Eh. I'm a little tired -- the old wake too early after too little sleep...
Given that pro-choice is hugely popular, of course if that's the only issue on a ballot, it'll win, duh.
Bu-u-ut...
Then far too many of the same people who vote for choice on a referendum elect Republicans who of course are dedicated to limiting it as much as possible.
I mean, far too many of these voters like choice but can't make the very, very small jump to choosing not to elect politicians dedicated to ending it as a practical matter. I mean, if those people are sooo pro-choice and supporting referendums that protect or whatever, there'd have been blue tsunamis in Kansas and Wisconsin and Ohio (which just a year earlier sent JD Vance to the senate).
Please.
And for the zillionth time, while I realize the voters can do the right thing, there's not a single time that I'd trust them to do the right thing.
A couple weeks ago, I sent an apology note to Amanda Marcote. Not that I'd ever had any interaction with her. When she was at Pandagon, she repeatedly said the bastards were never going to stop at Roe V Wade. They'd come for any and all kinds of contraception. That, in addition to full on culture war to the death.
I though she was needlessly overstating the danger.
I'd been paying attention to the freaks since the rise of Falwell. I knew what they thought and what they wanted. My error was in thinking that the grownups would keep them under control. Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A should have cured me of that. I still believed the repeal of abortion rights would remain the carrot, held just out of the theocons reach, the better to keep them stirred up and marching to the pols. Wrong on all counts. So, I thought I owed her one, and told her as much.
So much for my being the smart, cynical guy who has it all figured out.
I read an article the other day about a pastor in some Evangelical Church who was kind of freaked at his parishioners. He was teaching the Beatitudes("What’s so special about cheesemakers?) and the congregation was all like
" when did they slip all this mushy woke bullshit into our Holy Bibles?"
“remember that the other guys are fascists and you have to be prepared for them to act like it”
So true and also, they’ll never stop trying to suppress women and “the others.” We were guilty of complacency after the positive steps on civil and reproductive rights and I hope we’ve learned our lesson: the right will always be working to drag the country back to 1850 ( or in Wisconsin’s case, 1849).
An excellent example of Wilhoit’s law. The Wiki page linked to is for a different Wilhoit (Francis) from the one (Frank) who came up with the law. The Wiki article does note this misattribution. Maybe the confusion is due to the fact that Francis is a political scientist so it would presumably have come up with such a brilliant theory. Frank is a composer, and came up with his dictum, after Francis’s 2010 death, in a comment to s blog post. See, profound shit comes down in blog comments! From musicians!
Florida has shown the way to deal with things the voters demand but that Republicans don't want. Florida voters overwhelmingly passed an initiative to restore voting rights to convicted felons who had served their time and returned to being good citizens. The Republican legislature was bound by this ballot measure, so they wrote the appropriate law to restore those rights . . . to felons who had paid all their fines, court costs, and other fees while providing no mechanism whatsoever for applicants to verify those fees or even determine what was owed. Thus, the majority of convicted felons are still barred from voting because the state says "you owe us money, but we're not going to tell how how much or where to pay it."
I can see such methodology being used for denying women abortion rights. Should Ohio pass the abortion rights measure and reproductive freedom becomes enshrined in the state constitution, Ohio Republicans can simply pass a law barring clinics from advertising, having signage, or otherwise allowing the public to discover a clinic's existence. After all, if you can't find an abortion provider, you can't get an abortion!
Look for similar scummy tactics all over this land as conservative efforts to coerce the population with unpopular policies keep running into more and more resistance.
"...if you don’t like what voters demand, just make it illegal... If voters use their power to require something you don’t agree with, just take it away from them."
The crux. And, as with reproductive freedom, various gun laws, civil rights, and more, you have a Supreme Court in your arsenal who will invent a way to make whatever you've done in the states constitutional, national, and permanent.
Related: Alabama GOP straight up admits they, and likely the Louisiana and Texas GOPs, can’t win a fair fight. Persuasion doesn’t even occur to them, the only answer is voter suppression.
Sigh. Thanks, I guess, from Ohio for the dose of reality. We've been feeling pretty happy here about getting people to the polls to vote on an issue that, on its face, had nothing to do with abortion. Getting people to vote in November on the reproductive rights constitutional amendment should be easier. But, of course, the fight won't end there.
We have a history in Ohio of the Republican supermajority ignoring the state constitution and the Ohio Supreme Court. In 1997, the Ohio Supreme Court found that our system for funding public schools was unconstitutional, and it still hasn't been fixed. Instead, the assholes instituted a private school voucher system that they keep expanding. That's being challenged by public school advocates and is in the courts now.
But the better example is our constitutional amendment to end gerrymandering. We the voters were hoodwinked into amending the constitution in 2018 to create a redistricting commission that was supposed to change the way state and congressional districts are drawn. But the constitutional amendment we passed failed miserably because the redistricting commission is controlled by the people currently in power, the Republican supermajority, who created the maps they wanted and then ignored the Ohio Supreme Court when it found that the maps were unconstitutional. They gamed the system by waiting until elections were imminent and then getting a federal court order allowing them to use the maps that the state court had found were unconstitutional. We'll see a new constitutional amendment on the ballot soon that will try to fix the problem, but I have no doubt that the assholes will find ways to keep their power no matter what the constitution and the courts say.
And voters really don't want to vote for Democrats here, even though that would be the obvious way to protect reproductive rights. We had an opportunity to elect 3 pro-choice Dems to the Ohio Supreme Court last year, and the voters chose Republicans for all 3 seats. I've worked the polls in a Repubican county east of Cleveland and watched voter after voter simply grab a Republican slate card on the way in to vote the slate.
I made the mistake of clicking through to the American Spectator article; the beginning was bad enough ("the Dems lie to the people! LIE! How dare they, that's OUR schtick!") but I got to the link to the story about "TRANS INDIVIDUALS SEEK EUTHANASIA" and I had to tap out before I started punching things.
By the by, it continues to gall me how conservatives insist Texas and Florida are bastions of pure unadulterated FREEDOM at the same time they're forging exciting new ideas in authoritarianism.
The Guardian had one of those "Iowa voters stick by Trump" stories (AND GODDAMMIT WHY DO I KEEP READING THIS SHIT) but it had an interesting aside from the Chair of the Democratic Party in one rural Iowa county. Seems wind turbines have really taken off there, providing a nice, steady property tax income to the county and a pretty massive WINDfall to some farmers (hey, see what I did there?) Anyway, the Dem party chair said people just refused to give the Democrats any credit or to see the Republicans as an obstacle to their wealth and economic growth (she also blamed the national party for not devoting more resources to talking to rural voters.)
How it's related is that sometimes I think you just gotta take the W and move on. If Iowa farmers enthusiastically embrace wind and solar and consequently reduce the destructiveness of climate change, then I'll be happy with that, the Dems will just need to find their votes somewhere else.
It would be interesting to see the Venn diagram overlap of those who think all abortion should be illegal, and those who believe in the existence of angels. Similarly, of those against abortion, and those in favor of the death penalty. Of course the ur-contradiction of them all is believing you revere life, whilie being a Republican-"The Party of Cruelty, Fascism, and Unlimited Guns." Then again, religion is a kind of socially-sanctioned insanity, so maybe that accounts for everything.
Yep, Total War. Once you grasp that they truly, deeply, sincerely believe that tens of thousands of babies (babies! Cute little helpless babies with their little toes and fingers!) are MURDERED every day! RIPPED APART and flushed down the sewer! For NO REASON other than shallow convenience and cruelty! They are in a holy war with EVIL, with SATAN himself. Any action taken to fight this monstrous evil is just and righteous. Certainly there's a lot of mushy agreement that the sluts should just keep an aspirin between their knees and ixnay on the yevil, , but the engine driving this holy war Believe. They've given up any attempt to convince anyone of anything, mainly because every argument they've tried won't carry the water they need. They believe those cute little babies, those "potential humans", have immortal souls, but they know that dog won't hunt. Their "scientific" arguments are a joke, and their deep well of compassion for The Babies is bone dry once the little tykes pop their little heads out. So, brute force it is then. God will reward them. Hell, He's provided them with Trump who made that abomination Roe dissappear, what can't He do?
History teaches us religious wars are the worst wars, the insane logic of war is amplified by the insane logic of people who believe their fight is transcendental and they must prevail, no matter what generals babble about casualties and logistics. They will not go quietly.
Eh. I'm a little tired -- the old wake too early after too little sleep...
Given that pro-choice is hugely popular, of course if that's the only issue on a ballot, it'll win, duh.
Bu-u-ut...
