$175,000 for 50 years? He’s 71 now so he went into prison at 21. That means he spent virtually his entire life in prison. He could have done so many things, but instead he needed to sit in a prison cell. All because he was wrongly convicted.

And because I’m a math geek and need to figure this stuff out, $175,000 over 50 years is $3,500 a year. If we calculate what he would have earned at the federal minimum wage over that time frame (ignoring bank account interest or inflation just to keep things simple), we’d get over $500,000.

They’re giving him a third of what he should have earned at bare minimum. (And that ignores all the other horrible things involved with being wrongfully imprisoned for 50 years.)

Did you read what I wrote? It’s not that they decided they weren’t going to do anything. It’s that the rules of the government limit what they can do with a small majority. They can’t just unilaterally decide that they are passing a new constitutional amendment with a few vote majority in the House/Senate. They could try for a bill, but there they are limited by various other rules not to mention the conservative Supreme Court. If the Democrats had a big enough majority, they could get more bills passed.

And that being said, what’s the alternative? Allow the Republicans to get into power and hope that they don’t take away women’s rights too much? Many Republicans have already declared that they want a national abortion ban. Others have said that they want to criminalize miscarriage and ban contraception.

Voting third party (thanks to our First Past The Post system) won’t work. Sitting out the elections and not voting won’t work. The best thing to do is get as many Democrats in office as possible from local positions to the highest offices. Then, put pressure on the higher up Democrats to get a women’s rights bill passed.

At this point, and with our current political system, not supporting the Democratic candidate is essentially supporting the Republican one.

The Democrats could have passed a bill, but “enshrining it in the Constitution” would mean passing a Constitutional amendment. First, they would need a 2/3rds vote of Congress. That means that the Democrats couldn’t have a slim majority - they’d need a large majority. Or they’d need to find Republicans willing to vote for a Constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights. Basically an impossibility.

Even if the Democrats managed to get the Constitutional Right To Abortion passed, they would need to have 75% of the state legislatures pass it. Democrats don’t control that name state legislatures.

So perhaps the Democrats could have passed a national law, right? Except that the Republicans would inevitably filibuster this in the Senate. The Democrats could have changed the filibuster rules, but not all of them supported changing these rules. (Mainly because it would prevent them from stopping the Republicans if the Republicans regained the Senate.) Any law that was passed would inevitably have been challenged up to the conservative Supreme Court.

You could definitely criticize the Democrats for not pushing harder to pass a law guaranteeing abortion, but a Constitutional Amendment was out of reach.

And this woman also WANTS to have the baby. She and her husband were trying to get pregnant. Unfortunately, the fetus has abnormalities that mean it won’t survive. Without an abortion, she will need to wait until she hits term, have a C Section, and then have a dead baby.

Oh, and thanks to her medical history, she’ll likely be unable to have another pregnancy after that C-section. So it’s either give birth to a dead baby now and have no more or have an abortion now and (after she recovers) try to have another baby. Only one of these options might result in a baby that’s alive and it’s the option that includes abortion.

But Paxton will scream about how he’s “protecting the unborn baby” without caring that the fetus has a nearly zero chance of survival and without caring that the woman faces potential severe (possibly life threatening) medical complications if she’s forced to continue the pregnancy. He’ll force women to carry pregnancies to term even if it kills them!

The Red State Brain Drain continues. Professors leaving Florida. OB/GYN doctors leaving Texas.

Why would you want to work in a place that criminalizes your job?

And don’t forget the “life of the mother” exceptions in places like Texas that can only be triggered if the woman is actively dying. If she’s not close enough to death, it is still “carry it to term or else.”

You would also need someone on the Palestinian side that the Israelis would trust to keep their word and not attack. That trust just isn’t there and will be difficult to rebuild.

I’m not completely disagreeing with you. The illegal settlements need to go. I’d like to see any illegal settlements responded to by having a special group of Israeli police, working with Palestinian authorities and not just moving in on their own, arresting the settlers instead of the military moving in to protect them.

There’s also the outside influence to consider. Evangelical Christians love the settlers. They help them and any politicians who would protect them. They’d work against a politician who promised to arrest them.

There are a lot of factors in play and the solution won’t be an easy one.

That’s definitely a start. Unfortunately, just swapping Netenyahu out with someone less extreme wouldn’t get Hamas to stop their attacks. It wouldn’t cause the people on both sides to feel safe enough to trust in a peace process and to forgive past actions.

There are a lot of factors in play and the solution to this, if there is one, is going to be very complicated and difficult to achieve. It will be worth it, but it won’t be easy.

