POTUS No. 45 has just declared his opposition to a national ban on abortion, saying that states should have the final say on what happens within their borders.
What in the world are we to glean from the presumed Republican Party presidential nominee’s latest stance on abortion?
Let’s review for a moment this moron’s path through the abortion pea patch.
He once declared himself to be fully pro-choice on the issue. Then he ran for president in 2016 and promised to appoint judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that inscribed a woman’s right to choose as a civil liberty. He kept that promise, with three judges named to the high court during his single — and hopefully only — presidential term. Republican senators declared their intention to enact a national ban, the former POTUS was silent. Now he says it’s up to the states.
While making that declaration, the former Idiot in Chief has boasted about “single-handedly overturning Roe v. Wade.”
Where does this clown stand on the issue? Don’t answer that. I think I know. He doesn’t stand anywhere on it.
Alabama’s supreme court has issued a ruling that is going to reverberate all over the nation, as it endangers a medical practice that allows couples to welcome children into this deeply troubled world.
The court has ruled that embryos are “children,” and that the destruction of embryos that are not implanted into women’s bodies via in vitro fertilization theoretically could be construed as “murder.”
This despicable ruling is a nod by the court to the Christian nationalist movement in Alabama and it well could be — and should be — challenged as violating the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
This one hits many millions of Americans right where they live. Indeed, a member of my family gave birth some years ago to twins after she and her husband decided to seek an IVF procedure. Had the court ruling issued in Alabama had been in force in the state where they live, this couple could not have welcomed their son and daughter into the world.
The First Amendment declares that Congress must not enact any law that establishes a state religion. The Alabama high court has thumbed its nose at the amendment and declared that if Christian nationalists want to declare embryos to be children, then that’s all right. Let ’em have their say, the court has ruled.
This is crap. No, it’s worse than that. It is an evil intrusion into a couple’s most delicate decision-making process.
Amarillo’s five-member — and all-male — city council has me scratching my noggin over a highly dubious law it is considering for approval.
Let’s see how this works. The city is considering a ban on people using public roadways if they intend to travel through the city to obtain an abortion.
This prompts what — to me, at least — is an obvious question: How in the name of Big Brother does the city enforce such a law?
Amarillo, where I lived for 23 years before my wife and I relocated to the D/FW Metroplex, is the largest Texas city to ponder such a screwball idea. The city is getting plenty of pushback on it and the council so far is unable to make a decision.
This week, the council conducted a special meeting at the civic center to accommodate the crowd attending, but it didn’t allow any public comment.
This notion is being pushed by those on the far right who oppose abortion to the extent that they want to make it illegal for a woman to obtain one. The Amarillo City Council is considering whether to weigh in on it.
I am shaking my head over this goofy notion. I want to stipulate that the council contains not a single woman. These all are men making a decision that involves whether a woman can control her body.
I’ll get back to my point, which is that such a law is unenforceable! How do police track the traffic? How does anyone determine whether an occupant in the vehicle is heading for an out-of-state medical clinic to obtain an abortion?
And aren’t the right-wingers of this world opposed to big government, that they oppose the Big Brother imposing his will on the people? Oh, wait. I almost forgot! Their anti-Big Brother posture applies only to those issues that don’t get ’em all riled up.
This is about the slipperiest slope I have ever seen … ever!
All this blather and nonsense about whether President Biden has lost a step or two mentally ignores or dismisses a key question.
Which is: Have you listened to the unhinged, uncontrolled and incompetent rants of the guy Biden succeeded as POTUS?
Donald Trump is 77 years of age. He is just a tad younger than the president. Trump bloviates about the Big Lie while Joe Biden is negotiating with world leaders. Trump cannot seem to get Barack Obama off of what’s left of his mind, mistaking Biden with the 44th president fairly routinely.
The ex-POTUS clearly is declining, as some medical experts are suggesting. Yet those who are critical of President Biden on the specious argument that he’s losing mental acuity fail to recognize the same thing in what is becoming apparent in the idiot who wants to replace him.
Try to nibble on this nugget: Trump also said that under his administration, shoplifters would be subject to extrajudicial execution: “We will immediately stop all the pillaging and theft. Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”
He said that President Biden’s policies will lead us into “World War two.” Hey, wait. We fought that one already. He said Army Gen. Mark Milley, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed; that he swept all 50 states in 2020; that he defeated Obama in 2016; and that windmills are killing whales.
