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onceafanalwaysshallbeafan · 1 month

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What is the current status of KOSA? As of last night, 2024-04-20, this is what congress.gov had to say about it:

I'm seeing lots of posts fearmongering about how it's passed the Senate and is now in the House.

I've seen coordinated attacks against the democratic process over the past 8+ years. It would not surprise me in the least to learn that this might be part of a coordinated attack to get us to let up pressure on our Senators, letting them think that we're suddenly okay with it.

Please remember that Tumblr can just as easily be used to spread misinformation as Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. Check authoritative sources.

What I would do? Call your senators, your representative, and the White House switchboard to leave comments on pending legislation.

The government website says it's still in the Senate. Call your senators to oppose it as a current issue.

Call your representative to oppose it as a heads-up to ensure they are aware of it and your opposition.

Call the White House to ensure that President Biden knows not to sign it if it crosses his desk.

Former President Trump already destroyed 50 years of women's rights, and presided over the initial hysteria of the anti-trans groups. He appointed enough justices to the Supreme Court that we're guaranteed social regression until at least two conservative justices retire and are replaced with new Ruth Bader Ginsbergs. He and the GOP (he is basically synonymous with the GOP, after Laura was elected as co-chair) have done a huge amount of damage to our ways of life and our ability to address climate change and global warming. We need to say that enough is enough, and that they won't deprive us of our abilities to discuss the topics they find uncomfortable and want to prevent any kids from hearing about in any online spaces their kids could possibly stumble into.

OUR LIVES AND EXISTENCE AND CULTURE ARE NOT POLITICAL PAWNS TO BE BARTERED AWAY IN BACKROOM DEALS.

We must stand united, or divided we shall surely perish.

#stop kosa #kosa bill #anti kosa #fuck kosa #kosa #kosa status 2024-04-21 #this tag needs to be updated at least every Sunday #kosa status #congress.gov has a bill lookup

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wilwheaton · 3 months

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“Trump really cares only about retribution for himself, and it will consume much of a second term,” wrote former national security adviser John Bolton. Bolton went on to describe Trump’s fondness for humiliating people, and his unwillingness to consider anything that doesn’t offer a benefit for himself. This is all Trump is concerned about. Trump, and Trump alone, is all that remains of the Republican Party. Add on 91 felony counts, a recent loss in a huge fraud case, and a second round of losses to a woman he sexually assaulted in a department store, and the Republican Party is left bending the knee to a three-time loser who is going to spend most of 2024 in court and stands a very real chance of spending 2025 in jail. No platform. No plan. And a heavily damaged candidate who has already enjoyed a seven-year string of unbroken losses. Republicans have nothing to run on but chaos, and nothing to look forward to but the fear that they’ll be Trump’s next target.

Republicans see the writing on the wall, and it signals disaster for them

Everything Trump touches dies. Hopefully, the GOP is the last thing he ruins before he spends the rest of his life in prison.

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transistoric · 2 years

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angry political rant under the cut

okay this week the latest govt official up for assassination should be fucking joe manchin. mf toxic-waste stuffed tumor standing in for a person really went and teased that he might let a bill to combat climate change go through then doomed it bc it’ll tax the wealthy including the dirty energy sector CEOs AND had the shit dripping gall to claim it was in the interests of families suffering from inflation? LOL MF. you’re talking about protecting the wealthiest tax-payers not the families who can’t afford inflation and literally the very corporations behind the inflation. LOL PLUS?? inflation’s gonna go up anyway for all the damage climate change is dealing on the vulnerable, under-resourced, poverty-stricken populations like it has been doing for decades. but no. the class that CAN more-than absorb the costs (and is responsible for the conditions resulting in climate change in the first place) needs to keep sitting pretty bc that’s where you’re getting your (and this isn’t an exaggeration) blood-soaked donations from. yeah you care about families joe manchin

#THIS IS WHY I CAN'T BE ON TWITTER #honestly Joe Machin encapsulates every centrist who claims to be above party politics and is too enlightened to choose #the side that is staying all the damage wrought by the other #when their negligence whataboutism and apologist stances are all just thinly veiled GOP interests #i hate that there are people stuck in my life who essentially agree with this puppet

