Not Pulling Punches

And not mincing words.

Janelle Monae - BET Awards

About Those Rights

If SCOTUS moves to scuttle abortion rights next month - when they do the shitty thing the wingnuts hired them to do - it may very well be just the beginning of a general rollback of our rights under the Constitution.

Remember, the premise Alito stated in the leaked opinion is that if any right we think we enjoy now is not "deeply rooted" in the law or in our tradition, then it's not going to stand up under this iteration of the US Supreme Court.

And of course, the question on most minds is: What's next?

The Miranda Warning comes to mind.

• You have the right to remain silent.
• Anything you say can be used against you in court.
• You have the right to talk to a lawyer for advice before we ask you any questions.
• You have the right to have a lawyer with you during questioning.
• If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be appointed for you before any questioning if you wish.
• If you decide to answer questions now without a lawyer present, you have the right to stop answering at any time.

We tend to think of this as a given - the cops have to tell us what's up. But having been handed down in 1966, Miranda has a relatively short history. Not exactly "deeply-rooted".

And if the Roberts court decides to shit-can Roe because they contend citizens don't actually have a reasonable expectation of privacy, then there are whole big chunks of "settled law" that could be going kaflooey.

Annenberg Classroom - Annenberg Public Policy Center:

Our Rights
Chapter 22: The Right of Privacy

The right of privacy—the right to be left alone, as Justice Louis Brandeis once defined it—is fundamental to our understanding of freedom, but nowhere does the Constitution mention it. When Congress submitted the Bill of Rights to the people for ratification in 1789, privacy was not listed as a liberty that required protection from government. Yet today it is difficult to imagine American society without this right. How did privacy become an essential liberty?

For eighteenth-century men and women, privacy meant the right to be secure in one’s home, safe from the powers of government. The common law phrase, “A man’s home is his castle,” expressed this understanding. All Englishmen, whether in the Old World or the New, believed that “the poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the crown,” as Sir William Pitt, former British prime minister, said in 1763. This definition of privacy made its way into the U.S. Bill of Rights, albeit indirectly, in two separate amendments. The Third Amendment restrained the government from housing soldiers in private homes; this amendment reaffirmed the English practice as expressed in the Petition of Right (1628). The Fourth Amendment protected homeowners from searches except for probable cause and only then with a properly approved warrant. These guarantees were important, but no one understood them to include the right to be left alone.What they meant instead was protection from arbitrary government.

Privacy in the sense of solitude and isolation—or an ability to have “my space,” as we call it today—was a luxury enjoyed only by the wealthy until the industrial age of the nineteenth century. Most people before then lived on top of each other, literally as well as figuratively. Houses were small and bare. Entire families often slept in one room; toilets were neither separate nor private. The opportunities for intimacy we take for granted simply were not available to most people. The wealth created by industrialization began to change this condition. Houses grew in size, as did the number of people who could afford them, and with these developments came more physical separation and more opportunity to be left alone. The choices offered by a burgeoning marketplace and the vast scale of the American continent also encouraged individualism to a degree unknown in Europe. With these changes came a new meaning of privacy. Now it became a valued part of individual liberty; people assumed that what they did beyond public life, in their own homes, was no one’s business but their own.

After the Civil War, both the rise of large cities and the emergence of new technologies reshaped the concept of privacy. Block upon block of tenement houses in New York City, Chicago, and other big cities re-created the crowded conditions of earlier times. Inventions such as the telephone and the camera made it possible to enter people’s homes and their private lives without physical intrusion. Among the developments most threatening to the sense of privacy was the inexpensive daily newspaper, which regularly reported on the lives of the rich and famous for the amusement of ordinary folks. The stories carried by the new mass media had the ability to ruin reputations, and it was this threat that led to the first laws to protect privacy. These measures allowed harmed individuals to sue for damages by recognizing a general right to privacy, but not a fundamental or constitutional right. Future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis captured this new meaning in “The Right to Privacy,” an important Harvard Law Review article in 1890 that outlined its common-law roots.

The Supreme Court began to consider a constitutional right to privacy in the 1920s. Cases involving the Fourth Amendment offered the first opportunity for the justices to consider privacy as a guaranteed right. In 1928, Justice Brandeis eloquently disagreed with the majority decision in Olmstead v. United States that wiretapping did not require a warrant because it involved no physical trespass. The framers of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, he argued, “sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions, and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the one most valued by civilized men.” His views on wiretapping ultimately prevailed, as did his belief that privacy was a constitutionally protected right.

But what about other areas of privacy? What rights did citizens have to make private decisions without governmental interference? Or stated another way, in what private decisions did government have a legitimate interest? Clearly, the right to privacy was not absolute: even in their own homes, citizens could not, for example, commit murder or molest a child.Where did the right to privacy end?

In the 1960s, the use of a new technology—the birth control pill—raised this question in a case that became the basis for our modern understanding of a right of privacy. This case was different from many the Supreme Court has used to interpret the Bill of Rights. It involved an act of civil disobedience for the specific purpose of testing a law. Also, the plaintiffs were well-educated and respected citizens, quite unlike the “not very nice people,” as Justice Felix Frankfurter once labeled them, who were at the center of other rights controversies. The case did not lead to the cries of outrage that accompanied other expansions of rights in the 1960s, but it did set the Court on the path to its most divisive privacy decision, Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed a woman’s right to choose an abortion.

