Mostly Monday Reads: Shake off the stress, Fight for the Country
Posted: June 3, 2024 Filed under: U.S. Politics, Women's Rights | Tags: @repeat1968, Ayatollah Mike Johnson, Chief Inquisitor Alito, Felonious Trump, fetus fetishists, John Buss, Shake it Off, Uncle Tim Scott, White Christian Nationalism 5 Comments
“Felonious trump is angry, the deep state wouldn’t let him use his golf cart..” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
For the first time since moving here, I’ve got a bout of agita that’s gone to my stomach. I’m thankful for my meditation training from doctors, sangha, and teachers. It really helps. However, surfing Samsara has gotten more difficult these days. You may need to sit on a mat after reading some of the things I will share today. I’m going to go dig in the soil once I finish this. There are a lot of weeds to pull. I can visualize who represents which weed.
Public Notice has this headline today, as reported by Lisa Needham. “Mike Johnson says the quiet part on Fox.'”The justices on the court — I know many of them personally … they’ll set this straight.”
It was a given, of course, that Trump backers would spring to his defense following his conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Trump’s supporters are trying to dox the jurors, a sheriff is saying that it’s time we put a felon in the White House, and a bunch of MAGAs are flying the American flag upside down (though we have no update from the Alitos on the status of their flagpole). One of Trump’s lawyers and his legal spokesperson have both gone on Fox News and called on the Supreme Court to get their client off the hook. (More on that later.)
But one statement stands out in all this sound and furor: GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson’s call for SCOTUS to “step in.”
The morning after the conviction, Johnson went on Fox & Friends to reassure Trump supporters that he has the ear of the justices.
“I think that the justices on the court — I know many of them personally — I think they’re deeply concerned about [Trump’s conviction], as we are. So I think they’ll set this straight, but it’s going to take awhile.”
Johnson went on to say “this will be overturned, guys, there’s no question about it. It’s just going to take some time to do it.” (Watch below.)
This remarkable statement highlights how Republicans have come to — correctly — count on the federal courts to ensure they stay in power.
The Supreme Court already overturned Colorado’s decision to remove Trump from the ballot and agreed to hear his outrageous absolute immunity claim in the January 6 case after refusing to hear it on an expedited basis when asked by prosecutor Jack Smith. That foot-dragging resulted in the March 4 date for Trump’s DC trial being removed from the calendar, and it’s exceedingly unlikely there will be a new trial date before the election.
So why wouldn’t Johnson look to the conservatives on the Supreme Court to save Trump this time around?
Too bad David McCullough passed recently. We’ll need a narrator for this version of Ken Burns’ Civil War. Burns gave the commencement speech for undergraduates at Brandeis University. It’s worth a listen or read. Burns has documented a lot of our recent history and knows us well.
Another voice, Mercy Otis Warren, a philosopher and historian during our revolution put it this way, “The study of the human character at once opens a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul. We there find a noble principle implanted in the nature of people, but when the checks of conscience are thrown aside, humanity is obscured.” I have had the privilege for nearly half a century of making films about the US, but I have also made films about us. That is to say the two letter, lowercase, plural pronoun. All of the intimacy of “us” and also “we” and “our” and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction, and even controversy of the US. And if I have learned anything over those years, it’s that there’s only us. There is no them. And whenever someone suggests to you, whomever it may be in your life that there’s a them, run away. Othering is the simplistic binary way to make and identify enemies, but it is also the surest way to your own self imprisonment, which brings me to a moment I’ve dreaded and forces me to suspend my longstanding attempt at neutrality.
There is no real choice this November. There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route. When, as Mercy Otis Warren would say, “The checks of conscience are thrown aside and a deformed picture of the soul is revealed.” The presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems. When in fact with him, you end up re-enslaved with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction and addiction, “a bigger delusion”, James Baldwin would say, the author and finisher of our national existence, our national suicide as Mr. Lincoln prophesies. Do not be seduced by easy equalization. There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives. This is a choice that could not be clearer.
The lies are more evident than ever, but they’re directed at an audience with no interest in the truth. Here’s another one from Senator Tim Scott via Axios. And yes, I’m quoting William Kristol again.
Sen. Tim Scott wants you to know: 2024 is not an abortion-policy election.
“The Supreme Court has already ruled that this is a states’ issue. President Trump and Speaker Johnson have both said that this will remain a states’ issue,” Scott said yesterday on Fox News Sunday. “That is a settled issue for our party, and frankly, it is one that takes that issue off the table for the Democrats, who have the most extreme position on abortion
Here’s some truth via Pro Publica. “Witnesses in the various criminal cases against the former president have gotten pay raises, new jobs, and more. If any benefits were intended to influence testimony, that could be a crime.” The Trump Family Crime Syndicate just can’t stop criming. Here comes another set of charges that will be hard to get through trial before November.
Nine witnesses in the criminal cases against former President Donald Trump have received significant financial benefits, including large raises from his campaign, severance packages, new jobs, and a grant of shares and cash from Trump’s media company.
The benefits have flowed from Trump’s businesses and campaign committees, according to a ProPublica analysis of public disclosures, court records and securities filings. One campaign aide had his average monthly pay double, from $26,000 to $53,500. Another employee got a $2 million severance package barring him from voluntarily cooperating with law enforcement. And one of the campaign’s top officials had her daughter hired onto the campaign staff, where she is now the fourth-highest-paid employee.
These pay increases and other benefits often came at delicate moments in the legal proceedings against Trump. One aide who was given a plum position on the board of Trump’s social media company, for example, got the seat after he was subpoenaed but before he testified.
Significant changes to a staffer’s work situation, such as bonuses, pay raises, firings or promotions, can be evidence of a crime if they come outside the normal course of business. To prove witness tampering, prosecutors would need to show that perks or punishments were intended to influence testimony.
Here’s one from Amanda Marcotte–writing for Salon–that will once again show how far the fetus fetishists will go to control women and deny them bodily autonomy. “Texas professors sue to fail students who seek abortions. Men are using abortion bans to control and abuse women in their lives for “consensual sexual intercourse”
A pair of Texas professors figured out that their female students have sex and, boy, they do not like it. So now the philosophy professor and finance professor are suing for the right to punish their students who, outside of class, have abortions.
“Pregnancy is not a disease, and elective abortions are not ‘health care,'” University of Texas at Austin professor Daniel Bonevac sneers in a federal court filing with professor John Hatfield. Instead, Bonevac writes, because pregnancy is the result of “voluntary and consensual sexual intercourse,” students should not be allowed time off to get abortions. If the students disobey and miss class for abortion care, the filing continues, the professors should be allowed to flunk students. Additionally, Bonevac asserts that he has a right to refuse to employ a teaching assistant who has had an abortion, calling such women “criminals.”
The sexual hang-ups of abortion opponents are rarely far from the surface, but even by those low standards, the unjustified male grievance on display in this new Texas lawsuit is a doozy. At issue are federal regulations, called Title IX, first signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1972. They currently bar publicly funded schools from discriminating on the basis of sex or gender. This means that schools cannot penalize students for health care based on sex. As a male student would be granted leave if he had to travel for surgery, so must a female student, the federal statute requires. The two men argue that granting students an excused absence in such cases violates their First Amendment rights.
Even though the plaintiffs suing for the right to flunk female students for abortion include boilerplate arguments in which they feign concern that abortion is “killing,” the legal filing makes it clear that what really outrages Bonevac and Hatfield is that Title IX prevents them from controlling the private lives of students. Along with their anger about abortion, they grouse about not being allowed to punish students “for being homosexual or transgender.” They also argue they should be able to penalize teaching assistants for “cross-dressing,” by which they appear to mean allowing trans women to wear skirts.
It’s really difficult to describe these angry Christian white nationalists with any label but utter shitgibbons. If they can’t quote the Beatitudes, then they’re not really dealing with the historical Jesus. A shake-up at the Washington Post may make me finally cancel my subscription. This is the summary of the state of affairs by Politico today. “Playbook: The Trump Verdict Lands on the Hill.”
