years in prison (the maximum penalty for a first offense) for shipping mifepristone. (The law also applies to express common carriers, such as FedEx and UPS.)

In fact, a number of groups and individuals on the right are trying to revive the Comstock Act. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a policy blueprint for a second Donald Trump term to which more than 100 conservative groups contributed, says a Trump Justice Department should “announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such [abortion] pills.”

Last month, 26 Republican senators and 199 GOP members of the House signed a friend of the court brief in the mifepristone case accusing the FDA of “blatant disregard” for the Comstock Act.

Companies and individuals are probably safe for now because a Biden appointee at the department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion in December 2022 construing the Comstock Act to allow mailing mifepristone if the sender “lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully.” But a Justice Department under Mr. Trump could easily issue new guidance.

Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court picks were instrumental in the court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, a fact for which the presumptive GOP nominee and his party are paying a political price. For the time being, Mr. Trump is trying to take credit with the GOP’s pro-life wing, while ducking the issue otherwise. A high-profile effort to repeal the Comstock Act could force him to say clearly where he stands. One way or the other, this obsolete, misogynist law needs to be wiped off the statute books.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

Arizona Ruling Upends Trump's Smoke Screen on Abortion

Earlier in the week Donald Trump tried to use a smoke screen on the issue of abortion by saying that he wanted the states to set abortion laws even as prospective members of a Trump 2.0 regime are engaged in machinations to use the 1873 Comstock Act to in effect ban most abortions nationwide. That ruse was just blown wide open when the GOP controlled Arizona Supreme Court resurrected an even older statute - it dates from 1864 and before Arizona was even a state - to ban almost all abortions in that state and impose five year prison sentences on those aiding in abortions.  Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade - something Trump has repeatedly taken credit for - thanks to the right wing extremists Trump appointed to the Court (and who perjured themselves during their confirmation hearings), Republicans have paid a price at the polls.  Worse yet, the overturning of Roe made clear that abortion is only one of a list of rights and freedoms that Christofascists and far right religious extremists want to erase.  Clarence Thomas made this clear when he indicated that he also wants the Court to revisit same sex marriage, sodomy laws, and even the right to use contraception.  Both the scheming of Trump's advisors and today's Arizona ruling show that Republicans clearly want to move the country far backwards in time in terms of individual rights and freedoms.  Gays, blacks, Hispanics and even married couples need to wake up to the existential threat Trump and today's GOP pose to them.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the reverberations of the Arizona ruling:

It took little more than a day for Donald Trump’s political gambit on abortion to come undone. . . . . Trump was looking for a way to neutralize or at least muddy a galvanizing issue that has fueled Democratic victories for nearly two years. He hoped to keep it mostly out of the conversation ahead of the November elections.

On Tuesday, the Arizona Supreme Court showed just how difficult it will be to do that. The court resurrected an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions, except to save the life of the mother. The law also imposes penalties on abortion providers.

Trump had said let the states handle the issue. The Arizona court showed the full implications of that states’ rights strategy.

The Arizona ruling came in a state that will be especially crucial in deciding the outcome of the presidential election, a state that President Biden won by fewer than 11,000 votes and that Trump’s campaign team has eyed as one of the best opportunities for a pickup. It is likely that a referendum to protect abortion rights will be on Arizona’s ballot in November. The court ruling only heightens the significance of the issue for the rest of the campaign year.

But the court ruling reverberated far beyond Arizona’s borders. The Biden-Harris campaign and other Democrats pounced on the ruling in an effort to further their argument that Trump and Republicans are a threat to freedoms.

All abortion politics are national, not local. Abortion developments — new laws, new restrictions, new stories of women caught up in heart-wrenching and sometimes life-threatening decisions — are no longer confined to the geography where they take place. They are instantly part of the larger debate.

That has been true ever since the Supreme Court, in its 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, ended the constitutional right to abortion, which had existed for half a century. That decision, which overturned the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, provided a long-sought victory to abortion opponents, and they have since helped enact highly restrictive laws in states where Republicans control legislatures and the governor’s offices.

