Friday Homestead Dispatch

Bags O’ Mystery

“I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial, for neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done.” —Patricia Highsmith

“So let’s talk about the Nazis … I would like to know what they did that was illegal. I would like to know what they did — in detail, if folks would like to share — that was wrong, that infringed on another person’s right. holding a rally, and even holding a rally with guns is not illegal.” —Laurel Libby (R), Maine House of Representatives

1.
I was recently asked, regarding the political portions of my posts, if I think I’m just preaching to the choir. As I said in last week’s post I feel it’s necessary right now to punch a hole into the farce that is the Republican Party, and to shine a light on their agenda that has been in the works for years. Maybe the ‘choir’ here already has a firm grasp of the small portion of issues I am compelled to pass on each week, but hopefully I can help lift the lid of complacency that may be hovering over the heads of potential voters. Week in and week out, Fuckleroy and all the others are trying to wear out the folks that are truly for Democracy creating an apathy that makes it much easier to move to a more authoritarian style of government.

For instance, even some Republicans are admitting that Russian propaganda has presented itself on the floor of the U.S. Congress. House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner (R-Ohio) said recently “Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base. We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages. There are members of Congress today, who still incorrectly say that this conflict between Russia and Ukraine is over NATO, which of course it is not. [Russian President] Vladimir Putin having made it very clear, both publicly and to his own population, that his view is that this is a conflict of a much broader claim of Russia, to Eastern Europe, and including claiming all of Ukraine territory as Russia’s.”

Along this line, Thom Hartmann asks the question Is the Anti-Democracy Movement Reaching a Tipping Point in the US & Around the World? He pens that virtually the entire Republican Party is now committed to authoritarianism instead of democracy.  Not even one single Republican senator was willing to vote to guarantee free and fair elections when the We, the People legislation was before Congress, and the party is using Trump’s “stolen election” lie to undermine and ultimately end democracy at the state level.  Right now they are embracing Vladimir Putin instead of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of our Democratic ally. This debate about how humans should govern themselves is the real battle of our time, both metaphorically and literally, both internationally and right here at home. An even worse scenario he describes in a previous post is that, even if Biden wins the presidency and Democrats hold the Senate, Speaker Mike Johnson (who has said he thinks God Himself put him into the speakership to fulfill some great destiny) would, regardless of how many votes Biden won by, electoral or popular, simply refuse to certify the electoral college votes of enough states that the minimum of 270 isn’t reached. Under the 12th Amendment, like with the election of 1876, that throws the election to the House, where each state has one vote.

On top of all that, McConnell and other Republicans not only stacked the Federal Supreme Court, they’ve worked overtime to stack STATE Supreme Courts. As you’ve surely heard, the Arizona Supreme Court just took us back to Civil War times. The justices said Arizona could enforce a 1864 near-total abortion ban, first passed before Arizona became a state, that went unenforced for decades after the US supreme court legalized abortion nationwide in the 1973 decision Roe v Wade. However, the justices also ruled to hold off on requiring the state to enforce the ban for 14 days, in order to allow advocates to ask a lower court to pause it again. Kris Mayes, Arizona’s Democratic attorney general, vowed not to prosecute any doctors or women under the 1864 ban. Of course she did, but mainly we need to get these shitheel judges off the bench. Here are the judges that sit on that bench. Two of the justices will be on November’s ballot, and both voted for the ban. They are Clint Bolick and Kathryn H. King. Even though we can now vote them out, Republican legislators, who control the statehouse, are now considering a proposal to make it more difficult to remove Supreme Court justices except in extraordinary circumstances. Of fecking course they are.

Bolick and King

This comes on the heels of Fuckleroy announcing that “all legal scholars, both sides,” wanted Roe v. Wade overturned and the obscene calumny that Democrats support “execution after birth.” But the most misleading part of his spiel was the way he implied that in a second Trump administration, abortion law would be left entirely up to the states. “The states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land, in this case the law of the state.” Should Trump return to power, he plans to surround himself with die-hard MAGA activists, not the establishment types he blames for undermining him during his first term. And many of these activists have plans to restrict abortion nationally without passing any new laws at all.

He (Fuckleroy) did concede that the Arizona decision went too far. He blurted “Florida is probably going to change. Arizona is definitely going to change, everybody wants that to happen.” Later, at a Chick-fil-A (which seems appropriate), Trump would not take a definitive position when asked whether physicians should be punished for administering abortions. “Let that be to the states. Everything we’re doing now is states, and states’ rights.”

More from the New York Times link above: A key to these plans is the Comstock Act, the 19th-century anti-vice law named for the crusading bluenose Anthony Comstock, who persecuted Margaret Sanger, arrested thousands and boasted of driving 15 of his targets to suicide. Passed in 1873, the Comstock Act prohibited the mailing of every “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article,” including “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing” intended for “producing abortion.” Until quite recently, the Comstock Act was thought to be moot, made irrelevant by a series of Supreme Court decisions on the First Amendment, contraception and abortion. But it was never repealed, and now that Trump’s justices have scrapped Roe, his allies believe they can use Comstock to go after abortion nationwide.

From the viewpoint of history, Heather Cox Richardson’s post from Tuesday night is a must read. The same set of 40 laws passed mid 19th century that the Arizona Supreme Court have now used to oppress women’s rights also provided that “[n]o black or mulatto, or Indian, Mongolian, or Asiatic, shall be permitted to [testify in court] against any white person,” thus making it impossible for them to protect their property, their families, or themselves from their white neighbors. It declared that “all marriages between a white person and a [Black person], shall…be absolutely void. And it defined the age of consent for sexual intercourse to be just ten years old (even if a younger child had “consented”).

As she points out, the difference NOW is that women and people of ‘color’ can VOTE. NOW is the time to turn Arizona and the rest of the country BLUE. As I’ve said before, Democrats aren’t perfect, and I’m not FOR everything that comes down the pike from that side of the aisle, but the alternative is the observable reality we are all now witnessing.

Our own David Fitzsimmon’s had a few choice words as well. The MAGA-publican Party in Arizona will be wishing women never got the right to vote after our Dumbass-Ducey-packed-Koch-Club State Supreme Court issued their ruling, and at the very same time Pro-Choice activists were throwing down nearly twice as many petitions as the law requires to get their Amendment on the ballot. Have the MAGA-publicans not been seen this little news flash in their Fox news feedbag? Surely they’ve heard that every voter in California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Ohio and Vermont has voted in droves to protect the right to an abortion and to reject any and all pro-life mullahs on their ballots?

Speaking of former Governor Doug Ducey, he tweeted “I signed the 15-week law as Governor because it is thoughtful conservative policy, and an approach to this very sensitive issue that Arizonans can actually agree on. The ruling today is not the outcome I would have preferred, and I call on our elected leaders to heed the will of the people and address this issue with a policy that is workable and reflective of our electorate.” As Jeff Tiedrich writes, Doug, please join Kari Lake in fucking off all the way to Fuckoffistan. What Ducey hopes you don’t remember is that the “15-week” law he signed in 2022 “stated clearly that if Roe v. Wade was overturned, the 2022 law would go away in favor of the 1864 law.” On top of that, Ducey appointed five of the seven Justices who currently comprise Arizona’s Supreme Court — and all five of them voted in favor of the 1864 ban.

And the piece of work that is Kari Lake, former newscaster and an unsuccessful candidate for governor in the state along with being a Fuckleroy supporter and election denier, suddenly has made an about-face regarding the court’s ruling. In 2022, she said in a radio interview, “I’m incredibly thrilled that we are going to have a great law that’s already on the books. I believe it’s ARS 13-3603, so it will prohibit abortion in Arizona except to save the life of a mother. And I think we’re going to be paving the way and setting course for other states to follow.” An adviser to Lake on Tuesday argued she was referring to a different law, despite the fact that she cited the number of the 1864 code. In hopes of winning a Senate seat against opponent Rubin Gallego, she said, “I’m not going to Washington DC to impose federal restrictions on something that’s already been sent back to the states. I’m going to Washington DC to secure our borders, strengthen our families and help President Trump make America great again.”

If you have not signed the petition to Keep Abortion Legal in Arizona, go here. Although the ballot measure has 500,000 signatures already, more is better.

2.
INFLATION! My groceries are too high! I blame Biden! Oh, wait, what’s that you say? It has something to do with private enterprise, that sturdy foundation of Libertarianism? Corporations? Robert Reich reports that just four companies now control processing of 80 percent of beef, nearly 70 percent of pork, and almost 60 percent of poultry. So of course it’s easy for them to coordinate price increases. Albertsons operates 2,273 stores in 34 states. Its 15 brands include Safeway, Jewel-Osco, Vons, Acme, and Shaw’s. Together, Kroger and Albertsons employ around 700,000 people. Those dang sons of Albert. I did write about this pretty extensively in a post mid-February but this all bears repeating.

3.
In other news, at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne museum earlier this year a member of its technical services team hung one of his own paintings in a part of the gallery dedicated to modern and contemporary art, allowing him to share a space with works by pop art pioneer Warhol for an entire day. The 51-year-old man had smuggled his work into the display at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne “in the hope of achieving his artistic breakthrough.” Hey, whatever it takes!

4.
A couple of gigs to consider coming right up…one is the second performance of Dropped By Birds, my moody Eastern European-Zydeco-Tex-Mex-swing band. I’ll be playing accordion and piano along with Karl Hoffmann on bass, Les Merrihew on drums, and Alvin Blaine on all things strings. No cover at the Tucson Hop Shop Tuesday, April 23, 6-8pm. Come out, enjoy some beer and pizza and hang out with us!

And the Morpholinos will once again be holding court at their regular Thursday night Monterey Court gig, April 25, 6:30-9pm. Reservations recommended.

And now…

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