US Politics

Republican abortion bans restrict women’s access to other essential medicine Many pharmacies and physicians are forced to deny patients access to drugs, such as methotrexate, that can be used to help induce an abortionA few weeks after the supreme court’s 24 June decision to overturn the nationwide abortion rights established by Roe v Wade, the pharmacy chain Walgreens sent Annie England Noblin a message, informing her that her monthly prescription of methotrexate was held up.Noblin, a 40-year-old college instructor in rural Missouri, never had trouble getting her monthly prescription of methotrexate for her rheumatoid arthritis. So she went to her local Walgreens to figure out why, standing in line with other customers as she waited for an explanation.When it was finally her turn, a pharmacist informed Noblin – in front of the other customers behind her – that she could not release the medication until she received confirmation from Noblin’s doctor that Noblin would not use it to have an abortion.Since the supreme court’s elimination of federal abortion rights, many states have been enacting laws which highly restrict access to abortion, affecting not only pregnant women but also other patients as well as healthcare providers.As a result, many pharmacies and physicians have been forced to deny and delay patients’ access to essential medications – such as methotrexate – that can be used to help induce an abortion.Noblin is one of the 5 million methotrexate users across the US and one of the country’s many autoimmune patients. Although she was eventually given her prescription, Noblin and other patients are now forced to grapple both with a monthly invasion of privacy at pharmacies that ask them about their reproductive choices as well as the possibility of being wholly denied the medication in the future due to restrictive laws.For 60 years, methotrexate has been considered a cheap, standard treatment for nearly 60% of rheumatoid arthritis patients. It is also widely used to treat other autoimmune diseases, including Crohn’s disease, lupus and psoriasis. And, because it inhibits certain cellular functions, it has been used to treat a variety of cancers including leukemia, breast cancer, lung cancer and lymphoma.But methotrexate also treats ectopic pregnancies, in which a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus. Although rare, with only about 100,000 occurring annually, ectopic pregnancies are fatal for fetuses and can severely jeopardize mothers’ health. Therefore, the only treatment is abortion, and methotrexate commonly is combined with other medicine to perform the procedure.Methotrexate’s versatility prompted the World Health Organization to classify it as an “essential medicine”. Yet Roe v Wade’s reversal has significantly stunted access to the drug – even for patients who are not pregnant and simply require the drug to treat other conditions.Numerous health organizations have confirmed reports of methotrexate being denied to women since the federal abortion rights were eliminated.Calling the drug “an important part” of caring for the illness it is dedicated to fighting, the Lupus Foundation of America said: “We are aware of reports that some people are having difficulty accessing methotrexate in the wake of the supreme court’s ruling [in June].”Similarly, the American College of Rheumatology said that it is aware of the “emerging concerns surrounding access to needed treatments such as #MTX [methotrexate] after the recent decision” from the supreme court in the Dobbs case that led to Roe v Wade’s reversal.In Missouri, abortion is completely banned with limited exceptions for saving the pregnant person’s life or to prevent serious risk to that person’s physical health. As a result, for someone like Noblin, being banned from getting access in Missouri to her monthly doses of methotrexate – even if temporarily – was and is still quite damaging.Methotrexate helps Noblin and others alleviate pain as well as swelling in their hands and shoulder joints that occasionally becomes so excruciating that it hinders their ability to get dressed or drive to work.“If I weren’t taking it,” Noblin told the Guardian, “I don’t know how I would be able to function.”After her pharmacy got confirmation from her doctor that she was not going to be using the drug to induce an abortion, Noblin was finally able to get her prescription for July. In August, Noblin went into the pharmacy again, expecting the process to be smoother this time around. However, to her surprise, she was required to consult with a pharmacist before getting the medication and confirm that she was not pregnant and didn’t intend to become pregnant while taking the medication.Noblin told the pharmacist it was not their business. The pharmacist then told Noblin that she would not be able to get her medication if she did not answer the question.“I’m going to have to answer [that] every single month before they will even consider giving me the medication,” Noblin said.Additionally, another problem that Noblin and many others face is potentially being forced to spend $14,000 a month without insurance for Humira as a brand-name alternative. And they are worried about prosecution by their states.Noblin said she is on birth control but frets to think if she still gets pregnant.In that case she said she would get an abortion in Illinois, which has protected abortion rights. But would she be exposed to prosecution, accused of lying because she would have told a pharmacist she didn’t intend to get pregnant?“It feels like I don’t have any control over my own body,” Noblin said. “My body belongs to Missouri.”Jennifer Crow, a 48-year-old from Tennessee, faced similar issues after the supreme court eliminated federal abortion protections. On 1 July, Crow, who has inflammatory arthritis, received an automated call from her CVS pharmacy, informing her that her refill was declined.The call came in during Friday evening on a holiday weekend. As a result, Crow was left without her weekly dose of methotrexate.Before she started methotrexate, Crow’s joints would become too stiff and sore for her to move without pain in the mornings, limiting her mobility significantly.