And another day of SCOTUS limiting the EPA, blocking patients from crossing state lines, implications of Thomas’ press freedom dissent, AL cites abortion ruling in trans medication case, predicting crimes a week in advance, and FL sets felons up to commit voting crimes comes to a close:
“Trump's unprecedented politicization of the Secret Service (making a senior agent his deputy chief of staff and doing it in a way that he could then go back to the Service) followed the classic authoritarian playbook of co-opting and corrupting the presidential security services.” — Bill Kristol
“People saying “don’t vote, it doesn’t help:” this is how Trump won in 2016 by 77k votes, and appointed the 3 justices who overturned Roe and more. Want to see how much worse things can get, be apathetic and let Republicans take majorities. This hand wringing is a fool’s errand.” — Amy Siskind
"Let me also say this to the little girls and to the young women who are watching tonight – these days, for the most part, men are running the world and it is really not going that well." -- Rep. Liz Cheney
Deaths
US: 1,042,678 (+387)
World: 6,357,864 (+1698)
Cases
US: 89,360,080 (+123,631)
World: 552,586,175 (+903,517)
Supreme Court limits EPA in curbing power plant emissions. In a blow to the fight against climate change, the Supreme Court on Thursday limited how the nation’s main anti-air pollution law can be used to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. By a 6-3 vote, with conservatives in the majority, the court said that the Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency broad authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that contribute to global warming. The court’s ruling could complicate the administration’s plans to combat climate change. Its proposal to regulate power plant emissions is expected by the end of the year. — We didn’t need the planet, anyway. We don’t need clean air or clean water. Profits need to be made, and to Hell with everything else.
Supreme Court allows Biden to end Trump-era 'Remain in Mexico' policy. The policy required people seeking asylum at the southern border to wait in Mexico while their claims were decided.
“Well, now, there's a surprise: The Biden administration can stop the remain-in-Mexico policy on migrants seeking asylum, says the Supreme Court. A rare decision this term that is not a savaging of rights and safety.” — The Rude Pundit
“Be very clear — the people who bought the Supreme Court just got everything they paid for and more.” — Kaivan Shroff
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could give state legislatures broad, unchecked power over federal elections. The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear a case that could dramatically change how federal elections are conducted. At issue is a legal theory that would give state legislatures unfettered authority to set the rules for federal elections, free of supervision by the state courts and state constitutions.
Supreme Court takes up power of state legislatures to decide election-related issues. At the heart of the case is an idea gaining support among conservatives, known at the independent legislature theory: the notion that state legislatures have the sole power to set the rules for elections and that their decisions cannot be reviewed by state courts. Former President Donald Trump’s supporters advocated that position during disputes over the 2020 presidential election, for example, saying state courts had no authority to modify the rules for casting ballots by mail. Those arguments did not prevail, but at least four members of the U.S. Supreme Court found them to have some appeal. In the case now before the court, a victory for the North Carolina Republicans “would radically alter the power of state courts to rein in state legislatures that violate voting rights in federal elections,” said Rick Hasen, a professor and an election law expert at the University of California at Irvine. “It could essentially neuter the ability of state courts to protect voters under provisions of state constitutions against infringement of their rights.” -- Will 2024 be the last time America has free and fair elections? One never knows if the vote they just cast will be their last one. The freedom to vote can be taken away in an instant.
Hutchinson was 1 of the witnesses Trump world sought to influence, sources say. Hutchinson's security was a grave concern of the committee leading up to their hearing. It was part of why they kept her identity secret leading up to the meeting.
How life-threatening must a pregnancy be to end it legally? New abortion bans make exceptions for cases in which the mother’s life is at stake. Doctors wonder which threats are serious enough to absolve them of legal risk. Most abortion bans that have gone into effect since Friday or will become law soon make exceptions for life-threatening situations that arise in pregnancy. But there’s no clear legal definition of which conditions qualify for those exceptions, or how severe they have to be for a doctor to perform an abortion free of liability.
Antiabortion lawmakers want to block patients from crossing state lines. Several national antiabortion groups and their allies in Republican-led state legislatures are advancing plans to stop people in states where abortion is banned from seeking the procedure elsewhere...“Just because you jump across a state line doesn’t mean your home state doesn’t have jurisdiction,” said Peter Breen, vice president and senior counsel for the Thomas More Society. “It’s not a free abortion card when you drive across the state line.” -- They want Gilead to be real. That’s their goal.
In Texas, state-funded crisis pregnancy centers gave medical misinformation to NBC News producers seeking counseling. Across the U.S., more than 2,500 crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) provide free services and counseling for women struggling with unplanned pregnancies. They outnumber abortion clinics 3 to 1 nationwide, and as some states shutter clinics after Roe’s reversal, that ratio will grow. But when two NBC News producers visited state-funded CPCs in Texas to ask for counseling, counselors told them that abortions caused mental illness and implied abortions could also cause cancer and infertility. The nation’s largest national obstetricians’ group, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, says that’s medical misinformation. — WTAF? The right lives by lies.
12-Year-Old Incest Victims Should Birth Dad’s Child, House Speaker Gunn Says. Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn says abortion should be illegal even for a 12-year-old rape victim carrying her father or uncle’s child…“No, (the law) does not include an exception for incest,” Gunn said. “I don’t know that that will be changed.” “Do you think the Legislature should revisit that?” Pettus asked. “Personally, no. I do not,” Gunn said. “I believe life begins at conception. Every life is valuable. And those are my personal beliefs.” (Child pregnancies carry significantly higher health risks than adult pregnancies.) Daily Journal reporter Taylor Vance pressed Gunn further. “So that 12-year-old child molested by her family members should carry that pregnancy to term?” he asked. “That is my personal belief. I believe life begins at conception,” Gunn said. — These people are not pro-life. They want a domestic supply of (white) infants. This is some dystopian nightmare shit we’re living in.
The Roe ruling is not about states’ rights. It’s about power and control. Yet the anti-abortion wings of the supreme court, Congress and state legislatures are not scrambling to ensure just conditions for pregnancy and childbirth, nor child-rearing. This group espouses views and supports policies that ban racial justice education; prohibits trans kids from sports teams and bathrooms; refuses dollars for healthcare and unemployment; and expands police power. These are all efforts to restrict bodily autonomy and create hostile living conditions to preserve racial, gender, sexual, and economic hierarchies. Dobbs is about more than states’ rights and “protecting life”. It is about power and control. I completely understand the impulse to blame the supreme court’s logic on Christianity or the societal hatred of women. Rightwing evangelicalism is a bullet train that transports homophobia, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, and more across the world. However, in addition to the social awareness of these interlocking forms of oppression, we must understand that decisions like Dobbs also lead to material losses beyond individual privacy rights and bodily autonomy. Institutions and individuals benefit from our loss of agency.
The frightening implications of Justice Thomas’ press freedom dissent. Thomas’ dissent should not be overlooked. His words signal a direct assault on the public’s need to know the activities of their legislatures, courts and other public servants. When we eliminate the safeguards that allow the media to seek and report the truth, we infringe upon the public’s right to know the truth. It’s a violation of our constitutionally protected right to free press. It is a continuation of a growing movement to impede the essential work of journalists. -- Justice Thomas is a danger to America and to democracy.
Jackson sworn in, becomes 1st Black woman on Supreme Court. Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in to the Supreme Court on Thursday, shattering a glass ceiling as the first Black woman on the nation’s highest court. The 51-year-old Jackson is the court’s 116th justice, and she took the place of the justice she once worked for. Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement was effective at noon.
Alabama cites abortion ruling in transgender medication case. Days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states can prohibit abortion, Alabama has seized on the decision to argue that the state should also be able to ban gender-affirming medical treatments for transgender youths. The case marks one of the first known instances in which a conservative state has tried to apply the abortion ruling to other realms, just as LGBTQ advocates and others were afraid would happen.
WHO: COVID-19 cases rising nearly everywhere in the world. The number of new coronavirus cases rose by 18% in the last week, with more than 4.1 million cases reported globally, according to the World Health Organization. The U.N. health agency said in its latest weekly report on the pandemic that the worldwide number of deaths remained relatively similar to the week before, at about 8,500. COVID-related deaths increased in three regions: the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the Americas.
Justice Thomas cites debunked claim that Covid vaccines are made with cells from 'aborted children'. In a sharply worded dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas expressed support Thursday for a debunked claim that all Covid vaccines are made with cells from “aborted children.” His dissent came in a decision by the Supreme Court to not take up a legal challenge by New York health care workers who opposed the state’s vaccine mandate on religious grounds. — In addition to being a traitor, Justice Thomas is a whack job.
COVID-19 at Wimbledon: 3 top-20 men out after positive tests. At Wimbledon, where the All England Club is following British government guidance that requires neither shots nor testing, three of the top 20 seeded men have withdrawn over the first four days of action because they got COVID-19, with No. 17 Roberto Bautista Agut pulling out Thursday. That’s raised the specter of an outbreak among players at the Grand Slam tournament, where there essentially is an honor system: If you don’t feel well, you’re encouraged to get a test on your own; if you test positive, you’re encouraged to reveal that and take yourself out of the bracket.
