Friday, October 03, 2014

Yes. Texas will outlaw abortions if Greg Abbott is elected.

Closing clinics on the basis of "women's health" is Orwellian, to be certain.  But it's only the beginning.  The next step after that for the pro-life faction is to prosecute women who have abortions on a charge of murder, and to exercise capital punishment upon conviction.  Don't act so shocked.

A writer for National Review, (Kevin D.) Williamson likes to be the guy who will brashly express the crudest (and sometimes cruelest) version of his own team's deepest ideological commitments. Want an up-is-down revisionist take on American history that portrays the Republican Party as a far greater champion of civil rights than the Democrats? Williamson's your man. Looking for someone to mock a transgendered person pictured on the cover of Time magazine? Williamson will do it with unapologetic relish.

But none of that compares to what we got from Williamson earlier this week, when he took to Twitter to declare that he thinks women who have had abortions deserve to be executed for their actions. And not just executed in any old way, or by lethal injection, which is the standard in the 32 states that permit the death penalty. No, Williamson thinks women who have had abortions — along with the doctors, nurses, and hospital staff involved in the procedure — deserve to face death by hanging.

Now, the hanging bit is an almost perfect example of intentionally provocative rhetoric. (That's my preferred euphemism for "trolling.") Note how it adds an extra frisson of outrageousness to the proposal of capital punishment, given the way hanging has historically been deployed — as a uniquely public form of execution, used by governments as well as extrajudicial gangs of private citizens to inspire acute fear and intimidation. (Williamson might have just gone ahead and advocated beheadings, though of course, as another National Review author has recently argued, only a "purely evil" political organization could favor anything like that.)

Don't. act. so. shocked.

(T)hose who oppose abortion rights claim that the procedure amounts to the infliction of lethal violence against an innocent human being. If they truly believe that, then of course they also believe it should be prosecuted and punished like any other act of homicide. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about the Williamson controversy may be that his remarks surprised anyone at all.

Did you ask your favorite Republican what they thought of Williamson's proposal?  Perhaps you should, especially if there are going be any more debates you observe among candidates, and especially if they give you the chance to offer a query.

Repealing abortion rights at the federal level would just be the first step. It would be followed by an effort to outlaw abortion on a state-by-state basis. Then those involved in the illegal procedure would have to be prosecuted and punished. At the outer fringes of the possible, anti-abortion activists hope to see a Personhood Amendment protecting fetal life added to the Constitution, or perhaps the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly expanded to include the unborn.

While Republican presidential candidates are regularly asked if they endorse their party's platform in favor of repealing Roe, they are only rarely confronted with a follow-up question about whether they also believe that women who procure abortions and the medical professionals who provide them should be prosecuted and punished for murder — perhaps even for capital murder.

Since one typically comes to favor outlawing abortion only because of a belief in its homicidal character, it's hard to see how an opponent of abortion rights could do anything other than affirm a desire to see the murderers and their accessories brought to justice. It seems the only alternative would be to look hopelessly soft on crime.

Republicans in Texas, with supermajorities in the Lege and an eager new governor in Greg Abbott, will be the first state in the nation to ban abortion, and they will dare anyone to turn them back.  They have all the votes they need: five, on the US Supreme Court.  And then they will go after the murderers, those dastardly criminal women who would break the law and kill their babies anyway.

This is not an exaggeration.

As a reminder, motivating your voting base by fear is something Republicans do exceptionally well and exponentially better than Democrats.  It's also a very pointed note to a small handful of Democrats who think voting for Greens is a bigger problem than Democrats who vote for Republicans (more than 300,000 of them who voted in Florida in 2000, for anyone who doesn't wish to click the link).  Or for that matter, Democratically-leaning semi-sorta-sometimes voters who mostly don't.

Thank goodness Battleground Texas is working so furiously on the latter.  The former is a more internal failure, and might be remedied with some soul-searching, or perhaps even a 2016 presidential candidate along the lines of Bernie Sanders.  That's a discussion for later... about one month from now.

Thursday, October 02, 2014

Fear and loathing and Democrats and Greens

Bumping into this again.


This, of course, is bullshit.  The page that posted it also linked to a Mother Jones article written by Erika Eichelberger, who failed in her reporting as well.  In context, with my emphasis in italics in the excerpt.

If Keister's plan had succeeded, it could have helped Reed—the Northeast regional chairman of the NRCC—by putting on the ballot a progressive candidate who would likely draw votes away from his expected Democratic opponent, county legislator Martha Robertson. But Keister messed up: Because he filed the Robbins petition late and got the other Green Party member's address wrong, neither Green will appear on the ballot for the June primary or the November general election, according to New York election officials.

Let's establish once again that votes are earned, not "siphoned off".  To believe this logical fallacy, you would have to believe another one, that voting populations are zero sum.  So that's pretty much the end of that argument.  But in the comments at the Facebook page, you will see several folks invoking the very stubborn urban legend that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election.

