The Full Belmonte, 1/7/2023
Supreme Court’s looming mifepristone decision leaves abortion rights in spotlight
BY CAROLINE VAKIL
“The Supreme Court’s expected decision this summer on whether to restrict access to medication abortion promises to keep the issue front and center of the 2024 election.
Justices will hear a case weighing federal approval of the common abortion pill mifepristone, with a likely ruling in June — five months before voters decide who will go to the White House and Congress, and almost exactly two years after the high court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion.”
Read the full story here at The Hill
Donald Trump departs after speaking at an event Friday in Sioux Center, Iowa. (Jabin Botsford/The Post)
Trump’s promotion of debunked election report reveals divisions in his circle
“Although Trump and his campaign have used the 91 charges he faces across four criminal indictments as an effective rallying cry in the GOP presidential race, the particulars have not always been ideal in the eyes of some of his advisers.
By Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Marianne LeVine ● Read more » at Washington Post
Former federal judge: Trump’s violation of 14th amendment ‘couldn’t be any clearer’
BY LAUREN IRWIN
“Former federal judge Michael Luttig argued Saturday that former President Trump’s violation of the 14th Amendment ‘couldn’t be any clearer.’
‘Section three of the 14th Amendment simply could not be any clearer that the former President is disqualified from the presidency as the Colorado Supreme Court held,’ Luttig told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi on Saturday, the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Read the full story here at The Hill
Austin says he could have better informed public about hospitalization
BY LAUREN IRWIN
“Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he could have better informed the public about his recent hospitalization after concerns arose over transparency and what the Pentagon knew.
‘I am very glad to be on the mend and look forward to returning to the Pentagon soon,’ Austin said in a statement Saturday. ‘I also understand the media concerns about transparency and I recognize I could have done a better job ensuring the public was appropriately informed. I commit to doing better.’”
Read the full story here at The Hill
DeSantis ‘won’t accept’ being Haley’s running mate ‘under any circumstances’
BY LAUREN IRWIN
“Republican Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) said he would not accept being fellow candidate Nikki Haley’s running mate ‘under any circumstances.’
‘Well, I can tell you, I am not going to accept that under any circumstances,’ DeSantis told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto on Saturday. ‘You know, I’m running for president because I think we need somebody that can win and get the job done.’”
Read the full story here at The Hill
Esper dubs Trump a ‘threat to democracy’ on Capitol riot anniversary
BY LAUREN IRWIN
“Mark Esper, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, said former President Trump is a ‘threat to democracy’ on the third anniversary of the Capitol riot.
‘And yes, I do regard him as a threat to democracy, democracy as we know it, our institutions, our political culture, all those things that make America great and have defined us as, you know, the oldest democracy on this planet,’ Esper told CNN’s Jim Acosta on Saturday.”
Read the full story here at The Hill
Trump tells Iowans to ‘get over’ recent school shooting: ‘We have to move forward’
BY STEFF DANIELLE THOMAS
“Former President Trump shared his condolences for the victims and their families of a recent school shooting in Iowa during a campaign stop in the Hawkeye State Friday — but then urged his supporters to ‘move forward.’
‘I want to send our support and our deepest sympathies to the victims and families touched by the terrible school shooting yesterday in Perry, Iowa,’ Trump said during a campaign rally in Sioux City.”
Read the full story here at The Hill
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
“Investigative journalist Julie K. Brown's reporting for the Miami Herald in 2017 and 2018 led to federal charges for convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and identified nearly 80 of his victims. Epstein was investigated earlier in 2006, but federal investigators did not prosecute him at that time. Brown spoke with All Things Considered after unsealed court records revealed this week the names of several powerful men with social ties to Epstein. She explains what's important to know in the documents and why naming these men matters.” [NPR]
Michigan Republicans Hold Disputed Vote to Remove Party Leader
The effort to oust the state’s controversial G.O.P. chair after infighting and financial troubles faces challenges from her allies and is likely headed to the courts.
By Nick Corasaniti and Neil Vigdor
Jan. 6, 2024
“Simmering tensions within the Michigan Republican Party boiled over on Saturday, with some party officials voting to remove their embattled chairwoman, Kristina Karamo, in a contentious proceeding that she and other state Republicans argued was illegitimate.
The showdown, which occurred at a meeting held by a breakaway faction of the state party, now appears likely to wind up in court.
The effort to oust Ms. Karamo, who was not present for the meeting, is the latest clash in a party that has been marred by infighting and financial difficulties since Ms. Karamo took control of it in February, and is likely to further hamper Republican efforts in the critical swing state during the 2024 election cycle.
