I wasn't sure how to share this, but I want you to see it. It's part of a story on dailykos.com today, Oct. 28.
ABORTION SPECIALIST DROPPED FROM PANEL AT AMERICAN COLLEGE OF SURGEONS CONGRESS FOR REASONS OF “SECURITY.”
DOCTOR CALLS IT “CENSORSHIP”.
In May, 2023, Dr. Hern was invited to participate in a panel discussion entitled “What Every Surgeon Needs to Know: Management of Post-Roe Obstetric and Gynecologic Emergencies” at 4:15 PM on October 24, 2023 at the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress to be held at the Boston Convention Center.
Thanks, Grace. Mike Johnson could not be more frightening. Such a dangerous, far-far-right religious extremist trying to pass himself off as a serious politician in his business suit and nerdy glasses. And he got the unanimous endorsement of his party! If things weren't bad enough....
Since No to Christian Nationalism (love the handle) brought up Project 2025 and someone else introduced their sound bite on porn, I’m going to take that discussion a step further.
Many liberals don’t speak far-right language. Jessica talks a lot about their current war on language, but many fail to grasp how they have used language for decades to radicalize people.
Pornography is an example. Liberals hear Project 2025 wants to outlaw porn, and they get upset that PornHub might go away. I cannot say this loudly enough: What you think is porn is NOT what they call porn.
Porn is all art. Porn is any book that includes any sex between unmarried people. Homosexuality is porn. Porn is teaching about sex. Hell, in some of these circles, a woman wearing a modest bathing suit at the pool is porn. Their definition of porn is very broad and encompasses things you’d never dream of. Ditto many of the other sections of this 1,000 page abomination of a document.
I’m sorry if I come across as a lecturing liberal, but if my experience can help us arrive at better messaging to defeat these assholes, I want to put it out there.
Yes!!! Thank you for bringing that up. It’s important for people to hear this. Absolutely anything to these people will qualify as porn. Including art, movies, music, things we see and take for granted everyday will be banned. 💯
Many of their (Republicans') own voters would be surprised at that. The problem is they'll never really truly find out (despite our best efforts) unless they take power, and then it's too late.
Exactly. And they set liberals up to look like the crazies for wanting to force smut on innocent children, but liberals have got to do the extra work to explain what they mean when they talk about porn (or anything.) The left has never meaningfully done that work, and that’s on us to change.
Enough of this is on record to have a heyday with campaign messaging. If only Democrat operatives are smart and bold enough to use it.
Yeah, I don't know how much the tone set by the campaign at the top of the ticket matters, and that does concern me a bit. I'm not an expert, but I was thinking of this the other day and here is as good a place to post it as any (and I just had my weekly therapy session so I'm feeling reasonably good :)
What this election is like, for the median voter, is you shit your pants. You go to the drawer and the only other pair you have is one you shit in yesterday. So the question is, do you change your pants? The Republicans want you to focus on the fresh shit in today's pants, and how uncomfortable that is, and not to think too much about what's in the drawer, it's not as bad as you remember. The Democrats need to argue that whatever's in your pants now, you're only going to make things worse taking them off and putting yesterday's shitty pair back on, and btw they've gotten much worse sitting in the drawer.
What's not effective is trying to convince you that the pants you're wearing right now are clean and fresh. Even if they're truthfully not that bad, that's not how it's feeling. And maybe they will feel better in 12 months time, but we don't have control of that either. The strategy has to be that if you go to that drawer and put those other pants on it's going to be a disaster.
Hopefully they're getting the stupid stuff out of their system now so they find the right messages later. But I don't trust them not to fuck this up. This could be 1980 again except instead of Carter vs. Reagan it's Carter vs. Nixon. That has to make the difference.
Forgive me for taking this long to reply, but you have to submit this somewhere. My husband and I were in the car when I started reading this comment. (He was driving; I was reading.) I laughed until my face hurt, ended up reading it out loud to him, and he laughed, which is the bigger writing accomplishment here. Its perfection. So spot on. Please send it to somebody. Or somebody here who can, publish this.
Ha! Well, you've been published, so you would know! Not sure where the right venue is. It's more important to me that Democrats get the message. It's like, we're trying to insist the pants are great when all the polls are telling us something else. Do I think it's that bad? No, not really. Yeah inflation is still higher than we want it (housing costs are a BIG problem), there are two wars going on in the world, and there are lots of refugees at our border. I get the sense of malaise, though I think a lot of it comes from the stark division of the country. But it doesn't matter what I think. If voters tell you they're grumpy, you don't run ads saying "Woohoo Bidenomics!" It is THE dumbest thing you can do. When you are president there is nothing your -campaign- can do to change voters' opinion of you; you can only do that through your actions in office. You get blamed for everything, and most of it is beyond your control. This is like the most basic Politics 101. So you either drop out, or you make the other guy's numbers even worse. I hope -events- get better and Biden's numbers drift up, but they might not. Events might get worse. And idk whether the Democrats really understand that they CANNOT lose this election and just pick up the pieces at the next one. There is no next one.
A lot can happen between now and next November. I’m convinced Biden won last time because of covid. 45 was cruising until then. Many many many Americans don’t understand what’s at stake, because as long as they aren’t inconvenienced, they don’t want to be bothered. There are more of them than people who vote.
Sharing a conversation I had with my daughter's school nurse yesterday. My daughter had bad cramps and the nurse called me to ask what medicine she had taken at home before school so she could help her further. She then said she instructed my daughter to track her period with a phone app, so she could head off the cramps with a dose or two of Advil. Nurse was very well meaning, but I said oh no no no no to the tracker and I told her why.
Fighting the good fight with every conversation, everywhere, no matter how big or small.
Good for you! We have to protect our daughters now. That’s the most important thing. She can always buy a paper calendar, and use a code word or sticker to track. That’s what I do now ❤️ a paper calendar can always be burned ❤️
Trump's endorsement of Johnson is just jaw-dropping, coming about a month after he criticized DeSantis for his 6-week (total, really) abortion ban, not because he cares about women or our lives, but because it will cost them votes. He cheers on Johnson, who actually seems worse than DeSantis, if that's possible, and the Republicans all line up behind him. Do any of them care about anything but raw power anymore? It's just sickening.
Johnson is a 'true believer', but supposedly he takes care to be polite and 'civil' about it. That's how he won over the caucus. They won't change their policies but they might change the way they try to sell them, and our side needs to be very ready for that.
I've given up on them being statesmen and stateswomen. They don't care about our democracy, about human rights, about kindness or compassion. I've give up on those "leaders." It's the voters. He came down the escalator saying racist things and 7 million voted for him. Then he proceeded to take a wrecking ball to the country, subjugating women as a step toward authoritarianism and even more people voted for him. It's the voters.
Yep. The problem is we're trying to share a country with these people. In an ideal world there would be a 'rapture' to whisk the 74 million who voted for Trump away to hell and then the rest of us could breathe again, but it's not happening. In the real world all we can do is keep trying to hold the middle, whatever happens. I'm not sure we're doing a very good job of that right now.
Re: the New York Times piece about Poland developing a test for mifepristone and misoprostol in women's blood: I really appreciate the critical review of this piece, via the linked Wired article. That NYT report scared the s** out of me, and I didn't dig deep enough to realize that those studies were so biased and small. That's my good thing for the week, lol. 😂
The piece on Mike Johnson is good, but I would suggest a more in-depth piece as a follow up. It should be chock full of quotes and videos, e.g. quotes from briefs or any other statements Johnson has made. Also a full description of any legislation John has cosponsored on abortion. The Democratic party and activists like Indivisible already have the basic message. What they can use is raw material that can be used for ads. Videos would be especially useful for this.
Per Johnson, women need to be forced to birth (and raise to working age) more "able bodied workers" in order to pay into social security and medicare and prevent it from "toppling." In other words, women need have more babies so that tax cuts for the rich can continue.
Sigh. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I have a very bad feeling about this, which I get, is not based in fact. I worry with Mike Johnson being so close to the Presidency, that another coup is afoot. They know they can’t win. They see the polls. If Biden and Kamala are removed, Mike will take over and if Mike takes over, Project 2025 will come to pass. For those who don’t know what Project 2025 is, please look it up. One of its “suggestions” is a nationwide ban on porn - and those who make it. Michael Johnson has already equated being to gay to being pornographic. Connect the dots.
It’s not a conspiracy theory to say 45’s coup attempt never stopped, because it hasn’t. They failed in 2020 because they didn’t have the right people in position. They aren’t making that mistake this time. Hence, hundreds of vacant military posts waiting to be filled by loyalists and a maga cult member as speaker. Because even if Biden wins in a landslide, this asshole will do everything he can to prevent the certification.
