Happy Primary Day! Vox and FiveThirtyEight both have previews of today’s primary elections in Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Idaho, and Oregon. Spoiler: it’s not a hugely interesting election day if you’re not in one of those states, although I am curious about turnout in some of the Pennsylvania districts.
In theory, the U.S. has long been committed to nuclear non-proliferation. But in practice, the world’s only superpower is always more willing to negotiate with fellow nuclear powers (such as Russia and China) while saving regime change for those nations which either didn’t acquire nuclear weapons or gave them up (Iraq and Libya). But traditionally this realpolitik has been combined with efforts to bring non-nuclear powers into accord with the international non-proliferation regime, as with the Iran deal.
Under Trump, even that modest effort at taming proliferation is now abandoned, to be replaced by a candid recognition that only those in the nuclear club deserve respect. This discounting of international systems, very much in keeping with Trump’s instincts as a nationalist, bilateral dealmaker, could easily ignite a new age of nuclear proliferation. While Iran so far has been cautious, it could look at the North Korean precedent and think that their wiser course is to develop nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia has warned that if Iran does so, it too.
This spectacle, geared toward Donald Trump’s Christian American base, coincided with a massacre about 40 miles away. Since March 30, there have been mass protests at the fence separating Gaza and Israel. Gazans, facing an escalating humanitarian crisis due in large part to an Israeli blockade, are demanding the right to return to homes in Israel that their families were forced from at Israel’s founding. The demonstrators have been mostly but not entirely peaceful; Gazans have thrown rocks at Israeli soldiers and tried to fly flaming kites into Israel. The Israeli military has responded with live gunfire as well as rubber bullets and tear gas. In clashes on Monday, at least 58 Palestinians were killed and thousands wounded, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
One thing that could really help is for you to take immediate action to reverse the administration’s dumb decision to cancel the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) space telescope.
A visit to Planned Parenthood’s website to find any information about adoption is something of a seek-and-find exercise. The home page offers four featured “health topics”: STDs, birth control, abortion, and emergency contraception. Clicking on “See more topics” doesn’t reveal adoption either, nor does clicking on the “Learn” tab at the top of the page. Not even the “Our Services” page contains a reference to adoption; it does, however, include “abortion services”, “abortion referrals”, “LGBT Services”, “Pregnancy Testing”, and eight other services.
I’m just spit-balling here but maybe there isn’t more about adoption services on the Planned Parenthood site because adoption isn’t a service provided by Planned Parenthood? The author is also upset that Planned Parenthood disses Crisis Pregnancy Centers on its site, without engaging Planned Parenthood’s actual critique of Crisis Pregnancy Centers: they lie to the women who visit them. Does Bier think this is inaccurate? I honestly don’t know.