It’s a good thing RatF*cker Jr loves skiing, cuz he’s sliding downhill at great speed…
You are not your uncle.https://t.co/Qrn6waBuX3
— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) February 12, 2024
Can we please clear out the peanut gallery now? This is too important an election in too important a time in history for extraneous nonsense from its denizens. Dean Phillips is joining the Biden Is Past His Sell-By Date chorale. I don’t know what Cornel West is doing, but he’s doing it very quietly, and we’ve officially lost Marianne Williamson to the ineffable charms of the Field of Love, where she doesn’t have to pretend to enjoy going to Pizza Ranch in the middle of winter. That leaves us with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who managed to make the Super Bowl ever more of a freak show than it ordinarily is. I was dozing through a very uneventful first half when I was transported back to the winter of 1960. I felt a sudden urge to gobble some Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy and wash it down with a gallon of Moxie…
The extended Kennedy clan—and there is no other political clan that is quite so extended as the Kennedys—immediately went to DEFCON 1. The reaction was so instantly negative that the alleged candidate already has distanced himself from it, since it was merely the product of a PAC affiliated with his campaign…
Two hours apart lol pic.twitter.com/xSu3yvtPVB
— Tim (@tmbhmltn) February 12, 2024
Bought and paid for by Trump’s largest donor, Tim Mellon. That $15 million isn’t spending itself. pic.twitter.com/YXsZUO6hiI
— Lis Smith (@Lis_Smith) February 12, 2024
However, from what I’m seeing on social media — admittedly, not an expansive view — right now it’s the MAGAts complaining that RFK Jr stealing votes from their candidate, because he’s been pushing all their favorite conspiracy theories. (Bill Gates & the WHO want to poison you with nanobot vaccines in order to impose a New World Order! You will be forced to abandon your lovely suburban gated community to live in a Blackrock-owned apartment block, surrounded by illegals & worse!) So that cute lil Superbowl ad may have backfired nastily along multiple axes.
Perot got on the ballot in all 50 states. So far RFK Jr has gotten on the ballot in Utah. He’s having such a hard time getting on state ballots that he’s begun talking about trying to get the Libertarian Party nomination.
Cornel West may not get on any ballots. https://t.co/z0fakTzXEV
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) January 31, 2024
Also, there’s the problem that, as an ‘Independent’, RFK Jr has to qualify for ballot access without a free ride. His team has been sucking up to the Libertarians, but even they find his arguments dubious. And his superPAC’s methods for collecting signatures is already being litigated. (It ain’t easy, which is among the reasons we have only two major political parties.)
i thought this was the pitchbot for a moment. what a stupid ass timeline we live in. https://t.co/RjjBQH0op2
— Jean-Michel Connard (@torriangray) February 2, 2024
When RFK's campaign began, I called it a cynical cash grab. Now he's confirming it. https://t.co/g6CHPsvxOJ
— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) February 13, 2024
Remember, social media peeps: Sharing is caring!
And guess who is funding it….(including that Super Bowl ad) Trump megadonors. I explained tonight on the show (all below) https://t.co/QcP9KBX2so
— Jen Psaki (@jrpsaki) February 13, 2024
Finally, a reminder that chemical & surgical enhancements are not necessarily improvements…
MSNBC just unearthed footage of RFK Jr. from 2000 admitting that a third party candidate only serves to help Republicans win.
And then they confronted him on his hypocrisy. pic.twitter.com/rub0uNGCP3
— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) February 7, 2024
eclare
I couldn’t get the last tweet to play, but I’m glad someone is exposing RFK Jr’s hypocrisy. And that Jen is following the money. Hopefully these stories will gather more steam.
sab
My husband went to my grocery yesterday to pickup an Rx for his daughter at their pharmacy, and he got to sign Ohio’s latest anti-gerrymandering petition. Here’s hoping Yost lets this one onto the ballot.
My grocery is owned by old fashioned Republicans like my parents were. The party of Lincoln.
Arclite
Jen Psaki for president. Someday.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
He’s no Jack Kennedy
/Bentsen
Odie Hugh Manatee
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
More like a jackoff. IMO he abuses the Kennedy name/legacy for the attention and $$$ it brings in. He is in love with the attention and the sound of his own voice. Possibly some drain bamage there from drug abuse too.
