Idea: “Dobbs was never self-limiting to abortion—it was a save-the-date card for the religious right’s plan to come for the rest of our reproductive freedoms. …
This is the two-step wherein the state forces women to have babies they cannot raise, does nothing to help support them, then swoops in to seize the babies when their parents are seen as endangering them—a phenomenon that of course predominantly hurts poor women and women of color. The state also ensures that adoptions flow in the direction of more “worthy” parents, which means heterosexual and Christian parents, a regime also built into the legal framework. The list of people who cannot assert autonomy and control over their potential children has, in the course of a few weeks, now expanded from LGBTQ+ parents, single parents, poor parents, and parents of color to anyone who has started the process of IVF in Alabama.” —The IVF Ruling Is About Who Gets to Raise Your Children— Dahlia Lithwick in SLATE.
I’d like to publicly thank my son, who spent 35 minutes reading through the entire Dramatis Personae of the Pokémon universe into my phone, in a monotone, to create a soundtrack to help me fall asleep at night. At the end of the list, he even began an open-ended discussion of “cool cars,” including one with a V-12 engine —something that has reliably caused slumber when he broached the subject in the afternoon. Here’s hoping, because I have pretty much stopped sleeping at night altogether.
According to the Pokémon Super Deluxe Essential Handbook, “An important part of a Trainer’s job is to take good care of his or her Pokémon.” I feel very taken care of today!
The routines of journalists are based on assumptions of how candidates will behave and Trump violates all those assumptions. And so the routines break, and the practices break, and they don’t want to reinvent their routines, so they sort of keep on with the tools that they have, and they don’t apply to Donald Trump. And one of the best examples of that is the whole notion of a gaffe — a candidate lets something really damaging slip from his or her tongue, and it becomes a controversy and distracts from what the candidate is trying to accomplish. The entire presidency of Donald Trump is a gaffe. It’s a twenty times a day gaffe, and so to even use that term with Biden —which the campaign press did earlier in the year, talking about his gaffes— is kind of crazy there’s something lunatic about it. But it’s an example of clinging to your practices after the premises underneath them have fallen through.
Not so ancient inspiration: A cynical young person is almost the saddest sight to see, because it means that he or she has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. — Maya Angelou
Valerie Block 