Never pass up a chance to sit down or relieve yourself. -old Apache saying

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

suspending blog

I was really looking forward to a Kamala Harris presidency, but the Orange Menace somehow ended up on top. The joy is gone, replaced by nothing but dread. I'm too old now to dive into this newfound muck and retain my sanity. Cannot watch any news broadcast because it's all about Trump, all the time. He is already pulling illegal shit, but the Democrats are likely to do nothing about it. Several races this time around were very close, but there is no hint of fighting or recounts. Hell, Kamala puts out a picture of her laughing playing with her nieces. That's all well and good, but isn't it a little early to send a message that you are over the election and let's get back to "normal?"

There is no more "normal" with Donald Trump in the White House. I don't even want to list all the ways he is looking to destroy this country. It's too depressing. All that excitement with Kamala, all those rallies, she took the lead in most polls, Trump's own campaign was admitting that he was going to lose. And he sweeps EVERY swing state? GOP now has 53 Senate seats and they took the House. Not to mention the thoroughly corrupt Supreme Court, who conveniently granted him immunity from just about everything, just before he steals the election.

It's too much. I don't know what we are going to do, but I want to get the hell out of Texas and move to a blue state. But I don't think we'd be safe even there. And my wife has deep family ties to this area of Texas and does not want to move. 

This situation is about as ugly as it gets, and yet millions of Americans voted for this habitual liar and cheater. 

The only thing I can think of at this point is to suspend the blog once again. Maybe I will start it back up IF America returns to a semblance of normalcy.

Good luck everyone, we are going to need it.


Saturday, November 9, 2024

26,000!

Since the corrupt Supreme Court of the United States overturned the right of a woman to seek an abortion in the Dobbs case in June of 2022, Texas has led the nation in the number of rapes that resulted in pregnancy: over 26,000 rapes resulting in a pregnancy!  And since the Texas law has no exception for pregnancy resulting from a rape, one has to wonder: How many Texas women, since Dobbs was overturned, have given birth to their rapist's baby? Surely SOME of those rape victims, especially the rich ones, went out of state to get an abortion, but how many? There are no stats available on that, and the GOP hypocrites will never admit it unless exposed.

Before Dobbs was overturned, if a woman in Texas was raped and got pregnant from it, she had the right to terminate that pregnancy. I suppose most women did get abortions after getting pregnant from a rape. Would you, as a woman, after suffering a rape, want to carry that baby to term and give birth? Would you, as a mother, want your daughter to be forced to carry that child resulting from rape? 

And think of the numbers: 26,000 pregnancies from rape over a period of about 30 months, in Texas alone. At an average of 30 days in each month, that's 900 days since Dobbs. So, on the average, almost 30 women PER DAY are being raped and impregnated in Texas.  Surely not every rape results in pregnancy, but 26,000 DID. 30 women per day in Texas. Those numbers really wreck me. I never came anywhere near to raping any woman, and neither have any of my friends. I'm just guessing here, but these 26,000 rapists probably would not vote for women to have more rights. They seem like the kind of guy who can only think of dominating women, to the point of forcing them to have sex. Fucking scum.

And I am reminded of Texas Gov Abbott, who, when signing the no exceptions Texas anti-abortion bill into law, said that "goal number one in the state of Texas is to eliminate rape so that no woman, no person, will be a victim of rape."

How's that working out, Governor? Not very fucking well is it, you overpromising douchebag fucking partisan hack.

Greg Abbott Said He'd "Eliminate Rape" to Justify an Abortion Ban. He's Failed Miserably.

Thanks to his ban, Texas leads the nation: 26,300 estimated pregnancies as a result of rape.


News & Engagement Writer 

Mother Jones

After passing what was, at the time, the strictest abortion ban in the country, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sought to fend off critics by pledging to work to “eliminate rape” in the state. But a new study published yesterday shows the extent to which Abbott has failed to do so—even after a stricter abortion ban took effect in the state—and just how many Texans have likely been impacted. 

In September 2021, when Abbott passed SB 8, the law that banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy—effectively a total ban, since that’s before most people know they’re pregnant—and allowed any private citizen to sue abortion providers and people who “aid and abet” anyone who tries to obtain an abortion, it was the strictest anti-abortion law on the books nationwide. Predictably, he faced criticism, including from a reporter who asked why he was forcing victims of rape or incest to carry their pregnancies to term under the new law. The governor falsely claimed that the law wouldn’t actually force rape and incest victims to give birth, “because it provides at least six weeks for a person to be able to get an abortion,” and promised he’d prioritize working to “eliminate rape” in Texas. 

“Rape is a crime and Texas will work tirelessly to make sure we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them and prosecuting them and getting them off the streets. So goal number one in the state of Texas is to eliminate rape so that no woman, no person, will be a victim of rape,” Abbott said at the time. (Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki quickly shut down his comments: “If Gov. Abbott has a means of eliminating all rapists or all rape from the United States, then there would be bipartisan support for that,” she said at a briefing.) 

Since then, Texas’ abortion law has only gotten more extreme: abortion is now entirely illegal in the state due to a trigger ban that took effect in August 2022, two months after the Dobbs decision, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights. And now we have a sense of just how many people have likely been impacted: there have been an estimated 26,300 pregnancies as a result of rape in Texas, the highest of any state with a total abortion ban, according to a study published yesterday in JAMA Internal Medicine

Since there isn’t one reliable source on how many rapes occur in each state, researchers used multiple data sources—including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2016–2017 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, and FBI data showing rapes reported to law enforcement—to estimate how many rapes resulted in pregnancy in the 14 states that implemented abortion bans post-Dobbs. Overall, they estimate there were more than 64,500 rape-related pregnancies in these states; about 5,500 of those occurred in the five states whose abortion bans have rape exceptions. (Other research has shown that rape exceptions are seldom granted in practice: data published in October by the nonprofit Society of Family Planning found that an average of fewer than ten abortions were performed per month in states with rape exceptions in the first year after Dobbs.) 

So Texas accounted for nearly half—45 percent—of total estimated rape-related pregnancies. In other words: Abbott appears to have failed spectacularly to “eliminate rape.” And unwanted pregnancies as a result of rape will likely continue to rise in Texas in light of the abortion ban, study co-author Kari White, executive and scientific director at the Austin-based Resound Research for Reproductive Health collaborative, told the Houston Chronicle

Abbott’s office didn’t immediately respond to our questions about their response to the study’s findings in light of the governor’s prior comments and what new efforts, if any, they have implemented to tackle rape in Texas since the total abortion ban took effect there in August 2022. 

Jennifer Wagman, assistant professor of public health at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose research focuses on sexual violence, told me she wasn’t surprised by the study’s findings, and called Abbott’s initial pledge to “eliminate rape” by arresting people “absurd”—in part because sexual violence is notoriously underreported to law enforcement, with more than two out of three sexual assaults going unreported, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network

“There are so many different facets that need to be addressed if you’re going to really, legitimately, and sincerely commit to doing [rape] prevention—you can’t just arrest people and put them in jail and expect that to solve the problem,” said Wagman, who was not involved with the study. 

The JAMA paper alludes to this underreporting of rape as a limitation of the study, noting that “such highly stigmatized experiences are difficult to measure accurately in surveys.” But still, the paper helps fill an important gap in research, Wagman said: “We don’t know as much as we need to about the associations between sexual violence and abortion.”

Rose Luna, the CEO of the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault, which acts as the state’s federally recognized coalition and resource hub for sexual assault prevention providerssaid in a statement provided to Mother Jones that the organization is “profoundly disheartened that our state fails to afford a woman her fundamental right to make personal health care decisions, especially in the aftermath of a sexual assault.”

"A survivor of sexual assault already has experienced the ultimate violation of their body; they are left to endure the lasting effects, both physically and emotionally, of this violent crime,” Luna added. “Options are vital to healing.”

The study doesn’t indicate how many people pregnant as a result of rape could have obtained abortions in spite of Texas’ ban. Pregnant Texans who can travel can obtain abortions in the nearby states of Colorado, New Mexico and Kansas, where it’s still legal, and as my colleague Abby Vesoulis has reported, some pregnant Texans seeking abortions have obtained them in Mexico. While abortion pills also remain available and can be ordered online, the financial and logistical barriers to crossing state lines for procedural abortions put the option out of reach for many—meaning that, as the study notes, many are left “without a practical alternative to carrying the pregnancy to term.” 

Original.


Thursday, November 7, 2024

Same as 2020?

New info....apparently there are still about 10% of votes not yet counted out west. If true, once all votes are tabulated, the vote totals could be close to the 2020 totals.

So there is no "drop off" from 2020, but there is also no gains from 2020. Maybe the missing millions of Dems DID vote. 

I've heard from a few different sources that a lot of Dems were so sure that Harris was going to win that they either didn't vote, or voted 3rd party as a form of protest.

Was there cheating? Did millions of Americans decide that a woman, a woman of color, no less, should not occupy the highest office in the land? How many sexist bigots are there in this country?

America blew it. Bigly.


Wednesday, November 6, 2024

and she didn't

All that enthusiasm for Harris, all of Trump's wandering, rambling "answers" to questions, Trump's dwindling crowds, signs all over that Kamala is going to take it, and boom, Trump wins?

How is it that 10 million fewer Democrats showed up for Harris this time than voted for Biden in 2020, especially considering the stakes? Did they suddenly decide not to vote? 

Were some purged from the voting rolls? Did they have trouble getting to a polling site? I have to say that I still don't trust our elections in this country. I rather believe that a clever algorithm inserted in some machines could swing the election. 

Anyway, everything is still too raw to write much with coherence. I am repressing the rage and confusion somehow.

Seems this timeline has really taken a dark turn.


 

Friday, November 1, 2024

women's rights



I found the graphic above on Facebook recently. It is truly amazing to see the progress that women have made over the last 100 years. It was a long, long time coming, but I am sure that many present-day, old-fashioned males still cannot handle it, thinking that change has come too fast. Women used to be under their control, it says so in the Bible!!, and now we have all these "independent" women working, driving cars, running companies, and heaven forbid VOTING! 

"Childress cat ladies," Shady Vance calls them. (Oh, and just this afternoon, Vance called Kamala Harris "trash" that needed to be hauled out of the White House.) Classy.

I guess no one told Vance that being openly sexist wasn't going to attract many women's votes. Maybe he thinks there are enough Neanderthal men still around that he'll get elected. Not gonna happen, Shady. The only way you will be vice-president is if we allow Trump to steal this election, and that is NOT going to happen.

He's always watching

He's always watching