Today’s big news: a “leaked” memo from the Supreme Court suggests that the court will overturn Roe v. Wade. My first thought is that the leak was deliberate, a way to get people used to the idea that a decision that has stood for 50 years is being negated by a packed and biased court. Let people yell and tweet and fulminate, but that’s all you get to do.
My second thought: the main victims of this law will be women without financial means. Women of means will always have access to abortion; they can travel to another state, pay a private doctor, etc. It’s poorer women, often of color, who will suffer the most.
But who cares about them, right? Justice is blind to them, never for them.
What a partisan joke the Supreme Court is in the U.S. And they have the gall to argue that the court is apolitical!
W.J. Astore
I truly believe that if men got pregnant, abortion would be free, legal, and readily available across the United States.
But men don’t get pregnant, so the idea of carrying an unwanted baby to term is mainly theoretical for them. How easy it is, then, to outlaw abortion while claiming to be pro-life.
Having been raised Catholic, I was taught abortion is murder. It’s that blunt. As the Church was teaching me that, it was allowing predatory priests to molest children. There was even a predatory priest assigned to my parish when I was young. So I’m not too keen on the moral authority and teachings of the Church here. Again, if priests got pregnant, I truly believe abortion would be accepted within the Church. Perhaps it would be justified by arguing that priests, first and foremost, have to serve God and the Church and therefore shouldn’t be…
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Bracing Views 
Once again, Colonel: You have nailed it. So on top of hyperinflation, food, fuel, and other shortages, a resurgent Pandemic, a War in Europe, wildfires, mega-droughts, tornados, and tropical events, we will have Pro-Lifers and Pro-Choicers doing battle in the streets. Going to be an interesting Summer, eh? What with that election coming up, and all.
Great piece. i hope it gets very wide distribution and attention.
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In the 21st century this is unbelievable. Abortions WILL happen, just not the way they should! There are more pressing issues that need attention, such as drug addictions and climate change.
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To state the obvious, when you can predict exactly how the court’s justices will vote, based on which president nominated them, you have a partisan court.
As my wife likes to say, in America we keep chasing our own tails on so many issues, whether it’s abortion, race relations, union and labor rights, wars, you name it. We’ve become a retrograde country, perhaps because we sense our best days are behind us. We are flailing and lashing out unpredictably against the weaker elements of our society; even worse, we have the nerve to interpret this as “progress.”
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Namaste WJ and Readers! Women are second class citizens around the world. How can we change this?
Riane Eisler stated in the Chalice and the Blade that there needs to be partnership. However, it will take forever — UNLESS, women have a success that affects the whole world and leads to trust and respect for all people.
I humbly propose that women rise-up as the peacemakers around the world to stop the war in Ukraine and a plan is ready now. U.N. Secretary-General Guterres set the stage when he issued a call for a Global Cease-Fire. The call for a cease-fire was profound because stopping war affects all issues!
Women can be the POWER to implement the Cease-Fire and invite men to join to create the largest people movement the world has ever seen! It will set a precedent for all time. The act alone, successful or not, will change the world AND affect all women’s issues!
Peace and Love, Andre
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Namaste to You, Andre. Reading Your comment, i was immediately reminded of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoIRBAvvQ0I
i agree with You completely that Women could be that POWER. The question is: How is that POWER to be found, accepted, understood, and then effectively used to bring about the Changes that are needed? And what exactly are those Changes? Have a Great day. ~ jeff
People Have The Power
I was dreaming in my dreaming
Of an aspect bright and fair
And my sleeping it was broken
But my dream it lingered near
In the form of shining valleys
Where the pure air recognized
And my senses newly opened
I awakened to the cry
That the people have the power
To redeem the work of fools
Upon the meek the graces shower
It’s decreed the people rule
The people have the power
The people have the power
The people have the power
The people have the power
Vengeful aspects became suspect
And bending low as if to hear
And the armies ceased advancing
Because the people had their ear
And the shepherds and the soldiers
Lay beneath the stars
Exchanging visions
And laying arms
To waste in the dust
In the form of shining valleys
Where the pure air rarified
And my senses newly opened
I awakened to the cry
The people have the power
The people have the power
The people have the power
The people have the power
Where there were deserts
I saw fountains
Like cream the waters rise
And we strolled there together
With none to laugh or criticize
And the leopard
And the lamb
Lay together truly bound
I was hoping in my hoping
To recall what I had found
I was dreaming in my dreaming
God knows a purer view
As I surrender to my sleeping
I commit my dream to you
The people have the power
The people have the power
The people have the power
The people have the power
The power to dream, to rule
To wrestle the world from fools
It’s decreed the people rule
It’s decreed the people rule
Listen
I believe everything we dream
Can come to pass through our union
We can turn the world around
We can turn the earth’s revolution
We have the power
People have the power
The people have the power
The people have the power
The power to dream, to rule
To wrestle the world from fools
It’s decreed the people rule
It’s decreed the people rule
We have the power
People have the power
We have the power…
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Patti Smith
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Hello Joe (JG) and all. Thank you for your thoughts. I humbly would like to show you a plan that can “harness the power” of women and nonviolence. I have been very fortunate and presented the plan to the office of U.N. Sec-General Antonio Guterres and have networked with non-governmental women leaders from around the world. It has been an incredible journey.
