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Howard Stern is ripping the Supreme Courts decision striking down Roe v. Wade, saying the ruling might spur him to launch a White House bid.

Im actually going to probably have to run for president now, the SiriusXM host told Howard Stern Show listeners on Monday.

The show marked Sterns first public comments about Fridays Supreme Court decision, which overturned the 1973 landmark ruling that had provided a constitutional right to abortion.

Stern, whos long railed against the United States Electoral College system, said of conservative Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch: These appointed judges by [former President] Trump were appointed by a president who lost the popular vote by 3 million votes. This is where we get into trouble.

If he were to run for office, the 68-year-old radio pro said, I am going to do the very simple thing thatll set the country straight: one vote, one person. No more Electoral College. Im getting rid of it.

The problem with most presidents is they have too big of an agenda. The only agenda I would have is to make the country fair again, Stern said.

Stern slammed Justice Clarence Thomas, who joined the 6-3 majority decision, describing him as sitting there like Darth Vader, dormant [and] waiting for other kooks to join the Supreme Court.

Ill give you a couple of examples of why this is so horrible, Stern said, as he mentioned everyday women who go to the doctor and they find out that the baby has horrible birth defects.

A lot of times women are raped. A lot of times contraception doesnt work. And then theres even a more confusing state where a man and a woman want to have a baby, and all of a sudden things go medically wrong, Stern later told a listener.

We were past all of this and we still are. We as a country voted for Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes, Stern, who supported the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee over Trump, exclaimed.

We voted for Biden because it was repugnant all this horseshit, Stern continued. But now for life, were stuck.

The other thing is, if I do run for president and Im not f around, Im really thinking about it because the only other thing Im going to do is appoint five more Supreme Court justices, Stern said.

After co-host Robin Quivers questioned whether Stern could make such a change, he replied with a slight chuckle, I dont know. I dont know what Im doing exactly.

Im not afraid to do it. As soon as I become president, youre gonna get five new Supreme Court justices that are going to overturn all this bullshit.

Stern has floated a potential presidential run before. Last year, the Howard Stern Comes Again author said if he were to run against Trump in 2024, he would beat his ass. Trump has not confirmed a 2024 bid.

Stern ran as a libertarian in New Yorks gubernatorial race in 1994, before dropping out after the states Supreme Court upheld a requirement that he would have to disclose his personal finances as a political candidate.

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Howard Stern on Roe v. Wades overturning: Im actually going to probably have to run for president now - The Hill

If theres any doubt about the extremism of the Supreme Courts six Republican appointees, it was on full display with their opinion in Dobbs vs. Jackson Womens Health Organization, which overrules Roe v. Wade, establishing the right to an abortion. Roe had been the law of the land for almost 50 years.

Even more ominous is Clarence Thomas concurring opinion, in which he argues that the same rationale the court used to overrule Roe should be used to overturn cases establishing rights to contraception, same-sex consensual relations and same-sex marriage. Thomas is pointing the way for the radicals on the court to take in the future.

If the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution doesnt protect abortion, says Thomas, the court should reconsider other cases that rely on the same clause: Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 decision that declared married couples have a right to contraception; Lawrence v. Texas, a 2003 case invalidating sodomy laws and making same-sex sexual activity legal across the country; and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case establishing the right of gay couples to marry.

Thomas says the court has a duty to correct the error established in those precedents. Thats not all. After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions protected the rights they established, says Thomas.

I was in law school in 1973 when the Supreme Court decided Roe v Wade. Also in my class at the time was Clarence Thomas, along with Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Clinton) and Bill Clinton.

As Ive noted before, our law professors used the Socratic method asking hard questions about the cases they were discussing and waiting for students to raise their hands in response, and then criticizing the responses. It was a hair-raising but effective way to learn the law.

One of the principles guiding those discussions is called stare decisis Latin for to stand by things decided. Its the doctrine of judicial precedent. If a court has already ruled on an issue (say, on reproductive rights or gay marriage), future courts should decide similar cases the same way. The Supreme Court can change its mind and rule differently than before, but it needs good reasons to do so, and it helps if the justices opinion is unanimous or nearly so. Otherwise, the rulings appear (and are) arbitrary even, shall we say? political.

In those classroom discussions almost 50 years ago, Hillarys hand was always first in the air. When she was called upon, she gave perfect answers whole paragraphs, precisely phrased. She distinguished one case from another, using precedents and stare decisis to guide her thinking. I was awed.

My hand was in the air about half the time, and when called on, my answers were meh.

Clarences hand was never in the air. I dont recall him saying anything, ever.

Bill was never in class.

Only one of us now sits on the Supreme Court. He and five of his colleagues all appointed by Republican presidents, five by presidents who lost the popular vote, three by a president who instigated a coup against the United States are now violating stare decisis. They have not given a clear and convincing argument for why. Thomas wants the court to reverse more than a half century of rights.

The Supreme Court is now firmly in the hands of radicals, eager to throw stare decisis out the window. They are part of the anti-democracy movement now threatening America.

Read more from Robert Reich at https://robertreich.substack.com/

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The shame of the Supreme Court | News, Sports, Jobs - Minot Daily News

Hardly a day goes by in contemporary America without a mass casualty event produced by capitalist reaction. On Monday evening, a semi-truck trailer filled with bodiessome dead, some still clinging to lifewas discovered a stones throw from a busy interstate highway in San Antonio, Texas.

The truck was carrying undocumented immigrants fleeing desperate economic conditions in Central America and the legacy of over a century of US imperialist exploitation. The immigrants were forced to enter surreptitiously due to the anti-immigrant restrictions imposed by the Democratic administration of President Joe Biden.

So far, the official death toll is 46, but this is expected to rise, as local officials say 16 others were hospitalized at varying stages of illness. This is the deadliest such event in US history. It doubles the death toll of the second highest mass immigrant asphyxiation, when 19 people suffocated in a truck trailer in Victoria, Texas, in 2003.

Earlier Monday, temperatures in San Antonio hit 103 degrees Fahrenheit (40 Celsius). It is difficult to imagine how those who perished in the trailer spent their last moments struggling to escape. One individual who lives near the spot where the trailer was found told the New York Times, Now Im hearing there are kids. Families often make the journey together.

After discovering the trailer, police and Border Patrol reportedly deployed military-grade heat-seeking equipment to search for and detain any immigrants who managed to escape.

This social crime is the responsibility of the Biden administration, which was elected on the basis of mass opposition to the fascist Donald Trump, but whose administration has carried out a ruthless attack on immigrants, arresting more in 2021 than Trump detained in any one year in office. Biden is on pace to arrest some 2 million immigrants this year, a new record. Two days ago, Biden ended all previous restrictions on ICE arrests, ordering agents to arrest immigrants regardless of arrest record or how many years they have been in the United States.

The trailer was discovered in Texas hardly 24 hours after Spanish and Moroccan border police carried out a brutal melee attack on a crowd of African immigrants attempting to cross into the Spanish outpost of Melilla on Africas northern coast. At least 36 immigrants died, some after being beaten by police, some hanging from the barbed wire border fence, some in the stampede that followed the police assault.

Both crimes expose the lie that the US and its NATO allies are waging war against Russia in Ukraine for humanitarian reasons. If these crimes had taken place in Russia, the imperialist governments would have used them as pretenses to justify further escalation of a war which threatens the world with nuclear catastrophe.

It is already clear that the political establishment in the US will respond to the mass death in San Antonio by using the event to justify a further crackdown on immigration. An hour before the bodies were discovered in his district, Texas Republican Congressman Tony Gonzales tweeted that immigration is incentivizing lawlessness and creating absolute chaos at our southern border.

After the event, Gonzales blamed Democrats for being insufficiently iron fisted. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a fascist supporter of Trump, blamed Biden for the deaths, tweeting: They are a result of his deadly open border policies. They show the deadly consequences of his refusal to enforce the law.

