Is the GOP trying to alienate women?

It looks like GOP trash talking of women is not limited to just weird JD Vance. Listen to what Ohio Republican senate candidate Bernie Moreno, currently in a tight race with incumbent Democratic senator Sherrod Brown, said.

We don’t have to engage in such thought exercises after Friday, when Moreno was filmed dismissing suburban women’s focus on abortion rights at a town hall (the local NBC affiliate first published the footage Monday): 

“You know, the left has a lot of single issue voters,” Moreno said. “Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.’ … Okay. It’s a little crazy by the way, but — especially for women that are like past 50 — I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.’”

The campaign furiously backpedaled, telling NBC4 that he was “clearly making a tongue-in-cheek joke” about the left thinking that it’s the only issue women care about.

Ah, yes, the old “I was just joking” defense, often rolled out after someone says what they really mean that turns out to be offensive.
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Creepy Trump’s plan to get an extra electoral vote thwarted by local politician

One of the consequences of close presidential elections in the US is that one learns the minutiae of the complicated rules that govern it. One of those is that the winner of the contest is determined by who gets a majority of the 538 Electoral College votes. The votes are apportioned to the states, with each state given a number that is the sum of the number of its members in the US senate (two for each state) and House of Representatives (determined by its population size). Washington DC is not a state but for the purpose of presidential elections is treated as one with a single district and thus has three votes.

Since the number 538 is even, that leaves open the possibility of a tie result 269-269. In that case, the election is thrown to the House of Representatives, where each state is given one vote, determined by a majority vote of its congressional delegation. Since Republicans have a majority of the seats in a majority of states, this means that a tie vote will result in the Republican nominee becoming president. Hence each electoral vote matters.
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Musk fought the law and the law won

Elon Musk must think that his immense wealth makes him above the law. Since he is able to buy influence with prominent politicians in the US, he may have felt that he could act with impunity in other countries. In particular, he seemed to feel that he need not follow the laws that exist in Brazil regarding how companies operate there and as a result got himself embroiled with a no-nonsense Brazilian judge.

The spat between the self-declared “free speech absolutist” and the Brazilian judge began in January 2023, after former President Jair Bolsonaro’s far right supporters, spurred on by false claims of electoral fraud spread on social media, stormed the National Congress and tried to violently overthrow the democratically elected Leftist president, Lula da Silva.

Moraes, who was in charge of several investigations targeting Bolsonaro as well as his close associates and supporters, swiftly issued orders for X to restrict or fully remove accounts that helped fuel this shocking attack on Brazilian democracy.

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How could Mark Robinson be so stupid?

By now, pretty much anyone who follows political news is aware of how Mark Robinson, the current Republican lieutenant governor of North Carolina who is running for the post of governor, was found to been a frequent visitor to porn sites where he made all manner of posts in the comments section that would cause his religious supporters to wince, to put it mildly. He had already publicly made incendiary comments about women and the LGBTQ community as well as denying the Holocaust.

While I was aware of the story and posted about it last week, I had not paid much attention to how the reporters managed to identify him as the source of all the comments.

Seth Meyers describes how he was identified and I could not believe how mind bogglingly stupid he was.

Will this be the next right wing freakout?

Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, has signed into law a ban on all plastic bags given out by grocery stores.

“Paper or plastic” will no longer be a choice at grocery store checkout lines in California under a new law signed on Sunday by the governor, Gavin Newsom, that bans all plastic shopping bags.

California had already banned thin plastic shopping bags at supermarkets and other stores, but shoppers could purchase bags made with a thicker plastic that purportedly made them reusable and recyclable.

The new measure, approved by state legislators last month, bans all plastic shopping bags starting in 2026. Consumers who don’t bring their own bags will now simply be asked if they want a paper bag.

State senator Catherine Blakespear, one of the bill’s supporters, said people were not reusing or recycling any plastic bags. She pointed to a state study that found that the amount of plastic shopping bags trashed a person grew from 8lb (3.6kg) a year in 2004 to 11lb a year in 2021.

Blakespear, a Democrat from Encinitas, said the previous bag ban passed a decade ago didn’t reduce the overall use of plastic.

“We are literally choking our planet with plastic waste,” she said in February.

The environmental non-profit Oceana applauded Newsom for signing the bill and “safeguarding California’s coastline, marine life, and communities from single-use plastic grocery bags”.

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Not the way to win over women voters

The creepy Trump-weird Vance ticket has dug itself into a deep hole when it comes to women voters. What with weird Vance talking about childless cat ladies being a threat to the future of the country, refusing to say that they would veto a federal ban on abortions, supporting the many extreme Trump abortion bans in the various states, and having a Republican convention that reeked of toxic masculinity, their message is pretty alienating

Furthermore, floating the idea that people who have children should get more voting power than those without children because they are more vested in the future is bizarre, and arguing that grandparents are the solution to the high cost of affordable child care shows a lack of understanding of the depth and breadth of the problem.
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Creepy Trump says something surprising

In an interview, creepy Donald Trump was asked if he would run again in 2028 if he lost. I thought that he would reply the way he usually does, by denying the premise of the question and insisting that he would win in a landslide, that there is no way he would lose, and that the only way he could lose was if the election was rigged and in that case he would not accept the result. But what he actually said surprised me.

Donald Trump said in an interview released on Sunday that he did not think he would run for president again in 2028 if he loses this year’s race for the White House.

In an interview on the Full Measure television show with Sharyl Attkisson, the former US president – who ran in 2016 and 2020 – was asked whether he saw himself running yet again in four years time.

“No, I don’t,” Trump answered. “I don’t see that at all.”

He said: “Hopefully, we’re going to be successful.”

He sounds … resigned? Maybe even he sees that the tide seems to be turning against him.

Sri Lanka elects a new president

Sri Lanka has gone through a turbulent period for fifty years, with civil wars, racist pogroms, insurrections, vicious government crackdowns involving death squads, and the undermining of civil liberties and democratic institutions like the police and judiciary. Just two years ago, the government was on the verge of bankruptcy that led to massive protests that resulted in the then president and his brother the prime minister forced to abandon their posts and homes and flee the country.

There was hope that this would signal a new era in politics where the corrupt old guard would be swept away to be replaced by a new generation of leadership. But that did not happen. What did happen was that an old politician Ranil Wickremesinghe, a nepo baby himself from an old guard ruling family, who had led his party that once dominated Sri Lankan politics into deep decline so that they were completely eliminated from parliament except for one seat to which he appointed himself, managed to become president through a parliamentary maneuver believed to have been engineered by the ousted and disgraced leaders. He had himself run for the post of president before and been roundly defeated and he was seen as having no mandate. It was felt that he had been installed in the position by the former disgraced leaders in order to protect them from the consequences of the rampant corruption and violations of human right of which they had been accused. Since Wickremesinghe was seen as pro-western, he was viewed favorably by the US and the international lending agencies like the IMF and World Bank.
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Harris-Walz rack up endorsements

If the presidential election were to be decided by endorsements, Kamala Harris would win in a landslide. It seems like not a day goes by without yet another person or group endorsing the Harris-Walz ticket. Some of these are from political people like Republicans Liz Cheney, her father Dick Cheney, and Alberto Gonzalez (the attorney general during the Bush-Cheney administration). More than 100 former Republican administration people have also signed a joint letter endorsing. her.

More than 100 Republican former national security and foreign policy officials on Wednesday endorsed Kamala Harris for president in a joint letter, calling Donald Trump “unfit to serve” another term in the White House.

Former officials from the presidential administrations of Republicans Ronald Reagan, George H W Bush, George W Bush and Donald Trump, as well as Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama voiced their support for Harris, the Democratic nominee for president in this November’s election. They were joined by some former GOP members of Congress.
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