Politically, however, Republicans have paid a high price. Time after time, in red states and blue states alike, in both votes to install abortion rights into state constitutions and political campaigns waged around the issue of freedom of choice, Democrats have consistently won, often by significant margins.

The energy of this movement was first seen in Kansas soon after the Dobbs decision, when voters in that Republican stronghold supported keeping abortion rights in the state constitution. It continued through the 2022 midterm elections and after. Abortion rights proponents are working to put referendums on several state ballots beyond Arizona in November. An issue that once was more motivating for abortion opponents has become one of the most energizing issues on the left.

When he ran for president the first time in 2016, he was asked by Chris Matthews, then of MSNBC, whether there should be punishment for abortion. “There has to be some form of punishment,” he said. “For the woman?” Matthews asked. Trump responded, “Yeah, there has to be some form.”

In that campaign, he vowed to nominate justices to the high court who would vote to get rid of Roe. He made good on that promise and helped install three new members — Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — to give conservatives a 6-3 majority. Once the Dobbs case came before the court, Roe became history. Few decisions in recent years have had such an instantaneous political impact.

Trump has said repeatedly he is proud of what he did to assure that Roe would be overturned. Nobody did more to get rid of Roe than he did, he says. He said it again Monday in the video statement he issued outlining his thinking about a national ban on abortion.

To Trump, winning elections — winning his election — is everything and he calculated that a campaign debate about a national abortion law would lessen his chances in November. About that he is not wrong.

His announcement Monday split the right. Many Republicans fell in line behind him, as they always do. But not everyone. . . . . “Many Good Republicans lost Elections because of this Issue, and people like Lindsey Graham, that are unrelenting, are handing Democrats their dream of the House, Senate, and perhaps even the presidency,” he wrote on Truth Social.

By now it is clear how Trump has used the abortion issue to advance his own political ambitions. By declaring his strong opposition to abortion and by championing conservative nominees to the Supreme Court, he helped to cement support among evangelical Christians. They are now among his strongest backers.

His statement Monday was the latest effort to turn the issue to his personal advantage. On the politics, he is correct about the dangers to Republicans of continuing the intense debate about abortion rights. But as Pence said, he has abandoned those whose interests he once vowed to serve.

There is no safe harbor for Trump and the Republicans at this point. The abortion issue is no less complex and no less difficult for many Americans than it was while Roe was in force. But politically the winds have shifted, and done so dramatically.

Trump can make his own statements about state vs. national restrictions, but the debate set off by the Supreme Court nearly two years ago is not abating, as Arizona’s landmark decision Tuesday showed. Trump set this in motion, and now it is mostly out of his control.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

Don't Believe Trump on Abortion (Or Anything Else)

The issue of abortion restrictions remains radioactive for Republican candidates and has cost Republicans dearly at the polls since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.  With abortion access on the ballot in Florida this November, as well as several other states, it the issue will continue to roil Republican election efforts.  In this atmosphere, yesterday in announcing his supposed position on abortion  Donald Trump did what he always does: he lied and said he would leave the issue to the states.  In doing so, he never answered whether he would sign a national ban on abortion should he regain the White House and Republicans control both houses of Congress.   Moreover, he deliberately said nothing about the machinations of those who would likely de in a second Trump regime to use the 1873 Comstock Act to restrict access to abortion - and perhaps even other contraception materials/methods - by banning the shipment by mail or other carriers of abortion drugs and perhaps even items used in surgical abortions.  Indeed, the Acts language bans the mailing of every “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article,” including “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing” intended for “producing abortion.”  Thus, the list of what could be banned is lengthy indeed.  A column in the New York Times looks at Trump's dishonest attempt to hide the true agenda of the extremists who would make up the Trump 2.0 regime.  Here are Excerpts:

When Donald Trump was asked about the recent Florida Supreme Court decision upholding his adopted state’s abortion ban, he promised that he would announce where he stands this week, a sign of how tricky the politics of reproductive rights have become for the man who did more than any other to roll them back. Sure enough, on Monday, he unveiled his latest position in a video statement that attempted to thread the needle between his anti-abortion base and the majority of Americans who want abortion to be legal.