Estelle Griswold was concerned about the problem of world overpopulation. A religious, well-educated woman and wife of an advertising executive, she had worked in Europe after World War II with the Church World Service, helping to relocate the continent’s vast number of refugees. The experience shaped her views about the need to bring the world’s resources and its people in better balance. “A look at the slums of the world, at the chaos of a war-scorched earth, and you realize that life at the point of survival, where food, water and shelter are unobtainable is close to reversion to an animal order,” she wrote later. “Survival is first; civilization is second.”

It was this concern that led her to become executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut. She became a crusader for birth control in a campaign that would last the rest of her life, but as she admitted, she really knew little about the subject. She had never seen a diaphragm, then the leading means of birth control, at the time of her interview. What she knew was that women needed to be able to control this most intimate part of their lives.

Regulation of sex and birth control had a tortuous history in Connecticut, as it did in the nation. One of the state’s best-known citizens in the nineteenth century was Anthony Comstock, a lobbyist for the Young Men’s Christian Association’s (YMCA) Committee for the Suppression of Vice. The son of Connecticut Calvinists and a lifelong advocate for religion, he rallied his fellow believers and persuaded Congress to pass the Comstock Act of 1873, which outlawed obscene and immoral materials from the U.S. mails. Among the banned items was anything “advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for contraception or abortion.” Six years later, the Connecticut legislature went further and banned the use of any birth control device. State courts interpreted the law also to mean that doctors could not prescribe these devices.

Each year, supporters of Planned Parenthood lobbied the legislature to revise or repeal the ban on the use of birth control—among all the states, only Connecticut took this extreme position—but each year they failed. It was an unfair law, they argued, and its burden fell disproportionately on poor women who either had to refuse their husbands or risk their health and the family’s pocketbook on an unwanted child. Planned Parenthood defied the law by opening clinics in Connecticut in 1935, but the police promptly shut them down. The legislature refused to repeal or modify the ban. Catholic presence was strong in the state, so the law persisted until the 1960s, even though by then it was largely ignored in practice.

It was this situation that Estelle Griswold was determined to remedy. With her allies, she identified two women whose health clearly would be endangered by a pregnancy and enlisted them to bring suit against the state for refusing to allow them to buy birth control devices. Their suit, Poe v. Ullman, made it to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1961, only to be rejected by the justices because of the state’s long-standing refusal to prosecute anyone for violating the statute. There was no fear of enforcement, the Court said, so no harm was done. It would not “be umpire to debates concerning harmless, empty shadows.” This rebuff spurred Griswold to turn the empty shadows into a real controversy. She opened a birth control clinic and set out to ensure that police had no choice but to arrest her for breaking the law. Acting on a complaint, police visited the clinic, where Griswold made certain they saw the banned activities and products. Even though the prosecutor normally declined to bring cases like this to trial, Estelle Griswold’s unwillingness to have the arrest dismissed led to her trial and conviction for violating the state law. She finally had the case that demonstrated harm.

When this case reached the Supreme Court in 1965, the justices sided with Griswold. Writing for the 7-to-2 majority, Justice William O. Douglas ruled that marital relations between a husband and wife were a basic “right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights.” The Constitution protected this right even if it did not mention it specifically. It was an implied right, one that was part of the “penumbra,” or shadow, of several amendments. The First Amendment, for example, contained a freedom to associate privately; the Third and Fourth Amendments protected the sanctity of private homes; the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee against self-incrimination allowed an accused person to keep information private. The majority also found the right of privacy guaranteed in part by the Ninth Amendment, which reserved to the people any rights not named in the Bill of Rights. Rights are expansive, not restrictive, and whenever fundamental rights are at stake, Justice Arthur Goldberg noted in a concurring opinion, the state must have a compelling purpose for abridging these liberties. Invading the “sacred precincts of marital bedrooms” was not a legitimate reason, Goldberg wrote.

Griswold v. Connecticut was a landmark case in establishing constitutional protection for the right of privacy, and it received widespread approval. For Estelle Griswold, it was vindication for a cause she held dear. Three months after the decision, she reopened the birth control clinic in New Haven, and she remained active in women’s causes until her death in 1981. By then, the right of privacy had come to include the right of women to choose whether or not to continue a pregnancy. Unlike the earlier decision, the right to an abortion unleashed a bitter debate that continues today and raises new questions about the limits of privacy in a free society.

In 1972, the Supreme Court extended the right of privacy by striking down a Massachusetts law barring the sale of contraceptives to unmarried couples. This decision was a prelude to Roe v. Wade (1973). The question in the Roe case was straightforward: did government have any compelling interest in a woman’s pregnancy? In language rooted in Griswold, the answer was “no,” at least not in the early stages of pregnancy. The right of privacy, the justices concluded, was “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy,” although once the fetus became capable of living outside the womb, the state could intervene as long as the woman’s health or life is protected.

