17 thoughts on “Thursday Open Thread”

1. Apparently the Supreme Court has been leaking bits and bobs about the Roe v Wade discussion to the RightWing legal community as well as to the Wall Street Journal.

   The thought is that leaking Alito's draft decision is intended to keep the five Christian Nationalist Justices all on board, making it harder for Roberts to pull someone off to less extreme opinion.

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   1. Heather Cox-Richardson says the same thing:

      The uproar over the leaked draft of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade continues. You can tell just how furious the reaction has been by the fact that establishment Republicans are desperately trying to turn the public conversation to the question of who leaked the document. They are baselessly blaming the opposition to the decision—a Newsmax host blamed Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who hasn’t even taken her seat yet—for the leak, although observers point out that the leak seems more likely to have come from a hard-core right-wing antiabortion activist, since it will make it very hard for any of those justices currently in the majority to soften their stance.

      The draft decision takes a sweepingly broad position against Roe v. Wade, declaring that the Fourteenth Amendment cannot protect the right to abortion because such a right is not “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” This opens the door to similar attacks on constitutional rights previously established by the Supreme Court: the right to use birth control, marry regardless of race and gender lines, and engage in sexual intimacy between consenting adults. 

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      1. Another HC-R quote:

         Rebecca Solnit pointed out in The Guardian, the various groups now under attack form a broad coalition. “It doesn’t really matter if they’re coming for you, because they’re coming for us,” she wrote. And “[u]s these days means pretty much everyone who’s not a straight white Christian man with rightwing politics.” 

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   2. This was an interesting, nerdy take on the leak.  https://matthewbutterick.com/chron/what-we-can-deduce-from-a-leaked-pdf.html?fbclid=IwAR19qO9pCr075umxt0hUg8wIkmWiqu4Ty4rt6RPBXNy9-OjZzcz-zJDaSkI

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   3. And Here’s Josh Marshall assembling the timeline:

      Essential reading, as Josh cites other evidence of leaks dating back to February.

      As I wrote below, the rapid-fire follow-up reporting on John Roberts’ position on the Mississippi case, just hours after the Politico exclusive, made me think at the time that the leaked draft opinion wasn’t a one off thing. It seemed part of a larger breakdown of secrecy or on-going leaks tied to the Mississippi abortion case. You don’t come up with details about the Chief Justice’s position and arguments from internal deliberations on one of the biggest cases in decades in an hour and a half if you’re beginning from a cold start. Then this morning I found out about this Wall Street Journal opinion page editorial from April 26th in which they fairly transparently write about current Court deliberations in the Mississippi case, specifically that John Roberts was trying to pull an unnamed conservative Justice back from fully overturning Roe.

      …

      As I noted below, I think we know now that news of these internal deliberations had begun leaking out into the right-wing legal/media world back in April and that there was the kind of expected pressure campaign to make sure the five Justices held firm. In that context, given the most likely impact of the leak, the unprecedented nature of it and the fact that reporters had such immediate access to other details about the deliberations, it seems all but certain that the leak of the opinion to Politico was part of that pressure campaign. That’s clearly what Blackman thinks. And he could see all the signs even before the Politico piece was published.

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   4. My money is on Clarence or Ginny Thomas. They have the motive, the morality (i.e. immorality), the opportunity, and the means (network of right-wing ex-clerks.

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      1. Mine too. They also have the anger – for getting caught already in trying to overthrow our government. 

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      2. An alternative explanation from Scotus Blog suggests that the liberal side released Alito's actual draft in response to a steady flow of leaks about the deliberations that have been fed to the WSJ and right wing lawyers.

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2. Leaking the draft and watching the uproad does NOTHING for any of the 3 remaining progressives or their clerks.

   Take off the career staff and administrators, too.  Had it been one of them, there wouldn't have been much of the background knowledge the Politico writers would look for to validate the draft and set the tone of the article.

   I don't see the clerks of the Roberts and righter Justices acting on their own.  That would jeopardize legal careers. 

   Which leaves:  CJ Roberts and any allies he might have, wanting to demonstrate what will happen to the Court if the extreme view prevails.

   J. Alito and his allies trying to show to "own the libs" and lock in solidarity.  And a variant — Ginni Thomas, in her usual role as the middle person between types of RWNJs, the conservative legal community, funders, and elected Republican politicians.

   A LBJ was alleged to have said, make an outrageous claim and make the sumbitch deny it.

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3. CD3 voters  VOTE CORAM in primary and take out the trash regardless of your party desires or affiliation.

   PLEASE get rid of Boobert Bam Bam. 

   Got her weekly email blast and its repugnant as well as ignorant. 

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4. Hat tip to Mark Summers at DailyKos "The Popasna Polka".

   Apparently the Ukrainian army is well-dug in on the frontier with the breakaway Eastern regions. The Russian army keeps attacking Popasna and failing:

   Russian tanks and infantry move into the town.
   The defenders are hiding in massive concrete bunkers, with windows to shoot at the invaders.
   Eventually the invaders get in close, so the defenders close big concrete windows
   And they call in artillery to shell their own positions.

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5. Apparently posing in women's underwear wasn't enough ….

   Cawthorn calls nude tape ‘blackmail’ | The Hill

   Question:  Will Madison Cawthorn be the next Carlos Danger?

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   1. When this boy first came on the scene, he pinged my gay-dar. I told myself I was being silly, after all he was clearly the enemy. Now I'm not so sure I was wrong.

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      1. Can you use your gaydar as a targeting mechanism for the Jewish Space Lasers?
         Asking for a friend.

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   2. His wheelchair is in the room so this was after he was (theoretically, but a lie) admitted to the Academy?  This isn’t an eigth-grade antic, this is an adult who ran on a family values platform? 

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      1. The thing about all of these people, Cawthorn, Gaetz, Bobo, Empty G, and even their Orange Master, is that they don't actually, deep down believe in a damn thing they are screaming about. It's all a big performance for them, like a game show. For a while I thought they were die hard believers; but they're there just for the money and attention. There are no belief systems or principles involved.

         Performative scam artists all. What a sick fucking bunch.

          

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         1. Right. J.D. Vance will pivot and run to the left of Tim Ryan. 

            It's all about winning and power. When you're up against that cynicism, it makes the Democratic messaging really inept.

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