onfocus

Doctors who are found guilty of providing an abortion in violation of the bans can face up to 99 years in prison, a minimum of $100,000 in fines, and the loss of their medical license.

Just straight up evil behavior happening in Texas and other places that have outlawed reproductive care for women. I’m not sure how health care workers can navigate this ethically and they should never have been put in this position.

This is not, as CNN’s Chris Licht portrays it, a news company reporting on the existence of support for Trump; it’s a news company orchestrating a broadcast to accentuate support for Trump and silence those who disliked his responses. It is CNN making news instead of reporting it.

CNN, propagandist. Media bosses really want to bring fascism to America.

Good prophets know how to inspire the zeal of the faithful. They don’t necessarily have the social and political nous to deal with unbelievers, or to reach grudging but necessary accommodations with them. Often, indeed, disagreement is treated as being tantamount to heresy. Nor are prophets good at working with routines, which are antithetical both to their self image and their style of operation.

I have been thinking about this priest and prophet dichotomy since I read this post and I'm seeing it everywhere. It's like the tension between tech innovation and maintenance personified. Plus the phrase routinization of charisma has been giving me good brain dissonance.

Thomas wrote a landmark Supreme Court opinion upholding the doctrine in 2005, but began questioning it a decade later, before eventually renouncing his past opinion in 2020 and claiming that the doctrine itself might be unconstitutional. Now, Thomas could help overturn the doctrine in a new case the high court just agreed to hear next term.

Corrupt court. You can put a price tag on overturning precedents. Happy to hear Ron Wyden is working on accountability but I’m skeptical there will ever be consequences.

I’ve been returning to this site frequently. Getting a playlist right is an art that humans are better at than algorithms, and I’m enjoying these curated mixes more than the big streaming service offerings.

The arrangement reveals that Leo, a longtime Federalist Society leader and friend of the Thomases, has functioned not only as an ideological ally of Clarence Thomas’s but also has worked to provide financial remuneration to his family. And it shows Leo arranging for the money to be drawn from a nonprofit that soon would have an interest before the court.

Corrupt court. We’re just going to keep doing these until someone does something I guess?

“The most reasonable interpretation of the statute is that this was a gift to Thomas and thus had to be reported. It’s common sense,” said Kathleen Clark, an ethics law expert at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s all to the financial benefit of Clarence Thomas.”

Corrupt court. This level of corruption is unacceptable. They’re not royalty, this is a democracy. We need accountability.

If we want more people to enjoy what we believe are the benefits of something like Mastodon, it’s on us to make it delicious and convenient and multi-textured and fun instead of trying to shame people into eating their soysage and unsalted soup.

Classic case of built-by-engineers-for-engineers that is difficult to escape. I love Mastodon but as a decentralization enthusiast and developer I am also the target market. I hope the new onboarding process and features on the way like improved search will help.

New documents reveal Jane Roberts made $10.3 million from elite firms, raising questions about the Supreme Court justices' conflicts of interest.

Corrupt court. No wonder Chief Justice Roberts hasn’t done a damn thing to reign in ethics violations.

The nation is not “barreling toward default,” nor is it “careening,” or even “drifting” there. It is being pushed there by Republicans.

The media has had since at least 2016 to figure out how to cover irrational politics and they haven’t. They still imagine a world where Republicans want a functioning government—they don’t. Default is a win for them and stories should reflect that.

Nine days after he was confirmed by the Senate for a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, the then-circuit court judge got one: The chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, one of the nation’s biggest law firms with a robust practice before the high court. Gorsuch owned the property with two other individuals.

Corrupt court. It's amazing that these ethics disclosure forms are so confusing to supreme court justices. I thought they were our best legal minds. Also amazing, the purchaser "...has been involved in at least 22 cases before or presented to the court, according to a POLITICO review of the court’s docket." WTAF?

Gun policies, I argue, are downstream from culture, so it’s not surprising that the regions with the worst gun problems are the least supportive of restricting access to firearms. A 2011 Pew Research Center survey asked Americans what was more important, protecting gun ownership or controlling it. The Yankee states of New England went for gun control by a margin of 61 to 36, while those in the poll’s “southeast central” region — the Deep South states of Alabama and Mississippi and the Appalachian states of Tennessee and Kentucky — supported gun rights by exactly the same margin.

Interesting look at the roots of regional attitudes about guns from the author of American Nations about the different groups that settled America and their differing beliefs.