Unhappy Thoughts Part One

Currently coping with a swirl of thoughts, most of them unsettling and troubling. There's so many of them that I'm going to have to break them down into bite-sized chunks.

I seriously believe the level of sexism in this nation means we will never see a woman elected to the Presidency. I know that people are pointing to "other issues" as to the reasons why the two major candidates - with Hillary in 2016 getting tarred with "her emails" fake scandal, with Kamala in 2024 getting tarred with "inflation" - lost to a clearly unqualified (and by 2024 clearly criminal) donald trump, but the backlash they both got from male voters can't be ignored. Olga Khazan at the Atlantic makes the case:

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was a former secretary of state and senator running against the politically inexperienced real-estate tycoon Donald Trump. She lost. People would vote for a woman, the thinking went, just not that woman.

In 2024, Kamala Harris was the vice president, a former senator, and a former attorney general also running against Trump, who was by then a convicted felon and sexual abuser. She also lost. People would vote for a woman, once again, just not that woman.

The events of the past eight years might prompt some to wonder: If Clinton wasn’t good enough, and neither was Harris, will a woman ever be good enough to be president? What kind of a woman would it take? According to interviews I conducted with six researchers who study gender and politics, sexism was a small but significant factor that worked against Harris. And it’s going to be a problem for any woman who runs for president. “American voters tend to believe in the abstract that they support the idea of a woman candidate, but when they get the real women in front of them, they find some other reason not to like the candidate,” Karrin Vasby Anderson, a communications professor at Colorado State University, told me. In 2017, she wrote an article about the long odds faced by women running for president. The title? “Every Woman Is the Wrong Woman.”

...In 2017, a study found that about 13 percent of Americans were “angry or upset” about the idea of a woman serving as president. In an experiment that same year using hypothetical political candidates, Yoshikuni Ono and Barry Burden, political scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found that voters punish female candidates running for president by 2.4 percentage points. This means that a hypothetical female candidate would get, say, 47 percent of the vote, rather than 49.4 percent if she were a man. This bias against female presidential candidates, Ono and Burden found, was most pronounced among men and among politically unaffiliated voters—two demographics that Harris struggled with.

There is painful irony that women candidates lost to a man exposed as a vulgarian towards women, a court-adjudicated rapist and confirmed misogynist.

For all the decent - if not great - choices of women leaders in the Democratic ranks like Governor Whitmer or AOC, it is insane that too many men - even among liberals! - just won't consider it.

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.

Four for the Fourth 2023: Second Thoughts About DeSantis' Flailing

So the Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis is running around, campaigning - rather badly at it - for the 2024 Republican nomination for the presidency, and his biggest message is "let's make America like Florida" selling his argument that he's turned the Sunshine State into a bastion of FREEDOM against "woke" librulism.

The thing is, DeSantis hasn't really done anything for freedom in Florida. He's supporting book bans and whitewashing of racism from our history books. He's cutting back on social services that could free rural families from poverty. DeSantis even went out of his way to use the line-item veto power to slash at budget items to punish fellow Republicans who refused to back him in his presidential campaign, not a very liberating thing to do.

But it's been two big political items that DeSantis committed that are coming back to hammer him. Above all, his harsh stance on immigration that drove him to push for and sign legislation attacking migrant workers and their employers. Digby has the current dirt on that:

It’s a super great idea to crack down on immigrant labor during a time of full employment and a building boom in a big agriculture state. So smart. And that’s what Ron DeSantis has done so that he can pretend he’s a tough hombre in a border state (which he isn’t.)

I should mention that's a sarcasm font. Digby then quotes from a recent Wall Street Journal report:

Florida’s agricultural and construction industries say they are experiencing a labor shortage because a new immigration law that took effect July 1 is leading migrant workers to leave the state.

The law, signed in May by Florida Gov. and GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, seeks to further criminalize undocumented immigration in the state. It makes it a third-degree felony for unauthorized people to knowingly use a false identification to obtain employment. Businesses that knowingly employ unauthorized workers could have their licenses suspended, and those with 25 or more employees that repeatedly fail to use the E-Verify system to check their immigration status can face daily fines. 

Business owners and workers alike say the ranks of laborers in Florida have grown noticeably thinner.

“The employee who wants to work on the farm is not available anymore,” said Hitesh Kotecha, owner of a produce packaging facility in South Florida who leases land to farmers. “How are we going to run the farms?”

At downtown Miami’s construction sites, the story is the same: Workers have fled. Others are waiting to see what happens.

In Miami’s booming construction market, developers, construction companies and construction workers say the change happened as soon as DeSantis signed the legislation this spring. Workers at several construction sites in South Florida say a quarter to half of their teams are gone, exacerbating an already challenging labor shortage across the industry...

It's not just the employment:

In addition to increasing penalties on employers and workers, the new law requires hospitals that accept Medicaid to question a patient’s immigration status, and invalidates out-of-state driver’s licenses issued to people unauthorized to be in the U.S. It makes it a third-degree felony to knowingly transport into Florida a person who is undocumented and illegally entered the U.S. The law also adds $12 million to the amount of money the state has earmarked for its migrant-relocation program, bringing the total to $22 million this year. 

