Texas Woman Forced to Flee State for Abortion After Dystopian Legal Battle

A Texas woman who was pleading the courts for an emergency abortion—and who was personally and repeatedly targeted by Attorney General Ken Paxton—has been forced out of state in order to receive critical care.

Kate Cox has been at the center of a contentious post-Roe ruling, riding out a legal challenge to the state’s near-total abortion ban after learning that her fetus has a fatal genetic condition that could jeopardize her health and future fertility if carried to term. The lawsuit is the first of its kind since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.

On Thursday, Travis County District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble ruled that Cox should receive a temporary restraining order, allowing the 31-year-old mother of two to pursue an abortion under the ban’s medical emergencies clause. But hours after the ruling, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked the state’s Supreme Court to intervene and issued a statement promising to prosecute doctors performing the procedure with felony charges, even if a court permitted the procedure. On Friday night, the state’s Supreme Court blocked the lower court’s order and once again put Cox’s health in jeopardy.

“This past week of legal limbo has been hellish for Kate,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Her health is on the line. She’s been in and out of emergency rooms, and she couldn’t wait any longer.”

“This is why judges and politicians should not be making health care decisions for pregnant people—they are not doctors. This is the result of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade: Women are forced to beg for urgent health care in court,” Northup said. “While Kate had the ability to leave the state, most people do not, and a situation like this could be a death sentence.”

The burgeoning restrictions on the lifesaving operation have fueled a medical brain drain in several states pursuing abortion bans, with large swaths of medical professionals exiting en masse while states struggle to define the parameters and consequences of the bans. The vast majority of Americans do not support such restrictions, with 73 percent of respondents saying they support first-trimester abortions, according to a 2023 AP-NORC poll.

Voters have made their positions on the issue abundantly clear. Since Roe was reversed by the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority in June 2022, abortion has become a nonstop losing streak for Republicans, turning what was once anticipated to be a red wave in November into a trickle. That has led to a quiet stripping of pro-life policies from conservative platforms across the country, with the party attempting to ditch the “pro-life” branding altogether in an effort to skirt more electoral losses.

Special Counsel Jack Smith made a bold move on Monday when he petitioned the Supreme Court and asked the justices to decide, once and for all, whether Donald Trump has presidential immunity from prosecution for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Smith’s 14-page petition explains that this issue is “of imperative public importance and must be resolved so that the trial can move forward “as promptly as possible.”

“This case presents a fundamental question at the heart of our democracy: whether a former President is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office,” Smith wrote in the court filing.

Smith made the move in hopes of bypassing a lengthy appeals process, as Trump tried his best to throw out the trial.

Earlier this month, Trump’s team appealed a lower court ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, in which she denied Trump’s motion to dismiss his indictment on grounds of presidential immunity.

The appeal functionally suspends Trump’s trial, which Smith hopes to begin on March 4, 2024—one day before Super Tuesday. A definitive answer from the Supreme Court could allow Smith’s team to circumvent the appeal and for the trial to begin as scheduled without delay.

“The United States recognizes that this is an extraordinary request. This is an extraordinary case,” Smith wrote, and while it is extraordinary, there is some precedent for it. In his petition, Smith cited the 1974 case U.S. v. Nixon, in which the Supreme Court ordered President Richard Nixon to surrender tape recordings sought during the Watergate investigation.

We’ll see if Smith’s move pays off.

Disgraced politician George Santos issued his first round of promised hellfire against Representative Nicole Malliotakis on Sunday, chiding the fellow New York Republican for using info from classified briefings to turn some cash on the stock market.

“She receives classified briefings as a member of the Ways and Means Committee,” Santos said on CBS News’s The Point With Marcia Kramer. “Can somebody explain to me that she miraculously becomes a member of the committee and then she’s doing trades on NYCB with the Signature Bank collapse just a day before having an 80 percent stock hike? That’s not a lucky trade, Marsha, that’s a very well-informed trade.”

If Santos is to be believed, then more dirty laundry is on its way via ethics complaints against other tristate politicians in both parties who voted him out of the House, including Representatives Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, and Rob Menendez. Santos pledged those complaints were forthcoming last week before he got busy promising interviews to Ziwe and selling clips of himself on Cameo.

Speaking of, the fabulist congressman also claimed on CBS that the idea to start working on Cameo came from inside the House after a former member of Kevin McCarthy’s team suggested he get on the bespoke video service.

“He reached out and says, ‘George, you have such a large personality, people love you,’” Santos recalled McCarthy’s former staff member saying. “’You should just open a Cameo.’ I’m like, what’s a Cameo? So I looked into it.”

The reputed liar—who was caught lying about his entire résumé, his relation to Holocaust survivors, being “Jew-ish,” his connection to the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, and the kidnapping of his niece, among other things—is currently facing 23 counts related to illegally receiving unemployment benefits, aggravated identity theft, and credit card fraud. He is also completely unashamed of his political career.

“I feel like everything I stood for—I’m so proud of the legacy I leave behind, even with the short 11-month term that I served,” he said. “I feel like every vote I took I can stand by and I can defend, and I’m proud of that. But regrets, plenty. Like, there’s always regrets, right.”

Tucker Carlson is launching a new streaming service after failing to find a new network to anchor—and it’s got a fitting new logo.

The so-called Tucker Carlson Network went live on Monday, charging a fee of $9 per month for all your Tucker Carlson needs, including multiple shows, a podcast, and select interviews from the ousted Fox host.

All of that comes dressed in a neat little package that looks so much like a red pill that even fellow conservatives can’t help but point it out.

The red pill’s significance in pop culture originated from The Matrix—a trans allegory written by two trans women before they were out of the closet—where the choice between the red or blue pill meant the difference between staying complacent and living within the status quo versus embracing a life-changing, reality-altering truth.

Since the film, the symbol has taken a chauvinistic dive, being co-opted by incels and self-proclaimed misogynists in the mid-2010s to express vitriol toward women during a period of radically shifting gender politics, aggressing emerging conversations on rape culture and toxic masculinity. It was just a quick walk for the symbol to then become an image of far-right resistance, standing counter to seemingly progressive social movements like feminism in favor of “men’s rights.”

This isn’t Carlson’s first solo step into the media pool since he was ousted from Fox. In the spring, Carlson launched a show on X, formerly known as Twitter, where all of his videos were available without a subscription—that included the one-on-one August interview with Donald Trump, who skipped the first GOP debate in favor of talking with Carlson.

Carlson and his team allegedly explored launching this new network through the social media platform, though people familiar with the matter said the platform wasn’t able to move quickly on building out the technology needed to support the subscription service, reported The Wall Street Journal.

Alex Jones says he was just playing “devil’s advocate” when he spent all those years claiming the Sandy Hook shooting was a false flag operation.

Elon Musk spoke with the far-right conspiracy theorist during a livestream on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday. When Musk asked Jones about “the whole Sandy Hook thing,” Jones tried to shirk responsibility.

The livestream, co-hosted by Musk and influencer Mario Nawfal, occurred shortly after Musk restored the X account of the disgraced InfoWars host. On Saturday, Musk had posted an X poll asking users whether he should “reinstate” Jones on the platform. About 70 percent of users voted “Yes.” Jones and his InfoWars account were initially banned from Twitter in 2018 for “abusive behavior.”

As part of replatforming the conspiracy theorist, Musk gave Jones the space to explain away his misinformation campaign, in which he tried to convince the public that the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, which killed 20 children and six teachers and staff, was staged. Sandy Hook families secured a $1.5 billion judgment against the InfoWars host after winning a lawsuit over his conspiracy theories.

“Obviously, it would be heartless and cruel to deny a school shooting of children or attack the parents or anyone who was involved,” Musk said, before giving Jones the opportunity to lie about having done that very thing.

“Thank you for allowing me back into the public square so that I can actually tell the world what really happened,” Jones said.

Jones proceeded to make several excuses for his actions, explaining that he’d never gone to college and was not professionally trained. “I had a very small operation and did not even understand how powerful I was,” Jones said.

When the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary happened, “the internet exploded,” Jones said. “It was the top story off and on for years, with all these professors and former school safety people and all of them saying they believed it was a drill, and I simply covered them covering that.”

Jones added that he has already apologized many times and is sorry if he hurt anyone’s feelings.

“I apologize on every show. And I’ll say it again, I apologize that I just gave my commentary because I’m really just a guy … talk radio host. So I do that on the internet. I just take calls, and interview guests, and that I play devil’s advocate,” Jones explained. “And if that hurt people’s feelings, I apologize. But I did not send people to your houses. I did not pee on graves. I don’t know any of the stuff that went on.”

Jones’s return to X is just another of the many ways that Musk has allowed the platform to embrace and empower alt-right voices, making it increasingly less usable for any sane person.