Recommended soundtrack:
A small hospital in Sandpoint, Idaho, Bonner General, recently announced it will no longer offer obstetrical care due to the “political climate” in the state and a shortage of doctors. It turns out physicians object to having hard-right politicians without medical qualifications direct care plans and threaten clinical staff with lawsuits and jail time. From CBS News:
In a report last September, Pew found that Idaho was one of six states in which authorities can prosecute health care providers for performing abortions.
“The Idaho Legislature continues to introduce and pass bills that criminalize physicians for medical care nationally recognized as the standard of care. Consequences for Idaho Physicians providing the standard of care may include civil litigation and criminal prosecution, leading to jail time or fines,” Bonner General said in its news statement.
The article says women in Sandpoint who need labor and delivery services will now have to travel to the nearest cities, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho or Spokane, Washington for care. If they’re smart, they’ll opt for Spokane. It’s roughly the same distance but is located in a state that allows doctors to provide services that meet modern standards of care without unqualified conservative religious fanatics threatening them and otherwise interfering with healthcare decisions.
Get Out of the State You’re In
Speaking of state borders and conservative fanatics, wingnuts in Eastern Oregon are so incensed about being outvoted by fellow Oregon citizens in the more populous western part of the state that they’ve started a movement to move Idaho’s border west to swallow more than half of Oregon’s current territory. CNN posted a story about the “partisan rancor” behind the Greater Idaho Movement last week:
The redress that members of Greater Idaho want is representation of their conservative, minority viewpoint in an Oregon state government overwhelmingly controlled by liberal Democrats, said [former Portland school teacher Matt] McCaw. But with that unlikely to happen, being part of Idaho – which backed former President Donald Trump by more than 30 points – looks more appealing…
McCaw cited gun control and decriminalization of drugs as two major issues where the lesser-populated rural and vote-rich urban divide collide. “The political tension does not come because Portland’s doing something. The political tension comes when Portland does something and says we have to do the same thing. It doesn’t work for us.”
Sandie Gilson, a Greater Idaho Movement board member and a small business owner in John Day, Oregon, sees the problem more simply. “We are very different people,” she said of the cultures in the east versus the west of her state. “The rules and regulations that they’re making, that makes sense in the city, don’t make sense out here. The people here haven’t changed. Portland’s changed. Salem’s changed. Eugene has changed.”
Good gravy, what a bunch of whiny babies!
I’m a Democrat who lives in a county and state/federal districts that don’t have a single elected Democrat in a state where Republicans control every statewide elected office and both U.S. Senate seats.
Do I whine about it a lot? Absolutely, because living in a place with unified Repub control sucks in ways that materially make my life harder and hurt lots of people for no good reason, including some of my loved ones, which makes it personal. But it never occurred to me to petition a carve-out to make my property part of a state with politics that match my personal views. The choice is to stay and oppose the shitty state government or move. I chose the former. The Eastern Oregon whiners have the same choice.
Underground Like a Wild Potato
The Greater Idaho Movement is unlikely to go anywhere, but it does have sponsors in both state legislatures. Movement leaders imply that such efforts are an outlet for disgruntled citizens who might otherwise act out violently:
(McCaw) and (Idaho GOP state Rep. Barbara) Ehardt acknowledge that rural leaders in multiple states, many of them battleground states like Michigan and Georgia, have inquired about the political path Greater Idaho is taking. When asked where the moving of state borders for political reasons should stop, their answers become murkier.
“What I would say to that is it needs to go as far as it makes sense,” said McCaw.
Ehardt sees the immediate redrawing of the state line between Oregon and Idaho as one that would bring peace to the northwest region.
“We don’t want them to start an internal war battle. But at some point, that’s what people are going to turn to if they can’t be listened to,” she said of rural Oregonians. “So they’re turning to us. And if we can create a path forward, others can too.”
Well, “an internal war battle” doesn’t sound pleasant, but Ehardt misidentifies the problem. It’s not that the wannabe Idahoans in rural Oregon “can’t be listened to” — if they are anything like their ideological fellow travelers in Florida, they never shut the fuck up, not even when they fully control the levers of power.
The problem in rural Oregon and elsewhere is that — egged on by their favorite twice-impeached, two-time-popular-vote-loser former president — a loud contingent of Repub voters only accept election outcomes when their side wins. That’s a problem all over the country and will continue to be until sore losers realize that the operative word in that phrase is LOSERS.
Open thread.
Baud
I had posted this downstairs, but since this is an open thread.
Baud
I think you should consider starting a movement for creating the State of Sane Florida.
sdhays
Well, that’s on you, Betty.
PaulB
This also hits the eastern half of Washington, although they more often talk about creating a separate state rather than joining Idaho.
Amusingly, the FAQ of the Greater Idaho movement has something to say about this. Apparently, the eastern half of Washington isn’t quite conservative enough, and it has too many people.
“Idahoans are very concerned about keeping their state as conservative as possible. They had 2.46 conservative votes per liberal vote in the 2016 presidential election, but eastern Washington only had 1.43.”
“Moreover, eastern Washington has a population of 1.6 million in 2017, as compared to Idaho’s population of 1.7 million. Idahoans don’t want to be outvoted by others in their own state, so they’re not likely to want to include such a large population into their own state. If Republican-voting southern Washington state is included, that’s an additional 0.8 million.”
Kelly
Before Greater Idaho there was the State of Jefferson. The State of Jefferson was to be formed from some southern Oregon Counties and northern California counties. This will protect the rural people, the common clay of the new west, from Portland, Eugene and San Francisco. The dream lives on in the name of Ashland, Oregon’s Jefferson Public Radio. It’s a great public radio station. Ashland is a blue dot.
Ruckus
“But, but. but you have to make our state as fucked up as we want it to be because we are always 400 yrs behind the times!” We want slavery back, we want, open carry back, we want the courts to only recognize us, Minus 400 Years. Org as the only party eligible to able to vote, we want our state to be as it was originally 400 yrs ago.”
I like how time can go backwards to a position that it never actually occupied in the first place.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Kelly: I see a lot of random Cascadia flags and State of Jefferson BS where I live.
I don’t get it. Show me where on the doll that Portland hurt you…
Baud
Interestingly, ID is the fastest growing state population wise after FL.
Idaho was second-fastest growing state in the U.S. in 2022 – Idaho Capital Sun
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Ruckus: I think I would prefer Idaho as it was 400 years ago.
MisterDancer
From everything I’ve seen and read, that whole Pacific Northwest area is a hot mess for racism, and started as a hot mess.
Oregon was so racist upon it’s founding that they actually banned Black people from moving there. (See also, if you’ve WaPo access). Then there’s the Oregon Klan activities in the 1920s. And This article is fairly emblematic, as I understand it, of the modern issues leading to this situation. And then there’s the many right-wing think tanks thriving in the region.
And yes, that includes “Portlandia” — I believe this Atlantic article covers examples.
I don’t have a ton of first hand experience with the region. But I do have friends in the area, and yeah, I think it’s great overall, but I also think it hides a lot of these challenges and ongoing issues — and that’s a problem.
SFAW
I eagerly await a similar movement for a non-violent Reconquista of Nuevo Aztlan, f/k/a as the southern/border part(s) of Texas. I’m 100 percent certain that the RWMFs will support that, especially because they’ll view it — as they increasingly view the Russia/Ukraine “unpleasantness” — as merely a “territorial dispute.”
I also am eagerly anticipating you seceding from Fascist Florida, BC. I’d try to get my Congresswoman on board with Federal aid to your new state.
