Category: Politics

All things political. If you are reading this, you are doing something political. If you talk to someone about this later, you are doing something political. Basically anything that involves another person is probably going to be political as well as social. So yes. What I’m saying is that sex is political and dinner is political. So much for avoiding politics during dinner. Try to enjoy both activities anyway.

Snovid Anniversary

On the first anniversary of the SnoVID power blackout I laid out the story of my great uncle, Roger Heim. I thought it was relevant, facing the impending probabilty of going without power again for an extended period of time, potentially not surviving until the power came on again.

It’s possible. I need electricity to run some essential devices (CPAP, for one) the absence of which could cause traumatic loss of life. So I need the electricity to be on, and I need it to be on reliably. January 2023 saw a localized repeat of the power outages that were statewide in 2021, proving that the claims of Governor Abbott were the bullshit I knew them to be. The grid was not safe. Our power could be turned off for days for no good reason and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it.

Gross Negligence

I titled my original piece on the SnoVID debacle Guaranteed City Services for a very good reason. The City of Austin’s self-owned electric provider has gotten pretty lackadaisical over the last decade or so. They don’t seem as interested in making sure the power stays on all over the city all the time. The month of the SnoVID event marked two or three outages of more than a few minutes. I couldn’t even tell you how many times the power might periodically simply just turn off in the neighborhood over the months before and after. Ten? Twenty times? Who knows. I lost count.

After the grid service smoothed back out and returned to what Texas calls normal operations (but is still pretty sub-par) the power in the neighborhood was reliably on far more often than it had been up to that point. I had hopes that Austin would at least have learned a lesson from that catastrophe.

THE DISCONNECT: POWER, POLITICS AND THE TEXAS BLACKOUT

This last January proved those hopes to be unfounded. Both Austin City Manager Spencer Cronk and AustinEnergy’s manager Jackie Sargent were in charge during the SnoVID event. Both of them should have understood what it meant to be prepared for a hazardous winter storm. They clearly did not do their jobs and should be summarily fired for their failures. The power was off for three days because of a light dusting of ice across the city. I don’t want to hear about trees or power lines or any other bullshit excuses. Those crews should have been on standby and the power should have been restored across the city within hours, not days.

The storm my uncle Roge sat for a month without power in, hunting geese and squirrels and whatever else he could find to shoot and eat and survive for another day, that storm dumped a total of eight feet of snow across the entire midwest. Our power stayed on in our little town of four thousand people. The crews were out working day and night to make sure that the power stayed on, if that was what it took. That was the job they were paid to do, and they did their job. Which is more than I can say for the people who run the City of Austin.

This is 2023, I hear you saying. You can buy battery backups and solar power panels and personal wind turbines. You don’t need the grid to be up 24/7 anymore. Get with the times! That’s great. Sure. I could buy all those things. I probably will forego the rarified monthly dinner out in exchange for buying a battery backup that will power my CPAP machine, charge my phone and whatever else I can afford to pay to keep running. Probably not much. I’m disabled. I don’t have a lot of time, energy or money to devote to solving the Texas power grid problem for myself, personally.

Either we are living in a world where we can rely on our neighbors to have our backs, rely on our government to keep the power on and to provide basic city services as if they were guaranteed, or we are living in a anarchist hellhole where only the wealthy can buy a ticket out. We need to decide which version of this story we want to be in. Soon.

Lots of Luck in Your Senior Year

Honestly? I don’t give a shit about the State of the Union Address. I don’t watch it, not since they started this “rebuttal” nonsense. It’s just theater, a moment for every wealthy politician and rich pundit to tell you how terrible everything is. There’s no meaningful content.

twitter.com/Stonekettle

I don’t watch rebuttals. They are always embarrassing. Rubio with the water bottle. Bad sets. Bad speeches. Bad intent. Always. Embarrassing. Let’s face it, you can’t rebut a non-factual hour-long feel good ramble. You can’t do it, not without looking like the dickheads that you are. So just stop doing it. Let the President have his jollies for that one day a year.

