Salem Political Snark

Right-wing attack ads target progressive school board candidates

It's sadly predictable.

A few weeks before a local election where conservatives face off against progressive candidates, right-wing attack ads sprout like daffodils in the spring -- except the ads are a lot uglier.

The May 16 Special District Election is no different. 

Last Friday I wrote a post, Sexual assault claim spices up school board candidates forum. After the forum, someone told me that they saw two of the conservative candidates talking with the man who claimed that progressive candidate Cynthia Richardson, a Salem-Keizer schools employee, didn't take seriously a sexual assault that he says happened to his eight-year-old daughter.

Predictably, it didn't take long before a right-wing PAC started to run a sleazy ad targeting Richardson. I learned about the ad from a friend who told me on Sunday that it was running on YouTube videos he was watching.

I wrote a Facebook post about this and published it on the three pages I manage: Strange Up Salem, Salem Political Snark, and Salem Can Do Better. 

I figured that some people wouldn't like what I said on Facebook. But I didn't anticipate getting a "fake news" accusation. Here's part of the comment interchange I had with someone named Thomas on the Salem Can Do Better post.

Thomas: I just checked YouTube and did a search for "Cynthia Richardson" and the ONLY thing is a "Your Vote Counts" interview which also is done with all the other candidates. NOT ONE DEROGATORY ad on YouTube. This posting by Salem Can Do Better is false and disinformation.... AGAIN.

Me: I have a video of the attack ad. It’s very real.

Thomas: Not on YouTube. False and disinformation like always from the left.

Me: Here's a screenshot of the video my friend made of the You Tube ad. I'm not going to share the video because I don't want to spread right-wing hit jobs. I accept your apology for doubting that the video wasn't real. Us progressives believe in real news, not fake news.

Thomas: Does not exist. I did a search on "cynthia richardson" then a search on "Salem Keizer School board" I then did a sort to most recent and looked back for almost a year.... False or disinformation or "partial" truth. Either way false!!!

Me: Note that the screenshot says in the bottom right corner “video will play after ad.” This is a genuine ad that ran multiple times on YouTube yesterday.

So even when presented with evidence that the attack ad video exists, Thomas refused to believe his own eyes, choosing to follow in the footsteps of Donald Trump and assert that anything he doesn't like must be "fake news."

Thomas should have done some Googling, as I did, on the question of how to find ads running on You Tube. Short answer: it isn't easy, and may be impossible. 

I'm not the only one complaining about right-wing attack ads against the progressive school board candidates. The Salem-Keizer Proletariat substack had this post today: Salem-Keizer School Board race takes a far-right turn. The right-0n subtitle: Disinformation campaigns fed by dark money reveals desperation of right-wing slate of school board candidates.

A few excerpts: (Note -- the Marion+Polk First PAC is listed as being behind the attack video against Richardson being shown on YouTube.)

With ballots in the mail and around two weeks until election day, the far-right slate of school board candidates in Salem-Keizer has pulled off the gloves to dole out fistfuls of disinformation & propaganda funded by wads of cash from…well, sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Right-wing PAC Marion+Polk First appears to be the driving force behind much of the digital disinformation & mailers that made absurd comparisons between the far-right candidates and the progressive slate of candidates. A slate, by the way, that represents nearly a century of combined experience in education. Guess how many years the Republican candidates have? Virtual high-five if you guessed zero.

...Campaign supporters for both Troutt and Chandragiri began spreading a shameless hit-piece targeting Cynthia Richardson. To be clear, sexual abuse should be thoroughly pursued and it’s terrible that this person and their child is going through this.

But taking the weight of that situation and setting it on the shoulders of a school board candidate completely anonymously on an extremist, right-wing website right as ballots go out to voters is…as the kids might say, a little sus.

Richardson is an accomplished professional retiring from a lifetime and lineage of service in public education running against a transphobe bigot whose reaction to ideas she doesn’t approve of is to ban books.

Walks like a hit-piece. Talks like a hit-piece. Shrug?

There are also apparently digital TV ads being run against Richardson. Again, I haven’t seen the ads and am unable to find them online. From Twitter in response to Alexander’s tweet shared above:

Sexual assault claim spices up school board candidates forum

Once upon a time school board elections were a sleepy affair. Mostly the problem was finding candidates willing to serve in a position marked by long hours, boring meetings, and no pay.

That time has passed for the Salem-Keizer School District. Recent elections have been marked by competing slates of candidates: progressive and conservative. This makes what used to be a nonpartisan election highly political.

