FSTDT Forums
Community => Politics and Government => Topic started by: Radiation on May 15, 2019, 09:04:59 pm
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Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed a controversial bill that bans nearly all abortions into law Wednesday evening.
It's considered the most restrictive abortion law in the United States. The law makes it a crime for doctors to perform abortions at any stage of a pregnancy, unless a woman's life is threatened or there is a lethal fetal anomaly.
Under the new law, doctors in the state face felony jail time up to 99 years if convicted. But a woman would not be held criminally liable for having an abortion.
The law does not take effect for several months.
The Alabama Senate passed the bill Tuesday evening. The state House had already overwhelmingly approved the legislation. It's part of a broader anti-abortion strategy to prompt the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider the right to abortion.
I am pretty sure you all have heard of this and quite frankly it does have me angry and scared. It does seem that the conservatives are winning in everything and it's frightening. I don't know if anything really can be done because this is a ploy to get Roe v Wade overturned what with all the conservatives on the Supreme Court. If it does, well, welcome to the Handmaid's Tale. The Sons of Jacob are celebrating this decision.
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It has me angry and scared as well. RBG is really old as well and things will only get worse if she passes away or decides to retire. Over turning roe won't make abortion illegal, but it will be up to the states to decide. It will be pretty chaotic.
I can only hope that these boomer fucks and their out dated ways of thinking will ignite a new progressive era.
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Elections have consequences.
Electoral systems in which minorities get to dictate policy have even more consequences.
(If Senators' votes were weighted by the populations of their states, the Democrats would have controlled the Senate continuously since at least 1985. And if you total up all the votes cast for Senate in the 2012, 2014 and 2016 elections--even after shifting a good chunk of the 2016 California Senate vote to the Republicans to make up for that state's use of a top-two system, which thus made all votes cast in the second round, which is what counts for the official tally, count as Democratic votes since both candidates ran as Democrats--more votes were cast for Democratic candidates than Republican candidates. Under no sane system should the Republicans control the Senate after 2006.)
Also, fine point, Roe (and, more relevantly, Doe v. Bolton) was overruled in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
And I just want to add some Noam Chomsky here...
Amy Goodman: "Explain President Trump to us, and assess the massive response to him."
Noam Chomsky: "Well, Trump is, a, you know, I think there are a number of illusions about Trump. If you take a look at the Trump phenomenon, it's not very surprising. Think back for the last, um, ten or fifteen years, over Republican party primaries, and remember what happened during the primaries.
"Each primary, when some candidate rose from the base, they were so outlandish that the Republican establishment tried to crush them--and succeeded in doing it, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum--anyone who was coming out of the base was totally unacceptable to the establishment. The change in 2016 is they couldn't crush him, but the interesting question is why was this happening? Why in election after election was the voting base producing a candidate utterly intolerable to the establishment?
"And the answer to that is, if you think about that, the answer's not very hard to discover. During the, since the 1970s, during this neoliberal period, both of the political parties have shifted to the right. The Democrats, by the 1970s, pretty much abandoned the working class. The last gasp of more or less progressive Democratic Party legislative proposals was the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1978, which Carter watered down so that it had no teeth, just became voluntary. But the Democrats had pretty much abandoned the working class, they became pretty much what used to be called 'moderate Republicans'.
"Meanwhile the Republicans shifted so far to the right that they went completely off the spectrum. Two of the leading political analysts of the American Enterprise Institute, Thomas Mann, Norman Ornstein, about five or ten years ago described the Republican Party as a, what they called a 'radical insurgency that has abandoned Parliamentary politics'. Well, why did that happen? It happened because the Republicans face a difficult problem: they have a primary constituency, a real constituency, extreme wealth and corporate power. That's who they have to serve. That's their constituency. You can't get votes that way. So you have to do something else to get the votes.
"What do you do to get votes? This was begun by Richard Nixon with the Southern Strategy--try to pick up racists in the South. The mid-1970s, Paul Weyrich, one of the Republicans' strategists, hit on a brilliant idea: Northern Catholics voted Democratic, tended to vote Democratic, a lot of them working-class. The Republicans could pick up that vote by pretending--crucially, pretending--to be opposed to abortion. By the same pretense, they could pick up the evangelical vote. Those are big votes. Evangelicals, Northern Catholics.