“Methotrexate gave me back my independence,” she told the Guardian. “I knew without it, I’d be right back to limited mobility and lots of pain.”Four days later, the pain and stiffness started to return. She also began panicking, unsure if she’d ever be able to get her medication because she and her Georgia-based medical providers were both in states that implemented abortion bans after the Dobbs decision.She couldn’t understand why she was in that position, given that she’d had a hysterectomy years earlier. Eventually, Crow found out that CVS refused her refill because the chain had asked pharmacists to decline filling methotrexate prescriptions unless they indicated a diagnosis unrelated to an abortion, a practice Crow finds “invasive and unnecessary”.Crow, like Noblin, eventually got her prescription refilled. But since her treatment’s disruption she’s struggled with increased pain and decreased mobility.“The Dobbs decision has many unintended consequences, and as a middle-aged woman without a uterus, I didn’t think it would affect my care,” she said.Complicating matters: methotrexate is not the only essential medication that many are now struggling to access, despite the US health and human services department’s guidance on laws prohibiting pharmacies from rejecting patients with prescriptions for medications that may end a pregnancy.People on misoprostol – which prevents stomach ulcers for those who take aspirin, ibuprofen or naproxen – are also facing access hurdles because the drug can also be combined with other medication to induce abortion, said the Global Healthy Living Foundation’s chief legal officer, Steven Newmark. Such disruptions not only can lead to “serious health consequences”, but they violate patients’ treatment preferences, Newmark added.Nonetheless, methotrexate vividly illustrates the uncertainty created by Roe’s reversal. Texas lawmakers have made it a felony to dispense methotrexate there to someone who is past seven weeks pregnant and uses the medication to terminate a pregnancy.There have been reports from doctors that some pharmacies are refusing to carry methotrexate and other certain essential medication entirely. And some physicians have refused to prescribe those medications to patients who may become pregnant, citing concerns about prosecution.In a joint statement by multiple pharmacy organizations across the country, pharmacists and healthcare providers expressed concern towards “state laws that limit patients’ access to medically necessary medications and impede physicians and pharmacists from using their professional judgment”.The statement went on to call for clear guidance from state boards of medicine and pharmacy, agencies and other policymakers.To Rachel Rebouché, an expert in reproductive health law and dean of Temple University’s law school, the largest problem is clear.“The biggest issue is the confusion,” Rebouché said.TopicsAbortionRepublicansHealthWomenUS politicsMissourinewsReuse this content More

Louisiana school turned ‘college fair’ into transphobic church event, students sayMore than 2,100 high school seniors were taken to event that left many of the students traumatized, some attendees say More than 2,000 public school students in Louisiana were told earlier this week that they were going to a college fair. They were then shuttled to what parents later deemed a sexist and transphobic church event which left many of the students traumatized.On Tuesday, more than 2,100 high school seniors from the East Baton Rouge Parish School System – which serves residents of Louisiana’s capital – were taken to the local Living Faith Christian Center under the promise that they would receive college and career advice, as well as free food.The Christian nonprofit organization 29:11 Mentoring Program organized the event, calling it “Day of Hope,” the Baton Rouge Advocate reported. The permission slips distributed to students promised “free food”, “fun and games”, “college fair” and “special guest”.But, ominously, the bottom of the slips also read: “I agree to release and hold harmless 2911 Academy, any and all affiliated organizations, their employees, agents and representatives, including volunteer and other drivers from any and all claims arising from or relating to student’s participation.”What followed, according to some attendees, was an egregious erasure of the separation of church and state that some once thought was central to the US’s identity.Organizers separated the students by their assumed gender once they got to the event, according to Brittney Bryant, a teacher and mother of a transgender student who also attended the event.“Boys were instructed to go outside while the girls were left in the church for ‘girl talk’. My transgender child was discriminated against for walking out. I stayed and listened to the discussion. They talked about rape, forgiving the offender in life, suicide, prayer leadership, and many more dark controversial topics. We had females in the bathrooms crying due to the topics of discussion,” Bryant, who acted as a chaperone for the event, later wrote on Facebook.“Meanwhile the boys were left outside in the extreme heat. The boys then were escorted in and the girls outside. The boys’ topic was titled ‘real talk’. From the beginning no topics were discussed but began male chauvinistic competition for monetary reward for winners. Then proceeded to compete [in] push ups for more money.”Bryant added that transgender students who attended the event were bullied by other students. “Other students poured water on top of transgender students heads without any repercussions by any of the adults present,” she said.One of the students who attended the event, Alexis Budyach, described the event as a “horrible experience” in a statement on Facebook.“The majority of students chose to attend this field trip on the promise of free food and the opportunity to skip class, however the majority of students were not only disappointed by this event, but traumatized as well,” Budyach said. “I attended this college fair as someone who plans on applying to colleges soon, so I was disappointed once I saw what the event actually was.”Budyach, who identifies as a genderfluid person, wrote, “I immediately assumed that I would be discriminated against if I went with the boys” when event organizers divided students based on assumed genders. As a result, Budyach “stayed sitting down and kept my mouth shut”. Once all the girls were alone, “the host introduced three women meant to “guide us on our journey in being young queens”.Budyach went on to explain that one speaker told a story of how a man she secretly met on a dating app tried to kill her by strangling her. Apparently, the point was to discourage keeping secrets, but Budyach said the traumatic circumstances surrounding the event drowned out the message.