It oetfn semes lkie mnay of the cmomrentes hree are lnutiacs.

Just kidding about that lunatic thing, guys! All in good fun.

Regarding yesterday's post on cultural appropriation, here's another good Haspel from years ago:

Influence is plagiarism spread thin.

https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2016/10/03/yes-virginia-aliens-are-registered-and-voting-and-in-pennsylvania-by-the-thousands/

Eight counties in Virginia (not Arlington or Fairfax which are heavily populated).

Soros financed lawsuits stop checks of citizen status.

Motor voter checkbox on DMV license applications so a photo id will not stop.

Of course wanting only U.S. citizens to vote is racist.

Interesting article: The Intellectual Case for Trump.

Presents a more moderate Trump. Not sure I agree with all of it, but it was interesting.

Here's a smart guy essay going the other direction.






Meanwhile. I'd want more than that to touch your baby.

And let's be clear: Nothing describing itself as "intellectual" is anything of the kind.

Guys, don't be into video games.

Uh-oh. Cops and prosecutors aren't buying the "tragic accident" scenario here.

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/georgia-man-left-son-to-die-in-hot-suv-so-he-could-escape-his-life-and-seek-extramarital-sex-jury-hears

Obsessed with seeking sex outside his marriage, prosecutors say, a Georgia man left his toddler son to die inside a hot SUV so he could “escape from one life into another.” ...

From Harper's Magazine: "Where pregnant women have more to fear than Zika" by Rachel Nolan.

http://harpers.org/archive/2016/10/innocents/1/

It's 7 pages long. (Oddly, the cover you'll see - with Alexander Hamilton - is not what I remember seeing on the newsstand, since that cover mentioned this article in largish font.)

First paragraphs:

Flor Arely Sánchez had been in bed with a fever and pains throughout her body for three days when a July thunderstorm broke over the mountainside. She got nervous when bolts of light flashed in the sky. Lightning strikes the San Julián region of western El Salvador several times a year, and her neighbors fear storms more than they fear the march of diseases — first dengue, then chikungunya, now Zika. Flor worried about a lot of things, since she was pregnant.

Late in the afternoon, when the pains had somewhat eased, Flor thought she might go to a dammed-up bit of the river near her house to bathe. She is thirty-five and has lived in the same place all her life, where wrinkled hills are planted with corn, beans, and fruit trees. She took a towel and soap and walked out into the rain. Halfway to the river, the pains returned and overcame her. The next thing Flor remembers, she was in a room she didn’t recognize, unable to move. As she soon discovered, she was in a hospital, her ankle cuffed to the bed, and she was being investigated for abortion.

There are six countries in the world that prohibit abortion under all circumstances, without exceptions for victims of rape or incest or for cases in which the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother: El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Nicaragua, Malta, and Vatican City. In the United States, even the most fervent antiabortion groups maintain that women who have abortions are victims, instead directing their attacks at doctors. Earlier this year, when Donald Trump suggested that if Roe v. Wade were reversed, women who choose to terminate a pregnancy should be subject to “some form of punishment,” he was denounced across the political spectrum.

That scenario already exists in El Salvador, a country of 6.3 million, where an active medical and law-enforcement system finds and tries women who are suspected of having had abortions. Public prosecutors visit hospitals to train gynecologists and obstetricians to detect and report patients who show “symptoms of abortion.” Doctors are legally obligated to be informants for the police.

Salvadoran doctors at public hospitals must rely on after-the-fact evaluations, and women who suffer miscarriages or stillbirths immediately provoke distrust when they seek treatment. At private hospitals, however, patients can pay for discretion. In the capital, San Salvador, residents of the exclusive Colonia Escalón can arrange procedures at clinics for a thousand dollars; some women fly to Miami or Mexico City, if they can afford the ticket. Abortion is a poor woman’s crime.

