Fourteen children and a teacher were killed today in a mass shooting in an elementary school in Texas. As of this writing no one is saying how old the children were. The suspected shooter, a teenager, is reported to be dead also. Other children have been hospitalized.

Early reports say the shooter used a handgun but may have had a rifle also.

Less than a year ago, Gov. Greg Abbott signed seven gun rights bills into law. One of them, HB 1927, allowed eligible Texans to carry a handgun without a license or without training. Another, SB 550, got rid of a requirement to keep firearms in a shoulder or belt holster.

From June 2021:

“Texas will always be the leader in defending the Second Amendment, which is why we built a barrier around gun rights this session. These seven laws will protect the rights of law-abiding citizens and ensure that Texas remains a bastion of freedom,” Abbott said during Thursday’s signing ceremony at the Alamo in San Antonio. …

… “Those who believe and support Second Amendment rights, we support the right of every law-abiding American to have a weapon and defend themselves,” Abbott said. 

Gun rights rally at the Alamo.

Last year, attendees at the annual Southern Baptist convention voted to commission an investigation into allegations of sexual abuse within the denomination.  (For background into the allegations, see What Lies Beneath, February 2019.) Now a report has been issued, and it documents massive moral rot in SBC leadership. No surprise. The SBC denies what’s in the report, of course.

Theologian Russell Moore was one of the people who pushed for an investigation. When the allegations came out he was serving as president of the SBC Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. He resigned and left the SBC entirely in June 2021. I take it this was not entirely voluntary. Moore is religiously and culturally conservative, but he expressed the view that Donald Trump is nothing but a huckster and also was known to have sympathy for immigrants and for sexual abuse victims. This put him at odds with SBC culture. Ministers of individual SBC churches complained about him and began withholding money for missions. So Moore got pushed out and took a job as editor at Christianity Today.

This is from Moore’s response to the report:

The conclusions of the report are so massive as to almost defy summation. It corroborates and details charges of deception, stonewalling, and intimidation of victims and those calling for reform. It includes written conversations among top Executive Committee staff and their lawyers that display the sort of inhumanity one could hardly have scripted for villains in a television crime drama. It documents callous cover-ups by some SBC leaders and credible allegations of sexually predatory behavior by some leaders themselves, including former SBC president Johnny Hunt (who was one of the only figures in SBC life who seemed to be respected across all of the typical divides).

And then there is the documented mistreatment by the Executive Committee of a sexual abuse survivor, whose own story of her abuse was altered to make it seem that her abuse was a consensual “affair”—resulting, as the report corroborates, in years of living hell for her.

In other words, the boys closed ranked to protect the boys being boys.

One of the most damning revelations is that the leadership for many years had maintained a secret database of accusations. This was not done for the purpose of addressing the sexual abuse but to stay ahead of possible bad publicity and legal liability. Sex abuse victims who made too much noise were “ignored, minimized and ‘even vilified’ by top clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination,” it says here.

The SBC has a loose organizational structure that gives local churches considerable autonomy. One of the leadership’s excuses for not acting on accusations of sexual predation in the churches was that the SBC central administration didn’t have the authority to report local clergy to police. The leadership acknowledged that these things happened, but it was up to local congregations to deal with it. However, this same loosely governing body had in the past moved decisively to end the affiliation of churches that became accepting of homosexuality. The SBC governing bylaws ban gay or female pastors from serving in SBC churches but say nothing about sexual predators working in churches.

And, of course, officials in the leadership are among the accused perps in the report.

I warn you, this will be shocking — I got some interesting stuff from Erick Erickson, of all people. Apparently he’s a friend of Russell Moore. “Many of those implicated in the abuse turn out to be the very men who rallied to force Russell Moore out after he began publicly talking with survivors of the abuse,” EE writes. Then he says,

The men in charge were worried about governance issues and litigation more than the sin and victims. In fact, many victims were attacked and maligned.

The Southern Baptist Convention is a loose confederation of churches. Governance is at the individual church level. The Convention itself chooses to affiliate with churches that share a common missional purpose and Baptist approach, but the Convention does not hire, fire, or even oversee individual church pastors.

However, over the last few years, many of those implicated in the report have led the charge to sever ties with churches who put women in positions of church leadership or let women speak or preach from pulpits. Many of their allies have vocally attacked prominent women in the Southern Baptist Convention for not knowing their place. Concurrently, these same men were stymying efforts to sever ties with churches that employed documented abusers.

Typical. From there EE goes on to say that keeping women out of pulpits is biblically justified, and that’s true as I remember it, but as I’m not a Christian any more that’s hardly important to me. This is a pure reflection of their true values, not the Bible. The priority is protecting and maintaining the patriarchy, and if they have to break a few Commandments to do that, so be it. Greater good, etc.

These same men have probably marched through their lives thinking of themselves as keepers of the flame of morality and protectors of women and children. They’ve probably declared this out loud on many occasions. I don’t doubt that on some level they believe this to be true. But their real motivations, what really guides their actions and their opinons, have nothing to do with morality or Jesus or anything but the urge buried deep in their psyches to maintain their own privilege, their own Holy White Male status.

