if I’m honest I’m kind of baffled that there’s anti-voting content going around. again. you cannot have forgotten so quickly how bad trump was and how hard the republicans tried to prevent you from voting. did you forget the russian bots??

Time to talk about James Garfield! He's nearly forgotten today because his presidency was cut so short, but he might be one of the biggest over-achievers ever to reach the White House, and I'm overdue to tell you about his life story.

James Garfield, like Lincoln, came from a dirt poor background. Pretty sure he was the last president to be born in a log cabin. His father was a farmer who died when he was three years old, leaving him in the care of a mother and older brother who doted on him. They recognized that he was smart and wanted him to make something of himself, but young James had read a few too many books that romanticized life at sea, so at sixteen he ran away from home to get the closest possible version of that experience that he could manage--working on a boat in the Erie Canal. He came back home within a few months because he nearly drowned, and by then, his mother and brother had scraped up enough money for him to go to school.

After high school, he went to a prep school where he worked as a janitor to pay for his tuition. At least, for the first year. By his second year, the school decided to hire him to teach six classes! And later added two more because he was so popular! While he was still attending the school as a student, mind you! He went to college, became the principal of his old prep school, studied for the bar and became a lawyer, got involved in state politics, and then left to go serve in the Civil War, where he became the youngest-ever major general. Then his friends asked him to run for the US House of Representatives, and even though he refused to leave the army to go campaign, he won the election. Then he did leave the army to join the House, where he served eight terms.

Which brings us to the 1880 presidential election. Which was an absolutely wild and crazy political battle within the Republican Party. The big issue was civil service reform. Up to this point, all federal employees were appointed by the ruling president's party--it was called the spoils system, because "to the victor go the spoils." The president (or whoever he gave hiring power to) could appoint whoever he wanted to any government position, regardless of whether or not the person had any relevant experience. By the 1870s, this system had become a cesspool of corruption and cronyism, but the Republicans were split on the need for reform. On one side, you had the Stalwarts, who wanted to continue with business as usual. On the other side were the Half-Breeds, who wanted to replace the spoils system with a merit-based system where employees would have to meet certain education or experience requirements to get the job, which they could then stay in regardless of which party was in power.

Anyway, when it came time to choose the presidential candidate, the battle got ugly. On one side, you had Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, a political boss who maintained his power through the spoils system, who was there to nominate Ulysses S. Grant to a third term. On the other side, you had James G. Blaine (the Magnetic Man from Maine), a Half-Breed who'd been Conkling's archnemesis ever since he called him out on the Senate floor as a seedy, ruthless villain.

James Garfield had no interest in being president; he'd seen too many of his friends (including James Blaine) get their principles warped by their obsession with the presidency, and he wanted to stay well away from all that. He was there to nominate John Sherman (younger brother of a certain famous Civil War general). Sherman, for his part, knew that Garfield was the more popular politician from Ohio, and hoped to neutralize him as a potential competitor by asking him to give the nominating speech.

So anyhow, at the nominating convention, Conkling gives this rousing speech in support of Grant that has the crowd going wild. There’s no way Garfield's going to be able to follow that. So what he does is look at the crowd and calmly talk to them about how there may be a lot of noise and emotion here today, but this isn't where the election is going to be won. Votes are going to be cast by ordinary Americans living on their homes and farms with their families, and they need to know that there's someone who can serve their interests in the White House. The crowd is spellbound. Garfield then asks them, "What do we want?" To Garfield's horror, one guy yells out, "We want Garfield!"

Garfield made it clear he was there to nominate Sherman, and finished his speech. Then the voting began. Round after round after round of voting, with no one candidate getting enough votes to win the nomination. Garfield got one vote in the third round. In the thirty-fourth round, he suddenly got seventeen votes, as delegates desperate to escape the gridlock decided to throw some votes behind a different name. Garfield stood to protest, saying that no one had the right to vote for him since he hadn't consented to be nominated, but the president of the convention, who secretly liked Garfield more than any of the other candidates, told him to sit down.

By the thirty-sixth vote, Garfield won the nomination. He reluctantly accepted.

When Garfield won the presidential election, it was the first time since the Civil War that a president had been elected who had support in both the North and South. Garfield was seen as a man of the people, living proof of the American dream that any man, no matter how lowly, could one day rise to become president. As Garfield rode in the carriage toward the White House for his inauguration, a man in the crowd yelled out, "Low bridge!" as a reference to Garfield's now-legendary past as a canal worker; Garfield grinned, took off his hat, and ducked.

Once he became president, Garfield became embroiled in the war over civil service reform. Since it hadn't been reformed, he had a constant stream of office-seekers coming to beg for appointments to federal positions, and a lot of federal positions that needed to be filled. His archnemesis was Roscoe Conkling; Garfield was determined to enact civil service reform, and Conkling wanted to do all in his power to prevent it. Conkling forced Stalwart members of Garfield's Cabinet to resign, and he went to war with Garfield over the filling of federal positions.

And that's an interesting story, but the more important part of the battle was with another person entirely, who Garfield had never met. Charles Guiteau was a madman with a checkered past, who'd been involved in strange sex cults and in running various scams--mostly running out on rent payments. During Garfield's election, he gave one speech in support of Garfield to a tiny crowd, and Guiteau, in his delusion, thought that under the spoils system, this entitled him to a reward. He wanted to be a foreign ambassador, and he came to the White House every day seeking a meeting with someone who could give him the job. He was mostly stopped by Garfield's secretary, and his attempts to get help from the vice president and various Cabinet members also failed.

At last, Guiteau became frustrated, and decided that the only thing to do was kill Garfield. God wanted to maintain the spoils system, he thought, and the only way to do that was to get the reform-minded Garfield out of the way so the spoils system advocate Chester Arthur could be president. Guiteau tracked the president to a couple of spots in Washington, but always found a reason not to take a shot.

But on July 2, 1881, when Garfield was at a Washington train station, Guiteau shot him in the back. The bullet went past Garfield's spine and lodged in his pancreas. Robert Lincoln--who happened to be traveling with Garfield--secured the services of the doctor who had treated his father. The wound was examined--the doctor poking unsterilized fingers into the bullet hole--and Garfield was transferred back to the White House for treatment.

If the bullet had been left alone, Garfield would most likely have made a full recovery--nothing about the wound was fatal. Unfortunately, he was president of the United States, and doctors were determined to give him intense medical care--which meant that he died through medical malpractice. The head doctor thought these new-fangled ideas about "germs" and "sterile procedure" were conspiracy theories, and certainly not worth the extra work of sterilizing everything. The wound was repeatedly probed with fingers and unsterilized instruments, which led to a massive infection that spread through Garfield's whole body.

Alexander Graham Bell invented a medical detector to locate the bullet; it would have worked, but Garfield's doctors--convinced they knew the path the bullet had taken--only allowed Bell to scan the right side of Garfield's body--and the bullet was on the left.

Garfield was unable to keep down solid food. He dropped from 210 lbs to 130 lbs. Massive pockets of pus formed throughout his body. He was literally rotting from the inside. Yet by all accounts, Garfield remained cheerful and kind to everyone who cared for him.

Garfield was a healthy fifty-year-old man, and he rallied a few times, but he wasn't able to overcome the infection. The heat and humidity of Washington only made it worse. An air-conditioning device was invented and installed to keep the room cool, but at the beginning of September, the decision was made to transfer Garfield to a house at the New Jersey seaside, in the hopes that the cool sea breezes could aid his recovery.

