Fired up

Fierce Planet Posted on by

This matches what I see/feel around the mid-terms this year (gift link, will get you through the paywall for a while).

Women Are So Fired Up to Vote, I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It

…once the actual Dobbs decision came down, everything changed. For many Americans, confronting the loss of abortion rights was different from anticipating it. In my 28 years analyzing elections, I’ve never seen anything like what’s happened in the past two months in American politics: Women are registering to vote in numbers I’ve never witnessed. I’ve run out of superlatives to describe how different this moment is, especially in light of the cycles of tragedy and eventual resignation of recent years. This is a moment to throw old political assumptions out the window and to consider that Democrats could buck historic trends this cycle….

 
And we should be fired up. You know when the Court murdered Roe v. Wade, so many people said it will all go to the states now? Maybe the people will decide whether they want their state to keep reproductive rights legal? Look at Michigan, where citizens recently passed a measure to maintain abortion rights, and the legislature simply refused to allow it to proceed.

Michigan election board rejects abortion rights initiative

A Michigan elections board on Wednesday rejected an abortion rights initiative after its two Republican board members voted against putting the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot….

Michigan’s 1931 law — which abortion opponents had hoped would be triggered by a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade in June — remains blocked after months of court battles. A state judge ruled Aug. 19 that Republican county prosecutors couldn’t enforce the ban, saying it was “in the public’s best interest to let the people of the great state of Michigan decide this matter at the ballot box.”…

 
Trigger laws have gone into effect in three more states. This is why we have to focus more clearly on elections for state legislators as well as on national offices.

In conclusion, let’s listen to Jemele Hill. And then vote, and get everyone you know to vote as well.

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Good morning!

Fierce Planet Posted on by

Not sure this Biden speech will change many minds, but I am so glad he said what he did. It’s a moment in our country’s history that deserves recognition, and the danger must be named. I think he named it well, and judging by all the fainting and whines today, other people think so too.

 
I haven’t posted much recently because I’ve been busy. In addition to writing up my thoughts on the midterms, with a reference guide to the most important Senate races, I spent a couple of days following virtual sessions of Netroots Nation 2022. I live-tweeted a bunch of screenshots and recapped the panels I watched. I think all the live-streamed panels are available at that YouTube link, and next week I’ll write up a recap of my #NN22 experience.

The next weekend I spent entirely absorbed in ARMY’s Global Streaming Battle of the Eras, which was a blast. I was on #TeamHYYH of course, as I am still quite involved in thinking about the Bangtan Universe material. I spent several hours over two days recapping old videos set in the BU, as part of a hashtag battle. (My team won that portion of the fight, but alas, #TeamLY won the overall Battle.) A good time was had by everyone, near as I could tell.

I still have my notes for a potential Bangtan Universe essay, but I’m afraid I won’t get back to that until after the mid-terms. Maybe sometime, though. Those thoughts are still alive for me.

Bunny cakeAnd of course ARMY celebrated JK Day on Sept. 1, the birthday of Jungkook of BTS. I saw a number of fundraising initiatives that were created in his honor. One raised funds for at-risk children in Korea. Another was funding menstrual supplies for people in parts of Africa. Others went by with details I didn’t catch.

And separately, ARMY charity accounts were raising money for survivors of the terrible floods in Pakistan. It’s nice to see people do good things in the world.

I’ll leave you with these very true words from Greg Sargeant at the Washington Post (gift link, no paywall), about the Biden speech yesterday.

MAGA Republicans are seething with rage because Biden hit his target

…That’s a call for Americans to defeat Trump and MAGA in a manner that is peaceful and democratic. Biden is saying that an anti-MAGA majority exists in this country that can and must mobilize to stabilize our system.

And the idea that this majority is out there and exists for the rousing — well, that’s what enrages Republicans most of all.

 
Remember to check your voter registration, everyone. Some states are stripping voters from the rolls for no reason at all.

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The 2022 midterms are now

Fierce Planet Posted on by

The mid-terms are coming up fast and the political situation in this country is in flux. I want to focus on the key races that will help us hold, or perhaps even expand, our Senate majority. That’s looking very possible right now, even though the more traditional election forecasters still rate most of these races as toss-ups at best. I don’t have to tell you how important this election is. I honestly believe the future of our nation depends on holding the line this year and in 2024.

I’m focusing here on Senate races that need to be top priorities as we seek to increase our hold on that body. Covering the House races requires more time than I have to give, so for that, and for all the down ballot and state races that are so important, I would send you to the Elections Team at DailyKos. Ballotpedia is also a rich source of candidate and election information generally.

You may not live in the states where these Senate candidates are campaigning, but there are plenty of ways to get involved from a distance. If you have cash of course you can donate. You might check to see how much cash on hand each candidate has in order to target campaigns that might be lagging. Open Secrets has that information available.

You might look into an initiative called Give Smart, which can help you target donations. There was a lot of frustration the past couple of cycles that large amounts of cash ended up with candidates who really weren’t going to win. This effort tries to correct that.

And the good folks over at Balloon Juice are targeting these Senate races and as a group will aggregate donations to the candidates. They are always a good source of information for taking action.

If you have time more than money, there are several groups that pull together Get Out The Vote campaigns using letters, post cards, and/or texts. Most are affiliated with different branches of Swing Left, Vote Forward, or local Indivisible groups. Generally they target campaigns to voters who might vote occasionally but may not vote regularly. They will have a list of names in targeted states and districts, and some ideas about what to say.

Whatever campaign you choose, please consider getting involved in these efforts. Now is the time to get everyone on board for the elections in November.

Having dumped all that information on you, let’s look at the Senate races we have the best chance to win. Three of these are incumbents, and those must be our highest priority. I’ve included links to their web sites and a general assessment of the race as judged by the usual election prognosticators such as The Cook Report. Most of the experts have had these races as toss-ups at best, and mostly leaning to Republicans. Much of this is because mid-terms usually swing against the party in power, plus the fact of Biden’s poor polling this past year.

But I can feel the change in the electorate and its mood as this Administration has begun to pass at least early forms of initiatives that are very important to Democrats and those of us on the left. And of course the gutting of Roe v. Wade through the Dobbs decision has changed everything. I think myself that we have a strong chance of holding the Senate this year, and at least a small chance of holding the House too. We shall see.

And the candidates to work for are…

Continue reading →

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What patriarchy looks like in everyday life

Fierce Planet Posted on by

Beaten for no reason, dragged off the street for violations of modesty laws, subject to torture in those detention centers, refused school and work choices—this report shows exactly how women in Afghanistan are treated by the Taliban. Women who dare to protest, and some women do dare to, are treated even more harshly.

 
In the New York Times (gift link, no paywall) another report shows the same brutal situation.

Taliban Rewind the Clock: ‘A Woman Is a Helpless and Powerless Creature’

Girls are barred from secondary schools and women from traveling any significant distance without a male relative. Men in government offices are told to grow beards, wear traditional Afghan clothes and prayer caps, and stop work for prayers.

Music is officially banned, and foreign news broadcasts, TV shows and movies have been removed from public airwaves. At checkpoints along the streets, morality police chastise women who are not covered from head to toe in all-concealing burqas and headpieces in public.

A year into Taliban rule, Afghanistan has seemed to hurtle backward in time….

“Now it’s gone — all of it,” said Zakia Zahadat, 24, who used to work in a government ministry after she earned a college degree. She is mostly confined to home these days, she said. “We have lost the power to choose what we want.”…

This is the world the men in charge of the Taliban want. My heart goes out to the Afghani people, who cannot yet find the power to break these chains, and to the women who want things to change so much, and who put their lives on the line to make it so.

I am not expert enough to have any idea what can be done, though it’s clear the American occupation did not resolve the situation one bit. This has been generations in the making, and I fear it will take generations yet to come before women’s rights are once again respected.

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Medication abortion – will we lose that too?

Fierce Planet Posted on by

We certainly will if the antiabortion groups get their way. They are working now on legislation to ban medication abortions, even if the pills come from a state where abortion is legal. (gift link, should get you past the paywall)

Most abortions are done at home. Antiabortion groups are taking aim.

Two top antiabortion groups have crafted and successfully lobbied for state legislation to ban or further restrict the predominant way pregnancies are ended in the United States — via drugs taken at home, often facilitated by a network of abortion rights groups….

The groups are pursuing a variety of tactics, from bills that would ban the abortion-inducing drugs altogether to others that would allow family members to sue medication providers or attempt to shut down the nonprofit groups that help women obtain and safely use the drugs.

Their strategy reflects the reality that abortion access today looks vastly different from that of the pre-Roe world, one without easy access to abortion medications from out-of-state or overseas pharmacies….

National Right to Life, meanwhile, released a “model law,” a week before the overturn of Roe v. Wade that seeks to outlaw a coalition of nonprofit groups that assist women with self-managed abortions. Last month, Republican lawmakers in South Carolina became the first to introduce the legislation.

The efforts illustrate how the antiabortion battlefront now reaches beyond traditional bills seeking criminal penalties for doctors who provide surgical abortions in hospitals or clinics, instead targeting organizations that assist women with mail-order abortion prescriptions and safety protocols for self-managed abortions….

I continue to update my Abortion Resources page, and will try to pin down more location data for the various groups. Most of the groups, at least the U.S. ones, will face legal challenges as the antiabortion groups try to move their legislation through the various state authorities.

You will not be surprised to hear they wish to ban even informational pages like mine. They do not want even the knowledge of abortion options to be available to women.

Call, write, protest, donate, group with your allies—you know what to do. Stand up for your rights, or lose them.

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Violence

Fierce Planet Posted on by

I know I have said here more than once that I believe the right-wing patriarchy, the white supremacist movement in this country wants me and everyone like me to be dead so long as we refuse to conform to their ideas of how human culture should be structured.

They don’t want feminists to exist, or queers of any variety. They are uncomfortable with creative artists and free-thinkers. They don’t like science because they can’t control it. They definitely hate people of color and immigrants who come from non-Western countries. Even a whiff of social democracy as it exists in European countries, which threatens the supremacy of rich white men, drives them into frothing rage.

They want a society where those white men rule, where women and children are property (which, through laws or norms, was much the case when I was born in 1953), and the rest of us fall into the slots they have decreed we live in. And when we refuse to do so, when we push them out of power and insist on power of our own, they often respond with violent anger.

While this struggle is not unique to the United States, there are strong roots to patriarchy and white supremacy in the US. It’s a strand of American culture that has existed since the founding of our nation. It does not hesitate to strike out when threatened, and it perceives threats almost everywhere. Thus we have seen the continuing rise of right-wing militias in the modern era, which culminated in the assault on Congress on January 6, 2021.

This week the threat came in the form of the Department of Justice, which conducted a search of the Trump property in Florida, ostensibly to seek some range of classified papers that were in Trump’s possession. This threat is apparently so severe that the almost-instant response was a wide range of conservatives calling for violence and revenge.

Over at The Atlantic, Peter Wehner reports on their reaction.

Now They’re Calling for Violence

Trump loyalists have reacted to the search of the ex-president’s Mar-a-Lago residence with unhinged fury.

…MAGA-world denizens have called for violence and civil war, so much so that the phrase civil war was trending on Twitter Monday night. One user on Trump’s social-media platform, Truth Social, said, “Fuck a civil war, give them a REVOLUTION. We out number all of the [sic] 10 to 1.”…

Ben Collins, who covers disinformation, extremism, and the internet for NBC News, wrote on Monday evening, “The posts on these pro-Trump forums tonight are as violent as I’ve seen them since before January 6th. Maybe even moreso.”

Commentators in right-wing media, meanwhile, have been using extraordinarily reckless and inflammatory language.

The Gateway Pundit, a pro-Trump outlet, wrote “This. Means. War”—which was “quickly amplified by a Telegram account connected to Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s onetime political adviser,” according to The New York Times. Bannon called the FBI “the Gestapo” and said, “We need to choke down the FBI and choke down the Justice Department.”…

Wehner continues with many other examples, so see it all at the link. He believes there may well be worse to come, and I have to agree.

I certainly hope we aren’t going to descend into ever more violence. My own training is in mediation and cooperative decision-making, and my impulse when confronted with anger is to respond with a very light touch. But an awful lot of my lefty friends have guns—more than you probably imagine—and in fact think that guns are essential for their own safety at this time.

We already know the incredible level of individual violence which exists in the United States. I can certainly imagine we will see individuals and small groups lashing out even more often, with bursts of violence like the attack on an FBI office yesterday. How this will play out over time is completely unclear to me.

For now, I continue to live a peaceful life, and I wish the same for all of you. Please don’t take that peace for granted. It could change in an instant.

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Workers of the World, Unite!

Fierce Planet Posted on by

Starbucks workers are unionizing all over, but Starbucks is fighting the trend by firing union organizers.

As we see in the video below, the ultimate power belongs to the workers. Without us, they have nothing but an empty store.

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