You Will Anyway: Getting ready

Saturday, November 9, 2024

Getting ready

The text:

UPDATE 11/10/2024:

UPDATE 11/12/2024:

A number of blue state governors have stated clearly their intention to protect their residents from Trump depredations.

In doing so, they’ve also underlined that state Democratic strength has grown since 2016 — which is one of the few concrete ways we are better prepared for Trump now than then.

One of the most vocal blue state governors to promise anti-MAGA measures has been JB Pritzker of Illinois. In a combative news conference last Thursday, Pritzker warned Trump and MAGA, “To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom and opportunity and dignity of Illinoisans: I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior.”

“You come for my people, you come through me,” he concluded.

[...]

Illinois has taken a range of measures to shore up protections for vulnerable groups since Pritzker won the governor’s race in 2018. The state passed a law in 2023 shielding abortion recipients from civil or criminal discovery and from extradition to other states. The same law ensured that insurance in Illinois would cover abortion medication and gender-affirming care, and also strengthened protections for IVF.

Pritzker also signed legislation making it easier for trans people to change the gender on their birth certificates without medical certification. And the state passed laws to provide for foster provisions and guardianship for children of immigrants arrested or deported by ICE.

Now the Illinois governor is working on plans to try to limit the damage from Trump going forward. He and staffers have been studying Trump’s Project 2025 plan for the next four years. In the 2025 legislative session, Pritzker plans to pass additional legislation to protect the identity of abortion refugees and to try to safeguard access to the abortion pill mifepristone. He’s also looking into ways to shore up environmental regulations.

Perhaps most pressingly, Pritzker says he has been in touch with other Democratic governors to discuss Project 2025 plans to withhold police grants from blue states that refuse to participate in mass deportation. Prizker said that such actions would be “illegal” and promised to oppose them in court.
Public Notice

Up until the Supreme Court, I have faith. When it gets there, though, I have none.

Pritzker’s actions are being mirrored in other blue states. Gavin Newsom in California has called a special legislative session to provide more funds for the state attorney general’s office to challenge Trump measures on abortion, the environment, gun control, union dues, and more. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York AG Letitia James said they would increase coordination between their offices to “protect New Yorkers’ fundamental freedoms from any potential threats.” Washington state AG Bob Ferguson tweeted that the state had been “working for months to prepare for another Trump term,” going through Project 2025 “line by line” to address “unconstitutional assaults on your reproductive rights, access to health care, and civil rights.”

[...]

Democrats have also slowly gained ground in North Carolina and Wisconsin. The 2024 election broke the legislative supermajorities in both states, meaning the Democratic governors there can block rabid MAGA legislation.

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"It takes only a bit of knowledge of history to realize how dangerous it is to think that the people who run the country know what they are doing." -- Howard Zinn

"It’s not about not having something to hide; it’s about having something to lose. What we lose when we’re under observation is our humanity...Rights are inherent to our nature, they’re not granted by governments, they’re guaranteed by governments. They’re protected by governments." -- Edward Snowden

"Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause.” -- Howard Zinn

"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

"We should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace [Stasi style] mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.” ~ Edward Snowden

"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

"News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising." ~ LACUNA

"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

"There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack." ~ Molly Ivins

"The brain of our species is, as we know, made up largely of potassium, phosphorus, propaganda, and politics, with the result that how not to understand what should be clearer is becoming easier and easier for all of us." ~ James Thurber

"The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plane....When you hold up your arm and swear to uphold the Constitution, you don’t say, 'Except in wartime.'" -- George McGovern

"I’ll believe that corporations are people when Texas executes one." ~ Bill Moyers

"When did hope become a political dynamic? Hope is right below wishful thinking and right above performing a rain dance on the scale of activity." ~ Rich Hall

Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.