Dude is losing it, man. To think that some Americans actually want this lunatic in charge of the executive branch of our government is, well … simply beyond belief.
Have we become so wedded in Texas to the notion of following a hidebound ideology that we cannot consider the human impact from policies that come out of our Legislature?
Don’t answer that. I know the answer. I believe it is yes.
Kate Cox is now the official poster woman for a policy that needs a serious revisiting when the next Legislature convenes in January 2025. Cox is the Dallas woman who was pregnant with a child who was doomed to die days if not hours after being born. Cox needed an abortion. Why? Because doctors told her that giving birth could harm her reproductive future, that she might be unable to get pregnant again.
Cox could obtain that abortion in Texas because of a cruel law that makes the procedure illegal, except when a pregnancy endangers the mother’s life. No other exceptions are allowed. Cox got kicked around. A lower court granted her permission; the Texas Supreme Court nixed that ruling. Then it issued a permanent ruling that disallowed Cox’s desire to end her pregnancy.
She went out of state to receive the procedure.
This is an insane law. It needs to be rewritten to allow for the type of exception that Cox faced.
The so-called “pro-life” movement is heralding the SCOTEX decision. This movement has nothing to do with being pro-life. It is instead a “pro-birth” movement that put Kate Cox’s parental future in dire peril.
The Texas law — one of the nation’s most restrictive — makes abortion illegal after six weeks of pregnancy. Hell, many women don’t even know they’re pregnant so soon after conception! That didn’t matter to the numbskulls who forced this bill onto the books.
To worsen matters, they wrote a law that punishes doctors who perform an abortion with criminal penalties. And, of course, they didn’t allow for the type of circumstance that Kate Cox faced were she to give birth to a baby who had zero chance of survival.
Think for a moment about the heartbreak that awaited Cox and her husband and their family.
The next Texas Legislature has the power to improve a bad law by broadening the exceptions allowed for ending a pregnancy. If our legislators have a beating heart, they will act to lessen the chance of other women being trapped in the vise that could have delivered permanent reproductive damage to Kate Cox.
Kate Cox deserves better treatment than what she is getting from the Texas legal system.
The Dallas resident is being caught in a whipsaw over the issue of abortion. A court ruled that because the baby she is carrying is doomed to die shortly after birth that Cox is entitled to end the pregnancy contrary to the heartless Texas law that requires her to give birth.
Then the Texas Supreme Court stepped in and overruled the lower court, telling Cox that the baby’s well-being isn’t covered under the limited exceptions carried in the Texas abortion law.
The case is now being appealed again and Cox is waiting to learn whether she will be forced to give birth only to watch her baby daughter die.
This is cruelty that defies description.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton weighed in, too, vowing to sue Cox and her physician if she is allowed to end the pregnancy. What’s more, Cox’s doctor faces criminal penalty if he assists her in this effort.
This is utter madness! Cox faces the possibility of being unable to conceive another child if she is forced to give birth.
What on Earth have we unleashed in Texas if this woman is denied the opportunity to determine her own child-bearing future?
The year that is one month away from passing into history will be known in my house as the year of the broken heart.
2023 has been without question the worst year of my life. Today it got even worse. I said goodbye this morning to Toby the Puppy. He had been battling cancer for the past few months. What started as a urinary tract infection this past July turned into cancer of the prostate gland, the bladder, and one of his kidneys.
I took him this morning for his second scheduled chemotherapy treatment and at 9:30 his doctor called to inform me that Toby’s “quality of life” has been compromised beyond recovery. He suffered pain in his left front leg, apparently from a nerve condition. He had suffered severe weight loss. His appetite had all but vanished. All the pain pills and medicine to stimulate his appetite weren’t working.
The doctor gave me all the options. I collected myself and told her it was “time to let him go.” I called my sons, who rushed over right away to be with me. We all went back to the clinic and said our goodbyes to the best companion a grieving “daddy” could ever want. Indeed, my year began with the loss of my dear bride, Kathy Anne, to glioblastoma, a savage and aggressive form of brain cancer.
Now this.
Toby joined our family on Labor Day Weekend, 2014. It was love at first sight — for us and for him. We all fell in love with each other on the spot. Kathy Anne decided that we officially would call him “Puppy,” although he did answer to Toby, which was the name given to him by his previous family.
