Harris M. made a great comment about the problem of non-electric cars parking in the spots reserved for EVs at that Jewel - the one I shop at most often. Agree - the rule should be enforced, with towing as well as a ticket as needed, to keep these spaces available for EVs which are being charged. It's very much like the CTA's rules of conduct on buses and 'L' trains: posted, but rarely enforced. That's expanded on more in the current issue of the News-Star and its sister papers on the north side.
The Ninth Amendment protects a woman's INALIENABLE right to control her own life and body that includes the right to end a pregnancy without any state interference until the fetus itself becomes a being when its brain develops the capacity to support mind. Until then the fetus is a mere object and so has no capacity for rights and cannot be used to infringe on women's rights.
That Alito states "The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision" proves that he is not competent to sit on the court as are those who agree with him. The Ninth Amendment is explicit about protecting unenumerated rights, those with "no reference":
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Liberals let this happen because they are too lazy to vote Republicans out of office. too lazy to stand up to conservatives and their bullshit beliefs. Conservatism is opposed to liberalism by default and definition and so conservatives cannot live in a liberal society because liberalism is based on the concept of individual rights that rejects inherited privilege that conservatives believe in, as expressed by Alito's leaked opinion.
Wally Cox usually played a milquetoast kind of guy, but I remember being surprised by an episode of "Mission: Impossible" he was in. The guy was ripped!
Eric! The tweet above from Mark Joseph Stern (which you essentially retweet) is not correct. Alito doesn't call same sex marriage or intercourse "phony" rights. He says "those rights" are different than the right to an abortion. I DEPLORE the decision but no one can read it and assume that Alito believes that same sex marriage or intercourse are phony rights.
One thing about this leak: it permanently and hopelessly disgraces the Roberts court. Lack of security, and leaking a decision on arguably the most important decision in any of our lives, proves once and for all that SCOTUS is every bit as political as the most odious "conservatives" in Congress, starting with the weasel McConnell and the furrowed brow of Collins, and all the way down to Gym Jordan and and Marjorie Traitor Qreene.
No right-thinking American will ever again trust that SCOTUS decisions are made based on law and the Constitution and everyone now knows that decisions are based entirely on personal ideology of SC justices, nothing else.
That's just another permanent stain on our nation's institutions, perpetrated by modern "conservatives" and those who vote for them.
Does SCOTUSblog have a clue? It's worried about trust among the justices when SCOTUS just lost the trust of the majority of the American people?! A leaked opinion is the gravest sin, when SCOTUS just set back women's rights 50 years?!
As I have said before, I favor abortion rights and the primary requirement is that the Federal Congress must pass a law that defines when a pre-natal entity becomes a legal person and then prohibits any state law that infringes in any way on the medical decisions of a birthing person prior to that time. In the near term, this can also be demanded from the state legislatures. This also means that asking for a 'pro-choice' commitment from a candidate is not sufficient. We must also ask what specific legislation they will sponsor/co-sponsor/write/vote for/sign. The problem with past federal pro-choice legislators and executives is that in the last 50 years they have never done their jobs and passed the necessary legislation. Illinois law needs to be clarified because it still relies on an ambiguous 'viability' definition. Expending 'energy' on other political offices or demonstrations or programs is a distraction and a waste of time.
re: books and audio books and profit: publishers long ago decided that libraries buy many copies of the same book and that alone gives them a profit. And, people who use libraries tend to also buy books. Same with audio books: libraries pay more to get the audio book when it comes out and some audio book publishers do't let libraries have the new audio book for a time after it is published. If they did't make profit, they wouldn't be in business.
A few thoughts on the nigh passing of our old friend Roe v. Wade, and one about the Evanston-Skokie gender stuff.
1. Certainly not a surprise. One of the main reasons -- perhaps the main reason -- we have had a robust conservative judicial movement and philosophy over these past 50 years or so is because conservatives were outraged by Roe and dreamed of one day undoing it. That day is about to come. Roberts showed himself to be a pragmatist, so I doubted he would pull the trigger, but I didn't feel nearly as confident about the more recently appointed conservatives when it came to Roe. For them, along with Alito and Thomas, this is the fulfillment of a dream.
2. The logic of the decision could be used to undo other constitutional rights, such as gay rights, but those can be more straightforwardly defended than abortion rights on equal protection grounds, and I doubt that Gorsuch at least would vote to undo those protections (after having found that federal sex discrimination law applies to gay and trans discrimination as well). I do not foresee states banning contraception.
3. It is today, thankfully, easier to terminate a pregnancy than it was in 1973, and many large states were pretty much "abortion deserts" before this decision anyway. It will require domestic travel for in-patient abortion services, but abortions will continue to be widely available in the United States, thank goodness.
4. I disagree with Bernie Sanders that Congress should race to codify Roe v. Wade and undo the filibuster to do so. (Won't happen anyway.) I'm not sure it would be constitutional, and federalism is now our friend. We don't want to assert a federal statutory power over abortion rights that trumps state prerogatives, because when the shoe's on the other foot, that same power could be used to justify a federal ban. (Yes, I continue to believe that a measure of principled consistency should guide political positions -- naive, I know, but an instinct I actually think independent-minded voters appreciate and one that is good for all of us to cultivate.)
5. Congress should, however, move to prohibit any punishment of people who travel out of their red state to receive a legal abortion in a blue one or, I think, any interference with abortion pills delivered through the mail -- interstate activity well within Congress's power.
6. I, like Eric, am not holding my breath for this to galvanize Democrats at the polls, though that would be nice.
7. I'm guessing/fearing that the leak was not by a conservative, as at least one comment here suggests, but by a progressive clerk meant to gin up pro-Roe outrage, which will be very unfortunate if found to be true.
8. I agree with the holding in Roe. To me, the liberty imposition of an anti-abortion law (forcing a woman, having become pregnant, and perhaps not through happy or even consensual circumstances, to bear a child and thus assume tremendous legal and ethical responsibilities, not to mention a nine-month substantial physical burden and measure of health risk) is vast and easily outweighs the state's interest in expressing its moral disapproval, especially early in the pregnancy, when the personhood of the embryo/fetus is at its least plausible and the liberty interest is most acute (she at least needs time to discover she's pregnant and make a decision). While Alito is right that we do not have a long pre-Roe history of recognizing an abortion right, this history is largely informed by a body of law that did not take women's liberty seriously generally speaking.
9. At the same time, I recognize that there are non-crazy, non-bigoted, non-hateful arguments against Roe, especially as a matter of constitutional reasoning. Roe was a stretch. Even RBG herself once mused that, essentially, it wasn't worth the backlash. And the precedent argument is lame. As the conservatives have pointed out, many of our greatest Supreme Court decisions overruled long-standing precedent, Brown v. Board most prominently among them. Which is to say, this is not a crazy, nutso decision, and, for our own sanity if for nothing else, we might check our feelings that the sky is falling as a result.
Regarding that Evanston-Skokie gender curriculum, it's really nuts, and the failure of the mainstream, non-conservative media to get into it, as far as I can tell, is illustrative. My googling yielded lots of links about it to Fox News, the New York Post, the Manhattan Institute, and other such conservative outlets looking to make hay, but not a mainstream outlet that dealt with it seriously (other than than the Picayune Sentinel). This piece by a Daily Northwestern reporter -- my old job -- came the closest, but notice how it doesn't get into the actual cuckoo content at all, leaving an ordinary reader with the impression that opposition to it could only amount to backward bigotry.
I very much don't deny that trans identities are real and that gender dysphoria is real and that people, especially kids, should be supported. I bristle, however, at a sort of trans ideology that is homophobic, misogynistic, intolerant, anti-scientific, and heedless in the context of children. "Homophobic" because it says that gender non-conformity equals trans where it may well equal gay. "Misogynistic" because it conflates sex with stereotypical gender roles. Girl = girly. If you're supposedly a girl but don't feel girly, sounds like you're really a boy. This is retrograde nonsense. "Intolerant" because adherents brook no dissent and label dissenters on highly contestable, complex issues as mere bigots. "Anti-scientific," because it denies the existence of sex. Enough with this "assigned at birth" stuff, like it's flipping a coin. Sexing people is not very hard. There are ambiguous cases, but they are a slim minority. And "heedless" in that it embraces life-changing decisions before children can possibly make informed decisions about them. One reads that Evanston-Skokie shit, and one wants to pass a law like Florida's, if better worded. Once again, progressives are handing reactionaries victory on a plate.
A gender reveal party is a “sex assigned at birth” party ? You should have called that one out for being just plain wrong. Those parties take place BEFORE birth. Sex is not “ assigned” ( which sounds like a random guess) but either determined based on observed genitalia in utero or ….increasingly commonly …on scientific testing of chromosomes. Trans people don’t just have a gender identity at odds with their “ assigned” sex . In 99.999 percent of cases they have a gender identity at odds with their sex based chromosomes. While there are some possible chromosomal abnormalities are at play in some cases, only those without a Y chromosome will be born with clearly female anatomy . ( this doesn’t mean every single solitary human without a Y chromosome has this). But chromosomal sex is so linked to sex based anatomy in such an incredibly high number of cases that any variation must be considered an Anomaly.
I prefer to keep an open comment tab open as I read to capture initial thoughts. Hell no. Pritzker's Tweet seems like a typical political 'sound byte." Politico seems to have made a conclusion. RvW hasn't been struck down - they only have an initial draft in a long process of SCOTUS legal debating. I want to know who leaked this more than anything. Maybe it was to rally the troops - but a lot can happen between now and Nov. Will this one "issue" really create any wave? Elections are about who fills "My" checklist the best.
You mentioned books in libraries and used bookstores. Sharing magazines and newspapers are another example. These are all examples of the 'first sale' doctrine. The copywrite holder does not need to be notified (or paid) if the original purchased copy is loaned or shared. But it does not allow the production of a new copy. All digital sharing involves the reproduction of the original, which is the publication of a new copy, which requires the authorization of the copywrite holder and must be compensated. Other aspects include: you can't possess and loan a book simultaneously; and a physical copy degrades with time and is less valuable where digital copies are identical to the original and do not change in value due to use.
Visual tweet very funny again, as usual. I felt sorry for the guy that was so traumatized by the goose that he forgot how to use punctuation in his warning sign.
I count 4 uses of the word "women" in your well-written piece. That's 4 more than WaPo used in their poorly written pro-choice, anti-ruling editorial today.
Harris M. made a great comment about the problem of non-electric cars parking in the spots reserved for EVs at that Jewel - the one I shop at most often. Agree - the rule should be enforced, with towing as well as a ticket as needed, to keep these spaces available for EVs which are being charged. It's very much like the CTA's rules of conduct on buses and 'L' trains: posted, but rarely enforced. That's expanded on more in the current issue of the News-Star and its sister papers on the north side.
See https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/abortion-draft-supreme-court-opinion-key-passages-00029470 for all of the reasons that conservatives have no place on courts, they do NOT believe in rights, they believe only in privilege at the discretion of the powerful, and so have no interest in protecting them, which is the Supreme Court's primary function.
The Ninth Amendment protects a woman's INALIENABLE right to control her own life and body that includes the right to end a pregnancy without any state interference until the fetus itself becomes a being when its brain develops the capacity to support mind. Until then the fetus is a mere object and so has no capacity for rights and cannot be used to infringe on women's rights.
That Alito states "The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision" proves that he is not competent to sit on the court as are those who agree with him. The Ninth Amendment is explicit about protecting unenumerated rights, those with "no reference":
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Liberals let this happen because they are too lazy to vote Republicans out of office. too lazy to stand up to conservatives and their bullshit beliefs. Conservatism is opposed to liberalism by default and definition and so conservatives cannot live in a liberal society because liberalism is based on the concept of individual rights that rejects inherited privilege that conservatives believe in, as expressed by Alito's leaked opinion.
Wally Cox usually played a milquetoast kind of guy, but I remember being surprised by an episode of "Mission: Impossible" he was in. The guy was ripped!
Eric! The tweet above from Mark Joseph Stern (which you essentially retweet) is not correct. Alito doesn't call same sex marriage or intercourse "phony" rights. He says "those rights" are different than the right to an abortion. I DEPLORE the decision but no one can read it and assume that Alito believes that same sex marriage or intercourse are phony rights.
One thing about this leak: it permanently and hopelessly disgraces the Roberts court. Lack of security, and leaking a decision on arguably the most important decision in any of our lives, proves once and for all that SCOTUS is every bit as political as the most odious "conservatives" in Congress, starting with the weasel McConnell and the furrowed brow of Collins, and all the way down to Gym Jordan and and Marjorie Traitor Qreene.
No right-thinking American will ever again trust that SCOTUS decisions are made based on law and the Constitution and everyone now knows that decisions are based entirely on personal ideology of SC justices, nothing else.
That's just another permanent stain on our nation's institutions, perpetrated by modern "conservatives" and those who vote for them.
Does SCOTUSblog have a clue? It's worried about trust among the justices when SCOTUS just lost the trust of the majority of the American people?! A leaked opinion is the gravest sin, when SCOTUS just set back women's rights 50 years?!
As I have said before, I favor abortion rights and the primary requirement is that the Federal Congress must pass a law that defines when a pre-natal entity becomes a legal person and then prohibits any state law that infringes in any way on the medical decisions of a birthing person prior to that time. In the near term, this can also be demanded from the state legislatures. This also means that asking for a 'pro-choice' commitment from a candidate is not sufficient. We must also ask what specific legislation they will sponsor/co-sponsor/write/vote for/sign. The problem with past federal pro-choice legislators and executives is that in the last 50 years they have never done their jobs and passed the necessary legislation. Illinois law needs to be clarified because it still relies on an ambiguous 'viability' definition. Expending 'energy' on other political offices or demonstrations or programs is a distraction and a waste of time.
This is way off topics, but a picayune point regarding the Sun-Times.
Fran Spielman consistently quotes Lightfoot as using the word "gonna" meaning "going to." Every single story! (see example, first URL below)
But when quoting from someone else's packaged statement, "going to" is used (see second URL) I guess because the original is not verbalized.
But not in the Sun-Times style guide, as evidenced by the use of "going to" in an article by Lynn Sweet and Tina Sfondeles.
There's a lot of bad news these days, and my peeve is very pet; I feel bad about posting, but apparently not bad enough.
"we’re gonna work our tails off"
https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2022/5/2/23054290/lightfoot-whole-foods-closing-englewood-prices-replacement-store-emanuel
"Somebody is going to get killed down there"
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/5/2/23053815/lower-wacker-street-racing-ring-of-fire-police-crackdown-demanded-reilly-city-council-dowell
"So ultimately, we’re going to give them a menu of options and proposals"
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/5/3/23054453/exclusive-details-on-chicagos-bid-for-2024-democratic-convention
re: books and audio books and profit: publishers long ago decided that libraries buy many copies of the same book and that alone gives them a profit. And, people who use libraries tend to also buy books. Same with audio books: libraries pay more to get the audio book when it comes out and some audio book publishers do't let libraries have the new audio book for a time after it is published. If they did't make profit, they wouldn't be in business.
A few thoughts on the nigh passing of our old friend Roe v. Wade, and one about the Evanston-Skokie gender stuff.
1. Certainly not a surprise. One of the main reasons -- perhaps the main reason -- we have had a robust conservative judicial movement and philosophy over these past 50 years or so is because conservatives were outraged by Roe and dreamed of one day undoing it. That day is about to come. Roberts showed himself to be a pragmatist, so I doubted he would pull the trigger, but I didn't feel nearly as confident about the more recently appointed conservatives when it came to Roe. For them, along with Alito and Thomas, this is the fulfillment of a dream.
2. The logic of the decision could be used to undo other constitutional rights, such as gay rights, but those can be more straightforwardly defended than abortion rights on equal protection grounds, and I doubt that Gorsuch at least would vote to undo those protections (after having found that federal sex discrimination law applies to gay and trans discrimination as well). I do not foresee states banning contraception.
3. It is today, thankfully, easier to terminate a pregnancy than it was in 1973, and many large states were pretty much "abortion deserts" before this decision anyway. It will require domestic travel for in-patient abortion services, but abortions will continue to be widely available in the United States, thank goodness.
4. I disagree with Bernie Sanders that Congress should race to codify Roe v. Wade and undo the filibuster to do so. (Won't happen anyway.) I'm not sure it would be constitutional, and federalism is now our friend. We don't want to assert a federal statutory power over abortion rights that trumps state prerogatives, because when the shoe's on the other foot, that same power could be used to justify a federal ban. (Yes, I continue to believe that a measure of principled consistency should guide political positions -- naive, I know, but an instinct I actually think independent-minded voters appreciate and one that is good for all of us to cultivate.)
5. Congress should, however, move to prohibit any punishment of people who travel out of their red state to receive a legal abortion in a blue one or, I think, any interference with abortion pills delivered through the mail -- interstate activity well within Congress's power.
6. I, like Eric, am not holding my breath for this to galvanize Democrats at the polls, though that would be nice.
7. I'm guessing/fearing that the leak was not by a conservative, as at least one comment here suggests, but by a progressive clerk meant to gin up pro-Roe outrage, which will be very unfortunate if found to be true.
8. I agree with the holding in Roe. To me, the liberty imposition of an anti-abortion law (forcing a woman, having become pregnant, and perhaps not through happy or even consensual circumstances, to bear a child and thus assume tremendous legal and ethical responsibilities, not to mention a nine-month substantial physical burden and measure of health risk) is vast and easily outweighs the state's interest in expressing its moral disapproval, especially early in the pregnancy, when the personhood of the embryo/fetus is at its least plausible and the liberty interest is most acute (she at least needs time to discover she's pregnant and make a decision). While Alito is right that we do not have a long pre-Roe history of recognizing an abortion right, this history is largely informed by a body of law that did not take women's liberty seriously generally speaking.
