Indonesia is often touted as that rare thing, a somewhat/comparatively liberal majority-Muslim state. To put it another way it’s touted as being not as bad as Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or Bangladesh or need I go on. But that’s one hell of a low bar.

Now it’s thinking of making all sex outside of marriage a crime.

Indonesia’s parliament is drafting proposed revisions to the national criminal code that could ban all consensual sex outside marriage, sparking alarm among activists who it would breach basic rights and could be misused to target the LGBT community.

The parliamentary commission drawing up recommendations to change the Dutch colonial-era criminal code has still to finalize its proposals.

But a draft, seen by Reuters on Monday, included measures to criminalize extramarital sex, same-sex relations, and co-habitation, all of which were previously unregulated by law.

Not very liberal, is it. Why should a government even care how citizens arrange their sex lives?

Last month, the Constitutional Court narrowly voted to strike down a similar petition filed by the Family Love Alliance, one of the conservative groups behind the move to push legislation through parliament.

“The truth is the majority of religions in Indonesia hold the same values, so…(the revisions) are representative of the majority and of all cultures in Indonesia,” said Euis Sunarti, a member of the Family Love Alliance, which likens itself to conservative evangelical Christian groups in the United States.

It doesn’t matter what kind of theocracy it is, as long as it is a theocracy.

Junimart Girsang, a member of parliament from the nationalist Indonesian Democratic Party of Stuggle (PDIP), said same-sex relations could not be accepted in the country.

“In legal terms, religious terms and ethical terms, we cannot have that in our country,” Girsang, a member of the parliamentary commission, said.

Few Indonesian politicians have voiced support for LGBT rights for fear of alienating a largely conservative voter base ahead of legislative and presidential elections next year.

Not all that liberal then, it seems.

I saw this tweet before I saw the CNN story and I thought it had to be a parody, despite the blue check.

I mean come on. Even Paul Ryan can’t be so clueless that he thinks $1.50 a week is a meaningful pay increase. $1.50 won’t get you a bus ride, or a half gallon of milk, or a pair of socks. You could probably get an apple with $1.50, or a couple of carrots, or a small tub of Greek yogurt. How can Paul Ryan possibly think anyone would be “pleasantly surprised” to have an additional $1.50 a week? It’s meaningless. $1.50 an hour would be a small raise; a week is just nothing.

And yet – it really was his very own tweet.

House Speaker Paul Ryan deleted a tweet Saturday touting the GOP tax overhaul after critics called him out for appearing out of touch with the reality of low-income individuals’ financial situations.

The tweet shared the story of a secretary who, according to a report by the Associated Press, was “pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week.”

“A secretary at a public high school in Lancaster, PA, said she was pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week … she said [that] will more than cover her Costco membership for the year,” Ryan tweeted with a link to the full article.

A basic Costco membership costs $60 a year.

And 52 times 1.5 is 78 so wuhay she comes out way ahead – 18 whole spare dollars to buy socks with.

Paul Ryan deleted his embarrassing tweet of a blatant admission because he and Republicans don’t want you to know the truth: the #GOPTaxScam is a gift to corporate America and the top 1% at your expense.

He also doesn’t want you to know he got $500.000.00 from the Koch family. pic.twitter.com/ENXxASfAMP

— Nancy Pelosi (@TeamPelosi) February 3, 2018

As a thank you for passing a $1 trillion corporate tax cut, Paul Ryan received $500,000 in campaign contributions from the Koch brothers, which would probably cover the cost of buying a Costco. https://t.co/piiWqzOEGo

— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) February 3, 2018

A whole six dollars more every month. Thank god for Republicans.

Another thought about the Trump versus the FBI melodrama:

Mr. Trump’s current campaign threatens the autonomy of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, which was seared into the public consciousness after Watergate, according to veterans of the legal system. “Starting with Jimmy Carter, every president has embraced norms that preserve the independence of the D.O.J., law enforcement and intelligence matters from the White House,” Mr. Goldsmith said. “What is happening now is a violation of post-Watergate norms.”

