Thursday, June 30, 2022
Record Low 38% Are Extremely Proud To Be American
The charts above are from the Gallup Poll - done between June 1st and 20th of a nationwide sample of 1,015 adults, with a 4 point margin of error.
Women Should Have More Rights Than Fetus In 1st Trimester
The charts above are from the new Monmouth University Poll -- done between June 24th and 27th of a nationwide sample of 747 adults, with a 3.6 point margin of error.
AG Garland Should File Charges Against Trump
The following post is by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich:
After today’s explosive testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson — who served as chief assistant to Mark Meadows and was literally and figuratively in the middle of Trump’s White House — I don’t see how Attorney General Merrick Garland can avoid prosecuting Trump, as well as Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani.
If you didn’t hear or see her testimony, Hutchinson portrayed a plot, in which Trump was directly involved, to stop the counting of electoral ballots on January 6. Meadows, Giuliani, Mike Flynn, and Roger Stone were also directly involved. Trump knew rioters were coming to Washington with weapons, and knew they had weapons on January 6. He knew they were threatening the life of Mike Pence. He knew they were dangerous. He wanted to be on Capitol Hill when they stormed the Capitol. He could have stopped them at any point, but he chose not to.
It was the most chilling depiction yet of a president in charge of an attempted coup. Trump knew exactly what was happening and what he was doing. He knew he was acting in violation of his oath of office and inciting violence in order to stay in office. He repeatedly refused to listen to reason, or to change course.
More than any other hearing to date, the audience for today’s hearing was not just the American public but also the Attorney General. Time and again, Hutchinson gave testimony about serious federal crimes.
Hutchinson testified that (in rough chronological order):
1. As early as December, a plan was emerging that was considered “potentially dangerous for our democracy” and with “dangerous repercussions,” John Ratcliffe, Trump’s director of national intelligence, told Hutchinson at the time.
2. When Attorney General Barr said publicly that the Justice Department hadn’t found evidence of election fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the election, Trump exploded – throwing lunch against the wall of the dining room off the Oval Office, breaking plates. When she attempted to help the valet clean up, the valet warned Hutchinson to stay clear of him.
3. On the evening of January 2, Giuliani asked Hutchinson, “Cass, are you excited for the 6th? It’s going to be a great day. We’re going to the Capitol. Talk to the Chief about it.” When she spoke with Meadows, he said “there’s a lot going on Cass … things may get real, real bad on January 6.”
4. On January 4, Trump’s national security advisor Robert O’Brien asked if he could speak with Meadows about potential violence on January 6. Tony Ornato, Deputy Chief of Staff in charge of all security, also had reports of potential violence on January 6.
5. On January 5, Trump asked Meadows to speak with Roger Stone and Mike Flynn; Hutchinson believes they talked. Flynn had set up a “war room” at the Willard Hotel. Meadows wanted to join their meeting but Hutchinson advised against it. He dialed into the meeting instead.
6. On the morning of January 6, Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, asked Hutchinson to “please make sure we don’t go up to the Capitol, we’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable.” He was “concerned we were obstructing justice or obstructing the electoral count” and “look like we were inciting a riot.”
7. Moments before his January 6 rally on the ellipse, Trump was angry because he wanted the area to be filled with his supporters and worried that camera shots would show it sparsely filled. When told that Secret Service wasn’t letting people with dangerous weapons through the metal detectors (magnetometers), Trump said: “I don’t fucking care they have weapons. Let my people in. They aren’t here to hurt me. Take the magnetometers away” and “they can march to the Capitol after the rally is over.”
8. Later, when Trump was finishing his speech and rioters were on the way to the Capitol, Ornato asked Hutchinson to let Meadows know of the danger. But Meadows didn’t want to hear it. Sitting in a secure vehicle near the ellipse, Meadows repeatedly shut the door on her. Almost a half hour later, when she was finally able to tell him of the danger, he said “Alright, how much longer does the president have left in his speech?”
9. When Trump was back in his limousine (“the beast”) after the rally, he wanted to go to the Capitol but the Secret Service wouldn’t let him. When chief Secret Service agent Bobby Engle refused, Trump tried to grab the steering wheel and then lunged at Engle.
10. When the riot began, and they were back in the White House. Hutchinson heard Meadows tell Cipillone, “The President doesn’t want to do anything about it.” Moments later, when Cipillone and Meadows met with Trump, Hutchinson heard them talking about the “hang Mike Pence chants.” A few minutes later, when Cipillone told Meadows, “Mark we need to do something more, they’re literally calling for VP to be hung,” Meadows said, “you heard him, he doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong, and Mike deserves it.”
11. As rioters stormed the Capitol, many people phoned Meadows, urging that Trump tell rioters to stop. He could easily have walked down to briefing room just steps from the Oval Office. But Trump did nothing until 4:17 pm when he released a video, telling the rioters “go home, we love you, you’re very special … go home in peace.”
12. The next day, on January 7, many of his advisers wanted Trump to give remarks about national healing, but Trump resisted. Hutchinson said “he didn’t think he needed to do anything more” and “didn’t think the rioters had done anything wrong, that the person who did something wrong was Mike Pence.” Concerned that his cabinet might otherwise invoke the 25th amendment and relieve him of his duties, Trump ultimately delivered remarks, but still refused to use the words “this election is now over.”
13. Both Giuliani and Meadows wanted presidential pardons.
***
A final note: Liz Cheney, vice-chair of the committee, noted that several potential witnesses had been warned not to testify or to testify in ways that would not implicate Trump. She reminded the public (and any potential witnesses) that this attempted interference was itself a federal crime.
Wednesday, June 29, 2022
Poll Shows Public Upset With Court's Abortion Decision
The charts above are from a YouGov Poll done on June 24th of a nationwide sample of 2,954 adults, with a margin of error of less than 3 points.
Warren Says Hope Is Not Lost For Women's Rights
The following is an op-ed by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Tina Smith in The New York Times:
The Supreme Court has spoken: Roe is gone. But the Supreme Court doesn’t get the final say on abortion. The American people will have the last word through their representatives in Congress and the White House.
With its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, an extremist Supreme Court has overturned nearly 50 years of precedent, stripping away the constitutional right to an abortion and ruling that the government — not the person who is pregnant — will make the critical decision about whether to continue a pregnancy. At least nine states have already banned abortion; over a dozen more could soon follow suit by severely restricting or outright outlawing abortion, putting the lives, health and futures of girls and women at risk.
If we sound angry and alarmed, that’s because we are. This decision is devastating — and we have seen what happens next. We both lived in an America where abortion was illegal. A nation in which infections and other complications destroyed lives. A nation in which unplanned pregnancies derailed careers and livelihoods. A nation in which some women took their own lives rather than continue pregnancies they could not bear.
But we must hold on to hope. Each of us can and should act — both elected officials and everyday Americans. We can start by helping those who need access to an abortion. Support Planned Parenthood and other organizations that are expanding their services in states where abortion is available. Contribute to abortion funds. Encourage state legislators to protect reproductive rights in states like New Mexico and Minnesota that border places where abortion services will most likely be severely restricted and even criminalized. Encourage employers in states with abortion bans to give their employees adequate time off and money for travel to find the abortion care they need. Do all you can — and demand the same all-you-can approach from all of our elected leaders.
Earlier this month, along with Senator Patty Murray and half the Senate Democratic Caucus, we sent a letter to President Biden outlining executive actions he could take to defend reproductive freedom. These actions include increasing access to abortion medication, providing federal resources for individuals seeking abortion care in other states and using federal property and resources to protect people seeking abortion services locally. We need action, and we need it now.
On Friday, with the release of the Dobbs decision, we entered a perilous time that threatens millions of women across this nation. We urge the president to declare a public health emergency to protect abortion access for all Americans, unlocking critical resources and authority that states and the federal government can use to meet the surge in demand for reproductive health services. The danger is real, and Democrats must meet it with the urgency it deserves.
We’re in this dark moment because right-wing politicians and their allies have spent decades scheming to overrule a right many Americans considered sacrosanct. Passing state laws to restrict access to abortion care. Giving personhood rights to fertilized eggs. Threatening to criminalize in vitro fertilization. Offering bounties for reporting doctors who provide abortion services. Abusing the filibuster and turning Congress into a broken institution. Advancing judicial nominees who claimed to be committed to protecting “settled law” while they winked at their Republican sponsors in the Senate. Stealing two seats on the Supreme Court.
For nearly 50 years, right-wing extremists rejected the beliefs held by an overwhelming majority of Americans. They doubled and redoubled their efforts to create a future in which women and their doctors could face a prison sentence for seeking or providing basic health care. When these extremists couldn’t impose their radical views through the legislative process, they stacked the courts. And now that the Supreme Court has opened the door by overturning Roe, Republicans will continue their assault on our civil rights and liberties.
Former Vice President Mike Pence called for a national ban on abortion in all 50 states; Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, flat out stated that it’s a possibility. And the logic laid out by the majority in Dobbs seems to undercut other precedents, raising the alarming possibility that we could soon see an assault on privacy and marriage equality.
In order to fix the damage Republicans have done to our system in their efforts to control women’s lives, we need broad democracy reform: changing the composition of the courts, reforming Senate rules like the filibuster, and even fixing the outdated Electoral College that allowed presidential candidates who lost the popular vote to take office and nominate five of the justices who agreed to end the right to an abortion.
We can’t undo in five months the damage it took Republicans five decades to accomplish, but we can immediately start repairing our democracy. The public is overwhelmingly on our side. A vast majority of Americans oppose the decision the Supreme Court just made. Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And more Americans describe themselves as pro-choice today than at any other point in the last 25 years.
Let’s be clear: Roe may be gone, but the protections it once guaranteed are on the ballot. States like Kansas and Kentucky have initiatives to strip away state constitutional protections for abortion, while Michigan and Vermont are working toward statewide votes to create constitutional protections for reproductive freedom. But make no mistake, this radical decision affects all Americans, not just those in states where the right to a safe, legal abortion will soon fall.
Now is the time to demand that every single candidate for every single office voice a firm position on reproductive rights. Ask every Senate candidate to commit to reforming the filibuster rules, so that the chamber can pass federal legislation protecting the right to reproductive freedom. If voters help us maintain our control of the House and expand our majority in the Senate by at least two votes this November, we can make Roe the law all across the country as soon as January.
Simply put: We must restore our democracy so that a radical minority can no longer drown out the will of the people. This will be a long, hard fight, and the path to victory is not yet certain. But it’s a righteous fight that we must win — no matter how long it takes. The two of us lived in an America without Roe, and we are not going back. Not now. Not ever.
Tuesday, June 28, 2022
Voters Don't Like The Court's Decision On Abortion
The charts above reflect the results of the new NPR / PBS NewsHour / Marist Poll -- done on June 24th and 25th of a nationwide sample of 868 registered voters with a 5.1 point margin of error.
GOP Says More Religion Will Prevent Gun Violence - It Won't!
This GOP claim is ridiculous, and they don't even try to explain how it would work. They are just pandering to the religious right because they don't want to admit what the real solutions are to prevent gun violence.
The following post is by Kate Cohen in The Washington Post:
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), for instance, has said that “the secularization of society” is to blame for the massacre at a Texas elementary school. “I think the solution is renewed faith.” Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) said we needed to “embrace religious beliefs.” “The fact is,” said Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), “before prayers were eliminated in schools we didn’t have the kind of mass shootings we do today.” Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) blamed “the left” for having “taken God out of our classrooms.”
Of course, if they’re not going to vote for serious gun control, they have to say something about why yet another mass shooting happened and why it won’t be their fault when it happens again.
But let’s pretend that the “renewed faith” argument is made in good faith: They really believe more religion will equal fewer gun deaths.
This country already has a lot of religion, of course. Among citizens of wealthy Western countries, Americans are by far the most religious (and by far the most likely to die by gun violence). But with church membership falling along with the percentage of us who believe in God, it’s fair to say we’re more secular than we once were.
So … what if we all renewed our faith, put God back in classrooms and embraced religious belief — how exactly would that keep people from shooting children?
Seriously, Congressmen, please explain. How would it work?
Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) gave us a hint when he said, “We had a public school in my district that was forced by the left and the courts to take down ‘thou shalt not kill’ from in front of the schools.”
By his implication, without explicit reminders of Judeo-Christian rules of moral conduct, children fail to learn that things like murder, stealing and lying are wrong. But it’s not a question of knowing the rules. Studies show even psychopaths know right from wrong. It’s a matter of following those rules. Perhaps that’s where religion helps: Believing you’ll be punished (or rewarded) in the next life changes your behavior here and now.
That can’t be it, either. If the specter of hell dissuaded believers from doing wrong, surely Catholic priests would not have committed — nor would their superiors have countenanced — child sexual abuse. Neither would leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention have ignored or covered up reports of sexual abuse in its ranks.
If the fear of hell prevented believers from committing mass shootings, even, then the eight victims of evangelical Christian Robert Aaron Long would still be alive.
Religion doesn’t magically erase evil; it doesn’t even claim to. In addition to rules of moral conduct, the religions practiced by most members of Congress offer steps to follow when someone breaks a rule. The Catholic Church includes penance, with confession and absolution, in its seven sacraments. Jews observe an annual Day of Atonement, which features a process of confession and repentance called teshuvah. Muslims have a rite of repentance or tawbah, in which a believer regrets the sin, asks Allah for forgiveness and promises not to do it again.
Why do religions spell out what to do next when people do wrong? Because they understand that everyone does. Even their adherents.
That’s why the prisons are not filled exclusively with nonbelievers. In fact, self-identified atheists make up just 0.1 percent of the federal prison population. As for morality, a 2021 study indicates that nonbelievers are just as concerned as believers with protecting vulnerable individuals from harm.
So, religious belief doesn’t make people moral, it doesn’t keep them from committing crimes and it doesn’t stop them from killing.
It does help in one way, though. It offers a consoling vision of life after death.
At Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Uvalde, Tex., the Rev. Eduardo Morales urged mourners devastated by the massacre at Robb Elementary to keep their faith, saying of the 19 dead children and two dead teachers, “When we don’t believe, that is when they truly die.”
“My little love is now flying high with the angels above,” Angel Garza said after his 10-year-old, Amerie Jo, was killed in her classroom while trying to call 911.
If Republicans keep insisting guns aren’t the problem, they’ll be absolutely right about one thing: America will need more religion — to console more grieving families.
Monday, June 27, 2022
Overturning Roe Vs. Wade Was A Very Unpopular Decision
The charts above are from a new CBS News / YouGov Poll -- done on June 24th and 25th of a nationwide sample of 2,265 adults, with a 3 point margin of error.
World Sees Biden/U.S. More Positive - Putin/Russia Negative
Charts are from the Pew Research Center.
How we did this
This Pew Research Center analysis focuses on public opinion of the United States, Russia and NATO in 17 countries in North America, Europe, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. The report draws on nationally representative surveys of 19,903 adults from Feb. 14 to May 11, 2022. All surveys were conducted over the phone with adults in Canada, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea. Surveys were conducted face to face in Poland and Israel and online in Australia.
Data collection began a week prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the UK and Japan. All other countries began fieldwork the same day as or shortly after the invasion. Due to the time it takes to translate, program and test questions on our international surveys, we prioritized gathering data at the start of this significant international event rather than delaying, or pausing, fieldwork to add questions specifically about the war or the actions taken by world leaders in response. Analysis focuses on ratings of Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin, the countries they lead and NATO as the war in Ukraine was unfolding. In this report, the data is discussed in the context of over a decade of cross-national trends.
Views of Russia and NATO also include data from the United States. We surveyed 3,581 U.S. adults from March 21 to 27, 2022, after the start of the war in Ukraine. Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories.
