One million Americans have now died from the coronavirus, according to an announcement made Thursday by President Joe Biden, marking a long-dreaded milestone for an incomprehensible tragedy.
“Today, we mark a tragic milestone: one million American lives lost to COVID-19. One million empty chairs around the dinner table. Each an irreplaceable loss. Each leaving behind a family, a community, and a nation forever changed because of this pandemic. Jill and I pray for each of them,” Biden said in a statement. “As a nation, we must not grow numb to such sorrow. To heal, we must remember.” [….]
Over the last two years, the deadly virus has kept the nation tightly in its clutch, with wave after wave of the virus washing over with only relatively brief respites in between.
“This unthinkable tragedy will forever appear in the history books,” said John Brownstein, Ph.D. an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor.
The loss of 1 million lives is a reality that is still difficult for many to comprehend, and to accept. In some respects, the death toll remains hidden from view.
Experts said the statistic, however massive, does not fully capture the magnitude of the human tragedy.
“It’s one thing to talk about numbers, but then to realize that each one of those numbers represents a grandparent or a spouse or someone with their own unique story that we’ve lost. Already over a million of those stories in you know, in this country alone — it really is a tragedy and a tragedy, in many ways, of unprecedented proportions,” Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told ABC News.
United States becomes 1st country in the world to officially post 1,000,000 direct deaths due to #Covid19 shocking and saddening at the same time: https://t.co/er2OeVlNly
President Joe Biden on Thursday mourned 1 million American deaths from Covid-19, using the occasion to again urge Congress to pass additional funding to control the pandemic.
While other official tallies have placed the figure a bit short of that mark, Biden marked the moment during the White House’s latest virtual Global Covid-19 Summit, reflecting on the pandemic’s devastation on the nation after more than two years.
“This pandemic isn’t over. Today, we mark a tragic milestone here in the United States — 1 million Covid deaths. One million empty chairs around the family dinner table. Each irreplaceable, irreplaceable losses. Each leaving behind a family, a community, forever changed because of this pandemic. Our hearts go out to all those who are struggling,” Biden said during his opening remarks at the summit, later acknowledging that “around the world, many more millions have died” as a result of the pandemic.
“That’s why I continue to call on Congress here at home to take the urgent action to provide emergency Covid-19 funding that is vital to protect Americans to make sure we’re that we maintain our supplies of Covid-19 test treatments and vaccines, including next generation vaccines that are being developed,” he said, later highlighting the request’s $5 billion proposal “to keep up our global partnership in the fight against Covid-19.”
In a proclamation issued Thursday ordering flags to be flown at half-staff to mark the milestone, Biden wrote that the nation “must not grow numb to such sorrow.”
Thursday’s summit is aimed at “redoubling” efforts to control Covid-19 and preparing the world for future variants of the coronavirus or the next deadly pandemic, two senior administration officials said.
The event, which is also co-hosted by Germany, Indonesia, Senegal and Belize, is calling for countries to invest in the new Global Pandemic Preparedness and Health Security fund at the World Bank, and the US announced that its pledge will increase to $450 million, up from the initially promised amount of $250 million. The summit will also highlight an additional $3.1 billion in new funding commitments from countries around the world to combat Covid-19.
HBCU lacrosse team claims racial profiling during traffic stophttps://t.co/Okb10wejf5 How does a traffic violation lead to searching baggage of a Black lacrosse team? Boys, you got some “splaining” to do. Who cares if you stopped another bus with contraband on it? Profile much?
— Jocelynn Kountze@ (@KountzeJocelynn) May 12, 2022
The president of a historically Black university says he is “incensed” that the institution’s women’s lacrosse team was subjected to a “trying and humiliating” traffic stop in Georgia, where law enforcement used a minor traffic violation as an opportunity to search the students’ belongings for narcotics.
Nothing illegal was found, and coaches and members of the Delaware State University team — the majority of whom are Black — have spoken out about the experience in the days since, describing the stop-and-search as racial profiling and a frightening ordeal.
“We do not intend to let this or any other incident like it pass idly by. We are prepared to go wherever the evidence leads us,” President Tony Allen of Delaware State University wrote in a letter to the campus community. “We have video. We have allies. Perhaps more significantly, we have the courage of our convictions.” Allen also noted that he’s reached out to Georgia law enforcement and that he’s exploring “options for recourse — legal and otherwise.” [….]
The April 20 Delaware State incident was first reported last week by Sydney Anderson, a sophomore who was on the bus when deputies from the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office stopped the vehicle as it traveled north on I-95, taking the team back to campus after several games in Florida.
