A Huge Progressive Win in Wisconsin

Despite numerous electoral defeats in 2020, 2022, and other races where extreme MAGA candidates and/or darlings of the Christofascists have gone down to defeat, the Republican primary voter base continues to nominate ever more extreme candidates and those Republicans in office,  embrace ever more extreme positions. This despite the fact that poll after poll and survey after survey show that najorities of voters (at least outside of backwaters like southwest Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi to name a few) oppose the GOP war on abortion, gays, accurate history, and voting rights, Republican primary voters nominate candidates that not that many years ago would have been prevented from being on the ballot.  Driving to work Joe Scarborough, a former conservative Republican in Congress lamented that the GOP primary voters and their elected political whores seem unable to look beyond their right wing news bubble and grasp reality.  This propensity to nominate extremists received a sharp rebuke in Wisconsin in a state supreme court race where the progressive candidate annihilated the far right Republican candidate. The race results will have huge impacts on Wisconsin and is yet another message that Republicans around the country will likely ignore to their peril (and the benefit of the rest of us).  A column in the Washington Post looks at the progressive candidates huge victory:

In a state so evenly divided that a 1- or 2-point margin is a resounding victory, Wisconsin voters turned out in droves on Tuesday to deliver an unmistakable blow to right-wing judges and politicians pushing forced-birth laws, hyper-gerrymandering, voter suppression and union-busting. Progressive Judge Janet Protasiewicz clobbered former right-wing state Supreme Court justice Dan Kelly by 11 points. That gives liberal judges a 4-3 majority on the state Supreme Court, a dramatic shift for a court that in recent years had delivered one victory after another to right-wing politicians and activists.

The race turned primarily on two issues: An 1849 abortion ban triggered by the U.S. Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade and a radical gerrymander plan. The latter, possibly the most extreme gerrymander in the country, turned a 50-50 state into a 6-to-2 Republican advantage in congressional seats. The state Supreme Court race, given the issues involved — the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization backlash and the fact the court could play a critical role in determining the certification of Wisconsin’s 2024 presidential electors — had broken all spending records for judicial races, with tens of millions raised and spent by the candidates and third-party groups.

Pundits who thought defeated former president Donald Trump’s indictment would set off some sort of backlash to Kelly’s benefit were engaged in wishful thinking. Wisconsin voters are savvy enough to understand the former president’s legal debacles have nothing whatsoever to do with their state courts.

Democratic state party chairman Ben Wikler, who mounted a mammoth turn-out-the-vote operation, told me Tuesday, “The GOP machine thought they had broken Wisconsin’s democracy enough that they could rip away fundamental rights from half the population and never suffer the consequences. Tonight, an enraged electorate proved them wrong. In the state that tips the country, Dobbs, the crowning achievement of the far right, became its undoing.”

“Republicans here warn that ‘the rule of law’ might be replaced by ‘the rule of Janet,’ and that if she wins, hyperpartisan court races will become the norm,” intoned Semafor’s David Weigel, as if the right’s evisceration of voting rights and reproductive freedom is the norm and exemplifies the rule of law.

Kelly paid lip service during the campaign to the “rule of law,” but he has left little doubt that he is a right-wing champion, not a neutral jurist. He provided legal advice to the state GOP on the phony elector scheme and worked for antiabortion activists. His application to former governor Scott Walker “included a writing sample that likened affirmative action to slavery,” Wisconsin Public Radio reported. No one could be confused about his ideological bent. . . .

Protasiewicz explained in a recent interview for Wisconsin Public Radio, “I tell you what my values are because I think that Supreme Court candidates should share with the community and the electorate what their values are.” However, she added: “Nonetheless, I will uphold the law [and] follow the Constitution when I make any decisions. Nothing is prejudged.”

Frankly, after years of right-wing judges dissembling about their respect for precedent and their supposed open-mindedness (despite public advocacy against abortion), there is something refreshing about progressive judges going to voters to set out their values.

