The Daily Parker

Paul Krugman succinctly puts to bed any obfuscation of Southern aggression:

But it may be worth delving a bit deeper into the background here. Why did slavery exist in the first place? Why was it confined to only part of the United States? And why were slaveholders willing to start a war to defend the institution, even though abolitionism was still a fairly small movement and they faced no imminent risk of losing their chattels?

Let me start with an assertion that may be controversial: The American system of chattel slavery wasn’t motivated primarily by racism, but by greed. Slaveholders were racists, and they used racism both to justify their behavior and to make the enslavement of millions more sustainable, but it was the money and the inhumane greed that drove the racist system.

Labor was scarce in pre-Civil War America, so free workers earned high wages by European standards.

Landowners, of course, didn’t want to pay high wages. In the early days of colonial settlement, many Europeans came as indentured servants — in effect, temporary serfs. But landowners quickly turned to African slaves, who offered two advantages to their exploiters: Because they looked different from white settlers, they found it hard to escape, and they received less sympathy from poor whites who might otherwise have realized that they had many interests in common. Of course, white southerners also saw slaves as property, not people, and so the value of slaves factored into the balance sheet of this greed-driven system.

Anyone who believes or pretends to believe that the Civil War was about states’ rights should read Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, which point out that the truth was almost the opposite. In his conclusion, Grant noted that maintaining slavery was difficult when much of the nation consisted of free states, so the slave states in effect demanded control over free-state policies. “Northern marshals became slave-catchers, and Northern courts had to contribute to the support and protection of the institution,” he wrote.

And the war happened because the increasingly empowered people of the North, as Grant wrote, “were not willing to play the role of police for the South” in protecting slavery.

So yes, the Civil War was about slavery — an institution that existed solely to enrich some men by depriving others of their freedom. And there’s no excuse for anyone who pretends that there was anything noble or even defensible about the South’s cause: The Civil War was fought to defend an utterly vile institution.

Historians have known this for 160 years, but the Southern landowning class has successfully confused the issue for generations, as far as most people understand it. It's always money. Just like the Republican Party's craziness today.

Tomorrow I have a quick trip to the Bay Area to see family. I expect I will not only continue posting normally, but I will also research at least two Brews & Choos Special Stops while there. Exciting stuff.

And because we live in exciting times:

• The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York has charged an Indian national with a murder-for-hire scheme in which our "friend" the Government of India put out a hit on a Sikh activist living in our country.
• The US Dept of Defense has released its general demographic data for 2022, including all 1.3 million people on active duty and 994,000 reservists. (As Paul Krugman has said many times, the US Government is an insurance company with an army.)
• US Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) continues his fight to win Dumbest Asshole in Congress, scoring big points this week by appearing not to notice that his hold on 400-plus general and flag officer promotions has hurt the military.
• Julia Ioffe speculates on what will happen the day after the Gaza war ends.
• A Virgin Atlantic 787 made the Heathrow to Kennedy run yesterday using only biofuel.
• Meanwhile, both United Airlines and American Airlines have raised concerns about the planned Terminal 2 reconstruction here at O'Hare.
• Walking is good for you; walking quickly is better.
• Despite the declines in performing arts attendance generally, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra actually enjoyed a slight increase in ticket sales this year.

Finally, if you're in Chicago tonight around 6pm, tune into WFMT 98.7 FM. They're putting the Apollo Chorus performance at Holy Name Cathedral in their holiday preview. Cool! (And tickets are still available.)

I actually had a lot to do today at my real job, so I pushed these stories to later:

• Sure, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is a crazy Christianist who has fantasies about Israel, but not exactly the fantasies you'd expect from his kind.
• Speaking of Christianist loonies, Josh Marshall doesn't think they've learned anything at all from yesterday's blowout in Ohio.
• Julia Ioffe takes a look at the "horror in the Holy Land" while Eric Levitz examines the fraught language around the war.
• Molly White explains her op-ed in today's Times about the death-spiral of cryptocurrency failures.
• Ravinia Festival has sued Ravinia Brewing Co. over alleged trademark violations, as the neighborhood in Highland Park containing the brewery got its name originally from the music park.
• Michelin announced its recommendations for Chicago restaurants last night, awarding single stars to three new restaurants and a third star to Smyth.
• Northwest Texas had a magnitude 5.2 earthquake yesterday, which the USGS did not say was linked to aquifer overuse or fracking, both of which occur in the area.

