Garcia was fifteen weeks into her pregnancy, and, in cases of miscarriage in the second trimester, the safest treatment is a surgical removal or a medical induction of labor. Instead, she was “discharged to home self-care,” as her chart notes. All Garcia could do was wait until she had a natural miscarriage. The thought of it terrified her. What if she hemorrhaged in the middle of the street? Or in the car, picking up her children from school? Her doctor’s only departing instructions were: if you start bleeding or develop a fever, check into the hospital immediately. (The doctor did not respond to requests for comment.)"They" being centrists dipshit pundits.
A mournful silence settled in Garcia’s home. Escareño busied himself, but there were only so many times he could empty the trash or mow the lawn. Garcia spent most of her days lying in bed. In a corner of their bedroom sat purchases she had made for Vanellope: diapers, a snuggly blanket, and now a small urn.
Garcia’s situation was not unique. Across Texas, reports were surfacing of women being sent home to manage miscarriages on their own. In 2021, the state had passed a law known as S.B. 8, banning nearly all abortions after electrical activity is detected in fetal cells, which typically happens around the sixth week of gestation. The law encouraged civilians to sue violators, in exchange for the possibility of a ten-thousand-dollar reward.
Nov 27 (Reuters) - Ukraine should consider lowering the age of military service for its soldiers to 18 from 25, a senior U.S. administration official said on Wednesday, putting pressure on Kyiv to bolster its fighting forces in the country's war with Russia.
If senators can go on vacation, then so can I, a bit. Light blogging for the next few days, unless I get angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry, though.
An angry Rudy Giuliani lashed out in court Tuesday at the judge presiding over the collection proceeding for the $146 million defamation judgment against him — and complained he's having a hard time making ends meet.
Speaking after U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman said the former personal lawyer to Donald Trump had not been complying with court orders to surrender his assets, Giuliani snapped: “The implications you are making against me are wrong. I have no car, no credit card, no cash, everything I have is tied up. They have put stop orders on my business accounts, and I can’t pay my bills.”
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s legal team found evidence that a top adviser asked for retainer fees from potential appointees in order to promote them for jobs in the new administration, five people briefed on the matter said on Monday.When national tragedy strikes, and everyone (including, often these same people!) is saying things like "we must come together" and "now is not the time for politics," they're busy figuring out how to charge the feds $500 for a bottle of water.
Mr. Trump directed his team to carry out the review of the adviser, Boris Epshteyn, who coordinated the legal defenses in Mr. Trump’s criminal cases and is a powerful figure in the transition. Several people whom Mr. Trump trusts had alerted him that Mr. Epshteyn was seeking money from people looking for appointments, three of the people briefed on the matter said.
To make these nonstories seem newsier, Fuming/Deeply Concerned Biden reports are often peppered with direct or implicit claims of a just-around-the-corner “break” between Biden and Netanyahu. “Biden moving closer than ever to a breach with Netanyahu,” The Washington Post pronounced in February 2024. “After decades of building a ‘close, personal’ friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu, Joe Biden has had it with the Israeli prime minister,” Politico’s Michael Hirsh told us in March 2024. The New York Times’ Peter Baker informs his readers that Biden “has finally had it with an Israeli leadership that he believes is not listening to him.”Which means they see "you" as the mark.
Alas, no break ever materialized. Baker even indicates that Biden’s new supposedly angry posture was delivering results. “To some degree, the Israelis have responded,” Baker told Times readers on May 11, 2024, “despite more than three months of vowing to invade Rafah, they have yet to actually do so beyond limited strikes.”
Three days after Baker’s report, the IDF entered the center of Rafah, quickly turning the city that once held 275,000 residents “into a ghost town,” as NBC News put it. And, as of August 2024, Data from the Decentralized Damage Mapping Group showed, according to Bellingcat, “that almost 44 percent of all buildings in the Rafah governorate in southern Gaza have been damaged or destroyed.” Even the most pro-Biden analysts agree that Netanayu steamrolled through Biden’s supposed “Rafah red line.”