Trump’s address was, naturally, full of lies, including the absurd claim that “all legal scholars, both sides,” wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, and the obscene calumny that Democrats support “execution after birth.” But the most misleading part of his spiel was the way he implied that in a second Trump administration, abortion law will be left entirely up to the states.

Trump probably won’t be able to dodge the substance of abortion policy for the entirety of a presidential campaign; eventually, he’s going to have to say whether he’d sign a federal abortion ban if it crossed his desk and what he thinks of the sweeping abortion prohibitions in many Republican states. But let’s leave that aside for the moment, because when it comes to a second Trump administration, the most salient questions are about personnel, not legislation.

Should Trump return to power, he plans to surround himself with die-hard MAGA activists, not the establishment types he blames for undermining him during his first term. And many of these activists have plans to restrict abortion nationally without passing any new laws at all.

Key to these plans is the Comstock Act, the 19th-century anti-vice law named for the crusading bluenose Anthony Comstock, who persecuted Margaret Sanger, arrested thousands, and boasted of driving 15 of his targets to suicide. Passed in 1873, the Comstock Act banned the mailing of every “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article,” including “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing” intended for “producing abortion.”

Until quite recently, the Comstock Act was thought to be moot, made irrelevant by a series of Supreme Court decisions on the First Amendment, contraception and abortion. But it was never actually repealed, and now that Trump’s justices have scrapped Roe, his allies believe they can use Comstock to go after abortion nationwide.

“We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” Jonathan F. Mitchell, Texas’ former solicitor general and the legal mind behind the state’s abortion bounty law, told The New York Times in February. Mitchell is very much a MAGA insider; he represented Trump in the Supreme Court case arising from Colorado’s attempt to boot the ex-president off the ballot as an insurrectionist.

Mitchell is far from the only Trumpist dreaming of bringing Comstock back from the dead. The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, . . . . lays out an agenda for the department to target abortion medication.

“Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, there is now no federal prohibition on the enforcement of this statute,” he wrote of Comstock.

A resurrected Comstock Act wouldn’t just stop women from ordering abortion pills through the mail. It could also prevent doctors and pharmacies from dispensing them, since neither the Postal Service nor express carriers like UPS and FedEx would be allowed to ship them in the first place. And it would give the Justice Department a rationale for cracking down on the networks that help provide pills to women in states with abortion bans.

Some interpretations of the Comstock Act might curtail surgical abortion as well, since supplies used to perform them travel through the mail. Abortion could remain legal in some states but become nearly impossible to obtain.

Some anti-abortion leaders, knowing that their schemes are unpopular, don’t want Trump to talk about them before he’s in office. Speaking of Comstock, a movement attorney told The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey: “It’s obviously a political loser, so just keep your mouth shut. Say you oppose a federal ban, and see if that works.”

That is clearly what Trump is trying to do. Whether it works is up to all of us.

The only way to protect abortion access, access to contraception, and perhaps a host of other things is to make sure Trump is defeated in November and make sure that Republicans control neither of the houses of Congress.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Monday Male Beauty

 

Russian Propaganda Has "Infected" the Republican Base

With the likes of Tucker Carlson and many others on right wing "news" outlets actively pushing Russian propaganda not to mention all kinds of insane conspiracy theories and simple false facts, it is little surprise that at least some Republicans are beginning to belatedly admit that the Republican Party base is now thoroughly infected by Kremlin lies and falsehoods. Adding to the phenomenon is Donald Trump's endless efforts to push Vladimir Putin's agenda, raising thoughts once again of what exactly Putin has on Trump.  True, Trump would like to be a dictator like Putin, but the admiration of tyrants doesn't seem an adequate explanation for Trump's behavior and that of his minions within the GOP, especially in the House of Representatives.  Indeed, over the weekend Trump indicated that he wants (in addition to more tax cuts for billionaires) to force Ukraine to surrender part of its national territory to Russia, a move that would be akin to appeasement of Hitler in the lead up to WWII when the West sat by and saw Germany take over Austria and Czechoslovakia.  There was a time during the Cold War when such behavior might have been deemed treason, but not in today's Republican Party.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at those belatedly bemoaning how the GOP base is now drinking Russian Kool-Aid.  Here are highlights:

Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said Sunday that it was “absolutely true” that some Republican members of Congress were repeating Russian propaganda about the invasion of Ukraine instigated by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Turner did not specify which members he was referring to, but he said he agreed with House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), who said in an interview with Puck News last week that Russian propaganda had “infected a good chunk of my party’s base” and suggested that conservative media was to blame.

When asked on Sunday, Turner said he agreed with McCaul’s sentiments.

“We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages — some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,” Turner said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The pro-Russia messaging, Turner said, has made it harder for Ukraine’s supporters in the GOP to frame the conflict as “an authoritarian-versus-democracy battle.” “Ukraine needs our help and assistance now, and this is a very critical time for the U.S. Congress to step up and provide that aid,” Turner added.

Billions of dollars in badly needed military funding for Ukraine has stalled in Congress for months, amid growing opposition from Republicans, and particular vehemence from the GOP’s right flank. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has proposed forging a “peace treaty with Russia” in lieu of supporting Ukraine, has vowed to remove House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) should he move forward with a vote on an aid package.

U.S. allies and NATO members are also growing increasingly worried about future Russian aggression. The Washington Post reported this weekend that if Donald Trump wins the November election, he is proposing to push Ukraine to cede wide swaths of its territory to Russia, thus expanding the reach of Putin’s dictatorship.

Still, some lawmakers are more optimistic about getting some type of deal passed. Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.), an outspoken Republican supporter of Ukraine aid, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that he believed Johnson will prioritize passing supplemental security assistance for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan after Congress returns on Tuesday from a two-week recess.

The Senate earlier this year approved a $95.3 billion funding package. Many senators have echoed the White House’s warnings that without a fresh infusion of weapons from the United States, Ukraine risks ceding its war to Russia.

But Johnson, amid fierce opposition from his far-right flank, has so far refused to bring the Senate package to a vote on the House floor.

Hill, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, hinted Sunday that Johnson would probably introduce a version of the supplemental national security package that includes an additional provision to redirect certain frozen Russian assets toward paying for Ukraine’s reconstruction.

However, any changes to the legislation in the House would necessitate significant further delays to the provision of aid, by forcing the chambers to reconcile and approve the differences. But Hill said he believed there is widespread bipartisan support for the new provision, known as the REPO Act.

Large parts of the GOP has become the party of Putin.

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Corporate America Is In Denial About the Danger Trump Poses

Like many of the very wealthy, leaders of many segments of corporate think their wealth, influence and economic power will shield them from the severe turbulence a second Trump regime could unleash.  The mindset is akin to that of many in late 1920's and early 1930's Germany held in the face of growing Nazi power.  Time proved that mindset to have been disastrously wrong and ultimately wealthy Jews found their wealth would not protect them from the Holocaust and by the end of WWII, much of Germany's industrial base was in ruins. A lengthy piece in the New York Times Magazine looks at the phenomenon and lays out just how bad a second Trump regime could prove to both everyday Americans and much of corporate America. At his rallies and in unhinged statements, Trump has made clear what he wants to do if he returns to the White House that could cause extreme pain for corporate America.  This threat is made far worse by the probability that many of the so-called "adults in the room" who restrained Trump during his first regime would be absent and in their place would be ideologues and extremists who care nothing about what most Americans and corporate America want.  The column is a wake up call to corporate leaders who need to seriously understand the turmoil and economic pain Trump could usher in.  Here are excerpts:

There was anxiety in the thin mountain air when the planet’s economic leaders gathered in January at Davos for the 54th meeting of the World Economic Forum. Donald Trump had just trounced Nikki Haley in the Iowa caucuses, all but securing the Republican nomination for president. Haley was reliable, a known quantity. A resurgent Trump, on the other hand, was more worrying.

Dimon presides over the largest and most profitable bank in the United States and has done so for nearly 20 years. Maybe more than any single individual, he stands in for the Wall Street establishment and, by extension, corporate America. With his comments at Davos, he seemed to be sending a message of good will to Trump on their behalf. But he also appeared to be trying to put his fellow globalists at ease, reassuring them that America, long a haven for investors fleeing risk in less-stable democracies, would remain a safe destination for their money in a second Trump administration.

But would it? As Dimon noted, for all Trump’s extreme rhetoric in the 2016 campaign — his threats to rip up America’s international trade agreements and his attacks on “globalization” and the “financial elite” — his presidency, like most presidencies, proved to be business-friendly. . . . . And the Trump administration’s economic agenda of reduced taxes and deregulation largely suited corporate America’s interests; JPMorgan saved billions of dollars a year thanks to Trump’s corporate tax cuts.

But Trump and those around him are signaling that a second Trump administration would be very different. They promise a more populist economic agenda and a more populist governing style to match, with steep tariffs on imported goods and punitive measures against companies that do business with China. And his team has been clear about the fact that Trump is ready to move ahead without the blessing of the business community. “You’ll see loyalists,” says Brian Ballard, a fund-raiser and former lobbyist for Trump. “Wall Street’s supermen who thought they were the smartest guys in the room? That sort of stuff he won’t tolerate.”

Scholars who have spent their careers studying populist movements are not confused about what to expect. They have seen this sequence of events play out before, to disastrous effect not just on democracies but on businesses — and business leaders. If history offers any guide, they say, it’s that the Davos crowd should be a lot more concerned about a second Trump term.

For all the free-floating anxiety at Davos, America’s executive class seems to be maintaining a base-line faith that its interests aren’t really on the ballot in November — that no matter who occupies the White House, the conditions that have kept it at the center of the global economy for a century aren’t in any real danger. But those conditions could easily change, and significantly.

There may be nothing executives can say or do that would make a difference at this point. But they might want to start considering their options. . . . “They are missing that this is a moment of systemic danger for capitalist systems as we know them, and globalization as we know it.”

For decades, America’s business leaders got more or less what they wanted from the White House, regardless of who occupied it. . . . . there are no serious ideological competitors left to liberal democracy,” the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote in his 1992 book, “The End of History and the Last Man.”

History had ended before. The Gilded Age of the late 19th century marked the last, climactic chapter of decades of largely unconstrained corporate growth and ostentatious displays of private wealth. Then, as now, populists protested. Depression and war came next, accompanied by a new regulatory regime — the New Deal. Years of rapid growth and reduced income inequality followed, but they came to an abrupt halt with the oil crisis and recession of the mid-1970s

After Brexit — the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union in 2016 — there could be no doubt that history had started again. A new populist wave had already been swelling for years, but the world’s business leaders were nevertheless blindsided by the referendum’s passage, having vastly underestimated the growing backlash against globalization. Stock markets around the world tanked as investors worried about what this wave of nationalism might mean for Europe and the broader economy. For many British businesses, the effects of Brexit have been devastating, reducing investments, increasing costs and creating both labor and supply shortages.

Trump’s rise seemed to mark the arrival of this wave on America’s shores, but his antiglobalist rhetoric on the stump didn’t amount to much once he was in office. The business community got the tax cuts and deregulation that it wanted, even if Trump’s public image created problems for executives who had to answer to shareholders or employees. . . . Still, when all was said and done, the Trump presidency was good for business leaders, driving up stock prices and spurring an increase in mergers and acquisitions and initial public offerings.

Their memories of that era have surely been made rosier by their frustrations with President Biden, who has been a much more proactive regulator. . . . The Biden administration is also notably light on former corporate executives.

But scholars of populism warn that a second Trump administration could be far more destabilizing to America’s business leaders and to the larger global economic order. Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, detailed the many potential dangers ahead in a report last year, “How Does Business Fare Under Populism?” Examining the recent economic histories of Hungary, Brazil and India, she found that populist governments significantly increase volatility and risk by using their regulatory power to tilt markets or outright take control of businesses. The report makes for ominous reading for those accustomed to the comfort and stability of the neoliberal orthodoxy. “The business community here doesn’t understand what is about to hit them,” Kleinfeld told me.

Trump has made no secret of his intentions. Over the course of his campaign, he has outlined a radical program of protectionism, calling for a phaseout of all “essential goods” from China, as well as a ban on investments in China and on federal contracts for any company that outsources labor to China. All of this would be concerning enough for American business. But Trump has also proposed a 10 percent tariff on all imported goods, which would amount to the declaration of a global trade war, with other countries almost certainly retaliating with their own tariffs.

Together, these protectionist policies would drive up the cost of goods, create sweeping supply-chain issues and quite possibly cause hyperinflation. “We’re talking about massive economic shock waves,” . . . And tariffs are just the beginning. Trump’s promise to initiate what he calls “the largest deportation operation in American history” could be catastrophic for employers already facing a tight labor market.

Trump’s evolving policy views are in step with the broader populist migration of the conservative movement. . . . In addition to embracing radical protectionism, it calls for the next president to reduce the power of the Federal Reserve, limiting its ability to serve as a so-called lender of last resort for banks and other financial institutions facing cash crunches. This would increase the risk of financial crises, undermining confidence in the U.S. banking system and its financial markets. . . . To limit any internal opposition to his agenda, the report also calls for Trump to reimpose an executive order that Biden revoked, enabling him to fire thousands of civil servants across his administration and replace them with political appointees.

There are other, more existential reasons for concern, too. A hallmark of populist leaders is to tighten the state’s grip on the business sector — a phenomenon that Ian Bassin, a lawyer and pro-democracy activist, calls “autocratic capture.” To get a sense of how this works, consider Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a close Trump ally.

Like Trump, Orban governed as a traditional, pro-business conservative during his first term . . . But he has been a very different leader since returning to office in 2010. In order to consolidate and maintain his power, he has nationalized parts of the private sector, forced banks to reissue mortgages at more favorable rates, ordered utilities to lower prices, levied “crisis taxes” on various industries and imposed price caps on foreign-owned supermarkets. “Anything you were counting on by way of predictability just disappears,” . . . Along the way, Orban has made his friends and family rich, starting investigations, blocking mergers and directing the passage of legislation to devalue some businesses, which has made them vulnerable to takeovers by his allies or the government.

During a recent visit to the United States, Orban was shunned by the Biden administration but welcomed to Mar-a-Lago by Trump.

Privately, some business leaders and corporate executives have begun to express concern about at least some of what they are hearing from Trump. . . . “But they aren’t going to speak out if it’s not necessary.”

It’s easy to understand their hesitation. A number of businesses have already faced punishing backlashes from conservatives for embracing social causes like L.G.B.T.Q. rights. And Trump would almost certainly not hesitate to use the levers of government against anyone who opposed him.

Speaking out could be scary. And yet the entire global economic order might be at risk. Enlightened self-interest typically requires businesses to stay on good terms with those in power, but for Dimon and the Davos set today, that may turn out to be a fatally short-term view. “The only thing we know for sure about globalization,” Harvard’s Abdelal says, “is that it’s desperately fragile and can easily be broken.”

Corporate America needs to wake up and do everything possible to see that Trump is defeated.

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