Religion in Politics – The Wrongologist

First They Came For The Communists

The Daily Escape:

Provincetown, MA, March 2025 photo by Marty Cowden

Wrongo hasn’t written since January, and there are two primary reasons. First, his overwhelming feeling of helplessness when the Democrats lost both Houses of Congress along with returning Trump to the White House. Truly, the Dems can’t be forgiven for their meek performance since November.

Second, chemotherapy and radiation can ruin your attention span: It is difficult to read anything long-form, much less write connected sentences. On the other hand, I’m having more good days than bad right now.

But today let’s gear up to talk about the arrest by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and green card holder, over his participation in protests at Columbia against Israel’s bombing of Gaza.

On Saturday Khalil was arrested by ICE agents in New York City and swiftly moved to a detention facility in Louisiana while the government attempts to deport him.

The NYT reported: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security…said in a statement on Sunday night that Mr. Khalil had been arrested “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.”

‘Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization…’

Aligned”? So, Khalil was arrested for wrong-think. Charlie Pierce asks in Esquire:

“So we’re disappearing people now? Nice to know…Are we now allowing the rendition of legal residents to black sites in the United States?”

The Times That Try Men’s Souls

The Daily Escape:

“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” – From The Crisis by Thomas Payne.

Everyone knows the bolded part of the comment above, but the rest is where we have to get to with 18± days left until Election Day. The pollster’s narrative is that the race has shifted and Trump has gotten stronger over the last few weeks. That Harris is lagging, not surging. At least some of that is caused by Republican Pollsters. Simon Rosenberg wrote: (emphasis and brackets by Wrongo)

“The red wavers [pollsters] stepped up their activity this past week, releasing at least 20 polls across the battlegrounds. It’s a sign that they are worried about the public polling in both the Presidential and the Senate, and have dramatically escalated their efforts to push the polling averages to the right and make the election look redder than it is.”

But this all has Democrats in disarray, thinking some or all of the following:

The polls are right and we’re doomed.
The polls are wrong. Some of them are skewed by these “Red Wave” polls.
Early voter data show that Harris is in good shape.
Harris going on Fox is a sign of strength or maybe weakness.

There’s a nub of truth in each of these. But on the whole, it’s whistling past the graveyard. The cake is pretty much baked. What we need in last18± days before Election Day: Vote. Donate. Pick a local candidate and support them with your money and time.

Let’s go from the macro in politics to the micro. The Intercept reported on a December 2022 drug bust in that bastion of democracy, Jackson, MS:

“It was a tip that brought a drug sniffing dog to the main post office in downtown Jackson, Mississippi. An employee there had reported seeing someone in the lobby putting pills into hot pink envelopes:

“…a police officer from the small city of Richland, just south of Jackson, walked into a back room at the post office where one of the envelopes had been set aside. Steed, a K-9 handler, arrived with Rip, his narcotics sniffer dog. Rip got to the pink envelope, sat down. According to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, Steed said this meant the dog had smelled narcotics….This…was no ordinary drug bust. As it turned out, there were pills inside the package, but they were not the kind that Rip or other police K-9s are trained to detect. The envelope contained five pills labeled “AntiPreg Kit…their medical purpose is to induce abortion. Dwayne Martin, at the time the head of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in Jackson, told me this was exactly what the initial tipster had suspected.”

It turns out that they were acting under a USPS procedure called mail cover: a little-known Postal Service method for collecting data about people suspected of committing crimes. From the WaPo:

“The US Postal Service has shared information from thousands of Americans’ letters and packages with law enforcement every year for the past decade, conveying the names, addresses and other details from the outside of boxes and envelopes without requiring a court order.”

More: (brackets by Wrongo)

“…postal inspectors, federal agencies, and state and local police forces made an average of about 6,700 requests [of the USPS] a year, and that inspectors additionally recorded data from about another 35,000 pieces of mail a year, on average.

Using an enormous database of images of the outside of envelopes and packages, postal inspectors can digitally compare names, addresses, and other information on one item to others. And the findings can be freely shared with almost any law enforcement agency that requests them.

This is bad enough: Imagine what could happen to abortion-pills-by-mail and the people who use them if Trump is elected? Since the accounts of the regional USPS head and The Intercept’s FOIA documents show a piecemeal crackdown is already underway during a Democratic administration?