I think there are four factors at play here. They’re mixed together in an extremely messy fashion and overlap quite a bit, but they are:

1. The people on both sides fear for their safety. The Palestinians fear the Israeli government and military taking action against them. The Israeli people fear rocket attacks and raids like the one that just happened. When a populace lives in fear, it leads to -

2. Extremist groups are in charge. You have Hamas on one side whose stated goal is to kill all Jews. (Not just in Israel, but across the world.) You have the right wing Israeli government on the other side who push for horrible actions against the Palestinians in the name of “safety.”

3. Foreign interference. Iran on one side is arming/helping Hamas. On the other side, evangelical Christians help the settlers and push the Israeli government because they think Jesus will come back if Israel suffers a big enough attack. (Peace would prevent that attack and stop Jesus from returning.)

4. A long and bloody history. Both sides remember when they were killed by the other side. Both sides refuse to leave the past in the past and intend on making the other side pay. The problem here is that the cycle of violence never breaks. If you always have to attack because “they did X to us” then they will feel like they always need to attack because you did Y to them. It goes around and around and never changes no matter how much everyone suffers.

How do you untangle this mess? If I knew that, I’d have the Nobel Peace Prize. I wish I did know. I’d set the peace prize aside in a second, tell the world what to do, and stop it all. Unfortunately, I’m no diplomat. (Some of the best diplomats have failed in this arena.) I can see what’s going on, but I have no clue how to stop it.

The best I can think of is that perhaps UN security forces need to move in. Not to attack one side or another, but to keep both sides away from each other. Sort of like the national version of putting two kids who were fighting in time out until things cool down. But again, I’m no diplomat so for all I know that would make things worse.

The problem, even if we reinstated this, is that this applied to broadcast only. This wouldn’t apply to cable channels. Neither would it apply to Internet groups. Both of those would still be free to spout full blown lies and conspiracy theories dressed up as “news.”

The biggest thing that I can see that needs to be done would be shutting down “news” organizations like FOX News, OAN, and Newsmax. Also, breaking up online movements like Q where blatant misinformation is spread as if it’s proven truth.

Now, HOW you do that without massive first amendment violations, I don’t know. You would also need to be careful how it’s structured because that could easily be used to shut down anyone left of center should a Republicans take the presidency/control Congress.

Helping Ukraine isn’t relishing war. Yes, peace would be better, but that’s entirely in Russia’s control. If Mexico invaded the US and seized a state or two, does anyone think that the US would just sign a peace treaty and give up those states? (I mean, maybe if it was Mississippi or Alabama.) No, we’d strike back until we took back every inch of territory that we had lost.

Russia could have peace tomorrow by pulling their troops out and agreeing to never again invade a sovereign country. (I’m sure there were be more conditions before it would be a lasting peace, but that would be a great start.) Russia’s idea of “peace,” though, is “Ukraine becomes part of Russia and everyone in Ukraine who doesn’t like this is tortured, raped, and then killed.”

It’s a false equivalence to pretend that fighting to free your country from an invading force is the same as fighting as part of the invading force.

Some of the MAGA folks are already saying that we should bomb/invade Mexico to stop the drug cartels and immigrants. Of course, they hand-wave how horrible a war would be. They assume that Mexico would thank the US for such a great bombing and ask for more. Because MAGA.

And even there, he could hold onto the speakership by working with Democrats. If he throws the Democrats a few bones in exchange for them voting to keep McCarthy in any speakership vote, then the power of the Freedom Caucus would be blunted.

But silly me, the obvious path forward is really to keep doing the same thing and hope that the Freedom Caucus will become reasonable. Surely, that will work perfectly, right?

To be fair, we’re also worried that, if he does, his followers will go violent again. Not that this is a reason to excuse him him prison. It just means that it might not be all rainbows and puppies if Trump goes to prison. Our celebrations might be interrupted by home grown right wing terrorist attacks.

I worked for a pretty popular magazine back in the late 90’s. One day near the beginning/middle of 2000, we were all called down to the bullpen for a last minute meeting by management and marketing. (That’s never a good sign.)

We were told that we have a great product with amazing writing, but marketing doesn’t know how to sell it so they’re closing us down. Instead, we went online only. I was the web developer so I survived the firings.

So then we figured that we were set because our website produced more content and had more traffic than any of the company’s other websites. However, in March of 2001, we had another emergency meeting. Again, we were told our content was great, but the company was going in another direction. Instead of producing our own content, the company was going to just repost other sites’ content. I and everyone else in my team were let go.

Needless to say, the whole “we’ll just repost what other people posted” plan didn’t go so well. Last time I checked, the company wasn’t doing very well at all.