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A round-up for the past week…
(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)
(Jeff Danziger via GoComics.com)
(Nick Anderson via GoComics.com)
(John Deering via GoComics.com)
(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)
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(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)
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Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Spring Moves Into Summer
Reader Interactions
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Baud
I like the first one and the one of Alito in the doctor’s office. Both are on point.
Baud
Via Reddit, cover of a French magazine re abortion. Warning: extremely graphic.
https://i.imgur.com/KeRVjB3.jpg
Tony Jay
Slumped on the couch yesterday evening after a day of heavy garden work, I caught most of the delightful Olivia Rodrigo’s set from the Glastonbury Festival. It’s just a pity the PTB decided to cut the penultimate track, a raucous rendition of guest performer Lily Allen’s heartfelt paean to low-down dirty betrayers ‘Fuck You’ dedicated to the Submissive Six on the Supreme Court.
It guess it would have been tough for the editors to beep out entire extended choruses of “FUCK YOU!!!” blasted out by 100,000 past, present and future womb-cannons, but they probably should have found a way to show the energy and anger this monstrous decision has unleashed.
November could be very interesting.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Graphic yes, but to echo the sentiment in your first comment, very much on point.
OzarkHillbilly
“President Trump, on behalf of all the Maga patriots in America, I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the supreme court yesterday,”
-Mary Miller, Republican Illinois 15th Congessional District
I think that is what we call “The mother of all Kinsley gaffes.” And oh yeah, the crowd cheered.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch
@OzarkHillbilly: I hate Illinois Nazis
OzarkHillbilly
@David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch: Obligatory. I should have thought of that.
debbie
@OzarkHillbilly:
Jesus. A true Freudian slip.
This Court is criminal. Nominees were solicited and assured to have an acceptable pre-set agenda before being nominated, and once seated, they fulfilled that agenda, turning aside from other cases on other, irrelevant (to the Federalist Society) issues. As such, this Court violates the Constitution and should be impeached en masse.
IANAL and am sure I haven’t used the correct terminology, but at the end of the day, this country must be rid of this Court.
WV Blondie
I have a Supremely cynical observation: the Supreme Court decides the timing of the release of its decisions, right? And until Friday morning TFG had a disastrous week, because everyone was talking about the hearings. Now the only thing anyone’s thinking about is the Dobbs decision.
And three of the five “justices” in the majority on that decision were appointed by …
We already are aware of the scope of Ginni Thomas’ participation in the coup attempt (if not all the details). As the senior member of the court – and a member of the majority – I could see Clarence wanting to get in on the act.
Steeplejack
@rikyrah, @Baud:
Good morning!
NotMax
In need of a breather? Nine and a half minutes of something fascinatingly different.
raven
@WV Blondie:
A Term of the Supreme Court begins, by statute, on the first Monday in October. Usually Court sessions continue until late June or early July.
debbie
Someone in a previous thread pointed to Olivia Rodriguez’s condemnation of the SC during her show.
debbie
Lapassionara
@OzarkHillbilly: I saw a clip of a woman who essentially quoted the person behind the replacement theory. It was chilling. Stone cold racism. The “domestic supply of infants” line is based on this kind of thinking. Women are now livestock. So “white life” is correct, even if she claims otherwise.
Shalimar
@WV Blondie: I think they really thought they could bury this as a weekend-only story that people would forget about by the July 4th holiday.
oatler
@NotMax:
Nuclear-Rickrolled!
OzarkHillbilly
@Lapassionara:
“When people show you who they are, believe them.”
-Maya Angelou
O. Felix Culpa
@OzarkHillbilly:
Prezackly.
Suzanne
@Lapassionara: 100% correct.
There’s been a lot of comments about how rich white women will always be able to get an abortion. That’s true, but these freaks absolutely want to force white women to have more babies. Extra points if they drop out of graduate school or the professional workforce to do so, so that role can go to a man instead.
This is about an entire agenda to drive women out of public life, back to their roles as baby-makers and shirt-ironers.
Jerry
If you shop at Amazon.com, make sure to use smile.amazon.com where you can set up a portion of your sale going to a nonprofit of your choice. Yesterday, I set mine to Carolina Abortion Fund.
debbie
@Shalimar:
As much as I hate them, they can’t be so stupid as to think the decision could quietly slip through.
Baud
@Suzanne:
In the face of these travesties, there’s always a whirlwind of discussion about how Dems should respond. I find a lot of it off-putting, but I’ll throw one suggestion out there. In addition to promising to restore reproductive rights, of course, I would like to see Dems promise a massive child-centered program to make it easier for people to have and afford children. This isn’t a big departure from traditional Dem goals, but now it has added benefit of forcing the GOP to be against children in a more visible way.
O. Felix Culpa
@Suzanne:
If my daughters-in-law are at all representative, that ain’t gonna happen. I’m thinking the troglodytes know nothing about today’s young women. They ain’t going back to the 50’s or earlier. No way. No how.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@debbie: Thanks for the link. Lily Allen speaks for us all
Suzanne
@Baud: Agreed. Daycare and college are just ludicrously expensive, and I think we need to get those costs down by at least 75%. But also the ongoing costs, housing, food, clothes. There’s a lot of ways it could be done with policy.
O. Felix Culpa
@Baud:
Great idea. I would add addressing climate change to the mix. That’s also affecting young people’s decisions about whether to have children.
New Deal democrat
Good quote from James Moore’s “Texas to the World” newsletter this morning, paraphrased slightly:
“The Supreme Court is tossing away precedents like so many Bret Kavanaugh beer cans.”
You really can’t talk about the “rule of law” when a Junta of 5 changes what it is from day to day, regardless of how long it has previously been in effect.
Suzanne
@O. Felix Culpa: Your daughters-in-law are representative. There’s no way this will be successful at restoring the vision of barefoot-and-pregnant-in-the-kitchen. But look at those crazy kids in the GOP, darned if they won’t try!
Geminid
@OzarkHillbilly: Mary Miller faces Rodney Miller in a Rep-on-Rep contest for nomination in the newly redrawn 15th CD. The district is largely rural and small towns, and stretches from the Mississippi to the Indiana border. Davis has sewn up endorsements from most local Republican politicians and outfits like the Farm Bureau. Miller hopes to ride trump’s endorsement to victory.
Answering a front pager’s fervent prayers, the gerrymandering Democrats in Springfield redrew Davis’ old 13th District so that it stretches from the Illinois suburbs of Saint Louis to encompass Champagne County. The new 13th is considered safely Democratic.
There is another Rep-on-Rep contest in Illinois on Tuesday. This one is between Democrats Marie Newman and Sean Casten, in the Chicago suburbs. Casten is thought to be leading the race.
WV Blondie
@Shalimar: I know – but in that case I’d have thought they’d wait until June 30, since just about everyone will already have made their 4th oj July (and/or vacation plans), which would mute the public backlash.
And yes, Raven, I’m quite familiar with their calendar.
The Thin Black Duke
@O. Felix Culpa: I think they’re hoping that racism will get white women to fall back in line.
Jesse
@Tony Jay: why would this get traction in the UK? No one is affected.
Tony Jay
@debbie:
Yes, that one.
Lily Allen’s agent must be chewing their nails down to the quick waiting to see if that track becomes an anthem of this summer’s ‘expression of female opinion’.
The downloads!!!
Baud
@O. Felix Culpa:
The plan has to be somewhat focused to be effective.
Tony Jay
@Jesse:
1) Tell the women that.
2) What happens in America eventually happens here, and it’s speeding up.
3) Basic empathy.
Emma from Miami
@Jesse: It’s called “solidarity.” A lot of women do that thing.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Jesse: It’s a government taking away a human right
O. Felix Culpa
@The Thin Black Duke:
It might work with rural, small town white women (sadly, my roots), but not with most educated, more urban women. The troglodytes are in a bubble and don’t actually know anyone not like them. They have no idea how offensive and unappealing this notion is to women outside their bubble.
Jesse
@Tony Jay: I didn’t know about (2). That, to my mind, is the strongest, most salient reason for someone in the UK to speak out. The factors that go into the reversal of Roe feel so US-centric for me. But maybe some of those ingredients can be rebranded and exported and make sense. I mean, if things like Q Anon — for me, an inherently US-centric conspiracy theory —can be exported, I guess anti-abortion sentiment can be exported, too.
I just recently learned about the abundance of fake “pregnancy crisis” centers in Canada. I never knew. Seemed like yet another US thing.
O. Felix Culpa
@Baud:
I understand, and your proposal makes eminent sense.
That said, climate change definitely affects young people’s decisions about having children and will need to be addressed concurrently if the goal is to encourage hope in the future, as manifested by having babies.
Geminid
@O. Felix Culpa: Last time I visited New Mexico, three years ago, Governor Michelle Lujan Griffin and Democrats in the state legislature had just enacted a clean power plan designed to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. This was one of many good results from the Blue Wave of 2018. Have you noticed any new wind farms, photovoltaic installations, etc? Are many jobs being created?
As part of the clean power plan, the giant Four Corners coal fired power plant is to be shut down, but not until 2032. Maybe that date will be moved up. In the 1960s, orbiting astronauts could see the smoke plume from the Four Corners plant.
Torrey
I’d like to see a series of ads titled “Supreme Liars” showing each of the Gang of Six with their quotes saying they regarded Roe as settled law. Perhaps with a closing tag line like “If you lied to get your job, they could fire you.” Or “Is it really OK to lie to get a job?”
Steeplejack
@Lapassionara:
Jane Elliott on the “birth dearth.” (Elliott is anti-racist, which may not be clear at the start of the video.)
zhena gogolia
@Baud: The first one is brilliant. I don’t get the last one at all. Is that Bullwinkle?
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
This is genius. The GQP wants to do anything it can to have white women make more white babies, except do stuff that makes it easier for them to have and raise a family. Time to call them on it.
Steeplejack
@Baud:
Gravenstone
@Jesse: Those “crisis centers ” are a conservative Christian thing. Unfortunately their ilk isn’t just limited to the US.