The sentence is two to eight years in prison. But because El Salvador’s constitution classifies a fertilized egg as a legal person, in many cases prosecutors arbitrarily upgrade the charge to aggravated homicide, which carries a penalty of between thirty and fifty years in jail...

Here's a smart guy essay going the other direction. ~ Crid at October 4, 2016 9:00 AM

Interesting and makes some good points.

The idea that Trump will blow away the existing institutions and system is populist fantasy and a Democratic straw man. He won't have the power to do that without Congress' backing and both the Republicans and Democrats will obstruct any attempt by him to establish an authoritarian rule centered on him. The military will not back him in that either.

Hillary has a better shot of establishing an authoritarian government centered on her than he does of establishing one centered on him. She has the blank-check backing of one of the two major parties and has effectively split the other party. She has the legacy of eight years of Obama-selected military brass and military policy, as well as big government domestic policies she can simply carry forward. She has a multi-billion dollar reserve fund in the hands of a charitable foundation she controls. She has the implicit backing of the major media in the country and won't have much trouble reinstating the FCC's Fairness Doctrine with which to hamstring the opposing media. She has the firm financial and/or emotional backing of several of the major protest and political action groups in the country (BLM, Feminists, Homeless Advocates, NARAL, etc.).

I'm not saying either candidate wants to establish a dictatorship. In fact, most American politicians would have a difficult time doing so. Most of them wouldn't know how to do so and both parties, despite their cracks, remain strong enough to effectively oppose such an attempt. Not to mention that there are more than 300,000,000 guns in the hands of Americans and forcibly disarming them will be difficult.

In addition, most Americans are not in favor of an all-controlling government, even the ones who favor stronger federal government control. The US is not the weak parliamentary democracy of the Weimar Republic nor is it the Venezuelan or Argentinian peasant masses yearning for a strongman to "rescue" them from the foreign entities milking the country's resources on the backs of said peasants. It is not in imminent danger of falling to the Communists or to religious fanatics and in dire need of powerful savior.

Both candidates seem to have a low regard for their political opponents and the other party. Neither has shown, at least in the campaign so far, a willingness to consider the other party's concerns and issues. Whichever one wins will try to govern without the other one.

Obama is set to turn the Paris Agreement into US law without the approval of Congress. He'll use his regulatory authority and executive orders to bypass the Senate ratification of treaties required by the Constitution. He may even argue that it's not a treaty and, so, does not require ratification.

When Obama and the Democrats had absolute control over Congress, they ran roughshod over Republicans and their concerns. Expect more of the same from Hillary. The Dems seem to lack an understanding that if you want a deal (or legislation) to last beyond your period of being able to control its fate, you need to get a significant number of voters on the other side of the aisle to sign off on it. Trump, in his private sector deals, seems to understand that. If he gets a chance to make political deals, we'll see what he understands, if anything.

Not so funny when it's the boys who complain, isn't it?

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2016/10/04/boy-has-impure-thoughts-blames-cheerleaders-skirts-school-punishes-cheerleaders/

> Hillary has a better shot of establishing
> an authoritarian government centered on
> her than he does of establishing one
> centered on him.

✓ Affirmed.

But I don't think either candidate is more likely to increase the integrity or proficiency of government.

I mean, in one of the best-case Trump scenarios, department heads and senior functionaries across government lock their doors and stop answering their phones for four years. It's unlikely that they'd snap into full, courteous responsiveness when Romney takes office in January 2021.

Given that it was in Utah, Sixclaws, it's not too surprising.

On a different note, personally, I'm glad that, for all my family's constantly moving around, I never went to any school with jocks or cheerleaders. I was probably an adult before I had any idea of what it meant to have a letter on one's sweater.

"... for victims of rape or incest or for cases in which the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother ..."

lenona, yada yada yada. How many fewer abortions would there be if they were limited to those conditions? Go ahead and try to make that happen.

Stop acting like most abortions are due to anything other than an inconvenience to bearing a child that could be adopted by a loving couple of any color/persuasion.

