Pence’s pricey junket

Oct 9th, 2017 12:33 pm | By

How much did Pence’s flight from Las Vegas to Indianapolis in order to walk out of a football game cost us? CNN does the adding up.

Here is an estimate of just the air costs (which does not include costs of advance personnel, Secret Service or support on the ground):

According to the Air Force, flying a C-32, the model of plane used for Air Force 2, for one hour costs about $30,000. Pence’s flight from Las Vegas to Indianapolis Saturday took about three hours and 20 minutes, so it cost about $100,000
Pence then flew from Indianapolis to Los Angeles on Sunday, which took about four hours and 45 minutes, costing about $142,500.

The grand total: about $242,500.

A quarter of a million before you take the other expenses into account. All that just to march into a football stadium, wait a few minutes, and then march out again.

And what was the purpose of your journey? To whip up more hatred of black people.

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Mr Nomanners

Oct 9th, 2017 12:03 pm | By

The Times has a Republican’s Guide to Presidential Etiquette that it has updated to take in recent incidents in correct behavior.

Republicans used to care a whole lot about how a president comported himself, and whether he acted at all times with the dignity his station demands.

“Is President Obama Disrespecting the Oval Office?” Fox News asked in 2010, with a link to images of Mr. Obama and his aides tossing a football, or eating apples just inches from the Resolute desk.

“Wear a suit coat and tie,” said Andrew Card Jr., President George W. Bush’s former chief of staff, in reaction to pictures of Mr. Obama in shirtsleeves in 2009.

I remember that shirtsleeves nonsense. I don’t think I knew there were complaints about eating apples. I have a feeling I blogged something about substance versus appearance, and the fact that wearing a tie at all times did nothing to disguise Bush’s lack of qualification for the job.

“I do expect him to send the message that people who are going to be in the Oval Office should treat the office with the respect that it has earned over history,” Mr. Card said.

But hey, that was then! In 2017, there’s a whole new bar for tolerable conduct by the commander in chief. Our original guide cataloged several dozen examples. Almost five months later, it’s clear that an update is necessary. This expanded list is meant to ensure that Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and other congressional Republicans never forget what they now condone in a president.

So, if you are the president, you may:

  • Call for the firing of “son of a bitch” athletes who choose to exercise their right to free speech

…

…

  • Deliver a speech to the Boy Scouts of America that includes mockery of a former president and winking references to sexual orgies, and then lie by claiming that the head of that organization called and told you it was the best speech ever delivered in Boy Scout history

…

And tweet tweet tweet, and lie lie lie. It’s a useful list.

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La guerre est finie

Oct 9th, 2017 11:14 am | By

The war on coal is over; the war on the environment has intensified.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt told coal miners in Kentucky on Monday that he will move to repeal a rule limiting greenhouse-gas emissions from existing power plants, assuring them, “The war against coal is over.”

Awesome. Let’s have more and more and MORE greenhouse-gas emissions so that the environment can crash even faster and more destructively than it already is. Those fires racing through Sonoma and Napa counties in California right now? There will be more of those! Yay! And as for the hurricanes – they’ll be like this year only more so. Fun!

“Tomorrow, in Washington D.C., I’ll be a signing a proposed rule to withdraw the so-called Clean Power Plan of the past administration, and thus begin the effort to withdraw that rule,” Pruitt said.

The 43-page proposal, which was obtained by The Washington Post and other news outlets last week, argues that the agency overstepped its legal authority in seeking to force utilities to reduce carbon emissions outside their actual facilities to meet federal emissions targets. It does not offer a replacement plan for regulating emissions of carbon dioxide, which the Supreme Court has ruled that the EPA is obligated to do. Rather, the agency said it plans to seek public input on how best to cut emissions from natural-gas and coal-fired power plants.

And to the surprise of everyone the public input will universally urge voluntary personal dedication to turning the thermostat down a degree.

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Il ne regrette rien

Oct 9th, 2017 10:49 am | By

Bob Corker, the Tennessee senator who’s been brawling with Trump lately, chatted with the Times yesterday. He apparently gets what a disaster Trump is yet he thinks it will all be ok somehow.

Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged in an interview on Sunday that President Trump was treating his office like “a reality show,” with reckless threats toward other countries that could set the nation “on the path to World War III.”

In an extraordinary rebuke of a president of his own party, Mr. Corker said he was alarmed about a president who acts “like he’s doing ‘The Apprentice’ or something.”