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qqueenofhades · 2 months

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what's been particularly vile to me is this group of white online leftists who insist that anyone who cares about more than this one issue for the election is a bad person, like, as if us black and brown people are making up reasons to be afraid and not.....believing the gop when they say they are coming for us. believing trump who has said previously that he does not bluff, that he will do the things he's said he will do (i hate what social media has gone to the word gaslighting but it feels like gaslighting. we lived through four years of trump. we saw the damage. stop treating us like we're being dramatic). it must be great to not have to worry about that i guess? "life won't change under trump" is such a telling admission because maybe theirs won't but mine will. and so many others' will.

and it is often again these (white) online leftists that love to call anyone who disagrees with them a white liberal (derogatory) because they know it would be racist (bad) to be this shitty and condescending to poc but they don't want to actually listen to anything black and brown voters are saying. it's easier to just call us white liberals and throw our opinions out, to ignore the work of black people for decades to gain the right to vote, to disregard the weight of telling them to not do that. it's genuinely appalling. they care so much about racism until it's time to engage with poc who have different opinions than their online echo chambers, then we're just stupid liberals with terrible opinions like..... wanting to live. not wanting four more years of trump. so sorry for that.

sorry for this vent in your inbox, i'm just so fucking tired of white people trying to rewrite history as if trump wasn't that bad. he was for my family and countless others and i am terrified for what's to come if he wins.

The thing about (the often-white) Online Leftists is that they have become just as much as a radicalized death cult as the diehard Trumpists. If you don't want to die for The Revolution and/or sacrifice your life, friends, family, the rest of the country, etc., then you're Insufficiently Pure and must be Purged. (Which I think is just complete BS, as none of them could actually handle sacrificing anything, but it's increasingly the only kind of performative rhetoric that is acceptable in leftist-identified discourse spaces.) This is functionally identical to "if you aren't willing to lay down your life for our Lord and Savior Donald Trump and the Great White Christian Nationalist Dictatorship, you're a liberal cuck," but with the names and justification changed. It doesn't change the underlying radicalization, nihilism, and insanity of the premise.

Another thing the Trumpists and the Online Leftists have in common is that they are busily rewriting just how bad Trump was in order to serve their Ideology. Ever since January 6, 2021, the Republicans have thrown everything they have at revising and whitewashing any suggestion that it was an "insurrection," and the Online Leftists have done the same, in an attempt to "prove" their insane point that Trump "would be better" than Biden. This is embodied in the recent ultimate-brainworm-nonsense maximalist-online take that "Biden has to lose so the rest of the world will see that the US rejects genocide!!!" That's right, the message that the rest of the world would take from Biden losing to Trump is that the US rejects genocide. Never mind if Trump literally wants to commit all the genocide possible and to install himself as a fascist theocratic dictator. In the deeply twisted minds of the Online Leftists, this is the only possible interpretation of Biden's loss, so they'll push for it as hard as they can! The Trumpists and the Online Leftists, at this point, are working pretty much in concert to damage Biden for similar insane reasons and get Trump elected. Etc etc., one Nazi and ten people at the same table is eleven Nazis.

Like. Sure. Four years ago, when Trump was president and people were dying by the thousands because he didn't want to wear a mask because it smeared his bronzer, just to name literally one of the terrible things he did every single day (and not even mentioning how much worse a second term would be) we were absolutely better off. Super-duper great. (Sarcasm.) Either that or "there is suffering and evil in the world and the only solution is to drastically increase the suffering and evil for everyone and to destroy what progress we have managed to make because It Does Not Fix Everything Now" is an absolute moral imperative, and either way, yeah. I'm calling bullshit.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts

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anexperimentallife · 4 months

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The US far right has been working on their plan since AT LEAST the 1960s, when I was a kid listening to evangelicals talking about their plan to take over the US, and eventually the world. It's called "Christian Dominionism," and it's a fascist ideology which goes hand in glove with the GOP's plans.

Although it was not expressed so much to the world at large, this plan was OPENLY and FREQUENTLY discussed in far right circles. We kids, if we asked about it, were told that it was "God's Will." Ask any exvangelical about it, and they'll confirm. (Part of why I know so much about these dangerous and deluded folks is I WAS ONE OF THEM in my youth.)

And where has that plan gotten them? Well, the GOP recently released a hundreds of pages long document filled with their intentions if they win--including a nationwide abortion ban and a repeal of anti-discrimination laws, among other things.

Trump has already signaled his intent to create a military dictatorship if elected, by repealing laws against using the military against US citizens on US soil sp he can deploy them against dissenters, etc., and if the GOP pick up a few more congressional seats, he can do it. The GOP has already pushed to repeal presidential term limits, and Trump has indicated he'd like to be president for life.

So I'm amazed at all the people who think withholding their vote and letting the GOP win is going to somehow fix things and "push the Dems left."

You wanna know how to push US politics leftward? You're not gonna like it, because it takes actual work beyond stomping your foot and pouting and performatively showing everyone how "pure" you are by refusing to vote.

You have to start the same way the far right did (and again, they've been OPENLY talking about and pursuing this plan since I was a kid in the 1960s, AT LEAST)--they started by getting the most extreme right wingers they possibly could into any position they could. Positions like school board member, police chief, sherrif, city prosecuter, city council member, municipal judge, mayor, governor, hell, fucking dog catcher.

They encouraged far right extremists to become police officers and military personnel and work their way up the ranks to the point at which even the famously-racist FBI reported that major city police departments across the nation were pretty much taken over by members of white supremacist organizations.

In formerly reasonable churches, right wingers pushed for the hiring and training of more and more right wing pastors and mire right-wing theology.

More affluent right-wingers bought local papers and broadcasters, and as their political power grew, they changed laws to make it easier for a single entity to control the news--until now a mere handful of entities own nearly every major media outlet in the US.

And then they used every victory as leverage for the next one, and worked their way up. I mean, there's more, like the capitalization on economic and social anxiety and their inentional exacerbation of same so they could take advantage of it, but that's intertwined with the rest.

Essentially, they got this far because they put the work in.

If the US left is going to turn things around (and if it's not already too late), we've got to do the same, but it takes RESEARCHING and PROMOTING your local and state candidates, attending city council and school board meetings, and shit like that. It's actual fucking work to fix a country.

And then, after you've done all that--and after you've shown up to primaries to try to get any non-authoritarian leftist candidate you can nominated--then you vote for the leftest folks you're able to in the general. If there are no remotely leftist candidates, you vote for the centrist or right winger who will do the least damage.

Again, that's what the US far right has been doing for decades. Taking action. Wherever possible, taking new ground, but when they couldn't do that, ceding as little ground as possible. If they couldn't win, they made damn sure to do everything in their power to try to keep actual decent human beings from winning.

Actually doing the work doesn't have the emotional satisfaction of a grand gesture, but it definitely shows who is serious about making a difference and who would rather let everything burn than sully their imagined purity by voting for anything less than perfection.

Listen, Trump is not going to end the genocide in Gaza--in fact he increased tensions between the Israeli occupation and Palestine. And the GOP will never be persuaded. Hell, they want to let Russia take Ukraine and declare open season on asylum seekers.

The Dems suck. But the GOP is far, far worse, and will do MORE damage, and kill FAR MORE innocents. And if allowed to do so, will make it even harder to change the system than it is now. They've already PUBLICLY ADMITTED that their only chance of victory is keeping people from voting. Don't play into their hands.

Under current circumstances, you know what the Dems are going to do if Biden and a bunch of other Dems lose for not being pure enough? You think they'll be all like, "Oh, no! The left sure taught us a lesson by handing the country to the GOP! We'd better shift to the left!"

No. They're going to sip champagne in their multi-million dollar mansions and have meetings about how they need to move FURTHER RIGHT to win elections, because the left doesn't vote.

And if the US becomes a military dictatorship, most of the high ranking ones will simply take their fortunes and leave.

Yup, it'd sure teach ol' Joe a lesson to force him to spend the rest of his days sipping cocktails on the Riviera.

Look beyond the single battle and think strategically. That's how the GOP keeps gaining power. And refusing to act strategically is why the left is losing. We cannot take the hill we want right now. But if we lose the hills we've already taken, we risk losing the entire goddamn war.

So fucking vote. Work to get every leftist you can in any office you can. And if you can't do that, support the one who will do the least harm.

And if it takes voting for that shitbag Biden to keep Trump and the GOP out, hold your fucking nose and pull the goddamn lever.

#rob gets political

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mysharona1987 · 2 years

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Damn, this story is sad.

She wanted a baby so bad she had treatment for infertility.

Now she’s pretty sure waiting so long to treat her miscarriage has left her insides so scarred and damaged and generally messed up that she can’t ever get pregnant again.

The GOP: So pro life they are actively screwing over women who are desperate for kids.

#News #texas #gop #democrats #republicans #greg abbott #donald trump #politics #pregnancy #Ivf #people magazine #Biden #scotus

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mariacallous · 3 months

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Earlier this month, the Alabama Supreme Court issued an opinion, complete with a wildly theocratic concurrence from Chief Justice Thomas Parker, that functionally outlawed in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the state.

In the wake of the ruling, Republicans have tried to unwind this mess, with the Alabama legislature considering passing a law to ensure IVF access and Donald Trump coming out to say he strongly supports access to IVF.

All of this is a bit of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, as the damage is done. The entire spectacle was inevitable once the GOP gave the party over to anti-choice zealots decades ago.

In brief, the reason the Alabama Supreme Court’s opinion implicates and outlaws IVF is that the state has a Wrongful Death of a Minor statute, and the court decided this applies to “all unborn children, without limitation.” But there’s no language in the statute that says this. Rather, it’s just that over the last 15 years, the Alabama Supreme Court has issued a series of rulings saying that the undefined term “minor child” in the statute can be stretched to “unborn children” regardless of what state of development the embryo is at. Once the court created such an expansive definition, the decision that frozen embryos are people was inescapable.

To be fair, though, the Alabama Supreme Court is entirely made up of conservative Republicans, they were a bit hamstrung in their decision. Alabama’s state constitution states that “it is the public policy of this state to ensure the protection of the rights of the unborn child in all manners and measures lawful and appropriate." But that doesn’t necessarily mean the court was required to, as it did here, extend that “unborn child” definition to what it calls “extrauterine children” — embryos frozen by people pursuing IVF.

That IVF is even controversial is an indictment of the GOP

An IVF cycle is designed to produce multiple eggs that can be retrieved in one procedure. The more eggs produced, the greater the likelihood of a viable embryo that can be implanted, hopefully resulting in a pregnancy. Because of this, multiple embryos often remain, and people freeze those for several reasons. People may use them if the first attempt at implantation doesn’t work, thus avoiding multiple egg retrieval cycles. They may save them for later if they decide to have more children. They may donate them to other people struggling with fertility issues.

For people not saddled with the misguided anti-choice belief that a tiny clump of cells is the same as a person, this is a non-controversial process. It enhances the chance of pregnancy and allows people to plan for future children without undergoing multiple invasive egg retrieval cycles. But if one subscribes to the notion of fetal personhood — that a fetus is quite literally a person, with all the attendant privileges that confers — then those frozen embryos are the same as babies.

This is, of course, a religious, not scientific belief. Chief Justice Parker, in his concurring opinion, made clear that his vote, at least, stems directly from his religious beliefs rather than being grounded in the law. Citing Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, the Ten Commandments, and the King James Bible, Parker concludes that “even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”

Notably, none of those things are legal precedent. Indeed, in a country founded on the separation of church and state, they shouldn’t inform a court holding. However, since religious conservatives dominate the US Supreme Court, that separation has largely collapsed. This has emboldened conservative litigants and conservative state and federal judges to take ever more anti-choice stances.

Reproductive health activists have been sounding the alarm about the anti-choice attacks on IVF for years, particularly in the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. At least two prominent anti-choice groups, Americans United for Life and Students for Life, have railed against IVF. The chief legal officer for Americans United for Life, Steve Aden, called IVF “eugenics” and said that IVF created “embryonic human beings” that were destroyed in the process. Students for Life called IVF “damaging and destructive.”

These same anti-choice groups also hate birth control, and the Dobbs decision paved the way for them to mount a theocratic attack on it too. Christopher Rufo, who ginned up a panic over benign diversity initiatives and helped force out the first Black president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, has already telegraphed that this is his next attack.

Over on Elon Musk’s increasingly Nazi-fied social media site, X, Rufo is spewing rhetoric about how “the family structure disintegrated precisely as access to birth control proliferated” and that recreational sex is bad and leads to single-mother households.