This is something that affects medical care, and people relocating to Florida for family/personal reasons. In the push to get at illegal immigrants who have fake IDs, we're going to see an increase in legal migrants having their IDs challenged and facing penalties for laws they're not breaking. This could even affect natural-born Latinos some of whom come from families that have been in the United States since before the goddamn siege at the Alamo. Wanna bet how quickly a Peruvian-American family at Universal Orlando or EPCOT visiting from Utah gets tossed into jail all because their dad's driver's license fails a "papers please" checkpoint on I-4?

It's a nightmare. There is no freedom here, only Republican cruelty.

And it's not just the Latinos suffering. White women are waking up to the reality that DeSantis just gutted their rights to alimony.

The way divorce works in the United States is messy, but alimony was a system that provided women coming out of a failed marriage some economic stability, based on the economic realities divorced women are more likely to fall into poverty after separation. Alimony can be a headache for the ex-husband, but it was a way to ensure women couldn't be forced by economic uncertainty to stay in a marriage that was broken (and likely violent/abusive).

What DeSantis passed ended "permanent alimony" and shifted the system to an adjustable format that uses a more complex and possibly confusing scaling system that undercuts any fiscal stability divorcing women could find. Here's some of the details (via NBCMiami news site):

Along with eliminating permanent alimony, the measure will set up a process for ex-spouses who make alimony payments to seek modifications to alimony agreements when they want to retire.

It will allow judges to reduce or terminate alimony, support or maintenance payments after considering a number of factors, such as “the age and health” of the person who makes payments; the customary retirement age of that person’s occupation; the "economic impact” a reduction in alimony would have on the recipient of the payments; and the “motivation for retirement and likelihood of returning to work” for the person making the payments.

The bill will set a five-year limit on what is known as rehabilitative alimony.

Under the plan, people married for less than three years will not be eligible for alimony payments, and those who have been married 20 years or longer will be eligible to receive payments for up to 75 percent of the term of the marriage.

The new law will also allow alimony payers to seek modifications if “a supportive relationship exists or has existed” involving their ex-spouses in the previous year. Critics argued the provision is vague and could apply to temporary roommates who help alimony recipients cover living expenses for short periods of time...

Everything I'm seeing so far becomes either a greater risk that women will lose alimony they were promised, to where they won't get any alimony at all.

For lower-income women, this merely ensures they will have no safety net should they try to escape a bad (violent) marriage. For upper-income women, this is going to ensure they are sliding down into lower-income status while their rich ex-husbands stay rich.

This is not going to bode well for women in Florida, who are already coping with the harsh anti-abortion laws DeSantis and the Florida GOP dumped on them. And it ought to horrify all the women across the United States where DeSantis is threatening to make America just like the hellhole he's making right now.

If there's any joy to be had, it's that for all of DeSantis' pandering on Far Right issues - to stake an early primary lead against donald trump - he has failed miserably. Everything DeSantis does in Florida isn't impressing the MAGA base voters that he needs to secure a primary win by June 2024. The way things are going, DeSantis could summon a special legislative session to pass laws giving MAGA voters everything they desire - Florida criminal charges against Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, criminalization of the Democratic party, mass arrests and deportation of everyone NOT White or Male or Obscenely Rich - and he'll still be losing to trump just sitting there whining about how unfair the world is towards himself.

It'd be tasty schadenfreude except for the reality that DeSantis is actively bullying, punishing, and harming Floridians all so he could prance on stage.

The quicker DeSantis loses the primaries and the quicker the federal courts undo half the damage DeSantis' laws are inflicting on us, the better.

These Little Details

I'd still thought that everything I thought about that night - the shame, the fear - would fade in time. But that hadn't happened. Instead, the things that I remembered, these little details, seemed to grow stronger, to the point where I could feel their weight in my chest.
-- Sarah Dessen, Just Listen

With all the other drama going on, and the growing evidence of criminal matters that donald trump is facing, this week we will witness one of the more personal and troubling allegations against him.

This week, E. Jean Carroll's defamation and rape civil matter against trump goes to trial.

Details from Jennifer Peltz at AP News: 

Former President Donald Trump’s behavior toward women, long a source of flashpoints in his political career, now faces a new level of scrutiny: a trial in a lawsuit accusing him of rape.

Jury selection is set to start Tuesday in the case filed by former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, who says Trump raped her in a luxury New York department store dressing room in the 1990s...

The lawsuit is putting Trump’s history with women under a microscope as he runs to return to the White House. But if a trial over a rape accusation would be a crisis for most candidates, with Trump, it remains to be seen...

Trump’s political rise was riddled with criticism of his attitudes and conduct toward women. There were his insulting remarks about onetime Republican rival Carly Fiorina’s appearance, his misogynistic comments about former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, his double-down on denigrating a former Miss Universe whom he had pilloried about her weight and more — including, most notoriously, the crass “Access Hollywood” hot-mic recording that nearly derailed his 2016 campaign and elicited rare contrition for what he called “locker room banter.”

Then there were the dozen-plus women, including Carroll, who came forward during his campaign and presidency to accuse him of sexual assault and harassment. He denied all the claims. Other lawsuits over them were dropped or dismissed, but Carroll’s has endured...

