May 22: Louisiana abortion … Trump iffy on birth control … Alito’s flag … African migrants …
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Louisiana is about to become the first state to ban abortion medications as controlled substances, marking a stunning reversal from Louisiana’s history of being last in everything else, such as maternal health.
Gov. Jeff Landry (R-LA) is expected to sign a measure passed yesterday that would include mifepristone and misoprostol on the same list as Horse, China White, Sweet Lady H, and whatever the hell else heroin’s called in The Basketball Diaries.
Abortifacients have typically not been treated as controlled substances, due to their lack of addictive properties. However, it does appear possible that abortion medications could become habit-forming by acting on the brains of people terrified of raising a child in Louisiana.
(To wit, Louisiana Republicans also voted yesterday to deny lunch breaks to 16-year-old former fetuses even if they’re working more than five hours straight.)
Louisiana already banned every form of abortion other than to save a patient’s life or if the fetus is no longer viable (as a factory worker). Even children who are the victims of rape or incest are banned from having abortions because Louisiana.
While pregnant women can’t be prosecuted under the new law, anyone else who has these drugs but doesn’t have a prescription could go to jail. That would also bar pharmacies from selling abortion pills to people who’ve just had sex and fear they’re pregnant, and wish to abort the fetus when it’s still no more neurally developed than some Louisiana state lawmakers.
Sadly for fetuses and people, misoprostol isn’t just used for abortions. It’s also used to treat ulcers and help stop bleeding from miscarriages. Oh, and it’s also used in delivering babies … even the lucky few that Democrats choose not to abort after they’re born and attending kindergarten or, in Louisiana, working at an oil refinery.
Obviously, similar legislation is gestating in other backwards state governments. Louisiana’s bill began as a response to an incident in which a man gave his pregnant wife an abortion pill without her knowledge. Then someone got the bright idea of tacking on all possible uses of abortion medication. And here we are.
And here’s where we’re going…
Trump Frantically Attempts Pull-Out Method on Birth Control
It’s not just abortion that right-wing Christians are coming for. It’s everything to do with sex that isn’t within the bonds of marriage and also preferably awkward, brief, and deeply sad.
Just yesterday, D4FRFP1 Donald Trump suggested birth control could be made illegal if he’s elected re-president.
Specifically, banning birth control is an issue that should be left to the states, Trump ejaculated (IT ALSO MEANS “SAID”! LOOK IT UP! Yes, okay, it’s archaic, sure, but so is he.)
“Things really do have a lot to do with the states, and some states are going to have different policy than others,” Trump said in the political equivalent of having sex with a porn star while not wearing a condom.
Trump frantically tried to pull out before it was too late, but just doesn’t have that kind of control. And so, when he tried, he screwed that up, too, saying he “has never and will never” advocate for birth control bans. Thing is, that doesn’t rule out letting states have the bans.
Trump promised he’s got a policy coming soon on birth control, but he’s been promising that for abortion drugs for weeks now, with nothing in sight. IVF, too, I think? Who knows.
At this rate, Trump will be adding Christian nationalist bans on divorce to the Republican Party platform by convention time.
Even Some GOP Senators See a Red Flag with Alito
A handful of Republican senators tsk-tsked the upside-down American flag flown at Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house by someone who was definitely not him in the days after the Jan. 6 attack on Congress and attempt to steal the presidency.
The closest any of the Republicans came to suggesting actual thing-doing — given that Alito is hearing cases having to do with Jan. 6 — was Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT). Romney said, “We ought to take a look at it,” which is the kind of thing you say to preserve your Grown-Up Serious Guy rep without having to do anything messy like do more than look at it.
Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the party whip, told CNN it was a “bad decision” for definitely not Sam Alito to fly the flag at Sam Alito’s house. “I don’t know how you explain that,” Thune said, apparently unaware of how Alito explained that.
None of the Republican senators, however, appear to think Alito’s flag — or anything — rises (or sinks) to the level of recusal.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) sits on the Judiciary Committee and is in the running to be the GOP’s Senate leader. He said, “there are more important things to worry about,” which he will also do nothing about. And, yes, I mean climate change.
Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack Makes More Money Than Trump’s Entire Social Media Company
Trump Media & Technology, the parent company of Truth [sic] Social [sic], is losing money at an accelerating rate. In the company’s first Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing since it went public, Trump Media revealed making less than $771,000 in the first quarter of this year. That’s less than it made in the same period a year ago.
It’s also less than historian Heather Cox Richardson makes with her daily substack newsletter. According to a report last year, Richardson’s substack newsletter makes at least an estimated $5 million per year, more than the annual rate Truth [sic] Social [sic] managed to squeeze out of its extant suckers in Q1 2024.
Trump Media is nevertheless “valued” at $6 billion. It has also been losing users to X, another failing company “led” by a right-wing autocrat who’s worshiped for his business acumen despite having none. Richardson is also valued at $6 billion, if not by Wall Street, than by her readers.
Full disclosure: The Fucking News has yet to file any paperwork with the SEC, but can assure potential investors that fucking generally has a positive valuation.
Coral Reefs Threatened by Asshole Bleaching
Most of Earth’s coral reefs are now being bleached by assholes. Unlike historic asshole bleaching, this variety involves metaphorical assholes destroying our atmosphere and making Earth’s oceans so hot that 60.5% of coral reefs are now expelling the algae that give them their brilliant colors.
It also means that coral — marine invertebrates — are in poor health. As National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Coral Reef Watch Program Director Derek Manzello put it in scientific terms last week, the temperatures threatening Earth’s coral reefs are “crazy haywire,” or in layman’s terms, “way fucked.”
And who’s doing it? Well, the Pentagon is the one entity responsible for burning more fossil fuels than any other. But who’s doing it in the private sector?
We Don’t Know Who’s Doing It in the Private Sector
Shareholders of publicly held weapons companies have been trying to force the companies they (fractionally) own to disclose information about just how much they’re destroying the world that their weapons are sold as protecting.
But The Lever reports that the boards of America’s four biggest arms dealers are all recommending that stockholders vote against greater transparency into how much they’re destroying the planet that their weapons are sold as protecting.
The companies involved are Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX (formerly Raytheon), and Boeing (formerly Boeing). Board members at these companies include former Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work, former U.S. and NATO Commander in Afghanistan Gen. Joseph Dunford (USMC-Ret.), former Chief of Naval Operations John M. Richardson, former USAF Inspector General Stayce D. Harris, other former Chief of Naval Operations Gary Roughead, Gen. Ellen Pawlilowski (USAF-Ret.), Admiral James Winnefeld, Jr., (USN-Ret.), and then-Pres. Barack Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson…all of whose jobs used to be ostensibly protecting the planet.
Crime Watch
IMMIGRATION REFORM Maybe it’s just me, but if I had spent a few centuries — including this one — exploiting an entire…what’s the word I’m looking for?...contifuckingnent…I’d wanna make up for that, too, somehow.
Hell, if nothing else, depleting an entire contifuckingnent of natural resources — such as oil, minerals, and Homo sapiens — tends to create poverty and want, the kind of thing that sends migrants searching for a better life elsewhere. Anywhere.
So Europe has had two motives to help out Africa: Guilt for past (current) exploitation, but also helping make Africa self-sustaining (afreakinggain) so that fewer migrants come to Europe. That’s why Europe has spent hundreds of millions of dollars — sorry, “Euros” — on initiatives in three countries alone: Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia. Primarily that’s been through the E.U. Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, but there are dozens of other programs, too.
So, the Washington Post, Lighthouse Reports, and multiple international news outlets teamed up for a year to see how that’s going. Turns out: Shittily! Now, you’re probably thinking, goldarn government waste and fraud! Oh, sweet, naïve Newsfucker. Would that it were the case.
In fact, the investigation determined that European dolla”Euros” — intended to stem migration by improving life in Africa — have funded aggressive, violent, and sometimes deadly operations targeting migrants and, to keep them away from sparkling European shores so they won’t bother the German tourists…
…detaining migrants and dumping tens of thousands every year in remote areas of northern Africa. Like that whole desert patch that shows up on your maps of Earth as not green.
The groups involved, getting that sweet, European pseudo-money, include organizations (I’m dignifying glorified gangs here, obviously) implicated in human-rights abuses.
Here’s the Washington Post:
Migrants have been pushed back into the most inhospitable parts of North Africa, exposing them to abandonment with no food or water, kidnapping, extortion, sale as human chattel, torture, sexual violence and, in the worst instances, death.
Call me cynical but this sounds like a very bad way of making up for centuries of exploitation.
TCB
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D4FRFP = Disgraced, quadicted, fraudster, rapist, former President.
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