The Willful Blindness

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?

Let This Be a Sign Of a Strong Blue Wave This 2024

Update: ...

I still check on Infidel753's blog every Sunday - he does a weekly wrap-up of other online tidbits to read that are solid and cool - and I picked up on his article "Why I Anticipate a Blue Wave" from a few days ago. Inf makes some reasonable observations about what he calls "The Dobbs Effect":

My main reason for expecting a very substantial Democratic win is straightforward.  Since the Dobbs decision, I have believed that this election will be dominated by the abortion-rights issue, and nothing that has happened since then has given me any reason to change that assessment.  The need to restore and protect abortion rights will lead some Republicans (mostly women) to vote for Democrats, and will motivate many people to vote who would not otherwise have bothered.  These effects will swamp and overwhelm all other factors and will determine the outcome.

My supporting evidence for this claim is the results of all the abortion referenda, and almost all the elections, held since the Dobbs decision.  Every time abortion rights have been put to a public vote, they have won overwhelmingly, even in very red states.  Moreover, turnout in these referenda has been high, suggesting both that many Republicans are voting for abortion rights, and that many new voters are being motivated to participate.  As for the elections, in case after case since Dobbs, Democratic candidates have done ten or fifteen points better than the historic norm for the state or district involved.  Sometimes that shift has been big enough to allow the Democrat to win in a "red" district, sometimes not, but the point is that the shift is almost always there.  This recent election in Alaska continued the pattern.  Voters are well aware that Democrats in office will uphold abortion rights, while Republicans will attack them.

Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.  This axiom applies to voting as much as to anything else.  I can't think of any reason why the abortion-rights factor would not dominate the federal election just as much as it has dominated other elections since Dobbs (if anything, it's increasing in importance).  Moreover, most of those surprising election and referendum results since Dobbs were not anticipated by polling, which predicted much closer, more "normal" outcomes.  This shows that the Dobbs effect is not being captured by polling.  That may be because many Republicans are telling pollsters they expect to vote Republican again and only changing their minds at the last moment, in the voting booth; it could also be that the pollsters' turnout models are not capturing the effect of so many new voters participating.  It's likely that the current polling we're seeing for the federal election is similarly missing the Dobbs effect, for the same reasons...

Infidel shared in his Sunday round-up link to a USA Today report that is tracking the Early Voting turnout - which has seen an increase in turnout compared to 2020 - showing that where overall turnout is balanced between Democratic and Republican voters, the percentage voting for Harris is at 63 percent(!). All things being equal, we can conclude that a significant percent - at least double-digits - of Republicans have crossed the aisle to support the Dems. Whether this translates to down-ballot seats isn't known, but if the Dobbs ruling is truly pushing moderate pro-choice Republicans to change sides those results should favor the whole Democratic ticket.

Again, this is not just speculation or wishful thinking.  It requires only that the voters behave as they have done in every election since the Dobbs ruling, and that the polls fail to predict this effect just as they failed to predict it in all those earlier cases.  Imagine if this November every state and district votes ten percent more Democratic than it historically has, or even just five percent.  A swing of five percent would mean a landslide; ten percent would be an annihilating tsunami.  I'm not saying something like that definitely will happen, but it would be consistent with the pattern of the last two years...

The polling, as Infidel noted, doesn't seem to pick up on the shifts happening with women voters - they seem to stick to the same 2020 models that White Women voters will stay with a Republican Party that devastated their health care rights two years afterward and are threatening even more harm to come - and as always the caveat is that voter turnout still matters. That 63 percent vote for Harris in early voting (with 34 to trump) is tempered by that same article noting the voters waiting for Election Day itself support trump at 52 percent over Harris' 35 percent with the same group... but that's nowhere near the numbers Harris is getting and promises to get by November 5th. Put those two sets together and the average you get - 63+35 for Harris, 34+52 to trump - splits to a 49 percent Harris vs. 43 percent trump result (the 7 percent different is going to third parties as usual). 

Of course, results will vary from state to state - not every Red state will shift 10 percent to favor Democrats, some may not even shift 5 percent - but if enough states DO shift in favor for Harris and the Democratic Party, we should see an increase in states (and Electoral Votes) more than Biden's results in 2020.

Those hopes I have of securing battleground states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin grow stronger. The odds of keeping Georgia Blue as well grow greater. The possibility of flipping Texas, Ohio, Florida, even Kansas and Nebraska (maybe even Missouri) - any other states where the abortion rights referendum have happened or are happening now - are within reach of Democratic - and pro-choice - voters angered by the Culture War bullshit of the Far Right in their own communities.

Again. Voter turnout matters. Every vote in favor of Harris - and Democratic Senators, and Democratic Congresscritters, and State Legislators - needs to get into the ballot boxes now while Early Voting is still happening or on Election Day itself on Tuesday November 5th. Every blue vote matters, everybody. Stopping trump and stopping the Republican War on Women (and minorities, and immigrants, and schools, and Social Security, and...) is the mission.

Let's fucking GOOOOOO, America. Vote for Harris and every Democratic candidate you've got on the ballot. Vote like your life and your liberty and your families and friends are on the line. Because it all is on the line this 2024.

Update: thinking again about how close certain states were in 2020, if we consider a five percent shift minimum in favor of Harris for the Electoral count, the website 270towin has a map where states within five percent popular vote were left blank:

Now consider ALL of those blank states flipped Blue for Harris. Some already went for Biden - Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and especially Georgia - but now add in North Carolina and Florida(!). Even without the huge gain of flipping Texas - or my personal desire to see Kansas and Nebraska flip because THAT would break the "Heartland of America is Conservative" narrative in the Beltway media - that's still a massive 349 EV count and a good chance the popular vote for Harris goes over 90 million(!).

The only thing to worry at this point is if DeSantis goes full MAGA and declares secession in order to stop the Electoral certification. If Texas flips Democrat, I'll guarantee you the state GOP led by that jerkass Abbott will.

The Conservative Contempt for Women

As low as the Far Right Republican political agenda for 2024 can sink, it still keeps going in a downward spiral. Over the weekend, the media got wind of yet another interview VP candidate JD Vance gave where he exposed more misogyny towards women who did not fit his world-view (via Jason Wilson at the Guardian (US)): 

Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, said that professional women “choose a path to misery” when they prioritize careers over having children in a September 2021 podcast interview in which he also claimed men in America were “suppressed” in their masculinity.

The Ohio senator and vice-presidential candidate said of women like his classmates at Yale Law School that “pursuing racial or gender equity is like the value system that gives their life meaning … [but] they all find that that value system leads to misery”...

Ever since he was picked by Trump, Vance has been hit by scandals over his past comments, especially those concerning women and his perception of their role in society.

Last week his campaign was rocked by previous comments blasting a teachers union president for not having “some of her own” children. His previous characterizations of Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies” have also troubled the Trump campaign’s efforts to appeal to suburban women.

Sophie Bjork-James, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who has written extensively on topics including US evangelicals and populist politics, said: “Vance represents a new articulation of rightwing politics that is bridging the Christian right and a tech-influenced hypermasculine conservatism.

