election

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

It’s a year since the Dobbs decision, and, at the moment when pregnancy charities anticipate a spike in demand for their services, donations have collapsed.

Leaving morality entirely to one side, let’s examine cold hard fact. The average price tag for an abortion is $1500; the cost of giving birth ranges between $12-25,000, not counting the $10,600 per year that a child costs to raise. And nobody is stepping up to pay it.

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Oh No Not Again

Happy Indictment Day!

Only not.

Sure, “Teflon Don” got marched into court, had to get fingerprinted, and is facing full public disclosure of his hush money payments. It’s embarrassing. On the other hand, nothing he’s accused of has ever garnered more than a fine, not in any case I’ve ever seen. (NOTE: I’m not a lawyer.) The action itself — paying hush money — wasn’t illegal, or even immoral, and every campaign after Eisenhower has had a damage control unit.

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Election Update Explainer: Senate

There’s a lot of loose gossip going around about the slow vote counts that are delaying the final results in the Senate. Most of the conspiracy theories are patently false; there’s no reason to expect malfeasance anywhere, but for different reasons in each state. Having said that, there’s always the possibility of a challenge that would impact the final results regardless of the cause or the truth of any given conspiracy theory. The eventual determination, however, is always definitive for Senate races.

Let’s look at things state by state:

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This Was Not A Win

The fundamentalist fringe of the Republican party believes they’ve won a major victory now that Roe’s been struck down. They’re wrong, but we’ll save that for later.

An awful lot of Republican voters celebrated this weekend, even as protesters flooded the streets in cities across the nation. Republican party insiders know better. They’re counting the marchers and examining the present demographics of Texas and Georgia, and they’re slowly coming to the realization that they may well have just lost the mid-term elections by a landslide. Democrats haven’t been this unified since before Obama.

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We Need More Parties

The president flew out today, on his way to Europe to talk up his new spending plan. Which, at present, is half what his first spending plan was and does nothing to reduce our spending deficit, not to mention our debt.

Which is fine. Keynes explained it to us: Why it is that, in tough times, we need to borrow and spend so that the good times return sooner. He used many pages of complicated mathematical formulae to back up his premise, and the number of people who can even understand them much less comprehensibly explain them is tiny, so let’s just take his word on it, shall we? The government is right to borrow and spend. We may disagree on how it spends what it gets—

Ah, but that’s the point, isn’t it? We do disagree. We pretty much all disagree, and volubly, at great length.

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The Filibuster

While it may seem a strange way to conduct business, the filibuster within the Senate has existed as a procedure since 1806. It originated seemingly accidentally as an unforeseen consequence of a simple rules change, and has in one form or another regulated the legislative process ever since.

It has a much longer history; the first recorded filibuster was by Cato in the Roman Senate, opposing one of Caesar’s proposals in 60 B.C. However, the weight of tradition alone is insufficient to maintain this tool; one of McConnell’s unlauded triumphs was its preservation in the rules of the present Congress by passive opposition to the transfer of Senate leadership until language defining and guaranteeing it was inserted into the agreement. Otherwise, it may have been ended immediately with the convening of the new Senate — and it may well be again in 2022.

What is for us to consider rather is whether this tool is valuable enough to preserve, or instead fully deserves to be discarded as a relic of a long-outmoded past.

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It’s A Trap

Or, Why Nothing Will Happen On The 20th

Some people among us continue to insist that the election was stolen, that votes were manipulated and voices silenced — or invented, that tens of thousands of elderly folks in nursing homes (largely senile) had their ballots farmed at the behest of local organizers who wished to win more than they wanted to safeguard the election process.

Much of this is plausible. Certainly, the results of the election are not what they would have been had earlier laws remained in effect, and (in Pennsylvania’s case) had the governor strictly followed the legislature’s lead. Then too, given the truly vast number of election volunteers, surely some few must have violated the law here and there; in the present COVID age, identification validation went unverified in places it would not have. A neutral party could readily grant so much.

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On Trump And Civil Unrest

I’m going to be frank with you, and I want you to know why.

The thing is, we spend so much time pussy-footing around dangerous thoughts and ideas these days because we feel we can’t discuss them openly. Cancel Culture has taken its toll; the list of former celebrities only ever grows. Attrition is less among politicians, but pundits and journalists vanish almost daily, because they say something that society refuses to accept — there’s invisible lines, and they cross them, and that’s just something that cannot be borne.

Without judging this phenomenon, I want to acknowledge it and explain in terms accessible even to the meanest understanding why it does not dissuade me from being brutally open and honest about this topic.

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