A
handful of Senate Republicans have already indicated that they are on
board with the effort, including Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski
(Alaska), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Thom Tillis (N.C.). A fifth Republican,
Sen. Ron Johnson (Wis.), said last week that he had “no reason to
oppose” the measure, while also accusing Democrats of “creating a state
of fear over an issue in order to further divide Americans for their
political benefit.”
Sorry,
Senator Johnson, but Clarence Thomas created this state of fear with
his concurring opinion in DOBBS. I do not think the Democrats are
exploiting it -- and had not even thought that possible until reading
this article -- but if they are, they still did not create this fear.
Justice Thomas did it with what he wrote in DOBBS where he took away
privacy rights for all but LOVING V VIRGINIA -- which rests on the same
foundation as ROE, LAWRENCE, et al but Mr. Thomas is married to a woman of
another race and that must be the reason he didn't indicate LOVING
needed to be rethought.
Thomas, among the five justices who voted to overturn the precedent established by Roe v. Wade in
1973, also authored a concurring opinion suggesting the court should
also revisit other precedents, including those entitling Americans
access to contraception, same-sex marriage and same-sex relationships.
His role in the decision prompted a GWU student to launch a petition
signed by 11,300 people calling for Thomas to be removed from his
teaching post at the university.
Poor Clarence Thomas, he cannot face students now. He is a sad man with a sad life.
This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for today:
Wednesday, July 27, 2022. Iraq makes its case to the United Nations
Security Council, the political stalemate continues in Iraq, JACOBIN
produces a groaner, and so much more
Let's
start with JACOBIN and I'd honeslty probably let this pass without
comment were it not for the fact that JACOBIN can't stop pimping war on
Russia. Eileen Jones, you're not the embarrassment that IN THESE TIMES
has (
their JUSTICUE JUDY review was a non--stop mess of errors)
but you're not the writer you think you are either. Your review of
RESPECT was fairly spot on -- with many of the same points Ava and I had
made weeks before. But you don't know the industry so don't try to
write about it.
Eileen wants you to know that NETFLIX bet big on THE GRAY MAN and NETFLIX lost.
What the hell is she talking about?
She's
trying to write what industry papers were writing about ahead of the
film streaming on NETFLIX and right after it started streaming. The
angle the industry papers were going with.
And had she published it then, it might have been less embarrassing.
By which point, the industry wags were silenced by reality.
NETFLIX is not losing -- big or otherwise -- on it.
And
industry wags were stupid to have thought they would. It was a bunch
immature and ahistorical idiots who wrote that garbage to begin with.
Eileen saw it and ran with it.
At some point,
the casting is not going to work. We saw that as the 70s progressed.
But it is still new in streaming and the casting alone was going to make
THE GRAY MAN a success globally. You grab a variety of well known
actors from various regions and put them in one film together. It does
well in the global market.
The $200 million
price tag? Does seem high but NETFLIX, as Jane Campion has already
noted, is not going to stop making movies or stop making big movies.
It's going to be new talent and small films that will likely suffer as a
result of any financial issues NETFLIX may face (that's a whole other
story -- their financial woes -- and one Ava and I have covered in one
story after another for years now).
The Russo
brothers are a team NETFLIX wants to be in business with for prestige
and for hit potential. It's the deal they made and it paid off.
Eileen
and JACOBIN don't know the industry and shouldn't write about it. They
look like idiots. Had Eileen just written the review trashing the film
that she wanted, she might have been better off.
Should the film be trashed?
Alfre
Woodard is wonderful in the film. Ryan Gosling was the perfect pick
having already demonstrated in THE NICE GUYS that he worked very well
with a child actor. Everyone delivers a strong performance. Were I
casting it, I would've said no to Chris Evans. He does a strong job but
Captain America's not going to be easily accepted in the role he's
playing -- maybe that's why he wears that mustache in the film. I
understand his need to break out of type casting but, at present, he's
too associated with Captain America and I think it would have been
better with a different actor. That said, casting Chris in the role is
part of the reason the film's a hit.
