Bloody Kansas says no to slavery again
State voting systems are designed to be accurate, swift and resistant to sabotage. They have margins that require a recount for close races. They permit absentee voting by mail. They’ve worked very well for decades.
Suddenly, a raving lunatic spends the last 6 years claiming they don’t. Except he’s not a lunatic. He’s a constantly calculating always deceitful man.
The party he represents provides no actual evidence of any kind of vote fraud, or deficiency or significant miscount. In any state where they have the power to do so now, they are creating impediments, trying to get less people to vote. Less perfectly qualified voters voting.
But sometimes, the most devious deniers are thwarted.
They want to restrict and remove your right to vote more than anything else.
They also want to take away your access to knowledge from books and libraries and schools.
They want to compel you to have faith in their religion, not yours.
They want to have authority over your love life believing they can control your feelings. They can’t, but they continue to try. What is this knowledge that scares them so? What about their faith do they want you to believe in and what rules do they want you to adhere to?
Other than the vote, which is about maintaining their power, everything else is about your pee pee. Everybody’s pee-pees.
I’m not talking about hiding your pee pee from view as there’s very good reasons (sunburns in the summer, icicles in the winter) to keep pee pees covered.
No, their religious leaders don’t believe their God intended for people to have a penis or a clitoris, a vagina, testicles, nipples or a g-spot for pleasure. Those are all for making babies - if you’ve paid the cleric to marry you and the cleric has checked your pee-pees to ensure one has an outie and their spouse has an innie.
Sometimes they can point to some passage in a holy book to justify their pee-pee control efforts but more often than not some clerics just make up stuff on the fly. Not that the holy books grant true legitimacy because other clerics wrote those holy books. And they made up the most outlandish stories sometimes like Adam and Eve and a garden they were banned from because they got knowledge from someplace other than from the clerics.
They’re all about maintaining their own jobs first.
Politicians then use the works of the clerics to label people good or bad and some write laws to control your choices and again it seems it’s our pee-pees they’re most obsessed with.
Reasonable people understand that murder is not a useful thing to do in a civil society. And that the weakest in society - the young and the old - need extra protection from people who would use or abuse them. But they really don’t like it when the state or a cleric tells them that people are sinful when they have fun especially pee-pee fun.
And yesterday in a conservative middle America state - Kansas voters told them all that women get to control their own bodies there. Their entire bodies and everything their bodies contain. A stunning 59% voted to keep abortion legal there. In a conservative state where the majority still attend church.
And it was a record turnout in Kansas for a non-presidential election year. That abortion question drove the turnout.
This is exactly what smarter Republicans feared, that overturning Roe Vs. Wade would lead to a public rebuke of the efforts to take womens’ rights away. Not every state will have abortion questions on the ballot 3 months from now. So will voters annoyed by the SCOTUS decision express their rebuke by voting out Republicans? Yes, some will. Even in conservative states.
You get to control your own bodies that way. And self-control is more fun.
Also: mixed results on Donald Trump endorsements show his influence exists but is waning.
And, via the Washington Post today:
President Biden signed an executive order Wednesday directing his health secretary to consider actions to assist patients traveling out of state for abortions.
The travel-related provision in the order calls on Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to consider inviting states to apply for Medicaid waivers when treating patients who cross state lines for reproductive health services.
There was also news of another leader of Al-Qaida being killed, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the last of the trio responsible for planning and executing the 9-11 attacks among other acts of terror. And no innocents were killed in the drone strike.
It won’t stop the existence of Al Qaida. It won’t stop the medeivalism of the Taliban in Afghanistan. It just sends a clear message that - even if it takes years - if you plan to attack Americans, be prepared to die. It won’t deter everyone but it will deter some.
That seems like a useful function for governments to provide.
The guy they killed got his start by trying to kill Anwar Sadat of Egypt because Sadat made a peace pact with Israel. Ayman was a very bad, murderous man. Most Muslims, Christians, Jewish people, atheist people and others will agree on that, no matter what a cleric or politician tells them.
And now for something completely different…