WAPO SHOCKER — SALLY BUZBEE is out as the Washington Post’s executive editor after a three-year run, to be immediately replaced by former WSJ editor in chief MATT MURRAY and, after the election, by the Telegraph’s ROBERT WINNETT. Both have previously worked under WaPo Publisher and CEO WILL LEWIS.
The announcement came in an 8:38 p.m. news release and landed as a thunderbolt to the Posties we spoke to, who were uniformly shocked by the sudden timing of Buzbee’s departure, if not necessarily by the fact of it. It was an unusually abrupt transition for the Post, where top leadership transitions are typically announced months in advance. (The newsroom did not immediately have a story ready to publish and, adding insult to injury, the NYT managed to get theirs up first.)
The buried lede: After Winnett takes over the “core” newsroom in November, Murray will lead a “third newsroom … comprised of service and social media journalism and run separately from the core news operation. The aim is to give the millions of Americans — who feel traditional news is not for them but still want to be kept informed — compelling, exciting and accurate news where they are and in the style that they want.”
It’s all about the clicks these days. Today, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an Op-Ed from one of Alito’s former clerks. “I was a law clerk for Justice Alito. He must recuse himself from hearing cases involving Donald Trump. Flying the U.S. flag upside down, once a signal of distress, has become a symbol of those who reject the results of the 2020 presidential election. When Alito did so, it was indeed a distress call.” These are the thoughts of Susan Sullivan.
As a former law clerk to Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., I often admired him as a person for his integrity and honesty. As a progressive liberal, however, I vehemently disagreed with the approach he takes to reading the Constitution, the narrow interpretation he adopts, and his reverence for the framers’restrictive intent.
Over the years, I became increasingly distressed with the results of his decisions. And then came Dobbs.
By striking down the rights of women to choose whether to terminate a pregnancy, the decision last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which he wrote, eviscerated women’s fundamental right to self-determination. Dobbs is not just about abortion; it is about setting the clock back and undermining the core protections enshrined within the Constitution of liberty, equality, and access to justice.
And then came the flag.
Flying the American flag upside down, formerly a signal of distress, is now understood to unequivocally telegraph support for those who have co-opted and corrupted its original intent. It has become the symbol of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol in a violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, who challenged — and continue to deny — the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election. It is the emblem for the “Stop the Steal” Trump factions, the symbol now held hostage by those who attacked our democracy at its very core.
The New York Times reported earlier this month that Justice Alito flew an upside-down flag at his home in Fairfax, Va., and another controversial flag at his beach house on Long Beach Island — acts that are widely accepted as an abhorrent affront to anyone who respects our constitutional democracy. So, when that flag is flown upside down by a member of the nation’s highest court, it is indeed a distress call.
The U.S. Supreme Court is currently deciding whether a president’s actions while in office are absolutely immune from criminal prosecution, irrespective of whether they concern the legitimate business of the office. Donald Trump has been indicted in state and federal courts in Washington, D.C., Florida, Georgia, and New York, alleging fraud as well ascrimes in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection, the mishandling of classified documents, election interference, and more.
If the Supreme Court decides that he has blanket immunity — a decision expected any day now — these criminal charges, and any others, disappear. This means a president could commit serious crimes while in office, having nothing to do with the legitimate function of government, without facing any consequences. A president could theoretically hire an assassin to kill a competitor with impunity.
Justice Alito must recuse himself from having any role in the decision of these cases.
You may continue to read her rationale at the link. Meanwhile, this is an interesting read at The Guardian. “The reich stuff – what does Trump really have in common with Hitler? Comparisons between the ex-president and the 20th-century Nazi leader are controversial but a new book says they resemble each other as political performance artists.”
WhenDonald Trump shared a video that dreamed of a “unified reich” if he wins the US presidential election, and took nearly a full day to remove it, the most shocking thing was how unshocking it was.
Trump has reportedly said before that Adolf Hitler did “some good things”, echoed the Nazi dictator by calling his political opponents “vermin” and saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”, and responded to a white supremacist march in Charlottesville by claiming that there were “very fine people on both sides”.
The Hitler-Trump analogy is controversial. “Some of Trump’s critics – including Biden’s campaign – argue that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and authoritarian behavior justify the comparison,” the Politico website observed recently. “Meanwhile, Trump’s defenders – and even some of his more historically-minded critics – argue that the comparison is ahistorical; that he’s not a true fascist.”
The former camp now includes Henk de Berg, a professor of German at the University of Sheffield in Britain. The Dutchman, whose previous books include Freud’s Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies, has just published Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying.
In it, De Berg compares and contrasts Hitler and Trump as political performance artists and how they connect with their respective audiences. He examines the two men’s work ethic, management style and narcissism, as well as quirks such as Hitler’s toothbrush moustache and Trump’s implausible blond hair.
In a Zoom interview from his office at the university campus, De Berg quotes the American comedian and actor George Burns: “The most important thing in acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” He adds: “The most important thing in populism is authenticity. The moment you’re able to fake that, you’re in.”
De Berg, 60, happened to be renewing his study of National Socialism, and rereading Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, just as Trump was first running for the White House in 2015. “Obviously, there are massive differences,” he acknowledges. “Hitler was an ideologically committed antisemite who instigated the second world war and was responsible for the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews died.
“But then I looked at their rhetorical strategies and their public relations operations and I began to see how similar they are in many ways. So I thought, OK, why not do a book looking at Hitler from the perspective of Trump?
Well, it’s another Monday in this version of the United States.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Mostly Monday Reads: Dangerous Don’s Dirty Dance of Theocratic Fascism
Posted: April 1, 2024 Filed under: Republican politics, U.S. Politics, Women's Rights | Tags: @repeat1968, “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion”, Gas Lighting Trump Style, John Adams, John Buss, Louisiana threatens its librarians with jail, separation of church and state, Solemn Reverence by Randall Balmer., Trans Day of Visibility, Trump Bibles, Trump Media Stock 15 Comments
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I wish the media would not confuse traditional conservatism with theocratic fascism. This country has had its share of offbeat religions doing offbeat things, starting with the so-called Pilgrims. There were so many forms of it in the colonial US that the first Continental Congress couldn’t even develop an opening prayer to please everyone. The March 2021 edition of Church and State published “A Word From John Adams: A 224-Year-Old Treaty Says The U.S. Was Not Founded As A Christian Nation.” It’s an excerpt from Solemn Reverence by Randall Balmer.
John Adams had considered entering the ministry before opting to study law. Educated at Harvard, he served in the Continental Congress, as ambassador to Britain, and as Washington’s vice president before his election as president in 1796. He served a single term, losing the 1800 election to Thomas Jefferson.
Though reared a Congregationalist, Adams became a Unitarian. He did not believe in the Trinity – the Christian doctrine, defined in the Nicene Creed, that God exists in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
“My religion you know is not exactly conformable to that of the greatest part of the Christian World,” Adams acknowledged in a letter to his wife, Abigail, in 1799. “It excludes superstition. But with all the superstition that attends it, I think the Christian the best that is or has been.”
Adams understood the value of religion. “I have attended public worship in all countries and with all sects and believe them all much better than no religion,” he wrote to Benjamin Rush, “though I have not thought myself obliged to believe all I heard.” The second president’s most candid remarks about faith appeared in a letter to his son, John Quincy Adams, in 1816, long after the elder Adams had left office. “An incarnate God ! ! ! An eternal, self-existent, omnipresent omniscient Author of this stupendous Universe, suffering on a Cross! ! ! My Soul starts with horror, at the Idea, and it has stupified [sic] the Christian World. It has been the Source of almost all the Corruptions of Christianity.”
Perhaps Adams’s most enduring contribution to the conversation about church and state in the United States is the Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated during the Washington administration but ratified during Adams’s presidency.
That treaty negotiation contains the most significant indicator of what the founding fathers intended, which eventually became embedded in the U.S. Constitution: the separation of church and state. Its first was written in that Treaty.
The Senate ratified the Treaty of Tripoli unanimously, without debate, on June 7, 1797.
The language of Article 11 is pretty clear – “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion” – so anyone arguing that the United States is a Christian nation would need to explain away both Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli as well as the Senate’s unanimous ratification of the treaty. Clearly, those who constituted the government in the early years of the new nation – the executive and legislative branches – had no quarrel with the statement that the United States was not founded on Christianity.
The rebuttals of the Christian nation crowd are tortured, but they seem to rely on quoting the entirety of Article 11 (reproduced above in its entirety), not merely the opening phrase: “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion . . .” Fair enough. Context is always important. It’s not clear to me, however, how the full article in any way changes the plain meaning of the phrase. The treaty makes the case that the United States has no “enmity” against Islam or Muslims. The treaty does not assert that the United States is a Christian nation; it states the opposite: “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”
You may continue to read the excerpt of that book at the link. The book is still in print. You know me and my rabbit holes. You also know six of my direct ancestors ratified that Treaty. I feel like I have a lot of skin in this game. We all should have a lot of skin in this game. David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo has just published this. “The Easter Madness Of Donald J. Trump. INSIDE: Alvin Bragg … Wes Moore … Ammon Bundy.”
I trust that most of you were offline celebrating the holiday, warming to the Spring, welcoming baseball back, or watching college basketball. Congrats on missing another unhinged online weekend for Donald Trump.
Over the course of 70+ posts Easter morning, Trump vilified and attacked a wide range of his antagonists in ALL CAPS zeal. At the same time, he reposted articles declaring himself to be “The Chosen One.”
The contrast between the irreligious candidate embracing Christian nationalism and the lifelong Irish Catholic was, shall we say, striking:
It’s all so infantile and incredibly ridiculous that you can hardly be blamed for not wanting to be bothered about it over the weekend.
The New York Times’s Michael Bender wrote this today. “The Church of Trump: How He’s Infusing Christianity Into His Movement Ending many of his rallies with a churchlike ritual and casting his prosecutions as persecution, the former president is demanding — and receiving — new levels of devotion from Republicans.” I’m sorry, but watching all of this just makes me ill.
Mr. Trump has long defied conventional wisdom as an unlikely but irrefutable evangelical hero.
He has been married three times, has been repeatedly accused of sexual assault, has been convicted of business fraud and has never showed much interest in church services. Last week, days before Easter, he posted on his social media platform an infomercial-style video hawking a $60 Bible that comes with copies of some of the nation’s founding documents and the lyrics to Lee Greenwood’s song “God Bless the U.S.A.”
…
Mr. Trump’s braiding of politics and religion is hardly a new phenomenon. Christianity has long exerted a strong influence on American government, with most voters identifying as Christians even as the country grows more secular. According to Gallup, 68 percent of adults said they were Christian in 2022, down from 91 percent in 1948.
But as the former president tries to establish himself as the one, true Republican leader, religious overtones have pervaded his third presidential campaign.
Benevolently phrased fund-raising emails in his name promise unconditional love amid solicitations for contributions of as little as $5.
Even more than in his past campaigns, he is framing his 2024 bid as a fight for Christianity, telling a convention of Christian broadcasters that “just like in the battles of the past, we still need the hand of our Lord.”
On his social media platform in recent months, Mr. Trump has shared a courtroom-style sketch of himself sitting next to Jesus and a video that repeatedly proclaims, “God gave us Trump” to lead the country.
The apparent effectiveness of such tactics has made Mr. Trump the nation’s first major politician to successfully separate character from policy for religious voters, said John Fea, a history professor at Messiah University, an evangelical school in Pennsylvania.
“Trump has split the atom between character and policy,” Mr. Fea said. “He did it because he’s really the first one to listen to their grievances and take them seriously. Does he really care about evangelicals? I don’t know. But he’s built a message to appeal directly to them.”
I’m going to share Jennifer Ruben’s response to this with you.
The bigger problem is the Trump Snake Oil show has emboldened local theocratic fascists at all levels. Again, I dealt with them back in 1992 when the cry against anyone who wasn’t white and their brand of Christian was considered to be a multiculturist. They were as rabid back then as now against women’s Reproductive Rights and the GLBT community. I fled Nebraska for the safety of the French Quarter because of them. They’re insane. This is insane. This is from Piper Hutchinson, who is writing for the Louisiana Illuminator. “Ultra-conservative lawmakers target Louisiana libraries as culture war rages on.” This is radicalism. It’s theocratic fascism! The men who voted for that Treaty would be appalled; many were clergy.
With veto-proof majorities in both legislative chambers and the backing of a new governor, some Louisiana Republicans are taking aim at public libraries with legislation that could criminalize librarians.
Four conservative lawmakers have filed five bills that play off the library culture war currently raging across the nation, including in Louisiana.
Upset with what they view as sexually explicit materials in libraries and the “Marxist” American Library Association, far-right activists have filed thousands of book challenges in the past few years and pushed libraries to disaffiliate with the ALA. In Louisiana, public library oversight boards have mostly resisted calls to restrict book content, but some, including the State Library, have ended their ALA memberships.
The issue has captured the interest of Republicans in Louisiana, including Gov. Jeff Landry.
As attorney general, Landry set up a tip line to field complaints against libraries that he said failed to protect children from “early sexualization, as well as grooming, sex trafficking, and abuse.” Landry later drafted a “Protecting Innocence” report on libraries and supported legislation to restrict minors’ access to certain library materials.
Three bills filed could lead to criminal punishment for librarians.
House Bill 777 by Rep. Kellee Dickerson, R-Denham Springs, would prohibit any public employee from spending public funds with the American Library Association. Anyone who does would be subject to up to two years in prison or a fine of up to $1,000.
The bill would force public libraries, including parish and university libraries, to sever their memberships with the association and would prohibit libraries from sending their librarians to ALA conferences and other continuing education events.
Dickerson said in an interview she filed the bill because she wants money to be spent locally, rather than with a national organization.
The villainization of the American Library Association is something that perplexes most librarians.
“I’m not sure exactly what these people think go on at ALA conferences,” Suzanne Stauffer, an LSU library and information science professor said in an interview. “It’s workshops about how to better meet the needs of their community.”
“Frankly, the conferences are dull,” Stauffer added, laughing.
Michael Lunsford, a conservative activist who frequently targets the ALA, thinks otherwise. Lunsford, executive director of Citizens for a New Louisiana, a Lafayette-based advocacy group, has been on the frontlines of the library battle in Louisiana. He and his organization have been involved with attempts to restrict books before multiple parish library boards of control. The appointed volunteer boards oversee libraries and have the final say over what books are removed from the shelves
Lunsford described the American Library Association as a “Marxist” organization out to fundamentally change U.S. society.
“We’ve had an organization that comes out and says, ‘You have to have these erotic books in your children’s section or you’re a Nazi,’” Lunsford said.
Lunsford claimed he found a copy of “Let’s Talk About it” in the children’s section of the Lafayette Public Library. The graphic novel is a nonfiction young adult book that contains depictions of genitalia and descriptions of sex acts. The book is billed as a guide to coming of age, puberty, consent and sexuality and is targeted at readers 14 and older.
The books Lunsford and other ultra-conservative activists have targeted are primarily those with LGBTQ+ themes and those with sexual content are classified as young adult or adult books. Louisiana also recently adopted an extensive tiered card system that gives parents control over what types of books their children can check out.
Attendees at a Livingston Parish Library Board of Control meeting on July 19, 2022, show their opposition to a member who had submitted a list of books that she deemed inappropriate for children and young adult readers. Five of the books contained LGBTQ themes. (Piper Hutchinson/Louisiana Illuminator)
The weirdest temper tantrum this weekend is the conspiracy around the lunar calendar’s choice of Easter this year and the coincidence that it happened on Trans Day of Visibility. “Trending: Easter Controversy,” or: How little lies pave the way for the next big lie. No-News Weekend Internet is stupid-dangerous in the Trump era — as this weekend’s attack on the Transgender Day of Visibility shows.” This is from the Law Dork’s Chris Geidner.
This weekend’s gaslighting from the right around Easter falling on the same day as Transgender Day of Visibility is a stark sign of how empty the Republican Party has gotten — and how dangerous Donald Trump is, not only to transgender people, but to America.
