Im-Politic: The Court’s New Abortion Decision is Egregiously Wrong Itself

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abortion, abortion rights, Constitution, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, gun control, Im-Politic, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, privacy, Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court

The Supreme Court has finally decided to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling supporting a Constitutional right to an abortion based on the majority’s vigorously argued position that “Roe was…egregiously wrong and on a collision course with the Constitution from the day it was decided” and that the follow-on 1992 Casey decision “perpetuated its errors.”

Maybe so, but at least based largely on the official summary (the Syllabus) of today’s ruling released by the Court, the six Justices who backed the Dobbs v. Jackson (Mississippi) Women’s Health Organization decision expressed some views themselves about what government can and can’t regulate that look pretty internally contradictory at first glance and that seem – eggregiously – at variance with ideas about Americans’ liberties that – to quote a legal standard they cite – are “deeply rooted in [our] history and tradition” and “essential to this Nation’s ‘scheme of ordered liberty.’”

Perhaps first and foremost, the Dobbs ruling states that “the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.” And at least since a draft of the decision making this point was leaked in May, any number of pro-life supporters have argued that rescinding the right to an abortion by no means amounts to a nation-wide ban on the practice, and that states will remain perfectly free to keep or enact permissive abortion policies.

But in Dobbs, the Court has also called abortion a “critical moral question” because it “destroys what Roe termed ‘potential life’ and what the law challenged in this case calls an ‘unborn human being.’” Today’s Dobbs decision emphasizes this point in order to insist that their judgement poses no intrinsic challenge to other rights concerning highly personal behaviors, like the availability of birth control or gay marriage – which presumably don’t rise to abortion’s level.

All of which raises the question: If abortion is in a morality class by itself because of its devastating effects on the unborn, why do the six Justices supporting the Dobbs decision believe that states should have the any authority to regulate it? What satisfactory definition of morality could permit such a uniquely heinous practice to be permitted anywhere in the United States? Why, indeed, should it not be banned nationally – with or without whatever exceptions this or future Courts happen to allow.

In fact, contrary to the majority’s views, today’s Dobbs decision leaves in place many of the gravest threats to Americans’ freedom from government’s reach that appeared to receive support in the leaked draft version. Principally, the Court has now affirmed that not only does the Constitution grant no right to an abortion. It also holds that there’s no right to privacy having to do with the freedom to make “intimate and personal choices” that are “central to personal dignity and autonomy.”

To be sure, the six Justices in the majority correctly contend that no Constitutionally granted rights are absolute, observing that this founding document creates a system of “ordered liberty” that “sets limits and defines the boundary between competing interests” – and also, by extension, between competing rights, since many regularly clash with each other in real life.

But if the American system of government and law aren’t distinguished fundamentally by the assumption that a substantial burden of proof lies with government for infringing on the freedom to make “intimate and personal choices” related to “personal dignity and autonomy,” then it’s difficult to imagine fundamentally what it is distinguished by. In other words, if you can’t find something like a “right to privacy” in the Constitution, you’re not looking very hard.

And ironically, just yesterday, the Court supported this kind of argument when it struck down New York State’s “concealed carry” gun control law. That majority argued that this statute unconstitutionally “required law-abiding, responsible citizens to ‘demonstrate a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community’ to carry arms in public.” That is, an excessive burden of proof was placed on ordinary Americans, when it should belong to government. Why shouldn’t this kind of reasoning apply to abortion?

Finally, how can anyone believe that “a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification” that “violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause?” What men does the Dobbs majority believe will be affected by its decision? And how can these Justices reject the – inevitably gender-based — logic of the Casey decision’s statement that

“The Roe rule’s limitation on state power could not be repudiated without serious inequity to people who, for two decades of economic and social developments, have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives”?

One claim made by many Dobbs supporters is true — the practical, on-the-ground effects of the decision will be limited for the time being , mainly because the total numbers of legal U.S. abortions have been falling significantly in the last three decades, and because practically all of these have taken place during a pregnancy’s first trimester. (See here for the data.) Interestingly, that’s after Mississippi’s proposed abortion near-ban would go into effect.

Moreover, some other so-called “trigger laws” will allow abortions early in pregnancies, too. But others (see, e.g., here) will significantly narrow this window (even outlawing the procedure before most women even know they’re carrying), and in some of these and others, the lack of exceptions for instances of rape and incest, for example, are truly abhorrent. And now with Dobbs the law of the land, who knows what other outrages may lie in store?      

At one point the Dobbs ruling, the majority wrote that “In interpreting what is meant by ‘liberty,’ the Court must guard against the natural human tendency to confuse what the Fourteenth Amendment protects with the Court’s own ardent
views about the liberty that Americans should enjoy.”  As far as I’m concerned, that advice about leaving personal beliefs out of judicial decisions is a vitally important rule of thumb across the legal board, and as indicated by the above examples of tortured reasoning in today’s abortion rights decision, it’s one the Dobbs majority just threw under the bus.    