“He concerns me,” Mr. Corker added. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.”

So then it’s a pity that Corker endorsed Trump during the election, isn’t it. It’s not as if Trump seemed ok until after the inauguration – he never seemed ok.

Trump was of course lying when he tweeted that Corker had begged for his support.

Mr. Corker flatly disputed that account, saying Mr. Trump had urged him to run again, and promised to endorse him if he did. But the exchange laid bare a deeper rift: The senator views Mr. Trump as given to irresponsible outbursts — a political novice who has failed to make the transition from show business.

Mr. Trump poses such an acute risk, the senator said, that a coterie of senior administration officials must protect him from his own instincts. “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him,” Mr. Corker said in a telephone interview.

Yes, but again, none of this is surprising. It was always clear what Trump is.

The deeply personal back-and-forth will almost certainly rupture what had been a friendship with a fellow real estate developer turned elected official, one of the few genuine relationships Mr. Trump had developed on Capitol Hill. Still, even as he leveled his stinging accusations, Mr. Corker repeatedly said on Sunday that he liked Mr. Trump, until now an occasional golf partner, and wished him “no harm.”

How can a reasonable person (and Corker seems reasonable) possibly like him? If you have a friend or acquaintance who has been friendly and charming to you but is also a noisy emphatic misogynist and racist and xenophobe and bully…doesn’t that curdle the liking? That’s not some wild hypothetical, I’m sure we’ve all had that experience in miniature and felt the tension. Trump makes it easy by skipping over any tension and just making it impossible to “like” him.

In a 25-minute conversation, Mr. Corker, speaking carefully and purposefully, seemed to almost find cathartic satisfaction by portraying Mr. Trump in terms that most senior Republicans use only in private.

The senator, who is close to Mr. Tillerson, invoked comments that the president made on Twitter last weekend in which he appeared to undercut Mr. Tillerson’s negotiations with North Korea.

“A lot of people think that there is some kind of ‘good cop, bad cop’ act underway, but that’s just not true,” Mr. Corker said.

Without offering specifics, he said Mr. Trump had repeatedly undermined diplomacy with his Twitter fingers. “I know he has hurt, in several instances, he’s hurt us as it relates to negotiations that were underway by tweeting things out,” Mr. Corker said.

Make America Great Again, yeah?

All but inviting his colleagues to join him in speaking out about the president, Mr. Corker said his concerns about Mr. Trump were shared by nearly every Senate Republican.

“Look, except for a few people, the vast majority of our caucus understands what we’re dealing with here,” he said, adding that “of course they understand the volatility that we’re dealing with and the tremendous amount of work that it takes by people around him to keep him in the middle of the road.”

Then they should invoke Article 25 without delay. The man is wholly unfit, he’s deranged, he’s reckless – why are they not removing him from office?

One of the most prominent establishment-aligned Republicans to develop a relationship with Mr. Trump, the senator said he did not regret standing with him during the campaign last year.

“I would compliment him on things that he did well, and I’d criticize things that were inappropriate,” he said. “So it’s been really the same all the way through.”

Well he should regret it. The Trump of now is the Trump of then. He should regret it.

In August, after Mr. Trump’s equivocal response to the deadly clashes in Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Corker told reporters that the president “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful.”

He said on Sunday that he had made all those comments deliberately, aiming them at “an audience of one, plus those people who are closely working around with him, what I would call the good guys.” He was referring to Mr. Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly.

“As long as there are people like that around him who are able to talk him down when he gets spun up, you know, calm him down and continue to work with him before a decision gets made, I think we’ll be fine,” he said.

That’s just incomprehensible to me.

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Virtue signaling

Oct 8th, 2017 3:42 pm | By

And in between threatening new wars and teasing us with military surprises and attacking senators on Twitter, Trump and his people manage to find time to continue their ridiculous fight with football players who have the temerity to protest racism.

Vice President Mike Pence left a football game between the Indianapolis Colts and the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday after some players knelt during the National Anthem, saying he did not want to “dignify” the event.

“I left today’s Colts game because @POTUS and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem,” Pence wrote on Twitter.