What that passage doesn’t quite make clear is what Watergate has to do with it. Watergate made it eye-scorchingly clear how crucial it is to have federal law enforcement be independent of the president, so that he doesn’t get away with committing crimes while in office. Trump acts out every day the very reason he needs to stop acting out what he acts out every day – his megalomaniacal belief that the Justice Department is his Justice Department and has to do whatever he tells it to do. The independence of the DoJ is a bulwark against authoritarian government…even though it can be authoritarian itself, because nothing is simple. Trump and the Republicans are systematically breaking down that bulwark. This is dangerous, and a constitutional crisis.

David Strauss, a University of Chicago law professor, said Mr. Trump’s accusations were not mere political rhetoric, but messages with consequences. “It’s got to undermine public confidence in the F.B.I. to a certain degree. And it’s got to undermine morale at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department to an even greater degree,” he said.

“We have a president who seems to have no understanding of the professional ethos of the Justice Department, who has no understanding how these people think about their jobs,” he added.

Quite. That’s what I was saying about merit and skills and Trump the empty balloon.

Especially upsetting, some former officials said, is how Mr. Trump has publicly taunted specific individuals — a top F.B.I. official, an F.B.I. lawyer and an F.B.I. supervisor.

“It’s one thing for the president to criticize political appointees — although it is quite odd for him to criticize his own political appointees,” said Alan Rozenshtein, a lawyer who left the Justice Department’s national security division in April and now teaches at the University of Minnesota law school. But to attack career employees at the F.B.I. who are barred by regulations from publicly responding, he said, “that’s really bad.”

Some agents are leaving as a result. Josh Campbell, who spent a decade at the F.B.I. and worked directly for Mr. Comey at one time, wrote in The Times on Saturday that he was resigning so that he could speak out. “These political attacks on the bureau must stop,” he wrote. “If those critics of the agency persuade the public that the F.B.I. cannot be trusted, they will also have succeeded in making our nation less safe.”

One F.B.I. supervisor in a field office said public shaming of his colleagues had wiped out any desire he had to work at the bureau’s headquarters in Washington. “I’d rather chew glass,” he said.

MAGA.

How are they doing at the FBI? It can’t be easy.

In the 109 years of the FBI’s existence, it has repeatedly come under fire for abuses of power, privacy or civil rights. From Red Scares to recording and threatening to expose the private conduct of Martin Luther King Jr. to benefiting from bulk surveillance in the digital age, the FBI is accustomed to intense criticism.

What is so unusual about the current moment, say current and former law enforcement officials, is the source of the attacks.

The bureau is under fire not from those on the left but rather conservatives who have long been the agency’s biggest supporters, as well as the president who handpicked the FBI’s leader.

Republican critics charge that the birth of the investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and agents of the Russian government was fatally infected by the political bias of senior FBI officials — and President Trump tweeted Saturday that the release of a memo on the issue “totally vindicates ‘Trump.’ ”

But what if it’s not “political bias” but rather “bias” against a president who is in bed with Russia?

And/or – what if it’s “bias” against ignorant lazy talentless incompetence from a bunch of people who, whatever you think about the institution, have impressive skills?

KnowwhatImean? That’s an aspect of Trump that’s got to grate on a lot of people who do serious demanding work. He’s such an empty balloon. He has no talents, no skills, no training, no knowledge, no expertise – he’s all flash and marketing and nothing else. He’s a big meaningless noise, and here he is shouting at and accusing people who are – let’s be clear about this – Better Than He Is. He likes to rant about “merit” but that’s ironic when he himself has none.

One law enforcement official summed it up bluntly: “There’s a lot of anger. The irony is it’s a conservative-leaning organization, and it’s being trashed by conservatives. At first it was just perplexing. Now there’s anger, because it’s not going away.”

It turns out they’re not really conservatives. They’re opportunists/street fighters.

From the Classroom Vignettes file:

A teacher with Colorado’s Boulder Valley School District was placed on paid administrative leave following an alleged incident at the middle school, the school district said Thursday. CBS Denver confirmed the Lafayette Police Department is investigating reports that teacher allegedly assaulted a student who refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Karen Smith, Angevine’s physical education teacher, was placed on leave Thursday.

