We can always count on The Inion to find the funny side of the news.
Here are the test questions that show how far behind American students are.
Wanda Sykes is one of the funniest comedians alive today. Please watch this 2-minute clip. If she remade it today, she would talk about the books that made her who she is and why they are banned.
A friend from my college class shared this video, which is a montage of pop culture in the 1950s.
All the girls were beautiful, the guys were handsome, the dances were fast and frenetic. The highest achievement was getting that handsome guy to kiss your lips. Ah, those were the days.
A nagging feeling told me that these gorgeous women made me feel inadequate and ungainly. There must have been millions of girls like me, feeling somehow diminished by this feminine ideal of pulchritude.
I’m posting this because today is my birthday, and it’s a good day to wallow in the past. We were so hopeful then and believed that progress was inevitable. As more people were educated, we assumed, we would have a society that got better and better for everyone. We were naive.
This is one of the best letters that Heather Cox Richardson has written since I started reading her posts. It puts the current Supreme Court’s radical decisions into historical perspective. This Court, hand-picked by Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, is engaged in a shameless effort to move the clock back to the world as it existed before the New Deal. This Court threatens our democracy and our rights.
She writes:
Today the Supreme Court followed up on yesterday’s decision gutting affirmative action with three decisions that will continue to push the United States back to the era before the New Deal.
In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis the court said that the First Amendment protects website designer Lorie Smith from having to use words she doesn’t believe in support of gay marriage. To get there, the court focused on the marriage website designer’s contention that while she is willing to work with LGBTQ customers, she doesn’t want to use her own words on a personalized website to celebrate gay marriages. Because of that unwillingness, she said, she wants to post on her website that she will not make websites for same-sex weddings. She says she is afraid that in doing so, she will run afoul of Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws, which prevent public businesses from discriminating against certain groups of people.
This whole scenario of being is prospective, by the way: her online business did not exist and no one had complained about it. Smith claims she wants to start the business because “God is calling her ‘to explain His true story about marriage.’” She alleges that in 2016, a gay man approached her to make a website for his upcoming wedding, but yesterday, Melissa Gira Grant of The New Republic reported that, while the man allegedly behind the email does exist, he is an established designer himself (so why would he hire someone who was not?), is not gay, and married his wife 15 years ago. He says he never wrote to Smith, and the stamp on court filings shows she received it the day after she filed the suit.
Despite this history, by a 6–3 vote, the court said that Smith was being hurt by the state law and thus had standing to sue. It decided that requiring the designer to use her own words to support gay marriage violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.
Taken together with yesterday’s decision ruling that universities cannot consider race as a category in student admissions, the Supreme Court has highlighted a central contradiction in its interpretation of government power: if the Fourteenth Amendment limits the federal government to making sure that there is no discrimination in the United States on the basis of race—the so-called “colorblind” Constitution—as the right-wing justices argued yesterday, it is up to the states to make sure that state laws don’t discriminate against minorities. But that requires either protecting voting rights or accepting minority rule.
This problem has been with us since before the Civil War, when lawmakers in the southern states defended their enslavement of their Black (and Indigenous) neighbors by arguing that true democracy was up to the voters and that those voters had chosen to support enslavement. After the Civil War, most lawmakers didn’t worry too much about states reimposing discriminatory laws because they included Black men as voters first in 1867 with the Military Reconstruction Act and then in 1870 with the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and they believed such political power would enable Black men to shape the laws under which they lived.
But in 1875 the Supreme Court ruled in Minor v. Happersett that it was legal to cut citizens out of the vote so long as the criteria were not about race. States excluded women, who brought the case, and southern states promptly excluded Black men through literacy clauses, poll taxes, and so on. Northern states mirrored southern laws with their own, designed to keep immigrants from exercising a voice in state governments. At the same time, southern states protected white men from the effects of these exclusionary laws with so-called grandfather clauses, which said a man could vote so long as his grandfather had been eligible.
It turned out that limiting the Fourteenth Amendment to questions of race and letting states choose their voters cemented the power of a minority. The abandonment of federal protection for voting enabled white southerners to abandon democracy and set up a one-party state that kept Black and Brown Americans as well as white women subservient to white men. As in all one-party states, there was little oversight of corruption and no guarantee that laws would be enforced, leaving minorities and women at the mercy of a legal system that often looked the other way when white criminals committed rape and murder.
Many Americans tut-tutted about lynching and the cordons around Black life, but industrialists insisted on keeping the federal government small because they wanted to make sure it could not regulate their businesses or tax them. They liked keeping power at the state level; state governments were far easier to dominate. Southerners understood that overlap: when a group of southern lawmakers in 1890 wrote a defense of the South’s refusal to let Black men vote, they “respectfully dedicated” the book to “the business men of the North.”
In the 1930s the Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt undermined this coalition by using the federal government to regulate business and provide a social safety net. In the 1940s and 1950s, as racial and gender atrocities began to highlight in popular media just how discriminatory state laws really were, the Supreme Court went further, recognizing that the Fourteenth Amendment’s declaration that states could not deprive any person of the equal protection of the laws meant that the federal government must protect the rights of minorities when states would not. Those rules created modern America.
This is what the radical right seeks to overturn. Yesterday the Supreme Court said that the Fourteenth Amendment could not address racial disparities, but today, like lawmakers in the 1870s, it signaled that it would not protect voting in the states either. It rejected a petition for a review of Mississippi’s strict provision for taking the vote away from felons. That law illustrates just how fully we’re reliving our history: it dates from the 1890 Mississippi constitution that cemented power in white hands. Black Mississippians are currently 2.7 times more likely than white Mississippians to lose the right to vote under the law.
The court went even further today than allowing states to choose their voters. It said that even if state voters do call for minority protections, as Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws do, states cannot protect minorities in the face of someone’s religious beliefs. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that for “the first time in its history,” the court has granted “a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”
It is worth noting that segregation was defended as a deeply held religious belief.
Today, using a case concerning school loans, the Supreme Court also took aim at the power of the federal government to regulate business. In Biden v. Nebraska the court declared by a vote of 6 to 3 that President Biden’s loan forgiveness program, which offered to forgive up to $20,000 of federally held student debt, was unconstitutional. The right-wing majority of the court argued that Congress had not intended to give that much power to the executive branch, although the forgiveness plan was based on law that gave the secretary of education the power to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs…as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a…national emergency…to ensure” that “recipients of student financial assistance…are not placed in a worse position financially in relation to that financial assistance because of [the national emergency]”.
The right-wing majority based its decision on the so-called major questions doctrine, invented to claw back regulatory power from the federal government. By saying that Congress cannot delegate significant decisions to federal agencies, which are in the executive branch, the court takes on itself the power to decide what a “significant” decision is. The court established this new doctrine in the West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agencycase, stripping the EPA of its ability to regulate certain kinds of air pollution.
“Let’s not beat around the bush,” constitutional analyst Ian Millhiser wrote today in Vox, today’s decision in Biden v. Nebraska “is complete and utter nonsense. It rewrites a federal law which explicitly authorizes the loan forgiveness program, and it relies on a fake legal doctrine known as ‘major questions’ which has no basis in any law or any provision of the Constitution.”
Today’s Supreme Court, packed as it has been by right-wing money behind the Federalist Society and that society’s leader, Leonard Leo, is taking upon itself power over the federal government and the state governments to recreate the world that existed before the New Deal.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called out the lurch toward turning the government over to the wealthy, supported as it is by religious footsoldiers like Lorie Smith: “Today, the court substituted itself for Congress,” Cardona told reporters. “It’s outrageous to me that Republicans in Congress and state offices fought so hard against a program that would have helped millions of their own constituents. They had no problem handing trillion-dollar tax cuts to big corporations and the super wealthy.”
Cardona made his point personal: “And many had no problems accepting millions of dollars in forgiven pandemic loans, like Senator Markwayne Mullin from Oklahoma had more than $1.4 million in pandemic loans forgiven. He represents 489,000 eligible borrowers that were turned down today. Representative Brett Guthrie from Kentucky had more than $4.4 million forgiven. He represents more than 90,000 eligible borrowers who were turned down today. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia had more than $180,000 forgiven. She represents more than 91,800 eligible borrowers who were turned down today.”
In the majority opinion of Biden v. Nebraska, Chief Justice John Roberts lamented that those who dislike the court’s decisions have accused the court of “going beyond the proper role of the judiciary.” He defended the court’s decision and urged those who disagreed with it not to disparage the court because “such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country.” But what is at stake is not simply these individual decisions, whether or not you agree with them; at stake is the way our democracy operates.
Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute didn’t offer much hope for Roberts’s plea. “It is not just the rulings the Roberts Court is making,” he tweeted. “They created out of [w]hole cloth a bogus, major questions doctrine. They made a mockery of standing. They rewrite laws to fit their radical ideological preferences. They have unilaterally blown up the legitimacy of the Court.”
In a shot across the bow of this radical court, in her dissent to Biden v. Nebraska, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that “the Court, by deciding this case, exercises authority it does not have. It violates the Constitution.”
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The web designer who won her case today in the Supreme Court has not yet opened her business and has not been asked to design a wedding website for a gay couple. I’m not sure why she had standing to overturn the state’s anti-discrimination law when she has no business.
The case, though framed as a clash between free speech and gay rights, was the latest in a series of decisions in favor of religious people and groups, notably conservative Christians, who celebrated the ruling on Friday as a victory for religious freedom.
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the ruling “profoundly wrong,” arguing that the Colorado anti-discrimination law “targets conduct, not speech, for regulation, and the act of discrimination has never constituted protected expression under the First Amendment. Our Constitution contains no right to refuse service to a disfavored group.”
The designer, Lorie Smith, said her Christian faith requires her to turn away customers seeking wedding-related services to celebrate same-sex unions. She added that she intends to post a message saying the company’s policy is a product of her religious convictions.
A Colorado law forbids discrimination against gay people by businesses open to the public as well as statements announcing such discrimination. Ms. Smith, who has not begun the wedding business or posted the proposed statement for fear of running afoul of the law, sued to challenge it, saying it violated her rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion.
But when the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, 303 Creative L.L.C. v. Elenis, No. 21-476, it agreed to decide only one question: “whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent violates the free speech clause of the First Amendment.”
In a news conference Friday in Washington, Ms. Smith said she was grateful to the court, who “affirmed today that Colorado can’t force me or anyone to say something we don’t believe.”
Here’s what else to know:
- Progressive interfaith groups and L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy organizations around the country condemned the ruling. Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement that the ruling was “a deeply troubling crack in our progress and should be alarming to us all.”
- Both sides have said that the consequences of the court’s ruling could be enormous, though for different reasons. Ms. Smith’s supporters said a decision for the state would allow the government to force all sorts of artists to state things at odds with their beliefs. Her opponents said a ruling in her favor would blow a hole through anti-discrimination laws and allow businesses engaged in expression to refuse service to, for example, Black people or Muslims based on odious but sincerely held convictions.
- The decision appeared to suggest that the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. people, including to same-sex marriage, are on more vulnerable legal footing, particularly when they are at odds with claims of religious freedom. At the same time, the ruling limited the ability of the governments to enforce anti-discrimination laws.
- Lower courts have generally sided with gay and lesbian couples who were refused service by bakeries, florists and others, ruling that potential customers are entitled to equal treatment, at least in parts of the country with laws forbidding discrimination based on sexual orientation.
On her dissent, Justice Sotomayer wrote:
The unattractive lesson of the maiority opinion is this: What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours. The lesson of the history of public accommodations laws is altogether different. It is that in a free and democratic society, there can be no social castes. And for that to be true, it must be true in the public market. For the “promise of freedom” is an empty one if the Government is “powerless to assure that a dollar in the hands of lone person] will purchase the
same thing as a dollar in the hands of another].” Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 392 U. S. 409, 443 (1968). Because the Court today retreats from that promise, I dissent.
There’s been a rash of unexplained “suicides” since Putin invaded Ukraine. Was it something they said?
The young vice president of a Russian bank plunged to her death from her 11th-floor apartment window in Moscow, marking yet another mysterious fatal fall in the country, according to reports.
Kristina Baikova, the 28-year-old VP of Loko-Bank, plummeted from her window June 23 and was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the Baza Telegram channel…
Dan Rapoport, a well-known critic of President Vladimir Putin who was exiled from Russia, was found dead after plunging from his Washington, DC, luxury apartment building last August in what some had suggested was a suicide — claims his wife disputed.
Weeks later, Russian oil giant Lukoil chair Ravil Maganov fell from a sixth-floor window at a hospital in Moscow and died. Before his death, Lukoil had been vocal in its criticism of Putin and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to Euro Weekly News.
Then in December, the creative director of an IT company, Grigory Kochenov, plunged from his apartment balcony and fell to his death while Russian authorities searched his apartment.
The same month, a Russian sausage tycoon fell to his death from a hotel window in India just two days after his friend, also from Russia, died at the same hotel. A Russian real estate tycoon also took a fatal tumble down a flight of stairs while in the French Riviera in December.
And earlier this month, a federal judge, Artyom Bartenev, fell 12 stories from his apartment building and was pronounced dead at the scene.
The Daily Mail has a long list of other business tycoons, oligarchs and government officials who mysteriously died. Some fell from a high window, some fell down the stairs, some became ill and suddenly died. Not to worry. The KGB is investigating.
The United States Supreme Court has been on a rightwing roll, eliminating affirmative action yesterday, now upholding discrimination against gays, and striking down Biden’s attempt to provide relief to student debtors. The five conservative justices rewarded the faith that Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society placed in them. They were chosen based on their extreme ideology.
This morning, the Court ruled that a person who objects to gays need not do business with them. Colorado bans discrimination based on sexual orientation, but the Extreme Court struck down the state law. The justices in the majority based their decision of free speech rights, upholding the view that the web designer’s free speech was impaired if she had to do work for gay people.
WASHINGTON (AP) — In a defeat for gay rights, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled Friday that a Christian graphic artist who wants to design wedding websites can refuse to work with same-sex couples.
The court ruled 6-3 for designer Lorie Smith despite a Colorado law that bars discrimination based on sexual orientation, race, gender and other characteristics. Smith had argued that the law violates her free speech rights.
Smith’s opponents warned that a win for her would allow a range of businesses to discriminate, refusing to serve Black, Jewish or Muslim customers, interracial or interfaith couples or immigrants. But Smith and her supporters had said that a ruling against her would force artists — from painters and photographers to writers and musicians — to do work that is against their beliefs.
“The First Amendment envisions the United States as a rich and complex place where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court’s six conservative justices.
The student debt decision was also 6-3, with the conservative justices knocking out Biden’s efforts to reduce the financial burden on millions of people.
The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority struck down President Biden’s proposal to cancel at least some student debt for tens of millions of borrowers, saying it overstepped the powers of the Education Department.
In a 6-to-3 decision, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that a mass debt cancellation program of such significance required clear congressional authorization.
Citing the same authority the Trump and Biden administrations used to pause student loan payments during the pandemic, Mr. Biden promised in August to forgive $10,000 in debt for individuals earning less than $125,000 per year, or $250,000 per household, and $20,000 for those who received Pell grants for low-income families.
Nearly 26 million borrowers have applied to have some of their student loan debt erased, with 16 million applications approved. But no debts have been forgiven or additional applications accepted in light of the legal challenges.
I hope that all 26 million indebted people vote for Biden. He tried.
The Miami Herald editorial board published the following editorial about the end of meaningful gun control in Florida. Elect DeFascist and every American will be armed or fearful of leaving their home. This is a way to erode trust among citizens. Which lunatic bought a gun? Who’s packing heat? You? You? You?
Anyone with good sense in Florida is dreading July 1.
That’s the day when the state starts allowing people over the age of 21 to carry a concealed weapon without a permit and without any gun training — at all.
It’s the terrible law that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the complicit Legislature pushed through this session as they piled aboard the DeSantis-for-president train, intent on giving the governor the rightest of far-right of platforms to run on, in the hope of siphoning support from Donald Trump.
Florida isn’t the only state to do it. In fact, it’s the 26th, joining Kentucky, Alabama, Maine and Texas, among others.
But in a state that spawned the “Florida man” meme, lowering restrictions on guns is crazy. And scary.
You don’t have to look far to see why. Just a few weeks ago, on June 15, a Dunedin man emptied his assault rifle at a pool cleaner he thought was an intruder.
It was around 9 p.m., and the man and his wife were watching a movie when they heard noises coming from their patio and saw a man walking around their pool. They said they yelled at him to go away and told deputies that they didn’t recognize him.
The wife, sensibly, called 911. The husband got his gun. He saw a flashlight and fired into the back yard — from behind his couch, through closed blinds.
lIt was their 33-year-old pool cleaner who had been cleaning their pool for at least six months and was running behind schedule.
He wasn’t hit by a bullet, only glass and shrapnel. And of course, he ran. But the homeowner, with the blinds closed, thought someone was still outside. So, as video footage shared by the local sheriff shows, almost a minute after the cleaner ran from the pool deck, the man emptied the magazine of his rifle into the back yard. He shot a total of 30 rounds in about 90 seconds. Stray bullets were found on the shuffleboard court behind the couple’s home.
Will the homeowner face charges? Under Florida’s existing “stand your ground” law, which allows a homeowner to fire at someone he thinks is a threat, apparently not.
Sheriff Bob Gualtieri of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office offered the right assessment of the situation in a June 26 news conference: “It’s probably one of those things that I would call lawful but awful.”
And now we will have “permitless carry” in Florida. With it, no doubt, will come more “lawful but awful” situations. And deadly ones, too.
Can’t wait for July 1.
Peter Greene writes here about the latest news from Pennsylvania, where he lives. The Republican-dominated state senate passed a voucher bill. Newly elected Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro has said he supports vouchers. He’s getting lots of kudos from Rightwingers. Is this why we was elected? It’s now up to House Democrats, who have a sliver majority, to stop this giveaway to private and religious schools.
Peter Greene writes:
Choicers in Pennsylvania are so close they can taste it, and everyone has come off the bench to help push this newest bill past a governor who has said he likes vouchers just fine—under certain condition. This is from my piece from Forbes.com this morning.
Democrat Josh Shapiro made no secret of his support for school vouchers when he was campaigning for the Pennsylvania governor’s seat. Now conservatives are pushing him to put that support to work.
The Senate passed the newest school voucher bill Thursday night; House Democrats say that it will not advance. Supporters are still hoping that it can be saved in the budget process.
The Lifeline Scholarship Program has been kicking around Harrisburg in a variety of bills that presented a variety of school voucher formats as voucher supporters looked for a version that would garner enough support to pass. The current iteration is a traditional school voucher, essentially a taxpayer funded tuition subsidy for students attending private schools.
Under this bill, students in the lowest 15% of schools in the commonwealth (as determined by standardized test scores) would be eligible.
The vouchers, named a top priority by Pennsylvania’s GOP, have become a key part of the current budget negotiations in the state that is already under a court order to fix its funding system for public schools.
The voucher system would be a chance for school voucher proponents to get their foot in the door, an especially tasty victory in a state with a Democratic governor. To add to the pressure to pass, a coalition of right wing voucher fans has sent Shapiro a letter arguing for the voucher program.
Open the link to the article to find the link to the entire article in Forbes.
Diane Ravitch's blog 