Politics definitely was on display at today's forum for school board candidates vying for three positions in the May 16 Special District Election. The forum was jointly sponsored by the Salem City Club, Salem Chamber of Commerce, and the Keizer Chamber of Commerce.

Five of the six candidates took part in the forum.

From left to right in the photo above, Larry Scruggs is running against Krissy Hudson; Kelly Strawn is running against Satya Chandragiri; and Casity Troutt is running against the missing Cynthia Richardson, who reportedly had a conflict and couldn't attend.

Well, even though Richardson wasn't at the forum, she featured in an exchange that definitely grabbed my attention -- since much of the discussion up to that point had been full of platitudes.

No big surprise: all of the candidates think they're well qualified to be on the school board, want schools to be safe, support parental involvement in their children's education, favor openness and transparency, want to improve student learning; and such. 

The headline of the forum came when each of the candidates was able to ask a question of their opponent. Troutt was told by the moderator that she couldn't ask a question because her opponent, Richardson, was absent.

Troutt is part of the conservative slate, along with Chandragiri and Hudson. The progressive slate is Richardson, Strawn, and Scruggs. 

This helps explain why, when it came time for Chandragiri to ask a question of Strawn, he acted as a surrogate for Troutt. Chandragiri's question was whether Strawn would call out Richardson for not protecting victims of sexual assault.

Wow! That was a shocker of a question. I had no idea what Chandragiri was talking about.

Strawn said that he wanted to keep students safe, adding that he hasn't talked with Richardson but that it's bad to turn a personal issue into something political by an entire slate. Meaning, the conservative slate of Troutt, Chandragiri, and Hudson. 

When the forum was over and the City Club president was making some routine remarks, I fired up my iPhone to search for "Cynthia Richardson school board sexual assault." What popped up was an April 27 post in the Oregon Catalyst by Patrick Kirsch: My 8-year old was sexually assaulted. Cynthia Richardson refused to help. 

It's short, so I'll copy in the entire post by Kirsch.

I’m a parent, veteran, and resident of Salem. I don’t like to be involved in politics, but I can’t stay silent about the May 16th election.

I was shocked last week when I opened my voter pamphlet and saw that Cynthia Richardson has the audacity to run for the Salem-Keizer School Board. I know Cynthia as the head of the Salem-Keizer Office of Student Equity, Access, and Advancement. In that role she refused to stand up for a student in her district at the time she was most needed.

Last fall, my 8 year-old daughter was sexually assaulted at a Salem-Keizer school. I went through all the steps I could with the district to try to keep her safe. I was frustrated that they refused to do more than move the other student—who had assaulted my daughter more than once in the same day—to another classroom. I was told I was “lucky” to get that much.

I asked for staff to do something—anything—to acknowledge to my 8-year-old that this was wrong and that they were sorry they couldn’t protect her. She got nothing.

I reached out to the one person who I thought would be able to get something done—Cynthia Richarson, who heads a significant department and is supposedly there to help students have a safe and supportive learning environment. I thought surely because my daughter is biracial that Cynthia would care. She did not.

Over two phone calls with Cynthia Richardson where I asked her to get involved in the next steps in caring for and protecting my daughter she did nothing. Instead, the first thing she asked was why my daughter didn’t scream. As if it was my 8-year-old’s fault that nothing was done to protect her!

What is incredible is I was told by a school psychologist that even in cases of rape of students the district policy is to not move the offender from the school.

Cynthia Richardson has had the responsibility of leading the Salem-Keizer School District for years. Yet under her leadership the district seems uninterested in standing up for victims of sexual assault and even less interested in listening to parents.

If Cynthia Richardson can’t keep students safe, we can’t trust her to serve us on the school board.

Here's my take on what Kirsch said. Naturally I detest the idea of sexual assault. But I'm a political junkie, and some things seem out of place about Kirsch's post.

First, the Oregon Catalyst is a well-known conservative blog. It's "About" page says:

Oregon Catalyst started in 2005 as [a] place for conservative Oregonians to gather and share news, commentary, and gossip. Today, it is the largest Conservative political blog in Oregon.

So I find it curious that Hirsch starts off by saying that he doesn't like to be involved in politics, yet chose to write a post about his daughter's sexual assault for the largest conservative political blog in Oregon. 

I'll assume that he really did learn about Richardson's school board candidacy through the voter's pamphlet.

OK. Then what made him choose to tell his story via the Oregon Catalyst, a highly political blog? Why not contact a journalist at the Statesman Journal or Salem Reporter? This makes me wonder whether Hirsch isn't the non-political person he claims to be, given his decision to write a guest opinion for the Oregon Catalyst.

