Even knowing that she’s drawing it out, intentionally misdirecting the audience with segues that lead to further segues that lead back to earlier... topics, it’s hard to begrudge Griffin the time, as she manages to stay engaging and funny (if not completely linear) throughout her set. Her singular ability to turn a seemingly endless monologue into something that feels like a conversation (with a packed theater, no less) is captivating....I liked the cramming and freaking out. It was the idea of the show. It was the theater of desperation and heroic fighting for survival. It didn't so much matter what she talked about. She had been knocked down hard by the media establishment. The story was presented in a short video before she leapt onto the stage and ran from one end to the other with her arms waving in the air, Rocky-style....
Just to be clear, three hours is almost unheard of for a stand-up show, especially for a touring headliner in a venue like the Chicago Theatre.... I’ve reviewed more than 50 comedians and I’ve only seen one other show where a single comic did more than two hours. It was Kathy Griffin, last year in Skokie at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts. There’s no way around it: this tour is a comedy show styled as a rambling epic. And it’s masterful, even if it’s not a masterpiece....
Rather than cramming in so much material that she pushes up against the cut-off times for venues — “I have so much to get to in a half hour, I’m freaking out!” she remarked at 10:30 p.m. Thursday.... with a little editing, which could risk pulling in fewer laughs, but delivering a bigger payoff, it could go down as historical comedic commentary on freedom of speech, how the governmental apparatus can be used (or misused) and the place of comedians in pushing boundaries.
The evening after Hito Steyerl topped ArtReview’s annual Power 100 ranking, a devoted queue formed to view the German artist’s work Factory of the Sun at the opening of a group show at the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Turin....
In a list prioritizing influential ideas (the second and third positions are occupied by artist Pierre Huyghe and theorist Donna Haraway) Steyerl’s new Power 100 ranking merely reflects the buzz that already exists around this artist, theorist, and influential educator. This summer she presented Hell Yeah We Fuck Die at Skulptur Projekte Münster....
In an era when many people feel impotent in the face of corrupt cultural systems they cannot challenge, Steyerl takes a stand.....
I will be making my choice for Justice of the United States Supreme Court on the first Monday after the July 4th Holiday, July 9th!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 30, 2018
Audio of an exchange with Trump and the pranksters was posted online by “The Stuttering John Podcast” and features the president speaking with a comedian, who pretends to be Menendez. In a three-minute conversation, the two men discussed the Supreme Court, the debacle over immigrant family separations and Menendez’s corruption trial.What a screwup by Trump's call screeners, but Trump just sounds like typical Trump in the recording. So it's not as juicy as the prank call that got through to Governor Scott Walker in February 2011, at the height of the Wisconsin protests:
The White House did not refute the authenticity of the audio, and declined to comment.
I never thought Scott Walker’s people would be dumb enough to put me through....
I told Keith Gilkes, who was then Walker’s chief of staff, that the governor couldn’t return my call because “my goddamn maid, Maria, put my phone in the washer. I’d have her deported, but she works for next to nothing.” (In reality, I was calling with a free Skype number and couldn’t receive calls from a land line at the time.)
In my business, that’s called tipping your hand. All ethical liars do it. It’s the ridiculous, implausible hints that separate the ethical prankster from the confidence man, the satirist from the unrepentant political hack. But they didn’t get the joke, and soon Walker and I were comparing notes on how he could break the backs of those pro-union demonstrators....
At the appointed hour, Walker and I enjoyed a friendly chat during which I suggested that he physically intimidate his Democratic opposition with a baseball bat, whip up a good counter-protest by dressing hobos in suits and most disturbing: that he ought to plant troublemakers to discredit the pro-union demonstrators.
“[W]e thought about that,” Walker replied, and eventually added, “My only fear would be if there’s a ruckus caused is that would scare the public into thinking maybe the governor has to settle to avoid all these problems.” So it wasn’t morality, but a cynical calculation, that saved the public from that particular ruse.