We must acknoweledge that institutional complicity in sexual predation is not exclusively a Southern Baptist problem, or a Christian problem, or even an organized religion problem. It’s cultural; it’s social-psychological. It happens everywhere.

Even so, it is notable that the two Christian denominations that are most adamantly opposed to abortion rights, Catholic and Southern Baptists, are the same ones most known for harboring sex predators on a grand scale. This is not a coincidence.

There’s a piece at Five Thirty Eight that says “People who believe in traditional gender roles — and perceive that those roles are increasingly being blurred to men’s disadvantage — are much likelier to oppose abortion than people who don’t hold those beliefs.” Which comes under the heading of “Stuff That’s Blazingly Obvious” to me, but I guess somebody felt a need to gather data on it.  But note the zero sum thinking — blurring of the old order, expanding the parameters for women, must be coming at the expense of men. All that howling about “replacement theory” comes from that same place, whether about race or gender. The social order must be maintained at all costs. Equality terrifies them. Being just themselves terrifies them.They armor themselves in gender and race privilege and lose touch with whatever human beings may be huddled within the armor.

Do read The reinvention of a ‘real man’ by Jose A. Del Real in the Washington Post. It’s about a man in Wyoming who has made it his mission to coax other men out of the armor to be who they are.

More and more, theories about thegender gap in suicides are focused on the potential pitfalls of masculinity itself.

The data also contains a sociological mystery even the experts are unsure how to explainfully: Ofthe 45,979 people who died by suicide in the United States in 2020, about 70 percent were White men, who are just 30 percent of the country’s overall population. That makes White men the highest-risk group for suicide in the country, especially in middle age, even as they are overrepresented in positions of powerand stature in the United States. The rate that has steadily climbed over the past 20 years.

Some clinical researchers and suicidologists are now asking whether there is something particular about White American masculinity worth interrogating further.The implications are significant: Onaverage, there are more than twice as many deaths by suicide than by homicide each year in the United States.

A lot of these suicides involve guns and alcohol, of course, but I assume everyone has equal access to guns and alcohol in Wyoming.

Bill Hawley, the subject of the article, thinks these men suffer from a big gap between their expectations and their reality. They are also conditioned to be stoic and tough, to be out of touch with their own emotions, to be walled up and defensive. Many have a hard time maintaining marriages or relationships with their adult children. And they are much less llikely to seek help than women, because to admit one needs help is to admit to weakness. So the alternative is booze and a gun. Call it the masculine mystique.

This is what the Southern Baptists are protecting. This is what the “great replacement” crap is about. Some wingnuts are even tying the “great replacement” to forcing White women to carry pregnancies to term. See, for example, At CPAC, “The Great Replacement” Theory Meets Anti-Abortion Nonsense. This lunacy isn’t doing the Holy White Men a damn bit of good, either, but they aren’t able to see that.

See also Josh Hawley’s “Virtuous Men” Should Grow Up from November 2021, which points out that the leading cause of death among pregnant women in the U.S. is homicide. It also points to a Psychology Today article about “precarious manhood,” or about the way traditional male gender roles are fragile and easily lost.

Traditional masculinity, as a form of social status, is “hard-won and easily lost.” A real man cannot simply be: He must repeatedly prove his masculinity.

In the U.S., Knowles and DiMuccio note, masculinity is associated by many with behaviors like “avoiding the appearance of femininity and homosexuality, seeking status and achievement, evincing independence and confidence, taking risks, and being aggressive.”

And threats to (or doubts about) masculinity often motivate hypermasculine behaviors, such as risk-taking and aggression.

Nobody needs this crap, especially not the men who cling to it.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with the Southern Baptists, although that will be interesting to watch.

First, a couple of updates to the last post. It isn’t official yet, but the New York Times and the Associated Press have called the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania House district 12 for Summer Lee. Lee is a progressive, and the Democratic establishment and AIPAC threw a ton of money at the race in support of her chief rival, Steve Irwin, a lawyer and former head of the Pennsylvania Securities Commission. I understand it’s a blue district, so there’s a good chance Summer Lee will be the first Black woman to represent Pennsylvania in Congress. Congratulations, Summer Lee!

There’s something odd going on with the vote count for the Oregon House district 5 Democratic primary. This is the one between the progressive Jamie McLeod-Skinner and the fossil fuel toady incumbent, Kurt Schrader, also known as the “Joe Manchin of the House.” McLeod-Skinner is ahead. But there is one county that so far is not reporting votes for either the Republican or Democratic primary. This is Jefferson County, which appears to be more rural and conservative that most of the rest of the district. The Jefferson County elections page has vote tallies for county offices but none for the House district. As I said, this seems odd. Currently McLeod-Skinner is 9,668 votes ahead of Schrader, and I don’t think there are enough votes in Jefferson County to flip the lead to Schrader, but there are still uncounted votes in some other counties in the district. One of those is Clackamas, which appears to have given Schrader’s people access to the vote counting before they were supposed to, There’s also an issue with blurry ballots. Even so, some election observers in Oregon think it’s very unlikely that Schrader is going to erase his vote deficit now. Fingers crossed.

