DL Open Thread: Sunday, September 4, 2022

News Of Lydia York’s Demise Is Greatly Exaggerated.  She had a great day of campaigning at the Arden Fair.  Three hours spent equally between the parking lot where the visitors get the buses and at the Fair proper campaigning with the indefatigable Colleen Davis.  No sign of her convict opponent.  It’s precisely where Lydia should have been, and she nailed it.  This is for the defeatists looking to find reasons should she lose.  Spend a couple of hours on a phone bank instead.  It will change your perspective.

No Wonder Mitcher Lonely Is PO’d At Rick Scott:

It was early 2021, and Senator Rick Scott wanted to go big. The new chairman of the Senate Republican campaign arm had a mind to modernize the place. One of his first decisions was to overhaul how the group raised money online.

Mr. Scott installed a new digital team, spearheaded by Trump veterans, and greenlit an enormous wave of spending on digital ads, not to promote candidates but to discover more small contributors. Soon, the committee was smashing fund-raising records. By the summer of 2021, Mr. Scott was boasting about “historic investments in digital fund-raising that are already paying dividends.”

A year later, some of that braggadocio has vanished — along with most of the money.

By the end of July, the committee had collected a record $181.5 million — but had already spent more than 95 percent of what it had brought in. The Republican group entered August with just $23.2 million on hand, less than half of what the Senate Democratic committee had ahead of the final intense phase of the midterm elections.

Now top Republicans are beginning to ask: Where did all the money go?

The answer, chiefly, is that Mr. Scott’s enormous gamble on finding new online donors has been a costly financial flop in 2022, according to a New York Times analysis of federal records and interviews with people briefed on the committee’s finances. Today, the N.R.S.C. is raising less than before Mr. Scott’s digital splurge.

Read the entire article, and savor it–slowly.

Cali Is My Kind Of America:

California Supreme Court Justice Patricia Guerrero won confirmation Friday to serve as the court’s next chief justice, following a hearing in which fellow justices and other legal colleagues praised her as uniquely qualified to lead the state’s judicial branch.

The confirmation means Guerrero will appear on the November ballot statewide and, if approved by voters, will take over in January as the court’s first Latina chief justice.

“I’m honored to be living in a state where a little girl who grew up in the Imperial Valley and raised by immigrant parents from Mexico could grow up, follow her dreams and become the first Latina associate justice on the California Supreme Court,” she said in brief comments after her confirmation. “There has never been a Latino or a Latina to serve as chief justice until now. I am proud to be the first, and I look forward to the second, third and the fourth.”

The US Department of Veterans Affairs will begin offering abortion services for the first time, opening up new options for veterans and other VA beneficiaries whose pregnancies resulted from rape or incest or otherwise pose a threat to their health. Under a new Biden administration interim rule that takes effect immediately, pregnant veterans and their eligible family members will be able to receive abortion counseling at VA hospitals. Those that qualify will be able to get an abortion, regardless of state laws.

The VA is preparing to provide abortions services in “as many locations as possible,” the department announced Friday. VA doctors will have case-by-case discretion to decide, along with their patients, when a pregnancy puts a patient’s health at risk. Those who seek abortions under the rape or incest provisions won’t be required to provide a police report; self-reporting will be considered sufficient evidence.

VA secretary Denis McDonough called the policy shift a “a patient safety decision.” Fifteen states currently ban abortion in all or almost all cases, and some states—like Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma—don’t allow exceptions for survivors of rape or incest. People who want or need to end their pregnancies in those states currently must travel elsewhere or seek out abortion medications online, a legally gray area.