He was asked if White nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military.
Finally, Friday Reads: Texas blames its Victims
Posted: March 22, 2024 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: 18, 22, 26, 32, divided we'll fall, Gun Trafficking from Florida and Texas Gun Dealers, Texas hate laws, Together we'll stand, violence against women 8 Comments
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
It’s been hard to avoid Texas and Florida’s policy and political decisions these days. They’ve both taken a hard right turn and have elected officials who frequently create what is at the root of their biggest complaints. Chris Hayes sent me straight down the rabbit hole of Texas Gun Dealers and Smugglers when I first heard that Mexico was suing U.S. Gun Manufacturers. Russel L. Honoré woke me to the instances of gangs in Haiti and the breakdown of governance and its relationship to gun Smugglers from Florida. Both of the states are banning books, punishing women who require reproductive care, and terrorizing their LGBTQ communities. Both Texas and Florida have had instances of terrible mass shootings and have done nothing to address the root causes. They basically have no control over the explosion of the demand and access to automatic weapons. They appear indifferent that much of that demand comes from arms smugglers who constantly buy large amounts of guns and send them south.
No one needs a weapon of war. It’s a bigger version of the state of Vermont, whose lax gun laws have historically created a problem for its neighbors. Vermont has recently strengthened its laws and now stands as #18 for gun law strength. The biggest problem within Vermont was suicide by gun. They’ve now instituted a program and red-flag laws specifically tailored to address the issue. These statistics are from Everytown Research & Policy, which allows you to track many different public policies for your city and state. Texas is rated #32, while Florida is rated #22. Louisiana is #26. The South is plagued by a gun culture.
We don’t hear much about this, but the Biden-Harris DOJ has an initiative to stop the flow of guns out of the United States that are going to our neighbors in the South. Its primary focus is on the gun traffic to Mexico, which goes directly to the Cartels. Did you know that Mexican laws make it illegal to purchase or have a semiautomatic weapon? It’s our guns that are used to terrorize the locals and send them fleeing to us. It also gives these same folks money to purchase Fentynal to take care of the Opioid addicts in the US who use it in place of the OxyCotin they were given by their doctors who were told by Big Pharma Purdue that its pain drug wasn’t addictive. It is. It’s like the 21st Century Triangle Trade. (Read that link. It goes to UMass Law and a discussion of the company’s bankruptcy and how the Sackler family was shielded from liability.)
The Biden-Harris Administration continues to take significant and historic actions to disrupt the trafficking of illicit fentanyl and dismantle firearms trafficking networks. Drug traffickers’ supply of firearms enables them to grow their enterprises and move deadly drugs, including illicit fentanyl, into the United States. They use these weapons, which consist of everything from handguns to high caliber and assault weapons, against the Mexican people, including law enforcement and military personnel who try to stop their operations. That’s why discovering, disrupting, and dismantling firearms trafficking networks is critical to the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to combat illicit fentanyl.
This is from the Arms Control Association. It’s written by Chad Lawhorm. “Mexican Lawsuit Against U.S. Gun Firms to Proceed.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has revived Mexico’s $10 billion lawsuit against U.S. gun manufacturers, which previously was dismissed by a lower court.
Despite the broad immunity granted to gun-makers by the U.S. Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, the Boston-based appeals court unanimously found that Mexico’s lawsuit “plausibly alleges a type of claim that is statutorily exempt from the [act’s] general prohibition,” Reuters reported on Jan. 22.
Alejandro Celorio Alcántara, the lawyer leading the lawsuit for the Mexican government, told El País in an interview on Jan. 25 that the decision to revive the case was “historic.”
“Not only will we have the opportunity to present our evidence, we will be able to ask the defendant companies to share their evidence with us…. That’s the kind of information we’re going to get in litigation. It could be a gold mine,” he said.
The appeals court decision overturns a lower court’s 2022 dismissal, which found that foreign governments cannot sue under U.S. law. It marks a significant legal advancement for Mexico, supported by U.S. gun control advocates.
Mexico has argued that the actions of gun manufacturers have contributed directly to the violence within its national borders.
The lawsuit seeks financial damages and aims to hold these manufacturers accountable for their role in international arms trafficking and related harms, such as declining investment and economic activity in Mexico.
Other companies named in the suit are Beretta USA, Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, Colt’s Manufacturing Co., and Glock Inc. All have denied wrongdoing.
The U.S. law typically shields gun manufacturers from liability for the improper use of their products. The gun companies have argued that Mexico does not have legal standing to sue. (See ACT, September 2022.)
The lower court agreed with the immunity argument, ruling that the law prohibits legal action brought by foreign governments. The appeals court determined that the law was designed only to protect lawful firearms-related commerce and not the problem Mexico identified, namely, companies accused of aiding and abetting illegal gun sales by knowingly facilitating the trafficking of firearms into the country.
According to Celorio Alcántara, the gun-makers unsuccessfully attempted to distance themselves from the issue of gun trafficking by describing the scale and scope of supply chains and the number of individuals involved in those processes.
Mexico, on the other hand, focused on the U.S. law and why it did not apply. “We pointed out that [it] has no extraterritorial effect, that there is a direct violation of the machine gun export ban, and that the defendant companies violate state and federal laws,” Celorio Alcántara said.
The decision to revive the case could pave the way for other litigation against gun manufacturers on similar grounds, potentially affecting how firearms are marketed, distributed, and regulated within the United States and internationally.
“Other countries will surely be able to analyze whether this decision…gives them a window to sue, such as Jamaica, Canada, or other countries that are suffering from the same problem,” Celorio Alcántara said.
As the Mexican case proceeds, it likely will encounter more legal and political hurdles given the power of the gun lobby, contentious gun control debates in the United States, and intricate legal arguments surrounding the law.
Here is an academic publication on the topic. “Arms Trafficking Between the U.S. and Mexico. An examination of this complex issue — and why it often gets lost in the ongoing border debates.” As you can see, this is a typical ploy by the powerful men. Blame the victims at the border, but don’t blame the gun traffickers who are your neighbors.
The right to own a firearm is guaranteed in the constitutions of both the U.S. and Mexico, but the chances of a Mexican citizen legally obtaining a gun in Mexico are slim.
Gun laws in Mexico are highly restrictive–there is only one gun store from which Mexicans can buy firearms legally in the entire country. Meanwhile, the U.S. has the largest legal gun market in the world.
But many of the guns legally purchased in the U.S. do not stay in the U.S.
Over 2.5 million illicit American guns have crossed into Mexico over the last decade. Over that time, more than 215,000 people have been murdered in Mexico.
According to the Center for American Progress, the U.S. is the primary source of weapons used in violent crimes in Mexico. In 2018, more than 20,000 of the 30,000 intentional murders in Mexico were committed with firearms.
Most of the guns trafficked into Mexico are military and assault style rifles. For years, the Mexican government has urged the U.S. to reinstate the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which made it “unlawful for a person to manufacture, transfer, or possess” a semi-automatic assault weapon. The law was adopted with a sunset clause and expired in 2004, even though the majority of Americans supported a ban at the time.
