This is a nice thing to have for three days. Enjoy your Equality Weekend, ladies!
— Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek.bsky.social) January 17, 2025 at 10:15 AM
… Which, of course, we almost certainly can’t — not given the incoming maladministration, and America’s long history of general and specific misogyny. But I do appreciate the gesture, even while wishing President Biden had done this even a few weeks sooner.
President Biden: "Today, I affirm the Equal Rights Amendment has cleared all the necessary hurdles to be added to the U.S. Constitution, now! The Equal Rights Amendment is the law of the land, now! It's the 28th Amendment to the Constitution, now!" pic.twitter.com/7MiztbKVRv
— CSPAN (@cspan) January 17, 2025
I have supported the Equal Rights Amendment for more than 50 years and have long been clear that no one should be discriminated against based on their sex.
We must affirm and protect women’s full equality once and for all.
— President Biden (@POTUS) January 17, 2025
Ed Kilgore, at NYMag — “Biden Says ERA Is Ratified, But Supreme Court Gets Final Say”:
In one of those why the hell not? gestures open to a president down to his last weekend in office, Joe Biden declared the Equal Rights Amendment ratified and thus the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. A host of feminists and Democratic politicians have been urging this step from the moment Biden took office, based on three recent state ratifications (Nevada in 2017, Illinois in 2018, and Virginia in 2020) executed in defiance of a 1982 congressional deadline that ERA proponents failed to meet (35 of the 38 required ratifications had happened by then). Indeed, the House formally repealed the ratification deadline in 2021 and dismissed as legally ineffectual actions by five conservative state legislatures to rescind prior ratifications. But the Senate never acted, leaving the whole question in legal limbo.
From a technical point of view, the national archivist has the power to recognize ratified constitutional amendments by officially publishing them, and Biden urged this obscure official to do that with the ERA. But in December, anticipating this action, the archivist denied she had the power to do so. She cited prior legal precedents suggesting the 1982 deadline was indeed valid, not to mention ongoing litigation over the Virginia ratification…
While there have already been rallies at the National Archives to dramatize the issue, there’s every indication that the whole controversy will wind up at the Supreme Court, whose conservative majority is not terribly likely to redeem the decadeslong push for an ERA. But Biden’s action will revive the topic and all the underlying issues of long-postponed equality until such time as the Supreme Court acts.
It’s also something of a vindication for the junior U.S. senator from New York, notes CNN:
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, has been making a major push for certification, saying in a memo to interested parties that it would give Biden a way to “codify women’s freedom and equality without needing anything from a bitterly divided and broken Congress” in the aftermath of the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade …
The Equal Rights Amendment is the 28th Amendment, and it is the law of the land. pic.twitter.com/jl1Ewg2JAf
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) January 17, 2025
Women's rights are human rights, and human rights are women's rights.
I'm thrilled President Biden has affirmed the Equal Rights Amendment as the law of the land, guaranteeing all Americans equal rights and protections under the law regardless of their sex.…
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) January 17, 2025
From a brave, however doomed, thread:
I’m seeing a lot of confusion about the Equal Rights Amendment online.
I've been working on the ERA for 13 years & literally wrote a book about it.
So, let me help answer some questions.
1) Yes, it really is a real amendment & fully part of the U.S. Constitution. Full stop.— Kate Kelly (@katekelly.bsky.social) January 17, 2025 at 3:58 PM
The Archivist has no constitutional or legal role in the amending process. She does NOT get to decide what is or is not in the U.S. Constitution.
Her boss (the President of the United States) has spoken for his Administration.
That's it. The ERA is in! This is a victory.— Kate Kelly (@katekelly.bsky.social) January 17, 2025 at 4:01 PM
In the words of @tribelaw.bsky.social & Professor Kathleen Sullivan:
contrarian.substack.com/p/the-equal-…— Kate Kelly (@katekelly.bsky.social) January 17, 2025 at 4:02 PM
The struggle continues!
Women marched on Washington, met with Congress, and crossed the 38-state threshold to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.
A century in the making… it is long overdue. pic.twitter.com/gszAjgPMsf
— Senate Judiciary Democrats ???? (@JudiciaryDems) January 17, 2025
Baud
I welcome you as my equal, AL.
Suzanne
From what I am reading, the DOJ doesn’t believe this is real.
So this is largely symbolic.
TBone
Wet blankets and all, I’ma go with the proclamation that our President announced and the unelected national archive librarians can go fuck themselves. The librarians could have reinforced equality but instead chose to thrust themselves into a “my power is bigger than yours” dick measuring contest. While they are being bigger dicks, I measure President Biden as being the larger voice of reason. I dissent and will never obey in advance by giving NARA power merely because they print things. Fuck ’em, they didn’t win any elections.
Argent
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EiWhEWBmX7E
TBone
@Suzanne: consider the source.
Suzanne
@TBone: The NYT is reporting what the vast majority of news organizations are reporting, in this instance.
This is not any slam on Biden: symbolism is important.
sab
Back when I was in law school in the late 1970s, my female faculty advisor (card carrying member of NRA) said the ERA was impossible to implement and a bad idea.
Four years earlier I had had an internship with a state EEOC whose director and chief lobbiest were adamantly against laws like the ADA because they would distract from the real battle.
So I am just watching this. You never do know who your allies are
ETA: Note to Steve in ATL: she was a labor lawyer, and I cannot even remember which side (that alone was weird, us not knowing which side in labor law.) She had a german shepherd that sat under her desk all day. Lovely dog.
TBone
And furthermore they can go to hell in a swift boat
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SezLF-RkdXQ
Fuck the Fucking NYT.
Kay
Thanks for all the links, AL. I don’t have anything but the vaguest knowledge of the ERA.
I think older women (like me) have maybe done a poor job talking with younger women about these past efforts (that are in many cases being rolled back). That maybe instead of saying they “don’t know history” we should admit that we lived this very recent history and that’s why we know it.
I had this thought that Gillibrand could conceivably do an educational effort with just herself and her staff using social media so we don’t dump yet another mandate on public schools. This would be adult education, geared toward non college young women. Hire someone really good to create it.
Baud
Fun fact. The misogynists stalled the ERA in the 70s by arguing that it would force women into combat. Today, the misogynists argue that the fact that women aren’t in combat like men are shows that feminists are hypocrites.
Of course, they also argue that women shouldn’t be allowed in the military.
They’re not really big into intellectual consistency.
Starfish (she/her)
@Suzanne: A lot of people are skeptical of some of the meaningless gestures going on in Biden’s last few days.
sab
@Baud: Tell Sen Duckworth she wasn’t in combat.
Baud
@sab:
I’m sure they would say she shouldn’t have been.
Starfish (she/her)
@Baud: Wait, I thought the Hegseth hearing said that women ARE in combat, and the misogynists are pissed about it.
Baud
@Starfish (she/her):
And a lot of people have been demanding meaningless gestures.
People love to complain.
Kay
Remember when the Right told us the Texas anti abortion law wasn’t about reporting women to law enforcement? They lied:
https://www.newsweek.com/texas-website-urges-people-report-anyone-having-abortion-six-weeks-1624862
This is one of the most extreme anti abortion policies in the world. It puts the US on the very bottom tier of women’s rights internationally. The intent is to spur the men in women’s lives – husbands, fathers, boyfriends, brothers, pastors and priests, to monitor women’s movements and report suspicious activity.
Baud
@Starfish (she/her):
Didn’t you read what I said about the lack of intellectual consistency?
sab
@Kay: I suspect these efforts (ERA etc) were before your time. We made so much progress so fast, then BOOM! It stopped.
TBone
@Baud: Swiftboating. Pepperidge Farm remembers. It’s not even ancient history.
TBone
@sab: they’ll never stop me. I have credit cards now.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fOKtbJfNLFk
We’ve got half the money and ALL the p***y!
Kay
@sab:
We all do it. “Why don’t young people know about these events I personally lived thru like I know them?”
Then we attribute our knowing to our (supposedly) superior education. We know it because we existed in that period!
sab
@TBone: Good point. And I have my own health insurance.
Starfish (she/her)
@Baud: It is the time before caffeine in the morning, so probably not.
sab
@Kay: That is why I am okay with Rachel Maddow’s long leadups. She is explaining history she had to go out and learn. Her older audience lived it, but her younger audience didn’t.
ETA: A slightly older girl cousin of mine went to my same law school. She was one of three women in her class and was constantly harrassed by men in the library. “Why are you even here?” Three years later, when I came, women were half the class. Job market still sucked for us, but we were at least normal.
Suzanne
@Starfish (she/her): I understand. But I tend to differ from others here on the issues of symbolism, public image, PR, marketing, that realm of the fight. I believe that stuff is actually really important to master, and that we keep being surprised by it. We dismiss it as “vibes”, but I think we’d win more if we were better at shaping the vibes.
TBone
@sab: 💋 breaking protocol for you
TBone
@sab: glad I broke protocol for you!
Betty
Hi Anne Laurie. I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for all you do for Balloon Juice. We have come to depend on your late night and morning posts enlightening us about happenings in the world. Such a well done and appreciated service.
sab
@Suzanne: So true. We should back Biden instead of sneering or second-guessing symbolic moves.
Kay
It isn’t going to be like Handmaids Tale. Women are just going to quietly start disappearing from graduate programs and management tiers and television (other than in traditional roles) and movies (same) and sports. We’ll go back to not owning or running anything – we don’t own that much now, the US has not been particularly good for women financially, but we’ll lose the small gains we have made.
What I’m learning is none of it dies with a bang and a dramatic collapse- it just quietly and gradually slips away. Its like fighting a degrading, an erosion, not an assault. I would prefer an assault, I think.
zhena gogolia
@Betty: Yes, I really appreciate AL’s constructive approach to the “news.”
MomSense
@Kay:
I also think that the Republican message during the election that all Dobbs did was return this to the states was effective. We need to come up with some better way to explain why the states rights framework is so dangerous. Too many people think it is a legitimate way to protect rights and I think we saw evidence of that with all the elections where voters chose Trump and also voted for pro abortion access.
The enemies of expanded rights have been using it since nullification. Reagan and Luntz gave it new life and have used it so effectively. We really need to learn how to fight it because I think it is considered legitimate by too many people who don’t know the history.
TBone
Symbolic mood music
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBjKCs5yHsc
Ohio Mom
I was vaguely aware when I got my first credit card in the late 1970s that it was big deal, and that I was responsible for building up my own credit history.
This morning, after coffee and before cheesy grits (thank you, Short Order Cook Ohio Dad), I am thinking, Of course the PTB wanted the other half of the country holding credit cards and paying interest, talk about enlarging your customer base.
This doesn’t conflict with Kay’s prediction, in fact, the less you own, the more you might need that credit card.
Baud
@Ohio Mom:
I don’t know if I’m old fashioned or a radical commie, but I support women having a right to obtain credit cards.
Betty
@Baud: The bathroom issue was the other big bogeyman. Here we are, still on the bathroom issue.
TBone
@Ohio Mom: I never use credit for anything except making reservations. But it’s a hard won tool in my box that my mother never had, and I will blow shit up with it if I have to.
Kay
I thought the new WaPo slogan was a joke. “Storytelling” like in a dictatorship. Let the American Greatness narrative begin!
I used to love newspapers. I miss them.
Scout211
I agree with you on this and I think the Democratic Party is slowly starting to realize that the marketing and PR needs to be bigger and louder and actually trigger those vibes. It’s just the way that communications through social media and traditional media happen in today’s world. And the bigger, the better.
When has it ever mattered that the Republicans and Trump team tell the truth, make legally factual statements, give nuanced legal opinions? That is a thing of the past and has been gone a long time. And when it is proven that they were wrong, they just move on to the next PR message, often an over-the-top message meant to trigger vibes.
It may be late, but I’m glad the Biden team did this. And now the ERA becomes a political statement that has to be talked about and debated in the media and in Washington. The vibes have been triggered so the media will be covering this. It’s a good move, if only to remind the younger generation that equality was almost written into law.
sab
@Kay: I try not to include much of my real current life here.. but…
I am semi-retired, but I love my real life accountimg job.
The bosses over the year hired mostly women because we are substantially cheaper and our husbands have work related family health insurance.( Not me. Thank you Obama/Biden.)
They are discovering now that these same women retire when their husbands do, instead of hanging on into their eighties like male accountants do. It is creating a real shortage in manpower with nobody coming along to fill the gap.
And the state society has put so many roadblocks in that there are very few young accountants in the pipeline.
An interesting dynamic that all these folks created on purpose without contemplating the inevitable outcome.
MagdaInBlack
In the early “70’s in my small Illinois farm town, my girls scout troop leader handed out a little fact sheet about why the ERA was bad for women. I remember the part about how women would be drafted. I also remember thinking “Yeah? So?
Would I like being drafted? No, no one does.
Matt McIrvin
@sab: And Barney Frank kept talking about how the push to legalize same-sex marriage was strategically bad. Now he’s married.
Starfish (she/her)
@MomSense:
We really need some basic education. The original states’ right was slavery.
And though the chattel slavery of North America was so bad that we don’t compare anything more minor to it, the way some states want reports of people doing things out of state really has some “fugitive slave act” undertones to it. Are we going to put some bounties on pregnant women who leave the state?
TBone
@Scout211: as of yesterday, I am a fully equal human being until some fundie Supremacists burn me at the stake. That might take a while, I’m made mostly of water.
Professor Bigfoot
@sab: History makes it easy to assume one HAS no allies.
I sure feel that way these days.
Kay
@MomSense:
If that was true then wouldn’t we have seen more erosion to the GOP vote in states like Texas where they have one of the most restrictive abortion policies in the world?
Anti abortion STATE laws didn’t move anyone either. I don’t know if Ohio would have moved toward us had the Ohio reproductive rights amendment failed – I suspect it wouldn’t have.
Professor Bigfoot
@TBone: I basically live out of my cash-back credit card; then pay it all of at the end of the month every month.
Requires a bit of discipline, but oh, that sweet, sweet cash back… 😂
bluefoot
@Baud: and the recruitment numbers for the military show that the number of men is declining while the number of women have increased quite a lot in recent years. And these jerks can tell my retired long-distance marksman friend that she wasn’t in combat.
Ohio Mom
@Baud: Of course it’s good that women have their own credit,I’m just saying that it’s easier to win a right when that right also serves the powerful.
Contrast women gaining the right to a credit in their own name (and in the process becoming an income stream for the finance industry) vs health care being recognized as a human right. I’m not expecting to ever see that because as it is now, health coverage is a big fat goose laying big fat golden eggs for the PTB.
Starfish (she/her)
@sab: It appears that jobs like yours are going to start having to pay market rate if they want to get some people; and if they can’t stay in business paying market rate, then they are getting what they deserve.
A job for accountants without health insurance in the year 2025? Really? People are going to be trying to pay off their student loans. They can’t afford to pay off their student loans and go get health insurance on the private market.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I have a selfish reason to be happy that they don’t draft women right now since my kid is of otherwise draftable age and Trump seems to have some kind of war on his mind. But not caring that boys would be SOL is not the right attitude.
Of course, it’s unlikely that anyone would actually be drafted since today’s military services hate the whole idea of conscription and would rather resort to anything else, but if dumbasses are in charge anything can happen.
TBone
@Professor Bigfoot: work it! Using the system to benefit and not detriment is to poke a sharp stick in the eye of The Man!
Professor Bigfoot
@MagdaInBlack: RIGHT?
But that’s the nature of equality.
You get the good stuff “they” have always gotten, but you get the ugly too, and *that’s all right.* If we’re ALL playing under the same rules, then “so be it.”
But there is no longer any “rule of law,” so…
Scout211
This older woman made sure her daughters understood this and also spent countless hours talking about the ERA with my peers at the time. But back in the day, too many women were against the ERA for reasons that were sad and disappointing, but understandable.
At work I was called one of those “women libbers” because I did talk about equal rights for women. But even some women dismissed the idea that we needed a law to codify our rights.
ERA: My point is, I don’t blame older women for this. I was there and we did what we could at the time. I blame misogyny.
Professor Bigfoot
@Kay: Living where I do at the boundary between Cleveland and Appalachia, I don’t think it would have moved the needle one iota.
I remain convinced that as long as the Democrats defend the rights of marginalized communities, straight white Christians will NOT vote for them; because straight white Christians might want the benefits but not if they have to share them with those icky others.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: They’re not meaningless gestures if they’re done persistently and consistently — especially when done by POTUS. It’s one of the successful strategies of the Right. It creates space around actual, goal-oriented action.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
A lot of people thought gay activists were doing it wrong. John sent me to a Daily Kos convention in Minneapolis or Detroit (I went to two) where gay rights activists were protesting Democrats. I remember Gary Peters was either running or brand new and they shouted him down. They were not popular on BJ. It was considered disloyal and counterproductive. Until they won.
sab
@Starfish (she/her): Small accounting firms in my lifetime have never provided health insurance. Basically small firms were in the same market as individuals: not really an option. I only had health insurance working for a big Eight, and ethically that became not feasible.
Professor Bigfoot
I kinda hate that you’re absolutely right. The ONLY way to get these MOTUs to accept anything that benefits anyone other than them is if it ALSO benefits them.
Of course, Davis X. Machina’s dictum always applies, don’t it?
TBone
I wonder how many here took the time to read the opinion of highly respected Laurence Tribe on this matter. You might come away with a new perspective.
https://contrarian.substack.com/p/the-equal-rights-amendment-at-long
In laymen’s terms.
different-church-lady
If Trump is going to dump every goddamned thing in front of the Supreme Court, then why don’t we?
Kay
@Professor Bigfoot:
I was very involved in the Ohio effort and I was really optimistic. Completely wrong but very optimistic.
sab
@Starfish (she/her): That’s why they had been hiring married women. With husbands with company health insurance.
Ohio Mom
@TBone: That was my aproach until I married Ohio Dad, who would probably set out for a cross country trip with three quarters in his pocket — he charges everything, then pays the card off in full every month. He rubbed off on me though I still carry some cash for tips and rummage sales.
