jpedmd2026-10-06T13:21:26-05:00October 6th, 2026|

Alito, from Heather Cox Richardson’s October 5 substack:

“Alito went on to say that he does not anticipate that the court will overturn the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision recognizing the right to same-sex marriage. That case is different from Roe v. Wade, he said, because people have come to rely on Obergefell as they organize their lives.

“One of the important factors we take into account in deciding whether we should reexamine a past decision is the degree to which there has been reliance on the decision,” Alito said. “Obviously a great deal had changed in the country as a result of Obergefell. There was a lot of reliance in various ways on the decision in Obergefell.”

In fact, all but one of the justices who overturned Roe—Thomas declined to answer—said in their confirmation hearings that they considered Roe settled law. Crawford pointed out that people thought Roe was settled law and had organized their lives around it, just as people had organized their lives around Obergefell.

“After Obergefell, people of the same sex got married and entered into contracts…it was much more concrete,” Alito told Crawford. “Whereas with Roe, the argument was made that it had an effect on people’s ideas, women’s ideas about the kind of society that they were going to live in, that this would have an effect on the society. It was much more abstract than what would’ve been involved had we been asked to overrule Obergefell.””

Yes, being forced to carry a pregnancy resulting from a rape is truly an abstraction.  Forcing women to continue a pregnancy that increases their mortality risk compared to the alternative is an abstraction.  And women don’t organize their lives around unplanned pregnancies. Right.

And from RFK Jr.:

He likes to pretend Americans were much healthier 60 years ago: “I was raised in a time where we did not have a chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy testified during his confirmation hearing, suggesting that since his uncle’s presidency, the percentage of children with chronic illnesses had surged from 2% to 66%. But U.S. life expectancy has jumped from 69.7 years in 1960 to 79 years in 2024. Children are five times less likely to die in infancy or early childhood than when Kennedy was president, largely due to vaccines.

jpedmd2026-10-06T13:38:47-05:00September 15th, 2026|

Writing in the NYT, Thomas Edsall lays out the obvious evidence of a president in mental decline in his opinion piece Trump Has Untethered Himself From Reality.  An excerpt:

 “On April 30 of this year Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed, Democrats of Rhode Island, placed in the Congressional Record a statement by 36 prominent medical specialists questioning Trump’s mental fitness for office: ‘We are compelled to warn of a president of the United States who is increasingly a danger to the public.'”

As further evidence, see his DJYT’s social media post from today, September 15, one day after the Supreme Court ruled against his efforts to suborn the midterms in United States Postal Service v. California et al:

“It is a Court that will go down as having rendered some of the most destructive, hurtful, and damaging decisions in our Country’s history,” he wrote.

Yes, Donald, it will – but not for this ruling. Rather, see Trump v. United States, one giving him almost unlimited immunity for actions as president, and one that will surely go down in infamy as the principal enabler of this corrupt narcissist’s terrible actions.

• A good op-ed by virologist James Alwine appears in MedPage Today where he argues that while the threat of man-made viral bioweapons created by AI is real and should be mitigated, the threat of a dangerous virus generated via zoonosis is much greater – but we are doing very little to ward against it:

“In nature, viruses have multiple means to randomly mutate, thus enabling them to quickly create millions of variants while infecting and spreading in animals or people. Some of these random changes weaken the variant and it does not survive; other changes make no difference. However, now and then a random change makes a variant that is “better”; for example, it is more efficient at infecting us or at evading our immunity. These more efficient variants are selected and propagate; they become the source of more variants, and the evolution of the virus proceeds…Nature is infinitely better at creating viruses than humans and computers are. At this moment, the generation and spread of viruses in nature, by random change and worldwide mass replication, remains a far greater threat than AI-designed viruses.

The U.S. is presently unaware of what is happening with viruses in nature; we are unprepared for the inevitable next zoonotic epidemic or pandemic. The government’s denial of science and nonchalance toward both known and emerging infectious diseases leaves us in great danger.”

• Worth reading: Eliot Cohen, writing in the Atlantic, “Hegseth’s One Percent“; an excerpt:

“What is even worse than biblical illiteracy and historical ignorance from this product of Princeton and Harvard Universities is a project about which he seems to be deadly serious: the cultural isolation of the military. His speeches subtly denigrate the general officer corps and focus on the most impressionable segment of the military, those old enough to have bought into the system but young enough to be naive about its merits…It is profoundly dangerous stuff, the antithesis of what soldiers such as George C. Marshall or Dwight Eisenhower believed, that the soldier is a citizen first, that one cannot adequately defend this society without believing in its values and its essential goodness, that an air of contempt is incompatible with a life of self-abnegation.”

• These, of course, are only a few of the broken promises from the Drumpf. Save Rattner and Taylor Maggiacomo document 11 of the larger ones in the NYT here.