Finally, The Economist calls out "six books you didn't know were propaganda," including Doctor Zhivago and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

And cue the "Dems in disarray" headlines, which reminds me that reporters don't choose headlines, publishers do. (At least the New Republic has some cooler heads.)

Seriously, though, the Democratic Party did awfully well last night, winning another four years for Kentucky governor Andy Bashears, a Pennsylvania Supreme Court seat, and control of both houses of the Virginia legislature:

Eight years of Donald Trump’s chaotic leadership, a House Republican conference in turmoil and one very big Supreme Court decision on abortion rights have combined to produce untold damage to the Republican Party, a reality that hit home with special force in elections on Tuesday.

For Democrats, Tuesday’s results were an antidote to recent polls, national and in key states, showing Biden losing to Trump. “Polls don’t vote” quickly became a post-Tuesday mantra for the president’s allies and advocates, though Biden’s challenges are serious and will remain. Before anyone projects too far ahead, Tuesday’s results — concentrated in a few states and with voter turnout lower than it is likely to be a year from now when Americans everywhere will vote for president — are not a reliable indicator of what lies ahead.

But the election results in Virginia offer other indicators of problems for Republicans. The legislative elections in Virginia were widely viewed as a test of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin and his effort to steer a course that neither fully embraced Trump nor fully rejected him, seeking to prove that his call for a “limit” on abortion after 15 weeks, with exceptions, was a stance that could play well enough in the suburbs to neutralize the issue.

Tuesday’s elections couldn’t answer questions about what might happen in 2024. No off-year elections do that. But they were a reminder that Americans are weighing a variety of factors as they assess their choices — and that when a majority say they think the country is heading in the wrong direction, that isn’t solely because they are unhappy with Biden.

And Ohio voters said Yes to abortion protections and legal marijuana, the first of which author and Ohio resident John Scalzi loves, and the second of which Illinois-based cannabis companies like Green Thumb Industries love. As Scalzi wrote:

In a week where the press and some Democrats were wringing their hands about the fact that Trump is leading Biden in some entirely meaningless polls a year out from the 2024 presidential election, the actual reality of how people are voting offers, shall we say, some interesting and possibly corrective perspectivse. One, restoring peoples’ ability to control their own bodies is a winner, and we’ve seen that over and over and over again in the time since the Dobbs decision. Two, you won’t go wrong letting people have their weed. Three, people in general are not nearly as intolerant as their gerrymandered representatives, or professional propogandists, or the people hoping to monetize their shittiness on the former Twitter.

Yeah. And yet, the Times can't shut up about things being "bad for Biden." It's almost like they want us to lose.

Tomorrow, Ohio citizens will vote on Issue 1, which would amend the state constitution to protect reproductive rights. But if you read the state Board of Elections explainer—the language that will actually appear on the ballot—you might not know WTF the amendment does. That is by design; Republican-ruled state legislatures have learned the hard way that an issue with 65% support will probably pass if people know what they're voting for.

Here's the actual proposed amendment, which would become Section 22 of Article 1 (the Ohio Bill of Rights):

A. Every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on:

1. contraception;
2. fertility treatment;
3. continuing one’s own pregnancy;
4. miscarriage care; and
5. abortion.

B. The State shall not, directly or indirectly, burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, or discriminate against either:

1. An individual's voluntary exercise of this right or
2. A person or entity that assists an individual exercising this right,
   unless the State demonstrates that it is using the least restrictive means to advance the individual's health in accordance with widely accepted and evidence-based standards of care.

