Coronavirus: Texas says abortions 'non-essential' amid pandemic

As US states ramp up restrictions to contain the coronavirus, Texas has joined Ohio in deeming nearly all abortions as non-essential procedures that must be delayed.

The order against elective procedures is meant to keep valuable medical resources for those treating Covid-19 only.

In Texas, providers can be fined or jailed for violating the order.

I'm With Stupid wrote:Absolutely shameless and predictable. Using a crisis to push their anti-choice agenda.

Coronavirus: Texas says abortions 'non-essential' amid pandemic

As US states ramp up restrictions to contain the coronavirus, Texas has joined Ohio in deeming nearly all abortions as non-essential procedures that must be delayed.

The order against elective procedures is meant to keep valuable medical resources for those treating Covid-19 only.

In Texas, providers can be fined or jailed for violating the order.

Joining a long line of Republican lawmakers using a crisis to push through legislation they've always wanted that has fuck all to do with it. I fully expect by the end of this crisis, there'll be numerous illiberal laws on the books that they'll "forget" to repeal.

Alan C wrote:One of the witterings current on twitter is that Fox could be in a world of legal hurt over their early downplaying of covid-19, I can only hope that is the case.

here's no shortage of problems with McConnell's actual pitch. As the senator probably knows, for example, developments of global importance are not paused during White House scandals, and presidents and other leading American officials must be able to focus on more than one responsibility at a time. Trump's impeachment may have been important, but it was not all-consuming.

For example, Donald Trump found time to play golf several times between mid-January and early March, suggesting the impeachment ordeal did not dominate his attention to such a degree that he couldn't focus on other priorities.

Seabass wrote:Why paid sick leave is essential to beating coronavirus

Republicans like me built this moment. Then we looked the other way.

Don’t just blame President Trump. Blame me — and all the other Republicans who aided and abetted and, yes, benefited from protecting a political party that has become dangerous to America. Some of us knew better.

But we built this moment. And then we looked the other way.
Many of us heard a warning sound we chose to ignore, like that rattle in your car you hear but figure will go away. Now we’re broken down, with plenty of time to think about what should have been done.

The failures of the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis can be traced directly to some of the toxic fantasies now dear to the Republican Party. Here are a few: Government is bad. Establishment experts are overrated or just plain wrong. Science is suspect. And we can go it alone, the world be damned.

All of these are wrong, of course. But we didn’t get here overnight. It took practice.
Long before Trump, the Republican Party adopted as a key article of faith that more government was bad. We worked overtime to squeeze it and shrink it, to drown it in the bathtub, as anti-tax activist Grover Norquist liked to say. But somewhere along the way, it became, “all government is bad.” Now we are in a crisis that can be solved only by massive government intervention. That’s awkward.

Next, somehow, the party of idealistic Teddy Roosevelt, pragmatic Bob Dole and heroic John McCain became anti-intellectual, by which I mean, almost reflexively opposed to knowledge and expertise. We began to distrust the experts and put faith in, well, quackery. It was 2013 when former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal said the Republican Party “must stop being the stupid party.” By 2016, the party had embraced as its nominee a reality-TV host who later suggested that perhaps the noise from windmills causes cancer.

The Republican Party has gone from admiring William F. Buckley Jr., an Ivy League intellectual, to viewing higher education as a left-wing conspiracy to indoctrinate the young. In retribution, we started defunding education. Never mind that Republican leaders are among the most highly educated on the planet; it’s just that they now feel compelled to embrace ignorance as a cost of doing business. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, as an example, denounces “coastal elites” while holding degrees from Princeton University and Harvard Law School and having served as a Supreme Court clerk.

The GOP’s relationship with science has resembled some kind of Frankenstein experiment: Let’s see what happens when we play with the chemistry set! Conservatives have spent years trying to cut funds for basic science and research, lamenting government seed money for nearly every budding technology and then hoping for the best. In the weeks ahead, it’s not some fiery, anti-Washington populist with an XM radio gig who is going to save folks’ lives; it is more likely to be someone who has been studying this stuff for decades, almost certainly at some point with federal help or outright patronage.

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Seabass wrote:You'll never guess which party this guy belongs to.

Georgia governor says he didn't know asymptomatic people could spread coronavirus

Seabass wrote:You'll never guess which party this guy belongs to.

Georgia governor says he didn't know asymptomatic people could spread coronavirus