I also am skeptical that if a sexual assault truly did occur, school officials (including Richardson) were as uncaring as Hirsch claims. We're only getting one side of the story here. This afternoon I emailed Richardson's campaign asking if they had a response to the Oregon Catalyst post. Haven't heard from them yet.

Now, it might be that Hirsch was so disturbed by learning about Richardson's candidacy that he is now trying to harm her chances of being elected. However, the question remains: why did Hirsch choose a conservative political blog to tell his story? 

I heard from someone who also attended today's forum that Hirsch was the person who tried to ask a question from the audience after the Q&A portion of the meeting was over, and was told that time was up by the moderator.

What's unclear at this point is whether Hirsch just is an upset parent who wants to hold Richardson accountable for what he views as a dereliction of duty, or if he's being used by the conservative slate of candidates to cast aspersions upon Richardson's candidacy -- knowing that she's likely bound by school confidentiality requirements to not say much, if anything, about the sexual assault allegation.

I suspect both things are true. Hirsch is an upset parent who is being used for political purposes.

In other forum news, you won't be surprised to learn that all of the conservative candidates are anti-abortion and are proud to be getting the support of Oregon Right to Life. Which is one reason, among many, why I continue to advise that you vote for the progressive slate of candidates. (By the way, Larry Scruggs is better looking and younger looking than his photo.)

 

A tale of two Salem streets: McGilchrist and Court

Streets are kind of strange, when you think about it. Essentially they serve no purpose other than to get people and goods from here to there, usually by car or truck. 

So by themselves, streets are basically useless.

For example, unlike a park, you can't have a picnic on them. By and large streets are a highly visible and unattractive testament to our American addiction to vehicular travel.

But this isn't a given. At least, not now.

There's no reason why modern transportation planning has to be bound by the outmoded rules that have given us the ugliness of south Commercial Street and Lancaster Drive, to name a few examples of streets that genuflect to the Almighty Car and Truck rather than catering to the needs of human beings.

McGilchrist Street in south Salem is slated for a major makeover, paid in part by money from the $300 million City of Salem bond measure approved by voters last November. 

I haven't followed the McGilchrist project very closely, but the transportation savvy Salem Breakfast on Bikes blogger has. You can read all of his posts on this subject via this link. His most recent post has some cogent criticisms of the McGilchrist project. 

Here's some excerpts from "Cost Escalation and Overengineering Swamp McGilchrist Project."

The project is too expensive and overengineered... You may recall drawings from the Federal grant application that showed some paint-only bike lanes.

The words "cycle track" in the cross section (at top, again) are doing a lot of unearned and heavy lifting. First off, in the drawing shown to the Bond Implementation Oversight Committee, it's more a multi-use path, not really a cycle track, which should be distinct from the sidewalk. Second, it does not appear to run the full length of McGilchrist.

At least in public, we have not yet seen a set of drawings with a strong bike lane treatment that is continuous. Note those paint-only sections. Any separation is only in segments. For such an expensive project we should get best-in-class bike lanes the whole length! There's more than a little bit of bikewashing here.

The travel lanes are really wide and will induce speeding. The street is not being built for urban speeds. It's more than a little stroady. With the 2 foot "shy lane" and 11 foot travel lane, there's really two 13 foot travel lanes and a nearly continuous 12 foot center turn pocket. Even allowing for freight trucks here, it is too big.

Finally there is the budget and cost escalation.

In February the Bond Implementation Oversight Committee saw the funding, and the budget just keeps ballooning, apparently doubling in a year or two.  This table (above) was not included in the agenda and packet the City posted for the February meeting, and the City is generally not publishing any notice of the meetings on the City calendar. It may be that the committee is structured not to require formal Notice. But with the magnitude of the bond, they should provide more transparency.

Wow. It sure looks like the McGilchrist project more than doubled in cost in a single year from $22 million to $51 million. That's a heck of a lot of money. Maybe there's a good reason for the $29 million increase in the project budget. Regardless, the City Council definitely needs to conduct more oversight about this.

On the positive side of street improvements, soon several blocks of downtown Salem's Court Street will become two way rather than one way. As a Salem Reporter story said, the current three travel lanes will be transformed into two lanes with left turn lanes.

The project aims to increase pedestrian, biking and other alternate transportation options to cars while maintaining parking in both directions.

And at a cost of just $500,000.

So the apparent $29 million cost increase for the McGilchrist project would pay for 58 similar "Court Street" conversions in other parts of the city.