In The Hornet Newspaper, Anderson wrote thatthe incident was traumatic, especially for those who’d never had an encounter with the police before, and called it one of the “constant reminders of being Black in America.”
During a news conference on Tuesday afternoon, Sheriff William Bowman of Liberty County, who is Black, told reporters that the deputies didn’t know that the bus was carrying students from a historically Black university before they entered the vehicle, nor did the sherriff’s office realize the incident had been perceived as racial profiling.
Obviously, that is not true.
The Delaware State lacrosse players’ bus was pulled over about two and a half hours after the team left its hotel on the morning of April 20, Head Coach Pamella Jenkins said in an interview with The Chronicle. A police officer came to the door and asked the driver for his license and registration, saying commercial vehicles aren’t supposed to drive in the left lane.
Nobody on board thought much about it until one of the students noticed the officers pulling their luggage out from underneath the bus to search it, with the help of a drug-sniffing dog, Jenkins said.
Video footage taken by one of the players shows two white officers standing at the front of the bus as players and coaches look on. One of the officers can be heard saying, “If there is anything in y’all’s luggage, we’re probably gonna find it. … I’m not looking for a little bit of marijuana, but I’m pretty sure you guys chaperones probably gonna be disappointed if we find any.”
“I was definitely scared,” Jenkins said. “As a coach, especially traveling away from campus, I’m responsible for them and their safety, and in the moment, I felt helpless.” She credited the students for their level heads in face of an uncertain situation. “My hope was to just stay calm, stay quiet, so that they could do what they needed to do so that we could hurry up and get back to campus.”
Shortly after informing the students and coaches of their search, one of the deputies returned with a wrapped gift addressed to one of the players and asked what was inside. Jenkins said the student told the deputy that she didn’t know because it was a gift from a relative that she’d been told not to open until she got home. To this, the deputy said he would open the package off the bus but she would need to step off if it was anything that warranted discussion. The deputy returned a few minutes later and said they were free to go.
Yesterday, Republicans and one “Democrat” in the Senate defeated a bill to protect abortion rights. Could Democrats be getting angry enough to really fight back against GOP misogyny and lies? Here’s what women from the House of Representatives did before what they knew would be a losing vote:
House Democratic women walking to Senate ahead of the abortion vote, yelling “My decision, my body” pic.twitter.com/Fk3b2nP9PL
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) this week blasted Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for his stance on a number of issues facing the court, including abortion rights.
“Let me ask this question of brother Thomas,” Jeffries said during a House Judiciary Committee hearing this week. “Why are you such a hater? Hate on civil rights. Hate on women’s rights. Hate on reproductive rights. Hate on voting rights. Hate on marital rights. Hate on equal protection under the law. Hate on liberty and justice for all. Hate on free and fair elections. Why are you such a hater?”
Jeffries added the senior conservative justice “thinks he can get away with” his stances on those key issues and “escape public scrutiny.” [….]
Thomas is one of several conservatives on the court who has indicated, according to a leaked draft opinion published earlier this month, that they would rule in favor of a Mississippi state law on abortion that would directly overturn Roe v. Wade, which made abortion a federally protected right.
“We are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like,” Thomas said last week in response to public outcry over the court’s reported stance. “We use stare decisis as a mantra when we don’t want to think.”
Jeffries referenced Thomas’s comments, telling the justice to “start in your own home.”
“Have a conversation with Ginni Thomas. She refused to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. Why?” the congressman said. “Because she didn’t like the outcome. Because the former twice-impeached so-called president of the United States lost legitimately to Joe Biden. How did she respond? Instead, she said the Bidens should face a military tribunal in Guantánamo Bay on trumped-up charges of sedition. You’ve got to be kidding me.”
The president traveled the country on Wednesday, sharpening his lines of attack against the Republican Party as primary season kicks into full gear. Throughout the day, he laid into the GOP and baited former President Donald Trump, even testing a new nickname for his predecessor: the great MAGA king.
“Look at my predecessor, the great MAGA king — the deficit increased every single year he was president,” Biden said in Chicago at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers International convention, contrasting the deficit reductions during his tenure with Trump’s term.
With a little over six months to go until the November midterms — what is often a referendum on the president’s performance — Biden is moving into full-fledged campaign mode. The noticeable change in tone comes as economic concerns hover over Democrats’ prospects and the White House tests out a new strategy — painting a clear picture of the differences between Democrats and Trump and his followers.
With his MAGA king nickname, Biden was just getting started. At a DNC fundraiser later Wednesday, the president called his 2020 victory against Trump a “low bar,” and dug into his favorite phrase of late, “MAGA Republicans,” twice calling these politicians “petty,” “mean-spirited” and “extreme.”