Or maybe not. Maybe we should treat the SOTU like the Prime Minister’s questions:

The style and culture of PMQs has changed gradually over time. According to former Speaker Selwyn Lloyd, the now famous disorderly behaviour of MPs during PMQs first arose as a result of the personal animosity between Harold Wilson and Edward Heath; before this PMQs had been lively but comparatively civilised.

wikipedia.org

Maybe that’s what Marjorie Taylor Greene will be remembered for. The Congresswoman who introduced cage fighting to the SOTU. In that dystopian future, in a dark chamber lit by torchlight, they’ll eat the raw human flesh of their defeated opponents and shout her name in praise. Probably.

In the meantime her behavior warrants censure. Don’t hold your breath waiting for… Kevin McCarthy (I keep forgetting his name) to punish her. He already gave her his balls. Actually, George Anthony Devolder Santos (who shouldn’t have been seated in congress since we don’t know his real name) has one of his balls. Marjorie Taylor Greene has the other one. So their both safe from punishment for the term of this Congress.

…and they wonder why we don’t hate Joe Biden, don’t take them seriously when they say we should hate Joe Biden with them. Why would we believe anything any of them say? The Republican brand is falsehood now. Corruption has become a Republican stock in trade. They stole the anarchist/libertarian mantra “government doesn’t work,” and then proceeded to make government work even worse than before they were in power (Everyone still remembers the CoVID plague, right? Trump pretending it wasn’t happening for a year? Glad we all still remember that) Same people, even crappier government.

Joe Biden said he’d run for President and the entire country screamed THANK GOD (even the atheists) and voted for him. Two years later, in the midst of the unavoidable post-plague inflation (seriously, there are no cars for sale at a reasonable price, anywhere) the country starts to have second thoughts about Joe Biden’s leadership and they let a few too many crazies into the House of Representatives again.

That forgettable guy (googling again) Kevin McCarthy, who doesn’t win the speakership on the first vote (because he can’t count) doesn’t win the speakership until fourteen votes later, after he’s cut off his own balls with a rusty knife and handed them out as souvenirs to the would-be Republican majority, finally gets to be Speaker of the House. In name only, apparently.

No one in his caucus pays any attention to him. He tells them all to be adults during the SOTU and they shout and chant and act like British MP’s (worse than spoiled children) …and Joe Biden loves it. He eats it up. This is his natural environment, being in the scrum of the legislature.

NPR Politics – Biden had a sick burn in his State of the Union speech. ‘Lots of luck’ explaining it – February 9, 2023

They basically hand Joe Biden a win without his even having to try hard. Which is the way this entire two years is going to go for What’s His Name and his non-majority in the House of Representatives. I hate to break it to you guys, but this isn’t going to end well for any of you no matter how 2024 turns out.

The only personal observation that I will make about Joe Biden’s SOTU speech is that I really missed Barack Obama by the end of it. There has never been a better speaker than him in the White House. Those were some sweet, sweet days. I’ll probably never see days that good again.

As for rebuttals, there has only been one President in my lifetime that was so incapable of making sense that he needed someone to come after him and correct his lies. That would be Donald Trump, and I avoided his bullshit like the toxic plague it was so didn’t need the redirect. Trump’s second-string press mouthpiece, the now Governor of Arkansas (bet you guys miss Bill Clinton now, don’t you?) Sarah Huckabee-Sanders didn’t do herself any favors trying to rain on Joe Biden’s parade. All Rubio did was awkwardly reach for water.

Some of this was posted on twitter.

It’s Classified

The media is all over Joe Biden for his lapses in returning classified documents to the National Archive. There are now at least two instances where he left classified documents in previous offices. The press is outraged, especially the conservative pundits who are outraged, OUTRAGED, that Biden’s Justice Department went after Donald Trump for his retention of classified documents while he, Joe Biden, is guilty of doing the exact same thing.

