Althouse |
- "Several years back, you offered a stunning reading of the Rapunzel story. You looked at the beginning, in which a pregnant woman..."
- "Before he goes out to hunt, Brian Leydet pulls on his hiking boots and his all-white jumpsuit, fetches a homemade flannel flag..."
- "Destruction begins with small details. What is happening is not just a matter of food, but a way of mocking the people’s heritage."
- "Nearly 70 abortion procedures with Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin scheduled for Friday and Saturday had to be canceled..."
- "Men really need to consider what losing access to safe and legal abortion means for them."
- "In many states, including Wisconsin, Ohio, Georgia and Florida, abortion’s new battleground is decidedly unlevel, tilted by years of Republican efforts to gerrymander state legislatures..."
- I went to a theater to see a movie for the first time in over a year.
- Sunrise.
- The great blue heron at sunrise.
- "Kleinfeld began taking the women out of the waiting room, one by one, to deliver the news.... Since she opened Houston Women’s Reproductive Services in 2019, Kleinfeld had worked hard..."
- Long sentence of the day.
- Althouse photographs a sandhill crane great blue heron.
- "Is OREO in today’s #NYTXW?"
- "There are a lot of things that are too cowy to run on National Public Radio, like talking about cow poop too much. For example, I can have someone slip in poop, but not have someone slapped in the face with it."
- "As President, I will codify Roe v. Wade and my Justice Department will do everything in its power to stop the rash of state laws that so blatantly violate a woman’s protected, constitutional right to choose."
- "It feels like Democrats owe their people an apology for being bad at their jobs..." — writes Andrew Yang, taking for granted that Democrats have the "job" of doing the things they have not done.
- At the Milkweed Café...
- "I want to get out and protest right the fuck now - thinking of heading to the Capitol with a sign + my rage and hoping others join in."
- "The dissent, which would retain the viability line, offers no justification for it either...."
- "The dissent is very candid that it cannot show that a constitutional right to abortion has any foundation, let alone a '"deeply rooted'" one, '"in this Nation’s history and tradition."'"
- "The Supreme Court on Friday overruled Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion after almost 50 years in a decision that will transform American life, reshape the nation’s politics and lead to all but total bans on the procedure in about half of the states."
- SCOTUSblog has just gone live, covering the Supreme Court's case announcements.
- "The Court says that only gun laws which have historical precedent are constitutionally permissible, and then the Court dismisses..."
- "People talk about the fact that we’re coming in and ruining women’s sports — but there are way bigger issues that women’s sports face...."
- "In the early 1970s, Burton preached that members needed to immerse themselves in high art, such as opera and literature, in order to get rid of negative thinking.”
| Posted: 26 Jun 2022 03:49 PM PDT "... so craves the parsley growing in a witch's garden that she steals some, and the witch punishes her by taking her baby. The baby grows up to be Rapunzel, the girl with long hair who is locked in a tower. I'm thinking of the story now because our Supreme Court seems poised to strike down Roe v. Wade." Said Katy Waldman, recently, interviewing Marina Warner, in "Marina Warner Sees the Myths in Our Moment Warner has spent decades studying how our oldest stories speak to modern life, from the lure of fake news to the politics of abortion" (The New Yorker). Warner answers: Yes, I had read a book called "The Poison Principle," by Gail Bell, whose grandfather was guilty of murder by poison. The author mentioned in passing that parsley was an abortifacient, and a poison in great quantities. This struck me as an absolute bolt of lightning. It's not unusual for fairy tales to not make sense—it's part of their charm, part of their power. But, in this case, why would the mother crave this particular herb and then apparently not mind giving her child away? So that's how I worked it out: that the story showed a buried lesson, about both the need for abortion and the dangers of seeking or getting one. And, of course, you have the witch, too, who perhaps offers an insight into women who are childless and want children. So the story presents a double meeting of the need. |
| Posted: 26 Jun 2022 03:25 PM PDT "... out of his car and then, most importantly, duct-tapes his socks to his pant legs. Then he heads into the undergrowth, dragging his flag around like a morose matador.... Mr. Leydet's quarry is quick to attach to the white flannel, using its tiny hooks on their legs to grab hold....." |
| Posted: 26 Jun 2022 09:00 AM PDT "And when you mock the heritage of a people in this way, it is a prelude to trivializing what is most important and diluting or dissolving identity." Wrote Abdul-Hadi al-Majali, quoted in "An Innovator Sold Jordan's National Dish in a To-Go Cup. Controversy Ensued. Is 'mansaf in a cup' a novel way to enjoy the country's most treasured delicacy, or an affront to its most hallowed traditions?" (NYT). Mansaf is a rice-and-mutton dish traditionally eaten from a large, shared platter using one's bare hand. We're told "Often, the sheep's head is placed at the center of the platter. Its cheeks, eyes, brain and tongue are highly prized and intended for the table's most important guest." Perhaps the traditional style of eating is more important than the food itself, but does that mean you shouldn't eat the food without the traditional behavior, that it's a mockery to eat it in some other way? I can see why you might want to deprive people of the food unless they follow the tradition, because that would cause people who crave the food to slow down, gather together, and interact with each other. But it's hard to understand that eating the food — with a spoon — from a paper cup is mockery. The only thing I could think of is if someone were to sell communion wafers for people to snack on like a roll of Necco wafers. |
| Posted: 26 Jun 2022 07:58 AM PDT "Lucy Marshall, president of Women's Medical Fund in Madison, said no clinics in Wisconsin are providing abortion care as of Friday morning.... After a draft opinion indicating the court was poised to overturn Roe was leaked, [Wisconsin Attorney General Josh] Kaul said he would not enforce the state's abortion ban. Still, local law enforcement officials could choose to do so. Gov. Tony Evers attempted to repeal the state's abortion ban prior to the SCOTUS decision. But Republican lawmakers rejected the special session Wednesday, gaveling in and out within seconds.... In a Marquette Law School poll this month that surveyed just Wisconsin residents, 58 percent of respondents said they are 'very concerned' about abortion policy. The June poll also shows 31 percent said abortion should be legal in most cases, 27 percent legal in all cases and 24 percent illegal in most cases." From "No Wisconsin clinics are providing abortions as of Friday after SCOTUS struck down Roe v. Wade" (Wisconsin Public Radio). The abortion ban Kaul refers to dates back to 1849, and it makes abortion a felony (unless it is needed to save the woman's life). |
| "Men really need to consider what losing access to safe and legal abortion means for them." Posted: 26 Jun 2022 07:42 AM PDT Said Joe Colon-Uvalles, an organizer at Planned Parenthood, quoted in "The Voices of Men Affected by Abortion/In light of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, advocates from all sides of the issue have called for men to be part of the conversation. The Times heard from hundreds who wanted to share their stories" (NYT). The NYT solicited "stories" from "men who have grappled with abortion in their own lives." From the "hundreds" of responses, the Times made it's selections, and I'll just cut that down to various men's feelings without giving you the details of names, ages, and circumstances. Each quote is from a different man:
To go back to the quote from the Planned Parenthood organizer: "Men really need to consider what losing access to safe and legal abortion means for them." That's open ended. Do men feel benefited by what has been very easy access to abortion or will they feel benefited if sex and pregnancy do tie women to childbirth? We'll see how actively they participate in the post-Roe legislative process and which side they take. I wonder if men's feelings about abortion vary depending on whether the question is what happens to the pregnancies they've caused or to pregnancies in general. ADDED: About that man who said "Daddy loves you and I'll see you in heaven," the New York Times writes: "He wanted her to keep the fetus." Keep the fetus! AND: From the second-highest-rated comment:
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| Posted: 26 Jun 2022 06:01 AM PDT "... while Democrats largely focused on federal politics. As abortion becomes illegal in half of the country, democratic self-governance may be nearly out of reach for some voters.... Democrats may have won the popular presidential vote in five out of the last six elections, but Republicans control 23 state legislatures while Democrats lead 14 — with 12 bicameral state legislatures divided between the parties. (Nebraska's legislature is elected on a nonpartisan basis.)... Unshackled by the Supreme Court and often largely unopposed by Democrats, conservative organizations backed by billionaires like Charles Koch — including the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Republican State Leadership Committee — set out more than a decade ago to dominate policymaking at the state level.... In Wisconsin, Democrats hold virtually every statewide office, including governor. Yet, waves of gerrymandering have left Republicans with close to a supermajority in the State Senate and Assembly. That means an abortion ban that was passed in 1849, when only white men could vote, is set to go back into force now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned. 'Because the structure of Wisconsin's ultragerrymandered maps are so rigged against small-d democracy, we are going to have a law on the books that the overwhelming majority of Wisconsinites oppose,' said Ben Wikler, the chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.'" |
| I went to a theater to see a movie for the first time in over a year. Posted: 26 Jun 2022 07:36 AM PDT It's been over a year since we went out to see a movie. We saw "Nomadland" in April 2021, and when we saw that it had been over a year since we'd gone out to see a movie. Covid has been part of these long gaps, but not all of it. I'm not sure I will ever want to see a movie in the theater again. My #1 problem is that you are bound to sit through it. You can't pause. You can't walk away and come back later. That can be a positive. You've committed to sit through it and you almost certainly will. It's now or never. Ha ha. Guess what move we saw? Yes, you're right. It was Baz Luhrman's "Elvis": I would have enjoyed this so much more on my TV. In fact, I would have enjoyed it much more if it had been made as a TV mini-series with 5 or 6 hour-long episodes. Because this movie was too long and too short. There were so many ideas that could have been worked through. There were 2 big themes: Elvis's relationship to black people and their music and Elvis's bondage to Colonel Tom Parker. That had to be compressed in the movie, and the movie was still 2 hours and 39 minutes. I have other problems with seeing a movie in the theater. Insanely, the picture is worse. As discussed in last year's post about "Nomadland," the picture projected on the screen in this theater isn't good enough. It would look better on the TV I have at home. Is a big screen something special? I can get an equally big screen on my iPhone just by holding it close to my face. My TV at a normal distance is the same size within my field of vision as the movie screen. What about the audience? Isn't it something special to see a movie with a group of strangers? It might be, sometimes. Yesterday, entering the theater and seeing that our seats — the best seats, chosen on line — were in big recliners — in a row that was already filled with older couples already reclined — I was a tad dismayed. This seemed more sedentary than watching TV at home. One person had brought a blanket and was already covered up. And I could have done without the singing along. It wasn't loud, raucous singing along, but a low, respectful communion with Elvis. Wise men say, only fools fall in love.... Who knows what they were feeling? Anyway, I recommend this movie when you can watch it on TV and consume it in parts. It's just too long! But when and if you do watch it, I have some advice about how to watch it, advice that I thought up afterwards. This often happens to me: The first time through a movie is like a trial run, and afterwards I have a lot of ideas about what to look for, but then I need to watch it again. If I have the movie at home — a DVD or a streaming service — I can and often do go right back to the beginning and watch it again. I have proved over and over again to myself that if a movie turns out to have been worth watching the first time, it will be better the second time — not years later, after its impression has faded, but while it's perfectly fresh in my mind. I don't have the distraction of wondering what's going to happen, and I can notice all the details, and I appreciate things in the moment because I know what they'll connect up to later. So here's the key to watching "Elvis." Colonel Tom Parker — Tom Hanks — is absolutely disgusting and evil. He's a monster. Elvis makes a pact with the devil and he can't get out of it. He's caught in a trap.... The monster keeps rising up again. Now, the monster Tom embodies greed. And Elvis is the artist — all about music and love. Whatever flaws real-life Elvis had, movie Elvis has located in the monster Tom. You could think of them as one person with 2 sides. It's not realistic and I don't think it's an accurate portrayal. You never see Elvis overeating cheeseburgers or indulging weird sexual proclivities. You never see the tender side of Tom. It's a grand, doomed struggle between art and money — beauty and ugliness. ADDED: I wrote "You could think of them as one person with 2 sides," and now I'm reading there's actually a line in the movie — the Colonel says it to Elvis — "I am you, and you are me." I'm reading that in the Boston Globe, where I'm also seeing that the original cut of the movie was 4 hours long. Maybe we'll get all that when it comes to TV. |
| Posted: 25 Jun 2022 05:51 PM PDT At 4:56, I took this picture...  ... while Meade took this picture of me...  These pictures are such a deep blue — with fresh, cheerful pink — but by 5:22, as the sun emerged, the colors had shifted to golden brown.... Please use the comments section to write about anything you want. |
| The great blue heron at sunrise. Posted: 25 Jun 2022 06:38 PM PDT  |
| Posted: 25 Jun 2022 01:21 PM PDT "... to create a space where her patients would feel comfortable. She keeps a vase of lilies in the waiting room and lines the walls with motivational posters in various pastel shades. As Kleinfeld told patients about the ruling, a Spotify playlist called 'Peaceful Guitar' played in the background. Meanwhile, other patient advocates turned to the phones: They had 35 scheduled patients to call.... Some of the patients took the news in stride, calmly asking questions about various clinics in other states. Others asked if she was sure about the ruling. One begged. 'I can pay extra,' the woman said.... The phones kept ringing through much of the morning with new patients calling to schedule appointments, completely unaware of the Supreme Court's ruling.... Finally, Kleinfeld decided that she needed to record a new outgoing message. 'I'm sorry to report that as of today, Friday, June 24, 2022, Roe v. Wade, the right to legalized abortion, has been overturned,' Kleinfeld recited. 'As of today, we are no longer able to provide abortion services.' She paused, then added one more thought. 'We hope you all remember this when it's time to vote.'" |
| Posted: 25 Jun 2022 07:47 AM PDT  Is the author just dumping his thoughts on the page raw — expecting us to follow along? Or is this form perfection? Are you a strong enough reader to understand it on first read? Or is it better to read it, wander around in it, go over and over your favorite parts, then sweep through the whole thing? When you do finally grasp it — sooner or later — does it seem to relate to American politics today? That's a whole second matter I'd like to discuss. That paragraph was photographed by my son Chris. He and I have had conversations about the perceived problem of reading slowly, and I have taken the position that the best reading experiences have to do with slowing way down inside a single sentence. Of course, the worst writing slows you down too. The question is whether there's really something in there worth the journey. |
| Althouse photographs a sandhill crane great blue heron. Posted: 26 Jun 2022 03:51 AM PDT Meade's photo of me:  My photo of the  |
| Posted: 25 Jun 2022 06:22 AM PDT That's a Twitter account: Is OREO in today's #NYTXW? But: spoiler alert if you have done today's puzzle (and you care). I got there from Rex Parker's write-up of today's puzzle. |
| Posted: 25 Jun 2022 05:41 AM PDT |
| Posted: 25 Jun 2022 05:21 AM PDT Wrote Joe Biden, June 29, 2020. Later that year, Biden was elected President. Two years from that date, the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade. Because Roe v. Wade was not codified, abortion is now illegal in many of the states. |
| Posted: 25 Jun 2022 05:20 AM PDT A key I use to understanding puzzles like this is: People do what they want to do. What have they done? Begin with the hypothesis that what they did is what they wanted to do. If they postured that they wanted to do something else, regard that as a con. Work from there. The world will make much more sense. So Yang is only half way there. Apologies are not enough. They would necessarily be premised on an assurance that Democrats really did mean to do what they said they wanted. It's just as bad as a plea for votes to "undo our failures." If you use my key, these were not failures. These were achievements — achievements of ends that were kept hidden. *** A reading from the book of Matthew:
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| Posted: 24 Jun 2022 05:31 PM PDT  ... you can talk about whatever you want. |
| Posted: 25 Jun 2022 07:52 AM PDT Said one commenter — an hour ago — in the r/madisonwi discussion at Reddit. An hour ago is about exactly when I walked through the Wisconsin Capitol Square, past the "Forward!" statue, loomed over by the spire of the Episcopal church:  I thought I'd find at least a few people with signs, getting the protests rolling, but there was no one (other than a state employee watering the nearby flowers). But you'll find some links at that Reddit link post. One goes to Facebook, where there's an announcement of a march to begin at the spot you see in my photo, beginning at 5 p.m. You're told to "[b]ring your loved ones, your rage, and your grief." UPDATE: We drove up to the Capitol around 5 and there were lots of people with signs converging on the place. Traffic was blocked off. |
| "The dissent, which would retain the viability line, offers no justification for it either...." Posted: 24 Jun 2022 09:32 AM PDT Writes Chief Justice Roberts in his concurring opinion, rejecting the viability line without rejecting the right to abortion or finding a new line to replace the old line.
The viability line never made sense to me, and I taught Roe and Casey many times and always invited a students to explain the viability line. I never heard a satisfying explanation, and Roberts is correct, I think, that the dissenting Justices do not offer one. I'm relying on word-searching a document I haven't had time to read carefully, but the closest I come to an attempt at explaining the viability line is at pages 10-11 of the slip opinion:
That is to say, if you want to draw a line, you won't find a better place for the line. |
| Posted: 24 Jun 2022 07:41 AM PDT "The dissent does not identify any pre-Roe authority that supports such a right—no state constitutional provision or statute, no federal or state judicial precedent, not even a scholarly treatise. Nor does the dissent dispute the fact that abortion was illegal at common law at least after quickening; that the 19th century saw a trend toward criminalization of pre-quickening abortions; that by 1868, a supermajority of States (at least 26 of 37) had enacted statutes criminalizing abortion at all stages of pregnancy; that by the late 1950s at least 46 States prohibited abortion 'however and whenever performed' except if necessary to save 'the life of the mother,' and that when Roe was decided in 1973 similar statutes were still in effect in 30 States. The dissent's failure to engage with this long tradition is devastating to its position. We have held that the 'established method of substantive-due-process analysis' requires that an unenumerated right be '"deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition"' before it can be recognized as a component of the 'liberty' protected in the Due Process Clause. But despite the dissent's professed fidelity to stare decisis, it fails to seriously engage with that important precedent—which it cannot possibly satisfy." Writes Justice Alito in the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (citations omitted). |
| Posted: 24 Jun 2022 07:34 AM PDT "The ruling will test the legitimacy of the court and vindicate a decades-long Republican project of installing conservative justices prepared to reject the precedent, which had been repeatedly reaffirmed by earlier courts. It will also be one of the signal legacies of President Donald J. Trump, who vowed to name justices who would overrule Roe. All three of his appointees were in the majority in the 6-to-3 ruling. The decision, which echoed a leaked draft opinion published by Politico in early May, will result in a starkly divided country in which abortion is severely restricted or forbidden in many red states but remains freely available in most blue ones." Here's the opinion: Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. ADDED: What's most interesting at this point, other than examining Alito's opinion to see what differences there may be from the leaked draft, is the Chief Justice's concurring opinion. What was this elusive middle position that he struggled to identify at oral argument and failed to sell to any of the other Justices?
ALSO: From Roberts:
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| SCOTUSblog has just gone live, covering the Supreme Court's case announcements. Posted: 24 Jun 2022 07:16 AM PDT Here.
ADDED: The first case, Becerra, is too complicated to discuss here. It's about Medicare payments. But it's interesting that it's a 5-4 case, written by Kagan and joined by Thomas, Breyer, Sotomayor and Barrett. It's only the second case this term where Roberts and Kavanaugh haven't been in the majority. If Kagan is writing, that means she was assigned the task by Thomas (the senior Justice in the majority). AND: Roe and Casey are overruled! Alito writes — here. Roberts concurs. "Thomas writes separately to reiterate his view that the due process clause also does not protect a right to an abortion." |
| Posted: 24 Jun 2022 06:07 AM PDT "... all of the historical precedents for heavy restrictions on concealed-carry laws as outliers. The Court says that it is going to look to history, but dismisses early English common law as too old. The Court says that it is going to look to history, but dismisses any laws that were adopted after the mid-eighteen-hundreds as too young. The Court says that it is looking to history, but also says that shall-issue permitting is constitutional, even though shall-issue permitting is a twentieth-century invention. So the Court says that it is doing history and tradition analysis, but conveniently ignores any history it doesn't like." Said lawprof Adam Winkler, author of "Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America," quoted in "The Historical Cherry-Picking at the Heart of the Supreme Court's Gun-Rights Expansion/A century-old New York law requiring individuals to prove "proper cause" to carry a handgun has been struck down. Are other gun-safety measures in peril?" (The New Yorker). |
| Posted: 24 Jun 2022 06:24 AM PDT "The idea that a few trans women coming into a sport – and often times not even winning – and that's what's going to ruin women's sports is pretty horrifying.... Because people are so focused on the advantages, they kind of ignore the fact that there actually are disadvantages that also come along with a transition.... Beyond all of this, as a society we need to build understanding and acceptance for queer people before we should even worry about sports." Said "Transgender mountain biker Kate Weatherly slams 'horrifying' new rules on trans athletes" (NY Post). Weatherly was talking about the new rules in swimming and anticipating a similar development in mountain biking. Within this argument sports are both very important and very not important. Similarly, gender difference is considered very important and, simultaneously, very not important. |
| Posted: 24 Jun 2022 10:35 AM PDT "He relied on '44 Angels' — who included the spirits of historical figures such as William Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin and Italian poet Dante Alighieri — to lead him in enlightenment." From "Inside the 'love fest' cult that's allegedly infiltrated Google headquarters" (NY Post)("Google has been infiltrated by a 'destructive' California cult led by a 'pedophilic' leader, according to a lawsuit"). |
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