"Notice the word 'pretense'--it's crucial. You go back to the 1960s, every leading Republican figure was strongly what we call now pro-choice. The Republican Party position was, that's Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and all the leadership, their position was, abortion is not the government's business. It's private business, government has nothing to say about it. They turned almost on a dime in order to try to pick up a voting base on what are called 'cultural issues'. Same with gun rights. Gun rights become a matter of holy writ because you can pick up part of the population that way. In fact, what they've done is put together a coalition of voters based on issues that are basically unac--you know, tolerable to the establishment, but they don't like it, okay? And they've got to hold that to--those two constituencies together, the real constituency of wealth and corporate power, they're taken care of by the actual legislation. So if you look at the legislation under Trump, it's just lavish gifts to the wealth and the corporate sector. The tax bill, the deregulation, every case in point. That's kind of the job of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, those guys. They serve the real constituency.
"Meanwhile, Trump has to maintain the voting constituency with one outrageous position after another that appeals to some sector of the voting base. And he's doing it very skillfully. Just as a political manipulation, it's skillful. Work for the rich and the powerful, shaft everybody else, but get their votes. That's not a small--it's not an easy trick, and he's carrying it off, and I should say the Democrats are helping him. They are.
"Take the focus on 'Russiagate'. What's that all about? And it was pretty obvious at the beginning that you're not going to find anything very serious about Russian interference in elections. For one thing, it's undetectable. In the 2016 election, the Senate and the House went the same way as the executive, but nobody claims there was Russian interference there. In fact, Russian interference in the election, if it existed, was very slight, much less, say, than the interference by, say, Israel. Israel, the Prime Minister, Netanyahu, goes to Congress, talks to a joint session of Congress without even informing the White House to attack Obama's policies. And that's dramatic interference with elections. Not whatever the Russians tried, it's not going to be anything like that.
"In fact, there's no interference in elections that begins to compare with campaign funding. Remember that campaign funding alone gives you a very high prediction of election--electoral outcome. It's, again, Tom Ferguson's major work, which has shown this very persuasively. That's massive interference in elections. Anything the Russians might have done is gonna be, y'know, peanuts in compared. As far as Trump collusion with the Russians, that was never gonna amount to anything more than minor corruption, maybe building a Trump hotel in Red Square or something like that, but nothing of any significance.
"The Democrats invested everything in this issue. Well, turned out there was nothing much there, they gave Trump a huge gift. In fact, they may have handed him the next election. That's just a--that's a matter of being so inof--unwilling to deal with fundamental issues that they're looking for something on the side that'll somehow give political success."
(emphasis mine)
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Radiation, as I recall you voted for Trump. And that is after he said in relation to abortion 'there has to be some kind of punishment for the women'.
Aren't you in Michigan or something too? I mean your vote could have been the one that swung this election, that's how tight it was. Well you can welcome the annihilation of US women's reproductive rights proud in the knowledge that you helped usher in this new era.
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Radiation, as I recall you voted for Trump. And that is after he said in relation to abortion 'there has to be some kind of punishment for the women'.
Aren't you in Michigan or something too? I mean your vote could have been the one that swung this election, that's how tight it was. Well you can welcome the annihilation of US women's reproductive rights proud in the knowledge that you helped usher in this new era.
If you got beef with her, take it to F&B.
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Radiation, as I recall you voted for Trump. And that is after he said in relation to abortion 'there has to be some kind of punishment for the women'.
Aren't you in Michigan or something too? I mean your vote could have been the one that swung this election, that's how tight it was. Well you can welcome the annihilation of US women's reproductive rights proud in the knowledge that you helped usher in this new era.
If you got beef with her, take it to F&B.
Sorry? Who the fuck are you cracker?
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Radiation, as I recall you voted for Trump. And that is after he said in relation to abortion 'there has to be some kind of punishment for the women'.
Aren't you in Michigan or something too? I mean your vote could have been the one that swung this election, that's how tight it was. Well you can welcome the annihilation of US women's reproductive rights proud in the knowledge that you helped usher in this new era.
If you got beef with her, take it to F&B.
Sorry? Who the fuck are you cracker?
A guy who thinks rules are rules and your hostility doesn't belong here. You got something against her? Get your furry ass to the drama forum and start shit there.
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Wow, you are a pretentious fucker aren't you. I mean if you really thought that you wouldn't even be here. But frankly Radiation being a former Mod is more than big enough to take care of herself.
