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babylonsister

babylonsister's Journal
babylonsister's Journal
June 28, 2022

Jan. 6 Committee Focusing on Calls Among Trump's Kids Filmed in Documentary: Report

https://www.thedailybeast.com/jan-6-committee-focusing-on-calls-among-trumps-kids-filmed-in-documentary-report?ref=home?ref=home


Jan. 6 Committee Focusing on Calls Among Trump’s Kids Filmed in Documentary: Report
LISTENING IN
Dan Ladden-Hall
News Correspondent
Published Jun. 28, 2022 5:14AM ET


The House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol is focusing on phone calls and conversations between Donald Trump’s children and top aides that were recorded by a documentary film crew in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, according to The Guardian. The calls—which allegedly show Trump’s kids discussing election strategies—took place at a private event at the Trump International hotel in Washington, D.C., on the night of the first presidential debate in September 2020, anonymous sources cited by the paper claim. The Jan. 6 panel, which is holding a hastily arranged hearing on Tuesday, was said to have learned about the crucial discussions through the testimony of filmmaker Alex Holder, who spent months with Trump and his inner circle before and after the election.
June 27, 2022

GOP Candidate Wonders If It's Harder To Get Pregnant If A Woman Is Raped



https://crooksandliars.com/2022/06/gop-candidate-wonders-if-its-harder-get

GOP Candidate Wonders If It's Harder To Get Pregnant If A Woman Is Raped
This can't be real life.
By Conover Kennard — June 27, 2022


All of these doctors in the GOP! First, there was Dr. Todd Akin, who said, "rape can't cause pregnancy," and now we have the esteemed Dr. Yesli Vega, the Republican nominee running against Democrat Abigail Spanberger for Congress, who downplayed the fact that women can indeed get pregnant after being raped. Neither individual is a doctor, but they seem to think they are.

Via Axios:

At an event in Stafford County, Vega, a Prince William County supervisor, and sheriff's deputy was asked what she thinks Congress should do if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

She said, "The left will say, 'Well, what about in cases of rape or incest?' I'm a law enforcement officer. I became a police officer in 2011. I've worked one case where as a result of a rape, the young woman became pregnant."

How does she know how many rape cases end in pregnancy simply because she's a cop? What a painfully stupid thing to say.

She was then asked, "I've actually heard that it's harder for a woman to get pregnant if she's been raped. Have you heard that?"

"Well, maybe because there's so much going on in the body," Vega said. "I don't know. I haven't, you know, seen any studies. But if I'm processing what you're saying, it wouldn't surprise me. Because it's not something that's happening organically. You're forcing it. The individual, the male, is doing it as quickly — it's not like, you know — and so I can see why there is truth to that. It's unfortunate."


snip//

Republicans are just getting downright creepy in their attempt to force women and girls to have babies. Akin, whose comment that women’s bodies have a way of avoiding pregnancies in cases of “legitimate rape” lost his bid for the U.S. Senate, and died last year. We don't know if it was a legitimate death or not, though.
June 27, 2022

'This is a losing issue': GOP campaign consultants panicked about upcoming midterms after Roe decisi

Silver lining?

'This is a losing issue': GOP campaign consultants panicked about upcoming midterms after Roe decision
Republicans
Tom Boggioni
and Raw Story
June 25, 2022


According to a report from Politico, while Republicans are publically applauding a decision from the conservative Supreme Court to dismantle the 50-year-old Roe v Wade decision that allowed women to get an abortion, in private they are admitting it could not have come at a worse time.

In interviews with Politico's David Siders, Republican Party campaign consultants are throwing up their hands in frustration at a ruling that will make it harder for them to do their jobs in November -- particularly as they try to bring suburban women back into the fold after four years of Donald Trump.

As one GOP adviser put it: "This is a losing issue for Republicans.”


According to Siders' report, "... according to interviews with more than a dozen Republican strategists and party officials, they just didn’t want it to come right now — not during a midterm election campaign in which nearly everything had been going right for the GOP," adding, "In Republican circles, a consensus has been forming for weeks that the court’s overturning of a significant — and highly popular — precedent on a deeply felt issue will be a liability for the party in the midterms and beyond, undercutting Republicans to at least some degree with moderates and suburban women."

GOP strategist John Thomas explained, "This is not a conversation we want to have. We want to have a conversation about the economy. We want to have a conversation about Joe Biden, about pretty much anything else besides Roe."

more...