Ms. Karamo was part of a cohort of far-right activists who ascended to the top of state parties as former President Donald J. Trump and his grass-roots supporters raged against his 2020 election defeat.
The effort to remove her could signal a fraying of the loose coalition of conservative activists, who have been motivated by conspiracy theories about the electoral process and their unwavering support of Mr. Trump. Several county chairs who pushed for Ms. Karamo’s dismissal remain staunch supporters of the former president and of the false idea that the 2020 election was stolen….” Read more at New York Times
As Hamas-Israel war marks 3 months, fears mount for hostage families
“Omer Neutra took a gap year to Israel and ended up joining the military. Three months ago he disappeared, joining the list of hostages taken by Hamas.”
READ MORE at USA Today
Elon Musk Has Used Illegal Drugs, Worrying Leaders at Tesla and SpaceX
“Elon Musk and his supporters offer several explanations for his contrarian views and provocative antics. They’re an expression of his creativity. Or the result of his mental-health challenges. Or sleep deprivation.
In recent years, some at his companies and others close to the billionaire have developed a persistent concern that there's another component driving his behavior: his use of drugs.
And they fear the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive’s drug use could have major consequences not just for his health, but also the six companies and billions in assets he oversees.
Musk has used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, according to people who have witnessed his drug use and others with knowledge of it. He has smoked marijuana in public and has said he has a prescription for ketamine.
Musk didn’t respond to requests for comment. An attorney for him, Alex Spiro, said Musk has never failed a drug test at SpaceX and said there were ‘false facts’ in this article but didn't detail them.”
READ MORE at Wall Street Journal
‘Pre-internet’ nostalgia
Photos: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/picture alliance via Getty Images; William Gottlieb/Corbis via Getty Images
“Expect 2024 to feature more talk about ‘pre-internet’ life — a subject of intense curiosity to the growing cohort of people who never experienced it, Axios' Jennifer A. Kingson writes.
Why it matters: Boomers, Gen Xers and older millennials are now the last people to remember what it was like to use a pay phone, a paper map, a typewriter, etc.
Zoom in: There's mounting fascination among the ‘youngs’ in how people socialized, found where they were going, and got things done before the mid-1990s.
They're turning to vintage TV shows like "Friends" and "Seinfeld" to catch a glimpse, or asking questions on Quora and Reddit about what life was like.
Dinner table conversations have Gen Zers asking their elders: How did you meet up with people? How did you find what you wanted to buy?
Between the lines: Even people who did grow up pre-internet find it increasingly hard to recall how things worked.
By today's standards, things were more boring and inconvenient. You couldn't find the answer to whatever question popped into your head, and you couldn't reach anyone, anytime.
‘Many who lived through these 'Dark Ages' will tell you how life seemed less busy, less stressful, and more enjoyable,’ Christopher McFadden writes on the news site Interesting Engineering.
People got together in person more often since they couldn't text or Zoom.
Boredom begat creativity and useful ideas.
Pop culture was a lot less fragmented since everybody had to watch shows when they aired.” [Axios]
Donald Wildmon, Early Crusader in Conservative Culture Wars, Dies at 85
The American Family Association, which he founded, became a juggernaut in the Christian right’s campaign against sex and gay themes in art, television and pop culture.
By Trip Gabriel
Published Jan. 3, 2024Updated Jan. 6, 2024
“Donald E. Wildmon, a conservative activist whose alarm over indecency on television spawned a national organization, the American Family Association, a once powerful cog of the Christian right, and who led boycotts over sexuality and gay themes in some of America’s most popular TV shows and in the arts, died on Dec. 28 in Tupelo, Miss. He was 85.
The cause was Lewy body dementia, according to a statement posted by the American Family Association.
Mr. Wildmon’s crusades, beginning in the 1970s, against boundary-pushing trends in popular culture and the arts — including high-profile attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts — were an early thunderclap of the culture wars that have moved from the fringe of the Republican Party to its mainstream.
A former United Methodist Church pastor, Mr. Wildmon became a lightning rod for liberals, who accused him of bigotry and of stifling free speech. In 1981, the president of NBC, Fred Silverman, a champion of socially conscious television, said that Mr. Wildmon’s threats to boycott advertisers were ‘a sneak attack on the foundation of democracy.’
‘A boycott,’ Mr. Wildmon responded in an interview with The New York Times that year, ‘is as legal and as American as apple pie.’
Over more than three decades, groups that Mr. Wildmon led boycotted Target stores for substituting the word ‘holiday’ for ‘Christmas’; ran full-page advertisements denouncing the 1990s police drama “NYPD Blue” for ‘steamy sex scenes’; and picketed a Hollywood studio over Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which portrayed Jesus as having sexual desires.
