Listened to a story about “country lawyer” James Bopp this morning on NPR.  He admired the strategy that got us to Brown v Board of Education—get similar cases heard simultaneously or in quick succession until you get conflicting results.  You can then use that to force the Supreme Court to rule—they can’t let both decisions lie. 

I can’t help thinking Roe is under the same kind of attack.

I agree Amanda.

The current Republican push in the various state legislatures to render the Roe decision irrelevant is mind boggling. Almost every measure passed constitutes a direct interference with the provisions of Roe. Coupled with the numerous initiatives to curtail Planned Parenthood and access to contraception - if the Republicans are successful they’ll set women’s access to health and reproductive services back 40 years.

As an outsider looking in (I’m Canadian) I’m stunned at the apparent complacency.

I admit to a vested interest in what goes on south of the border - our current Prime Minister Harper seems to take his cues from the worst of right wing in the US, from union busting to social conservatism and women’s health issues.

The next time someone says Roe is safe, I’m sending them to this link.  It wraps it all up in a very concise way.  Thank you as always, Amanda.

Amanda is dead-on correct.  If they win on Abortion, the Right will try to finish off Reproductive Rights.  And then the target goes on Equality for Women, LGBT, and Minorities.  It’s a checklist, and this is just another tick mark for them, not the end of the list.

I think it’s clear that not overturning Roe keeps in place an enemy that has been used for almost 40-years to rally the proles of wingnuttia.  Its utility value for this purpose is very high.

However, the Reichwing Brahmans may have finally decided that if Row goes they will still have sufficient alternative Culture War talking points to replace it as the corner-piece of the Great Reichwing War on America(ns).  Time will tell…

Yes, Roe is under attack and has been for some time.  The religious right has been very successful in making abortion practically unobtainable (though technically legal) for a large part of the country.  They are not going to stop there - they are going to push until they fully overturn it.  Justice Kennedy and the conservative wing of the court has been chipping away for years (see Casey, and upholding the federal ban on dilation and extraction procedures).

But if you think the Democrats are a reliable ally in this fight, you are asleep.  The whole “legal, safe, and rare” meme was started by Bill Clinton.  Brilliant strategy there: cede the moral argument to the right wing with the addition of the work ‘rare’.  (Hey, if there is nothing wrong with abortion, then why DO you care about the frequency with which they occur.)  And let’s not forget Obama’s sellout during the health care insurance debacle.  How many women are now going to lose coverage thanks to his executive order?  Then between Blue Dogs and independents like “Short Ride” Lieberman (why does this jackass even chair a committee for the Dems at this point) in the legislature my hopes aren’t high.

and people who voted for Ralph Nader [...]

Oh, this canard rears its head again.  I voted for Nader, and I am sick of hearing it.  No, I really am.  Anyone bringing out the Nader canard as as likely to swing me to their point of view as they are by punching me in the face at this point. 

I have this silly notion that it is our civic duty to vote for the best woman or man for the job.  In 2000, that was Nader.  Perhaps if more people voted their heart and their head, we might get better leaders.  Instead, all we get is this “lesser evil, not as bad as, ack! Republicans booga booga booga, better vote Democratic” nonsense.  I try to vote FOR candidates, not against other candidates.

I just tune out all of this “zOMG how much worse it would have been if McCain would have been president !!!!!!!!!!” garbage when I hear it these days.  I voted for Obama not against McCain.  Obama has not lived up to his word, and his record on civil liberties, war, health insurance, LGBTQ rights, etc. is not something I particularly feel like affirming with a vote right now.  (Volunteer time and money?  Definitely not happening this time out.)

I agree with you, Amanda, but I think there’s another group that subscribes to these theories—people who do get it, do see the ugliness and viciousness of these attacks on women, and are understandably in denial, or a little paralyzed by how unbelievably violent it is.

I also think part of our self-image, as Americans, is that revolutions happen and terrorists come from Other Places.  Growing up, I remember specifically being told that one of the things that was special about our country was that people always addressed their grievances through the law and through the election process, and we always had peaceful transfers of power where people who voted against the winner felt safe.  None of that is true, of course.  But I think there is a strain of American exceptionalism in our discourse that treats our country as if it exists outside of, or maybe after, history, and American events as if they can only be understood in terms of their particulars, not according to any principal or pattern.  To consume American media, especially about domestic affairs, is to always see violence characterized as somehow not-violence, threats as not-threats, and historic change as somehow fitting with what is already known because to be living in history is somehow unthinkable.

Accepting all that means changing our self-image as citizens, and revising all our ideas about the type of political action we could expect to take over the course of our lives.  And doing so in order to accommodate a personal threat, and a new view of human ugliness and sadism, that is frankly repulsive.

I think that denial will be a long slog.  Even as I say this, I could stand to be a lot angrier myself.

“But I kept asking, until the insister gave up, what court case gave the court [the opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade].

The Republican Party would have found, and would find, a case to overturn Roe v. Wade if they thought Kennedy was a reliable vote to do so.

If McCain had won in ‘08, Republicans wouldn’t have had to worry about Kennedy.  Of course, there is the possibility that Stevens and Souter would not have retired because they would have known McCain would appoint right-wingers in their place.

I truly hope that “The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service” by Laura Kaplan remains a historical document and not a how-to guide.

I don’t have time to parse all of the comments on this blog, but it is mind boggling that you’re still getting the same ridiculous arguments this year when states all over America have passed draconian laws limiting Roe v. Wade. Who is so dense that they still don’t get it?

People, come on. Let’s please, please stop with the “the right wing is using Roe v. Wade for fundraising and assaults on reproductive rights will stop once it’s overturned” argument. I’m sure you know by now (especially if you read this blog daily) that attacks on Roe v. Wade are the first wave in the legislative assault on reproductive rights. Next, they are going after Griswold v. Connecticut. You can see that with your own eyes by reading the daily attacks various legislatures have plotted against Planned Parenthood. Feminists have been saying this for at least twenty years. (Probably longer but I’ve only been politically aware & active for twenty years so that’s all I can speak to) It is time to LISTEN and ACT.

The Supreme Court’s rationale in the Walmart v. Dukes case was that Walmart does not have a written policy of discrimination against women therefore they cannot be sued for something that they do not condone. What’s next? Because they don’t have a written policy condoning sexual harassment women workers can’t sue if that happens either?

I never said Democrats were a reliable ally.  That’s a strawman.

I said that Obama will definitely appoint pro-choicers.  Anyone who thinks otherwise is paranoid, and yeah, probably voted for Nader.  Sorry if it’s an “old canard”.  I will stop pointing it out when the country stops paying for Bush being able to get down to the wire close enough in Florida to steal the election.  Which is, I do believe, never.  But maybe it’ll fade out when his appointees leave the court and the wars are finally over.

Speaking of glib… 

As for the first group of commenters Amanda attacks, of which I guess I am a member even though I wasn’t targeted personally, I still strongly agree with the argument that Roe isn’t in more peril now than before the appointments of Roberts/Alito.  The O’Connor plurality opinion in Casey that Amanda cites to as the only reason that Roe wasn’t overturned earlier was also signed by Kennedy.  The premise of that plurality opinion was the importance of following SCOTUS precedent unless there’s been a fundamental change in the underlying reasoning of the prior decision that supports its overturning.  Kennedy did not sign on to the opinion of Scalia, who would have expressly overturned Roe.  Given that history, I don’t see why it is assumed Kennedy would reject his previous position and overturn Roe when he could have and chose not to vote that way before. 

If either Ginsberg or Kennedy retired (the most likely options) and were replaced by a more conservative justice, I would absolutely agree that Roe was in imminent danger.  That’s what makes this next election so important.

And as for the Walmart case, every single Justice agreed that the case could not be brought as a class action as situated.  The dissent stated not that the Walmart class action should be allowed to proceed, but that it might be able to proceed under a different rule that was not before the court, and which should be first determined by the district court on remand.  It’s extremely hyperbolic to say that the decision states that there’s no such thing as gender discrimination.  The furthest you can go is that the decision states that on a national, organized corporate level, it will be very, very difficult to show purposeful gender discrimination in a uniform way that would allow women to bring a single class action for damages. 

As an important side note, the decision wasn’t a rejection of the women’s discrimination claims; and the decision doesn’t state that the women weren’t discriminated against unlawfully.  Women who were discriminated against in the same manner, or within the same store or region will still be able to prosecute their claims in smaller joint actions or individually. 

Republicans’ control of the White House from 81-93 gave them so many appointments to the Court.

Liberals need to emulate that success.  We need to win next year and then make sure we nominate someone very electable in 2016.  In my opinion, that would be either Hillary, Joe Biden, or Al Gore.

If Roe goes down, Griswold is next.  And I’m afraid most people won’t realize what’s happening until they go to renew their Ortho-Novum and find out they don’t ‘meet the requirements,’ or their pharmacist ‘found a problem.’

Somewhere, Ceausescu is smiling.

“I’m sure you know by now (especially if you read this blog daily) that attacks on Roe v. Wade are the first wave in the legislative assault on reproductive rights.”

They’re feeling their oats and might just decide to pull the trigger on Roe, although hollowing it out has been their favorite tactic for the last 20-years or so.

“Next, they are going after Griswold v. Connecticut. You can see that with your own eyes by reading the daily attacks various legislatures have plotted against Planned Parenthood.”

They may even be bold enough to really go after Griswald, but that would be a bridge too far.  Overturning Roe would be a shock to the system.  But overturning Griswald would be the Republican/Conservative version of passing the Civil Rights Acts was to Democratic Party in the ‘60s.  Republicans would be dead as a party for decades after that kind of mistake.

Overturning Roe means little to those Americans with the means to circumvent any bans.  But banning birth control would affect people who matter in the American political system.

All of this is IMHO, of course.  And being underestimated has been a valuable tool for the Reichwing for the last 50-years, so I may be totally wrong…

Gangsta, and noted in the post, they actually have.  Your assumption is that these things move fast.  That’s incorrect.

But here’s a timeline:

January 2006: The swing vote on abortion rights, Sandra Day O’Connor, retires.  She is replaced by a rabid anti-choicer.

February 2006: The South Dakota legislature passes the first challenge to Roe, banning abortion.  (So your contention that they would have acted ASAP is true! Thereby discrediting your entire argument that they dilly-dallied because they don’t actually want to ban abortion.)

November 2006: Voters shoot it down.

2008: At the next available opportunity, South Dakota puts the abortion ban back on the ballot.  It is defeated again. There is no case yet to challenge Roe.

2010: At the next available opportunity, Republicans sweep various state legislatures.

2011: As soon as they get into their offices, Republicans start passing challenges to Roe left and right.  Many states ban abortion at 20 weeks.  Some put personhood amendments on the ballot.  Any one of these could go up the Supreme Court, giving the court a chance to rule.

So, I ask you once more:

When was there an opportunity for Republicans to overturn Roe? Please, point to the case that the court passed on. PLEASE, I’M BEGGING YOU.  POINT TO THE CHANCE THEY HAD BUT TOOK A PASS ON.

Or maybe, just maybe, admit you’re wrong. 

These things take time.  Roe v. Wade was actually filed in 1969, but not decided until 1973.  And that was a challenge to an existing law.  They have to write the legislation, get it going, have it challenged, and it’ll probably be a couple years out from there.

I used to think Kennedy was a solid pro-choice vote because he signed on Planned Parenthood, but not anymore.  If you actually read his decision in Carhart, it’s clear that he’s gone full wingnut.

I used to think Kennedy was a solid pro-choice vote because he signed on Planned Parenthood, but not anymore.  If you actually read his decision in Carhart, it’s clear that he’s gone full wingnut.

