Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Why just hope? The Court, this Court in particular, is political. If we assume the person who leaked this had inside info regarding the status of the votes, we can assume they leaked in an effort to create pressure to either lock in the justices or to cause one of them to change his vote. And given the fact that Roberts did not author this draft, it's a fair assumption he might be leaning toward a Solomonic decision (states can regulate abortion to an extent, but not unreasonably prohibit one).

I'd guess the vote most likely to join that and switch this to a 5-4 vote in favor of preserving Roe would be Kavanagh or Gorsuch.

Kavanagh clerked for Kennedy and replaced him. Kennedy famously changed his vote (allegedly at Laurence Tribe's urging) from overturning to upholding Roe in Casey.

Now is the time to bring intense pressure on Kavanagh and Gorsuch. Make it clear just how much they'll be pariahs, and how much damage they'll do to the institution, if they support Alito here. Make it clear how much damage they'll do to the country if they leave this issue to state legislatures. Now is the time to tell everyone you know who be able to be heard by or exert indirect pressure on the potential swing votes to get in their faces. Implore them not to take the country down a terribly dark path.

Seriously, if Kennedy could be swayed in 1992, why not Gorsuch or Kavanagh now? If you have to picket in their front yards, pressure the fuck out of these two. If shit gets intense enough, they might shift, and it appears there's a really solid chance Roberts is looking for an off ramp and in desperate need of an ally.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I hate to cite Bret Stephens, but this is excellent:

"[A] decision to overturn Roe — which the court seems poised to do, according to the leak of a draft of a majority opinion from Justice Samuel Alito — would do more to replicate Roe’s damage than to reverse it.

It would be a radical, not conservative, choice.

What is conservative? It is, above all, the conviction that abrupt and profound changes to established laws and common expectations are utterly destructive to respect for the law and the institutions established to uphold it — especially when those changes are instigated from above, with neither democratic consent nor broad consensus.

This is partly a matter of stare decisis, but not just that. As conservatives, you are philosophically bound to give considerable weight to judicial precedents, particularly when they have been ratified and refined — as Roe was by the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision — over a long period. The fact that Casey somewhat altered the original scheme of Roe, a point Justice Alito makes much of in his draft opinion, doesn’t change the fact that the court broadly upheld the right to an abortion. “Casey is precedent on precedent,” as Justice Kavanaugh aptly put it in his confirmation hearing.

It’s also a matter of originalism. “To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the courts,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78, “it is indispensable that they” — the judges — “should be bound down by strict rules and precedents, which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them.” Hamilton understood then what many of today’s originalists ignore, which is that the core purpose of the courts isn’t to engage in (unavoidably selective) textual exegetics to arrive at preferred conclusions. It’s to avoid an arbitrary discretion — to resist the temptation to seek to reshape the entire moral landscape of a vast society based on the preferences of two or three people at a single moment.

. . .
Americans are almost evenly divided on their personal views of abortion, according to years of Gallup polling, but only 19 percent think abortion should be illegal under all circumstances.

It shouldn’t be hard to imagine how Americans will react to the court conspicuously providing aid and comfort to the 19 percent. You may reason, justices, that by joining Justice Alito’s opinion, you will merely be changing the terms on which abortion issues get decided in the United States. In reality, you will be lighting another cultural fire — one that took decades to get under control — in a country already ablaze over racial issues, school curriculums, criminal justice, election laws, sundry conspiracy theories and so on.
. . .

[T]he decision will also discredit the court as a steward of whatever is left of American steadiness and sanity, and as a bulwark against our fast-depleting respect for institutions and tradition. The fact that the draft of Justice Alito’s decision was leaked — which Chief Justice Roberts rightly described as an “egregious breach” of trust — is a foretaste of the kind of guerrilla warfare the court should expect going forward. And not just on abortion: A court that betrays the trust of Americans on an issue that affects so many, so personally, will lose their trust on every other issue as well."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/03/o...servative.html

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

It has become more clear that there is some sort of split within the conservative side of the Court about whether to overrule Roe dramatically or to eat away at it by pieces. Alito wants to do the former. Roberts wants to do the latter. Alito would not have been drafting a majority opinion if Roberts were in the majority, so it appears that in February, Alito had five votes, so presumably Roberts was trying to win at least one, maybe most likely Kavanagh, back. The best guess is that the draft was leaked by Alito or someone close to him to try to mobilize pressure on the five to stick with his approach.