Garfield left Washington on September 6. A special train line was constructed that took him right up to the door of the house; when the train got stuck on the final hill, a crowd of hundreds that had gathered in support of the president worked together to push it to the top. Garfield's final few days were spent in the pleasant seaside atmosphere, but it was of no use. Garfield died on September 19, 1881. The country plunged into mourning--this president with so much promise, this man of the people, was dead, only six months into his presidency.

That short term means that Garfield is mostly skipped over in American history classes today, but he absolutely should not be. His rise from poverty to the White House is inspiring, and his death is tragic. There is so much to his story, and it's a shame that it gets shuffled aside in the grand sweep of American history.

Corporations Have Been Salivating Over This SCOTUS Decision | Robert Reich

“Professor and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and I collaborated on a video, together with the folks at Inequality Media, for which I co-wrote the script. Our hope in these videos is to distill complicated legal and political matters and make them more accessible to ordinary citizens.

The subject matter of this video is a pair of cases that came before the Supreme Court yesterday challenging the so-called “Chevron Doctrine.” 

It’s admittedly a fairly wonky concept, but it has been the baseline for federal administrative law for 40 years. I learned about Chevron back in law school in the early 1990s. It is still taught today as established precedent, and there are over 17,000 cases that have relied upon it, including 70 Supreme Court cases.

The weight of precedent is, of course, not a bar to this extremist, activist Court. Based on yesterday’s oral argument, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court appears ready to overturn Chevron. Such a move would likely be one of the most consequential of this Court’s term, and that is saying something...

...Back in 1984, Justice John Paul Stevens, in a unanimous decision (albeit with three justices recusing), wrote, “Judges are not experts in the field, and are not part of either political branch of the government.” Stevens later said of the opinion that it was “simply a restatement of existing law”—though the decision was by far his most consequential.

Conservatives back then (remember, this was during the Reagan years) believed that giving agencies instead of courts the power to interpret and implement ambiguous laws would be a good thing. Judges were too activist, they believed, and Reagan’s EPA had major regulatory dismantling to do. Those pesky liberal judges were thwarting many of their efforts. Forcing the courts to defer to the discretion of agencies handed more power to the White House, so they were fine with that.

But now that Republican presidents consistently have been losing popular elections, the shoe is on the other foot. Republicans might hold sway at the Supreme Court, but liberals control the “deep state” with all their fancy experts and experienced civil servants. So in the minds of conservative activists, it’s time for the courts to take back the power they once ceded.

As of yesterday’s arguments, it seemed pretty clear that there are least four conservative justices—Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh—who are prepared to end 40 years of established administrative law and seize the power to interpret laws back from federal agencies. Two other conservatives, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, asked questions of both sides, but it would only take one of them to go along with overruling Chevron to undo 40 years of caselaw... 

...Justice Kagan cut to the heart of the problem in her remarks. “Agencies know things that courts do not,” she said, “and that’s the basis of Chevron.”

She wondered who should decide whether something is a drug or a dietary supplement, the courts who have no expertise in this or an expert agency?  

“It’s best to defer to people who do know, who have had long experience on the ground, who have seen a thousand of these kinds of situations,” Kagan said. “And, you know, judges should know what they don’t know.”

Justice Jackson built upon this in her remarks. “And my concern,” Jackson said, “is that if we take away something like Chevron, the court will then suddenly become a policymaker.” “

Jay Kuo (The Status Kuo - https://statuskuo.substack.com)

I don't know how accepting you are of additions to your long political posts (so I'm sending this ask instead), but... two things that may be helpful to French Anon (presuming they're legitimately interested) might be how a constitutional amendment is the only thing that could truly "protect" the right to abortion access (or anything else that falls under the right to privacy) and why that's nigh-on impossible in the current political climate; and how the filibuster is really just a fluke that's become a custom, not anything that's actual good legislative practice and certainly not mandated by the constitution in any way?

Yeah, I mentioned in number 2 of my concluding points that a constitutional amendment was the only way to SCOTUS-proof abortion rights (and as you point out, anything else that assumes a basic right to individual privacy, since the ultra-maximalist language of Alito's ruling calls those into question as well). As you and I both said, there's no way in hell that a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to an abortion could be passed and ratified in this current political climate. Since Democrats have to do literally everything themselves, and since America is not a particularly liberal country (which is something that the Online Leftists generally struggle to understand), there's no way that they could get enough of a majority. Passing a new constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress, which would translate to 290 votes in the House (the Democrats currently have 220 seats) and 67 in the Senate (the Democrats currently have 50). With the vigorous Republican war on elections and voting, and the way they're only running more and more extreme MAGA candidates, it is functionally impossible at the current moment. There is no possibility of returning to a "moderate" Republican party. The extremism genie is out of the bottle, and they won't accept anything less than its worst manifestations.

Likewise, as you note, the filibuster isn't actually constitutionally required, but it has become used as an ordinary practice by Senate Republicans on every single piece of legislation. Mitch McConnell openly bragged about being the Party of No, where no matter what Obama and the Democrats wanted, it wouldn't get a vote. They have no political philosophy (aside from torment minorities and cut taxes for rich people); they just want to make sure that Democrats can't do anything and thus the average American citizen remains convinced of the federal government's irrelevance and dysfunction, no matter which of the two major parties is in power. This suits McConnell and his miserable cronies just fine, since they have no intention of actually making life better for anyone, and as long as they can keep the electorate at large believing that nothing will ever change, the voters who could remove them will remain apathetic, uninterested, and unwilling to stick their neck out or try particularly hard to alter the status quo. So as long as the filibuster stays, this works, because the Democrats can't get around it as circumstances stand and thanks to the Manchin/Sinema carpetbagging, they can't until and unless more Democrats are elected to the Senate and are willing to overrule it.

The filibuster and the Electoral College (which is, unfortunately, mentioned in the Constitution and thus harder to get rid of) both function as tools for the maintenance of institutional white supremacy, and were enacted to stop the Senate from overruling the white, Southern, slaveowning states with simple majority-rule votes. The Electoral College was designed to wiggle around the question of whether slaves were counted as people for the purposes of the popular vote, and to make sure that the Northern abolitionist states couldn't automatically outnumber the Southern slaveholding ones. That's also why it's a travesty that states like California (40+ million people) and Wyoming (300,000 people) each get two Senators and that's it. The two Democratic senators from California represent a FAR larger majority of the American people than the two Republicans from Wyoming, but the system is purposefully designed to dilute that fact under a false pretense of "fairness." And yes, the fact that it benefits the conservative faction is not an accident.

Anyway. America's political system still sucks and people are idiots, film at eleven. Deepest of all imaginable sighs.

"House lawmakers in both parties joined forces Saturday to send a massive package of foreign aid to the Senate, ending a long and bitter stalemate over the fate of the legislation and all but ensuring the delivery of billions of dollars in new help to embattled allies across the globe.

The rare weekend votes were the culmination of months of fierce debate within the House GOP conference over how — or even if — Congress should step in with another round of military help for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan while providing humanitarian aid for civilian victims in Gaza and other war-torn regions around the globe.

The debate had split House Republicans into warring factions, pitting Reagan-minded traditionalists — who support strong interventions overseas to counter the imperial designs of Russia and China — against a newer brand of “America First” conservative who fought to limit the foreign spending and focus instead on domestic problems, particularly the migrant crisis at the southern border. 

In the end, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) defied his conservative critics, pushing to the floor a series of four bills providing the overseas assistance but detaching those funds from a separate border security bill, which failed on the floor during Saturday’s votes. He framed the aid as a simple, but crucial, continuation of America’s responsibility to democratic allies under siege from despots. 

