It’s not in the least uncommon to hear political references to the State of Kansas being prefaced with the phrase ruby-red, meaning solidly Republican. This, despite the fact that it has a Democratic governor, a position that is up for reelection this fall, Governor Laura Kelly (D). She succeeded, in the elected sequence, former Senator, Governor, and Ambassador, in that order, Sam Brownback (R).

Remember him? Brownback, and his allies in the State Legislature – a pack of extremists – cut taxes while leaving spending in place, confident in the magic of the Laffer Curve, the idea that cutting taxes will lead to economic prosperity sufficient to cover the governmental budgetary hole left by cutting taxes. Five years later, with an unexpected, gaping, pus-filled hole in the State budget, and a Federal court hounding the State to properly fund education, most of Brownback’s allies went down to unexpected defeat, either in the primaries to moderate Republicans, or to Democrats in the general election. Once in power, the victors modified, mostly by rolling back, the tax policies to cover the gap, overriding Brownback’s veto in order to do so.

And Brownback? He resigned to accept the position of U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. He went down screaming defiance (or “patience!” as he might have put it), but, truth be told, it was disgrace. That’s what we call it when a person’s policy fails so disastrously that the tenets upon which it rests burn down with it. His Lt. Gov., Jeff Colyer, took over – I didn’t mention him before as he came to this position through inheritance, not election – and when he ran for a full term, he lost in the primary to well-known extremist and former State AG Kris Kobach (R).

So. Back to Governor Laura Kelly. How did she win the seat? Remember Kobach? It’s widely accepted that Kobach, as an extremist, repelled so many independent and moderate Kansas Republicans that Kelly snatched victory from the Republicans. And it’s true, she won only with a plurality, even if by five points.

There’s a pattern here, and I think it’s this: Kansans dislike extremists. And who is currently running for power in Kansas? On the Republican side, from what I can gather from random reading, a bunch of anti-abortion extremists. For Kansas voters, my impression is this would be fine if Roe vs. Wade were still in force, but with the Dobbs decision overturning Roe, the power dynamic in Kansas, as it is already proving in certain other States, may be changing. There is already evidence of a power dynamic change in the rejection of the Kansas Constitutional Amendment that would have rejected abortion protections of just this week.

Could we see a Kansas legislature of a vastly different nature after this November’s election? I’ll skip analysis, as I know little to nothing about local Kansas politics, but as a general rule, extremists are kicked out by voters once they appear to be imminently dangerous.

Does this give Governor Kelly (D) a lift in her re-election run?

And what about Senator Moran (R), also up for re-election. Until now I had him marked as a safe seat, but now I wonder. His On The Issues summation is on the right. It’s clear that he’s no moderate, and the OTI page quotes him:

Life from conception is sacred and must be defended.

The last Senate election in Kansas, of Roger Marshall (R), found Democrats to be short of the 50% mark by 8+ points. Can they make that up against a sitting incumbent with the aforementioned added boost?

I have no more facts than that, no polls, just that and the knowledge that the same primary that yielded the rejection of the Constitutional Amendment also yielded Mark Holland as the Democratic nominee. He claims to be or have been a pastor and mayor, but little detail is present on the source Ballotpedia page.

That first poll will speak to whether the rejection of the Constitutional Amendment was a one-time event, or if the Kansas electorate will continue to safeguard their right to abortion by showing Moran the door and giving the seat to the inexperienced, but pro-choice, Holland. I do not envy them their choice.

In the face of the conservatives’ failures in the Senate, principally the initial rejection of the Honor Out PACT Act, the transformation of the conservatives’ wine of the Dobbs decision into the fly-ridden sand of the overwhelming rejection of a proposed anti-abortion Kansas Constitutional Amendment, the legions of right-wing extremists who are fourth-rate politicians who think their failures at the ballot box are due to cheating rather than their manifestly inferior views on a variety of subjects, and – to put a premature stop to this litany of extremist failures, and this is my prediction only – not only the failure of a Republican wave to materialize at the ballot box this fall, but victory for many Democrats expected to fail, well, take a deep breah, Erick Erickson has to do something to keep the conservative faithful, errrrr, faithful, as it were.

Per usual, he’s determined to show that the liberal elites are just as guilty of perfidy and excess as the conservatives.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney says Donald Trump is the greatest threat to our republic. I respectfully disagree with a man whose whole family I adore.

I actually think bipartisan establishment lassitude toward China is a bigger threat to our republic than Trump. The whole reason we got Trump is that a large segment of the population can accurately perceive the American cultural/political elite decided our time is up and want to cash in while managing a decline in China’s favor. Our socio/economic and political elite have given up on America.

