By David Futrelle
What a fucking dark day for women, for survivors, for everyone who cares about democracy.
Here’s a thread for venting, lamenting, planning for November and beyond. No trolls.
Some relevant tweets:
We are a country where two presidents who both lost the popular vote have now placed four justices on the Supreme Court. Democracy in action.
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) October 5, 2018
https://twitter.com/floozyesq/status/1048274194830675968
The logic of popular democracy, and the structural fact of minority rule are going to make for an increasingly combustible mix.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) October 5, 2018
https://twitter.com/WesleyLowery/status/1048303187994824706
https://twitter.com/OsitaNwanevu/status/1048229711963467776
End gerrymandering. Statehood for DC and Puerto Rico.
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) October 5, 2018
https://twitter.com/persenche/status/1048318977464623105
https://twitter.com/Ethelmonster/status/1048305764861927427
I hope @SenatorCollins is proud of doing her part to promote rape culture.
Just read these (TW for sexual violence survivors): pic.twitter.com/EnsjQsY85h
— Leah McElrath (@leahmcelrath) October 5, 2018
Also every white guy currently explaining the (extremely real) villainy of white women to me can take a seat until they’ve come to collect Joe Manchin, almost all of the Republican Party, and the vastest share of Trump’s base.
— Rebecca Traister (@rtraister) October 5, 2018
Not sure where to direct your anger? If you have the extra scratch, start here… https://t.co/x0Za0bXQl5
— shauna (@goldengateblond) October 5, 2018
There are a lot of reasons to be angry today. This thread presents a few reasons for hope.
I come bearing glad tidings. Not distractions like goats and strawberries. But actually glad—meaning the pain of our enemies—tidings.
1. Trump Foundation in scalding hot water. https://t.co/fuiNuVA91h
— Virginia Heffernan (@page88) October 5, 2018
The symbolism here seems a bit on the nose.
This video of President Trump with toilet paper on his shoe is 100% real. He was boarding Air Force One in Minneapolis earlier today. pic.twitter.com/wr0ZnXknCx
— Beatrice Peterson (@missbeae on all platforms) (@MissBeaE) October 5, 2018
It’s weird how Soros conspiracy theories have been moving from the fringe to the mainstream. Now Giuliani has retweeted this:
Normal country.
@Moggie
The weirdest thing is that, billionaire-wise, Soros is small beans. The Koch brothers are each worth nearly 10 times what he is. Trump and Thiel together are worth about the same amount as Soros.
Presumably the subtext is “there’s a vast and powerful left-wing conspiracy behind him” rather than “right-wing billionaires are inefficient and incompetent”.
Don’t overlook the anti-semitic angle, when the right criticises Soros. When he’s referred to as the anti-Christ, the dog whistle could hardly be louder. When a close associate of the president retweets someone calling for the freezing of the assets of a wealthy Jew, I think American Jews could be forgiven for wondering whether a Kristallnacht is coming.
Freeze his assets on what basis? I’m old enough to remember when the Republicans were screaming about due process.
This is truly frightening. They really do believe that they have consolidated power to such a degree that they won’t ever be held accountable again. I hope it’s because they’re just overconfident due to living in a bubble. I fear it’s because the elections are rigged and they know they’ll win no matter what. The other possibility is they’ll accuse China of rigging it if the Democrats win one or both houses of congress and will make an attempt at overturning the election.
I’m also starting to be certain that now Trump knows that he can’t be indicted while in office, he doesn’t intend to ever leave office.
As a Mainer, I’ve been seeing white hot anger against Susan Collins from my friends and co-workers who were formerly lukewarm or apathetic about her. Year after year, Mainers have been returning her to Washington because she was supposedly “moderate” and had seniority. She talked a good game about standing up for her constituents and not playing politics.
Those days are over. She’s squandered any good will she once had.
Maine now has ranked choice voting. It’s going to eliminate third spoiler candidates siphoning votes away from Democrats, which is what’s helped Susan Collins stay in power and gave us eight years of our very own little mini-Trump governor. Her approval rating among likely Maine voters has plummeted from 60% last year to 35% in the latest poll (and that was before she announced her yes vote). Voters started turning against her when she sold us out on the tax bill and got played by Mitch McConnell. The Crowdpac $20.20 fundraiser has already raised $2 million dollars for her opponent.
As for Kavanaugh, it’s beyond outrageous that a lying rapist with an alcohol and gambling problem and mysterious debt benefactors is being rewarded with a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. It’s horrifying, the extent to which they don’t care and we don’t matter.
I think it’s worth reflecting that at no time in history have we ever been able to depend on the Supreme Court to defend the rights of women, minorities, workers, poor people, and dissenters. Those rights only come alive when people boycott, protest, and violate the law. Courts are not the vanguard of social justice. They lag behind by decades. Courts only come around much later, after citizens engage in direct action powerful enough to win these rights for themselves. The Brown v. Board of Education decision didn’t come from a suddenly enlightened court realizing that desegregated schools are a good idea. It came about because of the bravery of Southern families, and the realization by the government that they were losing hearts and minds around the globe, at a time when the Cold War was in full swing. Roe vs. Wade started out as a grassroots campaign, state by state.
It’s going to be up to us, at the state level, to find a way to subvert all the shitty decisions that are going to get handed down by the Kavanaugh court. It’s depressing, and it sucks, that we’re going to have to fight the same stupid battles all over again just to regain lost ground. But the Mitch McConnells of the world need to discover that abandoning the rule of law cuts both ways. If they refuse to recognize our humanity by extending the same basic rights they claim for themselves, we’re not obligated to respect them as legitimate rulers. Whatever way we can fuck up the system, whether it’s voting or takeovers of local school boards or consumer boycotts or everybody kneeling for the national anthem, I’m all for it.
What do you think the reason behind this was? Is Collins afraid of being primaried? Was she promised a cushy lobbying or consulting job if she votes yes and it costs her her seat? Is she just so removed from her constituents that she thinks voting yes is what they wanted? It just seems so cruel and sadistic to string along the entire country and listen to constituents who are survivors of sexual violence beg her to vote no only to announce at the last minute that she’s a yes. Why give up the pretense that she’s a reasonable and compassionate pro choice moderate when her entire career and all the good will she gets from the political press is based on that pretense?
I read somewhere that her husband is a lobbyist with financial ties to Russian oligarchs. Is that true?
Used to post here sometimes, have been lurking for months.
iknklast wrote:
Yeah, I’m no longer convinced it makes any difference, and I’m a member of the white middle class. How much more discouraged must minorities and those worse off than I am feel? Nobody cares.
I’m reading Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, and though I’ve always been loath to invoke the dictator, I’m seeing parallels between his rise and Drumpf’s. I’m very worried, and feel utterly powerless.
Re “Soros money”
Apparently, Koch et al think their money is too good to be spent on things like political influence. Or else…
This summer, I ended up discussing politics with a couple coworkers, who I thought might perhaps want to join the Helsinki summit main protest against Trump/Putin.
One of them claimed she feels any political protesting is potentially personally risky, and therefore to be avoided. OK, whatever. Her family is from China, so maybe it’s an inherited attitude. Maybe it was just a polite excuse.
The other coworker turned out to be an “immigration critic” and a believer in some weird shit. He claimed to believe that political protesting, voting etc. is a waste of time because everything is really run by “a few oligarch families”. Of course, that may also have been a polite excuse. Who knows, maybe he went to attend a pro-Trump gathering that weekend, like a small handful of Finns did.
Anyway, he sounded quite serious explaining that these “few” oligarchs own “most of the world’s wealth”. He didn’t claim it was a particularly left-wing oligarchy – instead he went straight on to mention “the Rothschilds” and their “3 trillion property”*. Later, he mentioned “Jews and Arabs” as examples of these oligarchs. So indeed, a vastly powerful and notably ethnic oligarchy, it’d seem. He claimed to have learned it from some Russian friends (that he’d known in meatspace).
* Just being generally out of words, and to amuse myself, I tried to confirm if he meant this in US trillions (and dollars, I’d presume) or European trillions. He didn’t seem to know or care about the difference. Maybe it was just meant as “very large number”. Mind you, we work/study in a field that generally requires certain amount of pedantry about facts and definitions.
@WWTH – Eric Garland had a thread about Susan Collins’ husband, Thomas Daffron, and his lobbyist ties to Russia. Was that where you heard about it?
https://mobile.twitter.com/ericgarland/status/1038894217756598272
I don’t know for sure if she’s compromised, but she’s certainly behaving like it. Her emails likely would have been included in the RNC hack. It’s really suspicious how many GOP lawmakers have taken a rightward lurch in the past 18 months. Lindsay Graham went from dissing Trump to being one of his biggest cheerleaders practically overnight. There’s either a carrot (wealth and unlimited power) or a stick (stay out of jail) behind their autocratic behavior.
Maybe she figures her best move is to burn her bridges with Maine voters, retire in 2020, and accept a cushy Heritage Foundation job. She was making noises about retiring this year and running for governor, but then abruptly decided her country needed her. (Like a hole in the head.)
Whatever her deal is, it’s clear there’s no place for moderates in the GOP any more. Maybe if the Republicans had been nicer and smiled more often, they wouldn’t have driven the independent voters away from her.
I am full of very salty “I fucking told you so” the Supreme Court was in play, and people didn’t bother to vote, or hated Hillary or what the fuck ever. Jesus what a clusterfuck. I am angry, but I expected this so I suppose I’m in better emotional shape, because I’ve stayed angry. Part of me will always be angry and I welcome this
Fuck.
Well, I’m obviously getting stuck in the spam file.
Which is par for the fucking course, these days.
Piss on it all. Fuck it, I’m done.
@WWTH
So am I. It was just this week, while they were busy making sure due process wasn’t served.
Missed the edit window. But I think we could all use some brain bleach.
Montserrat Caballe has died, which is not really the sort of brain bleach I’d like, but is an excuse for watching this again.
Actually, this might be more appropriate:
Oh God, Ford is going to be hounded and harassed for years by Trumpletons. For all their shrieks of “due process” for Brett, they’ll be sending her death threats for “false accusations” because don’t all women lie about rape? Unless she is white and the perp isn’t. Of course. /s
Ladies and gents, are we seeing a backlash to #MeToo? I mean, revolving around the case has been a lot more articles *about* false rape accusations lately, and op pieces about how “men can’t even say Hi to a woman now” blah blah blah. I’m so afraid that alt-righters will use K’s confirmation as “proof that she was lying” and from that, have ammunition to accuse every alleged rape that makes it to the news as “bitch be lying, just like Ford.”
Oh and no doubt they’ll whip out the “white conservative men are so persecuted boo hoo” card as well.
So, yes, he’ll be confirmed. I never doubted it, the Republicans have a majority right now. But here’s the thing: dude put a huge black cloud over his own head for no good reason. He played the partisan hack. He lied to the Senate, and we all heard it. He’d better hope Republicans retain the Senate, because if they don’t I guarantee we’ll all find out how a SC justice impeachment works. And he’ll blame everybody else, but he did this. Amy Barrett wouldn’t have been so stupid, so maybe we dodged a bullet there.
So it happened after all that – Kavanaugh became one of the Supreme Court judges. Ugh.
@Surplus – I don’t have great news in Quebec either. The CAQ (Coalition Avenir Quebec (“avenir” means, roughly, “future”)) just won the election and they’re talking about limiting immigration and rights for religious minorities.
Some background – for the past 40 years, Quebec has been governed by either the PQ (Parti Quebecois) or the Liberals. Their main difference: the PQ favours Quebec independence, and the Liberals union with Canada. The CAQ wanted to put aside that old argument.
Now, the PQ and Liberals are both supposed to be centre-left. The PQ (though mostly progressive in terms of feminism and LGBTQ+ rights) tried to pass a xenophobic “Charter of Quebec Values”* last time it was in power. The CAQ is NOT better on this – it’s centre-right, so it’s adding conservative anti-immigration sentiment to the old Islamophobia. Joy. 🙁
*Anti-hijab thing, mainly. Under the guise of secularism, it aimed to ban public servants (police officers, teachers, etc.) from wearing “overt religious symbols”… while keeping the giant cross in the National Assembly, of course.
That’s basically what the CAQ wants to bring back. Even if the law weren’t mostly aimed at ethnic minorities and discouraging them from getting jobs, I don’t like think restricting clothing like hijabs or kippahs makes sense from a secular perspective. Don’t think government should be religious? Me neither! So don’t act like a bloody theocracy by banning clothes for religion-related reasons! FFS.
(I’m a bit tired/grumpy; sorry if this is long or unclear.)
@epitome of incomprehensibility
I’m waiting with bated breath, really I am, for the Jewish teacher to be fired for wearing a kippah. Or at least for Legault’s face should every male Jewish teacher in the province decide to wear a kippah in solidarity.
I mean, being anti-Islam is fine, but it’s a lot harder to get away with that sort of anti-Semitism. But not firing them would make him an obvious enough hypocrite, even he might feel some shame.
And if others went to work wearing openly displayed crucifixes and signs on their head saying “Dare you.”
Also, since Ford, a few weeks ago, used the not-withstanding clause to overrule a court ruling (that his slashing the number of Toronto councillors *after the local elections had started* was unconstitutional), Francois Legault has said he’ll use it to push through any “no religious headgear” law he wants.
I feel like we Canadians should probably point out that there’s a difference between Ford (as in Doug, as in much less pleasant brother of Rob) and Dr. Ford (as in Oh God I hope she’s all right does she need to move to Canada I’m sure we can organize something).
Mars Attacks: HAHAHA THEY BLEW UP CONGRESS!
It is probably morally wrong to wish the terrorists blew up D.C.
It’s probably morally wrong to wish Obama didn’t kill all the terrorists who would now be prone to blowing up D.C.
I would say that I wish for this supposedly morally wrong thing, but I am afraid the FBI will show up at my door.
Never thought I would say “where are the terrorists now!?”
Not saying that I’m saying that.
Just sayin.
I think a serious case could be made for her deserving asylum because her life is in danger in the US.
Related: I don’t know if she has any desire to put herself through that, but I wonder what would happen if she decided to file charges against him? There’s no statute of limitations where the crime occured. What happens when a Supreme Court judge is convicted of a crime?
My main fear is all these right wing victories are empowering their hateful rhetoric and is going to result in *shudder* Jason Kenny and UCP beating the NDP in Alberta & Sheer beating Trudeau for PM. Kenney is totally the poster boy for right wing idiots, though. He barely graduated high school, and has been in politics pretty much ever since. He was one of Harper’s buddies and he’s not even from Alberta, so he should be disqualified on that basis alone. He should have stayed in Ontario, The fighting between him & Ford might have let someone decent win.
Fortunately, the federal Conservatives are going to be divided because the Canadian Trumpites are going to vote for Bernier, who’s still given the funniest “I promise I’m not a racist!” interviews I’ve ever seen.
Not that Trudeau is that great, but he’s generally not actively horrible for the sake of being horrible. And sure, he makes the right noises more than he does the right things, but making the right noises is better than nothing.
As for Dr. Ford, her professional qualifications ought to get her into the country if she wants. Unfortunately, so far the third-country agreement still holds, so we can’t accept anyone from the US as a refugee. Have to rescind that agreement before we could let her in on that basis. Still, now that Nafta’s been renegotiated, and isn’t called Nafta any more, so Trump doesn’t care, we could possibly take the risk of insulting the elephant next door by rescinding it.
We won’t, but we could.
@Surplus
The Democrats are a right-wing party, just not (quite) as far right as Republicans.
@WWTH
Collins is a Republican, and therefore has no conception of ethics, morals, or the public good. Any Republican who claims to be moderate is lying; the last moderate Republican was Dwight Eisenhower.