Yesterday, I learned that The Borowitz Report is now on substack. That email I received notifying me explains why I hadn’t received any newsletters for some time … although my New Yorker subscription is still up to date. This is not earthshaing in itself – I’m only sharing it to remind everyone that to read freecolumns on substack, there’s no paywall, but there is a request to become a paid subscriber, and you need to find that request and click on “Keep reading” or “Let me read it first” or whatever opt-out Substack has assigned to that particular participant. I recommend we all get used to it. Just since I started reading Substack authors, which is less than a year, Wonkette has joined it, and Talking Points Memo, and now Borowitz, and the number and names of people who blog there would suggest that one might not really need anythng else but Substack in order to be well informed. I’m not going there – I have numerous other sources I don’t want to give up – but just sayin’.
Yes, I know, Joe Manchin. But this time he’s exactly right. And if he can be right on this, he can be right on at least some other things. Which may explain why the party has put up with him for so long.
Right wing jurists. “History and tradition.” G.K, Chesterton once wrote that tradition is de,ocracy extended through time. His example was, Democracy says “Don’t ignore a good man’s opinion, even if he is (insert caste designator here.)” Tradition says, “Don’t ignore a good man’s opinion, even if he is dead.” Aside from the obvious facts that only men are included, and that all appear presumed to be “good” (IIRC he was writing in the nineteen-oughts), I have no objection to attending to the opinions of the dead. I’m fine if they vote. I’m not fine with their being dictators from the grave. History (with a little help from archeology) tells us that human sacrifice was a tradition for literally thousands of years. I don’t know, or know of, anyone who wants it back.
Yesterday, I got a couple of my hospital stay bills paid (with my HRA credit/debit card.) I haven’t paid them all because I haven’t gotten them yet – the hospital got my address wrong and then passed that on to everyone. I have like 8 MSNs (they used to be called EOBs), many have more than one provider, and one of them has so many providers it’s 14 pages. But the combination of Medicare and an HRA is a real blessing. Incidentally, today is Saint Joseph’s Day. Just two days after St. Patrick’s, and coming asthey do in the middle of Lent, they make a nice little break from Lenten fasting … if anyone is still doing that.
Robert Hubbell provided a link to a transcript of President Biden’s Gridiron speech. Unlike the White Hose Correspondents’ Dinner, video is never released from the Gridiron, so this is all we’ll get. FactBase, who posted it, attempts to provide reactions along the way. Remember, when you see negative reactions, that everyone there is a journalist. My reaction is very positive to thse remarks.
Viktor Orbán is in some ways more dangerous than Trump**. Unlike Trump**, he knows what he is doing and he is good at it. The meeting Heather Cox Richardson writes about was blatant subversion, and a public slap in the face to the United States (though it wpuld have been more public had the media bothered to notice it.)
Yesterday, Trinette was by again – I didn’t have much in the way of recyclables (I will next week) but I did have a big bag of trash. And she was kind enough to change the batteries in my thermostat. Not that it’s terribly difficult, if I weren’t so short (I used to be 5’5″ but I’m down to 5’0″) and so easy to get off balance. She went home to work on her taxes, and I came back to my “den” to work on this. And maybe my taxes too. I don’t envy her – she has not only her own taxes to do, but her two sons – pne of whom has out of state income and will again this year at least. Me, so much of my income (all of my Social Security) is non-taxable (yes, that means there isn’t a lot of it, but it’s enough) that I really don’t legally need to file. But I do.
Yesterday, I did listen to Turandot after all. Of course it was lovely – but I was also fascinated to observe that the Met’s announcer as well as the steeped-in-opera expert who seerves as her sidekick (you know that opera which the listeners voted on a few weeks ago? Well, he was at that performance when it happened. And was an adult at the time) both pronounced the name of the opera “Turandot” but the singers pronounced it “Turandough.” I believe “Turandough is more technically correct, based on a letter Puccini wrote suggesting that pronunciation, but I do like the sound of “Turandot” better myself. Not that it really matters. Oh, the conductor was the first Ukrainian, and therefore also the first Ukrainian woman, to conduct at the Met. Aside from that, I basically just laid out (in tiny bottles) my meds for the next two weeks. Boring, but it has to be done.
I am not deliberately seeking for Women’s History month stories which are also Black History – I just keep running into them, and they’re good ones.
Heaven knows I cannot generally recommend the New York Times for journalism, but this appears to have some valuable information. Hopefully you won’t be negatively affected by all the eye-blinking in the caricatures.
