Don’t forget that the Hamas leaders are living in luxury as billionaires in Qatar. If the Israeli response kills a few thousand Palestinians, then Hamas’ leaders will shrug their shoulders and say “sounds like good PR” while lounging in a hot tub.
$175,000 for 50 years? He’s 71 now so he went into prison at 21. That means he spent virtually his entire life in prison. He could have done so many things, but instead he needed to sit in a prison cell. All because he was wrongly convicted.
And because I’m a math geek and need to figure this stuff out, $175,000 over 50 years is $3,500 a year. If we calculate what he would have earned at the federal minimum wage over that time frame (ignoring bank account interest or inflation just to keep things simple), we’d get over $500,000.
They’re giving him a third of what he should have earned at bare minimum. (And that ignores all the other horrible things involved with being wrongfully imprisoned for 50 years.)
Did you read what I wrote? It’s not that they decided they weren’t going to do anything. It’s that the rules of the government limit what they can do with a small majority. They can’t just unilaterally decide that they are passing a new constitutional amendment with a few vote majority in the House/Senate. They could try for a bill, but there they are limited by various other rules not to mention the conservative Supreme Court. If the Democrats had a big enough majority, they could get more bills passed.
And that being said, what’s the alternative? Allow the Republicans to get into power and hope that they don’t take away women’s rights too much? Many Republicans have already declared that they want a national abortion ban. Others have said that they want to criminalize miscarriage and ban contraception.
Voting third party (thanks to our First Past The Post system) won’t work. Sitting out the elections and not voting won’t work. The best thing to do is get as many Democrats in office as possible from local positions to the highest offices. Then, put pressure on the higher up Democrats to get a women’s rights bill passed.
At this point, and with our current political system, not supporting the Democratic candidate is essentially supporting the Republican one.
The Democrats could have passed a bill, but “enshrining it in the Constitution” would mean passing a Constitutional amendment. First, they would need a 2/3rds vote of Congress. That means that the Democrats couldn’t have a slim majority - they’d need a large majority. Or they’d need to find Republicans willing to vote for a Constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights. Basically an impossibility.
Even if the Democrats managed to get the Constitutional Right To Abortion passed, they would need to have 75% of the state legislatures pass it. Democrats don’t control that name state legislatures.
So perhaps the Democrats could have passed a national law, right? Except that the Republicans would inevitably filibuster this in the Senate. The Democrats could have changed the filibuster rules, but not all of them supported changing these rules. (Mainly because it would prevent them from stopping the Republicans if the Republicans regained the Senate.) Any law that was passed would inevitably have been challenged up to the conservative Supreme Court.
You could definitely criticize the Democrats for not pushing harder to pass a law guaranteeing abortion, but a Constitutional Amendment was out of reach.
And this woman also WANTS to have the baby. She and her husband were trying to get pregnant. Unfortunately, the fetus has abnormalities that mean it won’t survive. Without an abortion, she will need to wait until she hits term, have a C Section, and then have a dead baby.
Oh, and thanks to her medical history, she’ll likely be unable to have another pregnancy after that C-section. So it’s either give birth to a dead baby now and have no more or have an abortion now and (after she recovers) try to have another baby. Only one of these options might result in a baby that’s alive and it’s the option that includes abortion.
But Paxton will scream about how he’s “protecting the unborn baby” without caring that the fetus has a nearly zero chance of survival and without caring that the woman faces potential severe (possibly life threatening) medical complications if she’s forced to continue the pregnancy. He’ll force women to carry pregnancies to term even if it kills them!
“Intense lobbying” is a weird way to describe threatening the holdouts, the wives of the holdouts, and even issuing death threats.
When the pandemic hit and I knew I was going to be working from home, I feared that my productivity would plummet and I’d miss the office. I reassured myself that it would only be a couple of weeks and then everything would go ban to normal. (Boy, was I naive!)
When I started working from home, though, I found that I loved it. I’m more productive without people chatting me up or managers looking over my shoulder.
