Don’t forget that the Hamas leaders are living in luxury as billionaires in Qatar. If the Israeli response kills a few thousand Palestinians, then Hamas’ leaders will shrug their shoulders and say “sounds like good PR” while lounging in a hot tub.
Did you read what I wrote? It’s not that they decided they weren’t going to do anything. It’s that the rules of the government limit what they can do with a small majority. They can’t just unilaterally decide that they are passing a new constitutional amendment with a few vote majority in the House/Senate. They could try for a bill, but there they are limited by various other rules not to mention the conservative Supreme Court. If the Democrats had a big enough majority, they could get more bills passed.
And that being said, what’s the alternative? Allow the Republicans to get into power and hope that they don’t take away women’s rights too much? Many Republicans have already declared that they want a national abortion ban. Others have said that they want to criminalize miscarriage and ban contraception.
Voting third party (thanks to our First Past The Post system) won’t work. Sitting out the elections and not voting won’t work. The best thing to do is get as many Democrats in office as possible from local positions to the highest offices. Then, put pressure on the higher up Democrats to get a women’s rights bill passed.
At this point, and with our current political system, not supporting the Democratic candidate is essentially supporting the Republican one.
The Democrats could have passed a bill, but “enshrining it in the Constitution” would mean passing a Constitutional amendment. First, they would need a 2/3rds vote of Congress. That means that the Democrats couldn’t have a slim majority - they’d need a large majority. Or they’d need to find Republicans willing to vote for a Constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights. Basically an impossibility.
Even if the Democrats managed to get the Constitutional Right To Abortion passed, they would need to have 75% of the state legislatures pass it. Democrats don’t control that name state legislatures.
So perhaps the Democrats could have passed a national law, right? Except that the Republicans would inevitably filibuster this in the Senate. The Democrats could have changed the filibuster rules, but not all of them supported changing these rules. (Mainly because it would prevent them from stopping the Republicans if the Republicans regained the Senate.) Any law that was passed would inevitably have been challenged up to the conservative Supreme Court.
You could definitely criticize the Democrats for not pushing harder to pass a law guaranteeing abortion, but a Constitutional Amendment was out of reach.
And also because the Republicans can project their views on those groups.
“If the ‘unborn baby’ or dead soldier could talk, they’d say that we should absolutely overturn this election result and name Trump President again. After all, he will protect the unborn (unless they happen to reside in his mistress) and what did those soldiers die for if not President For Life Trump?!!!”
That and the “Alpha Male” garbage. Even the author of the study on wolves has said repeatedly that his study was totally wrong. And yet some people continue to reference it and apply it to humans when even the original study wasn’t about people.
My father isn’t quite “Red Caesar,” but he recently told me that his dream ticket is Trump and RFK Jr. 🤦♂️
The sad part is that, when I carefully avoid buzzwords, he’ll actually agree with me on things. Say Medicare For All and he’ll rant about how that’s socialism. However, when he praises Medicare, he’ll sometimes wonder why more people can’t sign up for it. (Like, maybe allow All to get Medicare?)
If you say Defund the Police (a slogan I think is stupid), he’ll rant about lawlessness and crime. But talk about the specific issues and he’ll agree that the police unions have too much power, police officers who abuse their positions should be fired - not rehired one precinct over - and that police should have more training so that they don’t act like the first thing to do is whip out their gun and open fire.
It’s like he comes close to understanding why Progressiveism is good, but then immediately slides back into MAGA-land.
Part of it is projection. Part is them assuming that if they want to do X, then the other side must be doing it even more. (Which they also use to excuse doing X.)
Some of the MAGA folks are already saying that we should bomb/invade Mexico to stop the drug cartels and immigrants. Of course, they hand-wave how horrible a war would be. They assume that Mexico would thank the US for such a great bombing and ask for more. Because MAGA.
And even there, he could hold onto the speakership by working with Democrats. If he throws the Democrats a few bones in exchange for them voting to keep McCarthy in any speakership vote, then the power of the Freedom Caucus would be blunted.
But silly me, the obvious path forward is really to keep doing the same thing and hope that the Freedom Caucus will become reasonable. Surely, that will work perfectly, right?
I worked for a pretty popular magazine back in the late 90’s. One day near the beginning/middle of 2000, we were all called down to the bullpen for a last minute meeting by management and marketing. (That’s never a good sign.)
We were told that we have a great product with amazing writing, but marketing doesn’t know how to sell it so they’re closing us down. Instead, we went online only. I was the web developer so I survived the firings.
So then we figured that we were set because our website produced more content and had more traffic than any of the company’s other websites. However, in March of 2001, we had another emergency meeting. Again, we were told our content was great, but the company was going in another direction. Instead of producing our own content, the company was going to just repost other sites’ content. I and everyone else in my team were let go.
Needless to say, the whole “we’ll just repost what other people posted” plan didn’t go so well. Last time I checked, the company wasn’t doing very well at all.
Weren’t some hostages also drugged so they’d be “happy and smiling” for the cameras when released? I heard that, but don’t know the authenticity.
Edit: I found many news sources that said they were. I know some folks don’t trust anything Israel says so take reports like this with a grain of salt. Still, it’s been confirmed that many of the hostages were drugged while in captivity. Especially the kids - to keep them quiet. (Anyone with little kids knows they can be loud while scared and this must have been extremely scary. As a father, the reaction of “drug the little kids” makes me angry.)