The Democratic party establishment has urged caution, and asked supporters to resist sinking to Trump’s level. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, said, “Trump’s daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable”, while the Senate minority leader, Charles Schumer, said from the Senate floor that “the best solution is to win elections. That is a far more productive way to channel the legitimate frustrations with this president’s policies than with harassing members of his administration.”And in The Atlantic, by Vann R. Newkirk II, "Protest Isn’t Civil/Attacks on incivility are rooted more in preserving the status quo than in addressing ongoing harms and violence":
But Pelosi and Schumer, aged 78 and 67 respectively, seem to have been left behind by liberal activists who believe that there can be no compromise in resisting Trump....
Neil Sroka, the communications director of the progressive political action committee Democracy for America, says: “It’s disappointing to see corporate Democrats hand-wringing over this. If they fall into the trap of the false equivalency, this is literally why we lose.
“I have a great deal of respect for Michelle Obama but I think 2016 showed us that ‘When they go low, we go high,’ does not work against Donald Trump. We have to be willing to call out the bigotry and the hate of this administration and make people feel uncomfortable for associating with that hate and bigotry.... The discussion of civility betrays how deep white supremacy is in our discourse. A black woman standing up there saying we should make these people uncomfortable becomes ‘uncivil'....”
Marginalized people remain at risk of being labeled “uncivil” for all but the most passive of disagreements. From outrage over black activists stopping cars in San Francisco to essays that lectured Women’s March participants for signs that “send a message of hostility to those conservatives and Trump voters,” to the two-year-long freakout about Colin Kaepernick’s choice to kneel, cries to return to civility often overshadow the actual violence being targeted by protest. Remarkably, the current national hand-wringing was provoked by two legal and entirely nonviolent methods of protest. Denying a senior administration official a meal is perfectly legal in Virginia; Waters advocated a campaign of public shaming, not acts of violence.Notice that complaints about calls for civility can also be one-sided. My "civility bullshit" theme treats everyone the same. I don't think Newkirk and Smith have my perspective. They think that their side can dispense with civility, and they don't like being told to stand down by people who are supposed to be their allies.
The term civility itself is more a reflection of majority-enforced social norms than of a proven set of rules for effective debate. Ironically, a country founded on on tea-dumping, property-smashing, and norm-breaking has as its major bipartisan project a robust defense of social norms. [Martin Luther King Jr.] understood this dynamic well, and even applied it to riots in the inner-city. “A riot is the language of the unheard,” King famously said in his “The Other America” speech....
What King understood was that civility stood not as a companion or a near-synonym to his project of radical, militant nonviolence, but as its most insidious opponent. King and his intellectual forebears engineered nonviolence specifically as a tool that would break the violent foundations of white supremacy, and doing so necessarily meant disrupting order and breaking the law. The current model of civility counsels accommodation to violent power, but that course of action is actually antithetical to the Kingian project...
The cruel irony is that the success of King’s own project has made the call for more civility from America’s aggrieved groups all the more routine. Poor people, immigrants, black activists, and perhaps LGBT employees at a restaurant in Virginia are bludgeoned into silence by the constant cry for civility, made to hold still as injustices are visited upon them. Meanwhile, those with no real fear that they’ll ever wind up on the wrong side of the power dynamic in America can scold and hector.....
Civility is an instinct that only serves to silence them. It is itself wielded as a cudgel against those already facing obliteration that dictates to them how they must face it. It snuffs out nonviolent and violent protest alike. Civility is the sleep-aid of a majority inclined to ignore the violence done in its name—because in the end, they will be alright.
"We need more harlequins, fewer ticktockmen."
Said Icepick in last night's thread about Boston banning drinking games in bars. He began:
I recently read "The Scouring of the Shire" chapter from Return of the King. It was disturbing how much the Shire under (ultimately) Saruman's direction sounded like modern America. The country is being run by over-officious jerks, and the American people are putting up with it. Land of the free no more....And then:
We need more harlequins, fewer ticktockmen.A link goes to the Harlan Ellison story "Repent Harlequin!' Said The Ticktockman."
