Anyone who wants to complain about Democratic message can fight me.
WATCH: @brianschatz torches Republicans on their efforts to criminalize IVF pic.twitter.com/70pspEvQcQ
— Mike Inacay (@MikeInacay) February 29, 2024
.
I thought I would share this, in case anyone is looking for simple, clear messaging to anyone who has “concerns” about Biden.
This.
There is not a god damned thing — besides the second amendment — that will survive a 6-3 Republican SCOTUS for a generation.
Stop with the political purity bullshit and vote like your future depends on it. https://t.co/vV2rxUnVV3
— Angry Staffer 🌻 (@Angry_Staffer) February 29, 2024
Open thread.
OzarkHillbilly
Could not have said it better.
matt
Stop blackmailing me! I want to waste my vote in a jerk off session.
Odie Hugh Manatee
I hope the lights and roof stay on here. We’re getting a huge storm off of the Oregon coast. Power is sagging right now.
If it stays up I’ll be very surprised.
JML
I guess I’m glad to see liberals taking the court seriously, but fucking hell I got laughed at in 2016 when I told people we couldn’t fuck around on this shit. lot of mostly white, mostly male lefties said it wouldn’t matter, they’d never actually overturn Roe, and Hillary was really a republican. I would like all of those shitbags to have to go stand in a fire.
WaterGirl
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Oh, yikes, stay safe.
lowtechcyclist
Since this is an open thread, I’ll post here that my wife absolutely LOVES her Alley Cat Quilt that I won in the recent Ukraine raffle, and gave to her last night. Quiltingfool, you are amazing! My wife was admiring your craftsmanship – she doesn’t quilt, but knows a thing or two about quilts due to relatives who used to. And we both love all the kitties on it!
I feel so lucky to have this marvelous piece of art in my home – my wife said it’s almost too beautiful to use, but we both agreed that ‘almost’ was the operative word: it deserves to be lovingly used, and that’s what we will do!
WaterGirl
@JML:
I loved it when Brian Schatz said basically the same thing. If you didn’t watch that, you might find it cathartic!
We have so many talented and dedicated people in office, and the other side has a bunch of crappy power-hungry hateful control freaks. Brought to us by the gerrymander.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@WaterGirl:
Just got a gust at 36 mph that hit and made the house shudder. One of our cats is not having a good time. He’s hiding under the stairs in his cage, just about dead center in the house.
Supposed to be like this all day. The lights keep dimming and the battery backups keep tripping on and off.
Fun stuff!
WaterGirl
@lowtechcyclist: I’m so happy to hear that! Thanks for the update.
I have a quilt that QF made for me. Mine we cats also, but very different from the Alley Cat cats. For weeks and weeks I would notice some new detail in the quilt.
She has an amazing eye for color and detail and fabric.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊😊😊
Baud
@JML:
What did it matter to them?
WaterGirl
@Odie Hugh Manatee: In the 2 or 3 months after my 7 foot diameter tree crashed on my house, we had storms and 70 mph winds at least half a dozen times.
I had always loved storms, and I do again, but those high winds were very scary after just having had the tree fall.
I don’t envy you.
sab
@lowtechcyclist: That is lovely that it found such a good home.
Ken
Remind me of the BJ hive mind’s policy — when natural disasters* happen in red states, and the governor thereof asks for federal assistance, do we get to mock and laugh? Also does it matter if the governor has been making secessionist (or at least secession-adjacent) noises and defying Federal court rulings?
* Such as, say, the second- (soon-to-be-first-) largest wildfire in US history.
jonas
I’m hoping the IVF debacle unleashed in Alabama is one issue where Dems *can* finally break through the rightwing noise machine with their own well-coordinated, sustained media campaign that helps voters understand who’s doing what here. Our side is good at pithy tweets and memes and stuff, but what we’ve never had is a coordinated, integrated media megaphone the likes of Fox, AM radio, and Sinclair that Republicans use to flood the zone with bullshit 24/7. We’ve been way behind the 8-ball on this stuff for years, but maybe now finally catching up in terms of leveraging what media will listen to and honestly report on Dems to heighten the contradictions, as they say. Godspeed.