Carroll's case endured because she held onto key evidence, and told enough people around her at the time it happened to maintain credible witnesses. She is relying on New York state laws - some recently passed - that allow her to pursue this as a civil matter, unfortunately not as a criminal one.

That it has taken her THIS long - roughly 30 years - to bring this matter to any semblance of justice reveals the failures of our legal system to handle rape and sexual assault cases in a timely manner (or at all).

Carroll didn't go public with the assault when it happened because our society, our media, our law enforcement all view rape/assault victims with disdain and disbelief. A "blame the victim" world-view adds onto the horrors that the rape victim already endured. It's worse when it's men of power and influence - even at the small-town level - alleged to commit the crimes: Given their wealth (they can afford the lawyers) and status (they maintain "good" public relations), it takes decades for anybody to hold them accountable. She only went public in 2019 to bolter the other emerging allegations that kept appearing after trump's infamous Access Hollywood interview, and given her public stature she quickly received that vitriol from trump's defenders and then trump himself. It was trump's insistence on complete innocence - defaming Carroll as a liar and "a nut" in the process - that led to this trial.

Thing about the civil nature of this trial, it won't lead to trump being found guilty and going to jail. This is more about liability and damages owed: Even if trump is found liable for both the defamation and the rape, he can walk out of the courtroom a free man. However, in the eyes of the legal system trump would be considered a rapist (would he have to register as a sex offender?), a label that his political and media defenders cannot ignore. trump can campaign and ignore the decision all he wants, but his allies can't. The Republican Party will get asked repeatedly - first by the left-leaning media and even later the 'centrist' media that can no longer look away at trump's personal sins - why they are letting their party be led by a jury-confirmed rapist.

This all depends, of course, if the jury sides with Carroll or with trump. Given how trump's history of defamatory public statements and history with other women will be presented at trial, it's hard to envision in a just world that the jury will believe trump. But this isn't a just world (SEE AGAIN "Blame the Victim" mindsets), and the jury can go either way.

There's also the possibility of a settlement. Civil trials like this tend to get settled instead of risking the jury (even for the plaintiffs). This is where trump's history of surviving numerous civil cases picks up: he's always pushed and bullied the legal system to get his many fraud victims - from the building contractors he refused to pay, to people who bought into and lost money on failed ventures, to the victims of his faux Trump University - to accept settlements that would allow trump to avoid guilt. His victims eventually settle because his lawyers had delayed and obstructed the matter for so long they can no longer afford to keep going, and they'll take a portion of what's due just to be done with the matter. 

We've just seen this, with the Dominion defamation case against Fox News. Where the voting machine company had Fox dead to rights with all the evidence of them lying to save their ratings and revenues, Dominion still settled the matter the day of jury selection because they didn't want to risk the chance the jury wouldn't side with them. As much as Fox wanted to settle knowing the odds were against them, Dominion didn't want the risk either. For the company, it was a pure business decision: Get the money, get a back-room deal from Fox to avoid any further direct attacks, and get back to making profits.

But this case is different. Carroll can't really walk away from this with a settlement: Because the rape was personal to her, it's cost her privacy and her reputation, and settling even for a ton of money would be accepting the blame. After all that trump's said in public about her, the only way she could settle would be getting a public apology for trump's attacks. And trump can't apologize, not for that, because recanting his statements means Carroll isn't the liar he accused her being. Even working a settling to get trump admitting he attacked her is next to impossible because his narcissism cannot admit guilt or accountability. Carroll's only resolution is taking this to the jury, and hoping the jury sides with her, and holding trump accountable to the law regardless of his self-serving gaslighting.

For too long, as the #MeToo movement demonstrated, men of power got away with rape, with harassment, with lying about their behavior, and with humiliating women at every turn.

For much of his public history, trump has been a man of power who abused even his own wives, treated women as property, and got away with it because the media and the legal system looked away when it mattered most. Now, nobody can look away. Everybody's going to be watching. 

And Carroll - along with hundreds of other women - will have her justice.

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.

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.

The Day When Women Become Second-Class Citizens

We knew this day was coming.

We knew it when Anthony Kennedy retired from the bench, leaving his own abortion ruling Casey vulnerable to the Far Right candidate - that drunkard Kavanaugh - willing to overturn it and Roe V. Wade.

We knew it when Justice Ginsburg died back in 2020, allowing Mitch McConnell - that hypocrite - and trump to put onto the Supreme Court a radical Far Right candidate to skew the Court so far against abortion rights that overturning Roe was pretty much a done deal.

We knew it when Justice Scalia died back in 2016, when Obama was still in office and still President of the United States able to nominate a replacement - Center-Left - Justice, only for McConnell to stonewall Obama's nomination in the hopes that a Republican win that November would give him the chance to replace Scalia with another Far Right Justice.

We knew it when donald motherfucking trump won the Electoral College in 2016, in spite of losing the Popular Vote, all because enough Democratic voters refused to support Hillary out of partisan spite (yes, to every so-called Leftist or Progressive who thought Hillary Clinton didn't deserve your vote, go fuck yourselves, this IS on you as much as the goddamned Far Right wingnuts). When Hillary got only 65.8 million votes whereas Biden got 81.2 million votes four years later, where the hell were those 15 million or so voters when the nation needed them???

We knew it the minute all those Red states began passing laws specifically designed to attack Roe and to criminalize abortion, laws so harsh that even rational exceptions - for rape, incest, or the health risks to the mother - were denied. We knew it every time a Republican moronically claimed pregnancies were safe, or that rape wasn't a problem, just so they could believe their lies that abortion was a greater sin.

We knew it the minute Red states like Georgia and Texas and Missouri passed anti-abortion bills that sought to punish women - and anyone who helped them - who fled their states to get abortions in states where it's still legal. We knew it when Texas added an insane bounty law incentivizing the wingnuts of their state to hunt down and accuse others of committing abortions or helping women get an abortion. By making it financially safe to accuse others without punishment for being wrong, that law is bound to get innocent women - and any of their friends and family members - accused of something they didn't do and forced to pay out of their own pockets fines that they cannot afford. Can YOU afford paying $10,000 to some lying Bible-thumping wingnut accusing YOU of helping a friend with an abortion for a pregnancy they never had?

We should have known all this since 1992, when Pat Buchanan went before the nationally televised Republican Convention and declared a "Culture War," beginning the partisan divide between Red State and Blue State, the purge of Moderates from a Republican Party to ensure only the pure anti-abortion racist sexist haters were the ones in charge. 

We knew this, we've always known this: This was never about the fetus, this was always about punishing the women. This was always about the power to control what women can do for themselves, not just their health care choices but their rights to vote, their rights to earn fair wages, hell their right to have a career and live their own lives.

What is about to happen now - as Politico leaks the rough draft of Justice Alito's decision to overturn Roe and Casey and apparently a number of other civil rights victories over the decades - is that we are going to watch this conservative Supreme Court deny women any rights they have under the 9th and 14th Amendments. We are going to see not only the legal excuse to deny women their right to an abortion to save their own lives, we are going to see the devaluation of women, period.

Let me point this out: Alito is crafting a decision that will protect the rights of the Proud Boys gun nut ready to shoot up the nearest Planned Parenthood clinic, but if you're a 13-year-old girl that's just been raped by your college-age cousin you are shit out of luck.

Welcome to the Republican Wingnut Utopia of Women Suffering in Hell.

This is why I've been screaming for the past TWENTY YEARS to my fellow Americans to FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN. 

This day was coming.

And now millions of women are going to pay for the wingnuts' cruelty.

One Sentence Thought About Biden's Chance for a Supreme Court Pick

With Justice Stephen Breyer finally (!) announcing his retirement, giving President Biden the opportunity to select a honorable and qualified Supreme Court Justice to affect our jurisprudence for the next 20-30 years, we need to understand this won't put a dent in the 6-seat majority the wingnut conservatives have on a Court that's set to roll back 50 years of women's rights and civil rights, but it will at best provide better diversity on a bench that's supposed to represent ALL of the United States in terms of having more women AND more Blacks when Biden selects a woman African-American - who WILL be qualified, suck it you haters - to perform much-needed acts of Judicial Review: As well as providing a foundation that hopefully Biden will fill other upcoming vacancies (Thomas and Alito are both close to retirement age) as long as there's no goddamned obstruction out of that goddamned Mitch McConnell and his Republican cronies in the Senate so please for the LOVE OF GOD AMERICA vote more Democratic candidates into the Senate this 2022 election cycle because THE GODDAMN ELECTION RESULTS MATTER (hi, 2016! /cries).

Whew.

These Things Go Through Your Head When There's a Man On Your Back

(Blog title stolen from Tori Amos, who suffered this hell)

As I followed the stories coming out of the Congressional testimony by our women's Olympic gymnasts about the years of sexual abuse they endured, the thing that horrified me most wasn't their ordeal at the hands of their rapist (and what they suffered WAS/STILL IS HORRIFYING).

What horrified more than THAT was the ordeal those women suffered at the hands of the legal authorities who failed to protect them, and worse failed to believe them (via Ailsa Chang, Vincent Acovino, and Justine Kenin at NPR): 

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ALY RAISMAN: It disgusts me that we are still fighting for the most basic answers and accountability over six years later.

CHANG: That is Aly Raisman, who, along with three other Olympic Team U.S.A. gymnasts - Simone Biles, Maggie Nichols and McKayla Maroney - told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the FBI mishandled its investigation of Larry Nassar. Here is Simone Biles.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SIMONE BILES: To be clear - sorry.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Take your time.

BILES: To be clear, I blame Larry Nassar. And I also blame an entire system that enabled and perpetrated his abuse.

CHANG: McKayla Maroney said the FBI did not report her abuse for 14 months and falsified her testimony when they did.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MCKAYLA MARONEY: Let's be honest. By not taking immediate action from my report, they allowed a child molester to go free for more than a year. And this inaction directly allowed Nassar's abuse to continue. What is the point of reporting abuse if our own FBI agents are going to take it upon themselves to bury that report in a drawer...?