The intellectual dishonesty we get from the Federalist Society’s embrace of cherry-picked originalism (that inevitably leads to results conservatives favor) and the glaring intellectual dishonesty in service of partisanship from the current U.S. Supreme Court have made clear that the “game” is to reason backward from results.

Perhaps it’s time to end the charade wherein right-wing judges pretend not to be right-wing (while their Senate allies bombard any Democratic president’s nominee with QAnon-based conspiracy theories and blatant distortions). Judges on the right have been roving through the judicial landscape to turn back the clock on 150 years of social progress. It’s time to recognize that our courts were long ago politicized.

If voters overwhelmingly elect judges such as Protasiewicz who clearly articulate their values while vowing to consider each case on its merits, then we are witnessing something far too rare: informed democracy. When everyone lays their cards on the table, it turns out that an honest appraisal of judicial philosophies overwhelmingly benefits Democrats.

“The results couldn’t be more clear: Reproductive freedom was the deciding factor in this election. Wisconsinites turned out because they understood that when abortion rights are under attack, the attacks won’t stop there.”

Elected judges around the country should perk up: If they want to hijack democracy by acting like MAGA legislators in robes, they’ll find themselves out of office. And the warning to Republicans could not be more blunt: If you keep pushing right-wing judges widely out of step with the 21st-century United States to trample on cherished civil rights, voters will boot you out, up and down the ballot.

Republicans have every right to panic that Dobbs might usher in a new era of Democratic dominance in critical swing states.

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The Red State Death Surge

Most of the the media continues to be obsessed with covering every aspect of Donald Trump's indictment and arrest and the circus it is generating.  Meanwhilr, other important issues are given less coverage that due.  One example?  How Republican policies in red states are lowering the life expectancy of red state citizens.  In general, advanced nations are seeing further increases in life expectancy yet, in America life expectancy is falling overall.  On closer inspection, life expectancy in liberal blue states is almost the same as in peer nations.  The real decline is concentrated in red states where Republican policies are increasing the death rate and driving down life expectancy. This disparity has not always existed and has increased as Republican policies deprive poor residents of health care and in general are far less supportive of public health.  Thus, red state voters who vote for Republicans and anti-health care for all policies are literally voting for those who are killing them prematurely.  It's insanity yet the Reality of today's far right culture wars.  Here are excerpts from a column in the New York Times:

Last Friday the Medicare trustees released their latest report on the system’s finances, and it contained some unexpected good news: Expenditures are running below projections, and the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund won’t be exhausted as soon as previously predicted.

But one important reason for this financial improvement was grisly: Covid killed a substantial number of Medicare beneficiaries. And the victims were disproportionately seniors already suffering from severe — and expensive — health problems. “As a result, the surviving population had spending that was lower than average.”

Now, Covid killed a lot of people around the world, so wasn’t this just an act of God? Not exactly. You see, America experienced a bigger decline in life expectancy when Covid struck than any other wealthy country. Furthermore, while life expectancy recovered in many countries in 2021, here it continued to fall.

And America’s dismal Covid performance was part of a larger story. I don’t know how many Americans are aware that over the past four decades, our life expectancy has been lagging ever further that of other advanced nations — even nations whose economic performance has been poor by conventional measures. Italy, for example, has experienced a generation of economic stagnation, with basically no growth in real G.D.P. per capita since 2000, compared with a 29 percent rise here. Yet Italians can expect to live about five years longer than Americans, a gap that has widened even as the Italian economy flounders.

What explains the American way of death? A large part of the answer seems to be political.

One important clue is that the problem of premature death isn’t evenly distributed across the country. Life expectancy is hugely unequal across U.S. regions, with major coastal cities not looking much worse than Europe but the South and the eastern heartland doing far worse.

But wasn’t it always thus? No. Geographic health disparities have surged in recent decades. According to the U.S. mortality database, as recently as 1990, Ohio had slightly higher life expectancy than New York. Since then, New York’s life expectancy has risen rapidly, nearly converging with that of other rich countries, while Ohio’s has hardly risen at all and is now four years less than New York’s.

