SCOTUS removes Roe V Wade

[Mayhem]

Yeah but they were born so they got a chance to go to heaven.
That is the actual logic behind this.
It's moronic but hey, religion.

Eh, depends, when they weren't baptised they still tainted by original sin and go straight down. So basically republicans are in the business of sending souls to hell. Which is pretty on brand.

[Odinfrost]

Eh, depends, when they weren't baptised they still tainted by original sin and go straight down. So basically republicans are in the business of sending souls to hell. Which is pretty on brand.

Sometimes I wish I was a journalist so I could go to a press conference and ask questions in relation to this and watch them squirm

[Surfd]

Sometimes I wish I was a journalist so I could go to a press conference and ask questions in relation to this and watch them squirm

Problem is that they won't let you get anywhere near enough to ask the questions, because asking serious questions that make them uncomfortable gets you put on a watchlist. Like that teenage kid who got known for showing up at republican events and asking uncomfortable questions: they eventually ended up making the republicans so uncomfortable that they were having security remove him from the event the instant he showed up.

[Odinfrost]

Problem is that they won't let you get anywhere near enough to ask the questions, because asking serious questions that make them uncomfortable gets you put on a watchlist. Like that teenage kid who got known for showing up at republican events and asking uncomfortable questions: they eventually ended up making the republicans so uncomfortable that they were having security remove him from the event the instant he showed up.

Now that's hilarious.

[Surfd]

Now that's hilarious.

Quinn Mitchell is the kid by the way. Probably not even 17 yet as of now: https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...event-ejected/. Literally got under DeSantis's skin so badly his security detail started blocking him during events.

[Gigantique]

Quinn Mitchell is the kid by the way. Probably not even 17 yet as of now: https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...event-ejected/. Literally got under DeSantis's skin so badly his security detail started blocking him during events.

When you're struggling so hard to defend your policies against a literal child you have to block their access to you you'd think you would reconsider those policies.

But that requires insight so, fat chance!

[Poopymonster]

Eh, depends, when they weren't baptised they still tainted by original sin and go straight down. So basically republicans are in the business of sending souls to hell. Which is pretty on brand.

It's even better.
OS kicks in at BIRTH.
So all the aborted feti go cloudside immediately.

[Flarelaine]

Please steer clear from discussing religious dogma.

[Shadowferal]

Supreme Court upsets $10-billion opioid settlement because it shields the Sacklers

By a 5-4 vote, the justices ruled that a bankruptcy judge does not have broad power to arrange a mass settlement of thousands of claims that includes protections for people who are not bankrupt.

The justices were split in an unusual way. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch spoke for the majority, while Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Brett M. Kavanaugh dissented.

"We hold only that the bankruptcy code does not authorize a release and injunction that, as part of a plan of reorganization under Chapter 11, effectively seeks to discharge claims against a nondebtor without the consent of affected claimants," Gorsuch said.
...and the other side of the decision;
"Today's decision is wrong on the law and devastating for more than 100,000 opioid victims and their families," Kavanaugh said in dissent. "The court’s decision rewrites the text of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code and restricts the long-established authority of bankruptcy courts to fashion fair and equitable relief for mass-tort victims."

The Sacklers, owners of the Purdue Pharma company, had denied wrongdoing but agreed to contribute $6 billion to the settlement fund if they would be protected from future lawsuits.

Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy in 2019 facing thousands of lawsuits alleging its marketing of OxyContin as a nonaddictive pain relief pill had triggered an opioid epidemic that led to more than a half-million deaths since the mid-1990s. In the decade prior to the bankruptcy, the company had distributed about $11 billion to members of the Sackler family and their offshore accounts.

Their lawyers maintained that more than half of this amount was paid in taxes.

But the scale of the damage and the liability for OxyContin was extraordinary. A bankruptcy court later put a hold on new lawsuits, while the pending claims against Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers were estimated to seek in total more than $40 trillion.

While more than 95% of the creditors said they approved the deal, including all 50 states, the Biden administration's bankruptcy trustee opposed it. He did so because the settlement shielded the Sacklers from any further or future liability.

I'm all for sticking it to the Sacklers. But when does a "win" become a "loss?"

[Karreck]

But when does a "win" become a "loss?"

The immunity from future lawsuits in exchange for six billion was only a win for the Sacklers. They keep living their lives of wealth, free from any more consequences of half a million Americans dead.