But I have friends who for various reasons, ended up living hand-to-mouth and need that credit card for when they need car repairs or to replace an appliance or other emergencies.
Starfish (she/her)
@sab: It sounds like they are working with math similar to small doctors’ office, and that math means that most small doctors’ offices are either joining larger doctors’ groups (so they can have insurance) or closing up shop when they are done
With the threads about men just failing at life, increasingly the married women are the household breadwinners so they have to optimize for salary and benefits.
Professor Bigfoot
@Kay: It broke my fuckin’ heart.
I ran away from Tennessee forty years ago; ended up here and now it’s turning into another fucking Confederate state.
Went out to do some grocery shopping yesterday before we become the ninth circle of hell again; and honestly I have a hard time not thinking “fuck you white man, fuck you too white man, fuck you, and fuck you, and double fuck you in your goddamn hardly davidson fucking gear, fuck every last one of you shitweasel fuckers, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you…”
It is fortunate that no one can hear my thoughts our I would be forced to start carrying for self defense again.
TBone
@Ohio Mom: so do I. I paid off friend’s mortgage for her so she could, in turn, pay off her credit card debt. Then the dumb motherfucker maxed herself out again, and not for necessities. For bullshit, so she can sit in it, I’m not helping ever again.
If she had needed necessities, I’d have sent them to her.
Suzanne
@Scout211:
Exactly. What Trump has always been really good at is getting his people to feel something. He’s great at that. It is not a deep enough analysis to say that he wins because he’s racist, or that he’s sexist. Those things are absolutely true, but they are also true about other Republicans. Trump gets his people to feel a specific flavor of righteous anger and indignation in their racism and sexism (and xenophobia, homophobia, ableism, etc.). There is a tenor to it that matches. We keep underestimating that, we keep missing what, specifically, makes him compelling to people. Essentially because we here are mostly nerds and don’t respond to the same degree to those tactics.
I am a person who loves plans, which is why I admire the nerdy women of the government. Warren has a plan for that? Stick that needle into my veins. But, like, I am weird. My career has made me pretty pragmatic, but that is not most people’s approach. Emotional appeal will beat a plan, 9 times out of 10.
Professor Bigfoot
@Ohio Mom: I try to keep a $50 bill folded up stashed in my wallet.
I like to think General Grant always has my back. ;)
different-church-lady
@Suzanne:
Which is one of the things presidents do.
Professor Bigfoot
@TBone: I dug my way out of that hole once, and I ain’t never going back into it.
No matter how painful it might be, that sumbitch gets paid off EVERY MONTH, period full stop.
Ohio Mom
@sab: Then there are various handymen we’ve hired over the years who can be self-employed only because their wives have jobs that come with health insurance.
MomSense
@Kay:
No. Texas women with means have been taking shopping trips to blue states for abortions forever. It’s so entrenched now. Forcing poor women to pay the consequences by having children just reinforces the toxic way they have used religion to shame poor people and wealth or poverty as proof of whether or not god favors you. The wealthy women suffer no reputational damage for their hypocritical work around.
When my mom went to Texas to run HR for a large university she had a crash course in this whole mess because of the heat she took for making sure their self funded insurance covered contraception and the full range of reproductive healthcare. Wild shit. She had to be educated by some of the subversive liberal women who escaped the culture but know how it operates.
sab
@Starfish (she/her): So true. I have been the primary breadwinner for my whole married life, and I sure as hell did not plan for this. I never even had kids, and there I was supporting stepkids.
The kids are grateful, but that doesn’t fix my retirement planning.
Suzanne
@different-church-lady: See my comments below. I am glad he did this, because I think symbols are powerful.
TBone
@Professor Bigfoot: this is The Way, your discipline is exemplary. General Grant is a great reminder!
Nukular Biskits
Good mornin, y’all
Denali5
There was an article(I forget where) pointing out that as soon as women became numerous in a field, for example, veterinarians pay rates went down. Doesn’t seem to be the case for our dog, but who knows.
I am grateful to President Biden for taking the time to recognize the 28th. He has had so much on his plate.
sab
I have a lot of rightwing antigovernment inlaws who work for government jobs for the benefits. It boggles my mind, until I realize they are just opportunist takers. Things don’t need to make sense. Their job in life is to cash in on the opportunities.
Kay
There are now “Antifa” accounts all over my corner of TikTok. They’re ominous warnings of some kind of protest action. It’s probably poseurs or the FBI or Right wing operatives but I thought it was interesting.
I’m now in the “radical” section of TikTok – probably inevitable! :)
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: A lot of old-school gay activists thought the movement shouldn’t be promoting an atavistic institution like marriage at all, and some of the most prominent proponents were gay conservatives like Sullivan, so there was a lot of weird intersectional questions too. But it seemed to be the right way forward at the right time (even if some of that is going to be rolled back now). You push when you can.
Nukular Biskits
@Baud:
You had a great opportunity and blew it to say this, Baud:
Kay
@sab:
Back when I used to troll them I would say that to far Right public employees in the court system- that they needed to go to the private sector. It’s pretty effective. They squirm.
Ohio Mom
While whether the draft will ever be reinstated is not something I spend any time thinking about, I’m pretty sure women would not be included at the start because 18 y.o. girls are not required to be registered.
All 18 y.o. boys are, including the ones with disabilities. What a mess it would be, sorting through the motley bunch that would result.
Matt McIrvin
@different-church-lady: Well, one difference is that Trump will win and we’ll lose, but at least we’ll make them rule about it.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
Ah, Andrew Sullivan. The favorite of self hating Democrats who crave conservative approval.
Except he hates women. Oh, well! Not a deal breaker!
BellyCat
The long game always wins.
(Might want to also gain control of all the batteries for TV remote controls just to ensure eventual victory.)
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
The downside is they’ll want your daughter to produce male soldiers for the Fatherland.
Anyway
@Kay:
https://www.newsweek.com/texas-website-urges-people-report-anyone-having-abortion-six-weeks-1624862
Yep. The TX anti-abortion bill always had the component of snitching to law enforcement if there was even a suspicion that the fetus would not be carried to term.
that’s reason #6538 to hate and despise Zuckerberg— he’s making his staff move to a state where people in prime reproductive years may be in danger and not get proper medical care.
MomSense
@Kay:
BTW I was going through some boxes from the move and found an old Sherrod Brown campaign sign my mom had saved. Sherrod signed it but Connie and Martin Sheen wrote really nice long messages to her. My mom is an excellent phonebanker and had a huge personality. I remember at the time she called me to let me know how much fun she had visiting with them at her phonebank shift. She also enjoyed Nina Turner and when she saw her on tv a couple years later had a total WTF happened to her experience.
Chief Oshkosh
@different-church-lady: IMO, we don’t bring everything to the USSC because then bad, conservative decisions will be set in stone. There’s a somewhat analogous “dictum” in legal circles: A good lawyer never asks a question unless they already know the answer.
In this case, we pretty much know the answer: What would the Baby Plastic Jesus do?
Kay
@Ohio Mom:
My father was drafted and sent to Washington (state) and then Texas and he said the career military people were much more competent than draftees. “We were a mess”. Which makes sense.
Nukular Biskits
Even if this is a symbolic gesture/act, it will at least be a thorn in the side of the GOP-controlled Congress and Trump Administration for the few month or so.
And should be.
To borrow from an internet meme, that’s how you say “‘Fuck around and find out!” with some goddamn class!
Baud
@Nukular Biskits:
I’m just glad AL didn’t ban me for downgrading her status.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: On that issue, Sullivan was on the right side for the wrong reasons. The pattern with him, of course, was that if it affected him personally it was an exception.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
rikyrah
Seems like TikTok is going dark at midnight 😢🥺
BellyCat
Your dog is a veterinarian? DAYUMN! That’s some real cred at the dog park. :-)
Kay
@MomSense
Oh that’s nice. I wrote a letter to the Toledo Blade once supporting voting rights in Ohio, they printed it and Sherrod wrote me a note thanking me. I will miss him.
Nukular Biskits
@MomSense:
I’m not the first to say this but “states rights” is nothing but DEI for white evangelical men.
sab
@Professor Bigfoot: When I take my weekly $200 for expenses out of my ATM I get two $50s. That is awkward. Not easy to spend in small purchases.
Now I will treasure and hoard my Grant Bucks. Forced savings in rememberance.
Nukular Biskits
@rikyrah:
GM!!!!!!
Matt McIrvin
@sab: I remember the push for the ERA, and the thing I remember most clearly about it was how bugfuck insane it would suddenly make otherwise seemingly nice people when it came up. “DON’T EXPECT A MAN TO HOLD THAT DOOR FOR YOU, MISSY!”
MomSense
@Kay:
Do you have any thoughts on the stories about Trump’s first mass deportation scheduled to begin Tuesday in Chicago?
rikyrah
@Betty:
I know that’s right 👍🏾
Thank you, AL👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
rikyrah
@MomSense:
As someone wrote earlier, probably would have been California first, except for the fires, and the only place to find easy pickings of the undocumented, are on those farms in GOP areas.