The Thin Black Duke
@O. Felix Culpa: We’ll see how November goes. And yeah, I hope I’m wrong.
sdhays
@Jesse: The US political system has long (i.e. since the founding of the country) given disproportionate power to the reactionary right, and it’s supported by global super wealth, which exports it everywhere it can. Other countries’ political systems are designed to be fairer, and most other countries have more political engagement (these things are related), so they’ve had less success in other countries.
So far…
O. Felix Culpa
@Geminid:
Probably autocorrect, but Michelle Lujan GRISHAM. :)
There’s definitely an increase in solar installations. It appears that a major wind farm just went online earlier this year: https://www.powermag.com/largest-u-s-wind-project-online-in-new-mexico/
Michelle is up for reelection this year. She’s got a slight edge over the Republican, a Trumpie no-nothing (but I repeat myself) television weatherman.
Jesse
@Torrey: out of curiosity, I checked in on the Lincoln Project to see what their take is. They put out a statement, not at all bad IMO. But they’re still focused mainly on J6 stuff. Would love to see them take their brand of brass knuckles to conservatives. What you’re saying sounds like their wheelhouse.
R-Jud
@Tony Jay: Just chiming in to confirm that the GOP-fuckery-to-Tory-policy lifecycle is accelerating.
A lot of my UK-based friends have also used this event to point out the situation with regards to abortion access in Northern Ireland. From what I can tell, it has a ban after 12 weeks (with exceptions for fatal fetal abnormalities/ health threats to the pregnant person), as opposed to 24 weeks in the rest of the UK.
I was not aware of that before this week.
Suzanne
@O. Felix Culpa: There is absolute loathing on some parts of the right for women with careers and more education than a MRS degree. Like the kind of hate reserved for traitors.
Assortative mating has been hard on this cohort.
O. Felix Culpa
@The Thin Black Duke:
I fervently hope you’re wrong too. The polls suggest that between 46% and 53% white women voted for the Tangerine Baal (h/t BC). I don’t know how many of them will vote, or vote R in November. I’m confident that the group that voted D will not switch to R.
Plus, white MEN. Maybe they need to get a 2×4 clue too.
Barbara
@O. Felix Culpa: These people blame abortion for the collapse of marriage. They really don’t or don’t want to understand people under the age of 30. They think if they can turn back the clock in enough ways their kids will start getting married and going to church again. It’s like the denial stage of grief over the loss of the future that they had anticipated for their kids. And I am sure the increased proportion of “others” among children is just rubbing salt in the wound.
lowtechcyclist
@O. Felix Culpa:
Not exactly being in tune with young people at the advanced age of 68, I can’t say to what extent this is true, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I know that I wouldn’t want to be responsible for bringing another child into the world until I was sure there was going to be a future that wasn’t a slide into disaster.
pat
I am now referring to it as the Inferior Court.
Tony Jay
@Jesse:
Oh hell yeah. The links between the modern Tory Party Hard Right Brexiteer/Libertarian fuckwits and their Republican counterparts are very real and strengthening.
Flobalob Johnson is basing much of his eternal Election campaign on stirring up a US style kulturkampf, using most of the same Christofascist policy outlines as the GOP, only with the US centric tells (mostly) filed off.
And don’t dismiss the solidarity/empathy part of it. Nature gifted me with a magnificent penis and all the trimmings, but I am absolutely brimming with rage at what the Sinister Six have done. Just imagine how immediate and visceral and terrifying all of this must feel to tens of thousands of (mostly) British women and girls who, after all, queued up for hours to see an American artist sing the songs that speak to them as women.
This isn’t – just – an American issue. This is a global war.
japa21
@zhena gogolia: One of the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
I don’t get the last one either. Is that supposed to be someone specific or just a—what? Rat? And why the wings? (The tail rules out a moose, I think.)
Geminid
@O. Felix Culpa: No, unfortunately that was not autocorrect. I make that mistake with the good Governor’s name from time to time. Thank you for the CORRECTION!
I’m glad to see that the clean power plan is yielding visible results. I took I-20 through Texas the last time I drove out to your state, and just about every ridge from Fort Worth on was lined with wind generators. When I got to New Mexico there were hardly any. There is plenty of wind, though. Santa Rosa Lake State Park was the windiest place I ever camped. The wind there made the winds on the Outer Banks look like gentle zephyrs.
zhena gogolia
Sally made an excellent comment late last night, and I’m repeating it here. I’ve asked if it could be front-paged.
Jesse
@Tony Jay: thanks; I appreciate the insight. I can be pretty thick at times and need feedback like yours (and others in this thread) to help me think things through.
O. Felix Culpa
@Suzanne:
Oh, I know. I grew up in a rural small town and many of my elementary/junior high/high school classmates who stayed there are rabidly RW. We may have been friends back then, but they HATE us now.
NeenerNeener
@zhena gogolia:
That’s one of Trump’s “flying monkeys”, MAGAs who harassed the poll workers.
Steeplejack
@japa21:
Okay, that sort of makes sense.
lowtechcyclist
Random thought: how are bans on first-trimester abortion anything other than establishment of religion?
Sure, I know a few “pro-life” atheists, but by and large, the opposition to abortion is purportedly justified by the overwhelmingly religious belief that the fertilized egg is a full-fledged person, just like you and me, from the get-go.
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
Sally who?
Lapassionara
@Steeplejack: Yes. That is the clip I saw. Sometimes I see a post by a pro-life woman. They seem to focus on the “sweet cooing baby” image, and claim to be so happy for the “unborn.” Alito has purportedly said that all women seeking to terminate a pregnancy should be required to sit through a course in fetal development.
I think this attitude is instilled in people who are raised in the Catholic Church. As I understand it, Augustine developed the doctrine of “original sin,” which every child is supposed to be born marked with. Once the infant is baptized, or “christened” the infant is “saved” from that sin and is eligible for eternal life, so long as the infant grows up going to confession and atoning for other sins. Augustine also viewed sexual intercourse as sinful, and the only time it wasn’t sinful was if it was in the confines of heterosexual marriage and for the purpose of having children. Hence the prohibition on contraception.
All infants must be carried to term and baptized, and their life is valued more than the mother’s life, because the mother has presumably already been baptized and saved from her original sin.
Again, I wasn’t raised Catholic, so I may have some of these doctrines confused.
Anne Laurie
It’s one of Trump’s flying monkeys, the low-rent racists he sicced on election workers, after five years of assuring ‘the poorly educated’ he so loved that they ‘were very special to him’.
zhena gogolia
@NeenerNeener: Okay. Not a very accurate rendering of a Wizard of Oz monkey.
Tony Jay
@Jesse:
Hey, don’t beat yourself up. I’m a dirty English Lefty who got large chunks of his political edumacation on an American pets, plants and puerile pee-pee jokes site. You’re in the right place.
zhena gogolia
@Steeplejack: That’s her nym. I don’t know any more than that — I just saw the comment in last night’s thread and thought it brilliantly summed up the discussion we’ve been having.
ETA: I should have said “Commenter Sally”
zhena gogolia
@Anne Laurie: Thanks!
Mike S (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)
One obvious thing Democrats can do to kick the legs out from under this horrible decision is to bring up and support a constitutional amendment declaring a right to privacy. I want to hear TFG, McTurtle and the spineless McCarthy on TV saying people don’t really want or need that right and that privacy is just a con by the Democrats. All those mask refusnicks and vax dodgers might get a clue as to what an unbridled government can to to them. i.e. Lepoards:faces etc.
Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog
@OzarkHillbilly:
A slip of the tongue, like Ingraham
giving Trump a Nazi straight-arm salutewaving to the crowd at the convention.A regrettable misunderstanding
(I think of this kind of fascist provocation as implausible deniability. )
Tony Jay
@R-Jud:
Ulster’s dull, grey, minions of God the Dour were Orange to the core before Trump was a plank in his racist bastard father’s eye. The rest of Ireland has come a long way out of the sunless abyss of Godbotheration since the turn of the millennium, but the North still has a ways to go.
Spanky
As a FWIW, Youtube autocompletes “lily” to “Lily Allen” first and “Lily Allen Olivia Rodrigo” third, which of course id=s Glastonbury 2022.
Somebody’s watching. Many somebodies.
Tony Jay
@OzarkHillbilly:
“Nothing to see here. She just misspoke.”
“So what we’re the crowd cheering?”
“……….”
“Thought so.”
phdesmond
@NotMax:
thanks; that was interesting.
Fair Economist
@Baud:
And pay for it with taxes on billionaires.
prostratedragon
@WV Blondie: That has crossed my mind.
Gravenstone
@zhena gogolia: Clay Jones kinda sucks as an artist, but I think the cap is supposed to be the tell.
Jesse
@Tony Jay: heh
The German press is also covering this, but I’m pretty sure the overall sentiment is Schadenfreude. As an American abroad, that hurts. It’s not easy being an informal “embassador” of America in times like this, talking to Germans about what’s going on.
Fair Economist
@zhena gogolia: That’s really good. Thanks for rescuing it.
Betty Cracker
@Tony Jay: I think you’re absolutely right that it’s a global war and has been for a long time: democracy vs. authoritarianism, with Putin as the global champion of the latter. He fucked with the US and UK elections in 2016, and he won’t stop until he’s stopped.
We’ve made progress in the states in that Putin no longer has an ally in the Oval Office. But over the years, he successfully exported elements of his brand of hard-right so-con authoritarianism to places/institutions like Hungary (where CPAC staged it’s carnival of crazy event this year), Fox News, the Republican caucus in Congress and…Florida.
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
Sorry, wasn’t clear to me that it was a Balloon Juice commenter.
Tony Jay
@Lapassionara:
Jesus was, by all accounts, a stand-up guy. But a lot of the gobshites – from that fucker Paul on down – who have claimed to be speaking on his behalf, not so much.
Yes, Gandhi was pithier.
sab
@Lapassionara: My Catholic husband agrees with your take on it. He thinks his mother also agreed, but she wasn’t about to let herself die in childbirth and leave her husband alone to raise all the ( many) earlier kids.
Gvg
@lowtechcyclist: who is going to staff those proposed childcare centers? They pay terribly, cost a lot and don’t offer benefits. Not surprisingly, they had staff shortages even years ago when my nephew was young. There is no real future in it, people do it who have had bad luck economically for some time. They are also not open late enough and it’s hard to get there before closing from other jobs.
ok, I get you are proposing funding, but expanding something that is way to small now is harder than expanding something that is almost big enough. You have to be really strict about background checks. You also have to keep in mind that if republicans gain power, they would kill it, putting lots of people out of work, so it would be risky job wise when lots of opportunity exist elsewhere.
we need to get there, but 1 promising what we can’t deliver is bad for the brand and bad for the reputation of the idea and 2) we need to plan multi stage build up somehow where we work out how on a somewhat smaller scale and build consensus that we want that.
I favor expanding pre k another year back and for a longer day for 4 year olds, plus funding before and after school care at elementary schools. Make it part of the established school system. Oh, and in Florida, I’d like to get pre k into schools instead of vouchers to private daycares with mixed results and not much supervision I can see. I want it part of the system, not for profit chaos.
JPL
@Suzanne: A doctor on twitter said that shortly after the ruling was announced, their practice received 22 calls from females wanting to make appointments for tubal ligations. Some states are already going after birth control. That’s next.
smedley the uncertain
@zhena gogolia: Flying monkey?
Dorothy A. Winsor
Do any of the BJ lawyers know if this is true?
Eolirin
@Gvg: It is probably more beneficial to go for expanded pre-k and then Scandinavian like year+ maternity leave laws.
Assuming the federal government even has the ability to regulate business as of tomorrow.
O. Felix Culpa
@Barbara:
Funny thing is that evangelicals have a higher divorce rate than non-evangelicals.
Tony Jay
@Jesse:
1) “Remind me, Herr Schadenfreude, how did Germany deal with its far-Right extremist problem?”
2) I’d expect a lot of those people, deep down, want a bit of reassurance that the citizens of the United States are aware of the nature of their domestic threat and are fully up for doing whatever it takes to put the White Christian Settler State of Amerika six-feet under ASAP.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Gvg: Publicly funded education can be expanded at the other end too. Community college can be made part of the system. I believe this is already the case in CA if the student goes straight on from HS?
Betty Cracker
@zhena gogolia: It’s an excellent comment, except for this one line, which maybe I’m misinterpreting:
What does that mean? Is she saying it should be self-evident that voting is important? Manifestly, it’s not, given the shamefully low participation rates, especially in the midterms and local elections. So yeah, we have to find ways to motivate people to vote.
Maybe I’m missing some crucial context or something.
Eolirin
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Roe didn’t establish those privacy expectations, Griswold did so even not being a lawyer, no it’s not right.
And HIPAA is also actually a law, not just a decision, so everything about how potentially striking it down would work is very different.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Eolirin: Thanks. I’m glad I checked before passing it on!
BC in Illinois
@Tony Jay: @Jesse: @Tony Jay:
From Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland:
She also has re-tweeted Michelle Obama’s statement and other reactions.
Dangerman
@OzarkHillbilly: Fraudian slip
Tony Jay
@Betty Cracker:
I hear you. The 21st century Axis did a Palpatine and corrected the errors in co-ordination that cost their cause the last world war. The 21st century Allies need to wake up and smell the smoke wafting over from that pyre of rights and protections currently occupying our town squares.
Speaking as a Floridian, are there any godawful chunks of your great state you’d like to volunteer as an alternative Republic of Secessiona to Texas? I hear some parts would only benefit from the import of 70+ million units of occasionally mobile organic fertiliser and gator-feed. 8-)
JPL
Now this had an interesting tutorial on the abortion pill and gave practical advice on how to use it. link
One thing they did say is when you abort the fetus, you should be checked out. Dorothy at 96 mentioned HIPAA laws and the video said you do not have to say you used a pill. You simply miscarried.
debbie
@Eolirin:
Google tells me it started with COBRA and was then expanded with the ACA.
Eolirin
@Betty Cracker: I think it’s of a similar line to my comment earlier that politicians needing to convince people to vote for them is backwards. People need to be using their power to select and mold politicians.
Yeah, we need to motivate people to get involved again, but the idea that dangling policy at them is a solution is going to leave us vulnerable. Politics as consumerism is a large part of what’s lead us to this place. We need to be trying to figure out how to restore the concept of civic obligation and responsibility if we want a functional shield against creeping fascism.
Matt McIrvin
@Mike S (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!):
This, and the ERA, and a right to vote beyond the specific and circumscribed guarantees in the 15th, 24th and 26th Amendments, which lend themselves to loopholes especially with a hostile SCOTUS. Propose a whole bunch of them.
When the ERA failed the first time, the parade of horribles brought up to defeat it were largely things that are now either realities or are supported by the majority of Democrats. (Same-sex marriage, trans rights, oh no!) There’s no good reason not to be for it.
Passing any constitutional amendment of this sort is, of course, impossible at the present time with the political system and regional partisan breakdown we have. But conservatives know that you do this kind of thing not because you expect to win but because you’re playing the long game. It’s for what might happen 25, 50 years out.
Tony Jay
@BC in Illinois:
There’s a reason Sturgeon’s SNP have replaced Labour as the dominant party north of the border, and a huge part of it is being able to make clear statements like that without descending into focus-grouped shithousery because they’re scared what a few thousand English swing voters might think of such ‘Woke’ talk.
prostratedragon
Surprised that no one has mentioned Richard M. Daley, Chicago’s “wet mayor.”
https://www.npr.org/2011/05/13/136240147/in-chicago-a-political-dynasty-nears-its-end
Viva BrisVegas
@R-Jud: It’s a relationship that most, if not all, conservative political parties in English speaking democracies have with the US Republican Party.
I know that from Australia they regularly send their scions to intern with Republican congresscritters. Culture War talking points cross the Pacific as fast as email will carry them.
Our local Liberal conservative party has been taken over by evangelical Christianists. Who take their inspiration directly from their US brethren both in organisation and doctrine. This fed directly into Liberal Party policy on climate change, LGBTQI+ rights, and so-called religious freedoms which were a stalking horse for legislated religious intolerance.
Most people seem unaware of this overt international cross pollination that occurs between right wing parties. The Republicans being the most powerful and hence most imitated.
It’s probably even more significant than the covert support from Putin.
Eolirin
@debbie: Sorry, I was responding to the idea that Roe established the idea of the right to privacy. It didn’t. It used that as a justification for the ruling, but Griswold established that concept. Griswold is still standing for now. That’s why Alito specifically said this ruling only applies to Dobbs, because abortion is extra “special”, and Thomas was alone in stating a desire to go after Griswold and Obergefell.
They haven’t explicitly denied the existence of a right to privacy in this ruling.
And yeah as an actual law HIPAA isn’t even based on that anyway.
Jesse
@Matt McIrvin: amen to that. I’m also in the constitutional amendment camp. Doesn’t exclude other strategies, of course. Many other amendments started as state-by-state slogs that eventually got over the finish line. That may be how we get to a privacy amendment. Sure, there will always be some resistance. That’s ok. You don’t need 100% of states to go along.
And did I say that other strategies are ok, too. (Somehow I think this gets lost. Like, by advocating for an amendment, I’m advocating for playing the long game *and nothing else*.)
Cacti
Vox sums up the ugly truth about SCOTUS as having been principally a reactionary and oppressive institution for most of its history:
Far from being aberrant, the actions of the Opus Dei 6 are largely in character with the grand SCOTUS tradition putting ordinary people “in their place”.
schrodingers_cat
If BS or bust people who voted for Jill Stein had voted for Hillary we would not be in this situation at all. These are the very same people right now who are blaming Democrats for the fall of Roe and many of them have huge media platforms. They are also spreading apathy and making fun of voting
HRC wouldn’t have appointed RWNJs to the Supreme Court.
The Moar You Know
@Tony Jay: they hung 17 of them and put the millions of the rest of the guilty straight back to work in the new West German government, where they spent American money lavishly to be a pawn in the Cold War.
And this was probably the least awful outcome. Both for Germany and the world.
Cacti
@schrodingers_cat: Go back further.
Al Gore in 2000 is where it started.
Eolirin
@Jesse: Amendments and the rights they grant aren’t absolute. Even with a privacy amendment, which would be good, because we clearly need to make everything as explicit as possible going forward, they could rule that the concerns of the fetus or the danger of moral degeneracy from homosexuality (or if we get something protecting LGBTQIA+ rights, the health risks of anal sex) presents enough of an issue that the state has a valid interest in regulating it. None of the other rights enshrined by the constitution are without exception either. And honestly they can’t be. That would be extremely problematic too. We don’t want a right to privacy to exempt being able to prosecute domestic violence, for instance.
The only defense against this stuff is an involved electorate that doesn’t let a bunch of crazy people seize power. It won’t matter what laws we put together. There are ways to undermine anything
We have an electorate problem. We need to fix that first and foremost. It’s going to require cultural change. A change to how we interact with politics. How we organize. It’s not a top down thing.
Tony Jay
@The Moar You Know:
I was thinking of ‘not taking the threat seriously’ and ‘getting bombed flat at the cost of millions of lives’ prequel period to that stage.
Barbara
@O. Felix Culpa: Non-evangelicals are less likely to be guilted or self-deluded into marriage.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Incidentally Cal put a law in to protect abortion providers against other state laws.
Those justices who voted for this shit should be impeached for lying under oath like the lowlifes they are.
Betty Cracker
@Tony Jay: I’ve been thinking we need to raise the bag limit on gators because they’ve rebounded so successfully after being hunted nearly to extinction; you can’t pick up a watering can in the garden these days without one popping out.