May 24 primaries are in Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia, and there are runoff elections in Texas. I understand that in Texas there’s an automatic runoff if no candidates passes the 50 percent threshold. There are a lot of runoff elections. The primaries were March 1.

In Texas, I am primarily interested in the House district 28 race between Democrats Cisneros and Cuellar. Henry Cuellar is the incumbent, and he has the backing of Nancy Pelosi and the Dem establishment. But Cuellar wants to criminalize abortion. He was the only House Democrat to vote against the Women’s Health Protection Act, a law codifying Roe v. Wade protections. Jessica Cisneros is pro-reproduction rights and has the endorsement of Pramila Jayapal. She also has raised three times more money than Cuellar.

Another Texas race that I’m watching is for the Republican nomination for state attorney general. The incumbent is Ken Paxton, whom I have written about before. You might remember the stunt he pulled in December 2020 when he a filed suit contesting election results in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. And that’s not all. Tim Murphy writes for Mother Jones,

Paxton is swimming in the sort of scandals that typically end political careers. He has been under indictment for securities fraud since his first year in office, and he was the subject of a formal whistleblower complaint from a number of high-ranking former staffers who accused him of using his office to do favors for a real estate mogul who had hired a woman with whom Paxton had allegedly been having a lengthy affair. His lawsuit to throw out the electoral votes of four Biden-won states was so outlandish that it triggered an ethics investigation by the State Bar of Texas. The FBI has reportedly been circling. Paxton lost major donors and faced a primary challenge from a number of notable conservatives—Bush; Eva Guzman, a former justice of the state supreme court; and Rep. Louie Gohmert, of whom the less said the better.

But despite all that, Paxton has continued to wield real power in state politics, in ways that have rippled out to the rest of the country. His office defended the Texas law that effectively circumvented Roe v. Wade. It led the legal fight to restore the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. It’s fought climate-change standards. And most recently, his office drafted a legal opinion stating that gender-affirming care should be investigated as child abuse.

In other words, he’s the perfect Republican. His opponent is George P. Bush, Son of Jeb and commissioner of the Texas General Land Office, which I understand mostly negotiates mineral rights on state lands. George P. is the one and only pro-Trump Bush, according to many news sources. It’s possible that, if elected, he wouldn’t be much of an improvement over Ken Paxton, but I doubt he could be worse. Paxton got a lot more votes than George P. in the primary, however. There’s a lot of commentary out there right now calling this election possibly the end of the Bush dynasty.

And oh, my, Georgia. Georgia is also a runoff state, so Tuesday’s primaries might not settle things. So we may not yet find out if Herschel Walker will be running against Raphael Warnock in the general. But Walker is way ahead in the polls. Warnock does have a primary opponent named Tamara Johnson-Shealey, but no one seems to be polling the Democratic primary. Surely Warnock will win.

The polls all say that Brian Kemp will win easily over Trump’s boy David Purdue in the governor context. Stacey Abrams is running unopposed on the Dem side.

You all remember Brad Raffensperger, I’m sure. The Georgia secretary of state is in a tight contest with with a full-blown MAGA creature named Jody Hice. This will be a test of how much sway the Big Lie still has over Georgia voters.

Trump has endorsed Purdue, Walker, and Hice, as well as Burt Jones for lieutenant governor; Patrick Witt for insurance commissioner; John Gordon for attorney general; and Vernon Jones for the 10th Congressional District, and I hear he’s put a substantial amount of his own money into electing these people. So on Tuesday we’ll see how they do.

In Alabama, Tuesday may be the last hurrah of Mo Brooks, incumbent U.S. Representative for the 5th district. Trump got pissed and un-endorsed him, and now another candidate named Katie Britt is slightly ahead of him in the polls. All I know about Britt is that she’s an abortion criminalizer who hasn’t pissed off Trump, yet.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders is running for governor of Arkansas and is way ahead of the pack in the one and only poll I could find. Damn, Arkansas, what did you do to deserve this? Republican Senator John Boozman is running for re-election and probably will wn his primary easily.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around election results. Abigail Tracy writes in Vanity Fair,

Around seven weeks before Pennsylvania’s primary elections, Summer Lee commanded a lead of 25 points over rival Steve Irwin in the race for Pennsylvania’s 12th District, a blue stronghold encompassing Pittsburgh and its surrounding suburbs. It appeared that Lee, 34, a Black woman and progressive activist who currently serves as a Pennsylvania state representative, would make history. Then came the outside money. By election day, Democratic groups had dumped more than $2 million into the primary race to defeat Lee—dwarfing the outside money spent attacking Irwin, a mere $2,400. Specifically, the United Democracy Project (UDP)—a political action committee for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—spent $2,025,297 against Lee and $660,317 in support of Irwin, 62, a Pittsburgh lawyer and county Democratic Party organizer. The ads painted Lee as anti-Israel and claimed she was “not a real Democrat,” following a playbook that moderate groups have run against other progressives nationwide, including against Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman.

This race still hasn’t been called as I write this. With 99 percent of the votes counted, Lee is 445 votes ahead (updates here).