The American people believe we are in a recession, so we are in a recession. Our national cultural and political leaders believe our best days are over, so they are — it’s preventable and reversible, but not with a leadership that has quietly embraced the idea of China’s inevitability.

Does he mention the visit of House Speaker Rep Pelosi (D-CA) to Taiwan just this week? Incredibly, he does manage it – a few paragraphs beyond the quote, and carefully stripped of her undeniable membership in the liberal elite crew, because acknowledging that would invalidate his entire thesis. He doesn’t mention the fact that we finally left Afghanistan, as arranged by his President Trump and fulfilled by President Biden, in order to concentrate on China, nor Trump’s well-known affinity for China’s Xi, not to mention Russia’s Putin and North Korea’s Kim – autocrats all.

But as a spreader of fear of “the other,” which in this case is fellow Americans, it’ll certainly work on the unserious reader. By “demonstrating” the liberal elites’ supposed lack of nationalistic oooomph, he can excuse the conservative failures. He can even argue that extremists and incoherent odd-balls should receive conservatives’ votes, because, well, surely conservatives are better than them thar baby-killing liberals.

Ahem.

The rest of his little multi-topic post is equally ludicrous, in particular his attempted condemnation of the public health system. It seems he really wants to equate monkeypox with Covid. Does monkeypox even have a measurable death rate? Is the hospitalization rate of monkeypox comparable?

No. So his frantic condemnations are all ridiculous.

I don’t know if Erickson realizes just how much trouble his “movement” is in. Over the last few weeks he’s been incoherent with joy at the failures of the Democrats, at least what he perceived as their failures. Faced with the conservative failures above, plus those unmentioned, such as the January 6th Insurrection, he’s not been silent, but notably restrained.

But I read a post like this as a frenzied attempt to keep the conservatives from fragmenting, or even defecting into the moderate conservative camp. It’s hard to feel sympathetic. I see this as a symptom of the hard-line anti-abortion movement, much like the temperance movement, melting away as they begin to recognize that, fallacious or not, anti-abortion as a single issue vote is a disaster for the nation. It has been carefully cultivated for fifty years, its followers protected from the intellectual ripostes by hiding the faithful in the skirts of the Divine, but the biggest Divinity of all, Reality, is reaching up and whacking them in the head.

And the anti-abortion movement, along with a few other single-issue voter fabrications, are beginning to fall apart as the electorate really sees the end-result.

Abortion is one of those issues that are difficult, because it evokes strong emotions on both sides, as prospective mothers who find their situations difficult, socially or medically, demand a safe and respectable ‘out’, while those who think of abortion as ‘killing a baby’ are understandably upset. Intellectually it can be confusing as well, as a life is created and then is sustained at the heavy, even deadly, expense of the vitality of the pregnant woman. Evaluating such a situation a priori is a headache due to subjective factors involved, particularly those masquerading as being connected to Divine opinions.

So it’s best to remember that American law and morality, as much as the clerics and their followers may wish to dispute it, are a consensual matter, as befits a liberal democracy. We have an honest discussion, come to a conclusion in which everyone who wishes contributes, and make laws, or not, based on those conclusions.

So what happened in yesterday’s various primaries that might be of interest?

Kansas had a state Constitutional Amendment proposal on the ballot that would “… affirm there is no Kansas constitutional right to abortion or to require the government funding of abortion, and would reserve … the right to pass laws to regulate abortion.” If it didn’t pass? Then the Consitution, as currently formulated “… could restrict the people … from regulating abortion by leaving in place the recently recognized right to abortion.”

It was added to a primary ballot in which there was no pitched battles on the Democratic side, only the Republicans’ side, thus theoretically not likely to bring out many Democratic voters. Democratic voters in Kansas, I might add.

And then there appears to have been a conservative-led attempt to mislead voters:

The text claimed that approving that measure, which could allow the Republican-controlled legislature to outlaw abortion, would safeguard “choice.” If the amendment fails, constitutional protections would remain in place, buttressing current law that allows abortion in the first 22 weeks of pregnancy.

“Women in KS are losing their choice on reproductive rights,” the text warned. “Voting YES on the Amendment will give women a choice. Vote YES to protect women’s health.”

The unsigned messages were described as deceptive by numerous recipients, including former Democratic governor Kathleen Sebelius, who also served as health and human services secretary in the Obama administration. She told The Washington Post that she was “stunned to receive the message, which made clear there was a very specific effort to use carefully crafted language to confuse folks before they would go vote.” …

But the messages were crafted by a political action committee led by Tim Huelskamp, a former hard-line Republican congressman from Kansas, and enabled by a fast-growing, Republican-aligned technology firm, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the advertising blitz. The people and groups behind the campaign have not been previously reported. [WaPo]

For a lot of observers, this has a flavor of an Expected maneuver, at least on the left, while on the right, Erick Erickson doesn’t even mention it, at least not in his non-subscriber postings. Did any others?

