ShazzieB
ShazzieB's JournalBiden officials finalize a rule making it harder to kill birds, reversing Trump
BumRushDaShow posted this in Latest Breaking News today:
"Biden officials finalize a rule making it harder to kill birds, reversing Trump"
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142806574
Sharing it here in case anyone missed it!
Mississippi AG: Curtailing reproductive rights will empower women
Yes, you read that right. No, I did not make that up. 
MADDOWBLOG
Mississippi AG: Curtailing reproductive rights will empower women
Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch believes women will be empowered if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. Reality tells a different story.
Sept. 29, 2021, 9:26 AM EDT
By Steve Benen
In just a couple of months, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a case that will test the constitutionality of Mississippi's latest abortion ban. It's the first key showdown on reproductive rights since conservatives gained a dominant, six-member majority on the high court.
It's also, of course, a case that puts the future of the Roe v. Wade precedent in great jeopardy.
As The Mississippi Free Press reported this week, Mississippi's Republican attorney general is already imagining the societal landscape in the event the justices scrap the nation's existing reproductive rights.
"Think about this: the lives that will be touched, the babies that will be saved, the mothers that will get the chance to really redirect their lives," Fitch said last week. "And they have all these opportunities that they didn't have 50 years ago. Fifty years ago, professional women, they really wanted you to make a choice. Now you don't have to. Now you have the opportunity to be whatever you want to be. You have the option in life to really achieve your dream and goals, and you can have those beautiful children as well."
The Mississippi attorney general added, "Just think about the uplifting, the changing of course for women that have for these new babies, these women. And everyone knows it's all right, it's acceptable. You can have these beautiful children and you can have your careers. And so this really gets into, how do we empower women? How do we prepare for that next step? And we have to look at it with this whole vision and strategy. And I just think God has given us this opportunity to be here."
In other words, women will have amazing choices just as soon as the government forces them to remain pregnant against their will. The key to "empowering" women, the argument goes, is to curtail their reproductive rights.
[SNIP]
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/mississippi-ag-curtailing-reproductive-rights-will-empower-women-n1280328
The whole article is well worth reading, imo. (And there's no psywall!)
Posting this without comment, because the whole thing makes my brain feel like 🤯.
Why do I get a "gateway timeout" message when searching DU?
This happens frequently when I use the "search this forum" feature.
This is not a constant problem for me, but it happens often enough to be really annoying. Anyone know what causes this?
"
Teacher's aide wore blackface to school as a covid protest. Sort of.
Yes, you read that right. It's actually more complicated than that, but these subject lines don't allow enough characters to spell it out more fully.
What happened was, an actual, real live teacher's aide in Oregon created a major kerfuffle by showing up at school in blackface one day. Her excuse? Being unvaccinated for covid, she was told to practice social distancing while in the classroom, and her tiny white brain reached the conclusion she was experiencing segregation. Yes, I KNOW it doesn't make any sense. But here's a video where she tries to explain herself, and the multiple layers of epic stupidity are a wonder to behold.
Article here: https://www.nbc11news.com/2021/09/24/school-employee-suspended-wearing-blackface-protest-districts-vaccine-policies/
So, this woman thinks that being required to keep her distance from vulnerable children due to being an unvaccinated plague rat is exactly the same thing as Rosa Parks being told to give up her seat on the bus to a white person.
Also, she is evidently completely unaware of the offensiveness of a white person wearing blackface. And that is on top of being a vaccine refuser, which presumably means she is also a Trump worshipping conspiracy nut. Like I said, multiple layers of stupidity. And that's not even counting the school administration's stupid policy of allowing unvaccinated staff in classrooms with kids who are too young to be vaccinated.
This is nicely done, but I have one problem with it.
I'm not crazy about the idea of making vaccinated people responsible for convincing the unvaxxed to do the right thing. It's not our job!
The more people get vaccinated, the better it is for everybody. I get that. I just don't feel like taking on yet another responsibility, on top of masking, social distancing, and getting myself fully vaxxed.