If you, blessedly, have no idea what I am talking about, congratulations, you live a life free from what I think is best thought of as “No-News Weekend Internet.” In short, when nothing is happening, something must happen. It will always be stupid, but, in the past, sometimes that meant stupid-fun. Now, it means stupid-dangerous.
This time, it was two things. Easter moves around because it falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after March 21. Transgender Day of Visibility, which was founded in 2009, takes place on March 31.
This year, again, BECAUSE OF THE MOON, Easter is on March 31.
For a group of Republicans looking to demonize Joe Biden and transgender people, this was all that they needed to start a weekend of hate. Then, for kicks I guess, they added in an attack on the “new rules” for the White House children’s egg decorating contest — specifically, that submissions can’t be overtly religious — as a second anti-Christian thing that Biden has done despite the fact that the Biden administration didn’t change the rules.
It’s disgusting and done in extremely bad faith — but also dangerous.
Because of that danger, I’m going to go through what happened in detail and discuss why it’s so disturbing.
And, of course, the deplorable Caitlyn Jenner had to come join the gaslighting. This is from HuffPo. I really feel like I should drag out all the dumb jock jokes we used to tell in junior high school. It’s on that level.
Caitlyn Jenner, a trans woman, wrote on social media Saturday that she is “disgusted” Transgender Day of Visibility is on Easter this year. The annual event has been held on March 31 since its inception in 2009. Easter is a different date each year, however.
“I am absolutely disgusted that Joe Biden has declared the most Holy of Holy days – a self proclaimed devout Catholic – as Transgender Day of Visibility,” Jenner wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “The only thing you should be declaring on this day is ‘HE is Risen.’”
Tom Toles Editorial Cartoon
The last thing I will share with you is my absolute delight in having a new case study for my Graduate Students in Derivatives. This is from CNBC. “Trump Media plunges more than 20% after company reports net loss of $58 million in 2023.” So, the stock has a negative Price/Earnings ratio, which is incredible it even got listed in that situation. It’s the most shorted stock in history, which means people were paying a lot of money to bet it would crash. I’ve been carefully watching for a sign of a gamma squeeze. Also, its sponsor barely got out of serious hot water with the SEC before it could launch shares of JDT.
The share price of Trump Media fell sharply Monday morning after the social media app company closely tied to former president Donald Trump reported a net loss of $58.2 million on revenue of just $4.1 million in 2023.
Trump Media & Technology Group shares were trading down by more than 20% as of 12:30 p.m. ET.
Despite that plunge, the company’s market capitalization was still more than $6.8 billion after its 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed the loss for last year.
Much of the net loss appears to come from $39.4 million in interest expense, according to the filing.
A spokesperson for the company did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the new filing.
The filing shows that in 2022, Trump Media had a net profit of $50.5 million and total revenue of only $1.47 million.
The company ended 2023 with just $2.7 million in cash on hand, the filing said.
The losses last year by Trump Media — the owner of the Truth Social app routinely used by the former president — could continue for some time, according to the company.
“TMTG expects to incur operating losses for the foreseeable future,” says the filing, which came a week after the company began trading under the ticker DJT on the Nasdaq.
The filing also warns shareholders that Trump’s involvement in the company could put it at greater risk than other social media companies.
TMTG also disclosed to regulators that the company had identified “material weaknesses in its internal control over financial reporting” when it prepared a previous financial statement for the first three quarters of 2023.
As of Monday, Trump Media said these “identified material weaknesses continue to exist.”
That’s what we in the business like to call the discipline of the market. You may follow those links if you want to get into the weeds.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Juneteenth Reads: “A House Divided”
Posted: June 16, 2023 Filed under: Economic Racism and injustice, Republican politics, U.S. Politics, Women's Rights | Tags: A House Divided, Angry, Hateful, Juneteenth, Neil Giraldo, Pat Benatar, Wrong Republicans 8 Comments
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
We continue to celebrate our newest Federal Holiday this long weekend. It is Juneteenth, also called Freedom Day. The first Juneteenth was on the 19th.
On June 19, 1865, nearly two years after President Abraham Lincoln emancipated enslaved Africans in America, Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas with news of freedom. More than 250,000 African Americans embraced freedom by executive decree in what became known as Juneteenth or Freedom Day. With the principles of self-determination, citizenship, and democracy magnifying their hopes and dreams, those Texans held fast to the promise of true liberty for all.
If you’re a James Joyce fan, then today is Bloomsday! And, of course, we’re still celebrating Pride Month.
Another appropriate reference to June 16 is what happened at the Illinois Republican State Convention, in Springfield, Illinois, on June 16, 1858. It’s challenging to think the same speech would be given by any future Republican President, but this is the day Lincoln spoke up against slavery “agitation.” It is the source of one of his most famous speeches and lines. The future president was running for the U.S. Senate against Senator Steven A. Douglas.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Can you imagine American history being taught without learning about this pivotal speech? It clearly shows that slavery in the South was a root cause of the Civil War that followed. Today’s Republicans are doing everything they can to erase that kind of history.
Martha Yates Jones (left) and Pinkie Yates (right), daughters of Rev. Jack Yates, in a decorated carriage parked in front of the Antioch Baptist Church located in Houston’s Fourth Ward, 1908 — Source
Let’s look at the headlines. This is from Dana Milbank, writing for the Washington Post. “As Trump is arrested, Republicans honor the insurrectionists.”
Donald Trump could not have asked for a nicer arraignment-day celebration.
During the very same hour in which the former president surrendered to federal authorities in Miami, his Republican allies in the House were, in their most visible and official way yet, embracing as heroes and martyrs the people who sacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in hopes of overturning Trump’s election defeat.
In the Capitol complex, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), with sidekick Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and four other far-right lawmakers, held a “hearing” that honored participants in the riot, family members of Jan. 6 rioters and organizers of the attempted overthrow of the 2020 vote.
Technically, Gaetz couldn’t call such a hearing, because he isn’t a committee chairman. But House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who is trying to win back the support of extremists such as Gaetz, let it happen anyway.
Gaetz did his all to make the proceedings look official. There were congressional seals on his nameplate and on the big screen behind him. A meeting room in the Capitol visitor center was arranged to appear like a committee room, with lawmakers facing the witnesses. Gaetz advertised the “field hearing” as part of how “the 118th Congress is investigating the weaponization of the federal government.”
And then there’s Ted Cruz. The Senator from Texas always seems to set the bottommost tone for public discussion.
I love Pat Benatar. What exactly has she done besides write and perform songs empowering women? Let’s pause for a bit of mood music.
You may read the retorts from Twitter at Salon. “Ted Cruz weaves a bizarre scenario about Biden murdering children while listening to Pat Benatar. While discussing President Biden on the Joe Pags show, Cruz succumbed to a Satanic flight of fancy.”
JJ sent me more stuff than just the Pat Benatar on Ted Cruz. Perhaps he has to get all hellfire and brimstone because of this. “Ted Cruz Says Uganda Shouldn’t Kill Gays, And Christian Extremist MAGAs Are SO MAD (At Him).” This story comes via Wonkette.
Without near enough fanfare or attention from the West, the president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, has signed a “kill the gays” bill into law. It calls for a life sentence for anyone who has gay sex, and seven years for trying to, whatever that means. The death penalty would be for those who commit “aggravated homosexuality,” which the New York Times says includes “homosexual acts committed by anyone infected with H.I.V. or involving children, disabled people or anyone drugged against their will.” If they say you did “attempted aggravated homosexuality,” you could go to prison for 14 years. We are sure the processes for determining whether people have violated the law will totally be on the up-and-up.
Oh, and you could go to jail for 20 years for “promoting” homosexuality, which reminds us a bit of Russia, and also the spirit of Ron DeSantis’s Florida, even if they haven’t quite made it to calling for imprisonment yet.
So, Ted finally says something that makes him seem human. The Christoban are after him now.
In response, some of Cruz’s conservative fans were absolutely horrified that Cruz would interfere in another country’s Christian fascist genocide in such a way. RawStory collected some responses:
“Ted, seems to me your focus should be here at home working to get the unjustly punished J6 prisoners out of jail,” wrote one user in response. “I’m disappointed in you.”
