And another day of Russian election interference, the 25th Amendment, 1M US Covid deaths, liver damage in kids, Lake Powell, Southern CA not having enough water for summer, a public university makes drastic cuts, Cawthorn, and more on abortion comes to a close:
“This is a very conservative court that is increasingly out of step with mainstream public opinion, and there’s no real mechanism to change that.” — Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux
“Outlawing abortion, criminalizing gender-affirming care, banning books...The GOP is not the party of limited government. It’s not the party of "freedom," either. It's the party of social control.” — Robert Reich
“Never forget: They feign shock to avoid accountability.”— Sarah Kendzior
Deaths
US: 1,023,513 (+1932)
World: 6,269,507 (+3710)
Cases
US: 83,356,490 (+116,389)
World: 515,327,840 (+674,619)
Trump official interfered in report on Russian election meddling. Chad Wolf, Donald Trump’s acting secretary of homeland security, interfered with a report on Russian interference in the 2020 election by demanding changes, delaying its dissemination and creating a risk the report might be seen as politicised, a government watchdog said.
Report: Kevin McCarthy Suggested Invoking the 25th Amendment to Oust Trump. New leaked audio reveals just how close Republican leadership came to supporting the movement to oust former President Donald Trump in the days after the January 6 attack on the Capitol...Publicly, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has toed the party line, but behind closed doors, he brainstormed ways to remove Trump from office. “What the president did is atrocious and totally wrong,” McCarthy said in a call on January 8, 2021.
AP evidence points to 600 dead in Mariupol theater airstrike. Amid all the horrors that have unfolded in the war on Ukraine, the Russian bombing of the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater in Mariupol on March 16 stands out as the single deadliest known attack against civilians to date.
Samuel Alito's Antiabortion Inspiration: A 17th-Century Jurist Who Supported Marital Rape and Had Women Executed. The Supreme Court justice wants to turn the U.S. into a dystopian hellscape where women are property—and he’s not stopping there…Yes, Alito literally quoted this guy, who was born in 1609, as a defense for ending Roe v. Wade in 2022…“You don’t need to read too far between the lines of Alito’s draft to see a rationale for overturning or weakening Griswold (the right to contraception) Obergefell (same-sex marriage) Loving (interracial marriage) Lawrence (consensual sex acts).” Incidentally, it was less than a month ago that GOP senator Mike Braun said that states should be allowed to ban interracial marriage (before claiming he misunderstood the question that led to him saying such a thing multiple times).
It's impossible to wall off reversing Roe from landmark marriage and contraception rulings. Alito himself voted against the right to same-sex marriage when that case was decided in 2015…"Left to his own devices, Justice Alito would happily welcome challenges to many of the Court's foundational fundamental rights decisions," said Leah Litman, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School. "The critiques he levels at Roe -- it's not in the constitutional text; there aren't early state constitutional provisions or early state or federal court decisions recognizing the right -- apply to those other rights, and he'd happily overrule them if he could."…And while Alito and lawyers for Mississippi tread very carefully, one lawyer writing a friend of the court brief on behalf of Texas Right to Life did not. Jonathan F. Mitchell -- the architect of Texas' six-week ban -- did not mince his words in a friend of the court brief filed in the Mississippi case in support of the law…Mitchell allowed that the court could overturn Roe without "cutting the legs from under" Loving v. Virginia, which he said is defensible under the Civil Rights Act of 1866. But he added: "The news is not as good for those who hope to preserve the court-invented rights to homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage." He said the court did not have to overrule those decisions if it decided to overturn Roe. "But neither should the court hesitate to write an opinion that leaves those decisions hanging by a thread," he concluded, calling them "as lawless as Roe." — The Republican Party is a fascist party.
The biggest health risks women would face if Roe v. Wade is overturned. Research suggests the bans and restrictions would have manifold effects on maternal health. For one, if more pregnant people can't get the abortions they seek, they'd shoulder the risk of the U.S.'s relatively high — and rising — rate of death from pregnancy-related causes, which is particularly elevated among people of color. "There are going to be women that will die from pregnancy because of this decision, period.”...In addition, pregnant people would face the risk of prosecution for seeking to end pregnancies in states where abortion is banned, and research has shown that unwanted pregnancies have many harmful long-term consequences for mothers, including a higher chance of financial hardship and a severe toll on mental health. -- None of these deaths will bother Republicans because Republicans are not “pro-life.” They are only “pro-birth.”
What Would Striking Down Roe v. Wade Mean For The Midterms? This is a very conservative court that is increasingly out of step with mainstream public opinion, and there’s no real mechanism to change that.
Democrats, Stop Telling Us to "Just Vote" to Save Abortion Rights. The morning after Americans learned they will likely lose their governmentally-enshrined right to reproductive autonomy, President Joe Biden told them to get out and vote. Even though Supreme Court appointees aren’t democratically elected; even though his party controls the White House and Congress, the other two-thirds of the government’s system of checks and balances; even though some argue that former liberals on the court fumbled the bag by not handing off power; even though there are already plenty of elected abortion rights supporters in Congress who still weren’t able to stop this. No, the Democrats woke up in power and only remembered how to blame the people that got them there, rather than take any responsibility…All this instead of focusing on the real problem, which is that the Democrats remain impotent despite all the power they’ve gained, and unwilling to actually hold their party members to the promises they’ve made.
With abortion in jeopardy, minority women have most to lose. If you are Black or Hispanic in a conservative state that already limits access to abortions, you are far more likely than a white woman to have one. And if the U.S. Supreme Court allows states to further restrict or even ban abortions, minority women who already face limited access to health care will bear the brunt of it, according to statistics analyzed by The Associated Press.
America doesn’t have a real democracy. The Roe v Wade draft opinion proves it. Opinion polls have long shown conclusively that the public supports abortion rights — but Republicans have made sure we have a system that doesn’t reflect what the public wants.
The Far Right Is Already Celebrating the End of Abortion. The far-right is celebrating what it sees as the impending collapse of abortion rights in the U.S., labeling women “witches” and “whores” and declaring “Christ is King” across social media. “Christ is King” is a familiar phrase in Christianity, especially the Catholic Church, but it’s been co-opted recently by “America First” Christian ultra-nationalists, who have chanted it at political rallies and anti-abortion marches and used it as a rallying cry online. Now it’s being used to signify support for the demise of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide, after Politico published a leaked draft opinion by the Supreme Court Monday. The document revealed that a majority of the justices voted to overturn the landmark case…The far-right have been able to make those inroads by riding the wave of Christian nationalist ideology that swelled during Donald Trump’s presidency. Christian nationalists worship Trump as a Christlike figure and believe America is an inherently Christian nation. They’ve framed contentious social and political issues—voting rights, abortion, transgender healthcare, LGBTQ rights, vaccines, and “critical race theory”—as primordial battles between good and evil that threaten not only Christian values but American values…Many of the far-right accounts that have weighed in on Roe v. Wade since Monday night have also not held back from using explicitly misogynistic, violent language that promotes tired tropes about women and sexual purity. — The American Taliban.
As US poised to restrict abortion, other nations ease access. As women in the United States find themselves on the verge of possibly losing the constitutional right to abortion, courts in many other parts of the world have been moving in the opposite direction. That includes in a number of traditionally conservative societies — such as recently in Colombia, where the Constitutional Court in February legalized the procedure until the 24th week of pregnancy, part of a broader trend seen in parts of heavily Catholic Latin America.
Trump’s Justices Bullshitted Us on Abortion. Is Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision ensuring abortion rights, the “settled law” of the United States? Judging from the draft opinion leaked Monday night, former President Donald Trump’s nominees to the high court sure don’t think so. But that’s not the answer they gave during their confirmation hearings, when all three Trump-appointed justices attempted to reassure Congress and the public that pro-choice advocates had nothing to fear. — Republicans lie. They always lie. They lie more than Democrats. But the worst part is that they fuck the country over with their lies.
LGBTQ people fear abortion rights reversal. Some LGBTQ people fear the reversal of abortion rights protections would have far-reaching impacts — both on their health and other rights such as marriage equality.
Covid's toll in the U.S. reaches a once unfathomable number: 1 million deaths. 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..."This is far from over.” -- And so few people still care.
'They're still coming': More cases of unusual liver damage in kids reported. At least 228 such cases have been reported in 20 countries, she said. Ten percent of the children have needed liver transplants. The usual suspects, hepatitis viruses A through E, have been ruled out. Children are not showing up with evidence of Covid-19, and most are too young to have received the Covid vaccines.
Editorial: Look. I don’t care that Madison Cawthorn likes to dress in women’s clothing. I don’t care that Madison Cawthorn likes men. I don’t care that there is video of him and his cousin naked in bed together and Cawthorn shoving his dick in his cousin’s face. I don’t care what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own relationships. I do care, though, that Madison Cawthorn has attacked the entire LGBTQ+ community. I’m sure this is all GOP payback for him outing the GOP cocaine orgies.
Dr. Oz's vote in 2018 Turkish election renews criticism. But a photograph of Oz casting a ballot in Turkey's 2018 presidential election is rankling some national security experts -- particularly after recently saying he has "never been politically involved in Turkey in any capacity."..."Any single one of those would be enough to torpedo a [security] clearance," McClanahan said. "Taken together, I would not put good odds on that person getting a clearance anywhere."
Fed issues biggest rate hike in 22 years. The Federal Reserve said Wednesday it is raising interest rates by a half-percentage point to get a handle on the worst inflation America has seen in 40 years. -- Let’s be clear: inflation is currently a global problem. It is not unique to the US. It is not Biden’s fault. It is also temporary. Losing rights is not temporary. Keep perspective.
U.S. takes unprecedented steps to replenish Colorado River’s Lake Powell. Water levels at Lake Powell are so low as to endanger the production of hydroelectric power for seven Western states.
Officials worry Southern California won’t have enough water to get through summer without unprecedented cuts. As Southern Californians brace for unprecedented water restrictions, officials worry some communities won’t have enough water to get through the summer – at least not without residents and businesses significantly cutting back on their usage. The state’s top natural resources officer told CNN that California’s water emergency clearly shows the climate crisis in action. “Some would consider this a wake-up call. I disagree,” Wade Crowfoot, California’s secretary for natural resources, told CNN. “The alarm’s already gone off.”
University Seeks to Cut 67 Faculty, 44 of Them Tenured. The administration of Henderson State University, [a public university] in Arkansas, on Monday proposed cutting 67 faculty jobs, 44 of them held by tenured professors. The university also seeks to eliminate another 21 positions that are unfilled. In addition, the university would eliminate all part-time and adjunct positions. Twenty-four majors would be eliminated under the plan, including English, history, political science, biology, chemistry and mathematics. New “meta-majors” will be created in health, education and social sustainability, applied professional science and technology, business innovation and entrepreneurship, and arts and humanities.
Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.
Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.
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