“He appeals to evangelicals with the message that we find happiness by fulfilling traditional gender roles, which is a cornerstone of white evangelical Christianity. He also speaks to a misogynist trend emerging out of the tech world among people who would prefer not to talk about any kind of diversity at all.”

“What they share is the view that women shouldn’t be in paid work: they should be in the home and rearing children. But the public line isn’t ‘we hate women’, it’s ‘women will be happier if they stay at home’,” she added.

The Guardian contacted the Vance campaign for comment but received no response...

As a man, JD Vance is trying hard to present himself as a patriarchal Alpha Male: dismissive of women's rights, projecting his own misery onto them, and refusing to express any basic decency at all. 

We've seen these Alpha Male wannabes - and their Incel cousins - running around on social media, showing off their "conquests", expressing their toxic mindsets, and acting out their dominance towards everyone they view as their lessers. 

Remember Andrew Tate, the preening jackass who advertises himself as a male role model and tried taunting a young woman about his prized gas guzzling sports cars... and ended up exposing himself to arrest by Romanian authorities pursuing him for abuse, fraud, and human sex trafficking? He resumed his public behavior as a misogynistic asshole even after that arrest, which all led to fresh arrests by Romanian officials now including sex trafficking of minors.

This is who these women-hating men are: They can't stop themselves from their attitudes that women - and the younger the better - are property, no different than the 16 cars Tate has to own to make himself feel superior to the rest of us. To these men, women are basically slaves to their whims and needs. They don't see women as half the human population, or as humans at all. Ask them if women have brains, these guys will laugh. Ask them if women have souls, these guys will shrug it off.

As human beings, Vance and his Alpha Male colleagues just keep proving themselves - and everything their world-view represents - vile and wrong.

It's not just Vance that's the problem. The guy who hired him as his vice presidential candidate - trump - is demonstrably worse. Above all, donald trump is officially a sex offender, found liable for sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll that the judge declared was by definition rape. There's the long history of trump abusing his "privileges" owning the Miss Teen USA pageants. There's the report he raped his first wife Ivana. There's trump himself proudly boasting he can grab women by the p-ssy in the most vulgar way possible.

And with all that, the so-called "family values" religious-type leadership of the Republican Party accepts trump - and Vance, and hundreds of other vulgar Alpha Male assholes - as their own. Because those "Christian" values aren't about family, or humility, or love.

This contempt, this rage, this violence towards women explains how deep into the rot the conservative ideology has fallen. 

This is who conservatives are, in service to their ideology that only the true elites - rich, white, and male - must rule. Remember what Frank Wilhoit said: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Everyone else outside of their circle - the ethnic minorities like Blacks and Latinos (and even Asians), the youth, the poor, and now above all the women - must be shunned, defamed, disposed of.

Even those lessers who ARE in their circle - the conservative women (and Blacks and Latinos and Gays) in this case - who pander to this message of misogyny are just there to convince these men - if not those in the media looking for narrative cover - that they are ideologically in the right. The conservative women playing to the "tradwife" or anti-feminist stances are doing so because they personally profit - above all, the wealth and social influence - from living in the status quo that the conservative movement seeks to enforce. But the second these women are no longer valued for their contributions, they will find themselves in the same mess - poor, physically broken, emotionally drained - every other American woman suffers now.

Wonder why teacher's pay is so low across so many Republican-controlled states? It's because it's viewed as "women's work." Wonder why women's health care is declining across the nation? Because the bans on abortion - and the coming threat to birth control - are sending many OB/Gyns into retirement - and scaring potential new doctors out of the profession - before they can get criminally charged by ignorant wingnut politicians over basic women's health care.

If trump is trying to walk back the damage he'd done already over abortion - and health care in general - don't listen to him. Look at what he's doing. Look at who he's working with to promote even worse ills on the nation if he - and his cohort Vance - lie and steal their way back into the White House.

The Republican platform on women boils down to one word: SUFFER.

The cruelty remains the point.

For the Love of God and for the women in your lives, Stop Voting Republican.

Getting Ready for the 2024 Florida Ballot Amendments

It's about time to start thinking about the state-level referenda that will be on the 2024 general ballot along with the major races like President, Senator, Congress, and State legislators.

Ballotpedia does a good job of keeping track of these things, so I defer to the information they've got gathered for the six amendment offerings: 

Amendment One: Partisan School Board Elections

This one changes the county-level school board elections from the current nonpartisan (no party listed) to where a candidate has to establish affiliation. The debate around this is a question of transparency: While the ballot currently doesn't say which candidate's issues and ideologies are, you can judge by which company they'd keep if they were openly Republican (vouchers to private schools, doing nothing on teachers' pay, crowded classrooms, etc.) or Democrat (public money to public schools, improving teacher pay, smaller classroom sizes, etc.).

If you ever visit a state or county-level party website, you'll see listings for "Supported Candidates" that will include "recommendations" for school board candidates. They may pretend to be "nonpartisan" but they're really not.

I'm kind of on the fence on this one. You can't avoid the reality that there will be partisan candidates for school boards, especially as the fights over book censorship and transgender/gay rights move to the forefront. If you can tell which candidate is backed by either party, you can at least gauge which will better defend your interests. The problem will be the campaigning: If you make the school board elections officially partisan, the hostility and viciousness that comes with such campaigns could make the local elections more divisive.

On this one, I'm going to err on the side of "better to know which candidate is Republican and thus shouldn't be in office".

Amendment Two: Right to Hunt and Fish

While there is some hunting and fishing allowed in Florida, this amendment seems to expand that right to unregulated levels.

Florida is on a rare environmental stage: a diverse ecosystem relying a lot on water (shorelines, rivers, lakes) and on still-undeveloped geological areas like wetlands, swamps, and forests. There's a number of endangered animals still about - the Florida Panther for example - and a lot of dangerous wildlife - alligators and brown bears - facing more encroachment and threats from humans (not just the hunters). This amendment in my opinion would increase the risks towards a number of those endangered or dangerous animals to where we'll disrupt the Florida environment even more. Those who oppose the amendment also point to the threat of overfishing.

I've never gotten into hunting. My grandfather willed me a hunting rifle as a child and I never accepted it. I don't believe in hunting as a sport or as a natural part of the cycle (there are logical reasons to manage high-breeding animals like rabbits and deer in some places, but not for me). If I wanna stalk an animal I'm using my camera to take pictures, not lives.

Amendment Three: Legalizing Marijuana for adults

A previous amendment had legalized pot for medicinal purposes back in 2016, and this one looks to open the market to recreational use for those 21 and up.

This is coming at a moment when the Biden administration is pushing to reduce marijuana's Schedule status from Class I (dangerous, illegal, and criminal) to Class III (regulated/controlled by doctors). There's been more studies about the benefits and risks of using cannabis and essentially pointing to how it doesn't fit the Class I profile.

Reducing marijuana to Class III lowers it as a priority drug for law enforcement, which should reduce a lot of unnecessary arrests and prison time for otherwise non-dangerous users. Putting it at Class III still requires regulated control, and would encourage upholding penalties for things like Driving Under the Influence much like we do for alcohol.

I am not a drug user. I don't smoke anything. I don't drink alcohol (I've tried once or thrice). I don't begrudge those who do (except for smokers, I hate second-hand smoke, keep away from me ugh), although I advocate for moderation in all things. When I see how the War on Drugs has been a disaster - much like Prohibition that did nothing to stop alcohol consumption - anything that would reduce the prison rate in our nation and change policing habits is a good thing. If we can shift the focus on the War on Drugs away from punishment and towards health care (rehab and detox) we ought to see a reduction in drug use.

Amendment Four: Abortion Rights for Residents, setting a specific timeline and for cases where the woman's health is at risk 

This is the big one, now that the state court allowed for a restrictive six-week ban that essentially negated abortion as a choice for women no matter what.

Previous state court rulings upheld a right of privacy, but two decades of hard Far Right government allowed Republican governors to replace judges with anti-abortion advocates. Given that a solid majority of Americans agree that abortion should be a choice for the woman, this amendment is a strong effort to regain that choice and set the abortion deadline to a more viable 24 weeks.

This is where the Minority Party Rule obsession of the Republican Party is at odds with what the people want (and need). Without access to abortion as a health care right, more and more (poor) women are going to suffer from miscarriages, infections, stillbirths, and worse.

With the supermajority requirement of 60 percent approval for this amendment to pass, there's going to be a lot of fighting between the anti-abortion and pro-choice factions to get the vote out. Here's hoping the pro-choice side gets well above the 60 percent threshold to signal to the Far Right just how serious residents are in protecting their personal rights.

Amendment Five: Annual Inflation Adjustment to Homestead Exemption

This is where the Republican-controlled Legislature wants to add the Consumer Price Index to creating more tax cuts. Essentially adjusting on an annual basis more room for non-school related county/city millage rates. It probably won't be much for most homeowners as a tax savings, but the cities are opposing it because it will cut into their revenues.

I should mention as a city librarian employee, this tax cut could affect my library's budget, which affects all the steamy vampire romance novels we can add to the collection. You don't wanna lose your steamy vampire romance novels, do you? DO YOU?! Save the steamy vampire romance novels, and vote No on this amendment, thank ye.

Amendment Six: Repeal of Public Financing for Statewide Campaigns

There's currently a referendum amendment on the books from 1998 that set up public financing - and serious spending restrictions - for state-level offices such as Governor/Lt. Gov. The Republican-controlled state Legislature is looking - has been for a good while - for ways to undo that amendment and remove the restrictions.

The dangers of private, deep-pocket money getting into state-level elections are very real. The Republicans - deep in the tank for billionaires, land developers, and rich wingnuts - want more of that unregulated campaign money to finance themselves (and their consultant buddies eager for six-figure fees).

We've seen the effect of unregulated campaign financing at the federal level (fuck you, Citizens United). That's the LAST thing we need in the Sunshine State. This better be a hard No, Floridians.

So, to recap: Huge Yes to Amendment Four and abortion rights, Solid Yes on Three to allow marijuana use for adults, Middling Yes on One for Partisan School Board elections, Hard No on open Hunting/Fishing, Huge NO against inflation-adjusting property taxes and against the repeal of public-financed campaigns.

Get the vote out this November, Florida. Elections always matter. Especially the referenda, especially for our rights.

Florida, Get the Vote Out in 2024 to Protect Your Rights

Things as always are crazy in Florida. Especially with the religious wingnut Republican Party in charge of everything the last 20-odd years, to where abortion rights in the state suffer in spite of previous state Supreme Court rulings that upheld the privacy rights in the state constitution.

Today's Florida Supreme Court - now stacked with Far Right Conservatives by decades of Republican control - just gave the state residents a mixed bag of sorts with their recent rulings on two abortion-related items: One ruling that effectively ends abortion rights in the state but then another ruling that gives voters the chance to get those rights back (via Regan McCarthy at WFSU Public Media, an NPR affiliate): 

The Florida Supreme Court has issued two rulings that stand to significantly impact abortion access in Florida. Voters will get to decide the future of abortion through a constitutional amendment that will be on the ballot in November. In a separate decision, the court upheld Florida's current 15-week abortion ban, triggering a six-week ban to take effect in 30 days.

Lauren Brenzel is the campaign director for Floridians Protecting Freedom, the group leading the push for the amendment. Brenzel is happy to see the proposal heading for the ballot, but they worry the six-week limitations on abortion will create a “public health emergency.”

“There is nowhere in our southern region to intake Florida’s patients,” Brenzel says. “Women will be forced to travel thousands of miles away from their support systems and their own providers.”

Lawmakers approved the six-week ban last year but stipulated it would not go into effect until the court issued a ruling on Florida's current 15-week abortion limit. In an opinion Monday justices upheld the current rules and found that a privacy amendment in the state constitution does not protect access to abortion—reversing a ruling the court had issued back in 1989...

No matter what you think about American jurisprudence based on previous rulings to set precedence, be aware that Far Right judges will rewrite precedence to fit whatever agenda they have. Which is why it's a bit surprising the state court allowed the pro-choice referendum to move forward:

The proposed amendment could reverse the six-week ban. If the amendment language passes in November, Brenzel says it will go effect in January of next year. To pass, it needs approval from at least 60% of the voters who turn out at the polls. More than a million people signed petitions to get the proposed amendment on the ballot, but Brenzel says the next step will require even broader support.

“We need to make sure that we reach out to voters all across this very large state who come from a variety of different backgrounds and a variety of different standpoints on the uniqueness of pregnancy," Brenzel says...

The amendment received an incredible amount of signatures - I was one of them - to get on the ballot as Amendment 4 - well over a million, and well ahead of the deadline - and could well reach the supermajority 60 percent needed to pass (the polling at the Ballotpedia link shows it currently at 62 percent in favor).

Considering how the Florida Republicans instituted a six-week ban on abortion - trying to avoid the hassles of a complete ban, but making the timeline so strict (women do NOT automatically know they're pregnant) no person can achieve it - a lot of women and pro-choice men are going to be angered up enough to show up and vote. 

For the ones still on the fence regarding abortion, they need to understand this: None of this is about "the fetus" or the children. If it were, these "pro-lifers" would be pushing for more prenatal and postpartum health care funding, they'd be willing to accept the reality that miscarriages or health risks happen, they'd accept the hard reality that rape/incest are creating painful choices for women stuck with unwanted (even immoral) pregnancies. All of this is about the Far Right conservatives passing their moral judgment - and their own punishments - on women, on the poor, on minorities who lack privilege or protection, on their lessers.

Voting in favor of Amendment 4 carves it in stone that women needing an abortion - for rape, for incest, for health risk reasons - have a reasonable timeline (doctors put it at 24 weeks) to find the physical and emotional health care they need. It leaves it open as a choice between the woman, her health care provider, her family, and her faith (not the state's) and no one else's.

