Here in Michigan, the right for women to have the right to bodily autonomy will be on the ballot in November thanks to a concerted effort to get signatures on petitions to put this on the ballot. In a red state, this effort garnered almost twice as many signatures as was needed. This gives me hope.
Good job! Keep going. I have this sneaking suspicion that the anti-choicers are going to do something sneaky, like put out literature close to election day that claims that yes means no and no means yes. Be ready!
My first thought on hearing the good news from Kansas was that every state should hold a referendum about abortion. But then I realized that the GOP will do absolutely everything in its considerable power to prevent that from happening.
I am not optimistic that pro-choice sentiment will be stronger than the racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and fundamentalist Christian nationalism that motivate t-Rump-worshiping voters.
Not just abortion, but gun restrictions and equitable voting rights, among others, fall into the category of being supported by the majority of our population. And yet, these too, fall into the GOP prevention bucket.
The only thing that surprised me about Kansas was that the size of the No vote disappointed me. Nationwide polls have shown that ALL sectors—religion, pol party, ethnicity, you name it—consistently support abortion at a proportion higher than 59 per cent. In the privacy of a voting booth, why would people vote against their preference?
Looking ahead, to my mind, no one reports more acutely why disasters keep happening than Jane Mayer, the New Yorker staffer who's an authority on dark money, esp Koch and Mercer doings. She's turned her attention to gerrymandering, which she blames for what's gone so horribly wrong with state legislatures.
Gerrymandering enables election wall-to-wall of extremists so they can then enact whatever loony legislation ALEC hands them. It's as terrifying as a paranoid fantasy, except it's no fantasy, it's today's headlines. The "modern" SCotUS has already spoken: Gerrymandering for racist purposes is a no-no, for political gain it's the American way.
Mayer gets interviewed a lot for broadcast and podcast on her current reporting. Uppermost now is Ohio. She tweets updates of what she's up to. (FB habitués seem to assume that to read tweets you need a twitter account. You do not. Using the URL opens the feed as if it were a stand-alone website.) https://www.twitter.com/JaneMayerNYer/
Quite so, Doug. To men, abortion fits neatly into a category with gun restrictions, voting rights, and all the social issues. To women, what SCotUS did was political rape. Pregnancy and childbirth are life-changing—political affiliation irrelevant. Giving up a baby at birth is something only someone as shallow as Amy Coney Barrett or Sammy Alito could treat lightly. For a woman, birth is the beginning of an 18-year life-absorbing commitment that men can and often do walk away from—political affiliation irrelevant. Men may genuinely empathize, but I wonder if most—political affiliation irrelevant—even *can* get how personal the issue of abortion is to women.
Thanks, Lucian. That's where I see the division on this issue: most women and empathetic men on one side—party and state lines be damned—the rest in SCotUS or clerical robes or too-long red ties, outnumbered.
Here are a couple other takeaways. First, even with the obvious attempts to mislead the electorate ad stack the deck to hold this election at a time when many independents and Democrats historically have not gone to the polls, the result was a smashing rebuke of the right's attempt to force a fundamentally religious backed law down the throats of the general public. Maybe, just maybe those Christian fundamentalist with all that evangelical fervor do not represent the will of ALL the people/
Second, if this measure went down 60/40 in Kansas, a relatively conservative state what does that say the nation wide margin might be? Surely, higher say in the range of 2:1. And, if that is the case it is the kind of issue capable of generating mass turnout and tipping the ordinary balance of voting in an off year election. Maybe the Democrats can hold the House and pick up a couple of Senate seats if the have the common sense to make this a major issue in EVERY House and Senate race?
Third, this issue has resonance with women and young voters two blocs which historically do not vote with regularity in either two or four year cycles . Here again, the Ds would be well advised to spend a few bucks targeting these voting blocs for November.
Inflation and high gas prices are going to be a reality this cycle. Best the Ds find some other issues to offset the old wisdom that voters vote only their own economic interests.
Likely rate of inflation and gas prices will be heading down, too, that helps. We really need to move to cleaner renewable energy "with all deliberate speed," as soon as possible, electric vehicles, the works.
Thank you for articulating what I feel in my heart is true. That ALL humans have the RIGHT to "...life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." People all over the world. "Included in that limited category is the right of personal autonomy, which includes the ability to control one's own body, to assert bodily integrity, and to exercise self-determination. This right allows a woman to make her own decisions regarding her body, health, family formation, and family life—decisions that can include whether to continue a pregnancy." Women breathe life into the world through their bodies and very often take on the lifelong responsibility of that life that they birthed into the world. With every choice we make, other choices are taken off the table.
Whether here in Minneapolis or the Windy City, I shudder to think what this planet would be like if only energized with male energy, much as I enjoy all sorts of "male pursuits." Women's rights are universal human rights, not suggestions, as Lucian so astutely reminds us.
Yes, I agree. I would not want to live in a world without masculine or feminine energy. We need both. The diverse backgrounds of the many people I have known in my life are what makes life wonderful. All the different cultures add to the depth of my experience. That is one of the saddest parts about the right wing "thinking". I pity them for wanting a world dominated by people who only think and look like they do. How boring!
Equally amazing is that the extreme right is characterized by such incredible fragility, but packaged in a series of masks of assertion and bizarrely over-the-top "macho" attitudinizing, wild paranoid claims. Trump has developed it into his own quasi-Hitlerian variant, carefully wrapped in the American flag. But that fragility, that fear of "The Other," is always lurking. And naturally enough it transmogrified into hatred and fear of women, women's rights, women's freedoms, as Trump repeatedly signalled early on.
I worked for several years with a woman originally from Hungary, now an American citizen, with an advanced degree from the U of Minnesota, a sharp observer of current events, and we discussed Trump's chances of winning one afternoon when we had some time off, in April 2016, and I hadn't yet really paid sufficient attention to either Trump or how ineptly (over-confidently, yes, but ineptly) Clinton's campaign was proceeding. I was also donating regularly to Sanders so I was both more focused on his chances and biased from that perspective, thinking that the mass electorate was ready for progressive political change, not a "Great Leap Backwards." So I dismissed the idea Trump would actually win,.I naively thought Republicans in sufficient numbers in key states would be lukewarm. Zsuzsi thought originally that based on Trump's total lack of any political experience , and his various offensive remarks about all sorts of people, he would lose. How could we vote this guy into the presidency. Yes indeed, impeached twice, seditious insurrection, over 30,000 lies or serious distortions of fact as tallied by the Washington Post, and he is still a force in the no longer grand G.O.P. C'est incroyable! You could not make this stuff up, stuff Trump brought about, or the stuff of his whacko statements, stuff we undoubtedly are both familiar with and I haven't even explicitly mentioned. It would take really deranged people to invent it as a dystopian cartoon, complete with extorting a foreign leader, threatening to withhold important military aid unless he investigated your political rivals, etc.
In any event, Trump channels that fear you mention, that desire to elminate everyone from power who doesn't think and look like they do. He started up that engine when he announced his candidacy, demonizing Mexican immigrants, and never stopped to this day.
Thank you for this excellent commentary! I, too, was in disbelief on November 9, 2016. Disbelief and dread. I thought that we would lose our country for sure. I think his Achilles heal is that he demands total allegiance then turns around and stabs those people in the back. People eventually get tired of being treated that way and look for a way out. We are long overdue in abolishing the ghost of Roy Cohn.
With revanchist red state legislatures passing horribly misogynistic laws, Indiana has started the ball rolling, the anger among women especially, but certainly not limited to them, should reach the boiling point by November. At least that’s what I’m hoping after what happened in Kansas. Some of the dunderheaded Rethugs on the margins may be backing away realizing they’ve screwed the pooch, but the hardcore cult won’t. Any moderation by the Rethugs is strictly temporary in any case. Only. Major drubbing at the polls keeping the Democrats in control of Congress, and with luck more state legislatures, will make a difference. So VOTE. Drag everyone you know to the polls or get them absentee ballots. We have to win this one. And the next one, and the one after that.
I hate to break it to you but as an ex Republican these radicals ARE the new Republican Party. The justification so many are supporting Trump just to hold power sailed a long time ago with me. When you have sitting members of the House and Senate like Jordan, Gohmert, Gaetz, Green, Cruz, Johnson, Lee, et all you must recognize the reality. A way too large contingent of once "principled" Republicans now fully support the principles of fascism. Right out in the open as January 6 and its aftermath prove beyond any reasonable doubt. The Rusty Bowrers , Liz Cheneys and Adam Kinziners are dinosaurs in their party. About to all go extinct.
It's been a generation since the Republican Party made any attempt to argue their case, either in Congress, or to the American people at large. Republican officeholders and their paid consultants, are like a well-equipped, highly motivated mercenary army. Their loyalties are up for grabs to the highest bidder. Over time, the Republicans have come to represent fewer and fewer people, and their legislative initiatives clearly reflect that narrowing of focus on serving the interests of the wealthiest people in this country.
Before the end of the Cold War in 1991, Republicans could be counted on to support national defense measures against Russian initiatives. All that has gone away, and now Vladimir Putin is the Republican Party's avatar for the kind of government that today's Republican Party aspires to emulate. Back before the reign of Newt Gingrich during the Clinton administration, someone like Donald Trump would never have gotten any traction and Republican leadership circles, even as the party itself made its pitch to white working-class individuals and families whose economic prospects declined in the face of burgeoning world trade that flooded the United States with cheap imports, while simultaneously off-shoring of American jobs to China, India, and a host of other Third World countries overseas. During most of those years we had Republican presidents.
It took a generation and perhaps longer for people to realize the long-term damage that Republican economic doctrine caused our country. Republicans have traditionally supported business interests over those of labor; but in the past 40 to 50 years they basically sold out to multinational corporations. Not since the Eisenhower administration had sponsored the interstate highway system has a Republican administration, along with Republican senators and congressmen taken a leading role in rebuilding American infrastructure. It's all been about deregulation of business activities, pumping up the stock market, and, of course, massive tax cuts for business interests and wealthy individuals.
As a class, Republicans do not take their obligations as citizens seriously, and certainly not since the end of World War II. All you need to do is look at their rhetoric, and their record of accomplishment, or in this instance, a lack of meaningful accomplishment. Rather than serve our country in the armed services, Republican families are not sending their young and women into the armed services to serve, as they did through two world wars, and the peripheral wars that the United States has engaged in since the end of the Second World War.
It is a known fact that the uniformed armed services are having great difficulty in recruiting young men and women to serve our country. There is no cadre of young men and women who have graduated from the most selective colleges and universities, and whose families represent the accumulated wealth and accomplishment of the business classes to serve in military capacities. Those that do serve tend to be from small towns and rural areas whose economic prospects have been in decline for several generations. These people are voting Republican on cultural issues, even as their economic interests are diametrically opposed to those of the current Republican Party. Consequently, the stringent qualifications for recruitment that prevailed from the end of the Selective Service System, with its compulsory years of service (circa 1973), have been progressively lowered to the point where military services are feeling compelled to accept recruit enlistees whose qualifications are significantly lower than that which was allowed as recently as a few years ago.
Those of us who study these things know about former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's so-called 'Project 100,000', during the Vietnam War, which basically allowed the recruitment of enlistees whose AFQT (Armed Forces Qualification Tests) scores fell within what was then called Category 4, the fourth quintile from the top of the recruitment order. For example, Category 3, represented the 20 percent of all applicants tested whose rank order for the middle band of a normal bell curve distribution, between 40 and 60 percent of those tested, in rank order. Secretary McNamara's initiative allowed recruitment of enlistees in the bottom 20 to 40 percent, which included men who would not completed high school; men with chronic behavioral problems; and men with cognitive deficiencies that made them unsuitable for any but the most menial jobs and military occupational specialty classifications. A significant number of these so-called 'Cat 4' individuals were prone to chronic disciplinary actions, and separation from the service for chronic absences without leave, mental or emotional problems, unsuitability for service, and unfitness for duty. These are the consequences of the politics that focuses on economic growth and personal wealth aggrandizement to the exclusion of inculcating patriotism, and the duties of good citizenship. Having experience those failures of leadership back during the Vietnam War, we are now on track to repeat them because Republican officeholders and those who vote for them now think of themselves as a special tribe that no longer includes the remaining 65 percent of the American people who disagree with them. Over this past weekend, I watched a YouTube video of Malcolm Nance, retired Navy intelligence analyst, giving a recent talk before the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, in which Nance talked about the growing radicalization of Trump supporters, and increasingly, their reviled willingness to kill other Americans. On this basis alone, today's Republican Party is guilty on all counts.
Here in Michigan, the right for women to have the right to bodily autonomy will be on the ballot in November thanks to a concerted effort to get signatures on petitions to put this on the ballot. In a red state, this effort garnered almost twice as many signatures as was needed. This gives me hope.
I’m proud of living in Michigan so I can vote for this amendment. We worked hard getting twice the number of signatures needed.
Great news, Cathy!
Good job! Keep going. I have this sneaking suspicion that the anti-choicers are going to do something sneaky, like put out literature close to election day that claims that yes means no and no means yes. Be ready!
My first thought on hearing the good news from Kansas was that every state should hold a referendum about abortion. But then I realized that the GOP will do absolutely everything in its considerable power to prevent that from happening.
I am not optimistic that pro-choice sentiment will be stronger than the racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and fundamentalist Christian nationalism that motivate t-Rump-worshiping voters.
Not just abortion, but gun restrictions and equitable voting rights, among others, fall into the category of being supported by the majority of our population. And yet, these too, fall into the GOP prevention bucket.
The only thing that surprised me about Kansas was that the size of the No vote disappointed me. Nationwide polls have shown that ALL sectors—religion, pol party, ethnicity, you name it—consistently support abortion at a proportion higher than 59 per cent. In the privacy of a voting booth, why would people vote against their preference?
Looking ahead, to my mind, no one reports more acutely why disasters keep happening than Jane Mayer, the New Yorker staffer who's an authority on dark money, esp Koch and Mercer doings. She's turned her attention to gerrymandering, which she blames for what's gone so horribly wrong with state legislatures.
Gerrymandering enables election wall-to-wall of extremists so they can then enact whatever loony legislation ALEC hands them. It's as terrifying as a paranoid fantasy, except it's no fantasy, it's today's headlines. The "modern" SCotUS has already spoken: Gerrymandering for racist purposes is a no-no, for political gain it's the American way.
Mayer gets interviewed a lot for broadcast and podcast on her current reporting. Uppermost now is Ohio. She tweets updates of what she's up to. (FB habitués seem to assume that to read tweets you need a twitter account. You do not. Using the URL opens the feed as if it were a stand-alone website.) https://www.twitter.com/JaneMayerNYer/
Keep in mind that Kansas is a big red state. Considering that, 59% is a solid and significant number IMO.
Quite so, Doug. To men, abortion fits neatly into a category with gun restrictions, voting rights, and all the social issues. To women, what SCotUS did was political rape. Pregnancy and childbirth are life-changing—political affiliation irrelevant. Giving up a baby at birth is something only someone as shallow as Amy Coney Barrett or Sammy Alito could treat lightly. For a woman, birth is the beginning of an 18-year life-absorbing commitment that men can and often do walk away from—political affiliation irrelevant. Men may genuinely empathize, but I wonder if most—political affiliation irrelevant—even *can* get how personal the issue of abortion is to women.
As good a summation of the importance of abortion as an issue for women as I've read.
Thanks, Lucian. That's where I see the division on this issue: most women and empathetic men on one side—party and state lines be damned—the rest in SCotUS or clerical robes or too-long red ties, outnumbered.
Here are a couple other takeaways. First, even with the obvious attempts to mislead the electorate ad stack the deck to hold this election at a time when many independents and Democrats historically have not gone to the polls, the result was a smashing rebuke of the right's attempt to force a fundamentally religious backed law down the throats of the general public. Maybe, just maybe those Christian fundamentalist with all that evangelical fervor do not represent the will of ALL the people/
Second, if this measure went down 60/40 in Kansas, a relatively conservative state what does that say the nation wide margin might be? Surely, higher say in the range of 2:1. And, if that is the case it is the kind of issue capable of generating mass turnout and tipping the ordinary balance of voting in an off year election. Maybe the Democrats can hold the House and pick up a couple of Senate seats if the have the common sense to make this a major issue in EVERY House and Senate race?
Third, this issue has resonance with women and young voters two blocs which historically do not vote with regularity in either two or four year cycles . Here again, the Ds would be well advised to spend a few bucks targeting these voting blocs for November.
Inflation and high gas prices are going to be a reality this cycle. Best the Ds find some other issues to offset the old wisdom that voters vote only their own economic interests.
Likely rate of inflation and gas prices will be heading down, too, that helps. We really need to move to cleaner renewable energy "with all deliberate speed," as soon as possible, electric vehicles, the works.
I guarantee every Democrat and Republican noticed.