“I think providing lethal aid to Ukraine right now is critically important,” Johnson said this week. “I really do believe the intel and the briefings that we’ve gotten. I believe Xi and Vladimir Putin and Iran really are an axis of evil.”

“To put it bluntly, I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American boys,” he added. “My son is gonna begin in the Naval Academy this fall, this is a live-fire exercise for me as it is so many American families. This is not a game. It’s not a joke. We can’t play politics with this, we have to do the right thing.”

Rep. Mike McCaul (R-Texas) said Johnson had reached the decision to charge ahead by a method that’s become routine for the devoutly evangelical Speaker: he turned to prayer.

“I think he was torn between trying to save his job and doing the right thing,” said McCaul, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee who has pushed for months for more Ukraine aid. 

“We’ve told him what’s at stake here, and you want to be on the right side of history. And he’s a man of faith. He doesn’t wear it on his sleeve, but he, obviously, the night before he made a decision, reached out for guidance, and the next day he made the call.”

Passage of the foreign aid bills marked a moral victory for the inexperienced Speaker, who took the gavel less than six months ago. The package — passed with four separate votes — includes roughly $61 billion for Ukraine, $26 billion for Israel, $8 billion for allies in the Indo-Pacific, and a package of additional national security measures that features a potential ban on the uber-popular TikTok app.

But it’s come with political risks, provoking conservatives who were already furious with his penchant for reaching across the aisle to seal deals with President Biden on major legislation opposed by the Speaker’s right flank, including bills to fund the federal government and extend the spying powers of Washington’s intelligence agencies.

Those mounting frustrations have spurred a pale — but not powerless — effort to remove Johnson from the top job, which has gained steam in recent days as the Speaker made steps toward sending aid overseas. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) filed a motion to vacate late last month, which Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) endorsed this week.

Greene has not yet said when she plans to force a vote on her ouster resolution, and her path forward was muddied last week after former President Trump endorsed Johnson’s leadership — dealing a blow to the Georgia Republican, who considers Trump a close ally.

Still, even some of Johnson’s allies are bracing for the possibility that Greene might pull the trigger."

Calling Out The Fear Mongers

The Murdoch’s News Corp is at it again in Australian politics, making news rather than reporting on it. Sky News Australia, that blatantly one eyed right wing tabloid TV channel, is hard at it beating up BS into inflammatory stories. Calling out the fear mongers. Liberal party cronies and ex-staffers bleat non-stop anti-Albanese malarkey. The Australian newspaper in concert with Newspoll declares major popularity slump for the ALP federal government. This strategy of polling to start anti-government waves of public sentiment has been a long standing one for News Corp. They can then run multiple stories across their platforms with headlines about midterm slumps. The rest of the corporate media picks up these stories and runs with them, including the now chastened ABC.

Murdoch’s News Corp & One Eyed Opinion Based Reporting

Current affairs and news is all about click bait these days, so it is a tight focus on the politics of every thing rather than policy. Murdoch started the whole op ed, opinion based journalism decades ago. Consumers prefer to read gossip and opinion over substance and facts. Investigative journalism has become a rare commodity indeed. The Greek chorus of the Australian media repeats itself loudly, with young reporters unquestioningly following the bosses line. In actual fact, the Albanese government has achieved a lot in the China space for our trade revenue and the release of journalist Cheng Lei. Penny Wong and Albo have cleaned up the mess made by Morrison in the Pacific with our neighbours there. The economy is being well managed in a tight global downturn and inflationary period. Wages have started to go up for some sectors despite the gloomy times. The failure of the Indigenous Voice was a blow to the government and to the nation, however.

the fear monger! Dutton The Fear Monger Peter Dutton and his strategists have forged an attack plan in the mould of Tony Abbott’s in the Gillard days. The LNP will bully the Labor government whenever they can. Dutton is fear mongering over dangerous refugees released into the community by the High Court. He is banging his drum about the war in Gaza and going all anti-Arab. The yellow peril fear of China is never far from the LNP commentary. Dutton is crying wolf more often than that little boy in the story. Peter Dutton divided the nation by organising the defeat of the Voice by taking a partisan position on the referendum. He will be a wrecker from now until the government breaks or he does. The Australian hard right will be following the lead of the radical Republican party Trump campaign in the US. White supremacy and anti-LGBTQI dog whistling will never be far from the lips of these populist politicians on the right. The Murdochs will be right behind them amplifying their divisive messages. Dutton wants to create anxiety and social unrest, so that he can blame Albo for appearing weak. The Murdochs just want to make money and stay influential in the power stakes.  Wars put the wind up folk. Watching little children being blown up on the telly is unsettling. Many of us are vulnerable to suggestions that we might not be safe, especially older Australians. “ Of the 140 or so released to date, we can count three murderers and “several” sex offenders. Others have been declared “security risks”, while others again have been associated with criminal gangs. It is possible also that some people may have had their citizenship revoked and have found themselves in detention awaiting deportation. Of those who have gone through the criminal justice system and been found guilty, all have served their terms, but were nevertheless kept in detention because they could not be deported to a third country.” (https://www.abc.net.au/religion/philip-dwyer-refugees-indefinite-detention-cruelty-compassion/103166888) It is no easy task to find reports of any depth into these stateless people, who have already served their time in prison, and are now being used as fear monger fodder by the opposition. My hunch is that some of them have been labelled as criminals without proper scrutiny. It is political tom foolery and our media just lap it up, rather than questioning it.

Coalition No Alternative But Much Worse The ridiculous state of affairs is the Coalition presenting themselves as some sort of alternative after 10 years in government making a mess of things. The social housing/rental crisis is partly their doing, as it happened on their economic watch. Robodebt, where 500, 000 ordinary Australians were wrongly accused of being welfare cheats and ended up costing the nation $1.8 billion was a Coalition policy initiative. The abysmal planning around Snowy 2.0 and the national rail network are all things that are going to cost tens of billions of dollars of tax payers money. The PwC corporate tax betrayal and the outsourcing of billions of dollars of government public service work to consultancy firms are all LNP federal government corrupt and immoral practices. The fact that the Abbott, Turnbull, and Morrison governments failed to establish a federal ICAC to police the politicians is another dodgy black mark against them. These guys and gals are far from the finest Australians. Scott Morrison made himself the minister of everything – remember! Climate change deniers that have put back the green energy transition by a decade. “The Refugee Council of Australia (RCOA) has welcomed the High Court’s decision that has found indefinite immigration detention to be unlawful and unconstitutional in cases where there is no prospect of people being returned.   Paul Power, CEO of RCOA, has called for the urgent review of the cases of all people in immigration detention, to enable the release of those who cannot be returned, including refugees, people fleeing war and persecution, and stateless people.   “Indefinite detention has always been morally wrong and unlawful under international human rights law. It is welcome to see the High Court start to overturn its 2004 decision of Al-Kateb and recognise that such detention should not be permitted in Australia,” Mr Power said. “ (https://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/refugee-council-welcomes-the-historic-high-court-ruling-finding-indefinite-immigration-detention-unlawful/)

Parliament house was a dangerous place for women with all those pissed politicians & staffers wandering about. The media needs to calm down and stop stoking fears around a bunch of refugees who have been through hell themselves. They are not Attila the Hun or something worse. In many instances, they are just stateless refugees who have been adversely labelled by our immigration services to deny them entry and a refuge. Aussies may be doing it tough right now, as I am myself, but it would be well to take these things with a grain of salt. The grass will not be greener on Peter Dutton’s watch for a large number of Australians. The ex-cop will be an authoritarian PM that Australia would quickly come to regret. Conservatives enrich the wealthy and powerful at the expense of those at the other end of the spectrum, witness Robodebt. Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt, and Financial Freedom. ©WordsForWeb Read the full article

The next presidential election in America will be overshadowed by generative artificial intelligence (AI), a new and developing concern amid the regular discussions about immigration and inflation. For the first time in American history, the general public is worried about AI's potential negative effects on the 2024 election. Millions of Democrats and Republicans share the same worries that artificial intelligence-related misinformation may influence the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. Over half of American voters share this concern. It is hardly surprising that Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader in the Senate, convened an AI Insight Forum earlier this month given that government authorities and industry executives are now debating federal legislation to regulate AI. Silicon Valley is avidly pushing the disclosure of so-called synthetic content, which has caught the attention of corporate America. Google has mandated that political marketers disclose the use of AI in images and audio snippets. We are approaching unknown territory as Americans plunge headfirst into the 2024 election season. As was painfully clear this past May when a phoney image of a Pentagon explosion jolted social media and the financial market, AI-generated material can have real-world and real-time repercussions. What if Joe Biden or Donald Trump fall victim the following time? Or even worse, the offender? People have a right to wonder, yet the following are the pertinent inquiries: Is it possible to accurately sort through a deluge of AI-generated content and determine what is true or fake using common sense practices or policies? Who is in charge of enforcing such laws? The scene that follows is simple to picture: The polls show that Candidate A is leading and appears to be winning easily. Just before the votes are counted, Candidate B's crew produces an unfunny but vicious piece of AI-generated content. Candidate A's electability suffers greatly as a result of the scandalous content becoming viral. A week or two after Candidate B's election is called, it is revealed that the entire affair was a hoax and that Candidate A was wrongfully cheated out of an election. Perhaps an even more likely scenario is this: Candidate A is accused of having compromising material come to light, but the accusation is refuted with the explanation that the candidate was the victim of an AI-generated plot. Candidate A wins the election, but when it turns out that the accusation was accurate, everyone in America has moved on to other pressing concerns, like Netflix's revival of Suits. Many regulatory fixes will take effect after a harmful application of AI has already occurred and probably done significant harm. A proactive strategy is riskier, but unquestionably worthwhile. The back-burn solution is one response to the AI quandary. Back burning, which entails igniting tiny fires along a man-made or natural firebreak in front of a bigger fire front, is a popular method for putting out wildfires. In reality, the controlled flames remove the fuel in the way of a wide wildfire, building a barrier in front of an approaching forest fire as it consumes all available fuel. In a similar vein, we can add more fire to the spreading AI fire. If AI can be taught to create phoney images and audio recordings, it can also be taught to recognize and report AI-generated content. One type of content can already be distinguished from another using technologies, which makes this distinction visible to the audience. The content can then be either carefully read or heard, put up for review, or removed (let's say by Facebook or X). To prevent previous hoaxes from spreading again, a central database of "known offenders" may be developed and verified. This kind of remedy would address the immediate problem of reputational harm while also removing the potential for repeat offences in the future. A digital firebreak is effectively created by integrating a real-time monitoring

system against a database of well-known falsehoods while combining AI detection and centralization. The fire is therefore contained. As the election year approaches, IT companies should first take a look at the back-burn option. Who, after all, is more familiar with generative AI than generative AI? In 2024, there will still be more work to be done in order to stop negative actors using AI. There are bad actors, and this isn't going away anytime soon. Important free speech issues need to be taken into account to prevent governmental regulators and other organizations from unnecessarily restricting individual liberty. Any regulation also raises moral and ethical concerns about the capacity of generative or even predictive AI to recognize "truth," and those concerns should be handled carefully. But one thing is certain: In this election season, we need to be ready to put a broad end to AI-generated falsehoods. In the short term, as answers to larger-scale questions emerge, the fire-fighting-fire tactic seems to be an efficient, effective strategy. Americans may resume their normal political lives and more episodes of Suits as AI silently battles itself. Who knows: After the writer's strike is resolved, perhaps Netflix will release another season of stunning court cases and somber-looking file folders—all without using any artificial intelligence, of course. Source link

“STUDENT” AS A COMMONPLACE, IV

By way of reviewing William Schubert’s commonplaces of curriculum development, this blog to date, in describing the commonplace, the student, has addressed students’ personal and social interests.  This posting looks at students’ economic interests.  This is a moving target since the economy regularly changes.  But if one picks a particular time – one that has come and gone – readers can see what happened and gain a sense of how a particular approach or view of curriculum affects this area of concern.

          So, in this blog’s effort to describe and explain how liberated federalism, an approach to civics education, affects students’ interests, this posting addresses the economic interests of students of another time.  In this posting, that time is (was) the years leading up to the 2008 economic meltdown that the US and the world market economies experienced.  That resulted from the highly irresponsible behavior in the housing market and almost resulted in a world depression.

As it was, it did lead to a recession that just fell short of being a depression.  Of interest here are the years preceding that downturn.  And with that backdrop, this posting utilizes some of the ideas this blog shared with its treatment of the parochial/traditional federalist view.  That treatment outlined the reasons why a federalist approach would be useful for the economic interests of students, and they are not diminished in the liberated federalist approach, the approach currently being highlighted. 

To summarize that argument, it was pointed out that the general prosperity that the United States economy had been enjoying was the product of the productivity gains made by the nation’s producers.  That productivity advancement was basically the result of the downsizing among the nation’s larger corporations, which had allowed prices to become more globally competitive. 

But this has been accomplished at a price, especially in the years leading up to the ’08 recession.  Despite improvements, the average standard of living had been declining in this nation since 1973.[1]  The same downsizing that caused extensive layoffs, though, was opening opportunities for smaller, service-based businesses to spring up.  These operations provided employment for many displaced workers, but at substantially lower wages. 

Michael Sandel pointed out that an early, in part, politically motivated aim of Americans was to own their own businesses.[2]  Besides the financial motivations, Americans saw owning one’s own business (the aim was mostly limited to white males) as providing greater control in their lives.  At that time, from 1973-2008, that very spirit could, and to a great degree, did become popular again.

The republican based notions of being that sort of independent participant in the make-up of a community was and is congruent with the notion that within the proposed model, liberated federalism, an individual has or should have constitutional integrity.  Any quality that adds to individuals being in control of their lives adds to the integrity of those participants.  In addition, a heightened economic interest, caused by ownership of a business, increases the concerns within individuals for the welfare of the community where such businesses are situated. 

Any businesses are advanced by positive conditions in their immediate environments.  In return, the polity which governs those communities and businesses is also helped by the increased attention that business owners express toward the welfare of the community as demonstrated by their own actions.  In addition, students who are exposed to this federalist/republican way of thought might be encouraged to advance their interests in a more entrepreneurial climate. 

Short of such a direct ambition, the liberated federalist model provides students with an ideal that is a morally based tool by which to analyze the actions of businesses in their political activities (politically being used in its most extensive meaning).  As businesses engage in socially effective ways, students who are taught about government under the construct proposed in this account will be encouraged and prepared to ask penetrating questions of those political actions and actors.  This is in their economic, as well as political interests.

While the economy today has veered away from the conditions of 2008 and the years following that meltdown, one can appreciate the challenges average Americans faced at that time.  Whether or not this move toward owning small businesses was viable or prudent, one can still ascertain how federalist thought can affect the way people see their options and opportunities.  To generalize, one can easily appreciate how strong ties to one’s local social/political realities can be of benefit to the economic interests one might have.

A liberated federalist model looks back and gives readers a responsible review of how that model’s approach can potentially address the economic interests of students.  Next, this blog will directly address the political interests of students.

[1] Robert Reich, The Work of Nations:  Preparing Ourselves for the 21st-Century Capitalism (New York, NY:  Vintage Books, 1992).

[2] Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent:  America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996).

President DONALD TRUMP from CALEEB A WATSON on Vimeo.

Check out My VIMEO site { LINK BELOW } vimeo.com/752085347 Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021.

Trump graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor's degree in 1968. He became president of his father Fred Trump's real estate business in 1971 and renamed it The Trump Organization. Trump expanded the company's operations to building and renovating skyscrapers, hotels, casinos, and golf courses. He later started side ventures, mostly by licensing his name. From 2004 to 2015, he co-produced and hosted the reality television series The Apprentice. Trump and his businesses have been involved in more than 4,000 state and federal legal actions, including six bankruptcies.

Trump's political positions have been described as populist, protectionist, isolationist, and nationalist. He won the 2016 United States presidential election as the Republican nominee against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton but lost the popular vote,[a] becoming the first U.S. president with no prior military or government service. His election and policies sparked numerous protests. The 2017–2019 special counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller established that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit the Trump campaign, but did not establish that members of the Trump campaign "conspired" or "coordinated" with Russia. Trump promoted conspiracy theories and made many false and misleading statements during his campaigns and presidency, to a degree unprecedented in American politics. Many of his comments and actions have been characterized as racially charged or racist, and many as misogynistic.

Trump ordered a travel ban on citizens from several Muslim-majority countries, diverted military funding towards building a wall on the U.S.–Mexico border, and implemented a policy of family separations for apprehended migrants. He signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which cut taxes for individuals and businesses and rescinded the individual health insurance mandate penalty of the Affordable Care Act. He appointed 54 federal appellate judges and three United States Supreme Court justices. In foreign policy, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, the Paris Agreement on climate change, and the Iran nuclear deal, and he initiated a trade war with China. Trump met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un three times, but made no progress on denuclearization. He reacted slowly to the COVID-19 pandemic, ignored or contradicted many recommendations from health officials in his messaging, and promoted misinformation about unproven treatments and the need for testing.

Trump lost the 2020 United States presidential election to Joe Biden but refused to concede defeat, falsely claiming widespread electoral fraud and attempting to overturn the results by pressuring government officials, mounting scores of unsuccessful legal challenges, and obstructing the presidential transition. On January 6, 2021, Trump urged his supporters to march to the Capitol, which many of them then attacked, resulting in multiple deaths and interrupting the electoral vote count.

Trump is the only federal officeholder in American history to have been impeached twice. After he pressured Ukraine to investigate Biden in 2019, he was impeached by the House of Representatives for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in December. The Senate acquitted him of both charges in February 2020. The House of Representatives impeached Trump a second time in January 2021, for incitement of insurrection. The Senate acquitted him in February, after he had already left office. Scholars and historians rank Trump as one of the worst presidents in American history.[1][2] Following his presidency, Trump has remained heavily involved in the Republican Party, including through fundraisers and by making over 140 political endorsements.

Possible Politics of Bajor -. The main issues facing Bajor after the end of the occupation are “joining the Federation” and “role of religion in Government.” Most, but not all, ideals are represented in the Provisional Government.

Elections are held to the Assembly soon. Currently debate is raging over what electoral system to use. This has become a proxy issue between parties.

Speaking of parties, Bajor has several. One however stands out as ‘the incumbent party’ that dominated the Provisional Government…

Republican Front - The heirs of the Resistance. Big Tent party with big names behind it. Pro-federation, except when it isn’t. Are deeply religious secularists. Most Provisional Government Ministers are Front members. Unwieldy due to straddling all lines of thought at once.

Bajor also has four major parties, large enough to be represented in the Provisional Government and are almost certain to gain representation in the Assembly. Tend to break down into a quadrant but in practice this can be kind of blurry.

Freedom Party - The reasonable opposition. Originally split more due to personal feuds. But it has since evolved into a broadly religious, pro-UFP party. There is tension in those two stances, but that does reflect the popular mood. The best organized party on Bajor.

Worldwide Alliance - The personal vehicle of Winn Adami. As such can be very flexible when they need to be. However they always find their base in the devout and are generally UFP-skeptic. Got a large boost when Winn became Kai. Will likely have to rebrand hard.

Progressive Party - The self-declared party of the future. Largely built on the backs of exiles returning from the Federation. Pro-Federation as soon as possible, and are willing to make major changes to domestic laws to accommodate that. As secularist as they can get away with.

Independence Party - The party of Bajor reborn, hardcore resistance types mostly. Generally secularist in outlook, placing their faith in the people not prophets. In favor of aggressive expansion via settlement. See the UFP as too soft and resent the ‘abandonment’ of Bajor.

Minor Parties are, well, Minor. They exist, and may have local pull, or even a Provisional Government appointee here or there. But they are definitely also rans compared to the Front and the Four.

Colonial Alliance - The party of expansion. Represents the voting interests of Bajoran colonists on other worlds, both in the Alpha and Gamma Quadrants. Mixed on Religion, Mixed on the Federation. Protection from pirates sounds great but regulations sound bad.

Community of the Faithful - The religious party par excellence. Supportive of the old caste system and a formal role for the Vedeks in Government. Dislike the Federation, who wouldn’t let them in anyway.

Union Party - The Circle, but kinda sorta respectable. Foreigners out. Cardassians out. Federation out. Dominion out. Vague on religion, associated with continuity terror groups.

Alliance for Provincial, Regional, and District Autonomy - Support a federal system planetwide, maybe even an end to Bajoran Union. Understandably dislikes the Federation due to this stance.

Society for Harmony - Definitely not a Dominion Front Group. Nope.

Police reforms have become the top priority issue of the modern-day United States, where some lawmakers are favoring reforming the police, while others are equating it with defunding the police. While Democrats have passed the $3.5 trillion budget resolution without any help from Republicans, Tommy Tuberville, a Republican Senator, moved on to creating drama in the Senate to raise an issue that was irrelevant for the budget, police funding. A proposal by Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville was put forward aimed at eliminating federal funding to the localities that defund the police. The proposal was aimed at embarrassing the Democratic Senators on the issue of defunding the police but was sarcastically dealt with by the Democratic Senator from New Jersey, Cory Booker. Police reform is a much-needed legislative action, but it must not be equated with defunding the police at any cost.   [caption id="attachment_8567" align="aligncenter" width="2560"] Tommy Tuberville's proposal to cut localities funding which support police defunding is a flawed one, as it would never incentivize cities to introduce police reforms.[/caption]   Politicizing the Bills is the Republicans’ Favorite Measure: This Time It’s Tommy Tuberville Who is in Action During the debate on Democrat’s $3.5 trillion budget resolution, the Alabama freshman Senator offered a proposal that would reduce or even eliminate federal funding to the localities that defund the police. Tuberville opined that the men and women wearing badges are the heroes of the country and deserve support from lawmakers. He declared that the local governments of Portland and Minneapolis had defunded the police, and there is no reason that other states should also follow them in this step. Senator Tuberville has also offered the Empowering Law Enforcement Act, which would allow law enforcement in states and local leaders to enforce the immigration policies of the United States. Republicans consider him as a champion of law enforcement and a mouthpiece of law enforcement officers. However, Senator  Tuberville only put forth this proposal to embarrass Democratic Senators who have been talking about defunding the police. This was a politically devastating proposal that would only provoke terror and grudging admiration. The critical race theory has received unprecedented significance in the United States since the murder of George Floyd, and the rising discussion of the woke culture is further adding crispness to this debate. One faction of Democrats is highly driven by the woke issues, which is also one of the contributing reasons for the shrinking Democrats' popularity. Republicans are leaving no stone unturned to exploit this weak area of the Democrats as the 2022 Senate midterm elections near. [caption id="attachment_8568" align="aligncenter" width="613"] Cory Booker handled the situation well by sarcastically replying to Tommy Tuberville's comment about police defunding.[/caption]   What is All This Fuss About? Since the outcry of reconsidering police funding in the aftermath of the increasing Blacks’ murders by police, at least twenty major cities have introduced police funding cuts in one form or another, and Republicans are not big fans of them. This is primarily the reason behind Tommy Tuberville’s proposal of cutting the finances of the localities involved in this practice. The cities in the discussion include Los Angles, Seattle, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Baltimore, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and many others. While the slogan of defunding the police has become an unpopular approach to dealing with the issue, introducing police reforms should never be considered an attempt to defund the institution. In the United States, police are often overburdened with tasks that do not fall under their domain. This overpowers police without enacting much accountability. A prominent example of this is the authority of police to deal with mental health patients, which puts the lives of the pat

ients at risk. But cutting the funding per Tuberville’s vision is also not an option, as it would incentivize the lawmakers for not introducing any type of policy reforms.   Final Thoughts The Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville’s move seems to be more likely a tool to embarrass the Democrats rather than an amendment to seriously pursue. This is the reason the amendment proposal ended up with the sarcastic comments of Democratic Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who termed the proposal as a “political gift.” Defunding the police became a national sentiment after the deaths of George Floyd and many other Black Americans by police officers. There is enough data to prove now that the US police forces are far behind in terms of organization and training but ahead in the use of force by police officers. The deteriorating relations of minorities with police also suggest that police reforms are the need of the hour, and the cities and localities introducing them must not be deterred at any cost.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/23/robert-kagan-constitutional-crisis/

Much of this article is trash, written by a mewling conservative trying to distinguish Republicon policies and Republicon ideology as beyond and separate from "trump precursors" for "the last 30 years." Try 60 years, or more. Go all the way back to them with their fury and screams over Social Security as an evil Communist plot.

Kagan is a Never-trumper attempting to sound reasonable despite being a mental conservative, who thinks -- much like poor, beleaguered Joe Manchin -- that Democrats "need to let good Republicons" help them save the country.

He's one of those types of fools who, when he speaks of officials with integrity, is alluding to Mr. Anti-vote Raffensperger, who is to voting like so many white male Republicons are to immigration -- none too happy about illegal or legal. His hero Raffensperger is also one of the leading architects of the Republicon rash of Jim Crow 2.0 laws which Kagan points to as a prime symptom of Nazi-type fascism threatening American right now...but logical consistency fares extremely poorly on the Right.

However, there are some useful points in this article. The criticism leveled toward the Right by a [pre-trump] insider is one. And the insistent urgency of our nation's crisis is another.

"The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no doubt:

"First, [t]rump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running. [Or legal problems. Or even better, in order to be a bit safer, both].

"Second, [t]rump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. [t]rump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.

"Meanwhile, the amateurish 'stop the steal' efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that [t]rump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to 'find' more votes for [t]rump are being systematically removed or hounded from office. Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may 'revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election' by a simple majority vote. Some state legislatures seek to impose criminal penalties on local election officials alleged to have committed 'technical infractions,' including obstructing the view of poll watchers.

"The stage is thus being set for chaos.

..."Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it. As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian. They have followed the standard model of appeasement, which always begins with underestimation. The political and intellectual establishments in both parties have been underestimating [t]rump since he emerged on the scene in 2015. They underestimated the extent of his popularity and the strength of his hold on his followers; they underestimated his ability to take control of the Republican Party; and then they underestimated how far he was willing to go to retain power. The fact that he failed to overturn the 2020 election has reassured many that the American system remains secure, though it easily could have gone the other way — if Biden had not been safely ahead in all four states where the vote was close; if [t]rump had been more competent and more in control of the decision-makers in his administration, Congress and the states. As it was, [t]rump came close to bringing off a coup earlier this year...

..."Where does the Republican Party stand in all this? The party gave birth to and nurtured this movement; it bears full responsibility for establishing the conditions in which [t]rump could capture the loyalty of 90 percent of Republican voters. Republican leaders were more than happy to ride [t]rump’s coattails if it meant getting paid off with hundreds of conservative court appointments, including three Supreme Court justices; tax cuts; immigration restrictions; and deep reductions in regulations on business.

..."From the uneasy and sometimes contentious partnership during [t]rump’s four years in office, the party’s main if not sole purpose today is as the willing enabler of [t]rump’s efforts to game the electoral system to ensure his return to power.

..."With the party firmly under his thumb, [t]rump is now fighting the Biden administration on separate fronts. One is normal, legitimate political competition, where Republicans criticize Biden’s policies, feed and fight the culture wars, and in general behave like a typical hostile opposition.

"The other front is outside the bounds of constitutional and democratic competition and into the realm of illegal or extralegal efforts to undermine the electoral process. The two are intimately related, because the Republican Party has used its institutional power in the political sphere to shield [t]rump and his followers from the consequences of their illegal and extralegal activities in the lead-up to Jan. 6. Thus, Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, in their roles as party leaders, run interference for the [t]rump movement in the sphere of legitimate politics, while Republicans in lesser positions cheer on the Jan. 6 perpetrators, turning them into martyrs and heroes, and encouraging illegal acts in the future.

..."Even [t]rump opponents play along. Republicans such as Sens. Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse have condemned the events of Jan. 6, criticized [t]rump and even voted for his impeachment, but in other respects they continue to act as good Republicans and conservatives. On issues such as the filibuster, Romney and others insist on preserving 'regular order' and conducting political and legislative business as usual, even though they know that [t]rump’s lieutenants in their party are working to subvert the next presidential election.

"The result is that even these anti-[t]rump Republicans are enabling the insurrection. Revolutionary movements usually operate outside a society’s power structures. But the [t]rump movement also enjoys unprecedented influence within those structures. It dominates the coverage on several cable news networks, numerous conservative magazines, hundreds of talk radio stations and all kinds of online platforms. It has access to financing from rich individuals and the Republican National Committee’s donor pool. And, not least, it controls one of the country’s two national parties...

"The world will look very different in 14 months if, as seems likely, the Republican zombie party wins control of the House. At that point, with the political winds clearly blowing in his favor, [t]rump is all but certain to announce his candidacy, and social media constraints on his speech are likely to be lifted, since Facebook and Twitter would have a hard time justifying censoring his campaign. With his megaphone back, [t]rump would once again dominate news coverage, as outlets prove unable to resist covering him around the clock if only for financial reasons.

"But this time, [t]rump would have advantages that he lacked in 2016 and 2020, including more loyal officials in state and local governments; the Republicans in Congress; and the backing of GOP donors, think tanks and journals of opinion. And he will have the [t]rump movement, including many who are armed and ready to be activated, again. Who is going to stop him then?

..."[Republicons] have refused to work with Democrats to pass legislation limiting state legislatures’ ability to overturn the results of future elections, to ensure that the federal government continues to have some say when states try to limit voting rights, to provide federal protection to state and local election workers who face threats, and in general to make clear to the nation that a bipartisan majority in the Senate opposes the subversion of the popular will. Why?

[They, just like trump, want and intend to be in power at all costs.

..."We are already in a constitutional crisis. The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now. In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024. Now it is impossible only because anti-[t]rump Republicans, and even some Democrats, refuse to tinker with the filibuster. It is impossible because, despite all that has happened, some people still wish to be good Republicans [sic] even as they oppose [t]rump. These decisions will not wear well as the nation tumbles into full-blown crisis."

I follow historian Heather Cox Richardson on facebook and every day she does a write up about political history - I found yesterday’s on abortion and the anti-abortion movement really interesting

September 2, 2021 (Thursday)

In the light of day today, the political fallout from Texas’s anti-abortion S.B. 8 law and the Supreme Court’s acceptance of that law continues to become clear.

By 1:00 this afternoon, the Fox News Channel had mentioned the decision only in a 20-second news brief in the 5 am hour. In political terms, it seems the dog has caught the car.

As I’ve said repeatedly, most Americans agree on most issues, even the hot button ones like abortion. A Gallup poll from June examining the issue of abortion concluded that only 32% of Americans wanted the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision overturned, while 58% of Americans opposed overturning it.

"’Overturning Roe v. Wade,’" Lydia Saad of Gallup wrote, “is a shorthand way of saying the Supreme Court could decide abortion is not a constitutional right after all, thus giving control of abortion laws back to the states. This does not sit well with a majority of Americans or even a large subset of Republicans. Not only do Americans oppose overturning Roe in principle, but they oppose laws limiting abortion in early stages of pregnancy that would have the same practical effect.”

While it is hard to remember today, the modern-day opposition to abortion had its roots not in a moral defense of life but rather in the need for President Richard Nixon to win votes before the 1972 election. Pushing the idea that abortion was a central issue of American life was about rejecting the equal protection of the laws embraced by the Democrats far more than it was ever about using the government to protect fetuses.

Abortion had been a part of American life since its inception, but states began to criminalize abortion in the 1870s. By 1960, an observer estimated that there were between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegal U.S. abortions a year, endangering women, primarily poor ones who could not afford a workaround.

To stem this public health crisis, doctors wanted to decriminalize abortion and keep it between a woman and her doctor. In the 1960s, states began to decriminalize abortion on this medical model, and support for abortion rights grew.

The rising women's movement wanted women to have control over their lives. Its leaders were latecomers to the reproductive rights movement, but they came to see reproductive rights as key to self-determination. In 1969, activist Betty Friedan told a medical abortion meeting: “[M]y only claim to be here, is our belated recognition, if you will, that there is no freedom, no equality, no full human dignity and personhood possible for women until we assert and demand the control over our own bodies, over our own reproductive process….”

In 1971, even the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention agreed that abortion should be legal in some cases, and vowed to work for modernization. Their convention that year reiterated its “belief that society has a responsibility to affirm through the laws of the state a high view of the sanctity of human life, including fetal life, in order to protect those who cannot protect themselves” but also called on “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”

By 1972, Gallup pollsters reported that 64% of Americans agreed that abortion was between a woman and her doctor. Sixty-eight percent of Republicans, who had always liked family planning, agreed, as did 59% of Democrats.

In keeping with that sentiment, in 1973, the Supreme Court, under Republican Chief Justice Warren Burger, in a decision written by Republican Harry Blackmun, decided Roe v. Wade, legalizing first-trimester abortion.

The common story is that Roe sparked a backlash. But legal scholars Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel found something interesting. In a 2011 article in the Yale Law Journal, they showed that opposition to the eventual Roe v. Wade decision began in 1972—the year before the decision—and that it was a deliberate attempt to polarize American politics.

In 1972, Nixon was up for reelection, and he and his people were paranoid that he would lose. His adviser Pat Buchanan was a Goldwater man who wanted to destroy the popular New Deal state that regulated the economy and protected social welfare and civil rights. To that end, he believed Democrats and traditional Republicans must be kept from power and Nixon must win reelection.

Catholics, who opposed abortion and believed that "the right of innocent human beings to life is sacred," tended to vote for Democratic candidates. Buchanan, who was a Catholic himself, urged Nixon to woo Catholic Democrats before the 1972 election over the issue of abortion. In 1970, Nixon had directed U.S. military hospitals to perform abortions regardless of state law; in 1971, using Catholic language, he reversed course to split the Democrats, citing his personal belief "in the sanctity of human life—including the life of the yet unborn.”

Although Nixon and Democratic nominee George McGovern had similar stances on abortion, Nixon and Buchanan defined McGovern as the candidate of "Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion," a radical framing designed to alienate traditionalists.

As Nixon split the U.S. in two to rally voters, his supporters used abortion to stand in for women's rights in general. Railing against the Equal Rights Amendment, in her first statement on abortion in 1972, activist Phyllis Schlafly did not talk about fetuses; she said: “Women’s lib is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother and on the family as the basic unit of society. Women’s libbers are trying to make wives and mothers unhappy with their career, make them feel that they are ‘second-class citizens’ and ‘abject slaves.’ Women’s libbers are promoting free sex instead of the ‘slavery’ of marriage. They are promoting Federal ‘day-care centers’ for babies instead of homes. They are promoting abortions instead of families.”

Traditional Republicans supported an activist government that regulated business and promoted social welfare, but radical right Movement Conservatives wanted to kill the active government. They attacked anyone who supported such a government as immoral. Abortion turned women's rights into murder.

Movement Conservatives preached traditional roles, and in 1974, the TV show Little House on the Prairie started its 9-year run, contributing, as historian Peggy O’Donnell has explored, to the image of white women as wives and mothers in the West protected by their menfolk. So-called prairie dresses became the rage in the 1970s.

This image was the female side of the cowboy individualism personified by Ronald Reagan. A man should control his own destiny and take care of his family unencumbered by government. Women should be wives and mothers in a nuclear family. In 1984, sociologist Kristin Luker discovered that "pro-life" activists believed that selfish "pro-choice" women were denigrating the roles of wife and mother. They wanted an active government to give them rights they didn't need or deserve.

By 1988, Rush Limbaugh, the voice of Movement Conservatism, who was virulently opposed to taxation and active government, demonized women's rights advocates as "Femi-nazis" for whom "the most important thing in life is ensuring that as many abortions as possible occur." The complicated issue of abortion had become a proxy for a way to denigrate the political opponents of the radicalizing Republican Party.

Such threats turned out Republican voters, especially the evangelical base. But support for safe and legal abortion has always been strong, as it remains today. Until yesterday, Republican politicians could pay lip service to opposing the Roe v. Wade decision to get anti-abortion voters to show up at the polls, without facing the political fallout of actually getting rid of the decision.

Now, though, Texas has effectively destroyed the right to legal abortion.

The fact that the Fox News Channel is not mentioning what should have been a landmark triumph of its viewers’ ideology suggests Republicans know that ending safe and legal abortion is deeply unpopular. Their base finally, after all these years, got what it wanted. But now the rest of the nation, which had been assured as recently as the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh that Roe v. Wade was settled law that would not be overturned, gets a chance to weigh in.

World War Z was published in 2006, but takes place in 2009 at the earliest.  Late in the book, astronaut Terry Knox states that the International Space Station took over 10 years to complete; it started construction in November 1998, and Chief of Staff Karl Rove Grover Carlson says that the Republican party barely eked back into power after a disastrous 2-termer who started a “brush fire war” in the Middle East (George W. Bush).  He mentions an election year, but he doesn’t specify if it was the new president’s first or second term, so it’s either set right after 2008 or 2012.  This was written before the Nintendo Wii was announced, but one chapter mentions that people brought their GameCubes with them as they fled their homes in search of safety in the frozen Canadian wilderness.  This same chapter also mentions that they didn’t know how to pick survival gear; a park ranger finds a SpongeBob SquarePants sleeping bag frozen in the mud because its owner didn’t know the difference between a child’s indoor sleeping bag for slumber parties and a real insulated survival bag for camping.

The new president is never named, he’s just told be be pro-big business and anti-regulation, pushing a placebo zombie vaccine through the FDA to jumpstart the economy.  When shit hits the fan, he is “sedated” and his vice president takes power; we’re never told what happened to the president, whether he was bitten or had a stroke, just that he was “sedated.”  His Vice President is directly implied to be Colin Powell; he’s former military with family in Jamaica and black.  He appoints Howard Dean to be his vice president to form a bipartisan coalition; he is never referred to by name, but it is clearly supposed to be Howard Dean.  He was a rising star in the Democratic party from Vermont whose wife is a doctor and whose career imploded after he had a passionate outburst.  In 2004, Howard Dean gave a speech where he started passinately screaming about how he was gonna start sweeping state primaries and ride a wave into the White House, punctuating his point by going “HHEEUEAHHGH!!”  This was political suicide in 2004, and he was laughed out of the race.  In the book, he is referred to only as “the Whacko” because of this.  It is implied that he was Powell’s second choice for VP, his first being Barack Obama; the Whacko says that the Democrats wanted somebody else, somebody of the same skin color as the president, but that the country wasn’t ready for that.  In 2004, Obama was a candidate for senate in Illinois, so popular and so well spoken that he gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention before he even won his seat; then and there, pundits already had him pegged as the first black president, they could see the writing on the walls.  The Whacko becomes president when Powell dies of stress, but he is consistently referred to only as the wartime Vice President, out of respect for his boss.

Also, the Attorney General is implied to be Rudy Giuliani; all that is said about him was that he was the mayor of New York and once tried to give himself emergency powers to stay in office after his term.  Giuliani did exactly that after 9/11.

Other real life figures mentioned in the book

Fidel Castro; a ton of Cuban Americans flee the continent and return to the island during the zombie war, and he jumpstarts the economy by putting them to work as cheap laborers and slowly integrating them back into Cuban society.  He rehabilitates his image by stepping down as dictator and democratizing the country, voting himself out of office before the “nortecubanos” could hang him for decades of war crimes.

Nelson Mendela, referred to by his birth name Rolihlahla, the father of modern South Africa, he personally invites Paul Redekker, a former apartheid era political analyst, to solve the zombie problem; in the 80s, Redekker created a plan for the white minority government in case the black majority ever rose up against them.  In real life, Mandela lowered the temperature when he was elected president, saying that revenge against the apartheid government would do more harm than good.  In the story, Mandela uses this as justification to reuse the apartheid era plan to handle the zombie outbreak instead.  Redekker is so overcome by his compassion and forgiveness that he has a mental episode and dissociates, believing himself to be a black South African.

Kim Jong-il, the dictator of North Korea, he withdraws all troops from the DMZ and shuts the entire country down.  After months of radio silence, it is revealed that the entire country’s population has vanished; all satellite imagery shows a desolate wasteland, no zombies, but no humans either. He presumably moved everyone into subterranean bunker systems where he not only control their lives as on the surface, but now their access to food, water, and air.  He presumably became the god emperor he always wanted to be; either that, or the entire tunnel complex has been overrun, turning every man woman and child in North Korea into zombies.  The South Korean government refuses to send a expedition into the North to figure out what happened, lest they open up one of the tunnels and unleash millions of zombies onto the surface.

Martin Scorsese, mentioned in passing only as “Marty,” a friend of world famous film director Roy Elliot, who himself is a thinly veiled pastiche of Steven Spielberg.  Interestingly enough, the audio book features Martin Scorsese doing the voice of the conartist who created the placebo vaccine

One chapter has a ton of vapid celebrities hole together in a fortified mansion on Long Island, and takes great care to show each of them getting torn apart not by zombies but by regular people who storm the facility because they were stupid enough to broadcast their location on reality television.  A redneck with a “Get’er Done” hat (Larry the Cable Guy) and some bald guy with diamond earrings (Howie Mandel) blow themselves up with a grenade.  Rival political commentators, an annoying guy who talks about feminization of western society and a leathery blonde (Bill Maher and Ann Coulter) have end-of-the-world viking sex as the facility burns to the ground.  A dumb starlet (Paris Hilton) is killed by one of her handlers and her little rat dog escapes on foot.  A radio shock jock (Howard Stern) actually survives the war and restarts his show.

Michael Stipe of REM joins the army to fight the zombies

Another war veteran mentions how his brother used to have a bunch of Mel Brooks’ old comedy skits on vinyl record, and how he and his squad acted out the “Boy meets Girl” puppet skit with some human skulls.  Mel Brooks is author and narrator Max Brooks’ father.

Queen Elizabeth II, refuses to evacuate England when the island is overrun by zombies.  She intends to remain in Buckingham Palace “for the duration,” mirroring the fact that her parents refused to evacuate to Canada during World War II.

Vladimir Putin declares himself Tsar of the Holy Russian Empire, an ultra-orthodox religious state that has armed priests execute political dissidents under the guise of mercy killing people who have been bitten by zombies.

Yang Liwei, the first “taikonaut” (Chinese astronaut) has a space station named after him

While the main conflict is about government responses to the zombie pandemic, we see glimpses of a greater war torn planet.

A major plot line involves a Chinese Civil War which sees the entire communist politburo nuked out of existence by a rebel sub commander, as well as an attempted “scorched space policy” where the government planned to blow up their space station with scuttling charges to cause a cascade of space debris to encircle the Earth and prevent any other countries from launching missions in the future (this is known as Kessler Syndrome in real life, and was featured as the inciting incident of the 2013 movie Gravity).  The People’s Republic becomes the United Federation.

Iran and Pakistan destroy each other in nuclear war; everyone thought it would be India and Pakistan, but they had very close diplomatic infrastructure in place to prevent such a catastrophe; Pakistan helped Iran build a nuclear arsenal, but as millions of refugees fled from India through Pakistan to the east, Iran had to blow up some Pakistani bridges to stem the flow of zombies, which led to a border war and eventually total nuclear retaliation.

Floridians flee to Cuba, Wisconsinites flee to Canada, the federal government flees to Hawaii.  Everything east of the Rockies is abandoned and ruled by warlords until the government sorts itself out and mounts an expedition to clear the continent of zombies by literally marching an unbroken line of soldiers stretching from Canada to Mexico across the wasteland to the Atlantic.

Israel withdraws from Gaza and the West Bank to become super isolationist, building a wall around the entire country to stop the zombies getting in (they were the first country to respond to the pandemic, and the most successful), but the religious right rebels against the secular left in a civil war that sees Jerusalem ceded to a unified Palestine.

It is an amazing, multifaceted story with so much going on that nobody recognizes.  It was written as a response to the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror.  It’s about a geopolitical shift, a change in the status quo, a disaster from which the world never recovers; America before 9/11 was a very different place than American after 9/11.  Iraq and Afghanistan changed everything, and we’re still feeling their effects to this day; the story uses the zombie apocalypse as the next big international disaster the world must adapt to.  World War Z is World War III with zombies, and I think it would do a lot better if it were published today, now that we’ve had several decades to respond to the fall of the Soviet Union and the endless wars in the Middle East and a global pandemic.