Or maybe this.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I saw a suggestion that Kavanagh and Gorsuch recuse themselves given their senate confirmation testimony. That would allow them to back the fuck out of this insanity without having to join a position they don't want to take.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

My activist lawyer daughter is of the opinion we are entering a world where major cases will be reversed over and over the tides depending on the majority at any one time.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

So it's Barret who's the other possible swing vote with Kavanagh? I read the original story (TPM was subscription walled) and the author so stated as though it were an obvious fact, but he never explained why. I'd think she'd be one of the definite votes for Alito's opinion. I wonder why she's considered a swing and not Gorsuch.

If I had to bet, I'd lean toward a liberal employee of the Court having done this. If you're a conservative and you do a cost/benefit analysis, keeping it quiet seems the safer route. Why potentially imperil the win?

But then again... If you're a hyper-right-wing(nut) SCOTUS employee and you think Roberts is close to breaking the 5-4 majority for striking down Roe, maybe you're pretty sure Roberts will prevail and feel like you have to throw the Hail Mary. Seen from that angle, the leak could be a desperation move, and we're all worried about adoption of a crazy opinion that would otherwise never have seen the light of day. One can hope.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Great. That's a recipe for stability.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I'd love that. It's one of many results that could gift us a reprieve from a total fucking nightmare. Can you imagine what legislatures will devolve into if abortion is given to state govts?

State govt has many smart capable people within it. But it's also equally filled with idiots and craven opportunists. Even dumber and more coarse than most of the idiots we have in Congress.

Every state bill will be held up by an opponent using an abortion rider of some sort. Nothing will get done. Lunatics will put out bills criminalizing morning after pills, we'll see endless pandering to the extremes on this issue, and all the necessary boring policies that keep govt running will grind to a halt. Shitshow doesn't do it justice. Think a demolition derby of clown cars, with all the jesters in them on meth and armed to the teeth.

BUT... I don't see how a huge fucking mess is avoided even if this shitrag opinion ultimately finds its appropriate home in the shredder. If Roberts succeeds and Roe is upheld, the right will cry that it was fixed. The Court will be delegitimized to them, and these people are suicide bombers. The divisions of the past decade or so will explode from fissures into a goddamn canyon. To these crazy fuckers, this won't be a culture war anymore. It'll be a fucking holy war, a crusade.

And if that sounds nuts, well, read what GGG wrote a few posts ago. I had never heard of Integralism before. Catholic Natural Law is bad enough, and it was shocking to hear Alito and Bill Barr, despite seemingly being educated, adhere to such depraved concepts. But Integralism... Fuck. That's the bleeding edge of batshit crazy. That summons visions of the hyper-papist albino assassin in The Da Vinci Code.

It's best for all, by miles numbered too high to count, that Roberts succeeds. But I shudder to imagine the five alarm dumpster fire that follows in the wake of such reversal.

"We live in insane times." One would previously say a thing like that as rhetorical hyperbole. It'd mean nothing. But whatever the outcome of this decision and what's coming this fall, and after, to say we live in insane times is no longer an ironic expression. It's a clinical, technical, and inescapable observation.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I’m trying to imagine …

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/u...-homicide.html

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

And what crazy church lady is chopped liver?

I hate to go back to the Covid world
 

but while I have always been for mitigation, this poor white boy living in Shanghai ain't exactly livin the dream.

I guess that's why if I want a new MacBook Pro, I have to wait until July.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

That's an optimistic view, in that it assumes a world in which there could be a non-conservative majority on the Court.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

This Court could use the Fourteenth Amendment to decide that fetuses are persons deserving of equal protection. Everyone is just going to forget about conceptions of judicial restraint. Conservatives didn't spend the last five decades organizing to control the Court to turn around and not use that power.

Re: I hate to go back to the Covid world
 

Adder likey.

Re: I hate to go back to the Covid world
 

I’m surprised the government hasn’t shut Twitter down.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

That's civil war. Turn out the lights, folks. Republic's over.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

We're all probably excessively discounting the possibility that someone left it on a train or something.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Two people I don't know in the WaPo

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

True. You will see loads of states start challenging freedoms and rights by distinguishing between liberties and “ordered liberties.” And having read the difference between the two offered in the opinion, I think I can define them:

Ordered liberties are those Alito likes, while mere liberties are those he doesn’t.

His distinction between the two is so facile, so invented of whole cloth (and hidden between cherry picked out of context musings on the subject by Ginsburg, smugly offered) that definition is accurate. He took those categories, blurred the meaning, and simply lumped what he didn’t like into the mere liberties bucket.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Usually I feel something between mildly nauseated and slightly amused when someone mentions a "podcast", but Strict Scrutiny is one of the few I will occasionally listen to.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Idaho is setting up a case challenging Griswold.

