Republicans run ads on transgender children

Ugh...of course he is in California. I forgot . Perhaps an independent candidate who is not in thrall to the woke but is also not a raving fascist. But is such a creature to be found?

Not Newsom, Abhannmor! He has supported and signed (with enthusiasm!) legislation to put male violent criminals in women's prisons; and to make CA a "sanctuary state" where minors can run away from their parents and get "gender affirming" sterilizing cross-sex hormones and surgeries on the state dime without their parents' assent.

I am not in CA, but I am a forlorn lifelong Democrat, and I know I'm not the only one. I have absolutely no idea what I'll do in 2024.

Tulsi hasn't gone looney tunes. If you're talking about Ukraine, she just knows more than you do. A lot more, obviously.

What is this shit about 'extreme left'? Some kids stomping their feet and chanting about pronouns doesn't mean you have a serious left alternative.

The Democrats are a kick in the arse away from the Republicans on 99% of other issues. Which is why they are going to get thrashed. And serve them right.

They must escort Biden offstage and run someone half his age. Not Harris. Tulsi has gone looney tunes. AOC is Twaw. Bernie too old. Maybe Newsom. But whoever- they must ditch this twaw bollocks

*De Santis sending migrants to sanctuary states, who then sent them straight back, was a lesson in the left's rank hypocrisy.&

Where did this happen? De Santis certainly shamelessly used vulnerable people to score a political point and appeal to his base but where is it reported the sanctuary states "sent them straight back". I have never seen this reported. When it happened here in MA on Martha's Vineyard (a really cheap political point there), locals rallied and the commonwealth took care of them. People in the states far from the border recognise this is an issue that disporportionately affects border states and understand that we all need to deal with it. Effective cross party immigration reform (as was poised to happen years ago) along with a recognition of why people are fleeing countries like Venezuala might help. That's not going to happen with the current Republican party.

I think the banning of abortion and the banning of gender affirmative treatment are on the same spectrum actually - unwarranted interference of the government in decicions that should be between a person (woman in the case of abortion and that person's doctor. I don't want Florida or Texas legislating on any medical treatment. But as long as the medical profession is letting this shit show go on for minors, it will happen. And maybe not using "gender affirming care" might help too - it sounds so innocuous when the reality is quite different.

Of course Republicans are running ads on trans care - it is red meat to their base and the democrats have handed it to them on a plate. But does anyone thinks a republican party in power will be pro-women? Seriously. the party that gave us the Dodds decision? And slavers after Trump?

It’s not like the people running the left really believe people change sex and 3 year olds know what’s best for their tiny selves in the short, mid & long term. They just thought “ohhh our side seems to like this shit, let’s centre it, save ourselves the internal blow back from going WTF ? It’ll keep our base happy by letting they feel all virtuous. Plus let’s use this “fighting fascism” narrative the TRAs and the SJWs have. That should energise the base++ enough to get out and actually vote”

I agree with this. Just as I think the opposite is true for the right wing. It is not like any of them care about any trans child. But it appeals to the base and the good/evil/end of days thing that so many right wing christians seem to believe (see De Santis's latest ad invoking god and suggesting he might be God's annointed one to fight the forces of evil- you can't make this shit up - and Trumps anger at it because HE is god's annointed one). They wouldn't give a fuck otherwise.

And someone said upthread not to worry about a federal ban on abortion. Sorry but I will. After all I was told that I didn't need to worry about Roe v Wade either. All the judges said it was established precedent when being confirmed. Turned out I did.

Hmm, I see plenty of women on here who wish they could vote for Labour because the Tories are so awful now. I don't think that means they were ever Labour voters. I'm one of those who feel politically hoomeless, but not because I've voted Labour in the past. I just wish I could now because a strong alternative party is sorely needed.

I've seen a few posts that make we doubt that.

For info I was centre right leaning and now consider myself more centre left.

I'm slightly twitchy about the Republicans taking this on board. I just hope it doesn't get caught up in the Qanon types and their Save The Children stuff. I can see the perils there.

I'm saying is that it is incredibly naïve to assume that the Republican politicians actually share those concerns on a meaningful level.

It is possible to genuinely share these concerns and have a political agenda. That's why anything to do with child protection is such a hot topic. People on all political sides and at all shades of centrism to extremism have children and want to protect them.

People feel satisfied when they can align their political agenda with their personal concerns. In reality there are far more parents than there are gender ideologists, and it's the political liberal/left who have committed to support gender ideology. So right now, large chunks of the liberal left can't share those concerns or if they try they get silenced and drummed out. Whereas the right can comfortably line things up.

This has been borne in on me very painfully even here in Scotland. I wrote to my local MSPs about a couple of concerns and so far the only respones I've had which have even acknowledged I might have any legitimate concerns have been from Conservatives. Not Labour, not SNP, not Green, no-one else.

It's stupid too, in that all kinds of people are now more likely to vote Republican, if the polling is accurate.

An interesting short article at Unherd:
unherd.com/thepost/the-democrats-deserve-to-lose-the-hispanic-vote/

Highlights - the Democrats are losing the Hispanic vote: it's gone from 21% voted for Trump in 2016 to 38% in 2020, and it looks like if there was a vote today it would be over 40%.

Similarly the black vote is moving, with 12% of blacks supporting Trump in 2020 (which was up from 2016,) there is now 21% in support of the Republicans.

The suggestion is that for many of these voters, the economy has been the number one issue.

Thanks Moira, will try to watch the videos after bedtime!

I also saw this in the US Mail, which is quite long but interesting. The DM style is to sum everything up in bullets but even the bullet list is 8 long! They also have an article on Hollywood 'slebs deserting Biden. Or at least, keep a low profile this time round.

Although I don't think you can copy and paste their politics onto ours, it will be worth watching now it plays out from here.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11395851/midterms-election-2022-house-races.html

• Voters head to polls on November 8 to decide which party controls Congress for the latter half of Biden's term
• Multiple projections show the GOP winning in the House of Representatives, where Dems hold a slim majority
• At least 218 House seats are needed for either Democrats or Republicans to hold the majority
• Sunday's projections show a Republican-led sweep - even if Democrats win all 33 toss-up seats they will still fall short of the number of members needed for a majority
• A slew of Donald Trump-backed candidates are running in solidly red districts across the country
• New York's suburbs in Long Island and parts of Queens will see the first general race between two openly gay candidates in Republican George Santos and Democrat Robert Zimmerman
• Republican JR Majewski had an edge over House Democrat Rep. Marcy Kaptur before revelations that he misrepresented his military service in the Afghanistan war became public
• In California, GOP Rep. Mike Garcia appeared doomed until Democrats pulled money out of his LA County district in what appears to be a sign of low confidence

This is interesting. I'm not a Republican supporter but hopefully these adverts will raise the profile of this issue. Moderate Democrats need to actively speak out against it

Thanks for these pieces of commentary. l missed seeing Biden's V for Vendetta speech Part Deux! Did he have the red background again? I can't believe I was praying for this guy over Trump 2 years ago.

A couple of pieces here from Megyn Kelly on the Democratic scare tactics of impending Armageddon under the Republicans.

First, their final parting ad; second, mainstream media left wing commentators losing their shit, including the aforementioned clip of Sonny Hostin. They are still holding women's feet to the fire on abortion laws, even though they completely failed to do anything to protect these laws at a Federal level under the last 2 democratic administrations. It is very revealing that they have held this over women for so long, got completely and predictably screwed by the Republicans in the SC (who played the log game on RvW), and now they are a broken record, still offering women nothing else but scare tactics over something that has already happened. Interestingly, in the longer clip of The View piece, one of the other very liberal commentators, Sarah Haines, said that women's health is not her number 1 election issue either (hers is election denial, which only seems to be a problem if it's Republicans doing the denying).

Thanks for that piece, Rex.

This part really resonates with me:

Well, I did that already. And I was treated like an easy mark by the Dems — who pocketed my vote and ignored all of my concerns.

My view of the 2020 presidential election is this: in the primary, Democratic voters chose Biden because they thought he would be a moderate, a steady hand to help return things to the status quo ante Trump.

In the general election, a broad but not huge coalition of Democrats, independents, and some Republicans voted for Biden for basically the same reason: no more Trump, please! Let's get back to normal.

Instead of a return to normal, Biden took his narrow victory as a sweeping endorsement of the "progressive" wishlist and went gung-ho implementing it. Starting with his anti-woman executive order on Day One, by the way.

I saw this and thought it was quite interesting in respect of mid-terms:

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/will-biden-and-the-dems-finally-get-7a7?utm_medium=email

Quite hard to pick out a quote to give a summary but in essence it conveys the despair felt by Dems and reasons why they may switch to Rep or conservative Indie.

"[Biden] returned instead to his previous 2020 electoral blackmail: you have no choice but to vote for Democrats because the far right is so hostile to democracy. To which my answer would be: Well, I did that already. And I was treated like an easy mark by the Dems — who pocketed my vote and ignored all of my concerns. Voting for an actual election denier would remain a dealbreaker for me. But otherwise, when Trump is not on the ballot, why would I be suckered by the woke left again?
Worse than this bait-and-switch is the condescension that came with it. Think of the absolute assertions by the Biden administration and their media flunkies: The border is secure. Covid vaccines prevent infection. There is no CRT in high schools. The lab-leak theory and Hunter Biden’s corruption were disinformation. There is no medical debate about fast-track, affirmation-only, sex changes for minors. Inflation is caused by corporate greed. Women in college always tell the truth; and men always lie. A president can forgive student loans by fiat. Debt doesn’t matter. A woman can have a penis. The people who attack Asian-Americans are all white supremacists. The idea of individual merit is racist. Can you think of any social issue where the Biden administration hasn’t taken the position of the illiberal “social justice” left?"

On the impact on democracy, the piece says:

"The Weimar dynamic is a simple one. The left and right polarize; the middle collapses; inflation takes off, unnerving everyone and discrediting government; and at some point, as liberal democracy breaks down, voters are asked to choose between the extreme left or the extreme right.
What Biden has done, by showing that even an alleged moderate like him is just a vehicle for the extreme left, is accelerate the moment when we are faced with that horrible choice. And if that is the choice, I have little doubt that Americans will pick the far right. We’ll have a premonition of this next Tuesday.
The key for the survival of democracy is not another speech about democracy telling citizens they have no choice but to vote for one party. It is preventing the Weimar nightmare scenario ever happening. It is rebuilding the political center. It is about taking action on inflation and immigration and crime. Biden has failed catastrophically so far — and with his current policies, he will continue to fail."

I don't get this thing where people disparage a party for taking up a position that the electorate wants represented. Isn't the alternate that the electorate might be very interested in some issue and no party would talk about it? That isn't how it's supposed to work.

I would say that although this stuff around education, CRT in general, and GI are huge in the US now, people there are also upset about the way law and order stuff is being handled by Democrats. I just said this over in AIBU, but people are leaving states like California in large numbers to go to places like Idaho, because the way the blue cities are being run is scary and unlivable.

Oh wow, Moira! I didn’t see it live. Thanks for the extra context.

A couple of days later

That should have said, "A couple of days earlier...."

What Hostin actually said was, "I read a poll yesterday that white republican suburban women are now going to vote republican." So not only a stupid comment (why wouldn't republican women vote republican), but also a racist one. Which interestingly enough, in a thread about the reliability of media, The Hill glosses over. I am sure former federal prosecutor, Hostin is well aware of the connotations of the use of "cockroaches" in places like Rwanda to other certain ethnic groups and stoke division.

A couple of days later, Whoopie Goldberg had a very angry go at Conservative commentator Dana Loesch for calling women who have abortions "skanks". Both her remark and Hostin's were misogynist, but the View did nothing about the latter's, which arguably was worse in the current climate of racial and social tensions a few days prior to a crucial election (which may well result in violent protest whichever way it goes). The View really needs to get its own house in order before lecturing anyone else.

I saw that, Alienated! Jawdropping remark.

For anyone who didn't read about it, Sunny Hostin, a co-host of the popular women's TV talk show "The View" drew this comparison:

“I read a poll just yesterday” showing that “suburban women are now going to vote Republican,” Hostin said during Thursday’s episode. “It’s almost like roaches voting for Raid,” she added, in reference to the popular pest repellent.

thehill.com/homenews/media/3718196-sunny-hostin-suburban-women-backing-gop-like-roaches-voting-for-raid/

Which is amusing because the first and loudest group of American women that I saw push back against genderism en mass are the posters over on Lipstick Alley.

Republican white women are now “cockroaches”

Karen is “last election cycle”

The View has created the latest insult. Because who needs arguments when you can just keep creating new insults. < rolls eyes >

If voters are responding to Republican initiatives, the Democrats need to consider why, and be open to reappraising their own stance. Rather than write off republican supporters as self interested, racist, phobic, stupid or whatever.

Sadly, I agree with pp that they won't. Instead I look forward to another vociferous round of "Ugh, white women are the worst! Fuck those Karens."

I hope someone in Scotland manages to pick the ball up but it is in only the Tories opposing it.

If I were Sunak I'd pick this ball up and run with it very hard. Especially as the Tories have fuck all else to say.

Totally agree. Politicising safety issues is dumb. Like when wearing facemasks in a pandemic became a left vs right issue. Ridiculous.

<Longs for a world in which everyone accepts that drugging and operating on healthy children is wrong.>