There has been considerable research into the causes of these growing disparities. A 2021 paper published in The Journal of Economic Perspectives examined various possible causes . . . . the best explanation lay in policy: “The most promising explanation for our findings involve efforts by high-income states to adopt specific health-improving policies and behaviors since at least the early 1990s. Over time, these efforts reduced mortality in high-income states more rapidly than in low-income states, leading to widening spatial disparities in health.”

There is, in fact, a strong correlation between how much a state’s life expectancy rose from 1990 to 2019 and its political lean, as measured by Joe Biden’s margin over Donald Trump in the 2020 election . . . . There are several reasons to believe that America’s death trip is largely political rather than economic. One is the comparison with European nations, which have had much better health trends even when, as in Italy, their economies have performed badly.

Another is the fact that some of the poorest states in America, with the lowest life expectancy, are still refusing to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would cover the bulk of the cost (and the failure to expand Medicaid is killing many hospitals). This suggests that they’re failing to improve health because they don’t want to, not because they can’t afford to.

Finally, since Covid struck, residents of Republican-leaning counties have been far less likely to get vaccinated and far more likely to die of it than residents of Democratic-leaning counties — even though vaccines are free.

All of this seems relevant to our current era of culture war, with many Republican politicians praising rural and red-state values while denigrating those of coastal elites. . . . . the culture these politicians want all of America to emulate seems to have a problem with one of society’s most important functions: keeping people from dying early.

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Fox News Just Suffered a Huge Blow

Lost in the media frenzy surrounding Donald Trump's arrest today - something I will enjoy immensely as he is fingerprinted and a mug shot taken - is the huge blow Fox News suffered in the Dominion Voting Systems libel lawsuit.  Not only did the court reject Fow News' motion to dismiss the case - meaning the case will go to trial - but the court also found that on at least 20 occassions Fox made false accusations that Dominion tampered with voting results.  Stated another way, Dominion has met its burden of showing there is no genuine issue of material fact as to falsity, something that almost never happens before a libel case even goes to trial.  All of this means the likelihood of Dominion winning the case and a jury saddling Fox News with a major judgment has increased radically.  Adding to the fun for critics of Fox News is the fact that there is yet a larger judgment sought against Fox in a second libel case.  Combined, the two cases are seeking over $4 billion from Fox News.  Two columns in the Washington Post look at the situation and the reality that “Fox News” is a misnomer and that the cable network isn’t really a news organization. It merely plays one on television — and deserves to lose the $1.6 billion suit to Dominion.   Here are highlights from the first column: 

It’s not just Democrats who believe that Fox News hosts and their guests lied repeatedly about Dominion Voting System efforts to “steal” the 2020 election. It’s also the opinion of Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis.

Davis in a ruling on Friday regarding Dominion’s defamation suit against the network held that on 20 occasions, Fox made false accusations that Dominion tampered with voting results.

“Through its extensive proof, Dominion has met its burden of showing there is no genuine issue of material fact as to falsity,” the judge wrote. Since Fox never disputed falsity, Davis concluded: “The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.” Fox’s motion for summary judgment was rejected, meaning the suit will go to trial.

It cannot be repeated enough: Plaintiffs almost never win on the issue of falsity before the trial even begins. Usually, there is some defense that the facts were plausibly true — or at least that the comments were opinion (therefore, not actionable). Not in this case.

Fox’s lawyers and executives have suggested that Fox wasn’t responsible for what its star hosts said. Davis flatly rejected this. “FNN [Fox News Network] is not a passive entity. FNN controls what is broadcast on its various networks. FNN does this through its employees as agents of FNN,” Davis held. He added, “FNN did in fact publish the statements to its viewers.”

“Even if the neutral report privilege did apply, the evidence does not support that FNN conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting.” He added, “failure to reveal extensive contradicting evidence from the public sphere and Dominion itself indicates its reporting was not disinterested.”

