Categories
Art Just Shelley

My mother’s pen and ink

The first image is “One of the Family”, by Frederick Cotman, painted in 1880.

The second image shows the same painting, but this time in black and white from a magazine page. This second image is coated with ink marks, stains, and other signs of wear. The reason why is my mother used this painting as inspiration for the only pen and ink drawings she’s ever done.

I happen to have the first, and the best of her pen and inks, in image three. Mom gave it to Dad, who passed it on to me when he went into assisted living.

Mom took some liberties with interpreting the original artwork. For one, the father figure was dropped from her work. I’m not sure if it’s because Mom thought the he was extraneous for the work, or she was making a symbolic choice reflecting her ambivalence about the men in her life.

The rest of the images are of Mom’s pen and ink. I thought I would provide some detail. It took quite a bit of time to scratch this piece out.

Categories
Social Media

Outrage Porn

This week we’ve reeled from one outrage to another.

First, it was the letter DHS IG Cuffari sent to Congress, asserting that Secret Service people deleted texts after his department requested them. Followed by a claim that North Carolina is passing a bill making women who get abortions into murderers in the first degree. Then it was AG Garland sent out a memo that demonstrates he won’t charge Trump. This occurred in parallel with another outrage: Politico breathlessly claims that anti-abortion states will use geofence warrants to discover who is getting an abortion.

There were also assorted and sundry pronouncements, accompanied by exclamations and shouts of “How dare ____!” You fill in the blank.

Things aren’t great right now. We have an excessively dangerous political party controlling an increasingly dangerous court. We’ve already lost one right, bodily autonomy, and we fear we’re on the precipice of losing others.

At the same time, though, we’re going to miss the real dangers if we spend all our time up in arms about phantoms.

The items I just described are all good examples of these phantoms. They sound plausible, they imply danger, and the outrage us. But when you look more closely, the risks are minimal, the dangers not apparent. The outrage is more about driving attention than effecting change.

I call these phantoms outrage porn.

Secret Service deletes January 6 texts

Second Update

And, as expected, people are finally, finally beginning to question Cuffari, and his motives.

In addition, we’ve also heard that Secret Service Agents typically don’t even carry their smartphones in secure locations.

Update

It’s hard to get a clear story on what happened with these texts. Previously, the Secret Service said the texts were not deleted and were provided to the committee. But now they’re saying text messages were deleted because of the program they ran. At the same time, they’re saying texts had been given to the committee in the past.

So, am I wrong on this? Yes. The texts were deleted.

At the same time, I do no believe this action was based on some controversy,  covering up attempts to hide some agency-wide conspiracy to support Donald Trump. No, anyone who has ever made a major roll out of new systems in a large corporate setting will recognize what happened here.

The Secret Service deserves the flack it’s going to get. But no, the only controversy here is why Cuffari decided to send his letter last week, when he knew about the texts last year.

The Secret Service has had problems, not the least of which their behavior while on location. But there’s never been any indication of widespread support for treason in the ranks. A couple of agents wanting to get Pence into a car so they can move him to a place of safety is not an indication that the Secret Service is some form of shadow agency seeking to undermine our government.

So when Inspector General Cuffari sent a letter to Congress—totally out of the blue—making a claim that the Secret Service deleted texts about January 6th, and did so when his department asked for them, it called for us to examine the letter and its intents objectively. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen.

One well-known talking head after another breathlessly claiming the Secret Service is corrupt, deleted texts, calling for investigations and heads. Several even implied the Secret Service colluded with Trump.

Funny how people ignored some plain facts right in front of us. Facts, such as IG Cuffari being a Trump-appointed IG who has been heavily criticized for not doing his job; whose department is under investigation; who received a letter himself recently from Congress; who came to the job with some red state experience and a diploma from a diploma mill.

They also ignored the statement issued from the Secret Service, bluntly denying Cuffari’s claims; that if some texts were deleted it was because of a standard phone upgrade, and it doesn’t matter anyway, because the texts he mentioned were never deleted.

How do we know they were never deleted? Because when the House subpoenaed the texts, the Secret Service stated they would turn them over the very next business day after receiving the requests.

