Women: The Republican Problem

 We're going to have another nice day.  Temps in the low to mid 80s (F), mostly blue skies, and a light breeze are predicted.  Yesterday was gorgeous.  I hung out 2 loads of laundry and they dried fast.  Temps are supposed to begin climbing as the week continues, but no day in the mid to upper 90s (F) are expected.  

I've also started looking at the long range forecasts.  My trip to Greece is only a few weeks away, and temperature was one of the things that came into play when I made my reservationist.  The country can get very hot there in the summer, and I didn't want to be climbing through different archeological sites sweating my cojones off.  I'm figuring that the weather should be nicely warm when I'm there.

Yesterday was a good day for getting things done.  I mowed my lawn!  Went on a 9 mile bike ride.  Wrote lots of pages.  These are all good things.  I do have to go to work today, but only for 5 hours.  I've changed my availability for when I get back.  I'm going to be working less hours, only 1 eight hour day, that'll be Sunday.

I saw this and thought it very appropriate.

A number of Christians, the Evangelical sect comes to mind, do believe that God sent the Orange Anus specifically to overturn Roe v Wade.  They hate the idea that a woman should have a choice over what's happening in her body, they prefer women to be vessels.  This is a bit ironic because many Evangelical women have only allowed their body to be a vessel a few times.  Even more ironic is the fact that this Bobo Supreme Court, when overturning Roe v Wade, said that states should have the right to decide on this issue, not the Federal Government.  Because of this many women and men have started collecting signatures.  They want to enshrine a woman's right to an abortion, should she feel the need for one, in their states constitution.  Five states have already passed this initiative, including Ruby Red Ohio, where the conservatives are flipping angry as Hell because Americans told them to shut.  As of yesterday, 8 more states have qualified this same initiative to be on the ballot, including Republican held Missouri, and Ronnie DeSantis' red state, Florida.  In every state where these initiatives have passed, Democrats have also beaten Republican candidates by a large margin.  Ouch!  This is not what the Alito court wanted.  It's not what Republicans want.  Women are not going to be subservient to their wishes.  Republicans have a very large problem, and they simply refuse to understand.

Rest Day

Today is Tuesday.  This is the first of 2 rest days in the Tour de France.  Those cyclists deserve it, they've ridden over 1300 miles in 10 days (give or take a mile).  They will relax and eat pasta and build up their strength for the stages in the Pyrenees which come next.  Eli and Max spent the first rest day up in Montmartre.

That evening found us having dinner with Walker Beresford and her fiancé Henri d’Eauville at Le Poisson Blanc, a basement café in Montmartre.  The long dead souls of Beat poets filled the air around us while people wearing berets smoked cigarettes in long, eloquent holders.  This was a shadowland of past and present, where shiny cell phones lay on tables next to wine glasses and ashtrays filled with unfiltered cigarette butts, where some conversed and others listened to the pale, smoothly flowing sounds of a jazz flautist.  A transfixed moment from a Romantic age now only chronicled in books and on film.

Here in the United States we have a Moral Degenerate, and Idiot Jerk in the White House who is proving he will stoop to any level in order to get himself re-elected.  He is justifying his racism by call those voices unifying against him as unpatriotic... un-American..  Four of those voices are women of color.  He is trying to rip a page from McCarthy's playbook.  For those who don't know, McCarthy was a Republican politician who saw Commie, Pinko Sympathizers every where.  He got Congress to hold hearings on Un-American behavior.  The Idiot Jerk wants to do the same thing, except his targets are minorities.  It's the 'old, white thing' you know?
One of the opinions I saw this morning on NBC News claimed he'd flipped the race card on Pelosi, tying the entire Democratic Party to the far Left.  That might be true if we already hadn't seen 2 years of the Idiot Jerk.  He is inept.  He has henchies like Stevie Miller telling him what he needs to do to hold on to his base.  This is what he is desperately trying to do, make sure they go to the polls in 2020 and cast their votes for racism.  If you weren't prepared for this, you should have been; he will pull every dirty trick in the book.  He is a desperate, angry man who represents an aging white America that steadfastly refuses to even try to understand evolution.  We are changing... and it's worldwide.  The dominant gene is brown, not white.
There will be no rest day in politics until the Idiot Jerk and his minions are voted out of office.  Vote Blue. 

I saw where Mitt Romney made some sour grapes comments alleging Obama's victory had more to do with gifts to young blacks and Latinos then anything else.  Doesn't this sound a bit racist, especially when coming from an older white guy?  I suppose he must be appealing to all of those racists whose whose election night tweets were a reflection of the ugly side of America.  Like so many Republicans he is in denial.  In their minds there is no logical way they could have lost this past election which means they need to blame somebody or something.  This is quite normal with Republicans.  There is never a moment when they look at themselves in the mirror and admit to screwing up.  No, they are like that aging woman who paints her face with pounds of make up in order to convince herself she is still a porcelain beauty.  Like that old woman, they will eventually die still unaware the porcelain has cracked.  While there is some apparent bipartisanship jockeying right now history tells us the Republicans will shit it away because in their minds they can not be wrong.  If  you see anything even remotely resembling change it will only be one faction attempting to throw another faction under the bus.

Has the GOP already lost?

And you can bet they are already plotting the next presidential election.  I suspect they will run a white man for president and a token black, Latin, or woman as vice president.  Why?  Because they've tried using that playbook before:  McCain and Palin, a party ticket made in hell.  They don't understand.  For some reason they feel all they need to do is run a token to get votes.  People aren't that foolish.  They're not going to fall for the bait and switch.  Unless the GOP begins roasting some of the far right chestnuts no one is going to believe they've moved even marginally to the center.  What I suspect you'll see is more blame.  They may need to lose three elections in a row before they stop hitting the snooze button on realities alarm clock.

Fox News is killing the Republican Party

Democrats are ecstatic and Republicans are devastated.  What else can you say about the recent election?  I'll also go so far as to say most Republicans now find themselves in a quandary; how to regroup and proceed when statistically they alienate women and minorities.  I actually work with an associate who was claiming in the break room that Obama won "because the Democrats were loading people into vans, registering them, and taking them to vote."  When I started listing voter polling results he claimed "that's all from the liberal media, who lie," though I'd actually seen the information on number of websites from the Washington Post, and Bloomberg, to MSNBC.  Oh, wait, I'm wrong, there is a bastion of Conservative Honesty on the airwaves and it's called Fox News.  As soon as this associate said that I knew Fox News would kill the Republican Party.  Why?  Ratings!

I'd first read, a number of years ago, the Republican Party playbook was based on the ancient television show Leave it to Beaver and that the family values represented by that fictional family were those they wanted all Americans to aspire to; it doesn't work.  There was a time when the Republican Party was, like the Democratic Party, more centrist.  This is where the majority of Americans sit, leaning a little right here, veering a little left there, but never really straying too far to either side.  The Democrats get this, the Republicans don't.  Fox News doesn't either.  They mistakenly believe, based on high television ratings, that the American People accept Fox as an authority.  While some, like the associate I work with, might, most Americans vote their gut instincts, not the way some news organization wants them to vote.  We are not sheep, well, most of us aren't.

As for the Republican Party?  They've sutured themselves to Fox and as a result are in a terrible dilemma.      They have shut out most Women, Black, and Latino voters because they did not fit in with their Leave it to Beaver playbook.  And, things are only going to get worse for them.  During this past election Puerto Rico voted to apply for statehood.  When this gets ratified there will be even more Hispanics the Republicans will need worry about.