Here’s another squeaker. Ryan Grim writes at The Intercept,

A super PAC funded by the pharmaceutical industry blew more than a million dollars in an effort to salvage the career of former Blue Dog Coalition Chair Kurt Schrader, the Oregon Democrat who cast the deciding vote against drug pricing reform in the House Energy and Commerce Committee and organized with Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., to derail President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. His opponent, Jamie McLeod-Skinner, lambasted him repeatedly as the “Joe Manchin of the House.” Because Oregon votes by mail, and some ballots were blurred and unreadable in areas favorable to Schrader, results may not be known until early next week, but despite a funding disparity of some 10 to 1, the incumbent is on the ropes.

This race hasn’t been called, either, as only 53 percent of the votes have been counted. Right now, McLeod-Skinner has 60.5 percent of the vote to Schrader’s 39.5 percent (updates here).

Back to Ryan Grim:

Another super PAC in Oregon, funded by a cryptocurrency fortune and organized around the project of pandemic prevention, Protect Our Future, spent some $10 million to boost Carrick Flynn, while the super PAC linked to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority PAC, also dropped a million dollars into the race. It backfired, and local Democrats as well as national progressives — including the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC and the Working Families Party — rallied behind state Rep. Andrea Salinas, who appears poised for a victory.

This one has been called for Salinas, who is comfortably ahead with 70 percent of the vote counted.

And I’m sure you heard that John Fetterman easily mopped the floor with Conor Lamb, who was endorsed by Joe Manchin. I read that fact was used in anti-Lamb ads. Lamb might as well have been endorsed by Mitch McConnell. Exactly how out of touch are Manchin and Lamb, that either one though Manchin’s endorsement would help Lamb?

(I’ve been reading about Fetterman’s stroke. It really was similar to what I had a few weeks ago, with stoke symptoms brought on by a blood clot in the brain. He’s having a worse time of it, though. In my case the blood clot broke up on its own after about 45 minutes, and after I spent 24 hours in a hospital getting tests they sent me home with a Plavix prescription. In Fetterman’s case the doctors had to break up the clot, which I understand they do with a catheter. And his heart was clunky enough that they installed a pacemaker. But the stroke itself probably won’t slow him down any or leave any lasting effects. If he follows doctor’s orders he should be fine. He may have to cut back on the cheesesteaks and salty pretzels, though.)

Anyway, you know what’s going on. President Biden’s approval ratings have been in  minus territory for a while. The party establishment and big money donors blame the progressive wing for this. For example, here’s a recent article by Ruy Teixeira titled The Bankruptcy of the Democratic Party Left about how it’s the Left’s fault so much of President Biden’s agenda has failed to pass. The name “Joe Manchin” appears nowhere in this article. Enough said.

The problem with the Democrats for many years is that the party has an entrenched and powerful center-right establishment working against a growing faction of progressives who are perpetually marginalized.  But it looks like voters are finally catching on to why the change they want never happens. “Tuesday’s results suggest that Democratic voters — at least those in Pennsylvania and Oregon — would prefer that Democrats do more rather than less, delivering a stinging rebuke to the Kyrsten Sinema-Manchin wing of the party,” Ryan Grim writes.

I’m writing something on a deadline and need to get back to it, but here is some stuff to read.

I almost had a stroke myself when I read that John Fetterman had a stroke on Friday. I’m pulling for Fetterman to be the next U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania. But it sounds like what he had was more like a TIA, what I had a few weeks ago, and he should be fine. If it’s what I had he’s probably bone tired right now, but functional.

Headlines around the country are connecting the Buffalo shooting to white supremacy, Fox News, and the Republican Party. A samplng:

Nicholas Confessore and Karen Yourish, New York Times, A Fringe Conspiracy Theory, Fostered Online, Is Refashioned by the G.O.P.

Greg Sargent, Washington Post, A Fringe Conspiracy Theory, Fostered Online, Is Refashioned by the G.O.P.

Jonathan Chait, New York, Yes, Tucker Carlson Shares Blame for the Buffalo Supermarket Attack

There’s also this:

Josephine Harvey, Huffpost, State Senator Who Backs White Nationalism Suggests Buffalo Shooting Was False Flag

Matt Shuham, Talking Points Memo, Proponents Of Racist ‘Replacement’ Theory That Motivated Mass Shooter Double Down

There was also a shooting in Laguna Woods, California, yesterday. One dead, five wounded. This was at a Taiwanese Episcopal Church, and the victims are all Asian. I’d say that qualifies as a racist hate crime, also. As the shooter was reloading the pastor smacked him in the head with a chair and congregates tackled and hogtied him, or it would have been worse.

Elsewhere,

Frank Langfitt, NPR, Finland and Sweden announce they want to join NATO, marking a big blow to Putin. Yeah, take that, Vlad.

File this next one under “but the leak is the real story!”

Ian Millhiser, Vox, The Supreme Court just made it much easier to bribe a member of Congress and Paul Blumenthal and Elise Foley, Huffpost, The Supreme Court Makes Ted Cruz A Half-Million Dollars Richer. But they get so sad when you call them “political hacks.”

I’ve been ranting about “electability” for years. See, for example, “Speaking of Electability” from 2019. Basically, “electability” is the argument that voters must not vote for the candidate they really like but instead vote for the one that (according to some mysterious wisdom clearinghouse, somewhere) other people will like.