Here’s the difference between the Biden administration and the Trump administration when it comes to the subject of missing classified documents. The Biden team, in preparation of having their collective asses minutely examined by the Republican house that is set on conducting a witch hunt against them, did their due diligence and discovered that they hadn’t dotted all their eyes and crossed all their tees after all. So they said “we’re sorry” and they promptly returned the documents to the proper authorities. This is what happens when you have a mature adult in charge of government.

Donald Trump personally burned documents, ate them and tried to hide them in order to keep them from the proper authorities. He directed his flunkies in the White House to do the same and many of them followed his orders. They didn’t manage to destroy everything though, and several hundred documents ended up traveling to Mar-a-Lago with the petulant ex-president who refused to return all of them when their existence in his possession was revealed. Getting them back required several requests and finally a police raid, where the documents were found randomly mixed with other personal items of Donald Trump’s. This is what happens when you elect a child-man to the office of president.

Mike Pence: Classified Documents at Former Vice-President’s Home
twitter.com/Stonekettle

We need to all admit that we have coffee mugs from work at home. That’s what is going on here. This is a presidential version of stealing coffee mugs. Trump just wouldn’t give his back when they caught him.

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A Captured SCOTUS

A lot of the tradecraft of covert operations was used as they stealthily crept up to and captured the Supreme Court and now instructed in what it is that they wish to get done. And so I think once people have those two thoughts in mind that this is a captured court, not a conservative court, and that the manner in which it is captured is akin to an intelligence type covert operation, then you can begin to think about what the solution is. Once you’ve identified the illness, you could begin to think about the cure.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
Amicus – Religious Liberty and the Right to Vacation in Jackson Hole – NOV 23, 2022

The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court by Sheldon Whitehouse

If you want to understand the magnitude of the problem of the captured SCOTUS, you need look no farther than the next case on the docket for the SCOTUS:

Amicus – The Blockbuster Case That You Probably Haven’t Heard About – DEC 03, 2022

As Hila Keren points out repeatedly in that episode, the principal that should be at the heart of this case is that the marketplace must remain open, not subjected to every single little objection that can be thrown up by various believing parties who come to the marketplace and want their beliefs to be honored without question while participating in the market.

The SCOTUS shouldn’t even be hearing this case because there is no real case to be heard here. There is no one who wants a website made by the plaintiff because the plaintiff doesn’t even offer that service in the first place. It is a case crafted to be heard by this SCOTUS; a SCOTUS that has been put in place by the very same people who crafted this case. This entire scheme is improper and should be derailed before these people make a mockery of our entire system of justice.

MAGA: Amnesty – It’s Not a Border or an Immigration Problem.

More than two million people tried to cross the US-Mexico border in 2022, according to officials. They want to make this sound like a large number. It would be a large number, if these people were migrants and expected to go back and forth across the border each year.

These people are not migrants though, no matter how many talking heads call them migrants. They aren’t moving back and forth across the border several times a year, what migratory means. They aren’t just coming here because they want to move to America, what the word immigrant means. For the most part, these people don’t want to be here, they were forced to come here out of fear of where they were.

Allusionist 53: The Away Team – March 31, 2017

They are not immigrants beyond the fact that they want American protection from persecution (as foolish as believing that America will value the lives of refugees may be) and so want to become American citizens, with all the baggage that comes with being brown-skinned people in the original home of White Supremacy.

These people are refugees. That’s how you get two million people crossing a border into another country in a year. They are not invaders, drug runners or any other kind of criminal. They are poor, desperate people and we are using them as pawns in our political battles. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

Why is immigration such a big deal in the governor’s race? Because it helps win elections
texasstandard.org

Americans are outraged about the influx of refugees at the Southern border; at least, that is what Greg Abbott and the Texas GOP would like you to believe. They are betting on you being willing to torture poor refugee families in the name of your own security. That is the bet they are making in 2022. Will you do it? Will you go down to the border and use a cattle prod on these poor people in order to drive them back to their countries of origin, or will you be happy to allow the Texas and Mexican governments do your dirty work for you?