Im-Politic: Liz Cheney’s Weird New Messaging on the January 6th Hearings

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Capitol riot, conservatives, Donald Trump, election 2022, GOP, Im-Politic, January 6 committee, Liz Cheney, MAGA, midterms 2022, neoconservatives, Never Trumper, Republicans, Wyoming

With the first set of January 6^th Committee hearings on the Capitol riot on that day in 2021 coming up tonight in prime time, I just got a clue that these sessions might not be Must-See TV in terms of revealing any wide-ranging conspiracy (including Donald Trump or not) to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election illegally. The source? None other than my buddy, Liz Cheney.

To be sure, I was as surprised as anyone to learn that I’m a Close Personal Friend of the Wyoming GOP Member of Congress. After all, I’ve never come close to endorsing her long record as an enthusiastic neoconservative warmonger and leading Never Trumper. And there’s no reason to view me as the kind of Republican campaign donor who could help finance her efforts to continue representing her state in the House.

But here I am holding in my hand a “Dear Alan” letter from her dated May 21 inviting me to join her “National Campaign Team.”

The funny thing is, though, despite the role she’s actively created for herself as one of Washington’s most outspoken nemeses of the former President – to the point of earning a nod as one of two Republican members on the riot and sedition investigating panel unilaterally created by Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – her fund-raising pitch never mentioned the January 6^th Committee by name, and contained only the most glancing references to its work.

This letter – obviously sent to reach recipients just before the hearings – did say that “Putting my principles first has made me an enormous target,but I am not – and will not be – deterred. America needs leaders who are not afraid to do what’s right regardless of political fallout. I will never forget the duty that we swore to uphold: to defend the Contitution and he freedoms so many have worked so tirelessly to preserve.”

In addition, Cheney did promise to “uphold that oath at all times…not just when it is politically convenient.”

But that was it for her anti-insurrectionary work. Indeed, Cheney’s letter began with her claim that, “Since I was first elected, I’ve fought to restore America’sstrength and standing in the world, to pursue conservative solutions that stimulate job growth, to cut taxes and onerous regulations, and to expand America’s energy, mining, and agriculture industries.”

Cheney went on to “strongly oppose the massive waste and liberal priorities crammed into seemingly every bill the Democrats have put forward in the first year of the Biden administration” and called the party’s priorities not only “a radical socialist wish list” but an agenda that, by “handing our children and grandchilden something that has never happened…a weaker nation than the one left to us,” must be condemned as being as “unconscionable as it is immoral.”

And the letter was completely dominated by such themes.

Moreover, it’s clear that Cheney wasn’t simply appealing to voters in her very conservative and strongly pro-Trump state. Her letter was addressed to “ALL Republicans who believe in the Constitution and want to see our Party led in a way that actually reflects traditional conservative values and priorities.” So it’s logical to assume – especially since as a Committee member, Cheney already knows exactly what’s been discovered – that she doubts that the results of her January 6^th Committee work will greatly impress even a faction that’s long been clamoring for Trump’s scalp, and a recovery of the supremacy it’s clearly lost in right-of-center circles.

And because these Cheney-type Republicans and conservatives have generally been as virulently anti-Trump as even many Democrats (Google “The Lincoln Project”), it seems just as logical to assume that she also doubts that any hearings revelations will resonate much among the rest of the non-MAGA electorate either.

So if I’m expecting the January 6th Committee hearings to be a nothing-burger, think twice before you dismiss this perspective. After all, it seems like that’s what I’ve just heard from Liz Cheney.

Im-Politic: So Much for the “Pandemic of the Unvaccinated”

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Biden administration, CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, Im-Politic, vaccination, vaccine mandates, vaccines, Wuhan virus

Remember when President Biden was railing last fall that the CCP Virus crisis at that point was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” that was needlessly stressing the hospital system, and inexcusably exposing to danger those Americans who had done the right thing? How he used this claim to justify his push for vaccine mandates as a condition of employment for much of the U.S. workforce? And how numerous businesses, universities, and numerous state and local governments had already been using the same reasoning to shut the unvaccinated out of workplaces (both as employees and customers) and classrooms?

As I explained back then, this contention was completely unfounded because natural immunity and asymptomatic Covid had created towering, and likely insuperable, difficulties, in knowing the percentage of unvaxxed Americans who had even contracted the virus, much less who had been killed or hospitalized from it.

But just the other day, I discovered that even by the misleading evidence cited by the President and other fearmongers to make their case, this argument has completely fallen apart. The evidence – from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – ignores the above complications, and leaves out jurisdictions containing nearly 40 percent of America’s population.