Democrats keep falling into this electability trap and pushing anodyne and innocuous centrists over candidates with actual personalities and more progressive views, becuase the “centrists” are more “electable.” According to whom? According to the centrist old fogies who have been letting support for the Democratic Party erode for years.

For example, if the Washington Democratic establishment hadn’t chosen Amy McGrath months before the primaries to be the “electable” candidate to take on Mitch McConnell in Kentucky in 2020, maybe Charles Booker would have been the nominee. And Charles Booker might have won. We’ll never know.

Now the Washington Dem establishment is collectively wringing its hands because their “electable” candidate to be U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, Conor Lamb, is way, way behind the black sheep candidate, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman. This is not a nail biter. Expect Fetterman to be declared the winner of the Democratic primary as soon as polls close on May 17. But it was Lamb who got all the endorsements and the support for the party and even has a PAC to fund his campaign.

The rap on Fetterman is that he’s not a team player sort of guy and doesn’t work well with others. But it’s pretty clear he’s the guy Democratic voters want. Somebody named Amy Walter writing at the Cook Political Report writes that the “electability” argument just plain isn’t working among Pennsylvania Democrats right now. “In 2018, Democratic candidates prevailed in GOP-leaning CDs by leaning into a message of bipartisanship. Today, however, a restive Democratic base, discouraged by a lack of action on many of their key issues (like climate and student loan debt), and frustrated by GOP attacks on issues like abortion and election integrity, want fighters, not unifiers as their candidates,” she writes.

Basically, I take it, they are tired of Democrats who campaign on a promise to work with Republicans to get things done. For some reason. In 2020, here in the Midwest, all the Republicans were running on claims that Democrats were the spawns of hell who will eat your babies while Democrats smiled gently and promised to work with Republicans to get things done. Democrats mostly lost in these parts. Yes, let’s try something else.

On what universe would an overwhelmingly popular choice of Democratic voters not be the best general election candidate? Not a universe I’m familiar with. Yet the Democratic establishment has been practically frantic to promote Conor Lamb because he’s more “electable” in the general.

We’ll see. The Republican nomination fight is a nail biter. Right now it’s a three-way race featuring Mehmet Oz, who has Trump’s endorsement; David McCormick, a former CEO of Bridgewater hedge funds who is endorsed by Ted Cruz and some other Trump-aligned Republicans who can’t stand Mehmet Oz; and Kathy Barnette, a right-wing commenter and author said to be hyper-MAGA. Big chunks of the GOP establishment are trying to stop Barnette, possibly worried that she’s too crazy to be electable anywhere that’s not solid red.

So the general election will be very likely between John Fetterman, who appears to be popular with Democratic voters, and one of three very damaged Republicans who are scrambling all over each other to be More Trumpy Than Thou. The Democratic concern with Fetterman is that he might lose swing voters in the suburbs. He’s got tattoos, tends to dress casually, and is pretty consistently progressive, whereas Conor Lamb looks good in suits. Hmm. But I don’t see where genuinely moderate swing voters will go if the choice is Barnett. Oz is Oz; some parts of the MAGA base can’t deal with a candidate named Mehmet Oz. If David McCormick is the nominee he’ll have the backing of most of the Republican/conservative establishment and is not Mehmet Oz, which may make him the strongest general election candidate of the three. Again, we’ll see.

I’m not making predictions because I have never lived in Pennsylvania and am not expert in Pennsylvania politics, but I am not all that worried about whether John Fetterman is “electable.” What do you think?

Rachel Maddow notices that a remarkably high percentage of Trump’s endorsees are alleged spouse abusers.

Republicans want you to know that the last guy was just ACCUSED of killing his wife; he hasn’t been convicted. Yet.

Andrew was first arrested on March 26, just hours after state authorities found Nikki’s body submerged in a nearby creek, and Boone County Superior Court Judge Matthew C. Kincaid found probable cause for a murder charge against him two days later.

Authorities say they began investigating Nikki’s disappearance on March 25 when she ‘did not report for work.’

She and Andrew’s three children – one of whom is from Andrew’s previous marriage — tried repeatedly to contact her, according to the Lebanon Reporter, but her purse and phone were still at the house.

Andrew told the sheriff’s deputies – who found him with scratches on the neck – that they had gotten into a fight after she discovered that he was having an affair, and she was probably at her sister’s house, FOX 59 reports.

One of their children also told police that Nikki routinely left the house when she was upset, and Andrew had admitted to hitting Nikki in the past.

But when police found blood in the couple’s master bedroom and bathroom – and discovered that Nikki had filed for divorce from Andrew on March 17 – they called in the Indiana State Police to lead the investigation. …

… ‘During the course of the investigation, detectives were able to determine that during the course of a domestic dispute, 39-year-old Andrew N. Wilhoite, Elizabeth’s husband had allegedly struck her in the head with a blunt object, causing her to lose consciousness,’ they said in a statement following his arrest.

‘He then placed her into a vehicle and drove to a nearby creek where he dumped her body,’ they alleged.

Court documents obtained by Law and Order also show that Andrew allegedly admitted to state authorities that he killed his wife.