Today, 67% of Americans support a ban on military and assault-style weapons.
The semi-automatic, military style weapons that cross the U.S.-Mexico border, which were formerly banned under U.S. federal law, are now legal unless banned by state or local law. Arizona, for example, has not banned semi-automatic weapons, nor does the state require private sellers to initiate a background check when transferring a firearm.
More than 90% of Americans support background checks for all gun sales, yet a loophole in federal gun laws–known as the “private sale exemption” or “gun show loophole”–exempts unlicensed sellers from having to perform a background check before selling a firearm. This exemption helps legally purchased U.S. guns easily find their way into the hands of gun traffickers.
For some in Mexico, firearms trafficking is just another way to earn a living. Traffickers can purchase firearms in the U.S. and turn around to sell them in Mexico. They can get upwards of three times what they spent in Arizona at a gun show or through a private U.S. seller. Organized crime and drug trafficking operations take advantage of this supply chain and traffic both in bulk and little by little.
Between 2011 and 2016, over 70% of the 106,000 guns used in violent crimes in Mexico originated in the U.S. Those 160,000 guns represent a small fraction of the total number of weapons crossing the border from the U.S. into Mexico. In 2019, around 28,465 weapons, mostly handguns, were legally sold to Mexico. Yet, it is estimated that between 2010 and 2012, nearly 213,000 legally purchased firearms in the U.S. were illegally smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border. These 213,000 firearms represented 2.2% of arms sales in the U.S. during that time, valued at around $200 million.
U.S.-sourced guns are not only contributing to lethal crime and political instability in Mexico, but also Central America. From 2014 to 2016, 49% of guns used in the commission of a crime seized in El Salvador, and 45% seized in Honduras, were originally purchased in the U.S. This supply chain leads to the displacement of Central Americans fleeing violence in their home countries.
A Black Transgender friend who moved from New Orleans, where she frequently performed in the Drag Cabaret where I provided music, sent out this missive from Houston last week. I want to share it with you. “Black trans woman gunned down in early-morning hours in southwest Houston. Diamond Brigman, 36, was transgender, which left some wondering if she was targeted when she was gunned down last weekend.” A friend of mine was chased off the street by a woman wielding a knife early this week. She also was one of the performers I worked with. State officials are complicit in these deaths.
On Tuesday night, friends gathered to mourn the death of a woman who was shot and killed over the weekend.
Diamond Brigman was transgender, which left some wondering if she was targeted.
She was only 36.
Brigman’s friends said her killing is a stark reminder of the violence that trans women, especially Black trans women, face. She was shot and killed while standing on the side of Country Creek Street in southwest Houston early Saturday morning.
A little after 1 a.m. that morning, Houston police said surveillance video showed a white Chevy Malibu circle the area several times before a man got out of the passenger side of the car and opened fire on Brigman.
“Shot numerous pistol rounds out of the car. And, of course, the result of that is this individual dead on the side of the road,” an investigator said at the scene.
The shooter was described as being about 5 feet, 5 inches tall. Police said the shooter and the driver ditched the car and ran. They still haven’t been found.
“She was larger than life she had a lot of energy and always smiling and personable,” Joelle Espeut said.
Espeut is a local trans advocate and a friend of Brigman. She said crimes like this shouldn’t be happening in 2024.
“The rate and level of violence that is inflicted on Black trans women is parallel to the violence that is inflicted upon Black cisgender women,” Espeut said.
She said the majority of the killers are the same, too.
“Both Black trans women and Black cisgender women are being killed and murdered through intimate partner violence,” Espeut said.
Diamond Brigman. Say her name. Violence against women continues to plague this country. “When Your Home State Also Becomes Your Abuser’ The leading cause of death for pregnant women is homicide, most often by an abusive partner with a gun. And Texas is forcing victims to stay pregnant while making it easier for abusers to get guns.” This is from HuffPo. It’s reported by Alanna Vagianos.
The leading cause of death among pregnant and postpartum women in the U.S. is homicide, most often by an abusive partner with a gun. Pregnant and postpartum women are more than twice as likely to be murdered than to die from sepsis, hypertensive disorders or hemorrhage.
Experts tell HuffPost other states with abortion bans are also seeing an increase in domestic violence, but Texas stands out for a few reasons. The state was the first to severely restrict abortion in 2021, forcing women to stay pregnant nearly a year before Roe fell and exposing domestic violence victims to more violence with fewer ways to escape. At the same time, the Lone Star state has the largest rate of gun sales in the country and continues to have lax firearm restrictions. The state is so firearm friendly that gun rights groups chose it as the testing ground for a Supreme Court case that will determine if domestic abusers get to keep their guns.
In the last decade, the amount of women shot and killed by an abuser has nearly doubled in Texas.
Ah, Texas! Such a Pro-life Haven!
The cruelty continues in the MAGAtrocity. “HOUSE REPUBLICANS WANT TO BAN UNIVERSAL FREE SCHOOL LUNCHES. The Republican Study Committee’s annual budget also calls to permanently defund UNRWA and eliminate the National Labor Relations Board.” This is from The Intercept and is written by Prem Thakker. It doesn’t get any more pro-life than starving children to death and letting women reach death’s door in nonviable pregnancies like the story told by this woman in the Arizona State Legislature. “A Democratic senator needs an abortion. She told her colleagues about Arizona’s ‘cruel’ laws. While Eva Burch spoke on the Senate floor about her planned abortion, almost all of her GOP colleagues found something else to do.”
This is also part of their budget plan to kill everyone that’s not enriching them. ” House Republican budget calls for raising the retirement age for Social Security. A budget by the Republican Study Committee, a group of more than 170 GOP lawmakers, highlights how many in the party would seek to govern if Republicans win in November. And of course, Louisiana’s new MAGAtrocity Governo has this on his agenda. “Under Jeff Landry, Louisiana Republicans target unions, workers’ comp, child labor law. The bills would limit collective bargaining, change how unions pay dues and raise the bar for workers’ compensation claims.”
Blame and punish the victim. It’s a Republican policy thing. These things wouldn’t even pass Richard Nixon’s muster. It’s a game to see how cruel we can be!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Together we’ll stand, divided we’ll fall
Come on now people, let’s get on the ball and work together
Come on, come on let’s work together, now, now people
Because together we will stand, every boy, every girl, and a man
Before when things go wrong, as they sometimes will
And the road you travel, it stays all uphill
Let’s work together, come on, come on, let’s work together, ah
You know together we will stand, every boy, girl, woman, and a man
Oh well now, two or three minutes, two or three hours
What does it matter now, in this life of ours
Let’s work together, come on, come on
Let’s work together, now, now people
Because together we will stand, every boy, every woman, and a man
Oh, come on
Oh come on, let’s work together
Oh well now, make someone happy, make someone smile
Let’s all work together and make life worthwhile
Let’s work together, come on, come on
Let’s work together, now, now people
Because together we will stand, every boy, girl, woman, and a man
Ah, yeah
Well now, together we will stand, every boy, girl, woman, and a man
Ah, yeah
Songwriters: Wilbert Harrison
Let’s Work Together lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
Lazy Caturday Reads: A Mixed Bag of Stories
Posted: May 13, 2023 Filed under: abortion rights, Donald Trump, Twitter | Tags: abortion in Texas, animal cruelty, Chris Licht, CNN, CNN Trump town hall, Diane Feinstein, Elon Musk, Linda Yaccarino, Racism, Tommy Tuberville, violence against women, white supremacistis 11 Comments
August Macke, Still Life with a Cat.