The 35-year-old’s death was preventable, according to more than a dozen doctors who reviewed a detailed summary of her case for ProPublica. Some said it raises serious questions about how abortion bans are pressuring doctors to diverge from the standard of care and reach for less-effective options that could expose their patients to more risks. Doctors and patients described similar decisions they’ve witnessed across the state.This had nothing to do with "abortion" as our glorious pundits understand it, but is the obvious predictable consequence of prioritizing fetal "life" over the life of the mother.
On Friday, Biden spoke to French President Emmanuel Macron to try to solve the problem.The fake spin here is that France has made the Lebanon peace deal more difficult. Ah, yes, peace was at hand until Macron messed it up! At the level of "the Iraq war is more likely because peace protesters have emboldened Saddam."
A U.S. official said Biden told Macron that Netanyahu was right to be angry, and that it was not possible to mediate a deal while also pledging to arrest the head of state of one of the parties.
Macron told Biden he wanted to help but that his Foreign Ministry was only making clear its legal obligations towards the ICC. The French issued second statement to try to tamp down the tensions.
But in Trump’s freewheeling orbit, the incident was soon forgotten as his team has returned to the patterns of his first term in office — with shouting matches, expulsions from meetings and name-calling, all between the public celebrations and rocket-ship photo ops. As during Trump’s first term, competing factions have begun to run roughshod over each other, sometimes kicking up clouds of dust.
It'd be funnier if we didn't learn that Joe Biden spent years doing something and then looking to Morning Joseph for approval on his TV.
A broad difference between (most) conservatives and liberals is the former think "fairness" requires that for every one of their guys who gets busted, one of our guys should be busted too. While liberals more tend to think "fairness" means all the rapist pedophiles get busted.
The White House says it is working with Israel on a response to the ICC arrest warrants for PM Netanyahu and ex-Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. A spokesperson added that the US Biden administration disputes the idea that the court has jurisdiction. pic.twitter.com/8l3yg4agiW
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) November 21, 2024
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau confirms Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant will be arrested if they step foot in Canada after the ICC’s decision to issue arrest warrants. pic.twitter.com/QF1bw0p0EM
— Paris Marx (@parismarx) November 21, 2024
People have to get, as my father would have said, real work, real jobs. People are going to have to get jobs and they're going to be scrambling.I'm so old I remember when economists believed the natural rate of unemployment/NAIRU was 6%. That was stupid, but the actual rate has been below that since June 2021. If you think the issue is that people have dropped out of the labor force, the prime age participation rate is higher than it's been since April, 2001.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it will give Ukraine antipersonnel mines to help it slow Russia’s battlefield advances, marking the second major shift on U.S. military support for Kyiv in days.
A California woman told police that Trump Cabinet pick Pete Hegseth physically blocked her from leaving a hotel room, took her phone, and then sexually assaulted her even though she “remembered saying ‘no’ a lot,” a police report obtained by CNN shows.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyhu, accusing him of crimes against humanity war crimes over the war in GazaHopefully I am being too cynical.
The court has also issued arrest warrants for Israel’s former defence minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas leader Mohammed Deif. Israel said in August it had killed Deif in an air strike in Gaza earlier this year.
Rep. Ritchie Torres on Wednesday refused to rule out mounting a 2026 Democratic primary challenge to Gov. Hochul.
The effort is serious enough that the White House has launched a pointed pushback. “Disapproving arms purchases for Israel at this moment would …put wind in the sails of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas at the worst possible moment,” the document from the Biden administration reads.Everyone who stuck with this administration until the end should be occasionally politely asked to leave restaurants (the most extreme form of elite accountability there is).
The document additionally appears to endorse continued fighting despite the administration’s public narrative that it is seeking settlements to end the deadly Israeli military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon.
The irony here is that Jentleson is describing a campaign that looks a lot like the one that Harris ran, and lost. As progressives quickly pointed out in response, in 2024 Harris did indeed say no to the kinds of groups he mentioned, leaning on celebrity endorsements and vague pronouncements of “joy.” The special interests that were most influential this cycle weren’t progressives but AIPAC, cryptocurrency PACS, and Uber, whose former chief counsel Tony West (Harris’s brother-in-law) urged the candidate to moderate her message so as to better appeal to corporate interests.
