Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

So many bastards, so little time.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

Find someone who loves you the way trump and maga love traitors.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

Books are my comfort food!

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Reality always gets a vote in the end.

Fucking consultants! (of the political variety)

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

This blog will pay for itself.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Let’s Do This

Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Let’s Do This

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  2. 2.

    Baud

    If abortion is a fringe issue, I’d like to know that.  So it’s good for the Dems to campaign on it rather than ignore it.

  3. 3.

    Kropacetic

    If it’s the economy and inflation people are worried about, I’m glad we have the media to look at the issue and provide some insight into its causes and look at it from a global perspective and…

    Prices are up. How this affects Biden and the Democrats

     

    Republicans slam Democrats for high prices

    Goddamnit.

  4. 4.

    brantl

    I guess that Trump conceding Afghanistan in a move that would’ve embarassed Chamberlain, emboldening all of our enemies, doesn’t get any airplay, does it?

  6. 6.

    oldster

    On the one side, we have the party that will protect the rights of women, protect social security, protect fair elections, and support Ukraine against russian aggression.

    On the other side, we have the party that will take away women’s rights, destroy social security, ignore the will of voters, and do whatever putin pays them to do, abandoning the Ukrainian people to torture and slavery.

    It’s a clear choice.

    We have to make it clear to the rest of our country.

  8. 8.

    different-church-lady

    @oldster: ​  I don’t think a lack of clarity is the problem. It’s more the extremely popular trend to deliberately be a shitty person that’s at issue.​

  11. 11.

    Princess

    Abortion is an economic issue for a woman who wants to have one and can’t. And for her family. Most women who have abortions already have children.

  13. 13.

    Betty Cracker

    reporter: can you say how many votes will be enough to codify Roe into law?

    @PressSec
    : no, i can’t.

    Josh Marshall says the Dem’s Roe pitch would be much stronger if we did know exactly how many senate seats have to flip to break the filibuster and codify Roe. We know some sitting Dem senators are squishy on the issue, so we might need more than the two who would make filibuster absolutists Manchin and Sinema irrelevant. I’m not sure if he’s right or not.

  14. 14.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    “Fringe”? That makes my blood boil. And it’s not like I’m likely to need an abortion myself at my age. But the Dobbs decision allows politicians to treat women’s bodies like Putin treats Ukraine. “Mine, mine, mine” to quote Trump (probably). It signals the kind of country the Evangelicals and Maga Republicans want. They are,  indeed, the boss of you.

  15. 15.

    Nora

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: I’m with you, also beyond the age where I’d need an abortion.  But “fringe”?? When millions of women were just told their bodies are not their own, that they can be forced to carry pregnancies to term that they don’t want (and don’t forget people like Alito and Thomas will not be satisfied with Roe; they’re gunning for Griswold as well)?  That’s “fringe” as compared to the price of gas which, let’s remember, is NOT determined by the president or any political party and which is a fact all over the WORLD?  “Fringe”?? I’ll give THEM fringe!

  17. 17.

    TS

    @Princess:

    Most women who have abortions already have children.

    Which should be 100% irrelevant to the discussion.

    I find the morality police in Iran & people who want to force their will on women  in regard to reproductive issues are extremely similar.

    It is all a means for men to have political, economic, & domestic power over women.

  19. 19.

    Kropacetic

    There needs to be more discussion of the downstream Healthcare consequences. I knew some things that could go wrong but I never had a good grasp of the scope.

    People are being forced to put off cancer treatments and other life saving interventions to avoid risking harm to fetuses.

    Is the goal to have more children born to motherless families?

  20. 20.

    p.a.

    I know I’m not the only person who likes to play election advisor: I’ve seen lots of “we’ll protect your right to abortion” ads but I think highlighting news of what’s happening to women now in some states as we speak would be really effective to bring the point home .  I guess privacy rights come into it, but I think the immediacy of these stories can be very effective.

  21. 21.

    Baud

    Y’all treating women’s bodies like they’re something sacrosanct like guns.

    No wonder people think Dems are out of touch.

  22. 22.

    Kropacetic

    The only right you have over your body according to Republicans is to incubate outside organisms for release into the world.

    Republican COVID policy was just them trying to be more inclusive of men.

  24. 24.

    WereBear

    As we’ve seen, it’s not only women of reproductive age who suffer under such medical restriction. Radiologists take precautions “from 10 to 60” and now they are using such excuses to forbid lifesaving drugs to women and children.

  25. 25.

    Geminid

    I found this on @cherylrofer’s timeline:

       This is your daily reminder that Democrats are overperforming their in-party expectations for the midterms and that is due to negative partisanship over Roe. Roe messaging has made us more, not less, competitive.

    @Rachel Bitecofer October 18.

    Bitecofer made a name as a political scientist with her 2018 midterm model forecasting a 42-seat Democratic pickup in the House (they got 40). Now she has turned to political engineering, hiring out as a “Political branding strategist, Adslinger and polling/targeting expert.”

    Arizonans might see evidence of her work in campaign messaging for Adrian Fontes, Democratic candidate for Secretary of State. His campaign consultants, Matters of State Strategies, hired Bitecofer this summer.

    Bitecofer still maintains a lively and informative Twitter account.

  27. 27.

    Professor Bigfoot

    Link

    Dammit, my tech skills have all fled this morning— but apropros to the discussion, watch this on Eric Swalwell’s timeline.

  30. 30.

    WereBear

    @Geminid: She didn’t get tenure/high focus jobs because she’s a woman who is right, and they like one but not the other… preferably both, it seems.

    But it’s her outsider perspective which makes her more accurate than compromised corporate media. I’m glad she’s getting work in a field where results count.

  31. 31.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @p.a.: I agree. See Ireland:

    Halappanavar, 31, was admitted to a hospital in Galway while having a miscarriage. She repeatedly asked staff to terminate her pregnancy but they refused, telling her that Ireland was “a Catholic country.” She died at the hospital, from severe sepsis, five days after she had started miscarrying. The case angered many who had previously been apathetic about abortion law and reinvigorated the abortion-rights movement in Ireland.

  33. 33.

    phdesmond

    @NotMax:

    Today’s poem is called “International Gin and Tonic Day.”  it’s dedicated to Balloon-Juice’s own commenter G&T.

     

    International Gin and Tonic Day

    gin — what else?
    and tonic. — i’ll drink to that.
    plan to celebrate — how?
    call — and responsibly!

    October 19, 2022

  42. 42.

