… 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.
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.
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“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%.
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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.
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How the NFL punishes predators.
… where many of the lilies and lotuses are currently in full bloom. A couple of his pix:
… and now, only a few months later, we get a guilty verdict and a life sentence for his girlfriend, who Adelson apparently paid to put together the conspiracy to murder Florida State University law professor Dan Markel.
Markel had to die because he sought shared custody of his children by Adelson’s sister, and this annoyed Adelson. He allegedly had two thug friends of his girlfriend blast his head off.
Ja, ja, wheels of justice… UD only hopes they nail Adelson (and his mother?) before Markel’s elderly parents die.
Diploma mills once charmed me; in the early years of this blog, I couldn’t get enough of bogus outfits that would, in exchange for a few thousands, hand you a suitable-for-framing certificate attesting to your having earned a PhD. In our simulacral era, it’s a way-thriving con.
California Coast University remains a prominent diploma mill, with one particularly prominent purchaser: The Trumplover who – amazingly – remains Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, continues to put “PhD” after his signature, and continues – like all pathetic diploma mill grads – to insist that everyone call him doctor.
His main function in the job – currently getting all sorts of media attention – is withholding Trump-incriminating documents from Congress. Congress has had enough of it, and has written to him asking that he recuse himself from January 6-related probes.
So UD’s gonna go on record with the following: The letter writers won’t hear a peep out of Doc Cuffari, currently hunkered down in his office engaged in the same self-comforting activities mad Mark Meadows engaged in as scads of desperate staffers begged him to talk to the president about the ongoing rape and pillage of the Capitol. With his bogus degree and Trumplove and paranoid silences Joseph Cuffari has constructed a personal fantasy world as fragile as that of Blanche DuBois, and like her he will be carried out in a straitjacket.
When a fifteen year old in America’s jest-about gunniest state takes his parents’ gun (why wasn’t it locked away?) and annihilates three of his siblings and then himself, it generates a lot of interest. National coverage has been extensive because even high up in our mass murder madlands fifteen is remarkably young for such extensively lethal gunplay; and, you know, he killed his sibs and not his high school buds as per usual; and I mean just in terms of the whole leave an entire house a blood-splattered mess thing the killer exhibited noteworthy precociousness.
Now this all went down three days ago, and as this article notes, absolutely nothing has issued forth from the Alaska authorities. Just the bare minimum. No names. No explanation as to why a house full of little kids (a bunch of other sibs in the house survived) featured no parents and a gun.
Why so shy, big guys? The bedlam was discovered by a neighbor, so clearly the family’s identity is known to the neighborhood. Why don’t we know it? Why don’t we know anything about parents who had… seven? … eight?… kids and didn’t think it worth their while to put their gun away? Or did they say to their kinda funky fifteen year old Here’s the gun in case anyone tries to break in while we’re gone?
Here’s a possibility. In these big gunny states there’s a Lookaway Protocol. Nothing to see here. None of your goddamn business. You’re just gonna make a big fucking Thing about it and next thing you know they’ll take away our guns. It was probably a false flag operation, with gun-control fanatics playing the kids. Like at Sandy Hook. Let’s all just shut up about it and move on.
Capturing the anti-semite/Christian nationalist vote is always a little tricky. Digitally enlarging your Jewish opponent’s nose on attack ads sounds smart, but may backfire. If only anti-semites notice it, fine; if everyone notices it, then Georgia gets a Senator with the… peculiar name of Ossoff, rather than the all-American, snub-nose, Perdue.
If you’re only running to represent some loser district most of whose voters are Thomas Sutpen before he made all his money — piece of cake. But if you’re talking the whole state, you may run into problems.
I mean, in the case at hand, Doug Mastriano’s gubernatorial race in Pennsylvania, Doug’s heartfelt religious bigotry has long found natural outlet on Mad Dog Andrew Torba’s Gab, the social media site that fascist pigs really dig; and now that Doug’s running for office, what could be more natural than taking it one step further, and hiring Torba for campaign advice? Martin Bormann to Doug’s Hitler kind of thing.
But oh no. Cancel culture strikes again, and Doug has had to end a long and meaningful relationship with Torba/Gab.
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Update: UD thanks Jeff for correcting her earlier Senator/Governor mix-up.