Here's a hint and half for you, you slimy goatfucker, if you are going to maintain a facade of not being the latest iteration of our most persistent member, it would behoove you to act like the relatively recent member you are meant to appear to be...
Also I would have thought my level of hostility is pretty fucking mild given the issue under discussion.
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Wow, you are a pretentious fucker aren't you. I mean if you really thought that you wouldn't even be here. But frankly Radiation being a former Mod is more than big enough to take care of herself.
Here's a hint and half for you, you slimy goatfucker, if you are going to maintain a facade of not being the latest iteration of our most persistent member, it would behoove you to act like the relatively recent member you are meant to appear to be...
Also I would have thought my level of hostility is pretty fucking mild given the issue under discussion.
What the fuck you talking about, squirrel boy? And how hard is it to take this shit where it belongs?
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You know exactly what I'm talking about you fucking loon. And it's harder than you just sucking my dick, although it might require you to dislocate your jaw.
Anyway my comment to Radiation is on topic.. .
As for you, if you want to go to Flame & Burm - feel free to make a thread
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You know exactly what I'm talking about you fucking loon. And it's harder than you just sucking my dick, although it might require you to dislocate your jaw.
Anyway my comment to Radiation is on topic.. .
As for you, if you want to go to Flame & Burm - feel free to make a thread
Alright, fine.
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Now sod off, as my point was made to Radiation and not you.
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Back on topic, these laws are being made because the GOP knows that they have the majority on the supreme court and that "their guys" don't care about constitution as much as they care about the party. This is their chance to start making changes to laws and if they have luck there will be one more opening on the supreme court that they can fill while they still have the president and a majority in the senate/house.
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It's also apparent that there is not likely to be an ideological shift in the US Supreme Court for 20 years.
The whole system of being a judge until you die or retire is crazy. They should instate mandatory retirement at 75. They should also be appointing apolitical judges who determine cases on the law rather than their personal belief systems but I think the US is too far gone for that.
On topic from the Gruan: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/14/abortion-illegal-america-roe-v-wade (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/14/abortion-illegal-america-roe-v-wade)
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Radiation, as I recall you voted for Trump. And that is after he said in relation to abortion 'there has to be some kind of punishment for the women'.
Aren't you in Michigan or something too? I mean your vote could have been the one that swung this election, that's how tight it was. Well you can welcome the annihilation of US women's reproductive rights proud in the knowledge that you helped usher in this new era.
If you got beef with her, take it to F&B.
Shut the fuck up Junior Mod. Dave is right to point out that Trump advertised this outcome well in advance of his election victory.
ETA: and these laws are increasingly extreme. The heartbeat bills are outrageous enough as the cut off date for an abortion is two weeks after your missed period. Few of these laws even allow exceptions for rape, incest, or life of the mother. What is more, some states not only punish the doctor, but the woman, even for self induced abortions. I believe one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage, so women who suffer miscarriages would now have reason to fear criminal investigation. Oh, and at least in Alabama, the punishment is 99 years: more severe than a rapist would receive or a woman who just had her baby and killed it via abandonment.
Right now, in Toledo, there is an 11 year old girl who is pregnant after her step-father raped her. Since the Ohio law goes into effect in July, she can still abort the fetus and try to lead a normal 11 year-old’s life. However, if this occurred two months later, she would be forced to carry it to term under risk of criminal penalties.
Elections have consequences, and Trump advertised this outcome well in advance.
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Some of the less horrible and more amusing side effects of these laws is that if they sincerely believe that a fetus is a person, does that fetus have all the other rights and options that other persons have?
Can a fetus get a life insurance? Does a fetus have a citizenship in USA? That last one leads into two interesting possibilities...
a) If a fetus gets a citizenship does this mean that all the unborn children in the concentration camps are already legally US citizens who just happen to be inside immigrants?
b) If citizenship only comes after birth, this means that these fetuses are people of no nation. And that's very much against UN regulations. Every living person must have a nationality because children that don't have any official nationality are in very high risk of becoming victims of trafficking and slavery. This is especially true of children of poor families and refugees. ...Which again leads us back to the concentration camps and the people within. We already know that thousands of children have disappeared without a trace from the concentration camps and they need protection so this is yet another violation of UN agreements and human rights that USA may be committing.
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The answer to those two questions is....no. No they don't apply, what are you crazy?
Ironbite-I mean that'd mean things and Republicans don't do things.
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I’ve been saying it since Trump won: “Abortion rights were nice while they lasted.”
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Things might not be as bad as you think. Kavanaugh may not be as staunchly anti-abortion as he's been characterized (https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/12/brett-kavanaugh-may-not-be-solid-ally-abortion-opponents-were-expecting.html). That's not to say we shouldn't be wary (https://theintercept.com/2019/02/17/louisiana-abortion-law-brett-kavanaugh-dissent/), though...
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Radiation, as I recall you voted for Trump. And that is after he said in relation to abortion 'there has to be some kind of punishment for the women'.
Aren't you in Michigan or something too? I mean your vote could have been the one that swung this election, that's how tight it was. Well you can welcome the annihilation of US women's reproductive rights proud in the knowledge that you helped usher in this new era.
Yes I did and that was when I was listening to the alt right and was part of it. Now I see that they are acting just as bad, if not worse than the so-called SJWs that they mock and ridicule. Trump's election has made conservatives and the alt-right much more arrogant, hateful, and cocky and now I see that I was wrong in a lot of ways and now I'm coming back to my liberal roots and will more than likely vote for the Democratic candidate or I might not vote at all, but I no longer want Trump as president as the conservatives are trying to roll back or hijack women's and other marginalized groups' rights.
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Radiation, as I recall you voted for Trump. And that is after he said in relation to abortion 'there has to be some kind of punishment for the women'.
Aren't you in Michigan or something too? I mean your vote could have been the one that swung this election, that's how tight it was. Well you can welcome the annihilation of US women's reproductive rights proud in the knowledge that you helped usher in this new era.
Yes I did and that was when I was listening to the alt right and was part of it. Now I see that they are acting just as bad, if not worse than the so-called SJWs that they mock and ridicule. Trump's election has made conservatives and the alt-right much more arrogant, hateful, and cocky and now I see that I was wrong in a lot of ways and now I'm coming back to my liberal roots and will more than likely vote for the Democratic candidate or I might not vote at all, but I no longer want Trump as president as the conservatives are trying to roll back or hijack women's and other marginalized groups' rights.
This isn’t some sort of popularity contest or cool kids shit. This is policy that is ideal for the nation and improves the lives of its citizens and our standing in the world. It shouldn’t be subject to such extreme and swift whims.
Restated: you shouldn’t vote for Trump just because I piss you off.
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Radiation, as I recall you voted for Trump. And that is after he said in relation to abortion 'there has to be some kind of punishment for the women'.
Aren't you in Michigan or something too? I mean your vote could have been the one that swung this election, that's how tight it was. Well you can welcome the annihilation of US women's reproductive rights proud in the knowledge that you helped usher in this new era.
Yes I did and that was when I was listening to the alt right and was part of it. Now I see that they are acting just as bad, if not worse than the so-called SJWs that they mock and ridicule. Trump's election has made conservatives and the alt-right much more arrogant, hateful, and cocky and now I see that I was wrong in a lot of ways and now I'm coming back to my liberal roots and will more than likely vote for the Democratic candidate or I might not vote at all, but I no longer want Trump as president as the conservatives are trying to roll back or hijack women's and other marginalized groups' rights.
This isn’t some sort of popularity contest or cool kids shit. This is policy that is ideal for the nation and improves the lives of its citizens and our standing in the world. It shouldn’t be subject to such extreme and swift whims.
Restated: you shouldn’t vote for Trump just because I piss you off.
Yeah I realize that and you didn't piss me off in anyway so I don't know why you said that. Like I said I did get wrapped in something that I shouldn't have and I realize that it's my mistake and that I should be more careful about listening and blindly believing something in actuality was never part of me.
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Honestly, it sounds to me like you weren't a particularly committed Trump supporter in the first place. That's not an insult; if anything, I'm happy you were never a fervent supporter of Cheeto Benito.
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What was your actual thought process before voting? I'm in the alt-right and I don't like SJWs so even though reproductive rights are important to me, I'm going to vote against the person who campaigned her whole life about it and vote for the guy who expressly stated he wanted to ban abortions, criminalise Doctors and miscarrying mothers?
What the?
What was the issue that attracted you to voting for trump? Was it because he hates immigrants (well brown ones not eastern european ones, those he marries)
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All right, that's not really what this topic is about. Now, the real question is, does this stand a good chance of cracking Roe v Wade? And my stance is, I honestly think the Republicans have overplayed their hand here and that it's going to backfire right into their face. The reason why is not Kavanaugh, though - let's be honest, he's a Trump appointee and he's gonna do whatever Trump asks him to, because that's why Trump hired him. However, Chief Justice John Roberts has a much more even keel. He is a conservative for sure, and a committed one, but he's also a man who cares about his legacy, and quite a bit. He knows that any decisions the court hands down will have his name on them, because it's the Roberts Court, and he does not want to go down in history as the man who criminalized miscarriage, or who made it so an 11 year old child who was raped would have to carry their baby to term. If Roe v Wade stands, I think it's going to be because of Roberts, not Kavanaugh, and I also think it's going to be because the laws that are getting passed by eager Republicans in the states are just way too harsh and draconian for normal people to stomach.
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I wish I had your optimism.
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I do think it will only take 10 years of regressive abortion laws for the legislation to be undone. Or just tacitly ignored.
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Yeah I realize that and you didn't piss me off in anyway so I don't know why you said that. Like I said I did get wrapped in something that I shouldn't have and I realize that it's my mistake and that I should be more careful about listening and blindly believing something in actuality was never part of me.
1. You said I piss you off a number of times
2. It was more for sake of example
3. You were the one saying that the SJWs made you swing alt-right because of their whining. Then you said you swung back for the same reason.
Their whining, or sticking it to them politically, is not a good reason to vote for someone because it has no bearing on the actual policy they implement. Policies like family separation, trade wars, abortion bans, the $27 billion in expanded farm subsidies (to make up for lost farm profits from said trade war), the tax reallocation bill, the assault on Medicaid and the ACA, or so many more.
I sincerely believe you supported Trump to be “cool.” Though, it is your right as we are a free nation and a democracy.
As for abortion, I am not yet sure whether SCOTUS will go outright ban or accept the incremental burden the practice out of existence. Guess I’ll wait and see.
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Just your friendly reminder that Roe v. Wade was the flashpoint, Doe v. Bolton was the consequential decision (as it overturned a more permissive statute), and both were set aside by the actual current precedent, Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
It's a pet peeve of mine when people who agree with me on the issues get the facts wrong. (Not saying that I always get the facts right, of course.)
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I’ve been saying it since Trump won: “Abortion rights were nice while they lasted.”
That's the bizarre thing looking at the states from across the pond, a lecherous, non-consensual vagina grabbing, porn star boinking, foul mouthed 243 pound infant with a toupee in bed with the most sexually repressed people outside the Taliban and the Vatican. Can any of those buttoned up, neurotic Jesus freaks actually see the contradiction?
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Of course not, since abortion was never the issue for the evangelicals. Coit v. Green was: they needed an issue to rally around that, unlike allowing racially discriminatory policies in universities, couldn't cost them tax exemptions, and opposing abortion was that issue.
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I’ve been saying it since Trump won: “Abortion rights were nice while they lasted.”
That's the bizarre thing looking at the states from across the pond, a lecherous, non-consensual vagina grabbing, porn star boinking, foul mouthed 243 pound infant with a toupee in bed with the most sexually repressed people outside the Taliban and the Vatican. Can any of those buttoned up, neurotic Jesus freaks actually see the contradiction?
They'll say it's because "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" or because "God sometimes uses sinners to do His work". But IIRC, the evangelicals who support Trump are more likely to use "evangelical" as a political/tribal label than a religious one, which probably goes a long way to explain why they support him.
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This (https://newrepublic.com/article/153942/criminalization-womens-bodies-conservative-male-power)quote nicely sums up why buttoned up, peevish conservatives are happy doing business with a pussygrabbing monster from New York.
We live in a society that is comfortable letting men get away with sexual violence, but determined not to let women get away with consensual sex. This is why there are vast swathes of society who are comfortable giving vast executive and judicial power to men credibly accused of sexual assault—as long as those same men promise to confiscate women’s power to sexually self-determine.
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BTW, in case there actually were some dipshits who were still claiming that the point of the Alabama law wasn't controlling women, you ought to check this out:
https://twitter.com/TheSemDem/status/1129974426404052995?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1129974426404052995
Yeah, when the guys drawing up this legislation realized that this would criminalize in-vitro fertilization and other situations where the eggs could be destroyed outside of the woman's body, they carved out exceptions for them; it's only murder if the fetus is killed INSIDE OF THE WOMAN'S UTERUS...