    BlueGuitarist

    Thanks everybody for the contributions, supportive comments and skeptical queries on yesterday’s balloon-juice.com/2022/10/18/downballot-races-and-reverse-coattails/

    love all y’all

    Passing on message from a couple of the state senate candidates who say

    Thanks! and Thanks! and

    “Late money lets us take advantage of developments in the last few weeks of the race  — everything from printing another round of targeted postcards to deploying a highly-targeted digital campaign debunking a competitor’s smears — when otherwise we wouldn’t have the money to make it happen.”

    cheers

  45. 45.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Gin & Tonic: When I first read phdesmond’s comment, I misread “commenter” as “tormenter.” (My excuse is that my eyes still haven’t settled down since my cataract surgery.) But you know, commenter/tormenter, potato/potahto.

  46. 46.

    Geminid

    @WereBear: Rachel Bitecofer hit a career crossroads when Christopher Newport University declined to give her a tenure track position in the Spring of 2020. She struck out on her own, not an easy decision for a single mother.

    It’s turned out well for her. She moved back west to Eugene, Oregon, she has plenty of work, and she enjoys it. And Bitecofer gets to watch her beloved Ducks play PAC-10 football!

  50. 50.

    BlueGuitarist

    @NotMax:

    The statehood bill that passed the House doesn’t include part of any other state.

    When Tom Cotton objected to DC statehood saying that it should be part of Maryland, some folks pointed out that Arkansas was a part of France more recently than DC was a part of Maryland

  52. 52.

    Geminid

    @WereBear: I used look down on the social sciences, but that was an ignorant and prejudiced take. A solid base of social science knowledge is what gives value to Bitecofer’s work. I see this also in the writings of Magdi Semrau, aka Mangy Jay.

  53. 53.

    lowtechcyclist

    @BlueGuitarist:

    though DC should be a state in any case.

    Hell, if the Dems had the balls to do it, they should make it several states.  Kinda like the GOP did with the northern Plains and mountain West states a century and a half ago.  Nobody living there? So what? They decided two Republican Dakotas were better than one, and so on.

    So we should make each quadrant of DC a state, get eight new Dem Senators and four new Dem House members.  Up yours, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and North and South Dakota!

  55. 55.

    NotMax

    @BlueGuitarist

    As pointed out in the linked video, the 23rd amendment would remain in effect for a shrunken non-state federal enclave and also have to be repealed, which is far from a slam dunk.

  56. 56.

    Another Scott

    @BlueGuitarist: That’s a great comeback.

    Long ago I thought that DC was “just” a city and should “obviously” go back to Maryland.  But it isn’t.  It’s its own place with its own history and it’s long past time that it was recognized as a state.  Plus, retrocession would upend Maryland politics for no good reason.

    DC and PR should be states.  The federal government has shown that it cannot reasonably run their local affairs, and they’ve been political punching bags for most of their history.  Equal justice under law makes the answer clear.

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  57. 57.

    BlueGuitarist

    @Kropacetic:

    thanks for your contribution!
    I had the same problem with some contributions not going thru; i asked act blue for help.

    Clicked on the help and then the  contact us and filled in the send us an email form. Hope it is resolved soon.

  58. 58.

    Kropacetic

    @BlueGuitarist: I’ll reconcile the group against my bank statement when I have actual time later. Thanks for organizing this. Should be a model going forward.

  60. 60.

    BlueGuitarist

    @lowtechcyclist:

    in the 1880 census, the most recent one when a lot of those states were added, DC had a larger population than 4 of those states combined, ND+MT+WY+ID

  62. 62.

    Geminid

    @Geminid: Besides her grounding in social science method, Magdi Semrau also has experience teaching elementary school. The two strains came together when she critiqued a Jerkobin article about polling and working class political strategy.

    Semrau found their methodology deficient:

        I feel like I just found a child eating crayons.

  64. 64.

    jonas

    @brantl: ​
      Yep. Down the memory hole. IIRC, didn’t Trump even want to invite the Taliban leadership to Camp David to ink the deal? On September 11?

  65. 65.

    BlueGuitarist

    @NotMax:

    a sensible alternative would be to replace the Electoral College with popular vote!

    but as lowtechcyclist would say, democrats are not playing hard ball on this, they are offering to give up 3 extra electoral votes.

    We’re living with the consequences of the Republicans packing the senate in the 1880s on party line votes, and thereby rigging the senate and electoral college.

    In 1841, William Henry Harrison gave the longest inaugural address in history, in the rain, and died of pneumonia a month later. That story is better known than that he said Washington DC’s residents were unfairly denied their constitutional rights.

    would be good if it took less than 200 years to remedy that.

  67. 67.

    BlueGuitarist

    @WereBear:

    @Geminid:
    Good that Rachel Bitecofer is successful outside academia, but shamefully another awful case of sexism in higher education.

    there was a story in politico, aka tiger beat on the Potomac, where she says she heard Rachel Maddow on Air America mentioning a ph.d. In political science, and thought “wait, you can study politics?”

  68. 68.

    Leto

    Laura Bassett@LEBassett

    A Missouri woman whose water broke at 17 weeks, whose fetus was dying inside of her and threatening her life, was denied an abortion. She called a GOP state senator to beg for help getting around the law, and he sent her to an anti-abortion center.

    12:18 PM · Oct 18, 2022

    Missouri Woman Denied Emergency Abortion Called a State Senator for Help. He Sent Her to an Anti-Abortion Clinic.
    Mylissa Farmer’s water broke 17 weeks into her pregnancy and the fetus was dying inside her, but she couldn’t legally get an abortion in the state.

  69. 69.

    BlueGuitarist

    @NotMax:

    question for you about Hawaii, possibly foolish, but thinking possible new states – what do you think of

    Oahu being admitted as a new state in addition to Hawaii.
    (I realize that Oahu has more than half the population.)

    would appreciate your opinion.

  70. 70.

    Ohio Mom

    @Starfish: That link was weird, there were two audio tracks running at the same time, Val Demmings and a singer. As a result, couldn’t make out what she was saying.

    But I used it to get to Demming’s twitter and watched several clips. Wow! She is a public speaker on another level. Can we have her give debating lessons to other Democrats?

  71. 71.

    NotMax

    @BlueGuitarist

    Don’t think much of it. The remaining islands’ ability to stand on their own economically is questionable at best, all the more so now that intensive agriculture (read: sugar) is a thing of the past.

    Plus the process for splitting an extant state into multiple states is , to put it charitably, cumbersome.

    A side note: don’t know if you’re aware of it but in Hawaii there is virtually no government in place below the county level.

  72. 72.

    lowtechcyclist

    @BlueGuitarist:

    a sensible alternative would be to replace the Electoral College with popular vote!

    IMHO, it would take a Constitutional amendment.

    Yes, I know about the NPVIC, but the problem is, it isn’t binding, even after we get 270 EVs’ worth of states in the compact.