In addition, its central supposed finding is presented – and has been ceaselessly parroted by much of the national media – without mentioning any of the context that all along would have made clear just how rock-bottom low the chances of being hospitalized or killed by the CCP Virus have been.

Specifically, claims such as “Recent CDC data shows unvaccinated people are 20 times more likely to die” left out the fact that this finding showed that in absolute terms, as of December (the latest CDC figures cited in this ABC News piece), about nine unvaccinated Americans per 100,000 were dying from the CCP Virus versus about half a vaccinated American per 100,000 dying. In other words, unvaccinated Americans had a 0.009 percent chance of dying of Covid, versus 0.0005 percent of the vaccinated. And these literally microscopic numbers warranted throwing the lives of tens of millions of Americans into turmoil?

But even if you’ve been in favor of such measures, the latest CDC figures (from April, which you can see at the above link) show that the gap has been cut in half since December in per-100,000 terms and virtually disappeared in absolute terms.

That is, 0.62 unvaccinated Americans per 100,000 were dying of the CCP Virus – about nine times greater than the vaccinated rate of 0.07 Americans per 100,000 versus the 20 times gap last December. That is, many fewer than one of every 100,000 unvaccinated and vaccinated Americans alike is now dying from the virus. And at least as interesting: These numbers mean that since December, the death rate for the unvaxxed has plummeted by 93.11 percent, while the rate for the vaxxed has barely budged.

In addition, and not so coincidentally, the CDC data on hospitalization rates for the vaxxed and unvaxxed display exactly the same trends.

Yet despite this evidence, many businesses are still insisting on some form of vaccine mandate and/or CCP Virus testing for employees, and the Biden administation is still pushing them for federal workers. So much, it seems, for “following the science” as well as for the always-dubious idea of a pandemic of the unvaccinated. 

 

Im-Politic: No Abortion or Gun Control Boosts Yet for Democrats’ Midterms Chances

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Biden, Congress, Democrats, fivethirtyeight.com, generic ballot, Im-Politic, midterms 2022, polls, RealClearPolitics.com, Republicans

Have President Biden and Democratic members of Congress been handed two big political gifts during this midterm election year in the form of the leaked Supreme Court draft decision rescinding abortion rights and the mass shootings in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas?

I found that argument pretty compelling when the news broke about the likelihood of the Court overturning its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling – at least in terms of igniting some enthusiasm among Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters and therefore greater turnout from groups who’ve had little to cheer for many months. And I can see where the outrage understandably sparked by the more recent gun violence (and especially the Uvalde massacre of grade schoolers) might produce the same effect given Republicans’ strong opposition to significant new gun control measures.

There’s certainly enough time between now and the fall for abortion and gun violence to help prevent major Democratic losses – or for Republicans to mess up royally in any number of ways either on these or other issues. But for now, the consensus of the nation’s pollsters is that there’s no sign of significant voter shifts yet, and precious few signs of any voter shifts.

Some of the most revealing surveys on these scores deal with Americans’ views of the state of the nation, and whether it’s improving or worsening. When polls show the latter view dominating, that’s clearly bad for incumbents – this year meaning the Democrats, who narrowly control both the House and Senate. And that’s exactly what’s been happening since the abortion draft was reported the evening of May 2, and since the Buffalo killings took place on May 14.

According to the widely followed RealClearPolitics.com average of surveys gauging Americans’ views of the country’s direction, on May 3, respondents believing the country is on the “wrong track” topped numbers believing it’s on the “right track” by 33.4 percentage points. By May 14, it had grown to 41 percentage points. And as of yesterday, the wrong track’s edge had widened to 47.8 percentage points.

It could well be too early to assess Uvalde’s impact, but since that May 24 nightmare, the wrong track’s lead increased slightly from 45.6 percentage points to yesterday’s 47.8.

Another telling set of polls tries to measure what’s called the generic Congressional vote. It gauges whether respondents say they’re more likely to support a Democratic candidate for Congress all else equal (including who’s running in their own district or state), or a Republican hopeful. Here the results look better for the Democrats. On May 3, RealClearPolitics reports, its average of surveys showed the Republicans with a 4.1 percentage point edge. By May 14, however, the GOP margin had slipped to 3.9 percentage points, and by May 27 (the latest data available), that lead had been cut by more than half – to 1.9 percentage points.

Nonetheless, another polling compilation, by the website fivethirtyeight.com, shows a much more stable Republican lead. In fact, between May 3 and May 6, it remained at 2.6 percentage points, and dwindled only to 2.2 percentage points by May 30. (Just FYI, fivethirtyeight doesn’t track the country’s direction.)

Moreover, some pretty well established conventional political wisdom holds that any lead for the Republicans in such surveys is bad news for the Democrats, because Congressional races are of course held district-by-district and state-by-state, of course, and because both the Constitution’s system for apportioning representation and population trends have created a built-in Republican advantage in recent decades. So history lately teaches that unless the Democrats hold a big generic ballot lead, the November will bring them the cruelest news.