Kristine
Thinking of last night’s quilt thread…my jaw dropped when I saw how much BJ would be raising for Four Directions.
This blog is kind of amazing.
So’s WaterGirl.
TBone
I watched Elie yelling on the eve of Feb. 29. I love him! No punches pulled!
TBone
@matt: you need to talk to Senator Fetterman about that 😆
mrmoshpotato
@JML:
PREACH!
TBone
@JML: me too!
TBone
These guys are fighting mad, and on the right side of history.
https://www.citizensforethics.org/
They do good work.
TBone
@lowtechcyclist: 💙💙💙
lowtechcyclist
Re IVF, I thought I’d pass on this bit from Fred “Slacktivist” Clark‘s blog. He originally wrote it in 2016, but posted it again for obvious reasons after the recent decision by the Alabama Supreme Court.
I’d toss in: which decision would you rather defend afterwards: leaving the girl, or leaving the embryos? (Defend to whom? The parents of the girl, the ‘parents’ of the embryos, and to anyone else who became aware of your heroism in rescuing…well, whichever you rescued.) Yeah, me too there as well.
His point, obviously, is that we’d all save the little girl. And our moral intuition is correct: nobody really believes those embryos are the moral equivalent of human beings that have already left the womb and entered the world, no matter how many people make the claim that they are. We just deep down regard the little girl as a human being, and the embryos as something far less.
Believe what your insides are telling you, Fred is saying to the ‘pro-lifers.’ It’s that simple.
Kristine
@jonas:
The rightwing is just better at old media.
Last year, RW newspapers showed up in my mailbox for a few weeks at a time, giving me the opp to subscribe. One of those papers was The Epoch Times, which is now available for sale on the news rack at a local grocery store along with the Chicago Tribune and other regional/national newspapers. Do progressives have responses to that?
Downpuppy
The logic of the first picture is a little weak. The Republicans aren’t (currently) claiming that Presidents (Democratic) are immune from impeachment, just that Presidents (Republican) are immune from criminal charges, forever.
Of course the impeachment is a farce for many, many, reasons, but not due to immunity claims.
twbrandt
Meanwhile, the goat rodeo that is the Michigan GOP continues to beclown itself with competing conventions, infighting, back-stabbing, and screaming incompetence. I love it.
WaterGirl
@Ken: Has Texas asked for assistance? I wondered about that yesterday.
Bupalos
@jonas: A lot of folks really seem to think that what we need is for a liberal version of the right wing media ecosystem to emerge. I feel like this couldn’t be more wrong. I think it’s natural to be a little partisan-jealous of how easy, cheap, and effective the angry sugar high that their political project runs on appears. But I think that’s a really, really bad road for us to try and go down.
To me the sugar high messaging is summed up in the “they hate women” mantra we hear all the time in spaces like this. A healthier messaging is about how ideology and a thoughtless yearning for the past tends to systematically destroy freedom for everyone. It does that whether there is a them that intends for that to happen or not.
Eunicecycle
@Kristine: The Epoch Times has huge billboards in my area, proclaiming they are the #1 Most Trusted News Source! Based on nothing, I am sure.
lowtechcyclist
@Ken:
One song in Godspell opens with this:
When wilt Thou save the people, O God of mercy, when?
The people, Lord, the people, not thrones and crowns, but men?
Fuck the governor, save the people.
But send the rescue efforts with a big “YOU TOLD US YOU DIDN’T WANT OUR INTERFERENCE, WE’RE HELPING YOU ANYWAY” message in big letters that nobody can miss.
jonas
I’ve used a similar thought experiment for years in discussions on whether “life begins at conception”: You’re on a bridge above a deep river. Someone tosses in a fertilized zygote and a three year-old child. Which do you jump in after to try and save? The pro-life activist would have to answer that, finding yourself in a classic Burdian’s Ass conundrum, the only choice would be to let both die so as not to have to make a choice and now they’re in heaven with Jesus anyway. A morally monstrous response, of course, but with a certain grotesque consistency.
TooManyJens
@Ken:
I’d say only if the mockery is confined to the governor himself.
I don’t think it’ll do much good, since Republicans don’t care about being hypocrites. Still, a reminder to the voters that this aid won’t be available if their governor gets his way and he doesn’t actually give a shit about them wouldn’t go amiss.