If you read Alito's previous writing, it's pretty clear how challenges to things like gay marriage will go. From his dissent in Obergefell, you'll find some words that are almost verbatim from the Dodd draft: "To prevent five unelected Justices from imposing their personal vision of liberty upon the American people, the Court has held that “liberty” under the Due Process Clause should be understood to protect only those rights that are “‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.’” Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U. S. 701, 720–721 (1997). And it is beyond dispute that the right to same-sex marriage is not among those rights. See United States v.
Windsor, 570 U. S. ___, ___ (2013) (ALITO, J., dissenting)
(slip op., at 7)." He's kind of already written the opinion overruling Obergefell and Windsor.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

One thing I could never get an answer to; what was prohibited in Griswold? Condems? The pill? I just read contraceptives.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Connecticut's law banned the use of any drug, medical device, or other instrument in furthering contraception.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Thanks! In patents sometimes we read words “broadly as is reasonable.” A patent examiner would read that as covering condoms. Were they prohibited?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I will assume that question is rhetorical. Or, you can do your own research on the intent of 1879 Connecticut legislators.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Thank you!

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

And it is "condoms."

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I have no need to know the spelling (ps I’d already corrected the spelling).

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I believe it was one of the 19th Century Comstock laws. At the time they heavily targeted condoms; the pill and other medical forms of birth control weren't yet available. The act was likely amended over the years to add new forms of birth control.

The Comstock laws were part of a broad "social hygiene" push in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that included prohibition and other legislation focused on "morals". They were heavily pushed by preachers and doctors. Interestingly, the first big push back on them came from the military, which included condoms in soldier's kits during WWI to avoid having a large influx of Franco-American babies after the war.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I listened to a very funny podcast about something else in which Nick Gillespie (editor of Reason) made fun of Comstock for a good twenty minutes. Obviously, if you want to hear someone shred Comstock, and who'd be familiar with his ignominious place in history, Gillespie is the sort who'd do so with relish. I wish I could find it.

The commentary made short, Comstock was considered such a buffoon that his name became an insult. It became a synonym for provincial, parochial, unenlightened, priggish, and illiterate. Comstock's tenure as Postmaster General was considered by almost everyone in politics at the time and thereafter as a first order embarrassment.

Few national figures are considered less qualified, more inept, or as deranged. Even Spiro Agnew was considered more intelligent.

That now, a century later, Comstock's moralizing and busybody officiousness has raised its head again is mind blowing. It's not at all hyperbole to call the man a troglodyte (though probably unfair to troglodytes). He believed himself entitled not to judge, but to directly, and I mean very directly, physically police every bedroom.

It's incredibly sad, but also shocking, to think we've a massive rotten cultural cesspool in this country, of inbred degenerates (yes, they are) who insist they have the right to tell others who they can and cannot fuck. It's like mold or worms, under a rock for a century. All this time, we'd assumed they'd been drug along, that the wake of progress and the demonstration of the benefits of tolerance positively impacted them at least incrementally over the years. But no. They're still the temperance league of old. Dumb as dirt, with decades of precluded scolding to unleash on we heathens and libertines.

They'd do well to consider what happened the last time a debased culture tried to "rise up" against the Yankees. The Comstocks may run amuck in the Bible Belt. But we folks in the purple country won't be having any of their kind. Any Comstocks peddling their tripe in the Northeast Coast cities will quickly find themselves picking their teeth up off the floor.

I don't see any good in picketing Churches. The Catholics, most of whom don't follow the Church on matters reproductive, aren't the villains here. And they shouldn't be made enemies. But I do advocate something far more violent to be done to any "moral police" trying to push Comstock-like policies in our backyards. I think, and I say this without hesitation, a man who seeks to inject himself into someone else's bedroom via legislation should be treated like a man literally seeking to enter one's bedroom without consent. Beat the living shit out of the son of a bitch. I say this with deadly seriousness. These people have no place in enlightened locales.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Comstock is, however, a hero in certain circles on the right. It began with places like Hillsdale College and the Claremont Institution. But you'll find the folks in charge at the Federalist Society are part of the rehabilitation project, and that the circles that now control the court and Congress are all Comstock fans. It's part of the American History being busily rewritten.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Nixon could be rehabbed because, while a criminal, certain of his non-criminal policies (opening up relations with China) were smart. Clinton is seen as a sleazy guy due to proximity to Epstein, but he was a fantastic President. Even fucking Trump had some good policies (expending standard deduction helped lower middle class).

WTF could be rehabbed about Comstock? He was objectively a properly diagnosed imbecile whose policies were hated by almost everyone. The man burned books and opposed suffrage. Opposed. Suffrage.

This was the book Gillespie was talking about in the podcast I referenced earlier: https://www.thefire.org/the-mind-of-...hony-comstock/

It is disturbing to think anyone would even attempt to rehab this miscreant.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

[momentarily channeling Hillsdale College "historians"]

Comstock opposed the Progressives, who were eugenicists who inspired Hitler and sought to use birth control to limit the births of blacks, Catholics and other disfavored people, ultimately giving rise to the deeply evil folks like Margaret Sanger. He was part of a moral movement that maintained our Judeo-Christian history as being at the core of our society.

[/thankfully stop channeling Hillsdale]

You will find cites and discussion in the Alito draft opinion that reflect this concept of American history. Thomas is 100% on board with it and has inserted Hillsdale concepts into several of his opinions and dissents.

Way back when I was in college, my senior history thesis was on attitudes toward birth control and prostitution in the American Social Hygiene Society, one of the organizations that was bound up in all this stuff. I try to keep up on it, but it has become increasingly relevant over the last few years.

That podcast you pointed out talks about describes him as largely forgotten, but you may want to see what they are teaching at Liberty University and what they are trying to legitimize in the Fed Soc. He really is one of the "intellectual" rights' biggest heros. Leonard Leo probably gets off thinking about him. The podcast does have some interesting stuff about Comstock prosecuting and convicting Margaret Sanger's husband - I wasn't familiar with that, but, remember, Margaret Sanger is the greatest Boogey-Woman these people have, they loathe her very very deeply, and that alone would make him a hero to them. I think you'll also find him taught about in a lot of gender studies/history of women classes and in classes on the history of medicine. But those classes will be more the view of him you'd expect, as a clown and know-nothing. You'll find demonizing people like Comstock is part of what the attack on CRT is about - editing out the part of history classes that look at MLK or Margaret Sanger as forces for good.

Re: I hate to go back to the Covid world
 

Speaking of supply chain:

Friend of mine is a sales guy at the local Mini dealership. He stopped by a few days ago to see the baby, and caught me up on the goings on of auto sales. He's never made more money in his life, and he's never been more bored at his job. Most of the time everyone on the floor is just messing with their phones. There is NO inventory. None. Zero. Zilch. If you want a Mini, you have to custom order it and it takes four months to get here. He says his place doesn't go too far above MSRDP, but he knows some dealerships will (of all makes) will slap on a $5000 "dealer's fee" just because they can.
We're lucky, because we're 20 miles from the Port of Houston and the cars get here relatively fast. On the west coast it's six months to get through the Panama Canal and to LA.

Preowned cars are few and far between, mostly big trucks and SUVs because people don't want to pay to gas them up anymore. Their pricing is WELL above blue book, and if it's newer very close to MSRDP.

In addition, there's a specific part in the electrical system that's made for Mini, Audi, VW and BMW. The factory is Ukraine. All of the men who work there have left to fight the Russians, so most of the women in town have taken over. They have to be able to vacate and get to the busses in 15 minutes when the sirens go off. They have to shut the entire place down at night to prevent any lights from being visible to make them a target. He guesses there's some sort of plan to get another facility up and running, but for now, if that factory gets hit, it'll be a long time before any of those cars will be coming off the line.

He says the current estimate is about 2 years before the car market stabilizes again, and unless you absolutely need to get a new car, hold off. He's doing ridiculously well financially, but bored off his rocker.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Thanks. BTW once Less told me what to look for I found something that said Mass had a parallel law.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

We have 12 embryos on ice and I’m legit concerned that these insane people are going to try to seize them and impregnate some teenaged handmaidens with them.

I’m going to have to make decisions a lot faster than I intended about what my family size might be. But there is no way in hell Kanan is getting any siblings but through me.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Yeah, in the 1970s or 80s, right up through the period when I was at the Party, a lot of Dems would have openly supported limits on birth control (Catholic influence) and most Republicans would have supported them (the Right to Life influence and the effort to pull Catholics from the Democratic Party). It's easy to forget how recent this all was.

Ray Flynn, the first truly progressive mayor of Boston back then, came back from being Ambassador to the Vatican a total right wing nutcase, and still wanders around Southie muttering shit about how abortion and birth control are evil.

We're in the middle of a project to fix our laws to get rid of the old stuff like this right now, and its supported both by the Republican Governor and the Dems.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Meanwhile, Erick Erickson last week:
When I was interviewing for Summer Associate gigs, during the 2000 election, dude said that W running on education was yet further proof that women shouldn't have the right to vote (such silly things wouldn't be on the national agenda, you see).

Neither troll likely "really" meant it, but shit's definitely gone the wrong way.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

So fucked up.

Shakes head.

So fucking fucked up.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

What is a states rights issue and what can be federally legislated seem to be quite arbitrary categories.

George Carlin looks more and more a prophet every day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkMbMidsYIM