It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
Lawsuit targets Nebraska's defiance of law to restore voting rights to those with felony convictions
The American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska has filed a lawsuit challenging top election officials' defiance of state laws that restore the voting rights of those who've ever been convicted of a felony.
By MARGERY A. BECK Associated Press
July 29, 2024 — 1:31pm
OMAHA, Neb. — The American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska has filed a lawsuit challenging top election officials' defiance of state laws that restore the voting rights of those who've ever been convicted of a felony.
The ACLU filed the lawsuit Monday on behalf of three Nebraska residents who would be denied the right to vote under a directive from Secretary of State Bob Evnen, who recently ordered county election officials to not allow those with felony convictions to register to vote in November's presidential election.
One plaintiff, T.J. King of Omaha, had planned to register as a Democrat and vote in this year's election after finishing probation in 2022 following a prison term for drug and theft convictions.
''We have paid our debt in full, and we should be fully included in our democracy," King said in a statement. "Being a productive member of society comes with many responsibilities, including jobs, bills and taxes. Those are essential, and so is having a say in who represents us and how tax dollars are spent.''
Of the two other plaintiffs, one had planned to register as a Republican and the other as an independent.
Evnen based his decision on a July 17 opinion by the state attorney general that said a law passed earlier this year to immediately restore the voting rights of people who've finished serving their felony convictions violates the state constitution's separation of powers. The opinion also found unconstitutional a 2005 law that restored the voting rights of people with felony convictions two years after they finished all the terms of their sentences.
''This opinion is non-binding and cannot overturn a law passed by the Nebraska Legislature,'' the ACLU said in a statement.
Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers' opinion said only the state Board of Pardons can restore the voting rights of people with felony convictions through pardons, which are exceedingly rare in Nebraska.
Evnen sought the opinion from Hilgers. Evnen and Hilgers, along with Gov. Jim Pillen, make up the three-member Board of Pardons. All three are Republican.
Evnen's office said it had not been served with the lawsuit Monday morning and couldn't comment on it before reading it. Earlier in the month, he defended his actions, saying he believes the opinion was ''extensively researched."
With the election fewer than 100 days out, the ACLU filed the lawsuit directly with the Nebraska Supreme Court ''given the nature and urgency of the case.''
At least 7,000 Nebraskans could be kept from voting in November under Evnen's actions, according to the Nebraska's Voting Rights Restoration Coalition.
Jonathan Topaz, an attorney with the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, said state law makes clear that only courts can overturn a law as unconstitutional.
''Yet the secretary of state's directive attempts to do just that, undermining the will of the voters and lawlessly reinstating permanent felony disenfranchisement by executive fiat,'' Topaz said. "It would overturn a law passed by the democratically elected legislature, re-disenfranchise thousands of Nebraska citizens, and upend two decades of rights restoration law less than four months out from a presidential election. It cannot stand.''
The battle over allowing those with felony convictions to vote comes in a state that allows its presidential electoral votes to be split. Nebraska's electoral votes tied to its three congressional districts go to whichever candidate wins the popular vote in that district. The state's Omaha-centered 2nd District has twice awarded an electoral vote to Democratic presidential candidates — once to Barack Obama in 2008 and again to Joe Biden in 2020.
Evnen has denied that the opinion and his order to stop registering people convicted of felonies seems geared to disenfranchise a segment of voters only months ahead of a tight election, saying his actions aren't "geared to do anything other than follow the Nebraska Constitution.''
AMERIKA
Prescribing Newborns Opioids, Methadone Varies Significantly Across Children’s Hospitals
Researchers analyzed the prominence of opioid and methadone prescriptions for hospitalized newborns with substantial morbidities.
From 2016 to 2022, researchers found a significant number of opioid and methadone prescriptions across 47 individual children’s hospitals. Although opioid prescriptions were more significant than methadone, researchers came to the suggestion that a standardized approach to treating high-risk newborns is necessary for overall health outcomes.
“Infants exposed to painful procedures experience acute physiologic responses and increased morbidity, and opioids reduce these poor outcomes. However, extended opioid prescribing after surgery is associated with prolonged ventilation, total parenteral nutrition use, and hospitalization. Furthermore, higher cumulative opioid exposure is associated with impaired neurodevelopment, including impaired cerebellar growth, developmental disability, and poor socialization. Ultimately, regional and hospital-level differences in hospitalized infants’ opioid exposure may have significant effects on both short- and long-term clinical outcomes,” wrote authors of the study published in JAMA Network Open.1
With most newborn opioid exposures occurring in a hospital setting, researchers wanted to measure the extent of prescriptions for both opioids and methadone specifically in children’s hospitals across the US.
