I'm also eating it in the library.

SINNER!

I'm fed and watered and clean and I still feel dodgy. And one of the people I emailed to say I'd re-evaluate at lunchtime told me to stay home.

As I am weak-willed and easily swayed by peer pressure, back to sleep it is.

I have no library books at all. Just my schoolwork and the computer.

MARIA!! I just saw your call and I'm at the library. I will call you ASAP.

Yeah. It's not a medical term, but a political sound-bite. Sucks that the religious right has succeeded in getting most media people to use it.

NPR is using "a certain abortion procedure that opponents call 'partial birth' abortion." Yeah. Because they don't want to have to distinguish between D&E and D&X.

Cynical look at what Republicans might be up to:

A far more prudent strategy, and the one the President and his advisors will likely adopt, would be to appoint Justices who will preserve Roe but chip away at it slowly, for example, by devising new procedural rules that make it difficult to challenge abortion regulations in federal court, by upholding restrictions on particular medical procedures like partial birth abortion, and by further limiting abortions for minors and poor women. Moderates and independents may not like these changes, but such rulings will be much less likely to induce wholesale defections from the Republican coalition than wiping Roe v. Wade off the books. The latter is a simple, easy to understand result that people can get angry about and rally around. Procedural limitations on abortion, by contrast, are hard to explain to voters and therefore risk less political danger for the Republicans.

Chipping away at Roe slowly not only allows the party to keep moderates and independents from bolting, it also preserves a hated symbol for the party's base of religious conservatives to struggle against. As long as Roe remains law, religious conservatives can point to it as a example of what is wrong with America and with a liberal activist judiciary (which is, of course, increasingly staffed by conservative Republican Presidents!). Thus, the reverse litmus test not only holds the party's winning coalition together, it's also good practical politics.

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I don't think that's a cynical view as much as a realistic view. I mean, that's what is happening, right? That's why they're doing it, right? Or maybe I'm just cynical!

I don't think that's a cynical view as much as a realistic view.

Yeah, I think you're right.

Blah. I am blah. Everything is blah. Blaaaaaaah.

Duuuude. In the course of my work just now, I think I stumbled across that place you interviewed at, you know, the one that would be weird and morbid.

I think I stumbled across that place you interviewed at, you know, the one that would be weird and morbid.

I almost wish I'd gotten a little further in that process, just to see what it was like.