Friday Reads: Losing Constitutional Rights is not an American Value
Posted: May 6, 2022 Filed under: just because 54 Comments
Good Day Sky Dancers!
Well, it’s my turn to grieve with our community as our democracy turns to rule by reactionary theocrats. Both Lady Liberty and Blind Justice are women. Both will be less than second-class citizens soon by the pen of angry white men and a Hand Maid. Theocratic fascists on the Supreme Court-appointed by Republican Presidents who did not win a majority vote are taking down the rights of the majority of citizens and doing so without the consent of the governed.
Are we all going back to the place where only land-owning white men are recognized by the Constitution and U.S. Law? Is that where the Federalist Society is leading us? A country where the rest of us are ruled by their whims and superstitions? Will some of us go back to being their chattel? Their property? How can we remedy this gross injustice?
Rep Adam Schiff reminds us that the number NINE is only used in the Constitution for unenumerated rights and not for the number of judges on the Supreme Court. UnJust Alito sure forgets this one as he hammers his gavel of religious oppression on a majority of Americans. The superstition of a witch burner in 17th century England gets say over our bodies and we don’t?
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
The irony of their findings is as perverse as their outcomes. Let me remind you of a 2014 ruling “Supreme Court: Abortion ‘Buffer Zones’ Violate Freedom of Speech”. Evidently, harassing women getting health care at a clinic is free speech while protesting their decision in front of their building needs a large buffer zone plus cement barriers and huge fences.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that putting up “buffer zones” around abortion clinics is a violation of the First Amendment.
The decision, which reversed a lower court ruling, found that a Massachusetts law that imposes a 35-foot buffer zone around abortion clinics puts an unconstitutional limitation on protesters’ freedom of speech. Written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the unanimous decision in McCullen v. Coakley is an immediate victory for pro-life groups, which have fought hard for the right to protest outside of abortion clinics, and a loss for some pro-choice groups that sought to provide blanket protections for people attempting to enter and leave such facilities.
Evidently, anything that gets women killed and harmed is free speech. They don’t need to see or hear from us. It is really obvious now that the SCROTUS 4 plus the Hand Maid don’t care about anything but their zealotry and crusade to push us all out of the way of the divine white, male christoban hegemony.
The Republicans have been wrong and dishonest in so many ways that it hardly should surprise anyone. It’s fully documented that the last 5 Republican-appointed justices lied under oath. Yet, it is unlikely any of them including the openly corrupt Clarence Thomas will face any kind of real justice.
We continue to see the deceit employed by Republicans to cover up the insurrection on January 6th. And they are still at it. From Dana Milbank at The Washington Post: “McCarthy’s lying at the border cements him as the Great Prevaricator.” Republicans are trying and saying anything to change the narrative. Our southern border and the leak of Alito’s hate manifesto are just two issues of no substance they’re passing off as issues using their best jazz hands.
The Great Prevaricator stood on the banks of the Rio Grande and released a mighty river of deceit.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, in a news conference Monday afternoon with fellow Republican lawmakers at the southern border and in a separate interview with Fox News, misrepresented the source of illicit fentanyl. He grossly distorted a description of phones the federal government is using to track immigrants who crossed the border illegally. He teased the dubious notion that Democrats somehow obtained and leaked the audio of a private meeting he had with fellow Republican leaders.
And then there was this showstopper: He dissembled about his own lie.
First, he claimed he wasn’t lying when he falsely denied a New York Times report that he had told colleagues after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that he would advise President Donald Trump to resign. He suggested he misunderstood the question.
Yet McCarthy then appeared, in his garbled syntax, to repeat the original lie that he never told colleagues he planned to ask Trump to resign: “If you’re asking now, ‘Did I tell my members that we’re going to ask?’ Ask them if I told any of them that I said to President Trump. The answer is no.” (According to the audio recording of that meeting, McCarthy in fact said he was “seriously thinking” of telling Trump “it would be my recommendation you should resign.”)
Telling a baldfaced lie, particularly one of such magnitude, is a sign of low character. But repeating the very same lie just seconds after explaining you hadn’t told the lie in the first place is a sign of low brain activity.
Alas, this may well be the next speaker of the House.
I bolded that last sentence for emphasis. This is how I feel every time one of them opens their mouth. This means you Senator Say Anything, Susan Collins.
I called BB earlier this morning just so I could say Fuck you Susan Collins out loud to someone. And no one believes you’re shocked by Justice “I like Beer”‘s bald-faced lies either. It’s obvious you wouldn’t know the truth if it fell on you.
“Rally Mohawks! Bring out your axes, and tell King George we’ll pay no taxes on his foreign tea . . . — a song of 1773,” Panel 3 (1955) from “Struggle: From the History of the American People” (1954–56), by Jacob Lawrence.
Earlier this week, Republican senator Susan Collins claimed to be shocked and dismayed at the draft opinion indicating the Supreme Court was poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. Specifically, the Maine lawmaker was beside herself at the idea that Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch had misled her about their positions on the landmark ruling during their Supreme Court confirmations. Collins, you see, was one of the only people on the planet—along with her colleague Lisa Murkowski— who thought that the two conservative justices, nominated by a president who vowed to exclusively appoint judges who would overturn Roe, would not, in fact, overturn Roe. (While the votes could change, Politico reported that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh had preliminarily agreed with the majority to strike down the 1973 decision after hearing oral arguments last December.) “If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office,” Collins said in a statement.
Given how angry the lawmaker was about having apparently been lied to, how much she supposedly cares about preserving the right to an abortion, and how the whole thing blew up in her face so embarrassingly, you might think she’d be doing everything in her power right now to prevent such a right from being axed. But you would be very wrong!
In addition to saying Tuesday that she would not support abolishing the filibuster to allow the Senate to pass legislation codifying Roe v. Wade ASAP, Collins declared on Thursday that she would vote “no” on the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would establish the statutory right to an abortion and is expected to be voted on by lawmakers next week. Why? According to Collins, it just recognizes too many rights for pregnant people. “It supersedes all other federal and state laws, including the conscience protections that are in the Affordable Care Act,” she told reporters when asked about her support of the bill, adding: “It doesn’t protect the right of a Catholic hospital to not perform abortions. That right has been enshrined in law for a long time.”
Incidentally, according to Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, Collins’s claims about what the bill would do—and her excuse for not voting for it—are completely unfounded. “Some are saying that this legislation would tell hospitals—certain religious hospitals—that they have to perform abortions,” he said at a press conference without referring to Collins by name. “That is simply not true. This bill simply gives providers the statutory right to provide abortion care without medically unnecessary restrictions. That’s plain and simple. So this rumor is false.”
Collins is possibly lying to herself, but definitely to us if she thinks she’s really pro-choice. I think she’s mostly Pro-Susan Collins not wanting to be harassed by the same free speech given people charging and shouting nasty hellfire shit to women seeking healthcare at clinics.
Remember how we all couldn’t understand the attack on Iraq, much less Afghanistan based on 9-11. Remember how an illegitimate Dubya got the Supreme Court to make him a POTUS? Well, Uncle Joe did a good thing today.
It’s no secret that the Saudis were involved. Watch this story. I believe the fallout will be big.
For more than 20 years, successive US presidents have given Saudi Arabia a pass on the question of whether the kingdom’s government had anything to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As the story goes, plenty of individual Saudis were involved — including 15 of the 19 hijackers and Osama bin Laden — but there was no evidence to indicate that the Saudi government itself was behind the attacks. That’s more or less what the 9/11 Commission concluded, and the Saudi government continues to cite the commission’s report in official statements as proof that “Saudi Arabia had nothing to do with this terrible crime.”
In its report, the commission took particular pains not to implicate Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national who met two of the 9/11 hijackers in Los Angeles shortly after they arrived in the US. Bayoumi then helped them move to San Diego, where he signed as the guarantor on an apartment they rented.
Bayoumi has long maintained that he met the hijackers by coincidence, a claim the commission did little to contradict. Instead, it painted a mostly innocuous portrait of Bayoumi’s background, concluding that he was in the US “as a business student” and that he worked for the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority. “I don’t believe he was a ‘Saudi government agent’ working to help terrorists,” wrote Philip Zelikow, the 9/11 Commission’s executive director, in response to questions from a journalist in 2007.
But over the past several months, a raft of new documents released by the American and British governments suggest that the 9/11 Commission got it wrong. An FBI memo declassified in March, in response to an executive order by President Joe Biden, reported that Bayoumi was receiving a monthly stipend from Saudi intelligence. In other words, he was not a student but a spy. According to the FBI memo, dated June 14, 2017, Bayoumi was tasked with gathering information “on persons of interest in the Saudi community” and passing the intelligence to Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, the Saudi ambassador at the time.
“Allegations of Albayoumi’s involvement with Saudi intelligence were not confirmed at the time of the 9/11 Commission Report,” writes the memo’s author, an FBI special agent at the bureau’s Washington field office, whose name is redacted. “The above information confirms those allegations.”
A second declassified FBI memo shows that a confidential source told the FBI there was a “50/50 chance” that Bayoumi had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and “assisted two of the hijackers while residing in San Diego.”
The FBI declined to comment. But the revelations appear to undercut the Saudi government’s claims that it had no ties to the 9/11 attacks. While US intelligence agencies have repeatedly concluded that the Saudi government as a whole had no advance knowledge of the 2001 plot, they have flagged specific Saudi agencies and members of the royal family as having ties to Al Qaeda. Last year, newly declassified FBI files complicated another crucial piece of Bayoumi’s narrative, suggesting that his initial meeting with the two hijackers had been arranged by contacts at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles.
1915 February Frontispiece Suffragette – VOTES FOR WOMEN – for The American Magazine – painted by Mary Green Blumenshein a.k.a. M.G.B.
Republicans Lie. Women Die. Soldiers Die. Immigrants and Asylum Seekers Die. Children languish in cages and Die. Native Americans Die. Black, Brown, and Asian Americans Die. We get Insurrection, less voting rights, more expensive drugs and healthcare, subsidized Fossil Fuels that kill us and the planet, and the last guy in the White House that enough bad things cannot be said about including his role in the statistic yesterday that OVER 1,000,000 Americans have died of Covid-19. And just open any social media of any republican voter and you’ll see their lies repeated back at you. They are knee-deep in Lies. The Big Lie.
1 million have Americans died of Covid. That’s an “unfathomable number”. Remember all the Trump lies about nothing to see here when it was first diagnosed on his watch? (via NBC News)
The U.S. on Wednesday surpassed 1 million Covid-19 deaths, according to data compiled by NBC News — a once unthinkable scale of loss even for the country with the world’s highest recorded toll from the virus.
The number — equivalent to the population of San Jose, California, the 10th largest city in the U.S. — was reached at stunning speed: 27 months after the country confirmed its first case of the virus.
“Each of those people touched hundreds of other people,” said Diana Ordonez, whose husband, Juan Ordonez, died in April 2020 at age 40, five days before their daughter Mia’s fifth birthday. “It’s an exponential number of other people that are walking around with a small hole in their heart.”
How many more of these lies do we have to live through? Just imagine if the Supreme Court had not appointed Dubya. No Bush V. Gore enablers on the current court. No war in Iraq or Afghanistan. A real plan to save the planet. Just imagine if Hillary had won. A strong Nato checking Putin’s intentions. Diversity so that our country represents all the people and protects the right to vote! Laws that support all of us! Access to every bit of healthcare Women need! A country where you’re safe from religious indoctrination by a vocal and violent minority! Just think of what we got and what we missed out on!
Well, we’ve been through most of that as a community. Let’s hold each other in our hearts and do what we can to stop this attack on our democracy and our constitutional rights! Even our old friends the French See us.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Oh, and btw, FUCK SUSAN COLLINS!!!!!
peej
Carissa
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
grayslady
mablue2
NW Luna
peggysue22
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Have a peaceful weekend! I’m so glad for your thoughts and presence here! We’re a tight-knit family here! Continue to let us know what’s going on with you and your neighborhood!
Brava!
(typo “OVER 1,000,000,000”. Has 3 extra zeroes.)
And the US being one of the countries where states undertook all sorts of reporting shenanigans, only excess deaths can give us a real picture. The total number of covid deaths is near or over two million.
And, _and_, if around 1.5% is the fatality rate, that means some 133,000,000 million infections happened (asymptomatic or otherwise). The disabling long covid rate is somewhere around 15% of that number. Which means some twenty million people struggling with long term consequences.
All because a Dump on the Oval Office carpet “liked the numbers where they are” and then cared only about chances to grift.
Thank you! We haven’t even begun to know what will come of all of this. Each of those 1 million had a family. I can’t even imagine the level of grief and depression out in our country right now.
I remember seeing a CDC (?) estimate that for every death, there’s an average of nine people who are affected in a major way. Children, partners, parents, aunts, uncles, lifelong friends. That’s close to 20,000,000 people at a 2,000,000 death toll. That’s over 5% of the population. One in twenty carrying these holes in their hearts.
And some of them are carrying very jagged shards, too. I saw a post from a hospital nurse talking about a 12 year-old who’d mentioned that “I killed my mommy.” Turned out she’d caught covid, passed it to her mother, who then died. Now that kid gets to carry that for the rest of her life.
Oh, that’s sad! sniff sniff
I’d say that I don’t believe this except I can, and my impression is she’s reputable. Haven’t heard anything else yet. Dak have you?
Yes. This is true.
https://www.newsweek.com/anger-louisiana-abortion-bill-could-see-women-charged-murder-1704069
The Democratic Governor will vote for it as well every Democratic woman in the state senate is against abortion. This is a bi-partisan affair here. The Democratic Woman governor-Kate Blanco-signed the original trigger bill. The Southern part of the state is heavily traditional Catholic.
They need to kick these people out of the Democratic party.
Can you imagine what the party hierarchy would do if a Democratic politician got up and advocated re-instating Jim Crow laws? They’d lose their collective shit and that person would be GONE. This should be no different. If you don’t believe women are equal human beings with the right to control their own body, you have no business representing the Democratic party. Period.
I know you are making a rhetorical point about Jim Crow laws but I fully expect that laws giving business the right to refuse service to groups they don’t like will be proposed.
They will call it “freedom of choice” or “freedom of association” or “ freedom scheedom”, but getting bigotry ratified in law is part of the MAGANation agenda.
From the time the egg is fertilized, not implanted.
Too bad about ectopic pregnancies, IUD’s etc…
Just found out Mixon is pro-life. SHIT!!!
fucking Lousyana!!!
Not pro-life. Pro forced labor. Anti-woman. Pro state ownership of women’s bodies.
And he’s trying to have it both ways now …
Thank you Mister Manly Man for giving us your manly opinion on this topic that will NEVER FUCKING AFFECT YOUR BODY.
Women. Don’t. Need. Your. Input.
Dystopian!
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?
Argh! The parent tweet should have been the one where she tells about her mother miscarrying but the fetus was retained. She was hemmorhaging and the necrosis was spreading from the dead fetus while the doctors blathered on for 72 hrs whether they should do a surgical procedure to remove the dead fetus.
I read that thread. What a horrific experience that family lived through. Those days were terrible for women and it will be worse if Roe is overturned. Things are already very bad in red states.
Sorry, this has his ugly mug in it but at least it’s not Fugly UGLY Trump …
This!!
And of course, no help for moms that cannot afford pre-natal care, no sex ed, etc., etc.
It’s illegal to use even a ***corpse’s*** organs without prior legal consent. The only way women can be forced to donate their bodies to others is — one more time — if they are not seen as people. Not really human. A few fifths of a human.
Phrases like “the domestic supply of infants” is just a clearer than usual verbal outgrowth of the mental tumor. The brood animals aren’t producing!
and “domestic” clearly means they just want homegrown wipipo babies
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/amy-coney-barrett-people-of-praise/2020/10/06/5f497d8c-0781-11eb-859b-f9c27abe638d_story.html
Amy Coney Barrett was a “handmaid.” She belonged to, what could be considered a cult of the far right Catholic religion (not sanctioned by the Church) that established a male-dominated hierarchy and view of gender roles.