Due to the seemingly endless rush lately of headline developments like those above, and due to what seems to be the American public’s increasingly short attention span, big Republican gains in this year’s midterms may seem especially uncertain. And perhaps the abortion and especially gun control effects just need more time to develop. But the favorable numbers for the GOP on both the country’s direction and the generic ballot seem especially impressive, and encouraging offsetting public opinion trends for the Democrats on other issues that could be at least as important (e.g., inflation and immigration) are getting harder and harder to find.

Im-Politic: The Mysteries Behind Mass Shootings Keep Growing

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Andrew R. Morral, crime, Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, gun control, gun violence, homicides, Im-Politic, mass shootings, RAND Corporation, school shootings, The Globe and Mail

Mysteries continue to abound about mass shootings like the recent atrocities in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas. Chiefly, as I’ve previously noted, for most of its history, the United States was even more awash with guns than today. Yet Buffalo- and Uvalde-type shootings — the kinds of gun violence perpetrated by individuals against innocents completely unknown to them – are very recent phenomena.

Yesterday, thanks to my friend, the political commentator Mickey Kaus, I came across several more, in the form of a graphics feature from the Canadian daily, The Globe and Mail, and especially, the combined, and deeply confusing, story that seems to be told by charts four and five (below).

Let’s start with the chart on the bottom, chart five, which shows U.S. “Firearm-related homicides per 100,000 people, by county (2001–2020).” Unfortunately, the individual state names don’t show up on this reproduction, but as the original makes clear, the swathes of the country with by far the most gun-related homicides are Alaska, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and North and South Carolina. They’re the states with the biggest concentrations of dark brown counties (which signify the areas with the highest rates of such gun violence), along with big cities like Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago, which show up as little dark brown dots.

Moreover, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which is an ardent supporter of stronger gun control laws, the states mentioned above have all earned failing grades in terms of gun control measures – except for North Carolina, which merited a “C.”

So it’s easy to conclude that the above states are those where it’s easiest to get a gun – and where guns’ prevalence is most dangerous because they’re also logically the states with the biggest relative numbers of residents likely to use these weapons with deadly results.

Now, however, look at chart four, which illustrates “Deaths in mass shootings since 1982, by location [and] type.” The bigger the circle, the higher the numbers of fatalities that have resulted from each of these incidents. And what I see is that, with the (possible) exception of the Carolinas, those states with the highest levels of firearms homicides adjusted for population have suffered scarcely any mass shootings of any kind, and only one mass school shooting (depicted with grayish-blue circles) – in Arkansas.

Viewed from the opposite perspective, look at the states with the biggest concentrations of mass shootings of all types. They look very much like California, Texas, Florida, and New York. Just behind them are New York, Colorado, and Georgia, along with the D.C. area and the Chicago area.

Yet going back to the homicide chart, you can see that California, Texas, Florida, Colorado, and New York seem pretty tranquil on this front, with Georgia standing as an exception. (It’s true that Texas contains big areas of gray, where no data is supposedly available. But can anyone reasonably doubt that if these regions were homicide-heavy, we would know about it?)

Even more puzzling: The Gifford Center awards an “A” on gun control laws to California, Colorado, and New York, a “C” to Florida, and the aforementioned “F” to Texas.

These and other ongoing mysteries and paradoxes further convince me of the argument most recently advanced by Andrew R. Morral, who heads the Gun Policy in America research project at the RAND Corporation, a leading think tank: that “although some laws that reduce gun violence in general may also reduce mass shooting” (for example, restrictions on magazine capacity) “It’s an unfortunate fact that mass shootings are sufficiently rare that it is hard to establish with scientific rigor whether policies affect them….”

 

 

Im-Politic: Has Everyone Gotten “The Great Replacement Theory” Wrong (Except Me)?

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Buffalo shooting, Center for American Progress, conservatives, Democrats, Great Replacement Theory, Hispanics, Im-Politic, Immigration, Latinos, Payton Gendron, racism, Republicans, Steve Phillips, white supremacy

The question in today’s title has been nagging me for some time, and since the appalling Buffalo, New York massacre has brought the “Great Replacement Theory” (GRT) back into the headlines, it seems like an especially good time to explain why.

It’s not that the GRT doesn’t exist, or that it hasn’t played a part in motivating white racist violence in America. The idea that elites have sought to reduce the political influence of native-born white Americans through means ranging from promoting racial integration to supporting mass immigration not only unmistakably exists; it’s got a pretty lengthy history. And it’s been explicitly cited in recent years to justify killings of members of various minority groups (see, e.g., here and here), including (somewhat confusingly), Jews, who evidently are viewed by many adherents as non-white. (Or is their sin being non-Christian?)