Let's repeat that part: Maroney accused the Federal Bureau of Investigation of falsifying her testimony. They not only ignored what she said, they altered it so that everyone else wouldn't believe it.

And it allowed sexual predator Larry Nassar - now serving essentially life in prison for numerous counts of sexual criminal conduct - to keep assaulting young girls while that "investigation" did nothing.

It's as though law enforcement still hasn't figured out the one common thing about rapists and sex predators: THEY DO NOT STOP AT ONE VICTIM. Rapists and assaulters and stalkers and pedophiles will not stop until stopped. The second the FBI had reports from multiple women that Nassar was a threat, THEY SHOULD HAVE STEPPED IN. Someone in charge should have made efforts to separate Nassar from his source of victims.

Yet no one did.

When the FBI did investigate, it turned out they repeatedly mishandled information and failed to follow their own agency's policies. To quote the internal DOJ investigation:

The DOJ Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that senior officials in the FBI Indianapolis Field Office failed to respond to allegations of sexual abuse of athletes by former USA Gymnastics physician Lawrence Gerard Nassar with the urgency that the allegations required. We also found that the FBI Indianapolis Field Office made fundamental errors when it did respond to the allegations, failed to notify the appropriate FBI field office (the Lansing Resident Agency) or state or local authorities of the allegations, and failed to take other steps to mitigate the ongoing threat posed by Nassar.

After eight months of inaction by the FBI Indianapolis Field Office, the FBI Los Angeles Field Office received the same allegations. The OIG found that while the Los Angeles Field Office took numerous investigative steps, it too failed to notify the FBI Lansing Resident Agency or state or local authorities of the allegations, and failed to take other steps to mitigate the ongoing threat posed by Nassar. The FBI Lansing Resident Agency did not become aware of the Nassar allegations until after the Michigan State University Police Department (MSUPD) executed a search warrant on Nassar’s residence in September 2016, following the MSUPD’s receipt of separate complaints of sexual abuse by Nassar, and discovered child pornography at Nassar’s residence. During this period from July 2015, when the allegations were first reported to the FBI, to September 2016, Nassar continued to treat gymnasts at Michigan State University, a high school in Michigan, and a gymnastics club in Michigan. Ultimately the investigations determined that Nassar had engaged in sexual assaults of over 100 victims and possessed thousands of images of child pornography, led to his convictions in federal and state court, and resulted in Nassar being sentenced to incarceration for over 100 years...

The specific findings of the report include:

Officials in the Indianapolis Field Office violated numerous FBI policies in handling the Nassar allegations. Specifically, officials in the Indianapolis Field Office:

* failed to formally document a July 28, 2015 meeting with USA Gymnastics during which the FBI first received the allegations against Nassar;

* failed to properly handle and document receipt and review of relevant evidence, i.e., a thumb drive provided by USA Gymnastics President Stephen D. Penny, Jr.;

* failed to document until February 2017 an interview of a gymnast that was conducted on September 2, 2015, during which the gymnast alleged sexual assault by Nassar; and failed to transfer the Nassar allegations to the FBI Lansing Resident Agency, where venue most likely would have existed for potential federal crimes.

Indianapolis Field Office Special Agent in Charge (SAC) W. Jay Abbott and an Indianapolis Field Office Supervisory Special Agent (Indianapolis SSA) made false statements. Specifically, we concluded that the gymnast interview summary that the Indianapolis SSA drafted in February 2017, 17 months after the interview took place, contained materially false statements and omitted material information. We further concluded that the Indianapolis SSA made materially false statements when twice questioned by the OIG about the victim interview. In addition, we concluded that Abbott made materially false statements during his OIG interviews to minimize errors made by the Indianapolis Field Office in connection with the handling of the Nassar allegations.

Abbott violated FBI policy and exercised extremely poor judgment under federal ethics rules when he, without prior authorization, communicated with Penny about a potential job opportunity with the U.S. Olympic Committee, an entity with which Penny had professional connections. Abbott communicated with Penny about the potential job opportunity while the two continued to discuss the allegations against Nassar and while Abbott took an active role in conversations about the FBI’s public statements regarding USA Gymnastics’ handling of those allegations. Abbott should have known—and we found that he in fact did know—that this conduct would raise questions regarding his impartiality. Further, Abbott applied for the position with the U.S. Olympic Committee, and then falsely denied that he had done so when questioned by the OIG on two separate occasions...

Jesus Christ.

That the Department of Justice let these men retire or simply fired from their jobs is part of the overall mishandling of this situation. These men should be charged for their active crimes of falsifying statements and their own lies.

All because of what? Why the hell did the FBI - and nearly every other agency involved in this nightmare - screw up, at some points intentionally?

Because too many men in law enforcement, too many men in power, simply don't treat rape as a serious matter.

Just look at everything else out there where our legal system is failing rape victims and women in general:

• Preferential treatment to male suspects, especially when those suspects are celebrities, men of wealth, and men of power. Hi, Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein, Roy Moore, Harvey Weinstein, and too many politicians and millionaires to count. Those men only answered after decades of people in authority looking the other way couldn't afford to look away anymore... and even then the likes of Cosby got out early because a DA screwed up an earlier plea arrangement.
• Rape kits left untested for years if not decades, reducing the likelihood of catching rapists who keep raping while the evidence to stop them degrades into uselessness.
• Investigators who harass, confront, and mishandle rape victims and assault accusers in ways that convince rape victims they'll never be believed in court and never see any justice served.