This is an issue that matters, even if you don't think it affects you directly. Because it affects your families, your cousins, your friends, your coworkers, every woman you know in life, every woman you don't even meet in this state. We're seeing stories already from states with strict bans against abortion, and women are suffering from stillbirths, miscarriages, and complications from infection. It matters a lot for women to ensure and protect their own health care choices, especially against a group of Far Right wingnuts who don't care about other people's well-being, only their own stance above the rest of us playing to their own egos (they may claim it's their faith, but true faith is more abiding and forgiving than themselves).

This is a vote that could win. The previous pro-choice vote in a massively Republican state like Kansas proves it. The recent special election for a state Senate seat in Alabama - where the Democratic candidate campaign hard in favor of abortion and protecting IVF - that had the Democrat winning with 60 percent of the vote proves that pro-choice gets the vote out.

We need to get the vote out, Florida. Every person needs to get on the ballot this November and vote in favor of Amendment 4 to give women their power back over their own bodies and their own lives.

We also need to vote every Republican out of office at the state level, because you know these buzzards are going to do everything they can to obstruct and deny this Amendment even if it passes.

Elections matter, Florida. Vote for your loved ones, vote for your friends, vote for their own choice and their own health.

What the Wingnuts REALLY Want: Control of Women, Control of Science, Control of Everything

You would think the so-called "pro-life" movement would be thrilled to support something like in vitro fertilization (IVF). After all, IVF should be a good thing: It's the active choice to get pregnant and have a baby in spite of various health or physiological factors that were preventing couples (or women) from natural reproduction. It's expensive, and painful, and not always successful: but thousands of people choose it because they want to be good parents. In the opposition to abortion - that it's "baby-killing" or "ending God's gift" - the choice of IVF would reflect that positivity of life.

And yet, those anti-abortionists - you can't call them "pro-life" in most respects now they're not even "pro-fetus" - are perfectly happy nuking from orbit IVF as a medical option, just like they did in Alabama's Supreme Court ruling earlier last week.

It has to do - mostly - with how it's done: Harvesting multiple ova and fertilizing each one, freezing the embryos until one is needed, implanting it, and hoping it works. All those extra harvested eggs become troubling to the "pro-fetus" believers because in their world-view those embryos are now persons, and any potential destruction of those embryos would be an act of abortion. There's also the problem that an implanted ova may not take, which becomes in their minds an abortion as well.

I'd also argue the "pro-fetus" people are annoyed - jealous, really - by how instead of relying on God for the miracle of childbirth, people can rely instead on Science and fertility doctors to get it done.

There's also the rage against feminism, the fear that single women would choose IVF with a random sperm donor and avoid the emotional - and oft-times physical - complications dealing with men. God forbid the Patriarchy - "OBEY your husbands, ladies" - be denied or disturbed in any way.

But it all boils down to what these wingnuts REALLY want. They want control.

I mentioned before how I've seen them in-person protesting at clinics, driven by rage and shilling fearmongering images of bloodied fetuses. Eager to pass "moral" judgment on women and families they didn't know, just so they could have some insane level of control over how the world around them truly works.

In the Religious Right's obsessive need to end abortion as a choice, they will tear down everything else to impose their religious views - their control - on everyone else. They will deny rape and incest as a problem to ensure women can't get abortions from unwanted pregnancies. They will obscure the reality that pregnancies are not 100 percent safe, and deny how miscarriages, stillbirths, and ectopic pregnancies can happen in "God's perfect world." They will demonize women who suffer miscarriages and seek to jail any doctors foolish enough to provide any kind of prenatal care in these Red States under theocratic misrule.

The Religious Right are going after IVF because it's still a choice, one they can't control and one that dares question their foundational belief in personhood for embryos.

The Religious Right are going after birth control - something that actually stops fertilization, so it shouldn't affect "personhood" - because these wingnuts want their control over the reproductive act for every woman, even the ones - liberal Christians, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim - who don't subscribe to their religion.

The Religious Right will bust down the doors of every house in America to check on your uteri, women, never mind your personal rights. These same enforcers won't lift a finger to go after men who commit onanism and waste all that sacred sperm.

These same Religious Right will deny you any chance to get pregnant and have families on your own terms, through IVF or through personal use of contraceptives until you're ready - emotionally and financially - to have children. Because they want to control that part of your lives as well.

As much as they'd love to control your souls, and demand your fealty to their Church (not their God, because they will deny other Christians any say in what God truly is), they know in the end they truly can't. So they want control - political, physical, public - of everything else just so they can make themselves superior to the rest of us. 

The Religious Right are doing all of this so they can sit themselves atop a throne to look down on the rest they view as sinners and un-persons. 

Doing all this so they can judge us, before God judges them for the damage they've done to their neighbors.

God DAMN them, and for the Love of a true and just God drive every one of these Christianist absolutists out of our elected offices and courtrooms.

Signing a 2024 Florida Referendum for Women's Power to Choose

The State of Florida has a petition-initiative method of putting state amendments to a referendum so that every two years there's at least a handful of referenda on the ballots.

Right now, there's a petition to get a Pro-Choice abortion amendment on the 2024 referendum needing more signatures.

Here's the wording:

No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.

It would prevent the Republican-controlled legislature - and that bully DeSantis - from passing any harsher restrictions on abortion access. The state is currently set at 15 weeks, which is hampered by the various roadblocks that other laws use to slow a woman's ability to schedule and have an abortion, and the restrictions harm women in later stages of pregnancy suffering medical heartbreaks and life-threatening emergencies.

If you're a Florida resident and a registered voter and you believe that women (and their health care providers) should have their say in their own health care, that there are times when abortion is a valid choice, then please visit that link, click on the Petition button to download the PDF form, fill out and mail it in as soon as possible, please and thank you.

Republicans do NOT represent the majority of Americans who believe abortion should be a choice, but with the current gerrymandering tricks skewing political power to them we are not going to get the representation we deserve. This amendment will give power to our representation, and give women their power to choose - with proper medical advice - for themselves.

Republicans Will Vote For the Devil When It Suits Their Purpose

"He may be a bastard, but he's OUR bastard!"
- standard excuse given by political cynics whenever they justify supporting a terrible, scandal-plagued candidate

It's come up again that the Republican Party has no morality when it comes to selecting their candidates. The Georgia Senate race involving Herschel Walker - a well-proven domestic abuser with an insane history of fabricating his history - just got exposed with reports from the Daily Beast that he paid a number of former girlfriends to have abortions. All of this highlighting the hypocrisy of the GOP running on a pro-life anti-abortion platform.

Just like Alabama's Roy Moore back in 2017, when he was exposed as a pedophile chasing after teen girls in shopping malls and stalking them to their high schools, the Republicans are publicly and perfectly fine with Walker paying for abortions, because GOD FORBID the political power should ever go to those radical evil Democrats instead.

As Steve M. notes at his No More Mister Nice Blog, the cruelty AND hypocrisy are the ever-constant focal points of an unhinged power-mad minority party:

Right-wing thought leaders are making it clear that they don't care whether Walker was an accessory to what they normally regard as murder -- only power matters in this case...

