Stephan: This is what a country gets when it doesn't have a healthcare system, only an illness profit system, and teaches its children christofascist sex education. I don't know how many alarms we as a people need to have to realize that as a country we are on the wrong track.
Trump is at 41.9% approval rating across all polls in spite of everything that the news brought today. Nothing seems to shake the loyalty of the White christofascists, and more and more America remains me of Germany as the National Socialists came to power. The November vote is it, folks. That's when we decide which direction we are going to go.
Public health experts on Tuesday called for President Donald Trump to declare a public health emergency in the explosive rise of sexually transmitted diseases, which have increased nationally for four years in a row. Cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis rose by 200,000 between 2016 and 2017 alone, to a total of 2.29 million, according to preliminary data released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The U.S. has the highest STD rates in the industrialized world, said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors, on a media conference call Tuesday. The current crisis preys on the most vulnerable in the population, he said, and costs the U.S. $16 billion in preventable health care costs a year.
Public health experts on the call blamed the skyrocketing STD rates on a serious decline in public health infrastructure and funding. The purchasing power of federal STD funding has diminished by 40 percent since […]
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Wednesday, August 29th, 2018
Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate Economist and Op-ed Columnist - The New York Times
Stephan: Apparently, I'm not the only one who fears America teeters on a precipice.
Then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump shakes hands as he arrives at a campaign rally on Aug. 30, 2016, in Everett, Wash.
Credit: Evan Vucci/AP
Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a friend of mine — an expert on international relations — made a joke: “Now that Eastern Europe is free from the alien ideology of Communism, it can return to its true historical path — fascism.” Even at the time, his quip had a real edge.
And as of 2018 it hardly seems like a joke at all. What Freedom House calls illiberalism is on the rise across Eastern Europe. This includes Poland and Hungary, both still members of the European Union, in which democracy as we normally understand it is already dead.
In both countries the ruling parties — Law and Justice in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary — have established regimes that maintain the forms of popular elections, but have destroyed the independence of the judiciary, suppressed freedom of the press, […]
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Tuesday, August 28th, 2018
Stephan: This is the best assessment of guns and Americans I have read. Today what struck me about the news was that the mass shooting in Florida has vanished from the news cycle, too ordinary to be noticed. We are not a healthy society, and we never will be until we tell ourselves the truth about guns.
On Sunday, it happened again: another mass shooting in America. This time, a gunman killed at least three people in the Jacksonville Landing area in Florida.
Already, the mass shooting has given rise to new calls for gun control laws. “We don’t want your thoughts & prayers,” the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence tweeted. “We want you voted out of office for your negligence and apathy toward American gun violence.”
But if this plays out like the aftermath of past mass shootings, from Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 to Las Vegas in 2017, the chances of Congress taking major action on guns is very low.
This has become an American routine: After every mass shooting, the debate over guns and gun violence starts up once again. Maybe some bills get introduced. Critics respond with concerns that the government is trying to take away their guns. The debate stalls. So even as America continues experiencing levels of gun violence unrivaled in the rest of the developed world, nothing happens — no laws are passed by Congress, nothing significant […]
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Tuesday, August 28th, 2018
Emily Bazelon, Staff Writer and Truman Capote fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School. - The New York Times
Stephan: One of the main reasons the christofascists support Trump no matter what he does is that he is completely restructuring the American Judiciary with christofascist friendly judges, and we are going to have to live with these appointments for a generation. Here is an excellent assessment of what that is going to mean, and what will have to be done to overcome the institutional christofascist bias being built into America's legal system.
Credit: istock
In 1957, Robert A. Dahl, a father of modern political science, published a canonical article about the Supreme Court’s “most peculiar position” in American democracy. “Much of the legitimacy of the Court’s decisions rests upon the fiction that it is not a political institution but exclusively a legal one,” Dahl wrote. And yet, “from time to time its members decide cases where legal criteria are not in any realistic sense adequate to the task.” These decisions, among the court’s most momentous, turned on vague or ambiguous words in the Constitution, like “establishment of religion” and “due process of law,” with precedent and expert opinions on both sides. By making these rulings, the court cast itself as a “national policymaker” — and in so doing raised a difficult question: When should the justices, unelected figures in robes, reflect majority will and when should they stand for “Right or Justice” so as to protect minorities from tyranny by the majority?
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