Saturday, November 12, 2022

Don't Tread On Us

As more data from the midterm election results comes in, we can now see that abortion was the key issue for many of the voters who turned what might have been a GOP “red wave” into more or less a “hold” for the Democrats.

So it may be helpful to look back on how this happened. The effort by recent Republican presidents to stack the Supreme Court with ideological extremists, rather than jurisprudence experts, backfired when the court struck down protections for abortion a few months before the election.

Until that decision, the expectations on all sides was for a massive GOP win in November. But people all over the political spectrum reacted negatively to the court’s ruling, and that changed everything.

The earliest indication something was afoot politically was the overwhelming defeat of a state initiative to ban abortion in Kansas, one of the reddest of red states.

What is clear now is that a solid majority of Americans not only want to protect a woman’s right to choose, they also hold Republicans accountable for threatening that right.

In that sense, they don’t wish to turn back the clock and they said so loud and clear last Tuesday.

Many legal analysts believe that other rights, such as same-sex marriage, may be at risk if the legal reasoning applied in the abortion ruling is expanded to other cases pending before the court, and some Republicans have said as much.

Accordingly, the credibility of the Supreme Court, though not on the ballot directly, clearly was delivered a body blow on November 8th.

As a consequence, conservatives may wish to hesitate before electing more candidates who would appoint judges intent on rolling back the rights most Americans now take for granted. This may be a new twist on the American revolutionary tradition of “Don’t Tread on Me.” That revolutionary-war-era phrase may have been misappropriated by reactionaries in recent times, but mainstream Americans are now reclaiming it, as Tuesday’s results confirmed.

NEWSLINKS:

 

at No comments:

Friday, November 11, 2022

Reprieve

If you have been struggling to make sense of the midterm election cycle, welcome to the party. Almost everyone I respect has mixed feelings — relief that the worst outcomes were avoided, concern because there are still are plenty of election-deniers who did win office, and confusion because at this point we don’t know which party won control of the Senate.

The Senate is particularly important because the GOP-controlled House is likely to launch any number of witch-hunt-style investigations — into Hunter Biden, for example, or even more absurdly, impeachments.

If these occur, they will be nothing more than show trials demanded by the posers and quacks who have gained office by following in the shadow of Trump.

But all of that is a short-term problem for now. If the Senate remains Democratic, impeachments will die on the vine, as will all other baseless investigations. The good news is that Trumpism appears to have peaked and should soon enter a period of decline. The long-term damage to our system of governance is therefore the main issue.

How can those of us who operate in good faith help to repair trust in the system? At this point, the damage is severe enough that we are likely to face another crisis two years from now when elections roll around again. And again two years after that and so on perhaps for many years into the future.

And I’m afraid the ubiquitous conspiracy theories that drive mistrust aren’t going to go away anytime soon. The other day I heard someone complain that mail-in ballots encourage fraud because some ballots are mailed to addresses where voters no longer live.

Let’s examine this proposition. The ballots are mailed out by the county registrars under the supervision of the Secretary of State. If a voter has moved since the last election, they should have filed a change-of-address form with the county where they reside. California also makes this easy by allowing voters to file their information with the DMV as well.

So, if somebody receives a ballot for a voter who does not live at their address, the proper thing to do is return it to the address from which it was mailed. Only if they illegally use it to vote is a fraud involved. This probably happens in an infinitesimal number of cases but most people just throw the ballots away.

It is preposterous to imagine that anyone has the ability to track down the ballots mailed to the wrong addresses and use them to commit a widespread systematic fraud. No one person or party is in a position to do this.

So the wrong-address problem, which probably involves less than one percent of all ballots anyway, is in fact a non-issue.

But as I mentioned above, distrust of the government is so pervasive in America now that people latch on to far-fetched scenarios like this one to spread falsehoods that our election system is insecure.

It would help if we could restore a vital local press in this country. Journalists serve as watchdogs on matters such as election integrity and they are able to look into any allegations of fraud.

But lacking a vital local press, any community becomes vulnerable to the conspiracy theorists and quacks proliferating via social media and extremist propaganda circles.

Make no mistake about it. Democracy remains in great peril. Those of us of good faith have much work left to do.

NEWSLINKS:

 

at No comments:

Thursday, November 10, 2022

Bullet Dodged, For Now

 Tuesday was a good day for me, personally. I’ll get to that presently. But on a collective level, Tuesday was a great day for everybody. It brought much better news politically than many observers had predicted.

The most prominent election-deniers lost their bid to win office, particularly in the swing states. This means that the worst case scenario — a breach of the integrity of the 2024 presidential election —may have been averted, for now.

Republicans appear to have won the House but only by a handful of seats. The problem now for the new Speaker-to-be, Kevin McCarthy, is that his caucus contains so many right-wing extremists, election-deniers, and Trumpers that it will be extremely difficult to control.

Meanwhile, control of the Senate remains too close to call and may remain in doubt until a runoff in Georgia next month.

Historically, in a midterm election like this year’s, the party out of power typically gains many seats in Congress and the statehouses. But perhaps due to the shadow of Trump, Republicans fell way short of that kind of accomplishment.

What is the bottom line? More gridlock when it comes to legislation, which makes President Biden’s major victories earlier this year all that much more important, because they may not be repeated over the coming period.

But the most significant accomplishment is that voters largely rejected Trump and his favored candidates. The trendlines are all wrong for Trump and Trumpism.

And that my friends is a blessing. 

***

The reason Tuesday was a good day for me personally was that for the first time in over three years, I was able to drive myself to a doctor’s appointment many miles from where I live.

The weather was terrible that day, windy and rainy. As I reached the Bay Bridge, traffic slowed to a crawl and the windshield fogged to the point of near-invisibility. At that point, it helped that I had grown up in Michigan and learned how to navigate through bad weather conditions as a boy.

Hours later, back home, I felt a small sense of pride that despite my serious health problems in 2019, I’ve been able to fight my way back to the health status I enjoyed before my stroke.

On that point, I was overjoyed to see a fellow stroke survivor, John Fetterman, win his election in Pennsylvania. Forget politics. His opponent had vilified and ridiculed Fetterman during the campaign as he struggled to recover from that stroke.

In this case, the voters sided with the good guy. God bless America!

NEWSLINKS:

at No comments:

Wednesday, November 09, 2022

Afghan Conversation 46: Land of Forbiddens

This is the latest in a series of conversations I have been having with an Afghan friend about life under the Taliban.

Dear David:

Last Friday night, I went to the wedding of one of my friends. Inside the wedding hall, about two hundred men and boys were sitting on each side. Everyone around each six-person table was busy talking to each other. Half an hour passed, they brought the food and we ate. After the meal, everyone left the hall one by one and went home. There was no music and no dancing because the Taliban banned them in wedding halls. 

Before the Taliban, it was customary at weddings that after eating, everyone gathered together and danced to their favorite music in front of the groom. The pleasure of this dance lasted for several days and created happy memories. 

But the Taliban have a long-standing enmity with dance and music. In 2001, the first time they ruled Afghanistan, they broke everything that could play music, like televisions and cassette players. These days, many music videos have been published by local media and are also circulating on social media, so the Taliban go to artists' offices and break their musical instruments. No television stations operating inside Afghanistan are able to broadcast music. 

Afghanistan is the land of many forbiddens. Men and women being together in public is forbidden. Dancing is forbidden. Music is forbidden. Girls are forbidden to study. Women are forbidden to work. Women are forbidden to travel without a man. Women are forbidden to appear with their faces uncovered. For men, shaving is forbidden. Wearing Western-style pants is forbidden. Many other things are forbidden.z

Ultimately, happiness itself is forbidden.

NEWSLINKS:

at No comments:

Tuesday, November 08, 2022

The Enemy Within

Perhaps the most salient article to read this election day in America is from the New Republic: Why Do Republicans Predict a Rigged Election When They’re Projected to Win? by Timothy Noah.

The author argues convincingly that the election-denier movement is not concerned with the cognitive dissonance of Republicans winning control of Congress while they continue to insist the vote is “rigged.”

That’s because their main goal is simply to undermine faith in the electoral system.

“The point is no longer to win elections,” writes Noah. “The point is to hold power. If a corrupt system delivers that power, well, at least it was our side that won.”

Noah explains: “(O)ver the past two years Republicans, at Trump’s instruction, have surrendered to an increasingly nihilistic and repellant worldview, one that justifies the violence of the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill insurrection and finds humor in the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s 82-year-old husband. It’s getting harder and harder to resist comparisons between the GOP’s MAGA base and the Camicie Nere, the Blackshirts organized by Benito Mussolini to attack political enemies, later emulated by Adolf Hitler’s Braunhemden, or Brownshirts.”

Whether or not you agree with Noah’s comparisons to the rise of fascism in the 1930s, it is indeed remarkable that the other most important article today documents that Russia indeed has been interfering in U.S. elections (Guardian), also in order to undermine faith in the democratic process.

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the GOP would become aligned with this country’s greatest enemy, Russia, but that is exactly what has occurred. And don’t get me started about the world’s richest man, who supports all of this and is clearly insane.

NEWSLINKS:

 

at No comments:

Sunday, November 06, 2022

The Franchise

When I was growing up, we couldn’t vote until we reached the age of 21. Accordingly, my first time was in 1968, one of the most chaotic election years in our history up until that time. Two major figures, MLK and RFK, the latter of whom probably would have been elected president, were assassinated.

Demonstrations in Chicago during the Democratic convention turned violent when that city’s notoriously corrupt major, Richard Daley, dispatched his police force. I knew a number of the demonstrators who were beaten in the ensuing confrontations.

The country felt as if it might come apart.

I was among that part of my generation that doubted whether voting even mattered, but I voted nonetheless. And over the ensuing decades, in election after election, I have voted again and again.

Sometimes the candidates and measures I supported won; sometimes they lost. Gradually over the years, I developed a deep respect for the process, even though it has been badly corrupted by dark money and the purveyors of extremist propaganda.

Maybe that’s why I hold out a ray of hope that Republican voters will reject the election deniers on the ballot this midterm election, thereby preserving the integrity of the voting process.

Because once we can no longer trust that our votes will be counted accurately and honestly, we no longer will be living in a democracy, however imperfect.

The cruel irony, of course, is this is exactly the mindset of those who believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen — that Trump did not lose — even though there is absolutely no shred of evidence whatsoever that that was the case.

Such is Trump’s gift to history. He lied and cheated and then, when he lost anyway, he sold his supporters on the lie that the other side had beat him at his own cheating game.

Thanks to this tyrant, we now stand at a crossroads. Every citizen should vote accordingly.

NEWSLINKS:

at No comments:

Remember to Vote!

NEWSLINKS:

 

at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)