Accused Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron was a GRT believer, too – at least if a lengthy statement posted on-line shortly before his assault began really was – as widely believed – written by him.

But the claim that Republicans and other conservatives are the only non-fringe U.S. political figures who have written about the immigration version of GRT is flat wrong. It’s been explicitly in the nation’s political air since the issue achieved hot-button status in the mid-2000s with the outbreak of mass demonstrations by illegal immigrants and amnesty supporters and the Congressional battle over a “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” bill. And the mentioners have prominently included Democrats and Mainstream Media journalists.

For example, as just reminded by (conservative) columnist Rich Lowry, in 2013, the Center for American Progress (CAP) – closely associated not with the Democratic party’s progressive faction but with its supposedly moderate “Clinton wing” – published a paper arguing that “Supporting real immigration reform that contains a pathway to citizenship for our nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants is the only way to maintain electoral strength in the future.”

Nor was the 2013 report a one-off CAP product. CAP Fellow Steve Phillips’ 2016 book Brown is the New White argued, according to his publisher, that “hope for a more progressive political future lies not with increased advertising to middle-of-the-road white voters, but with cultivating America’s growing, diverse majority.”

And in 2013, journalist Emily Schultheis wrote in that unerring guide to Inside the Beltway political conventional wisdom, Politico, that

“The immigration proposal pending in Congress would transform the nation’s political landscape for a generation or more — pumping as many as 11 million new Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that, if current trends hold, would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.”

Moreover, the haste with which President Biden moved to overturn many of his predecessor Donald Trump’s restrictive immigration policies and Congressional Democrats determination to stuff lenient immigration positions into the Build Back Better stimulus bill and the so-called China competitiveness bill strongly suggest they firmly believe these claims.

So are Republicans and conservatives and whites and anyone else worried about GRT right to fear being replaced – that is, about mass immigration’s potential to change America into something they would find odious and indeed un-American? That seems anything but clear.

This post does a good job of presenting the reasons for and against such Republican concerns (though the author is emphatically pessimistic). But these days, it suffers a major flaw: It’s five years old. And since its publication, there’s been abundant evidence not only from polls but from actual voting behavior that Republicanism – including its Trump version, has significant and growing appeal to Hispanic voters. Or is it that this group is increasingly turned off by what it’s been seeing of the Democrats lately? Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Either way, that doesn’t sound very Great Replacement-y to me.

Certainly, this latter trend is too short-lived so far to warrant tossing GRT fears onto the ash heap of history. But at the least it argues for immigration restrictionists turning down the GRT volume some, and focusing on what I view as the strongest arguments against the Open Borders-friendly policies so long pushed by most on the political left, along with Big Business’ Cheap Labor Lobby, and globalist and libertarian ideologues (many of course lavishly funded by that Lobby).

These concern the wage-depressing effect of mass immigration throughout the economy, and the national security dangers created by indifference to the matter of who exactly is entering and residing in the country, And given the power and money still at the command of the opposition, they should be more than enough to keep the restrictionists’ plates full for the foreseeable future.

Im-Politic: Will the Pandemic’s Real Lessons Ever Be Learned?

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CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, facemasks, Great Barrington Declaration, Im-Politic, lockdowns, Mainstream Media, mandates, natural immunity, The New York Times, vaccines

Give The New York Times some credit here. On the one hand, its big, graphics-rich feature marking the grim news that about a million Americans have been killed by the CCP Virus has pinpointed a highly specific group of culprits for this towering toll, and an equally specific group of measures that could have held it way down (although it’s never indicated by how much).

Among the worst: “elected officials who played down the threat posed by the coronavirus and resisted safety measures” and “lower vaccination and booster rates than other rich countries, partly the result of widespread mistrust and resistance fanned by right-wing media and politicians.”

So clearly, the authors insist, mask-wearing and lockdowns and social distancing should have been imposed much faster and more widely (without stating for how long), and more vaccinations required.

On the other hand, the reader is presented with abundant evidence that the benefits of such measures might have been limited – which is especially striking since not even a hint is provided that such steps might have inflicted considerable damage in their own right – including from other threats to public health that have been neglected.

Most strikingly, consistent with its observation that “The virus did not claim lives evenly, or randomly.” the piece reminds that in fact, the worst damage was remarkably concentrated in a single group. Specifically, “Three quarters of those who have died of Covid have been 65 or older.” Moreover, of that cohort, a third were 85 and over.

And then there was the related nursing homes disaster. According to the Times piece, a fifth of the roughly million CCP Virus-induced deaths in America occurred among residents and staff of these facilities.

Why longer and more sweeping lockdowns and the like would have reduced the virus’ damage to the nation as a whole, considering all the economic, educational, and health harm they produced for the vast majority of Americans who were far less vulnerable, is never explained.