Tax time is approaching in the USA, and for the first time in years I will have to pay rather than get a refund. I did have a windfall this year, though, so I’ll have to send a check to Uncle Sam. This has prompted me to think about income tax, how we pay it, and a possible solution to make it less of a pain in the rear end.
I don’t mind paying my fair share of taxes. I realize that, unless we pay taxes, we can’t have such things as roads and bridges, libraries, public parks, public transit, fire departments, and so on. I don’t mind paying the salaries of police officers and firefighters, or helping a single mom feed her family healthful meals. I do, however, mind having to support brutal apartheid Israel or contribute to corporate welfare – as well as having to pay more because the super-rich and big corporations get fat tax breaks.
Already there is a strident and growing “Tax the Rich” movement. Even some of the 1% agree that they should pay more in taxes. It’s only fair that, the more you earn, the more you cough up. We need to eliminate not only ridiculous tax cuts for the wealthiest, but also close as many loopholes as we can.
That, however, is not the subject of my essay. I recently got an idea for making tax time less, well, taxing. Maybe it isn’t feasible, maybe it’s just a pipe dream, but here goes.
When you fill out your form and discover you have to pony up, what if you could delegate where your money goes? That way you could be sure your hard-earned cash was going where you wanted. What if you could require that X amount of money, or a percentage, went to libraries, and another to schools, and another to Green New Deal projects, and another to pay the salaries of municipal workers? If you didn’t earmark your taxes, the government could decide for itself.
Imagine if we had a system like that. You’ve probably seen the slogan “It will be a great day when schools have all the money they need and the Army has to hold a car wash in order to buy a tank” or some variation of that. What if the defense budget depended on how many taxpayers were willing to support it? On the other hand, selfish conservatives could refuse to pay for SNAP, welfare, WIC, and similar programs. Maybe then there would be less incentive to join anti-government bugnut groups.
However, I can see this will generate problems. First, it will lengthen the tax return forms. Second, which segments of the budget do you put down? How specific do you make each item? Do you have a blanket slot for “Public assistance,” or do you break it down into different programs? And what if people don’t earmark all of the moolah in their check to the IRS? What if people make errors, delegating more cash than they’re actually paying? Finally, adding a feature allowing taxpayers to decide where they want their taxes to go will require a legion of bureaucrats to handle.
An old saw states that there are only two kinds of ideas: good ones, and those that need improvement. Sometimes an idea that needs improvement serves as a stepping stone towards a workable solution.
Today, it looks as though we in the United States need some help from the goddess Cybele, the goddess of childbirth
It seems ironic that today, just as almost every other country in the world, including notoriously Roman Catholic countries like France and Ireland, has made abortion legal, and women may make their own medical choices and have bodiy autonomy, the United States is going backwards in time (though not as long as you might think. Abortion was never a political issue until sometime in the latter half of the 19th century the Pope at the time wrote an Encyclical condemning it.) It’s true that abortions were hard to get before that. But that probably was because so lttle was known about the female anatomy that there were no techniques for it – certainly no safe ones. Some doctors may have been influenced by the full version of the Hippocratic Oath, of course.
And it’s even more ironic that the way they chose to justify this draconian action (or actions) puts a huge risk not only women, but also the practice of IVF, in vitro fertilization. You may or may not know anyone personally who has used this technique, often when all else failed, to produce a child (I believe Tammy Duckworth had to use it due to her combat injuries.) If not, this highly personal story should give you at least an idea of how complicated it is at every point – and how hypocritical the Republican Party is (as if you didn’t know).
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I’m a political scientist, and the Alabama Supreme Court’s IVF ruling turned me into a reproductive-rights refugee
Spencer and Gabby Goidel hadn’t planned to become activists. Spencer and Gabby Goidel, CC BY-ND
That Friday evening, Feb. 16, 2024, unaware of the ruling, Gabby started taking her stimulation medications, worth roughly US$4,000 in total. We didn’t hear about the decision until Sunday morning, Feb. 18. By then, she had taken four injections – or two doses – of each of the stimulation medications.
For those who don’t know, the IVF process is a winding journey full of tests, bloodwork and bills. An IVF patient takes hormones for eight to 14 days to stimulate their ovaries to produce many mature eggs. The mature eggs are then retrieved via a minor surgical procedure and fertilized with sperm in a lab. The newly created embryos are monitored, sometimes biopsied and frozen for genetic testing, and then implanted, usually one at a time, in the uterus. From injection to implantation, one round of IVF takes four to eight weeks.