Key Takeaways
Researchers analyzed data from 132,658 high-risk infants hospitalized in 47 children’s hospitals across the country to understand the extent of variations in opioid and methadone prescriptions.
They found that high-risk infants were prescribed several different opioids across US hospitals, with 76.5% of all participants receiving some type of opioid prescription.
The results highlighted researchers' claims that a more standardized approach is needed to treat newborn infants with high-risk morbidities in the US.
In this retrospective cohort study, researchers analyzed data from 132,658 high-risk infants hospitalized in 47 children’s hospitals across the country. Observing data from the beginning of 2016 through the end of 2022, they separated each patient into 4 US regions: Northeast, South, Midwest, and West. The median gestational age of patients was 34 weeks, 54.5% were boys, and all participants were under 1 year at the time of hospital admission.
Researchers found that high-risk infants were prescribed several different opioids across US hospitals; 76.5% were prescribed opioids. Of all opioids prescribed to study participants, 66.5% were exposed to fentanyl, 60.6% morphine, 5.8% hydromorphone, and 7.9% methadone. Regarding the geographical layout of the results, opioid prescriptions were above 71% for all 4 regions, with the West prescribing the most opioids at 81.2% of all study patients.
Researchers found that high-risk infants were prescribed several different opioids across US hospitals. | image credit: Nenov Brothers / stock.adobe.com
“We found that most received opioids during hospitalization with wide variation across US regions and between hospitals. Furthermore, 16% of the variability in any opioid prescribing and 20% of the variability in methadone treatment was attributable to the individual hospital,” continued the authors.
The researchers’ findings showed significant success in the study with the aim of quantifying the variation in opioid prescriptions across US children’s hospitals. From 16% variability in opioid prescriptions overall to a 20% variability for methadone prescriptions, prescribing methods and protocols for high-risk newborns were staggered across the US.
Similar to a previous study analyzing opioid dosing, researchers suggest a more standardized approach to prescribing pain management therapies for high-risk infants.
“In this case-control study, a positive association was found between total prescription opioid dose dispensed and the odds of spontaneous preterm birth. These findings support guidance to minimize opioid exposure during pregnancy and prescribe the lowest dose necessary,” wrote Bosworth et al.2
While Keane et al’s study focuses on the general variability, both studies clearly highlight the complexities of prescribing opioids to high-risk newborns.
Each infant included in the study reported various comorbidities; 65.5% had congenital heart disease, 30.3% experienced prematurity, and 55.3% of infants underwent a procedural intervention. Demographics were also staggered, further owing to the sheer variation among study results.1
While researchers gave no suggestions into what a standardized approach would look like, they stated that it’s necessary to ensure a satisfactory balance of keeping high-risk newborns at a minimal amount of pain without negatively affecting their development.
“Institution-level variation in overall opioid prescribing and methadone treatment in high-risk hospitalized infants persists across US children’s hospitals. These findings highlight a need to develop standardized evidence-based protocols to manage procedural pain, prolonged intubation, and surgical recovery for high-risk infants,” concluded the authors.1
References
1. Keane OA, Ourshalimian S, Lakshmanan A, et al. Institutional and regional variation in opioid prescribing for hospitalized infants in the US. JAMA Netw Open. 2024;7(3):e240555. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.0555
2. Bosworth OM, Padilla-Azain MC, Adgent MA, et al. Prescription opioid exposure during pregnancy and risk of spontaneous preterm delivery. JAMA Netw Open. 2024;7(2):e2355990. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.55990
JD Vance Reposted Image Captioned, 'Woman Gets Violated By Dolphin and Enjoys It'?
The 2024 election rumors began with a false claim that he wrote about having sex with a couch.
In July 2024, Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance was the subject of numerous bizarre rumors, starting with the claim that he had sex with a couch to a more recent rumor that he was looking up "dolphin porn" based on a screenshot he reposted on X.