I want thousands of lawsuits to chip away at them, death by a thousand cuts. I want them bled dry and ruined.

[Shadowferal]

The immunity from future lawsuits in exchange for six billion was only a win for the Sacklers. They keep living their lives of wealth, free from any more consequences of half a million Americans dead.
I want thousands of lawsuits to chip away at them, death by a thousand cuts. I want them bled dry and ruined.

And I'm all for it.
I'm more about the length of time involved however. It'd be moot if the Sacklers die of old age...before a single penny goes anywhere.

[AntiFascistVoter]

This may provide the legal cover that some hospitals, at least in Idaho, need to feel confident to perform medically necessary procedures and help some ladies out. I'd say that's a win even if we might theorize it's done so for political reasons.

This is not what they ruled; they ruled than an injunction can stay in place while the case proceed through the lower courts. The headlines makes it sound like the Court vindicated the right to an emergency abortion; they did not.

The doctors and pateints are stuck in the same precarious limbo.
Once again, the SCOTUS regrets having caught the car on abortion. This time, to the extent that it has "ruled" anything at all in this case, it "rules" that it's a bad time to catch the abortion car again, so everyone should look away and allow them to say they didn't catch it after all.

The media also really regrets they caught the car on abortion. They really want to keep rewriting the script will-they-or-wont-they. It's keeps readers. Once Ross and Rachel hookup, they lose reader interest.

[Karreck]

And I'm all for it.
I'm more about the length of time involved however. It'd be moot if the Sacklers die of old age...before a single penny goes anywhere.

Families of victims still want to sue, hence the pushback against the bankruptcy deal. I say let em sue if they want.

[Paranoid Android]

This may provide the legal cover that some hospitals, at least in Idaho, need to feel confident to perform medically necessary procedures and help some ladies out. I'd say that's a win even if we might theorize it's done so for political reasons.

Umm, don't you see this is just a delay and once again a PR move since they will just wait for the right to do a total abortion law. I don't take much victory in "you have a few months, maybe year for emergency abortion" After that good luck.

If Supreme Court ruled against this it would have brought attention to how radical they are. Besides not letting women have a choice, them showing that even in emergency, just Louisiana is ultra crazy. This would have been used in many campaigns against Republicans.

[Poopymonster]

Umm, don't you see this is just a delay and once again a PR move since they will just wait for the right to do a total abortion law. I don't take much victory in "you have a few months, maybe year for emergency abortion" After that good luck.

If Supreme Court ruled against this it would have brought attention to how radical they are. Besides not letting women have a choice, them showing that even in emergency, just Louisiana is ultra crazy. This would have been used in many campaigns against Republicans.

This. Lots of this. All of this.

[Rasulis]

Demand for birth control, Plan B pills drop in Texas, other states with abortion bans

Texas and other states that implemented strict abortion restrictions following the overturning of Roe v. Wade have seen declines in the number of prescriptions for oral contraceptives, particularly emergency contraceptives like Plan B, a study published Wednesday in the American Medical Association journal JAMA Network Open said.

The analysis found an additional 4% decline in monthly fills for oral contraceptives among states that enacted the most restrictive abortion policies after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned abortion protections in 2022 when compared to states that maintained a “medium level” of restriction. Prescription fill rates for emergency contraceptives like ulipristal and levonorgestrel — known as Plan B or “morning after” pills — show a more pronounced shift. They increased during the first year after Roe ended in both groups but fell an additional 65% in the most abortion-restrictive states the following year.

The declines were largest among states that saw widespread closures of family planning clinics in the wake of abortion bans. In Texas, birth control fills declined 28% while fills for emergency contraceptives were down 48% in the same period. Confusion about the legality of Plan B could also be behind the declines, study authors note.

Surprising? No.

“On average around 11% of women more or less rely on family planning clinics to get their contraceptive care, including prescriptions,” Qato said. “If we know that some of those clinics, at least in Texas, closed directly after Dobbs, you would expect to see also a decline in oral contraceptive pills.”

Some other factors.

Being uninsured, on Medicaid or too far from another clinic could be barriers to getting care elsewhere for Texans who once relied on the clinics, Qato notes. Texas has the highest rate of uninsured residents of any state, with about 4.9 million – 17% — lacking coverage.

