#1 2022-06-24 13:15:40

The Democrats had 50 years to codify Roe versus Wade, but it was too lucrative to have the threat as a fund raiser, and the opposite of course for the Republicans. People's lives are fucking footballs to be kicked around by the political class.

https://video-images.vice.com/articles/627143965bf406009c70c13e/lede/1651590058185-screen-shot-2022-05-03-at-75822-am.png?crop=1xw:0.8769xh;0xw,0.0066xh&resize=500:*

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjby4b/ … ion-pills?

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#2 2022-06-25 06:08:22

What's the over/under on when the violence starts?

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#3 2022-06-25 07:10:47

Just what the Acceleratuonists gleefully want. Quite the  pernicious merging of fundamentalism and today's brand of power brokers

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#4 2022-06-25 10:23:01

This was always the danger of letting everyone vote and turning America from a Republic to a Democracy.  Stupid people will vote against their own self-interests just because it hurts other people too.  "Money = Free Speech" was just about the last nail in the coffin.  Trust fund babies, by the millions, are all grown up now and most of them have that same lack of empathy.  Is there a greater waste of space than the children of people who actually tried to make this country better and became rich because of it?

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#6 2022-06-25 12:54:45

The cheese stands alone.

After nearly seven months of deliberations, [Chief Justice John] Roberts found precisely zero takers among his fellow justices for his incrementalist approach that would have avoided overruling Roe for now, but allowed Mississippi to impose a near ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

The court's conservatives dismissed Roberts' stance as unprincipled and impractical, while the liberal justices called it "wrong" without detailing their objections.

Ultimately, Roberts' opinion amounted to an afterthought that had no impact on the outcome of the case.

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#7 2022-06-25 15:58:24

Found This:

America is an old brick house, hacked together with spackle and grout, and has been crumbling for some time. Finally, the cracks have become too large for us to ignore.

The alarmists have been warning of exactly this outcome for decades – though the GOP’s astroturfed campaign to seize the American state traces back to the Goldwater loss, the enshrinement of Civil Rights, and the judicial activism of the Warren Court. The lessons which they took away were clear: in order to return to white minority rule, they needed the Court. In order to get the Court, they needed the Presidency. And in order to retain the Presidency, they needed to rig the Electoral College. They succeeded. In both 2000 and 2016, the candidate who won the popular vote went on to lose the election. Both candidates appointed Conservative activist judges to the Supreme Court.

This was possible due to one of America’s many anachronisms. These anachronisms are not accidents. They are very intentional preservations of an oppressive institution. This country was not founded by enlightened philosopher-kings. Nor was it, as we like to pretend, founded by progressive thought-leaders whose outsized agency made it possible to throw off the reins of tyranny, so conveniently represented by a mad king and an ocean of distance. America was founded by slave traders and lawyers. It was founded by high-thinking hypocrites. Even if they were truly the greatest minds of their day, their day has come and gone and they have left us in quite the mess.

The tree of liberty is looking quite thirsty as of now, and it is time for Americans to consider what it means to be American. What America as a project stands for. In the nearly 50 years since Roe v. Wade was handed down, the Democratic Party had countless opportunities to enshrine protection for Abortion or indeed broader medical freedom into law. They failed. The Republican party, though their faults are so plain and rotten we need not comment on them for now, knows what it takes to wield state power effectively, and they are willing to do so. The Democrats are not, and the result of that is the reality we find ourselves in today.

The GOP has successfully struck down their single biggest cultural bugbear of the last 50 years. What do they do now?

Well, the answer is clear: they go on to the next one. Clarence Thomas specifically says that the Court should review decisions that made legal the open existence of gay people throughout the land (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003) and, just over a decade later, that which made marriage equality likewise recognized around the country (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015). Then they have cast their eyes back much further, even targeting Interracial Marriage (Loving v. Virginia) and lowering the status of Miranda Rights to some lesser, quasi-constitutional status – opening the door for their complete overturn down the road. As the reactionaries in the United States ramp up their eliminationist rhetoric targeted at queer and trans people, the Democrats sit on their hands and offer thoughts and prayers. As Christian Theocrats seize control of the state apparatus, Democrats loiter about and sing God Bless America. Democrats have become so enamored with their values-neutral governance strategy that they have seemingly resigned themselves to going down with the ship.

