[I]f abortion supporters could fare as well as they did in Kansas, they would have a good chance to defend abortion rights almost anywhere in the country. The state may not be as conservative as Alabama, but it is much more conservative than the nation as a whole — and the result was not close. There are only seven states — in the Deep South and the Mountain West — where abortion rights supporters would be expected to fail in a hypothetically similar initiative.

Kansas is just a blip.

At one level, the Republicans do realize that actually winning the culture war requires them to do what the white South did to post-Reconstruction Blacks: deny their critics the right to vote. That’s become the fundamental electoral strategy of a party that understands that they can’t hold power in an America based on majority rule. But it may be that their racism, sexism, homophobia, assault-weapon infatuation, and primitive religiosity targets so wide a spectrum of Americans that no campaign of voter suppression can encompass all the Americans they’ve threatened, or deter all the enemies they’ve made. It was the good Republican middle-class suburbs of Kansas City that doomed their anti-choice amendment last night. Does the GOP have to keep them away from the polls, too?

You take away Americans’ established rights at your own peril, as Kansans made very clear last night.

*************

Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect

As of Wednesday morning, Mr. Greitens had mustered less than 19 percent of the vote, a distant third-place finish. Mud that rancid still sticks.

More on Greitens.

‘Classical music, gentle sounds like lullabies, [and] nice melodies that inspire happiness.‘

As per UNICEF.

Georgia legislators have drawn up a list of not-nice melodies, all of which will be ineligible for the subsidy:

1. Anything by Mahler
2. Any version of Dies Irae or Stabat Mater
3. The theme to the Addams Family tv show
4. They’re Coming to Take Me Away

The Fetal Music subsidy is in addition to the fetus income tax dependent exemption.

As an Islamic revolution rages outside,

an old man sits on his balcony fantasizing

about slashing the bodies of infidels.

… on both sides of this photograph.

In putting the issue before voters on a mid-summer primary day, conservatives in Kansas were banking on a low-turnout affair that would pave the way for an abortion ban in a reliably red state.

What they got instead was a lopsided loss that preserved the status quo yet also changed a whole swath of calculations about 2022.

The push to allow lawmakers to ban abortion in Kansas backfired spectacularly. It woke up suburban voters and even those in conservative parts of the state who didn’t want to pursue something that was practically invited by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

It also brought an explosion of activism that Democrats hope carries them through to the fall — in the few states where abortion will be directly on the ballot and the many more where the issue will be more indirectly at stake.

No kidding. File this post with the overwhelming pro-abortion rights referendum that just took place in red state Kansas (see post just below this one). Strong majorities of Israelis don’t want any ultra-Orthodox representation in their government.

And that’s Kansas, right?

NARAL comments:

Kansans protect abortion access in the first public vote on reproductive freedom since #SCOTUS overturned Roe.

Voters are putting MAGA Republicans on notice: When you come for our rights, we’ll show up at the ballot box.

*************

“Staggering” turnout, and No to ending abortion rights wins by more than 60%. In some counties, the vote against ending the right to abortion was 95%.

**************

Oh, but authoritarian common good freaks know what’s best for America. You can’t just allow these… referendums to take place all over the country, since most (all?) of them will simply reveal that Americans don’t understand God’s will. As soon as Ginni Thomas and Adrian Vermeule take over, we’ll happily bow to their divinely-inspired wisdom.

‘What these players are doing for guaranteed money, what is the incentive to practice? What is the incentive to go out there and earn it in the dirt? You are just getting paid a lot of money up front and playing a few events and playing 54 holes.‘

Tiger Woods, who has just turned down around $800 million guaranteed from Saudi Swingers Inc, describes a dystopian green where mulish millionaires futz a bit with balls before breaking for كافيار.

Me, I love the image. The game Don DeLillo calls an “anal round of scrupulous caution and petty griefs” has always been for UD an excellent aide-sommeil: The low drone of commentators, the long verdant nothingness, the occasional tinny sound of spectators … I’d call it white noise if it weren’t so green.

The last thing UD’s looking for is some flashy hotshot pulling off improbable victories on the course. She wants petty anality, and the more the better. So, Saudi golf: Good on ya.

And then there was [Colin Blakemore’s] rapier-sharp wit. We recall when a visiting professor, one of the many world-class neuroscientists to visit his laboratory, was having a birthday. At the time, one project in Colin’s laboratory involved studying how a subpopulation of callosal projecting layer 5 neocortical pyramidal neurons retract their dendritic tufts that reached to the pial surface during the first week of postnatal development in the mouse. Colin’s memorable message on the birthday card was “May your tuft never retract”!

Trump claims CIA killed the leader of Al-Qaeda just to spite him.

… says the daughter of the violent white supremacist just sentenced to seven years in prison.

To which UD says: Soyez tranquille, ma petite. One thing at a time.

… which Macmillan Dictionary elaborates upon here; UD proposes that we extend this rich, alliterative phrase’s provenance to the actual air. That is, she suggests that we begin to designate the many ultraorthodox men who refuse to sit next to women on commercial aircraft flying fucks (details here), and that we get the word out as broadly as possible that under no circumstances should you ever give in to flying fucks who think qua woman you stink. Do not change your seat.

Consider a recent case:

[A] flight attendant approached [a woman flying from Israel to New York] and asked her to change her seat.

As the previous Director of IRAC and current Executive Director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), there is no one more prepared for such a situation than [Rabbi Noa Sattath], and yet it was a difficult and embarrassing experience for her all the same. She turned to the flight attendant and asked her, point-blank: “Are you asking me to move because of my gender?”

When the flight attendant said yes, Noa responded that the request was both offensive and against the law. The flight attendant apologized, then pointed to the man assigned the seat beside Noa and said that he could not sit next to her. The flight attendant left, and other passengers started discussing the situation. A few minutes later the flight attendant returned, apologized, and once again asked Noa to move. Noa knew her rights, and responded: “No. The request is against the law. Don’t ask again”.

At that point, 40 minutes before takeoff, Noa found herself surrounded by passengers trying to convince her to give up her seat, saying things to her like: “You know, it’s nothing against you personally;” and trying to explain halacha, Jewish law. It doesn’t matter how strong you are, or how prepared you think you are for this kind of scenario: it is upsetting and humiliating, and a lot of pressure can be placed on women to be silent and acquiesce to this discrimination. 

The flight attendant must have found another solution, since the man did not end up sitting next to Noa.

One doesn’t expect primitifs to be reasonable; the obscene part of the story lies entirely with the other passengers, who in this disgracefully common situation often behave like this. They often gang up on the woman and say inane things that further humiliate her and they tell her she has to move. They try to make her believe she is the fuck in this situation, whereas the fuck is, with crystal clarity, the appalling woman-reviler.

The flying fucks are out there and they don’t care that what they’re doing is against the law. They are ineducable; your job is not to educate them. Your job is to sit tight and sue the airlines.

*****************

“We are Jews and do not want to sit next to a woman.”