Who knew that the R in his name stood for Ratfucker?
sab
@sab: They are real estate magnates around here and they always give the Democrats short term leases for their campaign offices. Lincoln Republicans. A nearly extinct species.
NotMax
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Hell, he’s no Tom Kennedy.
;)
Betty Cracker
So, this bit of news is so stupid that at first I thought it was a hoax and checked the calendar to make sure it wasn’t April 1st:
Good lord. There’s a clip of him getting booed during the announcement over at Threads.
Tony Jay
When the main funding source of your ‘progressive’ candidate is conservative money, you haven’t got a progressive candidate, you’ve got a conservative cuckoo.
True in the US, true in the UK, where Keir Starmer’s candidacy for Labour leader was funded by so many corporate donors he kept his donor list secret while promising a laundry list of centre-left policies. Now ‘his’ Party is actively shrinking the membership base while welcoming the donations of lifelong Tory supporters to make up the funding shortfall, and denying that those donors want anything for their money except the very best future for all God’s boysies and girlsies.
It’s always follow the money.
NotMax
@Betty Cracker
From downstairs, also at the AP.
sab
@Tony Jay: I think our system is better than yours, but I am sure Aussie Sheila will disabuse me later.
I actually love her comments. We need different perspectives from people under different forms of democracy.
NotMax
@sab
Comments, yes. Harangues, no.
Tony Jay
@sab:
Your system has a lot of dispersed power and protections for candidates who actually do the hard work of running for City dogcatcher and posts northward. The end effect seems to be that the genuine ideological mood of the national Party and the people who make it up has to be taken into account by the people seeking to lead it. Biden obviously gets that and responds to it, Dean Phillips and Really Frigging Kooky III very much do not. That’s why the ratfuckers who pretend to be ‘the voice of the Left’ try so hard to shit in the communal drinking bowl, they’re terrified of progressive voters getting excited by the realisation that the Democratic Party is as solidly Leftwing on most issues as it’s ever been and their opinions are being listened to.
Over here we’ve had the scumfroth who make up Labour Together rip up the old rules for how Labour works as a Party to concentrate all power and the ability to gain that power in their own hands, while the same Media that spent 2016-19 screaming about non-existent ‘Stalinist intolerance’ in Labour has conveniently looked the other way and pretended it’s not happening.
Celebrate what you’ve got. I guess.
NotMax
Cute story.
Party on Saturday celebrating both Mom’s 96th and my step-sister’s mother-in-law’s 100th.
One guest offered to bring a special cake. As told to me he went to the bakery where it had been ordered to pick it up and was asked, “Do you want birthday candles with that?”
‘”Yes, 100.”
(stunned, fazed look from the clerk)
“On second thought, I’ll be needing 196.”
Aussie Sheila
@Tony Jay:
Oh hi! Our political donation system requires transparency of donations above a piddling amount (around $2500 per election year) and have to be notified to our Electoral Commission. However there are many ways to skin that cat as PWC,the Mining industry and others know.
Campaign finance regulation and laws need a thorough overhaul here and plenty are calling for it.
However from my experience social democratic parties always run after corporate finance, because it is big, reliable, and comes in when the Party needs it most in return for real and perceived influence.
For Parties like the ALP and UK Labour, funding from unions which provides both good money, and most importantly boots on the ground that Tories can’t match in hand to hand combat in important seats, corporate funding is always held up to be the equivalent of ‘union funding’ by conservative arseholes.
In my view, the corruption of western democracies by corporate and worse, foreign government funding, is so serious, that I believe absolute, immediate day to day updating on money donations be published for every political party from every donor, be they individuals like me or huge corporate donors or trade unions for that matter.
The US is simply awash in money, and since the USSC has decreed that money equals speech, there is probably nothing that can be done. But in the UK and Australia plenty can be done, and should.
What Conservatives have always hated about the Australian trade union movement is not so much the money they donate, which is probably peanuts compared to what big business and crime gives conservatives, it’s the boots on the ground.
In big elections, trade unions here turn out people to do the kind of electioneering that even the pols running have no idea how to do.
The Conservatives here fear the mobilising and persuading skills our movement together with preferential voting which permits unions to fuck with Conservatives in a lot of circumstances. And that’s why every generation they are ready with legislation to kills us. And every time they fail.
Pete Downunder
@Aussie Sheila: Agree totally about reform necessary in Aussie disclosure laws, the big change needed is real time reporting. As it stands donations are disclosed months or even a year after the election. I also agree about boots on the ground. The Green Party here is a sensible left party and refuses corporate donations. What it lacks in money it makes up for by an energetic ground game. A lot of doors get knocked and phones rung. It is making inroads and while not in sufficient numbers to hold government, it has enough seats to have bargaining power.
Betty Cracker
@NotMax: 196 candles! Someone better disable the fire alarms!
Aussie Sheila
@Tony Jay:
I really think the problem with UK Labour is that like everything in the UK it is too centralised in Westminster. Having six State governments and two Territories with their own constitutional powers gives Australian Labor more room to move, experiment and regroup if a loss is experienced at federal level.
While I agree with your general disdain for the Starmer/Reeves adenoidally choked partnership, part of the problem from here appears to be their almost stalinist grip on a Party that is too centralised for its own good.
While I think the US Constitutional dispersal of political power is designed to empower local elites at the expense of popular democracy, too much centralisation is also a bad thing. UK politics never seems to rise above what is happening in a few square miles of London, to the detriment of your regions and towns and cities away from the SE.
Maybe political reform should be the key socialist reform for the next decade. Economic reform appears impossible unless and until people can actually and meaningfully vote for it.
NotMax
@Betty Cracker
“Continued on next cake.”
:)
Aussie Sheila
@Pete Downunder:
Yes. While I would never join the Greens and only vote for them in select Upper House/Senate elections, our preferential voting system provides an effective check on the inevitable love fest that develops between centre left parties and Capital. In my opinion, the best and only defence against the kind of opportunism that such parties are prey to all over the world, is a free, democratic and militant trade union movement, together with an honest and transparent and preferential electoral voting system that has rigorous donation reporting standards.
Aussie Sheila
@Aussie Sheila:
Needless to say, donation reform is not top of the pops atm in the ALP. Nevertheless, it’s important, and so long as the donations in kind that the TU movement provides in such abundance is preserved, I am firmly in favour of root and branch reform, as are many many rank and file unionists and ALP members.
p.a.
@Betty Cracker:
ex-President K-Tel. ex-President Ronco. ex-President Popeil. (Youngs, non-US born current residents, foreigners may not get the references.)
Baud
@p.a.:
The New Jack Boots.
bjacques
That @capitolhunters thread from Adam’s Ukraine thread last night was a doozy, and it’s worth checking out the included article from The Point about Walter Isaacson’s serial journalistic malpractice:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1758549069943783429.html
Here it is as a separate link:
https://thepointmag.com/criticism/very-ordinary-men/
Anyway, among Dominionists, is adopting children of color a thing? Amy Boney Carrot and her husband did the same, and I get a distinct whiff of “Children of Ham” from that, especially when the children are posed almost as domestic servants and/or not legally adopted. Or exploited outright as in “Blind Side”. Then there were the American, Canadian, and Australian policies towards indigenous children.
But I doubt Johnson and Gaetz would have felt any need to retcon their family histories if it were only that, and Gaetz never struck me as being especially religious anyway.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Worst Molly Ringwald remake ever.
Geminid
Those Trump sneakers look nasty.
Baud
@Geminid:
They don’t even match the red caps.
Feathers
@Betty Cracker: Brief fantasy of creating knockoffs and distributing them to the homeless.
Recognizing this would be a wonderful moment in a comic book movie and terrible IRL.
LiminalOwl
@p.a.:
So they include lifts? And a dirty diaper?
(Are they actually gold lamé? The pictures I’ve seen look like patent leather, a distinctly different material. And IMO a much better TRUMPery symbol.)
Anne Laurie
Trump approved the style because it reminds him of a third-rate knockoff comic book character called ‘Captain USA’ or ‘Hero Man’. He wouldn’t wear them himself, but he could visualize a graphic novel about the extended TFG Universe where the Donald stand-in wears them.
Princess
@bjacques: Among Christians of various denominations adopting Black and brown kids is a thing. These two weren’t adopted though. Can’t help but notice that both are quite attractive. The whole thing stinks but you won’t get the truth by interviewing the “kids”. It will take real digging.
p.a.
I wouldn’t expect tRump to know, but his marketing team is really falling short by not marketing camo-design tRump shit and calling it “tactical”. The intertubes are full of “tactical” shit for the mooyuks. Tactical knives. Tactical belt buckles. Tactical
fannybutt packs (cleaned up for our Albion-ites). Tactical chewing gum (hides human scent AND hydrates!)Can’t live without tRump tactical digital-camo man-girdle.
Ken
Making the reasonably safe assumption that he’s getting these from some Asian sweatshop for under $10 a pair, he only has to sell about 1,200,000 pairs in the next month to get the bond money for the fraud ruling.
different-church-lady
@Betty Cracker: I’m suddenly wondering if a Trump nomination is the best thing we could have to drive turnout. Yeah, “nobody likes Joe” but hardly anyone hates him like people hate Trump, and the more Trump there is the more his haters will turn out.
Wondering. ..
different-church-lady
@Ken: This is Trump: it’s probably $399 for each shoe.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Laces are extra.
different-church-lady
@NotMax: For those kinds of numbers it’s better to use Roman candles.
RevRick
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Who really cares about the Kennedy’s any more? The only people alive when they were a ‘thing’ are either of the Silent or Boomer generations. The name Kennedy doesn’t have the cachet it had back in the 60s anymore.
Frankensteinbeck
@bjacques:
There is a racist as Hell ‘show charity by rescuing children from their primitive society’ tradition. The child itself can never be a full member of the community, and God forbid he/she marry, but it’s a prestigious display of generosity for the parent.
Ken
@Baud: I think the laces are decorative. In the pictures, the “shoe” looks like a soft-sided slipper, complete with the stretch fabric around the ankle.
RevRick
Third-party candidates in our system are just plain stupid. Even taking RFK3’s assertion that he’s running to “heal the divisions “ is a laughable claim. All you have to do is game out a possible win, and you see what a dead-end a vote for a third party really is.
*RFK3 wins… and he is confronted with a Congress full of Democrats and Republicans. Since he defeated the preferred candidates of their respective parties, neither has any intention of supporting him. So, in order to get anything done, he would have to align himself with one or the other. Which renders absurd the claim of healing the divisions in the first place.
hueyplong
It’s usually the case that anyone big on “never surrender” has a history of doing so (1865) or is expected to do so at some point in the relatively near future.
Trump adopting that phraseology is a really, really good sign.
Geminid
@different-church-lady: Virginia Democrats and Republicans alike said Trump was a potent GOTV force for Democrats from 2017 to 2020. During that period, Democrats here elected a Governor by 7 points after barely winning in 2013, flipped 3 House seats in the 2018 midterms, and flipped both houses of the General Assembly.
Trump also may have suppressed the Republican vote. At least, voting roll analysis of Youngkin’s 2021 win found that Republican-heavy precincts outperformed their turnout in the 2020 presidential race, and that accounted for part of the 12-point swing from Biden to Youngkin.
Betty Cracker
@different-church-lady: Sounds about right. There are enclaves (this blog, for instance) where people are more motivated to vote FOR Biden than AGAINST Trump, but it’s an exception.
@bjacques: Thanks for the link to The Point article about the Musk biography. That guy gets it.
Betty Cracker
@hueyplong: The Ron DeSantis 2024 slogan was “never back down,” another data point to support your theory. Also, IIRC, when Trump first started peddling “Never Surrender” merch, it featured his mugshot, which was taken after he, ah, surrendered at the Fulton County Jail.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Betty Cracker: I like Biden, but I really don’t want Trump.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I’m not sure this is technically true. About 40% of the vote for either party is locked in out of habit and tradition. These days, that number may be as high as 45%. I guess what motivates the remaining 10-20% is debatable. But Trump probably drives turn out on both sides so it could be a wash.
I’m pretty disillusioned with liberal Democrats, however. Too many sourpusses for what may be the best four years for us since the 1960s. It makes me care less.
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Biden has been wonderful IMHO, but we have many wonderful people waiting in the wings. Biden isn’t indispensable in the way that Trump is a singular threat.
Soprano2
@bjacques: There is a thing where they “adopt” non- white children but treat them more like servants than adopted children. Someone here, maybe Schrodinger’s cat, has talked about it before. She thinks that’s what Barrett’s adopted black kids are. There’s a word for its, but I can’t remember it.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I think you’re right that a certain percentage is locked in, and it’s hard to predict what motivates the unaffiliated. Trump and Biden are about equally unpopular according to polls, but my sense is Trump has a lower ceiling. I guess we’ll find out.
As for Democrats being sourpusses, I agree Biden’s accomplishments are underrated, but I don’t think that’s set in stone for all eternity. It’s such a weird time in our history. We’re still processing the mass PTSD of the pandemic, coming to grips with approximately 40% or so of our fellow citizens embracing fascism, etc. It’s a lot.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I’m not saying your wrong, but I am not as generous as you. A personal quality of mine. Some would say a failing.
frosty
I’ve seen this in the US. In 2022 I drove to Allentown PA to canvass instead of my semi-rural red county. We met at the IBEW hall to get our walk sheets and info. Way the hell more organized than my county Democrats.
My understanding is that PADEMs are so bad at GOTV because they relied on the unions for decades and they’re at a loss to figure it out themselves.
The Republicans use their churches. Violating the Constitution, but what else is new?
Baud
@frosty:
Political parties using churches does not violate the constitution.
Suzanne
@bjacques:
There’s a swath of evangelicals for whom it is absolutely A Thing. It’s seen as rescuing them from godlessness. I had some neighbors in AZ who were into it. David French has a daughter adopted from Ethiopia.
I will also note that infertility (and, I guess, invirility) is more common than many people really think, and there are lots of white couples that can’t have children. Private adoption is incredibly expensive and growing more and more rare…. because fewer white girls are getting “into trouble” (THANKS, BIRTH CONTROL) and if they are, they’re keeping their babies. And domestic adoption, if you’re not doing private, requires being a foster parent first. Lots of people don’t want to do that. (I have a number of friends who adopted children after being their foster parents, and it is a tough road. They usually adopted their kids when they were preschool or elementary school age, and often had some traumas to work through. I understand why this is hard.)
So, for rich infertile couples, who want infants, they go the international route. So they often adopt babies from “the third world” and raise them in “good Christian homes” and it’s a way of showing off both your piety and your wealth/worldliness simultaneously. Sometimes, the social systems in some of these other countries are shady as fuck, and human trafficking is rampant. Straight-up kidnapping babies from their families who want them is a thing that happens.
A part of the abortion debate that doesn’t get talked about enough, IMHO, is how some Christians want to ban abortion so there are more children in need of adoption by rich couples. Amy Coney Barrett’s mask slipped when she talked about the “domestic supply” of infants.
HinTN
@Baud:
Exactly right and he is setting the table for the next generation in a way I haven’t seen in my voting lifetime. Maybe it’s just finally that time but he’s fully participating.
frosty
When we were in Bolivia adopting our second son there was a couple adopting a 13-year old girl. The wife wore a WWJD T-shirt and I distinctly got this vibe from them. We wanted a family, they wanted to be saints rescuing a poor kid.
Turned out they couldn’t manage it and the girl was adopted by their adoption coordinator in the states a year or so later.
frosty
@Baud: OK, thanks for the clarification. I’ve read people complaining that touting candidates from the pulpit violated the first amendment.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: “The sourpusses you shall always have with you.”
But the six or seven Democrats I know are basically all happy cats. That’s a small sample, but I don’t think my friends are all that unusual.
Suzanne
@frosty: So I had some white neighbors in AZ (evangelical, he was older and on his second marriage) who had adopted a child through foster care, and they wanted to do it again. So they had two girls placed with them who were half-siblings, and neither of them were white. So I was talking to them one day, and they said that the two girls were no longer with them. I expressed my regret to them, because I know they cared about the girls, and the father responded, “We didn’t get to keep them because we’re white!”. Then the mom chimed in that a biological family member of both girls had became available to take them, so that’s where they went. It had nothing to do with being white. It was just….. there’s a preference to keep children amongst their biological families, if possible, and that’s what happened.
Honestly, I was really upset by this whole interaction and I tried really hard to not speak to them after that.
Falling Diphthong
Last I checked, Kennedy pulled support from Trump. Democrats find him an annoying twit, but Republicans are intrigued by his conspiracy theories. (Specifically, this was a Quinnipiac poll released shortly after the media was shocked to discover that RFKJ was an anti-semitic conspiracy theorist, like this was an unusual twist they could not have seen coming.) If you want to elect a conspiracy theorist with no experience in government who isn’t Trump, then RFK is your guy. To the media’s apparent surprise, that last sentence does not describe Democrats.
sab
@Baud: It does violate their tax exempt status. This is only enforced against black churches and leftish organizations. Planned Parenthood local chapters are extremely paranoid about this.
Dog Mom
Hmmm, what marketing genius thought selling a perfume would be good after the recent declarations of his odiferousness?
Starfish
@different-church-lady: I think that this is going to be the driving energy of the election. I really hate this type of election year.
LiminalOwl
@Suzanne:
THIS. Repeating for emphasis, and thank you for naming it.
Also, it’s unfortunately not just Evangelicals. I used to know a Black adoptee whose adoptive parents were white liberal Quakers. She had stories to tell, about the different treatment she and her sister (also Black, also adopted) received, compared to the couple’s “real” children.
LiminalOwl
@sab: Youbeat me to it: not the Constitution, but the tax law.
(And happy birthday! I didn’t say it in the previous thread because you’d said you don’t like birthdays, but your response to greetings there suggested it won’t offend. Best wishes.)
SFAW
@p.a.:
Sorry for picking nits, but: Ron Popeil invented a lot of the stuff he pushed on TV, he wasn’t a con man. Yeah, I’ve made fun of the various products, the ads, etc., but I still respect him for his actual work.
sab
@LiminalOwl: Thanks.
Suzanne
@LiminalOwl: So I don’t think anybody really understands how common infertility is, because it’s really a private medical issue. But it underscores a lot of this issue. (I will note that I don’t even like just calling it “infertility” because biological females are fertile and biological males are virile, and referring to it as “infertility” is not necessarily accurate and it of course linguistically ascribes the issue solely to bio females.)
Teenage pregnancy has absolutely plummeted in the last few decades thanks to availability of birth control, and there’s a lot less stigma now than there used to be about single parenthood. So there are fewer infants being placed for adoption relative to a few decades ago. This is one of the big social changes since the early 70s, since Roe, and it does not take much digging in gross corners of the conservative internet before you come to people saying that we need to ban abortion and then take those babies and give them to Christian families who are unable to have biological children. Which, again, is more common than people realize.
I want to note that I think interracial adoption can be really positive for children and parents. I have friends who are interracial adoptees and I have friends who have adopted children of different races, Some went the adoption route because they had medical struggles, some because they were single parents going it alone, some because they felt like it is an ethical calling (and not religious in nature). It’s the “saving the savages” (and yes, I have heard it called that) angle that I have an issue with, not adoption in general.
LiminalOwl
@Suzanne: And I have somewhat mixed feelings about adoption, but didn’t mean to suggest that adoption is universally bad—only that the Evangelicals, while often the majority and most obnoxious of adoptive parents, are not the only problematic ones.
(And, for what it’s worth, I have at least one non-religious family member who adopted because of infertility. Further, I too was unable to bear children—and wished to, or to adopt, but other personal circumstances made adoption unadvisable.)
Suzanne
@LiminalOwl: These are some of the social changes since the early 70s that the conservatives are losing their shit about:
1) The birth rate has declined significantly and average age of first childbirth and marriage is going up. Teen pregnancy has gone off an absolute cliff.
2) Women are getting more education and making more money relative to men than they used to.
3) Marriage rates are going down and assortative mating via education is going up…. so marriage is becoming more like a “capstone” in life for people with college educations, after they establish themselves in careers and are making some money. And they often live together for a while first, because (most) people are less weird about premarital sex and also about couples opting not to have children. (Divorce rates seem to be going down, too.)
The social conservatives hate all of this. They want people to get married young, even if that’s because they fooled around before marriage and had an oops pregnancy, so they can start popping those kids out. (They are, of course, also in favor of older men with younger women, but never the inverse.) And, of course, they want that division of labor…. men work that job and make the money, while women stay home with those kids and keep the house. Remember that meme that went around a year or two ago about “men want debt-free virgins”?
There’s a lot of blah blah blah in SoCon internet circles about how feminism has convinced women that it’s empowering to not have children but that’s a lie, that capitalism has convinced women that they need their own money and education but that’s also a lie. It all comes back to control. It lays bare the fact that men used to have lot more control/leverage over women and they have lost a good portion of that.
I am reminded of a tweet I read some months ago commenting on how it is a sitcom trope to have a kind of paunchy-looking dude with a hot wife. The tweet was about how “they show us to this on TV in order to make it more likely to happen in real life”. It’s 110% true. There’s a lot of people who are very interested in having women to control, and I see it everywhere.
frosty
@Suzanne: That was our experience. At the time, the wait for a healthy* white infant was two or three times longer and we didn’t want to wait.
We’re happy we did it. We saw parts of the world we would never have seen. We have two young men who love us and who we love dearly. I can’t believe how lucky we’ve been.
*Healthy is a crapshoot. You don’t know and can’t tell at infancy. Our healthy infant was dyslexic. Our healthy toddler was ADD and probably malnourished. We got them through those challenges.
sab
@LiminalOwl: Much of my family is adopted. My father was an only child because his mother had a difficult labor so his father decided no more pregnancies. So they adopted a little girl during the Depression. Adoption was easy then. But her mother treated her badly although her father and brother adored her.
My other cousins were both adopted. My uncle and aunt were on a waiting list for kids for almost ten years, and just barely missed the age 40 cutoff. They were able to adopt two kids.
One of my nieces is in a mixed race marriage (yikes that sounds odd because they are just a normal happy couple.)
They adopted locally in an open adoption (they know the birth mother). They got the first baby before the home inspection. The baby was at her own baby shower. Later they adopted her baby brother. The birth mother raised her first three but felt overwhelmed by the next four. Open adoption so everybody knows everybody. Kids in four different households..
My oldest stepdaughter was adopted out of foster care. Her birth mother was in a nursing home with MS. Her adoptive mother adopted her because she wanted a girl, and within two years tried to return her. Broke up her marriage. The daughter is the oldest child but also the last to arrive. She is age 40 now but still my husband’s only baby girl.
I have my own fertility issues so I am grateful for her and her daughter. My stepsons have their own mother, but she is all mine.
DesertFriar
@NotMax:
Just 8 candles if you do it in binary:
iioooioo
where i are lite candles and o are unlit.
Juju
@Soprano2: Indentured servitude?
Thor Heyerdahl
K-Tel. The pride of Winnipeg and it’s still in operation.
Paul in KY
@sab: Ranked voting is the most awesome, bestest, oi, oi, oi!
Paul in KY
@RevRick: When Pres. Kennedy was assassinated, we were over in France at Chateau Roux AFB. I was 4 and what I remember about that day was that everybody (adults) were crying. Men and women.
Paul in KY
@Baud: I love Pres. Biden, but I loathe loathe loathe TFG. So it would be more against TFG. In fact, if FDR was running on the Democratic ticket, it would still be more against that scumbag.
Ruviana
The Child Catchers by Kathryn Joyce is a book about the rise in international adoptions by evangelicals. It’s become kind of a “ministry”.
planetjanet
Just got back from voting in the Virginia primary and was happy to see that Kennedy was not on the ballot.
RevRick
@Paul in KY: I was in 9th grade biology class and as soon as word came, we were dismissed. What I recall was the silent gloom that descended on everything.
Ruckus
@RevRick:
As someone early in the boomer generation you are discussing I will just say that the current Kennedy on political display is NOTHING like the previous generations. NOTHING. His name is his only connection. He’s not that much younger than me but NONE of the previous generation has seemed to rub off on him. NONE. Sure they had their faults but that seems like the only part, other than a family name that he’s inherited. And even there he’s seemed to make every one of their possible faults a major point of his life and political ambition. Some will vote for him because of his name, but anyone who listens to him for more than 20 seconds and heard the previous generations speak will easily see that he inherited the name and absolutely nothing else.
Ruckus
@RevRick:
I was in tenth grade and when it happened we were assembled in the auditorium and told about it and a silence fell over the room and it stayed silent for quite a while. I seem to recall that we were sent home after a while. A very chilling time in America.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@NotMax: He’s no Mayor Quimby.
For all his faults, Quimby is in the arena getting shit done.