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/gop-consultants-abortion/
June 27, 2022

Supreme Court's Legal Terrorism: Appealing to "Tradition" on Abortion Is Obscene


Supreme Court’s Legal Terrorism: Appealing to “Tradition” on Abortion Is Obscene
by Lucian K. Truscott IV | June 26, 2022 - 6:19am

— from Salon

snip//

It's tempting to say that the justices handed down these two decisions because they could, but what they did and how they did it is even worse: Just a month after 19 elementary school children and their two teachers were shot dead with a semiautomatic military weapon of war, they mumbled about life and provided for the mechanics of death and. over a 24-hour period, set forth the new outlines of an obscene legal regimen.

They threw out 50 years of precedent and two of their previous decisions and concluded that since "the Constitution makes no express reference to a right to obtain an abortion," such a right does not exist. But the right to "keep and bear arms" is spelled out clear as a bell by the musket-owning founders in the wonderful Second Amendment.

What the six so-called conservatives are relying on these days are two words not found in the Constitution: history and tradition. Both are suddenly seen as absolutely necessary in determining whether certain rights deserve to be preserved. The decisions are rife with phrases like, "We then canvassed the historical record, and found yet further confirmation," and you know what the "historical record" confirmed, don't you? Exactly what the majority wanted it to. It turns out that in order for a constitutional right to be enjoyed by American citizens, it must be old, and the older the better. If a right existed in the 18th and 19th centuries, well, this court is fine with it. But if that right wasn't enjoyed by the citizens of, say, 1816 — like the right to privacy, under which various other so-called modern rights exist, such as the right to purchase and use contraceptives, the right to have sex in the manner you choose, and the right to marry a person of your own sex — then those rights simply don't exist.

The majority leaves out the inconvenient truth that abortions, legal or otherwise, have been performed since the beginning of history as we know it, and the ownership of guns and other weapons of death and destruction have been restricted by class, income, social standing and political power for just as long.

more...

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/lucian-k-truscott-iv/102145/supreme-court-s-legal-terrorism-appealing-to-tradition-on-abortion-is-obscene
June 26, 2022

Adam Schiff Schools Chuck Todd On Why Trump Should Be Prosecuted

https://www.politicususa.com/2022/06/26/adam-schiff-prosecute-trump.html

Posted on Sun, Jun 26th, 2022 by Jason Easley
Adam Schiff Schools Chuck Todd On Why Trump Should Be Prosecuted


NBC’s Chuck Todd suggested that the country was too divided for Trump to be charged, but Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) set him straight.



Transcript via NBC’s Meet The Press:

CHUCK TODD:

This country’s, I’d characterize it as dangerously divided right now. And an indictment of a former president, that could throw gasoline on this fire. Choosing not to hold him accountable could also throw gasoline on this fire. What is – there are no good outcomes here. What’s the worst outcome on that front, and do you understand why the attorney general may be really struggling with this decision?

REP. ADAM SCHIFF:

Well, I think it’s a very difficult decision, but I don’t think it’s a difficult – that is, to prosecute. It’s not a difficult decision to investigate when there’s evidence before you. And I think the worst-case scenario is not that Donald Trump runs and wins, but that he runs and loses and they overturn the election. Because there’s no deterrent, because there’s no effort to push back and to hold people accountable.

CHUCK TODD:

What if you prosecute him and he gets off?

REP. ADAM SCHIFF:

Well, that’s always a risk. But the fact is, if you follow the evidence where it leads, if you believe that you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt, then you have a duty to prosecute. And the decision not to investigate or not to prosecute becomes a political decision that, well, this person is immune from the rule of law.


Chairman Schiff was right. It doesn’t matter if Trump gets off the hook when he is prosecuted. The idea is that a deterrent to an attempted coup against the United States of America must come with some consequences.

The notion that the country is too divided for a former president to be prosecuted was dangerous nonsense. It is even more dangerous for the country if Republicans try to steal a future election and it results in a civil war.

There are larger stakes than whether or not Trump goes to jail, but prosecuting the former president would send a strong message to any future potential coup plotters.
June 26, 2022

John Pavlovitz: An Apology to My Daughter


An Apology to My Daughter
June 26, 2022 / John Pavlovitz


My Dear Daughter,

I’ve been thinking about you ever since the news a few days ago.

Every time I try to find the words to talk about this to you, they jumble all together, swelling up and getting stuck in my throat. Tears quickly well up in my eyes, and all I can manage is a barely audible, “I’m sorry.”

I am.

I am so very sorry.

I’m sorry for America.

It has failed you.

I’ve lived all of my life believing in this country, believing that we would never go backwards, only forwards. I believed that there were enough good people here to prevent the terribly ugly things of our past from becoming our terrifying present. I rested in the trust I had in the greater collective humanity here being enough. I had faith in the center holding and in our better angels prevailing.

I was wrong.

When your mother and I chose to bring you into this world, we never dreamed that you would spend a second of your life without the elemental freedoms over your body, over your decisions, over the care you receive from doctors. We knew you would face the challenges of living in a nation that still offered so much resistance to your progress, so many caustic messages about your self-worth, so much opposition to your full equality—but this… this was unthinkable.

We’re so very sorry—not for choosing you or for your beautiful life, but for you having to know the fear and the worry and feelings of less-than that women here have not had to endure for decades, because they and people before them fought so terribly hard for so long.

There are so many reasons for us being here right now: so much collective laziness and greed, so many opportunistic people who sacrificed your choice on the altar of their phony religion, so much first-hand and internalized misogyny. I wish I could rewind and help change even one small thing that would give you a different nation and a different day to wake up in today.

But since I can’t do that, I can only give you these promises in the present and for the the future:

more...



https://johnpavlovitz.com/2022/06/26/an-apology-to-my-daughter/
June 26, 2022

Things Are About To Get Worse Between Pence And Trump Over The Documentary

https://crooksandliars.com/2022/06/things-are-about-get-sticky-between-pence

Things Are About To Get Worse Between Pence And Trump Over The Documentary
This isn't going to go down well.
By Conover Kennard — June 25, 2022


British documentary filmmaker Alex Holder, who spent weeks interviewing former President Donald Trump and his family members, is suddenly getting a lot of attention. Holder testified privately before the Jan. 6 riot hearing.

It's no secret that former vice-president Mike Pence and the twice impeached one-term President have a rocky relationship now. After all, the former President sicced his crowd of fire-breathing lint-licking miscreants on Pence to the point that they wanted to hang him. You would think that would make Pence repulsed by Trump, but no. Instead, he has taken the cowardly way out. He doesn't particularly like talking about Jan. 6.

However.

MLive reports:

Vice President Mike Pence is shown in a new British documentary reacting approvingly to a congressional resolution to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove then-President Donald Trump from office.

In a clip taped six days after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, Pence smiles when an aide hands him a cellphone with a message disclosing the dramatic push to cut short Trump's time in the White House.

"Yeah, excellent," Pence says on the tape dated Jan. 12.

"Print it out so I can read it on the trip home," he adds.


You don't say.

A Pence spokesman told CNN that that characterization was false. "In the documentary, Vice President Pence was reacting to a confirmation that his letter was sent to Speaker Pelosi rejecting her ploy to invoke 25th amendment," the Pence spokesman said.

Well, you be the judge, but I know that if my former boss wanted me killed, I wouldn't play footsie with her, but you be you, Mike.
June 26, 2022

Olivia Rodrigo, Lily Allen Dedicate 'F**k You' Performance to Supreme Court Justices

I don't know who these women are, but I them!!

https://www.thedailybeast.com/olivia-rodrigo-lily-allen-flip-off-supreme-court-justices-who-voted-to-overturn-roe-at-glastonbury?ref=home

Olivia Rodrigo, Lily Allen Dedicate ‘F**k You’ Performance to Supreme Court Justices
🖕
Alan Halaly
Breaking News Intern
Published Jun. 25, 2022 8:07PM ET

Olivia Rodrigo brought Lily Allen on stage at the Glastonbury Festival on Saturday to help articulate her feelings about the reversal of Roe v. Wade. The pair performed Allen’s 2009 hit “F--k You,” dedicated to the Supreme Court Justices who voted to get rid of Roe. “I’m devastated and terrified that so many women and so many girls are going to die because of this. I wanted to dedicate this next song to the five members of the Supreme Court who have showed us that at the end of the day, they truly don’t give a shit about freedom. This song goes out to the justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. We hate you,” Rodrigo said, flipping them the bird.


https://twitter.com/i/status/1540834913049628673
June 26, 2022

Marge Piercy, 'Right to Life'