Even with rape as an act of violence, not only physical abuse but emotional abuse and spiritual abuse, and everybody who can do something to stop it - the cops in charge, the attorneys in charge, the judges in charge, the juries empaneled - keep acting like they want to handle anything else. That it's not worth their time, that the rape was "miscommunication" or that the woman "asked for it" with her clothes, her hairstyle, her drunken state, her demeanor, her bitchy attitude, or the shape of the moon that night.

Again, the word here. Horrifying.

One of the other shocking things is how little research into rape accusations there's been. Nothing to clarify or confirm the reality of how many rape victims there are, and if the allegations are valid (given how so many cops and DAs worry that rape victims are "ginning up" their stories for revenge or blackmail). If there's been any research, it keeps getting overlooked: There was one case study in 2010 done... which found only 8 percent or so of rape allegations were false. That meant 92 PERCENT OF RAPE ALLEGATIONS WERE REAL... and yet our legal system still treats rape like it's hearsay and we barely see any rape charges filed at all. Until it's too late and there's more victims piled up to make the "hearsay" into "Oh God they were telling the truth all along." 

Yes, there is due process. Yes, there should be steps to ensure the accused have their defense and day in court.

But for the love of God, the victims deserve due process too, the victims deserve their day in court to see justice served. If you're a cop or a lawyer or a doctor or a school administrator or a teacher or a social worker and someone's telling you they're a victim of assault or rape, you have the moral obligation to trust them and take the time to find out and make the effort to ensure rape doesn't happen again.

And yet here we are, finding more evidence our cops and investigators and administrators don't give a rat's ass.

Some of them deserve to be in jail as long as the rapist will be, for letting him flourish and rape again while they fiddled.

And what point will women trust this legal system that DOES NOT TRUST THEM?

Her Wings Are Cut

Her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.
-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Welp, the Republican War on Women jumped up a notch this morning when the Supreme Court in its infinite cowardice refused to stay or even comment on the law passed in Texas that pretty much denies every woman (in reality every poor and ethnic woman) her right to have an abortion.

If we can go into some detail about what Texas' law actually does, let's refer to Sarah McCammon at NPR:

The law allows private citizens to sue abortion providers and anyone else who helps a woman obtain an abortion — including those who give a woman a ride to a clinic or provide financial assistance to obtain an abortion. Private citizens who bring these suits don't need to show any connection to those they are suing.

The law makes no exceptions for cases involving rape or incest...

It bans abortion as soon as cardiac activity is detectable. That's around six weeks, which is before a lot of people know that they're pregnant. Other states have tried to do this, but those laws have been challenged by abortion-rights groups and blocked by federal courts again and again...

Anyone who successfully sues an abortion provider under this law could be awarded at least $10,000. And to prepare for that, Texas Right to Life has set up what it calls a "whistleblower" website where people can submit anonymous tips about anyone they believe to be violating the law.

"These lawsuits are not against the women," says John Seago with Texas Right to Life. "The lawsuits would be against the individuals making money off of the abortion, the abortion industry itself. So this is not spy on your neighbor and see if they're having an abortion."

In a federal lawsuit challenging this, a coalition of abortion providers and reproductive rights groups said the law "places a bounty on people who provide or aid abortions, inviting random strangers to sue them..."

When I heard the bit about the $10,000 bounty, I immediately flashed onto the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which also issued bounties on anyone deemed an escaped slave (which punished free-born Blacks) and penalties on Northerners who refused to help bounty hunters (which punished law officers into betraying their Black neighbors). This isn't the first time I made that analogy.

But this is appropriate analogy after all: This Texas anti-abortion law basically turns women into property, unable to have a say in their medical care or their ability to have families on their own terms.

The so-called Pro-Lifers, I've noted before, are not about the sanctity of life: If they were, they'd be foremost against the death penalty and wars of occupation (and they're not). The so-called Pro-Fetus people, I've noted before, are not about the fetus: If they were, they'd be pushing for more financial aid and improvements in pre-natal care, maternity leave from work, child care benefits, and increased food benefits to schools and families so that children won't starve (guess what, they're not).

No, the anti-abortion crowds have always been Pro-Judgment, willing to shame any woman they deem impure, eager to promote their own rage and anger towards other humans. Willing to promote a society where women earn less in wages, suffer more domestic violence, and are viewed mostly as breeding cattle stuck in generational cycles of poverty.

By passing a law that restricts abortion past an arbitrary deadline that no woman can keep - most women won't know it until they miss a menstrual cycle (four weeks at the most), and by then it would be too late to find a provider who would help - the Far Right are looking to deny women any say at all what happens to their own health. Pregnancy is NOT perfectly safe, and a lot of women could suffer - even die - if they're forced to carry a pregnancy their bodies can't handle.

By passing a law that refuses to respect rape / incest victims, they are forcing those victims to carry on a traumatic experience that would break their spirits if not their sanity.

By passing a law that allows ANYONE uninvolved in the direct affairs of that woman's life to earn monetary awards by simply snitching on them - even if the woman suffers a legitimate miscarriage, or even isn't pregnant - guarantees an abuse of that bounty system to where innocent women will be investigated and punished while assholes rack up easy payouts. That bounty system also punishes anybody pro-choice trying to help these women find ways to get out of state to where they could get the abortion they need to save their health and/or their sanity: a lot of social workers and doctors are going to become targets of unjustified persecution so that a greedy few stuff their wallets with false claims (and given the sadistic mindset of the state government enforcing all of this, the overseers of this system will likely ignore those false claims so they can "juke the stats" on their War Against Women).

This law - passed in the name of Christian morality - flies against the religious belief of Jewish, Hindi, non-religious, and liberal Christian churches. Who speaks for their First Amendment rights in this matter? Certainly not the Texan Republicans who pushed this law, or the rest of the Far Right Republicans nationwide who will look to craft similar laws in their own states to ensure their women suffer as well.

The only women who won't suffer in all of this are the ones who can afford to leave Texas (or any other Red state) for a place where abortion isn't restricted, and can afford to stay there for a year with family/friends so that nobody back home can accuse them of anything. In short, upper-income women (who tend to NOT be Black or Latina, hint hint).

To all the women in Texas about to suffer injuries to your persons because of a corrupt patriarchy that devalues women, these Far Right Bible-thumping hypocrites are trying to cut your wings.

Everyone else out here needs to fight back against those judgmental monsters. Every woman has a right to spread her wings to fly. 

What Would Ye Have The Ladies Do, O Sexists?

I hadn't commented on it much, but the ongoing sexual harassment scandal involving Governor Andrew Cuomo is coming to an end. He's resigning to avoid a likely impeachment process (via NPR): 

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has announced he will resign from office following a scathing report from the state's attorney general concluding that the third-term Democrat sexually harassed 11 women, and in one instance, sought to retaliate against one of his accusers who went public with her allegations.

"Wasting energy on distractions is the last thing that state government should be doing, and I cannot be the cause of that," Cuomo, 63, said in remarks from the capital of Albany on Tuesday...

In a nice touch, the Lt. Governor is a woman Kathy Hochul who will replace him as New York's first female Governor.

Hochul, who served one term in Congress before being tapped by Cuomo to be his running mate in 2014, said in a statement she agreed with the governor's decision to step down.

"It is the right thing to do and in the best interest of New Yorkers," she said. "As someone who has served at all levels of government and is next in the line of succession, I am prepared to lead as New York State's 57th Governor..."

Cuomo's departure from office, which will take effect in 14 days, represents a remarkable turn of events from just over a year ago, when the governor was seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party for his administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic. Yet even that performance is now under a cloud of scrutiny, as a separate investigation by the attorney general found that the number of nursing home deaths disclosed by the state was far worse than officials disclosed.

But it was the allegations of harassment that precipitated the once unthinkable prospect of Cuomo's resignation. The 165-page report released last week followed a months-long investigation into Cuomo's actions and outlined what New York Attorney General Letitia James called violations of both state and federal law. Prosecutors said their findings substantiated allegations from several women — allegations that included unwanted and nonconsensual touching, groping and kissing and sexual comments...

Another thing to note is how Cuomo handled the whole situation: Pursuing a policy of shaming his victims or attacking any accusers to bully his way through the scandal. "Deny deny deny" with a helpful dosage of "Attack attack attack."

But that's the common mindset, isn't it, of the hypocritical bastards who play their way to the top tier of politics or finance or anything to do with power. It's rare, hasn't it been, to see someone seize the reins of power who hasn't been a son-of-a-bitch towards those he (usually a he) views as his lessers (usually women).

I've noted it here often enough: The hypocrisy of sexism in high office. Cuomo is not even the first New York Governor I'm commenting about. There have been many others - across both major parties here in the United States - that it all starts to blend into each other as an ongoing crisis of leadership. A failure to be better men towards women, a failure of justice where fully one-half of our population suffers in the hallways and back rooms of power.

When you look at how men of power mistreat and attack the women in their circles, you should also pay attention to how women's pay in this country remains sickeningly unequal, you should also pay attention to how our legal system refuses to honor or defend rape victims far too often, you should also pay attention to how our culture continues to belittle and devalue anything women say or need.

Kicking Cuomo to the curb is one step towards holding men accountable for the bad behavior we've been showing women for millennia. But our nation has a long way to go and many steps to make - EQUAL PAY for Women! Take rape crimes seriously! - before women are going to be any safer in our workplaces and schools and homes.

In the meantime: Keep punching back, women.

Blood in the Streets of Atlanta: Violence Towards Women, Violence Towards Asians.

Let's break this down to the most basic explanation to what happened this past week across the Atlanta metro.

An angry guy with a gun shot and killed Asian women. If that doesn't sound racist to you, if that doesn't sound misogynistic to you, then YOU have a goddamn problem because that's EXACTLY WHAT THIS IS. (To the NPR article by Bill Chappell, Vanessa Romo, and Jaclyn Diaz)

The sheriff's office said Long confessed to the crime and told officials about a "temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate." They said it is too early to determine whether he'll be charged with a hate crime.