This shows what a bargain bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure is compared to super-expensive traditional street improvements -- which mainly are aimed at speeding cars and trucks along, not making it easier for people to walk and bike.

Angry men used to just complain. Now they shoot people.

Recently there's been three shootings of people who made an innocent mistake and were shot by an angry man. That got me to thinking about Mr. Wilson of the Dennis the Menace comic strip. (Yeah, I'm old.)

Dennis irritated Wilson, but back then cranky men just swore and complained. These days, given how awash our country is with guns, all too often angry men start shooting. We don't have a mental health problem. We have a gun problem.

I wrote about this on substack. Now that I've tried writing several posts on substack, I probably won't be doing so again, sticking with my blogs. 

Here's the Salem-Keizer school board candidates to vote for in May election

Two years ago, four progressive candidates were elected to the Salem-Keizer School Board. As I said in a a blog post congratulating them on their victories, this was a big win for quality education.

Pleasingly, each of the four progressive candidates ended up winning -- an amazing accomplishment.

Amazing, because Oregon Right to Life and its associated PACs (political action committees) went all out this time around, as they have in previous school board elections, in support of a conservative slate of candidates.

...With the four Salem-Keizer school board victories (assuming Cottingham survives the recount), progressives will end the nightmare of the current conservative school board majority being at endless war with both students and the Superintendent. 

Now the other three school board seats are up for grabs in the May 16 election. Once again, there are two contrasting candidates competing for each of the seats: a progressive and a conservative.

These are the highly qualified progressive candidates. I urge you to vote for them. Here's a brief bio for each and a link to their web sites that I got from the Progressive Salem candidate page.

Cynthia Richardson has served students in Salem-Keizer Schools for 25 years, including as Principal of North Salem and McKay High Schools. She holds a Masters Degree in Education from the University of Texas. Her most recent service was as Director of Student Equity, Access and Advancement. Having recently retired from that position, Cynthia is ready to lend her decades of  professional expertise to the School Board to continue to serve our students.

Kelley Strawn is as Associate Provost at Willamette University where he has been a professor and administrator for the past 15 years. He holds a Ph.D from the University of Wisconsin. He and his wife have educated two sons in Salem-Keizer schools. Kelley wants to bring his expertise in education and experience as a parent to the Board in order to support teachers and families in delivering the best possible education to our students.

Larry Scruggs served as an administrator for over two decades at the University of Portland. He holds a Ph.D. from Portland State University. Now retired, Larry works as a substitute teacher in Salem-Keizer classrooms where he has experienced firsthand what our students need for a great education. He is running for the school board to ensure that all our children have equal access to a quality education to prepare them for whatever field of endeavor they choose.

To learn more about the candidates, check out the descriptions of two candidate forums reported on by the provocatively-titled Salem-Keizer Proletariat.

Salem-Keizer School Board Candidate Forum
Student-run Salem-Keizer School Board Candidate Forum

This substack newsletter is written by Andrew Hickey, who describes himself this way:

Andrew Hickey is a journalist and communications professional living in Marion County, Oregon. He writes Salem-Keizer Proletariat, a digital newsletter focusing on the Salem-Keizer area and written from a progressive, working class perspective.

Abortion medication ruling threatens our prescription drugs

There's many reasons to criticize the ruling by a federal judge in Texas, Matthew Kacsmaryk, declaring that the abortion medication mifepristone has to be withdrawn from the market by the FDA.

I talked about some of those reasons in my first post about this wacko legal decision.

Today the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an initial ruling on an appeal by the Justice Department which provides more fodder for those of us who consider this to be a classic case of judicial overreach and incompetence.

It was great to see that executives of leading pharmaceutical companies, along with many others, have signed a letter condemning Judge Kacsmaryk's decision and warning of the consequences for other safe and effective drugs.

Here's the core of the letter.


Note the warning: "If courts can overturn drug approvals without regard for science or evidence, or for the complexity required to fully vet the safety and efficacy of new drugs, any medicine is at risk for the same outcome as mifepristone."

This is what today's anti-abortion zealots and their enablers in the Republican Party have brought us.

Chaos that threatens lives. They're not pro-life. They're pro-death, because they want to make it possible for a single extreme right-wing federal judge to be able to ban any safe and effective drug for no good reason. 

Hopefully the Supreme Court will recognize the danger of letting Kacsmaryk's screwy ruling stand. After all, this is the court that said in their decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, we want to allow the states to decide whether to keep abortion legal. 