However, abortion may be prohibited after fetal viability. But in no case may such an abortion be prohibited if in the professional judgment of the pregnant patient’s treating physician it is necessary to protect the pregnant patient’s life or health.

C. As used in this Section:

1. “Fetal viability” means “the point in a pregnancy when, in the professional judgment of the pregnant patient's treating physician, the fetus has a significant likelihood of survival outside the uterus with reasonable measures. This is determined on a case-by-case basis.”
2. “State” includes any governmental entity and any political subdivision.

D. This Section is self-executing.

That's about 200 words of plain English. Here's what the Board of Elections decided to put on the ballot:

Issue 1
A Self-Executing Amendment Relating to Abortion and Other Reproductive Decisions

Proposed Constitutional Amendment

Proposed by Initiative Petition

To enact Section 22 of Article I of the Constitution of the State of Ohio

A majority yes vote is necessary for the amendment to pass.

The proposed amendment would:

• Establish in the Constitution of the State of Ohio an individual right to one's own reproductive medical treatment, including but not limited to abortion;
• Create legal protections for any person or entity that assists a person with receiving reproductive medical treatment, including but not limited to abortion;
• Prohibit the State from directly or indirectly burdening, penalizing, or prohibiting abortion before an unborn child is determined to be viable, unless the State demonstrates that it is using the least restrictive means;
• Grant a pregnant woman's treating physician the authority to determine, on a case-by-case basis, whether an unborn child is viable;
• Only allow the State to prohibit an abortion after an unborn child is determined by a pregnant woman's treating physician to be viable and only if the physician does not consider the abortion necessary to protect the pregnant woman's life or health; and
• Always allow an unborn child to be aborted at any stage of pregnancy, regardless of viability if, in the treating physician's determination, the abortion is necessary to protect the pregnant woman's life or health.

If passed, the amendment will become effective 30 days after the election.

Shall the amendment be approved?

So what was wrong with the actual text of the amendment? And why did the Republicans in the Board of Elections want this text instead? One of the authors of the amendment, Dr David N Hackney, explains:

The clear lesson from 2022, when six states cast votes for reproductive rights, as well as the results of the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court race, is that voters vote in favor of abortion rights. Every straight up or down vote on reproductive freedom since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has gone in favor of defending or expanding access to abortion. So the strategy of anti-abortion activists has become to pull any available political, messaging or legal levers to prevent that.

[S]tate law allows our ballot board to substitute a summary, as long the initiative is reflected fairly — or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work. This is sensible for amendments excessively long or thick with legalese, making an unadulterated replication on paper ballots impractical. Issue 1, by contrast, consists of only 205 words (including numeration), in plain English. The 193-word summary written by the ballot board rescues voters from reading a total of 12 words.

Perhaps the most egregious change between the Issue 1 language and the summary written by the ballot board is the substitution of “unborn child” for “fetus.” “Fetus” is the unequivocally accepted medical term used in textbooks, lectures and research publications.

Ohio’s leaders have formally argued that “unborn child” is valid because it’s written into our existing anti-abortion statutes. This reasoning is circular, as “unborn child” is inappropriate in those contexts as well. Our attorney general’s office stated in a merit brief that “ballot language including the term ‘fetus’ has the potential to confuse voters, who may not know or understand the term’s varying definitions.”

This is, of course, just one of the tactics the Christianist Right uses all the time. They know they can't win on the merits, so they obfuscate, hoping to confuse or demoralize the people who would vote against their positions. Let's hope it once again fails tomorrow.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) forced through a vote on the top three general officer promotions that junior Senator Tommy "Coach" Tuberville (R-AL) has blocked for over six months, meaning we will have a Joint Chiefs Chair, a Commandant of the Marine Corps, and an Army Chief of Staff in the next couple of days. That leaves just over 300 admirals and general officers waiting for confirmation. No biggie.