And,
Eileen, it is a hit. There will be a sequel. People are streaming it
like crazy. You didn't understand the casting model and you didn't
understand that some industry wags were finally smelling blood in the
water with regards to NETFLIX (it's been bleeding for years) so you
wrote your silly piece that made no sense. Stick to reviews, not
reporting, because your attempt at reporting blew up in your face
because you didn't understand the models being used, industry jealousy
or even industry terms. That's how you end up writing a piece claiming
NETFLIX has lost big on THE GRAY MAN when the film is a hit for
NETFLIX. Your entire premise was disproven by the time your piece was
published.
That said, I do say "thank you."
Better readers at JACOBIN should read your garbage than the other
garbage that's promoting war on Russia. And if you're not getting how
stupid the pro-war garbage they're publishing is -- try substituting
"Florida" for "Ukraine" and "the United States" for "Russia" and see
just how weak the case they're making is.
Behind the backs of the American public, the US military is preparing
a provocation against China aimed at instigating a conflict that could
lead to a full-scale world war between the world’s two largest
economies.
This provocation comes in the form of a planned trip
to Taiwan by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the third-ranking figure in the
US government.
Despite US President Joe Biden’s publicly stated concerns about the provocative nature of the trip, New York Times
journalist David Sanger, an unofficial spokesman for the US
military/intelligence apparatus, reported Tuesday that “US officials
said the planning for Ms. Pelosi’s trip was moving ahead.”
By all indications, sometime next month, the octogenarian grandmother
of nine will strap herself into a C-130 cargo plane, possibly
accompanied by an escort of F-35 fighters and supported by US aircraft
carriers, and tempt fate by landing on Taiwan, amid warnings by Chinese military officers that they will “stop” her from entering the country.
This
level of recklessness is a testament to the deep crisis and
disorientation of the US political establishment, which is desperately
lashing out in all directions in the face of an intractable social,
economic and political crisis.
The dispatch of Pelosi, the
highest-ranking US official to visit the island in a quarter century, is
aimed at further undermining the one-China policy, which has been
systematically dismantled by the Trump and Biden administrations, who
have encouraged Taiwanese separatism as they have stuffed the island to
the gills with weapons. Now, provocatively, Washington is acknowledging
publicly a rising number of US military personnel on Taiwan.
Six mortar rounds were fired Tuesday night at the Turkish Consulate in
Mosul, in Iraq’s Nineveh province, landing nearby. There were no
reported casualties and no group has claimed responsibility for the
attack. It comes six days after a resort in Duhok province, in Iraq’s
semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, was bombarded in a suspected Turkish
artillery attack that killed nine tourists and wounded dozens of others.
We'll note this Tweet:
There was an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council yesterday regarding last week's attack.
AP reports (it's not identified as AP by ASHARQ AL-AWSAT but
it is AP):
[Iraq's Foreign Minister Fuad] Hussein said the Iraqi government is “sure” the Turkish military was
responsible for the attack. He pointed to the findings of its
investigation that Turkey's army has bases in the area near the resort,
PKK fighters have not been in the area for the last month and the
Turkish army uses 155 mm artillery projectiles whose fragments were
found at the scene.
Hussein added that many people in the area “gave us enough information about the activity of Turkish soldiers there.”
He called on the Security Council to urgently adopt a resolution
demanding that Turkey withdraw what he said were about 4,000 combat
soldiers from Iraq, and halt incursions into Iraqi airspace.
Hussein said that Iraq has issued 296 official notes of protests to
Turkey since 2018 in response to the neighboring country’s continued
violations on Iraqi land, which he numbered at 22,742 cases, calling on
the council to issue an emergency decision obliging Turkey to withdraw
its forces from Iraq.
The Iraqi foreign minister stressed that
there were no agreements between the Iraqi and Turkish sides which would
allow the latter to roam Iraqi land under the pretext of targeting the
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as they have claimed.
Iraq’s
demands before the council were listed by Hussein, which included
obliging Turkey to withdraw its forces from Iraq, the formation of an
international independent team to investigate the attack and hold the
perpetrators responsible, asking the council to include the Iraq-Turkey
situation in its agenda, and obliging the Turkish government to
compensate for the losses and damages caused by the attack.