    If we had yet another election where the popular and electoral vote results differed (which is the only situation where the compact would matter), there would be one or more states capable of swinging the election back to the EC winner by dropping out of or simply disregarding the compact.  And there’d be nothing to stop them from doing so.

    I think there are a number of issues that Dems should introduce as Constitutional amendments, just to make the point of who’s on what side.  The ERA (ideally expanded to include sexual orientation and gender identification), national popular vote, voting as an explicit affirmative right for all citizens 18+, the right of workers to organize for purposes of collective bargaining, a ‘corporations are not people, money is not speech’ amendment, and a few others I can’t think of right now.  (Yeah, the Constitution is a good document, but it needs some serious work.)

    None of these have a snowball’s chance anytime soon of getting through Congress, let alone the legislatures of 38 states, but it’s worth repeatedly elevating them as issues, to signal that we believe this is how our nation should work, and the other party is very much against that.

  73. 73.

    BlueGuitarist

    @Geminid:

    re Roe
    The fundraising reports through June 30 had little post Dobbs fundraising, so I had been hoping to see a big boost for some pro choice candidates in flippable districts in the 3rd quarter numbers.

    Disappointed that there wasn’t way more support for combat veteran Ashley Ehasz in PA-01 against a pro-forced pregnancy R incumbent in a district Biden carried by 5,

    and also WI-01, Paul Ryan’s old seat, redistricted from Biden -9 to Biden -2, where your standard R is challenged by a pro choice candidate named Ann Roe

    Ehasz is doing a good job linking her combat experience to fighting for freedom, right to choose, at home, like Pat Ryan did in the NY special. Choice is on the ballot,

    but also in WI-01, Roe is on the ballot.

  74. 74.

    Another Scott

    Meanwhile, … Dean Baker at CEPR:

    Last week I made fun of the Washington Post for writing a piece telling readers about the bad news that retailers are finding themselves with excessive inventories and may have to mark down prices to sell them off. The story is that with supply chain problems from the pandemic largely over, stores have been able to restock their inventories, but now see demand trailing off.

    The incredible part of the story is that the piece largely ignored the obvious implication, that consumers are likely to see price reductions in a wide range of goods in the near future. Since INFLATION! has been front and center in economic reporting for the last year and half, the likelihood that people will soon be able to get large discounts on everything from furniture and appliances, to clothes and kitchen items, should be good news. But this likely outcome was completely downplayed to the point of being almost ignored.

    The New York Times was apparently determined not to be outdone. It wrote a nearly identical piece telling us about the tough holiday season facing retailers, who may have to accept lower profit margins.

    “But discounts eat into retailers’ profit margins, and they have been able to employ that strategy only sparingly in recent years. During last year’s holiday season, in particular, retailers recorded bigger margins thanks to supply chain logjams. Inventory was low, and shoppers were clamoring to get their hands on products. The result: fewer discounts.

    “’A lot of that is going to reverse, if not more than reverse, across department stores and specialty apparel,’ said David Silverman, a senior director at Fitch Ratings. ‘Consumers are less compelled to buy, and they’re going to need the call to action.’”

    Like the Washington Post article, the piece pretty much ignored the fact that large markdowns will be good news for people troubled by inflation. But, the New York Times one-upped the Post on this one.

    It ran its troubled retailers piece on its home page just below a piece headlined, “alarmed by rapid price increases, Fed looks at raising rate again.” While making the case for more aggressive rate hikes from the Fed, the piece told readers:

    “And there is little evidence, so far, that the Fed’s policy is working to tamp down price increases.”

    It seems like the NYT is very committed to having a diversity of viewpoints in its new[s] section. We can either see a piece telling us that inflation is unrelenting or alternatively read a piece just below it telling us that we can expect sharp price declines in a wide range of goods.

    Either way, it’s bad news for Biden.

    Yup. (groucho-roll-eyes.gif)

    Lots of prices are falling from their peaks. Gasoline, framing lumber, wholesale used cars, etc. The trends are going in the right direction. I think the people arguing that the inflation spike was transitory will be proven correct – the issue is the timeline.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  76. 76.

    jonas

    @WereBear: ​
      I wouldn’t automatically assume bias. IIRC, she wasn’t denied tenure; she was an adjunct and the university wouldn’t/couldn’t convert it to a tenure-track position, so she left. Happens quite a lot, unfortunately. If a department has the budget and an available line open and higher-ups are amenable, they can sometimes pull of the adjunct-to-tt flip for an exceptional candidate, but it’s rare. Lots of competing interests are vying for tt resources at any one time, so it could just be another department had a more pressing need and the administration awarded them the line instead of poli-sci.

  77. 77.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Leto:

     and he sent her to an anti-abortion center.

    Just saying, “no, I’m not going to help you,” wasn’t enough for that asshole. He had to add the shit icing to the cake.

    The cruelty really IS the point with those people.

  78. 78.

    Kay

    @Leto:

    Jezebal story raises a really important point women may not be aware of – the fake clinics that religious fundamentalists run aren’t subject to any of the laws on privacy and confidentiality. The fake clinics can be surveillance sites that track pregnant women and report them to fundamentalist lawmakers, prosecutors or police. Frankly, you are nuts if you walk into one of those places and give them your name. They can use any information you give them any way they want.

    Women have to be extra careful now- they need to verify that people posing as “providers” of health care are actually licensed and regulated and all women should avoid revealing specifics on a pregnancy – the person you’re talking to could be an anti-abortion nut who considers themselves Morality Police.  Don’t say anything to anyone outside a trusted circle, is my advice.

  81. 81.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Another Scott: Gasoline prices were falling for months, but then the West Coast US just saw another HUGE price surge… which has already peaked, and prices seem to be dropping again. Not sure what was going on there, especially since prices hardly budged here in the East. But it did seem to generate another round of inflation/shortage/Biden-failing scare stories.

  82. 82.

    MisterDancer

    @BlueGuitarist: Two things:

    democrats are not playing hard ball on this, they are offering to give up 3 extra electoral votes.

    So — what’s this “hardball” actually look like, in real political terms? What do you de-prioritize to get this vote in? How do we sway Manchin/Sinema to actually break filibuster to make it happen?

    I mean, the good thing about the Roe approach is that all the country gives a damn about it, and thus are more likely to vote Democrat. Few outside DC gives much of a damn about making DC a State.

    Also: I know you’re asking NotMax, but I feel compelled to interject around this “let’s talk about making Hawai’i two states” thought experiment:

    We need to consider that approaching spaces full of Black and Brown people — like DC, like Puerto Rico, like Hawai’i (note on spelling) — as pawns in a larger political game, is not a great look. Just as it’s true that they are in the situation they are because those populations tend to Vote Blue, it’s also true that those populations have their own thoughts and ideas about America, including contradictory ones.

