The Supreme Court Is Now Forcing Taxpayers to Pay for Anti-Gay Religious Schools

Stephan:  Basically, five christofascist ideologues on the Supreme Court have taken over shaping the American culture to their tastes. And you are going to pay for it. There is something so fundamentally wrong about that it is hard to express. The last several months have shown us how flawed our political system is. We need to get rid of the electoral college, We need to impeach Thomas for this corruption, Barrett, and the other Trumpers for lying under oath at their hearings, and in their private conversations. we need to eliminate the filibuster rule in the Senate and really, although I don't think this will happen, restructure the Senate.
The Supreme Court is seen behind a fence after overturning Roe v. Wade, in Washington, D.C., on June 24, 2022.
Credit: Stefani Reynolds / AFP / Getty

Yesterday’s shameful Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade was telegraphed months ago.

But, during the angst-laden wait for the Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe, the court, so radically reshaped during the Donald Trump years, made hay trashing other vital precedents in its stampede to remake the country’s legal priorities in an extreme-right direction. This court will, with the Roe ruling and with a slew of other rulings from the past weeks, go down as arguably the most destructive court in United States history, certainly the most destructive in the post-Civil War era.

The six members who make up the majority on the court must be understood as far right extremists, not “conservatives.” By definition conservatives are not supposed to like sudden, jarring change; they are supposed to put a premium on stability and continuity. This court, by contrast, is a radically activist court, selectively trashing precedents to inject a far right vision of the role of religion […]

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The 4 remaining Supreme Court cases of this blockbuster term

Stephan:  The christofascist cabal of the Supreme Court is restructuring American culture, and they are not through, as this report spells out.
The christofascist cabal of the Supreme Court Credit: CNN

Although the Supreme Court issued the two most important opinions of the term last week, upending near 50-year-old precedent on abortion and expanding gun rights for the first time in a decade, this blockbuster term is not over.

Still to be decided are four disputes, and new opinions will be announced Wednesday morning.

A look at what remains:

Immigration: Remain in Mexico

The justices are considering whether the Biden administration can terminate a Trump-era border policy known as “Remain in Mexico.” Lower courts have so far blocked Biden from ending the policy.

Under the unprecedented program launched in 2019, the Department of Homeland Security can send certain-non Mexican citizens who entered the United States back to Mexico — instead of detaining them or releasing them into the United States — while their immigration proceedings played out.

Critics call the policy inhumane and say it exposes asylum seekers with credible claims to dangerous and squalid conditions. The case raises questions not only regarding immigration law, but also a president’s control over policy and […]

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New Study: Medicare for All Would Have Prevented 340,000 COVID Deaths in the US

Stephan:  Think about this:319 thousand Americans died because they would not get vaccinated. Then there are 340,000 who died because the United States has such a poor healthcare system. We need universal birthright single-payer healthcare whose first priority is fostering wellbeing, not making a profit.
Jim Watson / AFP via Getty

A new report finds that Medicare for All would have saved one-third of the one million lives lost to COVID in the US. That’s 340,000 deaths at the hands of our for-profit health system — all to make the private insurance companies even richer.

hat has long been speculated by the Left is now a quantifiable fact: the United States’ privatized and patchwork system of health insurance — which leaves millions uninsured or underinsured — has directly resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths during the pandemic. According to a new report, a shocking 338,000 of the United States’ one million reported COVID deaths could have been avoided if we had a Medicare for All system.

The study, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), lists a few key reasons for the lower death rate under Medicare for All, including reduced transmission, higher vaccination rates, and more hospital capacity.

For starters, researchers found that Medicare for All would have lowered the level of […]

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Who wants to be a billionaire? Most don’t – which is good news for the planet

Stephan:  What is it people really want for themselves? To be a billionaire? No, as it turns out, and this report describes the facts.

A founding economic principle that everyone is motivated by ‘unlimited wants’, stuck on a consumerist treadmill and striving to accumulate as much wealth as they can, is untrue, say the authors of a new study.

The long-held economic belief that people have unlimited wants has permeated economic thinking and government policies and has shaped much of modern society, including advertising and consumerism.

But belief in this principle has also had dire consequences for the health of the planet. Striving to continually increase individual wealth, and pursuing unending economic growth, has come at a heavy cost. As wealth has increased, so too has resource use and pollution.

Up until now, researchers have struggled to find appropriate ways to decouple economic growth from damaging economic principles. Now though, a new study led by psychologists at the universities of Bath, Bath Spa and Exeter challenges the idea that unlimited wants are human nature, which could have important implications for the planet.

Across nearly 8000 people from 33 countries spanning six continents, they surveyed how much money people wanted to achieve their ‘absolutely […]

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What the data says about abortion in the U.S.

Stephan:  Here are some real facts about abortion in the United States. The data does not look at all like the anti-abortion christofascist cabal claims: women casually choosing to have abortions. What I see is that women rarely if ever choose casually to have an abortion. There is always a compelling reason for them to make such a choice.
A line graph showing the changing number of legal abortions in the U.S. since the 1970s

Pew Research Center has conducted many surveys about abortion over the years, providing a lens into Americans’ views on whether the procedure should be legal, among a host of other questions. In our most recent survey, 61% of U.S. adults say abortion should be legal all or most of the time, while 37% say it should be illegal all or most of the time.

With the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization

✎ EditSign overturning Roe v. Wadethe 1973 case that effectively legalized abortion nationwide, here is a look at the most recent available data about abortion from sources other than public opinion surveys.

How we did this

How many abortions are there in the United States each year?

An exact answer is hard to come by. Two organizations – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Guttmacher Institute – try to measure this, but they use different methods and publish different figures.

The CDC compiles figures voluntarily reported by the central health agencies of the vast majority of states (including […]

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