Life happens unless you kill it.

Please explain the millions of kids in foster care and orphanages then Bob

Google is your friend lujlp. Many articles explaining the U.S. foster child system, the international orphanage system, and why people use one over the other.

That does not change my question though does it.

Life throws us challenges but it seems like women are the ones that believe they should get do-overs just because. ("Yes I gave him a blow-job while he was passed out but now I feel like he raped me." "My friends say he raped me so ...")

Yada yada yada.

Adulthood consists of many "well that didn't go as well as I thought it would" situations but only one requires killing.

"But I don't think either candidate is more likely to increase the integrity or proficiency of government."

The single most true statement said in this entire election cycle. Neither candidate favors that because doing so would work against the established interests, all of whom are heavily invested in corrupt government and don't want someone coming along and breaking their rice bowls.

As I've mentioned before, thanks in part to fertility clinics, there aren't nearly as many would-be adoptive parents as there used to be. So if all the girls and women who had been planning on abortion gave birth instead, we'd have, as Katha Pollitt said, "a surplus of babies in about five minutes. There are not as many people who want to adopt as adoption organizations want you to think there are."

Also, check out this chart - it's more lucid than almost anything else I've seen on the issue. (It's by a male blogger from Seattle - he's now in his late 40s.)

http://amptoons.com/blog/2006/03/21/why-its-difficult-to-believe-that-anti-choicers-mean-what-they-say/

There are eight policies listed on the left (you have to scroll down a bit). On the top, it's divided into two columns, which ask:

1. Is this policy consistent with the belief that abortion is exactly the same as child murder?

2. Is this policy consistent with wanting women who have sex to suffer consequences?

And finally, some more from Pollitt:

...What if it's not your life that's at stake but ''just'' your health? Or your diploma? Or your job? Or your marriage? What if you weren't forced to have sex, and you're not 15, but 25 - or 35?...

...But unwanted pregnancies are the stuff of every day.

Here are some reasons why women I know became pregnant: because her IUD came out one morning; because her husband failed - once, in 13 years! - to put on his condom in time; because she and her live-in trusted to the calendar and had a diaphragmless tryst on the beach; because she thought breast-feeding prevented ovulation and, anyway, she'd given birth just six weeks before. Stupid, trivial reasons, the same sort of reasons you might give for missing a train. (I'm sorry, you apologize later, I misread the schedule, I couldn't find a taxi, the meeting ran late.) Most of the time, people catch their trains, and most of the time, adult, middle-class, sensible women take care of birth control, and birth control takes care of them. (I'm not talking about teen-agers or the poor or the helpless here.) But a woman has about 30 years of potentially fertile sex - that's a long time to go without a slip-up. That's one reason why more than half the pregnancies in this country are accidents, and why, if you follow 100 women over their reproductive lives, 46 of them will have had an abortion by menopause, and many will have had more than one.

The abortion rate is always discussed in terms of values, to use the current cliche. Are Americans (by which is really meant American women) too promiscuous, too selfish, too frivolous, too in love with control? But surely we are not more so than Swedes, those fabled hedonists, or less so than the tradition-bound Greeks. Why, then, do Swedish women have fewer abortions than Americans, and Greek women more than twice as many?...

...Here are some reasons why friends of mine had abortions: they were in college and wanted to graduate. They were in graduate school or professional training and wanted to finish. They could not care for a child and keep their jobs. They were not in a relationship that could sustain parenthood at that time. They were not, in short, ready or able to be good mothers yet, although those who have children are good mothers now. Hard-hearted calculations of ''convenience''? Only if you think that pregnancy is the price of sex, that women have no work but motherhood, and that children don't need grown-up parents...

Oops. Here's a better link for that chart by Ampersand:

http://amptoons.com/blog/?p=2187

Also, I slipped up a bit: Ampersand is Barry Deutsch, born in 1968. He's a cartoonist in Portland, Oregon. Great blogger, too.