Scout211
Yeah, off and on for many years (decades?) the State of Jefferson was the hope of many of the most northern counties in California and the southern counties of Oregon. During the Obama administration years, it got a surge in counties wanting to join the new 51st state. There have been many discussions over the years here on balloon-juice about it. Interestingly, the movement waned during the Trump administration. Huh.
I live in a very red county in California and the number of people with State of Jefferson signs, flags and bumper stickers is higher than I would like, but the movement has definitely slowed down. At least the Greater Idaho movement has thought through the roadblocks that the State of Jefferson movement just could never conquer: How do you form a government when your tax base is tiny and no one wants any rules or laws to take away their FREEEEEDOMS!
They just attach themselves to Idaho and take their state money. Problem solved! I wonder what Idaho voters and politicians think about that?
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: My friend moved to Idaho and gradually became a cray cray conspiracy theorist. We are no longer friends.
raven
Athens, home of the 52’s, is is the same boat as Betty.
SFAW
@MisterDancer:
Everything old is new again: I recall reading (recently) that some RWMFs are trying to prevent recent/future (Demon-crap) transplants to their Red states from being allowed to vote within the first NN years.
Almost Retired
I would imagine that politics in this newly expanded Idaho (now with extra lebensraum!) would play out like present-day Shasta County, California. Where the mostly insane Republican politicians are recalled or replaced by utterly batshit Republican politicians. And eventually the bat shit contingent will be considered insufficiently devoted to the cause and will be replaced by rabid COVID-spewing raccoon dogs.
Alison Rose
@Kelly: Yeah, when that shit first started, I was like…no better way to insist you’re totally NOT racist and sexist than to name your fantasy state after a slave-owning rapist.
SFAW
@Almost Retired:
How would one tell them from the various flavors of insane RWMFs? Asking for a rational electorate.
West of the Rockies
Vile swamp-assed ogre that he is, Trump does exercise a special magic over the wingnuts. When he croaks, I believe the festering movement will further crumble without its pig-king. Bunch of hateful crybabies.
Old School
Looks like closing the hospital in Sandpoint adds travel time of one hour to Coeur d’Alene or 80 minutes to Spokane. Both of those locations are southwest of Sandpoint, so I wonder how big of an area would treat Sandpoint as their hospital destination. Presumably some people will now need to drive several hours for an obstetrician.
West of the Rockies
@SFAW:
That was Empty Green. Good ol’ Marge.
Kelly
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: Portland has been a rural Oregon boogie man for a looong time. When I was a country teen traveling an hour and a half to to concerts in Portland we always had a group, figured we needed to stick together and watch our backs. I got my degree in Eugene moved to Portland for my career and gosh it was nice in them big cities.
kindness
The Democratic Republic of Greater Tampa does have a nice ring to it.
Scout211
I guess the Idaho legislature approves.
West of the Rockies
@Scout211:
I’m in Butte County. I see a few of those State of Jefferson signs. A few more in Tehema, a lot more in Shasta. The movement is going nowhere though.
Baud
@kindness:
Fixed four more socialism.
Nicole
So true. I recently listened to The New Abnormal podcast episode on Dominion’s reveal of the FOX News texts after Biden’s victory and what really stuck with me (listening to them read what the hosts of the FOX shows were wailing at each other) was that not one of the FOX hosts was willing to state the obvious- that their viewers blamed FOX for any attempt to tell them the facts, and if FOX tried to tell them the truth about the election outcome, they would just stop watching FOX and switch to Newsmax or some other channel more willing to lie to them. But sure, we’re the snowflakes.
WaterGirl
Looks to me like this is an attempt to gerrymander the states just like they do congressional districts.
Alison Rose
@West of the Rockies: They’re gonna be out there weeping like he was Princess fucking Diana.
CaseyL
I’ve tried, in the past, to bend over backwards and see if their grievances have any basis in rationality. The only, ONLY, one I can find is that cities swallow up rural land and drive up prices of owning that land.
That’s it.
They oppose city policies that don’t make sense out in the hinterlands? OK, which ones – the regulations that keep them from turning their acreage into open sewers/meth labs/other blights?
The state sales tax? OK, how do they intend to pay for infrastructure? Oh, they don’t want any infrastructure? Bullshit- they want to have it, they just don’t want to have to pay for it (cf, the water wars in Arizona happening right this fucking second, where a bunch of “Live Free or Die” clowns now want the city they refused to support to give them water via a system they refused to pay into.)
I mean, if you dig down into their alleged grievances, it all goes back to their wanting free rides when it comes to things like infrastructure, but the “freedom” to be ignorant slobs, bigots, and domestic abusers when it comes to everything else.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@SFAW:
Someone should tell them: “So was Nazi Germany and Czechoslovakia. Look how that turned out. It didn’t stop there.”
Mai Naem mobile
Idaho is either second or third in the total of LDS members statewide. Good luck getting OB care for all those babies if other Idaho hospitals start going down this route.
trollhattan
@Kelly: Sierra foothills and everything north of Yuba City is infested with State of Jefferson flags (which must also be accompanied by a Trump flag–it’s a rule, you could look it up) and I think are going to be pissed that the Bigass Idaho proposed map stops at Red Bluff. Talk about alienating your fans.
OverTwistWillie
My neighbor was explaining he was avoiding retirement in KY, preferring TN because the lack of public sector unions would keep the tax load down.
( I guess his public sector pension doesn’t count.)
These idiots move somewhere on account of freedumb, overdevelop the place, demand blueland services, and then the polity turns to Democrats to sort out the mess.
tobie
I don’t think anything ever came of the effort, but the three westernmost counties in Maryland proposed seceding to West Virginia in 2021. WV’s Gov Justice welcomed them.
trollhattan
@Mai Naem mobile: They’re packed into the southeast part of the state and so I’d be interested in how this is going over in places like Pocatello and Twin Falls. “You can always drive to Salt Lake City” seems suboptimal.
Eolirin
@WaterGirl: Well, but in this case, it’s somewhat mutually beneficial, from a purely electoral standpoint, no? Oregon becomes that much bluer, and Idaho mostly stays the same. Maybe they get one or two more house seats, but those seats were probably going to be red anyway, without excessive gerrymandering on the part of Oregon.
It’s a really bad deal for the people in Oregon who would now be in Idaho, in that the quality of services they receive will likely tank, but hey, if they want to leave, what’s the harm in letting them? I’d be okay with it being put to a vote of affected residents, requiring a super majority, with funds provided to help relocate anyone that wanted to stay in Oregon.
kindness
@Baud: How did I miss that one?
Yea I live in Stanislaus County, Central Valley red/purple California. The State of Jefferson movement has kind of slowed. I see the flags in the hills above me in Tuolumne county when I go up for my mountain fun. Funny thing about the supporters. There is no tax base for that area to fund anything. When I ask them were they’ll get their money for roads, police, fire fighting they say the federal government will give it to them. I tell them that’s not how it works but that’s their pipe dream. And for a group that hates the federal government it really does toss things on their heads. Trumper types are never going to be smartest bunch.
trollhattan
@OverTwistWillie: Cost of living is less because, no unions? My brain just broke, but this seems like the ghost of Scott Walker at work.
Kelly
@WaterGirl: Worth noting we have two Dakotas because the North was gerrymandering the Senate prior to letting the Confederate states back in.
Baud
@OverTwistWillie:
That should be a rotating tag
andy
these people are human waste, of course, but what they don’t realize is that things that are good for city slickers are good for them, too. the basic problem here is that they don’t want those good things to happen to the ever-expanding out groups on their enemies list.
nobody loves them some abortion more than a rural redcap when some youth pastor gets one of their daughters pregnant. they just want to get it done on the sly.
they’re just too dim and too gutless to see the big picture.