“She also emphasized that if she had waited for the man god meant for her, then it wouldn’t [have] happened,” Budyach wrote, saying things took another turn for the worse when a subsequent speaker tried to encourage attendees to be kind to one another by vividly describing her son’s suicide by hanging.Later, students were led into the church, and the man leading the event’s closing offered a girl $100 if she could force her way past him and to the stage amid a discussion about domestic violence and male control, Bryant wrote in her post.The school district officials issued their own post on Facebook defending the church event as “amazing”. The post also said: “We were honored to hear directly from students to help them address the issues they face and to provide them with motivation and guidance to empower their choices.”Teachers, parents and students quickly flooded the post with furious comments.One parent wrote, “I signed a permission slip for a College and Career Day. What I got was indoctrination and trauma.”Speaking to WBRZ amid the backlash, the East Baton Rouge parish school board’s vice-president, Dawn Collins, said: “There is a separation of church and state, and it seems like those lines may have been crossed.”TopicsLouisianaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Trump claimed ‘I was not watching television’ on January 6, book says Ex-president denied knowing his supporters were rioting and called them ‘fucking crazy’, Maggie Haberman writes in new book Donald Trump denied knowing at the time the January 6 attack on the US Capitol started that a mob of his supporters – whom he privately called “fucking crazy” – were rioting, the author of a forthcoming book on his chaotic presidency writes in what may stand as one of the most surprising, non-believable postscripts of his tenure in the Oval Office.“I didn’t usually have the television on. I’d have it on if there was something. I then later turned it on and I saw what was happening,” Trump told New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman for her forthcoming account Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.“I had heard that afterward and actually on the late side. I was having meetings. I was also with [then-chief of staff] Mark Meadows and others. I was not watching television.”Trump’s comments on what Haberman describes as one of the persistent mysteries of January 6 – what he was doing during the deadly Capitol attack – comes despite congressional testimony that he was indeed watching events that day in early 2021 when his supporters tried desperately to prevent the certification of his defeat to Joe Biden in the presidential race weeks beforehand.In an extract published in the Atlantic, Haberman writes that she was given three post-presidential opportunities to speak with Trump and found that “his impulse to try to sell his preferred version of himself was undeterred by the stain that January 6 left on his legacy and on the democratic foundations of the country – if anything, it grew stronger”.At Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s “Winter White House”, the former president appeared “diminished”, she writes.Haberman continued: “After the headiness of being at the center of the world’s gaze, his time after the White House made him seem shrunken.“He often played golf and then went to his newly built office at the club for meetings with whoever traveled down to seek his approval.“He would watch television before going to dinner, where club members would sometimes applaud him, and then it would start all over again the next day, so removed from the daily rhythms of the broader world that he was oblivious to holidays on the calendar and staff had to remind him.”Within the book’s pages, Haberman reports that Trump dissed his supporters to aides ( “They’re fucking crazy”) ; that she found it “difficult to discern, though, whether Trump actually believed what he was saying about the election”; that while president he considered he was doing two jobs: “running the country and survival”.Asked about a second run for the presidency, Haberman writes, Trump “was more comfortable looking backward than forward. When I told Trump I wanted to talk about 2024, he asked, quizzically, ‘2024?’”In typical Trump style, he insulted allies that he felt had turned against him, saying of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell that “the Old Crow’s a piece of shit”.The former president also ruminated that he would not be facing civil indictment for fraud in New York under ex-state attorney general Robert Morgenthau, and he claimed that he had not taken important documents from the White House at the end of his term.“Nothing of great urgency, no,” Trump told Haberman, except letters from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with whom, he hinted, he was still in touch.Asked if he would do it over again, Trump said that he gets asked that question more than any other. “The answer is, yeah, I think so,” he said, according to Haberman. “Because here’s the way I look at it. I have so many rich friends and nobody knows who they are.”Ultimately, Haberman concludes, Trump “works things out in real time in front of all of us. Along the way, he reoriented an entire country to react to his moods and emotions.”To understand him at all, she writes, one would first have to understand the New York from which Trump emerged – “its own morass of corruption and dysfunction”.“I spent the four years of his presidency getting asked by people to decipher why he was doing what he was doing, but the truth is, ultimately, almost no one really knows him,” Haberman writes. “Some know him better than others, but he is often simply, purely opaque, permitting people to read meaning and depth into every action, no matter how empty they might be.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsUS elections 2020newsReuse this content More