What needs to be done is to fix our amnesty rules, fix the injustices in Venezuela and Brazil and half a dozen other countries South of our border here in the United States. Injustices that we helped to create with decades of money to banana republics that we helped to create in the first place. South America is the way it is now largely because we made it that way, because it suited our corporations commodity-extracting needs. Now that these refugees from our policies show up on our door, we need to torture them some more? I think we’ve seen enough depravity now.

Lawyers for Martha’s Vineyard Migrants Call for Criminal Probe
facebook.com/Stonekettle
New York City considers legal action against Texas over migrant buses

There isn’t a problem on the border that passing legislation that fixes the immigration system won’t address. That isn’t a presidential problem, that’s a @SenTedCruz problem.

The biggest problem with immigration is Republicans cowardice in dealing with immigration. @marcorubio is the poster child for this cowardice, scuttling his own bill in the face of grassroots Republican xenophobia.

These cowards have no room to complain now. We cannot just close the fucking border. That isn’t a possibility and these Senators have to know this. We need immigrants. They do most of the shit jobs in this country, so keeping them out hurts the Republican capitalist religion.

This self destructive bullshit fear mongering has to stop. There is blood on all Republicans hands now. The El Paso shooting, the Uvalde shooting, etcetera. Republicans created the environment where these events take place and so all of them are to blame for those deaths.

It sickens me that I am represented in the Senate by these cowards. That my governor is no better than a coyote exploiting the desperate people who show up at our border seeking help. That Republicans in Texas would encite this violence in their pursuit of power.

I will vote for anyone who has a workable humane solution to this problem that has festered since long before I was born. The problem for Republicans is that they don’t have any proposals that are humane and workable. Which means they won’t be getting any sympathy for from me.

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The midterm elections are over. Texas has spoken; and Texas as a whole is every bit as xenophobic and racist as most of us liberals feared it was. Texas has re-elected not only the grandstanding demagogue that is Governor Greg Abbott, but they also re-elected the only Attorney General in the United States that was under felony indictment at the time of their election, Ken Paxton.

Texas has declared its intentions to flaunt the law and common decency for the extent of the foreseeable future, and so I think the United States should answer the declared intentions of the citizenry of Texas. If Texas thinks it can get by without the help of the United States, the federal government should kick out the props that keep the Texas economy afloat and see how well the state really does without that federal money.

There are many ways this can be done without harming the day to day life of the average Texan directly, and yet starving the criminal enterprise that is Texas state government under Greg Abbott and single-party Republican rule. I would start with the money that the federal government gives to Texas to cover the costs of border security and immigration.

The US government pays Texas to deal with immigrants and asylum seekers. This is the second largest income that Texas gets (21 billion in 2004 from the feds) it’s probably not enough given the drain that refugees exact on the governments who wind up sheltering them; but still, Texas is paid to deal with the refugee problem itself and not to spend that money shipping asylum seekers to other states and contractually gagging the contractors that are illegally transporting non-citizens across state lines. Not only should charges be brought against Greg Abbott and the transportation operator for the crime of moving non-citizens across state lines (basically, Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis are coyotes) but I think that the US government should go even farther and take back the money that Texas is misappropriating and put it to use in solving the problem.

The US and Mexico should just designate an area along the Texas-Mexico border as the place to go to apply for asylum, to apply for entry into the United States, the way that Ellis island was used a century ago. Some portion of Texas and some portion of Mexico should just be federalized and set aside to deal with this growing problem of amnesty and climate refugee status, some place large enough to house these people for as long as it takes to resolve their cases and find them permanent shelter somewhere else. Staff these new facilities with enough judges and US attorneys as well as beds and commissaries to house and feed the people that Texas just leaves out in the cold, pretending they don’t have the funds to fix the problem.

Stop paying Texas to play with the lives of the innocent victims of abusive governments we helped to create, stop paying Texas to keep out migrant labor that the rest of the country needs. It’s time to meet Greg Abbott on the hill he has chosen to die on, politically. If he wants to ally with the White Nationalists and xenophobes that back Trump today, he’s going to have to do so at the cost of Texas land itself and Texas’ economic prosperity.

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Featured image: https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-IMMIGRATION/MEXICO/mopankddwva/

Maddow on Pat Buchanan & Racism

Buchanan is a paleoconservative, he is a white nationalist, he is an artist of white racial grievance as a driver of white working class votes and white middle class votes, honestly; and he has been calling for revolutionary white nationalist politics on the right consistently and in the same way without evolving at all himself from the sixties until now, through his most recent books.

The far right has figured that out. His books are required reading in the pro-Trump right wing paramilitary groups, some of which are facing sedition charges now; but he’s the most consistent, lyrical Republican racist of the mid-twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first and that will be important for us understanding what happened to the right and to the Republican party in this century.

…

I think it helps to look at it from a broad historical perspective and just to realize that these impulses and these arguments and these ideas of racial grievance and racial reorganization, and racial oppression, they don’t go away and they don’t change very much. They get articulated with more or less flowery language over time but, when you build the Nixon-Agnew administration on the idea that the civil rights movement is a bunch of communists and it’s American patriotism to oppose communists and therefore to oppose civil rights; and that’s why anyone who calls you a racist is really a commie…

When that’s the politics of the sixties and seventies and there is no corrective for it, you just evolve through it. When the Reagan politics around race and welfare queens and this idea again of exploiting racial grievance, but with a smile, persists through those times. When the deep racial radicalism on the right is sort of kept alive, is continually stoked, those guys are continually fomenting what they foment and they fall in and out of favor depending on what the media environment and the electoral environment can tolerate.

Rachel Maddow
spotify – Ezra Klein – What Rachel Maddow Has Been Thinking About Offscreen – Oct 14, 2022

What she is driving at there is the thing that put me off on Pat Buchanan from the very beginning:

Buchanan as Correct as Nostradamus

The problem that I had with Pat Buchanan was always that the thing he was talking about wasn’t the thing he was talking about. What I expressed to Dan Carlin as bad actor or bad faith in relation to his interview of Pat Buchanan in episode 71 of his Common Sense podcast. Buchanan would never come right out and say that brown-skinned people were keeping white people from achieving their white nirvana, but it was behind every single thing he thought and said and it bled through in every thought that he tried to express. He always was a bad liar. Not nearly the confidence man that Caudito Trump is. Trump, who took the racist subtext behind politics in the US and made it the text again. Pat Buchanan helped make a Trump presidency inevitable.

This racial thinking comes out in his belief that Slavic countries belong to Russia, for example.

Ukraine. A Russian Civil War?

The title of that article? That is the framing that Pat Buchanan would use when talking about the war in Ukraine. Talking about it as if all Slavs must be under the same government. Racial framing. Just in case you think that Rachel Maddow is making all that shit up. She knows him, which is more than I can say about him.

Midterm Trumpism

Trump says its about Trump so lets make it about Trump.

We are about to be in election season here in the United States. The midterm elections, so named because they come in the middle of a presidential term, are about to be held. The primary elections, which most citizens have gleefully missed out on, have occurred over the last eight months and the candidates for every house seat in the US House and one-third of the seats in the Senate have been selected. Now we go to the general election and pick which one of the candidates will be the one to represent us in the various elected bodies and offices across the country.

Here in Texas every major state office is also up for election. The Democrats are doing quite well given Texas history. Democrats haven’t been this close to holding a statewide public office since Ann Richards left the governor’s mansion (I really miss her) Republicans have to be sweating bullets right now, but they sure do try to pretend that they aren’t.

The various political pundits who are talking about the midterm elections would like you to believe that this election is about inflation or the economy or abortion. They say this quite openly on programs that promote the horserace narrative of election:

The Takeaway – Do Debates Help Candidates in Midterm Elections? – October 11, 2022

(I would be happy for there to be normalcy enough that debating between sane parties could be conducted. We aren’t in those kinds of times now.)

But the elections aren’t about any of those things. I wouldn’t mind if the elections were about abortion, that is a winning issue for Democrats. I do mind that Republicans try to make this election about immigration or about the economy because they don’t present the truth when they promote these troubling issues. The immigration issue is actually an amnesty issue and they won’t fix that (Biden and the Democrats might) The economy issue isn’t anything that Biden can fix and the Republican candidates can’t fix it, either. They might try to fix it though, and that scares me more than the inflation does.

However, the midterm election isn’t about any of those normal-type things. The elections are about the failed presidency of Donald Trump and his desire to see the certified results of the 2020 election reversed. All across the country there are candidates running for office that were handpicked by Trump to either overturn the 2020 election or at least rig the 2024 election in his favor. They are running in every state all across the country.

Don’t believe me? The January 6th committee hearings continued today:

PBS NewsHour – Jan. 6 Committee hearings – Day 9 – Oct. 13, 2022

Make no mistake here, we are in a battle for the future of our country; and if we want our country to be based on principles of a representative democracy then we have to get out and vote against anyone that Trump has endorsed and that proposes that there was anything wrong with the certified results of the 2020 election. There is no room for equivocation on this issue. If the candidate will not state on the record that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and that the election was not marked by huge amounts of fraud, then that candidate can not be trusted with the authority of any office within the United States.

Coup D’Etat

Remember what happened two years ago. Remember being trapped in your house because the President of the United States allowed the coronavirus to run rampant across the country and even encouraged its spread by deluding his followers about how bad it was. Remember that more than eighty-one million of us voted specifically to remove Donald Trump from office so that we could finally turn the corner on the pandemic. Remember how Donald Trump encouraged a mob to attack the capitol and attempt to overthrow the government that we had voted into power. Remember that he hand picked this group of candidates to run for him in 2022.

Remember all of this and vote to confirm that, painful as the present is, this is better than what we had two years ago. Better than it has been since at least 2007. Vote to put an end to Trumpism so that we don’t have to physically act to put an end to the Trumpists who will take power if we don’t consciously vote against them now. Vote like your country depends on it because it probably does and probably will for the rest of our natural lives.

A Bubbling Stew of Batshit Crazy

That is what Charlie Sykes deemed Trump’s response to the entirety of the January 6th committee findings and subpoena. You Trumpists remember Charlie Sykes right? He was one of you before you went batshit crazy with your now dethroned and soon to be indicted God-Emperor.

THE BULWARK PODCAST – Denver Riggleman: Why I Wrote It by CHARLIE SYKES – OCTOBER 14, 2022

Continuing to paraphrase Charlie Sykes, we can’t afford to wait for the sweet meteor of death (SMOD) or for the Orange bastard to choke on his last Big Mac. We need him to face justice, and it needs to be soon. The sooner the better. The only way this happens successfully is if we stick with the Democrats and hold their feet to the fire on the subjects that we think are important. Secure the democracy first, prosecute the criminals second, worry about the economy and abortion access after that. It’s important to keep your dumpster fires in the proper extinguishing order. The one that can destroy our way of government has to be extinguished first.

Postscript

It seems that the vast majority of Americans that bothered to vote in the midterms felt the same way I did. Trump was handed defeats across the nation, wining almost none of the races that he put his weight behind outside of the nutjob state of Texas that I am forced to call home. Did Texas stay red because Trump didn’t directly endorse Greg Abbott, or did it stay red in spite of that oversight? Who knows.

Texas is a Tossup

Marist is out with a new poll today. They put this headline on the news:

Abbott Edges O’Rourke in Texas Governor’s Race
marist.edu

In any other state, at any other time, this poll would have deemed the race a toss-up. The spread between candidates is less than the undecideds in the race and that is the definition of a toss-up. The sad part of this poll is that there are such low numbers of undecideds and/or that there isn’t a double-digit lead for the Democrats in all races.

The Republican governor of Texas, our governor, has wasted a billion dollars pretending that there is an invasion from Mexico for the better part of a decade now. There is no invasion from Mexico. There are economic upheavals all over the world and the US remains a beacon of hope, and, the Southern border is where everyone thinks they should go to get in. I remain mystified why you wouldn’t go to Canada instead and just stroll across the border there. Avoid the crowds, go to Canada. That is, if you aren’t just walking North until you hit the United States. If you are, you have my sympathies.

The explanation for why this ineffective milksop of a man, Greg Abbott, is popular in Texas is easy to understand. Republicans have been brainwashed for forty years now and their insanity has reached the new low of declaring everyone that opposes them a child molester. Remember Pizzagate? That sort of shit still goes on all over the Republican sphere. Accusing people of being groomers. Targeting trans children and their caregivers. How do you reason with people like that? How do you take them seriously?

Marist is well respected, but who commissioned this particular poll and who released it? Those factors play into what we are shown as news. I’ve been floored by the amount of news in this election cycle that insists on treating these midterms as normal or acting as if there is no downside in projecting Republican strength at this juncture in time.

There is no Republican strength. This needs to be stated bluntly. Republicans are actively at war with themselves, even in Texas. They can’t see a way forward from the trap they’ve made for themselves other than to hold on tight to Trumpism, which is a losing bet to make for everyone concerned.

Trumpismo

The news media should be making this very, very clear, but they don’t do it. They don’t do it out of fear of Republican reprisals or they don’t do it out of fear of violent reactions from the Republican base. Maybe it is misunderstanding what objective reporting means. In any case, they are doing us all a disservice. The Republican party is not a serious opponent in the here and now. They are an active threat to the American experiment and should be treated as such until their criminal leaders are brought to justice (yes, I’m looking at you Ken Paxton) This fact needs to be made explicitly clear to the American people so that they can adjust their expectations accordingly.

Reddit

Postscript

Greg Abbott won by about 10 points. Pandering and grandstanding still works well in Texas. The most unfortunate result was the Texas AG office being retained by the indicted Ken Paxton. He’s going to be doing the AG’s business from prison, I guess.

Disabled by Disability Red Tape

I can relate to the lamentations of the disabled person in this podcast:

The Indicator from Planet Money – Jobs Friday: The problem with disability support – October 7, 2022

I spent nearly five years trying to get disability myself:

Getting Disability

1 in four people will have to go on disability support before retirement. That means of the four or five people who might be reading this right now, one or two of you will need to be on disability in the near future. As this blog is read more frequently by disabled persons, that number is probably even higher and many of the complaints aired in the above episode probably echo with their own experiences.

I quite literally could have died during the five year process it took to get disability and it would have done nothing to demonstrate the need for support that my family and I needed at the time. The amount of fraud in the system is miniscule and yet the harm that is caused to disabled people and their families by delaying disability payments can be demonstrated time and time again. It is a black mark on our country’s moral ledger that this harm continues.

Once you have qualified for disability it then becomes a constant irritant, this need to demonstrate a need for continued support as if chronic illness is a thing that you recover from, or that the lasting effects of years of illness would not in themselves merit some level of support from the government. Rather than being something that you had to demonstrate a need for, disability payments should be a benefit that is granted automatically to every person who is not working. Granted automatically so that loss of housing, food and security isn’t a thing that the newly unemployed person suffers from.

If there are shirkers living off those easy benefits then it’s a simple matter of getting those people the mental help they need to get back out of their houses and get back to work doing something. You won’t live long sitting around your house doing nothing. Twenty years of disability has proven this to me. The only thing that keeps me alive now is getting out and engaging with the world on a near-daily basis. Something that I’m not allowed to charge anything for if I want to keep my disability payments.

Universal basic income would solve this problem, but I don’t expect we’ll be seeing that anytime soon no matter how feasible it might seem to the economists who support it. In the meantime if you aren’t working, can’t work, then you shouldn’t be facing eviction and eventual starvation because of it. It just shouldn’t happen anywhere that calls itself civilized.

Demonization

The headline screamed:

The Pagan roots of Democrats’ Abortion Extremism

Democrats, including President Biden, are quickly moving toward the extreme position that a woman alone can, in consultation with her doctor, make any decision at any time on abortion.

thehill.com

…and then the article behind the headline went on to equate Roman infanticide with modern medical abortion practices. Went on to equate the Jewish tradition of life beginning with the first breath with the Christianist demand that we treat every fertilized egg as equivalent to a fully grown human being. Worse than equating apples and oranges, this is more like equating fruit and fish.

These delusional people simply cannot grasp the fact that there is no good reason to believe that a clump of cells inside another person is itself a person that is more important than the person it is inside of.

Rather than being an extreme belief any other opinion aside from deciding for herself on a woman’s right choose represents the denial to women of the same rights that men possess. It really is that simple. If women are people equal to men, abortion is their choice to make.

If there are other, greater, concerns that should take precedence over the woman’s rights, it falls to the believer to prove that these concerns actually exist. Every attempt to prove that these concerns are real have historically failed.

Which is why Alito was forced to fall back on his false history of abortion always being illegal as a basis for overturning Roe. Make no mistake here, Alito lied throughout that opinion. Nearly every conclusion he reaches is false because it is based on that lie.

A Vaginal Dred Scott

Women, through the tireless work of midwives down through the centuries, have managed the knotty problem of unwanted pregnancy all on their own. That is the real tradition here, not the illegality of abortion (or the delusion of Roman infanticide conducted by the men of their time being the same as abortion, the laughable comparison made in the Hill opinion piece. -ed.)

The extreme position is the one that Christianists have forced on American women with the reversal of Roe. Women will continue to do what they have always done; decide for themselves whether they will have a child or not. The extremity will be measured in how many women’s lives will be lost because of the delusional beliefs about life in the uterus.

Abortion: As Natural as Life Itself

If this opinion makes me a pagan then your definition of pagan is as delusional as your definition of life is.

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The author of that Hill opinion piece is accusing everyone who doesn’t think life begins at conception of murder. That is the unstated subtext of the article. This is demonization. The author is setting up the readers that agree with him to see their opponents as less than human. Is trying to make it easier to kill US when the violent insurrection that they are fomenting comes into being. This isn’t about the sacredness of human life, this is about the rightness of their beliefs and their willingness to kill for them.


No, if we truly value LIFE, if we truly believe it to be SACRED, then before it even begins we as a people and as a nation must bend every effort to ensure not only its survival, but that it thrives to reach its full potential.

Twitter – Stonekettle
Postscript

I observed that “the dog didn’t want to catch the car” in A Vaginal Dred Scott, noting that overturning Roe was going to cost the Republican party dearly in coming elections. This has proven to be truer than the equally observable fact that Donald Trump is a loser as a businessman, a politician and a television star. Trump actually picked a few winners in key races to endorse in the 2022 midterms, even as it became clear in the election returns that election deniers were almost universally being rejected.

Trump and his big lie are out of favor; but the more vividly illustrated truth of the election was that women want the right to determine their own futures independent of government supervision. Abortion will be made available again across the expanse of the United States. That was the result that was clearly illustrated in states where abortion was on the ballot. This battle will cost lives; but it will be won by women, eventually.

Amicus – Why are we Still Obsessed with Roe v Wade? – DEC 31, 2022

The Roe in our culture is not the Roe of 1973 Supreme Court decision or the 1992 Supreme Court decision. So if the Supreme Court is telling you, “Hey, guys, this is over, you can go home now, we’re not going to talk about abortion in the Constitution anymore.” History tells us that that’s not going to work.

Mary Ziegler

Roe: The History of a National Obsession by Mary Ziegler