TBone
PSA at noon today, TCM sounds THE HORN
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say_Amen,_Somebody
Kay
@MomSense:
I saw they have had protests, which is encouraging. Chicago is a genuinely tough city and they don’t like outsiders fucking with them so there might be real resistance.
zhena gogolia
I was just thinking that TFG moving the inauguration indoors is a perfect metaphor. The unwashed masses gave him their votes voluntarily, voting against their own interests in a thousand different ways. But he’s shutting them out so that he and his billionaire buddies can stay warm — the People are out in the cold. And that’s the way it’s going to be.
Kamala would have never done this. She would have worn an impossibly chic hat, and Walz would have been in his element, and we would all be so happy!
moonbat
@Betty: Seconded, if someone hasn’t already seconded first.
Just put my support of this comment in proper numerical sequence.
rikyrah
@MomSense:
The thing is .. Chicago is home to a very large undocumented community FROM EASTERN EUROPE…
but, somehow, I doubt that THEY are the target 🎯
😒😒😒
MomSense
@Matt McIrvin:
I thought it was a party! My mom was still in student affairs at that time and my dad was a minister so they would organize these big fair like events for the ERA with music, speakers, lots of photos, games for kids. The whole controversial part of it was lost on me.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: You know, it’s funny, the supposed swing to the right of the country and the vogue for tradwife influencers hasn’t done a thing to budge the drop in total fertility rate that has conservatives moaning about die Untergang des Abendlandes.
Of course they always claim they win in the long term because more of the tradwives’ kids will populate the next generation, but social attitudes are less genetic and sticky than they think, otherwise no liberals would have ever existed in the first place.
rikyrah
@zhena gogolia:
Not only that, but every hotel room within 2 hours of DC would have been booked
The party would have started on Thursday, honestly
Sigh…. What could have been 🥺🥺
sab
@MomSense: Ohio Democratic party is pretty racist too. They respond to their voters, and Ohio voters are racist. They have hung many statewide candidates out to dry. Barbara Sykes. Kevin Boyle. Nina Turner.
Nina Turner is the one who got pissed off and turned on them.
Matt McIrvin
@MomSense: I lived in a super conservative Republican neighborhood and wasn’t entirely clear on the fact until later.
But it’s influenced the way I think about politics my whole life. The automatic reflex to kind of assume a hushed tone of voice when you advocate liberal positions in public lest somebody hear and go screaming bugfuck on you.
Kay
@rikyrah:
Such a self own by Dems. It is the most Dem friendly place on the internet – also genuinely diverse – race, ethnicity but also CLASS, which is where Bluesky fails.
Nukular Biskits
@Baud @Ohio Mom @TBone:
The discussion about women and credit cards hits close to home for me.
My parents divorced in ’72, I think and Momma took us three kids (including a baby) and the trailer (yup, I’m former trailer trash) back “home” where she found she couldn’t get a credit card, open a bank account, etc, in her own name. My grandfather (on Daddy’s side) signed for Momma’s first bank account. The phone (good ol’ Bellsouth) had to be in Daddy’s name.
The point of all this? When Momma passed away back a couple of years ago, it was a pain in the ass to close out all those accounts because they had someone else’s names on them, even those those folks (my grandfather and my father) had long since passed away twenty year’s prior.
The moral of the story here is the repercussions of treating women literally as second-class citizens (which was largely the institutional case up through the mid-70s, arguably) are still with us.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
100%
Kay
@sab:
I agree. Nina Turner is a jerk but the Ohio Democratic Party soured her on Democrats.
LAC
@Baud: Bingo! And love to let us know by their refrain “that’s not iiiit!”
We may very well deserve this shitty reebo oligarchy after all.
Chief Oshkosh
@sab: Yep. One of my jobs is federal and I have to deal with some of these people (to be clear, a tiny minority of all the other fed workers I’ve worked with). They seem to have the attitude that if THEY didn’t hold the position, some worthless POS blah person would, and then where would we be?
(Answer: much better off)
MomSense
@rikyrah:
Yeah it’s so fucked up. I live in a fucking rural cow town and apparently the white people who have always lived here don’t seem to notice all the migrant workers at the dairy farms?!?! These farms are massive. If the migrants are gone they shut down. It’s such fucking bullshit. They aren’t invisible. They get food at the variety store.
It reminds me of some of the documentaries I’ve seen where they would go to German towns that had concentration camps and they talked to people who acted like that had no idea. Bullshit. Of course they fucking knew.
evodevo
@Ohio Mom: Yeah..and that used to mean teaching in the local school system back in my day. Knew a lot of them…farmers wives, local small businessmen’s wives, etc. All those bootstrappy entrepreneurs these days..even today teachers pay isn’t all that, but you get health insurance and a pension, which now are worth their weight in gold.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
I used to hate-read Sullivan and I loved the story of how he got picked up for smoking weed on a federal beach in Cape Cod. That’s the perfect privileged Andrew Sullivan crime. He got preferential treatment too! It should have affected his immigration status.
Just Andrew Sullivan start to finish.
LAC
@zhena gogolia: i agree. AL postings are my favs here.
TBone
@Nukular Biskits: it is time to throw off shackles. I’m appalled that you had to go through that even though I saw this kinda crap in law offices all of the time, how ingrained it is, how elemental, how devastating.
TBone
@TBone: WATCH THIS and see why
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q–8bwv-YT8
lowtechcyclist
@TBone:
It raises the same question I raised in the overnight thread: why didn’t House Democrats speak out about this on January 28, 2020? Where were Pelosi, Hoyer, etc. the day after Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the Amendment? Why have elected Democrats acted for five years as if that didn’t actually mean anything? Because I have to say that five years of ‘oh, it doesn’t mean anything’ really undercuts them now when they say it does. Especially given the timing.
MomSense
@sab:
I know full well how racist Ohio is. My poor grandmother suffered so. She was born in 1898 – called the nword. Faced so much discrimination trying to work. Even cousins were shocked that her husband would marry that nword. Some of her stories were horrific. There were financial consequences as well. She could only contribute to Social Security her last year of working.
She cooked and took care of the children of wealthy tire company (she called them rubber companies which made me giggle at a certain age) owners.
When we moved to Maine we experienced a different kind of racism. She was the most important person to me. It was so painful for me to see what happened. She was a boss and handled it with amazing humor, but I also saw how she felt when we got home.
sab
@MomSense: Ohio has been stealing a lot of immigrant Nepali Bhutanese away from Maine. We welcome them in my city. They didn’t feel so welcome in Maine. We just passed a property tax to build them a bigger better High School. A school we had meant to shut down before they arrived. Now we have a state champion soccer team in a school that didn’t used to have a soccer team at all. (To be fair, Congolese kids also helped that team.)
TBone
@lowtechcyclist:
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/GMA3/video/alyssa-milano-equal-rights-amendment-97555975
sab
@MomSense: Wow. I hope someday I can meet you and hear your stories. Opposite sides of same city.
MomSense
@TBone:
Family Law is still so discriminatory to women. I knew that if I divorced my narcissistic, abusive ex sooner I would best case be forced to coparent and more likely lose custody and be bankrupted. I saw it happen All.The.Time.
TBone
@MomSense:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gtlqZOT2fOo
I’m all out of tears, they have hardened into potent rage. I’m not hysterical, but fierce. Fuck the patriarchy!
Nukular Biskits
@TBone:
What made it even more maddening is that none of us realized my grandfather was on the account … and had been since Day One.
We had to get a copy of his death certificate to get Regions to turn close the account … and he died back in late ’80s, IIRC.
I guess Momma thought it was easier just to keep things the way they were instead of changing them. Or it was a “cultura/generational thing”, given the times.
sab
@MomSense: I worked in a horrible office where an abused spouse had just quit, and the awful women in our office just wanted her to get divorced. Having been in an abusive relationship myself, I knew it could take years of planning to get out safely.
These women just didn’t care. They knew everything, and torched every slower road she had plotted out. I didn’t know how they slept at night, except they hadn’t brains to turn off.
Shalimar
Women’s rights are human rights, and humans include men. This second part is why we can’t have nice things.
MomSense
@sab:
Yeah that was a bad situation in part because of conflict and competition with other immigrant groups. Real time divide and conquer. We are working really hard to be better. I’m a long time volunteer with an immigrant advocacy organization. I will do any support work – ie clean, cook, run the food tables, help with the childcare so that it is easier for the members to participate.
Soccer is huge for us too! We are getting a pro team because it’s so big now. There is an amazing documentary film about the pick up soccer (futsol) program here. It’s my favorite thing to ever happen in this state. I loooove to volunteer at the tournaments.
jowriter
@TBone: An all-time favorite, on my own memorial playlist. Appropriate to the moment, thank you.
TBone
@Shalimar: fuckin’ A
TBone
@jowriter: yours in service, I remain
A problem child
Victim NO MORE
Kay
Chicagoans have been passing information on TikTok. Apparently ICE uses an administrative warrant – a warrant issued not by a judge but under authority of an administrative rule – and that is NOT valid to enter a residence or car under the 4th Amendment but vulnerable people believe it is so let ICE in. It isn’t even valid if a police officer relies on it (rather than ICE agent).
