The ignorant dudes who run the toilet block…...

The following article is part bullshit and part rubbish. So what else can we expect from an extreme right wing website? It's always worth knowing what influences are pushing the buttons of ignorance, including inside the Supreme Court — considering the rotten bananas amongst the bunch of judges. Here goes the "Independent Institute":

In the last of a series of landmark rulings issued at the end of its 2021–2022 term, the U.S. Supreme Court held that federal executive branch agencies cannot take major regulatory initiatives without explicit congressional authorization. It was the right decision.

The 6 to 3 majority determined in West Virginia et al. v. Environmental Protection Agency that the EPA’s “Clean Power Plan” (CPP), promulgated in 2015, overstepped its statutory authority by dictating that power plants must switch from coal to natural gas for generating electricity. The Court ruled that the EPA’s powers to limit carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act of 1970 (as amended in 1990) do not include the power to dictate what fuels must be used to produce electricity, a policy known as “generation shifting.”

The ruling was based on the Court’s “major questions” doctrine, which requires Congress to explicitly spell out in law administrative policy actions that have sweeping “economic and political significance.” The Obama-era Clean Power Plan presented a case in point. Citing the Clean Air Act as its authority, the Clean Power Plan set emissions limits on power plants intended to force them to switch from coal to natural gas (and later to so-called renewable energy). The EPA’s purpose, as those on the left put it, is to fight the supposed ‘existential threat’ of climate change. According to the Court’s opinion, even the EPA admitted that the CPP “would impose billions [of dollars] in compliance costs, raise retail electricity prices, require the retirement of dozens of coal plants, and eliminate tens of thousands of jobs.” A major question indeed.

The irony is that utilities already were substituting natural gas for coal. The hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) revolution enabled energy companies to unlock and tap natural gas deposits that previously had been unrecoverable. Supplies soared and prices fell relative to coal, so much so that many utilities converted their power plants to natural gas and the United States not only became energy-independent, but a net energy exporter.

Admittedly, the utilities’ shift away from coal also has been driven in part by the adoption of state “renewable portfolio standards,” which set target dates by which utilities must substitute electricity generated by (less-reliable) wind and solar power for electricity generated by fossil fuels. At least eight states, including California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Virginia already have set targets of 100% renewable power by 2050; by 2040 in the case of Oregon.

Writing for the Court’s majority, Chief Justice John Roberts agreed that the Clean Air Act allowed the EPA to establish “a ‘standard of performance’ for [utilities’] emission of certain pollutants into the air.” But the law did not permit the EPA to dictate how the standard of performance would be met. The Clean Power Plan thus overstepped the powers delegated to the EPA by Congress.

Despite the predictable handwringing that greeted the decision—President Biden, in his usual understated way, said it “aims to take our country backwards”—the Supreme Court’s decision in no way signals a looming environmental Armageddon.

Air and water quality began improving in the United States well before the EPA was created by President Richard Nixon in December 1970; it continued to improve at much the same pace thereafter. On a graph relating per-capita U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) to measures of domestic environmental quality (an environmental “Kuznets curve”), the effects of the EPA’s regulatory rules are an inconsequential blip in the trend toward a cleaner environment driven by economic prosperity.

The Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA represents a victory for constitutional government and a significant pushback against the seemingly endless expansion of the administrative state. And it’s likely to trigger new challenges to the largely unconstrained diktats of such executive branch agencies as the IRS, the National Labor Relations Board and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Court might also want to revisit Massachusetts v. EPA (2016), in which, among other things, it accepted the EPA’s identification of carbon dioxide as one of the greenhouse gases supposedly threatening the planet. It might even find, on a closer second look, that rather than being a pollutant, CO2 is essential to life on Planet Earth.

embattled country……..

This Is My Song

What I Can Still Love about My Embattled Country (and World)

BY FRIDA BERRIGAN

It’s hot and hazy as July rolls around. Growing up in the Baltimore swamplands, we used to say, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” Meaning that the humidity was harder to deal with than the feverish temperatures. At some point in my family, the phrase morphed into: “It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity.” At the time, we meant the antics of people when it gets hot, including public drunkenness, mishaps with fireworks, and fights over slights. (These days, sadly enough, you’d have to add to that list slaughtering people at a July 4th celebration with an AR-15-style rifle.)