As journalist Dan Denvir wrote before the election, Democrats this cycle fell back on an old playbook of trying to outflank Republicans on immigration. They championed a bill chock-full of the right’s preferred policies, like expanding ICE detention capacity and restricting asylum, then campaigned on the fact that the GOP voted it down when Trump told them to. Having previously called Trump’s border wall a “medieval vanity project,” Harris then pledged to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building it. As Denvir writes, “Given the choice to pander to reactionaries or shore up the party’s left wing, Democrats tend to prioritize the former. The result is a dangerous asymmetric polarization: Republicans radicalize on immigration, while Democratic elites chase after them. The ‘normal’ position on immigration moves ever rightward.”
What precisely might Harris have said to better convince voters that she would be adequately tough on immigration? And if her fatal flaws in Jentleson’s view mostly come down to things she said in the 2020 primary, does that mean that all candidates should ignore the realities of the race that they’re currently in—including in relatively progressive seats—so as to avoid Republican blowback if they run for something else in the future? The trouble with the “moderation” pitch isn’t just that it ignores the reality of the election that just happened. It also leaves Democrats playing catch-up in debates whose terms are perpetually set by Republicans, whatever the real-world consequences. The demand that the party embrace whatever positions happen to be popular at the moment imagines public opinion as exogenous to the work of politics. What precisely is the “moral imperative” to win elections if Democrats are merely choosing the correct position among the options that the right lays out for them?
A central pillar of American democracy is that no man is above the law. But Mr. Trump isn’t an ordinary man.There's no point in arguing with this stuff. Pointing and mocking is all it deserves.
The House Ethics Committee obtained records, including a check and records of Venmo payments, that appear to show that then-Rep. Matt Gaetz paid more than $10,000 to two women who were later witnesses in sexual misconduct probes conducted by both the House and the Justice Department, according to documents obtained by ABC News.
The Venmo records show that between July 2017 and late January 2019, Gaetz -- who was first elected in 2016 -- allegedly made 27 Venmo payments totaling $10,224.02 to the two witnesses, who were over the age of 18 at the time.
I think she's saying Dems need to do some code switching. Or cosplaying.At a post-election DSCC briefing with winning Dem candidates.
— David Weigel (@daveweigel) November 19, 2024
Elissa Slotkin: “I personally think that identity politics needs to go the way of the dodo.” Dems should take language “not from the faculty lounge, but the assembly line.”
Yesterday, as outraged "Morning Joe" fans registered their objections on social media sites, Scarborough defended his outreach to Trump, telling associates that having face time with a world leader is a no-brainer. Some of his MSNBC colleagues agreed. But there was more to the Mar-a-Lago meeting.
According to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, Scarborough and Brzezinski were credibly concerned that they could face governmental and legal harassment from the incoming Trump administration. Knowing that Trump has threatened retribution against his perceived political opponents, and that Trump has promoted lies about Scarborough and Brzezinski in the past, the MSNBC hosts decided to reach out to the president-elect.
Florida attorney Joel Leppard said in an interview with The Washington Post that one of his clients witnessed Gaetz having sex with the minor at a drug-fueled party in July 2017 — and that Gaetz was unaware of her age at the time but subsequently was told she was underage. ABC News first reported the news.
This woman and a second woman, also represented by Leppard, testified that they were paid by Gaetz to have sex with him and other individuals who attended these “sex parties.” They were paid through Venmo or other conduits — including the PayPal of Nestor Galban, whom Gaetz has referred to as his “adopted son.”
We’re told that health journalist Ed Yong, whose COVID reporting for The Atlantic won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021, shared posts on his private Instagram stories this week expressing outrage at the move, and what it suggested about the editorial direction of the magazine. Yong described Chait as a “fucking putz,” expressed frustration at The Atlantic’s skeptical coverage of trans issues and employment of the writer Helen Lewis. Yong also expressed disappointment at the publication’s occasional defense of Israel’s war in Gaza, and suggested that his friends should unsubscribe. (Yong left the magazine last summer.)
True of the Atlantic, true of all institutions.
Things change quickly. That was about 14 months ago. Trump must have pivoted to being "not like Hitler" since then.
“And he’s sure taking lots of credit for the president’s victory. Bragging about America PAC and X to anyone who will listen. He’s trying to make President Trump feel indebted to him. And the president is indebted to no one,” they added.