“They are cowered by Trump,” Biden said, telling the audience that Democrats have to make their case in 2022. “The fact of the matter is, they run the show — the MAGA Republicans. … It really is beyond the pale.”
The president, speaking to roughly 40 guests, said the GOP has a “radical agenda” and said it isn’t “your father’s Republican Party.”
What’s on your mind today? What stories are you following?
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Chris Coons, so-called Democratic Senator from Delaware, worked with Texas Senator John Cornyn to introduce a bill to protect the families of Supreme Court justices from scary peaceful demonstrations against their efforts to turn American women into broodmares. Coons could be working to protect women from Republicans who want them to loose their constitutional rights, but apparently that’s not important to him.
The Senate on Monday easily cleared a bill to extend security protections to the immediate family members of Supreme Court justices.
The bill — spearheaded by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) — passed the Senate by unanimous consent, meaning all 100 senators had to sign off in order for it to pass without a formal vote.
It still now heads to the House for passage.
“Threats to the physical safety of Supreme Court Justices and their families are disgraceful, and attempts to intimidate and influence the independence of our judiciary cannot be tolerated,” Cornyn said in a statement.
“I’m glad the Senate quickly approved this measure to extend Supreme Court police protection to family members, and the House must take up and pass it immediately,” he added.
Coons, in a statement, said that he was “glad to see this bipartisan bill unanimously pass the Senate in order to extend security protection to the families of Supreme Court members.”
Have there been “threats to the physical safety” of SCOTUS justices and their families? I haven’t seen it reported in the media. It seems to me that the people whose physical safety is threatened are women of childbearing age and their families. Apparently not. WTF?!
Chris Coons will be sponsoring a bill to give her a Secret Service detail by tomorrow afternoon.
After supporting Harry Reid’s filibuster reform as a freshman senator, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) later wished he could take it back. But there are no take backs in Congress.
“I have come over time to regret…changing the rules,” Coons told his colleagues from the Senate floor back in 2017, right before McConnell and Republicans followed Democrat’s lead and destroyed the filibuster so they could swiftly seat Neil Gorsuch on the court.
Last week, after the leak-heard-round-the-world, Coons rebuffed Raw Story’s question about filibuster reform, regret, and Roe v. Wade.
“I’m sorry. I’m out of energy. I’m out of time. I’m tired. Leave me alone,” Coons said.
Fuck you Coons!! And this guy is supposedly close to President Biden.
Catherine Rampell usually writes about economic issues, but today she has a column on abortion rights.
The Washington Post: These GOP politicians aren’t pro-life. They’re pro-forced birth.
Republican politicians working to overturn Roe v. Wade say they are pro-life and antiabortion. In fact, they are neither. What they are is pro-forced birth.
This distinction is about more than semantics. These officials have drawn a clear line, as evidenced by policies they’ve adopted in conjunction with their opposition to Roe. GOP-led states are making choices, today, that increase the chances of unplanned pregnancies and, therefore, demand for abortions; their choices also limit access to health care and other critical programs for new moms, endangering the lives and welfare of mothers and their children.
Mother and Child, Mary Cassatt
Consider Mississippi.
It was a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks that has set the stage for the Supreme Court to roll back nearly 50 years of reproductive rights. If the court does overturn Roe, as a leakeddraft decision suggests it soon will, another Mississippi law would automatically “trigger,” banning nearly all abortions.
Some residents who find themselves with an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy might be able to leave the state to seek an abortion. But others without the means to travel or take time off from work will be forced to give birth. And in Mississippi, that is an unusually dangerous undertaking.
Here’s why that is:
The United States has the highest maternal death rate in the developed world; Mississippi has one of the higher maternal death rates within the United States. The odds are worse for Black women, whose risk of death related to pregnancy and childbirth are nearly triple those for White women in the state.
Mississippi’s legislature recently considered whether to extend Medicaid postpartum coverage from 60 days to a full year after birth, as federal law newly allows states to do. If you care about the lives of new moms (and, by extension, their kids), this is a no-brainer. Roughly 6 in 10 births in the state are covered by Medicaid; 86 percent of the state’s maternal deaths occur postpartum. Pregnancy and delivery raise the risk of many health complications, including infections, blood clots, high blood pressure, heart conditions and postpartum depression. Giving low-income moms access to health care a full year after birth would save lives.
But Mississippi’s Republican leadership rejected the proposal. Not because the state lacks the funds (which would be partly covered by the federal government); one thing state pols did manage to get through this session was the state’s largest-ever tax cut.
Janet Yellen has weighed in on the abortion issue.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday argued that banning abortion would be “very damaging” for the economy by reducing women’s ability to balance their careers and their families.
“I believe that eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades,” she said in response to a question at a Senate Banking Committee hearing.
In her comments, Yellen said the 1973 ruling helped allow women to finish school and increase their earning potential, leading to higher participation in the workforce.
Research also shows that it had a favorable impact on the well-being and earnings of children,” she said. “There are many research studies that have been done over the years looking at the economic impacts of access or lack thereof to abortion, and it makes clear that denying women access to abortion increases their odds of living in poverty or need for public assistance.”
A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that Americans’ confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court has collapsed over the last 20 months — a period that began with former President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans installing a 6-3 conservative majority ahead of the 2020 election and culminated last week with the leak of a draft opinion signaling that five GOP-appointed justices plan to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The last time Yahoo News/YouGov asked about confidence in the court was in September 2020, a few days after liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and a few days before Trump nominated conservative jurist Amy Coney Barrett to replace her.
Back then, 70% of registered voters said they had either “some” (50%) or “a lot” (20%) of confidence in the court, and 30% said they had either “a little” (23%) or “none” (7%).
But the new survey of 1,577 U.S. adults, which was conducted immediately after the leak, found that registered voters have swung from mostly having confidence in the Supreme Court — by a colossal 40-point margin — to being evenly split on the question.
Today, just half of voters still express some (37%) or a lot (14%) of confidence in the court, while the other half now expresses either a little (24%) or none (26%).
And among all Americans — as opposed to just registered voters — most (53%) now say they have either no confidence in the Supreme Court (28%) or only a little (25%).
Mother and Child, Pablo Picasso
As usual, Trump’s negative influence on U.S. politics is in news. A journalist whose family arrived in Nebraska in 1856 weighs in on the damage Trump has done to the state.
LINCOLN, Neb. — In the old days, Charles W. Herbster, a cattle baron and bull semen tycoon who used his fortune and influence to get into Donald Trump’s good graces, almost certainly would have been forced to pull out of Nebraska’s Republican primary for governor by now. In recent weeks, eight women, including a state senator, have come forward to allege that Mr. Herbster groped them at various Republican events or at beauty pageants at which he was a judge.
But this is post-shame, post-“Access Hollywood” America, so Mr. Trump traveled to Nebraska last week for a rally at the I-80 Speedway between Lincoln and Omaha to show his continued support for Mr. Herbster. “He is innocent of these despicable charges,” Mr. Trump said. And Mr. Herbster, in true Trump fashion, has not only denied the allegations but also filed a defamation suit against one of his accusers and started running a television ad suggesting that the claims are part of a political conspiracy.
Mr. Herbster sees conspiracies everywhere — conspiracies to destroy him, conspiracies to undermine Mr. Trump, conspiracies to unravel the very fabric of the nation. “This country is in a war within the borders of the country,” he told the crowd at the Starlite Event Center in Wahoo on Thursday, a few days before Tuesday’s primary election. Over more than an hour, Mr. Herbster, dressed in his trademark cowboy hat and vest, unspooled a complex and meandering tale of the threat to America, interspersed with labyrinthine personal yarns and long diatribes about taxes.
It was convoluted but (as best I can understand) goes something like this: The coronavirus was manufactured in a lab in China and released into the United States in early 2020 by “illegals” from Mexico who were also smuggling Chinese-made fentanyl across the border. One of the smugglers, he said, had enough fentanyl in a single backpack to kill the entire population of Nebraska and South Dakota. The goal of this two-pronged attack, he explained, was to create a panic, stoked by Facebook and $400 million of Mark Zuckerberg’s money, to justify allowing voting by mail. Then, through unspecified means, the Chinese government used those mail-in ballots to steal the election — though Mr. Herbster hates that word. “They didn’t ‘steal’ it,” he told the crowd, his finger raised. “Do not use that terminology. They did not ‘steal’ it. They rigged it.”
Read more at the NYT link.
Woman and child on the balcony, Berthe Morisot
Former acting Defense Secretary Mark Esper is still making the rounds to sell his book. Here are his latest revelations about Trump.
Former President Donald Trump wanted to take the extraordinary step of reactivating retired US Navy Adm. William McRaven so that he could court-martial the former Navy SEAL commander for criticizing him, Trump’s former Pentagon chief claims in his new book.
Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper writes that he and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, had to talk then-President Trump out of a plan to recall both retired US Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal and McRaven to active duty as a way to open the two former senior military officers up to court-martial proceedings.
“Doing this ‘will backfire on you, Mr. President,’ we said,” Esper wrote of a May 2020 meeting in his book, “A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times,” which is out today.
Trump told Esper and Milley that McRaven and McChrystal were “so disloyal” because of what he thought they were doing and had said about him. Esper writes that Trump “was spun up” by media stories in Breitbart claiming that McChrystal was advising Democrats on how to use artificial intelligence to “track down and counter Trump supporters.”
Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper in his new book said that “leaks were a chronic problem” in the Trump administration and former President Donald Trump was the “biggest leaker of all.”
“The individual motivations for the leaks ranged from advancing a preferred policy outcome to enhancing the leaker’s own role or credentials to currying favor with the president. It was a noxious behavior learned from the top. The president was the biggest leaker of all. It turned colleague against colleague, department against department, and it was generally bad for the administration and the country,” Esper wrote in “A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times.”
Esper said the leaks “damaged trust” and made people “far more reluctant to speak up and share their views.”
“Nobody wanted to see their name in the morning news, especially when the words were so often twisted, misinterpreted, and taken out of context,” he added. “In the Trump administration, this could get you blacklisted or fired.”
The right-wing cable network One America News Network on Monday ran a pre-recorded 30-second segment acknowledging that there was “no widespread voter fraud” by Georgia election workers in the 2020 presidential election. The segment appears to be part of a recent settlement relating to a defamation lawsuit brought against the network by two such workers.
The segment notes that an investigation by state officials into unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud made by ex-President Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani turned up nothing. “The results of this investigation indicate that Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ‘Shaye’ Moss did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct,” a narrator states.
“A legal matter with this network and the two election workers has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement,” the voiceover adds.
Mother and children, William-Adolphe Bouguereau
Freeman and her daughter, Moss, say they were harassed online and in person after baseless rumors began circulating online, due in part to content published by the conspiracy website The Gateway Pundit, which the pair also sued.
In January 2021, when Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to try to “find” votes to overturn the state’s election results, he mentioned Freeman’s name 18 times. Freeman was also visited by a publicist for Kanye West, who threatened her in an effort to extract a confession about committing election fraud.
And if that weren’t enough, video of the pair doing their jobs was hyped up by Rudy Giuliani—and Sean Hannity—who falsely claimed that it showed “blatant, clear, obvious” fraud. While speaking to Georgia State House Republicans about the video during a Zoom meeting in December 2020, Giuliani at one point can be heard saying, “We should try to get this on Newsmax and OANN.”
Freeman and Moss sued Giuliani as well, and that case is ongoing.
That’s it for me. What stories are you following today?
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Some of these anti- Roe crusaders even went so far as to call themselves “new abolitionists,” invoking their antebellum predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery.
But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.
These mean and quite rude zealots are now at the center of what may domino into taking away the rights of GLBT and also, those laws that passed in the 1960s during the civil rights era that ended Jim Crow and the many blocks to full citizenship experienced by Black Americans. Many state governors are already testing the waters to chip away at the now gaping hole in the idea of the right to privacy.
Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.
When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) on Sunday refused to rule out the possibility that his state would ban certain forms of contraception, sidestepping questions about what would happen next if Roe v. Wade is
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Reeves confirmed that, if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, a trigger law passed in Mississippi in 2007 would go into effect that essentially outlaws abortions in the state, although it makes exceptions for rape and for the life of the mother.
When asked if Mississippi might next target the use of contraceptives such as the Plan B pill or intrauterine devices, Reeves demurred, saying that was not what the state was focused on “at this time.”
“My view is that the next phase of the pro-life movement is focusing on helping those moms that maybe have an unexpected and unwanted pregnancy,” Reeves said. “And while I’m sure there will be conversations around America regarding [contraceptives], it’s not something that we have spent a lot of time focused on.”
In other words, bring on the baby mills for healthy white babies and send the rest wherever! Tennesse’s Governor is up to the same Shenanigans!
BB sent me this thread that really states the deep shit our democracy has been buried under. Can we yet rise from the tyranny of a fanatical minority? Happy the decade of killing all mothers! Already I’ve reported people shrieking about baby killers and abortions after birth on Twitter! They deserve no quarter from us.
They need to win the national vote several times in a row by 5+ points to have a shot at breaking even.
Most forecasters look at the 2024 landscape, and don't think there's much of a chance for Democrats to hold the Senate past the 2024 election. 2/n
Because SCOTUS has approved political gerrymanders vis GIll, in most states that ban abortion there is no realistic hope of reversing these bans by voting out the incumbents who put the bans in place.
Only 8% of US House seats are competitive due to gerrymandering. 6/n
The (gerrymandered) state legislature turned around and passed a law requiring felons to prove they have paid all court fees before rights can be restored. Problem is, records in Florida are so sloppy that it is effectively impossible to do so. 8/n
There are VERY few good options for bringing back abortion rights after Dobbs v. Jackson. The US political and legal system is so broken that it is completely immune to the will of the people. A lot of legal minded folks can see the writing on the wall. 10/n
AT the same time, LGBT people are being labeled pedophiles and groomers, our trans children are being taken away by the state, and our existences obscenity. It's not hard to see a future where Texas is has banned SSM again and is yanking kids from loving LGBT homes. 12/n
Other states are passing fetal personhood amendments that would potentially allow states like Texas to reach into blue states where abortion remains legal (e.g. New Mexico) to prosecute doctors in NM who provide abortions to Texans (possibly under the felony murder rule) 14/n
People who don't study this within this analytical framework, but understand broadly that losing Roe v. Wade is bad and it FEELS like we're heading towards the Republic of Gilead, are rightly alarmed: they may not be conscious of all these things, but they sense the trend. 18/n
And there is more to this thread. Go read and realize we are at the end of our country as we have known it. We have a takeover just like the Taliban have taken over Afghanistan again because Donald Trump handed it to them. Just like he tried to hand Ukraine to Russia. He and Mitch McConnell have handed us over to “Charismatic Catholics’ that off-beat brand that 5 justices subscribe to and the leftovers of the so-called Moral Majority. We’re under the sway of theocratic rule and they’ll take it all the way back to where they will use public funds for segregated Christian academies that serve the same purpose that Madrasas serve in Afghanistan.
Young girl with kitten, William Mulready, 1786-1863
Good Afternoon!!
I’m really struggling to get going on a post this morning. Each day this week the despair I’m feeling about the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned has escalated. I go to sleep thinking about it and when I wake up the reality of what is happening hits me again. It feels like the grief I have felt over a death or the end of a relationship. It’s not just the loss of women’s bodily autonomy either–it’s the sense that this will lead to the loss of other rights and then to the end of U.S. democracy.
I read this piece by British economist Umair Haque at Medium yesterday, and I’m not sure how seriously to take it. I do agree with him that Democrats are not fighting hard enough against GOP efforts to turn our country into a patriarchal theocracy.
I warned you the far right was seizing control of our societies. Do you believe me yet? We warned you. Because the list of people who understood this fact is long. It ranges from thinkers like Sarah Kendzior and Jared Sexton and I, to plenty of average, sane people. And yet the warning was ignored. Not just that — but mocked.
I’m going to tell you what comes next for America — and it isn’t pretty — but before I do, it’s worth taking a moment to review how utterly incredible this situation is to someone like me. I study social collapse. I predict social collapse — and I’ve never, ever been wrong about where it will strike. That’s because I’ve lived social collapse, over and over again.
Antonio Rotta, Italian, 1828-1903
And yet even I’ve never — never — seen anything as painfully, jaw-droppingly idiotic as what transpired in America. That’s the only word for it. Even in the societies I’ve seen collapse into theocracy, none of this would have happened. None of what? A member of a fanatical religious cult being appointed to the Supreme Court. An alleged sexual predator. A man whose wife openly plots coups. And then all of the people on our side — the side of democracy — in power insisting that they wouldn’t do what they were obviously going to do.
I have never, ever, ever seen this level of jaw-dropping mind-melting idiocy. Anywhere. From the Islamic World to Eastern Europe and beyond. Think about what it means for a second when someone like me says that.
Even in the most hardcore failed states I’ve seen, appointing these kinds of figures to the Supreme Court — religious nuts, sexual predators, coup-plotters — would not have been normalized. By way of denial. It would have been fought tooth and nail. In many of those nations, frankly, the military would have stepped in to prevent it. I’m not saying that’s a wonderful thing, I’m just saying something would have happened, apart from denial. Because to the entire rest of the goddamned world, it is stroke-inducingly obvious what happens when you appoint religious nutcases, sexual predators, and coup-plotters to the Supreme Court. They try to kill democracy.
I hope you’ll read the article and share your thoughts on it.
Yesterday Dakinikat posted this in the comment thread:
Feels like this has been largely overlooked, but Alito's draft Supreme Court opinion on abortion uses the phrase "domestic supply of infants." It's real, on page 34. DOMESTIC SUPPLY OF INFANTS. pic.twitter.com/VuQWTJ4NHd
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this since I first read it and I’m not alone. Discussions about it have been dominating Twitter this morning.
And keep in mind, the quote in Alito’s footnote comes from a CDC report. Yes, you read it right: “the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life” is a reason to outlaw abortion. Rich couples need a “supply of infants” if they can’t conceive a child. Therefore women who don’t have the means to get an illegal abortion must be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term in order to supply infants to their “betters.” This is human trafficking, and before Roe it was accepted by society. There was an industry that literally stole babies and sold them to rich wannabe parents. It is still happening, but it’s more difficult because of the reduced “domestic supply of infants” post-Roe.
When Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett say, "Domestic Supply of Infants", they mean:
• Human Trafficking • Babies only • 99.8% White babies only
Shyanne Klupp was 20 years old and homeless when she met her boyfriend in 2009. Within weeks, the two had married, and within months, she was pregnant. “I was so excited,” says Klupp. Soon, however, she learned that her new husband was facing serious jail time, and she reluctantly agreed to start looking into how to place their expected child for adoption. The couple called one of the first results that Google spat out: Adoption Network Law Center (ANLC).
Klupp says her initial conversations with ANLC went well; the adoption counselor seemed kind and caring and made her and her husband feel comfortable choosing adoption. ANLC quickly sent them packets of paperwork to fill out, which included questions ranging from personal-health and substance-abuse history to how much money the couple would need for expenses during the pregnancy.
Klupp and her husband entered in the essentials: gas money, food, blankets and the like. She remembers thinking, “I’m not trying to sell my baby.” But ANLC, she says, pointed out that the prospective adoptive parents were rich. “That’s not enough,” Klupp recalls her counselor telling her. “You can ask for more.” So the couple added maternity clothes, a new set of tires, and money for her husband’s prison commissary account, Klupp says. Then, in January 2010, she signed the initial legal paperwork for adoption, with the option to revoke. (In the U.S., an expectant mother has the right to change her mind anytime before birth, and after for a period that varies state by state. While a 2019 bill proposing an explicit federal ban of the sale of children failed in Congress, many states have such statutes and the practice is generally considered unlawful throughout the country.)
François Aimé Louis Dumoulin, Self portrait, age 79
Klupp says she had recurring doubts about her decision. But when she called her ANLC counselor to ask whether keeping the child was an option, she says, “they made me feel like, if I backed out, then the adoptive parents were going to come after me for all the money that they had spent.” That would have been thousands of dollars. In shock, Klupp says, she hung up and never broached the subject again. The counselor, who no longer works with the company, denies telling Klupp she would have to pay back any such expense money. But Klupp’s then roommates—she had found housing at this point—both recall her being distraught over the prospect of legal action if she didn’t follow through with the adoption. She says she wasn’t aware that an attorney, whose services were paid for by the adoptive parents, represented her.
“I will never forget the way my heart sank,” says Klupp. “You have to buy your own baby back almost.” Seeing no viable alternative, she ended up placing her son, and hasn’t seen him since he left the hospital 11 years ago.
That’s how it works. In the old days, families sent their pregnant daughters to homes for unwed mothers, where their infants were taken at birth and passed on to adoption agencies. Read more about the adoption industry at the Time link. It’s a long article and well worth reading for background on the attitudes of people like Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett. The Handmaid’s Tale is not far from reality.
In the bad old days:
Amy Coney Barrett’s “domestic supply of infants” is reminiscent of a time in America when you could buy a Native child for $10 — no questions asked. pic.twitter.com/GLhUcRBlqS
It is essential that we recognise the trauma of forcing people to carry pregnancies to term and the issue with promoting adoption as the “simple” solution to parenting. If Barett’s views were to become the precedent for women and pregnant persons who do not wish to carry a child, we are turning into a society that is no better than The Handmaid’s Tale. We must consider the consequences of how the United States’s previous stance on abortion threw us into the Baby Scoop Era, where 1.5 million pregnant women and girls were sent to maternity homes to remain pregnant in secret until the baby was born and placed into adoption whether the mother approved or not.
Annual adoption numbers in the States have plummeted from 175,000 in the 1970s to around 125,000 in recent years. With over a million families looking to adopt (mostly infants) it is a recipe for disaster for this struggling business. Adoptive parents in the US typically pay between $20,000 to $45,000 for domestic private adoptions and between $15,000 to $40,000 for independent adoptions, while foster care adoptions are generally much less. We are facing an era where those in positions of power are pushing adoption for questionable reasons: a Supreme Court Justice who benefited personally from adoption is the perfect example of how white saviorism and toxic positivity in the adoption industry can encourage unethical policies and laws.
To suggest safe haven laws as the optimal solution, we are also ignoring the trauma of placing a child for adoption and the overarching effect that it will have not just on the birth parent, but current or future siblings, grandparents, and other family members. Adoption does not erase a child’s or parents’ genetic and biological desire to connect with not only their family members, but their culture as well. It does not erase the pain of a birth parent being separated from their flesh and blood. It does not negate the risk of pregnancy and birth complications that Black and Indigenous women are more likely to die from.
As an adoptee I have felt the trauma of not just being placed for adoption from a country that banned abortions, but the intergenerational wounds of my birth mother placing not just one, but three of her children for adoption. Abandonment, (or more gently put, placement of a child for adoption) is a traumatic event for children that can jeopardize a child’s development. It can also deeply wound families. From my birth mother, to myself, to my half-siblings that were adopted into a different family, to the children my birth mother parented, we have all been deeply affected by adoption.
In 2015, the Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “We will never see a day when women of means are not able to get a safe abortion in this country.” If you have paid attention to mainstream progressive politics in recent years, you have likely heard some version of this message: that privileged women — middle- and upper-class women, cis women, white women — are not going to experience much of a change to their circumstances when Roe v. Wade goes. In September 2021, on the day Texas’s sweeping anti-abortion law, SB8, went into effect, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts asserted that “when abortion is illegal, rich women still get abortions. Women with resources still get abortions.” It has become common wisdom, so much so that a December article on Bloomberg Law confidently predicted that “restrictive abortion laws will have little effect on professional women or those in their orbit.” [….]
But as we teeter on the threshold of the post-Roe world, it’s worth considering that the message that privileged women will be just fine is inaccurate and that its repetition, while well meaning, is counterproductive to the task of readying an unprepared public for massive and terrifying shifts on the horizon. It’s worth pointing out that it is simply not true that the reproductive options of white, middle-class, and even wealthy people are going to remain the same. Because while circumstances will certainly be graver and more perilous for the already vulnerable, the reality is that everything is about to change, for everyone, in one way or another, and to muffle that alarm is an error, factually, practically, and politically….
Anticipation, Victor Gabriel Gilbert 1847-1933 Frankrijk
Today, unlike in the early 1970s, we have mifepristone and misoprostol, pills that are available by mail and are safe and effective in inducing abortions, which are then indistinguishable from miscarriages. Lots of people in lots of places can end their pregnancies in medically safe ways that do not entail dirty coat hangers. However, now that there are widespread means of delivering abortifacients, anti-abortion crusaders are intent on criminalizing their use. Which means the frightening new questions are not simply about access but about whether people who take these pills, or the people who provide them, will be prosecuted, fined, and put in jail for doing so. In any criminal-justice context, it is true that people of color and poor people will still suffer more, but do not underestimate anger at abortion seekers of all races — including white women of privilege — who attempt to assert independence and reproductive autonomy.
For the really rich, it is true: Traveling to get an abortion and evading prosecution will more or less be a cinch. But the chasm between really rich and everyone else gets deeper every day, and it is simply not true that a suburban white mom of three in Missouri or the teenage daughter of well-off Christian conservatives in Alabama will be in a position to get the abortion she needs when she needs it with ease and without risk to herself, her family, or the people willing to help her. Even crossing to another state to obtain an abortion may entail legal jeopardy as states consider various means to prohibit and criminalize abortion travel.
Again, please read the whole thing if you have time.
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?
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
Rep. Adam Schiff on why he has called for the Supreme Court to be expanded: "I think the court is now the most unrepresentative body in the United States." pic.twitter.com/xJ7WKIH1Vt
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.
To think, the Supreme Court is acting like they’re under assault by placing additional barricades. When in fact, it's women who are under attack by SCOTUS. pic.twitter.com/2YVDpDKmtv
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.
Susan Collins a NO on D bill to codify abortion rights. Says it’s too broad and “doesn’t protect the right of a Catholic hospitals to not perform abortions. That right has been enshrined in law for a long time.” She voted against similar bill in Feb. The bill will stall next week
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.
Breaking: Documents ordered declassified by Biden – Saudis Directly Tied to 9/11: Declassified Documents https://t.co/0No5vTKrhq
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.
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!!!!!
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
We have passed another horrific milestone in the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. One million Americans have now died from the virus. ABC News: 
“I believe that eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades,” she said in response to a question at a Senate Banking Committee hearing.
“The individual motivations for the leaks ranged from advancing a preferred policy outcome to enhancing the leaker’s own role or credentials to currying favor with the president. It was a noxious behavior learned from the top. The president was the biggest leaker of all. It turned colleague against colleague, department against department, and it was generally bad for the administration and the country,” Esper wrote in 
Good Day Sky Dancers!
These mean and quite rude zealots are now at the center of what may domino into taking away the rights of GLBT and also, those laws that passed in the 1960s during the civil rights era that ended Jim Crow and the many blocks to full citizenship experienced by Black Americans. Many state governors are already testing the waters to chip away at the now gaping hole in the idea of the right to privacy.
So, chipping away at birth control has started in Mississippi. 
Good Day Sky Dancers!
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.
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