Jake Sullivan: US will act ‘decisively’ if Russia uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine US national security adviser says: ‘Any use of nuclear weapons will be met with catastrophic consequences for Russia’ America and its allies will act “decisively” if Russia uses a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Sunday, reaffirming the Joe Biden White House’s previous response to mounting concerns that Vladimir Putin’s threats are in increased danger of being realized.“We have communicated directly, privately and at very high levels to the Kremlin that any use of nuclear weapons will be met with catastrophic consequences for Russia, that the US and our allies will respond decisively, and we have been clear and specific about what that will entail,” Sullivan told CBS’s Face The Nation.Sullivan said that the Russian leader Putin had been “waving around the nuclear card at various points through this conflict”, and it was a matter that Biden’s administration has “to take deadly seriously because it is a matter of paramount seriousness – the possible use of nuclear weapons for the first time since the second world war”.In a separate interview with CBS, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he was not certain that Putin was bluffing with nuclear threats. “Maybe yesterday it was bluff. Now, it could be a reality,” he said. “He wants to scare the whole world.”The administration’s security chief said that Russia’s nuclear threat against Ukraine, including extending its nuclear umbrella over eastern parts of the country that are still being contested seven months after its invasion, would not deflect the US and its allies.“We will continue to support Ukraine in its efforts to defend its country and defend its democracy,” Sullivan said, pointing to more than $15bn in weapons, including air defense systems, hundreds of artillery pieces and rounds of artillery, that the US has supplied to Ukraine.He said that Moscow’s mobilization of troops was a “sham referenda in the occupied regions” that would not deter the US. “What Putin has done is not exactly a sign of strength or confidence – frankly, it’s a sign that they’re struggling badly on the Russian side,” Sullivan said.But, Sullivan added, it is “too soon to make comprehensive predictions” about a collapse of Russian forces.“I think what we are seeing are signs of unbelievable struggle among the Russians – you’ve got low morale, where the soldiers don’t want to fight. And who can blame them because they want no part of Putin’s war of conquest in their neighboring country?”Sullivan continued: “Russia is struggling, but Russia still remains a dangerous foe, and capable of great brutality.” He alluded to mass burial sites containing hundreds of graves that Ukrainian forces found after recapturing Izium from Russia and said, “We continue to take that threat seriously.”He added that the US, the International Atomic Agency and Ukraine nuclear regulators are working together to ensure there is no “melt-down” at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in eastern Ukraine.The Russians, he said, had been “consistently implying that there may be some kind of accident at this plant”.Reactors at the plant, Sullivan said, had been put into “cold storage” to “try to make sure there is no threat posed by a melt-down or something else at the plant. But it’s something we all have to keep a close eye on.”Separately, Sullivan said US criticism of a crackdown on mounting protests in Iran after the death in police custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini would not affect the administration’s offer to lift sanctions on Iran as part of the effort to reach a deal on nuclear enrichment.“The fact that we are in negotiations with Iran on its nuclear program is in no way impacting our willingness and our vehemence in speaking out about what has been happening on the streets of Iran,” he said.Last week, Biden told the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York that “we stand with the brave citizens and the brave women of Iran who right now are demonstrating to secure their basic rights”. The US president’s remarks came shortly after a defiant speech by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi.In his remarks on Sunday, Sullivan said the US had taken “tangible steps” to sanction the morality police who caused the death of Mahsa Amini.“We’ve taken steps to make it easier for Iranians to be able to get access to the internet and communications technologies to talk to one another and talk to the world and we will do all that we can to support the brave people, the brave women, of Iran,” Sullivan said.But Sullivan refused to be drawn out on whether the US would change its policy on lifting sanctions in exchange for a nuclear deal in light of the protests.“We’re talking about diplomacy to prevent Iran from ever getting a nuclear weapon,” he said. “If we … succeed …, the world, America and its allies will be safer.”But the pursuit of a nuclear deal, Sullivan said, “would not stop us in any way from pushing back and speaking out on Iran’s brutal repression of its citizens and its women. We can and will do both.”TopicsUS politicsJake SullivanUkraineRussiaIranBiden administrationnewsReuse this content More