The article’s case for vaccine mandates is similarly muddled. It repeats the widespread claims that most of those who died from the virus after vaccines became widely available were unvaxxed, and that “vaccinated people have had a much lower death rate — unvaccinated people have been at least nine times as likely to die since April 2021 [when the eligibility for the doses became universally available].”

At the same time, readers learn that:

>“at least 50,000 vaccinated people, many of them older or without booster shots, were among the deaths reported since late April 2021….”; and that

>”People 80 and older who had gotten shots were almost twice as likely to die at the height of the Omicron wave as those in their 50s or early 60s who had not, according to C.D.C. [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] data.”

Further, the article makes clear that, even forgetting about the decisive role played by age, claims about vaccine effectiveness are substantially exaggerated. Despite presenting the common contention that “unvaccinated people have been at least nine times as likely to die since April 2021,” the chart presented to support this point shows that this ratio has held for only part of the period duing which vaccines have become widely available. The chart also that the gap has almost disappeared today.

In addition, the piece reports that “The C.D.C. has received data on deaths by vaccination status from only about half of the states….” As the authors explain, this data shortage makes it “impossible to know exactly how many vaccinated people are among the million who have died.”

Conversely, this data shortage – along with thoroughgoing ignorance about how many Americans have enjoyed natural immunity from the virus and therefore passed up the jabs, and how many who caught Covid asymptomatically and made similar decisions – also prevents figuring out what share of unvaccinated Americans died of the virus.

But because both numbers are doubtless both enormous, this percentage is doubtless much smaller than commonly supposed.  The Times authors (and their editors, who it should always be remembered greenlight every article’s journalistic methodology) might have adjusted their judgements, and recognized that alternative pandemic mitigation approaches — including those that took into account the difficult tradeoffs that needed to be made — have long been recommended, had they bothered to consult any of the impressively credentialed specialists who have been making these points. 

Yet they seemed as determined to ignore or marginalize their views as the official U.S. medical establishment has been.  As long as both America’s healthcare leaders and its Mainstream Media so doggedly oppose full debate on the real lessons taught by the pandemic, it’s hard to imagine that the nation will be prepared for the (inevitable) arrival of the next deadly pathogen. 

Im-Politic: Overturning Roe Could Backfire Big-Time on its Opponents

Tags

2022 election, abortion, abortion rights, choice, Constitution, Democrats, election 2022, Im-Politic, midterms 2022, Republicans, Roe vs. Wade, Supreme Court

One of my favorite sayings has always been “Be careful what you wish for. You may get it.” And if life is remotely fair, it could well come back in spades to haunt supporters of the Supreme Court’s apparent decision to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion ruling.

Before explaining why, I should briefly re-lay my cards on the table on abortion generally. As explained in this May, 2019 post I’ve supported Roe because of all the evidence that it conforms with a strong, consistent, public consensus in favor of a thoroughly reasonable compromise solution to the abortion dilemma. Specifically, the national default position is that abortion should be legal, but individual states, reflecting the beliefs of their populations, should be able to impose some restrictions.

In other words, Roe never established an unqualified right to abortion – because unless we’re talking about hermits, rights in human societies, including those enshrined in the Constitution, can never be unqualified. There are simply too many rights, and they too often collide with other rights and imperatives. So durable balances need to be struck, and from time to time, they need to be modified in light of changing circumstances.

They don’t make everyone happy, and they leave important inequities. But given the existentially heated and fiendishly complex nature of abortion, despite all the resulting and inevitable controversy stirred by the ruling and by the underlying issue, Roe succeeded on those crucial grounds. In everyday parlance, it was “good enough.”

At the same time, almost none of Roe’s opponents really seem to believe that there is an unqualified right to life, much less that it begins at conception. Certainly, that’s not an argument made by the leaked Supreme Court ruling. Nor is it claimed by the Mississippi abortion law that the Court is still considering, or by the even stricter new Oklahoma statutes.

The above description of Roe doesn’t take into account the argument that the decision fails by purely legal and Constitutional standards. Indeed, even leading pro-choice Constitutional experts have agreed with that judgment. But the underlying assumption that law stands clearly apart from politics can’t withstand serious scrutiny – and certainly not in any system of representative government. In such systems, legitimate laws can’t help but originate ultimately in that society’s values and culture, and politics is one indispensible method of figuring out how to enable those preferences to govern behavior and resolve disputes in mutually acceptable ways.

As I noted in the 2019 post (quoting a prominent historian of the Constitution), a crucial test that the Supreme Court must pass, (including for its own public support), is avoiding getting too far ahead of public opinion or trailing too far behind. That is, responsible justices will be exceedingly mindful of politics, its changes, and the trends underlying them. For the past half century, the Supreme Court justices who upheld Roe achieved that objective.

