Politics and Birth Control: What You Need to Know

 Dear Cornelia,

Can you please explain to me what’s going on in the news? Is President Trump going to limit my access to birth control? Do I need to stock up before the election? 

-Politically Pressed

Hello My Dear Politically Pressed,

Right now may feel like a scene right out of The Handmaid’s Tale. So much is out of our control! Let me start by clearing things up for you, which I hope will ease your mind.

First of all, Trump himself cannot “limit your access to birth control.” Right now, insurance companies are required to pay for contraceptives under the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare or ACA). The Affordable Care Act also allows you to stay on your parent’s insurance plan until age 26 and get free mammograms, among many other things.

Right now the Affordable Care Act is under pressure, which means your access to birth control may be under pressure. But not from Trump. The future of the Affordable Care Act lies in the hands of the Supreme Court. In fact, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on the ACA exactly one (!) week after the election. However, the results will likely not be announced until the spring of 2021— the end of the Supreme Court’s session. Let me say that again: The status of your insurance-covered contraceptives will not change until this spring at the earliest. And no guarantee. T-God! So no, you do not need to “stock-up” on birth control. In fact, I’m not even sure that’s legal.

Now, as you know, with the tragic passing of Cornell’s very own Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg ’54, Trump will likely replace her seat in the court with conservative Amy Coney Barrett. It’s still up in the air whether or not Barrett could hear arguments on the ACA this November. But things are looking promising for Amy Coney Barrett, and not so promising for the Affordable Care Act.

Let’s just say hypothetically the Affordable Care Act is struck down. What will happen? If the ACA contraceptive coverage is changed or eliminated, the requirement for the coverage of contraceptives will fall onto the states. Unfortunately, only 28 states require insurance plans to cover contraceptives. Another issue: only 59 percent of workers are covered by state-regulated plans. The other  61 percent are insured by private plans, and the law will no longer require private plans to cover contractive costs. It is likely that without the ACA, millions of women will lose birth-control coverage.

To answer your question, your access to birth control will depend on what happens in the Supreme Court. Then, it depends on what state you live in and what your plan looks like.

The grim reality is that next spring, contraceptive coverage is likely to look much different. But it won’t go away completely. Look for insurance plans that include contraceptive coverage. Ask your employer. Don’t fret: There are other options for birth control. Planned Parenthood here in Ithaca can provide birth control options for next to nothing.

The best way to protect your access to birth control is to vote. The representatives we elect this fall will either be involved in defining the ACA or building new legislation to replace it. Let’s make sure our leaders know what we want.

Cheers,

Cornelia

https://cornellsun.com/2020/10/01/sex-on-thursday-politics-and-birth-control-what-you-need-to-know//

When is yours?

When do you do your “best” (as in clearest, most logical, most creative, most productive, etc.) thinking?  Do you even have a/some “peak performance” situation?   

Is it maybe:

• Upon waking up in the morning
• In the dark of the night, when you can’t sleep
• That time right before going to sleep
  
• When experiencing daydreams
• When under a lot of pressure (more chaotic situations)
• When under the influence of mind-altering drugs or alchol 
• Listening to your favorite music
• Reading a good book
• When you are able to separate your emotions/feelings from your thinking
• When you are angry
• Out in nature
• Sitting on the crapper (hey, who am I to question that? 😱)
• I’m always at peak performance... the “consummate thinker”
• I've never even noticed or thought about the concept of "clear thinking"
  
• Other (mix and match your personal specs)

So, give us the perfect scenario for your best thinking.

And thanks for recommending.

Trump’s Growing Rage at Political Opposition

Our enraged president is losing whatever control he had of his emotions and limited capacity to reason coherently. He is now calling for indictment of his political rivals. This may be related to his intolerance of restrictions his coronavirus infection has imposed on him. NPR is reporting that the president’s doctor has given him a clean bill of health to operate normally starting tomorrow despite no public transparency about his real clinical status. Presumably, the president ordered his doctor to do this. Previously, his doctors stated that they wanted him to remain out of the public at least until next Monday.

Calls for indictment of political rivals is more evidence of the president’s deadly serious, inherent anti-democratic authoritarianism and utter contempt for the rule of law. The New York Times writes:

“President Trump berated his own cabinet officers on Thursday for not prosecuting or implicating his political enemies, lashing out even as he announced that he hoped to return to the campaign trail on Saturday just nine days after he tested positive for the coronavirus.

In his first extended public comments since learning he had the virus last week, Mr. Trump went on the offensive not only against his challenger, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., but the Democratic running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, whom he called “a monster” and a “communist.” He balked at participating in his debate next Thursday with Mr. Biden if held remotely as the organizers decided to do out of health concerns.

But Mr. Trump secured a statement from the White House physician clearing him to return to public activities on Saturday and then promptly said he would try to hold a campaign rally in Florida that day, two days earlier than the doctor had originally said was needed to determine whether he was truly out of danger. The president again dismissed the virus, saying, “when you catch it, you get better,” ignoring the more than 212,000 people in the United States who did not get better and died from it. 

The president castigated his own team, declaring that Attorney General William P. Barr would go down in history “as a very sad, sad situation” if he did not indict Democrats like Mr. Biden and former President Barack Obama. He complained that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had not released Hillary Clinton’s emails, saying, “I’m not happy about him for that reason.” And he targeted Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director. “He’s been disappointing,” Mr. Trump said. 

‘Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes, the greatest political crime in the history of our country, then we’re going to get little satisfaction unless I win and we’ll just have to go, because I won’t forget it,’ Mr. Trump said, referring to the investigation into his 2016 campaign ties with Russia. ‘But these people should be indicted. This was the greatest political crime in the history of our country, and that includes Obama and it includes Biden.’  

Ms. Pelosi said she planned to introduce legislation on Friday creating a commission on presidential capacity to review the health of a commander in chief under provisions of the 25th Amendment providing for the temporary transfer of power to the vice president in case of inability to discharge the duties of the office. “Crazy Nancy is the one who should be under observation,” Mr. Trump replied on Twitter.  

‘I felt pretty lousy,’ Mr. Trump said. But, he added, ‘I’m back because I’m a perfect physical specimen and I’m extremely young.’ He once again played down the severity of the disease. ‘Now what happens is you get better,’ he said. ‘That’s what happens, you get better.’”

At this point in his mental deterioration, our delusional president is not even pretending to operate in accord with the rule of law. Also, his mentally unsound state of mind cannot be denied any longer. If sufficient evidence showed that Obama, Clinton or Biden had committed crimes, they would have been indicted already by the hyper-partisan Department of Justice. In recent years, there have been many partisan investigations to destroy prominent democrats. All have failed to indict anyone so far.

This is another example of the president’s deranged, fake reality-based world view. Just like there is no evidence of massive voter fraud, there is insufficient evidence to issue indictments of the democrats the president wants thrown in prison. Neither massive vote fraud nor the alleged democratic criminal activity exists. Our obviously mentally ill president is grossly unfit to be in office. He needs to be removed from office right now. That GOP members of congress condone this by their silence indicates that they too are grossly unfit to be in office. 

The monster here isn’t Kamala Harris and Pelosi isn’t crazy. The crazy monster sits in the White House. Sadly, that obviously sick, disrespectful, enraged beast is aided and abetted by a corrupt, incompetent tribal GOP leadership.

The DoJ’s New Voter Suppression Tactic: Building a Vote Fraud Narrative Without Evidence

Attorney General William Barr -- Building a 

narrative of massive vote fraud without any evidence 

In a new twist on voter suppression, the Department of Justice (DoJ) has reversed a decades-long policy of not opening aggressive voter fraud investigations in the months before an election. The idea was to avoid  “chilling legitimate voting and campaign activities” or “interjecting the investigation itself as an issue.” 

The New York Times writes on this politically fraudulent new form of voter suppression:

“For decades, federal prosecutors have been told not to mount election fraud investigations in the final months before an election for fear they could depress voter turnout or erode confidence in the results. Now, the Justice Department has lifted that prohibition weeks before the presidential election.

The move comes as President Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr have promoted a false narrative that voter fraud is rampant, potentially undermining Americans’ faith in the election.

A Justice Department lawyer in Washington said in a memo to prosecutors on Friday that they could investigate suspicions of election fraud before votes are tabulated. That reversed a decades-long policy that largely forbade aggressively conducting such inquiries during campaigns to keep their existence from becoming public and possibly “chilling legitimate voting and campaign activities” or “interjecting the investigation itself as an issue” for voters.

The memo creates “an exception to the general non-interference with elections policy” for suspicions of election fraud, particularly misconduct by federal government workers, including postal workers or military employees; both groups transport mail-in ballots. The exception allows investigators to take overt investigative steps, like questioning witnesses, that were previously off limits in such inquiries until after election results were certified.

The Justice Department could ‘build a narrative, despite the absence of any evidence, of fraud in mail-in voting so Trump can challenge the election results if he loses,’ said Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney in Alabama under the Obama administration.

‘They’ve told us this is their strategy, and we’re watching them implement it,’ Ms. Vance said.  

The policy shift, Mr. Hasen said, ‘encourages more of these announcements that could, these small-bore things, be treated as evidence of rigging and then promoted at a higher level.’”

Vance is right. The president has openly said that if he loses the election, it will be due to voter fraud. Clearly, any DoJ investigation itself is going to become a campaign issue. The president will use it as cover and claim that the investigation itself is evidence of massive vote fraud, despite there being no such evidence. This president will not accept defeat at the polls. He will lie, cheat, irrationally emotionally manipulate and even fabricate fake evidence to stay in power.  

This is the kind of lies, deceit and political fraud a corrupt tyrant wannabe engages in when making his best, last run at authoritarian power and corrupt wealth. This is also a part of what the end of a meaningful representative democracy can look like.

US Medical Supply Chain Failures Caused Coronavirus Deaths

FRONTLINE investigation to be broadcast

on PBS and online Oct. 6 at 10 p.m. EST/9 p.m. CST

A major ongoing months-long investigation by The Associated Press (AP), the PBS series “FRONTLINE,” and the Global Reporting Centre is analyzing the failures of the medical supply chain to respond to the pandemic. The bottom line is that warnings by experts and manufacturers for years have been ignored by both congress and presidents. The consequence is tens of thousands of needless deaths in the coronavirus pandemic. The AP writes:

“Medical supply chains that span oceans and continents are the fragile lifelines between raw materials and manufacturers overseas, and health care workers on COVID-19 front lines in the U.S. As link after link broke, the system fell apart.

This catastrophic collapse was one of the country’s most consequential failures to control the virus. And it wasn’t unexpected: For decades, politicians and corporate officials ignored warnings about the risks associated with America’s overdependence on foreign manufacturing, and a lack of adequate preparation at home, the AP and “FRONTLINE” found.

As the pandemic rolled into the U.S., Asian factories shut down, halting exports of medical supplies to the U.S. Meanwhile, government stockpiles were depleted from a flu outbreak a decade earlier, and there was no way to rapidly restock. The federal government dangerously advised people not to wear masks, looking to preserve the supply for health care workers. Counterfeits flooded the market.

Although it will take years for researchers to understand why the pandemic was disproportionately worse in the U.S., early studies that compare different countries’ responses are finding that shortages of masks, gloves, gowns, shields, testing kits and other medical supplies indeed cost lives.

Meanwhile, studies in nursing homes -- in China, Washington state and across the U.S. -- found that COVID-19 cases were significantly higher in places with shortages of personal protective equipment, or PPE. Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Andrew T. Chan and colleagues found health care workers who didn’t have adequate PPE had a 30% greater chance of infection than colleagues with enough supplies. Black, Hispanic and Asian staffers had the highest risk of catching COVID-19, they found.

“And these are unacceptable deaths, each of which could have been prevented if we had had adequate supply chains in place in advance of the pandemic,” said UC Berkeley Professor William Dow.

Dow and his colleagues say there would be massive savings, in lives and tax dollars, if the government invested more in buying and storing stockpiles of supplies. 

‘This is a case where no individual health care organization is large enough to move the market and induce suppliers to invest in those types of supply chains,’ said Dow. ‘So the government needs to be able to go in and guarantee a certain amount of purchases so that it will be in the self-interest of each one of these manufacturers to be willing to put in the investments into that supply chain.’  

Despite early warnings from inside the White House, the federal government failed to substantially mobilize domestic manufacturers until April, three months after the virus began spreading exponentially across the U.S.  

The impact of the virus varies greatly from country to country. But it is now clear that those with well-managed, diverse and flexible supply chains were able to protect against the deadly spread in ways the U.S. failed.  

The warnings of looming and potentially deadly supply shortages from the White House began confidentially in February when White House trade adviser Peter Navarro wrote to the COVID-19 task force, urging the administration to halt exports and ramp up production of N95 masks. The U.S. “faces the real prospect of a severe mask shortage!” he wrote on Feb. 9.  

In addition to halting exports and prohibiting the sale of N95 factory equipment to China, Navarro pleaded that the U.S. government must provide ‘immediate purchase guarantees for all U.S. supplies at maximum production capacity.’ 

And according to health care workers, the Government Accountability Office and even the FDA, N95 masks continue to be in short supply. The White House denies this.”

 

The AP article goes on to point out that people responsible for pandemic preparedness in the Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump administrations all said they warned about inadequate supply chains. Neither congress nor the White House made this a priority due to the cost of maintaining a US supply chain. 

In the wake of the 2014-21016 Ebola virus outbreak, an Obama advisor recommended that the US government needed to stockpile protective equipment during an emergency. The problem with that is that foreign suppliers may not be able to keep up with demand if their output was needed domestically. That is what happened.

A 2019 Trump administration pandemic simulation exercise concluded that the U.S. would not have stockpiled enough antiviral medications, needles, syringes, N95 respirators, ventilators, and other needed medical supplies to adequately respond. That is what happened less than a year after that exercise. In the wake of that exercise, the Trump administration made no move to prepare.

As time passed, American manufacturers of supplies either went bankrupt or shut down manufacturing due to limited demand for US supplies that were more expensive than foreign-made supplies. This failure may have saved billions of tax dollars, but that savings has now cost the US trillions in economic losses and thousands of lives. That was penny wise, but pound stupid.

Maybe this experience will result in a meaningful change. At the August Republican National Convention the president stated that “over the next four years, .... we will .... bring home our medical supply chains, and we will end our reliance on China once and for all.” Joe Biden announced a plan to invest $700 billion to support U.S. manufacturing by purchasing domestically made medical supplies and other goods.

Where does responsibility lie?

In the past, the president has blamed sitting presidents for the bad things that occurred while they were in office. He blamed Bush for the Iraq war and said he should have been impeached for it. If one applies the same standard of responsibility to Trump, he should be impeached for his failures. How one apportions responsibility to members of congress will depend factors such as on who failed to act and who opposed action.

American Christian Nationalism

“Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation. We reject this damaging political ideology and invite our Christian brothers and sisters to join us in opposing this threat to our faith and to our nation. We believe that:

• People of all faiths and none have the right and responsibility to engage constructively in the public square. 
• Patriotism does not require us to minimize our religious convictions.”  

