Month: May 2022

It looks like cult politics are the new norm in the GOP

There are several states in which abortion rights will be hanging in the balance depending on who wins the Governor’s races this year. This article is about Pennsylvania:

Jan Downey, who calls herself “a Catholic Republican,” is so unhappy about the Supreme Court’s likely reversal of abortion rights that she is leaning toward voting for a Democrat for Pennsylvania governor this year.

“Absolutely,” she said. “On that issue alone.”

Linda Ward, also a Republican, said the state’s current law allowing abortion up to 24 weeks was “reasonable.”

But Ms. Ward said she would vote for a Republican for governor, even though all the leading candidates vowed to sign legislation sharply restricting abortion. She is disgusted with inflation, mask mandates and “woke philosophy,” she said.

“After what’s happened this past year, I will never vote for a Democrat,” said Ms. Ward, a retired church employee. “Never!”

Pennsylvania, one of a handful of states where abortion access hangs in the balance with midterm elections this year, is a test case of the political power of the issue in a post-Roe world, offering a look at whether it will motivate party bases or can be a wedge for suburban independents. […]

In four states with politically divided governments and elections for governor this year — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Kansas — the issue is expected to be a fulcrum of campaigns. In Michigan and Wisconsin, which have anti-abortion laws on the books predating Roe, Democratic governors and attorneys general have vowed to block their implementation. Kansas voters face a referendum in August on codifying that the state constitution does not protect abortion.

Pennsylvania, which has a conservative Republican-led legislature and a term-limited Democratic governor, is the only one of the four states with an open seat for governor.

“The legislature is going to put a bill on the desk of the next governor to ban abortion,’’ said Josh Shapiro, a Democrat running unopposed for the party’s nomination for governor. “Every one of my opponents would sign it into law, and I would veto it.”

All four of the top Republicans heading into the primary on May 17 have said they favor strict abortion bans. Lou Barletta, a former congressman and one of two frontrunners in the race, has said he would sign “any bill that comes to my desk that would protect the life of the unborn.”

Another top candidate, Doug Mastriano, said in a recent debate that he was opposed to any exceptions — for rape, incest or the health of the mother — in an abortion ban. Mr. Mastriano, a state senator, has introduced a bill in Harrisburg to ban abortions after a “fetal heartbeat” is detected, at about six weeks of pregnancy. Another Republican bill would require death certificates and a burial or cremation after miscarriages or abortions.

Here’s what Pennsylvania Trump whisperer Selena Zito has to say about it. I actually laughed out loud when I read it:

If Mastriano wins the Republican primary in Pennsylvania, he may well cost Republicans the Senate race that will share the ballot this fall, a couple of congressional races, and perhaps even majorities in the state House and state Senate. That would be a pretty remarkable feat in a year when Republicans are expected to succeed throughout the country.

Mastriano is that bad. Yet everywhere you go across rural Pennsylvania, there are Mastriano campaign signs for governor. They are in yards, parking lots, along the sides of highways, and along the side of buildings. Try telling any of these voters who has amassed a cultish following that Mastriano has a lot of issues, and they dig in and support him more.

Imagine that. Did she think Trump was the only one who could amass a cult following among these people? Why? The whole party has devolved into nothing more than performative “own the libs” “fuck your feelings” political cultism.

Mastriano is known for wearing spurs everywhere he goes and giving elaborate and often uncomfortable speeches. This week, he became agitated and abruptly ended a podcast interview when asked about his attendance at a QAnon-linked event in Gettysburg, as well as the rally he attended just before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack subpoenaed him in March about his involvement.

Mastriano, a retired Army colonel elected to the state Senate in 2019, has emerged as a front-runner with a small core group of supporters. He could get the nomination just because there are so many people in the race; the latest Franklin and Marshall College polling shows that a whopping 40% of Pennsylvania Republican primary voters are undecided.

Pollsters for multiple campaigns in the state say Mastriano is the only one out of the nine who has been leading in their internal polling outside of “undecided.”

As one grassroots activist said: “I am certainly no mainline insider committee person, but I understand how bad he would impact races up and down the ticket. If there was one race I would have wished Trump endorsed in in the state, it would be this one, except then, you worry he would have endorsed Mastriano.”

Who knows if this guy can win the nomination? But unless the party decides to go after him the way they’re going after Madison Cawthorne, it looks like he has a good chance. The Republican base apparently loves flamboyant assholes. In swing states that doesn’t play as well as it does in Dixie.

All but 7 states have fewer people.

But hey, it’s fine. LA county has a whole lot of people, true. If we lived in a real democracy it might matter that all those states with fewer people than that one county had far more political power. Sadly that’s not the case.

It isn’t a liberal…

The Washington Post reports:

The leaked draft of Alito’s opinion is dated February 10 and is almost surely obsolete now, as justices have had time to offer critiques, dissents and revisions. But as of last week, the five-member majority to strike Roe remains intact, according to three conservatives close to the court who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

A person close to the court’s most conservative members said Roberts told his fellow jurists in a private conference in early December that he planned to uphold the state law and write an opinion that left Roe and Casey in place for now. But the other conservatives were more interested in an opinion that overturned the precedents, the person said.

I don’t think we need anything more to know that conservatives are trying to pressure Roberts. In fact, that second paragraph indicates that a conservative Justice shared what was said in a private conference and then whoever they told leaked it to the press.

So Republicans need to shut the fuck up about the leak.

Anyway, here’s the story. The inmates are now running the asylum:

The explosive leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade not only focused the nation on the magnitude of the change facing abortion rights, it also signaled the rise of a rightward-moving court that is testing the power of fellow conservative Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

As the country awaits a final decision, the intense deliberations inside a court closed to the public and shaken by revelations of its private negotiations appears to be not between the court’s right and left, but among the six conservative justices, including Roberts, in the court’s supermajority.

The mere existence of the draft indicated that five justices had voted at least tentatively to reject Roberts’s incremental approach to restricting abortion rights. Instead, they would reverse Roe after nearly 50 years of guaranteeing a right to abortion that could not be outlawed by the states.Advertisement

The fact that Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. authored the draft is a sign Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s longest-serving member and the only one to write that he would overturn Roe, asserted his seniority to choose who would get the job. In Alito’s more than 16 years on the Supreme Court, he has supported every government restriction on abortion that has come before him.

It is another signal that the 67-year-old Roberts, hailed by scholars just a few years ago as one of the most powerful chief justices in history, is not in control of the process as the court readies its most influential decision in decades.

There is also reason to believe Roberts has not given up. Many who know him well and have watched his maneuvering of the court through other issues are certain he is still preparing his own opinion in hopes he might draw at least one of the court’s newest conservatives to his side. Such an outcome might save 1973′s Roe and the subsequent affirming 1992 decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, while severely limiting their protections…

Roberts has sometimes sided with the liberals in some of those disputes, particularly when he thought the authority or reputation of the court was at stake.

That ship has officially sailed. The reputation of the Court is in tatters. Of course it really sailed when the conservative Justices banded together to accept Bush vs Gore and then ruled in a blatantly partisan manner. Everything that’s happened since then has simply reaffirmed that. But since shamelessness is their superpower, they no longer care. I kind of doubt John Roberts is going to care after this either. It’s just will to power, no matter what, by any means necessary.

I think Roberts will continue to pretend he is a moderating influence so they can keep up the pretense that the Court is not a fully theocratic, authoritarian body. But after this he surely knows there’s nothing he can do about it and that Alito and Thomas are the real leaders on the Court. I doubt he’ll put up much of a fight.

… but will they hold the next time?

Trump’s running in 2024. If he wins, and there’s a fair chance he will what with all the election shenanigans in the battleground state, he will undoubtedly take the advice of those around him who are demanding that enact a massive purge of the federal government and he will not hire anyone who isn’t a proven loyalist. I don’t think he will follow any laws he doesn’t want to and will be happy to fight any objections in court because … well, the courts are apparently terrified of Donald Trump (and his violent, insane cult following) and will never hold him accountability for law breaking. He knows this.

