I had some time today, so I looked up your reference on abortion legislation. Since this was passed in 2012 it's not surprising that I don't remember it. It's even less surprising that I remember the ballot proposal of 1972 as being defeated 2-1 instead of 3-2. Math was always my weak subject, and a certain amount of memory loss is normal at my age.
I do remember that, during the election campaign of 2012, there was a lot of talk about Republicans allegedly waging a "war on women". Since about half the voters are women, and the Republicans did pretty well in that election, I don't think many people bought that line of shit. Like most stories, though, there is probably a certain amount of truth to this one. There are some holy rollers who still don't believe in either abortion, birth control, or evolution and, unfortunately, many of them are Republicans. I can't do anything about that, and at least they aren't trying to take my guns away, so I will continue to vote Republican until somebody comes up with a third party that I can live with. The birth control part was a tempest in a teapot anyway because you can already get free birth control at your local health department, at least in Michigan. So, back to the abortion part:
The Supreme Court said that we couldn't prohibit abortions, it didn't say that we couldn't regulate them. Every business in America is subject to a certain amount of government regulation, so why not abortion clinics? Anyway, I thought that your people were in favor of regulating the shit out of everything. The article you cited only gave a brief summary of the bill, but I didn't see anything unreasonable about the regulations it described. I suppose I could look it up and go over every little detail of the bill, but life is too short for that. I remember you said something about the clinics not being allowed within a mile of a school. I doubt that it's a whole mile, but bars and some other businesses are restricted from operating near a school, so that doesn't seem too unreasonable.
I copied the following from the article because it's a good example of how a statement can be misleading without actually being a bald faced lie:
"Abortion rights advocates said the bill is intended to impose onerous regulations on abortion clinics that could force them to shut down. 'This bill was meant to ban abortion in Michigan, and it was pushed through in a lame-duck session by legislators who were voted out of office because of their extreme views on women’s health,' said Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund."
It says that the bill "could" force the clinics to shut down, but it didn't say that it "would" force them to shut down. Have any abortion clinics in Michigan actually been forced to shut down by these "onerous regulations"? I have not heard of any but, of course, there's a lot of things of which I haven't heard. To my knowledge, there has never been an abortion clinic anywhere around Cheboygan so, for us, it's a moot question anyway. Then there's the "lame duck" thing. Michigan legislators have been subject to term limits for a long time. (I voted against it because that's what elections are for.) Without looking it up, I can assert with confidence that many of the lame duck legislators were not voted out of office, they were term limited out, and their "extreme views on women's health" had nothing to do with it. Many of them that were vote out, must have been replaced by other Republicans because the Republicans maintained their majority in both houses. Even our RINO governor was re-elected, which surprised me because he pissed off a lot of people on both sides of the aisle during his first term.
I didn't say that Cheboygan was representative of the whole country, I just said that most people around here mind their own business and don't bother each other. It would be a good thing if the whole country was representative of us. As the census figures you quoted indicate, we do have Blacks and Hispanics around here, just not very many of them, which might be why they don't bother anybody and nobody bothers them.
I mistakenly told you we don't have any Jews, but my hypothetical wife says that we have at least two, a father and a son. She has seen them in the supermarket a number of times, and somebody told her that they were Jewish. How's that for anecdotal evidence? Granted that Cheboygan County is mostly Christian but, as I said, Emmet County right next door has some Wiccans and a substantial number of Native American traditionalists. This is not just a show they put on for the tourists, these guys really believe that stuff. I have attended a few of their ceremonies, and I was impressed with their sincerity. I should explain that Emmet County is to Cheboygan County like your North Side is to your South Side. Its population is certainly more diverse than ours, and people move freely back and forth across the border. If you consider the two counties as one, we have more diversity than we know what to do with around here.
Speaking of diversity. I seem to remember there was a lawsuit that made it to the Supreme Court some years ago. Some guy complained that the school he was trying to get into accepted a less qualified Black person over him, just because he was Black. At the time, the school had a quota system where they only accepted so many applicants of each race. As I remember it, the court said that they couldn't use a quota system, but that they could consider race as one of their criteria in the interest of maintaining diversity among their student body. I don't know how you interpret that, but it sounds to me like they can have a quota, just so they call it diversity instead of calling it a quota. Be that as it may, Michigan subsequently had a ballot proposal prohibiting any kind of racial discrimination in college entrance policy. I don't remember if it passed or not, but I remember the liberals complaining that the proposal would effectively nullify Affirmative Action, and promising to challenge it in court if it passed. I also don't remember what year this was on the ballot, but I think it was fairly recently.
What happened with "concealed carry" in Chicago? I am not familiar with that case.
I'm not all that familiar with Rand Paul, other than his illustrious parentage. What I said about him bringing the Republicans together was what I heard on the news. I don't think that they said he would bring them together, just that he seemed to be trying to. I'm sure that, by the time the election rolls around, we will have heard more than we want to know about Rand Paul and all the other candidates.
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