Stephan: The Great Schism Trend I have been following for years, and with which regular readers are familiar is coming to secession, as this just published survey describes and backs up with data.
Secession militant Credit: Sergio Flores/Getty
More Trump voters living in Republican-controlled states said secession would make things better in their states than those who said it would not, according to a new poll.
Respondents to a new Yahoo! News/YouGov poll were asked “Do you think your state would be better off or worse off if it left the United States and became an independent country?”
Among all respondents, more than twice as many said they’d be “worse off” (43%) as those who said things would be “better off” (18%), while 15% said things would be about the same and another 24% responded they were “not sure.”
But Yahoo News West Coast Correspondent Andrew Romano broke down the responses to a more granular level, and found people in red states who voted for former President Donald Trump were much more amenable to seceding:
Red-state Donald Trump voters are now more likely to say they’d be personally “better off” (33%) than “worse off” (29%) if their state seceded from the U.S. and “became an independent country,” according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll.
Stephan: This is the violent face of MAGA world, and it is growing. When you combine this trend with the availability of military-grade weapons of war you get what we see daily in the U.S. The question is, how long will we as a culture tolerate this?
Just hours after his arrest last month near the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a 26-year-old California man carrying a Glock 17 pistol, burglary tools and zip ties told an FBI agent what had inspired his cross-country trip to assassinate the conservative Supreme Court justice.
The suspect, who has pleaded not guilty and faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted, said he was upset about the leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade and the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that killed two teachers and 19 children. According to court records, the suspect believed Kavanaugh would vote to further loosen gun laws, and said that killing the justice before turning the gun on himself would give his life purpose.
The chilling incident is among a series of violent threats recently that have targeted political figures and comes amid a shifting landscape in which the share of partisans who think violence is sometimes justified to achieve political ends has grown significantly.
“The idea that violence is legitimate for political purposes has moved into the mainstream,” said Robert Pape, a […]
Stephan: Twenty-seven billionaires fund the GOP. Think about that, 27 oligarchs are funding what they want. This is what Citizens United made possible. This is why the United States is becoming an anocracy.
ver a decade after Citizens United and as the rich grow ever richer, billionaires are rapidly taking over Capitol Hill with political donations — and, as a new report shows, the Republican Party is a major beneficiary of this supposed generosity.
This election cycle, nearly half of the funding (47 percent) raised by the two major Republican congressional super PACs came from just 27 billionaires, a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness revealed on Wednesday. That’s $89.4 million, straight from the pockets of over two dozen of America’s richest people.
The vast majority of those billionaires — 86 percent — gleaned their fortunes from Wall Street; in turn, the finance sector benefits the most from GOP tax cuts and corporate handouts. These donors include Rupert Murdoch, founder of Fox News; Charles and Helen Schwab, the former of whom founded finance giant Charles Schwab; Ross Perot Jr., a Texas real estate magnate; and Trevor and Jan Rees-Jones, whose wealth comes from Chief Oil & Gas, which is credited as a pioneer of fracking.
The report says that these figures still don’t capture the full extent to which billionaires influence politics, as the rich are also able to donate through corporations and organizations without the donations bearing their names.
Stephan: If you are a woman in a Red state you better get comfortable with the reality that in your state you are second class. There are dozens of stories showing up in media of women in Red states whose lives hung in the balance while their doctors and the hospital's lawyers argued over whether that woman would die if her pregnancy was not terminated. That's how weird and heartless it has gotten in the Red states of America.
Kara Beasley, a physician, protests the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, in Denver on June 24. Credit: Jason Connolly/AFP/Getty
Just as advocates of abortion access warned, the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade is resulting in increased pain, anguish and risk of death for pregnant women. It’s forcing health-care providers into a Catch-22 where they increasingly must navigate between their professional obligation to provide appropriate medical care and their fear of criminal prosecution and loss of their medical licenses.
The Post reports that “the standard of care for incomplete miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies and other common complications is being scrutinized, delayed — even denied — jeopardizing maternal health, according to the accounts of doctors in multiple states where new laws have gone into effect.”
Forced-birth zealots have set up a system in which doctors in states with draconian and/or hopelessly vague abortion bans are compelled to defer medically recommended abortion until the woman is at imminent risk of death. In those states, too, pharmacists resist filling a prescription for medication to resolve […]
Stephan: If you are a pregnant girl or woman in a Red state you had better be prepared that if something goes wrong with your pregnancy you may not survive or, at best, you may go through a horrifying and painful experience. Am I exaggerating? Here is one a dozen such stories I have seen today alone. Women don't matter in Red states.
Young woman patient lying at hospital bed feeling sad Credit: Shutterstock
In an interview with the Associated Press, San Antonio-based Dr. Jessian Munoz revealed that a patient recently came to him while she was miscarrying and was developing what the AP describes as “a dangerous womb infection.”
Even though the fetus had no chance of survival, Munoz was legally barred from trying to remove it until no heartbeat could be detected, which meant the patient had to suffer for hours while she “lost multiple liters of blood” and had to be put on a breathing machine.
“We physically watched her get sicker and sicker and sicker,” said Munoz, who said that they only moved to operate on the patient a full day later than they should have, as that is how long it took for no fetal heartbeat to be detected.
