A strategic retreat

The DMN nails Obama hard for quitting on immigration this year.

Sometimes the White House has a strategy. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Turns out, it doesn’t much matter. Either way, President Barack Obama can find a way to tick off pretty much everyone.

Just over a week ago, he invited all kinds of derision by conceding that when it comes to military action in Syria to deal with the brutal Islamic State terror group, “We don’t have a strategy yet.”

On immigration, he did have a strategy. By the end of summer, he would roll out executive actions to overcome stalemate and obstruction in Congress. “In the absence of action by Congress, I’m going to do what I can do within the legal constraints of my office,” he said Friday in Wales.

The next morning, this morning, he abandoned that approach.

The details never came into focus. The White House kept playing for time, stalling on the fine print even until Saturday’s bombshell.

In order to mollify a few Senate Blue Dogs, the president has capitulated.  It's losing the war in order to hope to win a couple of battles.  It could not be more in keeping with his profile as a weak leader.  I'd like to say I am not surprised he chickened out, but I have to say that I am.  I can only imagine how frustrated Latinos must feel.

I'll outsource my remaining disgust to Jorge Ramos.

Back in 2012, Ramos brought up that first broken promise about getting immigration reform done his first year as president. Ramos pressed Obama to admit he didn’t keep his promise, but Obama insisted that he had to switch priorities to deal with the global financial crisis.

Ramos responded, “You promised that. A promise is a promise. And with all due respect, you didn’t keep that promise.” Obama maintained he still wanted to get it done, he just needs cooperation from Congress first.

If the GOP wants to impeach Obama after they take control next year, I'm going to find it difficult to stand in their way.  I always thought Joe Biden would make a better president than Hillary Clinton anyway.

Update: More here and here.

Davis discloses medically necessary abortion in memoir

Your Friday evening bombshell.

Sen. Wendy Davis, in her memoir due out next week, discloses the most personal of stories preceding her nationally marked fight against tighter abortion restrictions: a decision she and her then-husband made 17 years ago to end a much-wanted pregnancy.

It's very candid and very emotional.

Davis, in a copy of the book obtained by the San Antonio Express-News, wrote that her unborn third daughter had an acute brain abnormality. She said doctors told her the syndrome would cause the baby to suffer and likely was incompatible with life.

After getting several medical opinions and feeling the baby they had named Tate Elise “tremble violently, as if someone were applying an electric shock to her” in the womb, she said the decision was clear.

“She was suffering,” Davis wrote.

The unborn baby's heart was “quieted” by her doctor, and their baby was gone. She was delivered by cesarean section in spring 1997, the memoir says.

Davis wrote that she and her then-husband, Jeff, spent time with Tate the next day and had her baptized. They cried, took photographs and said their good-byes, she wrote, and Tate's lifeless body was taken away the following day.

“An indescribable blackness followed. It was a deep, dark despair and grief, a heavy wave that crushed me, that made me wonder if I would ever surface. ... And when I finally did come through it, I emerged a different person. Changed. Forever changed,” Davis wrote.

The issue of choice has once again laid bare the seething, boiling misogyny of the extreme right.   If the article's comments are any indication, that is.  Mark Jones gets it right for once.

Rice University political scientist Mark Jones said he doesn't expect the revelation to lose any votes for Davis, since he said it's a relative small proportion of voters who oppose abortion in cases of severe fetal abnormality.

“The group that will be most bothered by her having an abortion of a baby with a severe fetal abnormality is a group that wasn't going to vote for her anyway,” he said.

“The positive side of it for her is it humanizes her, and also makes it a little tricky for opponents to attack her on the abortion issue because now, it not only is a political issue for her, but it's a personal issue,” Jones said.

It energizes her core support, and it energizes her core opposition (to the extent that they could be any more angry and bitter and unhinged).  In this Kos diary you find some anecdotal evidence that there are Democrats who weren't supporting Davis before because of her stand on choice, and have, like conservatives, hardened their hearts to a greater degree with this revelation.  This is going to be your news of the day, all weekend.  And the court of public opinion will render a verdict on the political influence it gives both sides in less than 60 days.

Update: More from Socratic Gadfly, and this from Vox.

Talking about abortion is rare — but the actual experience isn't. More than one in every five pregnancies —  21 percent, excluding miscarriages —  are terminated, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit research organization that supports abortion rights. Each year, 1.7 percent of American women between 15 and 44 have an abortion.

There are literally millions of women who share a dark secret.  They are bonded in their... whatever emotions you wish to assign to their experience (a tricky game, for certain).  I stand in support of those women who are the only ones that can understand the heartache, the social stigma, and the consequences of their experience.  All they should receive from all of the rest of us is unequivocal, unconditional support of their choice, whichever choice they made.

But as long as we live in a state and a country that believes there is an invisible man in the clouds watching every thing you do -- and judging you for potential admission into his afterlife paradise -- then his minions in this realm will keep taking on the judgmental part as their personal privilege.

Fuck those assholes. We ain't going back in time to the days when coathangers and pennyroyal tea were the only choices women had.

More updates: Greg Abbott responds, and the UT poll results from last summer are worth repeating.

"Overall, 76% of Texans thought a woman should be allowed to have an abortion when her life was in danger, and 57% thought that a woman should be able to obtain an abortion when there was a strong chance of a serious fetal abnormality."

Those numbers include a lot of Republicans.