Friday, August 30, 2024

Just To Clarify

The judges accept this as "True." 🤷🏻‍♂️
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) called former President Donald Trump’s latest, vague campaign promise — that in vitro fertilization services will be paid for by the government or insurance companies under a second Trump presidency — “smoke and mirrors” on Friday, slamming him for the meaningless promise that she says distracts from the real threat: the possible criminalization of IVF treatments.

“Making vague promises about insurance coverage does not stop a single extremist judge or state legislature from banning IVF,” Warren said during a Friday morning press call hosted by Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign. “Making vague promises about insurance coverage does not stop a single one of the 131 Republicans in Congress from advancing their fetal personhood bill that would ban IVF.”

“Despite what Trump seems to think, American women are smart, and we aren’t falling for his gaslighting,” Warren added. “We know who Donald Trump is. We know the damage he has done, and we know the additional restrictions to access to IVF that lie ahead if Trump conceives the White House.”

Warren’s criticism came in response to an interview the former president gave Thursday in the battleground state of Michigan.

“We are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment,” Trump told NBC News before adding, “We’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.”

Asked to clarify whether the government or insurance companies would pay for IVF services, Trump reiterated that an option would be to have insurance companies pay for the fertility treatment “under a mandate, yes.”

...

“American women are not stupid, and we know the only guaranteed protection for IVF is a new national law, which Kamala Harris supports and Donald Trump opposes,” Warren said. 

“Trump’s record on IVF is clear. Check out the facts,” she later added. “Trump’s own platform effectively bans IVF. The Republican Speaker of the House and a majority of House Republicans have signed on to a federal bill to ban IVF nationwide. When a law to protect IVF nationwide was put up for a vote in the Senate, JD Vance voted against it. And four weeks later, Trump picked Vance to be his running mate.”
I have literally seen tweets assuming Trump supported IVF as legal and was proposing a federal law protecting it, because of this off the cuff announcement he made. Devil's in the details, people, and Trump never offers them. Then maybe it's just as well neither of you are in charge. This, OTOH, is very interesting:
Under the Compact, states that join would award their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote rather than the candidate who wins the most votes in their state. For example, if Donald Trump gets the most votes in Montana (assuming it joined the compact) and Kamala Harris wins the national popular vote, the Treasure State, as it is known, would award its three electoral votes to the Democratic nominee. The Compact does not take effect until states totaling most electoral votes (270 as of 2024) have joined. Once that happens, it ensures the candidate who wins the national popular vote wins the Electoral College. 

Jurisdictions totaling 209 electoral votes have signed up. That’s 77.4 percent of the way to 270. And given the exceedingly narrow focus of presidential campaigns on a tiny fraction of the country, the change can’t come soon enough.  

Every four years, Americans endure an absurd method of selecting our president that is so counterintuitive and unappealing that no other country follows our model. Rather than electing our chief executive by popular vote—the way we choose virtually every other federal, state, and local elected official in the country—the Electoral College chooses our president. Americans still vote for their preferred candidate on the ballot, but the candidate with the most votes does not necessarily become president. The litany of problems caused by the Electoral College are obvious. 

Problems like:

Rather than give every voter equal weight, the Electoral College distorts the voting power of Americans based on where they live. The importance of votes in swing states like Wisconsin, Nevada, or Georgia is wildly enhanced, while the value of votes in safe states like Oklahoma or Vermont is artificially diminished. This is evident from how candidates spend their time. A map of campaign stops by Biden and Trump between August 28, 2020, and Election Day shows that 96 percent of the campaign visits the two made were in just 12 states.   

No wonder seven swing states dominate the discourse: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina. The Trump and Harris campaigns will court these voters like they’re the prettiest girl at the dance. Their campaigns will not waste resources in safe states like Idaho or Maryland.

It's another vestige of slavery.  Although CJ Roberts declared the Year of Jubilee and gutted the VRA (because states' rights, ironically), we still need to jettison the Electoral College.  This Compact might be the way to do it (it would be doubly ironic if the Roberts Court declared it unconstitutional). 

Meanwhile, on the journalism front, even PBS is getting into the act (of noticing what the hell is going on):

(Margaret Hoover gave Justice Gorsuch a chance to trot out his '70's vintage rant about "regulations" with little to no analysis of how what he was saying was empty bullshit. His argument was "there's too much," the depth of intellectual insight Ronald Reagan was capable of. In a Supreme Court Justice, it was embarassingly inadequate. This is something in the way of redemption, IMHO.)

In closing:  "fact checking" is a brain disease.  It's apparenly contagious, transmitted by very bad reasoning from people who don't know any better.  If you contract it, seek help immediately.  It seems to work like a brain worm.
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he thought this was funny.  It is dangerous to take something like this too seriously.  If he is serious, "plan" is carrying a lot of baggage there that it can't lift.  Especially since the premise is absolutely ludicrous ("illegal" immigrants are not driving up the cost of housing by moving into nice suburban neighborhoods and taking up all the available stock, anymore than they are "taking all the black jobs."  Nor are they swarming like locusts onto the grocery shelves.  I take it back.  I can't give Weigel the benefit of the doubt.  He needs to seek help.).
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