Immigration laws are administrative rather than criminal because being undocumented is a status, not a crime. So when people say “there are no illegal human beings” that is quite literally true.
It would mean if you had undocumented in your car or home they need a real warrant, signed by a judge, to enter lawfully.
Matt McIrvin
@TBone: My impression is that a lawyer can make a plausible argument on either side of this, and when that happens, the way it shakes out is usually how the political winds are blowing.
So my response as a non-lawyer is just to back up and say, morally, the ERA should have become law long ago, and that’s about as much as I have any authority to say.
MomSense
@sab:
That would be awesome. My mom has one living friend left in Akron. She was supposed to visit last summer but she broke her hip. She was going to come to us because my mom broke her neck! Anyway if we are all healthy I hope to bring my mom to Akron to see her friend, go to her parents graveside, and see all the things King James has done! My mom loves him. They grew up in the same area, decades apart of course.
TBone
@Matt McIrvin: thank you for doing the work though.
MomSense
@Kay:
Reminds me of the old Boston Abolition days. “Keep top eye open”
Nukular Biskits
@Matt McIrvin:
Shades of “you can indict a ham sammich”.
No disagreement from me, though.
TBone
@lowtechcyclist: Senatorial Dictum
Matt McIrvin
@TBone: I haven’t done any work, I just think about stuff and flap my yap.
Starfish (she/her)
@MomSense: Can you tell us more about what has been done for Akron? My sense of it is that LeBron James is like the ONLY rich person who got involved in K-12 education that has done something worthwhile. Because doing something worthwhile involves investing in the community instead of having a big plan to destroy teachers’ unions.
TBone
@BellyCat: hahahahaha 😂 thank you LOL I’m still laughing!
sab
@MomSense: The blogmaster has my personal e-mail. If you want me to go take pictures or anything…also too I have a two bed guestroom on the northwest side of town.
TBone
@Matt McIrvin: you did the reading. Some people here yesterday excoriated me without doing the work first.
Anyway
Exackly. I have female coworkers with self-employed husbands — their family depends on mom’s health insurance. The accounting firms in the original post sound really old-skool.
Nukular Biskits
@Professor Bigfoot:
The great thing about wearing a mask during COVID was that no one could see you mouthing those words … LOL
comrade scotts agenda of rage
It’s a classic Lee Atwater-esque theme adapted to the modern, dog-whistle, GOP messaging machine.
Fuck Lee Atwater, to borrow a meme of sorts from in here.
TBone
@TBone: Doris Day had no fucks left to give either
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fU8tQpCZEzg
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=31wHZ-o7NLc
Whip Crackaway!
Anyway
You’re making me cry … I’m not a football fan but love Divisional Playoffs weekend — going to watch the games tomorrow and not think about reality.
Ostrich is my new spirit animal
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kay: I’m in the booktok section of tiktok, and I’m really annoyed that if tiktok closes down, I have a choice of sites belonging to Zuck, Musk, or Bezos. They say they’ll go dark tomorrow. We’ll see.
All I want to do is talk about books and writing with other people who are interested.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: Interesting and important.
Of course the fact that these guys have the physical power to hurt or kill you regardless of the legality of their warrant is also going to be an issue, and the deadening cynical reality that our ultimate interpreters of laws are a bunch of corrupt authoritarians who will probably say they have the power to do anything they want is another issue. But it might be possible to create friction.
sab
@Starfish (she/her): LeBron has been amazing. He started ” I Promise Academy” for kids who tested in the bottom quarter and need help. Kids who eventually graduate get free college. Meanwhile their families get housing ( something his single mom couldn’t count on).
He took over a local Lebanese owned nightclub venue (Tangier) where Margo Thomas got married.
He has turned it into a local neighborhood economic hub for folks in the neighborhood who were previously closed out. Stores and such.
I hope it works. So far the planning seems really sensible.l
Gvg
@Professor Bigfoot: I always thought it was my duty to serve too. It scared the heck out of me, the idea of being in combat, but I didn’t shy away from it as being the inevitable consequence of equal rights. I also knew it would cause some difficulties for the services when it came, if we had another draft war. Well, so? They have always had such challenges and had to overcome them, such as integration or even the sheer size of the world wars. The military has to be good at plans and adjusting to society at the time. They have to be can do.
I rather doubt we will do really big drafts again. Selective drafts are likely. The military would love to draft doctors (like my sister) and nurses. Other specialties too will be needed at time from special sciences to code breakers. Women would be just fine for that.
Don’t want to be drafted? Try to make a world without stupid wars. Not all wars are avoidable or should be forever, but being belligerent and macho stupid has wasted too many of our soldiers lives in my lifetime!
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: lookie here (PDF document):
https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/english_kyr.pdf
Starfish (she/her)
@sab: I thought it was interesting that they had programming around the school to help the families, like help the parents get their GEDs if they wanted.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Since this an opening thread. I was watching this financial annalist who was talking about China, he was talking about how the real problem China is facing is the decline work force, but the decline is not a consistent problem across China because young people are moving from the poor west of China to the affluent coastal east for the better paying jobs. Sounds like Red verse Blue America.
MomSense
@sab:
Yay, I’ll reach out. I really hope we can get to summer healthy enough to travel. It’s been a rough couple years health wise for my mom.
sab
@Anyway: If said accounting firm was mine, it is. Founder retired last year at 84. His son is 60+ and has only worked for dad. But they are the only women friendly accounting firm I have ever worked for. It is possible to have babies here and keep your job. Adjust for child care and later for sick kids. That is unusual in accounting.
narya
@Professor Bigfoot: I have at least that stashed somewhere in my home, and have had for a long while (35 years, maybe?). I don’t touch it except under great need, and I replace it as soon as possible after that. Even though I’m reasonably comfortable at this point, I feel more comfortable having that. I’ve never been at Fani Willis levels, but I totally got what she was talking about.
Glidwrith
@Anyway: I, too have been the bread-winner and insurance provider for my family for over twenty years. Once hubby finally landed a job that had insurance, it was such a financial relief! Of course, I still provide the kids health insurance and make nearly twice the $$$.
I can’t begin to describe the raging fury of what the Supremist court has done and what P2025 would like to do to us.
MomSense
@sab:
I think one of the first programs was providing bikes. My son has been involved in a bikes program here that I think is based off of the one James started. Libraries are doing summer reading programs. K-12 kids can spend Mon-Fri at the library getting help reading. They also get free breakfast and lunch. My son buys bicycles for two libraries so kids who participate in the reading program get a bicycle and helmet. It’s wonderful. Librarians are the best of us.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@MomSense:
Yup. I’ve been re-watching ‘Shoah’ after all these years and the director’s emphasis has been on the extermination camps in Poland. Places like Sobibor, Chelmno and Treblinka were in “bumfuck cow towns”. One surprising thing tho, is that the Poles interviewed (this was around 1980-85 so these were all people who were alive during the Holocaust) all admitted they knew what was going on.
Germans living next to Dachau? “Clueless” which means “bullshit”.
I’ve watched red-rurl KS “turn brown” in spots over the years as Hispanic migrants have moved there in droves. There’s a great map in the 11/23 issue of National Geographic (they still do great maps) showing exactly that over the last 40 years.
The white residents in those counties in KS sure as hell know the demographic shift.
TBone
@TBone: Shel Silverstein
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Vwf4P3Xx0
sab
@sab: Also too. I Promise Academy works through Akron Public Schools. Uses their people who belong to their union.
karen gail
It might be the “law of the land” but it isn’t in the eyes of the GOP; they have stated in public on media that they want to return women to the kitchens where these “christians” feel they belong, serving men. (I have had only part of cup of coffee and my mind suddenly went to “long hog” and mental picture of slow roasting over fire.)
Some of the loudmouth whiny white males have suggested taking away voting and rights of ownership from women. These are the same whiners who would love to have nonwhites as property.
sab
@MomSense: I remember the bikes. All over the first page here. No longer kids are still riding those bikes.
Kay
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
its a weirdly good site, right? I don’t know why it’s so user friendly and appealing but it is. I get a ridiculous amount of engagement for my juvenile and vindictive trolling of MAGA posters, both from enraged MAGAs and from friendlies. It amazes me that many people “read the comments”
narya
@rikyrah: Yeah, I don’t expect them showing up on the NW side . . . For those of you not familiar, in that part of Chicago the ATMs often have Polish as one of the languages. But I suspect that Pilsen is a more likely destination.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Since I already started ranting about tiktok, I’ll go on. :-)
I am annoyed at people who talk about people on tiktok as if they were all teenagers doing dances. It reminds me of people talking about fastfood workers as if they were all high school students working part time. I heard a Bulwark podcast in which they essentially nutpicked, ie found the nuttiest tiktoker on the internet and treated them as representative of everyone on the site. They were yukking it up about the stupid kids. Have whatever opinion make sense to you about Chinese ownership, but at least makes some effort to know what you’re talking about.
And btw, if I were Bytedance, I wouldn’t be crazy about selling proprietary technology to someone like Elon Musk either.