We all know what Frank Wilhoit said: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” But we need to realize that conservatives believe that this applies not just to what's legally permitted, but also to what's regarded as moral. If a conservative does it, that means it's not immoral. And the corollary: Liberals are immoral even if they don't commit immoral acts.

So Bill Clinton's marital troubles make him a moral degenerate, but Donald Trump's don't -- in fact, he's widely regarded on the right as a good Christian. Barack and Michelle Obama are depraved even though they've had a long, sturdy marriage. Similarly, Hunter Biden's past transgressions damn him for life, no matter how thoroughly he cleans up -- but Herschel Walker's past is irrelevant to the right.

What's the right's definition of a good person? A Republican in good standing. What's the right's definition of an evil person? Anyone who isn't a Republican in good standing, or on the way to becoming one. (Democrats who attack the "Democrat Party" get a special exemption.) So no one on the right is calling Herschel Walker an accessory to murder. It's only murder -- with, increasingly, the risk of real legal penalties -- if we do it...

Republicans keep proving that they don't care if the elected official or candidate they're backing is an imbecile, if that person is racist or anti-Semitic or misogynistic to hell and back, or if that person has so many ethical red flags they should never be trusted.

Republicans want emotionally broken, ethically vacant people among their ranks to ensure they are loyal only to themselves (and their rich deep pocket sugar daddies) and not to the states and districts they are sworn to serve. They know they are not truly representative of the needs of the majority, and they know they can't find people who are ethical and honest to run as Republicans. So they'll run the crooks they do draft into service, and use mudslinging attacks on Democrats as "leftist radicals destroying America" to rile up their base to show up and vote (while discouraging independent voters from paying attention) while doing everything to rig the midterms to discount/disqualify every Democratic vote they can.

Every Republican action exposes their gaslighting and hypocrisy as damaging to our national well-being. These midterms matter, people. For the LOVE OF GOD and for honest representation in OUR government, please show up to vote this November and PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD VOTE FOR EVERY DEMOCRAT YOU CAN. Do not let the Herschel Walkers and the Matt Gaetzes and the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the GOP win a damn thing.

The Pro-Choice News Out of Kansas

I don't want to always be "doom and gloom" around here, so when a bright ray of hope shines through I'd like to make a few comments about it (well, also refer to other people's comments to reinforce my own arguments, but that's how I roll son).

It's taken me a few days to blog about this development, but after all the bad news about Republicans banning abortion and trying to punish women across every Red state they control we've finally got one state where the majority of voters who are pro-choice pushed back. 

While Kansas has been a reliably Red state for ages - I have a personal joke that Kansas is so old-school Republican they make Ohio look Blue - it's also a state that had written a personal rights clause into their state constitution that their supreme court back in 2019 ruled meant women had a right to choose an abortion if they needed one. Angry that they couldn't punish women as soon as the U.S. Supreme Court nuked Roe with their Dobbs ruling, the state Republicans pushed a referendum onto the 2022 midterm ballots that would have cut that part of their state constitution and allow the state legislature to issue their anti-abortion laws.

And just to make sure not enough people would vote on it, they set the referendum along with the primary election cycle of the midterm, when usually only the party voters turn up (meaning a low-enough turnout to ensure the GOP plurality dominating Kansas politics would cast their likely YES vote to gut the abortion protection).

Funny thing. It turns out a lot of voters in Kansas turned up to vote on the referendum, a lot more than expected, and enough of them - not just Democrats by the looks of things, but also the Indy voters AND enough Kansas Republicans - voted NO to stop the ballot from passing. I shouldn't say "enough" as though it was a close vote: It was a DAMN BLOWOUT (it was 63-39 percent at one point but it's settled to 59-41 percent) in a clear sign Kansas voters across the spectrum wanted to keep abortion a legal right.

I could go into more detail, but Rani Molla over at Vox went there and so let's refer to her findings:

More than 900,000 Kansans showed up to the polls to vote on the state’s abortion referendum. That’s the biggest turnout for a primary election in the state’s history, according to the Kansas Secretary of State’s office. That number is closer to what we’d expect to see in a general election turnout, which is always vastly higher than primaries. And it suggests we could also see high turnout in upcoming primaries where abortion is on the docket...

Molla also included a number of charts, so let's take a look:

This is for primary cycle turnout. Reportedly, the Kansas Sec of State was expecting turnout around 36 percent, which would have matched the 2020 primary numbers. But look at that chart: 2022 turnout at near 50 percent of registered voters saw the greatest jump between 2-year election gaps. Something really got the voter turnout to spike higher than usual.

Molla provided some interesting context by pointing out the voter makeup of Kansas itself:

Seriously, I'm not kidding about Kansas being a Republican stronghold. Hell, If the "Unaffiliated" voting bloc formed its own party, it would put Democrats in THIRD place in that state.

So you would think that given the dominance of Republican voters would equate to dominance of conservative thought (if you consider the Indy voters between equally divided in leaning either way), and that conservative thought would equate to being anti-abortion enough to vote YES.

And yet, they did not.

Because, if it's been noted here already, a majority of Americans - a number that crosses into Republican ranks just a bit - are pro-choice when push comes to shove.

Ever since the Dobbs decision dropped, reports about the horrors of the Far Right war on women's rights have gone up. The reality that Republican leaders are using their state powers to force-birth pregnancies on 10-year-old rape victims. Stories about how women are denied medications because the pharmacies and doctors issuing them might get charged for triggering miscarriages. The growing realization that GOP-controlled states are passing "No Travel" bans that would intrude on women's privacy rights even when they're not pregnant.

In her Vox article, Molla points to evidence that women were key to the voter turnout against the referendum:

The referendum in particular seems to have brought out women, who are considered to be most affected by abortion laws. As Tom Bonier, CEO of a Democratic data firm TargetSmart, pointed out, the share of new Kansas registrants who were women skyrocketed after news of US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.

The Dobbs decision engaged women in Kansas to an unprecedented degree.

This chart shows the percent of new registrants in the state who were women (as a 7 day average). Note the spike after the Dobbs decision leaked, and huge jump after the Supreme Court handed it down. pic.twitter.com/pvi3WpuR86

— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) August 3, 2022

One of the concerns before this conservative Supreme Court made their move to end Roe turned on what might happen, what might the public's response be to women losing a personal right. Word is Chief Justice Roberts wanted to rein in Alito's wording (which made it an absolute ban) to create some wriggle room where reasonable exceptions like allowing it for cases of rape/incest and "health of mother" were involved. Which was why Alito's first draft got leaked, because someone in SCOTUS wanted to make sure the hard-liner stance stayed firm.

Well, now we're seeing what the public's response could be. In even the Reddest of Republican states, a solid majority of voters want to protect abortion as a right. Before Dobbs, there may have been a number of moderate/centrist-leaning Americans who disapproved of abortion but saw it as necessary to protect at-risk women suffering life-threatening situations, and to protect rape victims from the psychological (and for pre-teens, physical) harms of forcing them to birth. (Note: I do not want to underscore the reality that women SHOULD HAVE their personal right to choose no matter what, but I am pointing out how moderates view this issue, where they focus on guaranteeing those exceptions...) By denying the reality that there are times when abortion is a necessity to save the life of the mother, the Far Right have likely pushed Indy/Moderate voters to the side of Pro-Choice. As well as driving away whatever Moderate Republicans were still left after all the RINO purging.