This again. Football players MUST stand up with their hands on their chests (one hand per player) when a certain song is sung. God MUST be namechecked whenever a politician comments on an outburst of violence. Students MUST swear fealty to a piece of cloth and to God at the start of every school day. All this MUST be mandatory or everything will rot and fall off and die.

Except of course that none of that is true, but it’s treated as if it were true.

Pennsylvania Republicans are refusing to obey a court order to redraw their congressional map to make it not so grotesquely gerrymandered.

A top Pennsylvania state Senate Republican is refusing to follow a court order requiring lawmakers to turn over data that would redraw the state’s congressional map.

In a letter to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which struck down the map, state Sen. Joe Scarnati on Wednesday called the order unconstitutional and said he would not comply.
“In light of the unconstitutionality of the court’s orders and the court’s plain intent to usurp the General Assembly’s constitutionally delegated role of drafting Pennsylvania’s congressional district plan, Senator Scarnati will not be turning over any data identified in the court’s orders,” wrote Brian Paszamant, Scarnati’s attorney.

Let’s hear more about how patriotic and law-respecting the Republicans are.

To move to a less distasteful subject than rapey theocrats and constitution-trampling crooks, there’s this exciting story that’s been in the headlines for a couple of days of finding huge previously unknown Maya sites buried in Guatemala.

By raining down laser pulses on some 770 square miles of dense forest in northern Guatemala, archaeologists have discovered 60,000 Maya structures that make up full sprawling cities.

And the new technology provides them with an unprecedented view into how the ancient civilization worked, revealing almost industrial agricultural infrastructure and new insights into Maya warfare.

“This is a game changer,” says Thomas Garrison, an archaeologist at Ithaca College who is one of the leaders of the project. It changes “the base level at which we do Maya archaeology.”

The data reveals that the area was three or four times more densely populated than originally thought. “I mean, we’re talking about millions of people, conservatively,” says Garrison. “Probably more than 10 million people.”

The technology makes it possible to strip away vegetation visually and see what it’s hiding. Garrison spent eight years with a team mapping less than a square mile at a site called El Zotz without LiDAR, while LiDar took data for 67 square miles in a few hours.

The most important Maya city, Tikal, was found to be three or four times larger than the scientists had thought, with a previously undiscovered pyramid in its center. And Garrison adds that they’re not totally sure they’ve surveyed the entire extent of that city.

Suddenly having a broad view allows archaeologists to ask many new questions, he says. And there’s plenty of forest to still explore — the study area is a fraction of the total area where the Maya lived.

I call that exciting.

Tariq Ramadan has been charged with rape and is currently incarcerated.

I don’t see anything in English yet so this is from Le Monde:

Tariq Ramadan a été mis en examen, vendredi 2 février, pour viol et viol sur personne vulnérable. L’islamologue suisse a demandé qu’un éventuel placement en détention provisoire, requis par le parquet, fasse l’objet d’un débat ultérieur entre le juge des libertés et de la détention (JLD) et sa défense. Dans l’attente de ce débat, qui doit avoir lieu dans les quatre jours, il a été incarcéré.

Les enquêteurs du deuxième district de police judiciaire ont enquêté pendant trois mois, méthodiquement et sans laisser échapper la moindre information, avant de se décider à entendre, à partir de mercredi 31 janvier, le théologien suisse de 55 ans, qui a longtemps eu une très large audience auprès de centaines de milliers de musulmans européens.

Après avoir reçu deux plaintes pour viol, l’une déposée le 20 octobre 2017 par Henda Ayari, une ancienne salafiste devenue militante de la laïcité, l’autre le 27 octobre par une femme qui a préféré rester anonyme, et dont Le Monde avait publié le témoignage accablant, les policiers ont recueilli d’autres récits de femmes. Elles ont décrit la même forme d’emprise, la même violence et, selon un proche de l’enquête, « le même modus operandi » que celui dénoncé par les plaignantes, sans pour autant déposer plainte à leur tour.