Happy Caturday!!
It has been another exhausting week, and I’m tired of dealing with Trump’s poisonous effect on our country. Unfortunately his evil influence is still affecting a large portion of the GOP electorate. If only he would just disappear. But that’s not going to happen. We are stuck with him for the time being, and we have to face that reality. So I’ll include a few Trump stories in a mixed bag of other topics.
I really hate to post this story, but I’m going to so you know to watch out for this. I just discovered that Elon Musk has enabled animal cruelty tweets and videos on Twitter.
This is from Ben Collins, the disinformation and extremism reporter at NBC News: Cat and dog torture videos litter Twitter, adding to concerns about moderation.
Graphic videos of animal abuse have circulated widely on Twitter in recent weeks, generating outrage and renewed concern over the platform’s moderation practices.
One such video, in which a kitten appears to be placed inside a blender and then killed, has become so notorious that reactions to it have become their own genre of internet content.
Laura Clemens, 46, said her 11-year-old son came home from his school in London two weeks ago and asked if she had seen the video.
“There’s something about a cat in a blender,” Clemens remembered her son saying.
Clemens said she went on Twitter and searched for “cat,” and the search box suggested searching for “cat in a blender.”
Clemens said that she clicked on the suggested search term and a gruesome video of what appeared to be a kitten being killed inside of a blender appeared instantly. For users who have not manually turned off autoplay, the video will begin rolling instantly. NBC News was able to replicate the same process to surface the video on Wednesday.
Clemens said she is grateful her child asked her about the video instead of simply going on Twitter and typing in the word “cat” by himself.
Cats, by Franz Marc
So the autofill function on Twitter was guiding people to these horrific tweets.
The spread of the video as well as its presence in Twitter’s suggested searches is part of a worrying trend of animal cruelty videos that have littered the social media platform following Elon Musk’s takeover, which included mass layoffs and deep cuts to the company’s content moderation and safety teams.
Last weekend, gory videos from two violent events in Texas spread on Twitter, with some users saying that the images had been pushed into the platform’s algorithmic “For You” feed.
The animal abuse videos appear to predate those videos. Various users have tweeted that they have seen the cat video, with some trying to get Musk’s attention on the issue — some dating back to early May. Clemens said she flagged the video on May 3 to Twitter’s support account and Ella Irwin, the vice president of trust and safety at Twitter and one of Musk’s closest advisers….
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, told NBC News that he believes the company likely dismantled a series of safeguards meant to stop these kinds of autocomplete problems.
Of course Musk has fired all the people who used deal with issues like this. NBC reached out to Twitter about this problem and received no response, but apparently by Friday Twitter had completely turned off all search bar autofill suggestions.
Now a little comic relief. Here’s a suggestion for Dakinikat in her ongoing struggle to get her cat Keely to swallow her meds.
Dave Paresh at Wired has a story about Twitter’s incoming CEO: Twitter’s New CEO, Linda Yaccarino, Has a Fearsome To-Do List.
LINDA YACCARINO IS going to have to change her tune. As a long-time executive overseeing ad sales at global television giant NBCUniversal, she spent years fighting social media companies for the billions of dollars that advertisers divide up every year between old and new media….
At Twitter, Yaccarino will have to spin her knowledge of social media’s weaknesses into an asset and start competing with the traditional media industry that she has championed since long before online social networks were even a thing. Elon Musk announced on Friday that Yaccarino will oversee business operations while he focuses on Twitter’s technology and design as executive chair and CTO.
Together, Yaccarino and Musk will try to stop the drain of users and advertisers of the past several months and start to formulate his vision of turning Twitter into an “everything app,” with digital payments tools and other features Musk has yet to clearly articulate. All that will make Yaccarino’s to-do list more wide-ranging than she ever had in TV, and she must do it at a company still reeling from Musk’s sometimes chaotic revamp and his laying off of most of its employees. Here are five tasks awaiting her….
Yaccarino’s deftness at getting advertisers to open up their checkbooks earned her a huge role at NBC. She persuaded them to keep spending on TV spots even as consumers devoted more time to online services, and to try out new streaming options, such as NBC’s Peacock.
The challenge at Twitter is different. Most advertisers want to avoid association with questionable content, but Musk has embraced controversy, chopping down teams that moderate content and monitore potential racial and political bias in Twitter’s recommendation systems. He also relaxed rules for combating hate speech against transgender users, censored journalists and critics, and welcomed back users his predecessors had banned for breaking Twitter’s content rules, including former US president Donald Trump.
Good luck to Yaccarino. That sounds like the hopeful descriptions of Trump staffers who try to control him or at least minimize the damage he causes. Musk is just as much of a narcissistic psychopath as Trump, if not worse. Read more at Wired if you’re interested.
Breakfast with the cat, Rutholph Epp, German
People are still talking about Trump’s disastrous “town hall” on CNN.
Charlie Nash at Mediaite: Republican at Trump Town Hall Says Many in Audience Were ‘Disgusted’ or ‘Bewildered’ By Ex-President.
Many audience members at CNN’s town hall with former President Donald Trump on Wednesday were “disgusted” and “bewildered” by the spectacle, but were told to be respectful and not to boo, according to a report.
“The floor manager came out ahead of time and said, Please do not boo, please be respectful. You were allowed to applaud,” claimed Republican political consultant Matthew Bartlett in an interview with Puck News senior political correspondent Tara Palmeri on Thursday.
“And I think that set the tone where people were going to try their best to keep this between the navigational beacons, and that if they felt compelled to applaud, they would, but they weren’t going to have an outburst or they weren’t going to boo an answer,” he said.
Bartlett claimed that, while many in the audience applauded and cheered the former president, “there were also people that sat there quietly disgusted or bewildered.” He estimated that while around half of the audience expressed vocal support for Trump, the other half sat in silence. Bartlett also alleged that Trump repeatedly “lost the audience” when he spoke about topics like January 6 or the results of the 2020 election, despite the appearance on CNN that the audience was consistently on his side.
“In a TV setting, you hear the applause, but you don’t see the disgust,” Bartlett told Palmeri. “So Trump did not have the entire room on his side, make no mistake, even if it certainly came across that way on TV.”
Well, isn’t that special? CNN’s Christ Licht has a lot of answer for. But he still thinks the “town hall” was a success. He didn’t take it well when staffers criticized his decision to hold what amounted to a Trump rally on in prime time.