IVF can be as stressful as it is exciting. However, the potential of having a successful pregnancy and our own child at the end of the process, we hoped, would make it all worth it. The decision by the Alabama Supreme Court threw our dreams up in the air.
I study politics – I don’t practice it. I’m not involved in state or local government. I’m a scholar, not an activist or an advocate. But now one of the most intimate, personal events of our lives had been turned into a political event by the state’s highest court. As a result, I became something else, too, which I had not been before: an activist.
Making sense of the ruling
Throughout the process of creating, growing and testing embryos in a lab, as many as 50% to 70% of embryos can be lost. Similarly, in the preimplantation stage of natural pregnancies, many embryos don’t survive.
If embryos are children, as the court ruled, then fertility clinics and patients would be exposed to an immense amount of potential legal liability. Under this new framework, patients would be able to bring wrongful death suits against doctors for the normal failures of embryos in the testing or implantation phase. Doctors would either have to charge more for an already expensive procedure to cover massive legal-insurance costs or avoid IVF altogether.
Lab staff at an in vitro fertilization lab extract cells from embryos that are then checked for viability. AP Photo/Michael Wyke
The decision and its implication – that IVF could not continue in the state of Alabama – felt like a personal affront to us. We were infuriated to have this uncertainty injected into the process three days into injecting IVF medication.
While the decision clearly imperiled the future of IVF in Alabama, it was not clear to us whether we would be allowed to continue the process we had begun. We were left completely in the dark for the next four days. Gabby and I had no choice but to continue daily life and IVF as though nothing was happening.
I’ll never forget walking into class on Monday, Feb. 19, and telling the students about the court’s ruling and how it – maybe? – was going to jeopardize Gabby’s and my IVF process.
Before starting IVF, Gabby and I had gone through three miscarriages together.
IVF doesn’t always work. Approximately 55% of IVF patients under the age of 35 – Gabby is 26 – have a successful pregnancy after one egg retrieval. We couldn’t imagine the pain of telling friends and family that our attempt at having a child had once again failed. So we had agreed we were going to tell as few people as possible about starting IVF.
Yet, here I was now, telling my entire class what we were going through and how the Alabama Supreme Court ruling could affect us.
I wasn’t alone in sharing our story. The night before my Monday morning class, Gabby published an opinion column on our local news site about the ruling and our resulting fears and anxieties, which really resonated with people.
I was, that day and throughout the next few weeks, fixated on the conceptual gulf between the court’s ruling and public opinion. I wondered aloud, “Who’s against IVF? Surely, only 5% to 10% of the public agrees with this ruling.”
The actual numbers aren’t far off my in-class guess. Only 8% of Americans say that IVF is immoral or should be illegal. But the story is more nuanced than that. Approximately 31% of Americans and 49% of Republicans support “considering frozen embryos as people and holding those who destroy them legally responsible.”
In an attempt to tie our personal political experience into the class topic, I remarked that this court decision was a surefire way to get people involved in politics. I had no clue at the time how prophetic my comment would be.
We didn’t know what we were going to do, but we knew we were likely leaving the state to continue IVF. I needed to tell my department chair what was going on.
I was walking out of my department chair’s office when my phone rang. Gabby told me, “We got in, we’re going to Temple.” I ran back into my department chair’s office, told her we were going to Temple, Texas, and then rushed home.
A reporter from CNN beat me there. It was one of severalinterviews with majormediaoutlets Gabby did in the wake of her opinion column. After the interview, we threw clothes in a suitcase, dropped our dogs off at the vet and drove to the Atlanta airport. We flew to Texas that night.
One of the Goidels’ many media interviews in the wake of the Alabama ruling.
The thought of not completing the egg retrieval never seriously entered our minds. We were confident that we could get in with another IVF clinic somewhere, anywhere. But we’re affluent. We’re privileged. What if we weren’t so well off? We wouldn’t have wanted to give up, but we wouldn’t have been able to afford the fight.
We spent exactly one week at my parents’ house in Texas. Thankfully, my parents live an hour and a half away from the Temple clinic. We met our new doctor, Dr. Gordon Wright Bates, and were immediately reassured. His cool expertise and confidence were calming to a stressed-out couple. The Alabama Supreme Court may have upended our lives, but we felt weirdly lucky to be in such a comfortable place.
The egg retrieval was Wednesday morning, Feb. 28. By all indications, it went well. IVF, however, is full of uncertainties. Now we are waiting on the results from preimplantation genetic testing. After that, there’s implantation and hoping the embryo continues to grow. We’re not in the clear: IVF is a stressful process even without a state court getting in the way. But today we are in a situation more like an average couple going through IVF than we have been in the past few weeks.