Then far too many of the same people who vote for choice on a referendum elect Republicans who of course are dedicated to limiting it as much as possible.
I mean, far too many of these voters like choice but can't make the very, very small jump to choosing not to elect politicians dedicated to ending it as a practical matter. I mean, if those people are sooo pro-choice and supporting referendums that protect or whatever, there'd have been blue tsunamis in Kansas and Wisconsin and Ohio (which just a year earlier sent JD Vance to the senate).
Please.
And for the zillionth time, while I realize the voters can do the right thing, there's not a single time that I'd trust them to do the right thing.
A couple weeks ago, I sent an apology note to Amanda Marcote. Not that I'd ever had any interaction with her. When she was at Pandagon, she repeatedly said the bastards were never going to stop at Roe V Wade. They'd come for any and all kinds of contraception. That, in addition to full on culture war to the death.
I though she was needlessly overstating the danger.
I'd been paying attention to the freaks since the rise of Falwell. I knew what they thought and what they wanted. My error was in thinking that the grownups would keep them under control. Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A should have cured me of that. I still believed the repeal of abortion rights would remain the carrot, held just out of the theocons reach, the better to keep them stirred up and marching to the pols. Wrong on all counts. So, I thought I owed her one, and told her as much.
So much for my being the smart, cynical guy who has it all figured out.
"Resistance is futile, broodsows -"
You sure you're not from Ohio?
I read an article the other day about a pastor in some Evangelical Church who was kind of freaked at his parishioners. He was teaching the Beatitudes("What’s so special about cheesemakers?) and the congregation was all like
" when did they slip all this mushy woke bullshit into our Holy Bibles?"
FAFO Reverend.
“remember that the other guys are fascists and you have to be prepared for them to act like it”
So true and also, they’ll never stop trying to suppress women and “the others.” We were guilty of complacency after the positive steps on civil and reproductive rights and I hope we’ve learned our lesson: the right will always be working to drag the country back to 1850 ( or in Wisconsin’s case, 1849).
An excellent example of Wilhoit’s law. The Wiki page linked to is for a different Wilhoit (Francis) from the one (Frank) who came up with the law. The Wiki article does note this misattribution. Maybe the confusion is due to the fact that Francis is a political scientist so it would presumably have come up with such a brilliant theory. Frank is a composer, and came up with his dictum, after Francis’s 2010 death, in a comment to s blog post. See, profound shit comes down in blog comments! From musicians!
Florida has shown the way to deal with things the voters demand but that Republicans don't want. Florida voters overwhelmingly passed an initiative to restore voting rights to convicted felons who had served their time and returned to being good citizens. The Republican legislature was bound by this ballot measure, so they wrote the appropriate law to restore those rights . . . to felons who had paid all their fines, court costs, and other fees while providing no mechanism whatsoever for applicants to verify those fees or even determine what was owed. Thus, the majority of convicted felons are still barred from voting because the state says "you owe us money, but we're not going to tell how how much or where to pay it."
I can see such methodology being used for denying women abortion rights. Should Ohio pass the abortion rights measure and reproductive freedom becomes enshrined in the state constitution, Ohio Republicans can simply pass a law barring clinics from advertising, having signage, or otherwise allowing the public to discover a clinic's existence. After all, if you can't find an abortion provider, you can't get an abortion!
Look for similar scummy tactics all over this land as conservative efforts to coerce the population with unpopular policies keep running into more and more resistance.
"...if you don’t like what voters demand, just make it illegal... If voters use their power to require something you don’t agree with, just take it away from them."
The crux. And, as with reproductive freedom, various gun laws, civil rights, and more, you have a Supreme Court in your arsenal who will invent a way to make whatever you've done in the states constitutional, national, and permanent.
"...if voters use their power to require something you don’t agree with, just take it away from them."
it's called YOU'RE NOT IN A DEMOCRACY
Related: Alabama GOP straight up admits they, and likely the Louisiana and Texas GOPs, can’t win a fair fight. Persuasion doesn’t even occur to them, the only answer is voter suppression.
https://aldailynews.com/alabama-republicans-frame-redistricting-case-as-threat-to-political-power/
Sigh. Thanks, I guess, from Ohio for the dose of reality. We've been feeling pretty happy here about getting people to the polls to vote on an issue that, on its face, had nothing to do with abortion. Getting people to vote in November on the reproductive rights constitutional amendment should be easier. But, of course, the fight won't end there.