Worse yet, in 2022, it’s emblematic of a far larger picture of life on earth: the stupidity of trying to stay cool while burning carbon; the stupidity of the Supreme Court tying the collective hands of the Environmental Protection Agency when it comes to regulating the emissions of coal-fired power plants; the stupidity of blaming mental illness rather than assault rifles for massacres; the stupidity of a pro-life movement that seems to care about nothing but fetuses. And, of course, the list only goes on and on… and on.

And now, I think I’m breaking into a sweat even though I’m sitting still. The novelist Barbara Kingsolver posted this on Facebook recently:

“There are days when I can’t live in this country. Not the whole thing at once, including the hateful parts, the misogyny, the brutal disregard of the powerful for the powerless. Sometimes I can only be a citizen of these trees, this rainy day, the family I can hold safe, the garden I can grow. A fire that refuses to go out.”

So, in these hazy, humid days laced with commercial patriotism and an upbeat jingoism shaken loose from the daily struggles of most people, I’m trying to take her words to heart. I am a citizen of the trees, particularly the two plum trees I planted this spring. I am a citizen of the rainy day. (May it come soon!) I am a citizen of my family of five, of eight, of 16, of 150 (the number of people anthropologist Robin Dunbar says we can meaningfully connect with). Yes, it really does seem like that’s what it takes to go on these days — committing yourself to what matters, to what you still do love in this ever more disturbed America of ours.

Above all, I am a citizen of what I love! I resolve to be a citizen of goodness and generosity, competence and kindness. I pledge allegiance, above all, to libraries, used bookstores, community gardens, and the mutual-aid network of my local “Buy Nothing” group. This, sadly enough, is as much of my country, America, that I seem capable of loving in the age of Donald Trump and an all-too-extreme Supreme Court.

So, in an America in which Roe has gone down and gun sales only continue to rise (thank you so much, Supremes!), let me tell you a little about the things I still truly do love in America.

Used Books Stores

I recently ruined a library book! I spilled coffee all over it and there was no way to fix it. When I contacted the library, I was told that there would be a $30 fine to replace it. There was, however, another option: I could find a new copy and bring it in instead. Well, I have more time than money, so I set off to replace the State of Terror by Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny (a propulsive guilty pleasure of a summer read) that I had caffeinated to the hilt.

After checking out three brick-and-mortar used bookstores in my area I found that novel in no time at all for $1.50 (plus $4.00 shipping) at Alibris, an online used bookstore. But don’t feel bad for the stores that didn’t have a copy of State of Terror. I still spent at least $30 in them, picking up a couple of survival guides, an Octavia Butler novel (another kind of survival guide), graphic novels for my kids, and a few other books that caught my eye — but hopefully won’t catch my next cup of coffee.

There’s something so wholesome about used bookstores. If the $25 billion-plus publishing industry is a slick, cutthroat insider’s game riven with racism and inequity, then used bookstores are its antithesis. They’re all about the pleasure of knowledge, craft, and the word! Nearest to us here in New London, Connecticut, is the Book Barn in Niantic, a network of three stores loosely organized by theme and covered in cat hair. Their haphazard nature rewards curiosity and perseverance. The mismatched chairs and overturned milk crates invite you to pause, peruse, and dive in. When I go there with my family, we chant “five books are enough” before we get out of the car. Then we revise it to five books each (for a total of twenty-five) and, in the end, are likely to buy as many as we can carry. Given such frenzies, we can only afford to go once every few months even though many of the books are only a dollar each and most are less than five dollars. Honestly, how could you not love it?

Libraries

Excuse me for being so book focused, but that’s who I am, I guess. In between trips to used bookstores, we can always go to the library, where you can borrow 50 titles per card at a time! My kids, 8, 10, and 15, are so well known there that the librarian calls us when they leave behind a favorite stuffed animal or jacket (which is like every week).