Even in Red States like Kansas, alienating those Indy voters - who may now give Democrats a fighting chance to win statewide elections - as well as driving up voter registration for women - who may have tuned out political issues before, but now realize they've been turned into second-class breeding stock - can well add to the likelihood of another midterm Blue Wave much like 2018.

Everyone, this is where voter turnout matters. To every Democrat suffering in Republican-controlled states, you have a chance to turn the tables. To every Independent/No-Party Affiliate voter out there, you have an opportunity to show up and vote the anti-abortion bastards out of office. To every Pro-Choice Republican still out there - and yes, the Kansas referendum proves you're there - you have every reason to turn against a Republican party that no longer respects you or the women in your lives.

Get the damn vote out, America. If you believe women are equal, if you believe women have the right to control their own selves, if you believe Roe should be restored as the law of the land, YOU GOT TO VOTE DAMMIT, vote for every Democrat, vote against every Republican, VOTE VOTE VOTE.

Your vote is your power. Republicans are trying to deny you that power. Don't let them. 

VOTE VOTE VOTE.

Four for the Fourth 2022: Remember the Ladies

Reminder: here are links to my other Four For the Fourth blog articles, one about a plea for silent firecrackers, one about the need for fixing our nation to save our freedoms, and one about needing more metal music on the TV specials dammit!

It's hard to celebrate Independence Day this 2022 when half this nation's population are now - thanks to a sadistic Christianist Supreme Court - Second Class citizens.

As much as Frederick Douglass called out the hypocrisy of the 4th of July - the promise of liberty while Blacks were still in chains - we are now at the point in American history where the liberty and rights of women to choose their own health and well-being has vanished, turning women into slaves themselves to the states holding bondage over their uterus.

This is not a sound policy for the mostly White, mostly Male, mostly Rich conservative leadership that brought us to this tragic reality. These anti-abortion laws - seeking to confine women to their homes 'barefoot and pregnant', forced to bear babies against their will, and likely killing them when those pregnancies turn lethal - will only enrage the women and remind them of the horrors their grandmothers had to endure decades before.

When our Founding Fathers crafted first the Declaration of Independence and then the federal Constitution, they never even considered the rights of women at all. When Abigail Adams, wife to Founder John Adams and a fervent believer in equal rights, wrote a letter to John to "remember the ladies," her own husband scoffed at her. Via Lisa A Mazzie at the Marquette University Law Center Faculty blog back in 2013:

John Adams responded, “I cannot but laugh . . . .” To Mr. Adams, this was the first he’d heard of women’s possible discontent with the status quo.  “[Y]our letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest were grown discontented.”  For whatever “power” that Mr. Adams suggested that women had, it clearly wasn’t enough, for the new Declaration of Independence and Constitution failed to give any express (or even implied) rights to women.

Mrs. Adams responded to her husband, “I cannot say that I think you are very generous to the ladies; for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good-will to men, emancipating all nations, you insist on retaining an absolute power over wives...”

Mrs. Adams did not suffer hypocrites, even when it was her own husband.

Over the history of America, women's rights were undercut and ignored even as the rights of others were expanded. Full rights of citizenship like voting, for example, only belonged to property owners until the 1820s, when suffrage finally extended to all White men (and only Black freedmen in certain states). When the federal government needed to confirm voting rights for freed Blacks in the post-Civil War era, they passed the 15th Amendment but specifically excluded "sex/gender" from the equation. It took another 60 years of women constantly marching for suffrage before the 19th Amendment guaranteed at least that right.

And even then, full rights for women weren't a given. Every expectation in the workforce of less pay than men, getting denied opportunities in education or politics or business, forced into support roles in wartime, forced into gender roles as housewives and mothers, every dismissive treatment dumped on women throughout the 20th Century... If you were a girl, you had to work twice as hard and get told twice as often to "smile" through it all.

This was the mighty river of sexual discrimination women had to swim, every day of their lives, only barely reaching the calmer waters of the past 50 years when the civil rights movements of the 1960s opened up more opportunities. And they still had to... HAVE to cope against harassment and sexual assault to this very day.

I only learned this year a horrific fact, that until 1974 women couldn't sign up for their own credit cards: A man - either husband or father - had to co-sign with the bank on it. Women had no financial freedom at all until then. Some still don't.

And so with all this happening, as women face the darkness of 50 years ago returning to haunt them, do our American mothers and daughters and sisters and friends have any reason to celebrate Independence Day?

Because they're not independent today.

Goddamn us for taking that away from them.

We need to bring back the Equal Rights Amendment, get the states to go through approving it again, because it's not our women who need it, it's our nation that needs to break free of our fear and hypocrisy.

Get The Damn Vote Out for Dems In 2022 Or Suffer Forever

So of course the week I decided I need a break from blogging was also the week this nation's ultraconservative Supreme Court decided to drop all the bombs on America.

In one ruling, the Far Right-dominated Court decided to gut Separation of Church And State by making it legal for religious private schools to take public funds without restriction.

In another ruling, the Far Right-dominated Court decided to gut our Miranda Rights, making it easier for cops to refuse to tell people they're dragging in for interrogation that they have rights to remain silent and have their lawyer present, and making it more likely the cops will force people to endure unwarranted interrogations until they confess to shit they didn't do.

In another ruling, the Far Right-dominated Court decided to overrule a New York firearm concealed-carry law, by arguing that the individual right to carry weapons is guaranteed in the Second Amendment (the overriding "Shall Not Be Infringed" phrase) and Fourteenth Amendment (which other legal experts are saying is a misreading of what the 14th stands for).

And of course, what we've all dreaded since someone leaked the first draft of Alito's Dobbs ruling, the Far Right-dominated Court today nuked abortion rights by overturning the Casey and Roe decisions.

It should be noted that a majority of Americans support Separation of Church And State, they support Miranda Rights against an aggressive police force, they support gun safety laws, and they support a woman's right to decide her own health and well-being in case they need an abortion.

Of course, with all of these decisions going AGAINST what a majority of Americans support, the public opinion against the Supreme Court is at an all-time low (dropping to 25 percent and looking to crater from there). 

But the Far Right Minority basically running our country doesn't give a fuck, does it? All they care about is their Culture War, their religious fervor to rule or ruin, and the willingness of an emboldened Far Right judiciary to dig even deeper into madness by going after our rights to marry, our rights to birth control, our rights to privacy, our rights to even vote...

I warned about the sins of Minority Party Rule years ago, before Senators like Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins and before demagogues like trump kicked our nation into the pits of Hell.

...When you look at the current leadership in DC, you'll see a Republican Party led by the likes of (then Speaker) Ryan, McConnell and trump who all know they do NOT need to answer to the majority - they need to placate their minority base - and so they govern as they please, even in the face of polling numbers that mark them as some of the most unpopular life forms in modern memory. All they have to do is stoke their base to turnout for the midterms, all they have to do is keep their deep-pocket funders rolling in their tax-free profits, and let gerrymandering and voter suppression do the rest.