But you’ve suggested a higher use for the excess gator population, one that’s more attractive than the production of fancy shoes, belts, wallets, attache cases and tail fillets: controlling the influx of wingnuts. Food for more than just thought!
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: I think the context is a flareup of the long Sanders/anti-Sanders war that has gone on since 2016. There was a lot of blame caste after last week’s Supreme Court decision, and much of it was directed at the Sanders movement’s role in the 2016 outcome. So, many on that side have pushed back by attacking the feckless Democrats who keep telling people to vote more but won’t deliver when they do, and thus have not “earned” people’s votes.
Some of the party’s defenders note that this “vote more” trope is actually a straw man set up by the party’s critics.
The Israelis will now give a different demonstation of “vote more.” The shaky coalition established by Yair Lapid, Naftali Bennett and six other party leaders will dissolve this week on its own initiative. Defections made it unable to pass vital legislation. So this fall Israel will stage its fifth election since 2019. Lapid will replace Bennett, as an interim Prime Minister.
O. Felix Culpa
@Barbara:
Exactly. The pressure to remain “pure” until marriage leads to horny, sometimes starry-eyed young people getting married way too early, with predictable consequences.
Betty Cracker
@Eolirin: Okay, that makes a ton of sense. Thank you!
Eolirin
@Barbara: Divorce rates also correlate with education level, age, and earning potential. Being poorer, being less educated, and being younger all correlate with higher divorce rates.
You’d expect rural communities to be worse on all three fronts. Poorer, less educated, marrying younger
Now, which way the arrow of causality lies, idk. But there’s a lot going on to make people more likely to be miserable the more rural you get, and that’s just not good for any kind of relationship.
Barbara
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski knew they were being lied to. Full stop. I am avoiding getting into commentary on Dobbs because, mostly, I want some time to grieve, and then figure out how to move forward. However, I am thinking back to how I felt when Trump won and thinking about what would be next for the ACA. I am astonished it was not axed. We can fight even if we shouldn’t have to. Yes, I am very tired of this.
@lowtechcyclist: Yes, couldn’t agree more. So if we choose not to go to church, they are going to cram their church down our throats. When they start outlawing contraception because there is even a hypothetical possibility a fertilized egg might be compromised, then it will be even clearer.
Kay
@JPL:
I support passing this information along, that there is no test to determine if a miscarriage was induced with abortion pills or occurred without them, but I do want people to think about what this means. What this means is that women can no longer tell a health care provider the truth about their condition- they must lie for fear of being reported. One can’t have a real patient/provider relationship if one is compelled to lie to the provider and give incomplete information. It’s substandard medical care. This is what we have already accepted- women will have to lie to the people who are caring for their health in order to protect themselves.
Soprano2
@Barbara: I think this is right, along with wanting to punish the “sluts” for having “unapproved” sex. They don’t seem to want their kids to have a better life than they did – they want them to have the same kind of life they did. Thus all the book banning in schools and wanting total control of the curriculum – maybe if we can keep them from knowing anything better or different is out there, they won’t leave or change, is what they think. ETA I also think they believe kids are “turned gay” by reading about it in books, thus the total panic over books about gay and trans kids in schools.
Torrey
@Jesse: I’ve become increasingly unimpressed (or perhaps decreasingly impressed) by the Lincoln Project. They started out strong when their focus was on speaking fluent Republican to Republicans, but the ground has been steadily shifting since then, and I’m not sure their brand of Republican-speak is all that relevant to the base as it stands now. They also seemed at a certain point to be distracted by their visceral hatred of Donald Trump. Nothing wrong with a bit of visceral hatred in that direction, mind you, but it led them to focus their attention on a peculiar set of ads that seemed to be trying to get inside DJT’s head (“they’re all laughing at you, Donald,” whispers a woman’s voice in one ad) and less on effective messaging to the reachable Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who might be swayed.
I’ve read the statement they put out. It’s pretty weak tea.
Yeah, apparently, Roe wasn’t settled law, says the LP. So presumably overturning it is OK, then? Actually, all the justices said explicitly that it was settled law, and then six of them tore it down.
I want to see some serious work put into advertising. At this point, I think the best move is to make clear that it is already the case that SCOTUS has lost credibility.
YY_Sima Qian
On the Nick Anderson cartoon, I don’t think SCOTUS’s credibility is still hanging by a thread, by any stretch of the imagination. It hasn’t had credibility since 3 Trump nominees were rushed through Senate, after refusing Merrick Garland even a hearing, now it has just been laid bare for all to see.
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: I so look forward to the day when people on the port side of American politics can have a political discussion that isn’t haunted by the specter of Bernie Fucking Sanders. I’ve accepted the fact that I’ll be long dead when that blessed day arrives, but it’s my hope for my children and future descendants. ;-)
oldgold
The black robed pols Impersonating justices were so busy misreading the 2nd Amendment they had no time to read the 9th Amendment. “The Constitution does not mention abortion.” So what?
“9th Amendment. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.“
O. Felix Culpa
@Torrey:
In addition, the Lincoln Project isn’t going to save us. They’re Republicans and not working on the same project as Democrats. I relish their Trump hate, but more for the entertainment/Schadenfreude value than for looking to them for effective help.
Mike in NC
Front page story in the local Sunday newspaper: “Alligator Drags Person Into Pond”. Did not end well for either of them.
Tazj
@Baud: I agree. After the decision was announced many conservative exclaimed that now the real work had to begin in support of mothers and families. Why wouldn’t you have been doing that all along?
Some of us are old enough to remember conservatives not wanting to fund things like food stamps and WIC because too many irresponsible people were having kids and they were paying for it. A conservative local radio station in my area used to mock the newspaper’s Christmas fund drive for families in need every year. Why do those people have so many kids?
Maybe we can get things that will actually help people, at worst the hypocrisy will be exposed again.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: It is a wearying debate. I could get behind a General Strike to end it.
Jackie
@schrodingers_cat: McConnell was in power; he wouldn’t have let Hillary seat a single SC Justice. We would have limped along with 7 justices – assuming Kennedy didn’t retire.
Ksmiami
@debbie: by any means necessary…
Eolirin
@Soprano2: While there’s probably some level of actual belief in the idea that you can be turned gay by some people in those communities, I suspect it’s not a primary motivator.
The primary motivator really seems to be genocide of gay people. By denying support, denying normalization, furthering isolation, eliminating open community and suppressing community history, they enable violence. By normalizing abuse they increase suicide.
That’s the end goal of all of it. Either completely in the closet and in fear of your life if anyone finds out or already dead. No mention of you or anyone like you anywhere. Completely erased.
They don’t have the power to do this like they’re trying to anymore, thanks to the internet. Though guarantee they’ll try to break that too if they get enough power to.
Soprano2
@Betty Cracker: That line is about some Dems baldly stating that they have to be bribed to vote rather than considering it their civic duty to keep the good guys in power. I just saved you a lot of time wading through those comments.
O. Felix Culpa
@Betty Cracker:
I’m trying to move past the harm done in 2016, really I am. :)
And, his political descendants continue to sabotage state, county, and local Democratic politics. I speak from personal experience, extending from 2016 to the present. It’s frustrating, not least because I and other Dems share many of their stated policy goals. An unfortunate number of those operating under his mantle are not good faith actors, they are vicious, and they suck up significant resources managing their lies and attacks that could be used organizing.
FYI, we have tried to join forces with them, pointing out shared goals etc., but they are implacable enemies of the Democratic Party. An unfortunate reality that refuses to go away and is destructive at the local level. We’ve lost good volunteers because of their nasty personal attacks.
ETA: Not all Sanders supporters, in case that needs to be said.
lowtechcyclist
@Gvg:
Oh please. We’re talking about something that has zero chance of passing, whose point is to show that the ONLY way the GQP wants to encourage those additional white births they so desperately want is at the equivalent of gunpoint.
That said, I do have to slap this down:
Which is always a reason why we shouldn’t do anything in the first place.
Take something away that people have, and have been counting on, and they get upset. You may have noticed this happening over the past two days, for instance. And before that with the attempted ACA repeal.
(By contrast, take away something they don’t have yet, and it can happen almost unnoticed: at the end of his second term, the Obama administration greatly expanded access to overtime pay. But the new GOP Congress killed it at the beginning of 2017, before it had a chance to take effect. Hardly anyone remembers it.)
Soprano2
@Geminid: To me it’s more specific, because the idea that your vote has to be bought is offensive, full stop.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: My guess is it’s a line born of frustration at all the “We didn’t give young people exactly what they want so why should they vote?” comments, which frustrate me too. If you’re too stupid to see that Republicans should be kept out of power, I’m at a loss as to what to do for you. ETA: That was crystal clear to me since I was 10 years old.
Soprano2
@Eolirin: Trust me, they totally believe you can be “turned gay”. My mother told me once several years ago that it was ok that there were gay people, she just wished they’d go back in the closet so their “lifestyle” wasn’t pushed in her face all the time. So yeah, you’re right, because I think that view has “evolved” since then. Make it too dangerous to be gay, they think, and then no one will be gay, including my kids. You can’t discount their sheer terror that one of their kids or grandkids will turn out to be gay.
lowtechcyclist
I’d add a right for workers to organize for purposes of collective bargaining. Might should extend the ERA to cover sexual orientation and gender identity, too.
I’ve long wondered why the Dems don’t propose Constitutional amendments like these. Agreed, they have no chance of passing, but the point is to remind people of which side we’re on, and which side the Rethugs are on.
Tony Jay
@Betty Cracker:
Normally I’d have tagged that with “I am not a crank!”, but sometimes the craziest ideas prove the best ones.
Steeplejack
@Torrey:
I think that “apparently” is a stab at sarcasm, but, yeah, it’s weak coming from a (self-described) cadre of hard-hitting media pros.