I’m even eating healthier. When I went into the office, I’d pack all the food I’d think I needed for the day. I’d always overpack and then, with the food sitting right there, I’d snack throughout the day. Now, I can take the time to prepare healthy meals in my kitchen for lunch and snacks, while close, aren’t within arm’s reach.
I’m now permanently work from home and loving it. If I ever looked for another job, Work From Home would be a huge selling point. I’m not going to say I’d never go into another office, but if I had two job offers except one was work from home, I’d pick that one.
I wouldn’t put it that way at all. I’m sure the Palestinian people don’t see the Israeli military as liberators and the Israeli government/military don’t see themselves in this role. It would definitely be good for the Palestinians in the long term if they were given the right to vote back, though.
Extra policing would be fine if the problems with police departments were addressed. Without addressing that whole mess, though, throwing more police officers won’t solve that problem.
Hamas was elected in a plurality, not a majority, in 2006. Since then, they’ve cancelled future elections. I don’t think they should be recognized as Gaza’s legitimate government until they run elections. The leaders of Hamas don’t even live in Gaza - preferring to run things from the safety of another country as they funnel money away from the Palestinian people and towards their own pockets and weapons to kill Jews in Israel.
I’m not saying Hamas being deposed would fix the issues in the Middle East. That situation is such a twisted knot that no one thing will solve it. However, the Palestinian people need to be able to hold elections and decide for themselves whether or not Hamas will continue to lead them.
As an American Jew, I’ve almost gotten used to antisemitism from the right. From being told to my face “the only thing Hitler did wrong was not finishing the job” to having public Jewish displays vandalized to literal Nazis marching in the street being referred to as “very fine people.”
What has surprised me recently was the number of anti-semitic comments from the left. I’m fine with people criticizing Israel and pushing for better treatment of the Palestinian people. That’s not antisemitism and I’d actually agree with them. However, I’ve seen people on the left celebrating the attack, making fun of babies being killed, and even claiming that an attack on an American temple and bakery are justified because they are “symbols of the Jewish/Zionist state.”
I know many on the left aren’t anti-semitic, but it just feels so frightening to be targeted from both sides of the aisle - especially for Israel’s actions when I, as an American Jew, have zero control over what they do.
I believe that he’s telling the truth in so far as he believes that he didn’t need to support or even abide by the Constitution as President. He was fond of claiming that “Article 2” gave him the ability to do anything he wanted.
Bigly Covfefe!
This is one of the few things Trump actually excels at. Every time you think he’s gone as low as he could possibly go, he somehow finds a way to sink even lower.
It would be impressive if it weren’t so dangerous.
I want him to be given a phone, but have the only Internet to be a sporadic one that you can only get when you climb atop the toilet in the cell and reach WAY out to the point that you almost fall down.
Remind me. How good is Trump’s balance again?
“I crossed my fingers when I took the oath of office so it didn’t count. Also, I’m rubber and you’re glue. Whatever 14th Amendment you throw bounces off of me and sticks to you!”
-Trump’s next legal arguments…
The article had a video and I could only stand watching it for a couple of seconds. It started with a Russian sounding guy saying they were going to show why a Prius is dangerous to the environment. Then, they showed people laughing as they rolled coal at electric car drivers.
Is that their argument? “Electric cars are dangerous to the environment because people driving electric cars make me spew tons of smoke into the atmosphere”?
What’s next? “You recycled your can. That’s bad for the environment because that forced me to spill this toxic waste into a playground. All those kids got sick and it’s all your fault for recycling!!!”
I think it also got tied into the incel movement and became a toxic phrase. Even if you didn’t know the actual science, would you want to call yourself an “alpha male” if it made people think you were an incel?
The technical description of that feat is called Plus Ultra.
Weren’t some hostages also drugged so they’d be “happy and smiling” for the cameras when released? I heard that, but don’t know the authenticity.
Edit: I found many news sources that said they were. I know some folks don’t trust anything Israel says so take reports like this with a grain of salt. Still, it’s been confirmed that many of the hostages were drugged while in captivity. Especially the kids - to keep them quiet. (Anyone with little kids knows they can be loud while scared and this must have been extremely scary. As a father, the reaction of “drug the little kids” makes me angry.)