Alex Griffing at Mediaite: CNN’s Oliver Darcy Reportedly Scolded By Boss Chris Licht Over ‘Emotional’ Trump Town Hall Coverage: ‘They Put the Fear of God Into Him.’
CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy was reportedly scolded by his boss Chris Licht, the chairman and CEO of the network, over his critical coverage of the network’s Trump town hall on Wednesday night.
Puck’s Dylan Byers reported Friday that Licht “summoned” Darcy “and his editor to a meeting with himself and top executives in which they told him that his coverage of Trump town hall had been too emotional and stressed the importance of remaining dispassionate.”
Darcy reported on the town hall after the event, writing, “It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening.”
Jonelle Summerfield. Afternoon Tea for One
He offered some kind words for Kaitlan Collins, who moderated the event, calling her “as tough and knowledgable of an interviewer as they come.” He noted that “she fact-checked Trump throughout the 70-minute town hall.” On the whole, his analysis was critical of the network.
Byers, a veteran media reporter who has worked everywhere from NBC to Politico to CNN, added further detail:
“summoned Darcy and his editor Jon Passantino to a meeting with himself, CNN comms chief Kris Coratti, editorial executive vice president Virginia Moseley and senior vice president of global news Rachel Smolkin, in which they told him that his coverage had been too emotional and repeatedly stressed the importance of remaining dispassionate when covering the news, be it CNN or any other media organization.”
“Darcy stood by his work and pushed back on the ‘emotional’ characterization, one source with knowledge of the meeting said. But afterward two sources who heard about the meeting described him as visibly shaken,” Byers reported.
“They put the fear of God into him,” Byers reported another source saying. Darcy took over Brian Stelter’s Reliable Sources newsletter after Licht ousted Stelter at the network.
For Pete’s sake, Darcy is a media critic. He’s supposed to express his opinions. Chris Licht doesn’t seem to know much about journalism.
Diane Feinstein has finally returned to Washington and will again fill her seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Perhaps now Biden’s judicial appointments will resume getting approval. But there are concerns about Feinstein’s health.
From Paul McCloud at Rolling Stone: Feinstein’s Health Crisis Goes Back Farther than We Knew.
DIANNE FEINSTEIN, 89, returned to Congress this week, ending an almost three-month medical absence that highlighted her advanced age and deteriorating health. But her decline, and the problems it entails for American democracy, date back farther and go deeper than has been publicly known.
Multiple sources tell Rolling Stone that in recent years Feinstein’s office had an on-call system — unbeknownst to Feinstein herself — to prevent the senator from ever walking around the Capitol on her own. At any given moment there was a staff member ready to jump up and stroll alongside the senator if she left her office, worried about what she’d say to reporters if left unsupervised. The system has been in place for years.
“They will not let her leave by herself, but she doesn’t even know it,” says Jamarcus Purley, a former staffer.
Senators juggle a heavy schedule of votes, hearings and meetings on a wide range of subjects. Momentary lapses and mixups about a topic are far from unheard of. But over the last several years, interviews with Feinstein devolved into confusion on a near-daily basis. A familiar pattern would emerge: Feinstein would make an unexpected stance on a bill or policy position, only for her staff to quickly follow up by email to correct the record. It got to the point where reporters would pause before rushing to publish an otherwise-newsworthy declaration because of the inevitability of staff reversing her statement.
By Lotte Laserstein
Feinstein once notably seemed to forget she had relinquished her role as third in line to the presidency. As the longest-serving member of the Senate majority, she would traditionally serve as president pro tempore, behind only the vice president and speaker of the House in the line of succession. Feinstein announced last October via a written statement she would voluntarily give up the title. But when asked about it three weeks latershe told a reporter she was still considering what to do. The staffer quickly corrected the Senator.
It’s a sad career coda for a groundbreaking lawmaker, who has said she will retire when her term expires at the end of next year. Feinstein joined the Senate in 1992 as the first female senator from California, accomplishing a series of firsts as she rose through the chamber’s ranks. As well as advancing landmark gun control and marriage equality laws, she became the first woman to lead the Senate’s intelligence panel in 2009. In 2017, became the first woman to chair the Judiciary Committee.
There’s much more at the link.
Another Senator who should definitely retire is Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville, who wants to control the Defense Department’s abortion policies and thinks that white supremacists should be welcomed in the U.S. military.
Megan Leibowitz at NBC News: Military promotions impasse drags on as Sen. Tuberville defends blockade.
Dozens of military promotions continue to languish in the Senate as GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville digs in on blocking typically routine approvals over his opposition to the Pentagon’s abortion policy.
About 200 defense-related promotions are awaiting Senate action, but Tuberville has indicated he has no plans to ease up on his blockade unless the Defense Department reverses course on an abortion policy for service members and their dependents that was announced in October.
Since March, Tuberville has been using a procedural tactic to slow promotions that are often quickly approved in the Senate by unanimous consent. One senator’s objection, however, can stall the approval process.
The Alabama senator’s moves have provoked bipartisan backlash, including from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. Asked in a press conference Wednesday about Tuberville’s holds, McConnell replied, “No, I don’t support putting a hold on military nominations. I don’t support that.”
Tuberville responded to McConnell’s remarks on Thursday saying the Pentagon has not been responsive.
“I’m not talking to anybody — crickets from anybody in the military, you know, to work this out,” Tuberville told reporters.
When reached for comment, a Pentagon spokesperson said in a statement that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin “and the Department continue to engage Senator Tuberville and his office in good faith and have directly relayed how his hold on our general and flag officers have risks to our military readiness and severely limit the Department’s ability to ensure strategic and operational success.”
Still life with cat, Thomas Hart Benton
Philip Bump wrote about Tuberville’s remarks about white supremacists at The Washington Post: Sen. Tuberville rises to the defense of racists in the armed forces.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) offered an unusual criticism of the Biden administration in a radio interview this week.
“We, our military and [Defense Secretary Lloyd] Austin put out an order to stand down and all military across the country, saying we’re going to run out the White nationalists, people that don’t believe how we believe,” he told NPR affiliate WBHM. “And that’s not how we do it in this country.”
“They call them that,” he replied. “I call them Americans.”
Tuberville was elected to the Senate with President Donald Trump’s support in the 2020 election that Trump lost. Even before taking office, Tuberville pledged to oppose the electors cast by states Trump lost in an effort to slow or block Joe Biden’s ascension to the presidency.
Trump-adjacent rhetoric: that Biden and his administration are trying to villainize the right as being riddled with racists and domestic terrorists. It’s just that he got it backward. Instead of suggesting that decent, hard-working Americans were being cast as racists, he’s suggesting that racists are simply decent, hard-working Americans.
The idea that Biden (and Austin by extension) are using accusations of White nationalism as a cudgel was a central part of Tucker Carlson’s rhetoric back in his Fox News days. Immediately after Biden’s inauguration, Carlson highlighted a portion of the new president’s speech in which he — obviously alluding to the riot at the Capitol two weeks before — swore to uproot extremism.