Corporate greed, not wages, is behind inflation. It’s time for price controlsRobert ReichCorporations are using rising costs as an excuse to increase their prices even higher, resulting in record profits. We need limited price controls to break this cycle On Wednesday, policymakers at the Federal Reserve – America’s central bank – continued their battle against inflation with a third straight supersize interest-rate increase. And they warned that they’re not done. They’ll continue to raise borrowing costs until inflation is tamed.They assume that the underlying economic problem is a tight labor market, causing wages to rise – and prices to rise in response. And they believe interest rate increases are necessary to slow this wage-price inflation.This is dead wrong.Wage increases have not even kept up with inflation. Most workers’ paychecks are shrinking in terms of real purchasing power. Rather than causing inflation, wages are actually reducing inflationary pressures.The underlying economic problem is profit-price inflation. It’s caused by corporations raising their prices above their increasing costs.Corporations are using those increasing costs – of materials, components and labor – as excuses to increase their prices even higher, resulting in bigger profits. This is why corporate profits are close to levels not seen in over half a century.Corporations have the power to raise prices without losing customers because they face so little competition. Since the 1980s, two-thirds of all American industries have become more concentrated.Why are grocery prices through the roof? Because just four companies control 85% of meat and poultry processing. Just one corporation sets the price for most of the nation’s seed corn. And two giant firms dominate consumer staples.All are raising prices and increasing profits because they can.Big pharma, comprising five giants, is causing drug prices to soar.The airline industry has gone from 12 carriers in 1980 to just four today, all rapidly raising ticket prices.Wall Street has consolidated into five giant banks, raking in record profits on the spreads between the interest they pay on deposits and what they charge on loans.Broadband is dominated by three giant cable companies, all raising their prices.Automobile dealers are enjoying record profits as they raise the retail prices of automobiles.Gas prices have started to drop but big oil still has the power to raise prices at the pump far higher than the costs of crude.And so on.This is why Congress and the administration need to take direct action against profit-price inflation, rather than rely solely on the Fed to raise interest rates and put the burden of fighting inflation on average working people who are not responsible for it.Bold antitrust enforcement is essential. Even the credible threat of antitrust enforcement can deter corporations from raising prices higher than their costs.A windfall profits tax could also be helpful. This would be a temporary tax on price increases exceeding the producer price index’s costs of producing consumer goods.Price controls should be a backstop. The current inflation, emerging from the pandemic, is analogous to the inflation after the second world war when economists advocated temporary price controls to buy time to overcome supply bottlenecks and prevent corporate profiteering.Limited price controls should be considered now, for the same reasons.The inflation we are now experiencing is not due to wage gains from excessive worker power. It is due to profit gains from excessive corporate power.It’s profits, not wages, that need to be controlled.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
TopicsUS politicsOpinionUS economyInflationEconomicscommentReuse this content More

JD Vance playing defense in unexpectedly close Ohio Senate race If Republicans cannot drag Vance across the finish line, it could spell doom for the party’s hopes of flipping the Senate JD Vance had some explaining to do. After winning a brutal, costly primary to secure the Republican nomination in Ohio’s Senate race, Vance had spent the summer making few appearances on the campaign trail and allowing his Democratic opponent, congressman Tim Ryan, to dominate the airwaves.Now polls showed Vance, a first-time candidate and author of the bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, running neck and neck with Ryan in a race that many Republicans had hoped would be an easy win.“We have a tough campaign,” Vance said at an event with supporters in Avon, Ohio, last weekend. “I know that a lot of people are frustrated you didn’t see a whole lot of my TV commercials over the summer. Hopefully that’s started to pick up in the last couple of weeks.”Vance’s struggle to establish a clear lead in Ohio mirrors Republican Senate candidates’ missteps in other battleground states that could determine control of the vital upper chamber. Like Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Herschel Walker in Georgia, Vance was able to win the Republican nomination after receiving Donald Trump’s endorsement, but he has stumbled in his pivot to the general election.Republicans are now racing to avoid a Democratic victory in Ohio, often at the expense of investing in other close races. If Republicans cannot drag Vance across the finish line in Ohio, it could spell doom for the party’s hopes of flipping the Senate in the midterm elections this November.Although Trump won Ohio by eight points in 2020, recent polls show Vance and Ryan essentially tied. National Republican groups have picked up on the trouble in Ohio and have started devoting more resources to the race.The Senate Leadership Fund, a Super Pac aligned with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, announced last month that it would reserve $28m in TV and radio ads to boost Vance. As the SLF increased its financial support for Vance, the group also slashed roughly $8m of its ad reservations in Arizona, a shift that the Super Pac’s president partially attributed to “an unexpected expense in Ohio”. (The SLF announced Tuesday that it was pulling out of the Arizona Senate race entirely.)The SLF’s significant investment to support Vance underscores how Republicans are playing defense in an unexpectedly close race. Even if the SLF’s funding helps Vance hold on in Ohio, the victory would not bring his party closer to a Senate majority, as the seat is now held by a retiring Republican, Rob Portman.The reality is that Vance needs all the financial help he can get. At the end of the second quarter of 2022, Vance’s campaign reported having just $628,000 cash on hand, compared to $3.6m in Ryan’s bank account. Between April and June, Vance raised and spent $1m as he fought in the fiercely competitive Republican primary, while Ryan raised $8.6m and easily captured his party’s nomination.Ryan has used his cash advantage to launch a massive advertising blitz, running commercials that frame him as an independent-minded centrist and attack Vance as an out of touch elite with extreme views.In one of Ryan’s ads, an Ohio mother who lost her son, Joe, to opioid addiction criticizes Vance’s now defunct non-profit for enlisting the help of a doctor with ties to the pharmaceutical industry. “I don’t have words for how betrayed I felt,” the woman says in the ad. “JD Vance has chosen to help the drug companies rather than the people who are struggling like Joe.”In another memorable video, Ryan throws footballs at television screens showing the Republican ads attacking him. “They say you can know a person by their enemies,” Ryan says in the ad. “Well, here comes their bullshit ads.”Over the summer, Ryan’s ad campaign went largely unanswered by Vance’s team, allowing the Democrat to chip away at his opponent’s advantage in the Republican-leaning state.