Sunday morning’s Australian Broadcasting Corporation political journalist panel show ‘Insiders’1 was unusual in that it was hosted by Patricia Karvelas2. It is usually hosted by the answer interrupter David Speers. It was also unusual in that it did not have a Murdoch or Sevenwest hack on the panel. On the panel were Narelda Jacobs (Channel 10), Shane Wright (Sydney Morning Herald/The Age) and Sarah Martin (The Guardian).
Six of the nine justices on the US Supreme Court, which recently overturned the Roe v Wade decision, are current or former members of the Federalist Society. Founded in 1982, the Federalist Society has played a major role in “deliberately, diligently shifting the country’s judiciary to the right”. As well as training and socialising conservative law students, lawyers and professors, the society helps appoint young conservatives to prominent positions in government and to the bench.
The decriminalisation of abortion comes into effect in South Australia on the 7th of July1. There was a brawl within the Liberal Party, between the moderates and the conservatives, to remove abortion from the South Australian criminal code and deal with it in healthcare legislation.
Many media outlets have noted the drop in religiosity indicated by the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) census results, and I tend not to reiterate the same stuff the mainstream media have come up with unless there is something else that can be said. However, the disparity between this census and other recent surveys is something that has piqued my interest.
Now that abortion probably will be recriminalised in many states in the US, it is worth remembering that, in Australia, abortion was largely or completely removed from the criminal code in the various states and territories between 1998 and 2020.
In a rant about the supreme idiocy of Murdoch ‘ruperter’ (i.e. faux journalist) Adam Creighton1, I briefly explained what the 1973 Roe v Wade decision was about:
I went to my local GP and received my second booster (Pfizer again) at lunchtime yesterday, after having received my first booster in the middle of January1. It was touch and go whether I would be able to make it, after having been as sick as a dog for a fair proportion of he last month; first with a virus, followed by a secondary bacterial infection; then with another virus which stopped me eating much for a few days.
There is a new idiocy from the rabid Republican christofascist* gun nuts in the United States to try to counter the calls for gun control after the Uvalde school massacre. This massacre led to the deaths of 19, mostly ten-year-old children, and two of their teachers1.
I started feeling unwell on a Monday night, with tiredness and aching joints. This got worse on the Tuesday when I ached all over, had a mild headache, and an intermittent cough. Thinking it might be Covid-19, I did a Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) which turned out to be negative. That was a bit of a relief.