Gvg
@different-church-lady: because they are corrupt and will rule the wrong way right now in spite of the law being really on our side. They just make shit up and throw out President, which leaves us with more of a mess to clean up later. It does build up a case for SC reform, but not a consensus of what reform would be, which means it could split our coalition into arguing factions.
We will have to reform them however eventually. I favor some actual impeachments for corruptions and even not following law. As examples for the future. An ethics code with teeth and enforcement outside politics. And a larger size with understanding that it needs to keep up with the duties of the courts and growth over time.
MomSense
@sab:
There is something so joyful about a bicycle! I still remember the feeling of riding a bike for the first time.
NeenerNeener
But vasectomies are reported to be up about 39% since Roe was repealed.
sab
@hiMomSense: I remember the bikes. All over the first page here. No longer kids are still riding those bikes. Lots of kids. Basically every kid in that grade who couldn’t afford one. I think he is still doing that. Not just a one-shot publicity stunt.
ETA You get in really good shape riding a bike in Akron. We have hills. Steep hills.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kay: The comments are where it’s at on tiktok. People actually interact. That’s why it’s so hard to just move to another site.
Kay
I read the Laken Riley act and I think it will be a horrible mistake. Lawyers call laws like this “apostrophe laws” (named after victims) and they’re always poorly thought out, politicized junk.
It’s a bad law but my bigger worry is how it interacts with the Bill of Rights. I can’t figure that out though. I have to talk to an immigration lawyer who can maybe give me a map of how it might intersect.
I hope like hell we haven’t inadvertently weakened the 4th amendment just as fascist authoritarians take power. Good Lord.
sab
@Kay: I am really fucking disappointed in our Democratic legislators, as often. We have two houses of Congress and two parties. Where were our guys? Licking their wounds I understand. Consulting their failed consultants I don’t understand at all.
MomSense
@sab:
I think about it a lot. Joy is an essential part of organizing and effective social movements. It is absolutely necessary for learning. It kills me that the more we take the fun out of schools the worse the educational outcomes are. Did they expect that the 20 minutes saved by canceling recess would make the kids want to do math more than before? C’mon. Schools should hum, the joyful energy should be palpable.
Gvg
@lowtechcyclist: I didn’t know. All the years it was pending, I didn’t know those simple facts, it was not taught in school, the deadline was treated seriously by everyone the whole time.
Realistically, I think maybe experts either didn’t think it mattered at the time or weren’t listened to because people (media) didn’t think it mattered, but according to Tribe, there was never any legal deadline.
sab
@MomSense: I agree. I wish LeBron and his wife could read your comments
ETA LeBron’s wife is active, and does have her own name. Savannah James ( maiden name Brunson?)
Lily
@Baud: Was the anti-ERA campaign (Schaffly?) the 1st time that gender neutral bathrooms became a scare tactic? Bc White wm had to be defended. By defeating the ERA. As you said, “not really big into intellectual consistency.” (Huh, was that also around the same time that attacks on intellectuals became a more serious political tactic? Convenient if so.)
Kay
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
The Bulwark people were a temporary political alliance, not an ideological one. They’re conservatives. They heard someone in authority say “national security” and they immediately lined up behind censorship. You’re a liberal. You actually believe in free expression and political speech.
No one ever explained the threat, even. It was “this is daaaangerous!”. The billionaire Nazi who just purchased our government is not dangerous but TikTok is? What?
NeenerNeener
I tried posting it before and it disappeared…but anyway there are reports that the number of males getting vasectomies has gone up 39% since Roe was repealed. Unintended consequences….
And now my previous post is back. Go figure.
Matt McIrvin
@Lily: most of the ERA parade of horribles is things that either happened anyway or became mainstream liberal causes anyway. Gay marriage was another one.
TBone
@Gvg: 🎯
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
Tradwives will never conquer because the tradwife uniform is just awful. Normal grown up women don’t want to wear an 1860s dress.
I don’t understand why they went back so far. They’re recreating the 1950s. They should be wearing those belted, constricting dresses that look vaguely military. I think it’s to make it more “creative”, more cosplaying by the Right.
Glory b
@Kay: I think otherwise. I read where someone said Walter Cronkite did more to end the Vietnam War and Will and Grace did more for gay rights than protests did.
On your prime time television schedule, looking normal & likeable has a greater effect, I think.
Matt McIrvin
@sab: mine were NAY at least.
NotMax
@TBone
Let’s make a pit stop in the highlands, lads and lassies.
;)
Kay
@Glory b:
They pushed Dem lawmakers and it worked – they moved.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kay: I could probably take their default to the conservative position. It was the mocking that infuriated me.
Citizen Alan
I’m seeing comments along this line quite regularly now and they just depress me. Because, to me, what you’re really saying is “all the democrats need to do is get the other sides propaganda network to give them favorable coverage,” which is simply not how propaganda networks function.
Kay
What is wrong with RFKJrs face/head? It’s so bloated. That isn’t heroin addiction – they’re all bones – their faces are all planes and hollows. Is it steroids?
He looks like his head is going to explode. It’s like STUFFED into his shirt collar too. Why doesn’t he get a shirt that fits? Christ, he’s stolen enough money from environmental groups to get custom made shirts.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: how ’bout the repeal of birthright citizenship? Worst case, they revoke the citizenship of almost everyone pending some new review and documentation process about whether you have “clean” ancestry. Now most of the population of the US is “illegals” and they have arbitrary discretion about what to do with them.
Service guarantees citizenship! Do you want to know more?
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
I just started thinking about what they would replace birthright citizenship with. I looked to Denmark because I’m so familiar with the country. It’s complicated! There’s a “princess” exception and a “22 year rule”. All kinds of hoops.
Birthright is elegantly simple and sensible so of course they have to ruin it.
Anyway
Don’t think it will be retroactive – Birthright citizenship will be revoked?suspended for new births. An acquaintance who was born in Saudi Arabia to Pakistani parents had Pakistani citizenship – he recently got naturalized. It’ll be something like that for parents not on residential visas – infants will get the parents citizenship. Definitely going to be messy for sure.
KatKapCC
I love you, Joe, but this feels like a condescending pat on the head. Like the people who said he should resign after the election so Kamala would get to be president for two months. This is like giving a toddler a play cell phone so they stop asking for your real one.
TBone
@NotMax: oh dear you got my Scots Irish up! Love it!
They were doing it in 1968!!!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBqiNKbEdLc
zhena gogolia
@KatKapCC: That man just can’t do anything right, can he? It’s just amazing.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin:
Not to be a wet blanket, but the jury is still out on whether the push for gay marriage was bad in the long run or not. It galvanized the religious right to the point that they were willing to embrace the most repulsive and morally depraved human being to ever become President if doing so would reverse the gains in equal rights for LGBTs, women and other minority groups. I believe there is already a test case percolating out of idaho which SCOTUS can use to overturn Obergefell before the end of this decade. And I think we’ll be damned lucky if they don’t use the opportunity to overturn lawrence v texas, so let the red steaks can start putting uppity gays in jail.
Another Scott
Things don’t change until they do. Good for Biden for getting the ERA in the news again.
Meanwhile, I just noticed our old friend JeffreyW (of food porn and picnicking birds fame) is on Mastodon.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Glory b
@KatKapCC: Important symbolism, pat on the head, potato, potahto.
Glory b
@Citizen Alan: I think that the idea that disruptive, in-your-face tactics too easily backfire.
Winning hearts and minds gets ignored. Without them, gains are more subject to reversal.
Republicans are RELENTLESS in ways that escape us. Bakke, Roe, passed in the 70s and Republicans have never taken their eyes off the ball.
“Vote harder?” Lefties joke about it, but that’s the secret to their success.
Citizen Alan
And even then, it was a fucking lie. Before rise of lost cause mythology, the slave states were viscerally opposed to the states’ rights doctrine, because it allowed free states to interfere with the rights of slave owners within their territories. Dred Scott was the biggest assault on the rights of states to set the laws within their own borders up to that point in U.S history.
Matt McIrvin
@Citizen Alan: My position on all such things is that when you’re pushing for an expansion of rights, worrying about the political consequences 20 years out is a recipe for doing nothing.
By the same logic, we can say that the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 60s was a terrible, terrible mistake and white liberals should have just let Southern Black people suffer for the good of the party–the Democrats would be a lot more successful today! I get the impression that too many today actually think it was. But politics needs to be FOR something.
KatKapCC
@zhena gogolia: Oh, stop it. You do this too much. Just because someone criticizes ONE thing does not mean they’re saying he “can’t do anything right”. Is it your opinion that we are never ever ever allowed to offer any kind of disagreement with him at all? Because that’s ridiculous and you know it. I love Joe, as I said. I think he’s been one of the best presidents this country has ever had. I think he was treated horribly by his team, his party, the press, the public, etc. I would have been thrilled to get another term from him. But that doesn’t mean I think everything he’s done has been perfect and wonderful and that there haven’t been decisions I disliked. Because he is human and so am I. I get that you are sensitive to the negativity toward him that has occurred on this blog, but allowing that to morph into “If you ever disagree with Biden on anything at all under the sun, then that means you hate him and think he’s terrible and can never do anything right” just makes you sound like a child. You’re not. We’re both adults who should be able to recognize that no one is perfect. And I am entitled to feel how I feel about symbolic moves like this that come across as patronizing and pointless.