And what was its fate?

Kansans rejected the Amendment.

Overwhelmingly. Last number I heard was by 18 points.

From polls and from nurses’ anecdotes, from votes on Constitutional amendments, it’s becoming clear that the conservatives have lost the argument at the bedrock of liberal democracies: the attempt to convince their fellow citizens.

But they persist in attempting to change the law and in getting out over their ski tips. And how about a little thumb on the scales? Oh, sure, that’s OK, too.

I think it’s time, it’s past time, that they acknowledge that, on abortion, most Americans disagree to some degree with them. The law should reflect the sober discussions, vs the unsettled irrational passions for which the Bill of Rights and Amendments exist to restrain, of the citizenry, not those passions that have been fanned by power seekers.

These politicians who compete on the metric of who can be most extreme should, for the sake of the Nation, read the hint that’s being thrust in their faces.

Will it capsize all boats?

The discredited trickle-down economic theory, that lowering taxes on the wealthy and corporations will result in a supercharged economy as they invest in the economy, had a slogan attached to it, that rising waters lift all boats, wealthy and poverty stricken alike.

I couldn’t help but think of it while reading Professor Richardson’s latest post to her Letters from an American blog:

Far from the policy struggles of the Republicans and Democrats back East, in the summer of 1890, a new movement began, quietly, to take shape. In western towns, workers and poor farmers and entrepreneurs shut out of opportunities by monopolies began to talk to each other. They discovered a shared dismay over a government that seemed to work only for the rich industrialists, and anger that they seemed to be working themselves to the bone only to have the fruits of their labor taken by the rich. “Wall Street owns the country,” western organizer Mary Elizabeth Lease told audiences. “It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.”

Westerners suffering in the new economy began to come together. Reviving older Farmers’ Alliances, they distributed literature across the country explaining how tariffs worked and how railroad monopolies jacked up prices. Existing newspapers began to echo their arguments, and where there weren’t local newspapers, Alliance members began to print them.

Resulting in…

While congressmen and eastern newspapers fought over every scrap of Washington political gossip, western farmers and workers and entrepreneurs had organized. New newspapers, letters, barbecues, lectures, and picnics had done their work, educating those on the peripheries of politics about the grand issues of the day. When the votes were counted after the November 1890 election, the Alliances had carried South Dakota and almost the whole state ticket in Kansas, and they held the balance of power in the Minnesota and Illinois legislatures. In Nebraska and Iowa, they had split the Republicans and given the governorship to a Democrat. They controlled 52 seats in the new Congress, enough to swing laws in their direction.

While Professor Richardson undoubtedly is hoping for a similar wave this year, lifting the Democrats over the Republicans, from my vantage point I’m wondering if both canoes are going to end up tipped over. Could a political movement, independent of either major Party and the old smaller parties, achieve success in the scant time left to it in 2022?

Neither Party seems to be worthy of confidence. The Republicans feature amateur hour elected officials who run around howling that the last election was stolen, and sometimes even engaging in politically and/or legally dubious behavior. I do not exclude the former President from this characterization, as he has served as an inspiration to half-baked idiots nation-wide, as well as inspiring an attempt to interfere with the lawful procedures of Congress. He, and his devotees, live on the mistaken political philosophy that the only criteria a politician need have is a devotion to Party leaders and specified ideological/theological positions; experience, character, and expertise as a rhetorician need not apply.

The Democrats continue to labor under the twin crosses of their botch of handling the transgenderism issue and a whiff of arrogance that alienates independents. Add in a perception that certain elected officials’ philosophy, when it comes to crime, has led to an increase in highly violent crime – true or not – and a few other issues, and this appears to stir up the independents’ fears, as shown in the Virginia elections last year.

BUT – The problem with a new party is that it may be populated with smart people, or with grifters and power-seekers, and it’s unlikely to be populated with folks with relevant experience to the challenges of governing. Would we want that sort of thing? While the Republicans continue to howl out criticisms of how President Biden has handled the Afghanistan pull-out and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I have come to view those criticisms as hollow, being divided between those outraged that we’ve given up on Afghanistan, and those who just don’t like Biden and the governmental philosophies he represents. I think Biden, in the face of unremitting opposition from Republicans and traps set, clumsily as they were, by the former President Trump (R), has done quite well on the foreign relations front, while on the domestic front he’s been hobbled and unable to implement a full recovery program, although what has been implemented has done relatively well. Those squealing about inflation fail to consider the impact of Russia’s actions on the world economy.

And I don’t honestly see a new political party self-organizing in time to field candidates by 2022. But by 2024?

That’s a distinct possibility.

So, we’ll see what the people have to say. I’m looking forward to it, if with a little trepidation.

New Hampshire Public Radio (nhpr) reports on someone who sent a postcard to every single address in New Hampshire. Here’s the content:

The postcard, which contains photos of celebrities ranging from Johnny Depp to Jim Gaffigan, includes false statements and claims the “world will end” on Good Friday. The mailer includes a QR code and email address.

A person claiming to have sent the postcard declined NHPR’s request for an interview, and wouldn’t disclose their name or state of residence. According to the postcard, the person who mailed says they are taking refuge in Kansas, though the return address was a P.O. Box in Portsmouth.

And here’s the desperate attempt to rationalize what appears to be a quite silly postcard:

When asked how much they spent on the mailer via email, the person responded, “A lot. An amount of money that crazy people don’t have.”

Well. Except crazy people who inherit money. Or made it while sane and then lost that sanity.

Or, like Howard Hughes, defied their mental illness to become rich and, well, successful. Although that example tries to draw me to walk down the road of trying to define success, when he spent his last days in a room full of pots of his urine. Is that really success? Or just the part when he founded and ran his own airline?

The point is, though, is that this is an example of trying to get blatant silliness past everyone’s common sense by making an easily falsifiable claim, i.e., that crazy people don’t have money, by stating it as, well, an obvious truism. Always examine obvious truisms; they’re often not neither.

Poor dude, or so I assume this is a dude. If we don’t implode or explode on Good Friday, will they have the intellectual honesty to mail another postcard apologizing for their silliness? Or will they be stubborn and continue to try to accumulate social capital by making sillier and sillier claims?

Foreign Policy reports on GOP hijinks in the US Senate:

In recent weeks, the Biden administration and key Republican lawmakers have forged a rare consensus on the need for a tougher response to Russia’s war in Ukraine, advocating for providing deadlier weapons, imposing ruinous sanctions, and promoting vigorous efforts to address the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.

Yet, at the same time, Republican lawmakers, including Sens. Rick Scott of Florida and Roger Marshall of Kansas, have placed holds on the confirmation of several key Biden administration appointees with critical roles in addressing Ukraine’s crisis, including top officials destined for the U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development as well as who are responsible for managing U.S. policy on sanctions, humanitarian relief, refugees, and nuclear and chemical security.

Let’s add in some Gallup data:

Americans are following the Ukraine situation closely, as might be imagined given its dominance of daily news coverage. A recent Wall Street Journal poll shows 89% of U.S. voters are following the situation there very or somewhat closely. Pew Research shows 69% of Americans have read or heard a lot about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with most of the rest saying they have read or heard at least a little.

The next time these Senators are up for re-election, their opponents, both intra- and inter-party, have a ready-made attack available. Here’s my interpretation:

Senator, you personally did your best to cripple the American response to the Russian attack on Ukraine, and by extension autocrats everywhere. For how long have you been anti-American?

The Gallup data indicates that most Americans will know precisely the context of the question: The innocent victim status of the Ukrainians, the brutality of the Russian attacks, the bravery of the Ukrainians, etc.

And, with a little careful messaging by the Democrats, the importance of stifling an autocratic regime – a regime to which Americans should be automatically allergic.

An ambitious messaging operation would attempt to use the incompetency of the Russians to connect incompetency with autocrats everywhere. It’d be a difficult pull, but not outside the realm of possibility.

And to what important issue are the Republicans so desperate as to interfere in defending against an attack on freedom?

Scott, who has placed the largest number of holds, has blocked [several nominees essential to the Ukraine situation] confirmation, demanding that the Biden administration first take action on an unrelated issue: the Cuban government’s practice of siphoning the salaries of Cuban doctors exported to other Latin American countries.

No doubt annoying to the doctors, but not of earthshaking importance. Indeed, it’s not a critical American priority.

But here’s the thing: the Gingrichian strategy of opposition to the Democrats at every point, from stealing SCOTUS seats to denying necessary tax increases to denigrating climate science conclusions with utter nonsense, has brought us to this idiotic point in our politics. Prior to Gingrich, these sorts of things would have been dealt with by quiet contacts between Senators and President, regardless of Party. A disappointed Senator might have made noise about it, but holding up essential personnel or other such extreme measures? It wouldn’t have crossed their minds, in most cases.

But the days of collegial governance are gone, abolished by the ego of Gingrich^[1] and his ideological inheritors, and opposition politicians can no longer hope to have a quiet talk with the Executive in hopes of getting something done. Instead, it’s all about profile and interference in a domain in which the Senate, frankly, has little official reach: foreign policy is an Executive function, with only advice and consent from the Senate.

The ego endangers a nation’s response. Can’t say it’s the first time, but it’s still a shame on the honor of these Senators.

¹ A politician most notable for his lack of accomplishment.