F-ing Banned Roundup

 Ron DeSantis' botched campaign rollout includes the following hats.

What happened to the letter "F"? I have to assume that some parent filled out a form calling it obscene, and now it's banned in the state of, er, "Lorida".

Anyway, my browser needs clearing, so today you get a roundup.

* * *

Texas Republicans set up a bespoke center at the University of Texas to promote a conservative ideological vision. Texas Republicans also look set to wreck tenure. Turns out the latter poses a recruitment problem for the former.

The Fourth Circuit upholds race-neutral admissions standards at Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia against a challenge that they discriminate against Asian-American applicants. Ilya Somin objects here; I may have my own comments later.

Now that he's running, JTA runs down all the Jewish things you need to know about Ron DeSantis. He loves Israel. Also, his campaign against wokeness has resulted in banning books on the Holocaust, and neo-Nazis are flocking to the state.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) admits she "struggles" with the idea of removing Israeli settlers from the West Bank, suggests they have the right to stay where they are. I've said it before and I'll say it again; one need not like or even fully credit Tlaib's putative commitment to "one state with equal rights for all" to admit that it's clearly better than the many, many politicians whose position is "one state that does not even pretend to provide equal rights for all."

Louisiana Republicans are completely uninterested in hearing from the child rape victims whom they want to force to give birth.

Texas forces a woman with an unviable pregnancy to stay in the hospital until she gives birth to her stillborn fetus (or becomes sick enough to potentially die) by threatening her with criminal prosecution if she tries to leave.

If we don't raise the debt ceiling, it seems we have to triage who gets paid. I've seen many proposals on how to do this. But Kevin Drum raises the possibility that our treasury system isn't built to allow for any "choosing", and so we'd be forced to basically just arbitrarily pay whoever comes to the door first.

The Most Important Voter is the Uninformed Voter

For the first time in awhile, my representative in Congress is a Republican -- Lori Chavez-Deremer.

One of the very few bright spots of that fact is that I can call my congressperson to complain about Republican shenanigans without it feeling moot or preaching to the choir. Telling Barbara Lee that I oppose this or that GOP abuse felt a little pointless. But Lori Chavez-Deremer is a Republican in a swing district -- I can help put a bit of well-earned fear of god into her.

Anyway, today I decided to ring up her office to talk about raising the debt ceiling. But before I did, I had a thought: would it be better to play a little dumb?

Maybe I'm overthinking this. But my logic was that if I came out loaded for bear with facts and talking points and analysis, it'd be pretty clear I'm a high-information voter with strong views on the subject. And if I were the representative's staff (and the person I spoke to, for what it's worth, was perfectly polite and seemed quite intelligent), I'd correctly deduce that I'm probably not talking to an actually-persuadable voter. Even in swing districts, Rep. Chavez-Deremer is no doubt aware that there are plenty of voters who didn't vote for her before and are never going to vote for her in the future, and so their existence and their votes for her 2024 opponent are already baked into the cake. That someone like that is unhappy with her isn't really germane information.

By contrast, if somebody who doesn't seem to know a lot about the issue calls with concerns, that suggests that there's a problem seeping into the soft mushy center of low-information independents. And those voters absolutely are persuadable, which means if they get it in their head that the Congresswoman is causing a problem, that absolutely can make difference in 2024. If I was Chavez-Deremer's staff, I'd be far more concerned if uninformed voters who sound like they just read a couple of Facebook memes started complaining about her conduct than if informed voters did.

So I decided to go with that. I spoke in general terms about things I had "heard", I fretted about how "reckless" it seemed to be to just decide not to pay our bills, I worried about the effect this chaos would have on my retirement accounts, I insisted that the issue seemed simple (just raise the debt ceiling! Why is she making this more complicated than it is?), and I finally said that if we do drive over this cliff I won't blame Biden for it, I'll blame Chavez-Deremer.

I don't know if I make the most convincing uninformed voter. But it was a kind of fun, getting to be ignorant and obstinate and just go down the "I am constituent and I'm mad and you need to fix this" road. Life's little pleasures.