How can Republicans oppress people if their citizens thwart plans?

I finished the book Magic Season, a Son’s Story, by Wade Rouse. This is a memoir about Rouse trying to understand his father as he is dying. I had read a previous memoir by Rouse, At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream: Misadventures in Search of the Simple Life. This was about Rouse and his husband moving from the city to a rural area of southwest Michigan. It was funny and I found it quite entertaining. Rouse was born in the Ozarks of southwest Missouri. As a gay boy he did not fit in. His father tried to teach him to play baseball, which was a disaster. All the other things country boys are expected to do – hunt and fish (and handle what they kill), do farm chores – were also a disaster. His father didn’t know what to do with him. Even though Rouse was terrible at baseball and any other sport he fell in love with listening to the St. Louis Cardinals games on the radio with his father, then the two of them soon made the trip to St. Louis to attend games. The book is structured around the innings of a playoff game between the Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs in October of 2015. Rouse was with his father as caregiver. Not being able to play sports was just one way Rouse disappointed his father. Rouse went off to college to major in journalism, which Dad didn’t consider a real job. Rouse applied to Northwestern for his Master’s. When the acceptance call came Dad said he had decided to go elsewhere, without telling his son. I thought that was the worst of the meddling. When Rouse told his dad he is gay Dad didn’t speak to him for two years (Mom was fine with a gay son). When Dad called at the end of those two years all he did was talk about the Cardinals. Rouse’s boyfriend (later husband) Gary was annoyed that no apology was given. Rouse said the call itself, Dad being the one to break the silence, was the apology. Rouse said he didn’t want to blame his father (though there was plenty of reason to do so). He wanted to understand and honor his father. And by the end I think he managed that. He saw his father as the product of his time and place. Men were not taught how to handle their emotions or to deal with change, such as producing a gay son. All the old man knew how to do was rage at the world and drink another beer. By the end of the book I think Rouse did understand his father and through recognizing the good traits he had learned he figured out how to honor his nemesis. I highly recommend this one. Dartagnan of Daily Kos reported on the hostage taking by Republicans and Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio. Republicans say that since the Democratic Convention is after the deadline to put candidates on the state ballot they won’t let Biden be on the ballot unless they get abortion restrictions. There are a couple more things as part of the hostage ransom. This attempt at abortion restrictions comes after Ohio voters approved an amendment to the state constitution to protect abortion rights. There is a bill approving Biden for the ballot – this type of bill passed the Ohio legislature in 2012 and 2020 – but Republicans refuse to advance it. One of those other things is a measure to keep money from “foreign nationals” out of citizen sponsored initiatives. Sounds good, no? The problem is that the new rules for verifying and enforcing whether there is foreign money would so difficult and expensive to navigate that it would end citizen initiatives – which is the point. How can Republicans oppress their people if their citizens keep coming up with ways to thwart them? The other thing is a measure that would immediately funnel challenges to new abortion laws directly to the highly anti-abortion Ohio Supreme Court. One of the justices on that court is Pat DeWine – the governor’s son. Neither of these poison pills, are things the average voter is going to understand. One of them has convoluted reasoning and neither spell out the intended consequences.

What’s transpiring now in Ohio is a textbook example of how Republicans simply do not care about what the majority of their citizens want, and the lengths they’ll go to force their agenda down their voters’ throats.

Silence of the Kos community wrote that the Democratic Party is going to thwart the hostage-taking by doing virtual roll call (like they did in 2020 in the pandemic era) of the delegates well before the Ohio deadline. So Biden’s actual nomination as the Democratic candidate will come well before the convention. Robert Downen and Renzo Downey, in an article for the Texas Tribune posted on Kos, discussed the Texas Republican Party platform recently voted on by delegates. It has such things as: The Bible must be taught in public schools. Statewide leaders (such as secretary of state) must get a majority of votes in a majority of counties, not just overall – with 254 counties, most of them sparsely populated and rural, that would mean a Democrat could never again win statewide office (That would violate the Voting Rights Act? Well, call for repealing the VRA). Abortion is homicide. Gender transition treatment is child abuse. Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice. Biden was not legitimately elected. Immigration is the “greatest threat to American security and sovereignty.” And many more. Yeah, many of those were in the 2022 platform. And, yeah, the party is moving further right each time it writes a platform.

During a speech on the convention stage on Saturday, former gubernatorial candidate and state Sen. Don Huffines carried a printed version of the platform with him. He noted that Republicans have controlled the Legislature and the governor’s mansion for two decades, but the party still struggles to secure its priorities. “We could get any piece of legislation done anytime we want, but, every session, we struggle to get our platform into law,” Huffines said.

Many of us are glad that turning the platform into law is so hard. In another post from last Friday Downen wrote about the chaos in the Texas Republican Party (though not so much chaos as to stop voting on the platform). It’s a long article that I think is summarized as this: There was a lot of effort to purge Republican members who weren’t conservative enough. That prompted a shrinking of the donor base to there are two major donors left. They are...

Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, who have for years funded attacks by the far right on fellow Republicans, pushed for hardline restrictions on immigration and LGBTQ+ rights, and faced recent scandals over avowed white supremacists and antisemites working for their political network. In the decade before Rinaldi became chair, the party received $310,000 in donations from Dunn, Wilks or their political action committees. Since then, they have given more than $1.2 million to the party — and last year, as Rinaldi increasingly used his position to attack their political enemies, the billionaires made up a quarter of the party’s total donations.

The Texas Republican Party is beholden to only two super wealthy far right dudes. No wonder their platform reads as it does. In an Earth Matters report for Kos Meteor Blades had a few interesting segments. Blades looked at the nasty guy’s request for a bribe from the oil industry, saying he’ll undo all the Biden oil regulations. Thankfully, Rep. Jamie Raskin is asking the Department of Justice to investigate. But since there are so many legal ways to make big donations, being able to document the cash that is part of the bribe will be mighty difficult. To get to net zero carbon by mid century we must triple our investment in renewable energy by the end of this decade. And the chance to get to net zero is “rapidly closing.” The researchers who determined that predict that we’ll hit “peak oil” next year with sharp declines after that. Some industries are fairly easy to decarbonize. Others, such as avation and steelmaking, will be much harder. Millennials and Gen Z are anxious about the planet. As an action they can take they are quitting jobs that aren’t eco-friendly. The State of the World’s Human Rights report now includes the status of the right to a healthy environment. It shows climate impacts people in every country and causes more harm to marginalized groups. Cities are buying EVs in bulk for their government needs. That will speed up acceptance of EVs for personal use. It also gives cities a good way to reduce pollution. They’re also cheaper to run and maintain. Half the pasture lands on earth has been degraded by climate change. That threatens food supply. Two weeks ago Mitch Perry, in an article for the Florida Phoenix posted on Kos, reported that DeathSantis has signed a bill that will erase the phrase “climate change” from state laws. The bill was to be signed in Clearwater Beach, but 15 minutes before the ceremony the Gov’s appearance was canceled because the area was under a severe thunderstorm watch. The next day a poll showed that 68% of respondents say the state government should do more to address climate change.