The only thing holding a Minority Rule Party like that accountable is The Reality-Based World. Bad governance leads to mistakes, which leads to disasters, which leads to outrage and angry majority voters who finally get sick of it all and try their best to flip the bad actors out of power...

It would be pretty to think that all of those millions of American citizens (around 100 million last we checked) able to vote but had refused for some reason or another - apathy worse above all - will now realize what the hell is at stake here and turn up to register to vote now, and better yet show up in November in the midterms to vote heavily in favor of Democrats to throw every lying unethical crooked Republican out of power.

Right now, voter turnout is the only realistic plausible way to end Minority Party Rule, to end the death grip Republicans have on our nation's well-being, to counter every wingnut legal decision that this skewed Supreme Court is going to hit us with for the next 10-20 years until we can clear that bench and replace with jurists who recognize what our rights - our right to choose our health, our right to be free of religious domination by zealots, our right to be safe from a violent police state, our right to assemble freely in public without fear of gun nuts, our right to live - truly are.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, AMERICA, STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN. Save our nation, save our legal system, save each other.

Crazy Busy Week Ahead

Monday is going to be the start of one crazy week:

The House Committee investigating trump's Insurrection is going to present Day Two of their indictment, following up on a surprisingly strong opening night that pretty much accused trump of setting and staging the riot. Day Two is reportedly going to delve into how trump knew he lost the 2020 election but decided to undermine the electoral process and stage a coup. The television ratings by the way - 19 million viewers - put the audience around Sunday Night NFL numbers, which are pretty strong (Tucker Carlson's prime time show on Fox Not-News by comparison draws around 3 million)

Twitter is aflutter that this is the week the Supreme Court officially issues its rulings on abortion - specifically the case involving Mississippi's ban - that can effectively mean the end of Roe and abortion rights. Madness will surely follow.

Congress reportedly reached a "bipartisan" deal on gun regulations / safety laws that is supposedly Cloture-proof so it can pass the Senate and then arguably the House for ratification. It won't address the more serious needs - an assault weapons ban, universal background checks, et al - but it will address age requirements for purchases, more funding for mental health (no guarantee THAT will go where needed), and restrictions on domestic abusers having firearms in an attempt to reduce domestic gun deaths. It will be the first major gun safety legislation passed in 30 years (!) and while it won't be enough it will be interesting to see if the more positive elements - especially that domestic abuser restriction - can show success in saving lives.

Ukraine remains a war zone but there's signs that Russian attempts to secure the Donbas aren't working and that Ukrainians are mounting decent counterattacks. Granted, the experts were thinking Russian forces wouldn't last past May, but all of the momentum and global support remains with Ukraine. Russia is reportedly falling back on weapon supplies and equipment from the 1960s (!) which doesn't bode well for their long-term ability to wage war.

Oh, and the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team - yes, there's been ice hockey in Florida since 1992, people! - are going to their third straight (after winning back-to-back) Stanley Cup Finals (facing Colorado) looking to be the first NHL team since the 1980s New York Islanders to have three straight championships. It's a dynastic possibility, which would put this Bolts team atop the list of Greatest Hockey Teams of ALL TIME. And to Michael Wilbon who derisively mocks Tampa as "not real hockey town" and "SEC" - while ignoring A) the attendance records the Lightning set in the 1990s playing in a half-filled baseball dome, proving there's a fanbase for a Hockey Town and B) the SEC (Southeastern Conference) is a college conference that revels in national championships every year - all I gotta say is SUCK IT WILBON.

I may not even find time to blog about all of it. We're busy at the library with our Summer Reading programs. /sigh

Work is work.

What To Do When Republicans Kill Roe

Update: With thanks to Tengrain at Crooks & Liars including this article at Mike's Blog Round-Up!

The most likely thing that will happen once Alito's ruling - using the Mississippi anti-abortion law to nuke Roe - from the bench becomes official is that 18 states will automatically trigger abortion bans, with 4 other states implementing severe bans.

After that, the reactions - by both the women suddenly reduced to second-class cattle and the Far Right religious nuts eager to turn them into breeder stock - will get messier.

Anyone hoping for a mass exodus of every woman and girl from ages 13 to 40 fleeing the Red States will have to think again. While it makes the most sense - "Get the HELL out before they harm you!" is the most logical move to make - the sheer logistics of it can't happen. Too many women will be tied down, either for personal reasons (family), financial reasons (too poor), or age (too young). A number of women could flee - either with family living in pro-choice states that can take them in, or with high-enough job skills to relocate for employment - but it will be in the hundreds, not hundreds of thousands.

These Republican-controlled states are already passing legislation punishing pregnant women if they try to leave their states. Wanna guess how quickly those states will pass laws stopping women of child-bearing age from traveling at all to keep them in one place?

One thing that should happen once the states nullify Roe is that women should say goodbye to the dating scene. I'm not being flippant here or throwing out a Lysistrata gambit as a lark. This is a genuine concern. ANY social interaction with men is going to lead to a risk of pregnancy, even when the sex is consensual. Relying on birth control is not an option, especially when you see these Republican bastards are going after IUDs and condoms and birth control pills next. 

I do worry that this will give the prudes among the Far Right some enjoyment in seeing the Hookup Culture take a severe blow, but desperate times desperate measures. Ladies, you simply cannot risk a social life that could end up with you enduring a pregnancy you can't afford and could kill you.

I'm serious: Pregnancy mortality in the United States is horrifying. Increasing those mortality numbers through forced-birth - especially in matters of ectopic pregnancies - is a given at this point. 

The only way to survive this attack on your personal well-being right now is to just cut off the social stuff with guys. Uninstall the dating apps. No more speed dating or lock and key parties. Stay home. Watch movies with your girlfriends. Zoom chat while hanging out with your pets. Start up gaming nights on your XBoxes and Playstations, private teams, no boys allowed. Blow shit up on Call Of Duty, and avoid calling David for a quick one.

On the bright side, the end of Ladies' Nights at the college bars is going to drive a lot of conservative young men fratbros out of their goddamned minds.

On a more serious note, the dangers of sexual assault and rape are going to go up. Hell, a number of these rapists out there are going to view the end of Roe - especially as these states get rid of any abortion exemptions for rape victims - as a license to go wild. What we know about rapists is how they tend to view women as things, as objects, and the way that the Far Right is banning abortion rights for women is basically turning the entire gender into cattle, dehumanized and easily targeted by men who enjoy the power and pain they inflict. 

It hasn't been safe at all for young women in our world: the threat of rape is always there. But now it's going to get worse. In some respects, fleeing is the only rational response to all of this: There's only so much protective measures like traveling in groups and learning self-defense fighting can do. But again, Gods help us too many poor women can't afford to flee, and too many teen girls don't have the freedom to make that call. They're going to have to rely on their parents to get them to safety, and again not all of them can (or worse, the parents are too Far Right and anti-abortionist to care).

