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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
They watch more porn, they have more out-of-wedlock children and a higher divorce rate, and they are in the top 10 states where women and girls are raped and Oklahoma MAGAt Republicans are clear about one thing: women should not have control of their own bodies, and the state should keep a database on those who try.
People gather to protest the first anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in the Dobbs v Women’s Health Organization case in Columbus Circle in Washington D.C. Credit: Celal Gunes / Anadolu Agency / Getty
GOP-sponsored bill in Oklahoma, HB 3216, passed a legislative hurdle on Wednesday when it passed out of committee. HB 3216 would ban emergency contraception in the state and create a state database of people who have had an abortion.
“If the bill doesn’t get changed with the current wording then IUDs and Plan B could be inaccessible to women,” said State Rep. Trish Ranson (D).
Ranson also noted that she found it “highly concerning” that the legislation would seemingly allow the state to “track” people who have abortions. “I believe that there is an opportunity for tracking women. I believe that there is a major privacy issue that we should be concerned about,” she said.
Oklahoma currently has a near-total ban on abortion, permitting the procedure only under exceptionally restricted circumstances. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the state’s abortion policies are currently classified as “most restrictive.”
Samuel L. Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead, Assistant Professor of Sociology - University of Oklahoma | Associate Professor of Sociology - Clemson University - American Sociological Association
Stephan:
An ex-Mormon reader wrote to tell me that I was missing an important trend, the fact that conservative religious groups and Republicans are the biggest consumers of pornography and that Mormons were such big porn consumers that there was even a special channel for Mormon porn. Those are pretty inflammatory statements but if she was correct it was a trend of astonishing hypocrisy going on that I had completely missed. So I did some research and it turns out she was right. The same people who are hysterically nasty to LGBTQ people trying to control their lives are, in fact, the same people who spend hours watching porn. Article after article reported this (do your own Google) but I decided if I were going to report this in SR, it had to be peer-reviewed research so it was as reliable as possible. Well, here it is, and this is the conclusion: “However, interactions between individual-level evangelical identity and state-level political conservatism indicate that evangelicals who live in more politically conservative states report the highest rates of pornography consumption.” So the next time you hear some conservative ranting on about LGBTQ folk, ask them how much porn they watch.
Abstract
Figure 1. Relationship between evangelical Protestantism, recency of pornography viewing, and state-level political conservatism.
Recent studies have found that state-level religious and political conservatism is positively associated with various aggregate indicators of interest in pornography. Such studies have been limited, however, in that they either did not include data measuring actual consumption patterns and/or did not include data on individuals (risking the ecological fallacy). This study overcomes both limitations by incorporating state-level data with individual-level data and a measure of pornography consumption from a large nationally representative survey. Hierarchical linear regression analyses show that, in the main, state-level religious and political characteristics do not predict individual-level pornography consumption, and individual-level religiosity and political conservatism predict less recent pornography consumption. However, interactions between individual-level evangelical identity and state-level political conservatism indicate that evangelicals who live in more politically conservative states report the highest rates of pornography consumption. These findings thus provide more nuanced support for previous research linking religious and political conservatism with greater pornography consumption.
Within the past few decades scholars have sought to understand how broader community norms and cultures, generally measured at the state level, might correlate with the presence of pornography in those […]
The Republican attack on President Biden, claiming he had accepted a bribe was centered on the testimony to the FBI of Alexander Smirnov who has just been indicted for lying in his testimony. As a result, the whole Republican case against Biden falls apart, not that I think that will make any difference to the MAGAts.
FBI informant Alexander Smirnov indicted for lying under oath
The confidential source at the center of allegations being promoted by House Republicans that President Biden accepted a bribe has been arrested and charged with making false statements to the FBI.
The allegations risk unwinding the House GOP probe into President Biden. In making their case, GOP lawmakers have frequently pointed to conversations the confidential source, Alexander Smirnov, had with the FBI relaying that the head of Ukrainian energy company Burisma told him he had paid both President Biden and his son Hunter Biden $5 million.
The indictment alleges Smirnov made up the allegations given his opposition to President Biden’s candidacy.
“As alleged in the indictment, the events that Smirnov first reported to the FBI Agent in June 2020 were fabrications,” the Justice Department wrote in a press release announcing the grand jury indictment.
“The indictment alleges that the defendant transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against Public Official 1 after expressing bias against Public Official 1 and his […]
Mike Colias, Nora Eckert, and Sean McLain, Reporters - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan:
The EV vehicle market is crashing, and this article gives the details. Why is this happening? In my opinion, because people who buy EVs discover that there is no nationwide system for charging them. Why does this not exist? Because under criminal Trump, in contrast to Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s administration where there was a national program to build the interstate highway system, Trump made no effort to create a national program to replace gas stations. What should have happened was a national program to restructure major roads so that they would charge the vehicles driving on them. The truth is Americans who support MAGAt politicians don’t seem to understand that the Republican Party no longer exists as it once did. It has been replaced a cult that worships Donald Trump, and he has no interest in fostering wellbeing.
Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickups being assembled in Dearborn, Mich. Credit: Andia / Universal / Getty
The Michigan plant where the F-150 Lightning electric truck is built used to vibrate with excitement.
President Biden visited in 2021 and test drove the blazing-fast pickup. Before the first ones even started rolling off the assembly line in the spring of 2022, Ford said it would expand the factory to quadruple the number it could build.
That energy is rapidly fading. Ford is cutting the plant’s output by half, and workers are relocating to other facilities, mostly those making gas-powered pickups and SUVs.