Regardless of whomever is in power, the incident in Jackson provides a potential window into the future — one in which freelancing local Postal Service employees and officials call on the local cops who share their ideology to halt women from accessing reproductive care and potentially charge and arrest those providing or using abortion medication.

In the meantime, thanks to a Jackson-based postal worker, Rip the dog, and a federal agency that says it has no desire to police abortion, nearly 100 pregnant women did not receive little pink packages containing the medicine they requested.

Finally, Harris vs. Fox: She sat for the most confrontational interview of her campaign as she answered — and parried — questions from Fox News’ Bret Baier. The idea was to unmoor any loosely-affiliated Republican voters and show them she isn’t as scary as Trump and Fox News have portrayed her.

Baier thought he was prepared with enough “gotcha” questions. He showed a clip from a Fox town hall that conveniently edited out the section showing him saying “the enemy within”. But it was Harris who pounced:

“Bret, I’m sorry and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about ‘the enemy within’ that he has repeated when he is speaking about the American people. That’s not what you just showed…”

Baier insisted the clip was Trump’s response to a question about those statements, and Harris countered:

“You didn’t show that, and here’s the bottom line: He has repeated it many times, and you and I both know that. And you and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people.”

Baier absolutely knows that. Trump used the phrase on Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday morning program and at his rally in Aurora, CO., on Friday. Baier discussed and tried to sane-wash Trump’s usage of the phrase on his Oct. 15 show.

Go grab a napkin, Bret. You got served.

What Comes After Trump?

The Daily Escape:

“A leader without followers is simply a guy taking a walk.” – John Boehner

Trump will lose in November and he will lose in January when the Electoral College has its say. Wrongo hasn’t concluded this via his mad polling skills, but Trump has jumped the shark. He needs to exceed 46.5% of the national vote to get near an Electoral College win. But even his most dedicated followers now routinely are walking out of his rallies, so he can forget about 47%.

From Politico:

“Trump will never concede defeat, no matter how thorough his loss. Yet the more decisively Vice President Kamala Harris wins the popular vote and electoral college the less political oxygen he’ll have to reprise his 2020 antics; and, importantly, the faster Republicans can begin building a post-Trump party.”

He won’t go quietly, he may go violently, but he’s going. So the question becomes who or what replaces Trump as head of the MAGA movement? Let me make the answer clear: JD Vance comes next.

Why? He’s quick witted, articulate, greedy for power, and completely shameless. Hypocrisy won’t stick since he has endless bullshit to spin without blinking his eyeliner. All this makes him incredibly appealing to MAGAts. Vance is far more dangerous than Trump because he is exactly what the Silicon Valley tech bro Nazis and the extreme white Christian nationalists want.

Wrongo and Ms. Right were persuaded by Liberal friends to read Vance’s 2016 memoir. The pitch was that Vance explained why White Trump voters from southeastern Ohio and West Virginia wouldn’t vote for Hillary, or lean progressive in their politics.

The book is simply Vance pushing propaganda that fits the policy preferences of leading Republican policy groups. Vance’s stereotypes were shark bait for conservative policymakers who feed the mythology that the undeserving poor make bad choices and are personally to blame for their own poverty. So why waste taxpayer money on programs to help lift people out of poverty? After all, Vance got out of hillbilly Ohio without them.

It is depressing that liberals didn’t notice that Vance places so much blame on welfare rather than, on say, neoliberalism economics and corporatism. Those are the ideologies that moved jobs offshore, that got their companies leveraged, and later bankrupted while the jobs were never to come back.

Vance’s buddies are among the people who precipitated the economic holocaust in Middle America. He’s worked for money men Peter Thiel, Ted Leonsis, and Steve Case. In 2016, the gods of greed and hate had given him a mission.

So the question among Republicans is how best to push Trump’s exit to Mar-a-Lagos 19th Hole. That will be unquestionably assisted by Trump’s legal woes. If Harris is president, all of the cases go forward, and several result in convictions, accelerating Trump’s exit from the stage.

And who’s the leader in the club house? Sadly, the GOP is a Party driven by its base voters. That means the demands of the base will, at least for the foreseeable future, drive the leadership of the Party. That means the person who is shameless enough to feed them racist lies, someone shameless enough to admit they’re lies on CNN on Sunday. Ladies and gentlemen I give you JD Vance!

