StarfishSaver
StarfishSaver's JournalI won't ever need an abortion but I fight like hell to protect other women's right to choose
I wish more people were as willing to fight for rights that others deserve and desperately need even when those rights don't personally benefit them.
If they were, we'd be in a different place today.
"Mr. President. How many abortions have you paid for and/or helped to arrange?"
Just a suggestion for the next journalist who interviews him.
No point in asking IF he's paid for or arranged an abortion. There's little doubt that he has. In fact, given his sexual proclivities and prolificacy, it's virtually impossible that he hasn't. So they should skip straight to the number.
The time to get in Alabama's face was years ago
It's good that people are mobilizing now, but where's everyone been? Alabama has been laying the groundwork for this for years with little pushback from white people outside of the state.
For example, in 2015, the state announced it was closing or substantially reducing service hours for 30+ driver license offices. Lo and behold! Those all just HAPPENED to be in Alabama's "Black Belt," predominantly black counties where voters had voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama.
Why did that matter? Well, not only is the ability to obtain a driver license absolutely critical to obtaining and keeping a job, getting to school, health services, etc. (especially in these mostly rural areas with little reliable public transportation), Alabama had just past a very strict voter ID law that required people to have state-issued IDs that were issued by the state DMVs at their driver license offices. No state ID, no vote. And if you can't get to the driver license office because it's too far away one or two or three counties away, it's difficult and expensive and perhaps impossible to get the ID you need to vote in upcoming elections.
So, it was obvious that this was part of an effort to substantially curtail the black vote. But where was the outcry? While there was some national coverage and Hillary Clinton drew attention to it, there was hardly a peep of protest from people outside of Alabama.
Fortunately, the Obama Administration and the U.S. Department of Transportation were paying attention. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx used his authority under Title VI to order an investigation into the closures and when that investigation proved that Alabama's actions indeed violated Title VI (the section of the Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination in the use of federal funds - and the Alabama DMVs received some federal money), the Department ordered the state to reopen the facilities or risk losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal transportation dollars. The state complied and reopened the offices and expanded the hours.
But a lot of damage had already been done. Countless black Alabama residents were unable to get their driver licenses during that time and this surely resulted in significant suppression of the black vote in 2016. And, even though people rose up and voted in record numbers in the special election in 2017 - thanks to the high profile Senate race - the turnout would have been even higher had it not been for the state-imposed voter suppression that few people outside of the state bothered to pay attention to.
And it's only going to get worse. Because while Obama's Transportation Department vigorously enforced this agreement, in particular, and Title VI more broadly and kept a close watch on Alabama after that, it's unlikely that any of this is being enforced under Trump's administration. (Another example of how elections have consequences).
Alabama has been suppressing the black vote for years but white voters just haven't felt the need to go out of their way to fight back on their behalf. Now this voter suppression is coming back to bite white voters, especially white women, as the people (mostly white men) who the disappeared black voters would have helped defeat have turned their sights on the rights of women of all races.
I can only ask when I hear the too-late outcry: Where were you when black voters were being pushed out? And will you now, at long last, join the fight against voter suppression now that you see (or should see) that, even though voter suppression doesn't affect YOUR right to vote, it is putting your health, lives, rights and future at risk?
I'm really glad Elizabeth Warren has refused to go on FOX
I don't understand why people think Democrats can lure Trump voters into our tent by fishing around in the FOX swamp.
Anyone who watches FOX news and can't be reached through any other network, outlet or means is NOT going to vote for a Democrat. If they aren't getting their information exclusively from FOX, find out what else they're watching/reading/listening to and reach out to them there.
But wading into FOX is not only a waste of time, it's a distraction and drain of energy that could be better focused elsewhere.
When lamenting the erosion of Roe v. Wade and women's reproductive rights, don't forget
This isn't happening in a vacuum nor was it unforeseeable.
Many people didn't care about or bother to fight against minority voter suppression because, after all, it didn't affect THEIR ability to vote. So, they thought, what's the big deal?
But what they didn't realize or care enough to think about is that most of the people who were prevented from getting to the polls and whose votes were suppressed would have voted for the same people they did and would have helped ensure pro-choice politicians were elected and prevent anti-choice Neanderthals from taking control of state legislatures and governorships across the country, where these laws are being enacted and signed into law.
This is a perfect example of how fighting for the right of others is in our own best interests.
It's not just elections that have consequences. Not doing everything we can do to protect others' right to vote also has huge ramifications.
This is a process, a continuum, not a one shot deal - and we ALL have a critical role
Trump is not going to be drummed out of office based on one thing or one process. Impeachment will not remove him. An election will. But in order to remove him via election, the House must take steps toward impeachment and they must do it thoughtfully and correctly and in the right order so that, not only will they uphold the rule of law and send a message to history that this will not stand, but do it in a way that will help us remove him next November.
None of this can be done in isolation and none of us can sit back and expect someone else to do all the work.
Right now, the House under Speaker Pelosi's steady hand is doing EXACTLY what it should be doing. They are laying the necessary predicate for impeachment by exposing to the country Trump's obstruction and lawlessness and that it goes well beyond just the Mueller Report. In the process, they are also provoking him into helping them make their case.
They are proceeding with all deliberate speed, with "deliberate" being the operative word. They are building the case and making it stronger. And they are also creating the dynamics whereby when impeachment inquiry is opened, the public will think it was THEIR idea, not something pushed on them by a partisan Democratic House.
And the closer to the election this occurs (and I don't mean next summer, which would be too late, but not the next few weeks either, which would be too soon), the more it can effectively be used against him in the campaign and the more likely it will be to affect the outcome.
Now, that's the House's job and they're doing it. But we have a job to do, too - actually more than one. One of those jobs is to take the information that the House is developing and help them educate the public (i.e., friends, neighbors, colleagues) about what's happening. This means focusing attention outward and not expend our energy turning inward to constantly harp on, criticize and second-guess our Democratic leadership.
And then we have to work our tails off to turn out the vote next November. That means not just doing GOTV in November but starting now to educate voters about the stakes, make sure they understand why they should be voting FOR a Democrat and not just AGAINST Trump.
We have to do all of this together, hand in hand.
We can do this.
Imagine if Justice Breyer passes away in the next two years!
Wouldn't that be awful?
Why didn't he step down when Obama was president so that he could have been replaced with a liberal justice? But he insisted on hanging on and now he's in his 80s and he could die at any second and where would that leave us? Shame on him for being so selfish!
(I figured if we were going to beat up on Justice Ginsburg for not giving up HER seat a few years ago, we might as well give Justice Breyer the same treatment).
Trump knows he'll likely be impeached. He's trying to undermine it and get it over with
And he's trying to goad the Democrats into starting the impeachment inquiry before they've developed a strong case and plenty early enough to give him more than enough time so that it won't matter in 2020.
He knows (because his lawyers and advisors have told him) that if an impeachment inquiry is launched now, its scope will be constricted to what they now have and it will be very difficult to continue gathering a broad range of solid evidence on topics that haven't yet been fully explored. By rushing the process, they hope to push the Democrats into going in unprepared and with fewer arrows in their quivers.
Trump's team knows that they are in much greater peril if the various committees of jurisdiction other than the Judiciary Committee continue digging outside of the parameters of impeachment. They don't want to be bombarded with incoming from several different committees. They need to have ONE enemy, one target, one foil, to focus the media's and public's attention on. When they pick one enemy to fight and zero in on them with everything they have, they tend to win.
But they know they can't fight on several fronts at one time. They don't want Schiff and the House Intelligence Committee rooting around in Trump's foreign entanglements while, at the same time, Ways and Means obtains and analyzes his tax returns while Waters and her Financial Services Committee are going through his banking records and calling in Deutsche Bank executives to testify about them and Cummings and the Oversight Committee are hauling administration officials in to explain themselves. And they know that none of this is likely to happen in an impeachment inquiry since the impeachment process is not the best venue for developing new evidence (at least not evidence that falls within the Judiciary Committee's ordinary jurisdiction). Impeachment inquiries better suited to weighing and considering the evidence gathered elsewhere and presented to them.
Instead of dealing with several House investigations, Trump's people want to focus like a laser beam only on the Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry and to narrow that focus on the Mueller Report so that the Articles of Impeachment are limited to those specific issues, which are already known to the public, who haven't been swayed in great numbers by it. They want and need to make the impeachment inquiry the boogeyman, instead of dealing with several different investigations on several different fronts.
They want nothing more than for the Democrats to rush in before they've completed their other investigations and impeach Trump on a fairly limited scope of wrongdoing and they want them to do it soon so that the Senate can acquit by the end of the summer and then leave Trump more than a year to refocus the argument away from impeachment and leave him plenty of time to throw out 400 or so new outrageous distractions and make his impeachment an irrelevant distant memory come November 2020.
Don't be fooled.
Fortunately, Nancy Pelosi and her team know all of this, too, and aren't allowing themselves to be baited into jumping the gun, either by Trump or the people on our side.
You're talking about "charsima" of presidential candidates
But surely you don't think that Mitch McConnell and the Republicans took over the Senate in 2014 and kept it in 2018 because their sexy was just too much for the Democratic candidates to overcome - unless you think that Ted Cruz was so much younger and more "inspiring" than Beto?
Sorry, but I just don't buy it. An electorate that won't go out and protect their interests and communities because they don't think the candidates are exciting enough deserves the government they get. The problem is that the rest of us have to suffer from their self-centered laziness.
Trump voters may be ignorant, but they proved to be smarter than Dems about one thing: the courts
Trump voters were at least savvy enough to know that the courts were a paramount issue, something important enough to look past a candidate's outrageous, illegal, disgusting behavior to vote for him anyway because he would give them the courts they wanted.
On the other hand, Democrats - or, at least a critical mass of us - refused to vote for the candidate who would protect the courts because she wasn't perfect enough for their tastes.
And now, here we are, watching helplessly while Trump and McConnell completely and tragically reshape the federal courts in their image for generations to come.
If you don't understand the impact they're having or think this can easily be corrected when we take back power, note this: Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, but more than 150 of the judges he appointed are still serving as active or senior status judges on the federal bench.
Lesson: If for no other reason than than the courts, VOTE, dammit!
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Member since: Mon Apr 22, 2019, 03:26 PMNumber of posts: 18,486