Bupalos
Hopefully not. The real impact of things like the Epoch Times is simply to degrade social trust and make people fearful and angry. We don’t need to do that from the left. We can’t afford to do that from the left.
TBone
@TBone: oops fat finger typo, 28 not 29. Our tiny little local newspaper, The Union County Times, has its banner and headline done up in pink print today 🩷
jonas
@Eunicecycle: I’ve been noticing the Epoch Times laid out in the lobby of several hotels (Holiday Inn, Marriot, etc.) that I’ve stayed at over the last year or two. What’s up with that? Are hotel managers these days all MAGA? Or does someone drop them off and nobody really pays attention?
Ken
I haven’t heard, so treat my question as if-and-when they ask.
Obviously they should ask for help; a million acres, only about 3% contained, and it’s crossed into Oklahoma. (You’d think that last one would be enough to trigger some kind of Federal reponse.)
jonas
Shamelessness is their superpower, after all.
Kristine
@Eunicecycle:
Yeah. But I had to dump my dermatologist when she warned me about the cancer-promoting effects of the COVID vaccines and handed me a photocopy of an ET article as evidence. Looking back, I think she must’ve been 90% of the way aroud the twist already, but that crap wedges its way into all kinds of places.
TBone
@jonas: I got a few in my mailbox and use them for dirty jobs or burn them.
TBone
@Kristine: jfc
Ken
That’s why frozen embryos are so convenient for these moral questions. You can easily get a few thousand and their thermos flask into a volume smaller than the three-year-old.
trollhattan
@OzarkHillbilly:
They’re going to join amendments 1&2 to create
“Superamendment 1-2: The right to talk about and shoot firearms shall not be infringed.”
Geminid
@Odie Hugh Manatee: It sounds like you have battery backups. I understand they are being adopted more widely now.
TBone
@Ken: I thought President Biden touted federal fire/financial assistance when he was in Texas at the border. I saw that news, but where, I can’t remember.
WaterGirl
@jonas: Who gets the kickback for allowing them in the lobby?
JPL
@Ken: When the electrical grid went down in Texas during a massive cold spell, people died. Abbott didn’t ask for help then. The grid hasn’t changed much.
TBone
@WaterGirl: is DeJoy getting paid when they’re in my mailbox 🤬
JPL
@Geminid:My son is building an all electric house, and will install solar battery backups.
WaterGirl
@Kristine: Whoa! Hope you reported her to the medical board or whatever group she is part of.
trollhattan
@Ken:
It’s mandatory. While we also tsk-tsk the needless loss of stuff and life (pronounced: laaf).
They will steal the wildfire area record from California, which is finally something I’m happy to pass on to Abbott and crew. Sorry about all the laaf.
Also, in case anybody thought one needed forest in order to have wildfire, behold.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
@jonas:
Who are you people running into fires and jumping into rivers? I’m calling 911 and hauling my ass home.
Miss Bianca
@jonas: Epoch Times does big splashy feature articles with lots of photos about things like the biggest horse in the world…I think that’s what sucks in the normies, at first.
At least, the only times I see Epoch Times cited in any of my social media feeds or other listservs, it’s those articles.
lowtechcyclist
@jonas:
But once they take the “now they’re in heaven with Jesus anyway” out, they’ve cut their own legs out from under themselves.
They’re saying what appears to be standard doctrine among evangelicals: that there is an ‘age of accountability’ with respect to salvation – that is, children who die before reaching that age go directly to heaven, because they’re still too young to have made a sufficiently mature decision to accept Christ into their hearts.
And per that doctrine, 100% of aborted fetuses are in Heaven now. If they’d lived, would 100% of them have been saved, especially when you consider that they’d be raised by women that they consider baby-killers and immoral sluts to boot?
Why do they want to send people to Hell who would otherwise be in Heaven? What, you say eternal salvation isn’t the most important thing? Better to live for threescore and ten, then suffer for eternity, than to be aborted and spend eternity in paradise?
Their beliefs trip over themselves in interesting ways.
ETA: Of course, when you combine their belief in an age of accountability with their belief that most people don’t accept Christ and won’t be ‘saved,’ how is it moral to NOT butcher all the children before they reach the age of accountability?
OzarkHillbilly
@Kristine: Did you tell her why you no longer trusted her “practice” of medicine?
sdhays
@JML: “They’ll never overturn Roe, which I care about very much.”
These people are not “lefties”. Ok, so you don’t give a shit about Roe (while pretending you do), the right-wing Court lurves themselves corporations and rich people. So, it’s ok with you if they get a super majority to further empower those people? If that doesn’t motivate you, what part of the “left” do you think you’re a part of?
If you can’t be bothered to vote for non-right people and policies, you’re not on the left. Maybe you’re on the “nowhere” because you’re too lazy, but don’t pretend you’re aligned with any sort of left-wing ideology
ETA: Fuck those guys.
Ksmiami
@Bupalos: Republicans want to take us back to the ‘50s… the 1850s
OzarkHillbilly
@Miss Bianca: It’s the new Weekly (Weird) World News?
WaterGirl
@Miss Bianca: Epoch Times has HUGE ads on twitter, in fake Jack Smith’s feed, etc.
Miss Bianca
@OzarkHillbilly: Perhaps…but I have yet to see any articles about Bat Boy or “Cabbage Patch Doll Strangles Mom” coming from that direction.
Note I said, “yet”.
Splitting Image
@TBone:
Promoters of digital news have never adequately explained how puppies are supposed to get trained when all the newspapers are gone. Holdouts like the Epoch Times are filling a valuable niche.
rikyrah
Jennifer “A man is not a plan” Rubin 🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@JRubinBlogger) posted at 8:58 AM on Fri, Mar 01, 2024:
Not every outlet persists in ignoring Trump’s alarming rants and verbal pratfalls. Outlets taking Trump’s obviously loopy state of mind seriously deserve recognition. Salon interviewed John Gartner: 1/x
Jennifer “A man is not a plan” Rubin 🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@JRubinBlogger) posted at 8:59 AM on Fri, Mar 01, 2024:
Some examples of Trump’s non-words: Beneficiaries becomes “benefishes.” Renovations become “renoversh.” Pivotal became “pivobal.” Obama became “obamna.” Missiles became “mishiz.” Christmas became “Crissus.” Bipartisan became “bipars.” …
2/x
Jennifer “A man is not a plan” Rubin 🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@JRubinBlogger) posted at 9:02 AM on Fri, Mar 01, 2024:
Trump also engages in ..”tangential speech.” He just becomes incomprehensible when he engages in free association word salad speech …a sign of real brain damage, not being old, not being slow, not losing a step … but of severe cognitive deterioration. 3/x
(https://x.com/JRubinBlogger/status/1763580560641860002?t=RXy_SmAkSRDqFtpKueuPzg&s=03)
Ken
@lowtechcyclist: The Left Behind books had a follow-up series (because the money kept rolling in…) set in heaven. All the “raptured” children, from conception through about age 12, were of course in heaven, where they’d grown up. The authors gave absolutely no consideration to what might result from an embryo being raised in heaven, with no experience of earth. I’d think the result could be rather horrifying.
In fairness, their image of heaven wasn’t all that different from Earth. People still had jobs, lived in houses, ate dinner (though only buttered vegetables), and so forth. Again, in the hands of a better author, an exploration of “the afterlife is just like this one, except forever” could have been quite good. In fact it was, in Parke Godwin’s novels.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Baud! 20XX!
lollipopguild
@trollhattan: Old miranda rights gone. New miranda rights=’You have the right to remain silent, you will remain silent, or you will be shot!”
Timill
@jonas: Is the child Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?
Betty Cracker
@Miss Bianca: Fox News deployed a lure too, only it was boobs.
rikyrah
Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) posted at 7:49 AM on Fri, Mar 01, 2024:
“[Biden] worked with hardcore Republicans and took a position that progressives in his party hate. He came to the center… and they got a deal. Then [Trump] said he wants the crisis to continue unabated for the next year.”— @JoeNBC compares Trump and Biden’s border messages https://t.co/Pem1czPy9Y
(https://x.com/Morning_Joe/status/1763562324185522560?t=CC1UjafnEETbczLvXeuGDQ&s=03)
TBone
@Splitting Image: 😆 if I had a birdcage, they’d be shattered on every day.
TBone
@rikyrah: when he said “schlocks” for stocks, I started calling him Schlocky since he’d also recently had himself photoshopped on to Sylvester Stallone’s body.
topclimber
@Eunicecycle: Most trusted by China’s Falun Gong religious sect, which owns it.
p.a.
@rikyrah: I don’t see how his handlers let him get on a debate stage with Biden- despite how shitty most moderators are- unless the moderators are Ingraham or Hannity. Bingo card for the excuses they’ll provide to avoid uncontrolled interactions.
Geminid
@Miss Bianca: That’s about what the issues of Epoch Times I’ve read are like. Maybe 65% human interest-type stories without explicitely political content, and 35% political disinformation. The format is like a cross between the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. There’s hardly any advertising yet the rag has a wide, mostly free distribution, so somone is sinking a lot of money into the project.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Geminid: Falun Gong is sinking a ton of money into it. Those widely advertised Shin Yun shows? Those help fund this crap.
topclimber
@topclimber:
Also:
“Anti-vaccine activist and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calls The Epoch Times a daily read, among his most trusted news sources.”
Hoppie
@Ken: Texas really works its butt off to beat California, doesn’t it?
Geminid
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: I expect a well-organized group like the Falun Hong can self-finance an endeavor like Epoch Times. I wonder if there are wealthier entities involved as well, and who they are. I have even heard th organization called a “controlled opposition” group, and that seems possible.
trollhattan
Watched a scrub jay just spend two minutes clearing debris from a rain gutter outside the home office.
I want to hire this bird!
schrodingers_cat
@Geminid: They were instrumental in spreading a lot of disinformation about COVID-19 and not just in the US.
AM in NC
@lowtechcyclist: I post that analogy on FOX, except I up the number of embryos to 10,000. Even at those odds, almost everyone would grab the actual child, and we would rightfully look at anyone who grabbed the box of embryos and left the child to burn to death as a monster.
Geminid
@JPL: The Texas grid has not changed much overall, but I think utilities did some cold-proofing since thatt big February, 2021(?) power outage because yhere have been similar cold waves that did not result in mass outages. All the utilities had to do was make upgrads to their infrastructure that utilities up north had done decades ago.
Lobo
@lowtechcyclist: The trolley ethics question. hmm…
Miss Bianca
@Betty Cracker: Ah, the noted Page 3 girl gambit!
lowtechcyclist
@Ken:
Having been to a few funerals of my wife’s late relatives, all of whom were either nominally or not-so-nominally members of evangelical churches, I’ve gotten several doses of that view of Heaven: that it’s just like here, only no poverty and everybody’s nicey-nice to each other. (At least there were no jobs in their afterlife, unlike the LB sequels – now that I’m retired, it sounds like the LB afterlife would be a step down from this life, not an improvement!)
Matt
Dear establishment Dems: stop with the hippie-punching and LEAD like your future depends on it. Forgetting the word “bipartisanship” for the next decade would be a good first step.
Also: either the POTUS is a smol bean who can’t change anything OR he can wreck the whole system by fiat.
Baud
@Matt:
Or what? You’ll join the fascists? This isn’t a negotiation. Choose your own moral path forward.
WaterGirl
@trollhattan: That gave me a smile.
Subsole
@lowtechcyclist:
Try “Gov. Abbott doesn’t want you to have this.”
God, I loathe that man. I loathe what he does to my state. I think he is a genuinely broken person.
Subsole
@topclimber:
Thank you!!
For some reason I thought it was Aum Shinryuko.
Matt McIrvin
@JML: I remember it from 2000: Michael Moore saying abortion was not a good reason not to vote for Ralph Nader–the Republicans would never really outlaw abortion; they needed that issue to win elections.
To his credit, Moore came around on this before 2016.
Subsole
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah. And it only took eight years of Dubya slamming the nation’s dick in the door…
What a fuckin’ champ…
Josie
@Subsole: This
It’s impossible to know which one I hate more–Abbott or Paxton. Gosh, and then there is Ted Cruz. Such a wealth of choices.
wjca
NEWS FLASH: Breaking things is vastly easier than creating them or fixing them.