Why would Cuffari come out with this letter now? Oh, I don’t know, but I have a guess. Both Republicans and the media were on the hot seat because of the outrageous claims they were making about a little 10-year old rape victim getting an abortion in another state because of the SCOTUS actions.

Then there are all those calls for Biden to fire Cuffari.

But this is all just a guess.

North Carolina and First Degree Murder Charges

Update

This one now has an official Fact Check entry.

This one came to us not from the professional media, but one of the Twitter talking heads. A talking head who has since deleted the tweet, but I managed to capture a shot.

Tweet claiming women will be charged with murder for abortion

Even though he deleted the tweet, his work was done: the thing has legs. Just search on Twitter for “North Carolina abortion murder”.

You know what this is based on? Someone in the North Carolina legislature introduced a bill to add a state Constitutional amendment defining that people are people from conception and anyone that kills people is guilty of murder.

From this, Hultmark built up the claim that women be jailed until forced to give birth or sentenced to death if they aborted.

Folks, here’s the thing about state legislatures. They all have nutcases. Every single one has at least one fringe element who is typically ignored. Fringe elements file bills. Sometimes they file a lot of bills. And do you know what happens to these bills?

They die in committee. This particular bill didn’t die just once, it died twice.

Now personhood for fetuses is a real threat. We know states are introducing personhood for fetuses in their legislation. But not even this crazy GOP is crazy enough to put something like this into law. In fact, the GOP is twisting itself into a pretzel trying to say that aborting an ectopic pregnancy isn’t really abortion. Or that a 10 year-old terminating a pregnancy really isn’t getting an abortion.

The one thing the GOP does not want is even the remotest possibility of jailing pregnant women until they give birth, or executing a woman who gets an abortion. This is the bridge too far for the American populace, and the GOP knows it.

Bills are passing right now that are a danger right now. Our attention should be on them. Not a bill introduced February of 2021 that died in committee.

Maddow, Garland, and the Memo

This one is a bad one on Rachel Maddow. She discussed a memo that AG Garland released that seemingly re-affirms a memo AG Barr put that ‘talks about the importance of avoiding “partisan politics” in decisions regarding investigations and criminal charges and protecting the agency’s reputation for “fairness, neutrality, and non-partisanship.”‘

But, as others have noted since, this memo is boilerplate, standard, has been around for many administrations, and is no big thing.

I could go on, but the point has been made. Maddow and folks: do better.

I have a Geofence, you have a Geofence, we all have a Geofence

Last but not least is the Politico story released today that equates red states going after those getting abortions and states requesting geofence warrants. It then ties the two into making a claim that red states will use geofence warrants to target women getting abortions in other states.

This was Politico click bait. The publication is notorious for this.

First, a geofence warrant is based on a specific event. What police do is when there’s an event like a murder or bank robbery, it goes to a company like Google and asks for data for smartphones in the general vicinity of the event at a certain time.

As EFF notes, it’s a horrid invasion of privacy, and likely unconstitutional. A Virginia judge recently decided it was unconstitutional. But is it really that great a risk to women seeking an abortion?

Unlikely.

First, though geofence warrants are overly broad, they’re not completely without boundaries. These warrants are for cellphone data in the vicinity of a specific event within a specific period of time. They’re not endless trolling of all location data near abortion clinics that somehow will get tracked back to women in the state who may or may not be pregnant.

Even the reddest judge won’t stomach what will end up being a never ending netting of generalized location data for all time.

The example Politico used is anti-abortion people using ads to target people near an abortion clinic. This is nothing more than one company who used location data to display location-specific ads, who then got its ears pinned back by the Massachusetts state’s AG, and who promised to never, ever do that again.

There was no warrant related to this action. There couldn’t be, because there’s no event. Only the location.

That’s the key: there’s a difference between a generalized display of ads on your phones because of location and a police force vacuuming up all data for all smartphones in areas outside of their own jurisdiction in order to somehow capture that one woman that got away.

And how would these police be able to track woman A going to location B in order to do C? If you think they’re going to get search history data for anyone and everyone who searches for the word ‘abortion’, and then somehow magically trigger that into a warrant to wait to see if this same woman appears at any of the thousands of abortion clinics still operating in the country, think again.

Frankly, not even Alito or Thomas would stomach this one. OK, well, maybe they would, but I suspect Gorsuch, Roberts, and Kavanaugh wouldn’t want to come anywhere near it.