The uninsured rate is 40% for Texas single women. Also, more than half of Texas counties do not have practicing OB/Gyn.

[Edge-]

https://www.cnn.com/kfile-ed-martin-...ons/index.html

ne of the leaders of the Republican National Convention’s platform committee, which shapes the party’s official stance on key issues, has a history of pushing extreme anti-abortion positions, including advocating for a national ban without exceptions for rape or incest. He also entertained the possibility of jailing women who get abortions and the doctors who perform them.

Ed Martin, the deputy policy director for the convention’s platform committee, is one of three people the Republican National Committee selected in May to help craft the party’s platform, which serves as a blueprint for the Republican Party’s agenda by detailing policy positions and how Republicans and former President Donald Trump would govern if elected. The platform is expected to be pared down this year, slashing the length of the document to focus on Trump’s agenda for a second term.

Martin has consistently espoused a hardline position on abortion, criticizing Republicans with a more moderate stance on the issue, and has even questioned the safety of birth control.

“The true bane of the pro-life movement is the faction of fake pro-lifers who claim to believe in the sanctity of human life but are only willing to vote that way with a list of exceptions,” Martin said on his radio show in June 2022 – several days after Roe v. Wade was struck down.

Martin, an attorney and former chair of the Missouri Republican Party, was a staunch advocate for Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and conspiracy theories the election was rigged against him. He is also the president of Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagles – a socially conservative advocacy group named for the late activist best known for her opposition to feminism. Schlafly and Martin also co-authored the 2016 book, “The Conservative Case for Trump.”

CNN’s KFile reviewed dozens of episodes of Martin’s radio show, “The Pro America Report,” from 2022 to 2024, to evaluate his anti-abortion comments. Particularly noteworthy from Martin’s show, which airs on the streaming service Rumble, are his comments around the June 2022 Supreme Court ruling striking down Roe v Wade.

“If the conversation is, ‘Well, should there be a federal ban?’ And the consensus is that there shouldn’t – I disagree. I disagree with the consensus. I would like to see US Senators and US congressmen and women elected to office who would say, ‘Let’s ban abortion,’” he said in April 2024.

Reminder that this extremism remains central to Republican operations, as evidenced by the deputy director for the Republican convention's platform committee, one of three people helping craft the party platform.

Jailing women who get abortions? Republican-supported position.
National bans on abortion care? Republican-supported position.

Just a reminder: Do not believe Republicans, they keep lying about this topic.

[gondrin]

Supreme Court upsets $10-billion opioid settlement because it shields the Sacklers

By a 5-4 vote, the justices ruled that a bankruptcy judge does not have broad power to arrange a mass settlement of thousands of claims that includes protections for people who are not bankrupt.

The justices were split in an unusual way. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch spoke for the majority, while Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Brett M. Kavanaugh dissented.

"We hold only that the bankruptcy code does not authorize a release and injunction that, as part of a plan of reorganization under Chapter 11, effectively seeks to discharge claims against a nondebtor without the consent of affected claimants," Gorsuch said.
...and the other side of the decision;
"Today's decision is wrong on the law and devastating for more than 100,000 opioid victims and their families," Kavanaugh said in dissent. "The court’s decision rewrites the text of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code and restricts the long-established authority of bankruptcy courts to fashion fair and equitable relief for mass-tort victims."

The Sacklers, owners of the Purdue Pharma company, had denied wrongdoing but agreed to contribute $6 billion to the settlement fund if they would be protected from future lawsuits.

Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy in 2019 facing thousands of lawsuits alleging its marketing of OxyContin as a nonaddictive pain relief pill had triggered an opioid epidemic that led to more than a half-million deaths since the mid-1990s. In the decade prior to the bankruptcy, the company had distributed about $11 billion to members of the Sackler family and their offshore accounts.

Their lawyers maintained that more than half of this amount was paid in taxes.

But the scale of the damage and the liability for OxyContin was extraordinary. A bankruptcy court later put a hold on new lawsuits, while the pending claims against Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers were estimated to seek in total more than $40 trillion.

While more than 95% of the creditors said they approved the deal, including all 50 states, the Biden administration's bankruptcy trustee opposed it. He did so because the settlement shielded the Sacklers from any further or future liability.

I'm all for sticking it to the Sacklers. But when does a "win" become a "loss?"