From CNN:

“Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance on Sunday defended false claims about Haitian immigrants eating the pets of residents in Springfield, Ohio in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”

To support his claims, Vance pointed to what he said are firsthand accounts from constituents who have told him this is happening, though he didn’t provide evidence:

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,”

CNN’s Dana Bash replied, “You just said that this is a story that you created.”

JD Vance clearly isn’t ready for prime time, but as the leader of the ever-dwindling MAGA spud of the 2024’s GOP, he’ll do. Try to remember that this is a guy who went to Yale. Who’s gotten by on his resume rather than much of his actual achievements.

In the pantheon of shitty GOP politicians reflect on this:

“Dems: I can’t imagine a worse politician than Richard Nixon.
Ronald Reagan: Hold my beer.
Dems: I can’t imagine a worse politician than Ronald Reagan.
Newt Gingrich: Hold my beer.
Dems: I can’t imagine a worse politician than Newt Gingrich.
George W Bush: Hold my beer.
Dems: I can’t imagine a worse politician than George W Bush.
Sarah Palin: Hold my beer.
Dems: I can’t imagine a worse politician than Sarah Palin.
Donald Trump: Hold my beer.
Dems: I can’t imagine a worse politician than Donald Trump.
JD Vance: Hold my beer.
Dems today: I can’t imagine a worse politician than JD Vance.”

Ask Vance: Whose suffering does your lie draw attention to? The two plausible answers are “our country’s poor refugee population”, or “American pet owners, somehow.”

What a shameless, stupid, dangerous shit pile of a human.

The true successor to the GOP leadership will turn out to be yet another scary Ivy scholar (Harvard) with service in the US military, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK). Unlike Vance, Cotton is ready for political prime time.

For the next few years, we will watch these two scary Republicans duke it out to see if either is the flavor for the MAGA base. We will also watch to see whether the GOP can once again become a Party led by its senior leadership or simply by its rabble.

OK, that’s Wrongo’s opus for this week. Let’s leave you to ponder a piece of soothing music to start the week. Here is “Solveig’s Song” from Edvard Greig’s “Peer Gynt Suite Op 2 No 55” played by the by Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra:

Time To Learn About Project 2025

The Daily Escape:

Mollidgewock campground, Erol, NH – July 2024 photo by Amber Lavaliee. Wrongo and Ms. Right lived in NH for 12 years. This is a quintessential scene.

With all the hot air about Biden’s “will he or won’t he” moment, the subject of the Conservative right’s Project 2025 has not truly been covered by the media. From Judd Legum:

“Project 2025 is a radical blueprint for a potential second Trump administration, spearheaded by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. The plan calls for withdrawing approval for the abortion pill, banning pornography, slashing corporate taxes, abolishing the Department of Education, replacing thousands of experienced federal workers with political appointees, imposing a “biblically based… definition of marriage and families,” and placing the Justice Department and other independent agencies under the direct control of the president.”

From Rick Wilson:

“Project 2025 is Trump’s roadmap, written by Trump loyalists and embraced by Trump’s constellation of sycophants, fellow travelers, hangers-on, and job seekers. It will be the driving force of what Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts boasted was “…a second American revolution.” (Also, in keeping with all things MAGA, Roberts dropped an unsubtle threat into the statement, adding the revolution would be “bloodless if the left allows it to be.”)”

This lefty doesn’t plan to let its adoption be “bloodless”.

While Trump has recently disavowed knowledge of the Project or its authors, of the 38 people responsible for writing and editing Project 2025, 31 were appointed or nominated to positions in the Trump administration and transition. So Trump’s claim that he has “nothing to do” with the people who created Project 2025 is another lie: Over 81% had formal roles in his first administration. When Trump denies something, you should always take it as a full confession of his absolute guilt.

Trump’s name appears in Project 2025 312 times. That’s a yuuge coincidence, since he says he doesn’t know anything about it. More from Rick Wilson:

“I was able to confirm late last week that this decision by Trump to condemn Project 2025 was a deliberate effort prepared by campaign strategist Chris LaCivita and Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio after research came back showing that Project 2025 is poisonous with groups outside the hardest core of the MAGA base. The same research led the Trump campaign to demand that the RNC remove the national abortion ban plank (and other policy statements) from the 2024 GOP Platform.”

And just like that, the GOP 2024 platform won’t include abortion. From the WaPo:

“Republican delegates adopted presumptive nominee Donald Trump’s proposed convention platform at a meeting in Milwaukee on Monday, abandoning long-held positions on abortion and same-sex marriage while embracing new plans for mass deportation and a new opposition to changing the retirement age for Social Security.”

The strategy is to bury what Republicans plan to do by having the plausible deniability of the GOP platform.

Back to Project 2025. From Navigator Research, who says that when people know more about it their opposition to it grows:

“Opposition to Project 2025 grows as people learn more about the plan. After reading 19 proposed policies for Project 2025, opposition grows from 49% to 63% (net +14) while support for the plan declines from 31% to 24% (net -7%).”

Now the report is over 900 pages long, so it’s gonna take some time to digest. Here’s a chart:

Still, given the media’s focus on trying to drive Biden out of the presidential race, very few Americans know much about Project 2025. Here’s what Navigator found:

From Navigator:

“Seven in ten Americans have not heard enough to have an opinion about Project 2025, but after hearing about it, two in three Americans become opposed. 71% initially don’t know enough to have an opinion of Project 2025….Additionally, nearly four in five Americans report not having heard anything about Project 2025 either when described as “a series of conservative policy proposals aimed at reshaping the executive branch of the federal government if a Republican is elected president in 2024”

Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Democrats are most likely to have heard “a lot” or “some” about Project 2025, though fewer than two in five have actually heard about it (30%, 39%, and 33%, respectively).

Navigator grouped the Project 2025 policies by what percent, in the view of survey participants, would “hurt the country” and which were “strongly opposed” by survey participants. They found that eight of the nineteen polices were the most unpopular and harmful:

The list of the most unpopular policies includes:

Stopping overtime pay
Eliminating pre-existing conditions from health insurance
Adding new taxes on health insurance
Ending drug price negotiations
Eliminating head start
Cutting Social Security
Monitoring pregnancies by the states
Eliminating NOAA (the federal agency that tracks hurricanes) called the NWS above

But check out the policies that are just below those in the above chart. There are some beauties there as well.

This makes it clear that the threat to our nation is Trump and his minions, not Biden’s health. Maybe more people will pay attention to what Project 2025is, now that Trump is denying he knows anything about it. He’s drawn attention to it, by his denial, and it’s getting more widely known. Let’s hope the more people learn about it, the more they will see it’s horror.

The very public navel-gazing by the media and Democrats over Biden’s capacity for the last couple of weeks has overshadowed the social media attacks on Project 2025. Project 2025 means to lobotomize government agencies by replacing career civil servants with far-right ideologues loyal to Dear Leader. Michael Lewis in his book “The Fifth Risk” wrote that government manages a portfolio of risks that requires “mission-driven” careerists, experts with a dedication to the work, not to making big money from it. Donald Trump’s 2016 administration came to Washington DC to upend that system, to exploit it for profit. They abandoned data collection on anything Trumpers opposed, the NYT review explained:

“…like climate change or food safety regulations, or that they didn’t care about, like poverty, or stuff that they assumed were government boondoggles, which was most everything not involving the Pentagon.”

Look at it this way: If you decide to vote FOR the people pushing Program 2025, Trump will assume you’re all for it. And it will become the law of the land. You will NEVER regain the Rights you will lose in that process! If you vote against P-2025, you can still have your Rights as Americans which have been fought for over the past 250 years.

Now, can somebody please help the Biden campaign re-write their weak tea warning about Project 2025 on the Biden campaign website? (https://joebiden.com/project2025/) The headline is almost a paragraph long. The introduction is boring and wordy. All the truly frightening points about Project 2025 are listed so far below, few visitors will scroll down that far.

The Navigator does a great service by highlighting not only what’s in the text of Project 2025, they’ve shown it to Americans and have learned just how badly people think about it once they learn what’s in there.

Those Remaining Supreme Court Decisions

The Daily Escape:

Dinghies and roses, Kennebunkport, ME – June 2024 photo by Eric Storm Photo

Glad to be back! Wrongo and Ms. Right spent a long weekend with family in Napa, CA.

This week should see many more decisions announced by the Supreme Court. The National Review has the remaining lineup:

“There should be 21 opinions remaining because there are 23 cases left, including two pairs (the Chevron challenges and the Florida and Texas social-media laws) that are consolidated and likely to be decided together. We will likely get at least five or six opinions this week, maybe as many as nine. The Court will need to schedule more opinion days next week, probably at least three of them if it intends to wrap up the term by the end of the week; otherwise, it could spill over to July 1 or 2.”

And NR’s Dan McLaughlin gives us a scorecard of which justices have written this term’s opinions:

“…Justice Sonia Sotomayor has thus far published seven opinions representing the decision of the Court, and Justice Clarence Thomas six; it will be surprising if we get more from Thomas and more surprising if we get more from Sotomayor. By contrast, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch have each published just two opinions with the decision of the Court, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett three; they will likely have more….There’s only one case left from…November — Rahimi, the Second Amendment case — and the likeliest author of that opinion is either Roberts or Elena Kagan, neither of whom have published an opinion for the Court from the cases argued in that sitting.”

So much for analyzing the lineup. The real issue remaining is what the Supremes are going to do with the presidential immunity case, Trump v. United States. It’s taken so long to hear from the Court on this that many are suspicious. From Leah Litman at the NYT: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“For those looking for the hidden hand of politics in what the Supreme Court does, there’s plenty of reason for suspicion on Donald Trump’s as-yet-decided immunity case given its urgency. There are, of course, explanations that have nothing to do with politics for why a ruling still hasn’t been issued. But the reasons to think something is rotten at the court are impossible to ignore.”

Litman reminds us of the history of the case:

“On Feb. 28, the justices agreed to hear…Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution on charges that he plotted to subvert the 2020 election. The court scheduled oral arguments in the case for the end of April. That eight-week interval is much quicker than the ordinary Supreme Court briefing process, which usually extends for at least 10 weeks. But it’s considerably more drawn out than the schedule the court established earlier this year on a challenge from Colorado after that state took Mr. Trump off its presidential primary ballot. The court agreed to hear arguments on the case a mere month after accepting it and issued its decision less than a month after the argument. Mr. Trump prevailed, 9-0.”

Now nearly two months have passed since the immunity case was argued , long enough to remove the possibility of either the stolen documents case or the Jan. 6 case even being started before the November election. More from Litman:

“…indeed, at this point, even if the court rules that Mr. Trump has limited or no immunity, it is unlikely a verdict will be delivered before the election.”

FYI, the Nixon tapes case was decided 16 days after oral argument. Michael Podhorzer calls the decision delay election interference:

“By shielding Donald Trump from standing trial before a jury in two of his felony cases, Trump’s three appointments to the Supreme Court, along with the even more MAGA Justices Alito and Thomas and Judge Aileen Cannon, have already irreparably interfered in the 2024 election.”

But, according to Podhorzer, the Supreme Court’s actions have actually been worse than that:

“At no point since World War II has there been a 5-4 partisan ruling to make elections more democratic – not to expand voting rights, limit campaign finance, or constrain gerrymandering.”

He also reminds us that the problem started with Bush v. Gore:

“Beginning with Bush v. Gore, on at least a dozen occasions, SCOTUS has radically altered election law on a partisan 5-4 or 6-3 basis – often overriding bipartisan legislation enacted by Congress, and often relying on spurious facts or questions not even presented in the cases.”

Podhorzer includes the following graph showing the number of important election-related rulings each Court made, broken down by the ideology of the justices. The dark blue represents liberal consensus rulings; the dark red represents conservative rulings where the majority consisted only of Republican nominees:

Podhorzer closes with a very interesting analysis of how the Court has been hijacked by the Federalist Society and the Conservative Right, such that recent appointments to the Supreme Court have not reflected the demographics of the nation: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett are the only five of the 116 justices to serve on the Supreme Court to have been confirmed by senators representing less than one half of the US population. Only John Roberts among current GOP justices was confirmed by senators representing a clear majority of Americans.”

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Furthermore, of all the justices to serve in the last century and a half, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett are the only ones to have been named by a president who did not win the popular vote.”

This is the tyranny of the minority, and yet another reason why the November election is so important: It’s likely that the next president will appoint at least two new justices.

And our way out of the currently tipped scales of justice by the growing corrupt autocratic cabal at the Supreme Court begins with Democratic voters understanding the stakes when they go to the polls.

Otherwise, we’re sleepwalking toward authoritarianism.

Can You Sell Just Five Percent Of Your Soul To Satan?

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Duck, NC – June 2024 photo by Nate Waddell

This should be a trivial story, except it isn’t. The WaPo reported this week that two former law enforcement officers who defended the US Capitol from rioters on Jan. 6 were jeered on Wednesday by state GOP lawmakers during a visit to the Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives:

“Former US Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn and former sergeant Aquilino Gonell were introduced on the floor Wednesday as “heroes” by House Speaker Joanna McClinton (D) for having “bravely defended democracy in the United States Capitol against rioters and insurrection on January 6. As the two men — both of whom were injured by rioters on Jan. 6 — were introduced, the House floor descended into chaos. According to Democratic lawmakers, several GOP lawmakers hissed and booed, with a number of Republicans walking out of the chamber in protest.”

In this specific instance of MAGA misbehavior, two things are significant. First, the Pennsylvania House has 203 members split between 102 Democrats and 101 Republicans. This is very similar to the polarizing political split in the US House. Second, MAGAs acting out underscores just how polarizing the Jan. 6 insurrection has become with Republicans.

Once again, we’re seeing that MAGA Republican politicians support very few of the historical guardrails of our politics. Wrongo used to think that most Republicans were sincere in their beliefs in a certain moral standard; in fiscal responsibility, in honoring those who served in the military, and respecting police officers and other authority. But over time, every one of those supposed standards has been trampled, and while Trump has been the single biggest perpetrator, all of today’s the loudmouth grifters on the Right also share in this ignominy. It’s doubtful that any argument they make is in good faith.

The irony is that the MAGA Republicans readily abandoned their long-standing heritage of freedom, of democratic rule, of the fundamentals of law dating from the Magna Carta, and of British common law. They’ve replaced it all with the Ethos of Trump. Their patriotism, like Trump’s business prowess, is a sham. Its disposable if political advantage is on the line. See Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-AL) opinions on Ukraine if you doubt this.

And commitment to the principle of equal justice under law? That has been replaced with the saying: “For my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law.”

It’s nothing short of amazing how otherwise principled Republican politicians have flocked to Trump’s side. Their moves started slowly, but picked up steam during his presidency. Now they’re fully espousing whatever Trump says. And since his conviction in NY for fraud, it seems revenge is what’s driving them. Their willingness to shrug off a jury’s ruling and characterize it as illegitimate isn’t a new demonstration of their disregard for the rule of law. We’ve already seen this disregard in two impeachment trials, and in their disavowing any importance to the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection.

The MAGA movement has become a full-blown fascist enterprise before our eyes. The response we’re seeing to Trump’s conviction is bringing it more out in the open. Despite all of Trump’s bankruptcies, his greatest achievement in bankruptcy is in his completing the moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party. But Republicans still hope to re-elect their convicted leader to the White House. Now a felon, Trump cannot possess a gun, but they want to hand him the US military and nuclear arsenal.

Republicans ought to know that there’s no such thing as selling five percent of your soul to Satan. More likely, the Devil is in a Rent-to-Own relationship with the GOP.

Some decent news for your Saturday. Post the Trump verdict, the NYT resurveyed the participants in its last poll of 2,000 people. They found a perceptible shift toward Biden. It was only a couple of points but what’s meaningful about it is who shifted. Nate Cohn wrote:

“Perhaps not surprisingly, the swings were relatively pronounced among young, nonwhite, less engaged and low-turnout voters. In fact, 20% of Mr. Trump’s previous supporters who are Black now say they back Mr. Biden.”

Overall, Mr. Trump retained 93% of voters who told the NYT that they backed him in a previous survey. But in a close election, losing 7% of your supporters could be decisive. More:

“A potentially crucial sliver of Mr. Trump’s former supporters — 3% — now told us they’ll back Mr. Biden, while another 4% say they’re now undecided.”