The US still hasn’t adopted the Equal Rights Amendment. It still hasn’t codified women as full-fledged human adults worthy of human rights. The Supreme Court is now heavily dominated by Originalists who firmly believe that White Males are the only valid rights holders. Through gutting the voting rights act, they’ve accomplished reverting people of African descent and other ethnic groups designated ‘inferior’ (to white males) to 3/5 voting status. Now, they are reverting the status of women to that of chattel.
The Supreme Court is not bent on recreating the 1950’s (bad enough) but plowing all the way back to the 18th century.
Yes, and the hell of it is that the ERA is now interpreted to define “sex” — as in woman are discriminated against because of our sex — as the same things as ‘gender identity,’ a vacuous, undefined, subjective and unrealistic feeling. This is just as silly as believing that because a White man identifies as a Black man he should be treated as if he really was a Black man, and be called ‘stunning and brave.’
Women are oppressed because of our sex. Gender is how we are oppressed.
Biden’s Equality Act also states that ‘sex’ = gender self-ID. In the UK, their Equity Act allows same-sex (not same-gender) activities, spaces, and opportunities when there is a legitimate reason for this. For example, in women’s rape-survivor shelters, changing rooms, bathrooms, and for women’s sports and scholarships. The US Equality Act has no such exception.
It’s amazing to me we can be deprived of control over own bodies — which only happens to slaves if the bodies are male — and yet most of the talk doesn’t seem to begin to take on board that women are being reenslaved.
This is slavery.
The appropriate response is the one to any other people’s slavery.
Instead we’re told to be sure to vote in November. (I mean, sure, everybody should, but, but, but) for God’s sake your fundamental rights are not up for voting on!
I’m not disagreeing with your last point. But I’m really tired of the Democrats using abortion to blackmail me into voting for them and then doing absolutely nothing to actually protect my right to control my body. Right now the vast majority of Democrats begging me for money can’t even bring themselves to say the word woman.
Men on the left are not one bit less sexist than men on the right. So my choices are a party that hates me. Or a party that hates me and everyone else. I’m not personally willing to throw everyone else under the bus. I’m not happy about this.
Agree. Now the Dems are all fired up to protect abortion — but for ‘people’ instead of ‘women,’ and saying that some men and nonbinary people may need abortions.
You and me both. And I’m hearing that from a lot of women.
https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article261084877.html
At some point Susan Collins Joe Manchin and all these gutless pretenders will pay.
You cannot outrun accountability forever.
Fake pro-choice, fake Democrat, fake leaders.
Collins could save choice which she claims to believe in, but she cannot burst the Christo-fascist bubble.
It’s gotta be all for one and one for all. They can’t make all of us invisible if we can stand together.
I don’t get it. How is making it super-obvious to his wife that he’s been screwing around supposed to save his marriage? I even read the article, but it’s not explained.
These Tea Party Taliban move in mysterious ways their grossness to perform.
Yep. Hypocrites. Rules don’t apply to them, only to non-wealthy people and POC of any income. What a slimy dickbiscuit, as they say in the UK. Hope his wife divorced him.
Good News Every ONE!!!!!
Chuck Todd’s Daily ‘Meet the Press’ Show to Become Streaming-Only Offering
Chris Jansing will take over the 1 pm timeslot on MSNBC, with ‘Meet the Press Daily’ going streaming-only.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/msnbc-meet-the-press-daily-chuck-todd-streaming-1235141982/
This corrupt individual and his theocratic fascist friends that don’t recognize we live in a democracy and they are not part of the majority and have cheated themselves into a minority rule should look in the mirror.
Just voted in the Georgia primary.
We have to do our homework.
I must confess I waited till this morning to research all the candidates.
We cannot afford to NOT vote for Dems in the general so we must FORCE Pro-Choice candidates in the primary.
And no more votes for wishy washy liars like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski.
I should have started researching early because my investigation was rushed and cursory.
Keep the faith and VOTE VOTE VOTE!!! (That is rhetorical for emphasis don’t cast multiple ballots like those idiot Republicans)
Exactly!!!! Thanks for your vote!!!
Yes!