A number of fishyposts claimed the screenshot showed Vance had been looking up dolphin porn because he searched the words "dolphin" and "woman." Those two words were bolded in the caption of the image Vance posted, which stated, "Woman gets violated by a dolphin and enjoys it."
While Vance did indeed repost a screenshot in February 2024 with a cropped image featuring the caption, "Woman gets violated by a dolphin and enjoys it," this is not necessarily evidence he was searching for dolphin porn. Above the screenshot, he wrote on X, "Maybe the internet was a mistake."
On Feb. 17, 2024, Vance's verified X account shared a screenshot of another X post (archived here) featuring a cropped image of a woman and the top of a dolphin's head from an account called @crazyclipsonly. His own post is still available on X. It is not clear what is happening in the image, which appears to take place next to water and shows a number of people, including a seated woman, facing a dolphin. One man in the corner of the image is capturing the moment with his phone.
(X user @JDVance)
The bolded words "dolphin" and woman" on the post does indeed indicate that Vance was searching for posts with those words. When typing in a word on the search bar in X, the results always show that word in bold in post captions that come up.
Sources
By Nur Ibrahim Nur Nasreen Ibrahim is a reporter with experience working in television, international news coverage, fact checking, and creative writing.
JD Vance went viral for ‘cat lady’ comments. The centuries-old trope has a long tail
Tom Wargacki/Wire
Edith Bouvier Beale at her home "Grey Gardens" in January 1972 in New York. A 1975 documentary by that name explores the reclusive lives of Beale and her mother, living in their dilapidated house with over 50 cats.
By Rachel Treisman Published July 29, 2024
Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance’s criticism of prominent Democrats as “childless cat ladies” has unleashed fury among women, with many now reclaiming the age-old sexist trope as a call to action this election season.
In a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, then-Senate-candidate Vance complained that the U.S. was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too."
"It's just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance continued. “And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it?"
And his cat lady comments — amplified online by Vice President Harris’ presidential campaign — did not land well, to say the least.
First, many took issue with the accuracy of his comments. Harris is the stepmother of two children, now in their 20s, who famously call her “Momala.”
Their biological mom, Kerstin Emhoff, has publicly decried the “baseless attacks” and credited Harris for being a “loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present” co-parent over the last decade. Ella Emhoff, one of Emhoff’s daughters, also defended her stepmom in a post on social media, writing, “I love my three parents.”
And Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, whom Vance also name-checked, announced a month after that interview that he and his husband, Chasten, had become parents (to twins, we later learned).
Buttigieg told CNN last week that Vance made those comments “after Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey.”
“He couldn’t have known that,” he added. “But maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other peoples’ children.”
Vance doubled down after backlash from both sides of the aisle
That sentiment was shared by many who were stung by Vance’s comments, including in the worlds of politics and entertainment.
Critics include former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, actor Whoopi Goldberg and TV personality Meghan McCain, who tweeted that Vance’s comments “caused real pain” and have been “activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends.”
Even some conservative figures, like South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and Fox News host Trey Gowdy, have publicly shaded Vance’s remarks.
Intended targets aside, many critics see the cat lady term as an insult to the growing number of women who don’t have kids, whether by choice or not.
Gun control activist and former Rep. Gabby Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt in 2011, tweeted that she and her husband, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly — whose name has been floated as a potential VP candidate — were trying to have a baby through IVF “before I was shot and that dream was stolen from us.”
“To suggest we are somehow lesser is disgraceful,” Giffords added.
Actress Jennifer Aniston, who has spoken about her own fertility struggles, wrote on social media that she hopes Vance’s daughter is lucky enough to bear children one day.
“I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option,” Aniston wrote. “Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”
Vance slammed Aniston’s remarks in an appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show on SiriusXM on Friday, saying they were “disgusting because my daughter is 2 years old” and that even if she did have fertility problems down the road, “I would try everything I could do try to help her because I believe families and babies are a good thing.”
Ken Florey Suffrage Collection/Gado/Getty Images Cats were used as a symbol of anti-suffrage propaganda, but reclaimed by some suffragists. A century later, some voters see Vance's "cat lady" comments as a call to mobilize.
Vance defended his comments on Kelly’s show, saying he was not criticizing people who don’t have children, but rather the Democratic Party for being “anti-family and anti-child.”
Comedian Chelsea Handler, who does not have children, noted in a video response that even the nation’s founding president, George Washington, didn’t have biological kids (he also raised two stepchildren).
“I’d like to remind you that no president in the history of the United States has ever been a mother,” Handler added.
She vowed that “all us childless cat and dog ladies are going to go from childless and crushing it to childless and crushing you in November.”
We know that ancient Egyptians appreciated cats as a source of companionship (including in the afterlife) and associated them with deities, most famously in the case of the feline goddess Bastet.
But cats’ reputation soured in the Middle Ages, as they were increasingly linked to paganism and witchcraft.
While many Europeans kept cats as pets, many others came to see them as sinister (perhaps due to their handling of mice, especially at night). Twelfth-century accounts offer descriptions of the devil transforming into a black cat and of heretical religious groups worshiping cats.
People increasingly came to believe that witches — in particular, women — had the ability to shape-shift into cats, or used them and other animal “familiars” to do their bidding.
Alice Kyteler, the first person condemned for witchcraft in Ireland, was accused during her 1324 trial of possessing an incubus that looked like a black cat. Agnes Waterhouse, believed to be the first English woman executed for witchcraft (in 1566), confessed that she had directed her pet cat — apparently named Satan — to kill local livestock.
That negative association with cats migrated to colonial America, where black cats were a feature of the late 17th-century Salem witch trials. But gradually, in their wake, the trope took on a somewhat softer tone.
“In the early 18th century, as the witch trials were widely recognized as a grave miscarriage of justice, single women with cats were suddenly transformed in the public eye from frightening fiends to figures to be pitied,” Rae Alexandra wrote for KQED in 2021.
The trope of the single woman and her association with cats really took off during the Victorian Era.
In Scotland, an 1880 edition of the Dundee Courier declared that “the old maid would not be typical of her class without the cat," and that "one cannot exist without the other,” according to the BBC.
“There is nothing at all surprising in the old maid choosing a cat as a household pet or companion,” the newspaper suggested. “Solitude is not congenial to human nature, and a poor forlorn female, shut up in a cheerless ‘garret,’ brooding all alone over her blighted hopes, would naturally centre her affections on some of the lower animals, and none would be more congenial as a pet and companion than a kindly purring pussy.”
One year later, in the U.S., Hart Ayrault wrote in Potter’s American Monthly — describing unmarried women as “having failed in the prime object of existence” — that “tradition associates her with cats and parrots, on which she is supposed to lavish all that is left of affection in her withered heart.”
A few decades later, as women began mobilizing to win the right to vote — both in the U.S. and the U.K. — they found cats used against them once again.
Buyenlarge/Getty Images An English suffrage movement postcard from 1909 shows a man doing domestic chores, including watching a child and cat, while complaining he doesn't get a vote.
Cats — coded as passive and associated with the home, as opposed to more active, masculine dogs — became a symbol of anti-suffragist propaganda. Many cartoons showed men at home with kids and a cat, emasculated by women’s newfound ability to participate in politics.
But some suffragists, undeterred, sought to reclaim the cat.
In April 1916, Nell Richardson and Alice Burke embarked on a 10,000-mile road trip from New York to San Francisco. They drove their two-seater “Golden Flyer” across the country to advocate for women’s right to vote, and adopted a black cat along the way.
“The little black kitten is suffering as much as we are from the heat, but he keeps under a cover, and all we can see around the corner of it is a pink nose and a youthful whisker,” Burke wrote in her diary that spring, according to the National Park Service.
The cat, named Saxon after the manufacturer of their car, became their unofficial mascot — and still stands as a symbol of suffrage. The city of Mesquite, Nev., has held an annual “Saxon the Suffrage Cat” art contest for the last several years.
The cat lady stereotype has persisted too, further memorialized in mainstream popular culture with portrayals like the reclusive subjects of the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens, Sigourney Weaver’s character in Alien (which many social media users have invoked in recent days), Eleanor Abernathy (aka Crazy Cat Lady) on The Simpsons, and the humorless, cat-loving Angela on The Office.
But, just like a century ago, feminists have increasingly sought to reclaim the title as their own. There’s plenty of crazy cat lady-themed merchandise online, and now some of it is get-out-the-vote themed.
Copyright 2024 NPR
Rachel Treisman (she/her) is a writer and editor for the Morning Edition live blog, which she helped launch in early 2021.