Meanwhile:

• Republicans have latched onto the phrase "abortion tourism" to describe women trying to get adequate health care by traveling to states with fewer Republicans.
• Related: the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has a handy guide to right-wing terminology that denigrates women and family planning.
• Alexandra Petri compares her toddler to a certain billionaire, and darned if I can tell the difference.
• The government of Ottawa, Canada, has launched a full-frontal PR campaign against pedestrians after drivers killed almost 30 of them since 2016.

Finally, Bob Ballard's company recently did a 40-hour underwater survey of three WWII aircraft carriers sunk at the Battle of Midway. 

Today's weather feels like we might have real fall weather soon. Today's XKCD kind of nails it, too—not the weather, but the calendar.

In addition to nice weather, we have a nice bit of elected-official hypocrisy, too: the president of the Chicago Teachers Union got caught sending her son to a private school, and giving a really crappy explanation for it.

In other news:

• A jury took all of four hours to convict right-wing intellectual grifter Peter Navarro of contempt of Congress for ignoring the January 6th Committee's subpoena.
• Josh Marshall yawns at attempts to have the XPOTUS barred from the ballot on 14th Amendment grounds, even while conceding that's exactly what the section 4 of the Amendment is for.
• Even though they've attacked abortion rights, sex education, books and movies that feature independent women, and pretty much anything that empowers women and girls, the not-at-all-misogynist Republican Party now wants to end no-fault divorce, allowing as it does women to leave the "covenant" they made with their abusers.
• Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis told US Representative and contender for "Dumbest Person in Congress" Jim Jordan (R-OH) to go—sorry, she essentially said "bless your heart" in a delightful response to his threats of Congressional oversight.
• Julia Ioffe looks at the increasing cynicism of Africans and their rekindled affection for violent coups d'état.
• Veteran writer Tom Fontana ("St Elsewhere", "Oz," "Homicide: Life on the Street") reflects on his 4th writers strike in 40 years, and how pissed off he is.
• Strong Towns highlights a mapping tool to demonstrate how much of your city comprises parking lots. Unless you live in New York, San Francisco, San Juan, Washington, or Chicago, it's pretty grim.
• The National Hurricane Center warns that Hurricane Lee will reach category 5 before dissipating, but fortunately looks likely to miss more-populated areas—though Puerto Rico could get tropical storm winds early Sunday morning.
• National Geographic profiles Ann McKee's extraordinary work researching chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which cripples and kills US footballers more than people admit.

Finally, an old friend traveling back from Burning Man to Montreal plans to crash at my place on Saturday evening. I have two days to read up on the desert full of moop, Cory Doctorow's assertion that this Burn really was different, and the evidence that climate change played an outsized role in the muddy hell at Black Rock City this year.

Anti-abortion Republicans, having discovered by getting their asses handed to them in multiple referenda, that the majority of Americans don't want to ban the medical procedure, tried a new tactic in Ohio yesterday: make referenda impossible. They failed by a large margin:

Ohio voters rejected a bid on Tuesday to make it harder to amend the State Constitution, according to The Associated Press, a significant victory for abortion-rights supporters trying to stop the Republican-controlled State Legislature from severely restricting the procedure.

Late results showed the measure losing by 13 percentage points, 56.5 percent to 43.5 percent. The roughly 2.8 million votes cast dwarfed the 1.66 million ballots counted in the state’s 2022 primary elections, in which races for governor, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House were up for grabs.

The ballot measure would have required that amendments to the State Constitution gain approval by 60 percent of voters, up substantially from the current requirement of a simple majority. Republicans initially pitched that as an attempt to keep wealthy special interests from hijacking the amendment process for their own gain. The lawmakers voted largely along party lines in May to put the proposal on the ballot.

