S20.E14: Chloe Maxmin; Paul Begala; Michele Tafoya

[tessaray]

Air date: 5/06/22

Bill’s guests are Chloe Maxmin, Paul Begala, and Michele Tafoya.

[aghst]

Oh boy, "I'm pro choice" Tafoya thinks we can compromise.  Yeah Alito is compromising.

She doesn't think this SCOTUS will undo gay rights, gay marriage, interracial marriage.

Bill says he chooses the woman instead of the baby.  You won't miss the baby if you never seen it.  Well too late, several states eliminated exceptions for rape, incest, or when life of the mother is at risk.

She thinks Republican state legislators will be voted out if they make the abortifacient pills illegal.  Several red states already have.  And they'd go through the mail but it's illegal for them to do so.

Bill, Cornell alum, says you don't need to go to college.  True, he didn't need to go to university to become a standup.

But for people who want good-paying regular jobs, maybe even develop critical thinking skills so they can see through Republican bullshit, college education is still important.

The data on lifetime earnings between those who have college degrees and those who don't is pretty irrefutable.

What happens when fewer people go to college?  Fewer HBO subscribers and fewer people going to overpriced standup comic shows.

He may HATE current college students since they don't find him funny.  But they're the ones who are likely to be able to afford to go to his shows and watch him on HBO.

Edited May 7, 2022 by aghst

[iMonrey]

Once again, Bill's perception of the Democratic Party seems to be based on what he's heard on Fox News. In his interview with Maxmin he seemed to be implying Democrats think all white people are racists. Where the hell did he get that idea? He knows there are white Democrats too, right? He thinks white people voted for Trump because he represents them? How? Because they're white? I don't follow. I noticed how hard he was trying to get her to say Trump voters weren't racist and how hard she tried to avoid answering that question.

Who is this Michele Tafoya and what the hell was she doing on the panel this, of all weeks? This bitch kept shaking her head every time Paul Begala said something and honestly seems to believe overturning Roe V Wade won't result in red states making abortion illegal! What planet is this woman living on? What does her reference to preemies living have to do with any of this? Nobody is talking about preemies. Why does she keep talking about having a middle ground when that's clearly not even an option? Abortion will automatically become illegal in 13 states once Roe is overturned. No exceptions, no ifs, ands or buts. This woman is clueless.

And Bill was terrible moderating this discussion. Yeah, we all know you hate babies Bill. Not the time or place. What's really frustrating is that once, long ago, I heard the most compelling argument against "life begins at conception" and it was from Bill Maher himself. He said an embryo is not a baby, and you know how he knows? Because you can freeze it. I kept waiting for him to get serious and bring that up again but instead he just babbled about liking women more that babies. Criminy.

I do kind of agree with Bill and Begala about college debt forgiveness, though. 

Cheap shot at college grads during the mid-show bit. Can't even read? New rules was pointless. Rant about wokeism - check. Rant about free speech - check. 

The only thing I liked was Bill's joke about Madison Cawthorn. "Republican FuckFace Fucks Face." He can still pull off a good joke once in a blue moon.

[heatherchandler]

I love Bill, and trust his comedic instincts, but I truly cannot understand why he does the very unfunny mid-show gags.. not one of the mortarboard “jokes” were funny.  Why does the audience howl with laughter?

[vesperholly]

Michele Tafoya says she's pro-choice but there was a bunch of anti-choice talking points about the age of a fetus, premie survival and throwing Kermit Gosnell in as a red herring. 90% of abortions occur before 15 weeks and less than 1% of all abortions occur in the 3rd trimester. No woman is carrying a fetus to 38 weeks and then going "You know what? Nah." Many times women who end up with 2nd trimester abortions have delays in the procedure because of access or finances. Tafoya was a horribly tone-deaf person to be on the panel with this week's news and is clearly biased having had her own struggles with fertility.

If you want to feel cleansed of her mealy mouth BS and discuss the real implications of the leak and potential ruling, I suggest listening to this week's Strict Scrutiny podcast: https://crooked.com/podcast/what-the-scotus-leak-could-mean-for-abortion/

[DXD526]

Tafoya's cluelessness was staggering, and inexcusable. Her blithely dismissing the points Begala was trying to make and the warnings he was trying to issue, made her look shallow and irresponsible, IMO. And she can call herself pro-choice all she wants, but if you keep flinging out anti-choice talking points, you're anti-choice, regardless of how you choose to classify yourself (pun intended). 

[rwlevin]

5 hours ago, iMonrey said:

What does her reference to preemies living have to do with any of this? Nobody is talking about preemies. Why does she keep talking about having a middle ground when that's clearly not even an option? Abortion will automatically become illegal in 13 states once Roe is overturned. No exceptions, no ifs, ands or buts. This woman is clueless.

That is such a common pro-life talking point and it pisses me off. Nobody who gets an abortion after 20 weeks actually wants one. Those abortions are almost always because there is something wrong with the fetus and they won’t survive outside of the uterus. The parents have already bonded to that baby and many can’t deal with 4 more months of bonding knowing they will die shortly after birth. I believe I read an article by a doctor who provided abortions after 20 weeks that said he needed documented proof that the pregnancy wasn’t viable before he could even perform the procedure.

I just wish people, like this woman, would stop conflating preterm birth with abortion.

[hurrrz]

Bill's dismissive "go to other countries like Germany and you'll see it's even worse there" reeks of not really looking into the issue.

Sure, on paper abortion is not legal in Germany, however:

It's decriminalized if you follow requirements:

 

- The woman needs to declare to want an abortion

- Go to a mandated counseling session to get paperwork that this session happened

- wait at least 3 days between counseling and the actual procedure

- The procedure has to happen before the end of week 12 after conception

- It has to be done by a doctor

- It has to be a different doctor that did the counseling session

 

So sure, there are many hoops to jump through, and one could argue it's a bit extreme and involved. That said, access to all of these are fairly easy to get, it's not like there's only one counselor and one doctor in the country, they're available in every city from what I could gather.

So I guess my point is - sure as a law, abortion is not allowed in Germany, but there is a process in place for access to safe abortions which is what this issue is about in the first place.

[HC87]

Bill has really bought into the "higher education is useless" bs that conservatives have been pushing lately.

Tafoya is a former sports broadcaster....she was usually the reporter down on the field during football games. Looks like she is reinventing herself as a conservative gadfly....she's been on some different Fox shows lately like Gutfeld etc. She was particularly loathesome last night, she'll fit right in at Fox and other right-wing outlets.

Begala brought up some great points I thought....his brand of policies, sort of center-left, is a winning one politically speaking imo.

[Shermie]

I can’t figure out whose side Bill is on anymore, other than his own, I guess. He sure was a jackass when talking about rural people. All his talk about moonshine and trailers, ugh. Because if you don’t live in a big city, you’re a slack-jawed yokel. What a jerk.

[sugarbaker design]

Maxmin has an op-ed in the Sunday New York Times.

[Tachi Rocinante]

I didn't see Tafoya as that bad - she agreed with rape/incest as valid and that there should be considerations made.  She did hedge a bit though.

[Hedgehog2022]

On 5/8/2022 at 8:17 PM, Shermie said:

I can’t figure out whose side Bill is on anymore, other than his own, I guess. He sure was a jackass when talking about rural people. All his talk about moonshine and trailers, ugh. Because if you don’t live in a big city, you’re a slack-jawed yokel. What a jerk.

He lives in a Hollywood bubble. He has no use for rural folk unless they will buy tickets to one of his shows if he happens to play in a city near where they live.

[StatisticalOutlier]

On 5/7/2022 at 10:40 AM, iMonrey said:

I do kind of agree with Bill and Begala about college debt forgiveness, though.

Oh, I absolutely agree with them, just because there's no way to do it fairly, where you don't reward people who chose to take out loans instead of working and paying for college as they go.  Or punish people who did take out loans but chose to go to a "lesser" school because it was cheaper and they wanted less of a debt burden after they graduated. 

I wouldn't have a problem, though, with forgiving all interest.  The way student loans are paid back is a real mess, and it's actually impossible for someone to predict how much his payments are going to be.  Adding interest to that opaque situation can make the balance go up even if you're diligently making your required payments, and it's even worse if you're not.

I loved Begala's suggestion about public service in exchange for college/technical school.  Especially the military angle because the military is a way to get people to rub up against all sorts of others in a way you can't just ignore them, and actually have to learn to trust them.  I've thought for years that we'd be a lot better off if we had mandatory military service for everyone, no exceptions.  I'm sick of only a very small segment of society bearing the burden of our wars, and even then, often because they're in the military because it's the only way they can see to get out of their current situation.  Let's see how we react to wars when the children of people who matter have to fight them.

And let's see how people act when they have a common enemy, i.e., their superiors in the military. 

On 5/7/2022 at 5:21 PM, hurrrz said:

So I guess my point is - sure as a law, abortion is not allowed in Germany, but there is a process in place for access to safe abortions which is what this issue is about in the first place.

It's about accessible safe abortions, and the requirements you cited for Germany are similar to the ones enacted in states in the U.S. that were trying to restrict access without running afoul of Roe--requirements that abortion advocates have argued are indeed too restrictive and deprive some women, especially certain women, of their right to an abortion.  

On 5/7/2022 at 4:49 PM, rwlevin said:

Nobody who gets an abortion after 20 weeks actually wants one.

We don't actually know that.  I think the statistic Bill was referring to when comparing the U.S. to other countries is the availability of elective abortion after 20 weeks.  Apparently only seven countries allow that, and we're one of them, and I think that's where he was getting the idea that the U.S. currently is less restrictive than many places.  Then again, abortions at that point are very very few, so it's not a valid comparison for availability of abortion in the situations most women face.

On 5/11/2022 at 1:26 PM, Tachi Rocinante said:

I didn't see Tafoya as that bad - she agreed with rape/incest as valid and that there should be considerations made.  She did hedge a bit though.

To me, people who argue for rape/incest exceptions are "that bad" because they're substituting their values and opinions for the pregnant woman's.  And I think that's Bill's point about you either like babies or you like women.  In the case of abortion, you're going to have to choose one or the other. 

Of course we substitute "our" values for others' values all the time.  A serial killer doesn't think there's anything wrong with murdering people, but "we" do, so we don't let them do it. 

And that was some of the genius of Roe v. Wade.  It took the pick-the-woman-or-the-baby out of the calculus for part of the time by relying on viability for there to be a baby to consider.  Of course that doesn't work at all for people who think a baby is a baby from the moment of conception, hence the ire, but as a framework, it's workable.  Which is why the majority of people don't have a problem with it.

And at least the people who pick the baby every time, no matter what, are intellectually honest about their choice.  It's the baby.  Tough tacos to the woman carrying it.  Sucks to be you.  It's repellent, but makes sense as a framework.  And at least they're making their opinion about women clear, unlike those who are okay with abortion in the case of rape or incest, which sounds nice but really, it's demeaning to women because it doesn't allow them to decide what they think is proper grounds for an abortion for them.

Now, as for the new rule about bullshit detectors, Bill's off base on that.  Everyone thinks they have an excellent bullshit detector.  And for some the bullshit they're detecting is coming from the New York Times.  So it's not a lack of a bullshit detector, it's the lack of an accurate bullshit detector, and then you get into what is "accurate." 

And unfortunately, people are people, and they fall for all kinds of crazy shit, and I'm beginning to think that for democracy to survive, it needs to be in a sweet spot, where crazy theories are available only to crazy people who devote a lot of effort to finding them out.  It was in that sweet spot for a while, but I think it's not any longer.

[Victor the Crab]

1 hour ago, StatisticalOutlier said:

Now, as for the new rule about bullshit detectors, Bill's off base on that.  Everyone thinks they have an excellent bullshit detector.  And for some the bullshit they're detecting is coming from the New York Times.  So it's not a lack of a bullshit detector, it's the lack of an accurate bullshit detector, and then you get into what is "accurate." 

And unfortunately, people are people, and they fall for all kinds of crazy shit, and I'm beginning to think that for democracy to survive, it needs to be in a sweet spot, where crazy theories are available only to crazy people who devote a lot of effort to finding them out.  It was in that sweet spot for a while, but I think it's not any longer.

It used to be that the crazy people would print and distribute their theories and suspicions to only their fellow crazies. And sometimes plaster them on poles and fences around town. Here in Canada, the late and notorious Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel used to do that around Toronto for years.

But now, the internet, and it's red headed stepchild social media, have ruined all that, possibly for good. Now people are posting their batshit theories on line and getting into everyones faces about it. And that has caused a surge in people believing this bullshit.