Abortion foes pushed their luck too far

It has been no secret that supporters of abortion rights have been on the defensive for the last two decades as opponents passed one legislative action after another in Republican controlled states that limited the availability of abortion services to women. These took the form of long waiting periods, requiring multiple visits to clinics, forcing younger women to notify their parents and the fathers, forcing doctors to issue scary warnings to women about the dangers of abortions and forcing women to listen to them, and so on. The goal seemed to be that if they could not ban abortions entirely, they could make it so hard to get that the right was almost nullified.
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George Will is now available for offers

Right wing columnist and Fox News commentator George Will has left the Republican party because of their choice of Donald Trump as presidential nominee. He has also urged that people not provide him with any financial support and that they should work to ensure his defeat at the general election in November, brace themselves for four more years of a Democratic presidency, and seek to return to power with a more acceptable nominee in 2020.
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Trump and Jesus

According to a recent news report, James Dobson, former head of the group Focus on the Family (and remember that any group that has the word ‘family’ in its name is likely to be a bigoted one) said that Donald Trump had recently come to “a relationship with Christ” and that he knows the person who recently brought Trump and Jesus together. Dobson also said that Trump was still a ‘baby Christian’.
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Some good news about helium

Helium is a vital natural resource. Among other valuable uses, it plays an essential role in scientific research because in its liquid form it enables researchers to reach temperatures close to absolute zero on the Kelvin scale. What many people don’t realize is that helium is obtained from underground reserves and that these are finite and thus should be carefully conserved and not wasted on frivolities like balloons, making voices high pitched, and the like.
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Samantha Bee on the Brexit vote

While her clip was as funny as it usually is, she also shows the young woman who says that she regrets her vote to leave the EU because she did not realize the consequences and that if she had to do it again, she would vote to remain. Bee also shows the interview with the man who said that although he wanted the UK to remain in the EU, he voted to leave as a protest vote because he thought that the Remain vote would win.
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Political fallout of the Brexit vote

I must admit that I have been taken by surprise by the ‘sky is falling’ reactions to the vote by the UK to leave the European Union. This is my fault in that I, like so many Americans, wasn’t paying close attention to what was going on in Europe and while it appears that dire warnings about the consequences of leaving were commonplace over there, this news did not really register for me in the days before the vote.
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Sport Science on ‘The Block’

I am not a big basketball fan and know little about the finer points of the game. In fact, I did not watch any of the games played by the Cleveland Cavaliers during their championship-winning season that ended a week ago. I did not even watch the deciding game 7, preferring to work on my computer while occasionally checking the score. But when I saw that the score was tied in the dying moments of the game, I decided that it was time to tune in and after doing so, even an ignorant person like me realized that I had just witnessed a play for the ages.
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US Supreme Court strikes down Texas abortion restrictions

In an important decision today, the US Supreme Court by a 5-3 vote in the case Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt struck down the 2013 law in Texas that had placed onerous restrictions on clinics that provide abortions and thus threatened to shut down nearly all of them in the state. That law, if upheld, would have set the stage for similar laws in other states, effectively largely nullifying the right to abortion except for rich people who could afford to travel to the very few clinics in the US (or abroad) to get safe, legal abortions.
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