Hasta La Gadget!

One of the annual traditions over at Time magazine is the unveiling of the “Time 100,” which exists to remind everyone that the editors of the podiatrist waiting-room glossy have access to the world’s elite. Basically, they call up a bunch of famous people, ask them to write articles about another bunch of famous people, and then someone says, “Okay, that’s 100, we did it guys.” Later, there is a fancy party for all of these party-impoverished people.

Aging murder-satchel Henry Kissinger is apparently one of Time’s go-to eminences whenever there is a need for a handful of paragraphs to be written about some other toff, and this year, he’s somehow ended up drawing career nepotism hire and acting president of the United States Jared Kushner as his subject.

The resulting tribute? Well, it somehow manages to strip what scant “funk” remains in the word “perfunctory.” The phrase the internet has been using to describe this literary entanglement is “damning with faint praise,” but to be honest, it really damns Kushner with faint anything. It’s a wonder that Kissinger doesn’t begin by saying, “The Oxford English dictionary defines Jared as …”

Let’s take a trip through this brief article, which I’m almost certain was submitted via Twitter DM. Per Kissinger:

Transitioning the presidency between parties is one of the most complex undertakings in American politics. The change triggers an upheaval in the intangible mechanisms by which Washington runs: an incoming President is likely to be less familiar with formal structures, and the greater that gap, the heavier the responsibility of those advisers who are asked to fill it.

Aaaand, it is now halfway done! Did you know that presidential transitions exist? We’ve done them, more or less successfully, some 40-odd times, but maybe you didn’t notice that. Nevertheless, I suppose we are going to now hear about what makes Jared Kushner, “Time 100” honoree, uniquely gifted to handle the advisory role to which Kissinger alludes.

This space has been traversed for nearly four months by Jared Kushner, whom I first met about 18 months ago, when he introduced himself after a foreign policy lecture I had given.

Okay, so far we have Kissinger attesting to the fact that Jared Kushner is a thing that tangibly exists in space and time.

We have sporadically ­exchanged views since.

This is the only mention of an interaction between the two men. No “views” are documented or evaluated. Today, I got on an elevator and exchanged views about the nice spring weather with someone who works on the fourth floor of my building.

As part of the Trump family, Jared is familiar with the intangibles of the President. As a graduate of Harvard and NYU, he has a broad education; as a businessman, a knowledge of administration.

Jared is apparently in a relationship with his father-in-law. He learned some indeterminate things at two universities. He likely noticed that “businesses” are run through “administrations,” rather then through midnight Wiccan dances or water balloon fights. As Vox’s Zach Beauchamp observes, there are numerous reasons to doubt that Kushner has even the level of experience and attainment that Kissinger mentions in passing.

Where is this going? There is one sentence left in this piece, and it had better deliver.

All this should help him make a success of his daunting role flying close to the sun.

Ahh, yes. An Icarus reference. Very auspicious. And rather on the nose: Icarus famously fashioned wings of wax and perished when he flew too close to the sun. Additionally, Icarus’ father figure, Daedalus, was trapped within a labyrinth prison of his own making. Clever boy, this Kissinger. (Of course, the thing that sets Kushner apart from Icarus is that Jared may be entirely held together by wax.)

In case you’re wondering if Kissinger is always vague in his praise, a useful comparison can be made to his 2015 “Time 100” contribution, celebrating Elizabeth Holmes, in which Kissinger is far more florid and specific in his praise ― which may be simply due to the fact that he sat on the board of Holmes’ start-up, Theranos. Here’s Kissinger, enthusing:

Elizabeth Holmes’ is a story that could happen only in America. After her sophomore year she left Stanford to devote herself to a vision of health care available as a basic human right. When I was introduced to Elizabeth by George Shultz, her plan sounded like an undergraduate’s dream. I told her she had only two prospects: total failure or vast success. There would be no middle ground.

Well, Kissinger was certainly right about that. Holmes, too, traversed the sky in an Icarian manner. Theranos was birthed into the world and backed by a mountain of Silicon Valley funder ducats with the goal of revolutionizing blood-extraction technology. But in October 2016, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company was not close to delivering on the promises it had made, and Holmes was dogged by further controversy after subsequent reports demonstrated that Theranos was a dangerous, serial violator of lab standards and government regulations.

This might indicate that receiving a tribute from Kissinger in the “Time 100” may be the kiss of death. Nevertheless, the silver lining here is that if Kissinger’s profile of Kushner demonstrates anything, it’s that in the end, someone affiliated with Theranos proved themselves capable of draining the blood from something after all.

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WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump said Thursday that Iran hasn’t abided by the “spirit” of an international deal to curtail its nuclear program.

“Iran has not lived up to the spirit of the agreement,” Trump said at the White House during a joint press conference with the Italian prime minister.

Trump called the Iran deal terrible during his campaign for president last year, but his comment Thursday seemed to contradict what his own State Department said earlier in the week.

“The U.S. Department of State certified to U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan today that Iran is compliant through April 18th with its commitments under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” the department said on Tuesday, in the first compliance update to Congress under the terms of the deal. 

The State Department also said that “Iran remains a leading state sponsor of terror through many platforms and methods” and that the Trump administration is reviewing the deal. 

“I think they are doing a tremendous disservice to an agreement that was signed and it was a terrible agreement,” Trump said Thursday. “We are analyzing it very carefully and we’ll have something to say about it in the not too distant future.”

Under the deal, struck between Iran, China, France, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S., Iran is allowed to advance its nuclear program, but only for peaceful purposes, in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. 

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Bernie Sanders traveled to Nebraska this week to throw his support behind Omaha Democratic mayoral candidate, Heath Mello, who is running against the incumbent Republican mayor, Jean Stothert. A Mello win, Sanders has said, would give hope to other “progressive Democrats” in conservative states.

But Mello’s “progressive” credentials are questionable at best. As a state senator, he co-sponsored a bill mandating that women have an ultrasound before they can have an abortion, saying it represented a “positive first step to reducing the number of abortions in Nebraska.”

As a populist, Sanders has built a political career protesting economic inequality— and yet by campaigning for Mello, he has demonstrated a willingness to separate economic justice from reproductive justice. (So has Democratic National Committee Chair, Tom Perez, who is also helping to campaign for Mello and who has defended that decision, saying the job of the DNC is to help Democratic candidates win.) But abortion access is not just a medical issue, or even a social one; it is, at its core, an economic concern. Here’s why.

Unintended pregnancies place an enormous financial burden on women.

Raising children in the United States is expensive. Like, more than $230,000 per child (from birth to age 17) expensive. That includes food, transportation, housing, education (but not college), health care and child care. Oh, and daycare for babies is now more expensive than college tuition in most states. 

Women in this country already face a well-documented motherhood financial penalty. Research shows, for example, that mothers are less likely to be hired for jobs and they are offered lower starting salaries when they are hired. (Men don’t appear to be similarly disadvantaged by becoming dads, and might actually benefit from it, career-wise.)

“Having a baby is the most expensive health event that families face during their childbearing years. At the same time, a lack of workplace supports for many women during this critical time means a woman may not have paid sick days for prenatal appointments or well-baby care, or paid family and medical leave to use after giving birth. Addressing all of these issues is central to achieving economic justice for women and families,” said Sarah Lipton-Lubet, vice president of the National Partnership for Women & Families. 

Roughly 60 percent of women who have abortions are already mothers, which means they understand these factors not in some abstract way, but both deeply and personally. In fact, economic concerns are a major reason why women chose to end pregnancies. Estimates suggest that between 40 and 75 percent of women seeking abortions do so simply because they cannot afford to have a baby.

“The most common reason women give for wanting to terminate a pregnancy is that they feel that they cannot afford to have a baby or to have another baby,” Diana Greene Foster, director of research with the University of California San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards In Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) told The Huffington Post.

Low-income women are hit the hardest by unplanned pregnancies — and by policies that limit abortion access.

In the United States, roughly 5 percent of reproductive-age women have an unintended pregnancy each year, and those pregnancies disproportionately occur among low-income and poor women. In 2011, the unintended pregnancy rate among women living well below the federal poverty level —around $18,000 for a family of three — was five times higher than women living well above the federal poverty line. 

Low-income women also struggle to afford abortion, particularly because the Hyde Amendment has long restricted Medicaid coverage for abortion care. Research shows that in order to come up with the money necessary for the procedure, women are forced to forgo food for themselves and their children, to miss rent payments and to sell off personal items.

“When women are unable to get an abortion, they are more likely to be poor, less likely to work full time and more likely to receive public assistance,” Foster said. “And this has important consequences for their existing children and their ability to care for a new child.”

Also, because two-thirds of the unplanned births in this country are paid for by public insurance programs, namely Medicaid, according to the Guttmacher Institute, the reproductive health policy and advocacy group, unintended pregnancies weigh on the economy as well .

That means that any line separating reproductive rights from economic concerns is an imaginary one. Abortion is an economic justice issue, as is a woman’s ability to access broader family planning services. True progressives would do well to remember that.

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