9. At the same time, I recognize that there are non-crazy, non-bigoted, non-hateful arguments against Roe, especially as a matter of constitutional reasoning. Roe was a stretch. Even RBG herself once mused that, essentially, it wasn't worth the backlash. And the precedent argument is lame. As the conservatives have pointed out, many of our greatest Supreme Court decisions overruled long-standing precedent, Brown v. Board most prominently among them. Which is to say, this is not a crazy, nutso decision, and, for our own sanity if for nothing else, we might check our feelings that the sky is falling as a result.
Regarding that Evanston-Skokie gender curriculum, it's really nuts, and the failure of the mainstream, non-conservative media to get into it, as far as I can tell, is illustrative. My googling yielded lots of links about it to Fox News, the New York Post, the Manhattan Institute, and other such conservative outlets looking to make hay, but not a mainstream outlet that dealt with it seriously (other than than the Picayune Sentinel). This piece by a Daily Northwestern reporter -- my old job -- came the closest, but notice how it doesn't get into the actual cuckoo content at all, leaving an ordinary reader with the impression that opposition to it could only amount to backward bigotry.
https://dailynorthwestern.com/2020/05/12/city/teacher-calls-for-lgbtq-education-equity/
I very much don't deny that trans identities are real and that gender dysphoria is real and that people, especially kids, should be supported. I bristle, however, at a sort of trans ideology that is homophobic, misogynistic, intolerant, anti-scientific, and heedless in the context of children. "Homophobic" because it says that gender non-conformity equals trans where it may well equal gay. "Misogynistic" because it conflates sex with stereotypical gender roles. Girl = girly. If you're supposedly a girl but don't feel girly, sounds like you're really a boy. This is retrograde nonsense. "Intolerant" because adherents brook no dissent and label dissenters on highly contestable, complex issues as mere bigots. "Anti-scientific," because it denies the existence of sex. Enough with this "assigned at birth" stuff, like it's flipping a coin. Sexing people is not very hard. There are ambiguous cases, but they are a slim minority. And "heedless" in that it embraces life-changing decisions before children can possibly make informed decisions about them. One reads that Evanston-Skokie shit, and one wants to pass a law like Florida's, if better worded. Once again, progressives are handing reactionaries victory on a plate.
A gender reveal party is a “sex assigned at birth” party ? You should have called that one out for being just plain wrong. Those parties take place BEFORE birth. Sex is not “ assigned” ( which sounds like a random guess) but either determined based on observed genitalia in utero or ….increasingly commonly …on scientific testing of chromosomes. Trans people don’t just have a gender identity at odds with their “ assigned” sex . In 99.999 percent of cases they have a gender identity at odds with their sex based chromosomes. While there are some possible chromosomal abnormalities are at play in some cases, only those without a Y chromosome will be born with clearly female anatomy . ( this doesn’t mean every single solitary human without a Y chromosome has this). But chromosomal sex is so linked to sex based anatomy in such an incredibly high number of cases that any variation must be considered an Anomaly.
I prefer to keep an open comment tab open as I read to capture initial thoughts. Hell no. Pritzker's Tweet seems like a typical political 'sound byte." Politico seems to have made a conclusion. RvW hasn't been struck down - they only have an initial draft in a long process of SCOTUS legal debating. I want to know who leaked this more than anything. Maybe it was to rally the troops - but a lot can happen between now and Nov. Will this one "issue" really create any wave? Elections are about who fills "My" checklist the best.
You mentioned books in libraries and used bookstores. Sharing magazines and newspapers are another example. These are all examples of the 'first sale' doctrine. The copywrite holder does not need to be notified (or paid) if the original purchased copy is loaned or shared. But it does not allow the production of a new copy. All digital sharing involves the reproduction of the original, which is the publication of a new copy, which requires the authorization of the copywrite holder and must be compensated. Other aspects include: you can't possess and loan a book simultaneously; and a physical copy degrades with time and is less valuable where digital copies are identical to the original and do not change in value due to use.
Visual tweet very funny again, as usual. I felt sorry for the guy that was so traumatized by the goose that he forgot how to use punctuation in his warning sign.
I count 4 uses of the word "women" in your well-written piece. That's 4 more than WaPo used in their poorly written pro-choice, anti-ruling editorial today.