Icepick advises:
Professor, I believe you need some more tags. One for over-officiousness, and perhaps tags for harlequins (see Swartz, for example) and for ticktockmen (anything with Bloomberg).Ellison begins his story with a quote from Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience":
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purposes as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.Ellison introduces that quote with: "There are always those who ask, what is it all about? For those who need to ask, for those who need points sharply made, who need to know 'where it's at,' this...."
That story was published in 1965, when the phrase "where it's at" was quite the thing.
ADDED: I just bought "Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the 20th Century," which contains "Repent Harlequin!"
The design was unique in its incorporation of colorized graphics and photographs... The paper's overall content style and elevated use of graphics – the result of the concept developed by Neuharth, in contribution with staff graphics designers George Rorick, Sam Ward, Suzy Parker, John Sherlock and Web Bryant – was derided by critics, who referred to it as "McPaper" or "television you can wrap fish in," because it opted to incorporate more concise, shorter-form nuggets of information akin to the style of television news rather than in-depth stories in many of its sections like traditional newspapers, which many in the newspaper industry considered to be a dumbing down of the news.Gary Trudeau's 1988 book "We're Eating More Beets" was part of the derision:
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor became more moderate when Justice William J. Brennan Jr. and Justice Thurgood Marshall left the court, said Michael C. Dorf, a Cornell Law School professor who clerked for Justice Kennedy, and Justice Kennedy likewise moved to the center when Justice O’Connor departed.From The Washington Post, "Roberts gets another key role on Supreme Court: Swing vote" (that's the front-page teaser headline, inside it's "If it wasn’t the Roberts court already, it is the Roberts court now"):
“It could manifest in compromise positions in his taking substantively more moderate stances on issues,” Mr. Dorf said. “He might want to go slowly before taking an abortion case or an affirmative action case, or a same-sex marriage case to potentially overturn Justice Kennedy’s handiwork.”...
Mr. Dorf said that Chief Justice Roberts might act differently now that Justice Kennedy — often the deciding vote in those cases — was gone, much like congressional leaders spare their most vulnerable members of Congress from casting deciding votes on politically difficult issues....
“The best hope is to appeal to the chief’s sense of the court as a special, above-politics institution,” [said David S. Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University]. “Overruling [Roe v. Wade or the same-sex marriage case] in these circumstances would make the court and its justices appear like petty politicians.... [But] these justices don’t get to the point they are at in life without being political actors.... and this may be his political goal.”
A court in which Kennedy is replaced by another Trump choice “is also likely to encourage conservative legal activists to shoot for the stars — look for cases seeking to overrule Roe v. Wade, reverse or undermine LGBTQ rights, including marriage equality, and erode the progress toward racial justice that the civil rights movement has fought tirelessly to have recognized by an often recalcitrant court,” [said Elizabeth B. Wydra, president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center].ADDED: The center position is so powerful. Having seen the attention and (faux) adulation given to Justice Kennedy over the years, the Justices must be eyeing the vacancy. Some new person will get Kennedy's seat, but he is likely to be a staunch conservative like Gorsuch. The real vacancy we're seeing is in the "swing vote" position, and any Justice could feel pulled to try to sit there. Now, the liberals can't really aspire to occupy the position, but one of them, probably Justice Kagan, might become the force behind the swinging of one of the conservatives, and Roberts is the most likely to get swung. I picture Roberts seeing an opportunity to improve the reputation of the Court and to overcome the overt political look it's acquired over the years. I think there should be more elegant ways to do that than to simply throw his vote to the liberal 4 now and then. But if that's all he can do, I suspect he will.
Such bold action is not usually Roberts’s style, and the Supreme Court is institutionally averse to overturning precedents, a legal principle called stare decisis. Roberts’s preferred path, his defenders and detractors say, involves limiting the court’s precedents rather than reversing them....
Leah Litman, a liberal law professor at the University of California at Irvine, said the justices need not overturn the same-sex marriage decision to undermine it. “They could recognize a right for religious objectors not to marry LGB individuals; not to serve them; not to provide them health care; not to allow them to adopt,” she wrote.....