Biden promised to “confront and … defeat” the “rise of political extremism, white supremacy, [and] domestic terrorism” that the country was seeing.
“The question is,” Carlson said in response, “what does it mean to wage war on white supremacists? Can somebody tell us in very clear language what a white supremacist is?”
Tuberville is a real looney-tune, and I’m much more worried about what he will do next than I am about Diane Feinstein’s cognitive decline.
I’m going to end with another horror story–this time about abortion rights.
From the AP, via The Washington Post: A Texas woman was fatally shot by her boyfriend after she got an abortion, police say.
A man who didn’t want his girlfriend to get an abortion fatally shot her during a confrontation in a Dallas parking lot, police said.
Tuesday Reads: The News Is Surreal
Posted: October 19, 2021 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Bill Cassidy, Capitol insurrection, Colin Powell, Donald Trump, January 6 Committee, rape, Steve Bannon, surrealism, violence against women 11 Comments
Bridget Bate Tichenor, Untitled
Good Morning!!
Today the House January 6 Committee will vote to find Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress, and Trump has of course filed a lawsuit to prevent them getting documents related to his attempted coup. The Washington Post reports:
On the Bannon contempt vote:
Bannon was a private citizen when he spoke to Trump ahead of the attack, the committee said, and Trump has not asserted any such executive privilege claims to the panel itself.
Koga Harue Umi, The Sea, 1929
“Mr. Bannon appears to have played a multi-faceted role in the events of January 6th, and the American people are entitled to hear his first-hand testimony regarding his actions,” the committee wrote in the resolution.
The resolution lists many ways in which Bannon was involved in the leadup to the insurrection, including reports that he encouraged Trump to focus on Jan. 6, the day Congress certified the presidential vote, and his comments on Jan. 5 that “all hell is going to break loose” the next day.
Once the committee votes on the Bannon contempt measure, it will go to the full House for a vote and then on to the Justice Department, which would decide whether to prosecute.
Trump has also found time to weigh in on Colin Powell’s death. The Hill: Trump criticizes media for treating Powell ‘beautifully’ in death.
Former President Trump lambasted the media on Tuesday for what he said was too-favorable coverage of former Secretary of State Colin Powell after his death on Monday.
“Wonderful to see Colin Powell, who made big mistakes on Iraq and famously, so-called weapons of mass destruction, be treated in death so beautifully by the Fake News Media. Hope that happens to me someday,” Trump said in a statement.
Trump called Powell “a classic RINO,” an acronym for “Republican in name only.”
“He made plenty of mistakes, but anyway, may he rest in peace!” Trump added.
Classy.
Trump also attacked Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy. The Hill: Trump goes after Cassidy after senator says he wouldn’t support him for president in 2024.
Former President Trump blasted Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) on Monday after the senator said in an interview he would not vote for the real estate mogul if he ran for president again in 2024.
Cassidy during an interview that aired Sunday on “Axios on HBO” said that he did not believe Trump would be the GOP presidential nominee again.
“President Trump is the first president, in the Republican side at least, to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in four years. Elections are about winning,” Cassidy told Axios’s Mike Allen….
In a statement on Monday, Trump called Cassidy a “RINO,” an acronym for “Republican in name only,” and reiterated a notion he had hoisted on other Republicans that Cassidy had “begged” for his endorsement in 2020 “and used it all over the place to win re-election.”
Eugenio Granell The Pi Birds Night Flight
“Now, Wacky Bill Cassidy can’t walk down the street in Louisiana, a State I won by almost 20 points,” the Trump statement read. “He could not even be elected dog catcher today, the great people curse him.”
Trump did defeat President Biden by nearly 20 points in 2020 in Louisiana, winning about 58.5 percent of the vote. Cassidy did even better, winning 59.3 percent of the vote.
“Wacky Bill is a totally ineffective Senator, but Louisiana does have a great Senator in John Kennedy,” Trump said, referring to the state’s other GOP senator, whom he endorsed over the summer soon after Kennedy indicated he would run for reelection.
Cassidy was among the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump for inciting an insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, though Trump was ultimately acquitted after leaving office later that month.
It’s still very difficult for me to believe that this moron was actually president.
According to historians Thomas Lecaque and J.L. Tomlin at The Bulwark, Bannon is setting the stage for another insurrection: Steve Bannon Out in the Open. The erstwhile Trump adviser is refusing to talk to the Jan. 6 committee, but most of his energetic anti-democratic activities are in plain sight.
…Bannon’s troubling activities did not stop after January 6. Far from it. He is still out in the streets, at rallies, on conference calls, and on his podcast trumpeting it to the heavens: The insurrection isn’t over, it’s only just begun.
On September 22, the day before the committee issued its subpoena, Bannon more or less confirmed his involvement with January 6th. He has continued to push the idea that the Biden administration is illegitimate—“We told you from the very beginning, just expose it, just expose it, never back down, never give up and this thing will implode”—and said that he wanted to help “kill this [Biden] administration in the crib.”
Bannon is neither hiding nor defensively trying to justify his past actions. Rather, he is continuing to push the Big Lie and all of its permutations, tying together a web of far-right ideas and allies. Like most good propagandists, he knows that the veil between fact and belief is very thin in a highly partisan political environment. What pushes an overt lie into semi-gospel is sometimes merely it’s repetition. Bannon’s podcast, “War Room,” continues to promote conspiracy theories about the 2020 election—the day after his subpoena running a segment titled “50k Illegal Ballots in One County Alone.” His guests have included Trumpist members of Congress, like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene; conspiracy theorists Jack Posobiec and Mike Lindell; anti-vaxers; and other subpoenaed Trump administration figures. Topics run the gamut from the border to the debt ceiling to “how schools are indoctrinating kids” to “the battle of Lepanto” (sure to appeal to far-right Crusade-cosplaying insurrectionists and mass murderers alike). Perhaps most provokingly given his subpoena defiance, an episode on October 13 was entitled “The Continued Search for the Truth of January 6th.”
f Bannon were only a podcaster, were only pushing his ideas on one of the many far-right channels that have popped up in the last half-decade, that would be bad enough. But Bannon is incredibly active in person as well—a natural organizer and demagogue. It’s worth taking a look at just three of the events at which he has recently spoken.
Read all the details at the link.
Skunder Boghossian, Night Flight of Dread and Delight
At the Washington Post, authoritarianism expert Brian Klaas wrote about the history of election audits: Opinion: Republican ‘election audits’ have been used before — by dictators.
Thursday Reads
Posted: May 27, 2021 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: China, Covid-19, immunity, Joe Biden, mass shootings, Q-Anon, Sam Cassidy, violence against women, Wuhan lab leak theory 31 CommentsGood Morning!!
On Tuesday, I wrote about the sudden mainstreaming of the so-called “lab leak theory” of the origins of Covid-19 in China. Today David Leonhardt has an “explainer” of this sudden attention to this long-dismissed notion.
Suddenly, talk of the Wuhan lab-leak theory seems to be everywhere.
President Biden yesterday called on U.S. intelligence officials to “redouble their efforts” to determine the origin of Covid-19 and figure out whether the virus that causes it accidentally leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Major publications and social media have recently been filled with discussion of the subject.
The origin of the virus remains unclear. Many scientists have long believed that the most likely explanation is that it jumped from an animal to a person, possibly at a food market in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. Animal-to human transmission — known as zoonotic spillover — is a common origin story for viruses, including Ebola and some bird flus.But some scientists have pointed to another possibility: that it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. As in other laboratories, researchers there sometimes modify viruses, to understand and treat them.
“It is most likely that this is a virus that arose naturally, but we cannot exclude the possibility of some kind of a lab accident,” Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told senators yesterday.
Leonhardt writes–as I did on Tuesday–that the reason this is suddenly getting so much attention is because a number of scientists have recently argued that the lab leak theory should be investigated.
Among the reasons: Chinese officials have refused to allow an independent investigation into the lab and have failed to explain some inconsistencies in the animal-to-human hypothesis. Most of the first confirmed cases had no evident link to the food market.
But has anything really changed?
In some ways, not much has not changed. From the beginning, the virus’s origin has been unclear. All along, some scientists, politicians and journalists have argued that the lab-leak theory deserves consideration.
Almost 15 months ago, two Chinese researchers wrote a paper concluding that the virus “probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.” Alina Chan, a molecular biologist affiliated with Harvard and M.I.T., made similar arguments. David Ignatius and Josh Rogin, both Washington Post columnists, wrote about the possibility more than a year ago. Joe Biden, then a presidential candidate, didn’t mention the lab-leak theory in early 2020 but he did argue that the U.S. should “not be taking China’s word” for how the outbreak started.
But these voices were in the minority. The World Health Organization initially dismissed the lab-leak theory as implausible.
Read the rest at the link–I’ve probably quoted too much.
If you read the comments on the Tuesday post, you know that Quixote, who is quite knowledgeable on this subject, vehemently argued against the lab leak theory. Quixote posted another comment yesterday that I didn’t see until this morning:
The virus isn’t engineered because you can tell by the RNA sequence. If it had been, the inserted bits will be obvious when you compare it to related viruses. Sort of like Frankenstein’s monster is visibly sewn together from parts that don’t go together.
The early cases don’t particularly center on the lab or on people associated with it. They’re outside Wuhan, inside Wuhan, at the abandoned mine / bat cave, at the captured animal food market, and so on. The pattern is what you’d see if a virus mutated to be able to infect people, but wasn’t very good at it yet, and had been moving through the population for a while. In the course of simmering through the population, the most successful virus would be the one that changed enough to infect people easily.
It had enough time to do that, and that was exactly the threat the Wuhan lab, and also CDC people there, were looking for. (Trump, by the way, cut funding for both of those because what the hell do we need to be paying people in China for.) The danger was noticed by Chinese doctors (one of whom soon died of the disease) who tried hard to alert the world. They were squelched by the government. If the CDC people had still been there, it would have been a lot harder to squelch.
So tl:dr; no evidence covid19 was an intentional bioweapon thing. Poor evidence that it could have unintentionally leaked. It’s a fact that the attempted coverup by the Chinese let the pandemic get going. If procedures at the lab need improving, they certainly should be.
The other things you mention about China are all true. (Tibet too. Never forget Tibet.) It’s been obvious for decades that China was going to abuse whatever power it could get. But that’s another whole train of thought.
As bad as they are, covid19 does not fit the lab leak story at all well. Both things can be true: they’re bad and covid was an incompetent accident made infinitely worse by self-serving dictators all over the world, including China.
I agree that there certainly is no evidence for the lab leak theory. The only reason I thought there could be something to it was that several people in the lab got sick with something that looked like Covid-19 and were hospitalized. I thought they could have gotten the virus from the cave samples–not that the virus was engineered in the lab–and that somehow the virus got into the population that way. But there is no way to ever know if this happened, as China would never cooperate with any investigation.
Now that Biden has ordered an investigation, we will likely hear more about this, but I can’t see how we’re ever going to know for sure how the virus originated. The crossover from animal to human explanation makes the most sense.
It’s also worth checking out this thread on Twitter by a China expert.
In other Covid-19 news, The New York Times reports that two studies have found that Immunity to the Coronavirus May Persist for Years.
Immunity to the coronavirus lasts at least a year, possibly a lifetime, improving over time especially after vaccination, according to two new studies. The findings may help put to rest lingering fears that protection against the virus will be short-lived.
19 Faces of Covid-19, by Suzon Lucore
Together, the studies suggest that most people who have recovered from Covid-19 and who were later immunized will not need boosters. Vaccinated people who were never infected most likely will need the shots, however, as will a minority who were infected but did not produce a robust immune response.
Both reports looked at people who had been exposed to the coronavirus about a year earlier. Cells that retain a memory of the virus persist in the bone marrow and may churn out antibodies whenever needed, according to one of the studies, published on Monday in the journal Nature.
The other study, posted online at BioRxiv, a site for biology research, found that these so-called memory B cells continue to mature and strengthen for at least 12 months after the initial infection.
“The papers are consistent with the growing body of literature that suggests that immunity elicited by infection and vaccination for SARS-CoV-2 appears to be long-lived,” said Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research.
Read more at the NYT.
There was another mass shooting yesterday–so what else is new?
It’s also not new that the perpetrator had a history of violence against women. Fox News: San Jose shooting leaves 9 dead, deceased suspect identified; victims shot in separate buildings.
The eight people initially killed by a gunman at a Northern California rail yard Wednesday morning were shot in two separate buildings before the suspected shooter took his own life, authorities said Wednesday.
A ninth victim died in a hospital late Wednesday evening, authorities said.
The mass shooting epidemic, credit Dana Gornall
Santa Clara Sheriff Laurie Smith expressed her grief for the families of the victims before praising the quick response of law enforcement officers who went into a Valley Transportation Authority building as the active shooting was happening. She said deputies and San Jose police officers were the first on the scene.
The suspect was identified Wednesday as Samuel Cassidy, 57, who was a VTA employee, officials said. No motive is known for the shooting at this time.
An ex-girlfriend told the San Francisco Chronicle he was prone to alcohol-fueled mood swings and had been accused in a March 2009 court filing of rape and abuse. The documents were filed in response to a domestic violence restraining order that Cassidy had filed earlier that month.
The former girlfriend alleged his mood swings worsened when he drank alcohol and that he played “several mind games which he seems to enjoy.” She listed several incidents of alleged sexual assault in which he would hold her arms and force his weight onto her.
He would apologize and promised to never do it again afterward, the report said.
(Emphasis added)
Cassidy’s ex-wife said he had threated workplace violence years ago. KCRA3.com: What we know about Sam Cassidy, the suspect in the San Jose VTA shooting.