Late Wednesday night, March 6, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law a bill providing legal protection to IVF clinics in the state. Gabby and I rejoiced at the news. Hopefully, we’re the last Alabamian couple to flee the state for IVF.
A mobilizing moment
When state politics directly interferes with your life, it feels like a gut punch, as if the community that you love is saying you’re not loved back. It’s easy to see how such an experience could either discourage or motivate you. Research shows that traumatic events, for the most part, depress voter turnout in the following presidential election. By contrast, families and friends of 9/11 victims became and remained more politically engaged than their peers.
In this case, the Alabama Supreme Court ruling mobilized Gabby and otherwomen going through the IVF process. For better or worse, the women, couples and families mobilized by this decision will likely always be more engaged because of it.
“Oh, God,” I remarked to my dad, “we’re going to be activists now, aren’t we?”
“So?” he asked.
“No one likes activists,” I responded in jest. But if we’re going to have and raise the family we want, this is just the first of many decisions we’re going to make that someone’s not going to like.
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Cybele, I’ll bet you wish you have had a tool like IVF to help out couples in despair. But abortion too can oddly increase fertility in the long run. Mt mother, for instance, had surgery for an ectopic pregnancy (they called it a “burst tubal pregnancy” at the time, which essentially means it wasn’t caught in time and she was bleeding like crazy all over the docter’s office when it was caught.) Had she not been allowed to have her life saved with that surgery, I would not have existed. I came along about seven years later. And it just makes sense – if a woman is not able to get an abortion for a pregnancy which will kill her if not terminated, she will not bear any more children. Ever.
I don’t expect you to get through to any Republican lawmakers … but you may be able to give some hints on how to grapple with this issue to Democratic lawmakers. We have several who are good at turning factual information into damning narratives. To name a few Jamie Raskin, Jerry Nadler, Eric Swalwell, Adam Schiff, Ted Lieu … and that’s just in the House. There are some in the Senate also. Any assistance will be more a[[reciayed than I can possibly express.
Yesterday, I got very little done. Most of what I accomplished was clearing a way to the best seat to watch the actual television from – now that it’s working again. Escept that when it came time, the heavy snow we’ve has the last two days had mangled the signal so badly I couldn’t watch Fortunately , “Dead Man Walking” will be streamed through Passport – but the streams don’t start until the 19th. I was hoping not to have to wait. (I’ve already waited over 20 years just to hear it.) So, yes, this is skimpy. And i’ll have listened to Turandot and been grateful.
I missed “Pi Day,” so this is a bit late. And this parody is a bit over 8 minutes (about the same as the original IIRC) but it’s worth every second of your time that it takes. It’s upbeat, but it made me reach for a hanky It says, in a dfferent way, so much of what I have been feeling. (I even put it into my email signature.)
If you’ve been wondering why suddenly TikTok is neeing named in bills and voted on in the House, and now going to the Senate, this should make it pellucidly clear.
Yesterday, I looked up the radio opera for tomorrow, which is Puccini’s “Turandot.” It’s a lovely opera, with very effective music, including “Nessun dorma,” which became Pavarotti’s signature aria, and has been recorded now by almost evereyone (I’ve even heard a recording of Sarah Brightman singing it.) But tonight, Rocky Mountain PBS will air Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” starting at 8:00 pm and running until 11:00 pm. And that I just cannot miss. It is part of the Live in HD series, so it was recorded in October, and will be the same cast I heard in January. The three leading women I know well, and have not just heard but also seen them all, two of them in person, but I had to look up the bass/baritone. This is kind of a signature role of his. He spent some years corresponding with a death row prisoner in Texas – until the man suicided after SCOTUS turned his last appeal down. So I may end up sleeping though all or part of “Turandot” after all. We shall see.
Mary Trump writes about the Hur hearing. There are video clps all over of Jerry Nadler and Jamie Raskin handing Hur his posterior – you have probably seen some. Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff also got in on the act. Enjoy.
Although he technically is, being a human male over 18, I hate even seeing Kyle Rittenhouse called a “man,” To me, “little punk” is more appropriate.
I’m linking this instead of embedding it … but it’s only a minute. It’s a new ad made by VoteVets, and they have managed somehow to get Fox to commit to airing it on Fox & Friends (one of TSF’s favorite shows.) So backlash can be expected. I applaud VoteVets for doing this.