Rufo isn’t alone. The Heritage Foundation, which is also busy with a blueprint for a second Trump presidency that would destroy the administrative state and whose leader is still pushing the big lie that Trump won the 2020 election, has also called for the end of birth control. Also over on X, Heritage’s official account posted last year that “a good place to start would be a feminist movement against the pill and … returning the consequentiality to sex.”

And there you have it. Religious conservatives are calling for a return to a world where sex isn’t recreational or for pleasure but is instead fraught with consequences — namely, pregnancies that can’t be terminated even when the pregnant person’s life is in danger. To do this, however, they would need to succeed in getting the Supreme Court to overturn Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that invalidated restrictions on birth control.

More importantly, Griswold affirmed the constitutional right to privacy. It’s that right that not only underpinned the right to an abortion in Roe but also underpins other cases related to the rights of Americans to pursue sexual and marital relationships without government interference. In Lawrence v. Texas, decided in 2003, the Supreme Court relied upon Griswold to throw out laws that criminalized sexual contact between members of the same sex. Twelve years later, that same reasoning was used in Obergefell v. Hodges to affirm a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

Justice Clarence Thomas hates the right to privacy and has made no secret he wants it gone. In his concurring opinion in Dobbs, he called on the Court to “reconsider” all these cases and overrule them as “demonstrably erroneous.” Justice Samuel Alito has been a bit more evasive about this, writing in Dobbs that “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” However, Alito’s Dobbs opinion is littered with references to “fetal life” and how abortion destroys an “unborn human being.” As recently as last week, Alito wrote a statement decrying Obergefell because he doesn’t think it’s fair that people who are bigots about same-sex marriage ever get called bigots.

It isn’t just Thomas and Alito. During her confirmation hearing, Justice Amy Coney Barrett refused to say whether she thought Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell were rightly decided. In 2012, she signed an open letter stating that the Affordable Care Act’s required coverage for birth control was an assault on religious liberty. Similarly, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in his confirmation hearing, also wouldn’t say whether Griswold was correctly decided. Justice Neil Gorsuch did the same.

That makes five likely votes — with Chief Justice John Roberts a possible sixth — for a rollback of privacy rights in America. With that pillar of law gone, states would be free to outlaw same-sex marriage, get rid of birth control, and impose any other theocratic conditions they’d like.

The dog that caught the car

Right now, Republicans are scrambling to undo the damage they’ve wrought, realizing that an anti-IVF stance is alienating to most. Last year, the Pew Research Center found that 42 percent of adults had used fertility treatments or knew someone who had. From 1996 to 2018, over 1 million babies were born as a result of fertility treatments. Mike Pence has spoken publicly about how he and his wife used IVF and that the procedure should be protected.

In Alabama, Republican legislators are planning to introduce a law that would say the embryo isn’t a person until implanted in a uterus. But legislation doesn’t trump the state constitution, which means the Alabama courts could throw out any law they deem contrary to their fetal personhood interpretation of the constitution. Several Alabama fertility clinics have stopped IVF services, citing the legal risk. The state’s GOP attorney general, Steve Marshall, said he wouldn’t use the decision to prosecute IVF providers or people seeking IVF treatment, but that’s a slender reed to rely upon. What provider or patient wants to rely upon the vague assurances of the attorney general rather than a law that protects access?

And it isn’t just IVF. Elected officials in states that have banned abortion have openly mocked those people who have come forward with horror stories of being refused abortions even as they developed sepsis or faced the possibility of permanent future infertility. Doctors have no clear guidance on when they can terminate a pregnancy to save the life of the pregnant person, leaving them vulnerable to prosecution. People who currently have frozen embryos have no idea what to do with them, and nor do clinics. If the hardest-line anti-choice people get their way, access to birth control will become as spotty and politicized as access to abortion is now.

This type of amorphous fear is a feature, not a bug, of the post-Dobbs landscape. When the entire spectrum of reproductive health is murky, and the threat of prosecution looms large, doctors won’t perform abortions or IVF treatments. Patients won’t seek abortions even as their health deteriorates to a level that could result in death. People who can get pregnant will have their lives narrowed to nearly nothing as they try to sidestep the landmines of an ever-shifting jurisprudence over their bodies.

And that’s exactly the way conservatives want it, no matter their current feeble attempts to get out from under an IVF disaster of their own making. The GOP made common cause with the worst people in the country on this issue, and now we’re all stuck with the consequences.

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