An
Iraqi Parliament member announced that the Iraqi Parliament is
reviewing passing a law on expelling Turkish forces from Iraqi soil.
"The Iraqi
parliament is determined to determine the task of the case of the
illegal presence of Turkish army forces in the areas of northern Iraq,
which is considered a clear violation of its sovereignty," the source
cited.
The Coordination Framework, an umbrella
parliamentary bloc including all Iran-backed Shia factions, formally
nominated Mohammed Shia' al-Sudani to be the new Iraqi prime minister,
Iraqi state media reported Monday.
"Today, the leaders of the Shia framework
met in positive conditions and they unanimously agreed to nominate Mr
Mohammed Shia' al-Sudani for the [Iraqi] premiership," read a statement
released by the Coordination Framework.
Al-Sudani,
52, is a Shia Iraqi lawmaker from the south-eastern Maysan Governorate.
He has a Bachelor's degree in agricultural sciences. He has held
several posts and ministerial portfolios in the Iraqi government,
including the governor of Maysan, the minister of human rights in 2010,
and the minister of labour and social affairs in 2014.
The attention of Iraqis has shifted to the disagreement between
Kurdish forces over the nomination of the country’s next president,
after the Shia camp within the Coordinating Framework managed to reach
an agreement on the selection of the Minister of Labour and Social
Affairs Muhammad Shiaa Al-Sudani as its nominee for prime minister.
Iraqi political analysts say that the approach of the Kurdistan
Democratic Party (KDP) could scupper any deal with The Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan (PUK) to agree on a nominee for the presidency because the
KDP is not looking for a compromise with the PUK and continues to
pressure the pro-Iran Shia political alliance, the Coordination
Framework in a way that some descibe as an "attempt at blackmail"...
You
can't jump to the prime minister. A prime minister-designate is named
by the president. Once named, the designate has 30 days to form a
Cabinet which is the test that proves the designate is up to the job
and, if so, can move from prime minister designate to prime minister.
By custom, the president is a Kurd.
The
forming of a Cabinet in 30 days has never really been held and that's
why Iraq's governments have been in disarray from the start.
So what might be considered is how much does the Constitution have to be followed?
The
Constitution is clear that a president is elected and the president's
first job is to then name a prime minister-designate. Could Iraq use
the existing president to name a prime minister-designate? It probably
could attempt to but doing so would make the KDP angry and probably lose
their votes.
Another step around the impasse?
The
Coordinating Framework could nominate, in front of Parliament, a person
for the presidency. By custom, it would need to be a Kurd and it would
need to be someone popular enough to get the votes. There is no rule
in the Constitution that says the PUK and the KDP get to work out who
the president of Iraq is. They can be bypassed. But you're going to
need a very popular nominee to do that.
So, at present, the political stalemate continues.
We'll wind down with this:
I need you to take action on the Equal Rights Amendment today, Common Ills.
The
Equal Rights Amendment prohibits discrimination based on sex. Given the
devastating Supreme Court decision to repeal Roe in late June, it is
even more obvious that the ERA is needed more than ever.
We MUST act now to enshrine the ERA in the US Constitution.
The
US House has already removed the original time limit set on the ERA.
Now the House is in the process of advancing House Res. 891, which
expresses the sense of the House that the ERA to the US Constitution is
valid. This means that the ERA has already been ratified.
The
wording of House Res. 891 was intentionally modeled after language used
to confirm the validity of the very important 14th Amendment and it’s
Equal Protection Clause.
179
members of the House have already signed on to the resolution as
co-sponsors. We need 218 total co-sponsors, the majority of the House,
to sign on to House Res. 891. That has to happen as quickly as
possible. To do that we need your help.
Your job is easy! We need you to urge your Representative who is pro ERA to become a co-sponsor of
this historic House Res. 891. As well, please ask your Representative
to urge other members of the House to become a co-sponsor of House Res.
891. To show its importance, Speaker Pelosi has become the leading
cosponsor, along with chief co-sponsors Jackie Speier and Carolyn
Maloney.
We can do this!
 | Ellie Smeal |
P.S. Please help be a part of this historic moment by reaching out to your Representative today!
The following sites updated:
