I am both happy and increasingly worried at how often we rely on the Supreme Court to get the right thing done. This should never have come up to begin with.
It'll help quash this sort of thing if Clinton brings it up to a solid 16 years appointing district and circuit judges, right?
3: Only if the Dems get enough seats in the Senate to stop the Republicans from blocking everyone.
An old college friend (who would fit in very well here actually - would be funny if he was already here) works for the Center for Inquiry who have been working on this. Really good this week to see there is still some sense left in the world.
3:
I hope so. I think she'll def win 2016 but not sure about 2020.
I'm also really concerned that the kids aren't quite as left as we've been led to believe with the Bernie movement. Americans are good at selling each other out politically as soon as they start picking up steady paychecks. For example, I worry that a lot of the calls for student loan forgiveness don't come from a place of sincere and general solidarity so much as much as they do the same kind of place that their parents' bitching about paying a 40% top marginal tax rate comes from. Time will tell.
I also think it's a sign of the weakness of our system that we rely so much on individual court cases to make big decisions, but I don't see a good way out, either.
6: Given primary turnout, the ability to win 40% of the primary vote is not necessarily a groundswell / harbinger. (The one and only way the situations of Sanders and Trump can be compared.)
I had a dream this weekend that my mom started commenting on unfogged and I was trying to reassure myself that I'd only ever said factual negative things about her, but it's reassuring to have a thread like this where she wouldn't be welcome!
(8 in addition to, not contra, 6. And yes to 7 too.)
I don't think you need to wait for time to tell on that one. If most young people get good enough jobs that they don't need to stress to pay their student loans, only a small minority of them will give a shit about student loan forgiveness. Of course, getting most young people into jobs with steady paychecks sufficient to pay their student loans without stress would be a pretty fucking big accomplishment.
I can't figure out what the social conservatives are so mad about on my Facebook given that the law that was overturned was 100% not about abortion.
As Tim Burke recently said on Twitter, "If the only thing standing between our cherished values and losing those values is one or two SCOTUS votes, we have work to do elsewhere." Then he made an analogy which I liked but which I am omitting given mixed audience.
13: It just proves that the pro-choicers don't care about the health of the mothers as long as they get to kill the babies.
Is this distinguishable from actual pro-life rhetoric?
14: not the Tim Burke at Swarthmore, I take it?
The one who built the Scranton, Dunmore, and Moosic Lake Railroad, I think.
Here's a video of people celebrating at Whole Women's Health in McAllen, Texas:
https://www.facebook.com/NLIRH/videos/vb.85252863415/10154257616023416/?type=2&theater
No. Whole Women's Health happened to order precisely as many video cameras as they needed this year, so there were no extras in inventory to sell to Trader Women's Health.
A sad fact of this case is, as a friend of mine put it, is that we are celebrating the striking down of an obviously unconstitutional law that was allowed to wreak havoc on peoples' lives for three years before anything final was done about it.
21: I was wondering about that. Of the clinics that closed, how many will be able to reopen? And, it sounds like the state shut them down with a bad law... but that doesn't make up for the devastation that hit the finances of staff. I wonder how many personnel transitioned away and can't be replaced at this point?
I plan to keep an eye out for stories about this in the Texas Observer, where Andrea Grimes generally does very good coverage of this. The Texas Observer is also great on immigration.
21: I was wondering if there was any avenue open for clinics (and potentially women??) to seek compensation from the state for the flagrant violation of constitutional rights. Probably this was not flagrant enough to support compensation. But I'd like someone to bring a class-action lawsuit anyway.
24:
On one hand, I'd like to see this happen. On the other, I don't want to give them any more reasons to slash public services.
I also think it's a sign of the weakness of our system that we rely so much on individual court cases to make big decisions, but I don't see a good way out, either.
As Tim Burke recently said on Twitter, "If the only thing standing between our cherished values and losing those values is one or two SCOTUS votes, we have work to do elsewhere."
It seems obvious that the anti-abortion interest bloc has been out-organizing pro-choice groups for a while. They are also allied with people actively engaged in terrorism, but even in terms of pure political organizing, they've been more active. It's a problem.
A sad fact of this case is, as a friend of mine put it, is that we are celebrating the striking down of an obviously unconstitutional law that was allowed to wreak havoc on peoples' lives for three years before anything final was done about it.
1000 times this ^^^ Huge celebrations for winning something that was so clearly wrong. The anti-choicers get to enact increasingly crazy stuff, and we celebrate that we are only left with the somewhat problematic stuff. Woo hoo!! Women only have to have two appointments spread out over at least 24 hours!!! Victory! Are you f'ng kidding me?!?
And, following on 21 and 28, on the local npr this morning they interviewed a Ky state representative who in the next legislative session still intends to propose a bill restricting abortions modeled on the TX bill that was just struck down. He seemed unfazed by this--noting that he was working with advisers to see if any tweaks could be inserted to make the bill more likely to survive court challenge--but insisting he'll be proposing the bill either way, because "even if it only has a short-term effect, it would at least have a short-term beneficial effect."
Which is why something like 24 seems so important... There are no consequences for the assholes here.
(I searched briefly for a link to the news story, but didn't find one.)
Sorry for not posting much. My mom is in town and Jammies is not in town, and the net result is that I'm having trouble handling life, including posting. Regular postings to resume. I have a huge queue but they all seem to require a quiet moment to think about the item.
No need to worry about posting more. We can easily amuse ourselves with the existing posts.
I figured there'd been a lot of big news lately.