    And those thoughts and opinions are often lost to the greater American community, much less centered in these kinds of debates. I spend some time, for example, following movements in hawai’i that are, frankly, Done with America (examples: the Navy fuel jet leak incident, or the protests over using Mauna Kea for more telescopes), and although I may not agree, I think their voices — and very real concerns — need to be be factored in.

    Yes, this is just online chatter. Yet I think thinking broadly matters too; it very well may be that these areas do not, in fact, want to be “more American” than they already are, or have their Americanness “split up”. And that would make pushing for these States, against the will of the people there (esp. the Black/Brown folx), more than a bit callous.

    When we don’t actually pay attention to those voices, we risk simplifying them and their needs down to sources for the kinds of votes we want. That is analogous to how the GOP treats a lot of it’s voter community, and I would not wish — even as a thought experiment — to see us go too far down that road.

  83. 83.

    jonas

    @Matt McIrvin: Every year or so in CA, right on schedule, the big oil refineries in Vallejo and Torrance have “mechanical issues” or a “switchover to different formulation” that disrupts production and sends gas prices soaring. It’s really unfortunate, doggonnit, and they just can’t seem to predict these issues or work out the kinks. For some reason.

  84. 84.

    Kay

    I don’t think the lack of coverage or media interest in overturning Roe is ideological. I just think top level reporters and tv news personalities are extremely conventional, brittle people who follow the leader.

    They announced early on that abortion and womens agency doesn’t matter and they’ll never veer from that group decision.

    I knew it with how they allocated funds. They don’t put any money into covering banning abortion. All of the actual reporting comes from local news sources or explicitly feminist or liberal sites. If they thought it was important they would pay for it. The NYTimes has probably spent more for polling on abortion than on covering the consequences of banning abortion. They simply do not consider this important.

  85. 85.

    BlueGuitarist

    @lowtechcyclist:

    you’re right that it would take a constitutional amendment, and that Republican state legislatures will block it.

    the states that signed onto the Popular Vote Compact should repeal it because republicans won’t even agree that Democrats who win a state should get its Electoral Votes. There’s the old standard faithless elector problem, that lectors can vote for whom they choose regardless of the state vote, and there’s the new faithless elector problem of electors for the candidate who lost dishonestly trying to substitute their votes for the legitimate ones.

    we need to win state legislatures!
    hoping we can raise some money to help do that in PA and AZ.

  86. 86.

    Eyeroller

    @jonas: ​
     This will sound elitist, but Christopher Newport University is a second-tier university in Virginia with a small student body, so getting a new tenure-stream line would likely be problematic. But even at higher-tier universities, it’s very rare for an adjunct to be converted to tenure-stream. If a new line were to be created the incumbent adjunct would have to apply for it and wouldn’t be guaranteed to get it.

  87. 87.

    Another Scott

    @Eyeroller: Yup.

    DailyPress.com has a contemporary story with more details.

    Bitecofer did well in her House prediction, but she’s also been wrong about some things (like arguing [ in 2020 ] that former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden is a liability for Democrats. And she’s made silly mistakes on Twitter (e.g. talking about someone running for VA governor who had dropped out months before, IIRC.).

    She’s got lots of talent, but gets out over her skis a bit at times. She’s young.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  88. 88.

    Geminid

    @jonas: It’s also possible that Christopher Newport was put off by Bitecofer’s popular writings and public appearances, and were wary of her candor. They probably preferred a more ivory tower type.

    I think it worked out for the best for Bitecofer. She likes political engineering, and her talents seem to be in demand. And while Tidewater Virginia is not that bad a place, I bet Bitecofer is a lot happier living in Eugene, Oregon. I would be.

  89. 89.

    Matt McIrvin

    @MisterDancer:

    We need to consider that approaching spaces full of Black and Brown people — like DC, like Puerto Rico, like Hawai’i (note on spelling) — as pawns in a larger political game, is not a great look. Just as it’s true that they are in the situation they are because those populations tend to Vote Blue, it’s also true that those populations have their own thoughts and ideas about America, including contradictory ones.

    Yeah, the conversation on Puerto Rico statehood always goes there too. Mainland non-Puerto-Rican liberals always seem to imagine they can force these people in somehow as a guaranteed Democratic vote. But they’re not our pawns and they wouldn’t react well to that.

    Manipulating statehood is a tricky game in general. It occurred to me a while ago that any party with control of the White House and Congress (that can actually pass legislation), plus the cooperation of just one ideologically sympathetic state, could in theory legally take dictatorial control of the United States by just creating, say, 100 new states out of that state, each one the size of a small lot and populated with a few hand-picked loyalists, maybe living in a trailer (you’d need at least three, to be a Representative and two Senators–they could double up as the state government). Then they could slam through any arbitrary Constitutional amendments they wanted, and the temporary states could even be dissolved when they were done with that and the government had been remodeled to their liking.

    But nobody who didn’t think they were in on the game would regard that as legitimate, and does technical legality matter when you lose all perceived legitimacy? Maybe not if you’re a Republican, but it does if you’re a Democrat.

  90. 90.

    NotMax

    @Another Scott

    Yuppers. Have seen her virtually taken to the woodshed here enough times that I tend to look askance at her output. Which is different than discounting it entirely.

  91. 91.

    Leto

    @Kay: I saw that too, that they’re not bound to HIPAA rules. You’re correct ofc, too many people want to be team Morality Police so women/couples will have to be supremely cautious on who they trust. Another way conservatives are breaking America: continuing to make us fearful of one another.

  92. 92.

    Steeplejack

    Seems appropriate to note that “senior political correspondent” Hanna Trudo of The Hill, age 33, is “co-creating my dream life with God!” Her beat, “focused on progressive politics,”covering Dems/the left—White House, Congress & campaigns.” A lot of her stuff has a “Dems in disarray” tang to it. And “abortion as a closing pitch” is quite the take.

  93. 93.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @Geminid: My Dad was an engineer (metallurgist) so naturally I grew up hearing a lot of social science-bashing propaganda that took me years to unlearn.  That propaganda and framing is totally a Conservative/Libertarian framing specifically designed to undercut efforts towards racial, gender, class etc., equality.

    Nowadays I pay way more attention to what people in the social sciences say than anyone in the “hard” science fields.  In the last few days I’ve been watching Timothy Snyder’s excellent Yale class series on Ukraine and it is fascinating and enlightening.

  94. 94.

    Ocotillo

    I am on board with adding DC and Puerto Rico as states if they want to be and even the Virgin Islands for that matter but as far as dividing current states that would be a hard pass.

    I think it was on CBS Sunday morning, Ted Koppel did a story on eastern Oregon RWNJ cry babies wanting to leave Oregon and merge with Idaho.  Texas makes noise now and then about breaking up into smaller red states and of course their are the nutters in California who want to split and form their own States.

    Getting a bit off track, I did want Koppel to at least posit the thought that blue votes in Idaho, what if they wanted to splinter into their own state.  The people he interviewed in Oregon came across as somewhat normal (not Skinheads or white supremist like the state they pine to join) but they kept saying they were not being heard by the state government.

    Gee, I feel like that here in beet red Texas.

  95. 95.

    Tony G

    @Baud: The right to an abortion is a fringe issue for many men.  However, women achieved the right to vote more than 100 years ago, to the chagrin of many men.

  97. 97.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Eyeroller: I realize CNU isn’t Enormous State University, but when did nearly 5000 students (per Wikipedia) become a ‘small’ student body?

    I was an instructor there from 1985 to 1988, and judging from the pix, it’s totally different now.  (It really did have a ‘small student body’ then.) After I retire next year, I’ll have to do a day trip down there to see if any of the buildings I remember are still there.

    I lived within walking distance of that state legislative district that came down to the equivalent of a coin toss a few years back.

  98. 98.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Steeplejack: I have to admit, my knee-jerk response to this kind of thing is that she’s right–abortion rights is a fringe issue because most people are evil shits like her.

    But… that’s heavily, heavily conditioned by my growing up in what was then a deep red environment during Reagan times. My default assumption is always that most people default to right-wingnut thinking. Abortion in particular–my God, even mentioning it was fighting words. You had to be really careful what you said with that one.

    I suspect a lot of the people still in charge of the political media grew up with those assumptions as well.

  99. 99.

    Geminid

    @Matt McIrvin: I think it’s no accident that the DC Statehood bill passed by the House months ago has never made it to the Senate floor, and its proponents have not made a stink about that. I think there are Democratic Senators besides Manchin and Sinema who would not vote for the bill.

    Also, I think Senators with tough reelections in purple states, like Kelly, Cortez-Masto, Warnock and Hassan, were glad not to make that vote.

  100. 100.

    NotMax

    @Tony G

    The hard right is practically champing at the bit to getting around to scuttling that. As well as belay direct election of senators.

  101. 101.

    sab

    @Matt McIrvin: I am finding that the apolitical women I know, whose eyes used to glaze over at any mention of politics, now cannot shut up about abortion. They are furious. They know people who have had difficult pregnancies.

  102. 102.

    Kropacetic

    @NotMax: Since a lot of states ban felons from voting, these abortion laws can be used to make sure the wrong sort of woman doesn’t vote if you catch my drift…

  103. 103.

    cain

    @Nora: Yeah it’s only a fringe issue apparently for half this population. There apparently is no education about why this is important until it is personally experienced.

    The economy according to the sausagefest of pollsters and what not that American electorate is worried about – not even democracy because you know a part of that population know that they will never be affected by squishy issues not related to white men.

  106. 106.

    BlueGuitarist

    @MisterDancer:

    Thanks very much!

    Appreciate your comments as always.

    These are 3 very different cases.

    DC is denied deserved and desired statehood My first comment was that even if it didn’t serve Democratic political interests DC should be a state. DC isn’t a state because of racism. As Mondaire Jones said in the House debate, “One of my House Republican colleagues said that D.C. couldn’t be a state because the district doesn’t have a landfill. With all the racist trash my colleagues have brought to the debate, I can see why they’re worried about having a place to put it.”

    Puerto Rico is a very different case, which i didn’t mention because afaik Puerto Ricans haven’t expressed a clear preference for statehood.

    Years ago Hendrik Hertzberg had a thought experiment about how ~12% of the people who are oppressed are protected by the constitution leading to: if the ~12% who are African Americans were treated the same way as the 12% who live in small states, there would be 44 African-American senators.

    The politics of statehood until now institutionalizes disproportionate white power.

    DC statehood is right in itself, and it would have good consequences, but it isn’t enough. I would appreciate suggestions about what else should be done.

    The suggestion about Hawai’i was admittedly uninformed speculation. And I appreciate being educated by NotMax’s and your comments. (spell checker misidentifies which spelling of Hawai’i is correct)

    At the Constitutional Convention James Madison and James Wilson were adamantly against the Awful Compromise that led to each state having 2 senators. Wilson said that would defeat the purpose of the convention: to fix the problems under the articles of confederation, that the small population states were preventing the large states from taking necessary actions, that the structure of the Senate would continue the problem, and would get worse over time, anticipating the Senate as the graveyard of American politics.

    would appreciate suggestions on how to fix the senate.

  111. 111.

    Tony Jay

    @rikyrah:

    Not since this comment on Monday.

    With Kwarteng axed, Prime-Regent Hunt putting a round through the head of every single policy Truss has proposed since winning the leadership race in September, and just now being forced to ‘accept the resignation’ of loony-tunes Home Secretary Suella ‘I’m a whiter shade of brown’ Braverman, it’s clear that the non-Libertarian/British Nationalist wing of the Party is staging an internal coup.

    If I had to lay a bet, it would be on the Libertarian/British nationalist faction underbussing Truss (who is patently useless to them now) in order to force another leadership contest that they feel they stand a good chance of ‘winning’ as long as they get one of their candidates into the run-off vote where the batshit insane membership get to select the worst possible person.

    Basically it’s all just an internal Tory Party civil-war being fought out on the battlefield of Government, and our crappy News Media are enjoying the simplistic storylines and constant cast turnover far too much to point out how destructive and pointless it all is.

    Which is why they worked so hard to get them into office in the fist place. Imagine how boring a competent, progressive, left-wing Labour Government would be by comparison.

  112. 112.

    Matt McIrvin

    @sab: Something definitely has changed.

    I grew up in the post-Roe, mid-conservative-movement environment in which all the angry outrage energy over abortion was on the anti-abortion side, and that included anti-abortion women. But it’s not the same as it was.

  113. 113.

    Another Scott

    @BlueGuitarist: There’s some proposal out there to require every state have at least as many Representatives as Senators.  That would fix the minimum District size at roughly 290,000 (half of Wyoming).

    335M / 0.29M = 1155 Representatives

    That would neuter the power of the Electoral College in having a minority pick the President because of land has more votes than people.

    Getting rid of or reforming the cloture/filibuster rules in the Senate would address the blocking issues there.

    I think that would solve a lot of the problems in the US federal government, but still allow the Senate to continue (and avoid the problems with amending the Constitution to fix the Senate or the EC).

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  114. 114.

    Kay

    @Leto:

    I think it’s genuinely complex for women now, trust, even with a real medical provider. A high risk pregnancy situation was difficult to discuss even in the “before times” because the truth is we ARE weighing risks and benefits – we’re choosing- and the societal expectation for women is they will be put their own lives and well being second to either potential or actual children.

    When I read these local news accounts of the repercussions of banning abortion (always local, as I said- “the bigs” can’t be bothered with ‘ladies issues”) I can HEAR the women apologizing and explaining – “the pregnancy wasn’t viable! My LIFE was in danger!”. They feel they have to do this because the expectation in both the anti abortion “movement” and conventional and traditional thinking on women in the US is they will give up their lives to give birth.

    It’s a huge step backward for women. I can’t think  of an issue where I believe the conventional, traditional wisdom of media and essayists is MORE wrong. Women and girls will pay for this lurch backward in ways we haven’t even discovered yet. They no longer have bodily agency in the United States, so they receive substandard medical care. That’s huge and it’s just ONE consequence. This will ripple into education, the workplace, etc.

  115. 115.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Another Scott: It would reduce the small-state advantage, but that’s actually not the main reason that the EC is currently biased toward Republicans. (Our side has some small states too.)

    It’s mostly because the arrangement gives gigantic outsize power to large, purple states, and those have tended to be Republican-controlled in recent cycles, which also magnifies the effects of Republican vote-suppression techniques. To put it another way, the largest Democratic states are more Democratic than the largest Republican states are Republican, and that gives our individual votes less power in Presidential elections.

  117. 117.

    Kay

    @Leto:

    I don’t know which providers are fundamentalist religious nuts. Where I live, in a 70% Trump county, odds are I’m encountering some of them every time I see a medical provider. What if I have a failed pregnancy, confide that I plan to travel to Michigan for an abortion to one these Morality Police lunatics and they report me to a police agency under some fucked up “child abuse” theory or something?

    We’re encountering them in drugstores where they refuse to fill valid prescriptions – I can’t identify “far Right religious nut medical provider” on sight. Who can women trust?

  118. 118.

    brantl

    I think the Pukes are finally going to find out that while Democrats don’t care much for their pissing contests, we are more than willing to fight them, in the places that matter, every time they overstep. I don’t think they have even begun to realize how many people are, or lean hard, Democratic.

     

    I think they’re about to get a fist rammed up their noses, figuratively speaking.

  119. 119.

    Princess

    @TS: It’s relevant to the discussion because many of those women are making an economic decision when they decide to have an abortion. It’s not just because they’re not feeling it. It is absolutely an economic issue.

  120. 120.

    Kay

    I think one can see the deeply held conventional nature of major US media in their response to the challenge of reporting on Trump. They changed nothing. People complained and it made no difference- they simply circled the wagons and insisted their approach could remain EXACTLY the same with no acommodation or adjustment for a radically changed environment.

    They’re conventional really BRITTLE people- the industry must self select for that- and that’s why we get these deeply traditionalist takes on women and indeed ANY progress of any kind for any “group”. It’s what the whole “anti cancel culture” industry is based on “nothing must change from when I, personally, attended college”.

  121. 121.

    Eyeroller

    @lowtechcyclist: It’s small for a Virginia public university.  For instance, JMU, another (mostly) non-research university, is about 4x bigger.  UVA, with a far lower acceptance rate than either of those (gotta keep the Useless News ranking up) is 3x the size (counting undergraduates only).  Like most states, Virginia has a lot of higher-educational institutions with relatively little state funding.

  122. 122.

    Elizabelle

    @Kay:   Gift article for you and everyone.  Margaret Sullivan, former NY Times ombudsman and then WaPost media observer who recently decamped to teach at  Duke U, has a new book out on how inadequately the press covers Trump and the other autocrats.

    WaPost magazine:

    If Trump Runs Again, Do Not Cover Him the Same Way: A Journalist’s Manifesto

    I believed in traditional reporting, but Trump changed me — and it should change the rest of the media too.

    Margaret Sullivan was The Post’s media columnist from 2016 until late August. This article is adapted from her memoir, “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) From an Ink-Stained Life,” to be published this month by St. Martin’s Press.

    Sullivan’s final WaPost column, also a gift article.

    WaPost:  My final column: 2024 and the dangers ahead
    Before signing off, Margaret Sullivan offers advice to her fellow journalists on how to cover a perilous election

  123. 123.

    Tony G

    @NotMax: Yeah, they’re working on it.  “The Founders, anointed by God, intended voting to limited to white men who own a certain amount of property.”  And the Supreme Court will place their stamp of approval on whatever horrendous legislation is sent their way.

  124. 124.

    Soprano2

    @Leto: That’s the story that was in our local paper on Sunday. She lives in Joplin. That’s why I say this isn’t going away, it affects a lot more people than those who want an abortion.

  125. 125.

    Geminid

    @WereBear: No need to be shy about saying Rachel Bitecofer might be a good political engineer. A well established Arizona political consulting firm wasn’t:

    Matters of State of State Strategies

    “We are excited to be working with Dr.@RachelBitecofer on a brand offensive for our Democratic candidates,” said Vice President @MattGrodsky. “We are thrilled to have Bitecofer’s expertise and guidance as we approach the 2022 midterms.”

    @Mattersofst8 April 20, 2022.

  126. 126.

    Tony G

    @sab: I would like to see the economies of the states who impose abortion bans or restrictions really getting damaged because young women refuse to move to those states and young women start moving out of those states.  The reality is that the U.S. economy is not the way it was 100 years ago.  Almost all industries now rely on educated professional/technical people, and the workforce for every profession that I can think of is close to (or over) 50% female.  If a state loses those educated women (and the educated men who actually give a damn about women) then the economy of that state will take a big hit — and corporations will start moving out of that state, exacerbating the degradation.  States like Mississippi and West Virginia are impoverished shit-holes already, but the most visible hit will be on states like Texas and Florida.  Screw them.  If they want 19th century policies then let them move back to the 19th century economically.  Maybe their make-believe Jesus will save them.  As a lifelong taxpayer in New Jersey I’ve been subsidizing many of those “red state” morons for decades.

  129. 129.

    Tony G

    @Tony G: A real-life anecdote that might be relevant:  About ten years ago I was a “contract IT worker” at IBM in New York State for a couple of years.  I got the “contract” because a brainstorm by IBM middle-management had failed.  A few years earlier they had moved a software support center from New York State to Iowa.  “Rents and wages are lower in Iowa.  How can we lose?”.  Then they found out that: a) Very few people in Iowa had the necessary skill sets and b) Very few people who had the necessary skills wanted to move to Iowa.  So … after burning a lot of money in a dumpster, they moved everything back to New York State.  In effect, they paid me (and dozens of others) to clean up their self-imposed mess.  Funny story.  Multiply that story by thousands and that’s what could (and should) happen in the God-fearing, abortion-banning states of the Real America.

  130. 130.

    Tony G

    @sab: I’m actually shocked that Ohio is so backward.  Like many people in the East Coast (and I have a son in California) I really don’t know much about most of the country.

  131. 131.

    Tony G

    @sab: I really shouldn’t be surprised though.  The divide in this country really seems to be a divide between white rural areas (with small populations) and less-white urban/suburban areas (with large populations).  The legislative structure nationwide and in the states gives outsize influence to the white rural morons (with all due respect to morons).  When I worked at IBM in New York State — only about 40 miles north of New York City — all of my co-workers were white, many of them had set foot in New York City only a couple of times (if that) in their lives, and many of them were convinced that New York City was full of shiftless minorities and greedy Jews.  This was a few years before the rise of Trump.  I’m sure that many of them were Trumpies a few years later.

  132. 132.

    MisterDancer

    @BlueGuitarist: would appreciate suggestions on how to fix the senate.

    Hi. Thank you for asking my opinion, yet I cannot, in good faith, provide insight into what feel like hypotheticals, at this point in our Nation’s political state.

    Indeed: my immediate “solution” is what Watergirl has been leading discussions on — that we all pour time, money, and energy into getting the best Senate (and associated lawmakers) we can, right now. And then plan to do it again. And again.

    And again.

    And again.

    At some point, if we persevere thru media indifference, cultural backlashes, and the ignorance of our fellow citizens, we might finds enough daylight to debate how to actually repair the Senate, with some hopes it could actually be done.

    But 2022 is — for me, at least — not that year. Nor do I foresee 2024 improving on that front, and so on.

  133. 133.

    Geminid

    @Tony G: Ohio has had a relatively static economy, and that probably has made it more red. Politically, Virginia and Ohio have moved in opposite directions over the last 30 years, and their economies have moved in opposite directions too.

    A  state with a dynamic economy tends to have more college educated, and more first and second generation immigrants. These groups are more likely to vote for Democrats now. The movement of Georgia and North Carolina into purple status has accompanied dynamic economic development.

  134. 134.

    MisterDancer

    @Tony G: I would like to see the economies of the states who impose abortion bans or restrictions really getting damaged because young women refuse to move to those states and young women start moving out of those states.

    Blame for any and all economic issues will be shifted onto one of many handy scapegoats. Crushing the anti-abortion states with a lack of money merely accelerates shifting it to the already-having.

    Indeed: I’d argue that a Red State Marshall Plan would be a far more powerful tool for small-d democratizing Red States, than any dream of vengeance via vacuuming money from them. [EDIT: Or, what I think Geminid is also saying!] We already see this, in how these states keep refusing Federal dollars, or perverting their use in the case of COVID funds. They know that allowing their citizens to actually gain real wealth means they lose control of them and these Five Minute Hate sessions!

    I mean, we’ve seen this play out before — this is Jim Crow. Hell, it’s basically the economics of THE DUKES OF HAZZARD!

  135. 135.

    jonas

    @Tony G: I’ve asked myself this as well. Probably too early to tell what the long-term fallout is going to be, but I have to imagine that a lot of women are going to be thinking long and hard before applying for, or transferring to, a job, in places like TX, FL or OK. Higher ed in those states is going to get crushed, too, as universities are going to find it almost impossible to attract female faculty. The idiots in the state leg’s probably see that as a feature, not a bug (“hey, we’ll just hire rock-ribbed, conservative male academics”), but that’s not how things work. We’ll see if their tune changes when a major corporation pulls up stakes in TX or somewhere and relocates to IL or WA because their top female talent was getting poached right and left by rivals in blue states.

  136. 136.

    sab

    @MisterDancer: That’s what I think. The entire South didn’t take 100+ years to recover from the Civil War because Sherman marched 90 miles to the sea way naxk east in Georgia. They had the economy they thought they wanted. And now a lot of the Midwest is choosing to move in that same direction.

  137. 137.

    sab

    @Tony G: Term limits have done us a lot of damage politically. Guys like Kasich moved in from out of state, jumped on the Republican gravy train that protects them from college to retirement as they are shuffled from job to job in politics, government and think tanks.

    Democrats on the other hand cannot build careers in state politics because after two terms they are out and have to earn a livimg in the real world. So we can’t build a bench of people with experience and name recognition. We have a number of good people out there, but Sherrod Brown is sort of a unicorn in having had a long successful career.

    So the right wing political climate poisons everything else. My niece and nephew grew up here but got out as fast as they could

    ETA We have a bunch of blue big cities that are okay, but the gerrymandering and the term limits keep them from pulling their weight in politics.

  138. 138.

    Matt McIrvin

    @sab: The problem is that term limits are hugely popular across the political spectrum. It’s almost impossible to convince people that they are bad; they seem like a check on corruption. Even with very liberal people–I talk to them about this or that political abuse and they say “this is why we need term limits”. They see it as sticking it to bad politicians.

  139. 139.

    MisterDancer

    @sab: Term limits have done us a lot of damage politically.

    Term limits are a sledgehammer to the problem. Good politics is work, and we need to respect that work and stop actin’ like it’s just a side gig in a modern government.

  141. 141.

    Matt McIrvin

    @MisterDancer: It’s no coincidence that the standard right-wing caricature of a hated government official is a non-white woman behind the counter at the DMV, telling you something’s wrong with your application documents. How dare SHE give orders to ME, while drawing a paycheck from my tax dollars.

    Because of my white guy background it took me way too long to figure out the subtext there.

  142. 142.

    sab

    @Matt McIrvin: You stick it to bad politicians by voting them out. Term limits just let you force out other peoples’ politicians, good or bad.

    Emilia Sykes got to be so good as a state politician because she and her father were able to rotate back in forth into each others jobs every time a term limit was up because locally we like them both.(That created its own problem of apparent nepotism.)

    So the Republicans gerrymandered her district away when she and dad created problems as minority party members of the redistricting commission.

  143. 143.

    Tony G

    @Geminid: That sounds likely (although, in my east coast parochialism, I’ve never been to Ohio).  That’s been a trend in this country for about the past half-century.  When I was a kid (when my father was a union electrician for the New York Bell Telephone Company) a guy like my father — high school education, blue collar union job — could have a relatively decent material life — used car, cheap house, vacations at the Jersey Shore, union medical insurance.  In the decades since then, corporations have learned better ways to get rid of unions and to get rid of employees in general — moving operations to low-wage countries and/or replacing U.S. employees with cheap “contract workers”.  Of course these trends have been accompanied by a radical increase in wealth inequality.  The people who own this country have also learned how to use media (notably the Murdoch empire and its imitators) and right-wing “populists” (from Nixon to Reagan to Trump) to convince the people who are being screwed that it’s all the fault of those dusky-hued other people (and, of course, the fault of women).  My father was smart enough to know who his real enemies were, but many people buy the propaganda.  It’s been an increasing problem for my whole adult life.

  144. 144.

    Tony G

    @MisterDancer: As always, I don’t know what the answer is.  Just to be clear, I’m not advocating an actual organized boycott of states like Alabama and Tennessee.  I’m talking about the cumulative effect of individual decisions.  (A young woman getting her MD in a New Jersey university deciding that — nope — there’s no way that she’s going to get her internship in South Carolina, and a young woman in Texas deciding to move the hell out of Texas because the state hates women.  Those decisions will happen, and they’re already happening.).  As for a “Red State Marshall Plan” — there’s already been one for decades.  States like New Jersey and California routinely pay more in federal taxes than they receive in federal benefits, and for states like Kentucky and Arkansas it’s just the opposite — and that has been the case for at least 30 or 40 years.   So, from my perspective, I’m talking about a natural process of millions of individual decisions.  You cannot force a young woman with an Electrical Engineering degree from MIT to move to Kansas.  Actions will have consequences.

  145. 145.

    Tony G

    @Tony G: Here’s one example (probably among tens of thousands of examples) from the God-fearing state of Missouri.   jezebel.com/missouri-woman-denied-emergency-abortion-called-a-state-1849672223

    There have been many horror stories like this since June, of women suffering damage to their health — and potentially threats to their lives — in forced-birth states.

    Here’s the problem that these states will face.  The leaders in these states obviously hate women so they are happy to see women suffer and die, but there will be a backlash that will damage the economies in those states.  A high percentage of Americans (maybe 20% to 30%?) are as stupid and hateful as anyone on the face of the earth, so these people will either be ignorant of stories like this or will decide that those harlots deserve their punishment from an angry God.  But the people that these states need to have a healthy economy — intelligent, well-educated people — will be well aware of stories like this and will avoid states like Missouri (and Alabama and South Carolina) like the plague.  So, again, this is not an organized boycott (although I would not be opposed to an organized boycott) but the cumulative effect of individual decisions by women (and some men) to avoid dangerous Christian-fascist states will cripple the economies of those states.  Actions have consequences.  Ask Jesus to bail your asses out, morons.

  146. 146.

    Tony G

    @sab: That’s right.  The southern states are not backward because of what Sherman did almost 160 years ago.  They’re backward because they chose to be backward.  My wife’s home country (Japan) was essentially destroyed in 1945.  Japan was rebuilt and on its way to being an industrial power 20 years later.  Culture matters and, from my perspective, the culture of the states of the old Confederacy has not changed much since 1860.  Authoritarianism, exploitation, religious dogma and (of course) racism.

  147. 147.

    Tony G

    @Tony G: (Japanese people are racist, of course, like all other people.  But unlike many Americans, they know how to combine their racism with a thriving technological economy.)

  148. 148.

    Tony G

    @Matt McIrvin: That’s right.  I’ve never had a major problem dealing with the New Jersey DMV.  Now dealing with a bank or a medical insurance company — that’s what drives me up the wall.

  149. 149.

    Tony G

    @Tony G: What’s crazy about Japan (from my perspective as a gaijin) is that most of the racism (not from my wife’s family, of course) is directed toward the Korean minority — and from my perspective as a  dumb American, Koreans and Japanese look exactly the same and have very similar cultures.  I guess they needed someone to hate, and Koreans were nearby.

  150. 150.

    Tony G

    @Tony G: That, of course, is the “brilliance” of the MAGA slogan.  “Again” refers to a long-ago time when blue-collar workers were not quite as screwed as they are now (and when non-whites, women, gays and transgender people knew their place).  This is an “appealing” vision of the past (that will magically come back again) even though fewer and fewer people actually remember that era.  (I’m 66 years old, and that era was already gone by the time I was legally an adult.).  A “lost cause”.

  151. 151.

    Tony G

    @jonas: Yup.  The problem for the “leaders” in the forced birth states is that it is not (yet) legal or technologically feasible to micromanage and overrule individual decisions by women (and by some men).  Another anecdote: I was a teenager (and a Catholic) when the Roe versus Wade ruling was made.  From what I’ve read, it was relatively common for “anti-abortion Catholic” women to get abortions (both before and after Roe versus Wade).  The point being: Women will make their own decisions about matters that affect their lives, and those decisions might not coincide with what they tell the rest of the world.  Young Suzy and Betsy — evangelical Christians in Tennessee — might very well move out of Tennessee permanently if they “get in trouble” as the old phrase used to put it.

  152. 152.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Tony G: Medical insurance companies are amazingly shitty–every single damn time I have to get anything out of them, it’s a fight. Usually I have a doctor on my side and after a couple of rounds, they give in. But that’s always necessary

    With the Mass. RMV, I basically just have to be able to follow directions.

  154. 154.

    Tony G

    @Matt McIrvin: Yeah.  The problem with Medical Insurance companies is that (probably) they instruct their call center people to be as evasive and non-transparent as possible so that a certain percentage of customers will just give up and just accept whatever pittance is offered.  (I know that there have been times when I’ve just given up because I don’t have the time to spend hours on the phone.). I wouldn’t be surprised if these ghouls fired call center people who are deemed to be too cooperative.  For-profit medical insurance (combined with for-profit medical care) is a tremendous drag on the economy.  Besides customers wasting thousands of hours, every doctor’s office hires one or more people to do nothing but fight with insurance companies.  Apparently what happened is that in the same era (late forties through early sixties) that many other countries established some form of government-guaranteed health care, in Our Great Nation for-profit insurance companies got a grip on the system and by bribing (sorry, offering campaign contributions) to politicians and its been impossible to truly change the system ever since.  Even “Obamacare” (with the slogan: “Better than nothing”) maintains their grip.  The DMV is not the problem!

  155. 155.

    Tony G

    @Matt McIrvin: Japan treated the Korean people horribly and (I think) the Japanese government has never shown remorse for it.  The Japanese occupation of Korea in the 1910 was an early manifestation of Japanese imperialism that ultimately led to the Pacific Theater of World War 2.  Every country (certainly included the U.S.) has its ugly history, and the Japanese occupation of Korea was an ugly part of Japan’s history (and present).

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