“He won the primary thanks to Trump’s help, and it just felt like he went into the witness protection program,” Jessica Taylor, the Senate and governors editor for the Cook Political Report, said of Vance’s summer campaign schedule. “Vance took a hit in that really brutal primary, and you need to try to rehabilitate your image.”The Ohio Democratic party reveled in Vance’s absence from the campaign trail and the airwaves, sending out mocking statements each time he left the state to fundraise.“You have to kind of be here to rally people together, and he’s not been here. He’s literally been almost everywhere but here,” Elizabeth Walters, chair of the Ohio Democratic party, said earlier this month. “This has to be a tough moment for the party where your standard-bearer and your top candidate can’t be bothered to show up. I think that they’re going have a hard time in the fall of keeping their coalition together.”Even some of Vance’s supporters acknowledge that he has a lot of ground to make up in the race, with less than 50 days to go until election day. “What he has to get across is the record of his opponent, not what his opponent’s saying,” Tom Patton, a voter from Avon Lake, said as he left Vance’s event last weekend. “He has to do more.”Nicolette Allsop, a voter from South Amherst who attended the Vance event with her two sisters, begrudgingly agreed that Ryan has run “effective” ads in the race. Allsop’s sister, MaryJo Moluse of Avon, added that Ohio feels more competitive this year than it did in 2020. “I think it’s going to be a tough fight. I really do,” Maluse said.Vance and his allies appear to have woken up to that reality, as the candidate has ratcheted up his campaign appearances and his television ads in recent weeks. In one ad, Vance walks down a street in his home town and laments the country’s recent rise in violent crime, accusing Ryan of insufficiently supporting law enforcement officers.Mike Hartley, who previously served as a senior adviser to former Ohio governor and Republican presidential candidate John Kasich, pointed to the ad as an example of how Vance is successfully rebooting his campaign in the crucial, final stretch of the race.“That’s what he’s going to run on, and that’s what he should run on, and I think that’s just going to solidify his advantage,” Hartley said. “I think he’s done a good job of hitting his stride at the right time.”Vance has also kept up a busy schedule of campaign events this month, including an appearance at a rally with Trump last Saturday in Youngstown, which lies in Ryan’s congressional district. The region was once a Democratic stronghold, but it has moved to the right as white working-class voters have drifted toward the Republican party. Vance will need those voters to turn out in November to defeat Ryan, and he used the rally as an opportunity to criticize his opponent for allegedly misrepresenting his record.“There are two Tims out there,” Vance told thousands of rally goers. “There’s a DC Tim, who votes 100% of the time with Joe Biden, and then there’s campaign Tim, who pretends he’s a moderate … We need to kick DC Tim to the curb.”In his long and often meandering speech, Trump echoed that message, praising Vance as “an America First warrior” while attacking Ryan as a “far-left Democrat phony”. Trump also took a moment to dismiss a report that Republican Senate candidates are attempting to distance themselves from him, saying, “JD is kissing my ass he wants my support so bad.”“[Ryan] is lying to your faces, acting as though he’s my friend on policy, pretending to be a moderate so he can get elected and betray everything that you believe in,” Trump told the cheering crowd. “He is not a moderate. He is radical left.”That attack strategy appears to be resonating with some of Trump’s most loyal fans in Ohio, who helped Vance clinch the Republican nomination in May and could now prove instrumental in carrying him across the finish line in November.“I don’t really care for [Ryan],” Lori Ferguson, a voter from Cortland, said as she waited to enter the venue for Trump’s rally. “I think the way he’s talking now is simply trying to maybe make Republicans think that he’s on their side.”William Fair, a voter from Navarre who was ahead of Ferguson in line, admitted that he did not know much about Vance, but he said Trump’s endorsement was enough to secure his vote. “If Trump wants him, we’ll get him,” Fair said.Fair’s comments underscore the hefty challenge facing Ryan, despite his campaign’s effective ads and savvy messaging. For many voters, the “R” or “D” next to a politician’s name takes priority over any specific concerns about the individual candidate. That could put Ryan at a disadvantage, given that only one Democrat, Senator Sherrod Brown, has managed to win a non-juridical statewide office in Ohio since 2008.“We have increasingly seen, really over the past decade and a little more, that even Senate races have become almost parliamentary in nature – where you’re voting for the party and not necessarily the person,” Taylor said.Like all other Democrats, Ryan is also facing the national headwinds of record-high inflation and Biden’s underwater approval rating. Ryan recently told the New York Times that he would not campaign with Biden, reflecting the president’s unpopularity in Ohio.“[Ryan is] doing what he believes he needs to do to win, and I think they’re executing what I consider a good campaign,” Hartley said. “But I just don’t think it’s going to be enough … In my eyes, I think Tim Ryan has clearly peaked, and now JD Vance is going to seal the deal.”Even as national Republicans have swooped in to prop up Vance, Ryan has remained steadfast in his determination to snap Ohio Democrats’ losing streak.“He’s looking for a rescue squad,” Ryan said of Vance last Monday. “It’s not going to be enough to save him in Ohio because Ohio wants a fighter.”TopicsUS SenateOhioUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

