ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN and DARIUS TAHIR, - Politico
Stephan: Here is a twist in the right of a woman to control her own body that I could see developing but did not fully comprehend as to its effect on Roe v Wade, just as the issue faces an increasingly conservative Supreme Court. This report lays it out.
Abortion rights demonstrators rally outside the Supreme Court in Washington on March 4, 2020. Credit: Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
The battle over abortion rights has a dramatic new front: the fight over whether the Biden administration will make pills available online.
Even as they keep a sharp eye on the increasingly conservative Supreme Court, activists, lawmakers and medical groups are pushing Biden’s FDA to lift restrictions on a 20-year-old drug for terminating early pregnancies. Such a decision would dramatically remake the abortion landscape by making the pills available online and by mail even if the Supreme Court overturns or cuts back Roe vs. Wade.
Pressure that had already been building for years over access to telemedicine abortions is reaching a peak, as patients fearful of Covid-19 are seeking to avoid in-person medical procedures whenever possible and demand for the drug has skyrocketed.
As the Biden administration deliberates on the federal rules on where, when and from whom patients can get the pills, with a federal court deadline looming in early April, conservatives are already erecting barriers. In court, in Congress and in statehouses across the country, […]
Stephan: My view of these Ohio Republicans is that their existence is increasing the risk factor for society as a whole. They and those who think and act like them degrade our ability to control this virus. As I watch the politicization of a necessary medical intervention to get control of Covid-19, I am reminded of smallpox vaccination. If you were born before 1972 you have on one of your arms, up near your shoulder, a little scar from your smallpox vaccination. Every child got a smallpox vaccination, and it was not political. At the school I went to as a little boy your mother was contacted and she showed proof of vaccination. You could not go to elementary school public and private without having been vaccinated.
Nearly a third of Ohio Republican legislators told a newspaper they would not get the COVID-19 vaccine.
Ohio Republican legislator who will not get vaccinated. Credit: Raw Story
The Dayton Daily News asked 16 representatives and five senators from the Miami Valley whether they would be vaccinated against the highly contagious coronavirus, and 11 said yes but six said no, while another four declined to answer or didn’t respond.
State Rep. Nino Vitale (R-Urbana) a notorious anti-masker and coronavirus conspiracy theorist, would not tell the newspaper whether he would get the vaccine, but he doesn’t sound like he will.
“I’ve never vaccinated any of my kids,” Vitale said.
Nearly 1 million people in Ohio have been infected by the coronavirus, which led to more than 51,800 hospitalizations and […]
Stephan: Evangelical christofascism is inextricably intertwined with White male terrorism as this report describes and details. Religious extremism has always been a part of our history, whole states were founded first and foremost on religious beliefs. Still, watching Christianity become a White Supremacy right-wing sex-obsessed cult is one of the great social tragedies of recent American history.
However, seven of the gunman’s eight victims were women; six were identified as Asian and at least four of those killed were of Korean descent. Their names were Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Soon C. Park, Hyun J. Grant, Suncha Kim and Yong A. Yue.
Despite the denials, the killings are a hate crime that exists at the intersection of misogyny, xenophobia and racism, and underpinning it is the toxicity of Evangelical purity culture. Long was a longtime member of Crabapple First Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist Church in Macon, and reportedly told police that he viewed the people who worked at the spas as “temptations” he needed to “eliminate,” indicating that he set out with the intention of attacking Asian women whom he perceived to be […]
Sarah Pulliam Bailey, Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan: The things that stand out for me about Evangelical preachers in the U.S. are that although they are fairly charismatic and learn how to quote the Bible, they are not very bright, and mostly grifters more interested in getting their private jet than actually promoting the substance of Jesus' teachings.
Rapper Kanye West sports Yeezy shoes during a meeting with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington D.C. on Oct. 11, 2018. Credit: Calla Kessler/The Washington Post
From his couch in Dallas, Ben Kirby began asking questions about the lifestyles of the rich and famous pastors when he was watching some worship songs on YouTube on a Sunday morning in 2019. While listening to a song by Elevation Worship, a megachurch based in Charlotte, the evangelical churchgoer noticed the lead singer’s Yeezy sneakers were worth nearly the amount of his first rent check.
Kirby posted to his 400 followers on Instagram, “Hey Elevation Worship, how much you paying your musicians that they can afford $800 kicks? Let me get on the payroll!”
Plus, Kirby wondered, how could the church’s pastor, Steven Furtick, one of the most popular preachers in the country, afford a new designer outfit nearly every week?
With a friend’s encouragement, Kirby started a new Instagram account @PreachersNSneakers posting screenshots of pastors next to price tags and the street value of shoes […]
Stephan: One of the side-effects of the pandemic is that a change in modern economic theory which had already started replacing inflation as the determinant with debt has during the pandemic reached a paradigm-shifting consensus. The good news is that this new theory can allow the Biden administration to achieve real wellbeing fostering changes in America's social policies.
Congress has authorized $6 trillion in deficit spending to defeat the coronavirus. That’s more than the United States spent fighting World War II, when $4 trillion of government spending released the country from the clutches of the Great Depression.
Naturally, politicians and pundits debate whether the amount is excessive. But implicit in their seemingly routine deficit debate is a remarkable shift: Inflation has replaced debt — the old stalking horse for defeating progressive legislation — as the primary concern with deficit spending.
It’s a subtle change, with profound consequences. And it augurs the rise of a revolutionary approach to political economy, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), as the dominant paradigm in the politics of money.
Like Keynesians of yesteryear, Modern Monetary Theorists urge government to achieve full employment through fiscal policy, even when it requires deficit spending. Their comfort with large deficits emerges from an understanding that an obsession with national debt is a relic of another time, the age of gold standards and fixed currency arrangements. Today, in the age of national monetary sovereignty and free-floating currencies, countries […]