Thank you for articulating what I feel in my heart is true. That ALL humans have the RIGHT to "...life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." People all over the world. "Included in that limited category is the right of personal autonomy, which includes the ability to control one's own body, to assert bodily integrity, and to exercise self-determination. This right allows a woman to make her own decisions regarding her body, health, family formation, and family life—decisions that can include whether to continue a pregnancy." Women breathe life into the world through their bodies and very often take on the lifelong responsibility of that life that they birthed into the world. With every choice we make, other choices are taken off the table.
Whether here in Minneapolis or the Windy City, I shudder to think what this planet would be like if only energized with male energy, much as I enjoy all sorts of "male pursuits." Women's rights are universal human rights, not suggestions, as Lucian so astutely reminds us.
Yes, I agree. I would not want to live in a world without masculine or feminine energy. We need both. The diverse backgrounds of the many people I have known in my life are what makes life wonderful. All the different cultures add to the depth of my experience. That is one of the saddest parts about the right wing "thinking". I pity them for wanting a world dominated by people who only think and look like they do. How boring!
Equally amazing is that the extreme right is characterized by such incredible fragility, but packaged in a series of masks of assertion and bizarrely over-the-top "macho" attitudinizing, wild paranoid claims. Trump has developed it into his own quasi-Hitlerian variant, carefully wrapped in the American flag. But that fragility, that fear of "The Other," is always lurking. And naturally enough it transmogrified into hatred and fear of women, women's rights, women's freedoms, as Trump repeatedly signalled early on.
I worked for several years with a woman originally from Hungary, now an American citizen, with an advanced degree from the U of Minnesota, a sharp observer of current events, and we discussed Trump's chances of winning one afternoon when we had some time off, in April 2016, and I hadn't yet really paid sufficient attention to either Trump or how ineptly (over-confidently, yes, but ineptly) Clinton's campaign was proceeding. I was also donating regularly to Sanders so I was both more focused on his chances and biased from that perspective, thinking that the mass electorate was ready for progressive political change, not a "Great Leap Backwards." So I dismissed the idea Trump would actually win,.I naively thought Republicans in sufficient numbers in key states would be lukewarm. Zsuzsi thought originally that based on Trump's total lack of any political experience , and his various offensive remarks about all sorts of people, he would lose. How could we vote this guy into the presidency. Yes indeed, impeached twice, seditious insurrection, over 30,000 lies or serious distortions of fact as tallied by the Washington Post, and he is still a force in the no longer grand G.O.P. C'est incroyable! You could not make this stuff up, stuff Trump brought about, or the stuff of his whacko statements, stuff we undoubtedly are both familiar with and I haven't even explicitly mentioned. It would take really deranged people to invent it as a dystopian cartoon, complete with extorting a foreign leader, threatening to withhold important military aid unless he investigated your political rivals, etc.
In any event, Trump channels that fear you mention, that desire to elminate everyone from power who doesn't think and look like they do. He started up that engine when he announced his candidacy, demonizing Mexican immigrants, and never stopped to this day.
Thank you for this excellent commentary! I, too, was in disbelief on November 9, 2016. Disbelief and dread. I thought that we would lose our country for sure. I think his Achilles heal is that he demands total allegiance then turns around and stabs those people in the back. People eventually get tired of being treated that way and look for a way out. We are long overdue in abolishing the ghost of Roy Cohn.
Excellent, as usual!
With revanchist red state legislatures passing horribly misogynistic laws, Indiana has started the ball rolling, the anger among women especially, but certainly not limited to them, should reach the boiling point by November. At least that’s what I’m hoping after what happened in Kansas. Some of the dunderheaded Rethugs on the margins may be backing away realizing they’ve screwed the pooch, but the hardcore cult won’t. Any moderation by the Rethugs is strictly temporary in any case. Only. Major drubbing at the polls keeping the Democrats in control of Congress, and with luck more state legislatures, will make a difference. So VOTE. Drag everyone you know to the polls or get them absentee ballots. We have to win this one. And the next one, and the one after that.
My worry is all the newly installed MAGA Secretaries of State who are now running state elections.
Well said. Now we need to ensure that these radicals posing as Republicans are voted out of office.
I hate to break it to you but as an ex Republican these radicals ARE the new Republican Party. The justification so many are supporting Trump just to hold power sailed a long time ago with me. When you have sitting members of the House and Senate like Jordan, Gohmert, Gaetz, Green, Cruz, Johnson, Lee, et all you must recognize the reality. A way too large contingent of once "principled" Republicans now fully support the principles of fascism. Right out in the open as January 6 and its aftermath prove beyond any reasonable doubt. The Rusty Bowrers , Liz Cheneys and Adam Kinziners are dinosaurs in their party. About to all go extinct.