We Are Proud Boys review: chilling exposé illuminates Republicans’ fascist turn Andy Campbell has delivered a smart, well-written and brilliantly reported book about the street gang allied to Donald Trump and the GOP he commandsAndy Campbell has produced a smart, well-written and brilliantly reported book about another loathsome progeny of the most dangerous union of our time, the horror couple responsible for so many of the burgeoning threats to American democracy: Donald Trump and the internet.Proud Boys memo reveals meticulous planning for ‘street-level violence’Read moreIts subject is the Proud Boys, racist, beer-addled and violence-addicted street fighters who have become best friends with many of Trump’s warmest supporters, from Ann Coulter to Roger Stone.Coulter and Stone have both bragged about using these modern Brown Shirts as bodyguards. Stone even allowed himself to be filmed for a video in which he took the Proud Boys oath: “I’m a western chauvinist. I refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.”Coulter credited the group with saving her life when “2,000 antifa”, leftwing protesters, tried to shut down a speech at UC Berkeley. If she hadn’t invited 20 Proud Boys, she said, she “might not have made it to the campus at all”.The Proud Boys are “brawny, tattooed brutes”, Coulter cooed.As Campbell puts it, the Proud Boys have “proven that you can make it as a fascist gang of hooligans in this country, as long as you make the right friends”.The organization’s father is Gavin McInnes, 52, a child of Scots who moved to Canada. In Montreal in the early 1990s McInnes founded a magazine called Pervert, which in 1999 he and two others rebranded as Vice. He moved the magazine to New York a couple of years later, then left in 2008.In spring 2016, on his own talkshow, he declared his main priority: “I want violence. I want punching in the face. I’m disappointed in Trump supporters for not punching enough.”Not long after that, he “announced that he’d turned his audience into a gang”. He called them the Proud Boys.McInnes’s alliance with the GOP warmed up after he was invited to speak at the headquarters of the New York state Republican party in October 2018.Members were undaunted when their intended guest announced on Instagram that he planned to reenact an “inspiring moment … the political assassination of Inejiro Asanuma, the former leader of the Japan Socialist party, who was killed during a debate on live TV when a far-right ultranationalist rushed the stage and pushed a sword between his ribs”.Then he photoshopped an image of himself “with the eyes and clothing of the Japanese assassin”.Republicans loved it. On Facebook, they responded: “This Godfather of the Hipster Movement has taken on and exposed the Deep State Socialists and stood up for Western Values. Join us for an unforgettable evening with one of Liberty’s Loudest Voices.”After his speech, McInnes left the club with his sword. But Proud Boys “and their skinhead pals” attacked a handful of antifascist protesters after one knocked a MAGA hat from one of their heads.“They turned it into a pummeling,” a Huffington Post reporter remembered. “This was three people on the ground and people just kicking the shit out of them.”The two most violent attackers were each sentenced to four years in prison. The judge didn’t hesitate to draw the appropriate parallel to 1930s Germany. Mark Dwyer, of the New York state supreme court, said he knew what had happened then, “when political street brawls were allowed to go ahead without any type of check from the criminal justice system. We don’t want that to happen in New York”.Regardless, the New York brawl became another opportunity for the Republican establishment to normalize fascist behavior. Immediately after the attack, Fox News quoted Ed Cox, the Republican state chairman (and son-in-law of Richard Nixon) as “calling on Democrats to cease inciting these attacks”.As Campbell writes, the event at the Republican club was “a jumping-off point for the GOP into what would eventually become a full embrace of domestic extremist violence”.Kelly Weill, a reporter who covers domestic extremism, explained, the Proud Boys “really embody the political violence the GOP needs just a little bit of a proxy for. They can’t personally be out there doing it, so they have the Proud Boys”.It only took two more years for the Proud Boys to get an official, nationally televised presidential imprimatur, after Joe Biden suggested during a 2020 debate that they were one of the groups Trump should have denounced long ago. Trump said: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.”01:16Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, a former FBI informant and convicted felon who had become the Proud Boys chairman, described the effect of Trump’s declaration.“We got mentioned, and my life has not been the same since,” Tarrio told Campbell. “My phone started blowing up off the hook. I had 10 fucking news trucks at my house the next morning. I didn’t sleep for … two days.”The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against AmericaRead moreTrump’s longtime attorney, Michael Cohen, who turned on his former boss after pleading guilty to charges related to tax evasion and lying to Congress, was sure the president made his statement on purpose.“If you look at who the Proud Boys really are,” said Cohen, “they’re an army. This is Trump’s army … and when he loses he’s going to use them to try and keep control of power.”Which of course is what happened. Proud Boys were some of the most active players when Trump urged the crowd in front of him on 6 January 2021 to march on the US Capitol.Thirteen months after the deadly attack, the Republican endorsement of fascist violence became official: the Republican National Committee unanimously approved a resolution which memorialized the Capitol attack as nothing more than “legitimate political discourse.”Campbell’s book provides an indispensable account of exactly how the Grand Old Party reached that disgraceful destination.