YY_Sima Qian
@Viva BrisVegas: The nefarious influence goes beyond the Anglosphere. Poland has already outlawed abortion under almost any circumstance, & w/ the inevitable body count to show for it. The Christo-reactionaries in that country will be further encouraged by the overt regression in the US. The only pressure will come from the EU, but since Poland is a frontline state against Putin’s Russia, it will likely get a pass for its rapid slide into illiberalism. The primary reason Victor Orban gets so much attention for his proto-authoritarianism is because of his playing footsie w/ Putin.
The DPP in Taiwan currently espouses permissive social values & environmentalism (though I question its competence in execution), but the party historically has had strong & intimate ties to the reactionary right wing of the Japanese LDP & has worked to ingratiated w/ the GOP during the Trump years. Its disrespect of norms & institutions of democratic governance while pursuing permanent power in the past few years have disturbing Gingrich & GWB era GOP vibes. (The problem is that the opposition KMT is not that much better.)
While the Global South generally harbor deep suspicions & resentment of the US & Europe for their past colonial atrocities & post-colonial interference, a reactionary regime in the US will form alliances of convenience w/ reactionary forces in the Global South (of which there are plenty, such as the Hindu ethno-nationalists in India & parts of the Catholic Church in Africa) to push back against modernity around the world.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
You answered your question. Until constituents and social media reward Dems for failed attempts, we won’t undertake long term projects.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: They don’t reward dems for successes either. I haven’t seen a single article lauding Biden for ending the war in Afghanistan. Have you?
lowtechcyclist
@schrodingers_cat:
FTFY. I hate magical thinking.
Eolirin
@Soprano2: I mean, she’s basically telling you she doesn’t want to have to be exposed to gay people existing, right?
“It’s okay if there are gay people, as long as I never have to experience gay people” is more than just fear that kids will get turned gay. If you don’t want to see them, have to think about them, allow any accommodation for them in society then you have a desire for them to not exist, straight up, you just don’t have the courage of conviction to say they should be killed.
No one wants to have to hate and desire the non-existence of their own children never mind having their community turn on them over it. So of course they’re terrified.
But I’m sorry, it’s always been coming from a desired genocide. It’s not an evolution. They want to erase us. They’ve always wanted to erase us.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Or low unemployment.
sdhays
@YY_Sima Qian: The thread was pretty thin after Bush v. Gore, and nothing that came after really strengthened
ETA: The cynical bet that the Republican Party has made is that they stocked the Court with ideologues for a generation and have gerrymandered their way to enough power to maintain it, so “legitimacy” is a silly thing that doesn’t matter.
Eolirin
@Baud: Low unemployment and raising wages!
But inflation, so none of that counts.
Uncle Cosmo
@pat: The Extreme Court (XOTUS), pronounced “X-out-us”…
YY_Sima Qian
@Eolirin:
Yeah, I am sure that is the way many Germans thought of Jews & others (including homosexuals) in the 20s & early 30s.
Kay
@Baud:
That’s nonsense. Democrats took on a long term project of expanding access to health care beginning with FDR. In one fashion or another they have expanded it just about every four years. Democrats took on a long term project of expanding access to higher education in the 1960s. Many, many, many more low income students attend college or training past high school because of that long term project.
Apparently they didn’t need social media or professional media cheerleaders then- why would they need them now?
They’re not 6 years old. They shouldn’t need a cheer squad to initiate a new long term project.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
No, I didn’t. One thing a political party absolutely must convey is what it’s for and what it’s against. The main purpose of proposing Constitutional amendments is to help define that in people’s minds – and also force the other party to take a stand for or against, to reduce its ability to pretend to be other than what it is.
Now I’m OK with them as steps in long-term projects too, but their main benefit is in the here and now. They’re propaganda. They’re messaging, and not the focus-group-tested, make-sure-we-don’t-offend-someone-in-a-Midwest-diner kind. Here is what we’re for, and what they’re against. Pure and simple.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Barbara:
A-Freakin-Men.
@O. Felix Culpa:
Exactly. They wrote checks on their mad skills (Rick Wilson especially) that those skills couldn’t cash. Their effectiveness never matched their bravado. Their ads had great appeal to MSNBC panels and viewers (raises hand), Brian Williams couldn’t go an hour without smugly intoning that teh Democrats’ best messengers were ex-Repubilcans; but O’Bro Dan Pfeiffer (the smartest of that bunch) said that research showed that boring old Joe Biden’s boring old “Soul of America” ads were much more effective with Normies.
Barbara
@Eolirin: I agree that they don’t care whether gay people are harmed or even killed, but mostly they’re angry because out and proud gay people are an in the face reminder of their increasing cultural marginalization.
It means a lot to them to be culturally mainstream. They are angry, angry, angry to be rejected but especially by their children and especially on “core” values.
Baud
@Kay:
They need a constituency that will support those efforts. That’s what they had in the past that they don’t have anymore.
Betty Cracker
@O. Felix Culpa: Sounds like it varies considerably by place, which isn’t surprising. Before we moved to the boonies, I was involved in party politics at the county level, including during the 2016 primary and the aftermath for a couple of years. There was definitely strife and a level of toxicity from some quarters, including (but not exclusively) from the Sanders faction, but it didn’t get out of hand. Of course, we were all meeting-going Democrats, so maybe that’s a different context.
@zhena gogolia: It’s obvious to me too, but it’s manifestly NOT clear to everyone, so I’m open to exploring new tactics to achieve the goal, which is to marginalize Republicans. Would dangling specific policies help? Would emphasizing civic duty help? All of the above? I don’t know.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Or the vaccine roll out. Or the free COVID tests. Check out the 300 + thread from last night.
different-church-lady
Fuck having children.
There. I said it.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: We need to distinguish between BS voters who voted for HRC and the BS or bust contingent that is vocal on social media.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud:
Not just failed attempts, but partial successes. Anything less than everything is nothing. That’s the long-term disease that has grown out of Bernie-ism. Last night a couple of the usual suspects, and one revenant, were trotting out the “Biden has done nothing for student debt, the environment or Young People!” lines. When the things Biden has in fact done in those areas were pointed out, none of them counted for… Reasons.
(and no, I’m not letting go of Bernie, because neither he nor too many of his supporters learned anything from 2018 or 2020, and 2016 happened because we– Democrats and the broad Left– didn’t learn the lesson of 2000. John “Shelby” Roberts and Sammy Alito are on the Court because of Ralph Fucking Nader).
different-church-lady
@Geminid:
When has “vote less” ever worked?
debbie
@different-church-lady:
Ready for another day, I see.
debbie
@schrodingers_cat:
Susan Sarandon remains unrepentant. Make her the poster child.
schrodingers_cat
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Amen.
oatler
Lindsay Graham is on ABC right now warning us about the “Democrat Left”. We have no allies in MSM.
Kay
@Baud:
Obama got shellacked the midterm after passing the ACA. Pelosi got almost no credit at all for expanding access to heath care for low income children – media barely mentioned it and higher income Democrats weren’t even aware of it. There’s never been this tight “action/reward” sequence that you’re looking for. Still, Democrats have done “long term projects” for 70 years. The idea that they now “can’t” because of some group of unfaithful, spoiled voters of undetermined size or number getting in the way is nonsense.
How did Democrats make health care access their brand? By hitting it for 70 years. They owned “education” for 50 years too- less so now, IMO because they took their foot off the gas, but it wasn’t an accident that Democrats were 20 points ahead of the GOP on “education”. They made it so. They did that. They can do it again, with or without 100% cheerleading and pom pom shaking from their constituents.
different-church-lady
@debbie:
I deal with what I get.
Betty Cracker
@schrodingers_cat: Agreed. Seems like conflating those two distinct groups leads to misunderstandings and misplaced hostility. I tend to write the B or bust people off politically because I suspect they’re as unreachable as MAGA-dopes, and it’s my opinion that their actual influence is pretty negligible, though in a narrow race, that can matter a whole lot…
Eolirin
@Barbara: The core value in this case is that gay people shouldn’t exist.
Though this is also highlights another issue with the right. It’s not enough that they get to hurt their targets or get success in imposing their views, they need everyone to agree with them too.
They’re not going to get that ever again unless they kill almost everyone else.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: There are many BS or busters who have large media platforms and are constantly poisoning the well against Democrats.
Eolirin
@schrodingers_cat: The social media ones that just complain a bunch but are only talking aren’t worth paying that much attention to. It’s the people who have been bomb throwing at actual local on the ground events and stuff, or engaged in harassment campaigns that are the real problem. And I think it’s not necessarily that prevalent, especially now, but there are and have been real horror stories.
Kay
@Baud:
I mean, I look at the new gun bill and obviously it’s not my best gun bill but a quarter of it isn’t a gun bill at all- it’s an 11 billion dollar expansion/investment in mental health care access, which is a long term project of Democrats. Will Democrats get “credit” for this from their voters? No, probably not, but I would suggest that telling Democrats they just got 11 billion dollars for mental health programs is perhaps more productive than analyzing all the reasons Democrats are unfaithful and scolding the unfaithful.
different-church-lady
@Kay:
You know why dems won’t get any credit for it?
Because it costs money.
In America, spending money on things that help the public is the worst thing you can do.
schrodingers_cat
@Eolirin: When they are members of Congress with huge social media platforms constantly throwing shade on Biden admin or suggesting solutions that have no way of coming to fruition or are just illegal. They increase apathy.
They are influential
Kay
@Baud:
And as a practical matter Chris Murphy can’t really say “I stuck a mental health bill inside a gun bill” but that is in fact what he did. So we won’t hear about that. We’ll hear about the boyfriend loophole and they’ll sell it as “got something done”.
MisterDancer
Which is what the GOP has. That’s the Conservative Movement — it is decades of work to build up constituencies that are invested in long-haul work, and funded for same.
And that was built, in turn, off lessons learned from assholes like Father Conklin, and other Reactionary, Bigoted cesspools of humanity, going back to, yes, oligarchically-minded slaveowners and their meandering justifications for racially-driven Chattel Slavery.
