I think they are just moving into school boards because they see an opening with parents unhappy about too long of a time running schools remotely.

The real centrist position is probably "Having an anti-CRT insurgency is likely to get us identified as the suburb for assholes, cutting the valve of our property and making it harder for our kids to get into a nice college. "

Right, isn't a big chunk of this about ideological segregation / The Big Sort? Not the state level stuff exactly, but a lot of the local stuff happens in areas where there just aren't enough people who aren't right wing loons to push back.

I don't know how to think about the backlash against LGBTQ+ rights. I mean, broadly speaking, do we think that the US is worse in this area than it was, say, 10 or 20 years ago?

I think in a Western democracy, maybe the Big Picture looks pretty good over the long haul.* The over-riding problem is that democracy itself is in bad shape.

*Of course, Keynes knew what happens to us all in the long term.

We get a kind of ugly exurb of London named after us?

I think the center left loves school boards, don't they? Getting mired in squabbles over how to optimize childhood?

I think they love personally speaking and getting mired in squabbles. This does not extend to building political-organizing machines to control school boards - that's a right-of-center thing mostly.

4: I think public opinion and social norms have moved in a good direction in a way that seems quite stable to me on LGBTQ+ stuff. But I also think there's a large oppositional minority that's energized and getting more dangerously hostile. So it's scary regardless.

I was thinking something similar with being in a closet - being closeted is horrible but also protective. We're in a time where trans kids are thinking more concretely about not being in a closet, but are still potentially coming into close contact with incredibly hateful people.

Fascism/authoritarianism has a lot of short-run advantages. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

There's a lot to be said for passionate intensity. It's all fun and games until you invade the Soviet Union and your best minds emigrate to build a bomb.

5: I don't know where Milton Keynes name came from, but If I'm remembering correctly, it's pronounced differently.

Having Big-Sorted my family away from the ungovernable tribal regions of America, I get some selfish solace from US federalism. My kids are growing up to be smart in ways that they might not be if they didn't live in the People's Republic of Maryland.

6: Minivet gets it exactly right.

But it's so tricky. When I lived in Davis, there was a Gray Davis sponsored Democrat, running for the school board. He was a very political type, and he didn't seem that interested In education, so. UCR as personal advancement. The guy he ran against was maybe, nominally a Republican. It was supposed to be non-partisan. I talked to someone I knew who was on the school board, and she said the incumbent was an active parent, who was interested in the schools and really conscientious about doing a good job in a non ideological way.

3: This is also hard - even within a State. Like, where I live now my State Rep and State Senator are both pro Medicare for All. If I had moved somewhere slightly less liberal, I might have been able to push my rep for more liberal policies. If the surrounding area is significantly less liberal though, my voice won't matter, and I'm going to feel really uncomfortable personally, I.e. I won't like living there.

It's such a luxury that I live somewhere with so many opportunities available to push for more humane/progressive policies!

The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.

I think normal people who voted for Trump in 2016 are also pretty checked out, I have no idea what the weird dynamics is behind threatening school board candidates. Or having whack jobs choosing to run for those positions and the local election equivalent. Perennially possible to blame Fox I guess, but people choose to watch that shit.

Personally I'm more alarmed by the new popularity of rejecting elections, that's harder to undo.

Have there been examples besides that judge in California?

weird dynamics is behind threatening school board candidates

Difficult to overstate just how normalized violent rhetoric has become in the GOP. Every cycle, more and more Republican candidates are running ads where they literally shoot bullets through their opponents' campaign signs.

I don't know where Milton Keynes name came from, but If I'm remembering correctly, it's pronounced differently.

Milton Keynes (rhymes with means) has no connection to John Maynard Keynes (rhymes with planes), or indeed with John Milton. It's a new town, built around a mediaeval village called Milton Keynes which was on land owned by the Keynes family (to which JMK belonged).

I like the story I heard better, even though it's apparently wrong.

15: A large chunk of the SF school board just got recalled, for a melange of reasons that I think included some valid complaints, some misunderstanding of what the school board could realistically do, and some cover for anti-progressive reaction (if more centrist than rightist). Also, a county supervisor in a deep-red county got recalled for not kowtowing hard enough to insurrectionists (e.g., not voting to illegally reject the state mask mandate). I still don't know I'd call this a trend yet: recalls usually require someone with a lot of money stepping in to be viable. If the SF DA gets recalled, that will be further evidence.

Quickly as I'm running around: I'll find some links and post them in a little while. Does anyone need a primer on the anti-trans bills in Texas and Idaho? The abortion bill in Missouri trying to restrict women from leaving the state to get one?

4.1: If you replace "LGBTQ+" with "abortion" in this sentence, the answer's pretty clear, right?

I'm not sure. The court has changed and I think the same places, mostly, would have passed the same laws if they had hope of them being upheld.

My town just had a weird situation with the cops that I'm trying to piece together. Former student of the regional high school pulled over as part of a traffic stop. Said something about inappropriate conduct by 2 cops stationed as resource officers when s/he/ they were at school. The 2 police resource officers were put on paid leave pending an investigation. I'm trying to imagine how that conversation went during the traffic stop.

20: The no abortion for an ectopic pregnancy boggles my mind. Are they really that dumb or just invested in hurting women? With trans bills, I think the answer is clear and is based on hate. But how many of the sponsors of that abortion bill want their wives to die. They can't even protect the life of the fetus/embryo in that situation.

20.2: For abortion, you have to go back a few more decades to find a worse time in the US, but you don't have to go beyond living memory.

I keep coming back to the way democracy has been undermined in the US. Without that, we'd have a chance to grow out of the ignorance. The Supreme Court is an inherently non-democratic institution, but if the rest of the US government were built on democratic principles, then abortion wouldn't be an issue in the Court either.

19: I got the impression that the SF school board thing was kind of overdetermined -- there were three big things people were pissed about, and they weren't all simply ideological. The most ideological thing was that they did some stuff that was lefty-anti-racist in the way that gets called "woke", but that they were kind of clownish about it -- not simply too far left but sloppy. Wanting to take down or destroy murals that had been painted by a POC artist with anti-racist intent; making a list of historical figures that should no longer be honored in school names that included some people where the school board was flatly wrong about the history (that is, confusing two events with similar names). So they made rightwingers angry for being "woke", but they didn't get wholehearted support from the left because they were flakes about it.

Then they tried to make a prestigious magnet school lottery admission rather than test admission. I think that would have been a good change, and it is certainly politically weighted, but there are plenty of people who are least kind of on the left who are strongly opposed to that kind of thing, not to mention a large part of the Asian-American community whether their politics are right or left generally. So that pissed people off a lot.

And last I believe they were perceived to be doing a lousy job with Covid response. I don't know how fair that was, but not political.

So overall I wouldn't draw conclusions from that recall at all.

The thing about these policies is that a lot of people actually don't like them and our side can run against them. We've recently had a couple victories in NH (after so many losses) and it seems like there is a growing dissatisfaction with the way Republicans have overextended themselves with respect to education privatization, CRT, and the like.

It turns out that a lot of people actually appreciate the public education system and don't want to see it dismantled, and also don't want to see Becky's mom take control over the curriculum in their child's classroom. Its possible to build a movement opposing such things.

Spike's experience matches mine, although possibly our towns just have similar dynamics. People generally like their personal school and will fight for it, sort of, in dumb ways sometimes.

20.2: I think the situation isn't wildly different, actually. For LBGQT+ issues I think public opinion has improved a lot over the last 20 years; for abortion I think it's been pretty stable. The scary stuff happening in both cases seems to me to be successful political action by a vicious and energetic minority (nationally) that's seized local political power and is using it to hurt people.

On a related note, my local blog is gaining some moderate traction among people who pay attention to city politics on the left. I'm optimistic for my long term plan, which is to plant stronger arguments into their collective ability to talk about city politics and decisions about who to support.

I don't even have a single blog.

25 certainly matches my sense, especially .last.

26-27: I think rightwing attacks on education are definitely in backlash territory, but what liberals and leftists have always been bad at, at all levels, is really weaponizing rightwing overreach. Basically, no matter what rightwingers do, from start the Depression and oppose anti-Nazism to invade Iraq & collapse the international financial system, American voters are always willing to vote for Republicans again within a couple years. The exact reasons don't matter, but I think we have to take them as structural, not particular tactical failures.

Point being, while I think there's a good chance that school interference will be a successful issue for Dems in local races for a little while*, it's not going to delegitimize Rs in the long term, because nothing ever does.

*and even that's only if Dems can find a message on COVID measures that doesn't piss off too many people

7: "I think public opinion and social norms have moved in a good direction in a way that seems quite stable to me on LGBTQ+ stuff."

I think having all the initials there overstates the case. The big stumbling block at the moment, which was going fairly strong but now is meeting serious headwinds, is "T". This is especially true on the topic of trans youth, and to a lesser extent on trans athletes. A ton of people who have no problem with LGB folks are wary.

Also, as lk's 20 points out, the impending loss of Roe, which doesn't even make the initials list, is more important and mobilizing more women than any of the others, purely in terms of the number of people directly affected.

I don't have four currently active blogs.

According to the Constitution, you could.

Would I have to enumerate them in the census?

Only every ten years.

Anyway, I think the nationwide trend in school boards is that they attract not-very-ideological, sincere people but are highly susceptible to takeover by ideologues who very deeply do not care about good governance or education, but do want to further culture war and their own careers. Then those people overreach and/or run things into the ground and get voted out. But what hardly ever happens is lefty ideologues doing that because the two sides aren't symmetrical--DSA types don't view school boards as targets.

I wouldn't quite say it's a ratchet, because ISTM that the ideologues rarely have substantial long-term effects*, but it's kind of like a drunken walk with a bound that's only a bit left of center (BTW, I'm excluding big city schools from all this--that's a completely different dynamic).

*with the exception of pretty red places where the non-ideologues are also pretty rightwing--I'm sure most school districts in Kansas have literally never had boards that would look centrist to America as a whole

32: I think we're at a point on T issues that is less advanced than the others -- but we always were. Don't you think that all of them, from the point of view of social norms, are moving in the right direction?

As for Roe being more mobilizing, we'll see. Covid and Trump have taught us that centrist tolerance is pretty deep for even the most peculiar rightwing fetishes. (See Covid vaccination. See Trump.) It was once a truism that overturning Roe was political death for the right. Now I'm not so sure.

I'm wondering what will happen when SCOTUS declares fetuses to be citizens and bans abortion nationally. I'm not really expecting a serious backlash until then -- and I wonder if I'm being over-optimistic to expect it then.

"It's largely working because, in my view, these are things that the center-left mostly doesn't want to control." I think the center left loves school boards, don't they?

Just to be explicit on this: in purple suburbs, the people who run for school board are moms who find NPR a little stridently left and members of the local church where the minister didn't endorse Trump from the pulpit, but did spend October of 2016 and 2020 talking about God's Plan for America. For whatever reason, school boards just aren't on the radars of people more left than that, or even more stridently liberal.

It was once a truism that overturning Roe was political death for the right. Now I'm not so sure.
I'm wondering what will happen when SCOTUS declares fetuses to be citizens and bans abortion nationally. I'm not really expecting a serious backlash until then -- and I wonder if I'm being over-optimistic to expect it then.

I've long thought that truism was overstated, although the reaction against Trump suggests maybe not (the blue wave in 2018 was 90% driven by Women's March types). But I do think that the permission SCOTUS has given Texas to de facto ban abortion in advance is going to stoke backlash, because stories like the woman flying out of Texas mid-miscarriage are going to enter consciousness before whatever their end-of-session ends up being.

IOW, the horror stories are already happening, which should minimize complacence. OTOH, I'm not sure what comes of it.

37 and 39: I don't disagree with any of this, but I think you run into a little definitional ambiguity here. What is liberalism, as it relates to the schools? Teaching the history of race in the US? Teaching evolution? Conservatives are correct that, by their standards, schools are pretty uniformly left-wing -- and the liberals are correct to believe that teachers share with them a pro-education bias.

Oh here, N. Hannah Jones boosts a story of Indiana activists repelling an anti-CRT law.

"We had some members of our caucus who felt like it didn't go far enough," he said. "We had some members of our caucus that felt like it was too much of a burden on education and just not good policy that we wanted to move forward."

The bill, which would have limited what teachers could say in the classroom about race, sex and religion had been staunchly opposed by educators, school leaders, civil rights groups, Black community organizations and leaders in the faith community.

I feel like "enlightened pluralism" is really more of a necessity than a choice when you have a center-left coalition. The center is, pretty much by definition, not going to be up for dominance of leftist ideology.

The CRT stuff is so enragingly foggy. They cannot describe what they object to in any coherent way that they could get support for from any sizable part of the population (that is saying "we don't want the schools to able to teach that racism ever existed, still exists, or is bad" would be coherent and would also fairly describe what they want, but they couldn't get enough people to go for it even in the worst parts of the country), but they're completely getting away with this sort of indefinite bullshit.

Additional links:

- this NYT piece, focused on WI, shows the interplay between national conservative orgs and local people in school board recalls and debates
- ProPublica overview of GOP election-focused organizing as nationwide strategy
- Katrina vanden Heuvel writing in the WaPo in defense of fighting over school boards (tbh I just found this in a Google search and include it as padding)

20: Right, usually those bills get shot down, but there are people who truly believe that the ectopic embryo is a living person: that is the article of faith. It seems to rankle these people that there is even one situation where you just have to let the mother live and the "baby" die. The whole point of the pro-life movement is that the trolley switch can't flip that way.

I think it's a violinist.

There's a local private school that I think is destroying its reputation with a CRT fight. But I don't understand enough to be sure that's what it is or how it is likely to end.

The big insane "anti-CRT" bill that would make teaching essentially impossible (parental pre-approval for all lesson plans etc.) got beat here. It's about half insane over-reach (someone in favor of the bill literally saying that we shouldn't be telling kids that Nazis are bad) combined with a genuinely powerful "pro-business" Republican establishment that's able to keep a lot of the most insane stuff in line. I do occasionally think about changing registration to R just so I can vote for our governor in primaries. Having one of the best Republicans in the country as governor really does make a difference, and the business wing of the party really doesn't want to destroy our public schools.

and the business wing of the party really doesn't want to destroy our public schools.

Not unless they can get a really big tax break in exchange.

But yeah, the SF school board losing seems like a good thing. You need to have people who care about education rather than scoring political points in those positions, and you really can't get very far in SF if all Asian parents hate you. At any rate, elected school boards are the worst, the mayor should just appoint people. Democracy works best when each person votes for at most 3 or 4 positions total (e.g. national rep, regional rep, local government rep).

Was reading this Timothy Noah review of a couple of books related to the historical successes and failures of Democrats. Advice to Democrats often takes the form of: "If this doesn't work, we're screwed."

In this case:

Both authors conclude that the glue necessary to put Humpty Dumpty together again is the labor movement.

So we have the formulation, "If the Democrats want to be politically viable, they must have the support of a politically powerful labor movement -- or else we're screwed."

These formulations can almost always be simplified to "We're screwed."

Yglesias seems fond of variants that include, "If Democrats don't find a way to keep their current support while attracting more racists, we're screwed." Like the authors in 51, he's not wrong, just excessively wordy.

What is liberalism, as it relates to the schools?

Part of what we run up against is the old Colbert line about facts having a liberal bias. A non-ideological* presentation of history is going to look pretty liberal these days because Republicans have run away from the post-war consensus (the sort of thing Cronkite could say without pissing anyone off too much), and the broad US consensus around LGB issues--the sort of thing that comes up in terms of literature assigned and clubs allowed--is also left of center, albeit with plenty of support to the right of center.

So yeah, the NPR moms are going to make schools that are more friendly to liberals than to conservatives, but they're not going to talk about the Southern Strategy (except maybe the one AP History teacher), and whatever they teach about gay liberation will be very sketchy, and they'll probably assign way more books by dead white men and give Reagan credit for the fall of the USSR. That last bit, in particular, is what I mean by not being "stridently" liberal--the sorts of conservative propaganda that are echoed by Friedman and Dowd are going to be welcome. Whereas their rightwing counterparts go over the curricula with a fine-toothed comb trying to root out anything that puts liberals in an unalloyed good light.

*and I mean literal ideology, not just vague political preferences: no class analysis, no CRT, no free market worship

I seem to have lost all will to babysit this thread all day*. I'm going to do one more substitution with 4.1: If you replace "LGBTQ+" with "my" in this sentence, doesn't it seem like kind of a strange sentence? That is, I'm not sure I'm on board with the idea that some backlash is fine in general. Obviously when it occurs, you have to oppose it; but when it comes to strategy, that's where you get into the tradeoffs that we discussed vis-a-vis no-win situations in the other thread. And we get back to pluralism as potential weakness. But it's funny that your take on my "big picture" prompt is apparently much more panoramic than mine. (I'm not trying to dunk or be vicious! It didn't occur to me that there would be this range of picture-sizes.)

* in 20 minutes or so, I find out if I have jury duty this afternoon, in which case I'll be a bit tied up anyway.

I don't think that works very well because Klaus the Destroyer would say "my rights" about carrying his AR-15 into the school play.

And Klaus doesn't even have kids in the school.

There's a specific phenomenon where conservativism can successfully electorally exploit backlash on issues that they're clearly losing on even while they lose on those issues. There's a genuine difference of type between the racial backlash from 1880-1920 where racism actually genuinely won, and the racial backlash from 1980-2020 where society continues to become less racist even as people successfully get elected by exploiting racial backlash. The latter is still bad but it is a different kind of thing than the former, and I don't think there's anything weird about making a distinction between them.

That is, I'm not sure I'm on board with the idea that some backlash is fine in general.

I do think some degree of backlash is probably inevitable, but that certainly doesn't make it "fine in general." In the OP, you chose a five-year timeframe, and I proposed expanding that, but I am not thereby excusing the awfulness we saw in the last five years.

Right. It's hard to talk about without sounding like you're minimizing the problem, but the good guys really are winning on LGBTQ+ issues in terms of public opinion -- T less overwhelmingly than the rest, but the progress in the last twenty years, and even in the last ten, has been huge. These backlash laws are vicious people exploiting weaknesses in our democratic systems -- local concentrations of power, confused and underinformed voters, and so on, rather than a genuine rolling back of public opinion on LQBTQ+ issues to where it was in, say, 2010.

LGBTQ, that is. No disregard of the G's intended.

It's the classic Oscar Wilde "the problem with socialism is that it would take too many evenings". I unashamedly love street campaigning but I can't bring myself to take part in Labour committee stuff.

"If the Democrats want to be politically viable, they must have the support of a politically powerful labor movement -- or else we're screwed."

It does seem like the labor movement is finally showing some some signs of life again after decades of getting the beat-down. I'm not sure that translates into "politically powerful" just yet, but maybe it could.

Labor is an example where conservatives actually won (at least for a generation). Abortion rights are somewhere in between, where opposition to abortion has genuinely gained some ground in the past 40 years, but nothing like the rout that happened with labor.

I'm less optimistic? The backlash is here and cruel. Banning abortion for ectopic pregnancies? Banning women for leaving the state for an abortion? (How does that work without restricting the travel of the pregnant?) Making sure college professors can't say 'equity' without being reported by students? (Died in committee, thankfully.)

Utah's leg in a post -session bill, rammed through with no debate, banned trans kids from high school sports. The governor says he'll veto it, which they knew, but getting headpats from the far right is totally worth being cruel to a handful of kids, I guess. Texas's new law that makes supporting your kid's transition a reason for CPS to take them away? Maybe the arc of the moral universe is long but this epicycle sucks.

All but one of those are things that didn't pass, won't pass, or will be struck down by the courts. Yes bad things are happening, but I think it's a mistake to conflate bad proposals with bad things happening.

It's a pretty good sign bad things will happen given enough election defeats that the courts keep changing.

Yeah, I'm sort of generally politically pessimistic -- the demented kleptocratic far right is being incredibly successful at holding enough political power to stop anything good from happening and make lots of bad things happen. It just doesn't feel like a specific abortion or LGBTQ+ problem to me -- it's a Republican death cult problem, which is a racism problem, and an anti-LGBTQ+ problem, and an anti-abortion problem, and a destroying the safety net problem, and a poverty problem, and a climate change problem, and a police violence problem, and so on. All of those specific problems are vitally important, and how to push back depends on where you individually have some leverage, but it doesn't feel like it makes sense to think of them as fundamentally separable problems.

I argued above that it's a democracy problem. Americans suck, but we're not this bad.

I mean, okay. Utah is this bad.

54: I should add that it's often useful, when pondering my own problems, to remind myself to look at the Big Picture. It's also often a pretty stupid thing to say to others about their problems. I didn't mean to be doing that.

57 is a good point, and probably useful as an emotional corrective. As lk says, we have to oppose backlash never/however it comes, but knowing that the backlash may not be existential--that it may be a setback in a winning campaign can reduce the unhelpful anxiety without leading to numb passivity.

Obviously, you can't know for sure which kind you're in while it's happening, but IMO "We're winning but the fight isn't over" is a better message in every way than "We're about to lose everything we've gained." The latter leads to despair and hopelessness far more than it does to a surge of untapped strength. I mean, in truth it's different messages for different audiences/personalities, and on some level message doesn't matter--if the first message is true, it's probably because you really do have public opinion on your side and the backlash is a rearguard action, not reassertion of superiority by a temporarily set back foe. But, as pf said, democracy isn't doing great these days, and public opinion is mattering less and less.

Maybe the arc of the moral universe is long but this epicycle sucks.

Do we update the hover text anymore?

65:. I'm used to the "message bills.". But we're seeing things that used to get laughed out dying in committee, and the things that used to die in committee are getting voted on, and the things that used to die on the floor are now getting passed only to get vetoed, and now I guess we just hope the courts strike them down? It feels different than it did a decade ago.

I think what's worse is that the crazy people on the right have gotten crazier. The ectopic pregnancy stuff is mind bending -- I don't see how they in their own horrible little internal worlds get past the fact that an ectopic pregnancy cannot lead to a live birth. You can have a dead woman or a living woman, depending on the medical care she gets, but you cannot have a live baby. It's sheer nihilistic lunacy to ban medical treatment for the mother.

There's specifically a lack of contact with reality on the right, the ectopic pregnancy thing is based on a completely fictional medical procedure that has been made up on the far right. It's just completely insane in a relatively new way. It's related to the polarization of conspiracy thinking, and the incorporation of conspiracy thinking into the mainstream of conservatism.

72: Do we update the hover text anymore?

It's more a sort of ekranotext these days.

75: Yeah, there have always been conspiracist loons on both sides (Bob McManus, my mother) but now on the right there are enough literally in state legislatures to pass bills reflecting a total lack of engagement with reality.

The only slightly cheerful thing I think is that I don't think the right has gotten more numerous. The ones who I always thought were crazy have gotten even more wildly demented then I ever thought possible; the ones who thought were plausibly okay people, just wrong about a lot of stuff, and I couldn't figure out why they were okay making common cause with the loons, now I really don't understand that. And they've gotten better at exploiting the anti-Democratic aspects of the system. But there aren't, I don't think, more of the scary ones than there ever were.

And right on cue, Utah passes an abortion bill modeled after the one from Texas.

Oops. I mean Idaho. All those troglodytes look alike to me.

Slowly catching up...

55: of course, but Klaus wouldn't aver that he doesn't know how to think about the backlash against his rights. If he's thinking about it, he's pissed about it. Anyway, somewhat limited point.

To the comments about fundamentally solid progress: as I understand it, LGBTQ+ stuff in particular will always and eternally be despised by the religious right, much like abortion, and they will be opportunistic about suppressing it. This seems to be what happened in Florida. (God, of course I searched my browser history for whatever I've been reading about the bill in Florida and immediately got five pages of photos of Florida panther cubs. Dawwww such long little faces. I can't find the "anti-gay activists see a rare opening" take, but baby animals are better.) However the post-Trump right is a different thing, and their efforts to legislate against vulnerable minorities seem to be a lot more about the joy of bullying and hierarchy than about God's will, plus a bit of Qanon background radiation.

65: yes, but "there is so much visible and invisible labor". Finite labor supply, finite money supply, etc.

Cala's position is close to where I am, and other people I know are closer to November 9, 2016 levels of panic and despair. I guess I'll meditate more on that line about how the best lack all conviction, because I'm not entirely sure if it's about convincing oneself, convincing others, or a convenient fusion of the two. It's something no one believes. How could you be "the best" if you lack all conviction? Come on, Yeats.

I think the far right views their laws getting struck down by the courts as a kind of victory.

The Big Sort is kind of the scariest thing in this. We're getting a whole lot of in-migration of people who want to drive liberalism and liberals out of specific polities. And with enough new people, and too much 'well actually' from the reality-based, this can actually work. In a county well north of us, there's a current struggle over a few books in the library. The adults leading the charge dgaf about these books, since there's no chance their kids will read them. It's about demonstrating dominance, just like with the bills preventing the regents from banning guns from university classrooms, and political activities of students, or whatever. And if you don't like what your community is turning into. you can always move to Missoula, or Portland, or wherever.

Come on, Yeats.

The other common expression of this theme is: Liberals are people who won't take their own side in an argument. This resonates with me.

These days, however, I find myself full of conviction. I like panther cubs, but if I'm feeling down and need a smile, this photo always cheers me up.

Yeats would find the intensity of my convictions alarming, and I don't know that I have a convincing counterargument.

83.2: That's terrific, having someplace set up a classy public urinal like that.

82 was me.

80. I go to the Idaho bar annual meeting every now and then (when it's in Sun Valley) and I'm always a little surprised by the jealousy: we have a third federal judgeship, and they're still operating under their original constitution, as amended, while ours codifies Griswold (and thus, clearly, Roe). We have some right wingers who've taken to calling our Constitution 'that socialist rag' but they'll need to purge a whole lot of regular non-extremists from the Republican party to actually get the supermajority needed to do anything about it.

Our school board elections (coming in May) are drawing some attention. The races are obviously too local for TV ads, even too local for much local coverage. News has become so nationalized. The worst anti-masker on the board represents my fringe part of the district -- he was appointed to fill a vacancy last year, and I guess the full scope of his contempt for our community (he's also a fairly new resident) wasn't clearly understood. We have a decent guy running, and so I think it just might work.

On the whole, though, these kinds of positions require a whole lot of time and energy, and don't pay off much in a personal way.

Today is the deadline for filing election papers for state and federal offices. People were lamenting on twitter that there aren't Democratic candidates for a bunch of very red legislative districts, blaming the party. Which apparently can't find people willing to give months of their lives for a kamikaze mission.

And LB, opponents of CRT oppose Criticism of Racism. This is why 'well actually' about actual CRT is a waste of time.

(My wife has just started Medicare, and is surprised at the cost. A friend who started on it in November was lamenting how much better her Obamacare coverage was, for less money. M4A was a great marketing slogan, but there was always that 'well actually' from older people . . .)

Me again, dammit.

My wife has just started Medicare, and is surprised at the cost. A friend who started on it in November was lamenting how much better her Obamacare coverage was, for less money. M4A was a great marketing slogan, but there was always that 'well actually' from older people . . .

This has been a longstanding issue here especially for retired state employees, who have great medical coverage until they age into Medicare and have to switch. It became a flashpoint in the Dem congressional primary a couple cycles back where the more centrist candidate pointed out some of these issues with Actually Existing Medicare and the more leftist candidate (and his supporters in the Bernie wing) quickly countered that the "Medicare" in Bernie's M4A bill is actually a completely new program that has nothing at all to do with any currently existing program coincidentally also called "Medicare," and that implying otherwise is obvious evidence of being a neoliberal shill. Any implications of this argument for polling data on the popularity of M4A were studiously ignored.

(The centrist candidate ended up winning and getting crushed in the general, of course.)

88: Not sure which number the quote in 88 came from, but Part Anis free. It's the part B premiums that can be kind of high. That said, actuarially it's a great deal. An 80 year-old in an individual market would pay a hell of a lot more than the Part aB premiums.

Part Anise tastes like Pernod.

I have questions about the net effect of Covid on SS/Medicare balances, but it's probably too soon to know and kind of unseemly to ask while the ventilators are still going.

89 My friend the underpaid artist wasn't wrong that Obamacare was a way better deal for her. My wife is paying about a third of what her unsubsidized exchange cost, and the deductible/co-pay situation is much better. That said, she was hoping to pay less.

92: I have gold-plated blue cross right now by modern U.S. standards. It's declined in quality some. There used to be no co-insurance, and now it's 10% and the deductible went up to $200.

Because I used to be on my employer's plan, my doctor works for my employer, and my employer charges my private insurance a lot of money for labwork. I haven't switched doctors, because that's hard, but my bills for lab work would be a lot lower if I was paying 10% of Medicare rates.

Thread has died, but the potential subversion of election processes is probably my main concern at the moment. I think most Rs would prefer it not come to that (and it might not) but if the stakes are really high I think some things happen. Right now I will predict that at least one Congressional and/or senate race this year will exhibit some uncertainty due shenanigans of some kind (most likely at the county level). What might preclude is a general lack of truly competitive races. But I think there are some massive gray areas--for instance if Wayne County MI had not certified (as was close to happening) what would MI board have done? If it was 2020' R dude I think it still gets included, but the new folks? Think not. The cover will be too many irregularities/fraud. In 2024 it will almost certainly come into play if the outcome is at all close.

Of course the already existing John Roberts Law are already creating some havoc such as in Texas. But as our ahole Nates* of quantitative election prediction, it is not clear if there is a significant partisan advantage so they imply who cares? Because they are kind of assholes.

Also stuff like this very recent story.
Leaders of a far-right Telegram group pledged that its members would not misrepresent themselves as county employees when they went knocking on doors in Otero County, New Mexico for a "canvas" of local voter rolls. But just weeks later, state officials say members of the group are misrepresenting themselves--and possibly opening the county up to lawsuits.

Encouraging development are things like the prosecution of the Mesa County elections clerk (although of course a two-edged sword) and the Supremes not stomping on PA/NC congressional maps. Although it revealed at least 4** poised to indy state legislature it. If it really mattered and was quasi-sorta-maybe justified in a Prez election they would almost certainly do it with some flimsy fig leaf.

*The Nates have been showing their asses a lot of late.

**Particularly rich was Alito who tossed AL map revision because it was too close to the election, arguing to toss these even closer to the freaking primary. Harriet Miers comeback, all is forgiven.

94: I find it interesting that these shenanigans by local officials are often in places like Mesa and Otero Counties, which are conservative rural areas within states moving leftward. That's a context that's bound to produce a lot of frustration among the sorts of people in those positions.

95: not with the cultural war stuff, but I just saw a map of NE Philly, which is moving right pretty quickly. It is, of course, working class whites, but it's also starting form such a Dem lean that it still went like 2:1 for Biden--but it was 3:1 for Obama. But I bring it up because it's surrounded by areas, both urban and suburban, that are going rapidly the other way.

20 or 30 years ago, if you drew a diagonal line across PA at Blue Mountain (between Gettysburg and Harrisburg, basically), the SE and NW portions had roughly equal populations and almost identical R/D vote splits. Now the SE is much more populous (3:2?) and much more blue--IIRC it's something like equal R votes on both sides, but the NW has a small number of D votes and the SE has a HUGE number, adding up to a pretty consistent Dem lean that's deeply geographically uneven.

I'm confused about what your line is. Surely the "east of the Appalachians" portion of PA has had a clear population majority forever? Where does your line go?

Pennsylvania is an enigma wrapped in a past-date tortilla covered in Turner's iced tea.

Well, y'all know I'm simple-minded on the subject of fascists. Back in the '90s, when fascists were organizing, we shut them down. With words when possible, via other means if not. If there were more people on our side willing to throw down, we'd be having a much different and happier conversation.

Now I know you're all thinking "blah blah blah Natilo violence etc". You know why I support working class people using violence to defend themselves? 'Cause it fucking WORKS, that's why.

George Floyd would have been just another statistic if his vicious murder had not been filmed, and disseminated so widely. And nothing would have changed if the Third Precinct hadn't gloriously aspired to inferno-hood.

Of course, everyone knows that the MPD death squad that murdered Amir Locke was looking for revenge for Kim Potter's prosecution and conviction. So all I'm saying is, how close do the reprisal killings by fascists have to get to YOU, before you act?