BrotherBoy 2021

Oops, I listened to some of the oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and what Justice Sotomayor accurately called “the stench” of it made me sick. The argument from the six conservatives on the Trump and McConnell packed court was basically: “Hey we’ve overturned precedents in the past! What about Brown v. Board of Education? So stripping half of Americans of the basic right to bodily autonomy is no big deal!”

As Alexandra Petri and everyone else in America who can get pregnant savor their “last few hours before getting turned back into vessel,” we can all donate to the National Network of Abortion Funds, and share Plan C or Shout Your Abortion. Remember that we have safe and easily self-administered medication abortion now, and there’s an organization near you already working to ensure women can access it, if you need a productive outlet for your rage-energy. The New York Times, ever attuned to the cultural moment, decided that now is the perfect time to make a case for the self-negating concept “pro-life feminism,” which I would have ignored but it led to this outstanding rebuttal by Sarah Jones:

What if we let them in the tent, and the rest of us snuck out before we set it on fire? Just an idea. Anyway, there are only ten days left until the giant asteroid wipes us all out, hopefully.

Speaking of stench, CNN finally suspended its second-worst Chris yesterday as the reek of his misconduct in the service of handsy brother Andrew Cuomo’s political career became too much for even the notoriously anosmic Jeff Zucker to ignore. This instantly spawned “a new type of guy… the brother guy.”

And also whatever this blithering Nev Schulman-esque declaration was supposed to be, from CNN’s worst Chris:

Margaret Sullivan isn’t having any of it:

In Defector, Laura Wagner and Patrick Redford sorted through the New York Attorney General’s 300-something pages of newly-released transcripts and exhibits so that we can more easily “Laugh At Andrew Cuomo’s Pathetic Crisis Team.” Highlights include Lis Smith feeding MSNBC’s Katy Tur a line about the Cuomos just being “extraordinarily friendly, I guess, by nature” live on-air, Lis Smith threatening to do mean tweets at the New York Times’s Matt Flegenheimer, and Lis Smith suggesting that “you just fire every woman in the office” to Cuomo’s secretary Melissa DeRosa, a woman in the office. There are others involved but the mastermind of Mayor Pete’s meteoric rise to Secretary of Transportation really took home the MVP in this debacle.

Rachel Holliday Smith rounded up the best NY mayoral write-ins, which included both Gizmo Sliwa and Choire. Rachel Monroe wrote about the lure of old trucks in The New Yorker dot com and I’m not owned. Casey Newton explained the roots of Twitter’s ineptly introduced new anti-harassment policy. It’s a subscriber-only post but if that summary is enticing to you at all, you’ll find it worth subscribing to Platformer. Remember when Trump showed up at the first Presidential debate in 2020 too late to be tested for Covid, and we were like “oh he’s got Covid huh?” Yeah he definitely had Covid. Sure, sell fractionalized Banksy NFTs, why not.

Today’s Song: Odezenne, “Caprice”

~ the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward tabs ~

Pull up today’s song in Spotify and then let it roll, ça plane pour moi. 👌 I tweet angrily about the goddamn Supreme Court and sometimes other things @fka_tabs, and much less frequently cosplay as a media brand @TodayinTabs. Here’s the pro-forma suggestion that you should subscribe but honestly, my heart isn’t really in it today. Please donate to support abortion access and then subscribe to Tabs if you’ve got extra cash to spare.