At 8 a.m. Monday morning, another Trump abortion ban will take effect .
As the state of Iowa joins the growing ranks of Republican-led states banning abortion at six weeks , Iowans will wake up to new realities of state-forced birth, where the government controls private medical decisions for over half the state’s population. ALSO READ: Boebert, MTG and far-fight friends derail Speaker Mike Johnson’s summer plans Kamala Harris will also wake up to a new reality. After President Joe Biden withdrew and endorsed Harris as the 2024 Democratic nominee, Harris campaign committee, along with other supportive committees and super PACs, together raised an historic $250 million in campaign donations in under three days, much of it from first time donors .
Young voter registration surged in a day-over-day increase by 700 percent. Anyone missing the connection between Trump’s abortion bans and the drumbeat for Harris isn’t paying attention. Harris won’t let Trump/Vance flip the script on abortion Although abortion was carefully scripted out of the headlines and speeches at the Republican National Convention, Harris will remind Americans how Trump bragged about overturning Roe v.
Wade . He appointed three radical Supreme Court justices who were willing to lie to Congress under oath — and trash the credibility of the high court in the process — to overturn abortion rights. Harris will also remind voters how Trump publicly congratulated himself, bragging in writing that : “After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v.
Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone...
Without me, there would be no 6 weeks, 10 weeks, 15 weeks, or whatever is finally agreed to. Without me the pro Life movement would have just kept losing. Thank you President TRUMP!!!” Indeed, thank you Donald Trump, for confirming in writing that you’re responsible for women’s-life-threatening six-week abortion bans, you’re responsible for forcing women and girls to flee their home states to stay alive, you’re responsible for Republicans gunning for armed menstruation police , you’re responsible for pushing frightened women to the brink of death before doctors can intervene to save them.
Very well done, “President TRUMP!!!”. Bragging about the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision was probably the most consequential self-own you will ever make.
Why Trump/Vance efforts to “soften” state forced birth won’t work Faced with opinion polls showing that a strong majority of Americans think Trump overturning Roe v. Wade was a “bad thing,” Trump is now marketing a softer position on abortion , saying that rather than a national ban, it should be left up to individual states to decide. Vice presidential candidate and anti-abortion extremist J.
D. Vance , who would criminalize abortion even in cases of rape and incest because “two wrongs don’t make a right,” and who thinks “childless cat ladies” should not equally participate in democracy , now parrots Trump’s “softening,” Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.
D. Vance (R-OH) speaks during a campaign rally at Middletown High School on July 22, 2024 in Middletown, Ohio. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) Letting states decide via popular vote whether women — or the government — should make private health care decisions is more gaslighting than softening.
Under the 14 th Amendment , all persons born or naturalized in the United States have been entitled to the same equal protection under the law since 1866, regardless of popular whim. The whole point of the 14th amendment was to remove fundamental human rights from the vicissitudes of popular opinion, which, as MAGA illustrates, is easily manipulated. The 14th Amendment prohibits all states from making or enforcing any law that denies the equal protection of the laws to all citizens, or that deprives any person of liberty without due process of law; it does not subject these rights to periodic revision as popular opinion fluctuates.
ALSO READ: How much access did $50,000 buy someone at the Republican National Convention? When writing Dobbs , lifelong misogynist Justice Samuel Alito wrote deceptively that the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause could not protect women’s medical privacy, or abortion access, because “that theory is squarely foreclosed by the Court’s precedents, which establish that a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification.” In case you missed it, that was Alito selectively choosing to prioritize the Supreme Court’s “classification precedent” over 50 years of substantive due process precedent to reach his desired outcome. Alito summarily rejected Roe v.
Wade’s determination that a woman’s decision to terminate her pregnancy is a “liberty” protected against state interference by the substantive component of the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment . State-forced pregnancy and state-forced birth restrict women’s liberty for — at minimum — nine months. That’s not including however many days of painful labor, 18 years or more of financial struggle for most single moms and a lifetime of permanent medical changes resulting from pregnancy and childbirth .
Harris will stop the gaslighting Helping themselves to Alito’s smug and dishonest dismissal of Equal Protection for women, Trump/Vance’s “let-each-state-decide” abortion stance subjects women’s bodies and lives to the whims of popular vote. After owning Miss USA and similar beauty pageants for decades , it’s not surprising that Trump continues to see women’s bodies on a catwalk, subject to popular opinion and scorecards. Harris will serve it back in ways Biden never could, due to Biden’s Catholic reluctance to say the word “abortion” in public.