Roe raised profound moral and religious questions for many Americans: When does life begin? At what point does the state’s interest in protecting life outweigh the woman’s right to privacy, personal autonomy, and equality? Opinion polls continue to reflect a lack of public agreement on these questions. Most Americans support the right to privacy, including a woman’s control over her body, but they are uneasy with the idea that abortion might become a casual practice. The question raised by Roe is not whether abortion will continue to exist in the United States, but what is the extent of the constitutional protection?

Americans overwhelmingly want to keep government out of the bedroom, so the Court’s recognition of a fundamental right to privacy in this area receives broad support, as seen by Lawrence v. Texas, a 2003 case striking down a law that prohibited consensual gay and lesbian sex. Is abortion different? During the three decades since Roe, the justices have reaffirmed the right to privacy in matters of abortion but also have accepted some legislative limits on its practice. In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992), the Court retreated from its position in Roe v. Wade. It allowed some restrictions on the woman’s right to choose, provided the government did not unduly burden or interfere with her ability to get an abortion. Among the limits the justices have found acceptable are laws mandating a twenty-four-hour waiting period, requiring doctors to provide information intended to discourage abortion, and restricting abortions for teenagers younger than a certain age, usually eighteen, if they do not have parental or judicial consent. Today, it is unclear if the justices will continue to trim the broad right it recognized in 1973. A reversal of the Roe decision would give states greater latitude to regulate or even outlaw abortion.

Controversies over privacy extend to more areas of modern life than the bedroom. New technologies are again pushing us to consider questions we have never faced before. Advances in medical technologies allow doctors to keep even critically ill patients alive for long periods of time, but can we keep people alive against their will? Do we have a right to die—or to have others make that decision for us, based on their understanding of our wishes, if we are incapable of making it for ourselves? In 1990, the Supreme Court faced this question for the first time and decided that the right of terminally ill patients to die was part of our right to privacy. Within a few years, all fifty states recognized this right, and a national law, the Patients’ Bill of Rights, required federally funded hospitals to respect patients’ decisions regarding their treatment.

How a person engages in sex should be irrelevant as a matter of state law. Sexual intimacy is a sensitive, key relationship of human existence and the development of human personality. In a diverse nation such as ours, we must preserve the individual freedom to choose, and not imply that there are any ‘right’ ways of conducting relationships. Justice Harry Blackmun, dissenting opinion, Bowers v. Hardwick (1986)

Oregon extended the meaning of personal autonomy to include a right to doctor-assisted suicide, and in 2006, the Court refused to allow the U.S. attorney general to prosecute assisting doctors under federal drug laws. Further advances in medical technology doubtless will continue to raise questions that require a balance between our right to privacy and society’s interest in preserving life.

New communication technologies, including the Internet, also spur us to consider again our right to keep personal information private. Computers now capture reams of data about each of us, and this information helps to determine everything from our credit rating to the types of advertising we receive. Some of these data relate to things we expect to keep private, such as our medical records or our personal communications. What right do we have to this information, and what right do we have to keep it private? The questions have no simple answers. Knowledge of our purchasing habits allows marketers to provide us more of the goods we want, but it also may open us to sales pitches we prefer to avoid. Potentially far more serious in its consequence is the ability to capture new kinds of personal information, such as our DNA, as part of our medical care. Should insurance companies be allowed to use this information to set individual rates or to deny coverage to those who are genetically vulnerable to costly diseases? Should law enforcement or security agencies have routine access to our DNA, or do we have a expectation of privacy unless the government establishes probable cause to suspect us of a crime?

Increasingly, we as a society are trying to determine what privacy means in this brave new world of advanced technologies. The problem is not a new one. In his dissent in Olmstead v. United States, Justice Brandeis saw the threat to privacy that technical innovation posed to liberty: “Discovery and invention have made it possible for the government, by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet.” He warned that technology had the power not simply to make our lives more comfortable but also to threaten our liberty by invading our private lives.

The right to privacy is about defining the proper relationship between the individual and government. The founding generation aimed to permit individual citizens the widest latitude possible to live their lives and pursue their happiness without interference from government. It also vested sovereignty, or final authority, in the people at large, who in turn authorize elected representatives to act on their behalf. Our sense of democracy, as a result, rests firmly upon the idea of individual autonomy, or personal control over the decisions that affect us. The right of privacy supports our individuality, and it is our ability as individuals to make decisions, separately and collectively, about our present and our future that ultimately protects our liberty.

“The Right to Be Let Alone”

In 1890, overeager journalists attempted to crash an event hosted by a wealthy Boston lawyer-socialite, Samuel Warren, and his law partner, Louis D. Brandeis, who later became a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. The two wrote an article, “The Right to Privacy,” for the Harvard Law Review that Dean Roscoe Pound of the Harvard Law School cited as “adding a chapter to our law.” The authors argued for a right of privacy or, as Brandeis later defined it in the wiretapping case of Olmstead v. United States (1928), “the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” Although the Constitution does not mention a right to privacy, the Supreme Court has inferred it from the language of the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments.

That the individual shall have full protection in person and in property is a principle as old as the common law; but it has been found necessary from time to time to define anew the exact nature and extent of such protection. Political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights, and the common law, in its eternal youth, grows to meet the demands of society . . .

This development of the law was inevitable. The intense intellectual and emotional life, and the heightening of sensations which came with the advance of civilization, made it clear to man that only a part of the pain, pleasure, and profit of life lay in physical things. Thoughts, emotions, and sensations demanded legal recognition, and the beautiful capacity for growth which characterizes the common law enabled the judges to afford the requisite protection, without the interposition of the legislature.

Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person, and for securing to the individual what Judge Cooley calls the right “to be let alone.” . . . Of the desirability—indeed of the necessity—of some such protection, there can, it is believed, be no doubt . . . The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury. Nor is the harm wrought by such invasions confined to the suffering of those who may be made the subjects of journalistic or other enterprise. In this, as in other branches of commerce, the supply creates the demand. Each crop of unseemly gossip, thus harvested, becomes the seed of more, and, in direct proportion to its circulation, results in a lowering of social standards and of morality. Even gossip apparently harmless, when widely and persistently circulated, is potent for evil. It both belittles and perverts. It belittles by inverting the relative importance of things, thus dwarfing the thoughts and aspirations of a people. When personal gossip attains the dignity of print, and crowds the space available for matters of real interest to the community, what wonder that the ignorant and thoughtless mistake its relative importance . . .

[T]he protection afforded to thoughts, sentiments, and emotions, expressed through the medium of writing or of the arts, so far as it consists in preventing publication, is merely an instance of the enforcement of the more general right of the individual to be let alone. It is like the right not to be assaulted or beaten, the right not to be imprisoned, the right not to be maliciously prosecuted, the right not to be defamed. The principle which protects personal writings and all other personal productions . . . is in reality . . . the principle . . . of an inviolate personality.

Various Guarantees Create Zones of Privacy

Critics of the Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which recognized a right to privacy in marriage, chastised the majority justices because the Constitution does not mention a right to privacy specifically. Justice William O. Douglas, in the majority opinion, argued that the right can be inferred legitimately from the language of at least four amendments. He wrote about “penumbras, formed by emanations,” metaphorical language that suggested that the right was as logically related to the amendments as were halos around the sun or other celestial objects.

Specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance . . . Various guarantees create zones of privacy. The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one . . . The Third Amendment in its prohibition against the quartering of soldiers “in any house” in time of peace without the consent of the owner is another facet of that privacy. The Fourth Amendment explicitly affirms the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The Fifth Amendment in its Self-Incrimination Clause enables the citizen to create a zone of privacy which government may not force him to surrender to his detriment. The Ninth Amendment provides: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

Justice Arthur Goldberg, in his concurring opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut, relied on the little-used Ninth Amendment, which reserved any rights not listed in the Constitution to the people in his argument in support of the right to privacy.

The Ninth Amendment to the Constitution may be regarded by some as a recent discovery and may be forgotten by others, but since 1791 it has been a basic part of the Constitution which we are sworn to uphold. To hold that a right so basic and fundamental and so deep-rooted in our society as the right of privacy in marriage may be infringed because that right is not guaranteed in so many words by the first eight amendments to the Constitution is to ignore the Ninth Amendment and to give it no effect whatsoever. Moreover, a judicial construction that this fundamental right is not protected by the Constitution because it is not mentioned in explicit terms by one of the first eight amendments or elsewhere in the Constitution would violate the Ninth Amendment, which specifically states that “[t]he enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” . . .

Although the Constitution does not speak in so many words of the right of privacy in marriage, I cannot believe that it offers these fundamental rights no protection. The fact that no particular provision of the Constitution explicitly forbids the State from disrupting the traditional relation of the family—a relation as old and as fundamental as our entire civilization— surely does not show that the Government was meant to have the power to do so. Rather, as the Ninth Amendment expressly recognizes, there are fundamental personal rights such as this one, which are protected from abridgment by the Government though not specifically mentioned in the Constitution.

About Your "Rights"

In a system of 3 co-equal branches of government, where checks and balances are supposed to keep each of the branches from overstepping its authority, how exactly do we hold the SUPREME COURT accountable?

How does Congress pass a bill intended to rein in a SCOTUS that seems to be running afoul of the document its supposed to be helping us enforce and keep intact, when that court has the power to nullify any law it sees fit to nullify? When that court can actually (in effect) rule to nullify parts of the US Constitution itself?

This is just the latest in a long-running series of constitutional crises being manufactured by those dark and mysterious entities known collectively as "they".

Hey - I may be paranoid, but that don't mean nobody's out to get me.

Anyway, taking a look at a few wrinkles in this big fuckin' mess we're up to our eyeballs in:

WaPo: (pay wall)

Opinion: Louisiana reveals the war on rights that is coming if Roe is overturned

With the Supreme Court considering whether to overturn Roe v. Wade, Louisiana House Republicans advanced this past week an antiabortion bill of astonishing sweep. The proposal would rewrite the state’s homicide statute to “ensure the right to life and equal protection of the laws to all unborn children from the moment of fertilization by protecting them by the same laws protecting other human beings.” In other words, not only would the bill empower Louisiana prosecutors to charge women who get abortions with murder, it appears to declare the use of in-vitro fertilization, intrauterine devices and emergency contraception to be homicide, too.