I don't know what the answer is. Obviously, they need to be convinced, but not all of them are convinceable. I believe there is a subset of the vaccine resistant who might be swayed, using the right approach(es). But I don't know how to do it, and being vaxxed myself actually works AGAINST any credibility I might have with these people.
And getting back to what I said in the beginning, it's not my job to convince stupid people to get vaccinated, and I kind of resent the idea of the Detroit Free Press, or anybody else, telling me it is. As I also said above, I don't know what the answer is. I just don't like the idea of somebody trying to dump this in MY lap and make it MY job, just because I had enough sense to get vaccinated myself.
I will always speak out in favor of getting vaccinated, and I will always encourage people to get their jab if the opportunity presents itself. The recipients of any information I provide will then decide what to do with it. I am NOT responsible for getting them to change their minds.
Maybe I'm just overreacting and being weird about this. I don't know. All I know is how I feel right now, and how I feel is, well, everything I just wrote!
People who say things like that are invariably massively uninformed
about what the nazis were REALLY like.
A venn diagram with one circle representing people who know what REALLY happened during the Holocaust and another curcle representing people who say stuff like that quote would look like this: 🅾️🅾️
Especially if you are in certain parts of the country.
Where I live (a purple county in a blue state), it's not nearly so bad. Cases started going up when Delta came to town, but we have a governor who wasn't afraid to bring back the mask mandate for indoor spaces, and we have a pretty high vaccine rate as well. Covid cases are still up compared to July, but nowhere near what they are in places like Texas, Florida, and all the other red states with loons for governors.
Of course, the farther south you go in this state, the redder it gets, the lower the vaxx rate is, and the worse the covid statistics are. Those areas are also more rural and much less densely populated, but the most densely populated (and bluest) part of the state (Chicago/Cook County and the so-called "collar counties" that surround it) has a much lower per capita rate of covid cases and deaths than some southern Illinois counties, which says a lot to me.
When I read about what's going on down south and in the northwest, I feel like I'm living on a different planet. My heart goes out to all of you who are having to deal with having your own health care needs neglected due to the unvaccinated hordes that are clogging up the health care system. 
I am and have always been a C.
This stuff DOES takes time, you get only one chance, it's huge, and more stuff is being discovered which just adds to the time the whole thing takes.
I am pretty sick and tired of people beating up on Garland over this. None of us knows jack shit about what he's got on his plate, what he's up against, or what it might take to actually convict TFG of anything.
Even the people here who are lawyers and have an understanding of the process of investigating a case, bringing it to trial, and getting a conviction, don't know all the details and specifics of this particular case. And I've noticed that the lawyers among us are mostly telling us to be patient and give Garland a chance.
It's way too easy for people sit here and enumerate all the things they think he's doing wrong and the things they think he should be doing that he's not doing (as far as we know, which is NOT very damned far), when they don't actually know the first thing about it.
Because his daddy told him so.
That's where his narcissism originally stemmed from. When Fred saw that his oldest son wasn't going to follow in his footsteps, he began grooming his next oldest son to do so. From that time on, little Donnie was the Golden Child who could do no wrong in his father's eyes. He could and did get away with anything and everything, and his 2 sisters and younger brother went along with it, because to do otherwise would have meant defying Fred Almighty.
I'm very clear on that part of the story, thanks to Mary Trump’s book. How he managed to continue getting away with so much after Fred was gone, all the way up to becoming president and using the powers of the office in all sorts of nefarious ways -- well, that part escapes me! 
That "You will burn in hell for all eternity if you [fill in the blank]!" crap is powerful stuff.
At least it is for some. I got it mostly in church, rather from my parents, but I was the kind of compliant trusting child who believed what I was told unquestioningly until I got old enough to think for myself. (Yes, we DO exist.)
By my mid-twenties, I had started to intellectually reject a lot of the things I was taught, but there was a deeply buried, existential "...but what if I'm wrong?" fear that took years longer to fully dispel. 
It's gone now, but I still remember what it was like and how powerful it was.
Profile Information
Name: SharonGender: Female
Hometown: Chicago area, IL
Home country: USA
Member since: Tue Mar 26, 2013, 04:18 AM
Number of posts: 16,348