SCOTUS and whatnot

[chasfh]

9 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

Not all churches are scams.  Churches are like other businesses.  Some are good.  Some are scams.  

I won’t argue with you there. 

[oblong]

My son says "Nashville is Atlanta for white people"

It is a growing city for sure.

 

[chasfh]

14 minutes ago, oblong said:

My son says "Nashville is Atlanta for white people"

It is a growing city for sure.

 

I think they get one of the two next MLB franchises. There’s a lot of outside and tourist money there, which is also why Vegas will get the other team. 

[gehringer_2]

52 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

That is probably the most cynical view of treligion I have ever heard! 

I don't think religion began with that intention, but there is no doubt that rich expolit it to take advantage of the poor.  

There is belief, and then there are churches. Organized churches are collections of people and they are prone to every failing of people in all their other endeavors, which means that most organized churches become bastions of profit, self-preservation and parishioner control in service of the 1st two. In the end, this ends up having little to do with Christianity, or whatever other belief they represent, but a lot to do with the normal state of humanity. 

Edited May 19, 2022 by gehringer_2

[oblong]

It is sad that the Catholic Church hasn't effectively dealt with their history.  It's a large organization and those things move at a snail's pace.  But individually a parish can be a remarkable thing.  I'm not catholic but my wife is and we've raised our kids in the church and I still go with her.  I've coached sports teams all through that time.  We have a church festival, or did, before the pandemic.  There is a real sense of community.  We had a co ed softball team.  We have a food pantry to serve the community. A scouting program.   In a lot of ways they make people feel welcome and everything is fine. It was certainly a million times better than the fundamentalist church I grew up in.  There's nothing creepy about my experiences.  In the other church I always had this uneasy feeling that I was about to be led to a sales pitch of some sort.  Always loaded questions.  

[Motown Bombers]

 

[pfife]

isn't that part of the plot of The Matrix?

 

[Mr.TaterSalad]

14 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

 

This woman herself HAD AN ABORTION!!!

[Motown Bombers]

This is why Republicans oppose the Green New Deal. Liberals use baby fetuses as renewable energy. 

Edited May 19, 2022 by Motown Bombers

[oblong]

1 minute ago, Mr.TaterSalad said:

This woman herself HAD AN ABORTION!!!

well then she should know!

[gehringer_2]

10 minutes ago, pfife said:

isn't that part of the plot of The Matrix?

 

Well, it's like you said: You didn't think a Republican could actually make something up out of whole cloth all by themselves did you? If it's not pure projection they had to have seen it somewhere.

Edited May 19, 2022 by gehringer_2

[chasfh]

1 hour ago, oblong said:

It is sad that the Catholic Church hasn't effectively dealt with their history.  It's a large organization and those things move at a snail's pace.  But individually a parish can be a remarkable thing.  I'm not catholic but my wife is and we've raised our kids in the church and I still go with her.  I've coached sports teams all through that time.  We have a church festival, or did, before the pandemic.  There is a real sense of community.  We had a co ed softball team.  We have a food pantry to serve the community. A scouting program.   In a lot of ways they make people feel welcome and everything is fine. It was certainly a million times better than the fundamentalist church I grew up in.  There's nothing creepy about my experiences.  In the other church I always had this uneasy feeling that I was about to be led to a sales pitch of some sort.  Always loaded questions.  

Sounds something like the liberal Catholic Church of my youth. Glad to see there are still vestiges of that surviving through this weird fundamentalism time. 

[oblong]

occassionally the the priest at mass will venture into "taboo" topics but I know from conversations and social media that half the people listening are silently rolling their eyes.

I guess you could say it was "easy" to go and experience things.  Didn't require anything.  The things I did do were out of service because I enjoyed it and saw it as serving the community as much of a church.  Being involved allowed me to see the real benefit to doing these things for people who needed it.

 

[pfife]

wrong thread

 

Edited May 19, 2022 by pfife

[Jim Cowan]

13 minutes ago, pfife said:

wrong thread

 

Good post

[pfife]

This is the "constitutional framer" "originalist and textualist" Alito is leveraging for his opinion.

 

[CMRivdogs]

So Oklahoma has just passed a law on banning abortion at the moment of fertilization (Does a bell go off or something? Do you hear choirs of angels singing the  Hallelujah Chorus?)

Once again to penalties for the fertilizer. He should at least be charged with being an accessory.

[gehringer_2]

Led by don't-call-him-a-joke-even-if-he-is Clarence Thomas, the US Supreme Court officially separated itself and US law from any obligation to actually consider that justice be done.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/01/arizona-death-row-supreme-court-shinn-innocence/

"In the 1993 case Herrera v. Collins, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made a staggering claim. The Constitution, Scalia wrote, does not prevent the government from executing a person who new evidence indicates might be “actually innocent” — that is, someone with the potential to legally demonstrate they did not commit the crime for which they were convicted. Scalia didn’t just make his point casually. It was the reason he wrote a concurring opinion.