He is incapable of intellectual growth and completely depends upon his instincts which have been honed by popular culture and sycophants telling him what he wants to hear. With the number of batshit insane Jack D Ripper retired Generals out there in his circle (it’s not just Flynn) I’m not sure we can count on the military to stop him either. How many equally looney tunes officers are still on active duty?

I know everyone’s mad at Esper for not saying this during the campaign so people could know before they voted. But everyone knew he was a monster. He said many things that were equally crazy in public throughout his term. There were many books written that revealed his total unfitness for the job. Tens of millions voted for him anyway. And they will again.

“Well, not for the country!”

Thanks to Trevor Noah for busting that Villager’s savvy attitude. Grrrr.

Not you, ladies

Heather Cox Richardson adds to thoughts I’m having about the first bans on abortion about the mid-1800s:

If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But “Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced American women that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change modern society.

The Civil War years taught naïve Americans what mass death meant in the modern era. Soldiers who had marched off to war with fantasies of heroism discovered that long-range weapons turned death into tortured anonymity. Men were trampled into blood-soaked mud, piled like cordwood in ditches, or transformed into emaciated corpses after dysentery drained their lives away.

The war changed how women saw their second-class status in this country:

Women had bought bonds, paid taxes, raised money for the war effort, managed farms, harvested fields, worked in war industries, reared children, and nursed soldiers. When the war ended, they had every intention of continuing to participate in national affairs. But the Fourteenth Amendment, which established that African American men were citizens, did not mention women. In 1869, women organized the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association to promote women’s right to have a say in American government.

From her home in Boston, Julia Ward Howe was a key figure in the American Woman Suffrage Association. She was an enormously talented writer, who had penned The Battle Hymn of the Republic in the early years of the Civil War, a hymn whose lyrics made it a point to note that Christ was “born of woman.”

Howe was drawn to women’s rights because the laws of her time meant that her children belonged to her abusive husband. If she broke free of him, she would lose any right to see her children, a fact he threw at her whenever she threatened to leave him. She was not at first a radical in the mold of reformer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, believing that women had a human right to equality with men. Rather, she believed strongly that women, as mothers, had a special role to perform in the world.

Stanton had helped organize the Seneca Falls Convention ahead of the Civil War in 1848. The Industrial Revolution was already changing womens’ roles, Sara Robinson reminds me. Fewer wives worked alongside their husbands as they had traditionally. With the formation of the AMA and the establishment of medical schools in the 1840s, the medical community sought to eliminate competition from “homeopaths, herbalists, and especially midwives.”

Women as a growing economic and nascent political force became a threat to men’s hegemonic control as modernization slowly redefined family and gender roles. Criminalizing abortion contributed to keeping women in their traditional places. Where once accepted by common law before “quickening,” criminalization of abortion grew in the 1800s. Was it just medical advances, or did the growing suffrage movement influence the growing number of anti-abortion laws?

Conservatives on the Roberts Supreme Court seem determined to roll back the clock not just to the mid-20th century but to the mid-19th. Back to a time when women were the delicate, little flowers not the insecure, testosterone-fixated men today trying to keep everyone else from challenging their primacy.

Update: Also…

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

Bodily autonomy and the right to be let alone are intertwined

A thread by British science fiction writer Charlie Stross attempts to simplify the (impending?) death of Roe to a single, universal idea:

Big idea here: The US right’s war on abortion is part of a bigger fight—their war on the Enlightenment era concept of rights. (Alito’s ruling puts a lot of other rights at risk, not just abortion.) The solution is a basic right to bodily autonomy and self-determination.

The right to bodily autonomy means that you, and nobody else, have the right to control your own body. Nobody should be allowed to torture you, harvest your organs, perform surgery on you without consent, force you to be pregnant against your will, or brainwash you.

I think [almost] all of us can agree that the right to bodily autonomy is desirable for ourselves? If it is a universal right then the right to abortion is a natural consequence of it. So is the right to contraception. Transgender rights too. It’s a wellspring of rights.

Slavery violates the right to bodily autonomy. Anti-miscegenation laws violate it. And so on. It explicitly refutes both the Divine Right of Kings and the Biblical religious doctrines that informed the legal reasoning of Matthew Hale, the witch-hunting judge Alito cites.