My email is Andre (at) GlobalStrategyofNonviolence.org. Please send me a note and I’ll be glad to discuss it with you.
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i will do that, Andre. Thank You. ~ jeff
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Hello Jeff, I inadvertently called you Joe. Send me a letter.
Andre
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*I truly believe you have hit this nail squarely on its head!*
And that you’ve done it with a minimum of well chosen words!
*Thank You very much! Sincerely, Grandpa Ken Smet (Vietnam Aug68 – Jul69)
*
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In this article, Caitlin Johnstone captures important truths:
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/05/03/a-weird-stupid-dystopia/
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Some VERY important Truths, indeed.
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Glenn Greenwald has a very different and thought-provoking take on the leaked SCOTUS Roe v Wade draft decision at https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-irrational-misguided-discourse
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Glenn makes good points. Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that Roe v. Wade was decided hastily, circumventing a legislative process that was pushing abortion rights in the early 1970s, and the decision was too broad.
The question is: What do you do after 50 years, when Roe v. Wade has been “settled” law for all that time? When it’s doubtless saved the lives of tens of thousands of women, spared the horrors of back-alley abortions?
At what cost to society, and at what cost to the integrity of the court (assuming it has any left)?
For example, Susan Collins is already claiming that Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh promised her they wouldn’t join a sweeping repeal of Roe v. Wade. It appears their promises were false, which is no surprise to me, but it seems to be to her (though I doubt that too).
What stands revealed here is that the Supreme Court is just another compromised body composed of people lacking in integrity. Not exactly a promising verdict for justice in America.
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Is this a surprise? No, I believe we have seen it coming, and I am very concerned that we are seeing just the beginning of a very difficult and unsettling time in the United States. Here in central Pennsylvania, i.e., aka Pennsyltucky, I am sure many of my neighbors are preparing to rejoice in the streets as their prayers are at last being answered. While listening to a newscast this morning, the prevailing thought of the commentator was that this is just the beginning. That worries me. Knowing the mindset of the potential theocracy that would be wholeheartedly embraced by those who only believe in freedom when it fits their personal viewpoints, this ruling, as the commentator noted, could be that slippery slope that sees a deluge of reversals of the “horrors” that have been perpetrated by a liberal mindset. We should have seen this coming when women were denied the full benefits of the ERA. To me, the potentials are horrifying, but then I tend to be a bit cynical when it comes to justice and human rights. We (collective) in the US tend to be great at lip service but not always good at deeds.
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I’m not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they’ll have, immediately the floor will rise. – Christopher Hitchens
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We Need an International Antiwar Movement, Not a Cheerleading Squad for the Arms Industry
by Ron Jacobs
A ceasefire between the warring parties, a Russian withdrawal, a halt to arms shipments, a negotiated peace and an end to NATO. This is what the international left should be organizing around in regards to the Russia-Ukraine war. It shouldn’t be calling for stepped up arms shipments to Ukraine’s military or defending Moscow’s invasion.
When all is said and done and this war is stopped, the most likely situation for the vast majority of Ukrainian working people will be one where their greatest enemy could well be the Ukrainian government. Likewise, if the war goes on long enough, the greatest enemy of the vast majority of Russian working people could well be their government. The oligarchs in both nations will still be oligarchs, while the Russian and Ukrainian people will bear the costs—human, financial, and otherwise—for the war.
If the reader thinks the current conflict will somehow end with a different outcome, they need to revisit the history of war, especially war of the modern kind. You know, where civilian populations are bombed, conscripts are forced to kill and die in the thousands; where international bankers make loans to all sides until the battle begins. All the while generals and politicians talk nonsense about the principles being defended as if most of them had any principles that couldn’t be purchased.
It’s becoming clearer to more and more people that this war is truly a proxy war and that Ukrainians are being sacrificed by Washington and its clients (including the government in Kyiv) while Russians are being sacrificed by their government. Neither position—Ukrainian or Russian—is one to be envied.
