Reading archive 2022-06-30

 Teachers voice concerns after Orange County previews ‘Don’t Say Gay’ impact to classrooms - "According to representatives of the county’s teacher association, teachers and staff members will be disallowed from wearing rainbow articles of clothing, including lanyards distributed by the district last year. Elementary-level teachers reported being discouraged from putting pictures of their same-sex spouse on their desk or talking about them to students.

"'Safe Space' stickers aimed at LGBTQ students may have to be removed from doors, teachers will have to report to parents if a student 'comes out' to them and they must use pronouns assigned at birth, regardless of what the parents allow, the CTA reported."

Indicted Election Denier Tina Peters Loses Her Own Election—and Denies She Lost: “It’s not over,” Tina Peters said, as she was down by 15 percentage points.

Queer Animals Are Everywhere. Science Is Finally Catching On.: The animal kingdom isn’t nearly as straight as you think. - "This ['bisexual advantage'] model is supported by a 2019 paper from a group of young scholars that notes that the earliest creatures wouldn’t have discriminated between sexes, because the earliest creatures didn’t have sexes. Therefore, aversion to homosexual sex would have had to specifically arise over the history of life, which this team of researchers finds unlikely, since the opportunity cost of same-sex sex is relatively low. Given that sexual monogamy is more rare than we once thought, having occasional sex or even forming a lifelong bond with a same-sex partner doesn’t mean an animal isn’t also reproducing. As one of the originators of this “ancestral state” hypothesis, Max Lambert, put it to me: 'Biologists told ourselves for so long that it must be unnatural. My research led to a good question: Why do queer things exist? The simple answer is that animal bisexuality is not costly. It was so biologically simple.'"

Jan. 6 committee subpoenas former White House counsel Pat Cipollone: The panel has been ramping up the pressure, believing his testimony about former president Donald Trump could be explosive

Supreme Court to review state legislatures’ power in federal elections: The justices will look next term at a case from North Carolina, where Republicans want to restore a redistricting map rejected by the state’s supreme court. - "The Supreme Court on Thursday said it will consider what would be a radical change in the way federal elections are conducted, giving state legislatures sole authority to set the rules for contests even if their actions violated state constitutions and resulted in extreme partisan gerrymandering for congressional seats.

...

"Judges have reined in Republican gerrymanders in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, for instance, and rejected maps drawn by Democratic-led legislatures in New York and Maryland. 

"But the effort to have the Supreme Court examine what is called the independent state legislature doctrine has been a Republican-led effort. The GOP controls both houses of the legislature in 30 states."

Opinion  The Supreme Court’s EPA ruling says: We’ll do whatever we want - "At a time like this, intellectual engagement with this court’s rulings, as committed as many liberals are to that project, begins to feel beside the point. We could delve into the flaws in the court’s reasoning, or the myriad ways the conservative justices’ alleged devotion to 'originalism' and 'textualism' has been revealed to be a sham — and many will, including dissenting liberal justices. 

"But what the court’s conservative majority and the Republicans who cheer their decisions know is that only one thing matters: power. 

"Conservatives have spent decades amassing it, now they have it, and they’re going to use it in every possible way to create the country they want.

...

"The reason the court’s conservatives appointed themselves the decision-makers on climate policy is simple: They don’t like what the EPA did. No real constitutional or statutory violation was at issue. They simply believe, as part of their conservative ideology, that the government shouldn’t combat climate change, so they’re going to stop the government from doing it." [ed. note: it's all worth quoting, so just reread it]

Reading archive 2022-06-29

Gorsuch and Sotomayor’s extraordinary factual dispute

Yellowstone bison gores visitor and flings her 10 feet, park says

Yellowstone visitor gored in second bison attack in a month, park says

‘Where there’s bodies, there’s treasure’: A hunt as Lake Mead shrinks: The reservoir supplying electricity to 350,000 homes as well as irrigation and drinking water to about 25 million people stands at a record low

Peter Thiel helped build big tech. Now he wants to tear it all down.: Inside the billionaire investor’s journey from Facebook board member to an architect of the new American right - "As an undergraduate at Stanford University, he founded the right-wing campus newspaper Stanford Review, which published articles calling liberal professors secret Marxists and railed against the inclusion of non-White authors in the school’s curriculum, according to journalist Max Chafkin, author of the Thiel biography, 'The Contrarian.'

...

"And Thiel’s influence could be felt throughout the company. In his best-selling 2014 book, 'Zero to One,' he argued that businesses should strive to make such a singular product that they become monopolies — while entrepreneurs consolidate power to run their companies like monarchies. Zuckerberg appeared to heed these lessons, multiple people said, from the structure of Facebook’s board, which gives the CEO the majority of voting shares and ultimate control, to his aggressive efforts to purchase or copy nascent competitors, a strategy that has given rise to accusations that the company is a monopoly.

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"Thiel’s support of Trump — along with comments that resurfaced from a book co-authored with David Sacks that 'a multicultural rape charge may indicate nothing more than a belated regret' and that some rape charges are 'seductions that are later regretted' — provoked outcry within Facebook during election season, but Zuckerberg continued to defend his adviser."

Near Kherson, Ukrainians regain territory in major counteroffensive

Cassidy Hutchinson’s path from trusted insider to explosive witness: ‘I was disgusted,’ former aide to Mark Meadows says in testimony revealing new details

Reading archive 2022-06-28

Gen Z is influencing the abortion debate — from TikTok - "Savannah, who has a background in musical theater, has initiatives of her own, including writing and performing conservative rap songs. Last year, her music video 'Be Like Candace' caught the attention of right-wing commentator Candace Owens. Soon after, Savannah said, she was invited to be part of the organization Owens co-founded, the Blexit Foundation, which states a vision 'to change the narrative that surrounds America’s minority communities.'"

Opinion  Rudy Giuliani gets caught in another lie — at a supermarket

GOP Rep. Boebert: ‘I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk’

Frustration, anger rising among Democrats over caution on abortion: A growing number of Democrats are voicing anger at what they see as the passivity of Biden and other party leaders in the face of hard-hitting GOP tactics on abortion and other issues - "Some activists said Democratic leaders’ exhortation to vote for them to save abortion rights echoes the refrain activists heard on police reform in the wake of Floyd’s killing and on protecting voting rights — two major initiatives that have fallen short despite the narrow Democratic majorities in Washington. 

"'It’s very similar to what happened in 2020: 'Go back to the voting booths.' … It always comes back to 'Now you, the individual, do something,'' said Paris Hatcher, executive director for Black Feminist Future. 'But we’ve elected these people who are in office at this very moment to take action on things like this. It becomes a very passive way to pass the buck when we have elected them to make things happen that center on the well-being of the people.'" [ed. note: political power is derived from the individual's vote - that's what democracy is. You elected an official, not a demigod. We need more votes.]

Opinion  Susan Collins needs to own up to her decision to back Kavanaugh

Harris says she ‘never believed’ Kavanaugh, Gorsuch would uphold Roe

What Ruth Bader Ginsburg really said about Roe v. Wade - "One thing you’ll notice from the above is that Ginsburg calls the court’s decision hasty and “breathtaking,” she suggests it would have been better to go slower and focus on equal protection, and she laments legislators being taken out of the process so quickly and absolutely. But what she doesn’t say is that there is no constitutional right to an abortion or that Roe was wrong. Indeed her comments take issue mostly in how it arrived at a conclusion she supported, and how sustainable it made that right.

"And Ginsburg assured in her 1993 confirmation hearings that she did support it being a right. 

"Abortion 'is something central to a woman’s life, to her dignity,' she said. 'It’s a decision that she must make for herself. And when government controls that decision for her, she’s being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.'"

Yes, Capitol Rioters Were Armed. Here Are The Weapons Prosecutors Say They Used - "At least three people arrested in connection with the Capitol riot are facing gun charges, though the government has not alleged that those three were part of the actual breach of the building. Other defendants are suspected of possessing guns during the riot but, like the vast majority of the estimated 800 rioters, were not searched that day."

Reading archive 2022-06-27

The GOP’s false assurances that Roe v. Wade was safe - "The Supreme Court indeed overturned Roe on Friday. And when it comes to Republican assurances that other unenumerated rights such as same-sex marriage or contraception couldn’t also be in some danger, it’s probably worth remembering the assurances that were delivered on this issue."

Spanberger’s rival questions on tape whether pregnancy less likely after rape

With violent rhetoric and election denial, podcaster becomes GOP force: Joe Oltmann has built a sprawling political network in Colorado marked by false 2020 claims and suggestions that opponents be hanged - "Broerman had never heard of the podcaster but figured it was important to hear out anyone who might have identified vulnerabilities in the vote. Instead, he found Oltmann’s complaints vague, peppered with technical language about voting machinery that didn’t match Broerman’s knowledge of the system."

Reading archive 2022-06-26

For Trixie Mattel, drag is an art form. It’s also her empire.: A new double album, a Discovery Plus show and a comedy tour are just the latest ventures for the drag queen

Opinion  As an adoptee, I know: Adoption is not a fairy-tale answer to abortion

Opinion  We know what to do to save the giant sequoias

Opinion  The Supreme Court rulings represent the tyranny of the minority - "In Federalist No. 22, Alexander Hamilton warned that giving small states like Rhode Island or Delaware 'equal weight in the scale of power' with large states like 'Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York' violated the precepts of 'justice' and 'common-sense.' 'The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller,' he predicted, arguing that such a system contradicts 'the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail.'

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"To take but one example: Twenty-one states with fewer total people than California have 42 Senate seats.

"As an Economist correspondent points out, '5 of the 6 conservative Supreme Court justices were appointed by a Republican Senate majority that won fewer votes than the Democrats' and '3 of the 6 were nominated by a president who also won a minority of the popular vote.'"

GOP lawmaker calls Roe ruling ‘victory for white life’ as Trump rally cheers: A spokesman said the comment by Rep. Mary E. Miller (R-Ill.) was a ‘mix-up of words’

Reading archive 2022-06-25

Russia will soon exhaust its combat capabilities, Western assessments predict: Small shifts in territorial control matter less than the overall balance of forces, which analysts say could shift back in favor of Ukraine in the coming months

Emboldened Supreme Court majority shows it’s eager for change: Reinforced by Trump appointments, conservatives take on controversies dear to the right

Opinion  The Supreme Court radicals’ new precedent: Maximum chaos - "The right-wing majority’s selective application of history reveals the larger fraud in this pair of landmark rulings: Their reasoning is not legal but political, not principled but partisan."

Reading archive 2022-06-22

New York Times The Morning for 6/22/2022 - "The case, Carson v. Makin, concerned a Maine program that let rural residents who lived far from a public school attend a private school using taxpayer dollars, so long as that school was “nonsectarian.” Families who wanted to send their children to Christian schools challenged the program, arguing that excluding religious schools violated their right to exercise their faith." [ed. note: that is a batshit crazy argument]