And Project 2025 should be in the news every day. Democrats should be tearing that thing apart for campaign fodder.
Yeah. The election will bring one of three things, all of which are bad. Trump (or even another Republican) wins and they move to impose fascism. Biden wins and Republicans revolt (they're clearly telegraphing as much). Or it's too close to figure out who won and it's a free for all. I'd take door #2 as least bad, although if one cared only about the future and not the present, (which I disagree with because not everyone survives the present to get to that future), there's a case for #1 being the only long term solution, that the only way to eradicate this and set the stage for a new peace is to try it and have it fail spectacularly, just like WWII. I'd rather slowly starve it to death, but it seems like that's going to take a decade or two.
Honestly that's probably one of the less bad outcomes. A coup will generate more resistance and it could actually be easier to dispose of them that way. I'm worried about the Republicans winning the election fair and square. The voters are unhappy and they don't have confidence in Biden; most of the polling suggests Trump would win an election today. If that happens it won't be because of Republicans doing something right but because of Democrats failing, so it will take more time to build the resistance, time we don't have.
Another gem from the Project: "Project 2025's blueprint includes repealing the Inflation Reduction Act—a landmark law that offers US$370 billion to clean technology, shuttering the Loan Programs Office at the Department of Energy, eliminating climate change from the National Security Council agenda, and encouraging allied nations to use fossil fuels."
So let's encourage more use of fossil fuels. They don't even hide it. It was Nixon who started the EPA, just as a side fun fact. Boy has that party become rudderless.
Thanks for bringing up Project 2025. Horrifying!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"This includes educators and librarians being registered as sex offenders, and the closing down of telecommunication and technology firms that "facilitate its spread". When discussing the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Roger Severino, the Heritage Foundation's vice-president on domestic policy, calls for the rescinding of regulations "prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc."[12]"
I wasn't sure how to share this, but I want you to see it. It's part of a story on dailykos.com today, Oct. 28.
ABORTION SPECIALIST DROPPED FROM PANEL AT AMERICAN COLLEGE OF SURGEONS CONGRESS FOR REASONS OF “SECURITY.”
DOCTOR CALLS IT “CENSORSHIP”.
In May, 2023, Dr. Hern was invited to participate in a panel discussion entitled “What Every Surgeon Needs to Know: Management of Post-Roe Obstetric and Gynecologic Emergencies” at 4:15 PM on October 24, 2023 at the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress to be held at the Boston Convention Center.
Thanks, Grace. Mike Johnson could not be more frightening. Such a dangerous, far-far-right religious extremist trying to pass himself off as a serious politician in his business suit and nerdy glasses. And he got the unanimous endorsement of his party! If things weren't bad enough....
Since No to Christian Nationalism (love the handle) brought up Project 2025 and someone else introduced their sound bite on porn, I’m going to take that discussion a step further.
Many liberals don’t speak far-right language. Jessica talks a lot about their current war on language, but many fail to grasp how they have used language for decades to radicalize people.
Pornography is an example. Liberals hear Project 2025 wants to outlaw porn, and they get upset that PornHub might go away. I cannot say this loudly enough: What you think is porn is NOT what they call porn.
Porn is all art. Porn is any book that includes any sex between unmarried people. Homosexuality is porn. Porn is teaching about sex. Hell, in some of these circles, a woman wearing a modest bathing suit at the pool is porn. Their definition of porn is very broad and encompasses things you’d never dream of. Ditto many of the other sections of this 1,000 page abomination of a document.
I’m sorry if I come across as a lecturing liberal, but if my experience can help us arrive at better messaging to defeat these assholes, I want to put it out there.
Talk about Y'all Qaeda. This is Middle Eastern level religious extremism.
Y’all Qaeda is new to me, too. AND IT IS PERFECT. That smirk is the essence of y’all qaeda.
Can't believe I haven't heard that one before!
Yes!!! Thank you for bringing that up. It’s important for people to hear this. Absolutely anything to these people will qualify as porn. Including art, movies, music, things we see and take for granted everyday will be banned. 💯
Many of their (Republicans') own voters would be surprised at that. The problem is they'll never really truly find out (despite our best efforts) unless they take power, and then it's too late.
Exactly. And they set liberals up to look like the crazies for wanting to force smut on innocent children, but liberals have got to do the extra work to explain what they mean when they talk about porn (or anything.) The left has never meaningfully done that work, and that’s on us to change.
