Yes, he was enjoying it all right. Reveling in it.

And Nancy damned well knew it, and so did Chuck and all the other Dems, which was why she took over. And thank whatever gods may be that she did, too. If she hadn't, who knows how much worse it would have gotten and how would many have been murdered on the spot by those marauding maniacs before help arrived, if Nancy and the others hadn't started working the phones when they did.

Trump is lower than dirt for siccing those shitweasels on our nation's Capitol. Lower than slime mold, lower than the putrid crud between Steve Bannon's filthy toes. Compared to Trump, the contents of a cesspool looks like precious jewels and smells like gardenias. He IS filth, slime, and putrefaction all rolled up in one hideously revolting package!

Just caught a Darren Bailey ad on TV.

It ended with him saying, "I'm Darren Bailey, and your safety will always be my prority!"

My rejoinder: "Oh, come on, Darren. We both know you wouldn't give a rat's ass about my safety if my life was endangered by a tubal pregnancy or I was about to go septic from an incomplete miscarriage, you fucking hypocrite!"

Those things are happening RIGHT NOW, in states like Texas that have the kind of abortion bans that Bailey would like to see everywhere, including Illinois. I am SO sick of being slapped in the face by his lying, hypocritical mug every time I turn on my TV!

Note: I am way too old to have to worry about any of this stuff myself, but I am sick about what women are being put through in this country since the Supremely Unethical Court struck down Roe.

Well, now, to be fair to this dimwit, *insert sarcasm thingy*

he was asked an either/or question: should laws banning or allowing abortion (paraphrasing slightly) be decided at the state or federal level? And he picked state, because as a Republican would-be state lawmaker, he OF COURSE wants the state legislature to have ALL the power to regulate (i.e. ban the hell out of) abortion without any interference from those pesky blue states. Do we actually expect him to have the imagination to come up with a third option (i.e., treat women like sentient adults and gtfo of our personal health care decisions)?

*sarcasm off*

I'm pretty sure no on here said "yes" to the above question, because this is a REPUBLICAN we're talking about, and we all know what that means. As a Republican, the last thing he would EVER do is suggest that maybe lawmakers at every level should consider treating women like adults who are capable of making their own decisions about important stuff and butt tf out. So he gave exactly the answer I would have expected him to give to that question.

Why? Because he's a paternalistic Republican pos, and that is what they do.

Biden Reestablishes Arts and Humanities Committee Gutted by Trump

T5he committee’s main responsibilities will be to shape policy goals, stimulate arts philanthropy, and advocate for the expansion of federal backing of the cultural sector.

Inside the Law School Meltdown the Supreme Court Has Unleashed,.

The Supreme Court Is Blowing Up Law School, Too
Inside the growing furor among professors who have had enough.

Khiara Bridges remembers the exact moment she lost faith in the Supreme Court. At first, at the start of Donald Trump’s presidency, Bridges—a professor who now teaches at UC–Berkeley School of Law—held out hope that the court might be “this great protector of individual civil liberties right when we desperately needed it to be.” Then came 2018. That June, the justices issued Trump v. Hawaii, which upheld the president’s entry ban for citizens of eight countries, six of them Muslim-majority. Suddenly, Bridges told me, she realized, “The court is not going to save us. It is going to let Trump do whatever he wants to do. And it’s going to help him get away with it.”

Four years later, the justices completely shattered whatever remaining optimism Bridges could muster about the court by overruling Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. When the decision came down on June 24, she got a migraine for the first time in a decade. The image of the court as a majestic guardian of liberty was, she concluded, “a complete lie.” And it wasn’t just about her own personal feelings, either: Now she had to teach her students about the work of an institution that made her sick to contemplate.

Bridges is not alone. At law schools across the country, thousands of professors of constitutional law are currently facing a court that, in their view, has let the mask of neutrality fall off completely. Six conservative justices are steering the court head-on into the most controversial debates of the day and consistently siding with the Republican Party. Increasingly, the conservative majority does not even bother to provide any reasoning for its decisions, exploiting the shadow docket to overhaul the law without a word of explanation. The crisis reached its zenith between September 2021 and June 2022, when the Supreme Court let Texas impose its vigilante abortion ban through the shadow docket, then abolished a 50-year-old right to bodily autonomy by overruling Roe v. Wade. Now law professors are faced with a quandary: How—and why—should you teach law to students while the Supreme Court openly changes the meaning of the Constitution to align with the GOP?

A version of this question has long dogged the profession, which has fought over the distinction between law and politics for about as long as it has existed. For decades, however, the court has handed enough victories to both sides of the political spectrum that it has avoided a full-on academic revolt against its legitimacy. That dynamic changed when Trump appointed Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to replace far less conservative predecessors and created a Republican-appointed supermajority, a coalition further aided by the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to a seat that should have been filled by Barack Obama. The cascade of far-right rulings in 2022 confirmed that the new court is eager to shred long-held precedents it deems too liberal as quickly as possible. The pace and scale of this revolution is requiring law professors to adapt on several levels—intellectually, pedagogically, and emotionally.

*snip*

More: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/10/supreme-court-scotus-decisions-law-school-professors.html

Chicago violence victims' families call on Darren Bailey to stop commercials.

My reaction to what's happening in Ukraine.

I actually blame Mitch more than I do Trump.

Mitch knew exactly what he was doing. He never liked Trump, but he saw a golden opportunity to stack the federal courts with RW judges and ran with it. He hid his contempt for Trump and played him like a fiddle to accomplish that goal and succeeded, all the way to the Supreme Court.

All Trump did was sit in the Oval and rubber stamp whoever Mitch and the Federalist Society put in front of him. He didn't know one judge from another and wouldn't have had the patience (or the reading comprehension) to vet judicial candidates himself.

I'm sure Trump was happy with the results and more than happy to take the credit, but Mitch was the mastermind behind the whole thing. They're both to blame, but I think Mitch bears a greater share of the responsibility. Trump was literally just a tool (in every sense of the word) that Mitch wielded to get something he very much wanted.

My beautiful grandkitties!

My daughter sent me this lovely photo of her two girls, Banshee and Pooka.



Pooka is the gray one, and Banshee is the one who looks Siamese. They are sisters/litter mates, and I think they're about the same age as Siwsan's two "big boys," Madoc and Gryff.

My daughter says Banshee got her name because she "screamed" so much. Daughter and her boyfriend/partner then chose another name from Irish/Celtic mythology for her sister.

Here's some background on the names, if anyone is interested:

https://www.theirishroadtrip.com/the-banshee/
https://www.theirishroadtrip.com/the-puca/

Yes, most forced birthers believe Plan B is an abortifacient, and want it to be banned.

I think the quote says a lot about how few fucks Abbott actually gives about the so-called "pro life" movement. If he REALLY believed abortion was murder and was motivated by a desire to protect the "unborn," he would be anti-Plan B like the rest of them.

This quote makes it clear to anyone who is really paying attention that he couldn't care less about what happens to fetuses, embryos, blastocysts, and fertilized eggs and is motivated purely by a desire to score political points. Which makes his gleeful promotion of abortion bans that much more despicable, afaic.