He said that she attacked him when she learned he was having an affair, and he struck her in the face with a gallon-sized concrete flower pot, according to a probable cause affidavit.

Then when she fell to the ground, Andrew allegedly said he threw her into a truck, took her to a bridge and threw her over the side. He then allegedly tossed the flower pot along the side of US Route 52 as he brought a load of corn into town.

Multitasking is good. Maybe he should put that in his campaign lit. Oh, and there’s also this —

Nikki had just finished receiving chemotherapy for an undisclosed type of cancer, which she posted about on her Facebook page, as she shared how her hair had fallen out.

What a prince. But we’re not done. I thought of this after seeing this headline today.

This is from Talking Points Memo. Read at TPM or watch it here:

Daines on Abortion: Why do we have laws in place to protect the eggs of a sea turtle or the eggs of eagles… pic.twitter.com/yr0dM7aaAs

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 10, 2022

I can’t even.

There is very little Democrats in Washington will be able to do to save abortion rights, unless by some miracle they keep the House and increase their Senate majority in the midterms. Kate Riga at TPM argues that even if the Dems could pass a law that codifies Roe nationwide, the current SCOTUS might very well overturn it if challenged, and Republicans could revoke the law next time they control the White House and Congress.

This is all true, but if it comes to pass that such a bill becomes possible, Democrats should pass it anyway. And here is why.

One of the biggest reasons legal abortion is vulnerable is that hardly anyone actually understands what Roe allows and does not allow. In any discussion group about abortion, the pro-criminalizers will still argue that Roe allows women to abort for any reason at all points of gestation, which it does not. They tell each other lurid stories about healthy infants born alive and left to die or killed right before birth. Most of them have only a hazy idea about how pregnancy/gestation progresses and don’t understand, for example, that a fetus at 20 weeks’ gestation will not survive birth no matter what anyone does to save it. They also tend to be very naive about what can go wrong with fetal development and pregnancies that make therapeutic abortion the  humane, and sometimes the life-saving, alternative.

If we assume that most voters are not anti-abortion fanatics and are persuadable that a complete ban is a bad idea, the first thing that has to be done is simplify the issue. And the first thing to simplify: Nobody is pushing to make elective abortion legal throughout the entire 38-40 weeks of a full-term pregnancy. That absolutely has to be clarified.

One of my long-time gripes about NARAL and a lot of Democratic politicians is that they don’t try to educate the public about these issues. See, for example, How Democrats Need to Talk About Abortion and Why I Don’t Give Money to NARAL, both from 2019.

One of the things a national abortion law could do, if done right, is to clarify real-world abortion practices by setting up one nationwide standard insteads of a patchwork of state laws, many of which are under perpetual legal challenge. I am willing to bet that most voters don’t know what laws regulating abortions are on the books in their states unless their state’s abortion laws have been in the news recently.

And if Democrats want to stick to the text of the Women’s Health Protection Act passed last year, I would change one thing, which is to set a firmer gestational limit for elective abortion rather than rely on “the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider” that a fetus is or isn’t viable.

Most Americans think abortion should be legal in at least some circumstances (although claims I keep hearing that 70 percent of Americans support Roe v. Wade don’t match the polls I see, which say it’s more like 55-60 percent), and I believe that if the “some circumstances” issue were clarified, a lot of the acrimony and ambivalence would go away. The opposition to legal abortion would be limited to the hard-core anti-abortion fanatics, which polls suggest are less than 20 percent of voters, possibly a lot less.

It’s understandable why many courts and medical people don’t want to draw a bright line regarding gestation, because there’s always a certain amount of guesswork involved, both in determining precise gestational age of a particular fetus and in determining which might have a long-shot chance at survival outside the womb and which don’t. But I think that setting a firm gestational limit for elective abortion somewhere would put an end to a lot of opposition. There already are such limits in some states, but most voters don’t realize that.

The medical literature has been pretty much in the same place on this issue for decades, saying that the lowest possible threshold of viability is somewhere between 22-24 weeks, but “Current recommendations suggest babies born at 24 weeks of gestation should normally receive active intervention while babies born at 23 weeks of gestation should be discussed with parents regarding whether such intervention is appropriate,” it says here. In other words, even if the very early infants survive, their quality of life could be highly compromised, and decisions probably need to be made on a case by case basis.

Some of the confusion about gestational limits comes about because sometimes the count begins at the last menstrual period, not when the pregnancy actually began, which would usually be about two weeks later. Everybody needs to get on the same page about when gestation begins.

As a practical matter, even in the U.S. 90 percent of elective abortions are performed by the 12th week of gestation, which is way, way before viability. According to this very good article by Kaiser Family Foundation, 1.2 percent of abortions in the U.S. occur after 21 weeks gestation, and many of those are performed because of  “medical concerns such as fetal anomalies or maternal life endangerment.” And it needs to be made clear that in these circumstances the law needs to butt out. Gestational limits are strictly for elective abortions.

According to KFF, the single biggest reason women delay getting an elective abortion that long is that they either needed time to scrape the money together or were hassling with insurance coverage. A few didn’t realize they were pregnant until they were pretty far along. Some had trouble understanding how to get an abortion or how to get transportation to a far-away clinic. Some delayed because their boyfriend/husband disagreed.

