ShazzieB
ShazzieB's JournalHow one quiet Illinois college town became the symbol of abortion rights in America
It was a nearly seven-hour round trip from her home in Tennessee. Long enough for the decision to rattle in her head as the flat Midwestern landscape slipped by the car windows. No, she told herself. I thought it out. It's not the right moment to have a child.
*snip*
From there it was another hours drive to the outskirts of Carbondale, a place often reached by a two-lane state highway that winds by farm fields and churches or a busier route dotted with fast food, strip malls and a building on which, for a time, hung a banner reading, Pro Life. Pro God. Pro Gun. Pro Trump.
Mostly rural, conservative southern Illinois was an unexpected place for an abortion clinic, the 26-year-old thought, even if the towns welcome sign noted it was home to Southern Illinois University.
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2023/06/04/carbondale-illinois-abortion-clinics/70180040007/
Cross-posted to Pro-Choice
How one quiet Illinois college town became the symbol of abortion rights in America
It was a nearly seven-hour round trip from her home in Tennessee. Long enough for the decision to rattle in her head as the flat Midwestern landscape slipped by the car windows. No, she told herself. I thought it out. It's not the right moment to have a child.
*snip*
From there it was another hours drive to the outskirts of Carbondale, a place often reached by a two-lane state highway that winds by farm fields and churches or a busier route dotted with fast food, strip malls and a building on which, for a time, hung a banner reading, Pro Life. Pro God. Pro Gun. Pro Trump.
Mostly rural, conservative southern Illinois was an unexpected place for an abortion clinic, the 26-year-old thought, even if the towns welcome sign noted it was home to Southern Illinois University.
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2023/06/04/carbondale-illinois-abortion-clinics/70180040007/
Cross-posted to Illinois
Thanks for this!
It was even better than I remembered.
Rereading the poem together with the article confirmed my suspicious about what Salinas objected to:
There it is, in black and white: the dreaded "critical race theory" that these people don't even know how to define but are sure is the source of everything they think is wrong with this country!
Gorman's poem dares to acknowledge America's painful history while providing inspiration that we can learn from it and go forth to do better and create a country that does a better job of living up to its aspirations. For these Florida censors, no amount of inspiration can ever make up for the admission that America has ever been one iota less than absolutely 🎆PERFECT✨!
The "Chaos Caucus"
That's what Ali Velshi just called the House caucus that some of us like to call the Free Dumb (i.e., the so-called Freedom) Caucus, while covering for Lawrence O'Donnell tonight and talking about the situation with the Debt Ceiling.
I just thought some of you might enjoy that bit of humor. I know I definitely did.
Yes, and TFG also **LIED** about having sent everything back.
He lied (or rather got his lawyer to lie for him), saying that he had sent everything back when he had done no such thing. He also lied (and continues) to lie that classified documents he took were "automatically" declassified because he decided they were.
He has never (as far as I know) acknowledged that there is a specific procedure for declassifying documents which he has not followed, or (perhaps most seriously) that all of the documents he took, classified or not, are the property of the National Archives, i.e., the American people, and not Donald Trump's personal property to do as he wishes with them!
All of this adds up to a HUGE difference between Trump's actions, as well as his attitude regarding those actions, and those of Biden or Pence regarding the small number of documents they were each found to have in their possession. It is an outrage that some media outlets have reported on these matters in such a way as to greatly minimize Trump's wrongdoing as well as the enormous differences between the actions of Trump and those of the other two.
MSNBC (at least the shows I watch) has been doing a good job of covering all of these issues, including the way Trump "confessed" to some of his actions on the CNN "Townhall." This segment from Lawrence O'Donnell's show last night is a good example of the kind of deep discussions he has with legal experts on a regular basis:
The Second Amendment is a ludicrous historical antique: Time for it to go
We're not supposed to even whisper such things because the NRA and right-wing extremists have sensible Americans including many gun owners so bullied and cowed that we feel we are only allowed to hope for sensible gun-safety legislation around the edges of their highly profitable assault on American lives.
We've said it before, but it is always worth repeating for the millions of younger people coming to voting age each year who may not have considered it before: It doesn't take a grammarian or a constitutional scholar to tell you that the opening clause of the Second Amendment is obviously conditional:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Meaning, so long as a militia of citizens is necessary (and a well-regulated one, at that), then what follows is true. But only if that first part pertains.
More: https://www.salon.com/2023/04/23/the-second-amendment-is-a-ludicrous-historical-antique-time-for-it-to-go/
Hyper-rugged individualism & the terror of the 2nd Amendment
As long as property rights hold sway over human rights, none of us are safe.
*snip*
While the Founding Fathers crafted what many consider today as a brilliant and enduring blueprint for a new nation, the Constitutions of the United States, they were nonetheless products of their times with their individual human shortcomings and biases. Just coming off a war of independence against one of the worlds great colonial powers, leaders thought it reasonable to ensure the free people the capability of defending themselves against any potentially tyrannical government. In this regard, they established the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights, granting people the right to bear arms.
These same men owned large parcels of land, and many gained wealth from engaging in the slave trade. In her book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, historian Carol Anderson argues that the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was crafted by James Madison to mollify the concerns coming out of Virginia and the anti-Federalists, that they would still have full control over their state militias and those militias were used in order to quell slave revolts.
In other words, the right to bear arms was only meant for white people to repress forms of resistance, including uprisings by enslaved Black people. Since then, firearms and the culture supporting it has been encoded into the very DNA of the U.S.-American identity and what it means to be an American. But what was not even reasonable in the 18th century without substantial reform stands as an existential threat today.
More: https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/05/hyper-rugged-individualism-the-terror-of-the-2nd-amendment/
I can easily believe that we've only see his "good" (i.e. less awful) side.
Look at what we all know about him:
We've all seen ample evidence of his thin skin and his inability to handle any kind of criticism, and we've heard stories about him throwing plates of food at the walls when something doesnt go his way.
We know how vindictive he can be when he thinks someone has "wronged" him (like Obama making fun of him at the White House correspondents' dinnner), and we've seen the way he rages on social media at those he's upset with, complete with all manner of slurs and character attacks. We know he's got a highly exaggerated sense of his own importance. As potus, he seemed surprised to learn that there were actually rules that circumscribed what he had assumed was going to be boundless power, and he didn't like it one bit.
Those are just some of the things we know about this child-man. It stands to reason that they are only the tip of a very large iceberg. Anyone capable of publicly displaying the kind of childish petulance we seen from him so many, many times is almost always capable of a lot worse in private. Trump does his best to hide it when he's on camera and/or in front of a crowd where he knows his behavior will be widely reported, but the idea of him letting loose when he deems it "safe" to do so is 100% believable to me.
He lets all that anger loose when he speaks to crowds of his supporters, deploying it against targets that he knows they hate, which makes them feel that he's on their side. The anger itself they mistake for strength, and they assume he will use that "strength" against all the people, things, and ideas they themselves hate.
Knowing what I do about the "public" Donald Trump, I have no trouble believing that what JCMach1 described seeing in that airport was the real "private" Donald Trump.
I skip a lot of them, but once in a while I'm pleasantly surprised.
I watched one tonight with the title "Jamie Raskin DEMOLISHES Lauren Boebert and the GQP," and it was worth it for the great clips of Jamie Raskin responding to a speech given by Bobo on the House floor. There was a little bit of Bobo in the beginning, but most of it was Raskin, and he was on fire!
The problem is, you never can tell with these things. I happened to get lucky with that one, but there have been a lot of others I only watched a little bit of, once I saw that they consisted of a tiny clip or 2 buried in the middle of someone pontificating for several minutes on What It All Meant. Those are the ones that feel like a waste of time to me.
I do NOT fault anyone for posting these, though. I assume good intentions on the part of my fellow DUers, and I am seldom disappointed. People who come here with genuinely bad intentions usually get caught and banned early on. (Go, MIRT!) The ones that stick around seem to post things for the same reason I do; because they got something out of an item and think someone else might as well. Sometimes people guess wrong, but so what? I've guessed wrong myself. Far be it from me to beat up on anybody else for doing the same.
He is scum, but I find that suggestion very disturbing.
I don't know if you were joking, but I would object regardless. I find torture, no matter what the pretext, very disturbing. Can't change what happened in the past, but the idea of bringing it back is horrifying to me. I don't care who you want to reserve it for. Charles Manson? Adolf Hitler? Nope and nope.
For the record, I also oppose the death penalty, and I don't find prison rape jokes remotely funny. Some people tell me I'm just no damned fun at all!
Profile Information
Name: SharonGender: Female
Hometown: Chicago area, IL
Home country: USA
Member since: Tue Mar 26, 2013, 04:18 AM
Number of posts: 16,542