Basically, every time a Fox News viewer sees a commercial with an interracial couple, he’s reminded that America’s status as a white Christian nation is under assault, by people (progressives) who don’t want America to be either particularly white or particularly Christian. That viewer’s definition of “patriotism” is precisely the embrace of America as the white Christian nation of the viewer’s highly idealized youth, and he interprets the rejection of that vision as a kind of treason.
Paul Campos, writing for Lawyers, Guns & Money.
Author: lemkin
An Early Retirement
This is a sentence that succinctly captures one of the fundamental and pervasive problems with modern Democratic politics:
“Nadler, 75, is all but guaranteed at least one more term in Washington in the solidly Democratic district while Maloney, 76, will be forced into an early retirement.”
Ross Barkan writing for New York Magazine
Maybe one day, in the far far future, Dear Leader Trump XXVI will allow a Democrat under 70 to run for and hold office in one of the indentured provinces. A person can dream.
Things To Come
I think a lot of people have no idea what enforcement of abortion laws is going to look like between modern surveillance technology and the War on Drugs mindset. It’s the ideal American form of reactionary governance from time immemorial: a state that is incredibly intrusive in day-to-day life while providing few benefits.
Scott Lemieux, writing for Lawyers, Guns, and Money
This is a key point that seems to be largely unspoken in the wider media complex. Take a state like Texas and then remove Roe. Laws are already in place to ban all abortions. But I think everyone stops here and talks about how bad that would be for people with no resources to, say, fly to Massachusetts for an abortion.
The folks in charge of Texas, of course, have already thought of this. Their vigilante-based law already provides rewards for turning in your neighbor or co-worker who sneaks off to get an abortion. But why stop there? Medical abortion is safe and available. So Texas (and the other red states) will need to monitor the mail, internet searches, connections to specific websites where one might do a consult online; all of it. Same goes for crossing the border and getting the pills in Mexico; it’s all but guaranteed they’re going to clamp down harder on mifepristone than meth. I’d expect that, before too long, women traveling for any reason will begin to face enhanced questioning and scrutiny if they’re going someplace suspicious. Did you get a permission for travel form signed by your husband, Ma’am? Could we see some proof of your meeting registration in Boston? Why are you trying to drive out of Texas? We’re going to need to draw a little blood…
As if that’s not enough, then we get to the “just like an abortion” issue. That’s how these folks now in charge of our legal system define many contraceptives. Turns out that IUDs, Plan B, the regular old pill, and many other common forms of contraception are, in fact, considered abortifacients by the far right who now control the Supreme Court and govern red states across the land. If we’re lucky, married couples will still be able to access condoms in the red states of the near future, though probably not for long the way we’re currently going.
Lastly, can we file the “lets get together and maintain some “popularist” level of regulated access to abortion legislatively” nonsense in the “Tip and Ronnie working into the evenings to hammer out sensible compromises” Drawer of Centrist Fantasies? You could pass such a bill by a collective 535-0 tomorrow and within about six hours it would be struck down by a Trump judge and promptly 5-4’d by the Supreme Court; they might not even bother to hear it. There will be no plausible way (short of amending the Constitution, and I don’t consider that approach plausible) to pass any legislation guaranteeing a right to abortion in this country that will survive judicial “review.” These people don’t give a fuck and will contort their legislative “reasoning” into whatever non-Euclidean shape that is required to back-solve for “strike this down.” Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn’t been paying attention and should not be paid attention to.
It’s the Leaks
Perhaps we can get ahead of the “forget the impact of overturning Roe, it’s the leaking of the draft decision that matters” nonsense like this:
The release of the 98-page document is unprecedented in the court’s modern history: Early drafts of opinions have virtually never leaked before the final decision is announced, and never in such a consequential case. And early drafts of opinions often change by the time the decision from the court is announced.
Michael D. Shear and Adam Liptak writing in the Times of New York
if we actually bother to point out that this characterization is categorically false. Thirty seconds of Googling would net you this highly relevant bit of information that the Post somehow managed to find and print:
…it is not true that rulings have never been given to journalists before the announcement of the decision by the court. In fact, the result in Roe v. Wade itself was leaked by a Supreme Court clerk to a Time magazine reporter in January 1973. The issue of Time, with an article titled “The Sexes: Abortion on Demand,” appeared on newsstands hours before the decision was announced by Justice Harry Blackmun.
James B. Robenalt, Washington Post
We knew this decision was coming and we know that birth control is next. Codifying into law national bans on both would be planks in the GOP platform if they bothered with such documents anymore. This almost makes one think there’s a reason they don’t put out platforms anymore.
As it stands, the GOP is out there every day messaging against Griswold as being of a piece with Roe in the “wrongly decided” department of GOP jurisprudence i.e. “privacy for me but not for thee.” With a functioning Democrat party you might be able to message against that because, last time I checked, access to birth control both in and out of marriage is a pretty popular thing. Access to “safe, legal, and rare” style of regulated abortion is also a 70/30 “for” proposition. But our Establishment Democrat is still not sure they should do anything about being characterized daily as part of an organized pedophilia cult that likely drinks baby blood. This is why they fail.