Scalia’s claim was so outlandish that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor felt obliged to specifically rebut him, even though they agreed on the ultimate outcome in the case. Only one other justice joined Scalia’s opinion: Clarence Thomas.

 

Last week, Scalia’s once-fringe position became law. In Shinn v. Ramirez, the court voted 6 to 3 to overrule two lower courts and disregard the innocence claims of Barry Lee Jones, a prisoner on Arizona’s death row. Importantly, the majority did not rule that it found Jones’s innocence claims unpersuasive. Instead, it ruled that the federal courts are barred from even considering them. Thomas wrote the opinion.

and of course, they don't even care how many times they are proved wrong:

"Thomas also recites the prosecution’s narrative — including gruesome details of the crime — as if it were fact, ignoring the numerous expert witnesses and two federal courts that have said the injury that caused the girl’s death couldn’t possibly have happened at the time and in the manner the state of Arizona claims.

The Supreme Court’s own history ought to impart some lessons here. In 1994, Scalia described in an unrelated death penalty case the heinous nature of the rape and murder for which Henry McCollum was convicted and sentenced to death in North Carolina. It was, Scalia argued, a poster case for the death penalty. About 20 years later, McCullum was exonerated and freed. In 2006, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote a dissenting opinion defending the Tennessee conviction of Paul House that also included graphic descriptions of the crime and a recitation of the state’s narrative as if it were fact. House, too, was later exonerated and released."

Edited June 2, 2022 by gehringer_2

[smr-nj]

F’ing travesty. 🤬

[gehringer_2]

for starters the heinousness of a crime should not even be an admissible consideration in a trial of guilt because it is wholly immaterial to the question of guilt or innocence and only serves to inflame opinion against a defendant who should be presumed innocent. To me it's one of the great abuses of US criminal trial conduct in general.

Edited June 3, 2022 by gehringer_2

[Motown Bombers]

I'm old enough to remember when we we're told Republicans would be forced to be moderate. 

 

[chasfh]

1 hour ago, Motown Bombers said:

I'm old enough to remember when we we're told Republicans would be forced to be moderate. 

 

Republicans could hardly be doing a better job trying to drive talented people out of their states and steer their economies into the shitter if they reinstated Jim Crow laws.

[CMRivdogs]

Since we're hearing squat about the investigation into the abortion ruling leak, I'm guessing it's the same individual.

[gehringer_2]

2 minutes ago, CMRivdogs said:

Since we're hearing squat about the investigation into the abortion ruling leak, I'm guessing it's the same individual.

Not sure why Thomas would have leaked the Dobbs draft. I still tend to think it was Roberts, though on the other hand I don't know if I can give him credit for being that devious. I do think it is interesting how much time has passed between that leak and the non-release of an actual decision - maybe the time is not unusual yet but it has been a while.

[chasfh]

We haven’t talked about this in a long time, but I am going to go out on a limb here and predict that the Supremes will stop short of overturning Roe completely this summer. I can’t believe they would affirm it, either. My best guess is that they punt Roe to a future year, perhaps 2025.

This is an election year, and overturning Roe will create the danger of lighting a fire under Democrat voters, driving them to the polls in great gobs such that it would lead the Dems to victory in both the House and the Senate. That’s a fairly real possibility, and would be a horrible thing for conservatives all by itself.

But the other thing overturning Roe does is to douse the fire on the Republican side to campaign and fundraise against federal protections of Roe in the first place. Abortion is the most animating issue in today’s Republican Party because of its hold not only on red hats, but on many moderate conservative voters as well. A lot a lot of money gets raised on Pro-Life; taking that all away will not only cost R candidates a lot of money, but perhaps the election right along with it.

I don’t think the radical right wing Supremes will want to risk handing the House and Senate to Democrats, especially with the White House in Dem hands for the next two-and-a-half years. It would be better for the Court to hold off on Roe, which would allow it to maintain its position as a hot button political issue for the their side, and wait until Republicans gain trifecta control in 2025 to finally overturn Roe once and for all. By then the potential for consequences will be less severe, and elected Republicans will then have ample time to rig the elections process in the majority of states to maintain control in 2026 and beyond.

To anyone who scoffs at the idea and maintains the Supreme Court could never be so political as to take such crass electoral considerations under advisement, may I remind you that this is the year 2022, as well as Year Five of the Age of Trump.

 

Edited June 16, 2022 by chasfh