The New London library is within walking distance of our house. In addition to books, it has a job-search support center, a recently redesigned teen center, and meeting rooms for local groups and events. Patrons can check out free museum passes, use the free services of a notary, and pose any question under the sun to members of its calm, helpful staff. In addition, our library has a couple of surprising offerings, including Memory Kits for people developing dementia and quite a variety of cake pans shaped like cartoon characters, animals, or castles that can be borrowed like any book.

In this way, our library is very trendy. Like ever more libraries, it’s no longer just focused on lending out books. It’s a multi-use facility that hosts community events, serves as a free or low-priced Staples or a WeWork suite with computers, printers, and study carrels. It lends out Roku devices and laptops, while maintaining catalogs of diverse offerings. My sister-in-law, for instance, borrowed catering equipment like chafing trays and large casserole dishes for her son’s graduation party. At some libraries, you can even borrow lawn mowers, weed whackers, and pruning equipment for your garden and lawn. During prom season, some of them are opening dress-lending libraries to help cash-strapped families get strapless!

It’s all so wholesome and delightful that it’s easy to forget just how underfunded and under attack our libraries are. This in a country where, if you love books, you’ve instantly got financial problems, but if you love the military-industrial complex you’re guaranteed to have more money than you know what to do with. In a nearby town, a first selectman demanded that the library remove a copy of Who Is RuPaul? from its collection in response to a parental complaint.

The book, part of a popular series of biographies, tells the story of the performer, producer, personality, and queer icon whose groundbreaking talent has turned drag-queening into mainstream magic. In Indiana, North Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere, members of the right-wing armed hate group Proud Boys have tried to interrupt children’s story hours with vitriol and threats of violence. And yet, despite all the hate, librarians just carry on! The library, a bright, functional, welcoming space meant to exist outside of commerce and to be open to all, is one of the last true public spaces in this country, an enduring part of a shrinking commons!

“Buy Nothing” Facebook Groups

I know. I know. Facebook (now Meta) is big, bad tech. Our every cursor move is tracked, our every “like” logged. I should go on a total social-media fast, but I’m not on Instagram or TikTok and I do love to “like” my friends’ cat pictures! Above all, though, I love “Buy Nothing.” That site-specific network — there are groups everywhere — is built around asking, gifting, and gratitude. It’s online neighborliness personified, demonstrating, in the words of its founders, that “true wealth is the web of connections formed between people who are real-life neighbors.”

The New London Buy Nothing Group on Facebook has more than 1,500 people. It’s administered by a handful of souls who moderate the page to make sure, among other things, that no one feels badgered into choosing certain people for gifts. In the last few days, some members have offered up cats, organic plant fertilizer, and a toilet seat, while others have asked for vintage drinking glasses, a dog crate, and an old cellphone so a nephew can access the Internet.

People respond to all these queries by asking to be chosen, sometimes sharing why they want whatever’s been asked for and how they’ll use it. The gifters get to choose who to give items to and then they make arrangements to pass them on. When I see someone asking for something that I have in excess, I’ll post a picture of it and invite them to reach out and make a plan to pick it up. Things move pretty quickly then. The only time I had no takers, I was offering used school backpacks the same week that the local Rotary Club was giving out brand new ones filled with school supplies. We’re a friendly, dynamic group that stretches from the nicest homes in New London to the Red Roof Inn, a place people stay when they’re experiencing homelessness.

I love thinking about my front porch as a place where people can come to have their needs and wants met. In the last few months, I’ve shared a women’s history puzzle, a pair of kids’ boxing gloves, a mini-pool full of hostas, jars of sourdough starter, and vegetable stock, while collecting yoga mats, chicken wire, rosary beads, an aquarium, and small jam jars from porches and front steps all over town.

When I refer to “the city” of New London, Connecticut, which was founded in the 1600s and burned down by American traitor turned British Brigadier General Benedict Arnold in 1781, it sounds grand indeed. As it happens, though, we’re now actually a small community of about 28,000 people living in a six-square-mile area. In other words, we’re the size of a town.