Mai Naem mobile
@Baud: lots of Californians. Same thing for Montana and Wyoming. And a lot of the natives aren’t all that happy of their states being California’d. There’s a bumper sticker i see in AZ every so often – Don’t California My Arizona. Such a load of crap because these are usually the same people benefitting from their state being California’d.
trollhattan
@kindness: Instant welfare state. The negative cash flow to federal coffers would be monumental. “Finally, we can cut down the trees and mine the holy fuck outta the place, and nobody can stop us!” is not a good longterm plan for economic growth.
Governor Bundy will be lots of fun.
Alison Rose
@trollhattan: My Dad and brothers and I used to go camping at Mt Lassen when I was a kid. Haven’t been in that part of the state for many many years and am perfectly fine with that.
trollhattan
@Mai Naem mobile: That reminds me, been many years since my last “Don’t Californicate Colorado” bumper sticker sighting. Maybe in part because most cars don’t have identifiable bumpers (trucks are a different story).
Tom Levenson
They can change the borders if and only if Montana, Wyoming and both Dakotas agree to become a single state. That would have a population of about 2.4 million and would make those four together the 36 most popular state out of 47.
Alternatively, let ID take a chunk of western OR and grant DC statehood. And at least, combine the damn Dakotas, which would yield a single state with a population of a smidge over 1.7 million, or maybe 40% of greater Boston–creating the 40th most populace out of 49 states.
And just dissolve Wyoming. Got no reason to exist.
(H/t Randy Newman on that last one.)
FelonyGovt
@Mai Naem mobile: Yes, this hospital closure is going to start affecting even the most rabid anti-abortion crowd, and I assume this pattern is going to repeat nationwide in the reddest states. What are they going to do when they, or their precious pregnant wife or daughter or sister can’t get obstetric care anywhere without a 2 hour drive.
Eolirin
@Mai Naem mobile: Man, flipping Wyoming blue wouldn’t be terribly difficult if we could convince enough sane people to move there.
Kent
Only has a percentage of population. Washington has grown much more in terms of actual numbers of people moving in. In other words, the gap in population between WA and ID has grown over the past decade rather than shrank.
Baud
@Eolirin:
Ah but there the rub.
Baud
Shout-out to ID Dems doing what they can.
Mike in NC
So if you took away Florida’s sunshine, beaches, and palm trees, you’d be left with Idaho? Both places have been magnets for disgruntled white people wanting to band together for decades.
Somebody pointed out that favorite son Ron DeSantis considers himself a “Midwesterner”, whatever that means, even though he was born and raised in Floriduh.
MisterForkbeard
Regarding the Greater Idaho Movement: I’m almost okay with this. Those areas of Oregon are already getting R representatives, and this would assure Dem Senators and Governors in Oregon. Idaho would just keep being a Republican backwater. The upside here is mostly Democratic, other than the fact that Blue States would have to support the new Greater Idaho financially.
But really, Republicans should be looking to combine more of their states. Maybe stick both Dakotas and Nebraska together. And clearly Florida and Alabama should just combine. Maybe Arkansas and Oklahoma. :)
trollhattan
@Alison Rose: I’ve backpacked Lassen a lot but since the fire that took out Chez Levenson and also burned the northern half of the park, have not been back.
Beautiful area, surrounded by a lot of suck.
Another Scott
Changing borders over political disputes? How droll.
Real states change borders over water disputes.
GKHPC.com (from May 2022):
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@Eolirin: I think the people who are proposing this stuff aren’t smart enough to see most of that.
Alison Rose
@trollhattan:
LOL, perfect description.
trollhattan
@Baud: Once upon a time, Frank Church.
Kent
I grew up on the edge of Eugene. Oregon is basically one big city and two college towns surrounded by rural Arkansas. If Portland were the size of Boise then Oregon’s politics would look a lot more like Idaho.
I remember going to college football games and track meets in Roseburg and North Bend and other redneck rural Oregon towns and they were just as redneck, conservative, and racist back then in the 1980s as today.
But these dipshits will never get anywhere. The chances that a Democratic governor and Democratic state legislature would vote to give up 75% of the state to Idaho are less than ZERO. Not ever going to happen, ever.
The chances of that happening are roughly equal to the chances that the US Congress would ever vote to give back to Mexico the states of Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Texas just because a butt hurt minority in those states thought they should be part of Mexico.
OverTwistWillie
@Eolirin:
I read traffic in Jackson Hole is hopelessly f’d with all those rich Californians moving in.
Alison Rose
BTW in case you missed it, Randy Rainbow put out a Santos video last week that’s good for a laugh. The Post-It Notes bit slayed me, especially with the movie reference shot :P
piratedan
@FelonyGovt: in response, the hospitals in the Spokane area that I help support are ramping up their OB departments to handle the additional patient load. Reaching out to insurance providers to try and set up lines of communication for billing, which is as sure a sign as anything that something is in the wind.
CaseyL
@Tom Levenson:
I do like (love!) the idea of combining all those sparsely-populated states.
I also have a great idea for heading off potential fights over what to name the new state: in view of the giant volcano that exists under Yellowstone, I think it should be “Caldera.”
Eolirin
@FelonyGovt: They can’t get any maternal health services without a two hour drive. There are no obstetricians in the area anymore.
The whole point of this is that making abortion illegal has massive knock on effects for all pregnancy and reproductive related health care for women; a point that I wish had been being made more forcefully prior to Dobbs. This will kill some mothers that need abortions yes, but also make it harder to safely give birth for those births that are going to be viable and are wanted. It’ll kill infants that could have survived with better care provision as well. And it’ll worsen maternal mortality stats, killing both mothers and babies at greater rates due to substandard care.
The single biggest thing that these attacks on abortion rights are doing is lowering the standard of women’s healthcare in life threateningly dangerous ways, regardless of whether women are seeking abortions.
Ken
Now I’m confused. I thought unhappy conservatives simply moved from their liberal hellholes to Texas or Florida. At least, the governors of those states keep bragging about that.
Eolirin
@Baud: I know, right. Sigh.
Betsy
How, exactly, do the eastern Oregonians state that they are harmed by the laws that th Oregon legislature has passed? I’m genuinely curious.
trollhattan
It’s sunny today. Just not for long. Wheee!
Eolirin
@WaterGirl: Of course not, but it’s an argument for why Oregon’s legislature should maybe take them up on it, with some stipulations. They’re the kind of people who would think these things through.
Ken
At the least, Florida should give Alabama back its coastline.
Tom Levenson
@trollhattan: Some of those northeast and eastern counties are as red as it gets, albeit with tiny populations. But Plumas County, which includes Lassen NP, was 57% Trump 40% Biden in 2020–a wide margin to be sure, but not a monoculture by any means.
Of course, total votes in the county were around 11,000, so we’re not talking about anything particularly noticeable in a state of 55 million.
Still, shifts are happening. Biden did better than Clinton in the Central Valley; Trump improved on his 2016 numbers in heavily Hispanic counties, in places with high Asian populations, and on LAs white and rich west side. Realignments and coalitions shift. (And the Ds should be investing everything they can in outreach to Hispanic Americans, please, please, please being aware that they are not a monolithic community.
West of the Rockies
@Kent:
Ashland, OR is a very cool, beautiful and progressive town.
Betty Cracker
@Mike in NC: DeSantis really said that? Wow. Too bad that didn’t come out in 2018 — it could have pissed off a contingent that voted heavily for him. IIRC, his parents came down here for work from PA or somewhere like that.
Tom Levenson
@CaseyL: Caldera!
Perfect!
Matt McIrvin
Rural counties all over seem to like the idea of seceding from blue states, but the notion of blue states seceding from the US occasionally gets some juice from Northeastern and Californian liberals too. I’ve always thought of it as a desire to write off the civil-rights movement as a loss and pretend it never happened.