As recently as 2012, Biden affirmed his personal opposition to abortion in the most public of settings. Harris isn’t reluctant. She has read, and understands, the assignment.
She can communicate how abortion bans have increased maternal and infant mortality and decreased women’s equal opportunity to earn a living . She can explain how Republicans have unconstitutionally stripped half the U.S.
population of equal protection under the 14th Amendment because Trump justices said they could. Believed to be the first vice president to ever visit an abortion clinic, Harris talks about abortion rights clearly, forcefully and unapologetically , and she will help shape abortion into the pivotal issue in November — second only to preserving our republic from the marching threat of fascism . Harris now shoulders the burden of defending the country from two ranting, misogynistic authoritarians, a relentless rightwing propaganda machine and deep pocketed corporate donors happy to sacrifice women’s civil rights if doing so will lower taxes and government regulations.
In stepping away from power despite his strong conviction that he could and should serve a second term, Biden displayed as selfless an act of sacrifice and patriotism as any president since George Washington. As heart-wrenching as it was to watch his Oval Office address last Wednesday , women who have had it up to here with Republicans’ cruel machinations under Dobbs are grateful finally to have a fierce messenger . Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense.
Her Substack , The Haake Take , is free. ST. CLOUD — Former President Donald Trump had new material on Vice President Kamala Harris for thousands of cheering supporters in St.
Cloud on Saturday evening at a rally with his running mate, Ohio U.S. Sen.
J.D Vance. Trump called Harris — the likely Democratic nominee for president since President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign a week ago — a “radical left lunatic” who supports defunding the police, taking away guns, letting in tens of millions of undocumented immigrants, and limiting red meat.
He also said she isn’t very smart. Trump also took swings at his other favorite targets: Biden, “fake news,” radical Islamic terrorism and violent “illegal aliens” whom he compared to Dr. Hannibal Lecter from the horror movie “Silence of the Lambs.
” “I mentioned him because we have people like that coming into our country. They’re closing their insane asylum all over the world. They’re sending the criminals into the United States,” Trump said.
Trump added some optimism to his speech, promising an immediate turn of fate for America as soon as he’s back in the Oval Office: “Inflation will stop. The illegal aliens will be turned back. The cartels will be in retreat.
Crime will fall. Energy prices will plummet. Incomes will soar.
And a world in chaos will rapidly be transformed into a planet of peace.” In fact, economists from an array of think tanks and Wall Street firms say Trump’s plan to halt immigration and raise tariffs on imported goods would cause inflation to increase and inflation-adjusted incomes to drop. Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics and economic adviser to the presidential campaign of the late Sen.
John Mcain, told CBS MoneyWatch that consumers “will be hopping mad a year from now” about inflation if Trump wins and enacts his policies. The line to see Trump at the Herb Brooks National Hockey Center serpentined nearly a mile through a residential neighborhood, with people sweating in the 90-degree heat through t-shirts reading “I’m voting for the felon” and “Mean tweets and cheap gas.” Standing in line, Jake Wolf of St.
Cloud said he believed Trump would get the country “under control” with border security and “getting transgender sh** out of childrens’ schools.” Darla Schmidt of Montevideo befriended fellow truck driver Brian Nelson of Pine City in line. Both said their main concerns are the increased cost of living eating into their wages, and believes Trump will be able to rein in prices.
Asked about the prospect of higher tariffs driving up prices, Schmidt said it was like cleaning a house: “It gets nasty first, but eventually it’s going to work its way through.” While some 8,000 supporters made it inside the arena, more than a 1,000 others were disappointed to be turned away and left to cheer for Trump’s image on a giant screen set up in the arena’s parking lot. The Reformer was outside the arena with them.
Trump said they will win Minnesota easily as long as “they don’t cheat.” Ahead of the rally, Democrats including Gov. Tim Walz and U.
S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar held their own event to energize 300 volunteers at the St.
Paul Labor Center to kick off a Saturday door-knocking session. “Three days ago, the nation found out what we’ve all known in Minnesota, [Trump and Vance] are just weird,” Walz said at the rally. Walz is suddenly receiving lots of chatter as a potential running mate to Harris, in part for his blistering attacks on the Trump-Vance ticket: “They’ll be happy to only be 10 points behind by the time we’re done with them,” he said, according to a Harris campaign press release.
Despite its faint-purplish hue, Minnesota hasn’t gone red in a presidential election since voting for Richard Nixon in 1972. Even when Trump knocked down much of the blue wall across the Upper Midwest in 2016, Minnesota remained stubbornly Democratic. Hillary Clinton won the state, albeit by just 1.
5 percentage points, a closer margin than in any election since native son Walter Mondale squeaked out his only state win against Ronald Reagan in 1984. Minnesota’s elusiveness has made the state a particularly precious prize for Trump, who spent millions here in 2020 even as he lost ground in the state, trailing Biden by 7 percentage points. Trump vowed never to return to Minnesota if he lost the state in 2020, although he returned this year in May to speak at the Minnesota GOP’s annual Lincoln Reagan Dinner , where he repeated the flagrant lie that he won the state in 2020.
Even though Biden suffered floundering approval ratings in recent years, he maintained a 6 percentage point lead over Trump in Minnesota, according to a June KSTP/Survey USA poll . Harris has widened the margin for Democrats since becoming their all-but-certain presidential nominee with a 10 percentage point lead over Trump — 50% to 40% — in a KSTP/Survey USA poll released on Saturday. Ruby red St.
Cloud was friendly territory for Trump, who won 60% of the vote in Stearns County in 2020. Vance took the stage first, speaking for about 20 minutes, with a speech that previewed Trump’s message on immigration at the southern border, Islamic extremism and support for the police, even though his running mate is now a convicted felon and facing charges in three other cases. Vance also repeated a new attack on Harris for a tweet she sent four years ago in support of Minnesota Freedom Fund, a nonprofit organization that pays cash bail for people facing criminal trials or immigration hearings.
At the time, the organization was bailing out people arrested in the protests and riots following the police killing of George Floyd. Harris hasn’t been involved in the organization beyond that one tweet, according to the organization . “When rioters and looters were burning American cities to the ground, including Minneapolis, Kamala Harris was raising money to bail them out of jail.
Let’s throw them in jail and deport them out,” said Vance, who’s now on a ticket that promises to pardon many of the people convicted of rioting at the U.S. Capitol on Jan.
6, 2021, when Trump sought to disrupt the peaceful of transfer of power after losing the election. The Minnesota Freedom Fund has bailed out more than 2,500 people awaiting trial since its founding in 2016, arguing that the constitutional right to be innocent until proven guilty shouldn’t depend on a person’s income. Some of the people for whom the organization has posted bail have gone on to commit serious crimes, including rape and murder.
But the Trump campaign also attacked the organization for bailing out Jaleel Stallings , who was accused of attempting to kill police officers but later acquitted of all charges by a jury. One officer involved in the incident pleaded guilty to felony assault on Stallings, and apologized to him. Trump also falsely said Saturday that he sent in the National Guard to quell the rioting in Minneapolis after Floyd’s murder; in fact, Walz, a 24-year veteran of the National Guard before his time in politics, called up the Guard.
Trump was joined on stage by Shannon Owen, whose husband Josh Own was killed in the line of duty as a Pope County Sheriff’s Deputy, and Paul Perez, president of the National Border Patrol Council. The rally drew many East African immigrants, despite Trump’s anti-immigrant message. He promised in his speech to reinstate the travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries, including Somalia.
Osman Dagane, an Uber and Lyft driver from Minneapolis, said he arrived early Saturday morning to organize East African immigrants to come support Trump. He brushed off Trump’s previous comments on immigration — including that Somali migration to Minnesota has been a “disaster.” “Well, now he gets to know a lot,” Dagane said.
“He didn’t know that time, but now he know a lot.” Dagane left before Trump took the stage because he was mainly interested in seeing Vance. Many people started filtering out of the arena thirty minutes into Trump’s speech, leaving only the most devoted behind.
Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J.
Patrick Coolican for questions: [email protected] . Follow Minnesota Reformer on Facebook and X .
CONTINUE READING Show less Climate and environmental defenders on this week implored U.S. senators to block a permitting reform bill introduced this week by Sens.
Joe Manchin and John Barrasso that campaigners linked to Project 2025, a conservative coalition's agenda for a far-right overhaul of the federal government. Common Dreams reported Monday that Manchin (I-W.Va.