A New York Times story describes how hollow that promise may turn out to be.

When the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion in June, overturning a half-century of precedents, it made a vow. Writing for the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that “the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives.”

“Women on both sides of the abortion issue,” he wrote, should “seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting and running for office.” The early evidence suggests that supporters of abortion rights are winning those political battles.

By contrast, the new case, taking issue with an administrative agency’s scientific assessment of the safety of the pill, indicates that opponents of abortion continue to think that the judiciary is their most potent ally.

There's so much wrong with both Kacsmaryk's initial ruling and the Fifth Circuit's decision that left much of that bad ruling intact.

Today I've heard attorneys castigate the bizarre notion that some emergency room doctors had the legal standing to challenge the FDA approval of mifepristone because statistically speaking, eventually a pregnant woman who takes the drug will have a side effect that requires an emergency room visit where one of the doctors will have to take the time and trouble to treat her.

Aside from this notion being at odds with a Supreme Court precedent governing standing, this is what E.R. doctors are supposed to do. Treat people who come to an emergency room. That isn't a burden needing a judicial remedy. It's what E.R. doctors do every day -- help sick people.

If you're into legal stuff like this -- I find it fascinating -- I recently discovered Chris Geidner, the "Law Dork," on Twitter. I believe his full time job now is weighing in on important legal issues via Twitter and his substack newsletter, which I've subscribed to. 

Through Geidner, I found "Adam's Legal Newsletter," another substack newsletter. It has a great piece about this case, Mifepristone and the rule of law, part III.

The Fifth Circuit’s decision is less wrong than Judge Kacsmaryk’s decision. However, it is still very, very wrong. In this post, I will attempt to explain why.

Adam does just that. I heartily recommend his piece for those who like to delve into legal geekiness. 

City wants to increase taxes while giving millions to an airline

Since I'm a Democrat, most conservatives would say that I favor big government. But that's only partially true. 

I'll all for big government doing big things for the general public. However, when government wants more money to do things that don't make sense, I'm opposed to that -- as most people are.


That's why two recent stories in the Salem Reporter and Statesman Journal made me wonder, What are the folks at City Hall doing? This seems more than a little crazy.

The April 6 Salem Reporter story is titled "City looks to boost fee and tax collections by millions to fund expansion." It says that the City of Salem is considering raising taxes and fees by about $25 million a year.

The city of Salem is considering increasing fees on 70,000 residents and businesses and imposing a new payroll tax on workers to address what officials say is a budget deficit set to drain the general fund in less than two years.

Without more tax revenue, the city may “not be able to continue providing essential city services” including current police and fire staffing, according to a staff report.

The staff report describes the need for at least $25 million more per year. That would cover costs for some current city services but also expand them, such as adding community policing and funding staffing for a new fire station.

The move to hike city revenue comes five months after Salem voters approved a $300 million bond to be repaid by local property taxes.

...The city’s general fund pays for most core city services, including police and fire, parks and recreation, the library, code enforcement, land use planning, social services and the municipal court. City councilors also dip into the general fund for projects, like the $2.4 million transfer for Salem Municipal Airport improvements they approved in January.

Hopefully the City Council will take a close look at this proposal. Maybe the fee and tax increase is justified, but maybe it isn't.

I have trouble believing that the City of Salem is using all of the money it currently has wisely -- especially in the areas of police and fire, since those departments suck up most of the general fund money that the $25 million supposedly needs to supplement.

A key question that needs to be asked of City Manager Stahley is why, given that the economy of Salem, Oregon, and the nation is humming along nicely (the Federal Reserve is trying to slow down the economy, not speed it up), how is it that a $25 million tax increase is needed at this time? 

Of course, Salem doesn't have a city income tax, and property taxes are limited to an increase of 3% a year, basically.

So in a time of high inflation, it's easy to see why the City budget is strained. I just would like to see evidence that efficiencies in that budget have been seriously considered and found to be impossible to achieve.

One obvious place to look for saving money, other than the police and fire departments, is the subject of the Statesman Journal story by Whitney Woodworth, "On the agenda: Salem City Council closer to allowing commercial flights at McNary Field."

Council is set to vote Monday on whether to authorize the city manager to execute air carrier operating and revenue guarantee agreements with an airline and a local matching funds agreement with Travel Salem.

The name of the air carrier is redacted in city documents as part of a nondisclosure clause, but the agreement specifies the airline serves the Los Angeles basin, San Francisco, Phoenix and Las Vegas.

The agreement states the airline would schedule a minimum of two weekly flights.

Wow. Two weekly flights. And the City of Salem has taken $2.4 million from the general fund for airport improvements needed for commercial air service, as noted in the Salem Reporter story. 

That's not all of the subsidy being given to a still-unnamed airline. The airline is getting a price break on fuel flowage from 8 cents a gallon to 6 cents; it won't pay landing fees for two years; and there's a guarantee that the airline will earn a minimum amount on flights out of Salem or it gets $1.2 million from the City of Salem.

Now I'm really not going to sound like a Democrat.

I can understand government subsidies for an untested product or service that will provide an important public benefit, but commercial air travel certainly isn't untested and it is highly questionable that the public will benefit from being able to take a minimum of two flights a week out of Salem, especially since air travel is a large contributor to global warming.

I'll also bring up the "economy is humming along nicely" argument again. In this case, the City of Salem is having to significantly subsidize the operations of an unnamed airline in order to entice it to offer commercial air service here during a strong economy.

So what happens when the next recession happens? Business travel will plummet. So will vacation travel. If an airline can't operate in Salem now without a subsidy from the City of Salem, how big will the payout from City coffers have to be when the economy tanks?

It appears that the City Council has bought off on trying to bring commercial air travel back to Salem. That's unfortunate, given that city officials are wanting $25 million in fee and tax increases, and the airline subsidy will lead citizens to think, "Why are you giving so much money to the airline if there isn't enough money to pay for essential city services?"

Republicans want to ban abortion in blue states like Oregon

Most Oregonians, like most Americans, want abortion to be available to pregnant people who want one. But it's easy to become complacent about abortion access in our state because we lean so Democratic. 

Today's abortion ruling by a far-right federal judge in Amarillo, Texas shows that this complacency is misplaced. For if it stands, the ruling would make mifepristone, a drug used to induce an abortion, unavailable in all 50 states.

A Texas federal judge ruled Friday evening to suspend the FDA’s approval of mifepristone — one of two drugs used together to cause an abortion — virtually banning the sale of the pills across the country. The decision, however, will not take effect for a week, giving higher courts time to consider the appeal the Biden administration filed Friday night and delaying for now the impact on hundreds of thousands of patients who use the medication both for abortions and treating miscarriages.

U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo, Texas, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, sided with anti-abortion medical groups that challenged the federal regulation of the drug, ruling that both the initial approval of the pills in 2000 as well as more recent FDA decisions allowing them to be prescribed via telemedicine, sent by mail and dispensed at retail pharmacies, are unlawful.

The Biden Justice Department is appealing the ruling. Almost certainly the Supreme Court will end up deciding this issue. Today a federal court in Washington state issued a contrary ruling in a case filed by 17 blue states and D.C. (including Oregon) that requires the FDA to continue making mifepristone available.

A Slate story provides a good overview of the controversy.

What's galling is that Judge Kacsmaryk was chosen to hear the mifepristone case by abortion opponents because his anti-abortion views are so well known. Because he's the only federal judge in Amarillo, Kacsmaryk gets "judge-shopped" by right-wingers who know that if they file a suit in his district, they'll get Kacsmaryk.

This effort to have the most common means of getting an abortion banned nationwide should put to rest any fantasy that Republicans just want to leave it up to the states to decide whether abortion should be legal following the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

Actually, Republicans are determined to make abortion unavailable everywhere, including Oregon. Keep this in mind next time you vote and see a "R" by a candidate's name. That letter means that the candidate embraces a party that rejects the right of people in a state to decide whether abortion is available.

Even if the Supreme Court allows mifepristone to remain on the market, there's little doubt that the next goal of Republicans will be to push federal legislation that says life begins at conception, so abortion at any stage of a pregnancy is murder.

All the GOP needs to achieve this is to hold onto the House in the 2024 election, take back the Senate, and win the presidency -- each of which is disturbingly possible. 

The only good news I can draw from Judge Kacsmaryk's decision today is this: the politics surrounding abortion are much better for Democrats than for Republicans. This was evident in last Tuesday's election for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat that hinged on the candidates' abortion positions. 

The pro-choice candidate won easily, about 55-45 in a state that typically goes 50-50 in statewide elections. So the more Republicans push to ban abortion in swing states and blue states, the more likely it is that their unpopular position on this issue will turn off voters to the GOP.

Unfortunately, in the near term a nationwide ban on mifepristone would do a lot of harm. Hopefully the Supreme Court will understand that allowing Judge Kacsmaryk's crazy ruling to stand would be unfair and unjust.