Except that it doesn’t “disrespect our soldiers”; that’s why they kneel instead of sitting: it’s specifically to combine respect for our soldiers (many of whom, I might add, are black) with protesting police violence against black people. An administration with any decency and with any sense of duty to all the people would take that on board instead of constantly picking fights over it. Football players really are not doing anything wrong by refusing to follow a particular custom. It’s not as if they’re shitting in church. It’s just football. It’s just a song. Singing a patriotic song before a football game is not some kind of legal obligation. It’s not even a very old custom. It’s just some thing that somebody decided to do not that long ago; it’s not at all clear why players shouldn’t be free to reject or adapt the custom. People in other countries think we’re deeply weird for putting on a dumb patriotic display before getting down to smashing heads together. Presidents and their colleagues should have more important things to do than to make a fuss about it.

Donald Trump Jr., the President’s eldest son, tweeted his support for Pence’s decision.

Ahhhhhh that’s such a disgusting – and racist – thing to say. “Pride in our country” forsooth – that from the family that has been selling the country to Putin for years. God they are scum.

Bill Kristol is not impressed either. Yet again, weird to be in agreement with Bill Kristol.

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The de facto chief cartoonist for alt-Twitter

Oct 8th, 2017 3:12 pm | By

I hadn’t heard of the cartoonist Ben Garrison until I was looking for something else a couple of hours ago and saw this masterpiece:

ThinkProgress wrote about him last month:

Spend any time on some of the internet’s more devoted pro-Trump sites and you’ll likely come across one of Ben Garrison’s cartoons. Instead of using his artwork to mock the president, he frequently depicts Trump as a young, muscular, all-American hero, standing up to the Deep State swamp monster or slaying the dragon of Political Correctness…

Since 2015, Garrison has been the de facto chief cartoonist for right-wing communities online. His work regularly features at the top of the popular sub-reddit, r/The_Donald, and has been shared by Mike Cernovich and Julian Assange. Garrison now has nearly 100,000 followers on Twitter. He is also no stranger to controversy.  In 2016 he was accused of racism for drawing a cartoon that featured a pageant-ready Melania Trump next to a butch, unhappy-looking Michelle Obama.

Well accusing him of racism is just political correctness run mad, mk?

There’s more of his work on his Facebook wall:

Image may contain: 4 people, text

When did Trump ever observe a moment of silence? When did he ever look like that? But more to the point, which is more useful, a moment of silence, or trying to prevent mass shootings? Why are we supposed to think an empty pious gesture is a sacred good thing while actually trying to do something about the killings is rude and noisy and something only a horrible old witch would do?

No automatic alt text available.

That’s not the Carmen Yulin Cruz we all saw last week.

On the other hand, the guy also posts nice photos of Montana landscapes on his wall.

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Tuffer

Oct 8th, 2017 11:59 am | By

Of course he did.

Trump said on Saturday he had a good relationship with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson but that Tillerson could be tougher.

Trump, who made the comment to reporters at the White House, did not elaborate.

“Tougher” in Trumpspeak of course means a more heedless psychotic bully. Yes that’s just what we need more of.

Trump being tough this morning.

The scare quotes on “begged” are helpful. Corker didn’t really beg, Trump is just lying about it for effect. Thanks for the tip-off.

Yeah I don’t think that happened either.

Corker responded.

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Given what we know about the lies that led up to the war

Oct 8th, 2017 10:14 am | By

No. False dichotomy. We don’t have to choose between highly specialized academic history written for other historians on the one hand, and Ken Burns on the other. The fact that most history is not written for a broad public is not a reason to be uncritical of tedious sentimental Ken Burns.

Historians aren’t very happy with Ken Burns. He’s a simplifier; we complicate. He makes myths; we bust them. And he celebrates the nation, while we critique it.

That’s the party line, anyway, among my fellow academics. And while I agree with some of their attacks on the recently concluded TV series about the Vietnam War that Burns co-created and co-edited with Lynn Novick, there’s something else at work here.

It’s called sour grapes. Put simply, Burns has managed to engage a huge public audience. And that makes him suspect among members of our guild, who write almost entirely for each other.

The criticisms are so vituperative and dismissive that they need an explanation beyond the substantive objections, Jonathan Zimmerman says.

Several scholars praised Burns for including multiple voices — especially Vietnamese ones — in his interviews. But most historians in the blogosphere took him to task for distorting the conflict, especially with regard to his quest for a shared national narrative that can bind Americans together.

That’s been Burns’s key theme since his blockbuster 1990 series on the Civil War. And yes, it can lead him astray. As many historians observed, his Civil War series seriously underplayed the ways that the postwar “reconciliation” reinforced white supremacy.