) and Barrasso (R-Wyo.)—respectively the chair and ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee—introduced the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 . The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) noted that although the proposal "includes several positive reforms for the accelerated development of transmission projects," it also advocates "limiting opportunities for communities to challenge projects, loosening oversight for drilling and mining projects, extending drilling permits and fast-tracking [liquified natural gas] permits, and several other provisions friendly to fossil fuel giants.
" "This dangerous bill doesn't deserve a floor vote." These are nearly identical policies to what's proposed in Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership . The plan, which was spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, calls for "unleashing all of America's energy resources," including by ending federal restrictions on fossil fuel drilling on public lands; limiting investments in renewable energy; and rolling back environmental permitting restrictions for new oil, gas, and coal projects, including power plants.
While Manchin has been trying— and failing —to pass fossil fuel-friendly permitting reform legislation for years, Brett Hartl, director of public affairs at the Center for Biological Diversity , said that his "Frankenstein legislation is taken straight from Project 2025, and it's the biggest giveaway in decades to the fossil fuel industry." Hartl said the bill "deprives communities of the power to defend themselves and gives that power to Big Oil by making it harder for communities to challenge polluting projects in court," and "prioritizes the profits of coal barons over public health." "And it mandates oil and gas extraction in our oceans," he continued.
"The insignificant crumbs thrown at renewable energy do nothing to address the climate emergency." "Monday was the hottest day in recorded history," Hartl noted. "It's shocking that as the climate emergency continues to break records around us, the Senate continues to fast-track the fossil fuel expansion that is killing us.
This dangerous bill doesn't deserve a floor vote." Hartl added that "to preserve a livable planet," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.
) "must squash this legislation now." Manchin—who has said this will be his last term in office—has been a steadfast supporter of the fossil fuel industry, partly because his family owns a coal company . The senator says his permitting reform bill "will advance American energy once again to bring down prices, create domestic jobs, and allow us to continue in our role as a global energy leader.
" However, Allie Rosenbluth, Oil Change International's U.S. manager, warned Thursday that "this bill is yet another dangerous attempt by Sen.
Manchin to line the pockets of his fossil fuel donors, sacrificing communities and our climate along the way." "Don't be fooled: The Energy Permitting Reform Act is another dirty deal to fast-track fossil fuels above all else," she continued. "It would unleash more drilling on federal lands and waters, unnecessarily rush the review of proposed oil and gas export projects, and lift the Biden administration's pause on new LNG exports .
" "We urge Congress to reject this proposal and commit to action that protects frontline communities from the impacts of fossil fuel development and the climate crisis," Rosenbluth added. "Don't be fooled: The Energy Permitting Reform Act is another dirty deal to fast-track fossil fuels above all else." NRDC managing director of government affairs Alexandra Adams said Wednesday that "this bill is a giveaway for the oil and gas industry that will ramp up drilling and environmental destruction at a time when we need to be putting a hard stop to fossil fuels.
" "We cannot afford to roll back so many of our bedrock environmental and community legal protections and offer a blank check to the oil and gas industry," she stressed. "We need new solutions for permitting if we are going to meet our clean energy potential and address the climate challenge. But this is not it.
" "This bill would altogether be a leap backward on climate, health, and justice if passed into law," Adams added. "The Senate should reject it and look toward alternative solutions already being considered." CONTINUE READING Show less Long before the advent of reality television, the popular game show “ Queen for a Day ” thrilled American audiences by giving women who told heartbreaking tales of financial struggles a chance at winning expensive items that could help solve their problems.
Throughout its 1956-1964 run, each episode featured contestants describing a misfortune that had struck them or their families, such as polio, rheumatic fever or hunting accidents. They asked for everything from bunk beds to beauty school tuition to improve their lot. Eventually, a clap-o-meter would appear, superimposed over each woman’s face.
The winner would be chosen based on the volume of the audience’s applause. She was crowned Queen for a Day and lavished with dishwashers, sewing machines and sofas, while the losers – and the millions of Americans who had tuned in on their TV sets – watched. Today, something like that black-and-white TV show plays out nonstop, but on different devices.
It’s the plot of GoFundMe , the world’s largest crowdfunding website for personal causes. The privately owned company says it helped people raise over US$30 billion in donations between 2010 and early 2024. While that total sounds impressive, GoFundMe’s success leaves behind a trail of failed campaigns and disappointed users – a reality that the platform is designed to hide.