For mifepristone has been proven to be safe and effective for the 23 years it has been available in this country after getting FDA approval in 2000. Prior to that date, it was available in Europe, also with few problems. 

If a right-wing federal judge can get away with banning safe and effective drugs that have been in use for many years, nothing would prevent Republicans from doing away with birth control drugs. Yes, that would be hard to believe, but today's Republican Party is always finding fresh unbelievable horrors to inflict on the American people.

Democratic worries about Trump indictment are overblown

Democrats worry about things going wrong politically even when they're going well. Republicans are optimistic about things going right politically even when they're going poorly.

OK, that's a broad generalization. But there's still a lot of truth in what I just said. 

Evidence in support of my thesis comes from the reaction to the indictment and arraignment of Donald Trump. 

Yesterday Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney, presented an outline of his case against Trump in a post-arraignment news conference. I thought he did fine. 

Basically, a few weeks before the 2016 election Trump paid hush money to an adult film actress he had sex with so Stormy Daniels wouldn't tell her story after the Access Hollywood tape (where Trump talked about grabbing women by the pussy) had captured the public's attention.

Trump falsified business records when his reimbursement to Michael Cohen, his attorney, who paid $130,000 to Daniels from a home equity loan, was wrongly shown as legal expenses. 

Even though false business records usually is a misdemeanor, Bragg charged it as a felony under New York law. This is where most of the freakout at the indictment among nervous Democrats, and angry Republicans, is focused.

Did Bragg make a mistake in elevating the falsification of business records to a felony? Well, here's how I see this question.

First, Bragg is an experienced prosecutor. So are the attorneys who work under him. Recently elected as the Manhattan DA, Bragg has both a strong personal and professional interest in making Trump's indictment as solid a case as possible.

So everybody who is claiming that Bragg screwed up when he charged Trump with 34 felonies relating to the false business records assumes that they're smarter than the prosecutor who has seen all of the evidence against Trump and is highly familiar with New York law in this area.

Here's a tweet that makes this point.

Second, while I admit that I've been paying more attention to legal analyses that say the Trump indictment is on solid ground, my favorite MSNBC/CNN attorneys are well qualified to weigh in on how strong Bragg's arguments will be.

Like Harry Lipman, who wrote an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, Don't underestimate the strengths of Alvin Bragg's case against Donald Trump.

Manhattan Dist. Atty. Alvin Bragg’s indictment of former President Trump takes an open-ended approach to the charges that some critics of the unprecedented prosecution see as a weakness. What the detractors have overlooked are the substantial and unanticipated legal and factual strengths in the case Bragg outlined.

A key question in advance of Tuesday’s unsealing of the indictment concerned how Bragg would augment the easily proven misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records. Under New York law, those offenses become felonies only if they’re in furtherance of another crime. Many theories were circulating as to what second crime Bragg would allege, and most of the possibilities had noteworthy shortcomings.

Bragg’s answer was essentially “I’ll tell you later.” He took advantage of the wording of the state law, which requires only that the misdemeanor be done in service of “a crime,” to buy himself maximum time and flexibility.

...So even as Bragg hedged his bets with a skeletal indictment, his statement of facts and public comments reveal a clear path to a felony conviction: showing that Trump’s falsification of business records was meant to aid and conceal a tax offense (whether or not it occurred) and to prevent a revelation that would damage his campaign on the eve of the election.

Third, I liked the piece by Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo: The Law Isn't Brittle for Following It. He makes some good points about the law.

We’ve now had the day of spectacle and legal experts have had a chance to provide their first analyses of the case brought against former President Trump. On the substance the case isn’t difficult to understand: In the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, Trump orchestrated a hush money scheme to keep a series of affairs and assignations out of the press and in so doing broke a series of laws.

The legal arguments behind the case are more complicated, involving both federal and state laws, and a specific argument about how different violations of the law interact with each other to create a broader pattern of criminal conduct.

On this point fair-minded people (by which I mean people who are knowledgable and by no means carrying water for Trump) appear divided. Those saying the legal foundations of the case are shaky include Rick Hasen (see here) and Ian Millhiser (see here). On the contrary, Ryan Goodman et al. at JustSecurity (see here) say these skeptics are wrong and, broadly, that they’re not focusing squarely enough on the New York case law which controls the prosecution.

I’m not in a position to tell you which narrowly legal arguments are better. But I am in a position to argue against the underlying political argument of those who fear that the legal merits of the case aren’t unassailable.