Ohio resident and author John Scalzi buries Amendment 1 deep:

That Issue 1 is mostly about abortion rights isn’t just speculation; Frank LaRose, Ohio’s current Secretary of State, said the quiet part out loud, saying it’s “100%” about that, because the GOP these days can’t actually stop monologuing about their evil plans. That it would also toss out the possible marijuana legalization initiative for November, and possible future initiatives on things like raising the minimum wage or redoing the frankly ridiculous gerrymandering in the state, or anything else, was just the cherry on top. At the end of the day, the Ohio GOP wanted to make sure their broadly unpopular laws telling people with uteruses they had no control over their own bodies were never challenged.

And it might have worked, too, if the Ohio GOP hadn’t done what shitty people who want to take away rights always do, which was to almost comically overreach.

Basically, the Ohio GOP had to go out of their way to lose some traditionally GOP voters, and managed to do just that.

The blatant dishonesty of the GOP and conservative messaging on Issue 1 is par for the course with their political messaging elsewhere, and it reminds me of two things: The absolute contempt the GOP has for their voters, in that they don’t feel like their voters need or deserve anything close to the truth; and how extremely well-trained GOP voters have become to reject the truth when it is inconvenient for their personal political preferences. As noted before, this particular time, the GOP disinformation regime didn’t work as well as it usually does, and some portion of the usual GOP voters didn’t swallow the bullshit. This will not teach the GOP to back off on the bullshit. It will teach them to shove the bullshit even harder the next time.

Josh Marshall fills in the larger pattern:

The broader electoral question is whether the overwhelming backlash against Dobbs will extend to elections beyond ballot initiatives where abortion is literally on the ballot. There is lots of evidence that abortion rights were a key driver of Democrats’ unexpectedly strong showing in the 2022 midterm, though in the nature of things it’s hard to isolate just what role it played in any particular race.

The challenge for Democrats is simply to align as many elections as possible with the abortion issue and the backlash against Dobbs, especially in governorships and election to Congress. There’s little sign the full electoral potential of the issue has even come close to having been harnessed.

I can't remember who said, "your religion doesn't prohibit me from doing anything; it only prohibits you." It seems like an increasingly pissed-off majority of Americans are gearing up to remind the religious right of this simple truth in the next election.

Former football coach and mediocre white guy Tommy Tuberville (R-MS), currently fighting for the Dumbest Person in Congress title against several of his Republican colleagues in the House and Senate, has continued his one-man blockade in the Senate against confirming the promotions of general and flag officers across the US military. As a consequence, for the first time in a century, the US Marine Corps has no Commandant:

[Commandant General David] Berger, whose four-year tour as the Marines’ top officer came to an end, was supposed to hand the reins over to Gen. Eric Smith, who has been nominated for the job. Instead, Smith will run the Corps on a temporary basis while he waits for Senate confirmation, thanks to the hold. Because he’s not confirmed, Smith will have to hold off on making any making strategic decisions for the service. He will also simultaneously serve in his current position as the Marine Corps’ No. 2.

Tuberville, an Alabama Republican and Senate Armed Services Committee member, placed the hold in protest of the Pentagon’s new policy that pays travel expenses for troops if they cannot obtain abortions in their state. He has also voiced frustration that President Joe Biden has yet to reach out to discuss the matter.

The senator’s procedural holds mean that senior officers across the military are unable to move their families to their new assignments, and in many cases are losing out on the pay raises that promotions entail.

Berger is the first of four members of the eight-member Joint Chiefs of Staff who will begin retiring this year. With the hold in place, half the chiefs, the leaders of the Army, Navy and Marine Corps, along with the chair, will have no confirmed successor in the seat to replace them.

Obviously the US Marine Corps can function with only an acting Commandant for a while. But because Tuberville has stopped almost 300 promotions to O7 and above, critical lower-level posts have gone unstaffed as well. (Let's just forget for a moment that arcane Senate rules, specifically designed to halt legislative business far beyond the "cooling saucer" envisioned by the founders, allows this to happen.)