Well, that’s a big problem, isn’t it – all the more so because he’s so popular. Popularizing a sentimentalized and distorted version of the Civil War and its aftermath is a big deal. Americans seem to love to embrace a sentimental dishonest version of our history, and we see the unhappy results all around us.

And we see the same flaw in his portrayal of the Vietnam War, “begun in good faith, by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings,” the narrator declares.

That probably wouldn’t pass muster around a university seminar table, given what we know about the lies that led up to the war. So what? Surely, these documentaries have engaged millions of Americans in dialogues about their past. And isn’t that what history is supposed to do?

So what? So what? So spreading sentimental bullshit about the Vietnam War is exactly that, that’s so what.

The problem, Zimmerman repeats, is the shortage of good history for the general public.

“I believe you have failed and lost touch absolutely in the communication of history to the public and that it has fallen to the amateur historians, if you will, to try to rescue that history,” Ken Burns told the Journal of American History — the flagship publication in our field — in 1994. “I would hope that the academy could change course and join a swelling chorus of interest in history for everyone.”

That never happened. To be sure, a small number of academic historians — think Eric Foner, or Jill Lepore — have published books that attract wide readerships. And many others have entered the public sphere via blogs and social media, as the reaction to the Vietnam series illustrates.

I did think Eric Foner, also David Oshinsky, David Brion Davis, Gordon Wood, Henry Mayer…It’s really not that hard to find accessible history by going to a library or a large bookstore.

But I agree with him that historians shouldn’t be rebuked or penalized for writing non-specialist history.

At almost every institution, however, historians are still evaluated and promoted based on their peer-reviewed scholarship rather than by their public engagement. If anything, writing for lay audiences counts against them. When I was a junior professor, a senior colleague advised me to stop publishing op-ed columns. They marked me as a glib and unserious scholar, she said, or even — gasp! — as a journalist.

Until our academic reward system changes, Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and their fellow popularizers will dominate the history that Americans actually consume. That makes historians jealous, and — even worse — it makes us irrelevant. Our research won’t matter until it becomes common knowledge. And the history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world.

But Ken Burns does television. Eric Foner and Jill Lepore do books; Ken Burns does television. Maybe the solution here isn’t to stop criticizing Ken Burns, but rather to get people who work in public tv to get together with Eric Foner or Jill Lepore to do good documentaries. By “good” I do not mean ones in which we’re expected to stare at still photographs for a long long time while somebody drones sonorously on the soundtrack.

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When all the rules

Oct 7th, 2017 5:17 pm | By

Harvey Weinstein sent the New York Times a statement after its story on him was published.

It begins:

I came of age in the 60’s and 70’s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different. That was the culture then.

I have since learned it’s not an excuse, in the office – or out of it. To anyone.

Oh come on. The rules about behavior and workplaces were not that different. They were not so different that everyone – women included – thought it was just fine for powerful men to make job-seeking women come to their hotel rooms only to jump out at them naked and demanding a “massage.”

That was not “the culture” then.

The culture then was very into getting rid of sexual inhibitions and shame, but oddly enough that is not the same thing as men forcing themselves on women. A great many men did think it was, that much is true, but funnily enough men are not the whole of the culture and not all men (yes, not all men) thought that way.

The renaissance of feminism was also part of the culture then, and feminists have the quirky idea that sex should be mutual rather than unilateral, and enthusiastically consensual as opposed to unilaterally imposed.

It doesn’t take 50 or 60 years to grasp that not very subtle point.

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Wait and see

Oct 7th, 2017 4:11 pm | By

It’s Saturday afternoon; I guess Trump is bored with watching football.

“Presidents and their administrations have been talking to North Korea for 25 years, agreements made and massive amounts of money paid … hasn’t worked, agreements violated before the ink was dry, makings fools of U.S. negotiators. Sorry, but only one thing will work!” Trump tweeted in two messages on Saturday afternoon.

“Sorry, but I plan to blow up the world.”

“Soz, but I’m a reckless idiot who can’t find his own buttocks in the dark so I’m going to go to war with North Korea and its buddy China.”

“Sorry, but you laughed at me one time too many.”

The president’s latest tweets come as the world continues to try to decipher another cryptic message that Trump issued on Thursday night at the White House, as he posed for a photo with the country’s top military leaders.

“You guys know what this represents?” Trump asked reporters in the room that night. “Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.”