So assuming Justice Samuel Alito’s draft ruling stands, how is it likely to backfire on Roe opponents? For starters, they’ll need to start thinking seriously about a challenge that the 1973 ruling has enabled them to duck for decades, especially if Roe’s demise does significantly reduce the numbers of abortions.  The Roe opponens will need to deal with making sure that all the babies that aren’t aborted under the new regime have a real chance of leading satisfactory lives. After all, if you believe in the right to life, how can you neglect the quality of that life?

So unless there’s any chance that private adoption services will be able to place all the newborns with competent, caring parents (spoiler alert: there’s no chance), then the biological mothers and, when they stick around, fathers, will need a wide range of pubicly provided services and supports. In other words, Hello, Big Government. And those services and supports, which may have to be very long-lasting for the many new moms who are teens, won’t come cheap. So get ready for much higher taxes or deficit spending or some combination of the two.

For older new mothers who need to work, these supports will need to include paid family leave – whether by government or employers or some combination of the two. And if the goal is to help all the new children, this leave will need to extend for years – not just a few weeks. Moreover, this paid leave will also be needed even for many mothers who have working spouses or stable partners of some kind, unless these spouses or partners earn enough to pay all the household’s bills on their own.

Of course, there’s an alternative for the working mothers: Taxpayers spring for childcare. For as long as it’s needed. If, as is likely, Roe opponents don’t want governments handling this responsibility, they’ll need to admit many more immigrants to fill all the new positions private providers presumably would create. But no responsible Roe opponent would ever permit just anyone care for children, whether in government or for-profit or non-profit outfits. So extensive vetting and even training systems will need to be put into place, too.

In addition, for all the states that ban abortion very early in pregnancies, when many women aren’t even aware they’re pregnant, it’s only fair that they hand out accurate pregnancy test devices or pay for tests by physicians’ offices. That is, more expenses – and taxes or debt.

Finally, Roe opponents may well rue its demise this year on political grounds. It’s true that they may be able to fire up their voters to turn out to defend anti-Roe candidates in this year’s midterm Congressional elections as Roe supporters are to mobilize theirs on behalf of office-seekers pledged to codify it as federal law, and/or support nominated judges likely to try restoring Roe or at least its protections.

But it’s also true that whereas before yesterday, Roe supporters (who tend to be Democrats and Democratic leaners, just as opponents trend the opposite way) had almost no issues with which they could inspire their voters (because of the Biden administration’s failures on so many fronts), now they may have one issue that can help close the so-called enthusiasm gap and improve their performance this fall. So that shapes up as a net loss for Roe opponents and the GOP overall.

The opponents’ losses could be even worse, however, since (as shown by the poll linked above) Roe is pretty popular with the moderate Republicans who deserted the party in the 2020 presidential election and helped Joe Biden win the White House. They may not be incredibly numerous, but by definition they’re often found in many of the swing districts and states that could greatly determines which party controls the House and Senate. (It’s their presence that makes these precincts up for grabs – when it’s not the presence of moderate Democrats.)

Nonetheless, it’s also distinctly possible that such a Roe effect may not materialize, or flare briefly and then fade between now and November. (That’s clearly been the case so far for the January 6 Capitol riot, to my surprise.)  Further, abortion won’t be the only issue on voters’ minds, and any number of events could intervene in the weeks and months ahead to alter the political odds. 

Whatever the political impact, however, the nation seems fated to deal with some serious and potentially tragic real world fall-out from the Supreme Court’s seeming plans for Roe, unless the justices reverse course. Is it too much to hope that they remember another of my favorite expressions:  “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”?              

Im-Politic: A Mainstream Media Award for Spreading Immigration Misinformation

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Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden, Biden administration, Border Patrol, Department of Homeland Security, Evans Bishop, Haitians, Herblock, Im-Politic, Immigration, Lalo Alcaraz, Library of Congress, Michael Cavna, migrants, misinformation, Texas National Guard, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, Washington Post

The American Mainstream Media complex has already established the practice of not rescinding major journalism awards it’s handed out for stories that seemed plausible when published or broadcast, but have since been debunked. So I wasn’t surprised to find out yesterday that this national news establishment has taken its biases and its contempt for accuracy to the next level.

But I was disgusted nonetheless – and you should be, too – by the honoring of a political cartoonist whose work was exposed as fraudulent by the time the decision was made. Even worse, the U.S. Library of Congress, a part of the federal government that you and I pay for, has lent its name to this outrage.

The latest recipient of the Herblock Prize (named after the late, famed Washington Post editorial cartoonist) is Lalo Alcaraz, and it’s certainly noteworthy, as reported in the Post, that he’s the first Latino to win.