Michael McConnell, a former Republican-nominated federal judge and head of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, said... “If Justice Kennedy is replaced with an interesting, relatively non-doctrinaire conservative (like the best names on Trump’s list) this could augur a more fluid court with a more substantive middle and fewer 5-4 splits,” he wrote in an email.... "Every action seems to have a countervailing reaction,” McConnell said. “It would not surprise me to see a few of the conservative justices breaking more frequently with the liberal side. The court as an institution does not like to see itself as the instrument of an ideological movement.”
One could have walked past the pickup truck in the mall parking garage and not known what the two men had been through and what they were working on. Don't you just wonder what you walk past every day? Life is full of so many interesting things.To live, you must walk on past infinite interesting things, but it is worth stopping to think that there is a world inside every human being. Some other 2 men in a truck in the mall parking garage might be slacking off, wasting their time, throwing their life away. You don't know what you are looking at as you go on your way.
5) WEST: Information/Sex Offense – 5:24pm. Officers at the West Police District station were contacted by a subject (32-year-old HM) who wanted to turn himself in to police. The subject reported he had purchased a shoe camera that he intended to use to take "upskirt" videos of females, but the camera battery had exploded prior to obtaining any video, injuring the subject's foot. The subject was counseled on his actions and released from the scene as no illicit video had been taken. Investigation continuing.I'm glad this man is not named. This is a real "go and sin no more" situation.
All the recent talk about civility should not stop opponents of a right-wing court from doing everything in their power to keep the judiciary from being packed with ideologues who behave as partisans.It seems to me Trump won the election and he has the appointment power. He made Supreme Court appointments an issue and was strikingly clear about who he would appoint. I understand the motivation to oppose and obstruct him, but I don't think opposing him or going down without a fight has anything to do with civility. If those who want Trump's nominee confirmed are talking about civility, then they are the one's doing civility bullshit, and Dionne is just calling them on it.
Wisconsin was ahead of the curve giving public workers the freedom to choose during our 1st year in office. That’s why we’ve been a target of the big government union bosses ever since. pic.twitter.com/dN69oBXpDc
— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) June 27, 2018
Supreme Court rules in favor of non-union workers who are now, as an example, able to support a candidate of his or her choice without having those who control the Union deciding for them. Big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 27, 2018
He did not announce a retirement from the bench before the justices adjourned. Some justices (O'Connor and Brennan are two examples) have announced retirements over the summer, fwiw.Here's how you voted on my poll while we were waiting for the Court to get through its announcements:
In reasonably plain English: This is a case about whether government employees who are represented by a union to which they do not belong can be required to pay a fee to cover the costs of collective bargaining. The plaintiff in this case, an Illinois state employee, argued that having to pay the fees violates the First Amendment. Today the Court agreed, ruling for the employee and against the union.The important idea here is that unions for government employees are different from other unions and that everything they do, including bargaining for wages, is political, because they are making a deal with the government. I want to look at the opinion to see how this idea is discussed.
In addition to affecting how public money is spent, union speech in collective bargaining addresses many other important matters.... [U]nions express views on a wide range of subjects—education, child welfare, healthcare, and minority rights, to name a few... What unions have to say on these matters in the context of collective bargaining is of great public importance.... Even union speech in the handling of grievances may be of substantial public importance and may be directed at the “public square.” ....From Justice Kagan:
[W]e conclude that public-sector agency-shop arrangements violate the First Amendment, and Abood erred in concluding otherwise. There remains the question whether stare decisis nonetheless counsels against overruling Abood. It does not.... An important factor in determining whether a precedent should be overruled is the quality of its reasoning....
Abood... did not sufficiently take into account the difference between the effects of agency fees in public- and private-sector collective bargaining. The challengers in Abood argued that collective bargaining with a government employer, unlike collective bargaining in the private sector, involves “inherently ‘political’ ” speech. The Court did not dispute that characterization, and in fact conceded that “decisionmaking by a public employer is above all a political process” driven more by policy concerns than economic ones....
We recognize that the loss of payments from nonmem bers may cause unions to experience unpleasant transition costs in the short term, and may require unions to make adjustments in order to attract and retain members. But we must weigh these disadvantages against the consider able windfall that unions have received under Abood for the past 41 years. It is hard to estimate how many bil lions of dollars have been taken from nonmembers and transferred to public-sector unions in violation of the First Amendment. Those unconstitutional exactions cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely.