-- Christians Against Christian Nationalism 

“‘Let’s run the race marked out for us. Let’s fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents. Let’s fix our eyes on this land of heroes and let their courage inspire. And let’s fix our eyes on the author and perfecter of our faith and freedom and never forget that where the spirit of the Lord is there is freedom — and that means freedom always wins.’ .... But Pence, who accepted his party’s nomination for vice president during the speech, sparked outcry in some Christian circles as he closed out his remarks when he combined at least two Bible verses — and replaced references to Jesus with patriotic imagery.” -- Mike Pence, August 2020, dog whistling to Christian Nationalists by conflating Jesus with the US flag based on 2 Corinthians 3:17 and Hebrews 12:1-2

“‘I should have seen this coming,’ writes John Fea in his new book, Believe Me. The toxic mixture of fear, nostalgia, and desire for power so vividly on display in 2016 was not an aberration, Fea tells us. Instead, it’s part of a long white evangelical tradition. The alliance with Trump may have come as a shock to some, but the roots of this strange embrace run deep into the white evangelical past. .... These deep roots are best seen in the most effective chapter of the book, a ‘short history of evangelical fear’. Fea describes Puritan narratives of moral decline and social decay–narratives begun almost before there was time for decline to occur!–as perhaps ‘the first American evangelical fear.’” -- Colorblind Christians, discussing Trump’s 2016 election and the role that Evangelical Christians played in it

A program, God Bless, produced by the NPR program On the Media discusses the phenomenon of Christian Nationalism (CN) in America. Most of the following comments summarize the first ~20 minutes of the broadcast, which also discusses the historical origin of the mostly mythical belief in severe persecution of Christians by various hostile influences throughout history.

This is of some interest because this group is one of the president’s core supporters. The president and vice president both play on mythical fears that CN ideology is partly based on. They pander to this group in ways that are opaque to most Americans but quite clear to people who believe in CN. 

About 75% of Evangelical Christians are Christian Nationalists (CNs), but the emphasis is more on nationalism than on a specific brand of Christianity. The core ideal is to see “people like us.” American-born white people are people like us and that is the focus of power and privilege. Religion is secondary to the in-group and people in the in-group do not need to be religious hardly at all. More than half the American electorate is CN and about 20% of those (~11% of the total electorate?) fiercely endorse the CN ideology, while about 32% are not strident but still hold these beliefs.

For this ideology, being Christian “like us” and an American citizen translates into social beliefs and symbolic boundaries that tend to exclude others from political parties, political offices, social services and even who is a citizen or qualified to vote. The religious component holds that because these God-willed beliefs are sacred, adherents should be willing to do anything to insure that this vision of America comes to pass. Basically, CNs want to see Christianity play a role at the center of American life, with less influence from other religious faiths, secularism and probably racial minorities. 

Christian Nationalism myths include the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation and that Christians are being persecuted in the form of infringements on their religious freedoms. Although the idea of persecution is false in modern America, it is a central complaint that CNs frequently raise. The idea of persecution of Christians dates back to the early days of Christianity and has been raised even at various times when there is no significant persecution. The modern fear is that Christianity is under attack by hostile forces such as secularism, moral relativism and feminism with much of the threat coming from Jews.

The president is aware of the CN ideology and its large following. In his rhetoric anyone who is not a CN is anti-Christian. He has attacked Joe Biden, incoherently and falsely claiming that he “will take away your guns, destroy your second amendment, no religion, no anything, hurt the Bible, hurt God, he's against God.” An ad the president has run shows Biden worshipping with a black congregation with a voice over saying that people will not be safe in America if Biden is elected. Apparently, this kind of incoherence appeals to some or most CNs. 

One can presume that believers in the CN ideology are among the president’s most loyal supporters. Since he is doing what God commands, presumably the ends mostly or completely justify the means. That may even be true if, in the name of CN ideology, the president murders someone in broad daylight with dozens of witnesses seeing it. Most of these people are not going to change their support for the president, no matter what.

In the CN ideology, one can see why so many religious conservatives have no qualms about ongoing widespread voter suppression by the GOP. They do not want minorities or democrats to vote because those people are not “like us.”