Honestly, while the money is important, they should be held to the same standard as other drug dealers that deal in illicit drugs. They should be in jail for the epidemic they caused.

It wasn't an accident this happened. They actively pushed and encouraged massive overprescribing of their opioids.

Hell, when I had surgery done on my mouth many years ago, it was in the middle of when they were doing this. I was asked by the doctor on what he thinks my pain thresh hold would be like to give him an idea on what type of pain meds he should prescribed. I told him "I don't know but I tend to be resistant to pain and can handle it well." Still prescribed me both high dosage Percocet and high dosage Vicodin at the same time. I took literally one pill out of 100 when I started to feel some pain and never took another due to some of the side effect. That is what happened to a LOT of people. Thing is, I didn't get addicted to it and still won't take any narcotics because of some of the side effects.

[Edge-]

https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2...ght-be-in-play

For Arkansans following the efforts to put abortion rights on the ballot in November, it has been a whirlwind week. Last Friday, petitioners celebrated an inspiring achievement: More than 101,000 signatures were collected and turned in to the state by the July 5 deadline, a triumph of direct democracy and grassroots activism. Arkansans for Limited Government, the group pushing the measure, did it without national organizational support, on a shoestring budget. Just Arkansas women with clipboards, hustling.

Then, on Wednesday, came an apparently devastating setback: Arkansas Secretary of State John Thurston rejected the petition before the count and verification had even begun, arguing that they had failed to turn in paperwork that fulfilled two key requirements. “Today the far left pro-abortion crowd in Arkansas showed they are both immoral and incompetent,” crowed Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “The sponsors failed to follow the law, specifically a simple and straightforward affidavit requirement that other ballot committees followed,” Attorney General Tim Griffin added. “Failure to follow such a basic requirement is inexcusable: The abortion advocates have no one to blame but themselves.”

It was a gut punch for the organizers and their supporters — would all that effort be lost to a technicality on an unforced error?

But on Thursday, the plot thickened again: Thurston’s office admitted to the Arkansas Times that it had been mistaken in earlier stating that Arkansans for Limited Government had submitted just two documents on July 5 along with signatures. Once the full slate of documents was released — around the same time that the abortion petitioners issued a detailed response to Thurston — the reasons for nixing the signatures started to look more rinky-dink, with more avenues for challenge. Moreover, it now appears that Thurston’s decision to stop the count altogether could violate state law.

Lauren Cowles, executive director of Arkansans for Limited Government, sent Thurston a sharply worded letter Thursday saying he had “unlawfully rejected” the petition. “You must continue counting,” she told him.

That doesn’t mean that abortion petitioners are out of the woods. Their fate will ultimately be in the hands of state officials and judges, many of whom are politically hostile to their cause. If Thurston’s office does resume counting, they could still see significant numbers of signatures rejected. And even if they survive this hurdle, significant challenges will remain.

But the funeral atmosphere of Wednesday now appears premature. The fight has only just begun.

Abortion rights is an easy issue to understand, and few questions draw more passionate feelings from citizens. But its future in Arkansas will now be settled by the tedious minutia of statutory interpretation and election procedure. Here’s your guide to how it all works, how we got here and what might come next.

So it appears we have another instance of a Republican official straight up lying about reality in an attempt to slow-walk something they don't like.

This time the Arkansas Secretary of State lied about Arkansans for Limited Government's submissions and unlawfully rejected the valid documents.

Much more reporting on how insanely shady this shit by the Arkansas Secretary of State is in the article.

But it sure seems Republicans are still pretty terrified of putting this issue to voters, even in a state where polling shows not just plurality, but majority support for making abortion care access illegal in all or most cases - https://www.pewresearch.org/religiou...bout-abortion/

[Jastall]

https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2...ght-be-in-play



So it appears we have another instance of a Republican official straight up lying about reality in an attempt to slow-walk something they don't like.

This time the Arkansas Secretary of State lied about Arkansans for Limited Government's submissions and unlawfully rejected the valid documents.

Much more reporting on how insanely shady this shit by the Arkansas Secretary of State is in the article.

But it sure seems Republicans are still pretty terrified of putting this issue to voters, even in a state where polling shows not just plurality, but majority support for making abortion care access illegal in all or most cases - https://www.pewresearch.org/religiou...bout-abortion/

"Vote harder" said the Republican.

Ok, said the public.

"No, not like that!" said the Republican.