Many who worry that the legal arguments of this case aren’t strong enough argue that if the case gets watered down or thrown out on a legal technicality that that will just confirm the beliefs and add power to the arguments of those who say the legal system is already a sham, biased against conservatives and worse. So in this sense, it’s not just that the case may fail. It’s that its possible failure will empower those already trying to tear down civic democracy, the concept of impartial justice and the rule of law.

That’s flawed reasoning. Prosecutors shouldn’t bring marginal cases or those they don’t believe in in any case — not for ex-presidents and not for street criminals.

I hope the legal theory of this prosecution is robust because the underlying offenses are serious and deserve accountability. It’s fundamentally about a conspiracy to undermine the integrity of the 2016 election. (Let’s remember that one of Trump’s accomplices already did jail time for just part of this criminal conduct.) But if they don’t survive judicial scrutiny, that’s the rule of law too. That’s okay.

The rule of law is a set of agreed upon processes, not agreed upon outcomes. I don’t buy the argument that the rule of law cannot survive the rule of law working in Trump’s case. That doesn’t make sense.

Some people imagine I’m being a judicial Candide in these arguments: however it works out will be for the best. That’s not right. Everyone needs to make a concerted effort to disengage from the gravitational force of Trump’s drama, which so many are still living within. Trump committed a lot of crimes.

Now that he’s out of office the criminal justice process should take its course. The criminal justice system doesn’t have to pitch a no-hitter, let alone a perfect game, to justify itself or survive. That’s very much the world of Trump’s drama. Heads he wins; tails you lose.

Elon Musk's Twitter craziness reaches new heights

Elon Musk is doing a good job managing Twitter -- if his goal is to wreck the viability of the company that he paid $44 billion for, and now, according to Musk, already is worth less than half of that, $20 billion.

Musk's reputation as a genius is taking a big hit.

His mismanagement of Twitter also threatens the public perception of his other companies: Tesla and Space X. The only reason they're doing as well as they are appears to be that Musk has competent people managing them, whereas he's put himself in charge of Twitter.

I enjoy Twitter. It's a great source of information for me, given that I follow people who are experts in their fields: politics, law, local news, the Ukraine war, artificial intelligence, and other areas. So articles like Twitter is Dying sadden me.

Since Musk took over he has set about dismantling everything that made Twitter valuable — making it his mission to drive out expertise, scare away celebrities, bully reporters and — on the flip side — reward the bad actors, spammers and sycophants who thrive in the opposite environment: An information vacuum.

It almost doesn’t matter if this is deliberate sabotage by Musk or the blundering stupidity of a clueless idiot. The upshot is the same: Twitter is dying.

The value that Twitter’s platform produced, by combining valuable streams of qualification and curiosity, is being beaten and wrung out. What’s left has — for months now — felt like an echo-y shell of its former self. And it’s clear that with every freshly destructive decision — whether it’s unbanning the nazis and letting the toxicity rip, turning verification into a pay-to-play megaphone or literally banning journalists — Musk has applied his vast wealth to destroying as much of the information network’s value as possible in as short a time as possible; each decision triggering another exodus of expertise as more long-time users give up and depart.

Simply put, Musk is flushing Twitter down the sink. I guess now we all know what the dumb meme really meant.

On April Fools Day, the next — perhaps final — stage of the destruction will commence as Musk rips away the last layer of legacy verification, turning up the volume on anyone who’s willing to pay him $7.99 per month to shout over everyone else.

Anyone who was verified under the old (and by no means perfect) system of Twitter verification — which was at least related to who they were (celebrity, expert, journalist, etc.) — will cease to be verified. Assuming they haven’t already deleted their account. Only accounts that pay Musk will display a ‘Blue Check’.

This is just a parody of verification since the blue tick no longer signals any kind of quality. But the visual similarity seems intentional; a dark pattern designed to generate maximum confusion.

If you pay Musk for this meaningless mark you’ll also get increased algorithmic visibility of your tweets and the power to drown out non-paying users. Which mean all the fakes and imposters can (and will) overwrite the real-deal on Twitter.

Genuine users are rightly outraged at the idea of being blackmailed into paying Musk to prove who they are. These people — the signal amid the Twitter noise — are, after all, a core component of the value of the network. So of course they shouldn’t (and won’t) pay — and so their visibility on Twitter will decay. Which, in turn, will trigger more damage — as any remaining users wanting to find quality information will find it increasingly hard to come by… It’s death by irrelevance.

Here's some Twitter tweets that illustrate how badly Musk's attempt to make money by coercing users to pay $8 a month for a blue check ($1,000 a month for organizations) is going.