The thing I noticed about the State of Jefferson was that they adopted as their emblem a double X, to indicate that they’d been double-crossed by California or whatever (way to indicate that you’re an entirely resentment-based movement), but it also resembles the swastika substitute used by the nation of Tomainia in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator.
band gap
@MisterDancer: Seth Cotlar, history prof at Willamette University in Salem, has TONS of documentation about racist and far-right nuttery in Oregon going back to the 1920’s if not further. He has discussed all this stuff, along with the present day rwnj on his countless twitter threads. Just a wealth of history on one small but significant topic. Alas, for me it was just overwhelming, and I haven’t looked at twitter in months. Anyway, that guy is one of the underappreciated gurus on this subject.
Kelly
@Kent: I always lived near enough to occasionally see my old high school friends that never left. Wedding, birthdays that sort of thing. I really didn’t figure out how crazy the never left the area folks were until I retired and moved back to the western Cascade foothills. If I’d realized how little we have in common these days I probably would have stayed in the Portland metro and just continued visiting the dear old boondocks.
Anonymous At Work
Another classic of NYTs going diner-dumpster-diving for conservative voices in small, rural places as opposed to where the people are. Seriously, make like New Hampshire voters and live in one state while doing everything else in another state (Massachusetts or Oregon) that has an effective government.
Grumpy Old Railroader
Back in the 70’s I lived and worked out of SE Oregon. All the wacko’s back then were just as crazy as today but the hot button issues were “Get us out of the UN” and “IRS taxes are illegal.” I even worked with an onery old conductor who refused to pay federal taxes. Last I heard he moved to [checks contact info] Idaho and is now in the federal pokey for tax evasion.
Also NE California (or what we refer to as West Dakota) has no shortage of conservative loons howling at the injustice of taxation without representation by Sacramento Liberals. They don’t want to hear that they get more state and federal tax dollars poured into their counties than is taken out.
Matt McIrvin
@Tom Levenson: I’ve always been nervous about the fact that, in principle, a Republican government with a Congressional-Presidential trifecta, and one cooperative state government in cahoots, could legally convert the US into a one-party dictatorship just by carving a little piece of that state into several hundred new states. Populate every one of them with at least three loyalists living in a trailer home, to serve as a Representative and two Senators and double up as the state government, and you can just slam through constitutional amendments.
Another Scott
OpenThread – Teri Kanefield Mastodon thread about TFG’s filings in GA today. Includes linkies.
Cheers,
Scott.
trollhattan
@OverTwistWillie: Nobody can afford Jackson. Cheyenne, Casper, Gillette, Laramie, Rock Springs are a third of the state and presumably, where folks move to from elsewhere.
Winter is even worse than in Idaho, which sucks. Old folks want to go where it’s warm, generally speaking.
Eric S.
It occurs to me that Spokane may not be an option for many as their insurance probably doesn’t extend across state lines.
Eolirin
@Matt McIrvin: Such a thing would be so blatantly wrong that it would not have the support of the country as legitimate.
It would need to be followed up with violent suppression of protest to survive. And if you have the will and means to do that, you can just suspend the constitution regardless of the rules.
Hoodie
The last part is the problem. There aren’t that many jobs in Wyoming other than oil-related (boom and bust), and the climate is really harsh in a lot of the state. One possibility is increased development around Cheyenne as the Colorado Front Range expands, but the weather starts to get a bit dicey north of Fort Collins. There are other places in Colorado (e.g., Pueblo as Springs gets more expensive) that would likely get developed first.
trollhattan
@Matt McIrvin: Some form of that seems to be occurring in Israel right now. Which is about three kinds of frighting, if Bibi and his klan pull it off.
PaulB
Interesting tidbit: they can’t change the state boundaries without modifying the state’s constitution, which takes a 3/4 vote of both state houses, followed by a statewide vote:
NAME AND BOUNDARIES OF STATE. The name of this state is Idaho, and its boundaries are as follows: Beginning at a point in the middle channel of the Snake river where the northern boundary of Oregon intersects the same; then follow down the channel of Snake river to a point opposite the mouth of the Kooskooskia or Clearwater river; thence due north to the forty-ninth parallel of latitude; thence east along that parallel to the thirty-ninth degree of longitude west of Washington; thence south along that degree of longitude to the crest of the Bitter Root mountains; thence southward along the crest of the Bitter Root mountains till its intersection with the Rocky mountains; thence southward along the crest of the Rocky mountains to the thirty-fourth degree of longitude west of Washington; thence south along that degree of longitude to the forty-second degree of north latitude; thence west along that parallel to the eastern boundary of the state of Oregon; thence north along that boundary to the place of beginning.
SFAW
@OverTwistWillie:
and then the polity turns to Democrats to sort out the mess.
My brother described that phenomenon, relating to Nassau County (NY), more than 20 years ago:
1) The Rethugs get voted into office,
2) They fuck things up to a fare-thee-well,
3) People vote in Dems to fix things
4) Extensive work — which costs money — is required to fix things
5) Electorate shrieks “OMFG this fixing stuff is terrible/expensive”
6) Rethugs get elected
7) Repeats as necessary
alhutch
@Betsy: The short answer is they aren’t harmed at all. Much like moocher Red states, these counties that “voted” to explore this option are significant beneficiaries of the blue counties’ tax bases. They claim they aren’t “heard” because the state legislature is run by democrats. The R reps walk out to deny quorums when gun control or climate legislation is being considered. Basically, they wonder why the more populous and progressive counties won’t just let the “real” Oregonians turn the state into Idaho?
kindness
How about we just start with giving them Texas and see how that goes?
trollhattan
@band gap: IIUC the Klan was quite active in Oregon.
Kent
There is slightly more paperwork involved when you go to buy a gun at your local gun shop.
The local “whores” are still allowed to get abortions. But they conveniently ignore the fact that abortion rights were signed into the state constitution by a Republican governor in 1983.
They now have to use modern septic tanks rather than dumping their waste into local salmon streams.
They can’t arrest their local homeless for simply being homeless. Which also has nothing to do with the state legislature. It was a Federal court case originating in….wait for it….Idaho.
And there is lots of griping about public lands management, which is 99% Federal (Forest Service and BLM) and wouldn’t change one iota regardless of which state they are in.
Matt McIrvin
@Eolirin: I kind of imagine at least a prominent section of the pundit class just reacting “Wow, I looked it up and it turns out there ISN’T any rule that says a dog can’t play basketball!”
oatler
Here on the ground in AZ I heard talk of foreign interests buying Huge Tracts Of Land and not developing it…for some reason.
BenCisco 🇺🇸🎖️🖥️♦️
YES TO ALL OF THIS
smith
And we’re already rapidly heading towards third world numbers on maternal mortality, due in part to the severe impact of covid, an impact intensified by right wing anti-public health actions. But it’s just women dying, so no biggie, right?
Kelly
@Betsy: Rural Oregonians like to hate on zoning, land use until they don’t. Recently three gigantic chicken confined animal feeding operations (CAFO) were approved near here. The otherwise “It’s my land I can do what I want” folks are appalled and testifying before the Legislature to restrict that sort of thing. Oregon has the weakest CAFO regs on the Left Coast and there is a loophole in the water rights laws that allows unlimited pumping to water livestock.
Last year a bunch of rural counties lost a $1.5 billion lawsuit. Counties get a slice of money from logging state land. They claimed environmental concerns reduced their receipts and it oughta be against the law. A jury in rural very red Linn County agreed. Oregon Supreme Court ruled otherwise.
Spotted owl was all the fault Portland, Eugene and Corvallis
ETA: Then there’s folks like me selling expensive Portland Metro homes and bidding up the price of rural real estate ;-)
Eolirin
@Matt McIrvin: I mean, sure, but that doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be rioting in the streets or that blue states would recognize the authority of such a thing.
Kent
Arkansas has the same thing with blue spots like Fayetteville and Eureka Springs. Fayetteville went for Biden over Trump by 50 to 80 points depending on the precinct. It is about as blue as Ashland. And Eureka Springs went for Biden by +38. They just don’t represent a majority of Arkansas any more than Ashland represents rural Oregon.
JAFD
There’s a map in various places of the Internet, “50 States With Equal Population”. Interesting, but Burlington County, NJ, belongs to ‘Philadelphia’, not ‘Newark’ (if the branch library in Mount Holly, the county seat, gets the Inky every morning but not the NY Times …)
The movement to split North and South Jersey seems to have faded away with demographic and political change ….
Happy Equinox, regardless !
Kent
@Kelly: Yep, they are also getting butt hurt about wind farms. Despite the fact that wind farm tax receipts are about the only thing keeping some of those tiny NE Oregon counties remotely solvent.
Tom Levenson
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah. You see a version of that notion in states that create gazillions of tiny counties.
One problem is that it takes some infrastructure to be a state. Apparently you can do it w. half a million people. Much smaller and it becomes tricky.
But hell–let’s do it before they do it to us. DC statehood. PR statehood if they want it. CA into about 10 gerrymandered ~5 million pop states. ETc. Then TX would follow and it would be a race towards 18th c. Germany.
trollhattan
Speaking of individuals long, long past their sell-by date, Rupert Murdoch, everybody.
I hope Tracey Ullman is ready to relaunch Life with the Murdochs.
trollhattan
@Kent: And amazingly, you can graze critters alongside wind turbines. It’s uncanny!
Betty Cracker
Puss ‘n Boots finally commented on the Trump situation — with an anti-semetic dog-whistle: (NBC)
Issues like the scourge of drag shows, he means, i.e., virtual signaling for his base.
Then he aired Trump’s dirty tighty-whities:
Christ, what an asshole.
Almost Retired
@trollhattan: Wait…..THAT Jerry Hall?!??
Kelly
@Kent: The wind farm hate is purely a form of hating on environmentalism. The aesthetic complaints are comical. Them country folk are fine with clear cuts and anything else industrial.
Kent
@trollhattan: What we are really talking about is a collection of gray haired retirees living in crappy little spreads out in eastern Oregon who are pretending to hobby farm and imagining a frontier Oregon that never actually existed.
They get pissed about anything modern regardless of whether it even has anything to do with state politics. These are the same folks who get butt hurt if the beef jerky gets moved to the other end of the counter in their local grocery..
The are best ignored. That the NYT gives them oxygen is beyond me. It’s just the new version of Cletus Safari now that Ohio diners are passe.
Amir Khalid
@Almost Retired:
Yes, one of Mick Jagger’s exes.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Well, how about having St. Louis succeed from Missouri, then? Illinois would be a much more compatible state. We are a bit tired of being oppressed by our right-wing state government.
Alison Rose
@trollhattan: Well, if this is gonna be his 5th marriage, at least this time “till death do you part” might actually come true.
cain
@SFAW:
But only for liberals I assume? I assume they would want to move to a blue state and be able to vote red and change the state.
MisterDancer
@band gap: Yep, and he has just created a SubStack where he’s consolidating his work in preparation for a book: https://sethcotlar.substack.com/
Alison Rose
@Betty Cracker: These fuckers think Soros is behind everything they don’t like. I only wish Jews were as powerful as they think we are! I’m just saying, if we were in charge of everything, shit would be a lot better.
Also, aw, poor Ronnie is a little jelly because no porn stars would ever wanna fuck him. (Though I don’t know why she wanted to fuck Trump, but to each their own, I suppose.)
Soprano2
@Another Scott: Water will be the oil of the 21st century – something that people fight over incessantly even more than they already do.
cain
@trollhattan: lol – they’ll kill the place, and then will demand that the states around them give them what they need because they are “true Americans”. So patriotic that everyone should bow to their needs.
Hoodie
@Betty Cracker:
Hadn’t seen that before, did you just coin it? Trump would be jealous, he might steal it. Meatball Ron was a good effort, but not in that league.
Looks like DeSantis will try to go the route of laughing at Trump while saying that prosecution of him would be a witch hunt, a waste of time on someone silly. That’s not a dumb play, but it doesn’t give him a charisma transplant.
Roger Moore
@Scout211:
The truly Libertarian solution. Seriously, you see this with just about every Libertarian attempt to implement their paradise on Earth. A few of their wilder plans have started from a clean sheet of paper, but those never get past the
planningdreaming stage. Everything else starts by taking over a functioning government and then shutting down the parts the Libertarians don’t like.This is because Libertarianism isn’t really capable of building a functioning society. All they can do is to leech off a functioning society. When they actually try to run things, they can’t fund even the parts of government they accept as legitimate, so everything runs down.
Eolirin
@Roger Moore: And then the bears move in!
EarthWindFire
This. Fuck these people. I grew up in ruby red Wyoming back when it was sane enough that my new deal Dem dad could serve as a state legislator. Now that the state’s completely off the rails, Dad retired to not Wyoming. It never occurred to him to ask if his southern part of the state could be moved to Colorado.
Soprano2
@Betty Cracker: What are they going to do when George Soros dies? Who will their new all-purpose boogeyman be? As if he funds prosecutors, rather than the city of New York funding him.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Betty Cracker:
He’s trying to play it both ways, so he doesn’t piss off Trump’s base. Also, that’s proof right there that Florida is a different place than it was even 10 years ago. He wouldn’t have been able to say that and get away with it, considering so many Jewish northeast retirees moved there over the last few decades
Kelly
@MisterDancer: I concur on Seth Cotlar. Willamette University is across the street from the Oregon State Capitol and he walked over to watch several protests when the Proud Boys and other right wing assholes gathered to protest the march of progress. His reports on the protests and the ordinary people running local Republican parties have been wild. The right wingers busted into the Oregon Capitol before the Jan 6 insurrection. Oregon setting an example!
Alison Rose
@Soprano2: One of his kids? Maybe it’s like the Monarchy and the crown of Scary Jew gets passed down to the eldest child.
cain
@MisterForkbeard: That’s not how it works – what will happen is that they will take over the fed and congress will require that blue states fund the red states.
smith
@Roger Moore: Not just libertarians, but conservatives as well. The latter, of course, are perfectly willing to write laws to make the lives of women, POC, LGBTQ people miserable, but also are unwilling to write laws to tax themselves for the government services they want,. They then demand that the rest of us pay for them. For both groups, it’s not about freedom, it’s about privilege.
Hoodie
@EarthWindFire: Yeah, it’s striking to see how radicalized these places have become in comparison to what they were 30-40 years ago. I don’t know if it’s because of evangelical Christianity or because they’ve attracted every asshole that fled blue states, like retired LA cops moving to northern ID.
BruceB
As a resident of eastern Oregon, I have daily interations with people that think they want to be part of Idaho. Make no mistake, they are white Christian nationalists through and through. I see the Greater Idaho Movement as a fool’s errand for people that could be up to a lot worse.
The majority of the Idaho Firsters in Oregon are recipients of the generous Oregon Health Plan (medicaid expansion). You should see their faces when you tell them there aint no Idaho Health Plan. And who else would want their kids to get moved to a state that is 50th in pupil education dollars? Yeah, people that dont send their kids to public school. Who would rather pay sales tax than higher property taxes? Yeah, people with a lot of land and disguised income. Who would want women’s healthcare downgraded? White men. Who would want cannabis criminalized? Basically, nobody on that one.
So, we just pat their heads and borrow from our southern hospitality: “Well, bless their hearts.”
realbtl
Back in the early 50s Bernard DeVoto, born and raised in SLC Utah, summed up the “Westerners” attitude as roughly “Give me money and leave me alone.” Nothing new here.
suzanne
If they want to roll all of the square states in the west (Idaho, Montana, Dakotas, Wyoming, Utah) into one big state and give them two senators…. Godspeed, y’all.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@suzanne:
I second this motion. Make it so!
Roger Moore
@Grumpy Old Railroader:
They are just a bunch of spoiled brats. They have representation. They’re just annoyed they keep getting outvoted.
Steeplejack
@Baud:
Sovereign Citizens’ Republic of Bamalachicola.
sdhays
@Betty Cracker: Apparently he didn’t just say it, he wrote it in his book.
Gretchen
I had a surprising exchange on twitter last night. KS is fighting over a trans kids in sports bill. I said why is the legislature bullying the 3 kids in the state this applies to? A dad said he was worried about protecting his daughters. I asked how it would be enforced? Genital checks for all girls on a team? Who would do the checks? I pointed to the parents in Idaho who accused a girl who beat their girls of being trans, and the Ohio bill that could require pelvic exams of all athletes. The guy has girls in sports, had never thought of that angle, didn’t want anyone checking in his daughter’s pants. He thanked me for arguing respectfully and not calling him a bigot, he acknowledged that it’s a hard problem and he would think about it.
The Up and Up
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: I have a Cascadia Flag with Pride colours. Transrepublic baby.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_flag
They used to be readily available for purchase but perhaps the creator, Alexander Baretich, didn’t want MAGA appropriating.
Frankensteinbeck
@Hoodie:
When Obama was elected, someone here predicted that White America would lose their shit.
Hoodie
@sdhays: To paraphrase, he said he was geographically from Florida, but culturally from Pennsylvania and Ohio. In other words, he’s choosing his own pronouns.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
Now that’s a new state I could get behind!
Roger Moore
@Hoodie:
Two points:
Kent
FOX NEWS and Social Media.
40 years ago their main news sources were Walter Cronkite on the nightly news and whatever local newspaper they got. Also maybe Time Magazine or Life Magazine, etc.
Today network news and local media is all but dead. it is Tucker Carlson 7 days/week plus whatever filth and crazy they are being funneled on social media by “engagement’ algorithms.
Zzyzx
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
Cascadia is the other approach, making a country out of BC/Western WA/OR and (maybe) down to Bay Area. It’s frustration over the Bush years that sparked it.
I have a Cascadian flag but mainly because I realized I have an emotional loyalty to WA state much more than to the US as a whole. It’s not a call for an actual revolution, just a love for my region.
Cheryl from Maryland
@tobie: Those three counties have been whining for over a decade when redistricting House districts after the 2010 census gave them a Democratic Congressperson. First they sued; the case actually went to the Supremes who did the traditional Robert’s handwave over seemingly being impartial while giving these guys the shaft in order to protect gerrymandering elsewhere. The Republican Governor Hogan tried to help them get a GOP Congressperson by redoing the Legislature’s districts after the 2020 census, but the Democratic Candidate still prevailed. Too many Liberals now live in those counties.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Kent:
Also, right wing radio. In rural America, you drive a lot. The right wingers have taken over the radio dial. Dems could have done something about it and should have.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Zzyzx: I dig bio regionalism. Just doesn’t mesh well with practical politics or the US Constitution.
Citizen Alan
@Ken: I still say after the Civil War, they should have dissolved all the state lines in the former Confederacy and then redrawn them into new states with new names. Mississippi and Alabama should have ceased to exist as concepts after 1866.
Zzyzx
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: well yeah but it can be fun to imagine.
I fly Cascadia in the summer and a Seahawks’ flag once the season starts so I’m not exactly planning to go to the front lines.
Roger Moore
@Alison Rose:
Yeah, there’s the old joke about the Jew who read anti-Semitic propaganda because he liked to read about how powerful Jews are.
Hoodie
@Kent: Yep, cable TV first got a foothold in these areas because of the lack of large metros with broadcast stations, i.e., they were already set up to have Fox mainlined into their brains. Unless you’ve spent a lot of time there, it’s hard to understand just how isolated some of those places can be, and cable/internet gives them a simulated reality that is not corrected by other inputs. They’re kind of like lab animals that were injected with a virus and left to mutate.
Kent
Cascadia would actually be a very cool country if we could merge OR, WA, and British Columbia into one larger progressive Pacific Northwest nation. High-speed rail between Eugene and Vancouver BC, Outwardly looking Pacific Rim economy, etc.
But of course, not going to happen any more than “greater Idaho” will ever happen.
Sure Lurkalot
@Alison Rose:
Do we know whether he paid Stormy for sex? The $130K was to keep her quiet about it.
The Moar You Know
@Soprano2: George Soros.
The junkmail I still get from the NRA STILL has Ted Kennedy’s name on it as one of their prize boogeymen. Why ditch a crowd-pleaser?
Mai Naem mobile
@Gretchen: but that’s how a lot of non crazy Republican voters thought processes work. They get sucked in by some social/wedge issue but don’t think of the bigger picture and how things are going to work under whatever rules the GOP is proposing. You can sometimes walk them through it and sometimes the light turn on in their brain.
Alison Rose
@Roger Moore: No lie. I mean, we don’t even control Hollywood like people have believed forever. If we did, Mel Gibson sure as shit wouldn’t still be a working actor.
Alison Rose
@Sure Lurkalot: Honestly, I *hope* she got paid to have sex with him, because I cannot imagine doing so without it.
Of course, there isn’t enough money in Jeff Bezos’ piggy bank to make me even consider laying a finger on that man.
zhena gogolia
@Almost Retired: You’re just now finding out?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Alison Rose:
I’m mad that Gibson is starting to get work again. I don’t think he ever truly apologized
RaflW
One very tiny bit of activism in this theme: I read late last week about the Montana senate passing yet another terrible anti-trans law. This one bans birth certificate changes, drivers license changes, etc for trans ppl of any age. Just flat civic erasure.
Hasn’t passed the MT house yet, but given the region, I’d be surprised it stops.
Anyway, I found the MT tourism site that flogs skiing and wrote a very blunt email, saying truthfully that I’m an avid downhiller (32 days of lift-served riding so far this season), that we visited Whitefish and rode their summer lift for a hike a few years ago … and that I will never, ever set foot in MT or spend a dime at any ski resort there if this law passes. I made it clear: There is no such thing as a ‘hospitality industry’ in a state that would be so cruelly inhospitable to my friends.
If I were still a member of PSIA-AASI (pro ski/board instructors) I’d be firing off messages to the board and regional leads about ways that the industry should be working to make it clear that, while not as impactful maybe as not having OB-GYNs, snow resort workers have choices, and will GTFO these godforsaken states like ID, MT etc.
cain
oh wow, talking about weaponized bullying. Basically any girl beating up another girl would suddenly be scrutinized as trans and then get state/fed attention.
If you are an anti-govt type, this stuff should scare the shit out of you.
Almost Retired
@zhena gogolia: Yup. I gotta start reading the tabloids when I’m in line at the Supermarket.
Origuy
@Old School: There isn’t much north of Sandpoint until you get to Cranbrook, BC, about two hours away. I’ve been there, it’s a nice little town with a community college and a hospital. Of course, that means Canadian socialized medicine!
cain
@Hoodie: is that (git/fuckhead)?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Hoodie:
I understand why it’s important for cheap rural broadband to be a thing, but this is why I’m not all that thrilled either.
“Oh great, now wingnuts can post to 4chan faster/cheaper about QAnon than before”
Betty Cracker
@Gretchen: Kudos for you for keeping your cool and responding with logic and facts.
Roger Moore
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Democrats have tried to create their own liberal mirror image of the conservative radio networks, and it doesn’t work. The reason the conservative media system works is because their audience is pre-selected for being a bunch of gullible fools. That makes it incredible valuable to businesses trying to sell the kinds of crazy stuff we always see sold on Conservative media. You don’t get that with liberal media, so they couldn’t get the finances to work.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Roger Moore: They should have brought back the Fairness Doctrine and killed right wing radio. Instead, it is still around spreading poison.
smith
@cain: I read that as beating the girl at sports, not beating her up. Much worse — any girl who is an outstanding athlete is going to get her genitals examined.
cain
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
They don’t because I think in the 90s most liberals focused on the federal govt and never the state legislatures or local areas. That allowed Rush Liimbaugh and his ilk to clean up the white man demographic of which the Dem party were chasing for votes. They should have put up their own radio program on local TV.
Then again, it’s easy to shout and rant at the govt and not offer any solutions.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@cain:
The solution was to kill rightwing radio, including Rush’s show, by bringing back the Fairness Doctrine. I swear, people on this site do not understand how much radio people in rural communities or blue collar jobs consume. A LOT and because nothing was done about this, right wing poison has continued to infect the public.
EDIT: I’ll add that the GOP was terrified that Obama would bring back the Fairness Doctrine. It would have hurt them and they knew it.
cain
@smith: I can see many conservatives being very pissed by having that exam. Should be fun in a red state since they will need to find some liberal boogeyman to redirect their anger to.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
Is there a population of unicorns where this rational electorate exists?
EarthWindFire
@Hoodie: IMO, it’s a lot of things. In addition to Fox, right wing radio, etc, one factor is that, in these smaller red states, the kids leave. We’ve talked about that a lot on BJ. But we haven’t IMO talked much about who takes their place, at least not in the smaller western red states/areas. In these areas, the kids are replaced by people who move for coal, oil, and other resource extracting jobs. By and large, people employed by these industries skew red politically.
In Wyoming, this has resulted a handful of remaining Dem legislators (less than 10 percent of the legislature IIRC) coming from Laramie, Cheyenne, and Jackson. These are the parts of the state that don’t see as much resource extractive employment.
Anyway
@zhena gogolia:
I knew about Rupe and Jerry Hall getting hitched but first I’m hearing of their split…
WaterGirl
What a great title! I hadn’t noticed that earlier.
Kelly
@Kent: The right winger weeping about the birds killed by wind farms is also pretty rich. The are implacably opposed to any laws that improve wildlife habitat and do not care about the dozen or so human artifacts that kill 100 times as many birds.
Paul in KY
@Baud: The DPRGT is how we will call it.
rikyrah
@Roger Moore:
No lie told
Frankensteinbeck
@Sure Lurkalot:
It’s a ‘money is fungible’ and ‘prostitution is illegal’ situation. I think sex work should be legal, but since it’s not, I sympathize that a certain amount of creative accounting is required. And really, she let this old loser grunt for 5 minutes and then sat around and tried to look interested for a couple of hours while he watched TV. For $130,000. Even if the working conditions were gross, that is an incredible amount of money for a very brief amount of misery.
Matt McIrvin
@Hoodie: They’re radicalized partly because a lot of their beliefs that had a comfortable national majority anyway 30-40 years ago, now don’t. And even Christianity is visibly losing ground.
When I said I was in favor of expanded gay rights in the 1980s, it made me a weirdo and people said “fine, you get AIDS”. That’s a normal, majority position now.
When they say their beliefs are threatened, they’re not entirely wrong.
topclimber
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Maybe speedier web means better porn access and so a less grumpy group of MAGAT males? I mean, if they can shoot one gun more often maybe they shoot the other one less?
Old School
Hoodie
@EarthWindFire: Those oil and gas jobs also tend to be pretty transient. There are also probably a lot fewer smaller ranches and associated businesses. I think that the ones who do stay also tend to be on the nuttier side because, frankly, most of Wyoming outside of Jackson, Laramie and Cheyenne is either difficult to live in or downright inhospitable. My dad had an old WWII Marine Corps buddy from Idaho who used to joke about retiring in Rock Springs, which is close to living on the lunar surface.
Matt McIrvin
@Mai Naem mobile: I know self-described liberals who support the right-wing push to eliminate the 14th amendment’s birthright citizenship provision, because they read some story about birth tourism and it seemed unfair to them. It sometimes seems all too easy to drive a wedge.
Kelly
I’m off to the grocery store. Here’s Jim Faddis singing “Just an old dog” We saw him live Friday at the nearby CZBJ Hall. CZBJ was a Czech society back in the day. A local community group runs it now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gljc-7E7YaM&ab_channel=ClaireLevine
Paul in KY
@Betsy: No Anti-Woke laws passed you Woking Woker! How can they exist when their kids n stuff could be woked!!! Aieeeee!!!
karen marie
@band gap: He’s a great follow on Mastodon.
Roger Moore
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s fucking nuts. If you don’t want birth tourists, create laws to prevent birth tourism specifically*. Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.
*Which actually do exist. The US government tries to make sure pregnant tourists are scheduled to go home well before their due dates.
Kent
Liberal talk radio is like conservative stand-up comedy.
Neither of them work well and no one wants to see it.
Paul in KY
@trollhattan: My sister worked there for several months on a contract and said the wind just howled across those dismal plains. Some parts had beautiful scenery, bit the weather was nasty alot.
gvg
And what happens if these new butthurt states come into being, but populations keep changing and peoples opinions keep changing and new events and economic forces and cultural shifts keep happening like these things always have throughout history?
Of course I agree with all the reasons they are economically stupid. There is actually a dumb movement here in my county to split it because some people think the property taxes are too high and they could solve them all by splitting aways from the wasteful liberal city county government. Ignoring that there are higher costs with duplicating services and if they start with nothing they have to tax higher to build reserves because no one will want to work for them without things like government pensions which take tax money…I am pretty sure the local government made mistakes and wasted some money over multiple election cycles but the cure won’t be simple idealogical slogans that have no knowledge of real economics. These people pre picked the answer they want to be true. They don’t have facts.
Matt McIrvin
@Kent: The closest liberal counterpart to Fox News and talk radio is comedy shows. Some of which are really more like opinion/news-analysis shows that have some cussing and jokes in them for flavor.
The thing is, those shows are themselves not relentlessly partisan: they often go out of their way to attack Democrats who they think are supporting a bad policy. The robotic propaganda angle isn’t there. And it’s because liberals just don’t want that. They see virtue in criticizing their own side.
karen marie
@Gretchen: It’s not “a hard problem” unless you’re a fucking idiot.
EarthWindFire
FTFY. The reason rich people live in Jackson is because they have other homes to go to when it gets bad. Cheyenne’s wind makes Chicago’s look like a summer breeze and Laramie has three temperatures: 90, 70 and -10. My BIL came from Miami to attend UW on a fellowship and couldn’t get over how much the temperature swung. IMO that’s the primary reason the state’s population has never reached 700k.
Point taken about transients but a number of those jobs allow for settling down. And those who take them are diehard GOP.
Grumpy Old Railroader
Yeah another idea that is a retread of an old movement for Pacific States of America
EarthWindFire
Best description of Rock Springs I’ve ever heard.
Betty Cracker
@Kent: Well put!
@karen marie: In one sense I agree, but I’ve struggled with this a bit because I also know it takes a while to see what’s happening, and sometimes it’s best (in the sense that you get better outcomes) to extend some grace to people who are ignorant but aren’t trying to be dicks.
Wingnuts live in a bubble, but so do many liberals like us, i.e., people who would bother reading a site like this one. Social mores have evolved pretty quickly, and trans issues weren’t on everyone’s radar until assholes starting using them to spin people up with lies and fear for political gain.
There are people who haven’t figured all this shit out yet who might be able to see what’s happening and how they are being manipulated if you respond with logic and facts. Not everyone is acting in good faith, obviously, but some people are. If you call them fucking idiots instead, what do you gain?
Matt McIrvin
@Grumpy Old Railroader: Callenbach’s Ecotopia was a similar scenario–the Pacific Northwest secedes from the US to become an environmentalist utopian experiment. Lots of questionable aspects from a modern perspective, of course.
Matt McIrvin
@gvg: They think that with enough of a political majority in a small enough autonomous region, they can keep dissent forcibly suppressed or drive any malcontents out.
And they probably could. But they’d be left wondering why everyone is gone and everyone who’s left is dirt poor.
Kay
No one cares if the women in Idaho can’t get basic healthcare. The US is a negative outlier on health care for women and it’s barely mention, let alone addressed:
One of the reasons the US has such poor outcomes for pregnant women is because pregnant women in the US are not believed when they report pain and complications. This lack of respect for women comes directlly out of religious fundamentalism and anti abortion crusaders.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: The other one is term limits–LOTS of liberals are for term limits for all sorts of offices, to stick it to those awful politicians we can’t get rid of, and will not be dissuaded.
Nelle
@RaflW: I lived in Butte, so feel a tiny bit of remaining investment in the state. Thanks for the idea of contacting Montana Board of Tourism. I’ve now done so.
Betty Cracker
@Kay:
Wow, I knew our care was substandard, but that’s shocking.
Kay
But we can’t mention that anymore- it’s way too “woke” to note the gaping racial disparity or do anything to address it.
tommyspoon
@MisterDancer:
As someone who moved here from the East Coast eleven years ago, I can confirm those observations.
But, as a “certain generation” dies off, those attitudes are going to (mostly) die with them. If you’re under 45, especially in the Willamette Valley, you’re probably a very progressive Democrat. More progressive than the Dems in the State House, very likely.
The future for Oregon looks pretty good, from where I sit. But, I’m just a 55 year old actor/writer/punk living in the suburbs of Portland. I could be wrong. (But I’m willing to bet $$ that I’m not.)
Matt McIrvin
@Kelly: Ah, the birds killed by wind farms, the “homeless veterans” of the sky.
The Lodger
@Roger Moore: An example being the gold traders who were major investors in Air America shortly before it went bust. I wished them a lot of luck but they really, really didn’t know their customer base.
billcinsd
@Kelly: 7 of the CSA states were readmitted 20+ years before the Dakotas became states
Odie Hugh Manatee
Yeah, I’m surrounded by these separatist chucklefucks who rant while foaming at the mouth and driving around in their flag-festooned emotional support trucks. I’ve had a few of them hit me up about my opinion on it and boy do they ever melt down when I tell them that if they want the government of Idaho then they need to move there.
I was born in Boise and I will never visit that state for anything, ever again. It is a great state to drive through, though. Scenery is great but the people generally suck ass.
RaflW
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Al Franken & Air America radio tried. I don’t know the particulars of why it fizzled. We’d rather listen to music than endless jawboning about politics in the car?
There is a ‘liberal’ XM satellite station, but I have no interest in it.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
But if they’re crazy enough to be convinced to move there…
Betty Cracker
@Odie Hugh Manatee: FYI, I will be stealing “emotional support trucks” — the phrase, not the actual vehicles. ;-)
Kent
Not so unless your definition of Willamette Valley is limited to Corvallis and Eugene. How do you think Polk County, Linn County, and Yamhill County (all within Willamette Valley) voted in 2020? Hint, it wasn’t for Biden. Trump won Linn County (Albany) by 24 points. And Biden only won Marion County (which includes Salem) by 1 percentage point
It is easy to drive the 100 miles up and down I-5 between Portland and Eugene and ignore everything in between. That’s what a lot of urbanites do. But that is the actual Willamette Valley. My great grandfather pioneered a farm near Albany around 1910 and my dad grew up on the family farm my grandfather built in the 1920s and 1930s near Amity just north of Salem. I have extended family scattered all over the Willamette Valley. And they are nearly all die hard MAGA except for the few my age and younger who escaped to become educated and now mostly live in Portland or Seattle.
smedley the uncertain
@Mai Naem mobile: I seem to recall the phrase was “Don’t Californicate Arizona”. Back when I lived in AZ.
ETA: Someone beat me to it…
Ozmodion
@Scout211: The Idaho legislature largely treated the non-binding resolution as a joke. Several Dems gave sarcastic speeches in support. There are maybe half a dozen Idaho legislators who would seriously entertain assuming the part of Oregon with no water and no money.
Betsy
Great responses on the “harms”’suffered by the Oregon magats. Thanks, all who provided the local details.
Betsy
@trollhattan: What about Sheridan? I’ve heard some nice things.
StringOnAStick
Their proposed Greater Idaho maps always exclude Bend, Oregon because it is now firmly blue and getting bluer. It is also the most economically vibrant city in the eastern half of the state, but it has lib cooties so they don’t want us in their party. Good, I don’t want to be part of their grievance based politics.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@RaflW: I don’t want left wing propaganga radio. I want the Fairness Doctrine to basically eliminate right wing propaganda radio because it can’t exist when they are legally required to fairly present both sets of views along with actual facts. That used to be the law, until Reagan. If the party had prioritized re-instituting that law, it would have reduced the number of people, especially lower income blue collar and rural people, who were pulled into the right wing lunacy. It is still pulling people in and keeping their bubble securely fastened around them.
Another Scott
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: IANAL. But, this CRS report on the Fairness Doctrine from 2011 (17 page .pdf) seems to summarize the issues pretty well. And seems to me to make a decent case that it had outlived its usefulness and was actually as likely to chill debate (a station can’t be sued for not covering an issue, but can be sued for not covering both sides well enough) than promote it. Plus, government regulation of content requires “strict scrutiny” of the law, and laws rarely survive constitutional challenge on that basis.
I still think, though, that all the airwaves regulated by the FCC (including those used by satellite uplink/downlink systems, etc.) can have “public interest” requirements on their use. It might mean that their license can only get yanked at the end of a 5 year (or whatever) license period, but there needs to be consequences for propaganda outfits using our infrastructure to destroy the commonweal.
Unfortunately, how to do it under the First Amendment is a tricky, tricky problem. And Popehat reminds us that government control of speech and expression means that the first to be restricted are the marginalized and the “fringes” having new ideas…
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Betty Cracker:
Have at it! I found it from some rando on the internets and thought it accurate and hilarious…lol!
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Another Scott: I appreciate you providing that report. It is very useful. That said, radio is only part of the media landscape and I think a chilling effect on radio debate would be better than what is happening now. The fact that the most extreme crazy voices would be silenced is a feature in this case, not a bug.
Yet Another Haldane
“Bonner General” rang a bell: one of the OB-GYN docs there, Amelia Huntsberger, was featured in a recent episode of This American Life.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/792/when-to-leave/act-one-5
In the TAL tradition, it’s a heartbreaking story. By the end, Dr. Huntsberger is hanging on by the tips of her fingers. I guess they finally kicked her and her colleagues over the edge.
Gretchen
@smith: yes, parents of #2 and #3 in some sports competition accused #1 of being trans, because she was so much faster than their little darlings. It couldn’t have been a fair race if their girls lost.
Rodnchance
I like the idea of a greater Idaho because then I won’t have to drive as far to get to the Pacific Coast from Idaho.