GOP/Supreme Court Gave Us Rule By A Tyrannical Minority
The following post is by Max Boot in The Washington Post:
Everyone knows that the Founders were afraid of the tyranny of the majority. That’s why they built so many checks and balances into the Constitution. What’s less well known is that they were also afraid of the tyranny of the minority. That’s why they scrapped the Articles of Confederation, which required agreement from 9 of 13 states to pass any laws, and enacted a Constitution with much stronger executive authority.
In Federalist No. 22, Alexander Hamilton warned that giving small states like Rhode Island or Delaware “equal weight in the scale of power” with large states like “Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York” violated the precepts of “justice” and “common-sense.” “The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller,” he predicted, arguing that such a system contradicts “the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail.”
Hamilton’s nightmare has become the reality of 21st-century America. We are living under minoritarian tyranny, with smaller states imposing their views on the larger through their disproportionate sway in the Senate and the electoral college — and therefore on the Supreme Court. To take but one example: Twenty-one states with fewer total people than California have 42 Senate seats. This undemocratic, unjust system has produced the new Supreme Court rulings on gun control and abortion.
These are issues on which public opinion is lopsidedly in favor on what, for want of a better word, we might call the “liberal” side. Following the Uvalde, Tex., shooting, a recent poll showed that 65 percent of Americans want stricter gun controls; only 28 percent are opposed. Public opinion is just as clear on abortion: Fifty-four percent of Americans want to preserve Roe v. Wade and only 28 percent want to overturn it. Fifty-eight percent want abortion to be legal in most or all cases.
Yet the Supreme Court’s hard-right majority just overruled a New York law that made it difficult to get a permit to carry a gun, while upholdinga Mississippi law that banned all abortions after 15 weeks. This represents a dramatic expansion of gun rights and an equally dramatic curtailment of abortion rights.
Now, the Supreme Court has no obligation to follow the popular will. It is charged with safeguarding the Constitution. But it is hard for any disinterested observer to have any faith in what the right-wing justices are doing. They are not acting very conservatively in overturning an abortion ruling (Roe v. Wade) that is 49 years old and a New York state gun-control statute that is 109 years old. In both cases, the justices rely on dubious readings of legal history that have been challenged by manyscholars to overturn what had been settled law.
Conservatives can plausibly argue that liberal justices invented a constitutional right to abortion, but how is that different from what conservative justices have done in inventing an individual right to carry guns that is also nowhere to be found in the Constitution? The Supreme Court did not recognize an individual right to bear arms until 2008 — 217 years after the Second Amendment was enacted expressly to protect “well-regulated” state militia. The Second Amendment hasn’t changed over the centuries, but the composition of the court has.
The majority conveniently favors state’s rights on abortion but not on guns. It is obvious that the conservative justices (who are presumably antiabortion rights and pro-gun rights) are simply enacting their personal preferences, just as liberal justices (who are presumably pro-choice and pro-gun control) do.
So, if the Supreme Court is going to be a forum for legislating, shouldn’t it respect the views of two-thirds of the country? But our perverse political system has allowed a militant, right-wing minority to hijack the law. As an Economist correspondent points out, “5 of the 6 conservative Supreme Court justices were appointed by a Republican Senate majority that won fewer votes than the Democrats” and “3 of the 6 were nominated by a president who also won a minority of the popular vote.”
The situation is actually even more inequitable: In all likelihood, Roewould not have been overturned if then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had not broken with precedent by refusing to grant President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, a vote in 2016. McConnell brazenly held the seat open for President Donald Trump to fill. Now Trump’s appointee, Neil M. Gorsuch, is part of the five-justice majority that has overturned Roe. (Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined with the other five justices to uphold the Mississippi abortion law but not to overrule Roe.)
Public faith in the Supreme Court is down to a historic low of 25 percent, and there’s a good reason why it keeps eroding. We are experiencing what the Founders feared: a crisis of governmental legitimacy brought about by minoritarian tyranny. And it could soon get a whole lot worse. In his concurring opinion in the abortion case, Justice Clarence Thomas called on the court to overturn popular precedents upholding a right to contraception, same-sex relationships and marriage equality. So much for Hamilton’s hope that “the sense of the majority should prevail.”
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