[E]veryone thought that shifting the battle on abortion to the states would help anti-abortion groups. But in fact, what we’re seeing is that abortion rights groups are starting to rack up victories ...

[B]allot initiatives are turning out to be a real point of success for abortion rights groups...

[I]n Vermont and California, voters approved ballot initiatives that would explicitly establish a right to abortion in those state constitutions...

[Michigan] voters overwhelmingly said we want our state constitution to protect a right to abortion...

[T]here were three red states — Montana, Kansas, and Kentucky – [where] anti-abortion groups thought that voters of those red states would come out and say absolutely not. We do not want abortion. And in fact, in all three of those states those [anti-abortion] measures failed...

[B]ecause of the abortion issue, Democrats are actually making some gains in state legislatures…

Democrats now control the Pennsylvania legislature. That’s enormously important for access [to abortion], not just for Pennsylvania, but for women in West Virginia and in Ohio, where abortion is banned, because women from Ohio and West Virginia have been flooding into Pennsylvania to seek abortions...

In another example, look at Minnesota. There, the state Senate flipped the Democrats. They have control of both chambers of the legislature, plus the governor’s office, for the first time since 2013. And Democrats are really taking that as a mandate to achieve their legislative priorities. And that means they could do a mini Roe, essentially putting the protections of Roe into the state constitution...

[In Utah,] language written to defend polygamy is now language that is being used to defend abortion, and it’s working…

… I don’t think it’s what anyone expected when they wrote that constitution…

Republican legislatures may want to oppose abortion, but Republican voters, as in Wyoming, often have sort of a libertarian streak and think like, you know what? A decision to have an abortion is really up to the woman. I don’t want to interfere with that...

[W]hat we’ve seen in the last six months is that when you take abortion away or threaten to take it away, voters are going to come out to protect access to it…

[B]e careful what you wish for when you overturn Roe because [advocates] actually have something that might be even stronger up [their] sleeves...

[W]hen you put the right [to an abortion] into a state constitution, in most cases, it’s less contorted because when that right goes into the state constitution, it’s generally much more explicit than in the federal constitution. And when you put it in the constitution, you can make it much more expansive...

So take Michigan for an example. The right to abortion that was established by that ballot initiative that passed is far more expansive than anything that was in the US Constitution, far more expansive than Roe. It gives women control over the entire spectrum of choices in their reproductive health. That’s huge...

That’s not just sort of inserting the language of Roe into a state constitution. It’s not some sort of mini Roe. This is like maxi Roe. This is Roe on steroids..

Teams often act in concert, and this togetherness can be very intense. So in Iran at the moment, you have two featured teams:

1. Team Mullah, composed of hundreds of bullet-spraying gray-bearded men wearing gowns and turbans and granny glasses.
2. Team Football, composed of eleven handsome robeless turbanless non-bullet-spraying young men.

TF is on the world’s screens at the moment, arms locked, refusing to sing Iran’s We are some wild and crazy religious nutbags national anthem at the World Cup; boos can be heard throughout the stadium, where men and women wear shirts with the names of women murdered because their hijabs were askew.

Thomas L. Friedman makes me think about the limits of words in contexts of unlimited atrocity. You feel him straining, in this rather flamboyant, Faulknerian sentence, to arrive at, to be adequate to, to express verbally, the actually inexpressible horror of a man of no conscience who continues to command the loyalty of tens of millions of Americans. Up against evil embraced by millions, Friedman’s words seem weak.

Some writers resolve the inexpressibility problem by jumping over it into psychopathology. Trump is a high-functioning insane person (a contradiction in terms, no?), an hysterical narcissist, an infantile disordered etc. etc. Their writing goes toward elaborating his dangerous lunacy rather than, as with Friedman, his moral obscenity.

But approaching Trump in himself, whether your approach is ethical or clinical, seems a bit beside the point at this late date in his democracy-ravaging career. The point is not so much Trump as the capacity of so many Americans to adore him, in the way millions of Italians still adore Mussolini, and Russians Stalin. The pertinent pathology is ye olde escape from freedom.

Of course Trump helped; normal Americans finally, in the aftermath of the January 6 committee hearings, really felt, and feared, his movement’s cruelty and stupidity.

For the next several weeks, Trump’s social media statements will confirm his madness; he will almost certainly try to whip his Proud Boys up to some serious violence. So while this particular moment is about celebration, we have to start doing some cold consideration of the fact that his remnant nihilists will obey his orders to burn everything down.

But it was the Clarence Thomas brigade, with their vile denial of an important established right, that fucked up the Republican party but good. The medieval cruelty of denying raped ten year old girls abortions drew the attention of all enlightened and humane souls. UD believes the graphic barbarism of this behavior, especially in the context of ongoing highly publicized barbarism against girls and women in benighted countries like Iran and Afghanistan, has so shocked people with normal moral instincts that the abortion issue will not go away, but will continue to bedevil the Republican party as much as Le Monstre Trump has. Behind no exceptions anti-abortion lies precisely the bizarre religious fanaticism and coercion against which this country was established. I can think of nothing more anti-American. When the Supreme Court went there, it activated basic American instincts in millions of us, and now it can do little other than sit back and enjoy the fruits of its idiocy.

The country I love, the country I recognize, has spoken. I am intensely proud.

[T]he right-populist surge is retreating somewhat everywhere. Boris is gone in Britain, just a few years after a landslide win, replaced by a mainstream non-white Tory. Bolsonaro was just dispatched in Brazil (and is not protesting the results). Putin and Xi increasingly look like tin-pot tyrants, incapable of adjusting to events, adopting insane policies — invading Ukraine and imposing zero-Covid madness — and grabbing more and more power to protect them from the consequences. 

Cook Political Report.

We took a look at Yesli Vega here.

In a blow to moral degenerates everywhere, she, like so many Republicans this morning, has lost.

As the Dems do far better than predicted, UD’s watching the very close race between Incumbent Sadist Lauren Boebert and her challenger (who as of this writing holds a narrow lead) Adam Frisch.

Also the Iranians’ incredibly brave efforts. The attention of the world is, rightly, on the dissenters in the streets of Tehran as well as on the Ukrainians. But the forces of illiberal democracy – A sham designation, no? Fascism is better. – in Russia, Hungary, Italy, and of course right here in the MAGA movement – are certainly on the march, and we must always call them out, and fight them with whatever weapons we have.

I do wonder about Europe’s militant hijabis. What do they have to say? Why have we not heard their opinion of this massive anti-hijab movement?

… Russia becomes more desperate

and dangerous. A frightening time.

An emotional time.

Voters have grown more supportive of legalizing abortion following the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, with a clear majority opposing restrictions, like bans at a certain point of pregnancy or barring women from traveling to get a legal abortion, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll that underscores the importance of the issue in the midterm elections.

According to the survey, 60% of voters said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, up from 55% in March. Another 29% said it should be illegal, except in cases of rape, incest and when the woman’s life is endangered, compared with 30% in March. And 6% said it should be illegal in all cases, down from 11% in March.

Lord, that last number’s falling fast! From a robust, representative 11% to a piddling SIX PERCENT since MARCH? Fu-u-uck.

What the no exceptions crowd needs is a catchy name and a Joan of Arc. The Joan is easy: Kristi Noem‘s a babe, a firebrand, a fine orator, and totally behind the whole let the mother ship go down thing.

And here’s an idea: Change your last name from NOEM to NOEX. It’s too obvious. It’s so good.

Name? Maybe GodBods. The one thing this miniscule minority has going for it is that God has told them that their position on abortion is the correct one. Their name must stress this metaphysical advantage over non-God-directed positions. Bods reflects the fact that this is all about what God wants women to do with their bodies once they become pregnant.

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Some more numbers.

 In the six months before Dobbs, women [in Kansas] outnumbered men by a three-point margin among new voter registrations.  After Dobbs, that gender gap skyrocketed to 40 points. 

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Post-Roe Supreme Court numbers? Oy, you shouldn’t ask…

… is a wife, mother, and anti-abortion fanatic. You don’t get more NO EXCEPTIONS than Yesli, whose views were recently featured in an ABC news report. Let’s see…

[T]here should be no abortion even in the case of rape. A woman does not sit and get raped without wanting it… There can be no conception as a result of rape. [A woman’s body prevents pregnancies from rape because] it’s not something that’s happening organically [and the rapist is doing it] quickly.

As to possible deaths of mothers, Yesli says let God sort it out…

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Yes, yes, as you see I’m doing a mashup of Yesli and Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Dodoni; and that’s because once Virginia voters vote her in, they will essentially be living under the rule of a mentally unbalanced Greek bishop.

[A] majority of Texas voters are expressing strong support for abortion rights.

In a new survey, six in 10 voters said they support abortion being “available in all or most cases,” and many say abortion will be a motivating issue at the ballot box in November. Meanwhile, 11% say they favor a total ban on abortion.

But not to worry! The miniscule minority will simply run roughshod over the majority.

Not to push the panic button, Emma, but yeah, you should transfer — before the zeeeeriously zany zygote zealots down there get their way and make it so people like you could GO. TO. JAIL.

Remember that NC hasn’t enacted every, er, conceivable restriction on/punishment for abortion yet, but it’s getting there fast.

You happen to come from a sane and humane state – good ol’ MD – and it’s got plenty of fine schools for you to attend without worrying about incarceration.