Since the two complaints that were in the news in October the police have gathered more women’s accounts that fit the pattern of the first two.

Updating to include the BBC version:

A French judge has placed prominent Islamic studies scholar Tariq Ramadan under criminal investigation on two charges of rape.

The 55-year-old was questioned by police in Paris earlier this week and has now been remanded into custody.

He denies wrongdoing and is suing one of his accusers, a former radical Islamist, for slander.

Mr Ramadan teaches at Oxford University, but took leave of absence after the claims surfaced in October.

Then there’s the typical BBC refusal to admit that he’s not a nice liberal human rightsy kind of guy:

A controversial and influential figure among Muslim scholars, he is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian imam who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s.

Tariq Ramadan challenges Muslim fundamentalists and encourages dialogue between religions, but some critics say he is a promoting a version of Islam that is inconsistent with French secular values.

He has made regular media appearances in France and Britain, and is a popular figure among young Muslims in Europe.

“Some critics say”; “a version of Islam that is inconsistent with French secular values”; “a popular figure among young Muslims in Europe” – he’s an Islamist, a radical religionist who thinks religious rules should govern everyone. The Beeb as usual makes him sound like a liberal.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest that Trump is chopping down – now we want more global disease outbreaks.

Four years after the United States pledged to help the world fight infectious-disease epidemics such as Ebola, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is dramatically downsizing its epidemic prevention activities in 39 out of 49 countries because money is running out, U.S. government officials said.

But don’t worry, Donald Trump’s golf courses and hotels are profiting like crazy.

The CDC programs, part of a global health security initiative, train front-line workers in outbreak detection and work to strengthen laboratory and emergency response systems in countries where disease risks are greatest. The goal is to stop future outbreaks at their source.

Most of the funding comes from a one-time, five-year emergency package that Congress approved to respond to the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. About $600 million was awarded to the CDC to help countries prevent infectious-disease threats from becoming epidemics. That money is slated to run out by September 2019. Despite statements from President Trump and senior administration officials affirming the importance of controlling outbreaks, officials and global infectious-disease experts are not anticipating that the administration will budget additional resources.

Of course not. He thinks epidemics are what shithole countries deserve.

Countries where the CDC is planning to scale back include some of the world’s hot spots for emerging infectious disease, such as China, Pakistan, Haiti, Rwanda and Congo. Last year, when Congo experienced a potentially deadly Ebola outbreak in a remote, forested area, CDC-trained disease detectives and rapid responders helped contain it quickly.

But in future? The outbreak will just have to proceed according to nature’s plan.

Speaking of “where was the mother while this man was torturing a baby?” – the ACLU offers one example of a woman punished because a man abused their children.

Tondalao Hall spent her 13th New Year’s Day inside a prison cell this month. The man who abused her and her young children never served a single day in prison. The details of Hall’s story speak volumes about criminal injustice in the nation today.

Thirteen years ago, Tondalao Hall’s ex-boyfriend and abuser, Robert Braxton Jr., pleaded guilty to breaking the ribs and femur of their 3-month-old daughter. Hall had not abused her children. She herself was also a victim of her ex’s violence. Prosecutors presented no evidence that Hall, then 19 years old, knew of any abuse against her children. On the advice of her original attorney, Hall signed a “blind” guilty plea — meaning, a plea without any deal with the prosecutor promising leniency. That plea resulted in a 30-year sentence for “failing to protect” her children from abuse.

Hall’s sentence violates the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits the government from handing out cruel and unusual punishments to individuals convicted of crimes, in two ways. First, her sentence is disproportionate to her crime in relation to Braxton’s light sentence. Second, it lacks any consideration of the abuse she endured and the choices she was forced to make as a result.

In a cruel coincidence, Braxton was released from custody on the same day Hall was told she’d serve 30 years in a maximum security prison. Now, after eight years of probation, he lives with minimal consequences for his violent crimes.

The ACLU of Oklahoma is representing Hall and seeking her release because she has been abused and denied justice. Her suffering mirrors that of so many women of color who have been the subject of unjust prosecution.

She got thirty years for failure to protect; he got probation for the actual violence to their three-month-old baby.

