16 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread”

1. have a good day

    

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2. Same to ya…

   Things still seem  a little squirrelly….

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3. Hi! Would it be possible to make the "# Comments" indicator at the top of the post link to the comments section? 

   Also, it would be great if when viewing the comments I have made in the "My Account" section I could click on the comments to go to them (to see if anyone responded).

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4. "I never dreamed about success. I worked for it."

   Estee Lauder, co-founder Estee Lauder Companies

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   1. Estée Lauder, co-founder Estée Lauder Companies

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5. I know the new favicon for Colorado Pols is supposed to be the top of the capitol dome tilted over like the one in the main site image. But it really is not very effective at that tiny size. I think a new icon should be crafted that helps people quickly identify the browser tabs visually. 

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6. Who’d have thunk?  The War on Rural
   Colorado was just a figment of someone’s imagination? 
    

   Tri-State G&T’s plans for its coal plants

   In planning for the years 2026-2031, Tri-State Generation and Transmission wants to hasten its exits from two coal plants and add a ton of new wind and solar generation plus battery storage. This is to supplemented by new electrical production from natural gas.

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   1. Jeez, it's almost like coal-fired plants aren't worth it anymore

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      1. Thank Goddess we don’t have the billion-dollar+  boondoogle in Holcomb, KS around our neck.  (Thank you Bill Ritter, Kathleen Sebelius, etal. )

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7. Temple Grandin is a Colorado treasure. 

   Temple Grandin's new children's book uplifts young kids who think differently
    

   "Middle and elementary school is when we need to be exposing kids to hands-on stuff; art, tools and music. If you don't expose kids to things, you don't know what they may be good at," Grandin told CBS News Colorado's Dillon Thomas.

   Grandin, who lives with autism, is one of the most influential people in the agriculture industry. Though she was non-verbal until she was four years old, she has since blossomed into an inventor, professor, speaker and entrepreneur.

    

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8. "WOTD: abortion care is identical to miscarriage care". Kate Riga at Talking Points Memo.

   The case of Kate Cox, the 31-year-old mother of two in Texas who sued to end a nonviable pregnancy heaped with health risks to herself, has attracted nationwide horror for its sheer brutality. 

   Her fetus, at best, might have a brief and painful life; in the process of giving birth, Cox could be seriously sickened and left unable to have more children in the future.  

   Hers is not a singular tragedy, an unforeseeable aberration that left her in the cracks of a warm and generous Texas regime. The Texas abortion ban, no matter what anti-abortion activists and lawmakers say, was meant to prevent women like Cox from getting abortions as much as it was to ban young women from ending unwanted pregnancies early in the first trimester. 

   The abortion rights movement, with good reason, has often focused on abortion bans lacking exceptions (for pregnancies from rape or incest, or for fetal anomalies) as proof of their cruelty. But any notion that exemptions would spare the Kate Coxes of the world was always fantasy. 

   In the Texas ban, the combination of subjective, non-medical language — when is a condition “life threatening”? When is a bodily function “at risk” of “substantial impairment”? — and hefty penalties — including first or second degree felony charges, $100,000 fines for each violation and loss of medical license — guarantees that health care providers will read the exceptions narrowly. 

   And by stripping the courts of any ability to make that judgment, the state Supreme Court is pretending that providers, lacking any true agency under threat of such dire punishments, have the freedom to make the call in the often quickly shifting and uncertain terrain of emergency health care.

   “The law leaves to physicians — not judges — both the discretion and the responsibility to exercise their reasonable medical judgment, given the unique facts and circumstances of each patient,” the court hand-waved in a Monday night ruling against Cox’s right to get an abortion in-state.

   But it just as quickly invalidated that professional discretion when it flowed against the court’s ideological preference. When Cox’s doctor was brave enough to express her belief that Cox needed an abortion to avoid the serious harms covered by the ban’s exceptions — in a way that protected herself from running afoul of the law, and spoke to the unpredictable state of Cox’s health — the court simply nitpicked her opinion away. 

   “By requiring the doctor to exercise ‘reasonable medical judgment,’ the Legislature determined that the medical judgment involved must meet an objective standard. Dr. Karsan asserted that she has a ‘good faith belief’ that Ms. Cox meets the exception’s requirements,” the court wrote, adding: “But the statute requires that judgment be a ‘reasonable medical’ judgment, and Dr. Karsan has not asserted that her ‘good faith belief’ about Ms. Cox’s condition meets that standard.”

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   1. I have a serious hypothetical question about federal legislation. If it meant guaranteeing that abortion was legal in all 50 states during the first and second trimesters, would folks accept a ban on third trimester abortions subject to a narrow life-of-the-mother exception?

      In other words, in all those red states where it is currently illegal, it would become legal, and in all those blue states, it would be significanlty curtailed in the third trimester.

       

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      1. First, that will never happen federally. Second, we do not want or need a law to interfere with decisions that women must make with her health care provider and her family. When there are laws governing the reproductive rights of men, then we can revisit the issue.

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9. Yay! I signed onto the site today using my good ole IPAD safari browser! Progress Pols!

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   1. Me too. Finally. Feel like I have been in detention for two weeks.

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   2. That's great news! We've been working hard every night to solve these problems.

      Remember all users: shift+refresh is your best friend when something goes weird. In many cases you just haven't loaded the updated code that fixes stuff. Thanks for your continued support and patience.

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