The second person said that Musk had been overstepping his bounds, and that Musk has an “opinion on and about everything.”
“He wants to be seen as having say in everything (even if he doesn’t),” the source told NBC.
Matt Gaetz shouldn’t be able to resign away an ethics investigation.
— Senate Judiciary Committee (@JudiciaryDems) November 14, 2024
RT if you agree.
Or as one DNC member from Florida put it: “I don’t want to be the freak show party, like they have branded us. You know, when you’re a mom with three kids, and you live in middle America and you’re just not really into politics, and you see these ads that scare the bejesus out of you, you’re like, ‘I know Trump’s weird or whatever, but I would rather his weirdness that doesn’t affect my kids.’”
Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the two Georgia poll workers defamed by Rudolph W. Giuliani after the 2020 election, received his watch collection, a ring and his vintage Mercedes-Benz on Friday.
The deliveries, which Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer, Joseph Cammarata, reported to the court on Friday, were a long time coming for the women, who are mother and daughter. It was also a small down payment on what the former New York City mayor owes them.
"I defer at this moment to whatever course they decide to take. And I hope they take a course that is bipartisan," Jeffries said today about the Ethics Committee.
Breaking: Mike Johnson says he does not think the House Ethics Committee report into Matt Gaetz should be released.
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 15, 2024
Remember how Time's Up was co-opted by a bunch of rich donors and their social circle who then ran a side for profit business offering consulting on how to protect powerful men from their accusers?Tina Tchen, co-founder of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, will become executive vice president and chief strategy and impact officer at the Obama Foundation.They keep showing us who they are.Congratulations to @ObamaFoundation & dear friend Tina Tchen on her new role as Chief Strategy & Impact Officer! Tina is such a brilliant lawyer but also so COMMITTED to doing good. This is excellent news. https://t.co/KcLMj47u6q
— Jennifer Palmieri (@jmpalmieri) July 6, 2022
Jen Palmieri - Clintonworld fixture - tried to blame campaign decisions on unnamed YOUNG WOKE STAFFERS, the people who run things every time something goes wrong, was called out by other reporters, and backed down.
Clinton went on to note the history of the Jewish people and Judaism in what is now the State of Israel, saying that Jews “were there first — before their faith existed,” apparently referring to Islam and the Palestinian people.
He said that Jews had been in the land “in the time of King David, and the southernmost tribes had Judea and Samaria,” referring to the West Bank using the Biblical terminology also in use among Israelis.
Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, says he has ordered preparations to annex the occupied West Bank, hoping “2025 will be, with God's help, the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.” pic.twitter.com/qhPFTI8IDt
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) November 11, 2024
1) Are the Democrats too Right or Too Left?
2) The Democrats Have A Media Problem
3) Being a Democrat should be a Membership With Benefits
The first is a debate, the second is inarguable even if the prescriptions differ, the third is something which is also a good idea but no one ever follows through with it.
There actually was a lot of money pumped into a media effort recently, and I don't like to dump on it because I suppose any effort should be encouraged, but that most of you have never heard of it tells the story.
I don't think I could have voted for Biden. I held my nose and voted for Harris. I was never going to make a thing of it. I wasn't going suggest anybody shouldn't vote.
The thing is, my vote doesn't matter. I mean, yah, there's that chance the election would have come down to the state of Pennsylvania, and the state of Pennsylvania would come down to one vote - mine! - but while we like to imagine these things, they aren't very likely.
Absent mandatory voting, elections depend on lots of people deciding that it does matter if they vote, even though it really doesn't. Not individually.
Why did I almost not vote? No of course I didn't want the bad orange man to win - and ultimately that's why I voted - but also I've been watching a genocide unfold for past year and I've watched Biden's smirking ghouls at State on that subject and I've watched almost the entire Dem-industrial complex go after the people who opposed that genocide, or at best stay silent.
These people are so rotten and so horrible and many of them would be on trial in a just world. People were put on trial for less. "We" certainly supported putting people on trial for less, instead of opposing it in every way possible. We went to war - supposedly - over less!
So much for the international rules-based order.