Fight Outrage Porn

I understand that people are wary and a bit paranoid, and frankly we should be considering the GOP is redefining evil daily, and SCOTUS is off its rocker.

But if we spend all of our time in a state of outrage over events that really aren’t outrageous, we’re going to burn out. Our senses will become numb. We’ll be drowned out in that chorus of “How Dare They!” and miss the real threats that come at us.

So when you hear a story that triggers outrage, just stop for a moment. Before you retweet, reply, share, or blast out to your followers, take the time to think about you just read or heard; to consider the source; to do a little googling of your own to see how very real the outrage is.

We all want to be the firstest with the mostest, but I would hope that it’s more important for us to raise the alarm when the alarm really does need to be raised.

Categories
Diversity

JK Rowling is a bigot

Politico has a new story about JK Rowling and her battles with the trans community.

I liked the Harry Potter books and the Fantastic Beasts movies, but I’m not a fan of Rowling. Or that sad excuse for a human being the NY Times let write an awful piece this week.

These people are using the fight for women’s rights as a transphobic attack. They’re no longer even hiding it.

I had thought we, who have long fought for equality, would be better than this. Evidently, not.

Here are two terms for you: AFAB and AMAB.

They stand for assigned female at birth and assigned male at birth. They’re inclusive terms that can be used in debates such as those around the right to control our access to abortion, to pregnancy prevention aids, and to healthcare used to treat gender dysphoria.

If we want to include cis women, transmasculine, and non-binary in a discussion—and we do when it comes to the harm tossing Roe aside does—then AFAB will do until something better comes along.

I am a woman. I am a cis woman. I use she/her as my pronouns. Even fitting society’s stereotypical model of a ‘woman’, it is still a fight being the person who I am. I can’t even imagine how much harder it is being someone who does not identify themselves the same way, but is facing the same, or worse, healthcare restrictions. The least I can do is make sure when talking about abortion rights, we’re all included.

We’re all being hurt by the same people: those who value power over humanity. I’d be a pretty sad excuse for a human being if I allowed this.

So, sorry that Rowling gets her feels hurt. She’s a bully, and a bigot.

Categories
Legal, Laws, and Regs

A post-Roe world…15 years ago

There has been a lot of conjecture about what it means to have a post-Roe world. Can states make it illegal for women to travel to other states for an abortion? Can we talk about abortion services on the internet? Can abortion counselors work in anti-choice states?

Alito pretends that the issue of abortion is over and done; SCOTUS has figuratively wiped its hands and walked away. However, as he must have known, rather than settling law, Dobbs triggered chaos.

I went searching for writings on a post-Roe world and discovered an excellent paper by Harvard Law’s Richard Fallon Jr. The paper is titled “If Roe Were Overruled: Abortion and the Constitution in a Post-Roe World“. It’s freely available (no paywall). And it was published in 2007, 15 years before today’s turmoil.

The professor touches on all of the topics I opened with, and more. He asked the same questions we’re asking, and then provides enough explanation of the law for us to come away knowing there are no simple answers to any of them.

For instance, Kavanaugh seeks to reassure us that women will still have freedom to travel to other states to get the abortions they seek.

May a state bar a resident of that state from traveling to another state to obtain an abortion?” he wrote in a concurring opinion. “In my view, the answer is no based on the constitutional right to interstate travel.

However, as Professor Fallon carefully details, the pregnant individual may be able to travel to another state, but abortion providers in that state may not be able to provide the healthcare they need. And that’s the kicker: can a state forbid an abortion provider in another state from providing a service to the anti-choice state’s citizen?

In substance and effect, the Court would need to weigh one state’s interests in protecting fetal life against another state’s interests in making abortion within its territory a matter of individual conscience, and it would need to do so while, at the same time, taking account of the implications of national citizenship. So much for the idea that the overruling of Roe v. Wade would remove hard decisions about abortion regulation from the judicial province.

Not just interstate travel: could states punish a citizen for getting an abortion in another country? Could the people who assisted the person be criminally charged? Civilly sued? That trip to California or Canada may not be as straightforward as you think.

Frankly, Kavanaugh’s assurances on the freedom of interstate travel are just as duplicitous as his assurances about support for precedents.

I don’t think I understood until this week how much our freedoms, our rights, the very existence of our country and government, now seem to exist solely on the sufferance of the Supreme Court.

We only need to turn to the last page and the last paragraph of Professor Fallon’s work to see a summary of the post-Roe world we now live in (I added the emphasis):

As I have emphasized repeatedly, my aim is not to judge whether Roe v. Wade should be overruled. But when contemplating the possible eradication of that jurisprudential landmark, we ought to have a clear-eyed view of the constitutional consequences. If Roe were to go, it would not go gently. Instead, its departure would roil the waters of constitutional law and surrounding politics and churn up a host of new controversies. No matter how much the Supreme Court might wish to extricate itself from abortion debates, it could not imaginably do so.

Categories
Political

Biden and the McConnell ‘deal’

Update and edited 

Slate has more on the Devil’s deal. Evidently Biden will be ‘allowed’ to appoint two people to US Attorney positions in Kentucky, and McConnell will not block him.

That’s it. That’s the ‘big’ deal. Two positions tied solely to the President’s tenure for a judgeship that’s for life.

It’s a fool’s deal.

Earlier:

Yesterday, a story quickly spread on social media that President Biden was going to appoint a McConnell-backed anti-abortion Federalist lawyer to a permanent position on the bench in Kentucky. This, even after SCOTUS completely killed Roe v Wade the week before, and people in the country were still reeling from the impact.

Those of us alarmed at the news were told—in less than polite terms—that we were traitors to Biden, harmful to the Democratic party, and our concerns were unfounded because there were no judicial openings in Kentucky, anyway.

Well, that was true yesterday, but not today.

Today, Judge Karen Caldwell announced her intent to retire and take senior status, leaving an opening for Biden to make a nomination.

The McConnell Setup

The possibility that Biden would appoint someone like Chad Meredith in a supposed ‘deal’ with McConnell positively reeks of the latter’s connivance.

McConnell gets a judge that even Trump couldn’t stomach. In exchange, McConnell doesn’t use the ‘blue slip’ to hold up two US Attorney positions in Kentucky.

What’s a blue slip? It’s a courtesy extended to the Senators of the state where the appointment is made. The senator can either approve or disapprove of the appointment. It has no real power, and Trump and the Republicans routinely ignored them during his tenure.

That’s it. That’s the deal.

It’s a win/win for McConnell. By making this deal, he undercuts Democratic efforts not only for the 2024 Presidential bid, but also for the mid-term election this fall. Why? Because it confuses the message about  Biden’s, and hence, Democratic commitment for abortion rights.

Biden’s appointment says to the world (likely parroted by gleeful Republicans) that the Democratic party ‘talks’ about abortion rights…but that’s all it is. Talk. When it comes to politics, well, people’s basic right to control our own bodies has to take a back seat.

All of the candidates that have pro-choice strongly embedded in their campaigns for the fall now have to fight an unconscionable, undermining, ill-conceived ‘deal with the devil’.

We’re put on the defensive. Again.

Having faith in our candidates

If Biden follows through on this deal, he also sends a message that he has no faith in our candidates this fall, or the Democratic voters.

It says to all of us that he assumes we’ll lose the Senate and the House, and that if he wants to pull any kind of legacy out of the last two years in office, he’ll have to have all sorts of deals with McConnell in order to do so.

This is a pretty horrid message to send to the party and the people, especially when we’re freshly galvanized by an awful, terrible, no-good SCOTUS.

As party leader, he should have faith in the candidates. They’re a great group of people. And he should have faith in us.

Telling us we don’t matter

Worst of all, if Biden follows through on this appointment, he’s telling women and members of the LGBTQ+ community that we just don’t matter.

We just lost a fundamental right. We just got forced into a second-class citizenship. Where Biden was Presidential by encouraging the Senate to carve out a filibuster exemption to pass abortion support in the Senate, he would be anything but by making this extraordinarily bad appointment.

One and Done

I’m older and I’ve been through so many must-win political campaigns. I consider myself a ‘centrist’ and also pragmatic about how politics works.

But there are lines I won’t cross. Support for abortion is one of those lines. If President Biden crosses this line with this appointment, then he’s One and Done to me.