Dick Cheney is certainly right; and it’s not just Trump. Sometimes the entire Republican political establishment looks like cowards.

But at least they’ve got Josh Hawley: The man who stood up to Finland and Sweden!

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.): “It was a quite a gut punch. [Kinda like an illegal abortion, Senator.] Yes, I’m shocked, absolutely shocked. [Guess you’re spending too much time in DC. Maybe you should visit your state occasionally and get to know the people who live there. Or maybe Kansans should vote for a Senator not liable to be totally shocked by lopsided electoral outcomes in the state.] But regardless, I respect the process. .. That’s not what I was expecting, not what I was told the polling showed, and I thought it was gonna be a tight race. But it is what it is. And, again, I respect the process. I don’t have an explanation. [What a telling confession. You really have no explanation at all for this result? … Let’s start real slow for you. Are you able to come up with any explanation at all for why a person might vote in favor of abortion rights? Take your time.]“

[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.