Oklahoma is one of 29 states that makes “permitting child abuse” a crime. Oklahoma’s statute was designed to ensure that those who witness abuse take action to prevent further abuse. The statue is supposed to encourage people to report crimes against children. In Hall’s case, the law was used not to protect children but to criminalize and punish a domestic violence survivor.

It is a mockery of justice to claim that Hall’s sentence protected any of the children Braxton abused. In fact, each survivor of Braxton’s abuse has suffered tremendously as a result of her prosecution. Hall’s three children have been left to grow up without their mother, while their abusive father signed away his parental rights. This May, Hall’s oldest son will graduate from high school while his mother remains locked away from her family.

Oklahoma incarcerates more women per capita than anywhere else in the world. Oklahoma imprisons about 151 out of every 100,000 women, which is about twice the national average. The state’s harsh laws and other “hard on crime” forms of over-prosecution disproportionately affect women of color. Black and native women make up a combined 16.7 percent of Oklahoma’s population, but 33 percent of the prison population.

Oklahoma also ranks among the top five states for women enduring extreme violence from their partners. Survivors of this abuse are overrepresented in jails and prisons. More than half of all womenincarcerated in Oklahoma are survivors of domestic violence or sexual assault. Rather than address this problem through preventive services, district attorneys and lawmakers in Oklahoma have used the statute that landed Hall in prison to criminalize mothers enduring abuse, trauma, and adversity.

At the time Hall was arrested, she had been actively creating a plan to leave her abuser. But escaping a violent partner is much easier said than done, as the likelihood of serious violence or murder skyrockets when victims make moves to leave. As long as Hall’s abuser walks free, any claim that her sentence was about justice or protecting children rings hollow.

H/t Rebecca Solnit

Originally a comment by iknklast on Grave concerns.

why nobody in the media seems to grasp the gravity of what the GOP is trying to do

The media has struggled with the Trump dumpster fire from the beginning, because they keep trying to do things the same way. They keep treating it as politics as usual, so they try to figure out what the strategy is, what the end game is, what Plan B might be. None of these things exist. This is a demolition operation, and unless you understand demolition, you can’t get there.

Maddow gets it because she is able to see that this is not business as usual. But most of the pundits are in the mode of doing what they’ve learned to do, and thinking what they’ve learned to think, and acting how they’ve learned to act.

Many of the Republicans are in the same handbasket with Trump. This isn’t the Republican Party of Eisenhower, or even of Nixon, where working within the government system to promote business and lower taxes was the order of the day. This is a group of wildcats (no insult meant to any actual cats who might be reading this) who have no integrity, no conscience, no compassion, no human feeling for people outside their own set, and believe with an almost religious belief that they are a race of superior human beings. They have gorged themselves on Ayn Rand, and are vomiting Rush Limbaugh. They believe in the superman, and they are the superman. The rest of us are, to use a familiar parlance, “losers”.

They may sell themselves as promoting the “American Way”, but in reality, they are seeking to be the rulers of the rest of us. Some of them are motivated by money, some by Christianity, but a horrifying number are motivated by both. They are serving God and Mammon, and mistakenly believe that they are the natural ruling class. They believe fervently that they achieved their exalted place by their own efforts alone, because they are incapable of seeing all the people helping them as they climbed – including healthy doses of the government, which provides so much for so many and is despised by most.

This is what the media isn’t expecting. They have been part of the aristocratic class for a long time, and assume they understand it, but they are not listening anymore. They open their mouths to begin analysis almost the second the politician stops speaking, so they don’t have time to process what was said. And, if I may liken this to sports (my husband is an avid watcher), it is like those announcers who will discuss endlessly whether that ball was really in or out, whether that play was good or not, and will announce with enormous smug satisfaction what the answer is, even though they are perched in a soundproof booth above the field and may not be seeing what the refs are seeing. Just as these announcers are always totally sure that they know, even if the ref doesn’t, the pundits are convinced that they understand what is going on, even though this is nothing they’ve seen before. In short, they lack the flexibility to accommodate the new world where we find ourselves.