Two points of light.

Since so much of the news has been terrible of late, I feel like I have to point out some definite glimmers of light, both in Michigan:

Two ballot initiatives advancing progressive causes — reproductive freedom and voting rights — have turned in signatures far, far, farrrrr in excess of those needed to get on the November ballot. Both are constitutional amendments, which means if they pass, they’ll be difficult to roll back in the future. Michigan has these direct-democracy features baked into its constitution, which was last revised in 1963, so some very New Frontier details. Sometimes good ideas get in there, sometimes bad ones (term limits, ahem). But it’s the system we’ve been given, and some people are working it.

Anyway, the reproductive-freedom initiative would give women the right to make that choice at any point in their pregnancy, so of course the pushback has already started: This will allow 12-year-olds to undergo hysterectomies! Women will have abortions in the eighth month! And so on. But they turned in a record number of signatures: 753,000, well over the 425,000 required.

Promote the Vote, the other one, came in with something like 663,000, and would make voting easier, more convenient, and — this is the big one — provide for nine days of early in-person voting, which we don’t currently have. (On the other hand, I believe some of the union contracts make Election Day a holiday, in the interest of participatory democracy. That might go in the next negotiation, huh?)

That both of these breezed across the finish line with such a margin — all petition drives over-deliver, because all the signatures have to be verified, and inevitably some are tossed — suggests all is not lost.

And today was another J6 hearing, ai-yi-yi. This is getting so ridiculous, this giant pile of evidence, something more better come of it than a bunch of embarrassment. Meanwhile, dozens of Republicans are running for office on the STOLEN ELECTION. It’s revolting. Maybe November will sort a few things out; I certainly hope so.

Another perfect day today, and I smashed it — up early, worked out, walked the dog, showered, worked, cleaned the goddamn coffeemaker. Remembered to have something for dinner, prepped it in plenty of time, drank lots of water. It’s amazing what a good night’s sleep can yield.

Now let’s see what Wednesday brings. You never know.

Posted at 8:36 pm in Current events |
 

26 responses to “Two points of light.”

  1. Sherri said on July 12, 2022 at 9:30 pm

    That’s impressive signature-gathering. COVID and the general shortage of workers has made signature-gathering very difficult and very expensive. The statewide initiatives here all shut down because signature-gathering was going so poorly and blowing up the budget, including one I was involved with.

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  2. Mark P said on July 12, 2022 at 9:49 pm

    I certainly hope some things get sorted out in November. We have the brain-dead Herschel Walker running against Raphael Warnock for Senate in Georgia. The latest news on Walker is his comments about why we shouldn’t have clean air in the US. It will just float over to China, and China’s dirty air will float over here, and we’ll just have to clean that air. I’m afraid it will make sense to the same people that think Jewish space lasers causing wildfires in California makes sense.

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  3. Jeff Gill said on July 12, 2022 at 10:51 pm

    Water is my secret sauce this summer.

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  4. brian stouder said on July 12, 2022 at 11:56 pm

    Ever since my retirement a few weeks ago, I’ve been drinking a lot more water – and a lot less Diet Pepsi, and indeed, it’s good stuff,* at least here in Fort Wayne! In a few years (after our sophomore graduates from her high school) we shall be rural Cass County residents, and well water will be what’s on tap….so there’s that. Anyway – watching all this Congressional Trump-thumping has been exceedingly troubling (the treasonous moronic parts) and reassuring (the current ‘thumping’ part). Our next presidential election will be a biggie-biggie, indeed. The Republican Party will have to renovate who they are, and redefine what they believe…. or else embrace the evil. *the water, that is!

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  5. Ann said on July 13, 2022 at 12:10 am

    Sherri, the amazing thing about the Michigan petition was that as far as I know, it was all done by volunteers–30,000 of them. Although volunteers may be more likely to make mistakes than professionals, they are much less likely to be turning in pages of fraudulent signatures. It almost gives me hope.

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  6. Julie Robinson said on July 13, 2022 at 11:06 am

    Water is always my secret sauce, and here in Orlando we’ve learned to carry it around always, as it’s just too easy to get yourself dehydrated.
    Iced tea is good too though!

    Brian, do you have family in Cass County? Hope retirement is treating you well. We are so busy we can’t remember how we used to fit in work.

    Speaking of being busy and water, the pool temperature report just came in and it’s time to swim.

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  7. Deborah said on July 13, 2022 at 11:56 am

    The modern world: my husband is having a business zoom call out on the patio and LB is in her room having a telehealth facetime with her Dr. LB developed a bad rash, reaction from the Paxlovid she was taking. And she may be having the start of the re-bound. I am at day 6, feeling a lot better, completed my Paxlovid and I have more energy. Crazy combo of pandemics and technology.

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  8. brian stouder said on July 13, 2022 at 2:03 pm

    My lovely wife is a Logansport/Cass County girl. Years ago, she came to Fort Wayne to go to college, and when she graduated, she got a job where I worked…..and the rest is history (and proceeding into Current Events!). Grandpa (her dad) passed away a few months ago (all at once, and still surprising), and now the lovely house sits empty….so we roll over every few weeks (her sister lives a couple miles up the road, and keeps the place looking lived-in). So – after a lifetime of Fort Wayne style city living (literally in the shadow of WANE channel-15’s tower), I shall become a country boy (under Pam’s tutelage!)

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  9. Scout said on July 13, 2022 at 2:04 pm

    We had less than two weeks to collect appx 357,000 here in AZ and sadly, we fell short of getting repro rights on the ballot this election. It is especially difficult to gather large quantities of signatures this season because there are no outdoor events that gather large crowds when the temps go over 100. Very grateful for Biden’s EO that protects providers offering life or health saving abortion services in emergency situations.

    That hearing yesterday was something. I am really looking forward to next week’s must see tv. The committee is going far above expectations. It’s terrifying how much worse the attempted overthrow was than we even realized at the time. Heather Cox Richardson’s letter this morning does a great job encapsulating yesterday, and the end paragraphs are sobering af:

    “More and more, witnesses seem to be siding with transparency and the committee rather than with Trump. Today, Dan Friedman of Mother Jones published a tape of Bannon on October 31, 2020, laughing as he explains to a private audience that Trump will “win” in 2020 simply by declaring he won, even if he didn’t.

    Trump knew that Democratic mail in ballots would show up in the vote totals later than Republican votes cast on election day, “[a]nd Trump’s going to take advantage of it,” Bannon said. “That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner…. So when you wake up Wednesday morning, it’s going to be a firestorm,” he said. “You’re going to have antifa, crazy. The media, crazy. The courts are crazy. And Trump’s gonna be sitting there mocking, tweeting sh*t out: ‘You lose. I’m the winner. I’m the king.’”

    And, Bannon continued: “Here’s the thing. After then, Trump never has to go to a voter again…. He’s gonna say ‘F*ck you. How about that?’ Because…he’s done his last election. Oh, he’s going to be off the chain—he’s gonna be crazy.””

    OMG, he really was trying to make himself king. “Because he’s done his last election… he’s going to be off the chain…” I’d love to hear how the MAGAt apologists explain that.

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  10. David C said on July 13, 2022 at 2:26 pm

    The Rs can take their shit about the rape of the ten year old in Ohio being false and shove it up their asses.

    https://news.yahoo.com/arrest-made-rape-ohio-10-180049377.html

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  11. ROGirl said on July 13, 2022 at 2:49 pm

    I signed a petition a month or so ago at a shopping center on a Sunday. Someone with the same petition was at another shopping center on the same day, so they were extremely well-organized and deployed.

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  12. Jeff Borden said on July 13, 2022 at 3:32 pm

    Maybe the radical SCOTUS decisions will power a surprise this fall. Otherwise, we’re looking at multiple probes of Hunter Biden efforts to impeach Joe, etc. I’m not sure how much of that shit I can stomach.

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  13. Marge Taylor said on July 13, 2022 at 6:51 pm

    Brian, My grandmother was raised in Logansport, married and moved
    to Howard Co. You will like the area. My father worked on RR.
    that is how I came to Allen Co. Best to you and family.

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  14. Sherri said on July 13, 2022 at 6:59 pm

    Another friend has been nominated to the Federal bench! I hope he makes it through the confirmation process before the election, or that Dems retain the Senate.

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  15. Julie Robinson said on July 13, 2022 at 8:21 pm

    Sherri, you’ll have to remind us if the other friend was confirmed.

    Brian, how lovely. You’ll have plenty of time for renovations and can move at your leisure.

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  16. Deborah said on July 13, 2022 at 8:59 pm

    Brian, I remember when you wrote about your youngest being 4 years old. Time flies.

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  17. Dexter Friend said on July 14, 2022 at 3:39 am

    The Ohio-Indiana abortion case is sickening, and I mean actually made me sick. The way the Murdoch press handled the story as a political fictional story is beyond everything. These Republicans, all the way down the list, are disgusting cretins and mean liars, and I might add stupid, because they still love and believe Trump after this mountain of evidence from Trump former staff and appointees…it’s unconscionable.
    In this case, it’s the pro-life crowd refusing to believe the true crime happened in Ohio at all, and the trip to Indianapolis for the abortion never happened.
    Well, it goddam did happen. I have not been so mad at these Neanderthals since their predecessors told us we were doing a wonderful thing by blowing up Vietnam and sending US soldiers to die at about 200 to 240 per week, for years. These people focus only on Fox News and these crazed religious fanatics and their like-minded friends and ignore the facts all around them. Ohio’s law forced the 10 year old girl, likely raped at age 9, to travel across state lines to try to terminate this horrible rape induced pregnancy, and gratefully, it happened. The pro-lifers can go to hell.

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  18. alex said on July 14, 2022 at 6:46 am

    Justice Handmaiden in over her head: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/07/amy-coney-barrett-abortion-supreme-court-blunders.html

    Clarence Thomas was also notoriously silent for most of his career and no doubt for the same reasons: 1) He didn’t really know what the fuck he was doing; and 2) He knew what he was doing was political activism and not jurisprudence.

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  19. Dorothy said on July 14, 2022 at 9:20 am

    Brian I’m sorry about your wife’s grandfather’s passing but I have to cheer her chance to live a couple miles away from her sister. We’ve lived .5 miles from our son and his family for almost six months now and I can testify it’s the best thing we’ve done in a long time! I see the kids very frequently and I hope our health stays good for a long time so they can know their paternal grandparents were wild about them, and indulged them as reasonably and as often as they could!

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  20. basset said on July 14, 2022 at 12:59 pm

    And you are so fortunate to be able to do that… my brothers and I grew up with one grandparent deceased, another three states away in the pre-interstate highway days, and the other two in a different country. We missed out on a lot.

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  21. Deborah said on July 14, 2022 at 2:41 pm

    Sorry to do this through nn.c but we don’t know how else to do it. Some of you are FB friends with LB, her acct got hacked. She’s not asking you for money to be sent to a Venmo acct. She can’t figure out how to get back on FB to let people know.

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  22. Julie Robinson said on July 14, 2022 at 3:44 pm

    Seems like someone I know gets hacked every other day, and a few have had trouble getting back in. Such a bummer when you’re already fighting the Covid, Little Bird.

    I was feeling smug for buying D a new unlocked phone during Prime days–last year’s model for about a third of what this year’s are at the phone store. Turns out we have to go back down to the store to get a new sim card. Crud. Between this and changing plans I’ve dealt with the phone company multiple times a day all week.

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  23. Julie Robinson said on July 14, 2022 at 4:18 pm

    Jokes on us. We only had to swap the sim card and we could have done it ourselves. Guess the tech son doesn’t know everything.

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  24. basset said on July 14, 2022 at 4:23 pm

    A clever headline: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/717c9266-02be-11ed-aa15-45d37b45dc0d

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  25. Jeff Gill said on July 14, 2022 at 4:25 pm

    In the “truth is stranger than fiction” department, a wild convergence on the day we learn Ivana Trump died about Sarah Palin’s first appearance in the national news some 26 years ago, with a line I know y’all will savor when you read it:

    https://twitter.com/josephlawler/status/1547676255281000449

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  26. Deborah said on July 14, 2022 at 4:44 pm

    Ivana Trump is dead at 73.

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