Donald Trump is against women's access to contraception until he changes his mind again

Echo news reported in The Detroit News by Christine Fernando:

Trump says he is open to restrictions on contraception but his campaign says he misspoke 😩😕

Former guy Donald Trump said he was open to supporting regulations on contraception and that his campaign would release a policy on the issue “very shortly,” comments that he later said were misinterpreted.

The comments, made during an interview with a Pittsburgh television station, suggested that a future Trump administration might consider imposing mandates or supporting state restrictions on such highly personal decisions as whether women can have access to birth control. During an interview with KDKA News, Trump was asked, “Do you support any restrictions on a person’s right to contraception?”

“We’re looking at that and I’m going to have a policy on that very shortly,” Trump responded, according to a video of the interview that was briefly posted online before it was supposed to air, then taken down.

The likely Republican presidential nominee was pressed in a follow-up question if that meant he may want to support some restrictions on contraception.

“Things really do have a lot to do with the states, and some states are going to have different policy than others," Trump responded, before repeating that he would be releasing “a very comprehensive policy” on the issue.  (Clear as mud❓💩)

Trump previously said he would release a policy about use of the abortion pills in a Time magazine interview published three weeks ago, though he has yet to do so. This is the first time Trump has suggested he would have a policy on contraception 💥since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a national right to abortion two years ago, touching off political battles about aspects of reproductive rights, including contraception and in vitro fertilization.

Responding later to media reports of his interview, Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social that he “has never and will never” advocate for restricting birth control and other contraceptives. Even so, the Biden campaign was quick to seize on the interview.

“Women across the country are already suffering from Donald Trump’s post-Roe nightmare, and if he wins a second term, it’s clear he wants to go even further by restricting access to birth control and emergency contraceptives," Biden-Harris spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement.

Advocates on both sides of the abortion debate have long pressed Trump on the crucial question of whether he would allow women to access the abortion pill mifepristone via the mail. He has yet to make clear his views on the Comstock Act, a 19th century law that has been revived by anti-abortion groups seeking to block the mailing of mifepristone and other abortion medications.

When asked during an April 12th interview with Time magazine for his views on the Comstock Act and the mailing of abortion pills, the former president promised to make a statement on the issue in the next 14 days, saying “I feel very strongly about it. I actually think it’s a very important issue.”

During an April 27th follow-up interview, Trump said he would announce his stance “over the next week or two.” It’s now been three weeks since the interviews were published on April 30th and over five weeks since the GOP front-runner told the magazine he would release a statement.

When asked by The Associated Press for an update on when the announcement would be made, campaign officials reiterated a statement that reaffirms Trump's strategy of deferring to individual states on abortion. They did not give an updated timeline for a policy statement on medication abortion.

“President Trump has long been consistent in supporting the rights of states to make decisions on abortion,” the statement said.

Biden campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt said Trump’s allies have already “outlined exactly how they plan to eliminate abortion access nationwide with or without Congress.”

“We know Trump’s playbook because we’ve seen it,” she said in a statement. “Trump overturned Roe, brags about it constantly, and is proud of the horrific reality where women’s lives are at risk, doctors are threatened with jail time, and IVF and birth control access are under attack.”

Trump has often relied on the tactic of promising an announcement on a major policy stance in “two weeks” but not delivering, including on issues such as minimum wage, tax policy and infrastructure.

Abortion rights advocates and anti-abortion groups alike have expressed frustration with the delay.

“I imagine the events in New York City have been very distracting, but we are watching for an announcement,” said Kristi Hamrick, spokesperson for the anti-abortion group Students for Life, referring to the former president's hush money trial.

Hamrick said the group has been speaking with Trump’s team about what can be done to restrict abortion at a federal level.

Mini Timmaraju, president of the abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All, pointed to the GOP’s Project 2025, playbook – a blueprint for ways to reshape the federal government in the event of a Republican presidential win in 2024. The Comstock Act is not explicitly mentioned in the plan, but it calls for reversing FDA approval of mifepristone and restricting “mail order abortions.”

“Trump will say whatever he wants, but what really matters is what he did – and that’s to facilitate ending the constitutional right to abortion and set state abortion bans into motion,” she said.

At least 22 states require abortion medication to be delivered in person either by prohibiting mail delivery or requiring medication to be taken in a doctor’s office, though such laws have been temporarily blocked from going into effect in Kentucky, Montana and Ohio amid legal battles, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin and Michelle L. Price in New York contributed to this report.

QAnon incident in Detroit is danger on steroids!

This report seemed almost too shocking to be true: 

"Rebecca Lanis, 21, told the Detroit News on Sunday that after Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, her father began consuming 'crazy ideas' online, including conspiracy theories about vaccines (❓❗) and Trump." 

Reported in The Washington Post and The Detroit News.

“My Qdad snapped and killed my family.” Rebecca Lanis, a 21-year-old from Michigan — was on a forum dedicated to people who’ve lost loved ones to QAnon, the sprawling conspiracy cult that imagines that Donald Trump is waging a secret war against blood-drinking pedophiles who run Hollywood and the Democratic Party. 

The Detroit News reported how Lanis’s father, 53-year-old Igor Lanis, had indeed gone on a murderous rampage. In fact, Lanis described how her father had fallen down the QAnon rabbit hole after the 2020, election. He wasn’t violent, however, until the morning of Sept. 11, when he shot her mother, her sister and their dog, and was then killed in a shootout with the police. Lanis’s sister, despite being shot in the back and legs, survived. Her mother and the dog did not. 

Tragically, the killings weren’t the first to be linked to QAnon radicalization. Last year, a 40-year-old California man confessed to killing his two young children; in an affidavit, an F.B.I. agent said he “explained that he was enlightened by QAnon and Illuminati conspiracy theories” and had come to believe that his children had serpent DNA. In 2019, a QAnon devotee stabbed his brother to death after being convinced that he was a lizard. However bizarre, the idea that the ruling elite are really lizards or reptiles seeking to enslave the human race is an old conspiracy theory that has been subsumed into QAnon’s paranoid omnibus mythology.

Ms. Tina Lanis, 56, was found dead inside the home with multiple gunshot wounds to the back from an apparent attempt to flee out the front door, according to the sheriff’s office. The family’s dog was also found dead with multiple gunshot wounds.

In a 2019, intelligence bulletin, the F.B.I. listed QAnon among the “anti-government, identity based, and fringe political conspiracy theories” that “very likely motivate some domestic extremists to commit criminal, sometimes violent activity.”

Check this counter Right Wing Extremist website.

Far-right, white supremacist, and ethno-nationalist movements in Europe and the United States continue to thrive, propagating racism, hatred, and violence.

"It's really so shocking but it really can happen to anybody," Rebecca Lanis told The Detroit News. "Right-wing extremism is not funny, and people need to watch their relatives and if they have guns, they need to hide them or report them or something because this is out of control."

Jacob Anthony Chansley, who also goes by the name Jake Angeli, a QAnon believer.

Cult leader Donald Trump and Republican enablers

Opinion echo published in the The Detroit News by Harry Litman: Trump's impeachment defense is threadbare and irrelevant. But coward Republicans are supporting him.

Donald Trump’s hastily assembled impeachment legal team has submitted written arguments in his defense that are threadbare, amateurish and replete with irrelevancies.

Nonetheless, as it stands Trump figures to walk out of the Senate a winner.  (Maine Writer- I disagree with this particular statement by Litman.  Trump is not a winner, but he a cult leader that Republicans are somehow supporting like it's their political addiction.)

On Tuesday, the House impeachment managers filed a persuasive and on-point 80-page brief. It spends 35 pages on a methodical account of facts and evidence that draws a direct — and hard to refute — connection between Trump’s conduct starting in late December and the violent storming of the Capitol that stunned the nation on January 6.

At the same time, the House managers eloquently invoke the broader themes of constitutional principle and historical purpose that justify the House’s impeachment resolution, and show that the process Congress is now engaged in is deeply consequential to the republic.

Trump’s lawyers, on the other hand, seem to have gotten lost on their way to offering a hasty initial defense for a minor offense in a state trial court, “answering” the House allegations in rote fashion: Their client denies all wrongdoing. The brief‘s response to the contents of the article of impeachment against Trump is mostly “the 45th president denies.”

The shortcomings of the response may reflect delicate negotiations with a truculent client, one who sacked a different legal team over the weekend. The departed attorneys, according to unnamed sources, refused to commit professional suicide by affirming the Trumpian lie that the 2020, presidential election was stolen.

In fact, the new Trump team, not surprisingly, isn’t pursuing the Big Lie either. It would not only ensnare them in falsehoods (when attorneys lie professionally they can lose their licenses), it would add to the contention that Trump supported, even encouraged, the insurrection and that it was justified. In other words, it would hurt his case, not help it.

Instead, the former president’s defense rests on a blizzard of nonsense. The brief asserts, for example, that because Trump is out of office, the House’s article of impeachment is “moot and a non-justiciable question” — a court can’t decide it. In fact, most questions in the impeachment realm are “non-justiciable” because the Constitution commits them not to the courts but to the political system, the Senate, for a final decision. What the Senate as a body says about when an impeachment trial can take place, in other words, goes.

The brief further argues that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric on Jan. 6, which the House cites to justify “incitement to insurrection,” was “protected speech,” and that the impeachment violates Trump’s right to “free speech and thought.” That’s another swing and a miss.

The First Amendment has no applicability to an impeachment charge. Many, if not most, impeachable offenses by their nature are “speech.” For example, President Richard Nixon’s command to the FBI to stand down in investigating the Watergate affair. The House can surely pursue impeachment if a president’s speech abrogates the president’s duty to uphold and defend the Constitution.

It only gets worse from there.

Trump’s lawyers say the House deprived their client of “due process” by “rushing to issue the Article of Impeachment,” and that a single article of impeachment can’t be valid because it covers multiple actions. Both concepts, again, are borrowed from criminal law; they have no relevance to impeachment. And even if we read the “due process” complaint metaphorically, it’s obvious that Trump is being afforded ample notice and opportunity to defend himself.

The defense also tries to claim that the House impeachment resolution is a “bill of attainder,” a law passed specifically to target an individual for criminal prosecution. Bills of attainder are prohibited by the Constitution, but the brief is grasping at straws. Under its tortured reasoning, any impeachment would qualify as a bill of attainder.

That leaves one final defense. It, too, is errant, but it is likely to carry the day. In the Tuesday filing, it’s the bare assertion — with no argument from text, structure or history — that the Constitution itself does not permit the Senate to try an official whose term has expired.

But as I’ve said, along with a majority of constitutional scholars, it’s the Constitution that leaves it to the Senate to decide this issue. In at least two historical instances, senators have already allowed impeachment trials to go forward even after the defendant was “removed.” It did it again just days ago by rejecting Sen. Rand Paul’s point of order that sought to dismiss Trump’s second impeachment trial before it could begin.

That’s the right result under constitutional text, practice and history. The House managers’ brief adds to the point with a nice reference. Article 1, they wrote, gives the Senate “sole power to try all impeachments.” Trump was duly impeached by the House, ergo the Senate can try him.

Still, the vote count on Paul’s point of order showed that the “it’s too late” constitutional argument will probably attract sufficient support to prevent Trump’s conviction. A majority of Republican senators appear ready to ignore text and precedent — as well as the violence they witnessed and lived through — because blindness will give them a way to wriggle out of passing judgment on Trump’s behavior.

It is a shame, literally, that any Republican senator would shirk his or her duty to pass judgment on the merits of the case against Trump. As was true in the 45th president’s first impeachment, Senate Democrats are left to play to the court of history. There they will prevail.

Harry Litman is a former U.S. attorney and the host of the podcast "Talking Feds."

Maine Writer- In other words, cowardly and hypocritical Republicans are enabling cult Trumpziim. Trump is guilty but Republicans are blinded by cultism.