We have a history in Ohio of the Republican supermajority ignoring the state constitution and the Ohio Supreme Court. In 1997, the Ohio Supreme Court found that our system for funding public schools was unconstitutional, and it still hasn't been fixed. Instead, the assholes instituted a private school voucher system that they keep expanding. That's being challenged by public school advocates and is in the courts now.
But the better example is our constitutional amendment to end gerrymandering. We the voters were hoodwinked into amending the constitution in 2018 to create a redistricting commission that was supposed to change the way state and congressional districts are drawn. But the constitutional amendment we passed failed miserably because the redistricting commission is controlled by the people currently in power, the Republican supermajority, who created the maps they wanted and then ignored the Ohio Supreme Court when it found that the maps were unconstitutional. They gamed the system by waiting until elections were imminent and then getting a federal court order allowing them to use the maps that the state court had found were unconstitutional. We'll see a new constitutional amendment on the ballot soon that will try to fix the problem, but I have no doubt that the assholes will find ways to keep their power no matter what the constitution and the courts say.
And voters really don't want to vote for Democrats here, even though that would be the obvious way to protect reproductive rights. We had an opportunity to elect 3 pro-choice Dems to the Ohio Supreme Court last year, and the voters chose Republicans for all 3 seats. I've worked the polls in a Repubican county east of Cleveland and watched voter after voter simply grab a Republican slate card on the way in to vote the slate.
I made the mistake of clicking through to the American Spectator article; the beginning was bad enough ("the Dems lie to the people! LIE! How dare they, that's OUR schtick!") but I got to the link to the story about "TRANS INDIVIDUALS SEEK EUTHANASIA" and I had to tap out before I started punching things.
By the by, it continues to gall me how conservatives insist Texas and Florida are bastions of pure unadulterated FREEDOM at the same time they're forging exciting new ideas in authoritarianism.
The Guardian had one of those "Iowa voters stick by Trump" stories (AND GODDAMMIT WHY DO I KEEP READING THIS SHIT) but it had an interesting aside from the Chair of the Democratic Party in one rural Iowa county. Seems wind turbines have really taken off there, providing a nice, steady property tax income to the county and a pretty massive WINDfall to some farmers (hey, see what I did there?) Anyway, the Dem party chair said people just refused to give the Democrats any credit or to see the Republicans as an obstacle to their wealth and economic growth (she also blamed the national party for not devoting more resources to talking to rural voters.)
How it's related is that sometimes I think you just gotta take the W and move on. If Iowa farmers enthusiastically embrace wind and solar and consequently reduce the destructiveness of climate change, then I'll be happy with that, the Dems will just need to find their votes somewhere else.
I'm still surprised that over 40% literally voted for their vote *not* to count.
It would be interesting to see the Venn diagram overlap of those who think all abortion should be illegal, and those who believe in the existence of angels. Similarly, of those against abortion, and those in favor of the death penalty. Of course the ur-contradiction of them all is believing you revere life, whilie being a Republican-"The Party of Cruelty, Fascism, and Unlimited Guns." Then again, religion is a kind of socially-sanctioned insanity, so maybe that accounts for everything.
Yep, Total War. Once you grasp that they truly, deeply, sincerely believe that tens of thousands of babies (babies! Cute little helpless babies with their little toes and fingers!) are MURDERED every day! RIPPED APART and flushed down the sewer! For NO REASON other than shallow convenience and cruelty! They are in a holy war with EVIL, with SATAN himself. Any action taken to fight this monstrous evil is just and righteous. Certainly there's a lot of mushy agreement that the sluts should just keep an aspirin between their knees and ixnay on the yevil, , but the engine driving this holy war Believe. They've given up any attempt to convince anyone of anything, mainly because every argument they've tried won't carry the water they need. They believe those cute little babies, those "potential humans", have immortal souls, but they know that dog won't hunt. Their "scientific" arguments are a joke, and their deep well of compassion for The Babies is bone dry once the little tykes pop their little heads out. So, brute force it is then. God will reward them. Hell, He's provided them with Trump who made that abomination Roe dissappear, what can't He do?
History teaches us religious wars are the worst wars, the insane logic of war is amplified by the insane logic of people who believe their fight is transcendental and they must prevail, no matter what generals babble about casualties and logistics. They will not go quietly.