Umm...

One of the online news sources I get is called atAdvocacy, or @tAdvocacy, or @Advocacy.  It's a list of posts about various different things, and yes, of course it's rabidly left wing.  I pay no attention to anything right wing, but I really don't like things that are too extreme in the other direction, either.  When reports get sufficiently extreme, they're less reliable, but I do admit that left wing offerings make more sense to me and are better supported by actual facts.

Anyway, I got my atAdvocacy collection today.  One of the very short summaries was about Lucas Kunce running against Josh Hawley for Missouri Senator.  The actual and only purpose of the short post was to request campaign money for Kunce, but I don't believe in private money in politics, so that wasn't going to happen.  But there was also seemingly irrelevant mention, presumably to stimulate motivation to get Kunce elected, of Tommy Tuberville's (Ala) somehow single-handedly preventing confirmation of military brass, because he doesn't approve of abortion rights and "LGBTQ."

That, in itself, tells an important story.  I haven't seen any reports of surveys or polls as to how Americans feel about "LGBTQ," and I don't know if they tend to be welcoming, permissive, objecting, or couldn't care less because it's not their life, and it has nothing to do with them.  Frankly, I deeply hope it's the latter.  But many surveys and polls have shown that substantially most Americans favor abortion access.  (This past week, I read about a 13 year old girl from Alabama or Mississippi who had been raped by a stranger, got pregnant from the rape, couldn't find abortion access anywhere nearby, and would have had to spend $900 her family didn't have to travel to the upper midwest to get an abortion.  So she didn't get the abortion.  She got fucked, and it fucked up her life forever more.  Because people like Tommy Tuberville, who is an adult male and can't get pregnant, don't believe in abortion.  I wonder if Tuberville would feel differently if it had been his 13 year old daughter who had gotten raped and knocked up, like it was very different to Herschel Walker, when he was out knocking up women whose fetuses were not of interest to him.

And I've said before that there's an argument to be made for the anti-abortion sentiment: people opposed to abortion are "pro-life."  That position has legitimacy to it, except for two things.  One is why they're "pro-life."  If it's a reflection of personal religious devotion, they are working to violate the US Constitution's guarantee of separation of church and state.  The other is that the people who claim to be "pro-life" are rarely opposed to capital punishment (the one and only goal of which is to kill someone, with no benefit to anyone else), and they're rarely or never opposed to guns in society, the commonest results of which are 1) nothing, 2) someone who hasn't done anything wrong gets killed, and 3) someone who has done something wrong gets killed (and this is very rare).

Related is this story from atAdvocacy: As Abortion Rights Win Votes Across US, Nebraska Becomes Latest State to Launch Referendum (commondreams.org)  Again, the fact is that most Americans want abortion access.  If you care about Americans, then you care what they want.  If you don't care about Americans, then you like the SCOTUS' Dobbs decision, and it feels like a big "oops" when you start losing elections.

And then, there's this: Georgia Conservatives’ Warning To Republicans: Nominate Trump, And We Will Lose | HuffPost Latest News  Now, this is slightly misleading.  The message, or argument, is that supporting Donnie Trump will lead Republicans to lose the presidential election.  And there's a ton, or ten tons, wrong with Donnie Trump.  But he's also way ahead of the Republican pack.  So this is what Republicans want.  The fact, as illustrated by the other stories, and the outcome of Dobbs, is that a substantial majority of Americans don't want what Republicans want.  Americans want abortion access, and gun control.  Republicans don't.  Would it matter, and help Republicans, if they nominated Ronnie DeSantis, or Chris Christie, or Nikki Haley, or someone else?  Then, they'd have lost most Republicans, who want Donnie, and all the Democrats and Independents who don't want any of this.  Republicans have painted themselves into an unmanageable corner.

I'm not a big fan, or maybe not a fan at all, of Joe Biden.  I wish he understood that it's not a great idea to run for president when you're 81, and I wish that some creditable Democrat would run against him in the primaries (the DNC would no doubt undermine that).  But I'm going to hold my nose, and vote for him.  I'm not given a reasonable option.