Borderline Schizophrenic

Sorry, I was busy last week, trying to secure the right to have pockets for our nation’s women, so I haven’t been following the news as closely as I usually do. Let’s see… Nope, they still haven’t solved the Border Crisis (TM pending) yet. There’s been a lot of noise though.

Arizona is advancing a bill that would allow citizens to threaten and kill undocumented migrants found traveling across their property.

So that’s where we are now; making Joe Rancher judge, jury, and executioner, as long as the victims are undocumented. How is it they’re going to know the status of some guy’s papers, who he only sees through the scope of his rifle? I’m betting they’ll opt to play it “safe” and plug them either way. And if they’re NOT undocumented? Well, there’s plenty of land there to dig some holes, isn’t there?

I bet there will be contests before too long, with big prizes for the most kills. Er, I mean, “Defenses of your Life and Limb Against the Threat of the Unwashed Brown Horde.”

Next step, making omelets illegal.

If we can’t consistently get trained police to carry out their jobs civilly and lawfully, how can we expect a bunch of jolly ranchers to keep from shooting up brown strangers like it’s a carnival game?

I know, I know, they’re here ILLEGALLY, as the racists can’t wait to point out. But illegal entry doesn’t carry a death sentence, does it? Well, I guess it will now in Arizona if this bill passes.

Texas is also in the hunt to make the Southwest shittier. With the latest Supreme Court ruling, police officers in Texas can now arrest people on suspicion of being here illegally.

Again, how do they go about determining who to arrest? They arrest the brown people. Are there a lot of brown, legal, Texans there? Of course, but who cares? Even if they have to let them go, It’ll still be fun to round’em all up, just for kicks. Show’em who’s boss.

And with that, my friend, we have turned into Nazi Germany.

Now any fuck-stick with a badge (or without) can accost someone and demand to “see their papers.” Believe me, it won’t just be the police. It’ll be every Karen in line at Trader Joe’s, demanding papers from some poor shelf-stocker or bag boy. Or any Yahoo at a bar, into which a brown person dares to enter. And the intended effect is not just to deter illegal immigration, but all of it. Why else do you think they make it so hard to immigrate legally in the first place? They don’t care if it’s a matter of seeking asylum, escaping an oppressive regime or rampant drug cartels, or uniting with other family members. They’re not interested in high-minded legality, they’re interested in not having to hear “Press 2 for Spanish.”

And of course, they’re also interested in scaring the hell out of the rest of the country with horror tales of strife at the border and blaming it all on the Biden administration. The Poster Girl for Lead Paint, Marjorie Taylor Greene, was at it again this weekend, complaining about how the passage of the latest budget deal damaged her party’s attempts to fear-monger over the border.

She’s mad at Speaker Johnson over about losing leverage, it’s true. But not leverage over fixing the border, but election leverage. If she really wanted to address the problems at the border, she and her GOP cadre could have passed the Border Security bill from two weeks ago, that her own party negotiated (and got nearly everything they wanted.)

It amused me how bothered she was about it passing with a bipartisan vote. Or, in her words, “Without the majority of the majority.” Like any vote not blessed by her little club is invalid,  by definition. As if the vast amount of “minority” votes came from Mexicans, as opposed to Americans with whom she has philosophical differences. To troggs like EmTee Greene, the world is broken down into “us and them,” where “us” is her white MAGA Wingnut Brigade, and “them” is everyone else, Democrats, Latinos, gays, Jews, poor people, scientists, and other non-humans.

All she’s really doing is giving her own demographic a bad name.

How to Win the November Elections

I was talking with a business colleague the other day, about how I prefer a smaller cell phone size, so it fits in my pocket easier, without fear of bending or breaking it. I said it helps to have deeper pockets though, but because they’re men’s pants, they do, tacitly acknowledging the longstanding beef so many women have with clothing manufacturers, regarding a significant lack of pockets in apparel for women.

Then I said, “What will it take to get more pockets into women’s clothes, an act of Congress?

I was joking, of course, but later I was thinking, what if there WAS some kind of legislation directing pocket equality between the sexes? And the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced it could be the key to winning in November. Here’s how I see that going:

First, we get some Democratic Congress-people to create the Pocket Equality for Women, or “PEW” Act, into which they write a mandate to include at least two pockets in every woman’s top, vest, skirt, and pants. Pockets need to be real and not merely for decoration, deep enough to be useful… at minimum, the length of an average woman’s hand. I bet Nancy Pelosi would be down with it. 

Naturally, the PEW Act will set off alarms within the purse lobby. Big Purse will be like, “Good God, man! If women can carry their cash, license, credit cards, and cell phones in pockets, we’ll never sell another clutch. We have to kill this thing in its sleep!”

With that, the lobbying from CoachPAC grows fierce on Capitol Hill, as they lean on the Congress-people they’ve bought… I mean, “Those to whom they’ve donated campaign funds, trips, and sample bags.”

They’ll find some willing listeners, I’m sure. But the problem, like with everything else that’s been lobbied out of existence, they can’t come out and say they’ve been bought off. They’ll need to find some other angle that they can tout in public, to use to kill the bill. Now why would anyone be against pockets? This stymies them for a few days. But then, the Alabama delegation has a breakthrough:

“People can smuggle things in pockets… contraceptives, frozen embryos, very small fetuses… We must protect against Real Live Human Baby trafficking!”

Huzzah! They now have a platform from which they can kill the PEW Act. With all the MAGA talking heads hitting Fox "News" and the Right-Wing Media circuit, they revive their old “Selling Baby Parts” accusations to include transporting. Now, no matter what the Senate does, the bill will die in the House, with Speaker Johnson vowing never to bring it to the floor for a vote.

Hopes are dashed in the short term, but the Democrats seize the chance to bring the case to The People. At every campaign stop, the candidates charge up the crowd:

Pol: What do you want?

Crowd: POCKETS!

Pol: Where do you want’em?

Crowd: EVERYWHERE! [Breaking out the finger guns] PEW PEW PEW!

"YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO... YOU JUST HAVE TO PASS THE PEW!"

At campaign stops, debates, and in political ads, Democrats tout the PEW Act and demand Pocket Equality. President Biden assures the nation that he will never "pocket veto" the PEW Act. The nation’s women, envisioning a life in which they never have to worry about leaving their purses behind, or getting them stolen by someone coming up from behind them, turn out to elect Democrats up and down the ticket. And there is rejoicing across the land.

So, do the women actually get pockets? Eh, probably not. Maybe. Conflicts in working out the specifics and arguing about what constitutes a blouse versus a shirt cause delay after delay to the implementation date and keep kicking the can down the road.

But, with the right to be fully enfranchised human beings restored, as opposed to the current state of being treated as private property/incubators, the momentum carries over into other issues. The new Democratic House, along with the expanded Senate majority and the Presidency, pass bills reconstituting the protections from Roe and Griswald, creating a national guarantee of reproductive rights and healthcare. They also pass a new law requiring that dry cleaning charges for women’s clothing be no higher than the cost for that of men. And for good measure, they add some more Supreme Court members so that the current six religious and Big Business shills are outnumbered and kept from interfering with the will of The People.

Yes, it’s all there for the taking, right in our back pocket, if you will.

 

Director’s DVD Commentary: I apologize if you came here all amped up about a new campaign strategy, and instead, you encountered my absurdist tendencies run amok. But take heart; I’m still confident that a full-throated push for reproductive rights will be a winner, come November. We just have to lay out the facts and turn out in greater numbers than the Religious Wingnuts.

SOTU vs STFU

 SOTU

I enjoyed President Biden’s State of the Union address last week. It was good to see him get all fired up again. Content aside, he should have put to rest any doubts about his stamina and vitality. He sure didn’t look like a doddering, senile old man, as he’s painted to be by the Right-Wing Echo Chamber and even some mainstream media. And he certainly didn’t look like he needed a mental acuity test, like some of the corrupt opposition suggest.

Of course, Republicans can’t admit that so now they say he was hopped up on goofballs and pick-em-up pills. Jesus. They might as well put “Heads I win, Tails you lose,” right there on their bumper stickers. It may as well be their motto. Whatever a Dem does is not good enough and even when it is, they invent another reason why it’s not.

Plus, given the newly revealed, hyper-pharmaceutical culture of the previous administration, it’s probably just more deflection and projection of their own issues.

To all the yayhoos drawing ominous conclusions about his occasional stutters or stumbles, I’d like to see YOU try to read from a script for 69 minutes straight, on national television, with the occasional dipshit yelling at you from the peanut gallery. It’s not easy to do for the heartiest of people. These “critics” are like the armchair quarterbacks who think they could lead the team down the field at crunch time, but in reality, would lose containment just stepping onto a field in front of 65,000 people. Try it sometime, before throwing stones, Gomer.

Content considered, I thought there was a lot to like. I don’t know how he’s going to actually do most of the things he said he’s going to do, but that’s a problem for another term, one in which I’m sure he hopes can work with a Democratic Congress. Otherwise, he’ll be looking at Four More Years of doing little of substance. In which case, sometimes just keeping the wheels on is the best you can hope for.

STFU

I also caught the MTG sideshow, wherein she apparently thought she was on a reconstituted version of You Bet Your Life, where her task was to make President Biden say the magic words “Laken Riley,” and then when he did, it was like she was waiting for the giant duck to come down out of the rafters. Yes, he said the name (of a woman who was killed by an undocumented alien, one of the microscopically few, statistically, who have killed someone in this country). You know the deal… tens of thousands a year killed by domestically bred Americans and they don’t give it a second thought. But this is the outrage. We can add THAT to the Republican Platform, right after More Tax Cuts for the Rich… the Right to be Murdered by an American! Accept nothing less!

So did MTG win something for her Big Get? Were they playing GOP BINGO back there? I don’t get the big deal. Once again, we have a Republican acting like the dog who finally caught the car she’s been chasing and yapping at and has no idea what to do next. I’m sure that she’s just had a whole pile of free time open up now that she can’t go on Fox and yell about how “Biden won’t say the name.”

I have no clue how a vacant pea-brained self-promoter like her gets elected to national office. What happened, did they airdrop lead paint all over her district 30 years ago? Not that they would stoop to using someone’s pain and tragedy to score political points, like some common Democrat, would they?

I didn’t bother to stay up and watch the GOP response, but I understand it was a trip. “The Stepford Fundamentalist,” if you would. So the speech was full of fabrications, misrepresentations, and stories that happened a long, long time ago, in a place far, far away.

So Sen. Britt has been taking her lumps about that, and as well she should. However, let’s not put the blame solely on her and her doll’s eyes.

Do you think there’s any chance the Powers That Be would let some first freshman senator write and present their party’s nationally televised rebuttal to the President, all by herself? I know she didn’t sit there in her perfect kitchen, which probably hasn’t seen a white person wash a dish in it since it was built, and scratch out that speech in a spiral notebook? Or even on a Chromebook? Not without the supervision of the party bosses, she didn’t. In fact, I’d bet they had a whole team working on that thing.

They KNEW it was essentially fact-free. They KNEW their big story took place in another decade, with an entirely different cast of characters running things. And they put it in there anyway, because they don’t care if a story is true, as long as it works. I’m sure they were counting on the audience for that speech, the MAGA faithful, to embrace whatever fairy tale they spin out. And they will because they’ve been conditioned to filter out any sources of contradictory information and believe only what their own people tell them. Fox “News” has them well-trained and obedient.

An Irrelevant Thought

I love it when Sweetpea buys her margarita mix in 8-oz cans…

…I get to walk around and pretend I’m Andre the Giant.

Next Stop, the Warring 20s

There can be no doubt that Republicans are coming for women’s rights to reproductive self-determination. All signs are pointing in the same direction: to the 1920s.

We already know about Dobbs overturning Roe v Wade, which sent the abortion issue back to the states. We know that the Red States immediately began to see who could produce the most draconian laws to punish those who dared to make a choice with which The State did not agree. We’ve got total bans, 15-month bans, 6-month bans, travel bans, and lawsuits encouraged in which there is no recourse from having to pay for counsel, regardless of merit.

But that’s not good enough. Now the MAGA Bible-thumpers running the Republican Party are seeking a federal regulation that a legal human life begins at conception, now that the backward Alabama Supreme Court has so ruled.

While it doesn’t say so specifically, that put an end to In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) in the state because there were no provisions for the disposal of extra fertilized cell clumps. Storing them in perpetuity was also a no-go.

Banning IVF was not the goal. The real idea was getting human life defined as the moment of fertilization because THAT’s how they’re going to start attacking contraception. IUDs? Gone. Day-After pill? Gone. Birth control pill? Gone.

Why the birth control pill? If I remember from my old health classes, taking The Pill prevents ovulation, so there is no egg to fertilize. BUT, it also thins the lining of the uterus so there is less chance of implantation (same as an IUD). The implantation of the fertilized egg is when medical science considers a pregnancy to be happening. But, now with the new legal definition of “life” beginning at the moment a little swimmer pierces the outer rim of an ovum, any interference with the implementation becomes murder.

It’s clear that all of these moral and philosophical hurdles are not meant to “save babies.” Republicans don’t give a shit about babies. This is about controlling women to promote patriarchy, just like we had in the Old Days.

Most Repubs won’t admit that now, but don’t follow their words, just watch their actions. Like in 2022, after the Dobbs decision, there was a bill in play to codify the right to contraception. 194 Republicans voted against it.

Voted against contraception, in this day and age. Sure, they’ll tell you that it was because they thought it was unnecessary, or they were protecting the rights of pharmacy workers to withhold treatment from you due to their own beliefs. It was amazing they could spew such nonsense after Roe had just been done in, with one justice openly stating that he wanted to go after Griswold next (which enshrined the right to privacy decision that ensures access to contraception). It’s funny how they talk out of one side of their mouth about how something “isn’t necessary,” while from the other side, back actions that make it VERY necessary.

The bill never saw any action in the Senate. But the next year, a nearly identical bill passed the House again, by almost the same margin. (All Dems and a smattering of Republicans who were retiring.) The bill was eventually squashed by Senate Republicans before it could be brought to a vote.

At this point, you can’t be fooled by any single, seemingly “reasonable” Republican. They have become a monolithic entity… you’re either with them or against them. Any digression from the expected dogma and they stick you straight into the “against them” pile. And right now, regardless of what they say, their actions are coming to ban abortion and several kinds of contraception. And no Sex Ed, either. They don’t even want kids to know the correct terminology for their own anatomy. All they have to offer are platitudes about the “sanctity of life,” even as they watch hundreds of thousands fall into poverty, despair, and even death, for lack of family planning and reproductive health options.

This isn’t about you obeying your own sense of morality, it’s about obeying theirs. They don’t give a shit what you think about when life begins.

This campaign against reproductive freedom and for the subjugation of women is the only reason one needs to vote straight Democratic in November. It’s that important.