New London has been known for lots of things, including its arts scene, bar scene, sugar-sand beach, and being the childhood home of playwright Eugene O’Neill. It’s long and thin like a jalapeño pepper and so small that sometimes it feels like I know everyone. Then I find myself driving down a street I’ve never noticed before, searching for the address of the nice person who’s left me a copy of Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) on their porch in a brown paper bag.

Only 2,882 people voted in our last election, but it seems as if twice that many were actively searching for infant formula during the recent shortage. There’s a level of engagement, gratitude, and celebration on New London’s Buy Nothing Facebook page that I always find moving and delightful, sometimes overwhelmingly so.

Community Gardens

A little head of organic lettuce costs almost $3 these days at my local grocery store. A pound of organic strawberries, imported from Mexico, is about $8. Inflation is the word of the day, week, and year. And nowhere is it more obvious than at the checkout counter of my local grocery store. Like so much in this interconnected, fragile, unequal world of ours, we can blame the soaring cost of food on war and the greed of the corporations that call the tune in the global economy.

But far away from such overwhelming disasters is a modest set of raised garden boxes just up the block from my house. They burst with lettuce, strawberries, and a dozen other easy to harvest “snack” crops. And they’re free for the picking! Hand-painted signs in English, Spanish, French, and Arabic encourage passersby to harvest there and eat the food. The “snack boxes” were built and are maintained by a local food justice and youth empowerment organization called FRESH New London. Passersby can harvest the lettuce and strawberries and bring them home to wash and enjoy. They can pick snap peas, okra pods, and a little later in the summer sweet peppers and blackberries, too.

There are also boxes at the community garden where people can grow their own lettuce, peppers, tomatoes, and whatever else they want after accessing water and tools. While they’re at it, they can ask staff members and other gardeners for advice and help.

There are community gardens like ours all over the country, organized by groups of neighbors, non-profit organizations, or even towns and cities. Community gardens are places where we can get our fingernails dirty and our bellies filled with veggies and fruit, while connecting with neighbors, celebrating the beauty of nature, and even providing food for bees and other pollinators.

Of course, people like me can’t grow all our food this way, especially in places like urban Connecticut. Still, producing some of it in such a communal way reminds us that we have the power to feed ourselves and one another. And in these dispiriting times, that should be a strong message of hope!

A (Small) World Free of Nationalism?

“My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean and sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine,” we sometimes sing when our Unitarian Universalist congregation meets. Finnish composer Jean Sibelius wrote the music more than 100 years ago, while American poet Lloyd Stone provided the words in 1934 to what became the hymn “This Is My Song.” It continues, “But other lands have sunlight too, and clover, and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.” It’s a beautiful piece of music, poignant and full of a love of home that’s somehow radically and beautifully free of nationalism.

The sunlight beams down on used bookstores, libraries, community gardens, and even, however metaphorically, into the dark universe of Meta where there are still people who reject our click-and-buy culture, opting for mutual aid instead. “Buy Nothing!” is the thought lurking there, even if all of this can’t quite stave off the despair that circulates whenever I tune into the wider world of Supreme Court rulings and House January 6th hearings or contemplate why the heat and humidity and stupidity is rising all at once in this forlorn world of ours.

In my own small version of the world, “This Is My Song” is so beloved that my husband and I made it the entrance march at our wedding. It always reminds me that this planet is bigger and more beautiful than nationalism and militarism allow us to see. It reminds me that curiosity and connection form a web that can be stronger than border walls and xenophobia. It reminds me that the small bits of joy and hope that gardens and the gift economy give me is a seed that, with time, nurturing, and hard work, could grow into a more just and equitable future for us all.

So, that’s what I need to remind myself of with each new Supreme Court decision, each crazed statement from Donald Trump or so many other Republicans, each new Cold War moment in our embattled world. It’s good to know that there’s still something I truly do love about this country.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Frida Berrigan is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood. She is a To mDispatch regular and writes the Little Insurrections column for WagingNonviolence.Org. She has three children and lives in New London, Connecticut, where she is a gardener and community organizer.

https://tomdispatch.com/this-is-my-song/

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FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW.............