The ‘Queen for a Day’ show obliged contestants to air their needs publicly. Behind the success stories If you open GoFundMe’s Discover page, you’ll find a cascade of misfortunes. People from many walks of life use the platform to tell the public about the cancers and diabetes cases , house fires and other tragedies that have beset them or their loved ones.
They ask for help paying for everything from medical treatment to college textbooks. A fundraising meter appears, usually next to a photo of the person seeking help, and gauges how the appeal has resonated with website visitors. Winners go viral, blow through their goals and raise tens of thousands of dollars .
Others hope the crowd will choose them next. We are political sociologists interested in how people across North America use digital technologies to cope with the high cost of health care and higher education. As part of our research , we conducted 50 in-depth interviews and surveyed over 600 crowdfunding users between 2018 and 2021.
We also analyzed data from nearly 2 million GoFundMe campaigns. In “ GoFailMe: The Unfulfilled Promise of Digital Crowdfunding ,” our book based on this research, we explain that behind GoFundMe’s winners, whose stories are paraded on the site’s front page and its podcast – “True Stories of Good People” – stands a long line of also-rans. They raise almost no money this way but are put through an emotional roller coaster and give up a considerable amount of their privacy and personal data.
Digital hurdles When these platforms emerged in the 2000s, crowdfunding companies promised to use the internet’s networking capabilities to remove gatekeepers and democratize fundraising , so that anyone with a worthy cause could access the money they needed. Far from this techno-optimistic vision , we find striking inequalities throughout GoFundMe’s fundraising process. First, there’s the digital divide .
Many low-income people simply don’t ask for help using crowdfunding because they don’t know about it, can’t reliably access the internet, or are too intimidated by technology. For those who can get in the virtual door, crowdfunding rewards users who already have many economic advantages in the offline world. Wealthier people are more likely to be able to use online services, while poorer and less-educated users have a harder time marketing their misfortunes with compelling narratives, eye-catching photos and engaging videos.
And crowdfunding works best when there’s a crowd willing and able to help, which usually begins with family, friends and acquaintances. But if your family and friends are broke, like you, then there’s little help to be had , no matter how good your campaign is or how deftly you promote it. GoFundMe’s invisible majority We estimate that only about 17% of U.
S. GoFundMe campaigns for health care and emergency costs meet their goal. We’ve also found that most of the funds raised are concentrated among a very small group of campaigns.
We saw in the data we analyzed that the top 5% of highest-earning campaigns claimed about half of all dollars raised on GoFundMe. Because relatively well-off users tend to be more successful at crowdfunding, such a disparity is likely to only worsen already high levels of economic inequality in the U.S.
Despite the company’s assurances that every worthy cause has a place on GoFundMe, most of its users simply don’t get the funds they need when they use the platform. But you wouldn’t know this from browsing GoFundMe. Failure doesn’t sell.
The droves of campaigns that never get off the ground are largely hidden by an algorithmic recommendation system that promotes the most successful cases to prominence while sweeping the rest into the platform’s search results. This appears to be highly profitable for GoFundMe, which earns revenue from fees and tips added to donations but leaves many users feeling disappointed and some even duped. One user we interviewed, whose campaign for help with medical costs ended up not receiving a single donation, likened the experience to “shouting into that well of sadness, hoping people will see and hear you.
” Asked for comment, the company said our book was “rife with misconceptions,” but GoFundMe didn’t provide any details about what the people who don’t meet their stated fundraising goals get from the platform. “We are constantly innovating our product to ensure more organizers achieve greater success,” GoFundMe added. ‘Queen for a Day’ 2.
0? People have always asked for help, and every era has its way of deciding who gets it. In the 1950s, media companies experimented with new combinations of charity and entertainment and invented the TV game show. We agree with critics who consider “Queen for a Day” to be among the genre’s worst exploiters of hardship for profit.
The possibilities for companies like GoFundMe to use technology in new ways to improve people’s lives have never been greater. At the same time, the opportunities to profit from a crisis are also growing. To fulfill crowdfunding’s democratic promise, we believe that GoFundMe should be far more open about the success of all its campaigns, including those that flounder.
It could also do much more to make the platform more accessible to the people who are experiencing the most economic distress. Until it takes those steps, its users would be wise to proceed with caution – recognizing that behind every viral success lie countless untold stories of unmet needs. Martin Lukk , Ph.
D. Candidate in Sociology, University of Toronto and Erik Schneiderhan , Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .
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