Six women of Asian descent are among the dead, raising suspicions of a hate crime. Long claims race did not play a role in his decision to target the businesses, authorities said, relaying details from questioning the gunman.

Long is believed to have "frequented these places, and he may have been lashing out," Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds said after noting that the suspect indicated to investigators that he has a sexual addiction.

Tuesday's violence has amplified fears in the Asian American community, which has already been experiencing a spike in attacks and harassment since the coronavirus pandemic began...

The murderer - do not say his name - allegedly visited the spas earlier. He knew where he was going and as soon as he got that gun (without background check, without waiting) he knew exactly what he was going to do.

No excuse he and his defenders throw out there should stick. He targeted Asian women (his rampage did include White women and two men), and he targeted women who did nothing to him except exist without his permission and outside of his dominance.

What the murderer did is no different from a lot of other murderers and purveyors of domestic violence. There is a serious problem in our nation - no, scratch that, when you consider what happened in the United Kingdom recently with Sarah Everard, when you consider how Turkey is formally removing itself from an European committee addressing violence against women (implying they no longer care and may even encourage it), when you consider rape as a war crime is happening in every civil war and border clash out there, there is a serious problem with our planet - when it comes to addressing the underlying misogyny to a lot of the violence out there.

Racism is a serious trigger for acts of violence, but the amount of violence committed against women ought to horrify you. How many mass shootings in the United States revolve around domestic abuse culminating in one final act of gunfire?

How important is it that we as a nation pass a Universal Background Check for gun purchases, and making sure domestic abusers are included in those checks? How vital is that our Congress pass a new Violence Against Women Act that should force our lax law enforcement agencies to treat domestic abuse as a serious threat to public safety?

Both of those bills have passed the House this month, thank God. But they're held up now in a Senate that debating whether or not to get rid of the Filibuster, a tool of obstructionism likely to block those bills from passing like the majority of Americans want them to.

God damn our nation's history of racism - not just towards Blacks and Hispanics but also tragically towards Asians from Chinese to Japanese to Filipino to Vietnamese and so many others - and God damn our species' history of sexist-driven violence towards women.

We need to make our laws act towards both injustices before more people - WE ARE ALL HUMAN BEINGS DAMMIT - are killed for the rage and bloodlust of angry white men.

What We Do To Women In The Shadows of Our Government

 The report hasn't been fully verified but there's enough to this story to make one sick. Via Nicole Narea at Vox: 

The allegations began with a nurse, Dawn Wooten, who filed a whistleblower complaint on Monday that cited concerns about a seemingly high number of hysterectomies performed on immigrants detained at the facility.

On Wednesday, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the vice chair of the House immigration subcommittee, said in a statement that she had been briefed by three attorneys representing detainees at the facility. At minimum, she said, 17 or 18 people held at the Irwin County Detention Center had been subjected to unnecessary gynecological procedures — often “with the clear intention of sterilization” and without obtaining proper consent...

Many of the details of the allegations against the Georgia facility are still emerging, and both ICE and the private operator of the facility have called for skepticism of the complaint, which relies on secondhand accounts of the hysterectomies that were allegedly performed. Attorneys have since come forward with firsthand accounts of such procedures, but it is not clear to what extent ICE and the medical staff involved sought the detainees’ consent to perform those procedures or whether they were medically necessary...

According to Wooten’s complaint, the detainees, many of whom have limited English skills, were allegedly sent to a gynecologist outside the facility who performed the hysterectomies, often without them fully understanding why they were getting the procedure done. One woman was told it was because she had a “thick womb” or “heavy bleeding,” even though she had never experienced heavy bleeding or been told by a doctor previously that she had a thick womb, according to the complaint...

Hysterectomies can be commonly used to treat noncancerous growths in the uterus that contribute to heavy periods and painful sex, as well as endometriosis, pelvic support issues, abnormal uterine bleedings, chronic pelvic pain, and gynecologic cancers. But the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advises that, depending on a patient’s condition and comfort level, they may “want to try other options first that do not involve surgery” or see if the condition improves on its own first, waiting to perform the hysterectomy until a woman no longer wants to bear children.

Detainees were also subject to other invasive gynecological procedures, including one woman who allegedly had Fallopian tube removal without her consent, which will likely make it harder for her to conceive in the future...

The report suggests that these surgeries were unnecessary. There were other ways to treat women - birth control pills for example help with treating ovarian cysts - but it looks like this private corporation - well removed from any public oversight - went too far.

It's known as "Forced Sterilization."

It's considered a human rights violation.

And given the open hostility that trump and his closest handlers like Stephen Miller are towards immigrants, and especially towards women, a lot of this looks intentional.

And this is just at ONE detention facility run by ICE and their corporate partners.

And this is just ONE MORE moment of a Republican agenda to make women suffer for the sake of a twisted patriarchy.

Ye Gods, trump and his anti-immigrant horde are desperate to hurt other people - above all, to hurt women - any chance they get.