Yesterday, US Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) had this to say about the Coach:

This hold is unnecessary, unprecedented, and, at a critical time in national security, it is driving the U.S. military to a potential breaking point. It is also an affront to the military and their families, who so many of us just lauded for their sacrifices during the Fourth of July festivities. My colleagues thanked them profusely, but do not recognize that they are professional officers who deserve consideration, not as political chips but as men and women of our services.

Those of my colleagues who support this unprecedented delay are themselves politicizing the military by the very nature of their actions. These promotions have always been confirmed by unanimous consent very soon after being reported to the floor or, on the rare occasion, a single overwhelming vote without cloture. But now, in refusing to confirm these promotions, the uniformed military, previously and appropriately shielded from partisan politics, is being thrust into the midst of politics. This behavior was once reserved only for individual political appointees, civilian political appointees on specific matters of dispute, usually with some reasonable or negotiable outcome. No more. It seems it is ‘‘my way’’ or no way at all. And that is a sad demonstration of individual hubris.

The Senator from Alabama often says if we really wanted these generals and admirals, we would just vote, but I would like to explain that. The Senator is not allowing a simple vote; he is demanding cloture first on every nomination. So we asked the Congressional Research Service what it would take to process 251 nominations with cloture. They estimate to file cloture on all the nominations being held, it would take approximately 5 hours. Then 2 days later, the Senate could start voting.

It will take approximately 668 hours to confirm all these military nominations. That is 27 days if the Senate works around the clock, 24 hours a day. If the Senate just did military nominations for 8 hours a day, it would take 84 days. So ‘‘just vote’’ is not an answer. This is not a feasible solution to this issue.

Right now, a number of military officers who were planning to retire are on an indefinite hold because they have no one confirmed to take their jobs. Others want to go to new commands but cannot for the same reason. Their families cannot move to their new homes. Their children cannot get ready for a new school. Their spouses cannot take new jobs.

This is not a game. These are real lives that have been upended. Due to the pure obstinacy of the Senator from Alabama, the Senate is, in effect, holding thousands of loyal members of the U.S. military and their families in limbo. I believe we owe them more than that.

Hear, hear. This isn't a game to anyone but Tuberville. But it's kind of what we'd expect from a mediocre old white guy from Alabama, isn't it? Except...weren't the Republicans the party of military preparedness a few years ago? I guess we have always been at war with Oceania after all...

But for me, it was Tuesday:

• The Democratic National Committee has selected Chicago to host its convention next August, when (I assume) our party will nominate President Biden for a second term. We last hosted the DNC in 1996, when the party nominated President Clinton for his second term.
• Just a few minutes ago, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg filed suit in the Southern District of New York to enjoin US Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) from interfering in the prosecution of the XPOTUS.
• Speaking of the House Moron Caucus, Jonah Goldberg worries that the kids following people like Jordan and the XPOTUS have never learned how to behave in public, with predictable and dire consequences for public discourse in the future.
• And speaking of, uh, discourse, New York Magazine features Stephanie Clifford (aka Stormy Daniels) on its cover this week, in which the actor describes her meeting in 2006 with a "pop-culture curiosity" years before destroying American democracy even entered into his dementia-addled brain. It...isn't pretty.
• Jennifer Rubin thinks the Religious Right's "victory" in politicizing the Federal judiciary will cripple the Republican Party. (I believe she's right.)
• Today I learned that Guthrie's Tavern did not die during the pandemic, and in fact will offer free hot dogs during Cubs home games to all paying customers (while supplies last).
• Rishi Shah and Shradha Agarwal, the CEO and president of Chicago tech company Outcome Health, were convicted on 32 counts of fraud and other crimes for their roles in stealing investors' money.
• The Hubble Space Telescope has detected a runaway black hole moving close to 1,000 km/s with a 200,000-light-year tail of baby stars following it. (Those baby stars happened because at that speed, it wasn't able to pull out in time...)
• MAD Magazine cartoonist Al Jaffee, inventor of the Fold-In, died Monday at 102.

Finally, Tupperware has warned its creditors and shareholders that it may go out of business in what I have to call...an uncontained failure of the company.