Yes. Texas will outlaw abortions if Greg Abbott is elected.

Closing clinics on the basis of "women's health" is Orwellian, to be certain.  But it's only the beginning.  The next step after that for the pro-life faction is to prosecute women who have abortions on a charge of murder, and to exercise capital punishment upon conviction.  Don't act so shocked.

A writer for National Review, (Kevin D.) Williamson likes to be the guy who will brashly express the crudest (and sometimes cruelest) version of his own team's deepest ideological commitments. Want an up-is-down revisionist take on American history that portrays the Republican Party as a far greater champion of civil rights than the Democrats? Williamson's your man. Looking for someone to mock a transgendered person pictured on the cover of Time magazine? Williamson will do it with unapologetic relish.

But none of that compares to what we got from Williamson earlier this week, when he took to Twitter to declare that he thinks women who have had abortions deserve to be executed for their actions. And not just executed in any old way, or by lethal injection, which is the standard in the 32 states that permit the death penalty. No, Williamson thinks women who have had abortions — along with the doctors, nurses, and hospital staff involved in the procedure — deserve to face death by hanging.

Now, the hanging bit is an almost perfect example of intentionally provocative rhetoric. (That's my preferred euphemism for "trolling.") Note how it adds an extra frisson of outrageousness to the proposal of capital punishment, given the way hanging has historically been deployed — as a uniquely public form of execution, used by governments as well as extrajudicial gangs of private citizens to inspire acute fear and intimidation. (Williamson might have just gone ahead and advocated beheadings, though of course, as another National Review author has recently argued, only a "purely evil" political organization could favor anything like that.)

Don't. act. so. shocked.

(T)hose who oppose abortion rights claim that the procedure amounts to the infliction of lethal violence against an innocent human being. If they truly believe that, then of course they also believe it should be prosecuted and punished like any other act of homicide. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about the Williamson controversy may be that his remarks surprised anyone at all.

Did you ask your favorite Republican what they thought of Williamson's proposal?  Perhaps you should, especially if there are going be any more debates you observe among candidates, and especially if they give you the chance to offer a query.

Repealing abortion rights at the federal level would just be the first step. It would be followed by an effort to outlaw abortion on a state-by-state basis. Then those involved in the illegal procedure would have to be prosecuted and punished. At the outer fringes of the possible, anti-abortion activists hope to see a Personhood Amendment protecting fetal life added to the Constitution, or perhaps the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly expanded to include the unborn.

While Republican presidential candidates are regularly asked if they endorse their party's platform in favor of repealing Roe, they are only rarely confronted with a follow-up question about whether they also believe that women who procure abortions and the medical professionals who provide them should be prosecuted and punished for murder — perhaps even for capital murder.

Since one typically comes to favor outlawing abortion only because of a belief in its homicidal character, it's hard to see how an opponent of abortion rights could do anything other than affirm a desire to see the murderers and their accessories brought to justice. It seems the only alternative would be to look hopelessly soft on crime.

Republicans in Texas, with supermajorities in the Lege and an eager new governor in Greg Abbott, will be the first state in the nation to ban abortion, and they will dare anyone to turn them back.  They have all the votes they need: five, on the US Supreme Court.  And then they will go after the murderers, those dastardly criminal women who would break the law and kill their babies anyway.

This is not an exaggeration.

As a reminder, motivating your voting base by fear is something Republicans do exceptionally well and exponentially better than Democrats.  It's also a very pointed note to a small handful of Democrats who think voting for Greens is a bigger problem than Democrats who vote for Republicans (more than 300,000 of them who voted in Florida in 2000, for anyone who doesn't wish to click the link).  Or for that matter, Democratically-leaning semi-sorta-sometimes voters who mostly don't.

Thank goodness Battleground Texas is working so furiously on the latter.  The former is a more internal failure, and might be remedied with some soul-searching, or perhaps even a 2016 presidential candidate along the lines of Bernie Sanders.  That's a discussion for later... about one month from now.

Fear and loathing and Democrats and Greens

Bumping into this again.

This, of course, is bullshit.  The page that posted it also linked to a Mother Jones article written by Erika Eichelberger, who failed in her reporting as well.  In context, with my emphasis in italics in the excerpt.

If Keister's plan had succeeded, it could have helped Reed—the Northeast regional chairman of the NRCC—by putting on the ballot a progressive candidate who would likely draw votes away from his expected Democratic opponent, county legislator Martha Robertson. But Keister messed up: Because he filed the Robbins petition late and got the other Green Party member's address wrong, neither Green will appear on the ballot for the June primary or the November general election, according to New York election officials.

Let's establish once again that votes are earned, not "siphoned off".  To believe this logical fallacy, you would have to believe another one, that voting populations are zero sum.  So that's pretty much the end of that argument.  But in the comments at the Facebook page, you will see several folks invoking the very stubborn urban legend that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election.

It makes me sad when I see Democrats so afraid of Republicans and losing elections that they go home and kick the cat, so to speak.

So I offered some thoughts on that page, and they promptly deleted them and blocked me.  Then they came over to my blog's Facebook page -- where I had the same comments up -- and posted this.

Baby Boomers and Senior Citizens Against Republicans & The Tea Party Brains and Eggs - We removed you from our page, as it clearly states at the top of our page that we are a "DEMOCRAT ONLY" page, and that we ban trolls. You claim to be progressive? Good luck with that one. Your arguments are comparable to Republican trolls. The only one you are fooling is yourself.

As some of you may know, I was a delegate to the Texas Democratic Party convention, and I did vote in both their primary and their runoff, so by every legal definition of the word, I am a Democrat.  The problem for Democrats -- as you have probably already figured out -- is not just that I don't swallow the party line, it's that I also offer a lot of criticism to Democrats about how they conduct themselves, handle their campaigns, what they stand for, and so on.  This genuinely irritates some people.

As a reminder, I consider myself an independent progressive.  It's accurate to describe me as an activist in both parties.  I am more committed to progressive philosophy than I am partisan politics.  So their blocking me on their page has more to do with their hostility to having their thinking challenged than it does their little rules, or anything else for that matter.  I will acknowledge that the label I have applied to myself creates a lot of cognitive dissonance in partisans, and furthermore that I make no attempt to ameliorate their discomfort.

But for the sake of what happened in this particular disagreement, let's review what "the Democrats" wrote: two logical fallacies, one unprovable premise, one now two several ad hominems, including one calling me an 'ignorant teabagger'.  Hilarious.

That's just no way to get independents and progressives to vote for you, Dems.  And I'm pretty sure that you don't have any votes to lose in 2014, in Texas or almost anywhere else in the country.  And let's also be clear about the verb being used here: you're losing them.  They are not being taken away from you.

Update: Socratic Gadfly wades in with some additional inconvenient truths.