For a lot of reasons, the longer an abortion is delayed the more expensive and time-consuming it is, so it becomes more and more burdensome for poor women who have to delay the procedure to raise money.

Still, if the money barrier were taken away, that 1.2 percent would be even smaller. Several western European countries have a 12-week gestational limit for elective abortion, and this seems workable for them, but in every case women can get a first-trimester abortion in just about any medical facility, and that abortion is paid for by taxpayer-supported national health care. They don’t have to delay for financial reasons.

If there were, say, a national 23-week gestational limit for elective abortion, the criminalizers would fight to lower it. And then the discussion should include getting rid of the Hyde Amendment. We can reduce the gestational limit only if Medicaid pays for abortions. But having one national law, one standard, putting everyone on the same page, might make such negotiation possible.

And yes, there would be a few women who fall through the cracks and won’t realize they are pregnant until too late. “A few studies have estimated that one in 400 or 500 women are 20 weeks, or about 5 months, into their pregnancy before they realize they are pregnant. One in 2,500 women make it all the way to labor before they understand they’re going to have a baby,” it says here.

The criminalizers will never be happy if even one woman is allowed to abort for any reason. But I suspect the post-Roe period is going to open some eyes, and those ambivalent about abortion might realize that an absolute ban isn’t the way to go.

And of course, if Republicans control the House next year, there will be no such law. I’m just speculating, just in case.

“Rolling back abortion rights is rare in democracies and is a sign of democratic backsliding,” this lady says, and I believe her. Among the dumber arguments some righties are making today is that overturning Roe puts the abortion issue back in the hands of democracy.  Paul Waldman effectively shreds that claim.

Michelle Goldberg writes that The Death of Roe Is Going to Tear America Apart. I believe her, too. Most righties have no idea what they are about to unleash.

Righties — I refuse to call them “conservatives” — have become so extreme, so cut off from humanity, that they cannot even fake not being sociopaths. They are preparing to make abortion illegal in all circumstances, no exceptions. The raped 12-year-old should just suck it up and give birth, already. They are preparing to make it illegal to send medical abortion meds through the mail. They are writing laws that would stop women from crossing state lines to get abortions elsewhere. They are, in short, behaving like the monsters they are.

And women will die. Women will die all kinds of ways. They’ll die of back-alley abortions. They’ll die because they couldn’t get abortions to save their lives. I don’t expect large numbers of deaths (although I could be wrong), but there will be gut-wrenching deaths.

It’s often said that the beginning of the end of abortion bans in Ireland was the death of Savita Halappanavar, who died from sepsis in 2012 after her request for an abortion was denied on legal grounds.

After Savita presented at Galway University Hospital in severe pain, a doctor examined her and told the couple that “the cervix was fully dilated, amniotic fluid was leaking and unfortunately, the baby wouldn’t survive.”

The doctor, according to Praveen, said it would be over in a few hours, but the fetal heartbeat continued for three more days.

“Savita was really in agony,” Praveen said. “She was very upset, but she accepted she was losing the baby.

She was at only 17 weeks’ gestation, so there was no possible way to save the fetus. Even so, the hospital staff understood that Irish law required that nothing could be done until the fetal heartbeat stopped on its own, which took three days. As soon as the heartbeat could not be detected the contents of her womb were removed, but she died of sepsis a few hours later, in spite of the antibiotics they were pumping into her.

The case shocked Ireland, and a series of reforms were enacted as a result. Since 2018, elective abortion is legal in Ireland to 12 weeks’ gestation, and there are considerable exceptions after that. Back in 2018 I explained why the 12 week gestation limit is workable in Europe but not here. As Katha Pollitt explained in The Nation:

Here’s what’s really different about Western Europe: in France, you can get an abortion at any public hospital and it’s paid for by the government. In Germany, you can get one at a hospital or a doctor’s office, and health plans will pay for it for low-income women. In Sweden, abortion is free through eighteen weeks.

Using tax money to pay for abortions is a nonstarter for righties in the U.S. So here we are.

Women are going to be prosecuted for having abortions. They’re going to be investigated after miscarriages. Indeed, a lot of women may avoid seeking medical care after miscarriages. We know this is true because it’s been true in other countries where abortion is illegal and prosecuted. And it’s happened here already.

Back to Michelle Goldberg:

The right won’t be content to watch liberal states try to undermine abortion bans. As the draft of a forthcoming article in The Columbia Law Review puts it, “overturning Roe and Casey will create a novel world of complicated, interjurisdictional legal conflicts over abortion. Instead of creating stability and certainty, it will lead to profound confusion because advocates on all sides of the abortion controversy will not stop at state borders in their efforts to apply their policies as broadly as possible.”

The fiction they’ve pushed for years is that they just want the abortion question to be decided by the states. That makes it more democratic, see. An intellectually dishonest twit writing in WaPo today tries to make that argument — “The promise of a post-Roe democratization of abortion policy is that the representative institutions of each state can identify policies consistent with the views of its residents.” The states’ rights crowd used to make the same argument for desegregation.