It's been a generation since the Republican Party made any attempt to argue their case, either in Congress, or to the American people at large. Republican officeholders and their paid consultants, are like a well-equipped, highly motivated mercenary army. Their loyalties are up for grabs to the highest bidder. Over time, the Republicans have come to represent fewer and fewer people, and their legislative initiatives clearly reflect that narrowing of focus on serving the interests of the wealthiest people in this country.
Before the end of the Cold War in 1991, Republicans could be counted on to support national defense measures against Russian initiatives. All that has gone away, and now Vladimir Putin is the Republican Party's avatar for the kind of government that today's Republican Party aspires to emulate. Back before the reign of Newt Gingrich during the Clinton administration, someone like Donald Trump would never have gotten any traction and Republican leadership circles, even as the party itself made its pitch to white working-class individuals and families whose economic prospects declined in the face of burgeoning world trade that flooded the United States with cheap imports, while simultaneously off-shoring of American jobs to China, India, and a host of other Third World countries overseas. During most of those years we had Republican presidents.
It took a generation and perhaps longer for people to realize the long-term damage that Republican economic doctrine caused our country. Republicans have traditionally supported business interests over those of labor; but in the past 40 to 50 years they basically sold out to multinational corporations. Not since the Eisenhower administration had sponsored the interstate highway system has a Republican administration, along with Republican senators and congressmen taken a leading role in rebuilding American infrastructure. It's all been about deregulation of business activities, pumping up the stock market, and, of course, massive tax cuts for business interests and wealthy individuals.
As a class, Republicans do not take their obligations as citizens seriously, and certainly not since the end of World War II. All you need to do is look at their rhetoric, and their record of accomplishment, or in this instance, a lack of meaningful accomplishment. Rather than serve our country in the armed services, Republican families are not sending their young and women into the armed services to serve, as they did through two world wars, and the peripheral wars that the United States has engaged in since the end of the Second World War.
It is a known fact that the uniformed armed services are having great difficulty in recruiting young men and women to serve our country. There is no cadre of young men and women who have graduated from the most selective colleges and universities, and whose families represent the accumulated wealth and accomplishment of the business classes to serve in military capacities. Those that do serve tend to be from small towns and rural areas whose economic prospects have been in decline for several generations. These people are voting Republican on cultural issues, even as their economic interests are diametrically opposed to those of the current Republican Party. Consequently, the stringent qualifications for recruitment that prevailed from the end of the Selective Service System, with its compulsory years of service (circa 1973), have been progressively lowered to the point where military services are feeling compelled to accept recruit enlistees whose qualifications are significantly lower than that which was allowed as recently as a few years ago.
Those of us who study these things know about former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's so-called 'Project 100,000', during the Vietnam War, which basically allowed the recruitment of enlistees whose AFQT (Armed Forces Qualification Tests) scores fell within what was then called Category 4, the fourth quintile from the top of the recruitment order. For example, Category 3, represented the 20 percent of all applicants tested whose rank order for the middle band of a normal bell curve distribution, between 40 and 60 percent of those tested, in rank order. Secretary McNamara's initiative allowed recruitment of enlistees in the bottom 20 to 40 percent, which included men who would not completed high school; men with chronic behavioral problems; and men with cognitive deficiencies that made them unsuitable for any but the most menial jobs and military occupational specialty classifications. A significant number of these so-called 'Cat 4' individuals were prone to chronic disciplinary actions, and separation from the service for chronic absences without leave, mental or emotional problems, unsuitability for service, and unfitness for duty. These are the consequences of the politics that focuses on economic growth and personal wealth aggrandizement to the exclusion of inculcating patriotism, and the duties of good citizenship. Having experience those failures of leadership back during the Vietnam War, we are now on track to repeat them because Republican officeholders and those who vote for them now think of themselves as a special tribe that no longer includes the remaining 65 percent of the American people who disagree with them. Over this past weekend, I watched a YouTube video of Malcolm Nance, retired Navy intelligence analyst, giving a recent talk before the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, in which Nance talked about the growing radicalization of Trump supporters, and increasingly, their reviled willingness to kill other Americans. On this basis alone, today's Republican Party is guilty on all counts.
If I were a betting person, I would bet Hillary (from Kansas) had something to do with the voters being informed correctly.