By Gus Leonisky at 16 Jul 2022 - 2:10pm
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not about people, but about power…….

Controlling Bodies and Subverting Democracy

How Dobbs Is an Attack on Us All

BY LIZ THEOHARIS

When I was the age that my daughter is now, my favorite sweatshirt had the words “Choice, Choice, Choice, Choice” in rainbow letters across its front. My mom got me that sweatshirt at a 1989 rally in response to Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. In that case, the Supreme Court upheld a Missouri law restricting the use of state funds and facilities for abortion, an early attempt to eat away at Roe v. Wade. And though many adults in the Wisconsin neighborhood where I grew up thought that message inappropriate for a 13 year old, I wore it proudly. Even then, I understood that it spoke not just to a person’s right to an abortion, but also to the respect and dignity that should be afforded every human being.

Since then, it has become increasingly clear that our society does not confer rights and dignity on we the people — as seen in the slashing of school food programs, the denial of Medicaid expansion in states that need it most, attacks on Black, Brown, and Native bodies by the police and border patrol, as well as the Supreme Court’s recent decisions to put fossil-fuel companies ahead of the rest of us, guns above kids, and deny sovereignty to indigenous people and tribes, while failing to protect our voting rights and ending the constitutional right to abortion.

For millions of us, the Dobbs v. Jackson decision on abortion means that life in America has just grown distinctly more dangerous. The seismic aftershocks of that ruling are already being felt across the country: 22 states have laws or constitutional amendments on the books now poised to severely limit access to abortion or ban it outright. Even before the Supremes issued their decision, states with more restrictive abortion laws had higher maternal-mortality and infant-mortality rates. Now, experts are predicting at least a 21% increase in pregnancy-related deaths across the country.

As is always the case with public-health crises in America — the only industrialized country without some form of universal healthcare — it’s the poor who will suffer the most. Survey data shows that nearly 50% of women who seek abortions live under the federal poverty line, while many more hover precariously above it. In states that limit or ban abortion, poor women and others will now face an immediate threat of heightened health complications, as well as the long-term damage associated with abortion restrictions.

Indeed, data collected by economists in the decades after Roe v. Wade indicates that the greater the limits on abortion, the more poverty for parents and the less education for their children. Worse yet, the 13 states that had trigger laws designed to outlaw abortion in the event of a Roe reversal were already among the poorest in the country. Now, poor people in poor states will be on the punishing spear tip of our post-Roe world.

While the Supreme Court’s grim decision means more pain and hardship for women, transgender, and gender non-confirming people, it signals even more: the validation of a half-century-old strategy by Christian nationalists to remake the very fabric of this nation. For the businessmen, pastors, and politicians who laid the foundations for the Dobbs ruling, this was never just about abortion.

The multi-decade campaign to reverse Roe v. Wade has always been about building a political movement to seize and wield political power. For decades, it’s championed a vision of “family values” grounded in the nuclear family and a version of community life meant to tightly control sex and sexuality, while sanctioning attacks on women and LGBTQIA people. Thanks to its militant and disciplined fight to bring down Roe, this Christian nationalist movement has positioned itself to advance a full-spectrum extremist agenda that is not only patriarchal and sexist, but racist, anti-poor, and anti-democratic. Consider the Dobbs decision the crown jewel in a power-building strategy years in the making. Consider it as well the coronation of a movement ready to flex its power in ever larger, more violent, and more audacious ways.

In that context, bear in mind that, in his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that the Dobbs decision gives the Supreme Court legal precedent to strike down other previously settled landmark civil rights jurisprudence, including Griswold v. Connecticut (access to contraception), Lawrence v. Texas (protection of same-sex relationships), and Obergefell v. Hodges (protection of same-sex marriage). Whether or not these fundamental protections ultimately fall, the Supreme Court majority’s justification for Dobbs certainly raises the possibility that any due-process rights not guaranteed by and included in the Constitution before the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868 could be called into question.

