Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

Human rights are not a matter of opinion!

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

Fucking consultants! (of the political variety)

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

The National Guard is not Batman.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Monday Evening Open Thread: ‘Having Rights, Still Popular!

Monday Evening Open Thread: ‘Having Rights, Still Popular!

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Didn’t get a chance to post this last week, but it’s still relevant. Alexandra Petri, national treasure, at the Washington Post — “Having rights still bewilderingly popular”:

Tuesday’s election results suggest that the Republican legislative strategy of “taking people’s rights away for no clear reason” was not an overwhelming success at the ballot box. Potential Childbearing Vessels on Legs contumaciously insist on continuing to see themselves as fully realized people deserving of the protection of the law, and, unfortunately, they can still vote, and some of them even have friends who vote with them.

Given the options of “people have constitutionally protected rights over their own bodies and the course of their own lives” or “people can potentially see those rights whisked away at any time without warning,” Ohio voters overwhelmingly preferred the first thing. Given the option of creating a Republican majority in their state legislature that could permit their governor to sign a 15-week abortion ban into law, Virginia voters refused, apparently indifferent to the fact that the governor would be wearing a fleece vest and speaking in soft tones when he did so!…

It has been suggested that this is why voting is such a flawed method for determining what ought to happen, and some people are working so hard to do away with it. “Let Dave decide everything on everyone else’s behalf,” while popular with Dave, tends not to be popular with everyone else. And the thing is, as Justice Samuel Alito noted in his Dobbs decision, “Women are not without electoral or political power.”

Tuesday’s election suggests that people being treated like people, rather than not, is still inexplicably popular. Who can say how long this fad will last? If through 2024, there might be more problems!

Speaking of the soothing power of sweater vests:


… In Schuyler VanValkenburg’s ouster of Republican state Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant in a district near Richmond, “parents’ rights” loomed large because the GOP incumbent sponsored a law, signed by Youngkin, purportedly aimed at sexually explicit materials in schools that facilitated a rash of book removals.

Dunnavant accused her opponent of being willing to expose kids to such materials. But VanValkenburg took this head-on, running ads attacking that law and castigating book bans, while reassuring voters that as a high school teacher, he knows “the difference one book can make for a child.”

That suggests it’s politically potent to elevate the fight into a high-minded debate over the freedom of young minds to inquire, rather than letting Republicans drag it down into a muck of grubby accusations about porn in schools and “grooming” children.

VanValkenburg said he encountered many voters who perceived the right’s culture wars as not just a gratuitous attack on schools, but a broader effort to expand government intrusion into kids’ education. “The reason the book-banning is so visceral is that it hits on both those things,” he told me…

Then there’s Danica Roem, a delegate who on Tuesday was chosen by voters as the first openly transgender state senator in the South. She defeated a Republican who campaigned on banning transgender athletes from high school sports.

“She had every trans attack thrown at her, and she still won,” said Heather Williams, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee’s interim president. “These culture-war issues that Republicans are trying to lead on — they’re not where the country is.”…

Reader Interactions

72Comments

  1. 1.

    danielx

    Jeffries: What lesson was learned in Ohio? What lesson was learned in Virginia? What lesson was learned in Kentucky?

    From the Republican side: it is absolutely critical that voters do not have a direct or indirect say in these matters!*

    *Edit: direct via referendum or indirect through Demoncrat antichrist majoroties in state legislatures!

  3. 3.

    Patricia Kayden

    I live in Maryland and was inundated with Republican ads yapping about how Democratic candidates were pro-crime or easy on criminals. Thankfully, most of those Democratic candidates won despite the fearmongering.  I was wondering how the Republican candidates could blame Democratic candidates for the so-called rise in crime while letting Governor Youngkin off the hook.

    Let’s see if Republicans run with the “crime is so bad that you have to vote for us” playbook against President Biden. It’s not going to work.

  4. 4.

    Dan B

    The Ohio legislature’s move to stop the courts from ruling on Initative 1 is being led by 3 women and one man

    Like the Handmaid’s Tale the oppression of women will be led by women.

  5. 5.

    Another Scott

    It’s always good when the fear-mongers lose.

    Meanwhile, ICYMI, … Phys.org:

    Six weeks remain for you to add your name to a microchip that will ride aboard the spacecraft as it explores Jupiter’s moon Europa.

    It’s not every day that members of the public have the chance to send their names into deep space beyond Mars, all the way to Jupiter and its moon Europa. But with NASA’s Europa Clipper, you have that opportunity: Names will ride aboard the spacecraft as it journeys 1.8 billion miles (2.6 billion kilometers) to this icy moon, where an ocean hides beneath a frozen outer shell. The deadline to join the mission’s “Message in a Bottle” campaign is only six weeks away. The campaign closes at 11:59 p.m. EST, Dec. 31, 2023.

    […]

    The chip will be attached to a metal plate engraved with the original poem “In Praise of Mystery,” written by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón to celebrate the mission. Riding on the exterior of the spacecraft, the poem and names will be like a message in a bottle as they make about 50 close flybys of the ocean world.

    […]

    To sign, read the poem, and hear Limón recite it in an animated video, click here.

    […]

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  6. 6.

    lollipopguild

    WE will take away ALL of your freedoms and then lecture you endlessly about how FREE you now are!

  7. 7.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    but, but….  Ms. M&M is no longer wearing F-me heels!

    but, but …. CRT!

    but, but…. Tik Tok!

  8. 8.

    RaflW

    I’m highly amused that Terry Schilling at Claremont, via the Washington Examiner, is still as on Nov 12th flogging Youngkin as having the ‘neutralizing’ message on abortion. Days after the VA House flipped.

    My thought: Please proceed, Claremont Institute.

  9. 9.

    smith

    @Dan B: Like the Handmaid’s Tale the oppression of women will be led by women.

    Weird. It’s almost like women are brought up in the same patriarchal culture that men are.

  10. 10.

    RaflW

    Trump and his allies saying they’ll imprison or crush their opponents goes hand-in-hand with the Ohio GOP loudly proclaiming they’ll lop off part of the state’s Supreme Court jurisdiction to torpedo a very successful and popular statewide vote.

    They’re incapable of looking around and seeing the horrified — and extremely angry and determined — looks on all our faces.

  12. 12.

    Geminid

    @RaflW: Rep. Bob No-Good (VA-Liberty U.) was saying the same thing, that Republicans lost because they did not take a hardline stand on abortion. I’m not sure he believes that though.

    Good represents what he thinks is a safe district, but the 5th CD might not be so safe by 2028.

  13. 13.

    CaseyL

    @Another Scott: Ohmigosh.  I’ve been a Big Fan of Europa ever since 2010: Odyssey Two.  Europa consistently ranks as “most likely place to find non-Earth life” (though I think finding out water is a lot more common in the solar system than we thought a few years ago) may have expanded the most-likely-to-have-life candidates) and I tear up every time I think about that.

    I totally added my name :)

  14. 14.

    Redshift

    I’ve always thought that Youngkin’s win was mostly due to lots of normies thinking things were back to normal after Trump’s defeat, and not turning out at the higher levels they did during the TFG years. I never bought all the analysis that said his DeSantis-with-a-pleasant-face-and-a-fleece-vest was some new formula for GOP victory.

  15. 15.

    Wave Function Collapse

    The normal GOP playbook seems to be: “if we lose on an issue, then double down.”

    So I’m waiting for the new proposal to be a negative 15 week abortion ban. I could explain what that means, but it is too repugnant to type.

  16. 16.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @RaflW: Ari Melber showed a scary video of Jenna Ellis tonight, in which she reported a Trump official (I didn’t catch who) saying that they planned to stay in office no matter what. They weren’t going anywhere.

  18. 18.

    New Deal democrat

    People really, ***REALLY*** don’t like it when rights they’ve taken for granted, are taken away. Especially about their own bodies.

    I hope there are similar referenda are introduced in every other State that allows them next year. And Ohio follows up with a referendum forbidding the Legislature from stripping the State Supreme Court of jurisdiction to enforce Constitutional rights.

    And national Democrats should promise to introduce a Constitutional Amendment in Congress guaranteeing bodily autonomy. It won’t get a 2/3’s majority of course, but just putting GOPers on record as being opposed would be potent.

  24. 24.

    Geminid

    @Redshift: I thought Youngkin was an attractive candidate; he had the knack of seeming all things to all people. Youngkin’s money and lack of a record allowed him to buy advertising to fill in a “blank canvas,” as veteran Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter Jeff Shapiro put it.

    Youngkin knew he had to keep abortion and gun safety in the background, and he succeeded in this. Instead he found that the “danger” of Critical Race Theory was a good way to rally tlconservative voters. I think many voters were left scratching their heads, but the Republican base heard the dogwhistle loud and clear.

    But I still think Youngkin would have come up short had Terry McAuliffe run a better campaign. And as you say, some Democratic voters were complacent; on the other hand, Republicans were hungry.

  26. 26.

    Aj

    Republicans need to know the anger. Is bone deep.

    The non reaction since june 2022 by too many ‘reasonable’ men , crickets while 9 yr old girls and their moms are thrown under the bus, and the astroturf Moms for Hitler who helped Youngkins panties waded campaign to destroy teachers and librarians and export the nonsense country wide, has created a lot of complete and utter revulsion on a large part of the public.

    If the bible thumpers want their own country and reality they will have too leave and settle elsewhere. Screw them

  29. 29.

    JoyceH

    @Dan B: I remembered the name Scavino and that he was something in the Trump administration but I couldn’t remember anything else about him, so I googled. Know where he came from? He was the manager of one of Trump’s golf courses before the first campaign! Only The Best People …

  32. 32.

    Redshift

    @Patricia Kayden: I was very pleased to see the feamongering about crime fall flat, too. It was such a bunch of BS, shriek about crime skyrocketing when it’s going down, say Dems are to blame when it’s worst in GOP areas. And the phony graphics tying candidates vaguely to “defund the police.”

    It was so obvious they weren’t trying to convince anyone, just play to outrage to try to get believers to vote. But that’s pretty much all Youngkin has done with his time in office.

  33. 33.

    smith

    Well, this was inevitable: An ethics complaint has been filed against Preacher of the House Johnson because of his shady finances.

    Among other things, the complaint notes that Speaker Johnson failed to report:

    1. Multiple trips paid for by private entities
    2. The sources of his spouse’s earned income
    3. His spouse’s ownership interests in a privately-held business.

    These trips include a vacation to Israel and a trip to speak to a fringe religious group in Kentucky.

    The complaint goes on to detail the fact that Johnson failed to report his spouse’s income and interest in an LLC, along with a number of other bank accounts of which he is an owner. All of these allegations would violate the Ethics in Government Act.

    So it turns out he’s not just a backwoods old boy who does his business by bartering chickens and barrels of corn, but yet another slimy Republican operator hiding his conflicts of interest and — probably — questionable sources of income.

  34. 34.

    karen marie

    Ronna Romney McDaniels is smoking crack when she says the goal of the GOP isn’t to criminalize all abortions.  I guess she hasn’t heard about the GOP in at least four states attempting to ban interstate travel.

    Amazing how she’s able to keep her mind so pure.

  35. 35.

    Redshift

    @Geminid:

    But I still think Youngkin would have come up short had Terry McAuliffe run a better campaign.

    I don’t disagree, though I don’t think it was as terrible as some people do. But I think he probably thought, because of the turnout during the TFG years, that Virginia was more solidly blue than it was, and electing a popular former governor would require an all out effort.

  39. 39.

    Geminid

    @smith: I wonder if even half of Johnson’s skeletons have fallen out of the closet. I saw that reporters are beginning to examine Johnson’s record as a Louisiana state legislator, and his role at Louisiana College’s law school. And while Johnson’s finances are obscure  and opaque, they will be explored as well.

  40. 40.

    smith

    @karen marie: Hmm. I’m guessing this story is just getting started. I had speculated that Johnson might have some kind of “church” in the background that he transferred all his assets to, thus living tax-free, but if it turns out to be some mystery LLC instead, it might not be quite as bad as it could be. Still, I think we’re likely to see more dirt as people keep digging.

  41. 41.

    Geminid

    @Redshift: I would not say that McAuliffe ran a terrible campaign, but I think a a better campaign might have been worth a couple points. I asked several friends if they thought McAuliffe was overconfident, and they said they thought he was. One was quite vehement about it.

    And Youngkin’s team ran a smart, efficient campaign that made the most of his retail politicking skills. I imagine the man and woman who ran Youngkin’s campaign are hot properties now in GOP campaign circles.

  42. 42.

    smith

    @Geminid: Not listing any assets on his financial interest report was a humongous red flag, one somehow missed by his keen-eyed colleagues in Congress. It makes me suspect he’s not particularly bright.

    It reminds me of commentary I’ve seen about what’s being revealed in TFG’s NY state fraud trial. I’d always thought that when billionaires committed financial fraud they used all kinds of sophisticated and complex means to hide it so it’s hard to find and hard to understand. But, nope, in this case when they didn’t like the numbers they got, they just erased them and put in ones they liked better. And then sent emails to each other about t.

  43. 43.

    gene108

    @Geminid:

    Rep. Bob No-Good (VA-Liberty U.) was saying the same thing, that Republicans lost because they did not take a hardline stand on abortion. I’m not sure he believes that though.

    Conventional wisdom among Republicans is George W. Bush failed, because he was too liberal.

    The Republican brand of Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed by Republicans’ lack of devotion to true Conservatism.

  44. 44.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Frankensteinbeck: On Titan, water ice plays the role of rock and the sea is methane and ethane. The chemistry would have to be really weird.

    (edit: oh, you’re talking about a water ocean under the surface! Would be hard to access…)

    Enceladus, though, that’s like a mini-Europa, with a tidal heat source melting water under the ice, and it’s got geysers venting out of the south pole.

  45. 45.

    Geminid

    @gene108: I looked at Good’s remarks as part of an intra-party battle. Which is fine with me; the more they have to fight about the better.

  46. 46.

    rikyrah

    Body autonomy….

    Important to half the population…..

    Who cudda  known?🙄🙄🤔🤔

     

    I get mad on GP…

     

    And, then when I think about Peanut having fewer rights than I had at her age..

    The anger turns to rage😠😠

  48. 48.

    Scout211

    This is scary.

    The Chinese government has built up the world’s largest known online disinformation operation and is using it to harass US residents, politicians, and businesses—at times threatening its targets with violence, a CNN review of court documents and public disclosures by social media companies has found.

    The onslaught of attacks – often of a vile and deeply personal nature – is part of a well-organized, increasingly brazen Chinese government intimidation campaign targeting people in the United States, documents show.

    The US State Department says the tactics are part of a broader multi-billion-dollar effort to shape the world’s information environment and silence critics of Beijing that has expanded under President Xi Jinping. On Wednesday, President Biden is due to meet Xi at a summit in San Francisco.

    Victims face a barrage of tens of thousands of social media posts that call them traitors, dogs, and racist and homophobic slurs. They say it’s all part of an effort to drive them into a state of constant fear and paranoia.

    Often, these victims don’t know where to turn. Some have spoken to law enforcement, including the FBI – but little has been done. While tech and social media companies have shut down thousands of accounts targeting these victims, they’re outpaced by a slew of new accounts emerging virtually every day.

    Known as “Spamouflage” or “Dragonbridge,” the network’s hundreds of thousands of accounts spread across every major social media platform have not only harassed Americans who have criticized the Chinese Communist Party, but have also sought to discredit US politicians, disparage American companies at odds with China’s interests and hijack online conversations around the globe that could portray the CCP in a negative light.
    Private researchers have tracked the network since its discovery more than four years ago, but only in recent months have federal prosecutors and Facebook’s parent company Meta publicly concluded that the operation has ties to Chinese police.

    Meta announced in August it had taken down a cluster of nearly 8,000 accounts attributed to this group in the second quarter of 2023 alone. Google, which owns YouTube, told CNN it had shut down more than 100,000 associated accounts in recent years, while X, formerly known as Twitter, has blocked hundreds of thousands of China “state-backed” or “state-linked” accounts, according to company blogs.

    Still, given the relatively low cost of such operations, experts who monitor disinformation warn the Chinese government will continue to use these tactics to try to bend online discussions closer to the CCP’s preferred narrative, which frequently entails trying to undermine the US and democratic values.

    . . .

    And while Meta detected posts from various regions in China, the company and other researchers have found centralized coordination that relentlessly pushed identical messages across multiple social media platforms, sometimes repeatedly insulting the same individuals who have questioned the Chinese government.

    One of those individuals is Jiayang Fan, a journalist for The New Yorker who told CNN she began facing harassment by the network when she covered pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019.

  50. 50.

    Jeffro

    Sargent is right: the blessed “parents’ rights” movement has fizzled completely.

    That’s for two reasons:

    1. It’s a 60/40 (or better) center-left country when it comes to culture war issues.  And even some of the ’40’ are tired of it.
    2. Everyone, on both sides, knows that the culture-war psychos won’t quit at just Small Step A or Somewhat Reasonable Request B.  They’re in it to crush their enemies (or worse) and we all know it.
  51. 51.

    Bill Arnold

    @JoyceH:

    I remembered the name Scavino and that he was something in the Trump administration

    He was also one of Trump’s main links to the RW social media underground/swamps. Maybe still is. Many suspect that he wrote some of Trump’s tweets prior to 2021 and may write some of the Truth Social “Truths”. He was one of the few in the administration who would sometimes wear a mask, which was interesting; that may mean that he understands and respects probability and reality.

  52. 52.

    Jeffro

    @Geminid:Good represents what he thinks is a safe district, but the 5th CD might not be so safe by 2028.

    I think you might be on to something.  “Do-Nothing Bob” and “Psycho Bob” have that certain ring to them.

    (and this area’s turning bluer all the time – look at what happened to Meg Scalia Bryce’s campaign for school board!  BLOWOUT)

  53. 53.

    Bill Arnold

    @smith:

    But, nope, in this case when they didn’t like the numbers they got, they just erased them and put in ones they liked better. And then sent emails to each other about it.

    D.J. Trump’s profit margin in the NY real estate business was bulked up by often simply not paying contractors, and then if sued, settling for a small fraction of the contracted amount.

  54. 54.

    Miss Bianca

    @Jeffro: The parents’ rights movement hasn’t fizzled here. Yet.

    BUT – of the six Board of Education candidates who ran, the three I found least objectionable (therefore, voted for) got elected. Not a ringing un-endorsement of Batshitzania, but as close as it’s going to get here. So…yay? Yay-ish?

  56. 56.

    Anoniminous

    @Geminid: ​
     

    Youngkin knew he had to keep abortion and gun safety in the background, and he succeeded in this. Instead he found that the “danger” of Critical Race Theory was a good way to rally conservative voters

    Racism always sells to the majority of white southerners.

  61. 61.

    catclub

    @smith: one somehow missed by his keen-eyed colleagues in Congress. It makes me suspect he’s not particularly bright.

     

    I bet there are many backbench GOP reps who have refused to fill out the financial assets form and assumed no one cares about them ( and they are sovereign citizens who only have to report to a constitutional sheriff.)  One just happened to get elected Speaker.

  62. 62.

    BellyCat

    @Bill Arnold: Truth. Friend of mine, an architect involved in a Trump Casino in NJ, told me this in the 90’s. Ruined lots of honest contractors. I knew he was a scam artist long ago.

  63. 63.

    Suzanne

    I just had this supremely weird work dinner. We’ve been working from the client’s office all day, and we’re all staying at the same hotel. So we all went out for dinner — six of us, including our managing principal. Anyway, one of my coworkers — in his mid-40s — announces that his girlfriend is pregnant. And it was an accident. And they were using two forms of protection and she got pregnant anyway. And now he needs to figure out where they’re all going to live (him, the girlfriend, the baby, her two kids, and his two kids).

    It was awkward.

  66. 66.

    Princess

    @Scout211: I have a friend who as personally targeted by this and yes, it is scary. Interestingly on social media, the bots used the language of the very online left to attack her, calling her a white supremacist colonialist etc.

  67. 67.

    Jeffro

    @Suzanne: the really awkward part is when he figures out the odds of two forms of protection failing here.  Ahem.

    But anyway, I hope dinner was good otherwise?

  68. 68.

    Scout211

    @smith: It’s good that there is a complaint now filed against Johnson.

    I’m confident that the GOP controlled House will investigate that complaint as quickly as the complaints that have been filed against Matt Gaetz and George Santos.

  70. 70.

    VFX Lurker

    @rikyrah:

    Body autonomy….

    Important to half the population…..

    Who cudda  known?🙄🙄🤔🤔

     

    I get mad on GP…

     

    And, then when I think about Peanut having fewer rights than I had at her age..

    The anger turns to rage😠😠

    Same here. I don’t have kids, but my high school friends now have teenagers of their own. I want my friends’ kids to have more than what we had at their age, not less.

    I will write ten more Postcards to Voters tonight.

  72. 72.

    Bupalos

    Now granted Kentucky is pretty darn red,  but it isn’t that close to the reddest, and in general Dems really have to stop rhetorically inflating how irredeemable particular states are. I hear it constantly, applied to Ohio, Missouri, South Carolina, Iowa, even Texas- though I guess that one is just kind of legacy.

    At the very least add “right now” and remind people these things can and do change.

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