The Current Crisis, Writ Small
The absolute absence of any urgency among establishment Democrats is evident all over the map today. Both are regional dust-ups that paint a much wider story, the first in Idaho where a Political Science professor by the name of Scott Yenor made some extremely dumb-assed comments:
Our culture is steeped with feminism. It teaches young boys and girls that they are motivated by much the same things and want much the same things. Thus, girls are told to become as independent as boys are said to be. […] They are more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be. […] Young men must be respectable and responsible to inspire young women to be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children. […] Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade.
So, a dumb-ass. Fine. Becca Savransky, author of the linked article, reached out to State Senator Melissa Wintrow, a Boise Democrat and the former director of the Boise State Women’s Center. She apparently called the remarks “dehumanizing,” which is a good start. Then she proceed to say:
We’re not going back to the 1950s, I don’t know what everybody is so afraid of. Let’s drop our weapons. Let people be who they want to be.
Unfortunately, she’s wrong about two things here and missed an opportunity. People like Scott Yenor, the current GOP leadership, and all the many Trump voting GOPers out there aren’t after a return to the 1950s. They want a return to the 1850s. Back when Black people and women knew their place and, when they didn’t, could be and were shown their place. That’s who everybody should be afraid of and it’s not an academic issue to mull over a good whiskey anymore. It’s facing us at the national political level right now and every day until the 2022 midterms. Problem is, most folks don’t even hear much about that because it’s not stated when the microphones are turned on for some “Democratic response” to absolute bile like Yenor all the way up the chain to the extremely similar bile coming from people in actual power or who, you know, were either planning or directly involved in attempting and/or abetting violent insurrection against these United States in January of this year.
Second example, this one from Georgia, where there may be some troubling lack of Democratic voter engagement. Yes, just a drawn out race for mayor of Atlanta, but buried in the story is this bombshell:
Next year, the [Democratic Party] machine is going to be up and running at the fullest extent of its power, and you are going to see all this money flowing into Georgia
Antonio Brown, Atlanta City Council member
Always “next year” with establishment Democrats. Instead of screaming about election access and voting rights, you can always hear them saying “We only need to show up and work when it’s the big election cycles for the top offices,” regardless of vast recent evidence to the contrary. Compare and contrast that attitude with the GOP, currently and aggressively taking control of county election boards in red states across the country (you’ll recall those as the election boards that refused to throw the election to Trump regardless of vote count in 2020), rewriting election laws in every state they can (to make it easier to disregard vote counts when the GOP candidate loses), limiting access to voting in every state they can (including Georgia, where we see in this article that turnout is down, at least in part due to restrictions placed on vote-by-mail and early voting), and blocking any attempts to reform any part of creating guarantees for voting access, controls for the drawing of equitable voting districts, and broad standards for state and local election certification at the federal level.
But it is, of course, perfectly fine for the Democrats to take a long rest and really only bother to wind that old machine up for the really big races. No trouble with that approach at all.
This is why they fail.
Always prefered Milo Hamilton’s call. RIP Hank Aaron.
The president of the United States incited/commanded a mob to attack a joint session of Congress, in order to stop through murderous violence […] the legal installation of his successor. The president of the United States is quite literally guilty of felony murder, as well as sedition. He came close to getting his own vice president murdered in front of the man’s own family.
Paul Campos writing for Lawyers, Guns, and Money. Every time the microphone is turned on, this needs to be said by every Democrat. Every member of the GOP needs to be asked to acknowledge this as fact any time they are in public and every time forever from now on until Trump is removed from office, prosecuted, and if found guilty sentenced to jail. Any member of our government who denies these facts should be, at a minimum, censured. Insurrectionists like Cruz and Hawley (among many others) should be expelled and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
[Bloomberg] clearly was not prepared for these rather obvious questions, perhaps because he is a cloistered plutocrat surrounded by yes men and toadies, or perhaps because there is no defense at all. He appeared very much like what he in fact is — a very rich man who is likely facing bitter, unfiltered criticism to his face for the first time in years.
Ryan Cooper writing for The Week.
While I’m sure we’ll get plenty of “why are they so mean to Bloomberg” takes today, I’d say his ~$500M attempt to buy his way into both the Democratic party and the White House are effectively over.
Welcome to the Bullshit Economy
This whole thing needs to be the one and only speech any and all Democratic candidates for President give over the next, oh, five months; but I’d even settle for just a paragraph:
The Iowa disaster is a sign that our economic structures are breaking down, that private enterprise has become a shell game, where who you know matters more than what you can do. The bullshit economy has bled over into politics, with the perfect president but also the perfect amount of grifting and consultant corruption and unbridled tech optimism. This has long been part of politics—anything with that much money sloshing around will invite a little corruption—but the combination of political grift, the ardor for public-private partnerships, and the triumph of ambition over talent has created a fetid stew.
Lemkin 