I'm an engaged voter. I understand the issues. I understand harm reduction. I understand that the bad orange man is very bad indeed. I have no belief in accelerationism or fantasies about third party presidential runs. I am not a narcissist about this stuff; politics is never going to be centered around my personal desires.
But how dare these fucking people make me vote for this. How dare almost all of them, at best, stay silent. What did they want to be in positions of power for? Vacation homes and new boats?
It is, truly, a problem from hell, Samantha.
Gov. JB Pritzker is combing through hundreds of pages of Project 2025, shoring up legal resources and finding ways to further expand reproductive rights and environmental protections — all while he explores his own political future.
THE WOKE LEFT doesn’t even have a newspaper column in a prominent paper. It never appears on your favorite political TV shows. There are no prominent electeds except perhaps the fantasy version of AOC. I assume he doesn't mean the people who just spent a billion bucks or Harris herself.
(See post below for those just coming in)
As I said, I did my best not to pointlessly play shadow campaign manager, but the big warning signs to me were when Jen O'Malley Dillon and Anita Dunn took prominent roles. There was a clear shift when that happened.
If they won, they would be heroes and we would sing songs about them. But they didn't.
I am remembering how, for several elections, being online meant monitoring what nonsense Drudge (who is good now?) was feeding to willing gullible journalists (like NEW BLACK PANTHER PARTY THUGS AT PHILADELPHIA POLLING PLACES).
An issue with Christianity is many people take to it for the same reason kids love stories about heroes they can project themselves into. Harry Potter for the youngs, the son of God for megalomaniacal ketamine abusers.
Elon knows as much about the Bible as he does about writing code or designing rockets, but he does know it's about God's favorite boy - him.
I know it is mostly for his persona, but it does appeal!
The cons and marks have merged.
Kari Lake:
We’re ahead of my opponent, and I feel comfortable with our polling,” she insisted. “Our polling is a little different. We take polling, but we also combine it with AI, which reads all of what’s happening on social media and across the Internet.”
We don't need to waste money on polling, Kari, we can just ask Clippy.
At the end of June, in the afterglow of a debate performance that would ultimately prompt President Joe Biden to end his campaign for reelection, Donald Trump startled his aides by announcing that he’d come up with a new nickname for his opponent.
“The guy’s a retard. He’s retarded. I think that’s what I’ll start calling him,” Trump declared aboard his campaign plane, en route to a rally that evening, according to three people who heard him make the remarks: “Retarded Joe Biden.”
At the same time, the 2016 and 2020 polling misfires shattered many pollsters’ confidence in their own methods and data. When their results come in very blue, they don’t believe it. And frankly, I share that same feeling: If our final Pennsylvania poll comes in at Harris +7, why would I believe it? As a result, pollsters are more willing to take steps to produce more Republican-leaning results. (We don’t take such steps.)
Pregnant Teenager Died After Trying to Get Care in Three Visits to Texas Emergency Rooms
It took three ER visits and 20 hours before a hospital admitted Nevaeh Crain, 18, as her condition worsened. Doctors insisted on two ultrasounds to confirm “fetal demise.” She’s one of at least two Texas women who died under the state’s abortion ban.
Around that same time, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, an informal Trump adviser, emailed Axios to insist they cover the story, expressing hope that “Mollie Tibbetts is a household name by October,” as Democrats would be in “deep trouble,” Gingrich wrote. (Democrats ended up retaking control of the U.S. House in those midterm elections.)
Of course, not every member of Mollie’s family feels the same way about immigration, Trump, or politics in general. And when Trump uses the stories of slain Americans to call for sprawling crackdowns and revenge, some grieving families come out to embrace or endorse him.
Other heartbroken families refuse to sign onto his platform of retribution.
When Rolling Stone asks what Calderwood would say to Trump, or Vance, if either were sitting in front of her right now, she replies: “Where is your compassion? Where’s your humanity? It’s just not there, with either of them.… I don’t believe all illegal immigrants murder; there are people who aren’t illegal immigrants who murder women. That stigma of ‘illegal immigrants come here to murder,’ I think it doesn’t help anything. It divides people. And I feel pretty strongly about that. I don’t think this is a time for division.… This has got to stop.… This is a time to come together and heal.”