For half a century, Americans could more or less take for granted their right to terminate their pregnancies, seek help starting families or get IUDs. Many might not realize how dramatically overturning Roe would reshape American life. Some deny this reality, arguing that, should the Supreme Court repudiate Roe, as a draft majority opinion that leaked earlier this month suggests it might, the United States would resemble Europe, where first-trimester abortion is legal nearly everywhere. In fact, overturning Roe would result in the immediate banning of abortion in the 13 states that have antiabortion laws designed to kick in as soon as Roe is gone. Republican leaders in Nebraska, South Dakota and Indiana are calling for legislative special sessions to pass sweeping new abortion restrictions.

And Louisiana shows that, given the option, right-wing lawmakers are poised to wage a broad war against reproductive rights that would horrify most Americans. It might be that wealthy people in states run by anti-abortion zealots would be able to cross state lines to terminate their pregnancies or to seek other family planning options. (Though some Republicans want to try to ban that, too.) But poor people would be unable to get safe, legal abortions. On top of the health risks they would face seeking illicit abortions, in Louisiana these individuals might also risk being prosecuted for murder. Given that many women seek abortions because they would struggle to carry their pregnancies to term while caring for the families they already have, the bill would be a particularly cruel twist that would threaten the families who are least capable of facing such hardship.

If Roe were egregiously wrong, as Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. claims in the leaked draft opinion, the justices would have to weigh whether enabling such drastic and immediate consequences would be good for the orderly application of the law. But the court need not make that tough call, because Roe was a reasonable ruling to which seven justices signed their names, and which the court upheld in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Other than the makeup of the court, the only thing that has changed in the past half-century is that Roe has become a keystone decision for Americans’ personal rights. Overturning it now would wound the nation, worsen the country’s politics and make some of the most vulnerable Americans more so. It would be the height of gratuitous judicial activism.

Glenn Kirschner - There ought to be public hearings and an impeachment inquiry. 

Lawrence O'Donnell, with former USAG Eric Holder:

Last Night

Lawrence O'Donnell - The Last Word

For the first time ever,

5 people sitting in judgement -

5 people accountable to no one -

are about to hand down a decision

saying, "Y'know, Americans have

too darn many rights.

We need to take a few of 'em away."

Today's Tweet

Love the argument that we can’t have rights because we have a deeply rooted history of not having rights.

— Robyn (@hmntre) May 3, 2022

It's The Privacy, Stupid

Moving with alarming alacrity, the pinch-faced blue-nosed "conservatives" are very busy putting laws in place intended to fuck us all out of our rights.

And it turns out The West Wing got it right - 23 fucking years ago, dammit.

With A Nod To Jimmy Carter

Carter took all kinds of heat for telling us he was going to line up his foreign policy with the basic tenets of human rights.

I'll admit that it sounded kinda limp at the time.

But the weirdness of "soft" power is that it ends up being the hardest thing - to do, certainly, but also the hardest thing to resist once it's put forward. How do you argue against doing what's right, when you know it's the right thing to do?

Invading a country, without real provocation - no matter how much you hate their government or the way they conduct themselves - is just wrong and unjustifiable. We didn't stick to that one in 2003. We failed miserably, went into Iraq for all the wrong reasons, and we're still paying a steep cost for it.

The same point could be made about Afghanistan in 2001. That one's a little harder, but the principles are the same. The asshole Taliban in charge of that government gave the bad guys a place to hang out, and so they shared in the guilt for 9/11. But a full-on invasion was a bad idea because first, it was disproportional, and second, because of that disproportional response, we stuck ourselves with a busted joint (just like Iraq) that we had to rebuild afterwards while ducking the blowback from people who were thoroughly ungrateful for our noble efforts to liberate them by fucking everything up for them, and now - after 20 years - we're pretty much right back where we started. 20 fucking years.

And we've heard all the same shit coming from Putin that we heard from Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice and Bush - what a horrible threat "those people" are, and we have to get them before they get us.

It was bullshit then and it's bullshit now.

Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a war of conquest and nothing more.

So Biden is doing it about right, I think. He's trying to keep the world community focused on a very strong response, but doing it in a more balanced way that puts hard-power war-fighting resources in the hands of the Ukrainians while using the soft-power tools of sanctions and political pressure to degrade Putin's capacity to sustain his armed aggression.

The problem - as usual - is trying to get people to think in wider terms, and to start moving away from the old Henry Kissinger Real Politick I'm-Only-Out-For-Myself crap, which is very much what got us into this fuckin' mess to begin with.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Opinion: Too many nations still waffle on Ukraine. The U.S. cannot ignore them.

Russian aggression against Ukraine violated both morality and a principle of international law — the sanctity of sovereign borders. So stark was the transgression that neutral or nonaligned nations such as Switzerland and Sweden have strongly condemned President Vladimir Putin’s war and joined international sanctions against his regime. However, many large and influential nations, including some democracies with which the United States has strong relationships, have equivocated. It’s a troubling aspect of the crisis and calls for a deliberate but differentiated U.S. response.

The fence-sitters take a range of positions. In a category by itself is China, which has pursued neutrality while refusing to modify its prewar declaration of friendship with Moscow. Slightly less indefensibly, South Africa and India abstained from a United Nations resolution deploring Russia’s aggression and refused to levy any sanctions. Then come countries, such as Brazil, Mexico, Israel and the United Arab Emirates (not a democracy, to be sure), which did vote for the U.N. resolution but still balk at sanctions.