Where the GOP understands that in order to hold power in a nominal democracy, you have to win elections – and to win elections, you have to motivate a base of people to feel that they need or even want you around – the Democrats seem completely tied to the idea that trying too hard to get what you believe in – or indeed, even believing in anything too much – is per se bad. They seem to have convinced themselves that all they need to do is show up, be polite, and be willing to bargain with their fellow rational actors across the aisle, and the Government Machine will do the rest, spitting out Good Policy which is Good by definition of the fact that it is Bipartisan, never mind the fact that it is Bipartisan because the only things the two parties can agree on is how best to lurch this nation farther into a christian dominionist hellhole.

They will always find an excuse to justify the further erosion of your rights so long as you allow it. Let it never be forgotten that Jefferson Davis was inaugurated before Abraham Lincoln, that the first shots of the Civil War were fired from the South into a territory held by the federal government, nor that the Southern States were offered every opportunity to retain their peculiar institution for all time. They were not content to be left alone. They wanted control.

Remember: Reactionaries in every age do not wait for their feared plot to materialize. They are happy to take whatever action they deem necessary in order to prevent it. It is not sinking to their level to defend yourself from dirty tactics.

But the democratic leadership understand class solidarity, through a twisted bourgeois lens. They understand that they will not want for Abortions or Healthcare or Housing. They understand that their children will not be dislocated by climate change. That, or they do not care. What is in their heads is between them and their deities, but their actions make it clear: God isn’t coming to save us. The Democrats aren’t coming to save us. The politicians will always prefer the negative peace that is the absence of tension to the positive peace that is the presence of justice. We have abdicated the responsibility to fend off the rising tide of tyranny for too long. It is time for the working class to learn what solidarity means.

Arm yourself. Organize your neighborhood and workplace into unions or cooperatives. Join or start a mutual aid network. Plan for what you will do when the violence breaks out in earnest. Think about your medications. Think about your housing situation. Think about your own safety first. This is going to get worse before it gets better. Solidarity to anyone reading this. We’re done fucking around and we’re about to do a hell of a lot of finding out.

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#9 2022-06-25 19:23:57

Today's Soundtrack:

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#10 2022-06-26 17:44:42

DmtDusty wrote:

The Democrats had 50 years to codify Roe versus Wade, but it was too lucrative to have the threat as a fund raiser, and the opposite of course for the Republicans. People's lives are fucking footballs to be kicked around by the political class.

https://video-images.vice.com/articles/ … size=500:*

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjby4b/ … ion-pills?

For those who cannot roll their own, so begins the work of the night market. And those who pledge themselves to providing us the ways for alleviating human suffering. They may not receive nightly clapping from the balconies, but we appreciate them all the same.

The FDA also says those drugs can be prescribed through a telehealth appointment and mailed to the person’s home, although anti-abortion states have restricted access. A group called Just the Pill and Abortion Delivered said Friday that it's now launching new mobile clinics in Colorado -- one that will offer surgical abortion for patients over 11 weeks, and another equipped entirely for telehealth appointments for medication abortion.

Another group, called Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equality, is training local activists on how to "self-manage" an abortion, including when and how to take mifepristone and misoprostol. Several anti-abortion rights lawmakers and activists say this could potentially violate state laws that prohibit "aiding and abetting" abortion.

Kimberly Inez McGuire, head of URGE, said she believes their work will be protected as free speech.

"Before Roe (v Wade), we did not have safe and effective abortion pills like we do now. We didn't have the internet. And so it really is a different circumstance," she said.

This grassroots movement also is looking overseas. Among the options the website Plan C points people towards is Aid Access, an international organization that prescribes the abortion pill to women in the U.S. even if their state law prohibits it.

Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, founder of the organization, told ABC that she will personally conduct a telehealth appointment online with American patients and prescribe the pills to them for 95 euros; the pills are then filled from a pharmacy in India and mailed to the US address. Gomperts said she believes state laws only apply to residents of that state, whereas she works out of Amsterdam and Austria.

The FDA though warns getting medications overseas from sites not regulated by the US could be dangerous. Under federal rules, the abortion pill can only be prescribed by certified clinicians and provided from FDA-inspected manufacturers.

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#11 2022-06-27 13:24:22

The FDA though warns getting medications overseas from sites not regulated by the US could be dangerous. Under federal rules, the abortion pill can only be prescribed by certified clinicians and provided from FDA-inspected manufacturers.

A quick check on Amazon shows that federal rules being ignored.  And, just like the "certified clinicians" for generic Cialis, you're one if somebody says you're one.

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#12 2022-06-27 13:33:51

Opinion: Roe was very bad for America. The court gives us a chance to reset



Opinion by O. Carter Snead

Updated: Fri, 24 Jun 2022 18:31:23 GMT

Source: CNN

Editor's Note: O. Carter Snead is a professor of law, director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame and author of "What It Means to be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics" (Harvard University Press 2020). The views expressed in this commentary belong to the author. View more opinion at CNN.

After nearly 50 years, the US Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Casey and their related precedents, returning to the American people once again the authority to govern ourselves on the vexed matter of abortion through the deliberative processes of the political branches of government -- as is the case in the majority of nations around the world.

By my lights, Roe and its progeny have been very bad for America. By virtue of those precedents, the Supreme Court imposed on the nation an extreme, one-size fits all regulatory regime for abortion of its own invention, without any justification in the text, history or tradition of the Constitution.

Indeed, the reasoning in both Roe and Casey is famously weak and even the most sophisticated proponents of abortion rights have put forward their own justification rooted in the 13th amendment's ban on involuntary servitude or the 14th amendment's guarantee of equal protection, rather than mining that latter amendment's due process clause for an implicit right to privacy, which was the basis for the Roe decision, or an unwritten liberty interest, which was the grounding of the Casey decision. In my view, the Court's jurisprudence has, from the beginning, been a conclusion in search of a justification -- a tortured narrative of constantly shifting arguments, standards and rules.

Not only did Roe and its progeny corrupt the law, but it also badly damaged our politics. It channeled all of the political energy of the abortion debate into proxy battles for control of the Supreme Court that played out in a toxic fashion in presidential and senatorial campaigns, reaching a shameful apex in judicial confirmation hearings, which have become a no-holds-barred blood sport where politicians don't merely argue, they seek to destroy the nominee as a person. This has transformed into something entirely darker, with justices and their families facing harassment and other threats of violence, including murder.

And, of course, there is the human toll that can be attributed in large part to Roe. Since 1973, an estimated 60 million unborn lives have been lost to abortion, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute. This is a staggering number, roughly equal to the combined populations of New York and California.

But apart from all this, Roe and its progeny have wounded the nation in a way that is even more relevant now; Roe eliminated the need for us to talk to one another in the political sphere in a way that has real and concrete meaning for the laws and policies that bind us. The Supreme Court took the issue of abortion out of the political, legislative and executive spheres (except for minor ancillary side constraints such as parental involvement laws, informed consent provisions, waiting periods and limits on especially controversial methods of abortion).

It declared one side -- the abortion rights side -- the victor of the most hotly contested public question in the modern era, and told the other side to go home. And it did so under a notoriously weak interpretive analysis that even liberals like American legal scholar Laurence Tribe once recognized as unpersuasive.

So for nearly 50 years, those on opposite sides of the issue haven't really had to learn how to talk to one another in a serious way about how to find a path forward for the law and policy of abortion -- we simply did what the Supreme Court told us insofar as we could tell what that was. There was no need for those who disagreed to discuss the issue since we weren't allowed to govern ourselves. But that all has to change now. We need to re-learn how to talk about abortion as a precondition of self-governance.

How do we start? Much could be said, but I will limit myself to the perhaps obvious but important observation that we will not get anywhere unless we are honest and charitable with one another. We need to be candid with one another (and with ourselves) about what we believe and why it matters, what we intend to do and how we mean to do it.

But more importantly, we must be charitable. In particular, we owe our fellow citizens with whom we disagree the respect of listening and trying our level best to understand their arguments, the goods they hold most dear, the harms they most fear and to try to internalize their perspective. When we characterize their arguments, we must do so accurately and in their strongest form such that our interlocutors would recognize their own tone and substance in our rendition.

And we must genuinely embrace the notion that both sides have something vital to defend. Concretely, those who call themselves "pro-life" must understand that those who describe themselves as "pro-choice" are desperate to defend women's bodily autonomy and secure their equal position in the economic and social life of our nation. And conversely, the latter advocates must acknowledge that the former are committed to the intrinsic equal dignity of every human being, born and unborn.

Once that's out of the way, we can begin the hard work of trying to find common ground so that we can, together, care rightly for women, children (born and unborn) and families, both before and after they are born.

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#13 2022-06-28 06:05:01

Baywolfe wrote:

And conversely, the latter advocates must acknowledge that the former are committed to the intrinsic equal dignity of every human being, born and unborn.

This, right here, is the critical failure of the pro-birth movement. The law does not recognize a clump of cells as a person, and overturning Roe doesn't change that. Also, if you actually believe conservatives care about 'preserving life', there's a bridge I'd like to talk to you about.

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#14 2022-06-28 13:11:29

I so appreciate this site when we have these discussions.

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