A right to bodily autonomy is completely incompatible with the intentions of the Christian Dominionists behind the campaign against abortion, miscegenation, LGBT+, contraception, divorce, and minority rights now running in the USA.

They want to turn the clock back to the 17th century, and are doing so incrementally. You can’t win by fighting on the opposition’s chosen battlefield. Instead, pick a single goal that is easy to argue for and blocks ALL their objectives. A right to bodily autonomy.

Back in the heyday of blogs, Markos drew flak (I cannot find the post now) for rejecting the notion that the right to an abortion was a fundamental principle for Democrats. Like hell it is, he wrote. What’s fundamental is the right to privacy. From that, an entire host of rights flow.

In a 1928 dissenting opinion in a wiretapping case, Justice Louis Brandeis famously argued that the Constitution protects Americans “in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations” and “conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.”

In writing about the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786, Jefferson considered the inviolability of “the rights of conscience” in terms, I recall this morning, that also invoke bodily autonomy for support:

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Jefferson had more to say about Christians’ efforts to make the teachings of Jesus Christ the standard by which American freedoms were defined. Americans of the late 18th century were not yet prepared to include Black slaves’ legs under the protections of being let alone (and are not prepared to leave Black people alone even today). But Jefferson’s statement already leaned in that direction.

The right to be let alone includes both conscience and bodily autonomy, does it not?

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

Trump 2.0 is a liar. Imagine that.

Judd Legum has the goods:

It’s official: @GovRonDeSantis perpetrated a hoax, falsely claiming that dozens of math book publishers attempted to indoctrinate Florida students with Critical Race Theory

He knew this was false

But figured he could get away with it

On April 15 the FL Dept of Education issued a release: “Florida Rejects Publishers’ Attempts to Indoctrinate Students”

DeSantis said publishers included “indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students

That was a lie

On April 21, Popular Information obtained 8 of the rejected textbooks and found no examples of CRT or race essentialism for high school students or anyone else.

We now know a lot more. And it completely exposes DeSantis.

https://popular.info/p/inside-the-dangerous-math-textbooks?s=w

The Florida Department of Education has now released THOUSANDS of pages documenting the review of these textbooks.

Of those 70 reviewers only ONE REVIEWER complained of CRT in any math textbook

And she has an agenda.

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/education/os-ne-florida-math-books-reviewers-20220506-f7yjvubmofgzjinp6t5xylkwta-story.html

The reviewer who complained about CRT is a member of @Moms4Liberty. This is a group that is trying to ban biographies of MLK Jr. in Tennessee because that is supposedly indoctrinating students with CRT

https://popular.info/p/moms-for-liberty-says-book-about?s=w

6. Chris Allen, the @Moms4Liberty member, complained of CRT in two high school math textbooks.

She cites “Multiple examples of the
author pushing his opinion
about topic[s] relating to global
warming”

Other reviewers of the same textbooks found no CRT

But even if you accept that Allen’s analysis is correct (it’s not) it still doesn’t back up DeSantis’ claim that these math publishers are trying to indoctrinate ELEMENTARY SCHOOL students with CRT

That was false and DeSantis either knew or should have known it was false

Let’s dive in a little deeper. How did DeSantis and Florida claim there were dozens of textbooks seeking to indoctrinate students when there was a single reviewer who claimed two textbooks contained CRT?

Reviewers evaluated each criteria on a scale of 1-5. Florida concluded that anything less than a 5 on the “CRT” category meant the textbook contained CRT — EVEN IF THE REVIEWER EXPLICITLY SAID THERE WAS NO CRT FOUND

Something else of note. Several of the people reviewing these Florida math textbooks have no expertise in math.

At least one doesn’t live in Florida.

He’s a right-wing activist from Michigan

https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/state/florida-math-textbooks-werent-evaluated-by-just-math-experts

Originally tweeted by Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) on May 7, 2022.

It was all bullshit. But it doesn’t matter to DeSantis fans. They celebrate lying.

A good analysis from Pete Buttigieg

He’s right. Sadly, I have to say that it does seem to be working at least for the moment.

This is good too:

He is very good at explaining these complicated issues in clear, empathetic terms. Others could learn from this.