A happy warrior in Illinois
“To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom, and opportunity, and dignity of Illinoisans, I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior. You come for my people, you come through me.”
Comstock who?
If you go looking in the Project 2025 Policy Agenda for to the Comstock Act, the provisions in federal law now touted as a way to prevent sending mifepristone through the mail, you won’t find a single reference to it. But if you search just a bit, you’ll find an indirect reference.
Names in school (Project 2025)
The deeply sinister message here is that individual identity is not one’s own to decide.
Project 2025 on marriage and parental roles
The broad outlines of Project 2025 are frightening enough. Reading the details makes it all look much worse. Log Cabin Republicans, you’re kidding yourselves.
Eleven suggestions from Robert Reich
Robert Reich offers eleven suggestions “to prevent America and the world from falling into fascism.”
Relative frequency (Project 2025)
In Chapter Fourteen of the Project 2025 Policy Agenda, covering the Department of Health and Human Services, the words addiction, birth control, and hunger do not appear; the word fentanyl appears once; the acronyms HIV and AIDS appear once each; and the word nutrition appears four times. But the word gender appears twenty-two times, and the word abortion appears 143 times.
Project 2025
Did you know that there’s a Project 2025 website? And a thirty-chapter agenda?
Arizona 1864
The historian Heather Cox Richardson looks at the 1864 Arizona criminal code.
Biden on Navalny
“People in Russia and around the world are mourning Navlany today because he was so many things that Putin is not. He was brave, he was principled, he was dedicated to building a Russia where the rule of law existed and where it applied to everybody. Navlany believed in that Russia, that Russia. He knew it was a cause worth fighting for and, obviously, even dying for.”
Center for Reproductive Rights
The Center for Reproductive Rights is in the news. Not a difficult decision to donate.
No free will?
Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky says that there’s no such thing as free will. I cannot agree.
HCR on SCOTUS
On more bad news.
HCR on SCOTUS
Heather Cox Richardson writes about yesterday’s Supreme Court decision.
“Books are weapons in the war of ideas”
A 1942 poster with words from Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Giving up the whole game
Heather Cox Richardson on attacking transgender people: “Once you give up the principle of equality, you have given up the whole game.”
Prisons
“Holding onto anger would really just be trading one prison for another”: Lamar Johnson, wrongfully convicted of murder, just released from prison after twenty-eight years, speaking on the PBS NewsHour tonight.
Education and freedom
MLK on education as the key to freedom. Helen Moore on reading as the key to freedom.
In Kansas
The voters spoke.
A new strain
In The New York Times, “How ‘Stop the Steal’ Captured the American Right.”
Gilead
“We are turning into Gilead”: Jonathan Capehart on the PBS NewsHour just now.
Excerpts from a dissent
Excerpts from the dissent filed by Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Back to 1868
From the New York Times’s annotated text of today’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade: “The crux of Justice Alito’s legal rationale is that the 14th Amendment’s protections of freedoms that are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution must be limited to those rights that were understood to exist deep in the country’s history — especially around 1868, when that amendment was ratified. This is an example of “originalism,” in contrast to the more liberal interpretative method that views the Constitution as a living document whose meaning can evolve with society.”
“Indefensible”
Samuel Alito’s logic: past discrimination justifies continued discrimination.
Rights and wrongs, old and new
Neal Katyal and Amanda Marcotte on Samuel Alito’s thinking.
Roe
To characterize a decision that affirms an individual freedom as the imposition of a “highly restrictive regime” suggests to me the “Freedom Is Slavery” logic of 1984. Access to abortion does nothing to restrict anyone’s right not to have an abortion.
"If there are no human rights . . ."
Quotation from Burmese monk
Free Burma
International Bloggers' Day for Burma
Three blogs from Burma
Burmese blogger Ko Htike writes: In Burma, the only path to oppose the military junta is to demonstrate peacefully. The military junta repre...