Also, Trump only leads Biden by 4 points in Florida in the latest poll of the state by Fox News:

Biden is just outside the margin of error, but both of them have slipped slightly since the 2020 election. It should give some faint hope to Democrats, since Florida also has a November ballot initiative that would restore abortion rights. If the Florida initiative passes, abortion will be legalized up to 24 weeks. If it gets anywhere near the 60% required to become law, Biden has a chance in Florida. Trump doesn’t have a path to 270 electoral votes without Florida!

All we have to do is vote.

As usual, we’re heading into the weekend with mostly bad and a smattering of good news. It’s now time for our Saturday Soother, where we unplug from the social media that’s trying to murder our brains, and instead, spend a few moments of relaxation. Here on the Fields of Wrong, we’re attempting to turn a ½ acre patch of our lawn into a meadow that will attract pollinators. So far, the grass is very tall, and there are occasional flowers in bloom. Wrongo planted a few more this week, disturbing the bluebirds in one of our nest boxes in the process.

It’s going to be sunny and warm in the Northeast, so grab a seat under a tree. Now, watch and listen to the late, great Jeff Beck perform “Nessun Dorma”, on the Fender guitar. It’s the wildly popular aria from Puccini’s opera “Turandot” played here at the Crossroads Blues festival in February 2010. Beck also performed “Nessun Dorma” on many other stages. Beck died in January 2023. At the time, a fellow musician said…”If you haven’t heard this version of Nessun Dorma you need to because it can move you to tears.” Strongly recommended:

The Pro-Abortion Political Movement

The Daily Escape:

Artichoke blossom, Imperial County, CA – June 2024 photo by Paulette Donnellon

The repealing of Roe v. Wade via the Dobbs decision has helped create a dynamic new political movement: A revolt of millions of Americans (predominantly women) who think government has no business inserting itself into a woman’s personal decisions. This is going to be an important factor in the 2024 elections as it was in 2022.

The Economist says that only:

“….ten thousand women eligible to vote in this November’s elections were born before women won the right to vote. In the century since then, American women have steadily accumulated rights. In the 1960s the contraceptive pill let women choose how many children they had. In the 1970s no-fault divorce laws and Roe v Wade gave women more choices that had been denied to their mothers. This progress seemed irreversible, and was often taken for granted.”

Then it was time for the Trump-appointed Conservative Supreme Court majority to do what it had been hired to do: Overturn a woman’s right to an abortion. More from The Economist:

“A third of American women aged 15-49 now live in states where abortion is either illegal or impossibly restricted.”

These people are leading the biggest voter rebellion since the Tea Party movement in 2009.

Surprisingly, the number of abortions in the US has risen slightly since the Court’s decision, mostly due to the availability of the drug Mifepristone, which can be prescribed by mail. Medication abortions now account for about 63 percent of pregnancy terminations nationwide. The legality of Mifepristone is also currently under review by the same six Conservative justices. That decision could come down as early as today, and certainly by early July.

What a country! Americans have grown used to the idea that every spring, we wait for 9 unelected government officials with lifetime jobs to tell us what kind of country we’re going to live in. Elections should serve this purpose, and we the people should be doing the telling.

But that revolution remains in our future. What is part of our present is an attempt by House Democrats to force a vote on codifying the right to birth control access nationwide. From the NYT: (brackets by Wrongo):

“The [Democrat’s] maneuver, through a procedural move known as a discharge petition, is all but certain to fail for lack of Republican support, but that is by design. It is part of a broad election-year push by Democrats to highlight Republicans’ record of opposing abortion rights and other reproductive health choices that voters fear will be stripped away following the fall of Roe v. Wade.”

The Senate Democrats also plan to force a vote on an identical contraceptive access bill, which once again, Republicans are expected to block. This coordinated push shows that Democrats regard access to abortion and contraception options as a key issue that will show a contrast with Republicans this fall.

We’ve seen that the Dobbs decision caused an immediate political reaction. Six states have held referendums on abortion, and in all six, the abortion rights side prevailed. A potential problem for anti-abortion Republicans is that referendums to legalize abortion could be on the ballot in up to 16 more states.

Abortion rights campaigners already have enough signatures to get on the ballot in a few states, including Florida. That state is crucial because it was the abortion destination for many women in the South until May 1st, when it outlawed most abortions after six weeks. If the Florida initiative passes, abortion will be legalized up to the point of viability, roughly 24 weeks. Democrats vainly hope the issue has put Florida in play in the presidential election, although it must pass by 60% to become law. It can easily impact the elections in Arizona and other states. More:

“In only two of the six states that have held referendums, California and Vermont, did the abortion-rights side get such a large share. When Michigan held its referendum in 2022, 57% voted in favor of protecting abortion even though 63% broadly supported the procedure, a rate similar to Floridians.”