Glory b
@Kay: Steriods.
Look at before & after photos of former Pirate Barry Bonds for proof.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah, don’t fight because you might lose is just as bad as don’t fight because you’re allies are pure enough.
We need to be smart but not to the point of listlessness.
oldgold
I do not celebrate Biden’s statement affirming the 28th Amendment.
It illustrates what has troubled the Democratic party and his administration.
On January 27, 2020, the Commonwealth of Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. So, in January of 2025, while the moving van is backing up to the White House, Biden affirms the Amendment.
Once again, much more than a day late and a dollar short.
Villago Delenda Est
They misspelled “reactionary” here.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: This is an example where I think US liberals are too focused on European social democracies as the model for everything that is good and true, or as “the world”. Because Europe is weird and backward on this, and they end up with phenomena like multigenerational communities of native-born “immigrants” who are never allowed to be citizens. Yeah, that’s totally what we want.
I find that many people think, because they’re fixated on Europe, that jus soli citizenship is this unusual thing that only the United States has, when in fact it’s nearly universal in the New World.
I only realized this *after* a conversation I had years ago with my boss who was from the Dominican Republic, and who was wondering why the US considered this so important–the DR doesn’t! Turns out the DR is actually pretty exceptional in this hemisphere in not having it. And it took me embarrassingly longer to figure out the obvious reason why (duh, land border with Haiti).
Denali5
@BellyCat:
You have to understand I am an old person and don’t make much sense most of the time.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin:
My position at the time, which was also the position of every gay friend I had back in mississippi in those days, was that we should have cut the baby in half by simply getting the government out of marriage completely. All the marriage rights that people were complaining about should have been conditioned on civil partnership agreements, and actual marriage ceremonies relegated to a quaint custom primarily practiced primitive religious groups. TBH, it still bothers me that we have made the acquisition of so many rights under the law conditional with participating in a religious ceremony of any kind, even if it’s been watered down to the point that someone who became a minister of the church of life or whatever it’s called that he read about in the back of a magazine can perform a wedding ceremony
Citizen Alan
It was for me.
TBone
As I started my BJ day, thus shall I go attend to real life issues that are pressing. Davy Jones’s PA (recently sold) estate and equestrian paradise is only a half hour away from me, so I say
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xvqeSJlgaNk
Adieu
Matt McIrvin
@Citizen Alan: I remember that as the position that libertarians would butt in with to derail the argument. Because it wasn’t going to happen. The conservative objection was that expanding marriage rights was somehow an attack on marriage, and you’re going to compromise by ACTUALLY getting rid of legal marriage? That’s not a compromise.
And it’s not true that it’s necessarily a religious ceremony. I was married without a religious official participating at all (for the legal “solemnization”, we used a justice of the peace in Cambridge). I am kind of bugged on church/state grounds that religious officials ARE given that power (they aren’t in France, which is much more hardcore about official laïcité!) but you can opt out.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin:
Such tedious and rude people. Personally, I have never made it a point to hold the door open ” for women.” I hold the door open for anyone, regardless of gender, who is going to get to the door after I do coming from either direction.
Because i’m not a rude piece of shit who’s happy to see a door slam in someone else’s face or have to push someone aside to get through the door.
Villago Delenda Est
They have fundamental differences about all of the workings of society itself. On one hand, you have rabid capitalists who stoke the engine of change. On the other hand, you have fundigelicals who throw themselves across the tracks of the trains the rabid capitalists are running. How the coalition between these two manages not to go into the Thunderdome to settle things for once and for all astounds me. They cannot have it both ways.
UncleEbeneezer
Has anyone considered the possibility that Biden has known all along that SCOTUS will strike this down and open the door even more for anti-woman laws and that’s why he held off on this move until now. To at least delay, what he can’t stop.
zhena gogolia
@KatKapCC: You have a right to express your feelings, as do I. My feelings are that on the eve of power being turned over from a decent, hardworking public servant to A RAPIST WHO ATTACKED THE CAPITOL, I do not want to hear about what Joe Biden has done wrong. People asked him to make this gesture for their own good reasons, and he did it. I heard people on this very blog saying they hoped he would do it (but he’d probably be too cowardly, of course).
We’re losing Biden. There’s no point in criticizing him now. I will continue to express my feelings that we should leave him alone now.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
I completely understand activists – they push, they’re advocates, so I understand why they depict the US as having restrictive immigration laws but it isn’t at all true. Our immigration/naturalization code is much more expansive re: immigrants that that of most other countries.
But it makes sense. right? Danes are indigenous to Denmark. Irish are indigenous to Ireland. Indians are indigenous to India.
Americans (mostly!) are not indigenous to the US. Canadas and Australias immigration laws are most like ours and for the same reason. Republicans and media are inventing a white indigenous “American” that does not now and never existed. It’s a fantasy. I think it’s profound. A country cannot embrace so much fantasy, so many lies, and continue. It has to fail. This whole new far Right edifice is built on sand.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: I hear the pushback about American exceptionalism on this mostly from Canadians.
That there would be a big New World/Old World split is pretty historically predictable, in hindsight.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
Activists to me are like criminal defense lawyers. Everyone thinks they’re too punchy and uncouth unless it’s your ass that’s going to prison. All of a sudden they’re heroes.
TBone
@TBone: looks like I’m getting out like a Turkey Day scoot – just in time before that thang blows hahahaha
The predicted snow has arrived 24 hours early!
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
I asked our young associate at the law office this – he’s smart but he doesn’t yet know you can’t treat older women in the workplace like your mommy. I said “but we’re not indigenous thus birthright – born on the actual ground- not only made sense, it was essential”
He said “but how long are we not indigenous?” Quickly. Like he had read it in some Federalist dispatch. So this is an assertion of ownership. A retroactive indigenous categorization for white people. Just wild. And he thinks I’m radical. He’s inventing a history.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: For a while, I figured my European ancestry was complicated enough to just declare myself of American ethnicity, but realized belatedly that people who did that usually big old racists who were trying to concoct a new ethnicity that implied “white”. Yeah, no sale.
Citizen Alan
@Nukular Biskits:
Ninety percent of oral advocacy in law school seem to be learning how to argue both sides of any issue no matter how preposterous. I’m still salty about that time 25 years ago when I participated in a moot court competition and was stuck with the hopeless task of arguing against Miranda rights. Several of the judges were viscerally angry at me for staking out the positions I did, which were the only remotely viable positions to take if you lost the coin toss and were on that side of the debate.
Citizen Alan
I am a white man and you have just described my thought stream for the last twenty years or so that I lived in Mississippi. And i’m starting to get that way here in fresno. I swear, every time I see that one god damned cybertruck …
A Ghost to Most
Enjoy your pipe dream. Gilead starts on Monday.
Baud
The secret to MAGA success is that everyone wants to be MAGA. They just differ on the people who should be looked down on.
John S.
@KatKapCC:
You articulated that a lot better than I could. This is exactly the kind of bullshit around here that drives me up a fucking wall. Thanks!
Torrey
@TBone:
Haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale, have you?
Torrey
I worry, as well, that doing it on the way out makes it a target for the incoming administration in a way it wouldn’t have been if he’d done it any time in the last 4 years. Or just let it stay under the radar until the next time someone actually has power to move it ahead.
tam1MI
Biden could single-handedly cure cancer and those assholes would be skeptical.
Assholes gonna asshole.
Lily
I love this dog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjqtwNUE148
And today I started thinking his spirit might be appropriate toward my “new year” this year. A better thought than I had yesterday.
Baud
The time to fight this was when advocates were pushing for this.
zhena gogolia
I wonder how long into our new Mad Max existence we’re going to continue to dump on Biden. I guess it helps people cope.
John S.
@zhena gogolia:
When you’re not on every thread screaming about it, then we’ll know it has passed. Which is to say, never. But I guess it helps you cope.
zhena gogolia
@John S.: Oh, yes, my one comment constitutes “screaming.” I’m so strident!
And yes, defending a decent man whom we don’t deserve does help me cope.
TBone
@Torrey: yes the fuck I have
https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2019/09/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-testaments-real-life-inspiration
I also have access to large cash to pay off any credit if I need to use it and my bank doesn’t argue about anything with me – they waive ALL fees.
Ruckus
I joined the military in 1969 for a couple of reasons. Joining seemed better than being drafted during a war – and that turned out to be true. The second is that the world used to be a lot worse, and one of the reasons it was worse was the non recognition of the equality of at least half the population. We didn’t, as a country really recognize that every citizen was equal to every other citizen.
IT WAS BULLSHIT.
A nation built on equality has to actually have equality. Every single human being is equal. Not one side of humanity more equal than the other. EQUAL. Gender, race, etc getting differing levels of recognition is not in any way EQUALITY. It is bullshit. Race, Gender, Money differences/restrictions do not make a free, democracy. We have fought wars for this concept of country. And to continuously act as if one group or even a few groups are superior is BULLSHIT. Now of course we have restrictions of things – limits of acceptable behavior, but those are about each and every individual. Yes humanity, as all animals do, have 2 sides, gender. But separating those as one above the other is BULLSHIT. This is a country founded to be different than other concepts of a country, one of equality and freedom.