I truly hope that “The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service” by Laura Kaplan remains a historical document and not a how-to guide.

I bought and read that book several years ago just so I could have it as a reference if needed, actually.

Liberals need to emulate that success.  We need to win next year and then make sure we nominate someone very electable in 2016.  In my opinion, that would be either Hillary, Joe Biden, or Al Gore.

Show me a liberal, and I’ll vote for him/her.  But Al Gore did not run as a liberal in 2000, and he wasn’t electable.  He was so busy distancing himself from Clinton that he failed to notice that Clinton was extremely popular, even post-Lewinsky.  That does not, to me, speak highly of his political acumen.

“When was there an opportunity for Republicans to overturn Roe? Please, point to the case that the court passed on. PLEASE, I’M BEGGING YOU.  POINT TO THE CHANCE THEY HAD BUT TOOK A PASS ON.

“Or maybe, just maybe, admit you’re wrong.”

I never said there was a case to overturn Roe that the Court passed on.

Republicans are way smarter than the credit we give them.  They’re not going to pull the trigger on overturning Roe unless they know it’s going down.

Of course conservatives are going to overturn Roe vs. Wade.  It will probably be brought before the court as a states right issue.  As soon as the Supreme Court gets a case that will let it place abortion regulation back to the states the more conservative states will begin banning abortion outright and even the more liberal states will be pressured to start placing restrictions that will interfere with a woman’s right to choose her own health care.  Civil liberties are being chipped away on a daily basis thanks in large part to the court, but also because conservatives are so clever at manufacturing fear to allow them to pass legislation to weaken the protections of the constitution. 

Which doesn’t mean, of course, that the Republican party hasn’t been playing it for everything it’s worth in the past four decades.  Abortion is a big money raiser and organization theme for the right wing, but they will come up with other issues equally divisive to replace it.

Oh, fuck Ralph Nader and anyone who lived in a swing state and voted for him. Seriously, you still think Bush’s election was Al Gore’s fault? And not the corporate media who went out of their way to make Al look like a pointy-headed intellectual and George Bush like the kind of guy you’d want to have a beer with? And not the Republican organizations who fed Nader’s ego-beast money so he could get his message out so dipshit narcissistic wankers could think they were doing something radical by voting for the guy with the best message? Jeebus.

And so as not to derail the thread even further, I agree 100% with Amanda: Roe is under immediate and dire threat.

As republicans are obvious misogynist wingnuts and democrats are not reliable allies, what is left? Why mock those who go for third party candidates, when, as it is painfully clear by now, dems can’t be bothered to even talk about it - forget actually doing something about it - with any effectiveness?

Between the vote extortion comments from Axelrod, the flaccid embarrassment that is Dan Pfeiffer, and the total radio silence from Obama otherwise, where is the optimism in Obama’s admin coming from?

Of course he’d appoint pro-choice justices. So what? What good would that do amid the screams of “STATE’S RIGHTS!!!!”

What piece of this puzzle am I missing?

Gangsta, you continue to say they had an opportunity to pull the trigger and didn’t.

That’s an assertion that requires evidence, especially as I’ve produced piles of evidence that they tried to load the gun but got stalled.

Produce it.  If you cannot, then you are simply arguing from assertion.

Produce the evidence.  The evidence will take the form of legislation they refused to pass or a court battle they refused to wage. 

Since I’m actually the expert here and you’re just some idiot on the internet, the burden of proof is really on you.  One piece of evidence that the continuous legislative assault I just detailed is all a figment of my imagination.

Also, I give Republicans loads of credit for being smart.  Which is why they held off challenging Roe until they were sure they had the votes.

They literally mounted the first challenge a month after that happened, as I noted. 

Unless you produce this evidence you keep hinting at but not producing that my entire knowledge base on this issue is a fantasy.

@Gangsta #19 - That’s not how Republicans work.  They just keep throwing shit until something sticks.  Amanda laid out for you what they’ve been doing.  Personhood amendment fails one year, try it again, and again and again.  Lather rinse repeat.

I’d go further than Porgey. Overturning Roe just means that some states will be allowed to ban abortion. For the true believers this will not be nearly enough. As long as there are states that permit abortion, and airplanes and buses that don’t screen women for pregnancy before boarding, abortion will be a thoroughly viable fund-raising tool for the right.

I don’t think they’ll go after Griswold outright, at least at first. Not because they don’t want to, but because there are so many other ways (as with abortion) to make contraception inaccessible without explicitly outllawing it. First (as some states have already done) you get rid of contraceptive funding for poor women, then you start imposing regulatory restrictions on stores that stock condoms (under the guise of safeguarding health) and doctors who prescribe and pharmacies that carry the pill and other non-OTC contraceptives. And when states start running their own health-care exchanges, plans that cover contraception inexplicably run into roadblocks getting approved (sure, you can sue, and 5 or 10 years later get relief).

Richard Goblin;

“Perhaps if more people voted their heart and their head, we might get better leaders.”

No, if the people who broadly agree with you did that you’d be completely excluded from power even in deep blue areas until they wised up and started voting strategically. That’s because in America typically we use plurality elections, which means that if you’re not voting for one of the top two, you’re not voting.

If you don’t like it, the stupid response would be acting as if we had a better system when we don’t. The smart, reality-based response is to deal with the system we have intelligently until we can get it changed.

Amanda,

Again you revert to argumentum ad hominem, which is the cheapest of cheap shots.  You need to learn how to treat people with respect.

You started out this whole thing by saying that Roe has a solid chance of being overturned.  I replied that I disagree.  Not sure how that makes me an idiot, but whatever, it’s not like I care about your opinion of me anyway.

You weaken your argument greatly when you resort to personal insults.  It causes people to root against you.

@felagund

Oh, fuck Ralph Nader and anyone who lived in a swing state and voted for him. Seriously, you still think Bush’s election was Al Gore’s fault?

Yeah, fuck a person who dedicated his life to activism and has done more to actually help people in his career by far than most.  That awful, awful man!  What have you done in your career that can even begin to measure up?

And yes, Al Gore’s “loss” was his own damn fault.  He failed to shore up the left part of his base (many of whom voted for Nader) during the election.  He distanced himself from Bill Clinton as a show for the Village, despite Clinton’s popularity everywhere else.  And he sat on his thumbs and refused to fight during the post election battle despite winning the popular vote.

@Amanda Marcotte

I said that Obama will definitely appoint pro-choicers.  Anyone who thinks otherwise is paranoid, and yeah, probably voted for Nader.

I think it’s an ancillary issue for him.  Obama will appoint nice centrist Justices who are likely to be pro-choice.  But I doubt being pro-choice will be a litmus test for who he nominates.  I just don’t see any evidence that Obama cares that much about the issue (exhibit “A” - his executive order entrenching the Hyde Amendment).  Paranoia has nothing to do with it.

  Sorry if it’s an “old canard”.  I will stop pointing it out when the country stops paying for Bush being able to get down to the wire close enough in Florida to steal the election.

Riiiiiight.  The butterfly ballots, the Florida secretary of state, voter intimidation, and a crooked Supreme Court had nothing to do with that, did it?  Nor did all those people who voted for Bush (the people who to my mind hold primary responsibility).  Or maybe, just maybe Gore should have done something to appeal to all those Nader voters other than to say “but at least I’ll be better than Bush, vote for me or else!”

But hey, keep “pointing it out” (whatever ‘it’ is).  No need to worry about alienating people who voted for Nader in 2000, right?  That strategy worked for Al Gore didn’t it?

Oh look, it’s the “Nader voters are to blame for all the country’s ills.”. Must be campaign time again.

Now I didn’t vote for Nader, but I can certainly understand why someone would. It’s silly to say “Well, this candidate is good, but you’re not allowed to vote for him because this warmonger over here that wants to destroy the middle class is marginally less of an asshole than that warmonger over there that wants to destroy the middle class.”. It’s not much of an incentive.

As often as privilege is pointed out here, it’s funny how no one recognizes it when they’re doing it. Sure it’s ok to claim that everyone should support Democrats no matter what, I mean, it’s not like we work in one of the production or factory jobs they so love to destroy with FTAs. Especially now that the Democrats are trying their hand at union busting as well.

I do agree that Roe is under attack and that Republicans would probably get it overturned if they could manage it. That’s basically the only reason Obama will get my vote.

@Rare Vos: Because mocking those who vote for third party candidates is all we’ve got. The candidates the Dems put forward mostly suck. So we’re stuck trying to ridicule people to convince them to vote for the guy that sucks slightly less. We’re down to hippie punching to GOTV because it’s all that’s left. Hooray. We’re about as likely to get a return to sanity as we are to get a return to that “Rule of Law” we were promised.

Mike Ess, nothing is a bridge too far for people who bomb clinics and shoot unarmed men while they are in church.

Amanda briefly alluded to the fact that abortion will never be banned for everyone because of laws passed before Roe v. Wade in New York and California. But that only works for women who live there or who have the means to get to those states. She pointed out for the umpteenth time that a ban on abortion will not affect wealthy, connected people. It never has.

The same is true of contraception. The efforts to kill Planned Parenthood are to stop the organization from distributing birth control to three categories of women:  the young (especially teens), the poor, and women of color. Overturning Griswold is not about an outright ban on birth control. It’s to make sure that the undesirables are kept in their place. Wingnuts believe that Griswold was incorrect because it took away a mans total control over all reproductive choices. If a man decides that his wife should go on the pill, I don’t think they will argue with that. But some stupid woman should never, ever be allowed to decide her own reproductive choices. So no, there will never be an outright ban on birth control, just HUGE restrictions on who has access to it.

I don’t think Kennedy’s vote in the Wal-Mart case is predictive of his vote in a potential Roe-busting case. I think it’s more about the cons’ long-term project of breaking the federal courts, pushing more and more cases into ADR, and generally just making public resolution of legal disputes harder and harder to come by. Would have come out the same way if it was a class action by black men arguing that Wal-Mart discriminated against them, and then you wouldn’t be able to draw the misogynism connection. Moreover, no need to read tea leaves that way: you’re absolutely correct to say that he tipped his hand in the latest Carhart case, and showed that he doesn’t take abortion rights seriously.

As to your broad point, I agree that Roe is in serious danger, particularly if Obama loses. I would disagree somewhat with your ultra-pessimistic assessment of the chances of Scalia, Thomas, or Kennedy suffering a serious medical breakdown and either dying or being forced to retire. Good healthcare is good healthcare, but we haven’t yet found a way to prolong life indefinitely. I also suspect Kennedy would not have an ideological objection to stepping down and letting Obama appoint his successor. I think it’s more about enjoying the job and the status with him, such that if he really became too feeble to do his job, he would probably depart.

You need to learn how to treat people with respect.

Gangsta, I can’t even begin to tell you how creepy that comes off.

How about you show “people” some respect by not coming to someone else’s blog, derailing for two days on an argument you’ve all but conceded you can’t support with any evidence, then telling the author what to do in her own space?

Your language is creepy and threatening, and your point—how odd, I’ve read both threads, and I can’t seem to find it!  STFU, GTFO, etc., etc.

I wonder how many of the Nader defenders are women of reproductive age.

And as for the Walmart case, every single Justice agreed that the case could not be brought as a class action as situated.  The dissent stated not that the Walmart class action should be allowed to proceed, but that it might be able to proceed under a different rule that was not before the court, and which should be first determined by the district court on remand. 
Comment #11: CW21 on 06/22 at 11:25 AM

“In a company of Wal-Mart’s size and geographical scope, it is unlikely that all managers would exercise their discretion in a common way without some common direction.” 

In other words, they don’t believe that managerial action based on social prejudice is possible, it has to be directed by Walmart.  Look out, race is next.

@12: I really can’t see myself willingly or happily voting for Biden or Gore, and I don’t think Hillary Clinton will run.

I wonder how many of the Nader defenders are women of reproductive age.
Comment #35: typist on 06/22 at 01:15 PM

I am still of reproductive age, in fact, for me, getting pregnant would be pretty catastrophic.  I voted for Nader. 

But I only did so because my state was “safe.”  I would not have voted for him if I were in a swing state.  My vote was to express my agreement with many of his policies that made him “unelectable” e.g. drug decriminalization, pro-affirmative action, single payer health care, workers rights etcetera.

Oldfeminist, the “Nader defenders” I’m referring to are the ones who wouldn’t give a toss about a safe state vs. a swing state. The fact that you put that kind of conscientious thought into your vote means you’re not who I’m talking about.

And FWIW, oldfeminist, as if my opinion is relevant, you did the right thing. Because the outcome wasn’t in doubt. Our election system sucks, is the real problem.

Again you revert to argumentum ad hominem

When I asked you to prove your argument?  All I want is the evidence. But thanks for revealing that you’re a wingnut, because literally, claiming “ad hominem” when you’ve been beat in an argument is strictly a conservative thing.

Okay, everyone.  You can safely disregard everything Gangsta said.  He’s a conservative posing as a liberal to sow false complacency. Pure concern troll.

I should have guessed from his name, which I feared was some racist dogwhistle.  Looking to see who it is behind the scenes now.  I have my guesses.

Jthompson - so, it’s just another form of vote extortion then.  We mock repubs for demanding loyalty, “you’re either with us or against us” style rhetoric.  And then, engage in it.  Yay us!

Still waiting for this missing piece of the puzzle I apparently don’t have.

Tough to say.  It looks like he is using an IP masker, though, which is a sure sign that someone is a wingnut posing as a liberal.

I’m curious about something: is the proliferation of fetish heels on mainstream shoes some kind of reaction to the anti-feminist trend of the last ten years or so?

“Again you revert to argumentum ad hominem, which is the cheapest of cheap shots.  You need to learn how to treat people with respect.”

Gangsta, I didn’t see you in Latin class in High School and its evident in your misappropriation of ad hominem. Where exactly did Amanda leave evidence based argumentation behind and call you a fucking idiot? I didn’t see it….although, I’ll call you unnecessarily stubborn on a point that has been well established. I’ve been wrong on the internet (I’ve been wrong on Pandagon) and an individual who actually respects evidenced based thinking? Yeah, they can concede.

Excuse me, but I’m a pathetic little shit who really needs to get a life.

Yes, Roe is in danger.  I think the conservatives are doing a two pronged strategy on this.  ON one hand, make more and more restrictions until abortion becomes next to impossible to get.  On the other, slowly build up and go full throttle in hopes of controlling women’s bodies.  In the past, I think one could say the attacks on Roe were an election ploy for campaign funds et al but the Republicans in the last decade are increasingly moving towards not giving a fuck what anyone else believes except their corporate backers.  With the polarization of the party chasing most of the somewhat reasonable people from their tent and the tea party being used to push their agenda, this has unfortunately become especially clear.

However, we also have to watch the Democrats as well on this.  Yes, there are more differences now than 11 years ago (in part due to the polarization of this country going into hyperdrive under Dubya, Rove et al), but in some cases its a matter of degrees rather than kind.  Perviously Roe v Wade was the one thing that you could tell the difference between the GOP and the Democrats.  Sadly, some amongst them are willing to throw women under the bus for votes et al (Bart Stupak being the most obvious example). 

One thing to especially be watchful about is attempts by the Democrats to snare “Christian” voters from the GOP (usually white evangelical/fundamentalist/charismatics in this instance).  While these people aren’t monolithic, they have been proven to be solid pro forced pregnancy.  Thus, we should be on alert if there is a larger effort by the Dems to step aside while Roe is put through a wood chipper in order to get these people.  I hope it doesn’t happen but it is worrisome. 

As for Nader, it still amazes me that the Dems didn’t hire him and make him an advisor on a Karl Rove level after 2000.  I know that will piss off a few people here but it would make sense if the party actually wanted to show more respect to its base.  Even trying to get a coalition with the Greens would be a step forward.  There’s only so far the Democratic Party can go with a strategy of, as Jon Stewart put it after the 2006 elections, “Slowly backing out of the room while your brother gets screamed at for burning down the garage.”  Regardless, spending so much energy on Nader takes away from what we need to do in 2011.

These thoughts are far from complete but they’re the ones that first popped into my head.  Some of y’all will disagree but feel free to discuss amongst yourselves.

Don’t be so paranoid, anoNY.  I don’t respect your arguments, which are unfounded and facile, but I don’t mistake you for someone with a major personality disorder.  Fear not.

“but the court really wasn’t sauing that no discrimination occured”

Yeah - nothing in common and no question of law, except the reems of data showing systematic, constant discrimination against female employees. 

And because Wal-Mart had a policy saying that they don’t discriminate on the basis of sex, and because no one in power actually wrote the words “screw the bitches” into the policy manual, the reems of data showing the systematic, constant discrimination is magically not class action worthy.  Which TOTALLY has nothing to do with the current climate of “screw the workers” in this country, the coziness of SCOTUS to corporate backers, or the plainly stated desire on the right to kill class action lawsuits all together.  Nosiree!

So, basically, SCOTUS did exactly what they allowed Wal-Mart to do - as long as you don’t specifically say “screw the bitches”,you can screw them over in safety and comfort. 

@#5—Actually, I, too, think that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.  Why rare?  (1) Because I think the first line of defense against unintended pregnancy should be comprehensive sex education and access to affordable and effective contraception.  I would prefer that women not find themselves unexpectedly pregnant in the first place.  Abortion is still a surgical procedure, with the attendant risks of even minor surgery, and it would be better if abortion never needed to be used purely as a form of birth control.  (2) Because I think we should have a social safety net, including prenatal care, universal health insurance, and affordable child care, that ensures that no one needs an abortion because they can’t afford to care for a child.

@SomeGuy

That’s because in America typically we use plurality elections, which means that if you’re not voting for one of the top two, you’re not voting.

I am familiar with the old “first past the post voting system” theory of our two party system.  A theory refuted by Canada (three parties), the UK (three parties), and India (more than three parties) - all of which have more than two parties and all have a “first past the post” election system.  When the evidence disproves the theory, the theory has to go.

Part of the problem is that when people believe “if you’re not voting for one of the top two, you’re not voting” the perception makes it true.

The smart, reality-based response is to deal with the system we have intelligently until we can get it changed.

I disagree.  The smart response is to vote out politicians who don’t represent your interests even when they scream “but the other guys are so much worse.”  If you continue to vote people into office despite their failure to look after your interests or who go back on their campaign platform, then you are powerless.

But if you have a better idea, let me know.

AnoNY2:

Here’s a thought experiment. Let’s say it was something other than discrimination against women. Say health and safety, for instance that the local managers all had a policy, under profit pressure from the central office, of serving spoiled meat at the in-store lunch counter. And that the central office had received numerous complaints and the occasional lawsuit, but other than a one-sentence line in the employee manual saying that only healthful food was served in the store, did nothing to stop managers from continuing to serve spoiled meat and demoting anyone who complained about the policy. No mandatory training in food service for managers, no discipline for managers whose stores served spoiled meat, no mention at regional or national meetings that serving spoiled meat was a problem and that the central office wouldn’t tolerate it.

Is there a point at which you would agree that it wasn’t just an accidental decentralized confluence of events that led to so much spoiled meat being served?

I agree that the anti-choicers are not going to stop with getting abortion banned in as many states as possible, and anyone who thinks that most of them are pro-life is delusional.  It actually makes me angry that they’ve appropriated that label.  I was raised Catholic, and for all the Church’s many flaws, their “seamless garment” theology is at least consistent—it involves opposition to abortion, active euthanasia, capital punishment, aggressive war, torture, and in favor of caring for the poor.  Most anti-abortion activists don’t even come close to that.  Once they get abortion outlawed, they are going to keep working to restrict access to contraception and impose abstinence-only sex ed.  They don’t care about the dignity of each person, they just are obsessed with sex and making sure that women pay for having it.

Saying that voting for Nader wasn’t a wasted vote, mathematically at least, is idiotic, and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the way our two-party system works. The deck is stacked and the best that we can do is compromise in hopes that we can push things in our favor. (This is why, though I’m as frustrated with Obama as many other people, I’m willing to take what we can get in the moment as long as we keep on fighting.) If Nader had enough humility to do what made a real difference, he’d have run for the House or Senate instead of aiming at the Presidency Every. Damn. Time. He. Ran. for anything at all. Nader fucked himself and the country over, and if you voted for him in a swing state, you enabled him to do that. Ross Perot was an anomaly; third parties need to grow their power base from the bottom and ally with groups of similar interests.

The truth is, every time a 2000 Nader voter from a swing state defends their vote, they’re painting themselves as spiteful and petty, and not all that different from their opposites in the Tea Party. If you’re not willing to admit that a vote for Nader was, statistically speaking, a bad move (especially in a swing state), you’re as much a danger to the progressive cause as pseudoscience promoters like Deepak Chopra and Jenny McCarthy, and I want no part of you.

CW21 and anoNY2, you’re both correct in noting that the holding of the WalMart decision was limited to whether the case could move forward as a class action.  However, I think you’re both being overly-generous in your reading of the case’s broader implications, claiming that “the decision wasn’t a rejection of the women’s discrimination claims” and that “the court really wasn’t saying that no discrimination occurred.”  The majority opinion shows an abundance of faith in the notion that discrimination does not happen, or happens only on the rarest of occasions.  Even if the decision did not hinge on it, I think it’s certainly noteworthy that five justices would sign on to this statement: “...left to their own devices most managers in any corporation—and surely most managers in a corporation that forbids sex discrimination—would select sex-neutral, performance-based criteria for hiring and promotion that produce no actionable disparity at all.”

To add to Paul’s hypothetical, do you think the fact that the company did not have a policy of serving spoiled meat would save it from being found liable in the inevitable lawsuit brought by people who got sick?

Good post.  I think that choice is already fucked for those of us who are not the right color or socio-economic status.  Does anyone give a fuck whether a black, brown, and/or poor woman has autonomy over her body?  No.  The glibness on that other thread reflects the fucking cluelessness of our progressive movement.  “Hey, I can still get an abortion so what the fuck is the problem?”  The problem is that one day you won’t unless you have enough money to take a discrete trip to overseas.  If anyone really gave a shit, they would be up in arms about the fact that there are MANY MANY women in this country who already effectively have NO FUCKING CHOICE.  It might as well already be overturned for them.

I would disagree somewhat with your ultra-pessimistic assessment of the chances of Scalia, Thomas, or Kennedy suffering a serious medical breakdown and either dying or being forced to retire.

I think you forget just how young Clarence Thomas actually is - tomorrow will only be his 63rd birthday. Scalia is 75, and Kennedy will turn 75 next month, both of them 12 years older than Thomas. Thomas is actually closer in age to Samuel Alito (61), Sonia Sotomayor (56), and John Roberts (55) than he is to the two conservative justices who were appointed before him. I think people generally assume that Thomas is much older than he actually is because he was appointed to the Supreme Court nearly 20 years ago - when he was only 43 years old. No justice since Thomas has been appointed who was younger than 50 years old at the time of their appointment.

It’s entirely possible that we could be stuck with Thomas on the bench for another 15-20 years given his current age. Even more frightening is that because John Roberts is currently the 2nd youngest person on the High Court, he could potentially be Chief Justice for the next 25-30 years.

Anyone who thinks wingers will stop if they get Roe overturned is nuts. Look at how vigorously wingers are pursuing Voter ID laws, which solves a problem that doesn’t even exist.

(Of course, there is a voting problem they are hoping to solve, which is poor people and brown people having the right to vote).

To add to Paul’s hypothetical, do you think the fact that the company did not have a policy of serving spoiled meat would save it from being found liable in the inevitable lawsuit brought by people who got sick?

It shouldn’t, but I wouldn’t put anything past this corporate-bootlicking court. 

Apparently having criminal policy is okay as long as you’re not stupid enough to actually put it in writing.

We’re down to hippie punching to GOTV because it’s all that’s left. Hooray.

Word.
Roe v. Wade is going down in flames, and my daughter (and every other female who’ll be of reproductive age at that time) will suffer, not because of Ralph Nader, but because the electorate has triangulated itself away from having comprehensive opposition to the Right Wing war on Everything Lib’rul.  You allow yourselves to be confined to an ever-narrowing list of corporate-approved candidates, and you wring your hands at the diminishing returns.  That’s some weak, pusillanimous shit; thankfully, it has an imminent expiration date.  You know what?  That’s okay.  The U.S. won’t be the first empire to fall on its own bloody sword; we’re not special in that respect.

I’m predicting an Obama win in 2012, if only because the GOP clown car is even more out of control and scary-stupid than in ‘08.  The bankers, insurance companies, and warmongers know upon whom they can depend, and despite their occasional public pouting over the past few years they’ll make the sound investment again.  Another slick, well-financed campaign, this time with even more scary bogeyman as a foil (Bachmann!  Pawlenty!  Ooga booga!!) will probably get enough terrified and indignant lib’ruls to the polls.

Then the well-established fealty of Obama to the interests of concentrated wealth will likely result in even more mid-term gains for the GOP (as in 2010) and their own wealthy backers.  Enough reactionary voters (of which we have no apparent shortage) will again say ‘hey, I can’t get any help keeping the rich man from screwing me, but I can def’nitely keep the bitchez in line.’  Loyal >snicker< Democratic voters will again fail to support enough actual progressives in their local primaries, and a few more corporatist Dems will get creamed by teabaggers (or whatever they’ll call themselves in ‘14).  Then, voila!  the returns diminish even more, to the point where Obama can’t get anything past GOP majorities in both houses, and he might even get impeached for having a smudged state seal on his certificate of live birth.

Where does this leave the issue of reproductive rights?  Far worse off.  Americans have short memories and narrow minds. Most corporate media are eagerly assisting the right wing campaign against organized labor, and the locally organized pushbacks against state GOP assaults are getting insufficient help from the national Democratic leadership (including Mr. “I’ll put on comfortable shoes and walk the picket line with you” Hope and Change).  Hell, here in Chicago, we even have a Democratic Mayor taking potshots at teachers while he lavishes hefty salaries on his handpicked ‘administrators.’  (This shouldn’t be surprising.  Obama himself beat the state GOP hacks to the teacher-bashing punch.)  So even at the state and local level, where much of the reactionary activism is going on, many Dems are screwing their traditional supporters and encouraging the GOP surges that lead to these increasingly audacious attacks on reproductive freedoms.

Amanda, I really don’t understand the source of the vitriol towards Gangsta’s point.  He wasn’t disagreeing with your facts, just with your conclusion.  It’s like you’ve made it your personal point to try to bully and ridicule him now based not on your own counterfactual evidence that he is wrong, but rather his inability to provide proof that would turn his personal view into incontrovertible fact.

Regardless, there have been cases in which the Supreme Court could have (but chose not to) used to invalidate Roe after O’Connor left.  One post-Carhart example is Northland Family Planning Clinic v. Cox, 487 F.3d 323 (8th Cir. 2007).  After the district court and 6th Circuit struck down as unconstitutional a Michigan law that “pushed almost every boundary that the Supreme Court has imposed” on abortion laws, the Supreme Court denied the petitioner’s writ for certiorari that would have allowed the Court to expressly reverse prior precedent.  552 U.S. 1096 (2008).

I wonder if the Republican tendency to electoral and policy success has anything to do with the way they don’t rehash an 11-year-old argument every time the subject arises.

I wonder if the Republican tendency to electoral and policy success has anything to do with the way they don’t rehash an 11-year-old argument every time the subject arises.

Yeah, learning from history is a terrible idea.

Mr. Subjunctive, they scapegoat their enemies, not potential allies.

Learning the wrong thing from history is an even worse idea.

#71:  Yes, this. 

We are some navel-gazing motherfuckers.  Because our navels are smart and awesome.  And pure.  And full of integrity and shit.

typist@71:

Yeah, I definitely see a lot of learning going on in this thread.

It was eleven years ago. The votes have been cast and counted (or not). This cannot be changed. As far as I’m concerned, if person X doesn’t feel like candidate Y deserves their vote, that’s their decision. I mean, that’s why we say it’s their vote, as opposed to letting people fill out one another’s ballots.

We have actual problems now, about which things can be done. We will have actual problems in the future, about which we could be making plans now. The only thing this conversation accomplishes is 1) derailing Amanda’s original post and 2) forcing everyone to dig in their heels even harder to defend the way they voted in 2000, whatever it was. Neither 1) nor 2) accomplishes anything useful.

“I wonder if the Republican tendency to electoral and policy success has anything to do with the way they don’t rehash an 11-year-old argument every time the subject arises.”

Any political success on the Reichwing side is from one of two things:  Unthinking fealty to their core ideas — No Taxes, More Defense Is Better, No Sex Without (Mostly Negative) Consequences, No Taxes, Put Gay People Back Into The Closet, Respect Your Superiors At All Times, Obey Your Leaders At All Times, No Taxes, If a Hippie Likes It We Hate It — and the inability of some Americans who are not chronic koolaid drinkers to see that periodically voting Republican leads to nothing but grief.

Not rehashing old arguments on the Right?  Are you kidding?  They’re still rehashing Vietnam and Woodstock, still arguing over the merits of Civil Rights legislation, still arguing over every single piece of progressive legislation passed in the 20th Century, still arguing over the Civil War and its aftermath, still arguing over the Nation’s Founders and the founding documents.  Some of them even still seem pissed by the Magna Carta.

And you’re upset because somebody on the Left said something nasty about Nader’s 2000 POTUS run?...

Richard Goblin;

Did I say anything about party systems?

There is ONE bit of concern-trolling that is legitimate here, which is that activist groups on both sides of the issue have a habit of portraying Roe as being under more constant and severe threat than it actually is. (That helps them raise money.) So, there was a habit that many groups had of portraying Roe as having a one-justice majority during a long period of time (before O’Connor left the Court) when it actually had a two-justice majority. And people sometimes overstate the number of Supreme Court appointments presidents get—most of them get two, not four. Supreme Court justices are also careful about retiring when a like-minded successor can be appointed, for the most part.

There are basically 5 justices who support Roe, 2 who oppose it, and 2 who probably oppose it, which means if the Republicans get a Supreme Court appointment, they can probably get it overturned. And one of the votes for supporting it is squishy and will rule that various restrictions on abortion rights are permitted under Roe and Casey. Thus, a presidential election COULD result in its overturn, though I also suspect that Ruth Ginsburg would do everything in her power to not resign from the Court if a Republican got elected. (Similarly, if Scalia is going to retire, he’s not likely to do it with a Democrat in the White House unless he absolutely has to.)

Obviously, while that is the biggest threat to Roe, the more likely short-term threat is that the conservatives continue to obtain Kennedy’s vote for various restrictions that chip away at Roe without formally overruling it.

MikeEss@76:

They’re fighting one another on those things? ‘Cause what I see in the media and on the blogs is a pretty marvelously unified front.

Please.  I hope the purists find some creepy freak with a stupid name from Vermont or some other fucking place to primary Obama.  Ani DiFranco can croon songs of hope at his/her campaign stops.  And all of the Whole Foods-y set can get REALLY excited and feel awesome that their candidate is reflective of THEM and their interests.  While everyone else in America says WTF and the Republicans point and laugh.  But we will be PURE progressives in defeat!  It will be so fucking sweet.

I don’t know, did it ever occur to any of you that most people ARE stupidly ambivalent about choice?  Americans are mostly blinkered by patriarchy and stupid fucking Jesus shit (and the practicing Jews and Muslims are just as fucking dumb about the autonomy of a woman over her body as the bible-thumping morons).  Our politicians reflect US, they don’t lead us around by the nose convincing us to be assholes.  We ARE assholes and the people that we invite to Washington to fuck around on our dime are simply a reflection of that. All of us navel gazing internet fools are not the Democratic base.  The working class/kinda conservativish blue collar folks are the base.  And they don’t care about reproductive rights so much.  They care about jobs. And Jobs.  And Jesus.  And jobs.

Absolutely with Kit-Kat @53.  I too wish for abortion to be safe, legal and rare.  The same as I wish for root canals, heart bypasses and other medical treatments/surgeries, all of which have some risk.  Abortion typically has a far lower risk than pregnancy; but not having been pregnant without wanting to be (needing an abortion) is better than having to get even a safe and legal one on all fronts.

Roe is under threat, absolutely, and another conservative judge replacing a liberal is all it needs.  Unfortunately, Obama is so bad on oh, so many topics that I won’t be voting for him.  I will be voting third party, and if that loses the White House for the Dems, oh well.  I’m voting for a liberal for president or nobody at all.  Maybe a few more steps towards conservative Shangi-La will finally wake some people up.  And maybe Obama losing due to a candidate to the left will teach the Dems that they can’t count on liberals voting for them because the other guys are worse.  Reproductive rights are absolutely important, but they are not the only issue.  Warmongering, ignoring the constitution, supporting Wall Street over average Americans, in these and so many other ways, Obama has lost my vote and what he would have to do to get it back would be a Herculean task even if he was an actual liberal, and not Reagan warmed over.

Maybe a few more steps towards conservative Shangi-La will finally wake some people up.

I remember talking to people who, marveling that GHWB was elected, proclaiming “I didn’t think it could get any worse after Reagan.”

I really would prefer to NEVER have to say “I didn’t think it could get any worse after W.”

We are not in a sane country. Never underestimate how bad it will get, and never count on people “waking up.” The counter-spin is in place to keep people stupid and happy.

Oh but the Democrats already know they can’t count on liberals.  Which is why they keep moving to the right to get those lunkheaded “independents” (i.e. stupid people who don’t pay attention to what is going on around them but who prattle on about being “undecided” when asked a question about a given election).

So, vote for the independent.  Democrats have a long history of being the party of the stupid, xenophobic, and reactionary ‘everyman’.  We only got to be reasonable and half decent in the last half century.  I am pretty sure the DLC would be happy to see the back of our goofy asses.  Then they can get back to their pre-1950s fuckery.

“Maybe a few more steps towards conservative Shangi-La will finally wake some people up.”

Here’s the problem.  Building things takes lots of time and concerted effort.  But tearing things down is relatively easy.

The steps we’ve already taken toward a “conservative Shangri-La” since Nixon have been incredibly damaging to this country.  This accelerated under Reagan, and took off like a rocket by the time Bush Jr. and Big Dick Cheney had their 8-years in the driver’s seat.  A few more Republican administrations and you can pretty much write this place off.

If they succeed in pushing America into the Fascist pit the Insane Reichwing has planned for us all, we’ll find getting out almost impossible…

It’s already worse after W.  Obama has slowed down the advent of our eventual corporate serfdom in a fundamentalist surveillance state, but he hasn’t changed the course.  It started before the election when he voted for telecom immunity.  He has kept and expanded the unconstitutional powers that W grabbed.  He kept the office of faith-based whatever and nonsense.  Even when he completes his “reduction” in troops in Afghanistan, there will still be twice as many there as the day he assumed office.  His “evolving” ideas about gay rights have gone from fully supporting gay marriage in 1996 to being against it in 2008.  He is pushing for more free trade agreements.  His health care plan is a government hand out to private insurance companies.  His banking “reforms” are toothless and far short of what’s needed.  He appointed the cat-food…  sorry, deficit commission to find ways to cut the debt by removing any vestige of a safety net while not asking another penny from the rich.  He extended Bush’s tax cuts.  He has done absolutely nothing about climate change, though I guess it’s better than actively going full Inhofe.

What I don’t understand is why the Republicans don’t just nominate Obama at their convention.  Outside of his lukewarm support of reproductive health, and the fact that he’s black, what keeps him from being the ideal Republican candidate?  He could get every single electoral vote, a feat not accomplished since George Washington.

I fully expect things will get worse under Obama or Romney or Pawlenty or Bachmann or Hunstman or Gingrich or Cain or whatever other looney the Repubs dig up.  Obama just might let things get worse more slowly.  I think I’ve given numerous, reasonable reasons is why, swing state or not, I cannot in good conscience cast my vote for Barack Obama.  I did in 08, but “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on, shame on you. Fool me, you can’t get fooled again.”

Of course I did, anon.  You were clearly misrepresenting yourself to appear more liberal-friendly than you are, and proving that was necessary to help get you to a place where you’re forced to be more honest about how your “libertarianism” is just the same old right wing nuttery.

Simple fact: EVERY SINGLE PRESIDENT since Herbert Hoover who had to face a primary challenge in their re-election year wound up being defeated in the general election by the other party’s nominee. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.

Additionally, only once in American history was a primary challenger able to both defeat an incumbent president and go on to win the general election - James Buchanan in 1856. And historians widely consider him one of the worst presidents in the history of the United States (most still consider him worse than Dubya).

If President Obama has to face a tough primary challenge next year, the person who primaries him will have effectively handed the White House to the Republicans. Primary Obama in 2012 and you’ll be witnessing Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty becoming the 46th POTUS in January 2013.

Period.

DTGslu2K@88:

Were people in this thread talking about primarying Obama?

DTGslu2K@88:

I just did a find, and only two people mentioned trying to primary Obama: Weezie Jefferson and you.  And both of those comments stated basically that primarying Obama would be tantamount to handing the White House to the Republicans…  So, um…  who are you arguing against?

Shorter DTGslu2k “Don’t do anything at all even faintly critical of Obama or the boogieman will get you!”

We’ve gone from “if you’re a liberal vote for the liberal candidate in the primaries and vote Democrat in the general” (which is actually a fairly reasonable position) to “ZOMG don’t even think about using the primaries to advance liberalism or the Republican boogieman will get you!”

Tell me cousin, what exactly are liberals supposed to do to try and get liberal goals advanced?  You’ve just told us that we are, under absolutely no circumstances, supposed to even use the flipping primary as a means of demonstrating to Obama the depths of our displeasure with his hippie punching.

@SomeGuy, post 28: Careful there. If the stupid response is to act as if we have a better system than we have, that’s an argument in favor of anarchism or some other form of *revolutionary* leftism, not in favor of strategic voting.

Once again demonstrating Kropotkin’s old saying that the true utopians are the liberals.

Realize you’re in the middle of a war. The Republicans already know that fact. That’s why they’re winning.

The only thing this conversation accomplishes is 1) derailing Amanda’s original post and 2) forcing everyone to dig in their heels even harder to defend the way they voted in 2000, whatever it was. Neither 1) nor 2) accomplishes anything useful.

You are right, of course.  But good grief, bringing up 2000 is an engraved invitation to derail any substantive conversation.

I’m not sure where the solution lies.  The courts are unreliable in guarding reproductive rights at this point.  Electoral politics is near futile to accomplish much, especially when the party supposedly on our side is all bipartisany while the opposition is brutal and unyeilding.

I’m frustrated by the situation.  In the “good old days” my mentor, Sylvia Law, was fighting to force medicaid to cover abortions.  Now we are fighting just to hang on to what we got (on a good day) or slow the erosion (the rest of the time).

@ SomeGuy

Did I say anything about party systems?

Can you address my evidence that refutes your theory about “first past the post” voting systems?

Richard Goblin @93:

The only real general suggestion I can remember hearing is to imitate the way the Right took over: find and support really local, heavily partisan candidates (school board, sheriff, that sort of thing) who will push the local scene to the left, or even run for public office yourself. Since downticket races typically don’t attract a lot of interest, it’s easier to win them with a small number of reliable supporters, and there’s not as much money necessary to run. Then once that’s happened, you have a group of progressives who could go on to run for higher offices, and a grassroots organization that’s capable of supporting more major candidates in a meaningful way.

I don’t know whether this is a realistic plan (just because it worked for the Right doesn’t mean it could work for the Left), but it has a sort of common-senseish feel to it. Plus the goals are small enough to be achievable, and there’s less of a beating-one’s-head-against-the-wall feeling. I don’t know what city- or county-level offices might be involved in things like abortion or contraception access, but I’d be willing to bet that there must be a few that touch on it indirectly. (Somebody has to be inspecting and approving the pregnancy crisis centers, e.g., right?) Something to contemplate, anyway.

The down side, I suppose, is that one gets to focus on the school board while watching Congress drag the country to hell, but watching the country go to hell while getting a good person elected to be your County Auditor surely beats watching the country go to hell while grumbling about how disappointing Obama is. No? Yes? Maybe?

Gangsta is using a typical winger argument style—pretend to make a point while being totally obnoxious, then when you lose patience and say, “look, asshole, <explanation>,” cry that you’re just using ad hominem arguments as if that’s all you ever said. 

The moment you characterize him negatively, you “lose” the argument in what passes for his mind.  Even if the negative characterization isn’t used to support your argument, or is relevant.

Regarding comment #10:  I respectfully disagree, but thanks for addressing my comment (and the comments of many others) from yesterday and today’s post regarding Nader and 2000.

Hi Amanda,

First off, I think you did a great job refuting the first two arguments, and I completely agree with you.

I think you didn’t refute the third argument strongly enough.  Rather, I think you have to characterize people who say this…

Republicans don’t actually want to kill Roe v. Wade.  They need it to keep the base going

...as being under an extremely dangerous delusion- that the Republican leadership is rationally (albeit contemptuously) exploiting an anti-abortion base that doesn’t know any better.  The thinking goes that they are actually snake oil salesmen that are the merely worst kind of opportunists.  In the vast majority of cases, I think this is flatly false.

Someone can hope that opportunists lose interest in their leverage issue when they get what they want, or forget about it when an even bigger lever presents itself.  This isn’t entirely wrong- most anti-choice Republicans switched over to being the pro-war ticket and rode that for all it was worth when it was so valuable at the turn of the millennium. 

But the belief that the Republican leadership will eventually stop eying Roe V. Wade is pure fantasy.  Most of them are True Believers.  Their conscious motivation is religiously-based, regardless of whatever misogyny that Religion is itself based on.  They might switch issues temporarily to gain some extra seats, but they’ll ALWAYS swing back to abortion.  Roe isn’t safe now.  Nor will it be safe in the next year or the next decade.  Hell, I’m betting it’ll be under attack the next century.  Abortion is the gateway issue that motivates the Christian fundamentalist.  I don’t see that changing any time soon.

Yikes. I was given the (sadly nonbillable) task of summarizing Wal-Mart v. Dukes to a lay/non-J.D. audience today. Given the reaction here, I wonder if that is even possible…

Those who say that “don’t hold a gun to my head about Roe!” are making their allies their enemies for pointing out THE BASICS OF MATH.

“The smart response is to vote out politicians who don’t represent your interests…”

The problem is, if you are in a swing state, and vote for the third party candidate, you are NOT voting out the right-winger—YOU ARE VOTING THEM IN, because:

“Saying that voting for Nader wasn’t a wasted vote, mathematically at least, is idiotic, and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the way our two-party system works.”

And for those out there still defending Nader: THIS THIS THIS:

“If Nader had enough humility to do what made a real difference, he’d have run for the House or Senate instead of aiming at the Presidency Every. Damn. Time. He. Ran. for anything at all. “

You want a pure, unadulterated love affair with a perfect being?  Get a dog. 

This is politics.  We get as good as the two final offerings out there.  Do your duty, pick the best one and WRITE AND AGITATE THEM to take you seriously.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is paranoid, and yeah, probably voted for Nader.  Sorry if it’s an “old canard”.  I will stop pointing it out when the country stops paying for Bush being able to get down to the wire close enough in Florida to steal the election.

It’s not an “old canard”.  It is Hippie-Punching.  It is deeply misplaced anger.  It is stone-cold laziness.  It is a false & misleading victim-blaming Zombie Meme.  It goes nowehere & does nothing.  It is the same low-investmentIt is the talk of people who see every problem as a nail because they only tool they can be bothered to pick up is a hammer.  People who repeat it cannot help but sound like they’re whining.  It is the sound of progressives cutting their own throats by cutting themselves off from their own history.  It is the rest of the lobsters yanking the one trying to get out of the pot back into the boiling water & screaming “who do you think you are!?”.  The only functions its repetition serves is 1.) letting Gore off the hook for doing what Centrist Democrats always do & always will do - fold & capitulate - until it costs them more than it gains them, 2.) letting Bush get away scott free for stealing an election.  It is getting mad at the goalie for failing to do all of the work all by themselves while the defense & forwards are fucking off in stands signing autographs.

The Nader campaign was a direct result of 8 years of being taken for granted, w/ the Battle in Seattle being the breaking point.  Nader earned every vote he got by running a campaign the way you’re supposed to, showing up the DLC GoreDems in the process.  If Democrats gave the GOP 1/10th of the grief for the theft of the presidency that they give Greens for participating in the democratic process, they’d actually succeed in beating Movement conservatives back into the shit they came from and turning their country around.

On the issue of primary challenges / third party candidates:

I think people who like primary challenges / third party candidates and those that don’t are actually talking past each other.

Let’s take this example. Suppose Obama had a religious conversion tomorrow and announced that he has decided that he is pro-life and will push to ban abortion. How many commenters and posters here would support a primary challenge or third party candidacy then?

So what does that tell you? It tells you that these debates are really not about electability versus purity. They are about preference ordering. Most pro-choicers believe that being pro-life is a dealbreaker. Well, guess what? A lot of peaceniks believe that support for wars that they see as a form of murder and imperialism is a dealbreaker! Everyone has their own dealbreakers. One of the reasons that Nader and Perot and Buchanan all got votes as third party candidates is because there is a small but significant constituency out there who hate free trade, some on the left and some on the right. They literally hate it. They think it is destroying America and destroying our manufacturing base. For some of them, this is a dealbreaker.

We all have our dealbreakers. And whenever we enforce our dealbreakers, we take the risk of, yes, handing the election over to the other side. But the alternative to that is basically saying that your candidates can completely run all over you and you will never abandon them.

Hey, Sam Holloway:

Here, you wrote: “Mr. Subjunctive, they[Republicans] scapegoat their enemies, not potential allies.”

You, from the last thread:

“Fuck you…You most definitely have the government you deserve, you smug, clueless, masochistic asshole.”

This to a fellow progressive who dared to sugges that “President Palin” or Romney or Pawlenty would “do significant harm to this republic”.  Obviously a true statement (for a progressive).

How’s that working with your potential allies thing workin’ out for ya?

A thought experiment:  From above (which made me LOL although it’s too true to be funny:

“I hope the purists find some creepy freak with a stupid name from Vermont or some other fucking place to primary Obama.  Ani DiFranco can croon songs of hope at his/her campaign stops.  And all of the Whole Foods-y set can get REALLY excited and feel awesome that their candidate is reflective of THEM and their interests.  While everyone else in America says WTF and the Republicans point and laugh.”

REWRITE this from a RIGHT-WING PERSPECTIVE and WHAT DO YOU GET?

“I hope the [right-wing] purists find some creepy freak with a stupid name from Mississippi or Alabama to primary against Romney.  Ted Nugent can scream songs of freedom and America at his campaign stops.  Pat Buchanan can lead the opening prayer to smite the gays and abortion doctors.  And all the WalMart set can get REALLY excited and feel awesome that their candidate is reflective of THEM and their interests.  While everyone else in America says WTF and the Democrats point and laugh.”

No, wait—We’ve got that already—IT’S CALLED SARAH PALIN’S BASE of 20% of voters.

Get it, Nader-lovers?

“Fuck you…You most definitely have the government you deserve, you smug, clueless, masochistic asshole.”
This to a fellow progressive who dared to sugges that “President Palin” or Romney or Pawlenty would “do significant harm to this republic”.  Obviously a true statement (for a progressive).

To be fair, I started it by calling someone a whiny baby. These intra-left battles are incredibly self defeating but I’m not sure how to stop them.

BlackBloc;

I know it’s a war. And I’m not a liberal.

If by revolutionary left, you mean a left that would like to overthrow the government, then you’re talking about throwing yourself against a wall until you bleed to death. Beside that, simply abolishing the state would mean a Rothbardian dystopia (and extirpating other forms of hierarchical relations implies the sort of power the state has), while a small “vangard” seizing it always has and always will mean a totalitarian dystopia.

Let me suggest something a little different: repeat what Lincoln did, only instead of being conciliatory we finish the job. What I mean is, find a way, somehow, as soon as possible (whenever that is), to get a real hard progressive legitimately into the White House, along with a sympathetic House and Senate. Then attack the oligarchy on every front, especially the economic basis of their status as oligarchy. If they just grumble and take it, good. I expect they’ll launch a civil war instead, and that’s when we crush them. Our hard left president should already have lists of people to kill and families and corporations to dispossess. That’s where the (original) Republicans failed: they should have taken the entire net worth of every slaveholder and then divvied it up as compensation for the slaves, both as a matter of justice and to eliminate the planters. Instead the planter class stuck around keeping the south poor and bigoted, and their successors now form the most reactionary and intransigent portion of the oligarchy.

Of course you can’t just spring this on people without warning, as if this president could win election by pretending to be “mainstream” and then suddenly turn left and still accomplish anything. It has to be class war in the metaphorical sense right from the beginning.

Now, since we’ve been talking about third parties, someone will claim that Lincoln was a third party candidate. But the Whigs had already split up. Besides, the strategic situation is different now from what it was then (in particular, we have primaries), and in any case the better way to prepare is to get serious progressives into every office possible and make ordinary politics as “warlike” as possible—or rather, make it a two-sided war instead of continuous unanswered aggression. Then we can be ready when the moment comes.

Richard Goblin;

I see you didn’t answer my question. I’ll answer it for you: no. I said nothing about the number of parties.

Therefore, you have not presented any evidence against my theory, but only against Maurice Duverger’s. Actually, calling it “my” theory is a little grandiose, because people have been noticing it for as long as it’s been happening.

You do understand that one claim about the effect of the plurality system is not equivalent to all claims about the effects of the plurality system, right?

If people want to primary Obama, go right ahead. Just understand that all that it will result in is sending Mitt Romney (or whoever the GOP nominates) to the White House in 2013. Yeah, it sucks that that is the way that it is, but that’s the way that it is. I would love to have a far more progressive president than Obama has been so far. But between now and January 2017, he’s as good as we’re gonna get. The choice is either him, or someone decidedly even LESS progressive than him.

If people want to primary Obama, go right ahead. Just understand that all that it will result in is sending Mitt Romney (or whoever the GOP nominates) to the White House in 2013. Yeah, it sucks that that is the way that it is, but that’s the way that it is. I would love to have a far more progressive president than Obama has been so far. But between now and January 2017, he’s as good as we’re gonna get. The choice is either him, or someone decidedly even LESS progressive than him.

Again, this talks past the other side.

I should ask this as a stand-alone question. If Obama announced tomorrow he was switching to being pro-life, would you support a primary challenge or third party candidate in 2012?

This is not about one side being cool-eyed realists and the other side being dreamers who don’t care about the damage they do. This is about different people having different political preferences, and whether Obama is acting in opposition to the things that any particular person considers to be dealbreakers.

Dilan if “willingness to use military force on occasion” is your dealbreaker, you’re never going to have an American President you’re satisfied with.

@Richard
The first post the past system doesn’t work well in the UK, although it was publicly favoured over instant run-off, it has some very serious problems in England. Firstly the number of seats obtained by the main parties is not at all reflected by the percentage of the vote. There is a good, if somewhat unclear critique of FPTP as a voting system here (http://gowers.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/is-av-better-than-fptp/). I’d also disagree with the argument the UK is a three party system, while it technically is, constituencies tend to split into smaller 2-party systems where one of the three parties has no chance. Similarly the Lib Dems (3rd party) trail so far behind the other two it isn’t worth mentioning. (Until the current election where their small number of seats allowed them to make a majority with another party). I wouldn’t like to comment on Scottish/N Irish/Welsh elections as a lot has changed there since devolution.

@Kit-Kat
While I agree with you, if my sex education hasn’t failed me, early stage abortions aren’t surgical procedures but an abortion inducing pill (this isn’t talking about the morning after pill, which is different). I do however think it is a good idea to try to reduce the number of abortions required with good sex education, and easy access to contraception. The fact the religious right don’t want to do this, suggests a lot about what they really feel.

I’ve worried about the complacency of Democrats in general, and young women in particular, about Roe for more than a decade.

I was a teenager before Roe and I’ve written about how that adversely affected the girls and women I knew (forced marriages, forced births: including a woman forced to give birth to a fetus long dead, which poisoned her system so, it prevented her from ever having any other children.)

Meanwhile, wealthy women and girls were more likely to have options: I met one of those when I was an exchange student in Europe. One girl from a wealthy family told me how her boyfriend had taken her on a “vacation” to one of the Caribbean islands, where a clean, safe hospital abortion had been arranged.

An option not even dreamed of in the lower-middle class community where I grew up, or the state college I attended.

As Amanda has detailed, forced births and illegal abortions are on the rise in the states with the most restrictions.

I’ve voted for Democrats for over 40 years, this is just one of the reasons.

No, I’m no Obama supporter, but I’ll vote for the fucker and any other wishy-washy Dem, if that’s the only Dem, offer because I’ve seen what happens when Greens or Naders are the distraction: Republicans.

Who have been and will be relentless in their march to dead women and forced birth.

Dilan if “willingness to use military force on occasion” is your dealbreaker, you’re never going to have an American President you’re satisfied with.

It isn’t.

But that said, if someone really IS a peacenik, and they want to vote for a President who will stop war, why, exactly, is that not a legitimate position?

As I asked (and you didn’t answer), imagine if Obama switched to pro-life? Would you still vote for him?

This is preference ordering. There are people in this world who feel as deeply about the immorality of war as Amanda does about abortion. The difference is that the political world generally serves Amanda’s preferences by making major party candidates available who agree with her position, whereas the political world does not serve the peacenik’s political preferences—instead, what it does is occasionally produces candidates who SAY they will stop wars, but who often end up starting new ones and continuing old ones (Johnson, Nixon, Obama).

And what gets me about it is it is so smug, and the reason it is so smug is because the person making electability arguments never seems to even consider that some other voter might feel the same way about war, or free trade, or some other issue, that he or she feels about abortion or whatever his or her dealbreaker issue is.

I was as angry about the invasion of Iraq as much as anything, because it created war where there was (relative) peace. But the truth is most hardcore “war opponents” are not peaceniks, they’re isolationists. The alternative to American military presence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya etc. is not peace, but war without American involvement. That’s my policy preference by the way, to save American lives and American dollars, but it ain’t peace. It will mean lots and lots of death for the people in those countries, just like American withdrawal from southeast Asia led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the deaths of over a million Cambodians.

Does that mean America shouldn’t have withdrawn from Vietnam? No, it never should have been involved in the first place. But let’s not pretend that American military interventions are the source of all misery in the world or that their end will result in anything resembling “peace”.

Whoops.  That ought to read:  “It is the same low-investment/high-return dynamic Amanda wrote about in an earlier post.”  & 1/10 ought to be 1/1000th.

As a Canadian, I have zero patience & even less pity for this pathetic two-party “winner-take-all” ridiculousness & all the primadonna posturing it engenders.  If you want an example if how wrong-headed this approach is, just look to our last election: instead of acknowledging the benefits of a coalition in shutting out the ReformaTories & floating the possibility of forming one, Ignatieff consistently gave the idea a high-handed toffee-nosed pooh-poohing every time the subject came up & let everyone know he was going to form a majority Govt. & be the biggest swinging dick on the floor of the House of Commons, thankyouverymuch.  Result: Harper, a man who talks like someone who’d rip the wings off a hummingbird just for the fun of it, now has his majority & the Liberal party, one of the founding parties of Canada, is now in a desperate fight to fend off irrelevancy & extinction.  How’d that happen?  Because the Party leadership, instead of leading, took the rank-&-file for granted.

DLCentrist Dems made a grievous error in judgement by taking their base for granted in 2000 & this bullheaded, fuck-you refusal to own up to that mistake is why we’re still having this conversation 11 years later.  If Gore had been serious about running an intelligent, adaptable campaign, he could have made some bold, creative moves by adopting the Green Party’s platform into his own or taking on Nader as his VP, or both.  But instead of boldness & creativity, we got a lot of blather & pearl-clutching about how Nader was a “Spoiler” (Translation: “How dare you walk out on me while I’m ignoring you!  Ungrateful bitch!”).  We got folding & capitulation when Gore refused to fight for his own victory -  Fox, the propaganda arm of the GOP, called it for Bush before the results were even in & the rest of the straight corporate press went along w/ it for fear of looking like fools.  Bush bluffed, Gore folded & that’s the most generous interpretation there is.  Repeat in 2004.  DLC = Damn Lazy Chickenshits.

Any political success on the Reichwing side is from one of two things:  Unthinking fealty to their core ideas…and the inability of some Americans who are not chronic koolaid drinkers to see that periodically voting Republican leads to nothing but grief.

Yes, very much so.  The other two reasons GOPers beat DLCentrists almost every time is because the latter always start out by giving 1/2 the playing field away & then compromising w/ the Crazies until all that’s left of their original agenda is either a pittance or nothing.  The former, by contrast, start out demanding several times more than they knowingly hope to get & often wind up w/ more than what they need.  2nd, from the actual GOP itself to across the entire Right-Wing Lie Machine, when they push an agenda &/ go after a target, they go for the jugular.  There’s no pretense of fairness.  No lie too outrageous, no standard to decent to leave unviolated, no turd to foul to fling, no depth to low to sink to.  Precisely the strategy playing out in these latest attacks on the right to abortion.  They do it with the full knowledge of the media either being in kahootz with them (FOX, etc.) or easily intimidated w/ charges of “Liburl” bias.  The right smashes the media over the head with the “liburl bias” club to get what they want out of them the same way the failure-addicted DLCentrists smash GreenProgs over the head w/ “NADER!  2000!” to shut them up & keep them in line.

Until DLCentrists assume responsibility for their failures, quit taking their base for granted & start fighting to win instead of fighting to not lose, & until Progressives get in touch w/ their own brand of crazy & start using it to their advantage, nothing’s going to stop this:

”...corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

Mireille, although I share many of your feelings about Obama, that “Maybe a few more steps towards conservative Shangi-La will finally wake some people up” just reminds me of the 1930s German Communists who optimistically said, Nach Hitler, uns!. Didn’t work out well for them.

just reminds me of the 1930s German Communists who optimistically said, Nach Hitler, uns!. Didn’t work out well for them.

Well it did for Communists in East Germany.

This to a fellow progressive who dared to sugges that “President Palin” or Romney or Pawlenty would “do significant harm to this republic”.

I never disagreed with that premise, and I challenge you to find where I did.  (Hint: don’t waste your time.)  My point, made rather clearly and repeatedly, is that having Obama as president has also done “significant harm to this republic.”  I have not been alone in this post or the last in clearly illustrating the particulars of this assertion.  I will not dispute the style points between potential GOP candidates and another Obama term.  I’m sure Obama will say most of the right things and look eloquent as civil liberties continue to erode and the GOP juggernaut rolls along largely unopposed by the quisling, hedge-fund Democrats.

For the record: smug, clueless, masochistic assholes who attempt to brandish their cowardice as some sort of badge of groupthink superiority cannot be my allies.  My allies, actual and potential, are not interested in fucking themselves at the polls for some comfortable illusion.  Unfucking this country is going to require electing people who are not beholden to the corporate-owned bipartisan political machine.  It is going to require much more than that, of course, but it won’t happen without breaking that bipartisan stranglehold.  That is going to require electing some independents and Greens.  How we do that is up for debate.  That we must is not.  In the meantime, Democrats, enjoy your rapidly diminishing returns from your pitiful fucking lesser evils.  Also, consider that if you have to keep going back to 2000 to find a scapegoat for how fucked-up things are, it might be time to take an honest look in the mirror (if you can).

P.S., regarding the original topic of this fuckfest: How many Greens have been elected to national office since 2000?  Zero.  How many years did Democrats hold majorities in both houses of Congress?  4.  How many years did Democrats have both houses of Congress and the White House?  2.

Now I dare someone to tell me that the ramping up of the assault on women’s rights is the fault of ‘third party’ or independent voters.  If you feckless cowards can’t get together enough to put better ‘lesser evils’ in office, blame yourselves for this bloody mess.  Don’t blame those who lost the taste for Election Day shit sandwiches.

Obama loves Predator Drones

Obama loves Predator Drones

Game, Set, and Match for Smartpatrol @ 115.

Sam, we’re both from Chicago. I sincerely hope I don’t meet you. Because I don’t like morons.

L

@ maribelle re: 104.

I get that you’re making a false equivalency.

@ maribelle re: 104.
I get that you’re making a false equivalency.

What you apparently don’t get is that each portrait is equally unappealing to the median American voterm who is NOT LIKE YOU.

@ typist re 123.
In the quiet words of the Virgin Mary: Come again?

Smartpatrol, perhaps maribelle and typist are suggesting that illegal wars, massive unemployment and underemployment, and eroding civil liberties—and, oh yes, disappearing female reproductive rights—are more appealing to the ‘median American voter’ than, er, having dirty hippies be right.  They’ll proudly accept their laughably watered-down, Chinese finger puzzle policies (many of which have the requisite dignified veneer of progressive intent), as long as there is someone to their imagined left at whom they can point and scoff.

Examples: Getting out of Iraq! really means replacing active duty soldiers with more expensive and less accountable mercenaries, and maintaining the world’s largest ‘embassy’ indefinitely.  What?  You thought that meant actually removing all our military personnel and equipment from Iraq?  Silly hippie.  That’s not realistic.

Getting out of Afghanistan! means expanding operations into Pakistan, an unstable country with nukes. crickets chirping But we got bin Laden!  Woo hoo!  You’re not cheering, you terrorist-lover.
 
Single payer health care! (or, as known by it’s pre-battle surrender position, Health Care Reform!) means spending massive amounts of money and time to cook up a plan that further entrenches the core problem in our health care provision regime, which is the profiteers (i.e. insurance and pharma).  Huh?  What do you mean, why didn’t we just expand Medicare to all?  We didn’t have the votes, what with our Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.  Learn how the real world works, you self-indulgent child, and get a haircut.

Accountability! means, um, okay, never mind this one.  (see ‘Looking Forward, not Backward,’ or perhaps ‘&$@%&& Whistleblowers!’)  Bradley Who?  Don’t look at me like that, you fucking Naderite.

See how it works?  If you’re high and mighty and too good for that, then how’d you like a President Bachmann, hmm?  Then we’ll all get the same shit sandwich, only without the capers and arugula and the sprouted grain bread, and then we’ll all have you to blame for the Wonder bread covering our feces, you self-righteous fool.

/snark

Smartpatrol -

You’re certainly entitled to your opinions, but I’m a bit curious about how exactly you were able to be a Naderite in 2000 considering that your own linked blog indicates that you’re a Canadian citizen. Are you an expat?

Reasons besides, and possibly more important than, Nader for why Gore lost in 2000:

1) Gore - During the whole blowjob-gate debacle, about the only people that thought the consensual, if unfaithful, relations between the president and an an intern was important were the media and the people who already believed Clinton killed Vince Foster.  Despite this fact, Gore distanced himself from Clinton during the whole 2000 campaign, sidelining the best campaigner he had available.

2) Fox News - Most networks were calling Florida for Gore or were still saying undecided until all of a sudden Fox called it for Bush and every other network got confused and followed their lead.

3) Gore Again - The fact that Gore won Florida is pretty well settled.  It’s why the Republicans were so adamant about stopping a recount; they know they would have lost if it had been completed.  Gore didn’t have the heart or the guts to push back, which ended up pushing the decision to…

4) The Supreme Court - Who committed the most open and outrageous crime in the history of this country by taking the election out of the hands of the voters, and even the undemocratic electoral college, and put it into the hands of 5 politically and ideologically motivated Supreme Court justices.

The few votes Nader received, had they gone to Gore, may have swung the numbers to far to be contested, but it does not change the fact that Gore still won the popular vote over Bush, and had Gore had the fortitude to fight, may have even been able to keep the decision out of the hands of the Supreme Court.  Even had he still lost, a harder fight may have kept the facts more freshly in people’s minds and turned the tide in 2004, with more people realizing the invalidity of the first 4 years of the Bush presidency.

Beyond that, remember that Gore in 2000 was not the Gore of today.  He had Joe “Droopy Dog Cheney” Lieberman as his VP, and I don’t believe Lieberman would have been less war-happy.  We may not have gone into Iraq, but we’ll never know.  Gore would also have most likely been more of a continuation of the Clinton presidency, which, while not Bush-level awful, was still responsible for the repeal of Glass-Steagle (which many economists cite as being one of the key factors allowing for the economic meltdown of 2008) and the North American Free Trade Agreement.  He may have favored slightly higher taxes, but he was still a major proponent of big business.

The reason the Nader canard is still believed is because it is pushed by the DLCentrists to keep the left in line.  It serves them to discourage people from voting for an actual liberal candidate for president.  If all the liberals who were fed up with the Republican-Lite candidates actually voted for a candidate they believed in, rather than voted in fear of allowing a Republican to win, we may allow a Republican into the White House for a term, but how do you think the Democrats would respond to seeing 10, 15, maybe even as high as 20% of voters voting a third party to their left?  How could they continue to ignore that?  Perot got 18.9% of the popular vote in 1992.  Imagine the momentum he could have carried forward if he wasn’t slightly…  off?

How many people do you know who said they would vote Green except they were afraid it would be a throw away vote?  Per the fec.gov:

“Minor party candidates and new party candidates may become eligible for partial public funding of their general election campaigns. (A minor party candidate is the nominee of a party whose candidate received between 5 and 25 percent of the total popular vote in the preceding Presidential election. A new party candidate is the nominee of a party that is neither a major party nor a minor party.) The amount of public funding to which a minor party candidate is entitled is based on the ratio of the party’s popular vote in the preceding Presidential election to the average popular vote of the two major party candidates in that election. A new party candidate receives partial public funding after the election if he/she receives 5 percent or more of the vote. The entitlement is based on the ratio of the new party candidate’s popular vote in the current election to the average popular vote of the two major party candidates in the election.”
<CONT>

If a Green, or other suitable party, candidate got just 5% of the vote, think of the steamroll that could start?  (Again, Perot damaged the Reform Party by making it his own vanity party, which blew most any momentum they had.)  That’s the only way we’re going to break the two-party deadlock we live with now.  The Democrats and Republicans may disagree (on the surface and in public) on many things, but making it impossible for third parties to get a foothold is something they agree on.  And it’s not going to get any easier the longer we abide by their binopoly.

Maybe I’m too much of an idealist, like the kitten in A Dream of a Thousand Cats” (though I’m not a kitten anymore, almost 40), but I’d rather go down an idealist than allow myself to be handcuffed and dictated to as to who I can “responsibly” vote for without being called a traitor to the cause, when the candidate I voted for in the last election has basically betrayed any values I stand for.

@Tyler Healey #111/@Gangsta

Wow.  Just wow.  That’s why I described Amanda’s actions as bullying earlier (#69).  That’s exactly what they are in this situation.

While I don’t agree with all of the comments you’ve made on this thread or others, you clearly haven’t been making your points in bad faith or bad form.  Nor have you been making personal attacks on Amanda like she has on you.  I just don’t understand Amanda’s reaction in this situation at all. 

And while she derisively mocked you, and then @AnonNY, she either ignored or overlooked the exact type of evidence she was demanding from you. 

Somehow, I’m not expecting a response considering how far on a limb she put herself in challenging you. 

E.g., “But if there’s a case where a state banned abortion and the Supreme Court overturned it, I’d love to see a link!  And I apologize for COMPLETELY MISSING it in my capacity as a full-time expert on reproductive rights.”

The reality, of course, is that the Supreme Court has complete discretion over which cases to hear and has not pulled the trigger yet on a case that would allow them to overturn Roe.  But there have been cases which they could have chosen and didn’t.  This doesn’t mean they wouldn’t.  Justices often wait strategically for the ideal case before granting cert to decide a controversial issue.  BUT, as for whether Roe is in more imminent danger now than in 2006 of being overturned, there’s simply no evidence of this.  The Roberts Court could have, and have not, granted cert to a case that facially challenged Roe.

The problem the American Left has is that it is not thinking long term. It’s always about that next election. The window of attention is at best 4 years, and I would say it’s closer to 2. The reality is that right now the Left is eroding, there is no strong left-wing organisation left in the USA, and most of your activities (outside of the stellar work community organisations do on the ground, but those organisations are routinely short staffed and low on funds) are spent campaigning for the Democrats. IMO you can start working on propping up a viable third party now and lose the next 3-4 elections, or you can continue the current way 30-40 years and eek out close victories while the Dems shift slowly farther and farther to the right to fill up the spot the Republicans are retreating from to reach the insane base, until the Left disappears entirely and you end up with a permanent single party right-wing government (of the Dems or the Repubs, though by then the Dems will look like the Reagan-era Repubs).

That’s my advice for social democrats. By now I think even third party electoralism is as doomed a mean of social change as voting in the two party system.

The Court sometimes rules on legal questions simply by choosing not to hear certain challenges to it.  This has been the history of Roe and 2nd Amendment challenges.

and as if to make Amanda’s point for her:

http://jezebel.com/5814746/new-legislation-would-prevent-minors-from-traveling-for-abortions

Where the electability people are right is that it’s very hard to imagine our 2 party system (which is built into the structure of our Constitution, even though the framers didn’t really want political parties, in that they chose methods of election that made a 2 party system almost inevitable) being overturned, so if you are voting Green, or Peace and Freedom, or Working Families (or Right to Life on the right, for that matter), you are basically making a protest vote. Bear in mind the one time we really had a change in one of the two major American parties, it was in 1860 and it happened because of the cataclysmic split of the country over slavery in the runup to the Civil War, and even then, the Democratic Party basically reunited after the war and the Republicans ended up being not significantly different than the Whigs had been before.

My problem is simply that this position always seems to be based on an assumption that other people in your coalition have (or must have) the same dealbreakers you do, when, in fact, there are huge differences in what different voters feel they can and can’t live with.

Thank you, Ross Lincoln.  The focus on the Supreme Court misses the point.  Through tireless activism at the state and federal level, wingers have laid siege to women’s reproductive rights, leaving Roe v. Wade all but isolated to the point of being starved out.  While it might be factually true that the Supreme Court has not yet openly displayed a willingness to challenge Roe directly, it is largely irrelevant.  The preponderance of legal precedent is being built in an overwhelming fashion, to where even ‘liberal’ justices will find it easy to opt for overturning it.  At that point, we’re practically living in A Handmaid’s Tale.

This makes the other point of argument in these threads, which I interpret as ‘what do we do about it?’, more relevant.  My observation is related to the flame war related to that issue.  Do we keep ‘fighting’ to elect more centrist, corporate, and tepidly progressive Dems, who seem to waffle whenever it might endanger their campaign contribution gravy train; and who drive millions either away from the polls or into the arms of the GOP?  Or do we make concentrated efforts to replace them with either true progressives (i.e. the kind who can’t get corporate money) or Greens?  We know where the former route has gotten us.  Here.  I don’t see the latter gaining traction so long as so many of us are so deep in hock to the bipartisan shell game that we are placing our desperate hopes on candidates whose actions might have been repellent to the other side just thirty years ago.  (So deep in hock, mind you, that we line up and fling poo at the dirty hippies to our left, the ones who’ve finally said “this far; no further.”)

The truth is, every time a 2000 Nader voter from a swing state defends their vote, they’re painting themselves as spiteful and petty, and not all that different from their opposites in the Tea Party.

I would love a progressive version of the Tea Party.  Love it like I love chocolate.  The difference is in the way the Dems and the Reps reacted to their Tea Parties. 

All of us navel gazing internet fools are not the Democratic base.  The working class/kinda conservativish blue collar folks are the base.  And they don’t care about reproductive rights so much.

Is this supposed to convince me to vote for Democrats?  Because it does exactly the opposite.  If the Democratic party, from base to leadership, doesn’t give a shit about the issues that matter to me, why is it that they deserve my vote?

And, as numerous people have pointed out, it’s not “just” reproductive rights.  It’s the continuation of the PATRIOT act and its abuses of power.  It’s the continued court cases against government whistle-blowers.  It’s the complete absence of advocacy for unions.  And on and on.

You have to give right-wingers credit for figuring out that the enfilade is much more effective than the circular firing squad.

It’s useful to look at successful political movements and how they succeeded. The Christian Right did not rise to its current dominance of the Republican party by running third party candidates or simply threatening to stay home if the moderates didn’t give in to their demands. Instead, they organized and showed up for primary and general elections and ran candidates starting at the bottom and worked their way up. They moved things a little further to the right whenever they could. Remember as recently as 1996 Pete Wilson could run for President as a pro-choice Republican. That’s impossible now They spent a couple of generations doing this and now are reaping the fruits of their labors.

Take a look back at the last half century. Goldwater in 1964 was an unmitigated disaster for conservatives. Not only did he lose but he led to Democratic supermajorities. That allowed LBJ to get through the Civil Rights Act and Medicare and Medicaid. Those were the last significant liberal policy victories for over forty years - or last period for those who regard HCRA as a failure. The right got smarter - they brought in Nixon who was relatively moderate but nonetheless moved politics to the right. Reagan moved things further still and was friendly to the Christian Right, but still wasn’t all they wanted. His three Supreme Court nominees - O’Connor, Kennedy and Scalia included one true blue conservative, one moderate and the unreliable Kennedy. Bush the Elder started life as a moderate but converted to conservatism by time he got to be President and appointed Thomas to the court. Bush the Younger was the closest yet to the Christian Right and was the most right wing of all. One more Supreme Court appointment from him and Roe v Wade would be history. This didn’t happen because of any revolution. It happened because the Christian Right supported what they saw as the lesser of two evils in the short term while steadily remaking the Republican party in their own image. It worked. Despite a country that’s been getting more liberal on cultural issues, the hard right has gotten a lot of what they want because they took their time and then took over the GOP.

You want to succeed like the hard right? Learn from them! Show up at local party meetings. Make sure you vote in primaries. Start running candidates from the very bottom and build a farm team. Run candidates for the school board or town council. Take over the Democratic party like Michelle Bachmann and her ilk took over the Republican party. You can vote for the lesser of two evils in the short run while remaking the party in the long run. Assuming you’re as smart and capable as Michelle Bachmann and the Democratic establishment is no more capable than the old Republican establishment, there’s no reason it can’t work. It’s certainly got more of chance than this heighten the contradictions crap. You’ve got other ideas? Like the song says, we’d all love to hear the plan.

One other thing - some of us are on medicare or medicaid or have friends or family members on medicare or medicaid. Some of us live in red states and can’t easily move. Some of us can’t afford to take a hard line on principle. Some of us will pay a very high price - possibly lethal - if the Republicans take over in 2012. You’re liberals, not libertarians. Have some concern for the less fortunate.

P.S. - seriously, you’re using that scene from Star Trek as an example of drawing a line? The whole point of that scene was that Picard had gone off the deep end and was choosing the more extreme and less wise strategy. Not really supporting your case.

It’s useful to look at successful political movements and how they succeeded. The Christian Right did not rise to its current dominance of the Republican party by running third party candidates or simply threatening to stay home if the moderates didn’t give in to their demands. Instead, they organized and showed up for primary and general elections and ran candidates starting at the bottom and worked their way up.

This, this, this!

Far lefties think it’s the White House or nothing, when was the last time you fuckers paid attention to your local school board race?

...seriously, you’re using that scene from Star Trek…

No, stupid, not seriously.  That was a joke.  I saw the movie, and it sucked.  If voting for a candidate with Obama’s record is the wiser strategy, however, then I’d rather have someone “off the deep end” (at least by the prevailing standards in these threads).  I’ll be voting Green, thank you much.

Far lefties think it’s the White House or nothing

Paging Bill O’Reilly…  You’re not smart enough to do others’ thinking.  Work a little harder on your own.  By the way, consumerist liberals can be just as clueless and self-defeating at the local level as they can at the national.  Case in point: Rahm Emanuel winning 55% of the turnout in our recent mayoral race.  Just what Chicago needed; another elitist Democrat with unbreakable ties to huge money.

The Christian Right did not rise to its current dominance of the Republican party by running third party candidates or simply threatening to stay home if the moderates didn’t give in to their demands. Instead, they organized and showed up for primary and general elections and ran candidates starting at the bottom and worked their way up.

You got the organizing part right, but you leave out the lion’s share of the relevant history.  The Christian Right was a joke until it allied with the reactionary billionaires and the neocons.  It was a marriage of deep pockets, tireless organizing, and a huge, easily led voting bloc.  Kind of like eight years of Bush fatigue, plus record amounts of corporate spending, plus tireless organizing, plus liberal gullibility led to an easy Obama victory in ‘08.  (I would argue that Obama’s negritude, a huge minus, was largely canceled out by the complete unseriousness of the McCain/Palin ticket.  We’ll see a similar dynamic in 2012, though Obama’s minuses are now compounded by his own policies and the lingering malaise from the near-complete capitulation of his party, which they paid for in 2010.  But I digress.)

when was the last time you fuckers paid attention to your local school board race?

Every year when I go to the voting booth?  Do you honestly think I waltz in every four years and ignore all categories but the one for President?

You also leave out how leftist victories get won in this country.  It has to do with campaigns of direct action that scare the political establishment senseless—the radical flank effect—so that they take moderate action to appease the demands of the moderates in the movement.  That’s how the New Deal happened—US politicians were scared of a Russian-style Revolution, and it’s how the Civil Rights Act happened.

Smartpatrol:

“@ maribelle re: 104.
I get that you’re making a false equivalency.”

typist
“What you apparently don’t get is that each portrait is equally unappealing to the median American voter who is NOT LIKE YOU.”

Yes.  That was exactly my point. 

Some of the people on these threads seem to forget that we actually share this enormous country with many, many people who disagree with us.  President Obama has never forgotten for one second that he’s the president of the whole, huge, dynfunctional family.  He doesn’t get to tell whole sections to completely fuck off.  Must be nice for anon posters on a blog, but he doesn’t have that privilege.

@ Sam Holloway
If we could all be so determinedly, defiantly left-wing we could be Sam Holloway, insisting the reversing DADT is a horror because it would allow more ppl to join the corrupt military.  Dude, if you’re so far down the leftwing rabbit hole you can’t see that reversing DADT is a major victory for the left, there’s really no way I’m interested in what you have to say.  Because you represent about 10% of the population on a good day, and really have nothing to offer that’s helpful.  You will never like an American president ever so why bother?

An attempt at an outright ban failed in South Dakota and again in Louisiana

FYI, the Louisiana ban (LA House Bill 645) didn’t exactly “fail,” in that it wasn’t ever voted down.  It just never made it to the vote in the first place due to procedural reasons.  It was sent back to committee because of a fiscal note the author didn’t like, and simply didn’t have time to make it through committee before the end of the session (see summaries here and here).  It could very well rear its ugly head again in the next session.

“leftwing rabbit hole”
Yikes!  Sounds pretty crunchy.  I’m guessing there’s no Hasenpfeffer down there, but maybe some carrots. 
If everyone were as ‘left-wing’ as me, then no one would need to be defiant about it, and DADT wouldn’t be necessary, because ‘gay rights’ would be a redundancy.  (Duh.  Do some thinking before you construct your hyperbole.)  Alas, we live in a country where GLBT folks are often legally recognized as second and third class citizens.  DADT repeal does nothing to address that, and it’s effectiveness has yet to be determined.  We also live in a country that has anywhere from 700 to 1000 military installations around the world, and that’s currently involved into two military occupations and several other shooting wars.  None of these involvements is on solid legal ground and none of them are morally justified.  So, no, I didn’t call DADT ‘a horror’, but it sure is a mixed blessing at best.  Meanwhile DOMA (which denies legal rights that are taken for granted by other families) still stands, and it stood right through Obama’s first two years, when he had Dem majorities in both houses of Congress.  Is he perhaps tentatively criticizing it now that he has no majority in the House and a slim majority in the Senate?  My, how audacious!

If DADT ‘repeal’ is what you call a major victory, then it’s no wonder you’re frequently on the losing end.  When a U.S. president stands up and takes an unequivocal lead in championing gay rights, the drawing down of empire, and single payer health care, I’ll be impressed.  As I’ve said before, a shit sandwich with fancy trimmings is still a shit sandwich.  I’m not judgmental; if coprophagy is your kink, go for it.  It ain’t my thing.

P.S.:  I think I represent maybe 2 to 3% of the population on a sparkling day.  Maybe that’s why we’re so thoroughly, 97-98% fucked.

p.p.s.: Why bother?  Because I care enough to send the very best.