In a similar sentiment, a different Cruz follower argued that “it’s none of our business.”
Another follower used Cruz’s statement to simply dismiss him as a “RINO.”
Cruz follower JD Sharp, on the other hand, defended the law explicitly and argued it would help ensure high fertility rates in Uganda.
Echoing to this theme, one Twitter user replied to Cruz and said they wanted to “make homosexuality shameful again.”OK, psychos.
Take a gander through Ted’s replies at your own risk. Because Elon Musk’s paid blue checkmark system promotes replies from the vilest and stupidest people humanity has to offer to the top, you won’t have to look hard for Americans just openly supporting genocide.
So let’s look at the things the bottomless basement of the hate section of our divided house thinks are okay.
The Southern Baptist Convention has issues that won’t be solved by booting all women pastors.
Let me remind you of Christa’s experience with that denomination.
Juneteenth band. Photograph by Grace Murray Stephenson of celebrations in Eastwoods Park, Austin, 1900. — Source
Here’s another story from the Washington Post that makes the celebration of Juneteenth bitter-sweet. “Black Americans more upbeat but fear worsening racism, poll finds.”
An overwhelming share of Black Americans think the U.S. economic system is stacked against them and a slim majority believe the problem of racism will worsen during their lives, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll that explored the attitudes of the country’s second-largest minority group.
The poll finds that Black adults worry they are marginalized and under threat by acts of hate and discrimination in their day-to-day lives. Most also say it is more dangerous to be a Black teenager now than when they were teens.
There is good news about how indigenous children were shuttled to adoptive white parents so they could “save the man and kill the Indian.” That was actually the rationale for the Indian Adoption Project prior to the 1978 act–The Indian Child Welfare Act–existed. A challenge to that Law was just heard before the Supreme Court. A group of White Evangelicals would like to return to the good old days of kidnapping indigenous children from the tribes and screamed the act was racist. This decision is likely temporary as the beer and sexual assault connoisseur on the Court invited a future challenge from somebody with “standing,” which is why the court upheld the decision.
The Indiginous Nations have an odd advocate on SCOTUS. This is from NBC News. “Conservative Justice Gorsuch echoes ‘woke’ historians in railing against historical injustices. Gorsuch, appointed by former President Donald Trump, differs from his conservative colleagues on some key issues, including Native American rights.” This reminds me of the saying that even a broken clock is right two times a day. This is written by Lawrence Hurley.
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative appointed by Republican former President Donald Trump, but in a series of recent cases, he has spoken up about historical injustice in a way that seems at odds with Republican attacks on “woke” history’s being taught in schools.
That included his opinion Thursday when the court rejected a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act, a law intended to keep Native American families and communities together when children are in the adoption or foster care process.
Gorsuch’s concurring opinion was part history lesson and part explanation of his full-throated support for Native Americans.
He wrote about how Native American families were torn apart by federal and state officials’ attempts to assimilate them into Anglo-centric American society by eliminating their cultural ties to their tribes.
“In all of its many forms, the dissolution of the Indian family has had devastating effects on children and parents alike,” he wrote.
“It has also presented an existential threat to the continued vitality of tribes — something many federal state officials over the years saw as a feature, not as a flaw,” he added. His opinion was joined by two of his liberal colleagues: Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Chuck Hoskin, principal chief of Cherokee Nation, one of the tribes that defended the adoption law at the Supreme Court, said Gorsuch is “going to loom large over Indian Country cases for a long time” in part because he understands the complexities of Indian law.
“While he may possess a great range of views on a lot of legal issues, he seems to have the most solid understanding of federal Indian law of any justice of the modern era,” Hoskin added.
In other cases, Gorsuch has lambasted the Supreme Court’s own rulings that treat people living in Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories as second-class citizens and called out the torture of detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He has repeatedly voted in favor of Native American tribes in a series of different legal questions.
Detail from a photograph of celebrations in Richmond, Virginia, ca. 1905 — Source
This is from Rachel Weiner, writing for the Washington Post. “NSA staffer linked to ‘America First’ movement joined Jan. 6 mob. Paul Lovley was sentenced to two weeks’ incarceration for illegally demonstrating in the Capitol.”
A 24-year-old moved to Maryland to work for the National Security Agency six months before joining the attack on the U.S. Capitol with followers of a movement whose founder is known for espousing white supremacist views, according to court filings.
Paul Lovley was sentenced Tuesday to two weeks incarceration for illegally demonstrating in the Capitol.
“All I can do is take responsibility for my actions, learn from this experience, and move on with my life,” Lovley said in a letter to the court. “This entire situation has served as a wake-up call—something that forced me to truly reflect on what is important in life, what types of things to avoid engaging with going forward, and the dangers of cognitive dissonance.”
According to prosecutors, Lovley was working in information technology for the NSA before Jan. 6. The NSA referred questions about his employment to the Justice Department, which did not return a request for comment.
The night before the riot, the government said, Lovley hosted at his Maryland home four friends he met at an event for “America First,” a movement founded by Nick Fuentes, who has been banned from most social media platforms for repeated racist and antisemitic remarks. The Justice Department in other cases has described Fuentes, who was outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 but is not charged in the attack, as “a public figure known for making racist statements, celebrating fascism, and promoting white supremacy.” He gained national prominence after dining with former president Donald Trump in late 2022.
The five young men including Lovley entered the Capitol building a few minutes after the first breach, according to court records. Along with other rioters, they went into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and onto the Senate floor. After about 40 minutes, they left the building; prosecutors say one of Lovley’s friends then assaulted a police officer with a metal barricade and helped destroy reporters’ equipment.
He said he came to the area from California for his “first-ever serious job” and did not know anyone.
Alright, one more thing, and then we’ll take this all down thread. Who just got indicted by a Grand Jury for taking and decimating classified documents and didn’t get to go to a private golf club and rally a group of fascists?
From: Joe Becigneul, Step through time
She was called Phillis, because that was the name of the ship that brought her, and Wheatley, which was the name of the merchant who bought her. She was born in Senegal.
In Boston, the slave traders put her up for sale: “She’s 7 years old! She will be a good mare!”
She was felt, naked, by many hands.
At thirteen, she was already writing poems in a language that was not her own. No one believed that she was the author. At the age of twenty, Phillis was questioned by a court of eighteen enlightened men in robes and wigs.
She had to recite texts from Virgil and Milton and some messages from the Bible, and she also had to swèar that the poems she had written were not plagiarized. From a chair, she gave her long examination, until the court accepted her: she was a woman, she was Black, she was enslaved, but she was a poet.
Phillis Wheatley, was the first African-American writer to publish a book in the United States.
What’s on Your Reading and Blogging list today?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbezx-dREaw
Totally Tuesday Reads: Mounting Trump Troubles
Posted: May 23, 2023 Filed under: Republican politics, U.S. Politics, Women's Rights | Tags: Clementine Hunter, Reproductive Health Care, stolen documents, Trump Foreign Business Dealings 24 Comments
Saturday Night Clementine Hunter (1886/87–1988) Melrose Plantation, Natchitoches, Louisiana c. 1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I’m still trying to recover and finish up with the usual end-of-term things. I took some time last night to catch up with some of the headlines. I thought I’d share the work of Black American Folk Artist Clementine Hunter with you since the Juneteenth holiday is approaching. It’s always a good time to remind Republicans that Black Americans have made unique contributions to our country.
The Stolen Documents Case is heating up for Donald Trump. We learned last night that “Prosecutors Sought Records on Trump’s Foreign Business Deals Since 2017. The special counsel scrutinizing the former president’s handling of classified documents issued a subpoena to the Trump Organization seeking records related to seven countries.” Is that the sounds of chickens coming home to roost I hear? It’s just the feral roosters wandering the canal behind my house crowing their little beaks off, but it seems like an appropriate sound effect. This is reported by the New York Times.
Federal prosecutors overseeing the investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s handling of classified documents have issued a subpoena for information about Mr. Trump’s business dealings in foreign countries since he took office, according to two people familiar with the matter.
It remains unclear precisely what the prosecutors were hoping to find by sending the subpoena to Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, or when it was issued. But the subpoena suggests that investigators have cast a wider net than previously understood as they scrutinize whether he broke the law in taking sensitive government materials with him upon leaving the White House and then not fully complying with demands for their return.
The subpoena — drafted by the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith — sought details on the Trump Organization’s real estate licensing and development dealings in seven countries: China, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, according to the people familiar with the matter. The subpoena sought the records for deals reached since 2017, when Mr. Trump was sworn in as president.
The Trump Organization swore off any foreign deals while he was in the White House, and the only such deal Mr. Trump is known to have made since then was with a Saudi-based real estate company to license its name to a housing, hotel and golf complex that will be built in Oman. He struck that deal last fall just before announcing his third presidential campaign.
The push by Mr. Smith’s prosecutors to gain insight into the former president’s foreign business was part of a subpoena — previously reported by The New York Times — that was sent to the Trump Organization and sought records related to Mr. Trump’s dealings with a Saudi-backed golf venture known as LIV Golf, which is holding tournaments at some of his golf clubs. (Mr. Trump’s arrangement with LIV Golf was reached well after he removed documents from the White House.)
Clementine Hunter Mural. In 1955, at the age of 68, Hunter painted the top floor of the African House (an outbuilding of Melrose Plantation) during a three-month period. The painting consisted of nine large panels and several small connecting panels which encircled the room and depicted the story of the Cane River country.
Yes. Indeed! That’s the sound of Donald’s Karma ripening. Here’s more. This is from CNBC. “Trump faces $10 million defamation claim by E. Jean Carroll after CNN town hall remarks.” The power of narcissism compels him!
E. Jean Carroll filed court papers Monday seeking “very substantial” monetary damages from Donald Trump for making scathing remarks about her at a CNN town hall a day after the former president lost a $5 million lawsuit to the writer.
Carroll now is seeking no less than $10 million from Trump in damages in her original lawsuit in light of what he said May 10 on CNN.
The move came as her lawyers asked a Manhattan federal court judge for permission to amend that first defamation lawsuit, which she lodged against Trump in 2019, to reflect his new statements on CNN about her, which they say also are defamatory.
“Trump’s defamatory statements post-verdict show the depth of his malice toward Carroll since it is hard to imagine defamatory conduct that could possibly be more motivated by hatred, ill will, or spite,” the proposed amended complaint said.
“This conduct supports a very substantial punitive damages award in Carroll’s favor both to punish Trump, to deter him from engaging in further defamation, and to deter others from doing the same,” the complaint said.
Carroll’s second lawsuit, filed in late 2022 and alleging rape and defamation, ended with a jury in that court after less than three hours of deliberations finding Trump liable for sexually abusing her and for defaming her last fall when he denied her allegations.
Trump’s lawyer Joseph Tacopina, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday, filed a notice of appeal of that verdict.
While we’re on the topic of that CNN “town hall” and Karma, let’s look at this headline! This is from Justin Baragona, writing for The Daily Beast: “Here’s How Bad CNN’s Post-Trump Town Hall Ratings Have Been.”
More than a week after CNN’s disastrous town hall with former President Donald Trump, the negative impact the fiasco had on the network’s ratings is coming into clearer focus. Last week, the cable news pioneer suffered its lowest-rated week since June 2015, averaging just 429,000 total daily viewers from Monday-Friday. CNN was also down double digits compared to the same week last year in both total viewership and in the key advertising demographic of viewers ages 25-54. MSNBC more than doubled CNN’s daily audience, drawing 976,000 total viewers, while Fox News averaged 1.4 million. Fox News was down 41 percent in the key demo year-to-year and 24 percent in total viewers, having seen its ratings plummet as angry right-wingers flee after Tucker Carlson’s shock firing. In fact, Fox’s post-Tucker weekday demo audience is the lowest its been since the first week of September 2001. Ratings data shows that primetime is where both Fox and CNN are suffering the most. Since the town hall, CNN has seen several of its weeknight hours—including Anderson Cooper—fall behind Newsmax, the fringe-right channel that has surged since Carlson’s ouster. And on Friday night, the channel’s much-hyped interview show hosted by Chris Wallace averaged only 224,000 total viewers at 10 p.m., drawing 60,000 fewer viewers than Newsmax’s offering. While Fox News still led in both total and demo viewership in weeknight primetime last week, the conservative cable giant’s overall audience was down 38 percent and the demo viewership dropped an eye-popping 60 percent. MSNBC, on the other hand, saw its demo audience shoot up 44 percent.
Clementine Hunter “Playing Cards, circa 1970.
Way to divide the country even more, you idiots! The fallout from the overturn of Roe v. Wade continues. This is from NPR. It’s written by Julie Rovner. “Abortion bans drive off doctors and close clinics, putting other health care at risk.” This doesn’t sound “pro-life” at all to me.
The rush in conservative states to ban abortion after the overturn of Roe v. Wade is resulting in a startling consequence that abortion opponents may not have considered: fewer medical services available for all women living in those states.
Doctors are showing — through their words and actions — that they are reluctant to practice in places where making the best decision for a patient could result in huge fines or even a prison sentence. And when clinics that provide abortions close their doors, all the other services offered there also shut down, including regular exams, breast cancer screenings, and contraception.
The concern about repercussions for women’s health is being raised not just by abortion rights advocates. One recent warning comes from Jerome Adams, who served as surgeon general in the Trump administration and is now working on health equity issues at Purdue University in Indiana.
In a recent tweet thread, Adams wrote that “the tradeoff of a restricted access (and criminalizing doctors) only approach to decreasing abortions could end up being that you actually make pregnancy less safe for everyone, and increase infant and maternal mortality.”
Untitled (Miss Cammie with Ducks) by Clementine Hunter, ca. 1965
Thank goodness my daughter’s practice in Seattle, Washington, is safe from this nonsense. Still, it is certainly creating horrid problems in my state and the surrounding states where Republicans have hurried to end access to reproductive care. Michelle Goldberg writes this Op-Ed for the New York Times today about the lives of 13 women in Texas. “You Cannot Hear These 13 Women’s Stories and Believe the Anti-Abortion Narrative.”
It’s increasingly clear that it’s not safe to be pregnant in states with total abortion bans. Since the end of Roe v. Wade, there have been a barrage of gutting stories about women in prohibition states denied care for miscarriages or forced to continue nonviable pregnancies. Though some in the anti-abortion movement publicly justify this sort of treatment, others have responded with a combination of denial, deflection and conspiracy theorizing.
Some activists have blamed the pro-choice movement for spooking doctors into not intervening when pregnancies go horribly wrong. “Abortion advocates are spreading the dangerous lie that lifesaving care is not or may not be permitted in these states, leading to provider confusion and poor outcomes for women,” said a report by the anti-abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute.
Others have suggested that doctors are deliberately refusing miscarriage treatment, apparently to make anti-abortion laws look bad. “What we’re seeing, I fear, is doctors with an agenda saying, ‘Well, I don’t know what to do’ when, in fact, they do,” the president of Ohio Right to Life said last year.
A new filing in a Texas lawsuit demolishes these arguments. In March, five women represented by the Center for Reproductive Rights sued Texas after enduring medical nightmares when they were refused abortions for pregnancies that had gone awry. Since then, the Center for Reproductive Rights says it has heard from dozens of women in Texas with similar accounts. And this week, eight more women, each with her own harrowing story, joined the suit, which asks a state district court to clarify the scope of emergency medical exceptions to Texas’ abortion ban.
Other Republican Culture War Craziness continues throughout the country. Texas and Florida continue to lead the insanity. “Miami-Dade K-8 bars elementary students from 4 library titles following parent complaint.”
A K-8 school in Miami-Dade County last month issued restrictions for elementary-aged students on three books and one poem after a parent objected to five titles, claiming they included topics that were inappropriate for students and should be removed “from the total environment.” The move — which allows for middle school students at the school to access the titles — is the latest example of districts and schools across the state restricting or removing books from libraries in recent months. For Stephana Ferrell, the director of research and insight at Florida Freedom to Read Project, it underscores a growing trend to redefine what is considered age appropriate, “especially regarding books that address ethnicities, marginalized communities, racism or our history of racism.”
“Books written for students grades K-5 are being pushed to middle school [libraries and] out of reach for the students they were intended for,” she said. The books aren’t being banned from the district, she argued, “but they’re banned for the students they were intended for.” In March, Daily Salinas, a parent of two students at at Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes, challenged The ABCs of Black History, Cuban Kids, Countries in the News Cuba, the poem The Hills We Climb, which was recited by poet Amanda Gorman at the inauguration of President Joe Biden, and Love to Langston for what she said included references of critical race theory, “indirect hate messages,” gender ideology and indoctrination, according to records obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project and shared with the Miami Herald. In an interview with the Herald on Monday, Salinas said she “is not for eliminating or censoring any books.” Instead, she wants materials to be appropriate and for students “to know the truth” about Cuba, she said in Spanish. Get unlimited digital access.
This brings questions. How illiterate do they want our children to be? How disenfranchised do they want them to feel? Can they actually read?
As recently as 2020, “To Kill a Mockingbird” was one of the most frequently challenged books nationwide, largely because of its use of racial slurs, according to the American Library Association.
Today, members of the same political coalition that once mocked progressives for demanding “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” wish to shield children from the potential trauma of reading “Heather Has Two Mommies.” Those who once admonished students for being snowflakes now apparently believe children are too fragile to mount a musical with a gay character — or access reference books on puberty.
Butamid debates about how children will process texts invoking racism or sexual identity, a much more basic question plagues our educational system: whether children can process texts, period.
Parents around the country generally think their children have recovered from disruptions to schooling during the pandemic, surveys show. They haven’t. As of last spring, students were on average half a year behind in math and one-third of a year behind in reading, according to research from a team at Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins and the testing company NWEA.
Not that the U.S. educational system was so impressive relative to thosein our peer countries pre-covid, either.
In Oklahoma, which ranks 49th in education nationwide, the state’s top school official is devoting energy to banning use of the word “diverse” in computer science curriculums because it is too “woke.” In a telling Florida incident, a science teacher was investigated this month for showing her students a Disney film. Her transgression, apparently, was featuring a movie with a gay character — not, as you might imagine, screening a fictional film as an ecology lesson. (I speak as a product of the Florida school system, where my seventh-grade physics unit revolved around a screening of “Flubber.”)
It is dishearteningthat the culture wars have come for not just lesson plans but librarians, too. Librarians are instrumental in promoting literacy. They guide students toward texts that will absorb and engage them. They nudge kids toward books, films, periodicals and online resources that will answer burning, sometimes embarrassing questions.
Window Shade by Clementine Hunter, 1950s
So, what motivates a 19-year-old Asian-American from Missouri to do this? “19-year-old arrested on multiple charges after crashing into barriers near the White House. The suspect, identified as Sai Varshith Kandula, made threatening statements about the White House at the scene of Monday night’s incident, a law enforcement official told NBC News. A Nazi flag was seized by authorities at the scene.”
A 19-year-old Missouri man, accused of driving a truck into barriers near the White House, made incriminating statements that have led investigators to believe he was seeking to harm the president, officials said Tuesday.
The driver was Sai Varshith Kandula of Chesterfield, U.S. Park Police said Tuesday morning.
The charges against Kandula for allegedly “threatening to kill, kidnap, inflict harm on a president, vice president, or family member,” stem from statements he made to multiple law enforcement agencies, according to a Secret Service representative.
The suspect was interviewed by Secret Service investigators Monday night, the agency representative said, during the ongoing probe that also involves United States Park Police, the FBI and U.S. Capitol Police.
Kandula was further charged with assault with a dangerous weapon, reckless operation of a motor vehicle and trespassing.
My next question is, why this guy identifies with NAZIs? That’s an Indian surname. This hate stuff is just freaking confusing.
I think I need a nap and food or both. Have a great week!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Monday Reads: A bit of this and that!
Posted: July 25, 2022 Filed under: abortion rights, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Crimes against Children, Discrimination against women, Domestic terrorism, Donald Trump, religious extremists, Reproductive Health, Reproductive Justice, Reproductive Rights, Republican Code Words and Concepts, Republican presidential politics, right wing hate grouups, Treason and Sedition Republican Style, Trump Trash, white nationalists, Women's Rights | Tags: The Great Replacement Theory and Racism 24 Comments
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fränzi in front of Carved Chair, 1910.
Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!
There are a lot of long-form articles up today that are worth a read. I’m going to start with a few on the abortion issue since Kansas has a significant vote today. Kansas is the first state to have a Post-Roe vote. This is from The New York Times: “‘Everybody Is Dug In’: Kansans Fiercely Debate the First Post-Roe Vote on Abortion. The Aug. 2 ballot question will decide whether the State Constitution will allow legislators to ban or further restrict the procedure.”
Kansas voters will decide next week whether to remove protections of abortion rights from their State Constitution, providing the first electoral test of Americans’ attitudes on the issue since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
The election could give the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature authority to pass new abortion limits or to outlaw the procedure entirely, potentially reshaping the map of abortion access in the nation’s center. The vote, which has been planned since last year but took on far higher stakes after the federal right to abortion was eliminated, is expected to send a message far beyond Kansas as politicians nationwide weigh new abortion measures and watch for signs of how the public is reacting.
“Kansas is the bull’s-eye of the United States in terms of its geography, but it’s also the bull’s-eye where all the energy that has emerged from the Supreme Court decision has now focused,” said Pastor Randy Frazee, who leads a large church in suburban Kansas City, and who like many clergy members supports giving legislators the power to restrict abortions.
“Complementary Yellow Twin Sisters,” unknown artist
A good deal of my family is still in the Kansas City area. One of my great grandfathers was a Methodist circuit rider back in the day when Kansas had a healthy abolitionist movement. We’ll see if the old Kansas idea of Christian social justice is still there. FiveThirtyEight discusses “How The Fight To Ban Abortion Is Rooted In The ‘Great Replacement’ Theory.” It’s also firmly rooted in the idea that men own women and whatever activities they can do. This analysis was written by Alex Samuels and Monica Potts.
Throughout colonial America and into the 19th century, abortions were fairly common with the help of a midwife or other women and could be obtained until the point that you could feel movement inside, according to Lauren MacIvor Thompson, a historian of early-20th-century women’s rights and public health. Most abortions were induced through herbal or medicinal remedies and, like other medical interventions of the time, weren’t always effective or safe.
But the dynamics surrounding the procedure changed by the mid-19th century, as America’s elites began to fear a rising tide of immigrants from Ireland, Italy and other European countries (people often viewed as “inferior”), suffragists seeking new freedoms and recently freed Black people, whom these elites feared were reproducing at higher rates than the white population. Laws limiting abortion, it was believed, would ultimately force middle- and upper-class white women — who had the most access to detect and terminate unwanted pregnancies — to bear more white children.
“There were concerns that these other groups were demographically outpacing white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant women. And so they thought to limit the bodily autonomy of white women and limit access to contraception in order to force them to have children. That they felt would keep up with the demographic birth rate,” said Alex DiBranco, the co-founder and executive director of the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism.
It took time for the anti-abortion movement to attract supporters, and unlike today, religious groups were not originally an active part of it. Still, momentum built as a small but influential number of physicians began arguing that licensed male doctors — as opposed to female midwives — should care for women throughout the reproductive cycle. In the late 1850s, one of the leaders of the nascent anti-abortion movement, a surgeon named Horatio Robinson Storer, began arguing that he didn’t want the medical profession to be associated with abortion. He was able to push the relatively new American Medical Association to support his cause, and soon they were working to delegitimize midwives and enforce abortion bans. In an 1865 essay issued by order of the AMA, Storer went so far as to say of white women that “upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.”
The Family (John Gruen, Jane Wilson and Julia), Alice Neel, 1970
There’s a lot more in the article if you can stand to read all the misogyny, racism, and basic WASP nationalism. From Cameron Joseph, at VICE we learn exactly how deep the Republican Party’s hatred of women has become. “JD Vance Suggests People in ‘Violent’ Marriages Shouldn’t Get Divorced. The Ohio Republican Senate nominee claimed people “shift spouses like they change their underwear,” and that it had damaged a generation of children.”
“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term,’” Vance said.
“And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages,” Vance continued. “And that’s what I think all of us should be honest about, is we’ve run this experiment in real time. And what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy.”
Vance was responding to a moderator who referenced his grandparents’ relationship before asking, “What’s causing one generation to give up on fatherhood when the other one was so doggedly determined to stick it out, even in tough times?” And those comments came immediately after he brought up his grandparents’ relationship and how it differed from his parents’ generation. He described their marriage as “violent” in his best-selling book “Hillbilly Elegy,” though they’d reconciled by the time he came along and helped raise him, giving him a sense of safety and stability his mother was unable to provide.
“Culturally, something has clearly shifted. I think it’s easy but also probably true to blame the sexual revolution of the 1960s. My grandparents had an incredibly chaotic marriage in a lot of ways, but they never got divorced, right? They were together to the end, ’til death do us part. That was a really important thing to my grandmother and my grandfather. That was clearly not true by the 70s or 80s,” he said.
Terrace in Balcic, Nutzi Acontz, 1930
How about once women actually get choices, where they can take care of themselves and their families, that makes the horrid man in their life irrelevant? I endured one marriage of 20 years and believe me, never again. He’s working on his third btw.
So, one more topic I want to cover today is how the Republicans are trying to form a new kind of servitude on everyone but white Christian men and billionaires. First up from The Daily Beast: “The Four Stages of Republican Misinformation. The right has a tested formula to brainwash its base. From the Big Lie to attacking a 10-year-old rape victim, here’s how they do it.” This is written by Wajahat Ali.
The entire right-wing ecosystem unleashed its full arsenal to discredit the 10-year-old girl as a liar, intimidate her physician, demonize liberals, and continue its march backward, undeterred, in its quest to make Handmaid’s Tale cosplay a reality—in an America that subordinates and punishes women for having the audacity to control their own bodies.
To achieve its goal, the right uses a now familiar four-part strategy.
First, Republicans use any means necessary to achieve power and promote their unpopular, extremist, counter-majoritarian agenda.
Second, they create and promote disinformation and lies to frighten their base and Jedi mind-trick them into believing they are being oppressed by the actual victims.
Third, they create a specific villain, target them, and then attack them through scapegoating, smearing, and intimidation.
Fourth, they never apologize or back down once their lie is exposed, but instead, they double down, and in times of doubt, always pivot towards racism and fear-mongering.
To illustrate the strategy, look no further than the GOP’s rationalization of the Jan. 6 insurrection and embrace of the Big Lie—which gave them the successful blueprint to promote their hateful anti-abortion policies.
First, Donald Trump deliberately promoted lies and conspiracy theories about election fraud conducted by Democrats. Instead of accepting his defeat, he unleashed a premeditated, coordinated strategy to engage in a failed coup, which eventually resulted in thousands of his supporters overtaking the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn a free and fair election.
To get to the point where a 10-year-old rape victim has to cross state lines for an abortion, look to the GOP’s four-decade effort to kill Roe v. Wade. Republicans finally got their wish by packing the Supreme Court with right-wing extremists in black robes handpicked by the Federalist Society. Sen. Mitch McConnell stole Merrick Garland’s seat by refusing to hold a confirmation hearing, citing the need to wait until after the 2016 election. Then, he went against his own bullshit precedent and bum-rushed Justice Amy Coney Barrett on to the Court after millions of votes had already been cast in the 2020 election. That’s how they got a right-wing majority to dutifully overturn Roe, which led to Republican-controlled states imposing draconian laws that are punishing women and their health-care providers.
Second, the right-wing media ecosystem continues to amplify the Big Lie and fuel conspiracy theories, which has since resulted in a majority of GOP voters falsely believing Biden was not fairly elected. More than 100 Republicans who have won their recent primaries support the Big Lie, which has transformed into a MAGA litmus test for aspiring GOP candidates.
Anxiety, Edvard Munch,1894
There’s more. It’s a brutally factual and honest assessment. This leads to a story sent to me last night by BostonBoomer. This is from The Atlantic: “America’s Self-Obsession Is Killing Its Democracy. The U.S. still has a chance to fix itself before 2024. But when democracies start dying—as ours already has—they usually don’t recover.” It’s written by Brian Klaas. I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but we must wake everyone up to all of this.
American democracy is dying. There are plenty of medicines that would cure it. Unfortunately, our political dysfunction means we’re choosing not to use them, and as time passes, fewer treatments become available to us, even though the disease is becoming terminal. No major prodemocracy reforms have passed Congress. No key political figures who tried to overturn an American election have faced real accountability. The president who orchestrated the greatest threat to our democracy in modern times is free to run for reelection, and may well return to office.
Our current situation started with a botched diagnosis. When Trump first rose to political prominence, much of the American political class reacted with amusement, seeing him as a sideshow. Even if he won, they thought, he’d tweet like a populist firebrand while governing like a Romney Republican, constrained by the system. But for those who had watched Trump-like authoritarian strongmen rise in Turkey, India, Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Venezuela, Trump was never entertaining. He was ominously familiar.
At issue was a classic frame-of-reference problem. America’s political culture is astonishingly insular. Turn on cable news and it’s all America, all the time. Other countries occasionally make cameos, but the story is still about us. (Poland is discussed if Air Force One goes to Warsaw; Iran flits into view only in relation to Washington’s nuclear diplomacy; Madagascar appears only in cartoon form, mostly featuring talking animals that don’t actually live there.) Our self-obsession means that whenever authoritarianism rises abroad, it’s mentioned briefly, if at all. Have you ever spotted a breathless octobox of talking heads on CNN or Fox News debating the death of democracy in Turkey, Sri Lanka, or the Philippines?
That’s why most American pundits and journalists used an “outsider comes to Washington” framework to process Trump’s campaign and his presidency, when they should have been fitting every fresh fact into an “authoritarian populist” framework or a “democratic death spiral” framework. While debates raged over tax cuts and offensive tweets, the biggest story was often obscured: The system itself was at risk.
Even today, too many think of Trump more as Sarah Palin in 2012 rather than Viktor Orbán in 2022. They wrongly believe that the authoritarian threat is over and that January 6 was an isolated event from our past, rather than a mild preview of our future. That misreading is provoking an underreaction from the political establishment. And the worst may be yet to come.
This is another long read, but please check it out! I think I’ve saddled you with enough angst and anxiety for a while. Oh, and sorry, but I am on a Queen binge recently. So enjoy the killer lyrics and solo guitar by Brian May, the Freddie vocals, and the artwork that is this video.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
While the sun hangs in the sky and the desert has sand
While the waves crash in the sea and meet the land
While there’s a wind and the stars and the rainbow
‘Til the mountains crumble into the plain
Oh, yes, we’ll keep on tryin’
Tread that fine line
Oh, we’ll keep on tryin’, yeah
Just passing our time
While we live according to race, colour or creed
While we rule by blind madness and pure greed
Our lives dictated by tradition, superstition, false religion
Through the aeons, and on and on
Oh, yes, we’ll keep on tryin’
We’ll tread that fine line
Oh-oh, we’ll keep on tryin’
‘Til the end of time
‘Til the end of time
Through the sorrow, all through our splendour
Don’t take offence at my innuendo
You can be anything you want to be
Just turn yourself into anything you think that you could ever be
Be free with your tempo, be free, be free
Surrender your ego, be free, be free to yourself
If there’s a God or any kind of justice under the sky
If there’s a point, if there’s a reason to live or die
If there’s an answer to the questions, we feel bound to ask
Show yourself, destroy our fears, release your mask
Oh, yes, we’ll keep on trying
Hey, tread that fine line
Yeah, we’ll keep on smiling, yeah (yeah, yeah)
And whatever will be, will be
We’ll keep on trying
We’ll just keep on trying
‘Til the end of time
‘Til the end of time
‘Til the end of time
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