US Politics: them's indictin words

[Martell Spy]

Wow. I not only think De Satan is done with (I already thought that), but it sounds like he has gone off the deep end. I'm scrolling through Deadline and looking for entertainment news, not politics. And the headline is Satan threatening to destroy Disney and creating hotel taxes and road tolls.

Obviously he thought he could out culture warrior Trump on multiple fronts and this was one was of them. But it appears really lost in the weeds and getting trolled by the mouse company even before Trump gets started on him.

[Varysblackfyre321]

1 hour ago, Martell Spy said:

And the headline is Satan threatening to destroy Disney and creating hotel taxes and road tolls.

Where my free speech warriors at lol?

Desantimonious is using the power of the state to do the cancel culture and I don’t hear a peep.

Curious.

 

[ThinkerX]

7 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Where my free speech warriors at lol?

Desantimonious is using the power of the state to do the cancel culture and I don’t hear a peep.

Curious.

 

I have read articles on this. Team DeSantis got slammed hard in the comment sections. Even his die-hard supporters couldn't really go with this.

[Zorral]

 

59 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Desantimonious is using the power of the state to do the cancel culture and I don’t hear a peep.

Lookin' fer love in all the wrong places, you.

desatan got trumped by the TN xtianwhitegerrymanderingabusingfascistracists.

However do not fear -- there's plenty of pixels devoted still to FL's desatanist versions.  After all They r all KKK bros together.

[James Arryn]

56 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

I have read articles on this. Team DeSantis got slammed hard in the comment sections. Even his die-hard supporters couldn't really go with this.

If he’s the nominee, I guarantee they’ll get in line. 

[Tywin et al.]

The courts increasingly do not matter.

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/texas-abortion-pill-mifepristone-ruling/index.html

[Tywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

The courts increasingly do not matter.

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/texas-abortion-pill-mifepristone-ruling/index.html

Lol

Meanwhile in the birthplace of the Klan:

@Fragile Bird, if I promise not to steal your water, was the Dratini plushy enough to get safe passage to Toronto? 

[A True Kaniggit]

Biden’s 10%!!!!!

What the heck is that all about?

Bloody conspiracy theorists. 

Edited April 8 by A True Kaniggit

[Ormond]

I just heard one of the two young men expelled from the Tennessee legislature (sorry, don't know which of those two) say "The South Will Rise Anew" should be the slogan of young people in the South instead of "The South WIll RIse Again".

I just Googles that phrase and almost nothing came up -- evidently someone used it back in 2015 on Twitter in a post thanking CNN for their coverage of South Carolina getting rid of the Confederate battle flag on government buildings, but that is the only thing that turned up. 

I just think that slogan is brilliant myself and hope it gets picked up by those fighting oppression in the South everywhere. And it makes me think these guys who just got expelled are really impressive and will deserve all the attention they are going to be getting from liberals and progressives nationally. 

P.S. And I can't believe the Republicans in the Tennessee House were dumb enough to do this during Holy Week. What the expelled members did with the bullhorn can be compared to what Jesus did in overturning the moneychangers' tables in the Temple. And the Republicans can now be compared to the patriarchal religious authorities who wanted to get rid of Jesus to preserve their power and position. No, the expelled men in Tennessee are not "saviors" -- but if we ask that oversimplified question "What Would Jesus Do?", it's pretty clear to me they come closer to that than the people who expelled them did. 

Edited April 8 by Ormond

[Zorral]

They are rising again the frackin', superceded Comstock laws from frackin' 1873 to deny women reproductive care -- and all the other medical cares that are part of that.

Just as TN (and other states) are about to rise again lynch laws, because guns and lack of reproductive care are not killing enough women and other people evidently.

Way back when I was a junior in high school my English teacher gave me a book on the history and biography of that loon, Anthony Comstock.  Why didn't they drive a stake into him?

Edited April 8 by Zorral

[Zorral]

The key sentence below is "Though the act had been dormant for decades and Congress did away with its prohibitions on birth control in 1971, it was never fully repealed."

I ask, why was it never fully repealed, just like we ask, why was the right to abortion/contraception never fully made constitutional, which somehow made canceling dobbs legal?  Particularly since these are the means via which fascism in all its names and forms creeps back into societies and legal systems.  As I've said before, They have armies of people who scrutinize and study history of everything in detail to find their pinholes and leverage.

The Hideous Resurrection of the Comstock Act

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/08/opinion/comstock-laws-abortion-texas.html

Quote

 

Anthony Comstock, the mutton-chopped anti-vice crusader for whom the Comstock Act is named, is back from the dead.

Comstock died in 1915, and the Comstock Act, the notorious anti-obscenity law used to indict the Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, ban books by D.H. Lawrence and arrest people by the thousands, turned 150 last month. Had this anniversary fallen five or 10 years ago, it barely would have been worth noting, except perhaps to marvel at how far we’d come from an era when a fanatical censor like Comstock wielded national political power. “The Comstock Act represented, in its day, the pinnacle of Victorian prudery, the high-water mark of a strict and rigid formal code,” wrote the law professors Joanna Grossman and Lawrence Friedman. Until very recently, it seemed a relic.

Yet suddenly, the prurient sanctimony that George Bernard Shaw called “Comstockery” is running rampant in America. As if inspired by Comstock’s horror of “literary poison” and “evil reading,” states are outdoing one another in draconian censorship. In March, Oklahoma’s Senate passed a bill that, among other things, bans from public libraries all content with a “predominant tendency to appeal to a prurient interest in sex.” Amy Werbel, the author of “Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock,” described how Comstock tried to suppress photographs of cross-dressing women. More than a century later, Tennessee has banned drag performances on public property, with more states likely to follow.

And now, thanks to a rogue judge in Texas, the Comstock Act itself could be partly reimposed on America. Though the act had been dormant for decades and Congress did away with its prohibitions on birth control in 1971, it was never fully repealed. And with Roe v. Wade gone, the Christian right has sought to make use of it. The Comstock Act was central to the case brought by a coalition of anti-abortion groups in Texas seeking to have Food and Drug Administration approval of mifepristone, part of the regimen used in medication abortion, invalidated. And it is central to the anti-abortion screed of an opinion by Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, the judge, appointed by Donald Trump, who on Friday ruled in their favor.

It’s true that, as Kacsmaryk noted, the Comstock Act bars mailing “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion or for any indecent or immoral purpose.” The law imposes a five-year maximum prison sentence for first offenses and up to 10 years for subsequent ones. That’s why, almost as soon as the Supreme Court tossed out Roe, social conservatives started clamoring for the Comstock Act to be enforced against medication abortion. When 20 Republican attorneys general wrote to Walgreens and CVS warning them against distributing abortion pills, they invoked the Comstock Act.

Many legal scholars see this invocation of the Comstock Act as legally dubious. As David S. Cohen, Greer Donley and Rachel Rebouché explain in the draft of a forthcoming article, circuit court cases in the 1930s found that the Comstock Act applies only to materials meant to be used unlawfully. But for judges hellbent on banning abortion, as we’ve seen, precedent doesn’t mean much. “The Comstock Act plainly forecloses mail-order abortion in the present,” wrote Kacsmaryk. He added, “Defendants cannot immunize the illegality of their actions by pointing to a small window in the past where those actions might have been legal.”

On Friday a Washington judge issued an opinion directly contradicting Kacsmaryk’s and ordering the F.D.A. to continue to make mifepristone available. The dispute now is likely headed to the Supreme Court. The emphasis on Comstock in Kacsmaryk’s decision, tweeted the legal scholar Mary Ziegler, could appeal to “self-proclaimed textualists” on the Supreme Court like Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, who emphasize the ordinary meaning of words in a statute, outside the context of legislative intent or history.

Such a reading of the Comstock Act could do far more than prohibit patients from getting mifepristone by mail. “Absent the narrowing construction applied by the federal circuit courts, the law’s plain terms could effectively ban all abortion nationwide because almost every pill, instrument or other item used in an abortion clinic or by a virtual abortion provider moves through the mail or an express carrier at some point,” wrote Cohen, Donley and Rebouché.

There is something head-spinning about how quickly Comstock’s spirit of punitive repression has settled on a country where, not long ago, social liberalism seemed largely triumphant, with the rapid acceptance of gay marriage, the growing visibility of trans people and over-the-counter access to emergency contraception. The notion that it’s the government’s job to protect people from vice appeared increasingly passé as states legalized marijuana and gambling. It’s true that even before the end of Roe, conservatives had a lot of success rolling back reproductive rights in red states. But just a year ago, the idea of a judge using the Comstock Act to halt medication abortion nationwide would have seemed hysterical.

Maybe we should have seen it coming. Comstock’s power, after all, derived from a reaction to the sexual radicalism that took root in the Gilded Age. (One of his great nemeses was Victoria Woodhull, the suffragist, spiritualist, free-love advocate and presidential candidate.) By the time the Comstock Act was passed, vulcanized rubber, invented in 1839, had allowed for the mass production of rubber condoms and diaphragms. Other forms of birth control were widely sold in pharmacies. Before Comstock had Madame Restell arrested, which apparently drove her to suicide, she was a celebrity abortionist with a mansion across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. There’s a dialectic relationship between freedom and reaction.

Werbel described Comstock as representing “antiquated Christian nationalism.” She added, “He just doesn’t change over time. And the world around him does.” Ultimately, she argued, the cruelty of Comstock’s crusade helped spark the creation of the modern civil liberties movement, and she hoped that once again, Americans would rebel against religious authoritarianism. Indeed, the nationwide backlash against abortion bans suggests they already are rebelling. But a lot of people had to suffer before the first iteration of Comstockery subsided, and a lot of people are going to suffer from its rebirth.

 

 

Edited April 8 by Zorral

[A Horse Named Stranger]

17 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

The courts increasingly do not matter.

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/texas-abortion-pill-mifepristone-ruling/index.html

Well, one of my US legalese translators provided the following bit:

Quote

 

There is a six-year statute of limitations to challenge any federal agency action. The FDA approved the abortion pill, mifepristone, in 2000.https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/issue-brief/legal-challenges-to-the-fda-approval-of-medication-abortion-pills/ But who's counting? Certainly not Kacsmaryk. Like the Blues Brothers, he is on a mission from God.

btw, conservatives used to decry judges "legislating from the bench." You don't hear that much anymore, for some strange reason.

 

Furthermore 

Quote

Kacsmaryk is the only federal judge (I use the term loosely) in Amarillo, Texas. If you're a right-winger, he'll vote the way you want, irrespective of the law and the facts. So right-wingers make the pilgrimage to Amarillo to file their cases. https://apnews.com/article/abortion-pill-lawsuit-texas-judge-christian-kacsmaryk-3cfb483f1b9266df2e0cc31cc892d605

So in short in a sane world he should get overruled on appeal.

[Tywin et al.]

26 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Well, one of my US legalese translators provided the following bit:

Furthermore 

So in short in a sane world he should get overruled on appeal.

Hans, booby, you're not allowed to kidnap translators. 

Can I have a Coke?

Edited April 8 by Tywin et al.

[Zorral]

You all have seen that the Duke of Clarence and Ginni Thomas's sugar daddy is a nazi?  Harlan Crow (swear he's right out of Justified) collects personal possession possessed by Hitler. Partner says this is all over the twit spaces.

I, otoh, only read the WaPo.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/04/06/harlan-crow-clarence-thomas-kkfaq/

 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

20 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Hans, booby, you're not allowed to kidnap translators. 

Can I have a Coke?

No, may my virtual breathren stomp you in RDR2 for all etternity.

[Tywin et al.]

3 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

No, may my virtual breathren stomp you in RDR2 for all etternity.

I believe the only German characters are the family Arthur saves, and they don't do shit besides give him gold and medicine. Maybe you're thinking of the Austrian Strauss, who also doesn't do much physically besides demand for debt collections and get his ass kicked.

At the very least I can call Little Johnson my fellow countryman. 

 

[Zorral]

44 minutes ago, Zorral said:

You all have seen that the Duke of Clarence and Ginni Thomas's sugar daddy is a nazi?  Harlan Crow (swear he's right out of Justified) collects personal possession possessed by Hitler. Partner says this is all over the twit spaces.

I, otoh, only read the WaPo.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/04/06/harlan-crow-clarence-thomas-kkfaq/

 

And! The  Wall Street Journal has a hissy meltdown over the language used by Pro Publica in this story revealing the extent of the extravagance to which the clarences are treated by their sugar daddy.  As the wonderfully brilliant Jeet Heer puts it, "The WSJ is upset that Pro Publica fatshamed a superyacht."

This would be hilarious except, of course, the only point out of the WSJ is, as it is for All of Them, to just respond with anything, anything at all, to muddy the waters of the point that the wealthy have bought up / corrupted every institution in the USA because They are bottomless holes of greed.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

33 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I believe the only German characters are the family Arthur saves, and they don't do shit besides give him gold and medicine. Maybe you're thinking of the Austrian Strauss, who also doesn't do much physically besides demand for debt collections and get his ass kicked.

At the very least I can call Ron Johnson my fellow countryman. 

 

Fixed.

[Tywin et al.]

43 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Fixed.

It shames me to no end that he got a degree from my alma mater. But at least the university is also openly ashamed of him and he's not really welcomed back at all.

I joke regularly that the administration at UGA has to be horrified that MTG somehow got her degree from there.

Edited April 8 by Tywin et al.

[DireWolfSpirit]

"The Nation" with another amazing op-ed on the whole right wing media contrived controversy with the  Womens College Basketball (NCAAWB) National Championship.

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/caitlin-clark-basketball-ncaa/

The Maga agents were doing thier sickest trying to create a black/white racist spectacle over a hard fought, highly viewed Womans Championship.

Thier only problem, Caitlin Clark refused to be thier tool.

Great essay over there at the Nation, well worth the read and time imo.

Edited April 8 by DireWolfSpirit