Each country has its rationalization, often related to an entanglement with Russia, either current or — in the case of South Africa, where some still feel a misplaced sense of gratitude for the Soviet Union’s support against apartheid — historical. India still buys most of its weaponry from Russia, despite its recent alignment with the United States, Australia and Japan against China. Brazilian agriculture depends on Russian fertilizer. Israel has a deal with Mr. Putin, whose air force in Syria allows Israeli airstrikes on Iranian convoys that supply Hezbollah guerrillas.

Only for Mexico is the problem pure, misguided ideology rather than conflict of interest. It has only $2.3 billion in two-way trade with Russia, but the United States’ southern neighbor and largest merchandise trading partner — $614.5 billion in 2019 — nevertheless sticks to non-interventionist dogma under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Some members of his left-wing political party — unconscionably — chose this moment to inaugurate a “friendship committee” with Russia.

The lesson, unfortunately, is that much of the world does not share the combination of moral outrage and geopolitical self-interest that has forged democracies in Europe, North America and the Pacific Rim into a solid coalition arrayed against Moscow’s war. Mr. Putin has spent years trying to co-opt countries around the world, no doubt in anticipation of a long-planned move against Ukraine. Undeniably, he is reaping some benefits from that now.

Countries supporting sanctions against Russia account for the vast majority of world economic activity, so the refusal of others to cooperate is not decisive. Still, the United States should not underestimate either the need to counter Russian influence among nations that are equivocating or the opportunities to do so.

The Biden administration’s approach should vary, depending on its leverage in each country. There’s not much point using moral suasion on China, for example, though hints to Beijing of the price it would pay for re-arming Mr. Putin appear to be having some impact. For the rest, Washington should aggressively deploy moral suasion, trade and aid — economic as well as military. That’s what Russia has been doing; this country must respond in kind.

Straight Up

Mary Trump explains:

Bounty

I hear there’s a bounty on my womb.
A high price in the currency
of power and control.
In the currency
of violence
and cowardice.

You want to make a home in this body.
Penetrate it with your power and lust
and demand I carry the seed you’ve planted
pretending to protect the sacred
when we both know
your concern is for birth
and not for life.

I’ve seen the way you watch
as young mouths go unfed
as young arms are torn from their mother’s embrace
as young bodies are raped and ravaged and locked away
in the land of the free
and home of the brave.

You read me ghost stories
from the good book
about purity
and innocence
and all the ways my body is wrong
and all the ways my body does not belong to me.
But I prefer different fairy tales.
The ones that were woven from an
ancient mother’s womb
whispered to her from deep in the earth.
The ones that teach me
that I am fire and water
that I am land and thunder
that I am holy and sacred
that I am the great creator and destroyer
that I belong to me
and only me
and I alone
will decide.

I hear there’s a bounty on my womb
but you seem to forget
that I am the huntress
and I can smell the fear
dripping from your cowardly words
and I dare you to try and hold my fire
in your bare, trembling hands.

-- Gina Puorro

www.ginapuorro.com

Another Thought

An aspect that had never entered my mind: What about the kids who never were because a young woman was forced to have an unwanted child, and never got the chance to have kids she did want?

Ursula Le Guin -

via Lexington Chapter - Kentucky Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice:

They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all f*cked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke….

What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like? […]

It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child.

But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children.
The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents….
But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear.

What was it like, in the Dark Ages when abortion was a crime, for the girl whose dad couldn’t borrow cash, as my dad could? What was it like for the girl who couldn’t even tell her dad, because he would go crazy with shame and rage? Who couldn’t tell her mother? Who had to go alone to that filthy room and put herself body and soul into the hands of a professional criminal? – because that is what every doctor who did an abortion was, whether he was an extortionist or an idealist.

You know what it was like for her. You know and I know; that is why we are here. We are not going back to the Dark Ages. We are not going to let anybody in this country have that kind of power over any girl or woman. There are great powers, outside the government and in it, trying to legislate the return of darkness. We are not great powers. But we are the light. Nobody can put us out. May all of you shine very bright and steady, today and always.

Continuing The Fight (updated)

It should be hard to imagine a government led by people who think we have a right to Twitter but not healthcare.

It isn't hard to imagine that at all. Not here in USAmerica Inc.

Twitter shut down President Stoopid's account recently because of his insistence on using it to spread the "election fraud" bullshit, and now Amazon has stepped up by kicking Parler off their web services platform because:

And of course, the Q Cucks Clan have reacted with their usual cool and aplomb.

Buzzfeed:

Amazon's suspension of Parler's account means that unless it can find another host, once the ban takes effect on Sunday Parler will go offline.

Amazon notified Parler that it would be cutting off the social network favored by conservatives and extremists from its cloud hosting service Amazon Web Services, according to an email obtained by BuzzFeed News. The suspension, which will go into effect on Sunday just before midnight, means that Parler will be unable to operate and will go offline unless it can find another hosting service.

People on Parler used the social network to stoke fear, spread hate, and coordinate the insurrection at the Capitol building on Wednesday. The app has recently been overrun with death threats, celebrations of violence, and posts encouraging “Patriots” to march on Washington, DC with weapons on January 19, the day before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.

In an email obtained by BuzzFeed News, an AWS Trust and Safety team told Parler Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff that the calls for violence propagating across the social network violated its terms of service. Amazon said it was unconvinced that the service’s plan to use volunteers to moderate calls for violence and hate speech would be effective.

“Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms," the email reads. "It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.”

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the suspension.

In a post on Saturday evening following publication of this story, Parler CEO John Matze, who did not return a request for comment from BuzzFeed News, said it is possible the social network will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch."

Update - as of this morning, Parler is homeless.

Radicalization is big business. This shit will always be with us because there's always a double digit percentage of wackos out there who need to live in their fantasies, and there will always be cynical manipulative assholes looking to monetize the crazy.

We can't set ourselves up to fail by insisting that any given way of thinking is illegal, so we have to make it plain that there's a big difference between thought and action. 

We also have to insist on understanding the 1st amendment.

We can only push the culture forward and let the loonies know their deliberate ignorance and  abhorrent behaviors won't be tolerated in a civil society.

They won't be employed. and they won't be invited to the neighbors' for dinner, and they won't be welcome at the tailgates until they learn how to mind their manners.

A Little History

Mary G Harris-Jones (Mother Jones) was a badass in the best traditions of American Baddassery.

Union organizer, civil rights warrior, and all around champion of getting what you want by standing up and speaking truth to power - and being willing to take the hit because of it.

During the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike of 1912 in West Virginia, Mary Jones arrived in June 1912, speaking and organizing despite a shooting war between United Mine Workers members and the private army of the mine owners. Martial law in the area was declared and rescinded twice before Jones was arrested on 13 February 1913 and brought before a military court. Accused of conspiring to commit murder among other charges, she refused to recognize the legitimacy of her court-martial. She was sentenced to twenty years in the state penitentiary. During house arrest at Mrs. Carney's Boarding House, she acquired a dangerous case of pneumonia.

After 85 days of confinement, her release coincided with Indiana Senator John W. Kern's initiation of a Senate investigation into the conditions in the local coal mines. Mary Lee Settle describes Jones at this time in her 1978 novel The Scapegoat. Several months later, she helped organize coal miners in Colorado. Once again she was arrested, served some time in prison, and was escorted from the state in the months prior to the Ludlow Massacre. After the massacre, she was invited to meet face-to-face with the owner of the Ludlow mine, John D. Rockefeller Jr. The meeting prompted Rockefeller to visit the Colorado mines and introduce long-sought reforms.

Civics

Today's lesson is the 1st amendment:

Just A Thought

A coupla days ago, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley announced we'd be withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council, saying too many of the countries involved in it are asshole regimes that don't really give a fuck about human rights.

Then we got word about the Kids-Held-Hostage mess at almost exactly the same time.

Now, there's plenty of reason to believe it's just another episode of Cult45 stepping on their own dicks, but that could be assigning too high a probability that it's the kind of coincidence that is pretty goddamned rare in politics.

Daddy State Awareness Rule #1:

Every accusation is a confession

Just for the fuck of it, let's throw in the simple fact that 45* never mentioned anything about NoKo's abysmal record on Human Rights when he was giving Kim that long luxurious tongue bath.

And we should prob'ly try to remember a little something about the Muslim Bans too.

There is no bottom. The Daddy State will always find a way to go lower.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with Stephen Miller now. With Bannon gone, Miller could be 45*'s only really solid connection to the hardcore MAGA-rubes that comprise "the base".

In Other News

The Daily Beast:

During Wednesday’s Senate hearing on the Equifax data breach, a protester dressed as the “Monopoly Man” from the board game photobombed Equifax CEO Richard Smith’s testimony.

While the CEO discussed his company’s breach that affected 145.5 million people, the protester gazed skeptically through a monocle at the back of his head.

The protester, who is named Amanda Werner, tweeted a photo fully decked out in Monopoly’s Rich Uncle Pennybags attire, complete with the top hat, mustache, and monocle. Werner is a campaign manager for the Americans for Financial Reform coalition and the nonprofit Public Citizen.

In the tweet, Werner explained that the prank, while distracting, was meaningful.

Don't ever forget that "Tort Reform" is coded language used by coin-operated politicians to make it sound reasonable for their client corporations to fuck us out of our right to seek redress through the courts.

Yeah - Even Those Assholes

Unite The Right rally is on track - Aug 12, 2017 at Emancipation Park in Charlottesville.

Reminding us of the foundation of the First Amendment, Lloyd Snook put up this post at Snook & Haughey (here in Charllottesville):

Many in the community want the City to withdraw the permit necessary for them to take over Emancipation Park for the day. There are many legal reasons that the City might scrutinize the permit application very closely, but we need to steer clear of the illegalreasons that have been suggested. Let’s look at what the City can or cannot do.

The City can regulate or deny a permit application for reasons of safety, but notbecause of the content of what the alt-right people are going to say. Any regulations must be content-neutral.

The City can impose conditions and restrictions on marches and demonstrations only if the conditions and restrictions are reasonably tailored to specific needs and problems, and only if the conditions and restrictions do not have the effect of being an undue burden on public speech.

The City cannot pass on the costs of security to the permit applicants, at least where the security costs are incurred to protect against the angry responses of others.

Content Neutrality:

There are a few points that need to be made here:

• Hate speech is still protected under the First Amendment.
• Unpopular speech is protected under the First Amendment.
• Government cannot regulate or restrict protected speech.
• There is no such thing as a list of domestic terrorist organizations whose members can be denied the civil rights given to the rest of us.

From The Daily Progress:

Advocating pro-white viewpoints and flanked by members of the Warlocks Motorcycle Club, local right-wing blogger Jason Kessler spoke outside the Charlottesville Police Department on Tuesday night to discuss his upcoming rally and to denounce his opponents.

Kessler’s “Unite the Right” rally, planned for Aug. 12 at Emancipation Park, will take place a little more than a month after about 50 members of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan held a rally in Justice Park that drew more than 1,000 counter-protesters.

-and-

Kessler has distanced himself from the KKK rally, saying that the leader of the Klan chapter that filed for the city permit is an FBI informant and was paid by “left-wing groups to discredit legitimate conservatives.”

hat tip = Walker Thornton

About That Independence Thing

The big one for me is - we don't know that 45* won't pipe this info directly to the Kremlin, which is pretty much an invitation for the Russian Mob to fuck us over - again.

Reuters:

Maryland, Delaware and Louisiana on Monday joined a growing number of U.S. states that have refused to hand over voter data to a commission established by President Donald Trump to investigate possible voting fraud.

And actually, now that 20 Govs and AGs have declined 45*'s bullshit request, it's starting to  sound something like this: You can take a flyin' fuck at a rollin' donut, dipwad.

The push-back is gaining momentum.

Pro-Life = Dead Women

Criminalizing abortion doesn't stop abortion - it just makes it more dangerous.

Jennifer Wright, Harper's Bazaar

The Trump administration may be the most fervently anti-abortion since Reagan.

This will likely come as a surprise to every man who, prior to Trump’s election, assured me, “don’t worry, he’s really a democrat! He’s not going to do anything about abortion!”

It seems you guys were wrong.

Trump has reinstated the global gag rule, preventing funding for overseas reproductive health organizations that offer abortion related services. Closer to home, Trump signed a bill on April 13 that allows states to cut off funding from organizations like Planned Parenthood that provide abortions. He has suggested that federal funding could continue to go to the women’s health organization only if they stopped performing abortions.

All of this falls under the banner of a “pro-life” agenda.

Indeed, Vice President Mike Pence and counselor to the President, Kellyanne Conway, both spoke enthusiastically at the March for Life. There, the Vice President proclaimed, “We will not rest until we restore a culture of life in America.”

Perhaps when people enact these laws, they imagine what a world with more restrictive abortion rights—or a “culture of life”—looks like. I do not think these people are evil. I suspect they have a vision of a world that is flawed. I think when they imagine that world of outlawed abortions, they imagine a world full of adorable, bouncing babies. They imagine happy mothers, and fathers who are, unexpectedly, delighted and doting fathers.

That is not reality.

The impulse to restrict a woman's access to the full range of health services (including abortion) is dumb for a mess of good reasons - not the least of which is that the decision to have kids or not to have kids belongs to whoever gets pregnant.

If you prefer the clear-eyed pragmatic approach, then another reason is plain old ordinary economics. It's cheaper and way more cost-effective to prevent the problems caused by unwanted pregnancies. And going with workable measures that actually lower the need for abortion is way better than the bullshit law-n-order "solutions" either in place now, or being proposed to remedy those problems.

BTW - "workable" and "abstinence only" are incompatible. Remember - total abstinence wasn't 100% effective even for god.

Allow me to reiterate the basics on this:

• Eggs ain't chickens
• Caterpillars ain't butterflies
• Ain't nuthin' goin' on in my daughter's uterus that's any of your fuckin' business
• So fuck the fuck off, you pinch-faced blue-nosed puritanical fuck

Run It Like A Business

A smart guy told us back in the 90s that the 21st century would be about privacy.

I hate the notion of "prophesy fulfilled" and so I'll just ignore it because it's inconvenient, but damn, son - kinda looks like that's what's happening.

Sharon Begley at STAT

A little-noticed bill moving through Congress would allow companies to require employees to undergo genetic testing or risk paying a penalty of thousands of dollars, and would let employers see that genetic and other health information.

Giving employers such power is now prohibited by legislation including the 2008 genetic privacy and nondiscrimination law known as GINA. The new bill gets around that landmark law by stating explicitly that GINA and other protections do not apply when genetic tests are part of a “workplace wellness” program.

The bill, HR 1313, was approved by a House committee on Wednesday, with all 22 Republicans supporting it and all 17 Democrats opposed. It has been overshadowed by the debate over the House GOP proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, but the genetic testing bill is expected to be folded into a second ACA-related measure containing a grab-bag of provisions that do not affect federal spending, as the main bill does.

- and -

Rigorous studies by researchers not tied to the $8 billion wellness industry have shown that the programs improve employee health little if at all. An industry group recently concluded that they save so little on medical costs that, on average, the programs lose money. But employers continue to embrace them, partly as a way to shift more health care costs to workers, including by penalizing them financially.

So what's it actually about? It has great potential to be about shenanigans and fuckery.

But in the context of the 4th amendment, it's about none of your goddamned business.

Amendment 4:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.