The Christian nationalist movement long ago identified control of the Supreme Court as decisive for its agenda of rolling back all the twentieth-century progressive reforms from the New Deal of the 1930s through the Great Society of the 1960s. Less than a week after the Dobbs decision, in fact, that court overturned Massachusetts v. EPA, the 2007 ruling that set a precedent when it came to the government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions by polluting industries. May Boeve, head of the environmental group 350.org, put it this way:

“Overturning Roe v. Wade means the Supreme Court isn’t just coming for abortion — they’re coming for the right to privacy and other legal precedents that Roe rests on, even the United States government’s ability to tackle the climate crisis.”

To fully grasp the meaning of this moment, it’s important to recognize just how inextricably the assault on abortion is connected to a larger urge: to assault democracy itself, including the rights of citizens to vote and to have decent healthcare and housing, a public-school education, living wages, and a clean environment. And it’s no less important to grasp just how a movement of Christian nationalists used the issue of abortion to begin rolling back the hard-won gains of the Second Reconstruction era of the 1950s and 1960s and achieve political power that found its clearest and most extreme expression in the Trump years and has no interest in turning back now.

Abortion and the Architecture of a Movement

Throughout American history, a current of anti-abortion sentiment, especially on religious grounds, has been apparent. Some traditional Roman Catholics, for instance, long resisted the advance of abortion rights, including a church-led dissent during the Great Depression, when economic disaster doubled the number of abortions (then still illegal in every state). Some rank-and-file evangelicals were also against it in the pre-Roe years, their opposition baked into a theological and moral understanding of life and death that ran deeper than politics.

Before all this, however, abortion was legal in this country. As a scholar of the subject has explained, in the 1800s, “Protestant clergy were notably resistant to denouncing abortion — they feared losing congregants if they came out against the common practice.” In fact, the Victorian-era campaign to make abortion illegal was driven as much by physicians and the American Medical Association, then intent on exerting its professional power over midwives (mainly women who regularly and safely carried out abortions), as by the Catholic Church.

Moreover, even in the middle decades of the twentieth century, anti-abortionism was not a consensus position in evangelical Protestantism. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention, evangelicalism’s most significant denomination, took moderate positions on abortion in the 1950s and 1960s, while leading Baptist pastors and theologians rarely preached or wrote on the issue. In fact, a 1970 poll by the Baptist Sunday School Board found that “70% of Southern Baptist pastors supported abortion to protect the mental or physical health of the mother, 64% supported abortion in cases of fetal deformity, and 71% in cases of rape.”

So what changed for those who became the power-brokers of a more extremist America? For one thing, the fight for the right to abortion in the years leading up to Roe was deeply intertwined with an upsurge of progressive gender, racial, and class politics. At the time, the Black freedom struggle was breaking the iron grip of Jim Crow in the South, as well as segregation and discrimination across the country; new movements of women and LGBTQ people were fighting for expanded legal protection, while challenging the bounds of repressive gender and sexual norms; the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam had catalyzed a robust antiwar movement; organized labor retained a tenuous but important seat at the economic bargaining table; and new movements of the poor were forcing Washington to turn once again to the issues of poverty and economic inequality.

For a group of reactionary clergy and well-funded right-wing political activists, the essence of what it was to be American seemed under attack. Well-known figures like Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich, who would found the Moral Majority (alongside Jerry Falwell, Sr.), began decrying the supposed rising threat of communism and the dissolution of American capitalism, as well as what they saw as the rupture of the nuclear family and of white Christian community life through forced desegregation. (Note that Jerry Falwell didn’t preach his first anti-abortion sermon until six years after the Roe decision.)

Such leaders would form the core of what came to be called the “New Right.” They began working closely with influential Christian pastors and the apostles of neoliberal economics to build a new political movement that could “take back the country.” Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, often cites this Paul Weyrich quote about the movement’s goals:

“We are radicals who want to change the existing power structure. We are not conservatives in the sense that conservative means accepting the status quo. We want change — we are the forces of change.”

Indeed, what united these reactionaries above all else was their opposition to desegregation. Later, they would conveniently change their origin story from overt racism to a more palatable anti-abortion, anti-choice struggle. As historian Randall Balmer put it: “Opposition to abortion, therefore, was a godsend for leaders of the Religious Right because it allowed them to distract attention from the real genesis of their movement: defense of racial segregation in evangelical institutions.”

Many of the movement’s leaders first converged around their fear that segregated Christian schools would be stripped of public vouchers. As Balmer points out, however, they soon recognized that championing racial segregation was not a winning strategy when it came to building a movement with a mass base. So they looked elsewhere. What they discovered was that, in the wake of the Roe decision, a dislike of legalized abortion had unsettled some Protestant and Catholic evangelicals. In other words, these operatives didn’t actually manufacture a growing evangelical hostility to abortion, but they did harness and encourage it as a political vehicle for radical change.

Looking back in the wake of the recent Dobbs decision obliterating Roe v. Wade, Katherine Stewart put it this way:

“Abortion turned out to be the critical unifying issue for two fundamentally political reasons. First, it brought together conservative Catholics who supplied much of the intellectual leadership of the movement with conservative Protestants and evangelicals. Second, by tying abortion to the perceived social ills of the age — the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, and women’s liberation — the issue became a focal point for the anxieties about social change welling up from the base.”

What this movement and its allies also discovered was that they could build and exert tremendous power through a long-term political strategy that initially focused on Southern elections and then their ability to take over the courts, including most recently the Supreme Court. Abortion became just one potent weapon in an arsenal whose impact we’re feeling in a devastating fashion today.

A Fusion Movement from Below?

As Reverend William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, has pointed out, check out a map of the states in this country that have banned abortion and you’ll find that you’re dealing with the same legislators and courts denying voting rights, refusing to raise municipal minimum wages, and failing to protect immigrants, LGBTQIA people, and the planet itself. As the Economic Policy Institute described the situation after Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion on abortion hit the news in May:

“It is no coincidence that the states that will ban abortion first are also largely the states with the lowest minimum wages, states less likely to have expanded Medicaid, states more likely to be anti-union ‘Right-to-Work’ states, and states with higher-than-average incarceration rates… Environments in which abortion is legal and accessible have lower rates of teen first births and marriages. Abortion legalization has also been associated with reduced maternal mortality for Black women. The ability to delay having a child has been found to translate to significantly increased wages and labor earnings, especially among Black women, as well as increased likelihood of educational attainment.”

Indeed, the right to abortion should be considered a bellwether issue when judging the health of American democracy, one that guarantees equal protection under the law for everyone. Fortunately, the most recent Supreme Court rulings, including Dobbs, are being met with growing resistance and organizing. Just weeks ago, thousands upon thousands of us came together on Pennsylvania Avenue for a Mass Poor People and Low Wage Worker’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls. On the very day of the Dobbs decision and ever since, protests against that ruling, including acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, have been growing.

In a similar fashion, striking numbers of us have begun mobilizing against gun violence and the climate crisis. At this moment as well, we seem to be witnessing the rise of a new labor movement with workers already organizing at Starbucks, Dollar General stores, and Walmart, among other places. The Christian nationalist movement relies on a divide-and-conquer strategy and single-issue organizing. A pro-democracy and justice movement must resist that approach.

As a Christian theologian and pastor myself, I’ve been deeply disturbed by the growth of the Christian nationalist movement. We would do well, however, to heed their focus and fury. Its leaders were very clear about how necessary it was, if they were ever to gain real power in this country, to build a national political movement. In response, the 140 million poor and low-wealth Americans, pro-choice and pro-earth activists, and those of us concerned about the future of our democracy must do the same, building a moral movement from below. And such a movement must not be afraid of power, but ready to fight for it. Only then can we truly begin to reconstruct this country from the bottom up.

Liz Theoharis, a TomDispatch regular, is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, she is the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor and We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People's Campaign. Follow her on Twitter at @liztheo.

https://tomdispatch.com/controlling-bodies-and-subverting-democracy/

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GUS IS A RABID ATHEIST.......GOD HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH INDIVIDUAL CHOICES.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW...........................

By Gus Leonisky at 20 Jul 2022 - 7:48pm
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a sadistic comedian?

Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Associate Justice,
was born in Trenton, New Jersey, April 1, 1950. He married Martha-Ann Bomgardner in 1985, and has two children - Philip and Laura. He served as a law clerk for Leonard I. Garth of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit from 1976–1977. He was Assistant U.S. Attorney, District of New Jersey, 1977–1981, Assistant to the Solicitor General, U.S. Department of Justice, 1981–1985, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice, 1985–1987, and U.S. Attorney, District of New Jersey, 1987–1990. He was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in 1990. President George W. Bush nominated him as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and he took his seat January 31, 2006.

It does not say here that Sam Alito is a comedian and a sadist.... But some people thinks he is:

Last Thursday, Justice Samuel Alito gave a talk in Rome sponsored by the University of Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative. His remarks, which can be viewed here, were ostensibly about religious liberty, but Alito also used them to showcase his comedy stylings. After a ten-year-old rape victim crossed state lines to terminate her pregnancy, and while miscarrying patients are bleeding out in Texas before being allowed to receive life-saving medical treatment, Alito thought the Rome speech was the right time and place to mock international criticism of his opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.

It speaks volumes about Samuel Alito that, in the face of international outrage over the impact of this ruling on the lives of millions of women, he centered himself and his own feelings. His snarky little potshots at Prince Harry and Boris Johnson were not so much “jokes” about world leaders as personal petulance over international criticism, cloaked in the insistence that Alito doesn’t care what these world leaders think of him.

But to focus on Alito trolling American women, reproductive justice advocates, his liberal colleagues on the bench, and his international critics is to take his feeble bait. Alito is quite transparent about the fact that he delights in disapproval. He invites it! He welcomes it! His “comedy” is actually just a distraction from his gleeful effort to decimate whatever remaining legitimacy the Supreme Court still possesses in the eyes of the secular, liberal world order. Focus on that fact and there is really nothing hilarious to report from Rome at all.

For starters, there is the breathtaking conflict of interest at work when a justice gives faith-based speeches at faith-based events sponsored by faith-based parties who file briefs before the court. We only found out about this speech a week later when Notre Dame released the video, because the justices have no obligation to publicize or record their public speeches. The Rome event’s sponsor, Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative, was founded about four months before Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Supreme Court in 2020. As Gabe Roth of Fix the Court, a nonprofit that promotes judicial ethics reforms, noted in an email Thursday, RLI and its affiliated professors “have filed amicus briefs in several SCOTUS cases, and they have a near-perfect record.” (Naturally, these professors filed a brief in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization urging the reversal of Roe.) As Roth further pointed out, we won’t know if RLI financed the trip until mid-June 2023, when it must be disclosed under current law. For now, the image of a tuxedo-clad Alito chumming it up with the same conservative lawyers who are involved in cases before the court creates the unseemly impression of judicial indifference toward basic judicial ethics rules.

It’s no wonder that public confidence in the Supreme Court has plummeted to historic lows. A new Marquette poll shows the high court with a 38 percent approval rating, down from 60 percent last July; a recent Gallup poll shows that just 25 percent of Americans are very confident in the court.

The conservative justices, though, can’t hear the alarm bells over the cacophony of the trumpets of jubilee playing in their ears. Justice Clarence Thomas used a public speech this past spring to insult Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues. And with his Rome speech, Alito ripped away even the pretense that he cares about public regard for the institution. Quite the opposite. He clearly revels in the plummeting approval ratings and the international and domestic loathing. He takes it as a sign that his religious liberty project matters: The more the godless, or as he put it, the adherents of “the new moral code,” hate him, the more certain he is that he is correct.

Which brings us, of course, to the godless, whom Alito believes must be educated, by him, about their own ignorance. He concluded his speech paraphrasing a quote from St. Augustine’s Confessions (“Our hearts are restless until we rest in God”) and closed with the promise that “the champions of religious liberty, who ‘go out as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves’ can expect to find hearts that are open to their message.”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/07/alito-rome-religious-liberty-foreign-leaders-secularism.html

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By Gus Leonisky at 30 Jul 2022 - 7:00pm
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