Update: Steve in Manhattan, thank you again for sharing this blog to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-up! And to those of you stopping by, can you do me a favor and Follow Me if you can? It's... I'd like to know people out there are supporting each other. P.S. As soon as I can get a selfie of it made, I'm going to quit Twitter with both middle fingers aimed at Elon while I head off to Bluesky Social! Look for me there.
This is the thing driving me insane at this moment, and will likely keep me insane for a thousand lifetimes.
Due to the Republicans' effort to overturn Roe with the Dobbs decision, there were ten states this election cycle that had pro-abortion rights amendments for their state constitutions. The results showed that most of those states' voters - even dominated by Far Right powers - sided in favor of abortion rights (via Geoff Mulvihill and Christine Fernando at AP News):
Voters in Missouri cleared the way to undo one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bans in one of seven victories for abortion rights advocates, while Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota defeated similar constitutional amendments, leaving bans in place.
Abortion rights amendments also passed in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland and Montana. Nevada voters also approved an amendment, but they’ll need to pass it again it 2026 for it to take effect. Another that bans discrimination on the basis of “pregnancy outcomes” prevailed in New York.
The results include firsts for the abortion landscape, which underwent a seismic shift in 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a ruling that ended a nationwide right to abortion and cleared the way for bans to take effect in most Republican-controlled states...
For me the sad news is that Florida's pro-abortion amendment didn't pass, but only due to a super-majority (60 percent) requirement for state amendments. It still received 57 percent support, showing a clear number of residents - including other Republicans! - wanted women to have that right to abortion based on medical and psychological needs. If only 3 percent more had any more understanding of how rape victims and women suffering miscarriage are now burdened - or worse, forced to die - because Amendment Four didn't pass.
But what's driving me insane is how many of those same voters - here in Florida, and in Missouri, and Montana, and several others like Kansas and Ohio that saw pro-abortion support in voter referenda - went and voted back into office the same Republican bastards who took away abortion rights in the first place.
It's like those voters refused to pay attention to who caused this problem with women's rights. They didn't blame donald trump for appointing three anti-abortion Justices to the Supreme Court that passed the Dobbs ruling. They didn't hold accountable the Republican Senators who approved those Justices, and in fact gave the GOP control of the incoming Senate term. And they certainly didn't vote out of office the state-level Republicans who are so partisan in their Far Right agenda that they will ignore, obstruct, or defy those state amendments however they can.
In Florida's case, the pro-abortion amendment's failure is likely going to encourage DeSantis - that bastard - and the legislators still controlling Tallahassee to pursue even harsher measures such as going after birth control. They are going to double down on punishing women for being women, I guarantee you this.
How self-defeating can you get? Did ANY of you pay attention?
It wasn't just on abortion that the majority of American voters showed this schizoid desire to support relatively liberal positions while voting into office extremist conservative SOBs.
trump and the Republican Party pretty much campaigned on demonizing immigrants, not just the illegals crossing the border but lawful migrants like Haitians. For the love of God, trump held a last-minute Hate Rally in Madison Square Garden where Puerto Ricans - official citizens since 1917! - were insulted to their faces. And yet more Latinos ended up voting for trump and Republicans, in spite of the reality that trump and the likes of Stephen Miller are openly planning to attack birthright citizenship and attempt "denaturalization" of those who already cleared legal hurdles to citizenship. It's as though those Latino voters - and American voters whose communities rely on migrant workers to survive - don't believe the leopards will be coming to eat their own faces.
Most of the voters' ire towards the Democrats revolved around the high inflation that hit the nation in the Post-COVID economy. Nevermind the fact President Biden passed an Inflation Reduction Act that generated jobs and worked - slowly, alas - to reduce the inflation rate. And those angry voters sided with trump who wants to replace our income tax system with high tariffs that will create WORSE inflation - we're talking Great Depression levels - than we've ever known.
And in spite of the relative success of the ACA (Obamacare) that aid most Americans with their health care costs, those Americans just gave power back to a Republican Party eager to repeal the whole thing (and this time with no clear Replace plan to offer). The same Republican Party that literally DID NOTHING this past term of Congress (the lowest level of legislative activity ever seen).
This isn't about me being some "elitist" liberal snob - I'm barely middle class, goddammit - wondering why my fellow Americans just won't vote the way I want them to. This is me genuinely wondering HOW my fellow Americans haven't paid attention to who (evangelical Far Right greedheads) - and what (racism and sexism) - are causing the problems and turmoil that do affect them as much as all of us.
This is why I'm screaming into the void anymore. The willful blindness of my neighbors and even some family members to the real problems out there and how the Republicans they just voted for are the cause of those problems looking to double down on that madness.
It's like nobody among those 73 million trump voters remembered the madness, the cruelty, the broken acts of poor governance that trump and his Far Right cohorts brought about the first time around between 2017 to 2020. It's like they refuse to remember how since 1988 every time a Republican-led government broke things - Bush the Elder's recession, Bush the Lesser's failed wars and financial meltdowns, trump's excessive tax cuts and refusal to handle the COVID emergency with ANY level of competency or compassion - their partisan extremism made it impossible to solve those crises and were disastrous AND deadly for our nation.
What the hell, America. Seriously. Did you pay ANY attention at ALL?
4 comments:
We have a propaganda problem. The collapse of our information delivery systems has left a void that has mostly been filled by bad actors with evil intent. The legacy media is in decline because falling viewership has reduced the money that used to support the journalism they have on offer. Without that money, the incentive structure has shifted to propagandizing the public instead, and the goddamn Republicans have been doing that for decades already anyway...
-Doug in Sugar Pine
Yes, people were paying attention. The reality is more complex than you are suggesting. A referendum on one issue allows voters to vote just on that one issue. Voting for candidates is different. Each voter faces a pair of candidates, both of whom have some positions he agrees with and some he does not. He has to decide which issues are most important to him and vote accordingly, even though that means voting for a candidate who has some positions he doesn't like.
Evidently there are quite a lot of voters who support abortion rights, but also have other issues on which they agree more with the Republicans (such as immigration) which they deem more important. Such voters will quite logically end up voting for an abortion-rights initiative but also voting for Republicans who oppose abortion.
I suggest that anyone who voted for Trump (or Stein) who then complains about what's happening over the next for years be responded to with one word: Toyota.
Infidel, hey. I saw your Sunday roundup https://infidel753.blogspot.com/2024/11/link-round-up-for-10-november-2024.html , and there was the postscript where you looked at what factors contributed to trump's win, and I do agree with you about one thing: a lot of voters forgot about what happened during trump's disaster of a first term because a lot of those disasters did not directly affect them (not until COVID and his lethal mismanagement of the crisis). As you noted, there were not a lot of things trump did that directly affected myself, much like it didn't directly affect a lot of others. His tariffs wars for example caused only minor disruptions (at the time) and only affected a handful of industries (although a lot of farmers suffered from reprisals from their trading partners overseas). So voters today still don't comprehend how trump's plan to increase tariffs WILL come to harm the whole nation (including themselves).
I think my original complaint still stands, however: These voters may have wanted liberal policies - depending on the policy - but they still refused to accept the liberal-leaning politicians that would have defended them and went with the candidate(s) mostly likely to sabotage or destroy such policies.
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