The sudden change “was a little bit of a shocker,” said Matthew Schulte, who inspects trucks at the factory in suburban Detroit. “Reality has set in.”
As recently as a year ago, automakers were struggling to meet the hot demand for electric vehicles. In a span of months, though, the dynamic flipped, leaving them hitting the brakes on what for many had been an all-out push toward an electric transformation.
A confluence of factors had led many auto executives to see the potential for […]
Nina Mast, Staff Writer - Economic Policy Institute
Stephan:
Child labor is becoming a significant, although little covered by media, trend. Backed by corporations who want to be able to employ children, and are funding/bribing state legislators across the country, America’s decades-long tradition of ending child labor is being weakened. Look at the map at the head of this article. If you live in one of the states doing this, write your state representative and senators and tell them you will not vote for them if they support weakening child labor laws.
Child labor remains a top issue in 2024 state legislative sessions amid soaring violations and widespread abuse of child labor laws in multiplesectors of the economy. On one hand, the coordinated, industry-backed effort to roll back child labor protections state by state has continued to expand. At the same time, some state legislators are proposing legislation to strengthen the rights of young workers and the laws designed to safeguard their health and education.
Since 2021, 28 states have introduced bills to weaken child labor laws, and 12 states have enacted them. By contrast, 14 states have introduced bills to strengthen child labor protections already in 2024—up from 11 states in all of 2023—as more state lawmakers recognize the need to address increasing violations and threats to current state and federal standards.
Attacks on child labor laws continue trend of weakening important state standards, with eventual goal of diminishing federal child labor laws
From the 1800s onward, states have often led the way on child labor regulation. Today, many important policy tools for preventing exploitative forms of child labor—such as work permit […]
Missouri is a state with very poor social wellbeing based on objective facts. Poor Healthcare, closing its libraries, terrible laws to control women, and awful, basically insane, gun laws. A 12-year-old can carry an unlicensed AR-15. Today the voters and the governor lived with the consequences of the laws they have voted for and passed. The MAGAt Republican governor was there personally and ran away scared from the post-Super Bowl mass shooting that occurred today and has dominated the news. This is what Red state America has degenerated into.
MAGAt Republican Missouri Governor Mike Parson Credi: Chris Kohley / St. Louis Post-Dispatch / TNS
Someone who says they ran away from the mass shooting at the Chiefs parade on Wednesday says they saw someone else running: a GOP governor who frequently touts his support for firearms.
Earlier on Wednesday, between eight and 10 people were shot near the Chiefs Super Bowl parade, and two armed suspects were then placed under arrest, according to Kansas City police, the New York Post and the Associated Press. Chaos erupted.
In that chaos, one man reported seeing Missouri governor Mike Parson running scared.
Patrick Quaife, identified on his social media as a KC alum, posted his observations after escaping the gunfire.
“I just ran away from a mass shooting at the Chiefs parade where I saw the Missouri governor (the gun lover below) running scared for his life next to me with an army of officers protecting him,” Quaife wrote, including a photo of the governor supporting “responsible, law-abiding gun owners.”
Just how stupid are the MAGAt Republicans of Missouri? Read this. This is why 18,854 Americans died by gunfire in 2023. America’s gun psychosis has warped our entire society and made attending any mass event in the United States potentially dangerous, as the Kansas City Mass Shooting makes clear. Will anything happen to correct this madness? I doubt it.
US founder Alexander Hamilton died after a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804. Credit: North Wind Picture Archives / Alamy
A Missouri Republican’s proposal to reintroduce dueling to solve statehouse differences was branded “utter stupidity” by a leading historian of political violence.
“Back in the day,” Joanne B Freeman of Yale tweeted, “they were smart enough to take dueling OUTSIDE. The draft that I saw suggests doing it in the chamber. This doesn’t show guts or bravery or manhood – if it’s supposed to. It shows utter stupidity.”
Freeman is the author of The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War.
The state senator behind the proposal said he was making a point about the breakdown of regular order in Missouri politics.
The draft rule change came to national notice when it was posted to social media by Democrats in the state senate.
“The Missouri Republican civil war continues to escalate as a member of the Freedom Caucus faction has filed a proposed rule change to allow senators to challenge an ‘offending senator to a duel’,” they wrote.
It was not my intention when I started to plan SR for Thursday to focus on Missouri. But the wellbeing of this Republican-controlled state is deteriorating so alarmingly and so quickly that when one compares it to what is happening in Texas, Florida, or a dozen other Republican-controlled states one sees The Great Schism Trend playing out openly before our eyes. We have become — not becoming, become — two very different countries within one nation.
Missouri senators voted Wednesday against amendments that would have allowed abortions in the cases of rape and incest in the state.
Missouri senators debated a bill that would make it illegal for public funds to go toward abortion providers, such as Planned Parenthood. During the debate, Missouri state Sen. Tracy McCreery (D) introduced amendments that would allow exceptions for abortion in incest and rape cases.
“I think the consensus is that Missouri law went too far when they banned all abortions,” she said during the discussion, according to audio posted online by the state Senate.
However, her efforts were struck down along party lines by the Republican-controlled state Senate, The Associated Press reported. McCreery also argued the current abortion ban shows the state does not care about women who are victims of rape.
“What we’re saying is, ‘We don’t care,’” McCreery said of the abortion ban, according to the AP. “We’re going to force you to give birth, even if that pregnancy resulted from forcible rape by a family member, a […]