In 1982, Mr. Wildmon called for national brands to withdraw their ads from an NBC-TV movie written by the poet Maya Angelou, “Sister, Sister,” in which a woman has a relationship with a minister who embezzles from his church. Mr. Wildmon said the movie — which he had not seen — promoted “negative stereotyping of Christian people.”
Though he sometimes played up a folksy country persona in national TV interviews, Mr. Wildmon was sophisticated about the bottom-line ways of TV executives and big brands.
‘People may call me an ignorant bumpkin,’ he once said. ‘I don’t mind. The more they are mistaken, the better it is for me.’
His boycotts did not always hit the mark. The protests against “The Last Temptation of Christ” in 1988 only raised awareness of the movie, which opened to long lines and sold-out shows in major cities.
In 2006, the American Family Association and other groups announced a boycott of the Ford Motor Company over its sponsorship of gay pride events and advertising in publications aimed at gay readers. Nearly a year later, Ford had not changed those practices.
Other Wildmon campaigns were more effective. He was credited with pushing the Southland Corporation to remove Playboy and Penthouse magazines from 7-Eleven stores in 1986 after testifying before a Reagan administration commission that pornography was linked to violence.
In 1981, the chairman of Procter & Gamble, Owen B. Butler, said the company had withdrawn ads from 50 TV shows after threats of a boycott from Mr. Wildmon and the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the leader of the Moral Majority, who teamed up to form the Coalition for Better Television.
‘We think the coalition is expressing very important and broadly held views about gratuitous sex, violence and profanity,’ Mr. Butler said at the time. ‘I can assure you that we are listening very carefully to what they say.’
While still a pastor, Mr. Wildmon had a revelatory moment over the Christmas holidays in 1976 when he gathered around the television with his family. He kept switching channels — from a program with an adultery scene, to another with profanity, to a third with a man attacking someone with a hammer — before telling his children to turn off the set and resolving to do something about what he considered immoral content.
He challenged his church in Southaven, Miss., to forgo TV for a week. The story was picked up by local news media, then nationally, and Mr. Wildmon found a new calling. He resigned from the ministry and moved his family to Tupelo, where he lived for the rest of his life. In 1977 he founded the National Federation for Decency, later renamed the American Family Association. By 1989, his campaigns against popular culture brought in $5.2 million that year in donations into his group.
That year, Mr. Wildmon was at the forefront of attacks against the National Endowment for the Arts over grants for work that many conservatives considered obscene. As a right-wing fury enveloped the small federal agency, hearings over its budget brought the actress Jessica Tandy, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and others to Washington to passionately defend it.
Mr. Wildmon had sent a photograph in 1989 to every member of Congress of a work by the artist Andres Serrano of a small crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine, which had appeared in an exhibition partly funded by the N.E.A. ‘I would never, ever have dreamed that I would live to see such demeaning disrespect and desecration of Christ in our country that is present today,’ Mr. Wildmon wrote to lawmakers.
The Serrano work, along with an exhibition that included sexually provocative photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe that the N.E.A. also helped underwrite, led Republicans in Congress to pass legislation requiring the N.E.A. to uphold ‘general standards of decency’ when funding art. The Supreme Court later ruled that the requirement did not violate the First Amendment.
In 1990, the chairman of the N.E.A., John E. Frohnmayer, clashed with Mr. Wildmon when they appeared together on CNN. “My question for you,” Mr. Frohnmayer angrily asked, “is what has your association done for the family lately?” Mr. Frohnmayer was forced out of the job by President George H.W. Bush two years later when N.E.A. funding became an issue in Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign.
Donald Ellis Wildmon was born on Jan. 18, 1938, in Dumas, Miss., the youngest of five children of Ellis Wildmon, a venereal disease investigator for the state health department, and Bernice Wildmon, a schoolteacher. He graduated from Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., in 1960 and from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in 1965. Ordained by the United Methodist Church, he was appointed to several congregations in Mississippi and Georgia before leaving the ministry to start the activist group that would become the American Family Association. He passed its leadership on to a son, Tim Wildmon, in 2010.
In addition to his son Tim, he is survived by three other children, Angela and Mark Wildmon and Donna Wildmon Clement; his wife of 62 years, Lynda Bennett Wildmon; a sister, Louise Yancy; six grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.
In many ways, Mr. Wildmon’s crusades sought to hold back powerful tides of modern American life, where acceptance of gay rights has gradually become mainstream and most restraints on violence, profanity and sex on television, especially streaming, gave way long ago.
‘It’s not sex per se I object to,’ Mr. Wildmon said in 1981. ‘It’s the constant, gratuitous dwelling on it. I’m saying there ought to be more balance.’” [New York Times]