The only other rational response to the end of Roe ought to be a massive voter realignment among women - and among the men who agree women should have the rights of privacy and equality under the Constitution - away from the wingnut Republicans who caused all this chaos and despair. It would be pretty to watch as every unregistered woman 18 and older head to the nearest place with voter registration forms and sign up to be Democratic voters. It would be nice to see any registered No-Party or even pro-choice Republicans re-apply their voter IDs and switch to Dem. One hopes that the number of angered, eager pro-choice voters reaches levels even in Red states that would flip control from Republican to Democrat, and that the new Democratic majorities at the state level would rewrite the laws to give women back their power of choice.

Thing is, in the week we've learned that the Supreme Court is poised to end Roe and abortion rights for women, there hasn't been a noticeable stampede of angry women or angry voters filling out registration forms. It's likely that most of our fellow citizens, even young women, may well be worried about this loss of personal rights: It's just they won't do anything about it until it directly affects them (Abortion as an issue being, well, Someone Else's Problem). Sad thing is, by the time they will be affected by this, and by all the other privacy rights the wingnuts are about to eliminate, it'll be too late.

The rights pertaining to abortion choice rely a lot on the due process rights of the 14th Amendment and the privacy rights of the 9th. Once the Far Right has a way to cut away one of those rights, they'll be able to cut away all the others. People need to understand that risk, and they ought to be registering to vote to get those Republicans the hell out of elected office to stop them from dragging our nation into the firepits of our worst historical behaviors.

It'll be a fight these midterms because the Republicans in power have already made efforts to rig the upcoming elections results anyway to favor themselves. The only way to beat them is with massive voter turnout against them.

Please wake up and fight back, Americans.

It's not just women's rights that are getting killed here. It's all of our rights on the chopping block.

What Is Actually In the Upcoming SCOTUS Ruling to Overturn Roe

I'm not a legal scholar, merely a political history amateur, so I should refer to others will legal backgrounds have their say on what they've noticed in the leaked rough draft.

Here's Paul Campos at Lawyers Guns and Money giving his two cents: 

(2) The hypocrisy of the Furious Five in regard to the issue of democratic legitimacy is something to behold. The overwhelming majority of the public supports legal abortion in most circumstances — to the Great Unwashed the question of whether Roe should have been overruled and the question of whether abortion should be legal is of course the same question — but in a few weeks abortion is going to be illegal in much of the United States because it’s a Republic Not a Democracy. What that means in practice is that a distinct minority of religious fanatics, white supremacists, and super fans of the patriarchy (but I repeat myself) will get to make abortion illegal, despite an overwhelming national consensus against doing so, because our political system is set up to empower those people far beyond what power they would have in anything resembling an actual democracy...

(3) Speaking of which, the most emetic portions of Alito’s little Schoolhouse Rock sermon were the bits where he claimed that the Dobbs majority was taking no position on the substantive question of whether or not abortion should be legal. Sure Sammy. So when the radically anti-democratic [see (2) above] GOP trifecta makes abortion illegal across the entire nation in three years or so, you’ll be striking that anti-federalist overreach down, right? Oh I thinks not...

Here's Ian Millhiser at Vox to give some understanding:

1) This is a maximalist opinion

For many years, largely as a bid to convince the relatively moderate conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy to permit as many abortion restrictions as possible, many abortion opponents did not explicitly ask the Supreme Court to overrule Roe. Instead, they urged the Court to uphold restrictions that would make it so difficult or expensive to operate an abortion clinic that facilities in anti-abortion states would simply shut down.

But Kennedy is no longer on the Court. And Jackson already achieved the goal of permitting states to shut down abortion clinics by imposing such severe costs on those clinics that they could not remain open. There’s only one more frontier left for abortion opponents to cross: a Supreme Court decision explicitly overruling Roe. And Alito’s opinion skips gleefully across that frontier.

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito claims in the draft opinion, which holds “that Roe and Casey must be overruled...”

4) If Alito prevails, abortion will swiftly be illegal in at least 18 states

At least 18 states currently have total or near-total abortion bans on the books. Some of these laws were enacted before Roe was decided, while others were enacted more recently. Some of these laws contain narrow exceptions to protect individuals who need an abortion to save their life or to avoid a permanent disability, but not all contain exceptions for non-life-threatening medical conditions. Some of these bans will also forbid abortion even when a pregnancy results from rape...

If Roe is overruled, many of these laws will take effect immediately. Others will take effect days, weeks, or perhaps a month after Roe is overruled. But, by the end of the summer, it is likely they will be in full effect...

Here's Mary Ziegler at The Atlantic (paywalled):

Something fundamental about the Supreme Court has changed in recent months. It is not simply that the Court has a conservative supermajority, although that is true enough. What is really striking is just how emboldened that conservative supermajority is—how willing to take on a number of deeply divisive culture-war issues; how blasé about making major decisions via the Court’s shadow docket; how open to making rapid, profound changes to long-standing precedent. Last night, when Politico released a leaked February draft of an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito that would reverse Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision recognizing the right to choose abortion, the public got its most arresting taste thus far of just what this conservative bloc could do...

...The draft claims that the justices cannot predict the consequences of their actions and, even if such a prediction were possible, shouldn’t care what the public thinks anyway. The job of the Supreme Court, Alito suggests in the draft, is to say what the law is, not to care about what the people think, much less what the people think the Constitution means...

That the conservative majority could make such an argument—that it could believe such an idea—is a product of America’s grievous polarization. This majority knows that it will be celebrated by the conservative legal movement and the leaders of the Republican Party...

But even so, the speed with which this conservative majority is moving to reverse Roe is astonishing. The Court did not have to take this case—the lower courts had not split on the constitutionality of 15-week bans. The anti-abortion-rights movement had not invested much in such laws, which did not make for an especially strong case against abortion rights. The conservative majority is not going to sit around and wait; nothing about this seems particularly hard for these justices. No soul-searching was required.

This is the kind of draft that comes from that sense of certainty. It suggests that there can be no right to abortion because states were criminalizing abortion when the relevant constitutional provision, the Fourteenth Amendment, was ratified. Though the draft stresses that other precedents are not on the chopping block, it’s unclear why that would be: The same logic applies to same-sex intimacy and contraception, which were being outlawed at roughly the same time.

The draft concludes that this issue should be decided by voters, not justices, but—and this is subtle but quite significant—it also distinguishes abortion from other rights the Court has protected by stressing the value of fetal life. If this language is in the final opinion, it will be read by anti-abortion-rights leaders as an invitation to return to the Court and ask the conservative justices to hold that the Constitution recognizes the personhood of the fetus—and that abortion is unconstitutional in blue as well as red states. If the Court goes that route, the issue will be far, far out of the hands of voters in all states for a very long time to come...

In short: America is going backwards, the Republican minority control of our nation is going to make things worse, and the only recourse is for a supermajority of American voters even in the Red states to rise up and kick Republican officials out of elected office before it's too late.

GET THE GODDAMNED VOTE OUT, AMERICA. AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN.