This country is going down an insane path, led by an ugly minority of racists and misogynists and theocrats and billionaires. It’s time to fight back!
The red states have declared war not only on abortion rights and women’s equality, but also on the bedrock principles that allow states to co-exist in a functional federal union. They have set us on a course of rancor and division, of escalating provocation and reprisal. Blue states have no choice but to act decisively to protect our rights and our people. Red states want a culture war? Let’s give ’em one.
Returning abortion to the states means calling the question at every level of society and in every center of power. From the biggest U.S. state to the scrappiest union local, from the tiny abortion fund to the massive hospital system. Every kind of power must be brought to bear: legal, economic, and cultural.
Blue states have already started to overhaul their abortion infrastructure to accommodate an influx of new patients from red states. Eliminating unnecessary restrictions on abortion care in blue states is a first step to ramping up capacity. For example, some states still have outdated laws that restrict abortion care to doctors, despite years of clinical experience that have shown that other health professionals—like nurse practitioners, nurses, and midwives—can safely manage many abortions. Eliminating those regulations would increase capacity.
There are lots of good ideas — and changes in the works — in that article. One thing I’d like to see is the criminalization of these crisis pregnancy centers that are a blot on the landscape. I so despise these things, and they’ll be promoting their fake ‘services’ at the Stevens County Fair next week.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, we need the RadLefties to sabotage everything because we can’t have any social progress until their Glorious 5-Year Plan is (now 50+ years in the making) is conceived and implemented. Then, we need Liberals to pull all our punches because the conflict may escalate and they’ll get their shining suits of armor tainted. And we need to wait on the Progressives getting the cooperation and consent of MRA’s and Anti-Choicers because consensus and unity FTW, amirite?
And, we need to save some emotional energy for the shocked sense of betrayal when the conservatives (in an outcome predictable by anyone but us, as usual) fight back.
It would be funny if so many millions weren’t counting on the left to get it’s shit together.
I’m sure everyone has seen the Kansas amendment to prohibit abortion fail big time.
This is close to the final tally.
The vote wasn’t even close, the pro choice vote won by 17.5%.
Kansas was close to a worst case state for pro choice.
The forced birthers and the christofascists don’t have the support or numbers they claim they have.
On the one hand, it would be great if the Republican Party has finally gone too far and their less-ideologically-invested voters turn on them. But keep in mind:
The Kansas Republicans deliberately used ads to try and confuse voters about what voting for and against this amendment would mean, which means that there is almost certainly a nonzero percentage of people who voted against the amendment even though their actual intent, if they only knew, was to vote for it.
This was an attempt to amend the state constitution using a primary election ballot, which is very much not normal. The result may or may not reflect how the state will vote in the general election.
Even if the state flips, Democrats are very definitely not a pro-choice party. They’re just not (yet) an anti-choice party. During the primaries, Pelosi was out stumping for an anti-choice candidate in Texas (against a pro-choice alternative), who won that primary, which means that that seat will be siding with Republicans on abortion rights no matter who wins in November. And the party won’t extend support to candidates like Geoff Young in Kentucky, who run on very popular platforms which are deemed “too radical”. There are, just off the top of my head, 4 tactics which could have been used on Manchin to make him shut up and toe the line if Biden had really wanted to do anything in the platform; all of them are routinely used (or threatened) against left-leaning candidates (as, for example, when AOC wanted to vote “no” to aid for Israel and she was threatened into not voting at all). So the party bigwigs very definitely don’t want real action to protect abortion, and actually want all this political kabuki theater that achieves nothing. (Which is why people like Susan Montgomery up there at comment #1 are full of shit — it’s not the radicals who can’t be trusted to do the right thing, it’s the moderates. And, in history, it’s always the centrists trying to prove they can’t be swayed by the left who proceed to put their country in the control of literal fascists rather than resist them. The original German Nazis didn’t have a ballot-box showdown with the left, they had power ceded to them by centrists who thought it was possible to placate them with compromise. Susan Montgomery is too ignorant to realize it, but she wants Trump and his successors to own the US.)
Susan @1: I think you’re suffering from hippie dysplasia.
How about allowing medication abortions in urgent care facilities?
@4 Rob, smirk all you like ;) I could mention SEPTA (Greater Philadelphia’s buses and trains) going on strike one week before the 2016 election – only in Philly proper, while Trump Country stayed running – as a good example of RadLeftie sabotage. Hillary lost PA by 45,000 votes and there were certainly 50,000 Philadelphians too uncertain if they could get to a polling place on Election Day to plan ahead.
But, I’ll go with Obamacare. The Rads booed and hissed that it wasn’t Universal Health, even though they knew that pushing that through would be impossible. The Progs watered down the bill with conservative ideas – even the political suicide provision of individual mandates – in the name of compromise and consensus with the GOP which they knew they weren’t going to get. And the liberals in the middle stood by helplessly for fear of taking a hard stand on anything.
Look at every failure in the last 30 years and you’ll see these dynamics in play.
SM@6–
That is a complete misreading of the history of Obamacare. The Rads booed and hissed (as you put it) because anyone with a working empathetic brain knows that universal health care is the gold standard that should be the goal of policy development. You are demeaning intelligent, informed people as saboteurs and “Rads” for the crime of expressing an opinion that is pretty much as close to an objective truth as you’re ever going to get in politics. That is, you’re trading in insult rather than arguing in good faith — but even worse, you are flat out wrong about what happened.
These “Rads” weren’t the people who forced Obamacare to be watered down. It was, as you acknowledge yourself, the complete failure of compromise and consensus from the GOP, which held the power in the Senate. The liberals “in the middle” and the more progressive Dems still worked together to get the best possible policy past GOP obstructionism. This is not just a bad example if you want to argue that radicals routinely sabotage good policy for the sake of perfectionism, it’s actually a counter-example.
Because that will solve the problem of partisan division and extremism.
“You’re either with us or against us.” – W
Drew, do us a solid and go fuck yourself to death.
please forgive my posting this twice, but, it is important:
This is the malicious nature of repugnantcants:
https://americanindependent.com/house-senate-republicans-resolution-crisis-pregnancy-centers-election-day-anti-abortion/
by Josh Israel – August 1, 2022
If Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and other congressional Republicans get their way, the week of the election will be >> officially designated in honor of anti-abortion pregnancy centers that misrepresent their purpose, claiming that they provide a range of services for pregnant people, lying about the supposed dangers of abortion, and manipulating patients to reject the procedure. <<
We live in Arizona, it is now completely controlled by redneck xtian terrorists. AZ sucks!! In 2019 we began research to relocate to a less barbaric state. We are angry and frustreated, the tRUMP plague put all that on hold.
One thing I’d like to see is the criminalization of these crisis pregnancy centers
That’s what firebombs are for. One of the protests following the Dobbs decision resulted in one of those being obliterated here in Portland. Normally I condemn property damage, but this is no mom and pop, this is a privately funded, anti-woman, propaganda center. I have no sympathy and I hope whoever opened the place rots in hell.
A real numpty trifecta of whinging in response to a bit of good news!
And vice versa, presumably. From what I’ve seen, the pattern of voting is just what you would expect if the vast majority voted the way they intended to vote: the cities voting “No”, rural areas “Yes”.
Susan Montgomery@1,6,
WTF are you on about? Specifically, what do you mean by “Progressives” or “Progs”? Because in normal American parlance, that means those on or to the left of the Democratic Party, but what you attribute to them are actions or attitudes associated with the right of that party.
Are you angling for a column in the NYT?
I long ago asked myself, “Self, why would anyone want to live in in undeveloped and barren wildernesses and wastelands that are rural America.” There is no culture to speak of. No libraries, theaters, museums, or centers of learning worth a damn. There is no decent art or sophistication. No variety or diversity. Just the same boring, small towns where everyone is a white Christian and nothing more
Then I realized I was answering own question. These people hate cosmopolitan civilization. They despise having their opinions of world being challenged. They can’t stand to be amongst people who don’t look or even act like them. To them, Art is made “degenerates.” Education is a tool of “godless Communists.” We all know how these knuckle-draggers feel about racial diversity. Even the conveniences of modern civilization like mass transit, public health & safety, and plumbing have infantilized us and made us weak.
They are barbarians, but they are not pounding at our gates. Instead, they live right next store with a coal-rolling pick-em-up truck in the driveway and Trump 2024 sign in the front yard.
Ugh… Trust me to post a tirade about the low mentality of Red State Americans full of missing words. Pardon me, I got a beam in my eye to remove.
Dear @13 Akira MacKenzie,
I agree with your insightful comments. We are trying to escape those barbarians. They are overrunning AZ, too, even in the large cities. For almost 30 years our organizations have focused on the fine arts, communication and involvement in progressive civic endeavors. Since the tRUMP plague, we have been mostly threatened and criticized. Many in our community have died or been devastated by the plague. We need to move to a state where we will feel welcomed, not besieged.
Akira MacKenzie @14: Please try not to argue that every voter in a Red State is a knuckle-dragging troglodyte. Please try to keep in mind that the GQP has spent the past several decades, and god knows how many millions of dollars, on an industrious program of gerrymandering to keep non-GQP voters away from the levers of power, and suppressing the votes of non-GQP voters. Thanks!
@15 Well, you might as well leave at a time when you can still sell your home for some value. AZ has been running at a water deficit for decades now and with the federal government’s announcement that the Southwest has 60 days to come up with a water plan that doesn’t involve the Colorado River, the “someday AZ, NM & TX will run out of water” is now. Lake Mead’s not looking so good, and water farming is meaningless if there’s no actual rainfall, especially since the mountain snowpack is next to nothing as it is. All the hand-wringing over the Northeast’s population exodus to the Southwest will be coming to an end as those with the means to do so will come back to the states that still have water.
@13 Not everyone who lives in rural America is 1) a right wing nut 2) uneducated and 3) hates the left, progressive ideas and art and culture.
My cousin was a doctor in NH. Very progressive, drove a pickup truck (and a snowmobile in the winter) because he needed a pickup truck for supplies for his horses and for hauling a horse van around. In decent weather, he would take one of the horses and one of the horse carts and do local errands in that. (Vacations at his home are where I learned to drive a sulky and put a harness on horses.) He also needed the pickup truck and snowmobile for the occasional house call in bad weather.
He could have been a doctor anywhere. He just liked nature and quiet and wanted enough room to raise his horses.
His kids grew up to be environmentalists and research biologists (with small farms of their own).
When he retired & sold his practice, he moved to KY, so he could raise more horses.
There are bigots on both sides of the political divide.
BTW, if you really want to convince the coal rollers to give up their Canyoneros, just drive by in a hybrid. Or give them a ride in one. I convinced my local gas station owner to get a hybrid (along with 4 other people). Nothing convinces people to give up the gas guzzlers like spending an average of $40 a month on gas (when gas was $6/gal), while commuting to a job, running errands, etc.
@1,6,12 For the record, I was all for Obamacare, right up until they removed the public option. Maybe that makes me one of your moderates or maybe it makes me one of your rads. I saw no point in forcing the individual mandates if doctors and other healthcare providers were not going to be mandated to take Obamacare. What good is it to “have healthcare insurance” if nobody takes that insurance? When it first passed, Obamacare truly sucked. (I know because I looked into signing up for it anyway and found exactly one proctologist who would take it in a 90 mile radius. No other doctors, dentists or hospitals, including the public ones, would take it in the first year.) It has improved over the years, if only because more healthcare providers will take it. That said, it still sucks if you get seriously sick, because Obamacare is basically a 70/80/90% off coupon for healthcare. The average heart surgery in the US is approximately 150K, so it’s a good thing we all have an extra 30K hanging around doing nothing, for those medical emergencies!
Of course, thanks to the right, we can all get insurance through our jobs (ha ha) and… immediately lose that insurance when you get seriously sick, because you lose your job and lose your insurance right at the time when you need it the most! Because big business always has the best ideas and outcomes for everything. (Assuming that whatever crappy health insurance you can get through your job actually covers anything you actually need in the first place.)
@11 That’s what monkeywrenching is for. Arson is a serious crime. But superglue in the door hinges or locks does an excellent job at keeping the doors closed and it’s usually a misdemeanor at best. IF you get caught. Because cops WILL actually hunt down arsonists. Superglue in the locks? “Well, you do run a controversial business, have you considered security cameras, etc.” Because it’s a lot easier to find out who threw a Molotov cocktail or poured 5 gallons of kerosene on a building before setting it on fire than it is to chase down someone who bought a $2 tube of superglue. One of those things is a lot more obvious than the other.