And another day of texts, Russian atrocities, 3 words from the Supreme Court, ID’s GOP platform, pregnant women can’t divorce in MO, Cruz goes after same-sex marriage, ‘systemic failures’ at Uvalde, hot temps, eliminating the DOE, conservative activists taking over school boards, and penalizing the homeless comes to a close:
“Every religion has violent extremists, but there's only one people are afraid to call out.” — Brandon Friedman
“To recap: a Republican Senator blocked Democrats’ bill giving women the right to travel across state lines for an abortion. So Republicans want to ensure that women cannot escape places where abortion is illegal even when the life of the woman is at risk or she’s been raped.” — Neera Tanden
“The MAGA Republican Party wants politicians involved in decisions about
- marriage
- abortion
- school curricula
- which books you can read
- contraception
- what teachers can teach
Elect Republicans if you think you have too much personal freedom.” — Dan Pfeiffer
"Liberty, once lost, is lost forever. " — John Adams
Deaths
US: 1,048,843
World: 6,387,680
Cases
US: 91,275,149
World: 567,715,187
January 6 committee’s investigation stirs up fresh revelations ahead of last planned hearing. The corroboration comes as the committee plans to zero in on Trump’s conduct on January 6, 2021 at its hearing next week, which will focus on Trump’s response – or lack thereof – as rioters breached the Capitol walls and forced lawmakers to flee their chambers...The committee announced Friday that it would hold the hearing on Thursday, July 21 at 8 p.m. ET. -- If you still support Donald Trump specifically, or the GOP in general, then you are a traitor to the United States of America.
Jan. 6 panel expects to get Secret Service texts by Tuesday, says new witnesses will appear in next hearing. Thursday's public hearing will focus on what the panel is calling the crucial “187 minutes” — the time it took for Trump to urge his supporters to leave the Capitol after the attack began.
Trump Tells Team He Needs to Be President Again to Save Himself from Criminal Probes. When Donald Trump formally declares his 2024 candidacy, he won’t just be running for another term in the White House. He’ll be running away from legal troubles, possible criminal charges, and even the specter of prison time. In recent months, Trump has made clear to associates that the legal protections of occupying the Oval Office are front-of-mind for him, four people with knowledge of the situation tell Rolling Stone. Trump has “spoken about how when you are the president of the United States, it is tough for politically motivated prosecutors to ‘get to you,” says one of the sources, who has discussed the issue with Trump this summer. “He says when [not if] he is president again, a new Republican administration will put a stop to the [Justice Department] investigation that he views as the Biden administration working to hit him with criminal charges — or even put him and his people in prison.” -- Our system is so screwed up.
Response to Moscow Mechanism Report on Ukraine. That’s why today’s efforts at accountability are so important. Today’s Moscow Mechanism report gives us an opportunity to pull back and document the unconscionable atrocity crimes, human rights violations, and abuses members of Russia’s forces have committed since Russia launched its brutal full-scale invasion in February of this year in an attempt to seize additional territory from Ukraine…Colleagues, this report was harrowing to read. The scale of Russia’s atrocities is vast. For example, the mission cited “abundant” reports of women and girls being raped and sexually abused by Russia’s armed forces (p. 90). The report mentions the case of 23-year-old Karina Yershova in Bucha who was abducted, raped, tortured, and finally shot dead by Russian troops. The report also highlights a report by Commissioner for Human Rights Denisova that 25 girls aged 14 to 24 were kept in a basement in Bucha and gang-raped by Russian troops, resulting in nine becoming pregnant (p. 91). The report also states that a one-year-old boy was sexually abused and a 78-year-old woman was raped by Russian troops (p. 94)…Yet despite this clear prohibition, the report notes that more than 1.3 million Ukrainian civilians are reported to have been deported against their will to Russia, including more than 200,000 children (p. 72). — Evil lives. There is so much more mentioned than just this. All of it is horrifying. We are literally watching history repeat.
How the Supreme Court recalibrated the abortion debate in just 3 words. “Unborn human being” is the term Associate Justice Samuel Alito adopted from the Mississippi statute, thereby replacing the key phrase in the landmark 1973 Roe ruling that spelled out a constitutional right to abortion: “potential life.” It may seem like a semantic argument. Experts say it’s anything but. Alito didn’t write God or Christianity or Bible anywhere in the opinion, but his justification is a veiled “religious narrative,” said Rebecca Todd Peters, a religious studies professor at Elon University. By co-opting the language in Mississippi’s law in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the majority opinion gives credence to the notion – embraced largely by the religious right – that life begins at fertilization, she said. The ruling has already emboldened several states to ban and criminalize the medical procedure in almost all circumstances. “That is an enormous shift,” Peters said. “It erases whole groups of people who have different religious beliefs.” -- Republicans are all about erasing groups of people who are different from them.
Abortion laws spark profound changes in other medical care. A sexual assault survivor chooses sterilization so that if she is ever attacked again, she won’t be forced to give birth to a rapist’s baby. An obstetrician delays inducing a miscarriage until a woman with severe pregnancy complications seems “sick enough.” A lupus patient must stop taking medication that controls her illness because it can also cause miscarriages. Abortion restrictions in a number of states and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade are having profound repercussions in reproductive medicine as well as in other areas of medical care. -- These are dark days to be an American.
No exception for life of mother included in Idaho GOP’s abortion platform language. By a nearly four-to-one margin, Idaho Republicans at the state party’s convention in Twin Falls rejected an amendment to the party platform on Saturday that would have provided an exception for a mother who has an abortion to safe her life…Herndon’s proposal also included updates to the abortion section of the platform that addressed the U.S. Supreme Court, adding, “Idaho has the sovereign authority to defy the federal judiciary should they once again propose the fiction that abortion is a federal constitutional right.” The platform also includes a new section saying the party believes parents, not the state, have a sacred duty and right to rear their children in the manner they see fit. It also said the party believes a child’s gender assigned at birth to be an essential characteristic of identity and purpose…The approved platform also includes language stating the party’s primary should be open to all people who affiliated as Republicans at least one year before the primary election and support a “vast majority” of the party platform. There is also a new section of the platform stating the party supports the repeal of the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gives Congress the power to levy and collect income taxes. At the same time, the platform also includes a section on judicial interpretation, stating that the party opposes any interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and Idaho Constitution that is not rooted in textualism and originalism. The platform “emphatically affirms” that judges have a duty to interpret statutory terms to mean what they conveyed to reasonable people at the time they were written. — You read all that correctly. It sounds like ID Republicans are looking to secede from the union.
Pregnant Women Can't Get Divorced in Missouri. Drake also points out what seems to be a double standard in regards to how the state treats an unborn child in a divorce proceeding compared to in abortion law. She says that the whole basis for Missouri putting the pause on a divorce proceeding until a child is born is because Missouri divorce law "does not see fetuses as humans." "You can't have a court order that dictates visitation and child support for a child that doesn't exist," she says. "I have no mechanism as a lawyer to get that support going. There's nothing there because that's not a real person." This aspect of Missouri divorce law has gotten more attention in the weeks since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, triggering a ban on abortion in Missouri except in cases of medical emergency. Though what is meant by medical emergency is still ambiguous. — What the actual fuck?
Daughter of doctor who gave 10-year-old an abortion faced kidnapping threat. The Indiana doctor who recently provided an abortion to a 10-year-old rape victim whose story has garnered national attention faced serious threats in the past and is named on an extreme anti-abortion website linked to Amy Coney Barrett before she was a supreme court justice. Dr Caitlin Bernard testified last year, in a case involving abortion restrictions in Indiana, that she was forced to stop providing first-trimester abortions at a clinic in South Bend. She stopped the procedures after she was alerted by Planned Parenthood – who in turn had been alerted by the FBI – that a kidnapping threat had been made against her daughter. — Pro forced-birthers are irrational and violent.
“The bottom line is, democrats are the only party fighting to protect a woman’s right to choose.” — Val Demings
Ted Cruz says Supreme Court was ‘clearly wrong’ about 2015 same-sex marriage ruling. Cruz, a longtime opponent of same-sex marriage who believes the issue should be left to the states, echoed views expressed by many conservatives, including Justice Clarence Thomas, that the Supreme Court should revisit past rulings such as Obergefell v. Hodges. In a separate opinion on last month’s abortion decision, Thomas explicitly called for the court to reconsider its earlier rulings striking down state restrictions on contraceptives, state sodomy bans and state prohibitions on same-sex marriage. -- Republicans will come for everything if they gain power. If you value having rights and freedom, never vote Republican.
‘Systemic failures’ in Uvalde school massacre, report finds. Nearly 400 law enforcement officials rushed to a mass shooting at a Uvalde elementary school, but “systemic failures” created a chaotic scene that lasted more than an hour before the gunman who took 21 lives was finally confronted and killed, according to a report from investigators released Sunday. The nearly 80-page report was the first to criticize both state and federal law enforcement, and not just local authorities in the Texas town for the bewildering inaction by heavily armed officers as a gunman fired inside a fourth-grade classroom. -- The “good guy with a gun” theory, so ferociously spouted by ammosexuals, has been proven to be complete and utter bullshit. Four hundred cops couldn’t stop one mass shooter armed with an AR-15, yet these same ammosexuals promote arming teachers with the expectation they will stop the next school mass shooting. What lunacy. The only way to stop this shit is to stop voting for fucking Republicans. Up and down the ballot, only vote Democrat. Period. Otherwise this shit will continue and continue and continue. We do not have to live the way Republicans and the NRA want us to live.
These gun deaths didn't make national headlines, but they left a devastating mark. The country's enormous gun death toll – more than 45,000 in 2020, the last year with available data – is made up largely of lives taken one by one. These personal tragedies aren't seared on the national psyche like Columbine or Parkland or Sandy Hook. But they tear real holes in the lives of the friends and family left behind.
Menstrual changes after Covid vaccines may be far more common than previously known. A study found that 42% of people with regular menstrual cycles said they bled more heavily than usual after their Covid vaccination.
Parts of the U.S. and Europe are bracing for some of their hottest temperatures yet. Across much of the United States, millions of Americans are getting ready for some of the warmest days they've ever seen. Parts of the Great Plains are forecast to hit record-breaking temperatures this week, according to meteorologists at AccuWeather. Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas could reach temperatures as high as 110 degrees...But it's not just happening here. Climate change is making heatwaves around the world more frequent and intense, scientists have found.
Fires scorch Spain and France, where flames reach the beach. Firefighters battled wildfires raging out of control in Spain and France, including one whose flames reached two popular Atlantic beaches on Sunday, as Europe wilted under an unusually extreme heat wave.
“I wish everyone on Earth knew how genuinely "off the charts" key planetary trends are right now, and how abnormal and critical it is. Things like atmospheric CO2 fraction, heat extremes on land and ocean, biodiversity loss and extinction rates. All alarms should be going off.” — Peter Kalmus
Betsy DeVos calls for abolition of federal Education Department she once led. Former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, appointed by former president Donald Trump, told conservative activists in Tampa Saturday that the federal Education Department should be abolished, leaving education decisions to state and local boards. -- It has been a Republican wet dream for quite a while to eliminate the Department of Education. Right now, Republicans think they are invincible and can get away with pretty much anything they want. If the GOP does take control of Congress, then expect eliminating the DOE to happen. If everything goes back to the states, then we will no longer be the “United States of America.” All rights, and non-rights, will be regionally located. Unless, of course, the GOP takes over everything and forces their form of “government” on the entire country at the federal level. If you value having rights and freedom, then never vote Republican.
Moms for Liberty’s conservative activists are planning their next move: Taking over school boards. The organization’s rapid ascension — its leaders say it has nearly 100,000 members across 195 chapters in 37 states — has been driven by the appeal of its core issues among conservatives, including battling mask mandates in schools, banning library books that address sexuality and gender identity, and curtailing lessons on racial inequity and discrimination, its founders say...Critics accuse Moms for Liberty — which is registered as a social welfare nonprofit organization and so does not have to disclose its donors — of sowing division in communities, rolling back progress on issues of diversity and inclusion, and scaring educators out of the profession. Activists with the group have offered a $500 bounty for information on teachers using critical race theory, the academic study of how racism is perpetuated by laws and institutions, in their classes. They organized protests against Covid mitigation protocols, referring to one school’s mask policies as “segregation.” And they demanded schools pull books about Ruby Bridges and Martin Luther King Jr., saying the depictions of racism were too disturbing for young children. -- The doorway to fascism widens.
Missouri’s top mental health official balked at new homeless law. The governor signed it anyway. In a May letter obtained by the Post-Dispatch, Missouri Department of Mental Health Director Valerie Huhn told the governor’s budget office that the law will have negative impacts on people living on the streets and could exacerbate the problems, rather than fix them. “When people experiencing homelessness have criminal justice histories, it is difficult to find housing,” Huhn wrote…The law, which goes into effect Jan. 1, 2023, makes it a felony to sleep on state-owned land, such as under highway overpasses and bridges. After one warning, anyone found illegally camping on state-owned land could face a $750 fine or a Class C misdemeanor charge punishable by up to 15 days in prison. — Americans like to penalize the less fortunate rather than help them.
Employers who want workers in the office more often may be in for a fight. “Employees really want flexibility and choice over where, when and how to work. They don’t want to be told: ‘You need to be here on these days.’ They want to be able to choose.”...Whether it’s a hybrid model or requiring employees to come in five days a week, employers need to show the value of asking workers to commute into the office again if workers have been successfully working from home for two years.
Nearly 100 have been hospitalized, but Daily Harvest still doesn't know what's making people sick. The FDA said that 96 hospitalizations and 277 illnesses have been reported by people who ate the company's frozen French Lentil & Leek Crumbles.
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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