From here... https://www.facebook.com/midlifefabulous/

"A woman is not a basket you place your buns in to keep them warm. Not a brood hen you can slip duck eggs under.
Not the purse holding the coins of your
descendants till you spend them in wars.
Not a bank where your genes gather interest
and interesting mutations in the tainted rain, any more than you are.
You plant corn and you harvest it to eat or sell.
You put the lamb in the pasture to fatten and haul it in to butcher for chops.
You slice the mountain in two for a road and gouge the high plains for coal and the waters run muddy for miles and years.
Fish die but you do not call them yours unless you wished to eat them.
Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman.
You lay claim to her pastures for grazing,
fields for growing babies like iceberg lettuce.
You value children so dearly that none ever go hungry, none weep with no one to tend them when mothers work, none lack fresh fruit, none chew lead or cough to death and your orphanages are empty. Every noon the best restaurants serve poor children steaks.
At this moment at nine o'clock a partera
is performing a table top abortion on an
unwed mother in Texas who can’t get
Medicaid any longer. In five days she will die
of tetanus and her little daughter will cry
and be taken away.
Next door a husband and wife are sticking pins in the son they did not want. They will explain for hours how wicked he is, how he wants discipline.
We are all born of woman, in the rose
of the womb we suckled our mother’s blood
and every baby born has a right to love
like a seedling to sun.
Every baby born unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come due in twenty years with interest, an anger that must find a target, a pain that will beget pain.
A decade downstream a child screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched, a firing squad is summoned, a button is pushed and the world burns.
I will choose what enters me, what becomes of my flesh.
Without choice, no politics, no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield, not your uranium mine, not your calf for fattening, not your cow for milking.
You may not use me as your factory.
Priests and legislators do not hold shares in my womb or my mind.
This is my body. If I give it to you I want it back.
My life is a non-negotiable demand."
~ Marge Piercy, 'Right to Life'
June 25, 2022

Goddamn It and Goddamn Them

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/jaime-o-neill/102134/goddamn-it-and-goddamn-them

Goddamn It and Goddamn Them
by Jaime O’Neill | June 25, 2022 - 7:15am


snip//

Their persistence paid off hugely this week. Six really perfidious and rotten people imposed their will on a majority of Americans who didn't want them to do what they did. Insanely, in the aftermath of the most recent uproar about children in schools being killed by men with guns, the Supremes demonstrated their supreme indifference by giving their 6-3 blessing to the right of any citizen to carry a concealed weapon, invalidating state laws that prohibit such casually irresponsible "freedoms." Haven't the fascists always told us that state's rights were sacred?

And then, supreme in their arrogance and indifference to the Constitution and precedent, they sent down the edict that fetal cell rights will reign supreme over the rights of living women.

It's an abomination,
though I suspect the evangelicals, the Mormons, and Catholics will be rejoicing their asses off this weekend, and the choruses of "hallelujah" will be loud in the tax-free mega churches.

snip//

My vocabulary of vile names for these people is inadequate to the task of condemning them for their imperious wickedness, for the callous indifference to the harm they do to people they don't know.

But one word does come to mind. They are monsters. Sanctimonious monsters who do their monstrous work dressed in black robes, reassuring themselves they are serving God's will. They rationalize such hubris, telling themselves that what they do is only what God urges them to do. They tell themselves that their machinations are patriotic, consistent with the values of the Founding Fathers, many of whom were land owners who commonly and without shame also bought and sold their fellow human beings. They do their monstrous work sanctioned in their wisdom by degrees conferred upon them by the highest temples of learning we have. They are applauded by many of their equally privileged fellow alumni who, I think, know better. Or surely should know, given their vaunted educations.

So, I'm mad as hell, and as in the movie that featured that famous line, I don't want to take it anymore. But unlike that movie, we all know that we'll continue taking it so long as our government is dominated by a wholly-owned cabal of privileged ex-preppies and heirs to privilege. And those who will take the worst of the shit we shouldn't have to take are those who will pay the biggest price for what has been done by truly despicable human beings far removed from the consequences.

Clarence Thomas had the audacity to say that he had been subjected to a "high-tech lynching" when he faced accusations of sexual harassment during his confirmation hearings. Lynching was an egregiously inappropriate analogy for what Thomas had experienced.

It is, however, possible to see what has been done to America's women is akin to mass rape, a violation, an obscenity.

I hope I can take my own advice to grieve this affront without being distracted by the next outrage to issue our Washington. I don't want to lose this anger. And my advice to anyone who feels as I do is to get mad, stay mad, and turn that anger into action, perhaps beginning with demands for the impeachment of "Justice" Clarence Thomas whose corruption is perhaps the most overt and obvious.

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Hometown: NY
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Current location: Florida
Member since: Mon Sep 6, 2004, 09:54 PM
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