Unlike the majority, I see nothing “questionable” about Abood’s analysis.... The decision’s account of why some government entities have a strong interest in agency fees (now often called fair-share fees) is fundamentally sound. And the balance Abood struck between public employers’ interests and public employees’ expression is right at home in First Amendment doctrine.
Ten days before the primary, Mr. Crowley skipped a debate against Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, and instead sent a surrogate, a Latina former city councilwoman. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez called it “a bizarre twist” on Twitter to be seated across from someone “with slight resemblance to me” instead of her opponent.I've long thought it's a rule of thumb that the better looking candidate wins. I don't know what flipped this primary — and she won by 15 percentage points — but Ocasia-Cortez looks absolutely fantastic.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez used the moment to generate a fresh wave of publicity in the race’s crucial closing days.
Now @JoeCrowleyNY is playing guitar. He dedicated the first song to @Ocasio2018 — “Born to Run”
— J. David Goodman (@jdavidgoodman) June 27, 2018
@ pic.twitter.com/U3sx6mth90
"I didn't see why it was necessary to fire her," Seinfeld said. "Why would you murder someone who's committing suicide?"1. "Why would you murder someone who's committing suicide?" Answer: Because you want credit as the murderer.
"But I never saw someone ruin their entire career with one button push," he added. "That was fresh."...
"I think they should get another Roseanne," he advised. "They brought Dan Conner back, he was dead and they brought him back. So, why can't we get another Roseanne? There's other funny women that could do that part. You need to get the comic in there. I hate to see a comic lose a job."
We traveled in the same local circles, working on campaigns for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Mary Burke and other liberal candidates. He’s a feminist, an environmentalist, a passionate advocate for civil rights.... I got to know him during the protests against Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 and developed a huge crush.I don't know if the letter-writer will find a "real" feminist man there and male feminism will manifest itself in a beautiful, giving form, but the letter-writer is given another task, ruining the man's reputation in the lovely group of local campaign workers:
[S]pread the word about this hypocrite. It sounds like his reputation deserves a hit so future potential girlfriends know what they’re getting into.
Protesters confronted Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Monday over migrant family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border, a sign that outrage over the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policy is not abating.Chao and McConnell are leaving an event. This would be worse if they were confronted at their home. The men probably see themselves as behaving in a mild manner, but thronging around a woman — a 5'3", 65-year-old woman — looks terrible, and Chao got a huge advantage out of this, because she looks courageous, poised, and nervy.
Chao and McConnell, who are married, were about to climb into a black SUV when they were approached by a small group of young men at Georgetown University. One started repeating, “Why are you separating families?”
A short confrontation ensued. “Why you don’t leave my husband alone? Why you don’t leave my husband alone?” Chao responded as McConnell got into the SUV.
A Harley-Davidson should never be built in another country-never! Their employees and customers are already very angry at them. If they move, watch, it will be the beginning of the end - they surrendered, they quit! The Aura will be gone and they will be taxed like never before!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 26, 2018
ROBERTS, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which KENNEDY, THOMAS, ALITO, and GORSUCH, JJ., joined. KENNEDY, J., and THOMAS, J., filed concurring opinions. BREYER, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which KAGAN, J., joined. SOTOMAYOR, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which GINSBURG, J., joined.From the Roberts opinion:
Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, foreign nationals seeking entry into the United States undergo a vetting process to ensure that they satisfy the numerous requirements for admission. The Act also vests the Presi- dent with authority to restrict the entry of aliens whenever he finds that their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” 8 U. S. C. §1182(f). Relying on that delegation, the President concluded that it was necessary to impose entry restrictions on nationals of countries that do not share adequate information for an informed entry determination, or that otherwise present national security risks....In section IV of the opinion the Court looks at"the claim that the Proclamation was issued for the unconstitutional purpose of excluding Muslims." First, the Court finds standing based on the "the alleged real-world effect that the Proclamation has had in keeping them separated from certain relatives who seek to enter the country." Looking at the substantive merits, the question is whether "singling out Muslims for disfavored treatment" violates the Establishment Clause."
By its plain language, §1182(f) grants the President broad discretion to suspend the entry of aliens into the United States. The President lawfully exercised that discretion based on his findings—following a worldwide, multi-agency review—that entry of the covered aliens would be detrimental to the national interest. And plaintiffs’ attempts to identify a conflict with other provisions in the INA, and their appeal to the statute’s purposes and legislative history, fail to overcome the clear statutory language....
Moreover, plaintiffs’ request for a searching inquiry into the persuasiveness of the President’s justifications is inconsistent with the broad statutory text and the deference traditionally accorded the President in this sphere....
A reminder that we are expecting the justices to announce opinions in order of reverse seniority. So if we are expecting Alito to write Janus and Breyer to write Fla v. GA, we would get Janus first if those were the opinions for today. Roberts always goes last, and Thomas (who could have NIFLA) would be next to last.UPDATE: First is Thomas with NIFLA. 5-4.
This case is a First Amendment challenge to a California law that imposes two different sets of requirements on crisis pregnancy centers – non-profits, often affiliated with Christian groups, that oppose abortion. First, it requires centers that are licensed to provide medical services to inform their patients that free or low-cost abortions are available. Second, it requires centers that are not licensed to provide medical services to include in their advertisements disclaimers to make clear that their services do not include medical help.Here's the opinion PDF.
The court reverses on both notice requirements.
Throughout history, governments have “manipulat[ed] the content of doctor-patient discourse” to increase state power and suppress minorities:Justice Kennedy has a short concurring opinion that is joined by Roberts, Alito, and Gorsuch. Excerpt:
“For example, during the Cultural Revolution, Chinese physicians were dispatched to the countryside to convince peasants to use contraception. In the 1930s, the Soviet government expedited completion of a construction project on the Siberian railroad by ordering doctors to both reject requests for medical leave from work and conceal this government order from their patients. In Nazi Germany, the Third Reich systematically violated the separation between state ideology and medical discourse. German physicians were taught that they owed a higher duty to the ‘health of the Volk’ than to the health of individual patients. Recently, Nicolae Ceausescu’s strategy to increase the Romanian birth rate included prohibitions against giving advice to patients about the use of birth control devices and disseminating information about the use of condoms as a means of preventing the transmission of AIDS.” Berg, Toward a First Amendment Theory of Doctor-Patient Discourse and the Right To Receive Unbiased Medical Advice, 74 B. U. L. Rev. 201, 201– 202 (1994) (footnotes omitted).
The California Legislature included in its official history the congratulatory statement that the Act was part of California’s legacy of “forward thinking.” App. 38–39. But it is not forward thinking to force individuals to “be an instrument for fostering public adherence to an ideological point of view [they] fin[d] unacceptable.” Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U. S. 705, 715 (1977). It is forward thinking to begin by reading the First Amendment as ratified in 1791; to understand the history of authoritarian government as the Founders then knew it; to confirm that history since then shows how relentless authoritarian regimes are in their attempts to stifle free speech; and to carry those lessons onward as we seek to preserve and teach the necessity of freedom of speech for the generations to come. Governments must not be allowed to force persons to express a message contrary to their deepest convictions. Freedom of speech secures freedom of thought and belief. This law imperils those liberties.Breyer is reading his dissent. I'm reading it too. Excerpt:
Abortion is a controversial topic and a source of normative debate, but the availability of state resources is not a normative statement or a fact of debatable truth. The disclosure includes information about resources available should a woman seek to continue her pregnancy or terminate it, and it expresses no official preference for one choice over the other. Similarly, the majority highlights an interest that often underlies our decisions in respect to speech prohibitions—the market- place of ideas. But that marketplace is fostered, not hin- dered, by providing information to patients to enable them to make fully informed medical decisions in respect to their pregnancies.UPDATE: Trump just won on the travel ban. Roberts writes. New post up for discussion on that. Keep this comments thread for the abortion-speech case.
Of course, one might take the majority’s decision to mean that speech about abortion is special, that it involves in this case not only professional medical matters, but also views based on deeply held religious and moral beliefs about the nature of the practice... We have previously noted that we cannot try to adjudicate who is right and who is wrong in this moral debate. But we can do our best to interpret American constitutional law so that it applies fairly within a Nation whose citizens strongly hold these different points of view. That is one reason why it is particularly important to interpret the First Amendment so that it applies evenhandedly as between those who disagree so strongly. For this reason too a Constitution that allows States to insist that medical providers tell women about the possibility of adoption should also allow States similarly to insist that medical providers tell women about the possibility of abortion....
“During my trip to the southern border, it was clear that ICE, and its actions of hunting down and tearing apart families, has wreaked havoc on far too many people," Pocan said.Here's the reaction from the newspapers' readers — mainly (I think!) us liberal Madisonian:
"Unfortunately," Pocan continued, "President Trump and his team of white nationalists, including Stephen Miller, have so misused ICE that the agency can no longer accomplish its goals effectively."
Waters's comments have been roundly denounced, including by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and some will argue she's a fringe figure in the party who doesn't speak for most Democrats. But what she said is a logical extension of the debate and the questions raised over the Red Hen incident. Plenty cheered such harassment of Nielsen and Miller, such was their anger over the family-separation policy. When passions run as strongly as they do with a story like this, actions will be ratcheted up.Civil disobedience?!! Somebody needs to look up the definition of terms! "Civil disobedience" doesn't have to do with harassing individuals and shaming or scaring them out of appearing in public. Civil disobedience is declining to obey an unjust law. It's governing your own behavior in observance of a higher morality than the government's law. It has nothing to do with violating just norms — such as rules of etiquette or the legal protection from threats and physical violence — to hurt other people when those other people offend your moral standards!
Which means Democrats and Trump opponents as a whole need to decide where their line is for civil disobedience (or, in Waters's case, possibly going beyond civil disobedience)....
One of the oldest depictions of civil disobedience is in Sophocles' play Antigone, in which Antigone... defies Creon, the current King of Thebes, who is trying to stop her from giving her brother Polynices a proper burial. She gives a stirring speech in which she tells him that she must obey her conscience rather than human law...Civil disobedience is an important tradition in American history. Don't mix it up with bad behavior that has had — and deserves — no veneration.
Thoreau's 1849 essay Civil Disobedience, originally titled "Resistance to Civil Government"... [argued] that citizens are morally responsible for their support of aggressors, even when such support is required by law. In the essay, Thoreau explained his reasons for having refused to pay taxes as an act of protest against slavery and against the Mexican–American War....
By the 1850s, a range of minority groups in the United States: Blacks, Jews, Seventh Day Baptists, Catholics, anti-prohibitionists, racial egalitarians, and others—employed civil disobedience to combat a range of legal measures and public practices that to them promoted ethnic, religious, and racial discrimination....
Confucius had very little to say about the roles and expectations of women in the family or in society. Thus it was left for Confucian scholars to apply the principles...
Song Ruozhao wrote in “Analects for Women”: “To be a woman, you must first learn how to establish yourself as a person. The way to do this is simply by working hard to establish one's purity and chastity. By purity, one keeps one's self undefiled; by chastity, one preserves one's honor.... When walking, don't turn your head; when talking, don't open your mouth wide; when sitting, don't move your knees; when standing, don't rustle your skirts; when happy, don't exult with loud laughter; when angry, don't raise your voice. The inner and outer quarters are each distinct; the sexes should be segregated. Don't peer over the outer wall or go beyond the outer courtyard. If you have to go outside, cover your face; if you peep outside, conceal yourself as much as possible. Do not be on familiar terms with men outside the family; have nothing to do with women of bad character. Establish your proper self so as to become a [true] human being."
The jungle has a variety of effects on military operations. Dense vegetation can limit lines of sight and arcs of fire, but can also provide ample opportunity for camouflage and plenty of material with which to build fortifications. Jungle terrain, often without good roads, can be inaccessible to vehicles and so makes supply and transport difficult, which in turn places a premium on air mobility. The problems of transport make engineering resources important as they are needed to improve roads, build bridges and airfields, and improve water supplies. Jungle environments can also be inherently unhealthy, with various tropical diseases....I gave some thought to whether "jungle warfare" had a racial tinge that made it inadvisable for speech in polite company. I'm on high alert for that kind of thing because some guy on "Fox & Friends" just got flayed for saying "you're out of your cotton-picking mind." He said it to a black person, who reacted quickly, saying that he had "some relatives who picked cotton, and I'm not going to sit back and let you attack me on TV like that."
Bulganchimeg Gantulga, 19, a university student studying political science... is considering never marrying at all. “When men don’t respect women, it’s obvious what kind of husband they will be,” Bulganchimeg says.Meanwhile, the men reject the women who are above their level:
A survey released in March by the World Bank found Mongolian men in their 20s often described women as more ambitious than men, a trait they found unattractive. Some wondered why women invested so much in their education, given that it increased their risk of not being able to find a husband.It's interesting that women don't choose to underachieve.
Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, has complained that men can’t “control crazy women” because men “have absolutely no respect” for someone they cannot physically fight. Does this adolescent opinion deserve as much of an audience as the nuanced thoughts of Kate Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell University, about the role of “himpathy” in supporting misogyny?...
There is a clear line between censoring someone and refusing to provide them with institutional resources for disseminating their ideas... What just access means in terms of positive policy is that institutions that are the gatekeepers to the public have a fiduciary responsibility to award access based on the merit of ideas and thinkers. To award space in a campus lecture hall to someone like Peterson who says that feminists “have an unconscious wish for brutal male domination”... is not to display admirable intellectual open-mindedness. It is to take a positive stand that these views are within the realm of defensible rational discourse, and that these people are worth taking seriously as thinkers.
Neither is true: These views are specious, and those who espouse them are, at best, ignorant, at worst, sophists. The invincibly ignorant and the intellectual huckster have every right to express their opinions, but their right to free speech is not the right to an audience.
ALITO, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and KENNEDY, THOMAS, and GORSUCH, JJ., joined. THOMAS, J., filed a concurring opinion,in which GORSUCH,J.,joined. SOTOMAYOR,J.,filed a dissenting opinion, in which GINSBURG, BREYER, and KAGAN, JJ., joined.From Alito's majority opinion:
It was the challengers’ burden to show that the 2013 Legislature acted with discriminatory intent when it enacted plans that the court itself had produced. The 2013 Legislature was not obligated to show that it had “cured” the unlawful intent that the court attributed to the 2011 Legislature. Thus, the essential pillar of the three-judge court’s reasoning was critically flawed.From Sotomayor's dissent (for the 4 liberal Justices):
When the congressional and state legislative districts are reviewed under the proper legal standards, all but one of them, we conclude, are lawful.
This disregard of both precedent and fact comes at serious costs to our democracy. It means that, after years of litigation and undeniable proof of intentional discrimination, minority voters in Texas—despite constituting a majority of the population within the State—will continue to be underrepresented in the political process. Those voters must return to the polls in 2018 and 2020 with the knowledge that their ability to exercise meaningfully their right to vote has been burdened by the manipulation of district lines specifically designed to target their communities and minimize their political will.UPDATE 2: Ohio v. AmeEx, written by Justice Thomas, also 5-4. SCOTUSblog summarizes:
This is an antitrust case, in which a group of states are challenging a provision in the contract between American Express and the merchants that accept its cards; the provision bars the merchants from trying to steer their customers to use a particular credit card.... The Court holds that Amex's steering provisions do not violate federal antitrust law.... Court defines the market as two-sided, including both merchants and cardholders. When the market is defined this way, the Court says, it is clear that the plaintiffs have not met their burden to show anti-competitive effects.And that's all for today, so I guess there will be another day.
For more than 120 years, the American economy has prospered by charting a middle path between pure lassez-faire and state capitalism, governed by an antitrust law “dedicated to the principle that markets, not individual firms and certainly not political power, produce the optimal mixture of goods and services.”That is, Breyer — a former antitrust lawprof — misspelled laissez-faire.
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