Greg Abbott blames Joe Biden for migrant deaths, but the governor’s own border security efforts have fallen short. To immigration experts, the astounding loss of life inside the same kind of commercial vehicle Abbott had targeted in his inspections illustrates just how difficult it is to stem migration into the country, even as he has spent the last year pouring billions of state dollars into securing the border.
Florida gave voting rights to people with felony convictions. Now some face charges for voting. In 2018, nearly two-thirds of Florida voters approved Amendment 4, which restores voting rights to most people with felony convictions who have completed the terms of their sentence. The amendment originally restored the right to vote to roughly 1.4 million people. But, shortly after the election, the GOP-controlled Legislature passed a law requiring that people with felony convictions pay off all fines, fees, and restitution associated with their sentence before they are eligible to register to vote. After GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the law in June 2019, roughly 774,000 people who would have been eligible to vote were no longer allowed…Florida has no centralized system for someone with a felony conviction to determine whether they owe fines or court costs. For a person with a record in multiple counties, determining eligibility would require contacting multiple county clerks, some of whom lack written record of how much money people owe…More voters could also be charged with illegal voting as the investigation continues. And advocates fear that, like Bolton, those who could be arrested may have no idea they’re even committing a crime. — The system Florida uses is not an accident. It all works as designed.
San Antonio’s Migrant Tragedy Shows There’s No Limit to GOP Opportunism. But that hasn’t stopped Republican politicians and anti-immigration demagogues from seizing on the dreadful event to blame the loss of lives on President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, which they describe, inaccurately, as “open borders.” It was, in fact, another inevitable consequence of the deadly and ineffective legacy of decades of both Republican and Democrat policies of “prevention through deterrence” and militarized borders. Nonetheless, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s former senior adviser and a heartless anti-immigrant crusader who fostered the infamous zero-tolerance policy that separated families at the border, attributed the “incomprehensible tragedy” to “vile, monstrous and utterly depraved” open border policies that, according to his twisted reasoning, are somehow “pro-smuggling, pro-cartel.” It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: this line of reasoning makes no sense…Still, the chorus of Republicans exploiting this event included a number of those whose very policies and anti-immigrant stance have contributed to a deadlier border…To be clear: closed borders are causing people to die. That has been the case for decades as violence and death as a means to prevent migration have been factored into policies that have largely failed to manage migration flows in the long run, but have succeeded in producing casualties. As long as anti-immigrant hardliners and different administrations continue to advocate for tough-on-border policies and further militarization, the same outcome will repeat itself. As Jean Guerrero wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “The border has become a mass grave and a testament to the decades-long inhumanity and irrationality of US border and immigration policies.”
How We Fight Back When Officials Resist Releasing Information You Have a Right to Know. Texas agencies have fought against releasing records that could help clarify the response to the Uvalde school shooting. The blanket denials are reminiscent of another tragic case one reporter covered years ago…The resulting fight showed me how guarded city officials can be and how sometimes when a reporter is fighting for information in the public interest, there’s more at stake than what’s in any given document.
Shortage of beds in state mental hospitals delays treatment in North Texas. Hundreds of prisoners in the Dallas County jail are waiting more than two years for a bed in a state mental hospital.
New Algorithm Can Predict Crime in US Cities a Week Before It Happens. The algorithm, which was formulated by social scientists at the University of Chicago and touts 90% accuracy, divides cities into 1,000-square-foot tiles, according to a study published in Nature Human Behavior. Researchers used historical data on violent crimes and property crimes from Chicago to test the model, which detects patterns over time in these tiled areas tries to predict future events. It performed just as well using data from other big cities, including Atlanta, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, the study showed.
Police sweep Google searches to find suspects. The tactic is facing its first legal challenge. Privacy advocates are watching the case closely, concerned that police could use reverse keyword searches to investigate people who seek information about abortions.
California sets nation’s toughest plastics reduction rules. Companies selling shampoo, food and other products wrapped in plastic have a decade to cut down on their use of the polluting material if they want their wares on California store shelves. Major legislation passed and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday aims to significantly reduce single-use plastic packaging in the state and drastically boost recycling rates for what remains. It sets the nation’s most stringent requirements for the use of plastic packaging, with lawmakers saying they hope it sets a precedent for other states to follow.
Pair of orcas targeting great white sharks off South Africa’s coast. A pair of orcas drove great white sharks away from a stretch of South African coast after killing five sharks over just a few months in 2017, according to a new study.
Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.
Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.