The man who opened fire Wednesday at a rail yard in San Jose, killing nine other people and ending his own life, has been identified as 57-year-old Sam Cassidy. He was an employee of the Valley Transportation Authority, which provides bus, light rail and other transit services throughout Santa Clara County, authorities said.
Cassidy was identified as a maintenance worker at the Valley Transportation Authority….
According to The Associated Press, Cassidy had talked to his ex-wife about killing people at work more than a decade ago.
“I never believed him, and it never happened. Until now,” a tearful Cecilia Nelms told The Associated Press.
She said he used to come home from work resentful and angry over what he perceived as unfair assignments.
“He could dwell on things,” she said. The two were married for about 10 years until a 2005 divorce filing and she hadn’t been in touch with Cassidy for about 13 years, Nelms said.
I’m still perplexed and fascinated by the Q-Anon phenomenon. There a couple of stories about it today.
NBC News: Study finds nearly one-in-five Americans believe QAnon conspiracy theories.
Washington, we have a problem — politically, informationally and societally — when 15 percent of Americans agree with the QAnon statement that the U.S. government, media and financial worlds “are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.”
Or when 20 percent agree with this statement: “There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.”
Or when another 15 percent agree that “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
These are the results of a PRRI-IFYC study that was conducted online March 8-30, but that was just released Thursday.
And the study finds that Republicans, those who trust far-right news outlets like OANN and Newsmax, and white evangelicals and Hispanic Protestants are all more likely to believe these statements than other Americans.
It’s hard to call something fringe when approximately one-in-five Americans believe these statements, especially one that true patriots “may have to resort to violence” to save the country.
Here’s the PRRI story: Understanding QAnon’s Connection to American Politics, Religion, and Media Consumption.
Three Components of the QAnon Conspiracy Movement
The far-right conspiracy theory movement known as QAnon emerged on the internet in late 2017 and gained traction throughout former president Donald Trump’s time in office. QAnon’s core theory revolves around Satan-worshipping pedophiles plotting against Trump and a coming “storm” that would clear out those evil forces, but the movement has also been described as a “big tent conspiracy theory” that involves a constantly evolving web of schemes about politicians, celebrities, bankers, and the media, as well as echoes of older movements within Christianity, such as Gnosticism.
To understand how this loosely connected belief system is influencing American politics, religion, and media, we fielded three questions, each containing a tenet of the QAnon conspiracy movement….
QAnon Beliefs and Partisanship
A nontrivial 15% of Americans agree with the sweeping QAnon allegation that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation,” while the vast majority of Americans (82%) disagree with this statement. Republicans (23%) are significantly more likely than independents (14%) and Democrats (8%) to agree that the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.
Similarly, one in five Americans (20%) agree with the statement “There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders,” while a majority (77%) disagree. Nearly three in ten Republicans (28%), compared to 18% of independents and 14% of Democrats, agree with this secondary QAnon conspiracy theory. Trends among demographic groups are similar to those of the core QAnon conspiracy theory.
Fifteen percent of Americans agree that “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” while the vast majority (85%) disagree. Republicans (28%) are twice as likely as independents (13%) and four times as likely as Democrats (7%) to agree that because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence.
Click the link to read the rest.
So…that’s a mixed bag of news for you. What else is happening? As always, this is an open thread.
Monday Reads: Trigger Post for victims of Rape and Assault and Racism
Posted: March 22, 2021 Filed under: child sexual abuse, children, Mid Day Reads, physical abuse | Tags: misogyny, Racism, violence against women 22 Comments
Yayoi Kusama
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
If you read one thing today make it this opinion piece at The Guardian by Rebecca Solnit: “Women are harmed every day by invisible men”. The title really doesn’t say it all but the body of the essay does.
I was a teenage advocate to challenge how women and children are treated by about every layer of society and the justice system when men do something untoward and harmful to them. My neighbor was in Junior League that established one of the first rape and abuse crisis lines for women in the country. It is now nationally recognized and run by the YWCA in Omaha. At the time, we had one phone in a psychologist’s office in West Omaha, training to use the list we had and to listen, and then various resources that we could provide to callers. It was small but became mighty. Fortunately, it now has skilled counselors on phones instead of teenage volunteers and homemakers.
I learned many things at the time about exactly how unfair the entire criminal justice system was to women and child victims at the time. Sex crimes were in the property crimes divisions of police stations. Women officers? Nope. Could a man rape his wife? Nope. Have at least three witnesses present to see the entire thing? No? Then, forget prosecution. My job at the crisis line was to say here’s the person you call, here’s a hospital that will help you, and eventually we started having lists of safe houses and counsellors. This was the mid 70s. A lot has changed on that front but one thing hasn’t.
Whatever happens to a woman is still likely seen to be her fault. The perpetrator eventually becomes invisible. She asked for it. She provoked him. She had a drink. I even had a friend while at university who knew I was still passionately working on campus and at the legislature to change things who had just been raped by the library rapist. She asked if it was worth reporting it because she had a couple of hits off a joint before she went there to study. I’m like Go to the hospital! Call the police! Do not make this man the winner of anything!
Ask any woman and they’ll have similar stories from either their own lives or women they know. I grew up with my mother pointing to the imprint of an iron on her inner thigh and the stories of how it got there. My mild mannered banker of a grandfather was violent and abusive. My family oozed white, WASPY upper mild class privilege so I don’t want to hear any of that other kind’ve stuff that excuses men’s–and especially white men’s–actions and behaviors. It’s still rampant.
Tschabalala Self
Solnit’s writing always hits home but this one hit home so hard my house shook. She’s speaking to the latest spree shooter who targeted Asian Women working for Day Spas in the Atlanta area. However, she reminds us that we’ve seen this and we’ve seen the response over and over and over.
Some white guy with no emotional or self control has to eliminate “temptation” or was forced into a “rage” or a “hard on” by some women. So, rather than get his act together he kills the “objects” of his temptation or rapes her. Then, the media continues with his narrative. Women are to blame for what happens to them. Women are just men’s property. They are objects. They are less. These guys have a right to feel resentful and harmed and to correct that by taking it out on the woman or women or they’re just lone wolves, disturbed little boys, men with issues we can’t possibly understand.
This is Solnit’s opening narrative.
The alleged murderer of eight people, six of whom were Asian American women, reportedly said that he was trying to “eliminate temptation”. It’s as if he thought others were responsible for his inner life, as though the horrific act of taking others’ lives rather than learning some form of self-control was appropriate. This aspect of a crime that was also horrifically racist reflects a culture in which men and the society at large blame women for men’s behavior and the things men do to women. The idea of women as temptresses goes back to the Old Testament and is heavily stressed in white evangelical Christianity; the victims were workers and others present in massage parlors; the killer was reportedly on his way to shoot up Florida’s porn industry when he was apprehended.
This week an older friend recounted her attempts in the 1970s to open a domestic-violence shelter in a community whose men didn’t believe domestic violence was an issue there and when she convinced them it was, told her, but “what if it’s the women’s fault”. And last week a male friend of mine posted an anti-feminist screed blaming young women for New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s travails, as though they should suck it up when he violated clear and longstanding workplace rules, as though they and not he had the responsibility to protect his career and reputation.
Sometimes men are written out of the story altogether. Since the pandemic began there have been torrents of stories about how women’s careers have been crushed or they have left their jobs altogether because they’re doing the lioness’s share of domestic labor , especially child-rearing, in heterosexual households. In February of this year, NPR opened a story with the assertion that this work has “landed on the shoulders of women” as if that workload had fallen from the sky rather than been shoved there by spouses. I have yet to see an article about a man’s career that’s flourishing because he’s dumped on his wife, or focusing on how he’s shirking the work.
Informal responses often blame women in these situations for their spouses and recommend they leave without addressing that divorce often leads to poverty for women and children, and of course, unequal workloads at home can undermine a woman’s chances at financial success and independence. Behind all this is a storytelling problem. The familiar narratives about murder, rape, domestic violence, harassment, unwanted pregnancy, poverty in single-female-parent households, and a host of other phenomena portray these things as somehow happening to women and write men out of the story altogether, absolve them of responsibility – or turn them into “she made him do it” narratives. Thus have we treated a lot of things that men do to women or men and women do together as women’s problems that women need to solve, either by being amazing and heroic and enduring beyond all reason, or by fixing men, or by magically choosing impossible lives beyond the reach of harm and inequality. Not only the housework and the childcare, but what men do becomes women’s work.
Please Read the entire thing. Then, consider this stream of tweets by Bruce Bartlett on research by Pew Research. It’s basically a reading list of things surrounding white–but especially white male–fragility. Yes. Racial discrimination is a problem for white males in their minds just about the same way that the mass murderer felt women tempting him were his problem.
Minnie-Evans
The research thankfully shows that the majority of all of us in this country see racial discrimination and even white people. But, then there’s the wipipo that think it’s all about them. Bartlett writes about this at The New Republic: “The Ultimate White Fragility. White people in not-insignificant numbers maintain a persistent belief that they’re the ones suffering historic levels of racial discrimination.” Robin DiAngelo, coined the term in a best-selling book in 2011. Yes, that’s 10 years ago and look where we are on this.
Over the last 10 years, the issue of reverse racism and its social and political implications have drawn extensive interest from social scientists. The most well-known study was by Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers of the Harvard Business School and Tufts University, respectively, in 2011. They found that whites increasingly viewed racial prejudice as a zero-sum game—reduced bias against black citizens automatically led to increased bias against their white counterparts. As the chart from their article shows, perceived discrimination against whites by both whites and blacks rose as discrimination against blacks was perceived to have fallen. (This analysis is available through Tufts University.)
Further studies in 2014, 2015, and 2016 confirmed that many whites do indeed see racial progress as a zero-sum game. However, the latest study, published last year, was more skeptical of this trend. Nevertheless, the idea of zero-sum racial discrimination is very popular in the Republican Party. Then-Senator Jeff Sessions expressed the widely held GOP sentiment in 2009 when he said, “Empathy for one party is always prejudice against another.”
Grace Hartigan
Notice it’s the same set of white evangelicals and republicans that tend to come up in all the quotes and polls that Bartlett cites in that 2019 article. It’s a complete taste of Trumpism. All of this is deeply intertwined with both patriarchy as viewed by many religious traditions like white evangelical Christianity and white supremacy which has been at the root of native genocides and slavery of Africans and black Americans since the country’s inception. It continues to poison the well.
So, the Supreme Court is considering reinstating the death penalty of the Boston Marathon Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Remember that Domestic Terrorist Timothy McVeigh of the Oklahoma bombings was the last to receive the federal death penalty in 2001 until Trump went on killing spree at the end of his term. You may remember that a woman was one of them. The other were primarily black men This is from January and BBC Canada.
Five people have been executed in the run-up to President-elect Joe Biden’s 20 January inauguration – breaking with an 130-year-old precedent of pausing executions amid a presidential transition.
They make Mr Trump the country’s most prolific execution president in more than a century, overseeing the executions of 13 death row inmates since July of this year.
The five executions began with convicted killer 40-year-old Brandon Bernard who was put to death at a penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. They ended with the death of Dustin Higgs, 48, at the same site on 16 January.
Lillian Bassman
President Biden does not support the Death Penalty. This is from the AP link.
The Supreme Court said Monday it will consider reinstating the death sentence for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, presenting President Joe Biden with an early test of his opposition to capital punishment.
The justices agreed to hear an appeal filed by the Trump administration, which carried out executions of 13 federal inmates in its final six months in office, including three in the last week of President Donald Trump’s term.
The case won’t be heard until the fall, and it’s unclear how the new administration will approach Tsarnaev’s case. The initial prosecution and decision to seek a death sentence was made by the Obama administration, in which Biden served as vice president.
Queenie McKenzie
Justice and jobs are not generally meted out equally in this country and many white men fear they will be. The Capitol Hill Riot/Insurrection will be a test of this certainly. Today’s NYT: “Evidence in Capitol Attack Most Likely Supports Sedition Charges, Prosecutor Says.“I personally believe the evidence is trending toward that, and probably meets those elements,” said Michael Sherwin, who had led the Justice Department’s inquiry into the riot. “. This is from Katie Benner.
Evidence the government obtained in the investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol most likely meets the bar necessary to charge some of the suspects with sedition, Michael R. Sherwin, the federal prosecutor who had been leading the Justice Department’s inquiry, said in an interview that aired on Sunday.
The department has rarely brought charges of sedition, the crime of conspiring to overthrow the government.
But in an interview with “60 Minutes,” Mr. Sherwin said prosecutors had evidence that most likely proved such a charge.
“I personally believe the evidence is trending toward that, and probably meets those elements,” Mr. Sherwin said. “I believe the facts do support those charges. And I think that, as we go forward, more facts will support that.”
Scott Pelley’s interview on 60 minutes can be found at this link.
I’d like to point you to a more inspiring read from Vogue: “5 Female Artists From Around the World Who Celebrate Women in Their Work.” If you’d like to share something with the kids or grand kids, try the Multicultural Kids Blog.: “7 Women Artists Who Changed History.”. You can also check out this from Art and Design: “Famous Female Artists – 5 Incredible Women Artists That You Need To Know”
I hope you have a good week. It’s so nice to have so many flavors of spring decorating the avenue now. All the azaleas and camellias are in bloom. I hope they’re finding they’re way to your corner of the northern hemisphere!
Meanwhile enjoy a live performance of Suzanne Vega and her song “Luka”. And then listen to Natalie Merchant and “Motherland”. Gee, I like this Women’s History month thing! And, I notice I’m really late in the day already! This was my morning to sleep 2 hours later than the I usually get up in Fake Time and 1 hour later in Real Time. My body is really not liking this time change. But, anyway … your turn!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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