Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Optimism opens the door to great things.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

This really is a full service blog.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

In after Baud. Damn.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

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The War On Women

Thursday Morning Open Thread: The GOP Death Cult Doubles Down In Its War On Women

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Yep:

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Please proceed, Governor

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Remember yesterday when we speculated that a contested primary could be useful in exposing GOP radicalism on abortion? From RadioIowa:

Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis says Donald Trump’s recent statements on the abortion issue show the former president’s “values” are out of step with Iowa GOP voters. Trump said during an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the six week abortion ban DeSantis signed into law this spring was a terrible mistake.

“Donald Trump may think it’s terrible. I think protecting babies with heartbeats is noble and just and I’m proud to have signed the heartbeat bill in Florida and I know Iowa has similar legislation,” DeSantis says. “I don’t know how you can even make the claim that you’re somehow prolife if you’re criticizing states for enacting protections for babies that have heartbeats.”

Like everyone in the pro-lie movement, DeSantis is a fucking liar. A fetus at six weeks looks kind of like a tadpole and nothing like the Gerber baby, and it doesn’t have a “heart” in any meaningful sense of the word. Here’s how a qualified medical expert (i.e., NOT Ron DeSantis) describes it:

“While the heart does begin to develop at around six weeks, at this point the heart as we know it does not yet exist,” said Dr. Ian Fraser Golding, a pediatric and fetal cardiologist at Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego.

So yes, Repubs are liars, and the reproductive freedom issue isn’t going away. I’m NOT saying the Dobbs decision will carry Democrats to victory in the fall. I am saying the Dobbs decision is deeply unpopular and a millstone around Republicans’ necks because they own it 100%.

That’s why they generally avoid talking about it, but the infighting is bringing the issue to the fore. Good.

Open thread.

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The GOP’s Collective Action Dilemma on Dobbs

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Repubs have a massive Dobbs problem. It’s terrifying for GOP candidates who have to get votes outside of deep red areas, so Repub politicians and the anti-abortion activists who support them are addressing it in the usual way: lies and misdirection.

But it’s tricky because they spent decades screaming in people’s faces while trying to remove a constitutional protection for half the population. Adding to the awkwardness, their victory was delivered by an openly rigged, corrupt court that most Americans don’t trust.

That’s a lot to sweep under the rug, and the task is complicated by the fact that Repubs are embroiled in a contested presidential primary. Weirdly enough, this might be one of the few scenarios where access-based, horserace reportage can be useful. Stenography allows us to observe the narrative sausage-making from each camp in real time.

Like his rivals, Trump has tried to have it both ways on abortion. He steamrolled Kristen Welker during the NBC interview yesterday, and the take from NYT horserace specialists Haberman & Swan suggests the GOP field has a collective action dilemma: Repubs overall would be better off downplaying the issue, but individual candidates have an incentive to play it up.

Here’s a gift link to the Times piece and a few excerpts:

Asked whether Mr. DeSantis went too far by signing a six-week abortion ban, Mr. Trump replied: “I think what he did is a terrible thing and a terrible mistake…”

With Ms. Welker on Sunday, Mr. Trump again refused to clarify his position.

“What’s going to happen is you’re going to come up with a number of weeks or months,” Mr. Trump said. “You’re going to come up with a number that’s going to make people happy.”

He made a far-fetched promise that as president he would “sit down with both sides” and negotiate a deal on abortion that would result in “peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years.”

Yep, that’s definitely not going to happen, just like the “terrific,” “phenomenal” and “fantastic” replacement Trump promised for the Affordable Care Act never materialized either. But Trump, a prolific liar and equivocator, recognizes other liars and equivocators, and in that interview, he called them out or put them in a position to call themselves out.

Welker tried to pin Trump down on whether he supported federal or state level bans. It doesn’t matter, according to Trump, who remained fixated on a magic number of weeks where there’s an imaginary consensus that only he can reveal. When Welker tried to get an answer on the fetal personhood question, Trump aimed a firehose of bullshit at her, splattering his rivals in the process:

FMR. PRES. DONALD TRUMP: It’s much more important, the number of weeks is much more important. But something will happen with the number of weeks, the amount of time, after which you can’t do it. And you know what? The most — the most powerful people that are anti-abortion are okay with that now. And you know what? They weren’t okay with that even a year ago.

KRISTEN WELKER: Your former vice president, Mike Pence, believes that a fetus should have constitutional rights. Do you believe that, Mr. president?

FMR. PRES. DONALD TRUMP: Well, Mike Pence said something about 15 weeks too, which was a big change for Mike Pence, because Mike Pence had no exceptions. I have exceptions, by the way. I think people should have exceptions. I think if it’s rape or incest or the life of the mother, I think you have to have exceptions. It’s very important…

Now all of a sudden — excuse me — now all of a sudden he’s saying 15 weeks. I said, “Wow, where did that come from? That’s a radical change.” Look, something is going to happen that’s going to be good for everybody. And that’s what I’m — I’m almost like a mediator in this case.

He’s not wrong about Pence — supporting a 15-week federal ban (even while leaving draconian state bans in place) is a radical change. The forced birth gang’s willingness to engage in that bit of misdirection is a testament to how much they fear the backlash.

The Times interview notes that Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of S.B.A. Pro-Life America, was “less than thrilled” that Trump attacked DeSantis for the six-week ban but unwilling to criticize Trump. Of course she won’t criticize Trump — she’s as much of a liar as he is.

None of the forced-birth liars have the guts to say what they really want, which is to give the absurd notion of “fetal personhood” force of law and use it to control every woman who ovulates, the downstream consequences in terms of personal freedom and the ability to deliver or receive standard medical care be damned. In the pre-Dobbs world, Dannenfelser and Pence would have denounced as a baby killer any Repub who proposed a 15-week ban.

Meanwhile, the campaign mouthpiece for DeSantis used the Times coverage of the abortion issue to take a whack at Trump, and liar and equivocator Mike Pence lied and equivocated some more:

A spokesman for Mr. DeSantis, Andrew Romeo, responded to Mr. Trump’s attack by criticizing the former president for suggesting he could negotiate with Democrats on abortion, adding that the “disastrous results of Donald Trump compromising with Democrats” while he was president included “$7 trillion in new debt” and “an unfinished border wall.”

Former Vice President Mike Pence, a strict social conservative who has run to the right of everyone in the Republican presidential field on the abortion issue, cast his former running mate’s comments in stark moral terms.

“Donald Trump continues to walk away from the pro-life legacy of our administration,” Mr. Pence said in a statement Sunday morning. “There’s no negotiating when it comes to the life of the unborn. We will not rest, we will not relent, until the sanctity of life is restored to the center of American law in every state in the nation.”

To sum up, this issue isn’t going away for Repubs. In addition to the House loonies attaching forced-birth provisions to every bill in that chamber and Senator Potato Head of Alabama continuing to hold the U.S. military command structure hostage to his radical forced-birth agenda in the other, it looks like Trump and the Not-Trumps in the primary will keep the issue on the front burner through an endless slap-fight among themselves. That’s encouraging!

Open thread.

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Sunday Night Funnies Open Thread (Extremely On-Line Social Media Edition)

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Yes, you *have* heard the name Bari Weiss before, at least if you’ve skimmed the posts sharing my unhealthy compulsion to mock Bari and all her cronies. On the other hand, their ‘ideas’ are so weightless and insubstantial that perhaps they slide off your minds, unregretted.

It’s the end of the weekend, after one chaotic week and facing into another, and mocking the deserving is as much energy as we can spare… (Bonus: Elon Musk’s most mock-worthy ex!) From Kerry Howley at NYMag, “Scenes From the End of the Sexual Revolution”:

The question “Has the Sexual Revolution Failed” contains within itself a number of other questions (failed at what? Failed whom? Why are we talking about this?), precisely none of which were answered Wednesday night at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, where 1,600 plaid-skirted e-girls and be- khakied normies and the aspiring canceled paid as much as $165 a seat to hear a British ideologue, a deft Dimes Square shape-shifter, an ex-Muslim podcaster, and Techno Mechanicus’s mother debate the resolution. You can’t really fault the organizer, even if the organizer was Bari Weiss. It ought to have worked. An ill-defined proposition, half of Red Scare, a random British lady very upset about BDSM, and Grimes? No notes…

The alt-right’s inchoate longing for sexual repression in the absence of religion remains mysterious. Fifty-six percent of the audience, polled beforehand by text at an event featuring four ambitious women and moderated by a queer married media mogul, agreed that the sexual revolution had “failed.” The debate was drawn from Louise Perry’s book, serviceably titled The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, which takes as its presumed reader an extremely credulous liberal raised up in isolation from any information beyond the feminist blogosphere circa 2004 and who needs to be informed, at truly extraordinary length, that men are, on average, physically stronger than women. Women have been pressured to “fuck like men,” a situation that leaves alpha males very happy but all women depressed, abused, vulnerable, and commodified. If there is nothing here that went unsaid by Kay Hymowitz or Christina Hoff Sommers in the dark heyday of the hookup-culture think piece, at least everything sounds better in a British accent.

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The Pro-Lie Movement (Open Thread)

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I won’t truly believe America is safe from the possibility that Ron DeSantis could win the 2024 GOP primary (and thus have a non-zero shot at becoming POTUS) until the day a living, breathing and un-incarcerated Trump accepts the nomination. (Frying pan, fire, etc.)

Truthfully, my anxiety will persist beyond that. Trump is so legally and actuarily imperiled that we shouldn’t discount his distant-though-closest, squintiest rival until the ballots are printed and the voting starts.

DeSantis isn’t giving up either. He’s preternaturally committed to this run. He’s still plodding around in cowboy boots he finds uncomfortable so he can look a bit taller. Before the campaign launch, he lost weight so rapidly he earned the nickname “Captain Ozempic” in Tallahassee. He is rumored to have given up not only dessert spoons but the pudding cups themselves.

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Dobbs Backlash, Continued

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We recently saw this Biden-Harris campaign ad on a streaming channel here in Florida:

I think the ad strikes the perfect tone because the ultimate question really is who’s qualified to make your healthcare decisions — you and your doctor or these guys? As someone who experienced a high-risk pregnancy once upon a time, I can think of fewer scenarios more repellent than Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump weighing in on my medical options. The fucking NERVE of those fucking fuckers!

Also regarding the ad, at first I wondered why they bothered to throw forced birther Sen. Tim Scott into the mix. Now I’m thinking it was a savvy move on the Biden-Harris campaign’s part because DeSantis has been noisily insisting that the GOP primary is a “two-man race.” By including Scott, the ad underscores that’s not true. (Because DeSantis has the charisma of a damp lump of dryer lint and the compassion and sensitivity of a cold steel toilet seat in an unheated county lockup.)

***

The University of Florida’s student newspaper, The Independent Florida Alligator, has been independent since the 1970s because back then, university officials tried to stop the on-campus incarnation of the paper from publishing information on abortion access. Now the media outlet is caught up in another controversy on reproductive health information, this time for rejecting an ad from an abortion pill vendor. From an editorial published on Thursday:

The Alligator would like to formally address its denial of an abortion pill through mail advertisement from MayDay Health that circulated social media over the last 24 hours.

General manager Shaun O’Connor made this decision without consulting the editorial board. He is in charge of advertising for The Alligator and denied the advertisement after talks with three lawyers from our legal team. The paper is allowed to approve or deny any advertisement.

The Alligator could have faced legal repercussions if it ran this advertisement. Florida statute 797.02 states knowingly advertising, publishing or distributing materials that provide information about obtaining substances or assistance for inducing a miscarriage can result in a first-degree misdemeanor in Florida.

While we support fair reporting and pride ourselves on informing the public, an advertisement is not an article. The editorial board will personally be reaching out to interview all parties involved to address and explain what occurred.

O’Connor said if a future editorial includes information from the ad on how UF students can get abortion pills by mail, he’ll back the editorial board. The paper should honor its history and serve its community by publishing that information. I believe it will.

Open thread.

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Reaping the ‘Pro-Life’ Whirlwind

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Because they have no regard for democracy and zero respect for women, Repubs didn’t think through the possible electoral consequences of their decades-long quest to rescind a longstanding constitutional right by overturning Roe. They gave even less thought to the healthcare ramifications — agricultural boards spend more time pondering how grazing land policy affects cattle than your average Repub lawmaker thought about the impact abortion bans have on women’s health.

So, when the Leo Court obliged and effectively made half the population second-class citizens, empowered state-level Repubs to insert themselves into millions of people’s private medical decisions, and forced healthcare providers to change standard care protocols to conform to religious dogma, Repubs were caught flat-footed by public reaction. And now they are belatedly alarmed because the Dobbs decision blowback has been measurable in most elections held since June 2022.

Public responses by individual Repubs are all over the map. House Repubs and Senator Potato Head from AL act as if governing with a mandate to ban abortion nationwide. Chickenshit candidates like Ron DeSantis sign bans in the dead of night and avoid the subject on the trail. But according to NBC News, Senate Repubs held a messaging workshop this week to try to rebrand their way out of this conundrum:

At a closed-door meeting of Senate Republicans this week, the head of a super PAC closely aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., presented poll results that suggested voters are reacting differently to commonly used terms like “pro-life” and “pro-choice” in the wake of last year’s Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, said several senators who were in the room.

The polling, which NBC News has not independently reviewed, was made available to senators Wednesday by former McConnell aide Steven Law and showed that “pro-life” no longer resonated with voters.

“What intrigued me the most about the results was that ‘pro-choice’ and ‘pro-life’ means something different now, that people see being pro-life as being against all abortions … at all levels,” Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said in an interview Thursday.

Well, maybe those polled have seen stories about women who seek emergency treatment for miscarriages being advised to quietly bleed out in their homes until the local archbishop and megachurch pastor deem their lives sufficiently endangered to warrant medical intervention. Or maybe they’ve read about Orwellian laws that encourage random busybodies to monetize their neighbors’ deeply private situations.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said the polling made it clear to him that more specificity is needed in talking about abortion.

“Many voters think [‘pro-life’] means you’re for no exceptions in favor of abortion ever, ever, and ‘pro-choice’ now can mean any number of things. So the conversation was mostly oriented around how voters think of those labels, that they’ve shifted. So if you’re going to talk about the issue, you need to be specific,” Hawley said Thursday.

“You can’t assume that everybody knows what it means,” he added. “They probably don’t.”

Yep, that will surely do the trick because if there’s one thing all American women are demanding with a single voice, it’s additional and more specific mansplaining from Josh Fucking Hawley! (Who represents a state that bans abortions with no exceptions for rape or incest, BTW.)

Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., summarized Wednesday’s meeting as being focused on “pro-baby policies.”

Asked whether senators were encouraged to use a term other than “pro-life,” Young said his “pro-baby” descriptor “was just a term of my creation to demonstrate my concern for babies.”

These fanatical dingleberries will never land on the actual word that describes their position on reproductive healthcare, which is “anti-woman.” But it seems like many voters have reached that conclusion all by themselves. I don’t think more branding workshops will keep Repubs from reaping the whirlwind they sowed for generations, but this is America, so who knows.

Open thread.

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