Enough of this is on record to have a heyday with campaign messaging. If only Democrat operatives are smart and bold enough to use it.
Yeah, I don't know how much the tone set by the campaign at the top of the ticket matters, and that does concern me a bit. I'm not an expert, but I was thinking of this the other day and here is as good a place to post it as any (and I just had my weekly therapy session so I'm feeling reasonably good :)
What this election is like, for the median voter, is you shit your pants. You go to the drawer and the only other pair you have is one you shit in yesterday. So the question is, do you change your pants? The Republicans want you to focus on the fresh shit in today's pants, and how uncomfortable that is, and not to think too much about what's in the drawer, it's not as bad as you remember. The Democrats need to argue that whatever's in your pants now, you're only going to make things worse taking them off and putting yesterday's shitty pair back on, and btw they've gotten much worse sitting in the drawer.
What's not effective is trying to convince you that the pants you're wearing right now are clean and fresh. Even if they're truthfully not that bad, that's not how it's feeling. And maybe they will feel better in 12 months time, but we don't have control of that either. The strategy has to be that if you go to that drawer and put those other pants on it's going to be a disaster.
Hopefully they're getting the stupid stuff out of their system now so they find the right messages later. But I don't trust them not to fuck this up. This could be 1980 again except instead of Carter vs. Reagan it's Carter vs. Nixon. That has to make the difference.
Forgive me for taking this long to reply, but you have to submit this somewhere. My husband and I were in the car when I started reading this comment. (He was driving; I was reading.) I laughed until my face hurt, ended up reading it out loud to him, and he laughed, which is the bigger writing accomplishment here. Its perfection. So spot on. Please send it to somebody. Or somebody here who can, publish this.
Ha! Well, you've been published, so you would know! Not sure where the right venue is. It's more important to me that Democrats get the message. It's like, we're trying to insist the pants are great when all the polls are telling us something else. Do I think it's that bad? No, not really. Yeah inflation is still higher than we want it (housing costs are a BIG problem), there are two wars going on in the world, and there are lots of refugees at our border. I get the sense of malaise, though I think a lot of it comes from the stark division of the country. But it doesn't matter what I think. If voters tell you they're grumpy, you don't run ads saying "Woohoo Bidenomics!" It is THE dumbest thing you can do. When you are president there is nothing your -campaign- can do to change voters' opinion of you; you can only do that through your actions in office. You get blamed for everything, and most of it is beyond your control. This is like the most basic Politics 101. So you either drop out, or you make the other guy's numbers even worse. I hope -events- get better and Biden's numbers drift up, but they might not. Events might get worse. And idk whether the Democrats really understand that they CANNOT lose this election and just pick up the pieces at the next one. There is no next one.
A lot can happen between now and next November. I’m convinced Biden won last time because of covid. 45 was cruising until then. Many many many Americans don’t understand what’s at stake, because as long as they aren’t inconvenienced, they don’t want to be bothered. There are more of them than people who vote.
Sharing a conversation I had with my daughter's school nurse yesterday. My daughter had bad cramps and the nurse called me to ask what medicine she had taken at home before school so she could help her further. She then said she instructed my daughter to track her period with a phone app, so she could head off the cramps with a dose or two of Advil. Nurse was very well meaning, but I said oh no no no no to the tracker and I told her why.
Fighting the good fight with every conversation, everywhere, no matter how big or small.
Of course, your daughter may wonder what a this paper marvel is from a bygone era 😂🤣 but hey, at least she can track her symptoms and be safe.
Good for you! We have to protect our daughters now. That’s the most important thing. She can always buy a paper calendar, and use a code word or sticker to track. That’s what I do now ❤️ a paper calendar can always be burned ❤️
It's just disgusting that we have to live this way.
Trump's endorsement of Johnson is just jaw-dropping, coming about a month after he criticized DeSantis for his 6-week (total, really) abortion ban, not because he cares about women or our lives, but because it will cost them votes. He cheers on Johnson, who actually seems worse than DeSantis, if that's possible, and the Republicans all line up behind him. Do any of them care about anything but raw power anymore? It's just sickening.
Johnson is a 'true believer', but supposedly he takes care to be polite and 'civil' about it. That's how he won over the caucus. They won't change their policies but they might change the way they try to sell them, and our side needs to be very ready for that.
All they care about is raw power, fueled by hate.
I've given up on them being statesmen and stateswomen. They don't care about our democracy, about human rights, about kindness or compassion. I've give up on those "leaders." It's the voters. He came down the escalator saying racist things and 7 million voted for him. Then he proceeded to take a wrecking ball to the country, subjugating women as a step toward authoritarianism and even more people voted for him. It's the voters.
Yep. The problem is we're trying to share a country with these people. In an ideal world there would be a 'rapture' to whisk the 74 million who voted for Trump away to hell and then the rest of us could breathe again, but it's not happening. In the real world all we can do is keep trying to hold the middle, whatever happens. I'm not sure we're doing a very good job of that right now.
Re: the New York Times piece about Poland developing a test for mifepristone and misoprostol in women's blood: I really appreciate the critical review of this piece, via the linked Wired article. That NYT report scared the s** out of me, and I didn't dig deep enough to realize that those studies were so biased and small. That's my good thing for the week, lol. 😂
Mike Johnson is just the "friendly face" of the far-right MAGA movement. He's also an election denier.
The piece on Mike Johnson is good, but I would suggest a more in-depth piece as a follow up. It should be chock full of quotes and videos, e.g. quotes from briefs or any other statements Johnson has made. Also a full description of any legislation John has cosponsored on abortion. The Democratic party and activists like Indivisible already have the basic message. What they can use is raw material that can be used for ads. Videos would be especially useful for this.
Per Johnson, women need to be forced to birth (and raise to working age) more "able bodied workers" in order to pay into social security and medicare and prevent it from "toppling." In other words, women need have more babies so that tax cuts for the rich can continue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS0oJnJ2oME
They are pro-slavery and have been since the founding of this country. It's the same people.
Sigh. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I have a very bad feeling about this, which I get, is not based in fact. I worry with Mike Johnson being so close to the Presidency, that another coup is afoot. They know they can’t win. They see the polls. If Biden and Kamala are removed, Mike will take over and if Mike takes over, Project 2025 will come to pass. For those who don’t know what Project 2025 is, please look it up. One of its “suggestions” is a nationwide ban on porn - and those who make it. Michael Johnson has already equated being to gay to being pornographic. Connect the dots.
I hope I’m wrong.
It’s not a conspiracy theory to say 45’s coup attempt never stopped, because it hasn’t. They failed in 2020 because they didn’t have the right people in position. They aren’t making that mistake this time. Hence, hundreds of vacant military posts waiting to be filled by loyalists and a maga cult member as speaker. Because even if Biden wins in a landslide, this asshole will do everything he can to prevent the certification.
And Project 2025 should be in the news every day. Democrats should be tearing that thing apart for campaign fodder.
Yeah. The election will bring one of three things, all of which are bad. Trump (or even another Republican) wins and they move to impose fascism. Biden wins and Republicans revolt (they're clearly telegraphing as much). Or it's too close to figure out who won and it's a free for all. I'd take door #2 as least bad, although if one cared only about the future and not the present, (which I disagree with because not everyone survives the present to get to that future), there's a case for #1 being the only long term solution, that the only way to eradicate this and set the stage for a new peace is to try it and have it fail spectacularly, just like WWII. I'd rather slowly starve it to death, but it seems like that's going to take a decade or two.
Honestly that's probably one of the less bad outcomes. A coup will generate more resistance and it could actually be easier to dispose of them that way. I'm worried about the Republicans winning the election fair and square. The voters are unhappy and they don't have confidence in Biden; most of the polling suggests Trump would win an election today. If that happens it won't be because of Republicans doing something right but because of Democrats failing, so it will take more time to build the resistance, time we don't have.
Another gem from the Project: "Project 2025's blueprint includes repealing the Inflation Reduction Act—a landmark law that offers US$370 billion to clean technology, shuttering the Loan Programs Office at the Department of Energy, eliminating climate change from the National Security Council agenda, and encouraging allied nations to use fossil fuels."
So let's encourage more use of fossil fuels. They don't even hide it. It was Nixon who started the EPA, just as a side fun fact. Boy has that party become rudderless.
Thanks for bringing up Project 2025. Horrifying!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"This includes educators and librarians being registered as sex offenders, and the closing down of telecommunication and technology firms that "facilitate its spread". When discussing the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Roger Severino, the Heritage Foundation's vice-president on domestic policy, calls for the rescinding of regulations "prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc."[12]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
I hope you're wrong too, especially relating to porn.