The Dixiecratic Solid South was an example of how coalitions were built, back then. “We” didn’t need it because “we” had stable, known ways to sell out Blacks, Women, and other marginalized groups to get things going. FDR had enough votes to ignore the (at that point little-used) filibuster, under the right situations and circumstances — and thus, his threats to SCOTUS had, you know, teeth.
Indeed, it’s at least correlation to look at the very programs that helped marginalized groups, and the shattering of the “stable” voting blocs that led to today’s situation.
I know we’re all on knife’s edge. But this is…I dunno. I guess I’m angry and frustrated, too? I’m not sure where this debate is going?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
(thread)
Yesterday they were justifying 2016 by saying HRC deserved to lose because she picked a pro-life running mate, and Biden ‘wrote the loophole’ that made Dobbs possible.
They refuse to acknowledge that Republicans exist and have power. There are a few people here who sing from a different page in the hymnal. It’s weird. And toxic.
James E Powell
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
The Lincoln Project’s biggest impact was on the Beltway courtiers and the political press in general. They helped prevent or at least greatly reduce the press’s tendency to promote Trump.
Not all of their ideas or ads are bad, it’s just that we’ve reached the point where people are no longer persuaded by TV ads. They can reinforce pre-existing beliefs, but they don’t seem to change minds at all.
Barbara
@Eolirin: I think the core value is that all people – even gay people – should agree that gay relationships offend God. That’s how it used to be. So even if they knew people who were gay their closeted experience reaffirmed traditional values. But I’m not arguing with you over whether it feels like they think you shouldn’t exist. They certainly don’t care if their dominance kills you.
different-church-lady
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Murc’s Law now, Murc’s Law forever.
Kay
@MisterDancer:
It’s a “debate” that has barely mentioned abortion since the decision came down and is instead exclusively focused on “Bernie Bros” and allegeldy feckless and spoiled younger voters and Democrats who aren’t “loyal enough” which is really fucking disappointing to me and seems to be the only “debate” we ever have on Balloon Juice now. A debate about how bad some Democratic voters are and how super awesome others are.
Ten comments out of 100 will be on the issue or event- any issue. The rest will be moaning about disloyal Democrats and who we’re blaming this week. Are we going back to Ralph Nader voters on this one or is this the Susan Sarandon “debate”?
Kathleen
Baud
@Kay:
Dems pass good bills and generally make good compromises. The question is whether Dems announce a long term project about amending the constitution. They don’t do things like that because it earns them immediate enemies, while any new friendships are delayed unless and until Dems are close to success, when everyone takes credit.
Eolirin
@schrodingers_cat: They have Twitter. Twitter is mostly young people. Young people have been turning out for us more since Trump. They turned out in record high numbers for Biden. And I don’t see that changing thanks to Roe.
I don’t think they’re that influential.
different-church-lady
@Kay: This week’s decision was a time bomb, and the timer was set back in 2016. So it’s natural there’s a lot of revisiting of old grudges. But yes, it doesn’t help a damn thing going forward.
Sister Golden Bear
@Eolirin:
As I’ve said many times before, they want to eradicate us LGBTQ+ folks from public life — and ideally eradicate us period. Though the latter is the quiet part they usually don’t say out loud.)
Suzanne
@Eolirin: You are right on this: it is all about driving LGBT people out of public life. In the closet is fine, totally out of town is better, the grave is acceptable.
Lots of the socon right feels like they used to be in positions of social power and now they aren’t, and they fear “cancellation” from their jobs or their soccer team or their friend cohort or whatever. And they fear “losing their kids”.
I think a significant part of gathering the political power that we will need is to marginalize these people as much as possible. Cut friendly ties with them, don’t frequent their businesses, try not to buy real estate near them. They should feel uncomfortable and embarrassed. They should be rejected from polite society.
Sister Golden Bear
@Soprano2:
And we all know that the same godbotherers banning abortion would immediately abort a fetus if they knew it would grow up to be LGBTQ+.
phdesmond
@zhena gogolia:
i took it to be a reference to flying monkeys in Oz.
MisterDancer
I think I get it.
Not going to deny I’ve been beyond angry reading some of the commentary here, myself.I’ve been trying to brainstorm ways to address this without being mean, or unfairly silencing people — my post a couple days ago on local/regional groups was about that, for example.
You make a really good point, though. I’ll see what I can do to try again, in a different way.
Baud
@Suzanne:
As well as from our society.
different-church-lady
@Suzanne:
That’s why they’re working so hard to make sure there’s no such thing as polite society anymore.
schrodingers_cat
@Eolirin: Socia, media drives the conversation in the legacy media. Look at Biden’s approval rating and tell me that they are not influential.
scav
@Barbara: I don!t think they know they are happy, feel their lives are a success, if they don’t see themselves, their choices reflected in the mainest of the mainstream, as the only option. eg, “Of course I’m happy, I’m married, have 2.4 children and the latest dishwasher.”. I can never wrap my head around being so needy, so unsure of my very life that would make me imagine that my child, if even exposed to the thought of a viable option to it (Oh! Look! A Happy non-Religious Gay couple! or A satisfied single career woman without babies!) would instantly desire anything but what I have. But, then again, I don’t need the validation of my children or the approval of mainstream teevee ads to reassure me about my life or decisions so . . . .
They’re very odd people.
ETA I’m not sure they’d be sure they liked vanilla ice cream or Lays Potato Chips if not reassured that 9 out of 10 dentists recommended them as did their bishop.
Geminid
I picked up the Washington Post yesterday evening when I was grabbing pizza in Stanardsville. I got around to it just now and read an article subtitled “In Uvalde, collective grief gives way to collective rage.” The reporter describes a newly created group called “Fierce Madres.” These women intend to hold that city’s leadership accountable for the failings on May 24 with demonstrations, City Council appearances and most consequentially, voter registration drives.
They are reviving the city’s Chicano civil rights movement that in the early 1970’s staged a six week walkout from Uvalde’s segregated schools. Robb Elementary was then the city’s “Mexican school” and the firing of a Robb teacher who had rocked the boat led to the walkout. After a lawsuit the schools were finally desegregated five years later. Now Uvalde’s Latino residence see that the job of winning their rights is not yet finished.
Robb Elementary is still predominately Latino, and there is a common belief that this was why police took so long to end the massacre. Residents also believe that Uvalde’s political leaders hope the matter will blow over. Fierce Madres member Estella Martinez’s close friend’s daughter died in the shooting, as well as a cousin’s grandaughter. She says the politicians are wrong:
different-church-lady
@schrodingers_cat:
It doesn’t just drive it, it supersedes it.
Eolirin
@Kay: We are all united in our feelings about abortion rights and initial discussion was much more focused on donations and immediate actions people could take, and then we ran out of that, and of course things people can argue about are going to dominate the space afterwards. It’s one of the consequences of a flat comment section instead of a threaded one.
TS
@Jesse:
This is getting traction all around the world. Women who have achieved a degree of rights to their own bodies cannot believe what is happening in the US and have major concerns related to the same thing happening in their own countries.
It seems like we are seeing the collapse of a democratic republic that is ruled by a group of unelected people who want their world back in the early 1900s – before woman even had the right to vote.
Suzanne
@scav:
You’re not an authoritarian.
It’s critical to remember that these people genuinely have a different psychological profile than people who are liberal/left. They seek authoritarian social structures, both to impose them and to submit to them.
This is a weakness for us in some ways, because we’re endlessly rehashing the debate wondering why young people won’t just fall in line and vote for Democrats. But it’s the same reason that they would lean liberal/left at all: because they don’t feel allegiance to bullshit authority structures and hierarchies.
ETA: I will note that I am sympathetic to this viewpoint, because I also feel like many of our political structures are sclerotic and probably outlived their usefulness. I used to be more interested in the minutiae of the Constitution, and now I’m like, “Those old white dudes wrote with feathers, IDGAF what they would have thought about anything”.
MisterDancer
Kay’s point is still fundamentally right. We’d do better to heed her than to try to explain it away, in my opinion.
People eating each out up online might have the best of reasons, yet we should be smart and wise enough to avoid doing that — and acknowledge when people are just fed up with reading it, and let them be fed up, yanno?
Old Dan and Little Ann
A fun video! Dog loose on the soccer field. AKA a Bitch on the pitch.
https://twitter.com/Karri_Kemyst/status/1540835695094206464?s=20&t=_l9VuGPJA65KpbrmzArGpg
scav
@Suzanne: But they do so go on about the free market and freedom but so evidently don’t believe for a second that their lives could stand up to competition of any sort. Yes, like the sun rising, I shouldn’t be surprised that their logic chips never seem to be engaged.
debbie
@Kay:
Their arguments haven’t changed a whit over the years. It seems to me that is what would need to be directly responded to. ♀️
Kay
@Eolirin:
I’m disappointed in all of it, whether it’s why Democrats didn’t “codify” Roe- a stupid fucking question, both practically and legally- or why some unknown and unidentified group of voters did not vote for Hillary Clinton which is so “how many angels on the head of a pin” I can’t even finish reading any comment about it.
Spanky
@MisterDancer:
Most debates don’t go anywhere. Some debates help define points you want to drive forward.
It’s ok that it doesn’t go anywhere, today. It’s what goes forward that counts.
Eolirin
@schrodingers_cat: That’s such a weird take. Traditional media is influenced by social media insofar as the members of traditional media are also present on social media and are influenced by what they follow on their own feeds. But that’s mostly each other.
Biden’s approval slump started with Afghanistan, and that was heavily driven by traditional media. Inflation is the next big one, also driven primarily by traditional media.
You know what’s not really a big focus on traditional media? Student loan stuff. Especially not from the direction of how the Biden administration isn’t doing enough. That’s one of the things you’re talking about when it comes to members of congress sniping at Biden, right?
Not that misinfo and coordinated campaigns aren’t a threat. They did a ton of damage in 2016. But they’re not organic, and it isn’t going to be our members of congress we need to worry about there.
