9/10,11, and 12

The world was bigger then. Our two oceans provided us with the same illusion of protection our grandparents enjoyed

It's not just that I am a man who was born and raised in New York City. It's not just that my family goes back generations here: my dad and his two brothers were cops who patrolled its streets, and my mom worked on the 97th floor of Tower One. ...
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9/10,11, and 12

Creeping Fascism

The Texas law attacking reproductive justice is the antithesis of both law and democracy

_____ Is there any other phrase for the events that have activated the Texas abortion law other than “creeping fascism”?  First, the ban itself is essentially an anti-law, designed to promote vigilantism. In itself, that’s not surprising. S.B. 8 is the culmination not just of numerous state-level laws that have narrowed abortion ...
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Creeping Fascism

By Turning Law Enforcement Over to ‘Abortion Vigilantes,’ Texas Uses Lawlessness to Destabilize Equal Treatment Under Law

So far, it has the Supreme Court’s blessing

_____ The United States Supreme Court finally spoke about a new Texas law that, in effect, creates a market for abortion vigilantism, according to the Editorial Board’s Mia Brett. While the law stands, it invalidates Roe. The high court should have said any law that invalidates a 50-year-old court precedent recognizing ...
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By Turning Law Enforcement Over to ‘Abortion Vigilantes,’ Texas Uses Lawlessness to Destabilize Equal Treatment Under Law

How Banning Abortion Will Transform America

The Texas ruling takes us one step closer to the state surveillance of Ceaușescu’s Romania

_____ Across the United States, Republican-controlled legislatures are outlawing abortion, with the hope of bringing the issue before a sympathetic Supreme Court. If they succeed in revoking women's reproductive rights, the U.S. will quickly become a different society—one resembling Communist-era Romania.  “It was a horrible time,” recounts one Romanian gynecologist, referring to the period ...
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How Banning Abortion Will Transform America

Handing Power Back to the Vigilantes

Texas’s new abortion ban erodes the power of the federal government to protect civil rights, and there is no reason that this mechanism couldn’t be used to undermine much more.

_____ The new anti-abortion law in Texas is not just about abortion; it is about undermining civil rights decisions made by the Supreme Court during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The Supreme Court declined to stop a state law that violates a constitutional right. Since World War II, the Supreme Court has ...
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Handing Power Back to the Vigilantes

Texas Women Just Lost Their Right to Their Own Bodies

It’s time to fight back, and time to understand the anti-feminist backlash that allowed this to happen.

_____ I am frothing and devastated watching the Supreme Court allow Texas to functionally overturn Roe v. Wade. I’m angry in a million different directions: At the woman-hating “pro-life” movement that has spent decades working up to this moment; at Democrats who have never done enough to preserve abortion rights; at ...
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Texas Women Just Lost Their Right to Their Own Bodies

The 2021 Voting Rights March, a Photo Essay

August 28 has become an anniversary to celebrate the accomplishments of African-Americans and to demand more rights

_____ August 28 has become an anniversary to celebrate the accomplishments of African-Americans and to demand more rights. The first one in 1963 was a March for Jobs and Freedom. The latest was a demand for a federal bill to stop state voter suppression laws. The first one brought 250,000 people ...
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The 2021 Voting Rights March, a Photo Essay

Will GOP Voters Go to War with Corporations Over New Vaccine Mandates?

And what are Republican leaders going to do when the civil society moves in the direction of good public health?

_____ Now that the Food and Drug Administration has finally given its full blessing to the Pfizer BioNTech shot, the president is jawboning corporate leaders into establishing mandates requiring employees to be vaccinated. This is not a reversal, as some reporters have said. Joe Biden is not ordering firms to do ...
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Will GOP Voters Go to War with Corporations Over New Vaccine Mandates?

Individualism Vs. the Common Good in America

For all that Republicans insist that individualism is the heart of Americanism, in fact the history of federal protection of the common good began in the 1860s

_____ America is in a watershed moment. Since the 1980s, the country has focused on individualism: the idea that the expansion of the federal government after the Depression in the 1930s created a form of collectivism that we must destroy by cutting taxes and slashing regulation to leave individuals free to ...
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Individualism Vs. the Common Good in America

Cuomo and the Buffalo Bills’ Billion

When a political scandal and a stadium subsidy collide

_____ New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced his resignation last week following the release of a report by New York Attorney General Tish James showing that Cuomo had sexually harassed several women. When Cuomo officially leaves office next week, Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul will take over. Cuomo has been governor for more ...
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Cuomo and the Buffalo Bills’ Billion

The 20-Year Militarization of Our Borders Has Failed like the 20-Year Military Occupation of Afghanistan. Let’s End Both

They cause more harm than good

_____ The conventional wisdom in Washington already appears to be that the president made a huge mistake by failing to evacuate Americans and Afghans before that government’s collapse and the Taliban took over. I suppose that’s the result of a video from Kabul in which desperate people are witnessed doing desperate ...
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The 20-Year Militarization of Our Borders Has Failed like the 20-Year Military Occupation of Afghanistan. Let’s End Both

Redistricting and Race in the 2020 Census

Will an increasingly urbanizing, multicultural nation continue to accept being governed by an ever-smaller white, rural minority?

_____ Last week, the Census Bureau released information about the 2020 census, designed to enable states to start the process of drawing new lines for their congressional districts, a process known as redistricting. Because of that very limited intent for this particular information dump, the picture the material gives is a very ...
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Redistricting and Race in the 2020 Census