The problem, however, which was overlooked by the Herb Block Foundation, the Library, Post reporter Michael Cavna, and apparently every single one of his editors, is that Alcaraz has purveyed the falsehood that last year, U.S. Border Patrol agents used whips against migrants from Haiti trying to enter the country illegally. In fact, as shown in the article, he insinuated that such brutality has long been Standard Operating Procedure by the Border Patrol. (For some reason, I couldn’t manage to reproduce an image of the drawing here.)   

When it came out, it was plausible that this incident deserved investigation. After all, even President Biden declared, “I promise you, those people will pay.”

Almost immediately, however the claims of whipping began falling apart. The photographer who took the pictures in question declared that “I didn’t ever see [any agents] whip anybody, with the thing. [The agent he photographed] was swinging it. But I didn’t see him actually take — whip someone with it. That’s something that can be misconstrued when you’re looking at the picture.”

In fact, it quickly turned out that what were described as whips were really split reins. Even Open Borders-happy Alejandro Mayorkas, the Biden administration Secretary of Homeland Security, stated that these reins were being used to ensure control of the horses – before following up by claiming that the pictures “horrified him.”

Late last month, a representative of the Border Patrol agents’ labor union told the New York Post that the accused officers had been cleared of criminal wrongdoing, though the Customs and Border Patrol agency of the Homeland Security department is still conducting an “administrative investigation” that could still cost them their jobs. And in early April, a group of Republican Senators, noting that more than six months had passed for a probe that Mayorkas had promised would be “completed in days, if not weeks,” pressed the administration to release the findings. Yet they still remain secret.

None of this wealth of exculpatory information, however, seems to have impressed Alcaraz – much less persuaded him to apologize for spreading such misinformation. And why should he, when mainstream news organizations like the Washington Post actually continue codding his treatment of the controversy. Indeed, here’s how reporter Cavna described the award-winner’s drawing: “In one work, he drew a rope-wielding member of the U.S. Border Patrol on horseback in the style of an antique engraving — visually evoking last year’s viral photo of an agent trying to stop a Haitian migrant in Texas.”

Alcaraz is lucky in one respect though – he has a chance to make amends. As widely reported, late last week, a Texas National Guard member Evans Bishop drowned in the Rio Grande River while trying to save a migrant struggling to swim across. The Guard isn’t the Border Patrol, but it’s carrying out the same border security mission. How fitting if Alcaraz drew a tribute to his selflessness.  And how seemingly unlikely.

Im-Politic: Why I’m Cancelling Linkedin

Tags

Big Tech, censorship, free speech, freedom of speech, Im-Politic, Linkedin, social media, Twitter

I’ve generally found social media platforms valuable in helping me reach audiences I value – but that doesn’t mean that they’re all equally valuable. And because Linkedin‘s perfomance in this regard has been mediocre at best, I’ve decided to respond to its decision to suspend my account for “behavior that appears to violate our Terms of Service” by in effect telling it to take a hike. 

Not that it would have been all that difficult for me to go through Linkedin‘s appeals process to get reinstated. In fact, I’ve swallowed my pride twice to take these steps for Twitter. But for all its glaring faults along censorship, partisanship, and double standards lines, Twitter has been incredibly effective at helping me achieve my goals.

Linkedin, by contrast has been kind of a flop. I’ve met a good number of folks who seem genuinely interesting, and reconnected with old friends and colleagues I’ve missed. But engagement levels are rock bottom. Moreover, at 68 and retired, I’m neither job-hunting nor searching for contacts to create future career opportunities.

Now it’s true that my Linkedin suspension has probably been a simple mistake on the platform’s part. That seems to have been the case for Twitter, and I was reinstated in a matter of hours on each occasion when I allegedly raised a red flag.

As best as I can tell, the post that got me into trouble on Linkedin was this one – where I reported that global CCP Virus deaths were approaching the number of European Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust. I assume that some algorithm, or 20-something censor, or combination of the two, saw the word “Nazi” and decided the post was hate speech.

But the idea that any software progam could be incompetent enough, or any censor boneheaded enough, to cancel me for this item is so offensive itself that I simply couldn’t stomach even the modest knee-bending required to get reactivated. At the same time, of course there’s a more fundamental issue at stake here: Why should Linkedin or any of its counterparts be in the business of supervising what kinds of expression are and are not acceptable to begin with?

Sure, I know that legally speaking they’re private companies and therefore have the right to enforce any standards of behavior they feel like. But there’s also a lot to the argument that they’ve become so powerful collectively – and in some cases individually – that they’ve acquired a worrisome amount of power to influence how the entire world (and the U.S. public) receives and transmit news and other types of information that shape politics and policy, and broader social and cultural practices and behaviors.

Again, that’s why I’ve so far allowed Twitter to be the boss of me – at least in principle. But Linkedin? As far as I’m concerned, you’re completely dispensible. So I’m telling you to take your Terms of Service and shove them. In other words, you’re cancelling me simply because you can? Well I’m cancelling you out of my life simply because I can.