He went everywhere with us in our RVs. To both coasts and the Great Lakes, through the western half of Canada. To dozens of Texas state parks. Toby was a road warrior. He was smart. Toby would react excitedly to hearing Emma’s name, even though our granddaughter was not necessarily present when we mentioned her to him.
Toby had a bark that belied his small size. He sounded much larger than he was … and that made it all the more special when he did bark, because he did so only for a reason, such as when strangers would come to our door.
I sought to chronicle Toby’s life on this blog with the series I called “Puppy Tales.” A theme throughout the series was his ability to bring smiles to our faces. Indeed, he made us laugh every … single … day.
Those of you who wonder about Toby the Puppy’s progress in his fight against cancer are entitled to hear the latest news.
He is doing well!
My pup has just begun the second phase of his treatment. He endured the radiation treatment. Toby’s appetite kinda/sorta went into the tank for a time after that phase of his treatment. Then it recovered. He has resumed his gluttonous eating habits, which of course pleases me to no end.
Now comes the chemo phase. The doctor’s office drew blood from my puppy this morning, then phoned me with the result. Toby’s doctor declared, “Toby is doing great.” Then she said that my puppy is “as good a candidate for chemotherapy as any patient I’ve ever had.”
She performed rectal exam and declared that his prostate “doesn’t seem as enlarged as it was before.” His cancer includes his prostate gland. I am trying to compute the 2+2 equation, and it is telling me the radiation helped control the cancer.
Now we proceed to Phase 2. Chemotherapy won’t be as frequent as radiation, but it will last bit longer.
My constant companion and best pal is a fighter. He is holding up quite well. I am grateful beyond all measure for the treatment he is getting. This has been the worst year of my life … hands down! I am harboring a measure of hope that the immediate future for my precious pup is looking a good bit brighter.
Abortion is a political issue that gives me the heebie-jeebies, given the intensity of views on both sides of the great divide.
I consider myself to be pro-choice, but clearly not pro-abortion. And, no, those terms are not mutually exclusive. I merely cannot counsel a woman to obtain an abortion; then again, I do not deserve to have any say on how a woman should make such a gut-wrenching decision.
Republican politicians, therefore, are on the wrong side of history when they continue to dictate to women what they can and cannot do to manage their own biological affairs. Voters across the nation are making their feelings clear as well on that issue, turning back GOP-led efforts to ban abortion, to make it illegal.
Ohio voters spoke loudly and clearly on the matter by ratifying a measure to make abortion rights part of that state’s constitution. Other states’ voters in places such as Kansas, Mississippi, Kentucky and Virginia have offered the same message to GOP pols: Do not dictate to us how we can make these decisions.
The Dobbs decision by the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade earlier this year, energizing abortion-rights advocates across the land. Let us not be coy about this fact, either: abortion is going to play a major role in every election going forward as we march toward the 2024 presidential election.
Voters already are speaking with absolute clarity on this issue. They have warned the pols in D.C. to keep their mitts of women’s reproductive rights. The key question now is this: Will the hide-bound politicians listen to what their constituents — their bosses — are telling them?
You know already that I love this gig of writing a blog, so much so that I have just crossed the 700-day mark.
Seven hundred consecutive days of posting a commentary on High Plains Blogger! I consider that a big … deal, if you get my drift.
I get a particular question from time to time, which goes like this: How are you able to write so frequently? My answer is that I do not know or why that it happens. I am prone to respond simply that “It’s what I do and it’s who I am.”
I’m not boasting about it. I merely want to call attention to this streak because, in a manner that many of you will understand, it has served as a form of therapy for me since I experienced the worst day of my life.
Feb. 3 came and went. The day began with my dear bride struggling to regain consciousness after suffering a grand mal seizure about six days earlier. The day ended with a phone call from the hospital telling me Kathy Anne had “just passed.” The glioblastoma lesion in her brain took her from us and it shattered many hearts.
I have sought in the months since then to tell the story of my personal journey through this darkness. My family and I are going through it together, but as a form of therapy, writing about this passage has given me strength. It helps clear my head … along with the road trips I have been able to take with my trusted companion, Toby the Puppy.
I likely would have continued this streak without the tragedy that befell us but since we have been dealt this hand, I am continuing to play it for as long as it is reasonable.
I want to thank you for reading it and sharing it when the spirit moves you.
Seven hundred consecutive days of blogging means a great deal to me. It happens to mean even more as I am able to continue to use this forum as a guide path that leads me toward the light.
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