As an acquaintance and Vietnam Veteran Against the War member pointed out on Facebook, this is the perfect war for the US-dominated military-industrial complex. There are no body bags coming home, no anti-war demonstrations, and virtually no pressure to negotiate. Indeed, a substantial part of what usually constitutes the US antiwar movement is actually cheering on the Ukrainian military in this conflict. In short, this is a dream situation and Washington and its minions will fight to the last Ukrainian to keep the war industry’s profits rolling in.
Continued at https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/05/03/we-need-an-international-antiwar-movement-not-a-cheerleading-squad-for-the-arms-industry/
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The SC is political because the law is political. Interpretation is everything regarding the law and the specialty of lawyers is interpretation that will read the law for the benefit of the client. Thus we have corporations being treated as persons with all the rights of a person. The history of the SC shows how it reflects the thinking of the times and how it bends with pressure as was seen with the outrage coming from the blocking of FDR’s New Deal legislation bringing change in SC rulings. Racism was just fine with the SC right up until Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka in 1954.
What galls me is how McConnell was, as you point out, able to prevent a sitting president from making an appointment. Predicting the future is folly (the assumption that Hillary would be elected) another minus sign for Obama’s legacy.
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It seems to me that a government that can BAN abortion could someday just as easily REQUIRE abortion. In fact, I recall a time in this country when women were sterilized without their consent. Amazing we keep going backward.
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sex, violence, and vengeance; these alienable traits comprise our legacy and should have been transferred to the human trash-tip millennia ago in our evolutionary history. instead, those traits have become more intractably embedded. my solution? perform tubal ligations on every female bairn upon her birthing. the maternally-oriented can raise non-human animals. commensurately: no more abortions; no more retrogressive politics; no more vicious, unrelenting cycles of violence and vengeance; no more US… and good riddance, i say! and yes, i’m a pyrrhonist, not a prudent problem-solver. thanx for manumitting me to vent on your most eximious and judicious site, wja.
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The court will never lose the stench from this blatant political decision
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My first reaction was “Halleluja…we are going to stop killing children”.
My second was that the leak was an obvious effort to derail the decision…another act of treachery by those who deal in treachery vs. values.
So good to see the Supreme Court working as it should!
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Well, here goes nothing:
1. “Stop killing children”: When does a fetus become a “child”? Moment of conception? Fetal heartbeat? Viability outside the womb? Are you using science here, or religious belief, or both?
2. The leak: My first thought is that the leak is designed to defuse outrage and protest. To get everyone used to the idea before the summer, when the decision will be released.
3. The Supreme Court working as it should: You mean in a partisan nature that agrees with your positions? SCOTUS, as much as possible, should be non-partisan, unbiased, and therefore unpredictable. That the court is so predictable now is a measure of how one party/group of interests has come to dominate it.
4. Finally, what really worries me: The Court couldn’t care less about individual rights. It’s a pro-business court defined by elite agendas. Justice depends on how much money and power you have. Thus the law itself is now hopelessly politicized and compromised.
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Here you go…
1. Let’s start with assisted viability. That will evolve over time, until assisted viability becomes the moment of conception (hooray). Am using science, religious belief, gut feel, and instinct (I have always been a renaissance man). Facts too, believe it or not. And one of them is that every single abortion ends a human life.
2. The leak as defussion? Yep, go with that. And I have a bridge to sell you.
3. The supreme court is planning to strike down a really bad law. Have you read it?
4. The tantrum against this recent potential decision is so similar to the reaction to the recent Musk purchase of Twitter: “We’re not getting our way! You might be biased…only we can be biased!” The court is working as it should…impartially. Impartiality looks like bias to those who are used to being biased.
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your use of the word ‘tantrum’ suggests bias. we are all inarguably, categorically biased, in every realm of our lives that promotes what we already believe or whence we hope to succeed. even your use of the neologism ‘de-fusion’ precedes or follows judgemental perpendings, decisions, and behavioural modalities. adjudicating that a conceptus “is a human life’ is an in-extremis bias that should be the judgemental provenance of a femme as to whether or not she can succeed as a caregiver and do justice to both herself and a dependent for the next 20 years of her life.
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Fifty-two years ago today, in a place called Kent, Ohio, America got a sneak preview of what lays in store in the second decade of the 21st century.
In fact, with hyperinflation, food, fuel, and other shortages, a resurgent Pandemic, Roe v Wade, weather- and climate- related disasters, a War in Europe and perhaps East Asia, and ~ especially ~ an election scheduled for November, a Kent State Redux could very well happen this very year.