We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered in a New Era of American Extremism is published in the US by Hachette
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Nearly all abortions become illegal in ArizonaSeveral clinics halt procedure as dual measures, including 19th-century ban with no exception for rape or incest, take effect Almost all abortions became illegal in Arizona on Saturday, after a new law banning abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy took effect and a judge lifted an almost 50-year-old injunction that blocked a near-total ban on abortions from being enforced in the state.Judge Kellie Johnson of Pima county’s superior court released a ruling on Friday that allowed the enforcement of the decades-old ban, a day before a new law that would ban most procedures after 15 weeks was scheduled to take effect, reported the Washington Post.The law Johnson reinstated dates from 1864 and bans all abortions with no exception for rape or incest. The only exception involves a recipient whose life is in danger.The law was later updated and codified in 1901, before the 1973 US supreme court decision known as Roe v Wade that established nationwide abortion rights. Many states failed to update their laws after the provision of those federal abortion protections, which the US supreme court’s current conservative majority eliminated in June.Immediately after Johnson’s ruling, several Arizona clinics that provided abortions stopped carrying out the procedure to avoid criminal charges for their medical professionals, forcing almost all patients in need of an abortion to travel out of state.Those who have already stopped offering abortions included Planned Parenthood along with two other abortion providers, the Associated Press reported.Under Arizona’s new anti-abortion law, doctors or other healthcare professionals who terminate pregnancies could face between two and five years in prison.Abortion rights advocates and Democratic legislators condemned the new law in Arizona as well as Johnson’s ruling.The president and CEO of the Arizona branch of Planned Parenthood, Brittany Fonteno, called the ban “archaic” and said it was “sending Arizonians back nearly 150 years”, referring to when the law was first written, according to the Arizona Republic.The Arizona senator Krysten Sinema called out Johnson’s ruling on Twitter, writing in part: “A woman’s healthcare decisions should be between her, her family, and her doctor. Today’s decision removes basic rights Arizona women have relied upon for over a century and endangers their health, safety, and wellbeing.”Arizona’s other US senator, Mark Kellyposted on Twitter: “Repealing Roe v Wade set Arizona women’s rights back decades. This decision sets them back 158 years, to before Arizona was even a state. I won’t stop until we restore abortion rights so my granddaughter can have the same freedoms my grandmother did.”What’s the difference between miscarriage and abortion? For some women, it’s hard to tellRead moreJohnson’s ruling has also caused confusion statewide, with some calling for the enforcement of the harsher ban codified in 1901 and others wanting only the 15-week ban to be enforced, reported the Post.The Arizona attorney general, Mark Brnovich, who filed to have the injunction blocking the older ban lifted, has argued that the harsher of the two laws will take precedent, reports the New York Times.Meanwhile, Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, has stated the 15-week ban will be followed, with a representative of his office telling the Times that the governor is proud to have signed the ban. However, Ducey has not clarified whether the more restrictive law will be enforced.Johnson, for her part, has indicated that the more restrictive law should be followed versus the 15-week ban.“Most recently in 2022, the legislature enacted a 15-week gestational age limitation on abortion,” the judge wrote. “The legislature expressly included in the session law that the 15-week gestational age limitation” would not “repeal” the previous ban.Legal experts have also warned that the previously approved 15-week ban may no longer be tenable, with Loyola Marymount University family law professor Kaiponanea Matsumura telling the Post that Brnovich’s position as attorney general “opens the door to prosecutions under that law”.Arizona is now among at least 14 states which have outlawed most abortions. Several more have similar bans that are temporarily blocked amid legal wrangling over whether or not they can be enforced.TopicsArizonaAbortionUS politicsWomenHealthnewsReuse this content More