Feeding kids

Alexandra Petri has a satiric piece in The Washington Post: “We must protect life from conception until the moment of birth!”

It’s no surprise to me to learn that Mary Miller (R, IL-15) is one of just forty-two members of the House of Representatives who voted on Thursday against the Keep Kids Fed Act of 2022, created to help fund meal programs throughout the year. Miller is zealous about prohibiting abortion and allowing unlimited access to weapons. Not so zealous about feeding children.

One detail: the bill is meant to

extend flexibilities for summer meals in 2022. This will make it easier to feed all students during the summer months, particularly those in rural areas, through flexible options like meal delivery and grab-and-go. [My emphasis.]

Rodney Davis, Miller’s opponent in the Republican primary, voted for this bill. Friends who tell me that there’s no difference between Davis and Miller, that it’s a mistake to cross over to vote in the Republican primary: you’re wrong.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

[Miller holds a super-spreader event — I mean a campaign rally with a defeated former president today.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I’ve read Ben Zimmer’s prose many times, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a crossword puzzle by him before today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper. It’s a good puzzle, relatively easy with toughies here and there. I began with 13-D, eight letters, “Groups inspired by pop-punk” and 20-A, five letters, “Rome’s ____-Shelley Memorial House,” and never had to look back.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, nine letters, “Non-stretchy attire rarely worn on Zoom calls.” A delightful start. But rarely ? Really? I learned this amusing term only recently and am grateful to know what I have been wearing on and off Zoom calls.

1-D, six letters, “Scouts, often.” Noun? Verb? This clue gave me more trouble than it was probably meant to.

8-D, seven letters, “Mega-selling action figures of the ’90s.” Oh, yes, I remember them.

15-A, nine letters, “Settled.” This ambigious clue had me stuck for a bit.

17-A, nine letters, “Emotional fulfillment guide written long, long ago.” Pretty decorous.

35-D, eight letters, “Ticket stubs, menus, etc.” I love such stuff.

39-D, seven letters, “Trademark for wearable Teflon.” Somehow “wearable Teflon” doesn’t sound nearly as cool.

43-D, six letters, “Originally, to adjust a musical instrument.” Huh.

49-D, four letters, “Metaphorical concession.” Pleasantly defamiliarizing.

55-A, nine letters, “‘That’ll never happen again.’” Colloquial clue, colloquial answer.

60-A, nine letters, “Orthodontist's palatal appliances.” BITEPLATES won’t fit. Need more room!

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Excerpts from a dissent

Excerpts from the dissent filed by Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization :

For half a century, Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833 (1992), have protected the liberty and equality of women. Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that the Constitution safeguards a woman’s right to decide for herself whether to bear a child. Roe held, and Casey reaffirmed, that in the first stages of pregnancy, the government could not make that choice for women. The government could not control a woman’s body or the course of a woman’s life: It could not determine what the woman’s future would be. See Casey, 505 U. S., at 853; Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U. S. 124, 171–172 (2007) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting). Respecting a woman as an autonomous being, and granting her full equality, meant giving her substantial choice over this most personal and most consequential of all life decisions.

*

As of today, this Court holds, a State can always force a woman to give birth, prohibiting even the earliest abortions. A State can thus transform what, when freely undertaken, is a wonder into what, when forced, may be a nightmare.

*

The lone rationale for what the majority does today is that the right to elect an abortion is not “deeply rooted in history”: Not until Roe, the majority argues, did people think abortion fell within the Constitution’s guarantee of liberty. Ante, at 32. The same could be said, though, of most of the rights the majority claims it is not tampering with. The majority could write just as long an opinion showing, for example, that until the mid-20th century, “there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain [contraceptives].” Ante, at 15. So one of two things must be true. Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.

*

In 1868, the first wave of American feminists were explicitly told — of course by men — that it was not their time to seek constitutional protections. (Women would not get even the vote for another half-century.) To be sure, most women in 1868 also had a foreshortened view of their rights: If most men could not then imagine giving women control over their bodies, most women could not imagine having that kind of autonomy. But that takes away nothing from the core point. Those responsible for the original Constitution, including the Fourteenth Amendment, did not perceive women as equals, and did not recognize women’s rights. When the majority says that we must read our foundational charter as viewed at the time of ratification (except that we may also check it against the Dark Ages), it consigns women to second-class citizenship.

*

The Fourteenth Amendment’s ratifiers did not think it gave black and white people a right to marry each other. To the contrary, contemporaneous practice deemed that act quite as unprotected as abortion. Yet the Court in Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1 (1967), read the Fourteenth Amendment to embrace the Lovings’ union. If, Obergefell explained, “rights were defined by who exercised them in the past, then received practices could serve as their own continued justification” — even when they conflict with “liberty” and “equality” as later and more broadly understood. 576 U. S., at 671. The Constitution does not freeze for all time the original view of what those rights guarantee, or how they apply.