The corporate media will alternate between demands for a military-style crackdown on the border and denunciations of whichever criminal was driving and abandoned the trailer in the heat.

But the existence of smugglers is a criminal byproduct of the bipartisan border policies of the US government which are fundamentally to blame.

Deaths like these did not occur prior to the militarization of the US-Mexico border initiated by Democratic President Bill Clinton. In the 1990s, Clinton, with the support of Democrats and Republicans, enacted programs like Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold-the-Line, the aim of which was to militarize urban crossing zones and force migrants to cross in the uninhabitable deserts.

In 2006, under the George W. Bush administration, Congress passed the Secure Fences Act, which facilitated the construction of hundreds of miles of border barriers and further militarized the border. Those voting yes for this law included then-Senators Joseph Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain and Charles Schumer.

In 2010, Obama signed legislation that deployed a fleet of drones to the border and 1,500 National Guard soldiers to block or arrest immigrants. In 2018, the Democratic Party caved when Trump illegally redirected congressionally-apportioned money to fund his deployment of the National Guard to the border. The Biden administration kept pandemic-related restrictions on all asylum applicants and kept Trumps Remain In Mexico policy in place, which barred all refugees from entering the US through Mexico.

The trailer was discovered in southwest San Antonio, barely a mile from where nine immigrants were found dead of dehydration and asphyxiation in the back of a semi-truck trailer almost exactly five years ago, on July 17, 2017. At that time, the World Socialist Web Site wrote:

The world is pulsing with people who are forced to flee their homes under the weight of decades of economic exploitation and war. According to a UN report from 2015, there are 65.3 million refugees in the world, more than the population of the United Kingdom, France or Italy.

The refugee crisis is the product of the capitalist system and requires a socialist solution. Never in history has the contradiction between the ease with which capital flows across borders and the difficulty with which human beings flee across national boundaries been so acute. As the world economy becomes increasingly interconnected through the advent of the Internet, mobile phones and integrated global supply lines, the ruling classes of the so-called democratic countries are increasingly protecting themselves, as Leon Trotsky put it, by a customs wall and a hedge of bayonets.

Socialists reject attempts to reconcile left-wing slogans with nationalist poison. Figures like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US expose their pro-capitalist outlook when they talk about reasonable management of migration (Corbyns Labour Party manifesto) and denounce open borders as a right-wing proposal that would make everybody in America poorer (Sanders interview withVox, July 18, 2015).

Socialists oppose the division of the world into nation-states and call for bringing the geographical organization of the world into harmony with the international character of the global economy.

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At least 46 undocumented immigrants found dead in truck trailer in sweltering Texas heat - WSWS

If you follow Fox News, the big story of the week wasn't about the former American president who urged his supporters to murder his vice president so that he could stay in office after being voted out of it. It was that President Joe Biden who, according to a wingnut-driven narrative was elected by election machines manipulated by Martians, fell off a bicycle. This was really significant for acolytes of a certain former leader who let's put it this way is not exactly notable for his athleticism, and it was just the evidence Biden's detractors were looking for that he "is not up to the job." It seemed a wee bit like wishful thinking by supporters of someone who encouraged his countrymen to self-inject cleaning fluid to avoid contracting COVID-19, but there you are.

Americans suffer from short memories, which works decidedly to Biden's disadvantage. When he took office, the country was in economic, social and political free fall. A pandemic that Biden's predecessor had brilliantly dismissed as a "hoax" had ravaged Americans, leaving millions of them suddenly out of work. Instead of pulling together in a crisis, Americans targeted one another. And a former president who legitimately qualified as a fascist had undermined the institutions on which American democracy rests.

Biden began by managing to persuade Americans to vaccinate themselves and their families against COVID-19, overcoming the right-wing influencers who belittled the vaccine while making sure that they received it. Over 67% of us are now fully vaccinated, to huge beneficial effect.

The aid packages orchestrated by Biden did what they were intended to do. The first year of Biden's presidency saw record economic growth and record job creation. Unemployment, which stood at 6.7%, now stands at 3.6%.