Tin soldiers and Nixon’s comin’
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drummin’
Four dead in Ohio
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are gunning us down
Should have been done long ago
What if you knew her and
Found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?
Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na
Na-na-na-na, na-na-na
Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na
Na-na-na-na, na-na-na
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago
What if you knew her and
Found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?
Tin soldiers and Nixon’s comin’
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drummin’
Four dead in Ohio
Four dead in Ohio (four dead)
Four dead in Ohio (four)
Four dead in Ohio (how many?)
Four dead in Ohio (how many more?)
Four dead in Ohio (why?)
Four dead in Ohio (oh)
Four dead in Ohio (four)
Four dead in Ohio (why?)
Four dead in Ohio (why?)
Four dead in Ohio
Four dead in Ohio
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Neil Young
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What if You knew America,
and found her dead on the ground?
Where will You run when You know?
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I really don’t think Susan Collins was that naive
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/susan-collins-roe-abortion-stance-was-doomed-supreme-court-votes-rcna27227
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Unasked Questions About Abortion
With abortion surging into the spotlite with the U.S. Supreme Court leak of what may be the pending decision on Roe v Wade, almost everybody has “Yes” or “No” answers to the following standard questions:
1. Does a Woman have a Human Right to an abortion?
2. Does a Fetus have a Human Right to be born?
But there are several arguably much more important Questions that nobody is even asking, let alone answering:
1. Does the “Right” to an abortion include the “Right” to make somebody else pay for it? On what basis is somebody who is totally against abortion ~ for whatever reason, secular or sectarian ~ forced to pay taxes that fund the provision of abortion services? When has that question ever been asked by either pro- or anti-abortion advocates, activists, and actionists? Or any politician, pundit, propagandist, or anybody else?
2. Does anybody actually, really believe that outlawing abortion will really, actually end it? Abortion clinics all over the nation are reporting surges in patient-clients from out-of-state. And for those who can’t afford a trip out-of-state, there are always folks ready, willing, able, and available to bring back the good ole days of the back alley “clinics.” Coat hanger, anybody?
3. How many Homes For unWanted Children and uWC Adoption Services have the anti-abortion folks set up as real world, bullet-hits-the-bone alternatives to what they like to call a “holocaust”? At this point, they obviously care more about the Fetus before it is born, than they do about what happens to the unWanted Child after it is.
4. How is forcing a woman to carry to full-term a Fetus that she does not want any different than Involuntary Servitude, aka Slavery? Wasn’t there a Civil War and a Constitutional Amendment that supposedly eliminated that? At least when it came to former Slaves? But apparently not for Women when it concerns their own bodies.
Questions 1 and 4 are the by-far more significant; 2 and 3 merely call attention to anti-abortionist ignorance of history [ie, Prohibition, our “War On Drugs,” and abortion before Roe v Wade] and their indifference to and hypocrisy about UnWanted Children.
Question 4 lays it right on the line for all those folks who like to wrap themselves in the flag and claim that abortion is “Anti-American,” and is a significant player in what is destroying this nation and preventing it from being “Great Again.” Or, we are now told, to become “Great Again, Again.”
And Question 1 challenges pro-Choice folks to answer the bottom-line question: Should government funds at any level raised by taxes and/or debt be used to provide abortion services? And it challenges pro-Life folks to even ask it.
Particularly if the same argument ~ that someone who is against abortion should not have to pay for other peoples’ abortions with their present and future tax dollars ~ is applied to other government spending.
Such as having to pay taxes to pay for an undeclared, unconstitutional, illegal, and immoral 20-year “Forever War.” Or the U.S./Russia War in Ukraine.
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What it’s all about: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/06/republicans-midterm-elections-roe-v-wade-senate-house
“If the leaked draft of the majority opinion in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization is close to the final cut, the court stands to energize otherwise dejected Democrats and put Republican members of Congress in Democratic-leaning states at risk. Expect the anticipated Republican House majority in the midterms to be smaller than currently projected.
Indeed, the Democrats also now have a real shot to maintain their control of the Senate. Overnight, their odds of retaining seats in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and New Hampshire, while flipping Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, improved.
Beyond federal offices, fights will now be waged this fall over governorships and legislatures in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020, but where the incumbent governor is a Democrat, and the legislature is in the hands of the Republican party. In a post-Dobbs world, look to the states to emerge as roiling battlegrounds.”
So, Democrats are counting on this SCOTUS decision to energize their base and their fund-raising efforts. Because they have nothing else.
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