*

As a matter of constitutional substance, the majority’s opinion has all the flaws its method would suggest. Because laws in 1868 deprived women of any control over their bodies, the majority approves States doing so today. Because those laws prevented women from charting the course of their own lives, the majority says States can do the same again. Because in 1868, the government could tell a pregnant woman — even in the first days of her pregnancy — that she could do nothing but bear a child, it can once more impose that command. Today’s decision strips women of agency over what even the majority agrees is a contested and contestable moral issue. It forces her to carry out the State’s will, whatever the circumstances and whatever the harm it will wreak on her and her family. In the Fourteenth Amendment’s terms, it takes away her liberty.

*

After today, young women will come of age with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers had. The majority accomplishes that result without so much as considering how women have relied on the right to choose or what it means to take that right away. The majority’s refusal even to consider the life-altering consequences of reversing Roe and Casey is a stunning indictment of its decision.

*

With sorrow — for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection — we dissent.

The full decision is here.

Back to 1868

From the New York Times’s annotated text of today’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade:

The crux of Justice Alito’s legal rationale is that the 14th Amendment’s protections of freedoms that are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution must be limited to those rights that were understood to exist deep in the country’s history — especially around 1868, when that amendment was ratified. This is an example of “originalism,” in contrast to the more liberal interpretative method that views the Constitution as a living document whose meaning can evolve with society.

And yes, “Thomas’s concurring opinion raises questions about what rights might be next.”

Today is a dark day for freedom and dignity.

Two more posts on Alito’s thinking
“Indefensible” : Rights and wrongs, old and new

“Once upon a time”

One of the great beginnings.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, is about to engage in some heavy lifting: Ulysses begins today.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

[Geen : not a typo. The song is “Lilly Dale,” by H.S. Thompson. Here are the lyrics. And here are two recordings. Whoever sings to young Stephen Dedalus changes grave to place.]

Our tube

Edd Byrnes, Farley Granger, and David Groh, all in the Murder, She Wrote episode “How to Make a Killing Without Really Trying” (February 4, 1990). Familiar faces in new arrangements: one of the pleasures of television. See also these arrangments.

[Byrnes, best known as Kookie from 77 Sunset Strip; Groh, best known as Joe Girard from Rhoda.]

Supreme inconsistency

Gonna be very weird if Supreme Court ends a constitutional right to obtain an abortion next week, saying it should be left to the States to decide, right after it just imposed a constitutional right to concealed carry of firearms, saying it cannot be left to the States to decide

— Neal Katyal (@neal_katyal) June 23, 2022

Cross my heart — this is exactly the point I made about three hours ago as Elaine and I were pulling into a Walgreen’s parking lot.

[I call anticipatory plagiarism.]

Netizen Trump

“You guys may not be following the Internet the way I do”: Donald Trump, pushing his Department of Justice to investigate a conspiracy theory about Italian satellites changing votes for him to votes for Joe Biden.

Members, plural

Liz Cheney just dropped a bombshell, I think: at the end of today’s hearing of the January 6 committee, the committee will show videotaped depositions in which White House staff identify the members of Congress — members, plural — who requested pardons after January 6.

*

And they were: Andy Biggs, Mo Brooks, Matt Gaetz, Louie Gohmert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Scott Perry.

EXchange names on the screen

[From Dial Red 0 (dir. Daniel B. Ullman, 1955). Click for a larger page.]

It makes sense that a movie that opens with a shot of a telephone directory would at some point have a look inside.

Why do columns of directory text fill the screen in old movies? I think such shots provide a low-grade reality effect. It’s not enough to show a character opening a telephone directory; we must see what the character sees. And what the character sees is somehow real: even a fictional telephone directory is in some way a work of non-fiction.

NOrmandy was a real exchange name. In Los Angeles, the exchange may have been NOrmandie. So spelled, that’s a Los Angeles street name.

More telephone EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Black Angel : Black Widow : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Blue Gardenia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : The Brothers Rico : The Case Against Brooklyn : Chinatown : Craig’s Wife : Danger Zone : The Dark Corner : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : Escape in the Fog : Fallen Angel : Framed : Hollywood Story : Kiss of Death : The Little Giant : Loophole : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Naked City (8) : Naked City (9) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Nocturne : Old Acquaintance : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : Pitfall : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Red Light : Side Street : The Slender Thread : Slightly Scarlet : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success (1) : Sweet Smell of Success (2) : Tension : Till the End of Time : This Gun for Hire : The Unfaithful : Vice Squad : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?