When pressed to explain what he meant, Trump said: “You’ll find out.”

Oh, isn’t that adorable. He’s such a card.

More on that fun moment:

At 7:18 p.m., reporters were led into the lavish dining room where the military’s senior leaders and their spouses were lined up on either side of the president and first lady Melania Trump in preparation for a formal group photo.

“You guys know what this represents?” Trump said gesturing to the commanders surrounding him as he made looping motions with his right index finger.

He dramatically paused and then said: “Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.”

“What’s the storm?” a reporter called out, as the officials and their spouses continued to pose, their faces frozen in toothy smiles, even as many of their eyes began to dart around the room.

“Could be the calm before the storm,” the president said.

It felt like the opening scene of an action movie — the president, stiffly rotating from side to side, surveying the country’s military leaders and providing an ominous hint that something would soon unfold. He wouldn’t say what, but it seemed clear that it wouldn’t be anything good. Maybe something involving North Korea or the Islamic State terrorist organization or Iran or who knows what else.

Who knows, who knows, because here is this stupid vain greedy man we’ve given possession of all the keys, and he’s toying with us. It could be anything – anything except a good idea.

On Thursday evening, reporters were only in the dining room for about a minute — and they kept asking the president to explain what he meant.

“What storm, Mr. President?” an NBC News reporter called out.

“We have the world’s great military people in this room, I will tell you that,” Trump said in a loud but calm tone, flanked by his generals, whom he then thanked for coming to the White House.

Again, a reporter asked: “What storm, Mr. President?”

He responded: “You’ll find out.”

That’s this reckless toad of a man playing games with the people he’s supposed to serve.

At the White House press briefing on Friday afternoon, about one quarter of the questions directed at press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders revolved around the president’s calm-before-the-storm remark. She did little to provide clarity to Americans worried that the country might be headed into war.

“We’re never going to say in advance what the president’s going to do,” Sanders said when first asked about the storm comment. “And, as he said last night. . .you’ll have to wait and see.”

As if we were talking about birthday presents or a surprise trip to who knows where. That’s how childish and incompetent they are.

Later in the briefing, another reporter noted that the president did give advance warning that he might do something by saying that there could be a storm coming.

“He, unprompted, dangled these hints,” the reporter said.

Sanders responded: “He didn’t talk about any specific actions at all.”

So she confirmed he was playing a stupid sadistic game. That makes sense.

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Harvey Weinstein is a VICTIM

Oct 7th, 2017 12:15 pm | By

Oh I see. It’s women’s fault. It’s women’s fault that Harvey Weinstein is a sleazy harasser and that everyone in the business knew it and nobody did anything about it.

This one time I’m going to quote from a Breitbart piece, one by Daniel Nussbaum.

Several actresses who worked with Harvey Weinstein on critically-acclaimed films have come under fire from one of their fellow stars for refusing to speak out publicly after a bombshell report Thursday detailed decades of sexual harassment allegations against the Hollywood movie mogul.

Yeah! It’s their fault! Never mind Harvey Weinstein, never mind the way women are shut out of management jobs in Hollywood, never mind the long history of the “casting couch” and the haha jokes about it – talk about the women. Make it their fault! Why didn’t they risk their careers to stop this very powerful producer using his power to bully women?

Poor Harvey Weinstein. If women had just done their job of nurturing and protecting and taking care of everything, he wouldn’t be in this sad predicament. Goddam women!

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White House press release on late night talk shows

Oct 7th, 2017 10:18 am | By

Lordy lordy lordy.

He thinks a “good story” is one that says nice things about him. I guess no one has ever explained to him that in journalism the criteria for “good” have more to do with accuracy and clarity and significance and the like than with whether or not they say nice things about belligerent stupid frauds who get themselves elected to high office.

He’s working hard for his donors. I guess no one has ever explained to him that he’s supposed to work hard for all of us, not just his donors.

All that’s going on in the world and the country, and the president of the US is yammering about late night talk show hosts.

More and more people are suggesting=Donald Trump is saying more and more times every hour.

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A vicious public backlash

Oct 7th, 2017 9:27 am | By

Hungary is in a tragic mess.

When Zoltan Fenyesi offered a free holiday at his guesthouse to a group of refugees, he thought the act might become an example of Hungarian hospitality. By introducing them to his neighbours in Ocseny, a village of 2,300 in south-west Hungary, he hoped it might also prove the refugees posed no danger.

