Continuing from Stanton's blather: "Most Americans do not know a new, individual, and living member of the human species begins to exist at fertilization. And younger Americans are the least informed. Consider this horrifying statistic: nearly one in four 18-22-year-olds think that a human life starts at birth."
No. That's such a manipulative sentence. Wow. Shame on Newsweek for letting her get away with that. There's no much wrong with her argument. She doesn't get to decide how to define "member of the human species," then cite a poll where the respondents didn't meet her definition. That's crap.
When that "member of the human species" can be a "new, individual" without having to be an extricable part of me, you can start to craft laws around it. Like Roe was. You can't subjugate me to get to your definition of "living member of the human species."
This woman is fanatical. Like almost the entire GOP. They have no governing philosophy other than to see this fanatical view of the world come to fruition, no matter how they achieve it.
Shame on Newsweek !!! " ...the fate of unborn children has been left to the whims of voters rather than to the "equal protection of the laws" for "any person" guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment."
Enough.
How do the editorial page editors let Stanton get away with this lie? Do they have such lax standards as to allow her to argue that "any person" includes embryos? That's INSANE. And this use of language is going to seep into the body politic as normal. They're trying to normalize it. We can't let that happen. I don't know what I'd do without this newsletter....
The 'mainstream' media will get us all killed if we let them. That's how these things happen, when the guards against them fail. I always go back to 1930s Germany.
Yes. I've said that if they win they trifecta (which they will if they're winning the presidency), they'll try to silence journalists, activists, artists and other creatives, academics, etc. Authoritarians always pass a 'national security' law. I'm sure too many Americans can't imagine that, but the thing to remember is that the atmosphere in the country after they'd just won an election would be completely different from now.
The attack on science education is terrifying to me because I was a high school biology teacher. I notice that young women are never taught about what happens to their bodies during pregnancy and all of the risks, warning signs to be aware of, or ways to mitigate risks during pregnancy. It seems like something that ought to be taught but has never been taught. Women are left to find out on their own. I remember showing The Miracle of Life and I am pretty sure that it concentrated exclusively on the fetus, almost as though the mother was unimportant.
The mother IS unimportant in our world. That's the sickening truth. If we wanted to distill the thousands of years of misogyny in human societies down to one tenet, I don't think there's a better illustration. And it's so exactly backwards from the way it should be.
The only thing I'm legitimately confused by is the fight for abortion 'reversal'. It just seems counterintuitive? Why would you want it out there that if you get an abortion, don't worry, you can 'reverse' it? Especially when clinical trials got halted cause everyone kept, uhhh, bleeding or something?
So sad that CNN used this language. And that even progressive Jen Psaki fell into the Republican trap in discussing late-term abortion! The mainstream media needs to be corrected every time this happens to reduce these kinds of misstatements. And Jessica is so correct that we need to keep repeating that NO legislation of abortion is acceptable. As the campaign unfurls there will unfortunately be so much misinformation to correct, and as the Republicans continue to debate the number of weeks in a so-called acceptable ban, the more this will be imprinted on the minds of the general public.
It's a tiny wave in the ocean. But let's not forget the Dissenting Opinion of Chief Justice Donald Beatty in the South Carolina case this week:
"The result will essentially force an UNTOLD NUMBER of affected women to give birth without their consent. I AM HARD-PRESSED TO THINK OF A GREATER GOVERNMENT INTRUSION BY A POLITICAL BODY (my caps)."
The Republicans have held the legislature for so long in South Carolina that I'm certain all the justices were appointed by Republicans. So anytime a Republican speaks out against these laws it's a good thing.
Can't read past the CNN thing. (I stopped watching CNN after the Trump propaganda show.) Reading that "abortion survivor" line is just infuriating. Forget the mainstream media. They don't get it and they're blinded by trying to be objective when objectivity about lies and subjugation is really aiding and abetting our descent into an authoritarian state.
Ron DeSantis is an IDIOT. His answers during that debate were nonsensical -- shooting drug traffickers in Mexico "stone-cold dead." I mean, really !
That debate overall was terrifying. One of them said the first thing he'd do to combat crime is fire Garland. They don't even know how the transition from one administration to the other works!
I know this fight will now come to my town. I live in a conservative upper middle class town in NJ that voted for TFG 2-1. I laugh driving through it, with its nice lakeside neighborhoods and big wasteful houses (we don't live in one of those) and think oh yeah sure, American Carnage right here...
Our BOE is full of Moms of Liberty. They will love this k-12 "science" overhaul. OMG. I'm glad my kids are teens and very educated about the facts!
Idk what control the state has over education standards in NJ, but that's my first thought for how to stop it. Of course it's the exact opposite in red states where the state is overruling school boards in blue cities.
"You may recall that Texas is being sued by a former prison guard who had a stillbirth after her employers prohibited her from leaving work, even after she started to get labor pains seven months into her pregnancy. You also probably remember that their defense is that her fetus doesn’t qualify as a person under the law, in spite of the state abortion ban. Slate has a piece pointing out that “Texas isn’t alone in treating the very same unborn life in strikingly inconsistent ways across different contexts.” They point out that Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Arizona, Mississippi, and Idaho all have abortion bans but won’t allow parents to sue over the death of a fetus. It’s almost as if the laws aren’t about ‘protecting babies’ at all!"
You are absolutely right. It isn't about the fetus at all; it's about who gets to decide and clearly it isn't the pregnant person. It's the government. I saw this happen in Florida in the case of Laura Pemberton. She was not allowed to decide HOW she wanted to deliver her child (she wanted to deliver VBAC but was forced by law enforcement and a judge to undergo a c-section). When she sued, she lost because the state said it had a vested interest in the life of the child. As though she didn't have a vested interest in the life of her child and hers wasn't more important...because clearly it isn't. They have made their position clear. Women don't count.
I can understand that some people have religious objections to abortion. I not only don’t understand why they believe that gives them a right to control other people’s choices, I don’t understand how you can think your beliefs are so sacred, so holy - that it’s perfectly ok to lie about the actual facts.
I was pissed off about South Carolina last night, and did a little research to refresh my memory on the details of embryology. I was right. And so I wrote the following:
In case you missed this little bit of fuckery, back in January, the South Carolina State Supreme Court threw out a 6 week abortion ban. It was found unconstitutional because it violated the state constitution’s right to privacy. The opinion was written by Justice Kaye Hearn, the only woman on that bench.
She has since retired, and was replaced by a man. The legislature then passed another 6 week ban, and Wednesday, the South Carolina State Supreme Court upheld the ban, which went into immediate effect.
Here’s the really, really infuriating part: In the ruling, Justice John Kittredge admitted that the law “infringes on a woman’s right of privacy and bodily autonomy,” but “the legislature has made a policy determination that, at a certain point in the pregnancy, a woman’s interest in autonomy and privacy does not outweigh the interest of the unborn child to live.” Apparently, that “certain point” is before most women are aware they are pregnant.
Just to be crystal clear, the all-male South Carolina Supreme Court is stating outright that the ban is a violation of our privacy and bodily autonomy - but that it doesn’t matter.
Our privacy and bodily autonomy are of less value than a collection of cells that is 4-6mm in size. That’s two tenths of an inch. 0.16-0.2” Half a centimeter. But we are subordinate to it.
The South Carolina Supreme Court is saying that *we* don’t matter. Our hopes and dreams, our wishes and plans for our own future, our health, and our lives are subordinate to something so small, I’d need a magnifying glass to see it clearly.
Despite all the bluster, a six week embryo doesn’t have a heart (there’s a fetal pole which will become a heart). The head isn’t yet fully formed,it’s just a bump at the end of the neural tube. The brain hasn’t developed. There are no eyes, no ears, no nose. No spinal cord. There isn’t even an umbilical cord yet. It will not even be a fetus for two more weeks.
And yet. Our privacy, our autonomy, our futures, our very lives - must be subjugated to, and held hostage by, this embryo.
They are pivoting to “we’re doing this because it’s the moral thing to do. Our definition of morality is more important than a woman’s life or health.” We saw that with Pence in the debate but we’ll se it a lot more. And we need to have a compelling response.
Yeah, I think they see these women who've had to go out of state for care, or who've been forced into birth no matter what the circumstance, as just regrettable side effects of their dystopian movement. They don't care at all.
And wasn't it telling how Pence said it was never a state's rights issue. Didn't hear him saying that before Roe fell. They'll say and do anything to subjugate us.
I think our response should be similar to Jessica’s “let’s talk numbers.” Is it moral to allow…and give specific examples. Is it moral to allow women to die? To be septic? To have hysterectomies because they couldn’t get healthcare? To have lifelong health problems because of the same? To have no doctor in their area? To be forced to have a baby and watch it die? Is that moral? We have so so so many examples unfortunately. And we should use them. They won’t persuade anti-abortion people, but they will speak to people in the middle.
This is exactly what they are doing in sex Ed. They want to rewrite the standards to write out LGBTQ+ folks. And what they are doing with claims of CRT. And when they push homeschooling. And when they refuse to pay teachers or find their pensions.
Regarding the Republicans, we should probably consider ourselves fortunate that it's going to be very difficult for their party to not nominate Donald Trump. I don't think Trump can beat Biden. Barring an economic collapse or left-wing riots in cities, in which case almost any Republican would be favored.
Even though all of the other Republican candidates are just as crap, people seem to doubt, for whatever reasons, that Biden is up to the job, so he could be vulnerable to another Republican, especially if it made January 6th seem more or less off the table.
Without paying almost any attention to their candidates, I'm pretty confident in saying Nikki Haley would be the most dangerous in a general election. Women, and also people of color (and I believe she was considered 'of color' or 'other' growing up in South Carolina?) are perceived by voters as more liberal than they are. Notice how despite the fact that she's as nuts as the rest of them, she's somehow considered the moderate or sensible one?
But, also fortunately, that effect works against her among the Republican voter base. No matter how far to the right she goes she still won't be trusted by many of them. So I think even if they somehow avoid Trump, they won't be able to nominate the person who would have the best chance at getting the positive media narrative and fooling voters in the middle (and being most difficult for Democrats to campaign against, because of her gender and color). 🤞
A lot of the right wing pages I checked freely admitted that Haley was good - and then hand wave her away entirely. It’s like they were patting her on the head.
They seemed to be split as to who “won.” Fox News is clearly in the bag for DeSantis. The further right the site was, the more likely they were to pick Ramaswamy as the winner.
But most of them thought it was a debate for the VP slot - most thought Trump was unbeatable. They clearly have no clue who Trump is - the idea that he’d pick a VP who is more articulate, more of a media draw than he is? That’s laughable. Part of why he picked Pence last time, was Pence’s bona fides with the evangelicals- the other part is that Pence is a milquetoast with absolutely no charisma.
Did he pick Pence or did they pick him for him? He has a LOT more power over the party now than he did in 2016. I'd think loyalty would be his top criterion. Not sure he thinks there's anyone more articulate or more of a media draw than he is (and the base agrees). But those traits could signal ambition which usually works against loyalty.
And yes, I agree about loyalty - which only goes one way with Trump. That’s why Ramaswamy is kissing up so much, but Trump has an almost preternatural sense about people who might steal an inch of his spotlight. Look how fast he got rid of Steve Bannon after inauguration- the minute he started getting a lot of press - when SNL did a skit implying Bannon was the real power - he dumped him immediately.
Exactly. Absolute, groveling loyalty, never make a mistake, never do anything you could be ridiculed for, and never, ever, steal the spotlight from Trump.
That would seem to be the situation. Which is good for us because the media would be very eager to help a Haley candidacy; they would absolutely love that narrative.
CNN is disgusting for using the phrase 'abortion survivor'. But it does point to something. The truth about whatever did or did not happen regarding that woman is more complicated. Truth usually is, and it usually requires more time and effort, on the part of both the teller and the listener, than lies or nonsense do. Lies and nonsense fit much easier into sound bites than truth does. It's very worthwhile to try to make truth pithy. Nonetheless, if we're mostly not going to communicate beyond sound bites and short phrases, we're mostly going to end up spreading lies and nonsense.
“Lies and nonsense fit much easier into sound bites than truth does.”
Bingo. And that is exactly the problem with the Democratic Party’s messaging. The American electorate has neither the interest nor the education to understand nuance.
Yeah, we have to figure out the messaging. Their messages are often easier to understand even though (or because) they're dead wrong. And so that's what the media follows.
Maybe but we could at least try to be better at explaining ourselves. This information needs to be accessible to anyone who can get pregnant including older children.
I laughed out loud at the quote that 'Republicans are losing elections' because of "widespread scientific ignorance". REALLY? Because that's actually the only reason they aren't getting destroyed even more on the issue. There's nothing in the science to support considering a fetus as its own human being until around that point that we call 'viability', maybe 24 weeks or so? and plenty to argue against it. And despite the conservative libel and slander that gets doctors killed, a fetus would only ever be aborted after that point in pregnancy if it were seriously ill and had no chance of living more than a few painful moments after birth. In other words, if the fetus were NOT viable.
But if they want more education maybe we should take them up on it. Yeah I know what they really mean is propaganda in classrooms. And yeah in some states and some school districts that might be what they get. But the rest of us should consider that maybe if we had real education in this country on pregnancy and fetal development and all the horrific things that can and do go wrong in nature, and what abortion care really is (and is not), not to mention contraception, then maybe we wouldn't have a population so prone to believing the nonsense and outright lies conservatives tell about these subjects.
I think about these photos from that article all the time. Why aren’t they everywhere?? I think I’ve sent them to everyone I know and no one has ever seen them before. What can we do to get them seen?
Maybe all of us could post them on our various social media, but I really would like to see them on billboards… I’ll also send the link to the Lincoln Project. I’ll do that today.👍🏻
Continuing from Stanton's blather: "Most Americans do not know a new, individual, and living member of the human species begins to exist at fertilization. And younger Americans are the least informed. Consider this horrifying statistic: nearly one in four 18-22-year-olds think that a human life starts at birth."
No. That's such a manipulative sentence. Wow. Shame on Newsweek for letting her get away with that. There's no much wrong with her argument. She doesn't get to decide how to define "member of the human species," then cite a poll where the respondents didn't meet her definition. That's crap.
When that "member of the human species" can be a "new, individual" without having to be an extricable part of me, you can start to craft laws around it. Like Roe was. You can't subjugate me to get to your definition of "living member of the human species."
This woman is fanatical. Like almost the entire GOP. They have no governing philosophy other than to see this fanatical view of the world come to fruition, no matter how they achieve it.
Yes. All of this. So much.
Shame on Newsweek !!! " ...the fate of unborn children has been left to the whims of voters rather than to the "equal protection of the laws" for "any person" guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment."
Enough.
How do the editorial page editors let Stanton get away with this lie? Do they have such lax standards as to allow her to argue that "any person" includes embryos? That's INSANE. And this use of language is going to seep into the body politic as normal. They're trying to normalize it. We can't let that happen. I don't know what I'd do without this newsletter....
The 'mainstream' media will get us all killed if we let them. That's how these things happen, when the guards against them fail. I always go back to 1930s Germany.
https://apnews.com/article/787784fe65c844669f3a3472cd3eb44a
Yes. I've said that if they win they trifecta (which they will if they're winning the presidency), they'll try to silence journalists, activists, artists and other creatives, academics, etc. Authoritarians always pass a 'national security' law. I'm sure too many Americans can't imagine that, but the thing to remember is that the atmosphere in the country after they'd just won an election would be completely different from now.
The attack on science education is terrifying to me because I was a high school biology teacher. I notice that young women are never taught about what happens to their bodies during pregnancy and all of the risks, warning signs to be aware of, or ways to mitigate risks during pregnancy. It seems like something that ought to be taught but has never been taught. Women are left to find out on their own. I remember showing The Miracle of Life and I am pretty sure that it concentrated exclusively on the fetus, almost as though the mother was unimportant.
The mother IS unimportant in our world. That's the sickening truth. If we wanted to distill the thousands of years of misogyny in human societies down to one tenet, I don't think there's a better illustration. And it's so exactly backwards from the way it should be.
The only thing I'm legitimately confused by is the fight for abortion 'reversal'. It just seems counterintuitive? Why would you want it out there that if you get an abortion, don't worry, you can 'reverse' it? Especially when clinical trials got halted cause everyone kept, uhhh, bleeding or something?
So sad that CNN used this language. And that even progressive Jen Psaki fell into the Republican trap in discussing late-term abortion! The mainstream media needs to be corrected every time this happens to reduce these kinds of misstatements. And Jessica is so correct that we need to keep repeating that NO legislation of abortion is acceptable. As the campaign unfurls there will unfortunately be so much misinformation to correct, and as the Republicans continue to debate the number of weeks in a so-called acceptable ban, the more this will be imprinted on the minds of the general public.
It's a tiny wave in the ocean. But let's not forget the Dissenting Opinion of Chief Justice Donald Beatty in the South Carolina case this week:
"The result will essentially force an UNTOLD NUMBER of affected women to give birth without their consent. I AM HARD-PRESSED TO THINK OF A GREATER GOVERNMENT INTRUSION BY A POLITICAL BODY (my caps)."
The Republicans have held the legislature for so long in South Carolina that I'm certain all the justices were appointed by Republicans. So anytime a Republican speaks out against these laws it's a good thing.
Can't read past the CNN thing. (I stopped watching CNN after the Trump propaganda show.) Reading that "abortion survivor" line is just infuriating. Forget the mainstream media. They don't get it and they're blinded by trying to be objective when objectivity about lies and subjugation is really aiding and abetting our descent into an authoritarian state.
Ron DeSantis is an IDIOT. His answers during that debate were nonsensical -- shooting drug traffickers in Mexico "stone-cold dead." I mean, really !
That debate overall was terrifying. One of them said the first thing he'd do to combat crime is fire Garland. They don't even know how the transition from one administration to the other works!
"Both sides" and the search for truth are incompatible goals, and the media almost always chooses the former.
This is what happens to people who grow up with anti-science indoctrination. Also from Newsweek. I wrote it but post a link for newer folks: https://www.newsweek.com/children-motherhood-parenting-church-religion-1803783
I know this fight will now come to my town. I live in a conservative upper middle class town in NJ that voted for TFG 2-1. I laugh driving through it, with its nice lakeside neighborhoods and big wasteful houses (we don't live in one of those) and think oh yeah sure, American Carnage right here...
Our BOE is full of Moms of Liberty. They will love this k-12 "science" overhaul. OMG. I'm glad my kids are teens and very educated about the facts!
Idk what control the state has over education standards in NJ, but that's my first thought for how to stop it. Of course it's the exact opposite in red states where the state is overruling school boards in blue cities.
It's crystal clear.
"You may recall that Texas is being sued by a former prison guard who had a stillbirth after her employers prohibited her from leaving work, even after she started to get labor pains seven months into her pregnancy. You also probably remember that their defense is that her fetus doesn’t qualify as a person under the law, in spite of the state abortion ban. Slate has a piece pointing out that “Texas isn’t alone in treating the very same unborn life in strikingly inconsistent ways across different contexts.” They point out that Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Arizona, Mississippi, and Idaho all have abortion bans but won’t allow parents to sue over the death of a fetus. It’s almost as if the laws aren’t about ‘protecting babies’ at all!"
You are absolutely right. It isn't about the fetus at all; it's about who gets to decide and clearly it isn't the pregnant person. It's the government. I saw this happen in Florida in the case of Laura Pemberton. She was not allowed to decide HOW she wanted to deliver her child (she wanted to deliver VBAC but was forced by law enforcement and a judge to undergo a c-section). When she sued, she lost because the state said it had a vested interest in the life of the child. As though she didn't have a vested interest in the life of her child and hers wasn't more important...because clearly it isn't. They have made their position clear. Women don't count.
Jeezus, I’m tired.
It’s a never-ending tsunami of bullshit.
I can understand that some people have religious objections to abortion. I not only don’t understand why they believe that gives them a right to control other people’s choices, I don’t understand how you can think your beliefs are so sacred, so holy - that it’s perfectly ok to lie about the actual facts.
I was pissed off about South Carolina last night, and did a little research to refresh my memory on the details of embryology. I was right. And so I wrote the following:
In case you missed this little bit of fuckery, back in January, the South Carolina State Supreme Court threw out a 6 week abortion ban. It was found unconstitutional because it violated the state constitution’s right to privacy. The opinion was written by Justice Kaye Hearn, the only woman on that bench.
She has since retired, and was replaced by a man. The legislature then passed another 6 week ban, and Wednesday, the South Carolina State Supreme Court upheld the ban, which went into immediate effect.
Here’s the really, really infuriating part: In the ruling, Justice John Kittredge admitted that the law “infringes on a woman’s right of privacy and bodily autonomy,” but “the legislature has made a policy determination that, at a certain point in the pregnancy, a woman’s interest in autonomy and privacy does not outweigh the interest of the unborn child to live.” Apparently, that “certain point” is before most women are aware they are pregnant.
Just to be crystal clear, the all-male South Carolina Supreme Court is stating outright that the ban is a violation of our privacy and bodily autonomy - but that it doesn’t matter.
Our privacy and bodily autonomy are of less value than a collection of cells that is 4-6mm in size. That’s two tenths of an inch. 0.16-0.2” Half a centimeter. But we are subordinate to it.
The South Carolina Supreme Court is saying that *we* don’t matter. Our hopes and dreams, our wishes and plans for our own future, our health, and our lives are subordinate to something so small, I’d need a magnifying glass to see it clearly.
Despite all the bluster, a six week embryo doesn’t have a heart (there’s a fetal pole which will become a heart). The head isn’t yet fully formed,it’s just a bump at the end of the neural tube. The brain hasn’t developed. There are no eyes, no ears, no nose. No spinal cord. There isn’t even an umbilical cord yet. It will not even be a fetus for two more weeks.
And yet. Our privacy, our autonomy, our futures, our very lives - must be subjugated to, and held hostage by, this embryo.
How does that make you feel?
Sheer madness. The question is how long such madness can persist.
They are pivoting to “we’re doing this because it’s the moral thing to do. Our definition of morality is more important than a woman’s life or health.” We saw that with Pence in the debate but we’ll se it a lot more. And we need to have a compelling response.
Yeah, I think they see these women who've had to go out of state for care, or who've been forced into birth no matter what the circumstance, as just regrettable side effects of their dystopian movement. They don't care at all.
And wasn't it telling how Pence said it was never a state's rights issue. Didn't hear him saying that before Roe fell. They'll say and do anything to subjugate us.
It’s been very hot all week, which makes me ill. Right this minute my only response would be “Fuck you.”
I’m afraid that’s neither compelling nor much of a response.
I think our response should be similar to Jessica’s “let’s talk numbers.” Is it moral to allow…and give specific examples. Is it moral to allow women to die? To be septic? To have hysterectomies because they couldn’t get healthcare? To have lifelong health problems because of the same? To have no doctor in their area? To be forced to have a baby and watch it die? Is that moral? We have so so so many examples unfortunately. And we should use them. They won’t persuade anti-abortion people, but they will speak to people in the middle.
Yes she promised us a talking points column, and I think yesterday's column is a great place to start.
She made slides. I saw them on IG and have already shared them once.
Waaah! I’m whining because I don’t have Instagram, and I don’t want to have an account there. I’m glad you’re sharing the slides!
This is exactly what they are doing in sex Ed. They want to rewrite the standards to write out LGBTQ+ folks. And what they are doing with claims of CRT. And when they push homeschooling. And when they refuse to pay teachers or find their pensions.
Regarding the Republicans, we should probably consider ourselves fortunate that it's going to be very difficult for their party to not nominate Donald Trump. I don't think Trump can beat Biden. Barring an economic collapse or left-wing riots in cities, in which case almost any Republican would be favored.
Even though all of the other Republican candidates are just as crap, people seem to doubt, for whatever reasons, that Biden is up to the job, so he could be vulnerable to another Republican, especially if it made January 6th seem more or less off the table.
Without paying almost any attention to their candidates, I'm pretty confident in saying Nikki Haley would be the most dangerous in a general election. Women, and also people of color (and I believe she was considered 'of color' or 'other' growing up in South Carolina?) are perceived by voters as more liberal than they are. Notice how despite the fact that she's as nuts as the rest of them, she's somehow considered the moderate or sensible one?
But, also fortunately, that effect works against her among the Republican voter base. No matter how far to the right she goes she still won't be trusted by many of them. So I think even if they somehow avoid Trump, they won't be able to nominate the person who would have the best chance at getting the positive media narrative and fooling voters in the middle (and being most difficult for Democrats to campaign against, because of her gender and color). 🤞
Republicans will not elect a female president. Especially not one a member of her own party (male, SC legislator) called a “rag head.”
Andra,
A lot of the right wing pages I checked freely admitted that Haley was good - and then hand wave her away entirely. It’s like they were patting her on the head.
They seemed to be split as to who “won.” Fox News is clearly in the bag for DeSantis. The further right the site was, the more likely they were to pick Ramaswamy as the winner.
But most of them thought it was a debate for the VP slot - most thought Trump was unbeatable. They clearly have no clue who Trump is - the idea that he’d pick a VP who is more articulate, more of a media draw than he is? That’s laughable. Part of why he picked Pence last time, was Pence’s bona fides with the evangelicals- the other part is that Pence is a milquetoast with absolutely no charisma.
Did he pick Pence or did they pick him for him? He has a LOT more power over the party now than he did in 2016. I'd think loyalty would be his top criterion. Not sure he thinks there's anyone more articulate or more of a media draw than he is (and the base agrees). But those traits could signal ambition which usually works against loyalty.
The final decision was his.
And yes, I agree about loyalty - which only goes one way with Trump. That’s why Ramaswamy is kissing up so much, but Trump has an almost preternatural sense about people who might steal an inch of his spotlight. Look how fast he got rid of Steve Bannon after inauguration- the minute he started getting a lot of press - when SNL did a skit implying Bannon was the real power - he dumped him immediately.
He dumped numerous people who garnered press. Narcissists don't want to compete for attention.
Exactly. Absolute, groveling loyalty, never make a mistake, never do anything you could be ridiculed for, and never, ever, steal the spotlight from Trump.
That would seem to be the situation. Which is good for us because the media would be very eager to help a Haley candidacy; they would absolutely love that narrative.
CNN is disgusting for using the phrase 'abortion survivor'. But it does point to something. The truth about whatever did or did not happen regarding that woman is more complicated. Truth usually is, and it usually requires more time and effort, on the part of both the teller and the listener, than lies or nonsense do. Lies and nonsense fit much easier into sound bites than truth does. It's very worthwhile to try to make truth pithy. Nonetheless, if we're mostly not going to communicate beyond sound bites and short phrases, we're mostly going to end up spreading lies and nonsense.
“Lies and nonsense fit much easier into sound bites than truth does.”
Bingo. And that is exactly the problem with the Democratic Party’s messaging. The American electorate has neither the interest nor the education to understand nuance.
Yeah, we have to figure out the messaging. Their messages are often easier to understand even though (or because) they're dead wrong. And so that's what the media follows.
Maybe but we could at least try to be better at explaining ourselves. This information needs to be accessible to anyone who can get pregnant including older children.
I much prefer the term 'pan fetus,' but maybe I am just nostalgic for early the 90s grunge scene.
Ha!
I laughed out loud at the quote that 'Republicans are losing elections' because of "widespread scientific ignorance". REALLY? Because that's actually the only reason they aren't getting destroyed even more on the issue. There's nothing in the science to support considering a fetus as its own human being until around that point that we call 'viability', maybe 24 weeks or so? and plenty to argue against it. And despite the conservative libel and slander that gets doctors killed, a fetus would only ever be aborted after that point in pregnancy if it were seriously ill and had no chance of living more than a few painful moments after birth. In other words, if the fetus were NOT viable.
But if they want more education maybe we should take them up on it. Yeah I know what they really mean is propaganda in classrooms. And yeah in some states and some school districts that might be what they get. But the rest of us should consider that maybe if we had real education in this country on pregnancy and fetal development and all the horrific things that can and do go wrong in nature, and what abortion care really is (and is not), not to mention contraception, then maybe we wouldn't have a population so prone to believing the nonsense and outright lies conservatives tell about these subjects.
Hope all these anti-women, anti-freedom jerks rot in hell.
This is what needs to be taught, remedially, to Americans: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/18/pregnancy-weeks-abortion-tissue
I wish we could put it on billboards everywhere.
Our once great educational system is under attack by theocrats who want to replace science with nonsense.
I think about these photos from that article all the time. Why aren’t they everywhere?? I think I’ve sent them to everyone I know and no one has ever seen them before. What can we do to get them seen?
Maybe all of us could post them on our various social media, but I really would like to see them on billboards… I’ll also send the link to the Lincoln Project. I’ll do that today.👍🏻
I looked at this on the Contend Projects and found this quote from Brooke Stanton:
“ I am not a scientist, but like you, I am a human being.”
Thanks, Brooke, but I prefer to get my science information from scientists. And our schools should insist on it. Sheesh!
Common sense is in very short supply, particularly among our opponents.