“However, in a handful of cases, hints about deliberations have slipped out publicly, including in Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion-rights precedent that the justices now appear to be on the verge of abandoning.” There was even a case more than 100 years ago in which a clerk was prosecuted, but never convicted, of leaking valuable information to traders on Wall Street.
The implications of the ruling are enormous. If a majority on the court erases Roe v. Wade, wrote Jill Filipovic, “For American women, it throws the future into question: What will it mean to live in a country that has made it clear it doesn’t see you as an equal citizen — that doesn’t recognize the most basic, intimate right to decide what happens inside your own body?”
“And the conservative movement won’t stop there,” Filipovic predicted. Advocates on the right will challenge the court’s landmark rulings legalizing contraception and same-sex marriage.
“National surveys show that a majority of Americans say abortion should usually occur within the first trimester. And many voters favor the limitations that Mississippi is seeking to put into place.”
How we got here
“The American people have consistently told pollsters that they want the freedom guaranteed under Roe v. Wade to remain in place,” Ghitis noted. But the power a minority can wield through the Senate and the Electoral College enables it to control policy for the nation.
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Victory Day?
Monday is the day Russia commemorates victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. Pundits have predicted either that President Vladimir Putin will claim victory over Ukraine or that he will use the day to rally support for a wider war.
Back from a trip to Poland and western Ukraine, Repass said “Ukraine still needs a lot of help” and “NATO is moving too slow.”
“What are they thinking? If there’s one thing we know about such a conflict, it is as President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said in a joint statement in 1985, “(A) nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” wrote Helfand and Christ.
“The US and Russia currently have some 3,000 strategic nuclear warheads pointed at each other, according to the Federation of American Scientists. A 2002 study showed that if only 300 Russian warheads got through to cities in the United States, 77 million to 105 million people would be killed in the first afternoon…”
“Food production would crash, triggering a global famine that would destroy modern civilization,” according to a study published in the journal Science Advances.”
After the Soviet Union developed nuclear weapons in the 1950s, wrote former US Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and former Sen. Gary Hart, “Our strategic planners began to think about survival of the nation following a nuclear exchange between our two countries. The umbrella for this planning came to be known as ‘continuity of government’ — an effort to address the question of who, and under what authority, would run our country if tens of millions of Americans and government structures were to perish in a nuclear attack?”
The result was the creation of a series of little-understood emergency powers vested in the President. Cohen and Hart noted that “The ones of notable concern, particularly to those of us who desire to protect our constitutional rights, have included the suspension of habeas corpus and national elections, silencing of the press, censorship of information, various forms of martial law, the detention and arrest of individuals designated as terrorists or enemies of the state — and much more…”
Orwell
“Much of Orwell’s writing, and particularly his final novel ‘1984,’ was preoccupied with the importance of speaking the truth and the risk to both individuals and societies when states attempt to censor and manipulate speech.”
Putin has based his rationale for invading Ukraine partly on the claim the Russians are de-Nazifying the country. Last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov took that to new depths by falsely saying that Hitler had “Jewish blood” and contending that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Jewish heritage “does not negate the Nazi elements in Ukraine.”
Red elephant
During the final round of the Palos Verdes Championship, Golf Channel reporter Jerry Foltz asked “world No. 3 golfer Lydia Ko why a physical therapist had rushed onto the course to treat her,” Holly Thomas noted. “Smiling, Ko said: ‘It’s that time of the month,’ explaining that she has problems with her back when she has her period. Foltz, clearly stumped, mumbled, ‘Uh, thanks.'”
It pointed up “two glaring oddities: First, that female sports stars spend roughly a quarter of their time with a physical handicap, yet are expected to stay quiet about it, and second, how wild it is that in 2022, a male reporter was flummoxed by the mention of something that happens every few weeks to approximately half the people he knows. Yet, as absurd as the reporter’s reaction was, it’s not surprising that he was thrown…”
Trump’s influence
Former President Donald Trump passed the first test of his influence in the May Republican primaries — J.D. Vance, his preferred candidate for the nomination for Senate in Ohio, won.
In Georgia, the news for Trump wasn’t so favorable — a special grand jury was convened in the wake of his post-election phone call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, asking him to “find 11,780 votes” so that he could nullify President Joe Biden’s victory in that state.
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Mom’s Day
Kirsten Powers’ mother “claims I started yelling at her almost as soon as I had exited the birth canal. This is obviously hyperbole, but probably only slightly. We could not have been more temperamentally different and fought constantly.”
So it’s hard for Powers to wake up on Mother’s Day and “jealously watch women across Instagram and Facebook posting pictures and paeans to their ‘best friends’ and ‘perfect’ mothers.”
Their “relationship was so tumultuous that most people — including me — assumed that after I went away to college it would end. It nearly did, but in my mid-20s we went to family counseling and forged a fragile peace that was threatened many times over the years though miraculously held,” wrote Powers.
Then, while writing a book on grace in 2020, Powers saw the relationship “through a different frame.”
“I realized also that throughout my childhood, she was also dealing with Olympian levels of stress as she worked as a trailblazing archaeologist and professor leading the way for future women… Rather than being wrapped up and tied with a perfect bow, this story ends with something different: acceptance and appreciation for what we did have, grace for what we did not and gratitude for the years we have left to try and live a different and imperfect story.”