Overall, Davis’s ruling means that even before the first witness is heard in Fox’s defamation trail, the jury will be told the network repeatedly published false statements about Dominion that injured its business reputation. That is not exactly saying that Fox acted with malice, which Dominion’s lawyers will have to prove to win the case. Still, a jury might well come to that conclusion considering that the entity didn’t bother to check out an outrageous, obvious lie. Dominion now starts with a powerful advantage: Who’s going to believe anything Fox says at this point?

“The ruling is as significant for Fox News as it is for the whole of right-wing media,” said Angelo Carusone, CEO of Media Matters and who has documented Fox’s antics for years. “For Fox, the ruling underscores their incredibly weak legal position and dramatically increases the likelihood that they Fox will lose at trial.” He added, “Regardless of how this shakes out legally, Fox is on its heels, which means the right-wing echo-chamber is currently without its conductor at a moment when it needs it the most.”

On the issue of malice, Davis’s damning recitation of the facts shows that Fox knew it was lying. . . . . Fox’s arguments appear weak. It claims there’s a difference between not knowing something is true and knowing it’s false. But running something without any evidence that it is true sounds like the very definition of malice — i.e., reckless disregard for the truth.

 The pretense that Fox is a real news organization is being blown to smithereens — as is a great deal of the right’s narrative about everything from stolen elections to race to immigration. Discredit Fox, and you discredit a huge portion of the right-wing echo chamber and the MAGA pols who thrive in it.

Credible media, elected officials and voters can now stop treating Fox as a legitimate news outlet. If Fox doesn’t believe its own propaganda, why should anyone else?

The second column is similarly damning to Fox News:

What Fox did to Dominion was not journalism. It was more like a mugging.

After the 2020 election, Fox repeatedly aired wild, unsubstantiated and patently false allegations about Dominion’s voting machines having “stolen” votes — and, by extension, the presidency — from incumbent Donald Trump.

In a ruling on Friday sending the case to trial, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis wrote that the evidence produced so far makes it “CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.”

The lies pushed by Fox’s hosts and guests included claims that Dominion was created in Venezuela to rig elections for dictator Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013, and that the company’s machines used some kind of algorithm to change Trump ballots into votes for Joe Biden. These and other false statements, Davis ruled, were presented by Fox as fact rather than opinion and — to state the obvious — were harmful to Dominion’s reputation.

What is most stunning about the voluminous evidence presented thus far by Dominion is how differently Fox operates from any news organization I’ve encountered in all my years as a journalist.

Text messages, emails and other internal Fox communications show that in the weeks after Election Day, as Trump and his advocates pushed the “stolen election” lie, the network’s most senior executives — including Murdoch himself — and its most popular hosts were less concerned about reporting the truth than about having Fox’s huge, lucrative, Trump-supporting audience stolen away by even more MAGA-friendly outlets, such as Newsmax and One America News (OAN), with even fewer journalistic scruples.

At legitimate news organizations, senior figures do not seek to have staff members fired for telling the truth. At Fox, however, this appears to be business as usual. During the 2020 vote count, Fox was the first network to call Arizona for Biden — which all but extinguished any chance for Trump to win an electoral majority and sent him into a rage. Real news organizations take pride in being first — and right — on an election call. Fox, by contrast, ended up firing the politics editor who oversaw the Arizona call, ostensibly as part of a bureaucratic reorganization.

[T]he network’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, complained in early December 2020 about an anchor who had fact-checked some of Trump’s false “stolen election” claims. “This has to stop now,” Scott wrote. “This is bad business and there clearly is a lack of understanding [of] what is happening in these shows. The audience is furious and we are just feeding them material. Bad for business.”

I don’t believe this case threatens the protections accorded to journalists. My only worry is that some people might get the idea that actual news organizations think and act like Fox. We do not.

Anyone who watches Fox News is either a total fool or is allowing themselves to be played for fools. 

