Tuesday Tabs and Takes
Some stories and passing comments.
- Via NPR: A publisher abruptly recalled the “2,000 Mules” election denial book. NPR got a copy. Apparently, the publisher is worried about being sued.
- Dueling internal polls in the Utah Senate race via KSL: Two internal polls from Lee and McMullin camps tell different stories about Utah’s senate race.
- Sticking to the same Senate race, this is just a typical Jennifer Rubin piece from WaPo wherein she engages more in wish-casting than solid analysis: Evan McMullin is showing how to fight rabid Trump sycophancy. Not only it is a significant long shot for McMullin to win, the notion that what he is doing in some kind of blueprint is simply incorrect. (I first noticed Rubin when she was all in for Romney back in the day and have noticed that whatever she is writing about she is always all in even if the surrounding evidence for her position is weak).
- Ends up the abortion issue isn’t so simple. Via CNN: Once a ‘quintessential pro-life Texan,’ she had to flee her home state to get an abortion.
- Via the NYT: After a Legal Fight, Oberlin Says It Will Pay $36.59 Million to a Local Bakery. What strikes me here is that this will be a right-wing talking point for the next decade or more because the story is about Oberlin. But I will say that what Oberlin isn’t, despite the way it is often talked about, is some representative sample of higher education.
- Via the WaPo: An ex-professor spreads election myths across the U.S., one town at a time. What is striking about this story to me is two-fold. First is the utter delusion this fellow is operating under (not to mention the notion of throwing away a tenure-track job at a good school to go on some weird barnstorming tour). The second is that tragedy that he has an audience.
“I don’t think he understands what he’s talking about most of the time,” said Greenhalgh. “He takes things and extrapolates them to a place that comes completely out of thin air. It sounds good and people believe it because it sounds authoritative if you don’t know much.”
- Ruth Marcus, writing in WaPo, also comments on the Chief Justice Robert’s speech that I wrote about this weekend: What Chief Justice Roberts misses. I thought this quote was worth highlighting:
Specifically, Kagan said, acting like a court means respecting precedent, applying judicial methodologies consistently and irrespective of outcome, and not lunging to make decisions more far-reaching than the pending case requires. “People are rightly suspicious if one justice leaves the court or dies and another justice takes his or her place and all of a sudden the law changes on you,” she said. “That doesn’t seem like law.”
On the abortion ban story, we see the typical Republican who is completely devoid of empathy and grace.
She was adamantly anti-choice, until it affected her personally – after which she suddenly saw the light and decided that allowing doctors and patients to make medical decisions together was the right way to go.
@Tony W:
Sometimes that’s what it takes. It never before occurred to her that she’d be in the position of needing an abortion.
Jennifer Rubin is just terrible. She was Ann Coultereque in her support of GOP excesses and has now swung completely the other way as if we can’t look up her old positions.
The story also demonstrates how it has tied the hands of physicians. You dont know when you can intervene. As it currently stands, it looks like you cant intervene until you can absolutely prove the mother was going die without intervention. That is hard to do and once a person reaches that stage it may not be reversible, and if reversible it may leave permanent damage.
Steve
Regnery (and more broadly its parent, Simon & Schuster) has been publishing far-right crap for decades. It’s interesting to me how much the new trend for election denial has changed the game and made them vulnerable to lawsuits in a way their previous content, no matter how egregious, simply wasn’t. I kind of wonder how they’ve navigated hate-speech laws in other countries where they might be published, but to my knowledge they haven’t run into serious legal trouble up to now.
Reality slaps a conservative upside their head and suddenly they have a change of heart? I am shocked, shocked I tell you!
QFT.
@OzarkHillbilly:
It’s not surprising, given her apparent level of self-absorption.
I loved that quote by Kagan. Not flashy, but right on the point. It’s probably the most interesting thing she’s written/said that I’ve read so far.
Delete. Wrong thread.
@OzarkHillbilly: Per the article, she had the change of heart 7 years ago. It was only this year it affected her.
Oberlin and schools like it are so outside of my lived experience that I don’t even have an opinion on them academically. But I remember this story pretty well, and I think it is a good example of the difference between supporting an individual or a group, and supporting justice and fairness. They often seem to overlap, because if someone is discriminated against, it is only fair and just to fight for them. But you can tell the difference in a case like this. Oberlin as an institution and its leader individually clearly showed they have no real interest in justice and fairness, only in supporting the categories of people it has chosen.
@MarkedMan: Ok, thanx for the clarification. Maybe she can can explain to the supercilious six that the rights of Americans shouldn’t vary according to their address.
@MarkedMan: Even so, the change of heart sprouted from the realization that her tendency to miscarry made her situation problematic. Did she transfer ANY of that reality to the causes of women not her sisters or cousins?
@Just nutha: True. And it there does seem to be a truth that many people who self identify as Conservative don’t have much empathy for others. Something has to happen specifically to them or someone close to them in order for it to become “real” for them.
@MarkedMan:
I don’t see that feature/bug/characteristic as unique to conservatives, but it certainly may be more common. At least it appears so publicly.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: It’s more pointed with conservatives.
Liberals will be in favor of more rehab clinics and halfway houses for nonviolent offenders and the like… provided that they don’t have to see them. It’s just not as exciting; the story just doesn’t have the same emotional punch.
@Gustopher:
Ayup! But I can see the point. They spent a lot of time and effort flipping houses and driving up property values to keep the riffraff out. Can’t be putting in services after they spent all that effort driving the people who use them out. Don’t make no sense.