Biden's critics blame him for our high inflation rate. This makes no sense. Michael Klein, professor of international economic affairs at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and founder of the economic analysis website Econofact, puts it succinctly: "Inflation is a problem all over the world." A recent Deutsche Bank report shows that America's year over year inflation rate is near the median among the 111 countries surveyed. Our 8.6% rate is lower than that of the United Kingdom (9.1%), the Netherlands (8.8%) and Spain (8.7%), and only slightly higher than that of the Eurozone as a whole (8.1%).

Biden has nothing to do with the problem. Asked what role a president has in inflation, Klein replies, "Virtually none." And to the extent that COVID-19 aid packages so vital to our recovery contributed to inflation at the margins, Klein makes the necessary point with an analogy. "During COVID," he says, "we were on the precipice of an abyss. It's very hard when you're putting out a fire to avoid water damage."

Then there's the little matter of Ukraine, a country that people of conscience understand needs to be defended against Russia, a country that people of conscience understand needs to be defeated. The spikes in energy and food prices caused by Russian aggression should be laid not at Biden's feet but those of Vladimir Putin, whom the not-so-Grand Old Party coddled for four long, humiliating years.

The Left's carping at Biden makes no more sense than that of the Right. If the president does not cancel all student debt upon the demand of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, he is denounced by the same crowd who helped hand the country over to former President Donald Trump in the first place. They seem prepared to do it again. The Squad gets to tweet. Biden has to run the country and lead what is left of the free world.

Bulletin: tweeting is easier.

With Roe v. Wade demolished, we remember the geniuses who refused to support Hillary Clinton because there wasn't much difference between Clinton and Trump. We have them to thank for three Supreme Court justices and an end to constitutional protection of women's right to choose.

Thanks, guys. Job well done.

Jeff Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.

Photo credit: tiburi at Pixabay

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Bum Rap: Slimed by the Right, Sniped at by the Left, Joe Biden Presses On, by Jeff Robbins - Creators Syndicate

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.Paul Morigi/Getty Images

Hillary Clinton in a recent interview with the Financial Times ruled out a 2024 presidential bid.

"No, out of the question," she told the newspaper, pointing to Biden's desire to run for reelection.

A recent NYT report detailed how some Democrats are weighing whether to back Biden in 2024.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in an interview published on Friday ruled out a 2024 presidential campaign, saying that her entry into the race is "out of the question."

While speaking with the Financial Times, the former first lady and US senator said that she expected President Joe Biden to stand for reelection in two years. When asked if she could view herself launching a campaign after unsuccessfully challenging Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination in 2008 and losing the general election to Donald Trump in 2016 Clinton quickly waved off such a proposition.

"No, out of the question," she said.

She continued: "First of all, I expect Biden to run. He certainly intends to run. It would be very disruptive to challenge that."

Biden has said publicly and privately said that he intends to run for reelection in 2024.

However, a recent New York Times report detailed that some Democrats have expressed concerns about Biden's standing among the general public as his approval ratings continue to sag and the party faces a difficult midterm climate where Republicans are set to make major gains in Congress.

Some have raised questions about Biden's age he is currently 79 years old and would be 86 at the end of his second term if he wins reelection in expressing doubt in whether he will go through with a campaign.

If Biden doesn't run, Vice President Kamala Harris would be a natural successor, but after her 2020 presidential campaign fizzled before the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, some Democrats might look elsewhere for a candidate.

After a rocky first year in office, Harris' political teamsought a reset; several aides have departed the vice president's office in recent months and she brought on longtime Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons to serve as her communications director.

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Politicians who could potentially be in the mix in the event that Biden chooses not to run in 2024 include Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg; Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Bernie Sanders of Vermont; and Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois.

Clinton later in the interview said she feels Trump will run for president again if he is up for a third White House bid.

"I think if he can he's going to run again," she told the Financial Times. "Follow the money with Trump he's raised about $130 million sitting in his bank account that he used to travel around, to fund organising against elections ... I don't know who will challenge him in the Republican primary."

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