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Africa is Marching Backward on LGBT Rights

Much of Africa remains a hell hole where ignorance flourishes and, if one is LGBT, the best option is to leave the continent entirely.   With leaders and legislators utterly ingnorant to the fact that anti-gay policies and homophobia were European imports, not indiginous to the continent, and American evangelicals and Christofascists working hard and spending lavishly to spread their anti-LGBT posion, prospects for improvement are bleak.   Adding to the ominous situation are Russia's and China's embrace of anti-gay policies as a wedge issue against American human rights policies.  Putin in particular has gone all in when it comes to anti-LGBT laws as he has pandered to the long anti-democractic and anti-modernity Russian Orthodox Church as a means to shore up political support on the home front. Leading the way in anti-gay extremism is Uganda where now simply being gay can lead toinprisonment.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the horrible reality across much of Africa.  Here are highlights:

The Ugandan parliament’s discriminatory bill making it a crime to identify as gay is an abhorrent assault on personal freedom and human dignity, and the country’s president, Yoweri Museveni, should not sign it into law. That may be too much to hope, since he has regularly made homophobic remarks, including last month calling LGBT people “deviants.” Also, this draconian bill passed to applause and cheers in the legislative chamber, with all but two of the 389 lawmakers at the session in favor.

Sadly, Uganda is not an outlier in Africa, posing a challenge for President Biden and other Western leaders as they seek to engage with countries on the continent — and keep them from joining China’s orbit.

Uganda’s 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Bill would not only make it illegal to identify as gay, punishable by prison time, it would also place a duty on friends and family members to report anyone in a same-sex relationship. Journalists and media outlets found to publish or broadcast supposed gay content could be prosecuted. Funding for any LGBT-related activities would be outlawed. And anyone found engaging in “aggravated homosexuality,” defined as abusing children or vulnerable people, would be subject to the death penalty.

Sadly, while this bill is extreme, Uganda is hardly alone in its anti-LGBT posture. Of the 64 or so countries that still criminalize same-sex relationships, at least half — at least 32 by most counts — are in Africa. While generally the world is moving toward more acceptance on LGBT rights, Africa forms a near-unanimous block of intolerance. A core group of African states nearly derailed the appointment and renewal of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s independent expert on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Near, but not unanimous. South Africa, which held its first Pride march in 1990, became the first country on the continent to legalize same-sex marriages. Five other countries have recently decriminalized same-sex relationships: Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, Lesotho and Seychelles.

The Spartacus Blog’s regular Gay Travel Index, which advises LGBT vacationers on the best places to enjoy themselves and where to avoid, lists only South Africa and the French island of Reunion as secure destinations in Africa for gay travelers. The worst-ranked countries are Niger, Mali, Lesotho, Cape Verde and Botswana. In four countries, Nigeria, Mauritania, Somalia and South Sudan, being gay is punishable by death.

Egyptian security forces in recent years have been accused by human rights organizations of detaining and torturing LGBT people. Rwandan authorities reportedly detained LGBT people in the lead-up to the 2021 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, saying they did not represent “Rwandan values.” Gay people in Nigeria are regularly arrested.

Vice President Harris, on her recent three-nation trip to the continent, rightly talked about the need for African countries to ensure “all people be treated equally.” She spoke first in Ghana, where the parliament is considering a bill almost as bad as Uganda’s that would imprison people who identify as gay and make it a crime to advocate for LGBT rights. Harris said she raised the issue of human rights in private talks with President Nana Akufo-Addo. . . . . But even that “quiet diplomacy” approach provoked fierce criticism. The Biden administration’s advocacy of LGBT rights is likely to come across as another example of the United States lecturing Africa and not listening.

China under President Xi Jinping and Russia under President Vladimir Putin have both taken a more conservative, backward turn on LGBT rights, trying to depict homosexuality as another example of a decadent West in decline. That message is likely to find resonance in Africa. U.S. evangelical religious groups operating on the continent are also reportedly pushing homophobic views.

The best approach is to emphasize that LGBT rights are human rights and to showcase those countries, such as South Africa, that have taken a different path. Biden has announced plans to make his first visit to the continent as president this year. He should not reward countries with abysmal records on LGBT rights with a presidential visit. In the face of such blatant discrimination, staying silent is not an option.