It makes me sad when I see Democrats so afraid of Republicans and losing elections that they go home and kick the cat, so to speak.

So I offered some thoughts on that page, and they promptly deleted them and blocked me.  Then they came over to my blog's Facebook page -- where I had the same comments up -- and posted this.

Baby Boomers and Senior Citizens Against Republicans & The Tea Party Brains and Eggs - We removed you from our page, as it clearly states at the top of our page that we are a "DEMOCRAT ONLY" page, and that we ban trolls. You claim to be progressive? Good luck with that one. Your arguments are comparable to Republican trolls. The only one you are fooling is yourself.

As some of you may know, I was a delegate to the Texas Democratic Party convention, and I did vote in both their primary and their runoff, so by every legal definition of the word, I am a Democrat.  The problem for Democrats -- as you have probably already figured out -- is not just that I don't swallow the party line, it's that I also offer a lot of criticism to Democrats about how they conduct themselves, handle their campaigns, what they stand for, and so on.  This genuinely irritates some people.

As a reminder, I consider myself an independent progressive.  It's accurate to describe me as an activist in both parties.  I am more committed to progressive philosophy than I am partisan politics.  So their blocking me on their page has more to do with their hostility to having their thinking challenged than it does their little rules, or anything else for that matter.  I will acknowledge that the label I have applied to myself creates a lot of cognitive dissonance in partisans, and furthermore that I make no attempt to ameliorate their discomfort.

But for the sake of what happened in this particular disagreement, let's review what "the Democrats" wrote: two logical fallacies, one unprovable premise, one now two several ad hominems, including one calling me an 'ignorant teabagger'.  Hilarious.

That's just no way to get independents and progressives to vote for you, Dems.  And I'm pretty sure that you don't have any votes to lose in 2014, in Texas or almost anywhere else in the country.  And let's also be clear about the verb being used here: you're losing them.  They are not being taken away from you.

Update: Socratic Gadfly wades in with some additional inconvenient truths.

Ebola and Texas

It's too cheap a shot to take at our neighbors to the north about the way the folks at Texas Presbyterian Hospital handled the patient with Ebola who went there and was sent home with antibiotics.  After all, international flights from western Africa arrive daily in Houston.  And Atlanta, and Miami, and New York and Los Angeles and Chicago. 

Overburdened first-line healthcare specialists in the emergency room are responsible for maximizing profit in equivalent measure to the suits in the executive office, no matter which American city's hospitals we speak of.

It is not, on the other hand, unfair to point out that there are lots of people without health insurance who do not see a doctor until they are wildly ill, because their state's leaders refuse to extend them even the most nominal healthcare coverage.

Do we turn away poor folks with Ebola because they don't have insurance?  Of course we don't... because they might infect the children whose parents do have health coverage.  When a third-world problem becomes a first-world problem, then everybody gets excited.

There might be a better way to stop the spread of a contagion than knee-jerk panic reactions.  But that would require planning, and thought, and then taking the proper action.

Not to mention some measure of compassion for those less fortunate.

If there's one thing I know for absolute certain, those are not qualities possessed by the majority of the current leadership of Texas.  And the other certainty is that our once-every-two-or-four-years opportunity to change that is coming up quickly on the calendar.

Wednesday, October 01, 2014

Texas Lyceum: Abbott 49, Davis 40

From the press release:

A recent poll conducted by the Texas Lyceum, the premiere statewide nonprofit, nonpartisan leadership group, shows that among likely voters Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott is ahead of Democratic State Senator Wendy Davis by nine percentage points.


The killshot...

[Abbott holds] slight leads with both Independents (38 percent to 32 percent) and with women (46 percent to 44 percent).

It's worse for Leticia Van De Putte (47-33, Patrick) and David Alameel (48-30, Cornyn).

This isn't exactly the boost the top of the ticket was hoping for.  If the debates over the past couple of days move the needle favorably, it will have to be reflected in the next poll, YouGov or some other polling outfit working the field at this time.  Time is simply running short for the Democrats to stem this tide.

Here's the link to the executive summary, the full results, and the crosstabs, as well as the main page where those links are all together.

Update: Gadfly has more.

Smackdown

Chris Hooks at the Observer has the best take.

If you only have time to watch one of the three major debates this election cycle, you should make it tonight’s debate in Dallas. If you’re pulling for Wendy Davis to do well, you’ll enjoy it. But it’s worth watching because something strange happened tonight: Like the sky opening up after a monsoon season of turgid talking points, Wendy Davis and Greg Abbott actually took each other on tonight, to a certain extent. And against all odds, something approximating a discussion about policy took place.

[...]

Davis and Abbott grappled with each other on two wide fronts—the first, over ethics issues. Davis was asked about her legal work, which she rebuffed and went through the list of accumulated attack lines about Abbott’s tenure as AG. (She gave a stronger refutation of the conflict-of-interest charge after she was pressed.)

But when Abbott was asked (at about 19:45 in the video) about accusations his office helped hide incompetence and mismanagement with Gov. Perry’s Texas Enterprise Fund, he didn’t handle it very well. He offered that the recently issued audit of the fund didn’t single him out for criticism. “From the beginning of my campaign I’ve been questioning this very fund,” he said. (Perhaps, one suspects, because he knew how badly it was being run.) He tried to turn the question back to Davis, but she beat it back forcefully. As to the question of why Abbott’s office helped hide non-existing TEF applications from reporters, he couldn’t really answer.

The AG did not seem as prepared for tonight's skirmish, was knocked off balance several times, and the moderators -- while very aggressive in going after both candidates -- did not fluster Davis to the extent that they did Abbott. To say that this questioning format was an improvement over the first debate understates its value.

Many more of Davis' punches landed than they did a week ago, Abbott was less successful in batting them away, and the moderators piled on him.  And he couldn't handle it.

On the issues, Abbott and Davis made stark distinctions. Neither could really answer a question about how they’d fund their education plans, though Abbott at least had a dollar figure for student spending that made it appear that he had given it some thought. But Davis hit Abbott hard. It was ludicrous, she said, for Abbott to keep saying he would make Texas schools No. 1 while defending huge cuts to funding and refusing to commit to providing more resources.

“Mr. Abbott, you’re talking out of both sides of your mouth,” she said. “You say you want to make Texas No. 1 in education. You cannot accomplish that goal without making the appropriate investments.”



But the best part of the debate might have been the discussion over Medicaid expansion—at about 29:30 in the video above. Medicaid expansion is, quite literally, a matter of life and death, one of the most serious issues in the race. If Medicaid isn’t expanded in Texas, a quantifiable number of people will suffer and die—unnecessarily. But it hasn’t come up in the race as much as it might.

Abbott said he’d ask the feds to give Texas its Medicaid dollars as a block grant to be spent as the state sees fit, which few think is a realistic possibility. He assured listeners that he “wouldn’t bankrupt Texas” by imposing on Texas the “overwhelming Obamacare disaster.”

Davis laid out a forceful argument for Medicaid expansion. “I have to laugh when I hear Mr. Abbott talk about bankrupting Texas,” she said. “Right now Texans are sending their hard-earned tax dollars to the IRS, $100 billion of which will never come back to work for us in our state unless we bring it back. As governor, I will it bring it back. Greg Abbott’s plan is for you to send that tax money to California and New York.” Abbott’s rebuttal left Davis smiling from ear to ear. The whole fairly long exchange is worth watching.

The debate was pretty much everything the Davis campaign could have wanted.

Later today we should finally see the Texas Lyceum poll we've been waiting for.  Lyceum is nonpartisan, independent, and old-school; they survey adult citizens mostly by landline (which suggests an inherent Republican bias; we'll see).  If it shows Davis any closer than the closest she's been -- eight points behind -- then she'll get a much-needed shot in the arm.

More on the faceoff from the Dallas Morning Views (unimpressed) and Egberto Willies (partisan, impressed).  One excerpt from the second link...

The best illustration of Greg Abbott being beholding to the insurance industry came with a question about home insurance being too high. He could not say the rates were too high. Instead he said he did not look at the numbers. Wendy Davis said categorically that the rates were too high. She slammed Greg Abbott on his insurance industry relationship. “I don’t cotton to people who sell out our hard working Texans for the interest of big insurance companies,” Wendy Davis said. “Mr. Abbott on the other hand has taken enormous contributions from them.”

She went on to say that Greg Abbott most recently advocated a settlement with Farmers Insurance. The judge accused him of laying down to the insurance company and refused to accept the settlement because he was selling out the claimants.

Abbott had one moment when it looked as if he would turn the tables on Davis: in the anticipated discussion of the scandal swirling around the Texas Enterprise Fund, the attorney general accused the senator of profiting from an application (that didn't exist, as we know) to the TEF by virtue of the title company she once worked for having been involved with a sporting goods store (Cabela's, or 'Cabela' as Abbott refers to it) opening in Fort Worth.  She successfully cracked back again: "You're lying, and you know you are lying."  And explained precisely how he was lying.

It seemed to this watcher as if Greg Abbott thought he was gleefully springing a trap, only to have it snap back around his neck, a la Elmer Fudd.

Game over.  Greg Abbott's lifetime of corruption and fraud was exposed and laid bare.  We'll have to wait and see how much it slows his march roll to the Governor's Mansion.

The HouChron also fact-checked.  Also not good for Abbott.

Update: More from Trail Blazers on both the debate and the Lyceum poll.