The end goal of the anti-abortion movement

Some of the extremists in the anti-abortion movement in the US seeks as their goal the complete abolition of all abortions with no exceptions. They are also seeking to make medical abortions even harder by placing abortion pills under the list of controlled substances, making them much harder to obtain. But the end goal is not just the elimination of abortion. They are seeking much broader rollbacks on all manner of freedoms that have been gained in the last half-century.

In his concurring opinion in the 2022 case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overthrew Roe v.Wade, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas said that he wants the Supreme Court to revisit its other landmark decisions such as the right to use contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut 1965), the right to engage in homosexual acts (Lawrence v. Texas 2003), and same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges 2015). This is perfectly in line with what religious fundamentalists and evangelicals seem to really want, which is the prohibition of all sexual activity except between men and women within a marriage, and that too just for the purpose of procreation.
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Fox News in a squeeze

To put the current fight within the family of Rupert Murdoch for control of the Murdoch media empire in context, one needs to understand the changing political media landscape in the past three decades.

When the cable news channel Fox News started in 1996, it barely made a blip in the public consciousness. It was designed to be right wing and its founding CEO Roger Ailes was unapologetically so. But initially most people, and even journalists in major media like ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and the print news were not even aware of its existence or confused it with the Fox TV broadcast network. That changed in 2000 when in the highly close presidential election, Fox News made an early and controversial call giving Florida to George W. Bush and that proved to be a significant factor in determining the final outcome.
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Succession fight over Rupert Murdoch’s media empire

Fox News has been a pernicious influence in US public life. It has promoted extreme right wing policies, cultivated hatred of immigrants, indulged racists, targeted minorities, and in general been on the wrong side of almost every major social issue.

Rupert Murdoch, the founder of Fox News and owner of other major media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and the UK-based Times and Sun, has been challenged by three of his children who are fighting to prevent him from changing the terms of the irrevocable trust (worth $1.49 billion) he created to take over his empire when he dies. The closed hearing before a probate judge began on September 16 in Reno, Nevada. We will likely not know what is going on until either a settlement is reached that everyone agrees to, or the case goes to court because one or the other side appeals the probate judge’s decision.

In a nutshell, Murdoch has six children by his first three wives. According to this report, “The trust was formed at the time of the 1999 divorce of Rupert from his second wife, Anna Murdoch Mann, the mother of James, Lachlan and Elisabeth. She wanted to ensure her children had a future ownership stake in the Murdoch empire. The trust was “irrevocable,” meaning it would be difficult to alter.”

Under the terms of the trust, Murdoch’s four eldest children (from his first two wives) would end up sharing equally the 40% voting power over the father’s empire. But while the eldest son Lachlan shares his father’s political views, the other three Prudence (from his first wife), Elisabeth, and James have gone in a different direction. In fact, James has endorsed Kamala Harris. That may be why the patriarch wanted to change the terms of the trust so that Lachlan would inherit all the controlling power of 40%.
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Harris campaign going wide in North Carolina

In an earlier post, I said that at this stage of the campaign, each side had to decide whether they want to ‘go wide’ (i.e., attempt to win states that are historically tilted against them and, within each state, seek to broaden their appeal beyond their own base so that the opponent’s lead among their base is reduced)) or ‘go deep’ (focus on just the states that you have a good chance of winning and also try to run up the score with their own base and hope that that will be enough to overcome the opponent’s vote). It is hard to do both due to limited resources. A campaign that feels confident and on offense tends to go wide while one that feels defensive tends to go deep. At least as far as the state of North Carolina is concerned, the Harris-Walz campaign seems to be going wide.

Democrats last won North Carolina in 2008 with Barack Obama and it has been seen as a tough state to win. But Harris-Walz seem to be making a push there, and even going wide within the state. They are not just campaigning in the urban centers but also going into rural areas, hoping to make inroads with voters who tend to vote Republican by having campaign workers make personal appeals to win them over. Most of the time, the workers strike out, but occasionally they get a ‘win’, a voter who seems persuadable or who even says they will vote for Harris.
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Is the GOP trying to alienate women?

It looks like GOP trash talking of women is not limited to just weird JD Vance. Listen to what Ohio Republican senate candidate Bernie Moreno, currently in a tight race with incumbent Democratic senator Sherrod Brown, said.

We don’t have to engage in such thought exercises after Friday, when Moreno was filmed dismissing suburban women’s focus on abortion rights at a town hall (the local NBC affiliate first published the footage Monday): 

“You know, the left has a lot of single issue voters,” Moreno said. “Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.’ … Okay. It’s a little crazy by the way, but — especially for women that are like past 50 — I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.’”

The campaign furiously backpedaled, telling NBC4 that he was “clearly making a tongue-in-cheek joke” about the left thinking that it’s the only issue women care about.

Ah, yes, the old “I was just joking” defense, often rolled out after someone says what they really mean that turns out to be offensive.
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Creepy Trump’s plan to get an extra electoral vote thwarted by local politician

One of the consequences of close presidential elections in the US is that one learns the minutiae of the complicated rules that govern it. One of those is that the winner of the contest is determined by who gets a majority of the 538 Electoral College votes. The votes are apportioned to the states, with each state given a number that is the sum of the number of its members in the US senate (two for each state) and House of Representatives (determined by its population size). Washington DC is not a state but for the purpose of presidential elections is treated as one with a single district and thus has three votes.

Since the number 538 is even, that leaves open the possibility of a tie result 269-269. In that case, the election is thrown to the House of Representatives, where each state is given one vote, determined by a majority vote of its congressional delegation. Since Republicans have a majority of the seats in a majority of states, this means that a tie vote will result in the Republican nominee becoming president. Hence each electoral vote matters.
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Musk fought the law and the law won

Elon Musk must think that his immense wealth makes him above the law. Since he is able to buy influence with prominent politicians in the US, he may have felt that he could act with impunity in other countries. In particular, he seemed to feel that he need not follow the laws that exist in Brazil regarding how companies operate there and as a result got himself embroiled with a no-nonsense Brazilian judge.

The spat between the self-declared “free speech absolutist” and the Brazilian judge began in January 2023, after former President Jair Bolsonaro’s far right supporters, spurred on by false claims of electoral fraud spread on social media, stormed the National Congress and tried to violently overthrow the democratically elected Leftist president, Lula da Silva.

Moraes, who was in charge of several investigations targeting Bolsonaro as well as his close associates and supporters, swiftly issued orders for X to restrict or fully remove accounts that helped fuel this shocking attack on Brazilian democracy.

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How could Mark Robinson be so stupid?

By now, pretty much anyone who follows political news is aware of how Mark Robinson, the current Republican lieutenant governor of North Carolina who is running for the post of governor, was found to been a frequent visitor to porn sites where he made all manner of posts in the comments section that would cause his religious supporters to wince, to put it mildly. He had already publicly made incendiary comments about women and the LGBTQ community as well as denying the Holocaust.

While I was aware of the story and posted about it last week, I had not paid much attention to how the reporters managed to identify him as the source of all the comments.

Seth Meyers describes how he was identified and I could not believe how mind bogglingly stupid he was.