. . .

Searching large linguistic databases is a relatively new approach to judicial analysis called legal corpus linguistics. Although it has gained in popularity over the last decade, it is barely discussed outside of an enthusiastic group of right-wing conservative legal scholars. Which raises the question: How did this niche concept wind up driving such a consequential decision in the country’s health policy?

Now, new disclosures seen by HuffPost shed some light. Just weeks before she issued the ruling, Mizelle had discreetly attended an all-expenses-paid luxury trip from a conservative group whose primary mission is to persuade more federal judges to adopt the use of corpus linguistics. For five days, Mizelle and more than a dozen other federal judges listened to the leading proponents of corpus linguistics in the comfort of The Greenbrier, an ostentatious resort spread out over 11,000 acres of West Virginia hillside.

The newly formed group that picked up the tab, the Judicial Education Institute, received more than $1 million in startup funding from the billionaire libertarian Charles Koch’s network and DonorsTrust, a nonprofit that has funneled millions in anonymous donations to right-wing causes and has been dubbed “the dark money ATM of the conservative movement.”

Trump appointed Mizelle to the federal bench in late 2020 over objections from the American Bar Association that she had not been practicing law long enough to be qualified. A search of her other rulings found she had never previously applied corpus linguistics.

While the stage is full of applause, there was an incredibly touching exchange between Volodymyr Zelensky and an American WWII veteran.

— 🇺🇸 Veteran: Ah, the savior of the people.

— Zelensky: No, you are our savior. Thank you.

— 🇺🇸 Veteran: I pray for you.

. . .

The survey found that 63% of all respondents were pressured or forced into having sex with a current or former partner when they didn’t want to, and nearly 40% said their partner threatened them if they said no to sex. Around a quarter reported that their partner pressured them into becoming pregnant, and 13% said their partner used or threatened violence while they were pregnant with the intention of ending the pregnancy. More than 30% of respondents said they do not have access to an OB-GYN or physician who focuses on reproductive health. The survey was conducted on the Hotline’s website and all responses were anonymous.

“When you have a country that has now allowed abusive partners to be completely emboldened in restricting access to health care, in allowing someone to feel like they cannot control their own bodies, and when the states and the country decides to say, ‘Actually, no, your bodies aren’t your own.’ It is a very dangerous recipe, and the findings underscore that,” Crystal Justice, the chief external affairs officer at the National Domestic Violence Hotline, said in a Monday press briefing.

Abortion access and intimate partner violence are inherently linked because pregnancy is an extremely dangerous time for victims of intimate partner violence. Murder by an abusive partner is the leading cause of death for pregnant and postpartum women in the U.S. ― outpacing medical issues like sepsis and hemorrhage.

“We often think of these life events like a marriage or a pregnancy being some of the most happiest times of our lives,” Justice added. “They are some of the most dangerous, and often the times when we see violence and abuse escalate in an abusive situation.”

“Survivors are being forced to walk the line of isolation and safety to get the abortion care that they need, while also minimizing their risks of criminalization and punishment by their abuser as well as the state.”

Heritage's supposed Social Security "solutions" would reduce benefits while siphoning revenue out of the system.

"Every time a purported savior of Social Security floats a proposal to supposedly protect the program by reducing future benefits, people should be reminded of an observation made by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman more than a decade ago:

The risk is that we might, at some point in the future, have to cut benefits; to avoid this risk of future benefit cuts, we are supposed to act pre-emptively by...cutting future benefits. What problem, exactly, are we solving here?"

. . .

The reality is that privatization schemes for Social Security have been bandied about for decades — the Brookings Institution, The Century Foundation, the Economic Policy Institute, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities all tackled privatization efforts during the Clinton and Bush administrations — and they always serve as a Trojan horse to dismantle the program.

Privatization schemes would replace a federally guaranteed benefit available to tens of millions of working Americans with a volatile investment account subject to the whims of the business cycle, with no clear protections against economic downturns or other risk factors.

Telling the female part of a graduating class that all the effort and money they spent getting their degree and all their life ambitions should be canned for (or secondary to) domestic servitude and becoming breeding livestock is unacceptable. It is as intolerable as parents, churches, doctors, and politicians telling women and girls they should or have to do these things and that their ambitions and accomplishments are secondary or don't matter at all. Worse, passing legislation to force pregnancy and childbirth, no matter what the circumstance; staying in harmful or abusive marriages, no matter what the circumstance -- as if women are just property. These attitudes are precisely the crap I fought against all my life. I knew early on (remember my dear Mom telling me): "It's YOUR life."

And that is what those women should have been told: "It's YOUR life." That prick was way out of line. If we don't call this stuff out, if there are no consequences and pushback, and if we don't tell them to stay in their damn lane, this crap will continue for more generations. And what a shame. What a goddamned shame. And speaking of 'God,' what deity worth worshipping would say, insinuate, believe, or teach that is the purpose of half the human population on Earth? None that I want anything to do with, for sure. Whether God said such things as Butker and other men claim God said or men interpret God's alleged words as they want to hear them is up for debate. I lean heavily toward the latter, though, since the world's major religions are subject only to patriarchal interpretation. It is a spirit-crushing meat grinder that needs to end. If I wanted to have any relationship with God, I'd have to first get around all that. It's a hell of a mountain range to climb to see if a God is worth having a relationship with on the other side.

These men are obstacles to, not interpreters of God. How dare they believe they have any right to that or girls' or women's bodies, dreams, spirits, lives, careers, and ambitions? Who the hell do they think they are?

Who funds the CO2 Coalition?

Created in 2015, the coalition is a nonprofit based in Arlington, Va., with a revenue of $1.06 million in 2022, the latest data available from public documents. The coalition doesn’t list many of its donors.

“It is a front-group tied to the fossil fuel industry and conservative funders. They’re shills, promoting untruthful or misleading claims,” said Michael Mann, a climatologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mann’s work was included in a report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. “The coalition isn’t a legitimate source of science,” he said.

Coalition funders have included the conservative Mercer Family Foundation, a major Trump donor, according to Grantmakers.io, a public IRS data site; the Charles Koch Foundation, connected to Koch Industries, which has owned oil refineries and pipelines, and has conducted a “climate change disinformation campaign,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit that studies climate change; and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation Inc., which supports groups that fight critical race theory, according to SourceWatch, part of the progressive Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit watchdog organization.

This is how MAGA, conservative men, and the Talibangelicals believe childbearing-age women & girls should be treated. This is what they consider them to be: state-owned breeding livestock:

USSC has done a catch and kill (rather, catch and delay so it can be killed) operation on Trump's January 6th case. They took it to delay it, much like David Pecker bought negative stories about Donald Trump to "kill" them so that they were never published. . . .

TWO THINGS:

1. They took the January 6th case to DELAY IT. That is all. When they take indisputably criminal cases (no disagreement from any courts or juries on the way to the USSC) just for the delay, that's a clue. Otherwise, they'd have not taken that case.

2. When they take previously decided cases to overturn them and cases intended to impose ideologies that are very unpopular with the general American public, that's a clue. Such cases are being massively shoveled up to this court by the Koch/Federalist Society (on orders from the same) for MAGA to finally get what it wants from this court because they can't get it legislatively or at the ballot box.

Roe v Wade: overturned. Affirmative Action: overturned. VRA: destroyed. COMING SOON: LGBTQ rights: soon to be destroyed. Access to and use of birth control and medication abortion: on their list. Civil Rights Act: soon to be destroyed.

Rep. Jamie Raskin said that the USSC offices should be moved to RNC HQ. At this point, at least six of the so-called "justices" should move there to allow six actual justices to be installed in their place. Of course, that won't happen but functionally, it should.

It should be clear to anyone and everyone why those six conservative justices -- and particularly the last three appointed -- are there. Donald Trump and his team celebrated when the USSC took the January 6th case, and he called them "my justices". There is no pretending that any concern for justice, the rule of law, or integrity exists on the part of that court those six justices occupy. . .