That means we’re in the middle of a vast political battle that parallels the presidential battle. Outside groups are pouring tens of millions of dollars into competitive House districts to amplify the message. The main super PAC supporting House Democrats last month announced a new $100 million fund focusing on abortion rights in swing districts.

And the group Americans for Contraception plans to spend more than $7 million on television and digital ads, targeting Republicans in the Senate who vote against the bill and House members who do not sign the petition.

A few voters could be pulled away from the Republicans. More from The Economist: (emphasis by Wrongo):

“The midterm elections in 2022 hinted at that….Although only 14% of registered Republican voters were upset about the Dobbs ruling, a quarter of that group voted for a Democrat in their House district…. Republicans and independents who saw abortion as an important issue were more likely to vote for Democrats in 2022 than two years earlier.”

That equals 3.5% of Republicans, and may be among the reasons a predicted “red wave” lifting Republican candidates failed to appear in 2022.

Republicans are in a bind on reproductive rights. They can’t reconcile their Party’s hard-line policies on women’s health and they’re out of step with the vast majority of the country. Despite that, they continue to try to tuck anti-abortion policies into pending legislation.

However the 2024 elections pan out, the anti-Dobbs movement represents something different in US politics. Unlike the Republicans, it isn’t a group of keyboard warriors vying for attention or grift online. Instead it’s people giving up their weekends and evenings to try to persuade their neighbors about an idea they hold deeply.

And it isn’t simply a political cause about a single issue. It’s many issues: The right to live, the right to privacy for medical procedures, the right to not be forced by the state to undergo unnecessary physical or mental injury.

Like most successful revolutions, it’s participatory and local. It is how democracy in America was designed to work. Help it succeed in November!

Cartoons Of The Week – May 26, 2024

The Republican War against women continued as Louisiana became the first state to criminalize abortion pills. The state’s Republican governor Landry signed a bill classifying mifepristone and misoprostol, two drugs used to induce medical abortions as controlled substances.

That puts the abortion pills in same category as anti-anxiety medications Xanax and Valium. The law makes it a crime to possess them without a prescription or outside of a professional medical practice, punishable by one to five years in prison and fines of up to $5,000.

The law will also make it harder for people who need misoprostol for other conditions. The drug is used to induce labor, treat miscarriages, reduce the risk of serious bleeding from ulcers and other indications. This is yet another reason for women everywhere in America to turn Republican legislators out of office.

And we’ve ended another week of decidedly ordinary cartoons, with many about Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and his flags. On to cartoons.

What the future is for women in Louisiana:

Then and now, where “then” wasn’t long ago:

The Red Flags are there. What should we do?

Alito is sitting pretty:

In a not-so-unlikely future:

Haley backtracks on Trump:

Why do Republicans always minimize the Trump outrage du jour?

Cartoons Of The Week – April 14, 2024

The Daily Escape:

Salt Run, St. Augustine FL – April 2024 iPhone photo by Wrongo. This is a tidal inlet fed by the Atlantic Ocean. The far shore is a protected state park and the ocean is just over the dunes in the distance.

Wrongo has been enjoying the spring weather here in Florida, the second stop on our caravan of sibling visits in the south. This view is from my sister’s home.

Many cartoons this week about OJ’s death, along with lots about Arizona’s new anti-abortion bill. Here’s the best that I found. First, a leftover about the eclipse from earlier in the week:

OJ left the building, but isn’t home yet:

OJ’s running just like back in the day:

Ukraine Will Lose If Republicans Have Their Way:

School voucher money is shrinking public school funding:

With a few exceptions, those private schools that far outpace the public ones have the advantage of being able to pick and choose their students. Also, the public gets the schools it demands.

The Arizona fallout won’t be limited to abortion:

Cartoons Of The Week – March 31, 2024

Last week, it seemed as if every cartoonist wanted to draw something about the Baltimore Key Bridge, or about Trump’s bibles. Here’s the best of the lot.

Bridge collision brought some elephants to reality: