Heidi Przbyla at Politico reports on yet more degradation of the Supreme Court: Princeton Professor Robert P. George, a leader of the conservative legal movement and confidant of the judicial activist and Donald Trump ally Leonard Leo, made the case for overturning Roe v. Wade in an amicus brief a year before the Supreme Court issued its watershed ruling. Roe, George claimed, had been decided based on “plain historical falsehoods.” For instance, for centuries dating to English common law, he asserted, abortion has been considered a crime or “a kind of inchoate felony for felony-murder purposes.” The argument was echoed in dozens of amicus briefs supporting Mississippi’s restrictive abortion law in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court case that struck down the constitutional right to abortion in 2022. Seven months before the decision, the argument was featured in an article on the web page of the conservative legal network, the Federalist Society, where Leo is co-chair.
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That’s one explanation That Statista chart is from May 10, 2022. A followup from Oct 18, 2023 reports the market has cooled somewhat since last year. Nevertheless: While house prices have continuously grown in recent years, incomes have not followed at the same pace. That means that for aspiring homeowners, purchasing a home has become increasingly unaffordable. In a survey among people actively looking to buy a home, one in three millennials cited the high house prices as the main barrier to homeownership. Meanwhile, inflation is on the rise and has forced the Federal Reserve to introduce a gradual increase in interest rates, leading to a double increase in the cost of borrowing. As a result, homebuyer sentiment plummeted, Americans across all age groups agreeing that the current time was not a good time to buy a home. Home ownership is still one of the main ways Americans build wealth. If I were Gen Z, I’d be pissed too. The Redfin chart above is also from summer 2022.
Sleepwalking into dictatorship The first time I heard colonizer used was (IIRC) in Black Panther (2018). Since then the smear has caught on a bit, and not in a Martin Luther King sort of way. But that single word of dialogue served in the film to instantly replace the European view of Africa with an African view of Europeans. It carries racial connotations, but is anchored not as much in skin color as behavior, on what Europeans do. We’ve used enablers in the past to describe Donald Trump’s allies inside and outside of government. Former Rep. Liz Cheney offers on “CBS Sunday Morning” a more pointed term for Trump’s confederates based on what they do. They are collaborators, and she doesn’t mean colleagues. She deploys collaborators as the French Resistance might against the Vichy government. “If you look at what Donald Trump is trying to do, he can’t do it by himself,” Cheney tells John Dickerson. “He has to have collaborators.
There are dozens A Newsweek headline on Saturday caught my attention: Democratic 2024 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson compared the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Florida Democratic Party to the now defunct Soviet Union, telling Newsweek on Saturday that their actions ahead of the primaries are “essentially authoritarian.” Williamson, along with fellow Democratic contenders Cenk Uygur, a political commentator and creator of the The Young Turks, and Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, has slammed the Florida Democratic Party’s decision to not include their names on the primary ballot. Instead, Democratic voters in the southern state will only see Biden’s name listed—unless the decision is reversed. In an earlier story, Newsweek reminded readers that Uyger is ineligible to serve as president. But that’s an aside. As for the Florida Democratic Party, it’s been a mess for some time. Not that we can talk here in North Carolina where Democrats in 2022 opposed Green Party recognition. Unwisely, I think. I hope that’s changed.
Via Axios: Muslim Americans in several swing states are scheduled to gather in Michigan on Saturday to start a campaign they’re calling #AbandonBiden, a reflection of their outrage over President Biden‘s handling of the Israel-Hamas war. Arab American and Muslim American anger could hurt Biden’s re-election prospects in most of the 2024 swing states he won in 2020, as those groups have been heavily Democratic. Muslim American leaders from Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona, Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania are expected to meet in Dearborn, Mich., to start the new campaign. “This #AbandonBiden 2024 conference is set against the backdrop of the upcoming 2024 presidential election and the decision to withdraw support for President Biden due to his unwillingness to call for a ceasefire and protect innocents in Palestine and Israel,” the group said in a statement. “Leaders from swing states will work together to guarantee Biden’s loss in the 2024 election.” The campaign primarily will focus on social media for now, organizer Jaylani Hussein of Minneapolis tells Axios.
Trump has always been a sloppy speaker. But he’s not the same person he was, that’s clear. Someone pointed out the other day that the past and the present seem to be merging in his mind at times. The stuff where he’s talking about golden showers and how his wife took it and constantly saying that Obama is president are tells that something is off in his sense of time and place. Here are a couple more excerpts from speeches he gave this weekend. They are bizarrely disjointed even for him. Some are just the usual misspeaking but he doesn’t seem to realize he’s done it. In the past he would do some verbal gyration to cover it (of course, he would never say “excuse me” and correct himself as normal people do) but he just sails past this stuff now. This is just delusional: This is a massive Freudian slip: Of course, he’s also the same jackass he always was: The Flock of Seagulls hairdo gets more elaborate by the day. Can he not see it?
DeSantis tries to ape Trump again, in the stupidest way possible: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he would replace Obamacare with a “better plan” — part of an interview in which he criticized former President Donald Trump for failing to deliver on numerous policy promises during his term in the White House, including frequent pledges to replace the health care law. “Obamacare hasn’t worked,” DeSantis said in the interview with moderator Kristen Welker, which aired Sunday morning. “We are going to replace and supersede with a better plan.” He declined to provide details about how his plan would “supersede” Obamacare, also known as the Affordable Care Act, adding that his campaign would most likely roll out a proposal in the spring. I can’t wait. I think this is good. With all the Republicans now falling in line to repeal Obamacare and kill Social Security and Medicare, in addition to their hostility to abortion rights, I think we have the makings of a good domestic argument about the future. And they are on the wrong side of it.
As Israel resumes its bombing of Gaza, the risk of a wider regional war grows. Mouin Rabbani analyzes the military and propaganda battles between Hamas and Israel.
The post Two Months That Shook the World: The First Phase of the Gaza War appeared first on The Intercept.
Free at last! George Santos is Rep. Santos no more. In a bipartisan vote that handily exceeded the two-thirds requirement, the U.S. House voted to expel the mutiply indicted Santos on Friday morning. Not to worry, George Washington Anthony Elizabeth Taylor Devolder Kitara Julius Caesar Santos will land on his feet, even if he has (for now) denied he is in talks with “Dancing With the Stars.” He’ll have no trouble staying busy. Facing 23 felony charges (he has pleaded not guilty) Santos has a full schedule planning for his trial in September next year: The schemes laid out by prosecutors are wide ranging. Prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York say he falsified campaign reports with fake donations and fictional personal loans to artificially bolster his standing. They say he stole from donors, using their credit cards without authorization and through a Florida company called Redstone Strategies. And they have charged him with collecting more than $20,000 in unemployment payments when he was, in fact, employed. Prosecutors say that Mr. Santos used the money on personal expenses, including designer goods and credit card payments.
What a concept The passing of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman named to the U.S. Supreme Court, has received a flood of remembrances. But one in particular emphasizes what differentiates her from justices who came later. She was a politician first, “rising to become the majority leader of the Arizona state Senate” (Politico, Peter S. Canellos): In its history, the court has been divided almost evenly between justices whose primary experience was in electoral politics, law practice or academics, with many of the academic-minded justices having spent significant time as judges on federal courts. But over the years the profile of a judicial nominee shifted strongly in favor of scholarly judges. Today, potential Supreme Court justices tend to establish their judicial ambitions at a very early age, often in their 20s, attain lower-court appointments in their 30s or early 40s and thereby position themselves for appointment to the high court before they reach middle age.