But in truth they aren’t going to leave it at that. Indiana and Missouri won’t be content to allow Illinois to keep abortion legal, I can promise you. Senate Republicans are already pushing for a nationwide ban.

Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said he expects a push for federal abortion restrictions.

“Just take my state of North Dakota. Having a North Dakota child killed in the womb in Fargo versus Moorhead, Minnesota, you know, on the other side of the Red River — I don’t find a lot of solace in that just because it didn’t happen in my state,” Cramer said. “I think you could expect that pro-life activists would push for federal protections. I mean, I wouldn’t take that off the table.”

Related — here’s your ideal Republican candidate, who just won a primary in Indiana —

A Lebanon man accused of killing his wife in March and dumping her body in a creek is among the candidates to advance in a local election after Indiana’s primaries Tuesday.

Andrew Wilhoite, who’s suspected of fatally striking his wife with a gallon-sized concrete flower pot, secured a spot Tuesday as one of three Republican candidates in the race for a seat on the Clinton Township Board.

The 40-year-old has been incarcerated in the Boone County Jail since March after police said he told investigators he threw a concrete flower pot at his wife, Nikki Wilhoite, the night before and dropped her body over the side of a bridge.

Hey, it was only a wife. Nobody important.

The Inquisition — I mean, the Supreme Court — has dropped the big one, albeit prematurely. Chief Justice Roberts confirmed that the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade is indeed authentic, but it may not be final.

The Right is on the warpath vowing to prosecute whoever leaked the opinion, but it’s not clear to me that there is any law covering leaking Supreme Court opinions. It says here that if the leaker is someone with legitimate access to the documents, then there is no crime to prosecute.

It’s interesting, though, that Republican politicians immediately seized on the leak rather than the opinion itself as a source of controversy. For example, Josh Hawley: “The left continues its assault on the Supreme Court with an unprecedented breach of confidentiality, clearly meant to intimidate. The Justices mustn’t give in to this attempt to corrupt the process. Stay strong.”

We don’t know who leaked the bleeping opinion. It might have been Alito himself, for all we know. And why the leak is a cause of intimidation isn’t clear to me. Whatever is happening now is what would have happened if the opinion had been released officially. In some ways, in fact, the leakage dampers the bombshell nature of the decision just a bit. It was an advantage for the conservatives to leak it. Now the right-wing noise machine will be screaming about the leak and hope people don’t notice that the Supreme Court is about to declare that women are cows.

At Slate, Jeremy Stahl points out the pros and cons of who benefits most from the leak, and like me he sees a bigger advantage to the Right than the Left. “It turns attention away from the monumental—and likely to be deeply unpopular—ruling itself, and toward what conservatives are portraying as a dastardly and corrupt breaking of the norms.” It was a smart tactical move, in other words.

(Update: This is from emptywheel—

CNN’s report suggests this leak more likely came from Roberts’ chambers than the most likely other source, Stephen Breyer’s. The most logical explanation for the leak is that Roberts is trying to get his colleagues to adopt a less radical opinion. And if that’s the purpose, it might have the desired effect, both by making it clear what a shit-show the original Alito opinion will set off, but also by exposing the opinion itself to the ridicule and contempt it, as written, deserves.

So there’s that.)

What happens next is that very soon abortion will be completely illegal in large parts of the South and Midwest, and probably other places. I expect the most conservative states to not make allowances for rape, incest, and maybe not even the health of the mother. Right wingers have argued for years that abortion is never medically necessary to save the woman, which is seriously not true. Right-wing state legislators will be tripping all over each other bragging about how draconian they can be against fertile women. 

Also note that the arguments Alito made in the leaked decision arguably could pave the way for overturning Griswold v. Connecticut (governments can’t ban contraception) and Obergefell v. Hodges (legalizing same sex marriage).

So yeah, this is serious, but not unexpected.

I’ve been predicting for years that if Roe is ever overturned, Republicans will be sorry. So now I guess we’ll find out if I was right. Historically, promises/threats to end abortion have been very good at turning out the Right but not the Left. Greg Sargent writes today,

During the 2021 gubernatorial race in Virginia, Democrats poured millions of dollars into ads highlighting the GOP candidate’s opposition to abortion. Democrats also raised the possibility that the Supreme Court might gut abortion rights, a message directed right at the Virginia suburbs.

Instead, schools dominated, and Glenn Youngkin became governor. The idea that abortion rights might be gutted in Virginia likely seemed far-fetched to many voters, as the court hadn’t acted yet and Democrats were on track to keep control of the state Senate.

Polls taken earlier this year show that the U.S. public supports Roe by huge majorities. It’s not even close. But how strongly do they support it? We’ll soon see.

So we’ll see what happens. Best case, the overturning of Roe v. Wade combined with whatever comes out in the June public January 6 hearings could cause Republicans to lose some elections. Worst case, Republicans take back Congress next year and spend the next two years investigating Hunter Biden and passing laws to ban abortion and same sex marriage nationwide, which Joe Biden will veto, but that’s all that will get done. Oh, and they’ll probably pass some more tax cuts for rich people that rich people don’t need. That’s a given.