There are signs of a coordinated campaign starting. We do need to fight it. But when those kinds of things succeed they’re a lot bigger than the leftist burn down the democratic party down types, even if those types are used to launder it.
MisterDancer
Man, this whole business of “make Democrats do better!” has been roiling for years, here and elsewhere.
I don’t think it is, right now, a debate with a direction. I fear it’s circular firing squad business, and we have limited resources for that business. I mean, I truly sympathize with a lot of it — I feel it myself!
Yet I’m not certain how all this fighting about the Party helps anyone who needs an abortion in, say, Texas today — or really, 5 years from now. We’re not developing Party stratagems here, I don’t think — albeit we could develop on-the-ground activism, if there was enough energy to put behind that work.
Let me say it another way, in today’s “There’s a MLK quote for everything” entry:
schrodingers_cat
@Eolirin: I beg to differ. Reporters spend a lot of time on Twitter that’s a part of their job, why do you think BJ now has a Twitter handle to influence the discourse.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I thought it was because Cole wanted to hang out with classier people.
Geminid
@Eolirin: I can’t speak to absolute numbers, but many of the incisive Twitter polemicists I follow are middle aged, like Ragnarok Lobster and AGrayBee (whose tweets under the handle Substack of Boba Flett I often see here). WonderKing82, Kenneth House of Pfizer, and social democrat Michael Paulauski are in their late 30s or early 40s, I believe. Mangy Jay worked for Ralph Nader in 2000 but was too young to vote (she has since repented).
Some like Meg Wolters, @(((Buffalo Meg))), are retired. And one of the very best is Denise Oliver-Velez, who was a Black Panther in the 1960s and has been a human rights activist ever since. Ms.Oliver-Velez delivers her opinions in a very blunt way, “with the bark on.” She reminds me of Virginia Senator L. Louise Lucas, who at 78 savages Governor Youngkin with youthful exuberance.
So Twitter as I experience it is a cross-generational medium.
different-church-lady
@schrodingers_cat:
Hell, Twitter is the reason Cole no longer reads the blog.
ian
@James E Powell:
This is the work of the LP
https://www.theroot.com/apparently-the-lincoln-project-believes-white-supremac-1847977364
It was a huge deal in Virginia governor election- and may have been enough to swing the outcome in that tight election.
These people are not our friends.
Uncle Cosmo
And the call is coming from inside the house.
That is, the “you” in that sentence is really “they.”
Human (hell, primate or for that matter mammalian) sexuality isn’t univalent or bivalent; it’s on a spectrum, and probably a multidimensional spectrum as well. IMO the number of H. saps throughout history whose sexual orientation is 100% hetero- (or for that matter 100% homo-) can probably be counted on my fingers and toes (full complement, thanky kindly).
And like a volcano, the harder they try to shoehorn their sexuality into the only mode allowed in their belief system, the greater the eruption when the contradictions blow the top off the allegedly-somnolent mountain.
They see this happening with distressing frequency amongst their “spiritual leaders.” (How can a bigtime pastor rail in the pulpit against the “abomination” of homosexuality while he’s engaging a male prostitute on the side for purposes of frequent and lurid “abominating”???) Then they look inside themselves & feel the hints, however faint, of unacceptable attractions…and it scares the living shit out of them, because it means they’re gonna burn in hell forever.
They can’t accept themselves as they are, so they do the only thing they know how to do: Stomp down on it. The religious equivalent of what 12-step programs call “white-knuckling.” And a major part of the downstomping is ensuring that no one, no where, no how is allowed to make a public display of any unacceptable alternative – it too must be vigorously crushed.
And thus an entire society becomes the victim of a vocal and vigorous minority’s fear of itself. (Aided and abetted behind the curtain by the bazillionaires who set all us “little people” at each other’s throats in the smug belief they can buy their way out of any social constraint that emerges.)
(JMO I guess…)
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Actually I was talking about the Real Citizens United handle. But you are right about his personal Twitter handle!
Eolirin
@MisterDancer: I may have worded it inelegantly but I was trying to highlight a specific consequence of how the comment system is set up here. Something that could get changed. I don’t think there’s a reasonable way to tell people who are still upset over 2016 to stop being upset or to stop bringing it up without moderation, and if we had threads that can at least get isolated to its own loop, hopefully allowing other conservation to happen while those people relitigate that stuff.
@Kay: That’s completely understandable.
schrodingers_cat
@different-church-lady: Actually I have to confess I spend more time on Twitter than here.
schrodingers_cat
@Eolirin: Relitigate? They are still at it torpedoing the Democrats from the left. The toxic movement didn’t end in 2016.
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
I keep seeing posts here about Twitter, but I hear that more young people are on Instagram, Tik-Tok and other services.
Note that I absolutely agree that social media is important, probably more important than traditional news media, which has been long abandoned by most young people.
Geminid
@ian: That time the Lincoln Project ventured into campaign theatre and got burned. The five tiki torch bearing “protesters” expected reporters to interview them so they could explain that they were trolling, but no one did. It was a stupid stunt to begin with.
The LP definitely ended up with egg on their faces, but I think the actual effect on the race’s outcome was insignificant. Few voters even heard about it.
different-church-lady
@schrodingers_cat: Dopamine is a hell of a drug.
Kay
Every far Right state could have put these programs in to “trigger” when their Far Right justices banned abortion.
Yet none of them did. They all had draconian pregnancy regulation laws ready to roll! But oddly the professional anti-abortion activists did no work at all on the promised “pro family” policies.
Another lie from the anti-choice activists. They won’t even expand Medicaid and all their states have LOUSY maternal/child heath outcomes.
The best place to be a pregnant person or infant is in a blue state. It’s not even close.
Eolirin
@MisterDancer: 100%. There is a reason I keep going back to us having an electorate problem not a party problem.
This blog is not part of the party decision making process anyway. Nothing that gets said here will influence the various party organizations in any way. If we want to affect change we have to do that ourselves.
And I do think we’ve been doing a pretty good job of focusing on that as a community, with our fundraising and activist focused efforts. Just not in the comment threads.
oatler
@MisterDancer:
eating each out up online
I sort of misread that
MisterDancer
Agreed. Now, TicTok — or, weirdly, even Tumblr — is far more youth-oriented than Twitter, these days. If you actually wanna get a meme rolling thru the socials, you’ll use a TicTok video well before a Twitter thread, most days.
Kay
@Brachiator:
Biden gets creamed on Tic Tok. My youngest shows me the posts “is this true?” It’ll all that Biden has dementia or is incompetent and my son’s Tic Tok is not even political- it’s mostly music.
The Biden Administration needs to hire a person or persons who understands that 18-20 year old group and who sees what they see. I think they will be shocked.
different-church-lady
@Kay:
Boy, Greg Price can pack a lot of lying into a single sentence.
Baud
@Eolirin:
Biden has me on speed dial.
MisterDancer
@oatler: That’s because I certainly miswrote that. :)
Eolirin
@schrodingers_cat: Do you think that talking about how there are toxic people on Twitter doing things that hurts the democrats chances over here actually affects anything those people are doing over on Twitter?
It’s not like we haven’t had these exact same conversations over and over again. Relitigation is exactly the right word in the context of the constant back and forth over this. Everyone’s positions are relatively well understood by everyone in the conversation at this point.
I don’t mind continuing to engage in that discussion personally, especially because I think there’s nuances and assumptions about things that deserve further examination, but it taking up as much space as it does, making it harder for other conversations to happen, is problematic.
Kay
@different-church-lady:
I’ve been following them for a while. They’re like the “upper crust” of the anti-abortion movement. The rabble are all just regular wingnuts though so for example the first comment under that Tweet is “I’m pro life and I dont support any of those things”.
It’s true for criminal punishment of women who get abortions, too. The fancy Notre Dame lawyers make soothing noises about how they’re all “love the sinner” while the actual anti-abortion voter wants women punished, and punished harshly. The polling from anti-abortion VOTERS is 70% “lock them up”.
The professional spokespeople are VERY slick, very polished, but anti-choice voters? Not so slick. They’re all “string the sluts up”. It’s almost amusing. I suspect the “real” anti-choice movement will prevail over the professional, expensively educated salespeople and we’ll get real nasty overt women hating right out in the open.
Go read the comments anywhere from anti-choice voters who are crowing over their win. It’s raw misogony – they want the witches burned.
Eolirin
@MisterDancer: Twitter skews sub 40 very heavily last I looked at the stats. Since the voting demographics are usually broken down something like 18-30, I figure that counts.
But the general trend is the youngest users are always on a new platform.
Baud
@Kay:
The elites sound like they’re modernizing the compassionate conservative trope.
Kay
@different-church-lady:
These are people who will use state power to force a 13 year old rape victim to carry the child of her rapist. It’s not complicated for me. That’s a godammned monster and they can get all the “media training” they want and pile up all the prestigious degrees they want and quote all the bible they want- the BLOOD and BONE of it is that they will gleefully FORCE that girl to do that. Monsters.
Baud
@Eolirin:
Tumblr isn’t new, right?
Eolirin
@Baud: Wait, Tumblr isn’t completely dead? :p
Baud
@Eolirin:
I don’t know. Someone upthread said the kids were on Tumblr now.
Kay
@different-church-lady:
Because the difference between them and me (and it’s the whole thing) is I am not FORCING anyone to get an abortion. That 13 year old rape victim wants to carry that child? Fine by me. They can tax me to support her- I hope she makes it and grows up and gets some help with the baby and graduates high school and I will happily pay taxes to help with that.
MY position is “her choice”. THEIR position is “force her and use state power to do it”.
Betty Cracker
@Eolirin: It’s almost like they want to be on a platform their moms don’t use.
Soprano2
@Sister Golden Bear: My mother had a cousin everyone “knew” was gay, but it was publicly hidden. That’s what she wanted to bring back. I’m sure she didn’t want her cousin to be dead, although I understand the argument and agree that a lot of conservatives want that.
Geminid
@Baud: Please ask Joe to remind Ron Klain to call me. Ron may have lost my number, but Honus got it through public records.
MisterDancer
That’s me! Yes, there was a small-yet-vital influx back to Tumblr, esp. when the Musk situation w/Twitter got announced.
I know I still see on my Tumblr Dashboard a regular run of “wait, there are ‘old’ people on Tumblr?” posts, to this day.
Eolirin
@Baud: Tumblr may skew young still, but once they got bought out and then banned porn in a real dumb way usage fell off a cliff.
Maybe there’s been a bit of a resurgence of usage.
But it’s a general trend not a fundamental truth. Established platforms will tend to start to skew older and newer platforms will grow with younger populations. There will be exceptions.
Soprano2
@scav: They used to dominate popular culture, and now they don’t and it makes them angry. My old boss told me once it upset him how many gay people you see on TV, and that was over 10 years ago. Lots of them really think being gay is an abomination against God, so they don’t want any part of society to embrace it.
Baud
@Soprano2:
Being conservative is an abomination against Baud!
Baud
@Eolirin:
Maybe the new Balloon Juice will attract a younger cohort.
Matt McIrvin
@Eolirin: Since constitutional amendments are largely a symbolic/aspirational tactic anyway, actually aimed at affecting the minds of the electorate, making them simple, broad and inspiring is probably more important than crafting them to cover all corner cases. In a better world in which such things could be ratified, we would likely have a better judiciary that would not interpret them in a malicious manner.
Brachiator
@Kay:
I am never sure how much stuff on social media represents real conversation and how much is deliberate misinformation and how much is noise meant to take up space.
And yeah, a lot of music. I don’t know how politically engaged some young people are. Some don’t care, but may look at stuff that flows by.
But I have seen some coordinated right wing campaigns on YouTube. There are channels where people, mostly black people, react to music, mostly white rock from the 70s and 80s. But then suddenly, most of these people were reacting to clips from Jordan Peterson, Prager University and other right wing sources. I don’t know how successful any of this stuff is, but it takes up space.
Yep. Totally agree. I don’t necessarily agree with his positions, but Robert Reich has a fun and well produced site on YouTube.
But this is one of those areas where I cannot say what the Democrats should definitely do. They may need more social media engagement, but they don’t need to waste time and resources chasing Ghosts.
Matt McIrvin
@O. Felix Culpa:
The religious-conservative view of mores and laws is that they need to be punitively constructed such that biology forces people to behave in accordance with God’s plan for them against their sinful nature.
I suppose liberals have a similar view of the tax code. But it tends to punch up, not down.
Eolirin
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah sure. I’m just saying you can’t defend a democracy against fascism if the electorate wants fascism, or is apathetic toward the people who do.
Our core problems are fundamentally electorate problems. Breaking things is easy. Law isn’t sufficient protection against fascism. Civic engagement is a requirement.
Kay
@Baud:
I find them more unbearable than the rank and file wingnut. The sickly sweet mommy and baby meeping. I have a gut reaction to these sorts of religious people and have had it since I was six years old – it is “I don’t want your help, please leave me alone”.
I know exactly how this is going to play out too -they are going to launder public funding thru various private wingnut and hard right ideological entities and orgs and that’s who will be running all the homes for unwed mothers and religious/political indoctrination “services” these pregnant women will be getting.
It’ll be a publicly funded, full employment program for fundamentalist religious along with a heaping helping of Right wing political dogma. You watch. I would bet my house on it.
You want that pack of diapers or voucher for child care? The price is you become a Christian Republican.
Fuck them. I’d dig a fucking ditch 12 hours a day before I’d take a penny from any of them. It ALWAYS comes with strings.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: Talking to relatively normie liberals makes me think that the majority of the radical discontents-of-democracy talk on the left doesn’t reach them at all (and they’re deeply shocked and disturbed and tell me to delete my Twitter when I bring it up)–it’s a relatively esoteric intra-left thing. Most people have never encountered tankies or violent left radicals (though the latter are a boogeyman on the right, certainly). The TikTok attacks on Biden are probably more damaging.
Baud
@Kay:
Exactly right.
Kay
@Brachiator:
I don’t know how to do it either but surely the Democratic Party can rustle up some 23 year old who does, and hire her.
O. Felix Culpa
@schrodingers_cat:
That is an important distinction. My younger son told me in 2016 that he would “vote his demographic” in the primaries and for HRC in the general. That was a fine approach, in my view.
Matt McIrvin
@Eolirin: The frustrating thing is that the electorate doesn’t want fascism, in the majority, it’s just that enough do and they are abetted just enough by inequities in the system that they can game it.
Soprano2
@Kay: Also “no state resources can be used to help the slut after the baby is born because she’s being punished for her slutty ways.”
Matt McIrvin
@O. Felix Culpa: He understands strategy. Based on anecdotal experience I think a fair number of 2016 Bernie supporters actually do.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Most do. As I mentioned the other day, the problem is that the majority of them can’t stand up to the dead enders. And someone has to. You can’t let attacks go unanswered, whether on TikTok or Twitter.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah, the twitter-war attacks on the Democratic Party can be maddening but they probably don’t have much effect. And the pushback from the more committed Democrats is fierce!
Kay
@Baud:
The family leave will be a deduction from future Social Security benefits. “Ivanka Trump’s plan” – the plan Goldman Sachs wrote and she waved around for 20 minutes.
Baud
@Kay:
I’m sure there will be a robust child-selling marketplace too.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I think Justice Barrett has made it clear none of these women are keeping the children anyway-she wants them up for adoption.
Just the LEVEL of personal intrusion into women’s lives this is going to require. It’s breathtaking. They will be tracking every single pregnant woman in the country. It impacts every single one. There will be states where one cannot receive modern “best practices” care for a miscarriage. That will just not be available to women in those states. Their medical care will be dicated by religious fundamentalist lawyers.
Substandard care. BAD medical care. If you’re in Texas and you’re pregnant get thee to Colorado is my advice. If you’re in Ohio head to Michigan. Don’t stay in the substandard care state.
Sasha
Whoever drew that last one knows about a narcissist’s “flying monkeys”.
Citizen Alan
@Tony Jay: My head canon is that everything in the New Testament attributed it to Paul was actually propaganda nserted at the direction of the Roman Empire in order to make christians more obedient to authority.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Interesting that you can trace that rightward drift/reverse evolution through the generations of political dynasties:
Prescott >> Poppy >> Shrub’n’Jeb >> P
George >> Willard >> Ronna
I think the more recent Kochs are said to be more right-wing than even their father, who leaned a little more libertarian, and Papa Mercer just wants his money, but Rebekah is an Old Testament Bible thumper.
ETA: Oops, wrong thread
Soprano2
@Kay: I watched a documentary about these people that was creepy as hell. They have a “fetus fetish”, but once the baby is a few months old you’re on your own, you slut. “Let that be a lesson to you not to have sex again until you’re properly married”, they say. They think shotgun weddings are a good thing.
Eolirin
@Matt McIrvin: Apathy is a big problem.
Soprano2
@Kay: I think Barrett will be disappointed. I can see them proposing their “pregnancy camps” for all 50 states. I watched a TV show set at at the beginning of the 1900’s. There was a “hospital” where the mistresses of wealthy men went to have their babies. Most of them were told the baby died, but they were actually adopted out. Wonder if right-wingers would want something like that?
Tony Jay
@Citizen Alan:
It wouldn’t surprise me, but in my head canon there really was a Paul who was Saul and his ultimate loyalty was to the guy that poor old Jeshua bar Joseph was warning people against.
rikyrah
@Suzanne:
No lie told.
rikyrah
@schrodingers_cat:
tell it.
TELL IT.
Kristine
@Lapassionara:
My mom worked in Catholic hospitals in the 50s and 60s, and told me the unwritten rule was that if they had to choose between saving the mother or the baby, to save the baby.
So, that comment about baptism etc fits.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist:
As cited by Ronald Reagan, former SAG president and union-buster extraordinaire, as a knock on the Communist Polish government.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: I think most people who go into politics as mainstream Democratic Party politicians are pragmatists who want to get stuff done, and see proposing things that can never pass as wasted effort, or as actively damaging because you get loser stink. In other words, it’s a cost of being the reality-based team who care about governing.
But the thing about quixotic doomed proposals is that they are almost free. Frickin’ spam them and make it clear why they’re getting no traction. Again, conservatives learned this decades ago. I don’t want to emulate them in every detail but this one is not harmful in itself.
Matt McIrvin
…The tactic of proposing doomed laws and amendments may also be tainted by association with the kind of third-party activist who actually prefers to lose elections because it keeps your hands clean. That’s not the attitude I’m advocating.
thisismyonlinenym
@Lapassionara:
“Domestic supply of infants”. This Slate article points out the links with slavery, forced birth and the 14th amendment.
They want a supply of white babies. So they can be raised as evangelical “christians”. This is their solution to their terror of Replacement Theory.
thisismyonlinenym
@OzarkHillbilly: No gaffe. From further down in the same guardian article:
Omnes Omnibus
@Eolirin: JFC, you say you want to find a way to end the 2016 debates and threaded comments is your solution? You are just changing the fight to a different subject and one on which Cole is not going to budge (and rightly so).
different-church-lady
@Eolirin:
No, but it might help keep some of those toxic ideas from getting a hold here.
different-church-lady
@Kay:
Nice of his followers to point out he’s lying so quickly and bluntly.
Matt McIrvin
I am fond of threaded comments myself, but the commentariat here will never accept them and this is the end of the matter.
thisismyonlinenym
@Suzanne: Someone had an observation (Kay?) in some other threads how this is more than just their shitty bigoted laws, it’s the whole christian conservative culture they want to impose.
They wanted their shitty women-are-2nd-class-citizens culture in all areas of life now, work, home, education.
They lost the culture war by popular opinion. In a democracy that’s a big L.
Now they are going to force their shitty culture onto everyone by law. That is their real goal. Subjugation by white cis gendered patriarchy. That’s their culture. That’s their goal.