And the only way that works is equality and freedom.
TBone
@Ruckus: four kegs good, two kegs bad
https://interestingliterature.com/2021/02/orwell-four-legs-good-two-legs-bad-meaning-analysis/
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: anyway, that’s why I prefer to emphasize what sounds like a patriotic exceptionalist angle: that the US is just not an ethnic nationalist country, it was based on an idea, of human rights and equality. Of course the people who did that were huge hypocrites and full of shit, but it was a good idea. The answer isn’t to throw it out but to keep pushing to make it real.
That’s the formula Frederick Douglass eventually settled on, it’s the formula Lincoln used, it’s the formula King and the feminists used. And we can complain about it being bullshit in the implementation till the cows come home but it’s the only rhetoric that ever worked in this country to make things better.
(Who explicitly rejects it? People like Miller and Bannon. Fuck them.)
moonbat
@Matt McIrvin: True dat. I got married in a feed and seed store in Sevierville, TN. Nary a man of the cloth in sight. It was sort of a wacky tradition there.
TBone
@Matt McIrvin: come sit by me please
moonbat
@UncleEbeneezer: An excellent point. But people would rather argue vibes it seems.
moonbat
@Matt McIrvin: Amen.
Ruckus
@Torrey:
This is one of the basic tenants of this country.
It is never the wrong time to say it.
This is a fight. It has always been a fight. It will likely be a fight for a long time. Look who is one of shitforbrains major supporters – the world’s wealthiest man. Who is trying to buy his way to his concept of government. His money makes him rich, but it doesn’t make him any better than a wino sleeping on the ground. And in this case it may be making him far worse.
That is the point of equality. His money doesn’t buy him his humanity or more rights to or for anything. My military service gets me the VA but it doesn’t make me better than the world’s wealthiest man and his money doesn’t make him better than me, just far, far, far, far richer. I’m sure I didn’t use far enough times there….
My point is that we are equal, him, me, you. His bank account is bigger but that is, for the concept of equality of this country, absolutely immaterial.
TBone
@Ruckus: correction (I can’t help it): tenets
Everything else is spot on.
dc
Article V of the Constittuion says nothing about the Executive or an archivist nor deadlines: https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-5/
The Amendment is done and is a part of the Constitution. Of course the Supreme Court won’t agree.
Ruckus
@TBone:
I was talking about renters….
OK so I wasn’t. I’m old, I’m human, we make mistakes. At least I can type…. sort of
In other words – thanks!
tam1MI
Which is why I think Biden’s move here is brilliant. He is laying down a marker.
At least one Dem seems to have learned to copy tactics that Repugs have been using successfully for half a century now.
Matt McIrvin
Anyway, I think the American version of whiteness was basically invented precisely so that we could mimic the forms of ethnic nationalism without actually having a national ethnicity that was enough of a controlling majority to *be* ethnic nationalist and remain unified. It’s a kludge, a bad hack, and it’s not a new fantasy, it’s 300 years old. it’s remarkable that even though the founders of the US subscribed to it they avoided making too much of it in their mission statements, probably because they knew it was a bad hack. I know Jefferson did even though he was a major practitioner of racism. The cognitive dissonance broke his brain.
Matt McIrvin
@Matt McIrvin: …but the people who DID put racism front and center in the mission statements were… the founders of the Confederacy! That’s what you get when you regard the whole equality thing as a bug rather than a feature.
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus: One of the problems we have right now is the right-libertarian concept of “freedom” as respecting property rights above all–I should be able to do whatever I want with my money, including pushing poorer people around–which basically makes the country a plutocracy. Any oppression you can buy your way out of with sufficient cash isn’t a problem.
zhena gogolia
@Matt McIrvin: Interesting idea.
Villago Delenda Est
@Matt McIrvin: Indeed, several of the declarations of secession explicitly said the white man is superior to the black man who is only fit to be the property of the white man.
Lincoln fought to preserve the Union. Davis fought for slavery.
TBone
@dc: that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
@Ruckus: your newletter is worthy of subscription and my years of proofreading have taken their toll!
When I changed my keyboard permissions this thing went haywire in a whole new direction and I feel your pain being a stubborn, old mule myself!
TBone
@tam1MI: hard agree, we’re gonna hafta create this reality in just the same way
Matt McIrvin
@zhena gogolia: The way I’m saying it there, it’s kind of ahistorical because the founding of US predates the big 19th century European push for ethnic nationalism, that state boundaries ought to coincide in some sense with the traditional ethnic countries. But we were a bunch of British colonies and they definitely had this idea of ethnic “countries” making up the kingdom with Englishmen on top.
Miss Bianca
@Matt McIrvin: The LGBTQ+ movement back in Tha Day when I was in college tended toward the “radical queer” end of the spectrum, at least the activists I knew did, and I do remember a general skepticism about same-sex marriage as being bourgie and repressive and “why would we want to reproduce the social systems meant for Breeders”. That sort of thing.
I hadn’t realized how much I had internalized that argument until the same-sex marriage issue really got some legs under it and I was forced to consider why I was…not against it, per se, but wondering why it was so important to some people.
Honestly, I thank Joe Biden for pushing Obama towards support of it, his publicly changing his stance on it kind of opened up my eyes as well.
Miss Bianca
@rikyrah: Yeah, and *those* immigrants, the Eastern Europeans? Man, could they be assholes.
I’ll never forget the experience of my last years in Chicago, living just across Western Ave from Ukrainian Village, and one time when I was walking my dog over there I had some old lady come out on her porch and yell at me to “go home!”
God, it was so funny but also so infuriating, I almost found myself yelling, “YOU go home to wherever the fuck came from, you ugly old bitch – my family’s been ‘home’ here for over 200 years!” Ha, the inner WASP came boiling to the surface for sure!
ETA: Huh, and now Safari is suddenly wiping out my nym and email off every post so I have to re-enter them. Da fuq…?
apocalipstick
@Starfish (she/her):
States’ rights was holed below the waterline by Roger Taney in Dred Scott. The ad hoc application of that doctrine is one of the more glaring examples of the, ahem, malleability of conservative reasoning.
Matt McIrvin
@Citizen Alan: This was the sweet older lady who lived across the street, a good friend of the family, and I hadn’t heard her so much as raise her voice before. My little sister brought up feminist ideas and suddenly she was turning bright red and flinging spittle at this little girl. It was like Jekyll and Hyde.
Matt McIrvin
@Miss Bianca: Reminds me of what we were talking about in another thread, how it’s possible to feel like a wild-eyed radical among normies (even liberal normies) but a complete square in radical circles. I was thinking online but college campuses can be like that too.
(of course MY college campus was full of evangelicals and Reaganites, the radicals were kind of outnumbered)
apocalipstick
@Kay:
If you don’t do birthright, then you have to do per sanguinem, right? Then how far back does that go, because at some point, we all run out of bloodline.
Your young associate has a point, it’s just the exact opposite of the one he thinks he’s making.
Matt McIrvin
@apocalipstick: I figure it usually all boils down to “*I* decide who is a real American.”
…But I do figure a lot of people have this intuitive idea, sometimes echoed by historians, that we are in the process of creating an American People and at some point we’ll just be the ethnic nation for the American People. I’ve lazily subscribed to that idea myself. But its active legal proponents tend to be up to no good.
apocalipstick
@Matt McIrvin:
Isn’t that what we often do? ‘A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.’
I think that part of the hard work of creating an ‘American people’ is that there is no end point and this ongoing process will always involve new people who don’t look like me.
Matt McIrvin
@apocalipstick: Yeah, with these folks the idea is that at some point the “American People” have been statically established, you draw a line around them and from then on nobody coming in is American People any more. And maybe the magic line was established in, say, 1924. Before 1965 at any rate.
WTFGhost
@dc: There is no place in the Supreme Court for the ratification of amendments. The court doesn’t exactly have jurisdiction.
That doesn’t mean they won’t declare they have it. But it does mean they have to go on record as *opposed* to equality.
Dan B
@sab: My parents and my father’s parents were good friends with the Seiberlings (Goodyear). My grandmother was a trained operatic singer as was Gertrude Seiberling. Together they founded the precursor to the Akron Symphony Orchestra, the Tuesday Musical Club. When my brother and I were toddlers my family was offered the apartment above the Carriage House. My mother didn’t want us growing up with the Firestones and Goodriches. John Lithgow ended up living there with his family.
Gloria DryGarden
So true. Also, the lower your income…
Gloria DryGarden
I need to look up that Phyllis schafly movie about ant ERA, starring Cate Blanchett. Just to add to the cognitive dissonance.
Meanwhile, what about calling the nation something different? I’m just playing and being sarcastic/ contrarian, but what about United Ethnicities of America? Or United Genders and Colors of America? Gives us something to live up to…
sab
@Dan B: Tuesday Musical is still going strong. They like to say that they are older than the Cleveland Orchestra.