Instead his offer last month provoked a vicious public backlash. A fraught town hall meeting called to discuss the invitation was captured on camera by local media, Mr Fenyesi received death threats and the clashes sparked an anguished national debate over how far ordinary Hungarians should go in fending off foreigners. In the process, Ocseny has become a byword for racial fear.

Viktor Orban, in a very Trump-like move, supported the protest and brought it to national attention. Yeah, that’s what we need, more fear and hatred of foreigners!

Meanwhile

the populist-nationalist Fidesz government is sending leaflets to every household in a “national consultation” over an alleged plan by George Soros, the Hungary-born billionaire investor, to flood Europe with refugees.

And poison the wells and make bread out of the blood of children.

Zoltan Fenyesi has been subject to threats, including threats to cut off his head.

“What happened [in Ocseny] was not civil disobedience or resistance, but the first step towards lynching,” wrote Andras Sztankoczy, a conservative columnist, in a Hungarian newspaper last weekend. Despite the threats against Mr Fenyesi, Mr Orban said there was “nothing wrong” with the protests.

Many sides, many sides.

Although he fears for his safety, Mr Fenyesi makes a point of continuing to live his life in Ocseny as before — frequenting the same pub and speaking with his neighbours. But something deep in Hungarian society has changed, he says, adding: “What our government is doing will leave a scar for generations.”

It’s like that here too. The hatred and contempt Donald Trump has stoked will be with us for generations.

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The religious right wants to see more women knocked up

Oct 6th, 2017 4:19 pm | By

CFI on the Trump administration’s new rule letting godbothering employers refuse to include birth control in their employees’ health insurance:

The Center for Inquiry condemned the new rules announced by the Department of Health and Human Services, dramatically curtailing the effectiveness of the Affordable Care Act’s Contraceptive Mandate.

Under the new rules, any employer may claim an exemption to the requirement to provide contraceptive coverage without co-payment, whether the employer’s objection is based on religious grounds or any other moral reasoning. This fundamentally undercuts the purpose and operation of the Contraceptive Mandate, a rule that was effective in ensuring broad access to reproductive health care for women.

The Contraceptive Mandate, a key part of the Obama administration’s signature health care reform, required health insurance to cover FDA-approved methods of contraception without co-payment by the insured party. In doing so, it significantly increased availability of critical reproductive health insurance to women across America, who, previously, had often been compelled to pay significant out-of-pocket costs to access such essential care.

Out-of-pocket costs in addition to their insurance premiums. The birth control coverage isn’t free, it’s included in the insurance – except, now, when the godbotherers say no it isn’t.

Limiting contraception coverage has long been the objective of religious right groups. The religious right provided President Trump with a significant part of his support in the election. “This represents a shocking step backwards in American health care,” said Nick Little, Vice President and General Counsel of the Center for Inquiry. “At the behest of their allies in the religious right, the President and this Administration have determined that a woman’s access to affordable, essential health care must be subordinated to the religious whims of her employer.”

The Center for Inquiry submitted amicus briefs in both the Hobby Lobby and Zubik cases, and will continue to seek to defend broad, affordable access to contraception and other reproductive health care.

Robyn Blumner, President and CEO of the Center for Inquiry, added, “On these grounds what’s to stop the Trump Administration allowing employers to exclude blood transfusions from insurance coverage because Jehovah’s Witnesses object? Medical insurance is a benefit of employment. Giving employers the ability to dictate those benefits on religious grounds draws employees into their employer’s religion as a condition of employment. This is bad for women and a pluralistic society.”

The thing about the blood transfusions is that it would have an impact on men as well as women. The birth control thing hits women. They like that.

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The god memo

Oct 6th, 2017 12:07 pm | By

And just in time for the weekend – Sessions issues a heap of theocratic guidance for federal agencies. Amen, Master.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued sweeping guidance to executive branch agencies Friday on the Justice Department’s interpretation of how the government should respect religious freedom, triggering an immediate backlash from civil liberties groups who asserted the nation’s top law enforcement officer was trying to offer a license for discrimination.

In a memorandum titled “Federal Law Protections for Religious Liberty,” Sessions articulated 20 sweeping principles about religious freedom and what that means for the U.S. government — among them that freedom of religion extends to people and organizations; that religious employers are allowed to hire only those whose conduct is consistent with their beliefs; and that grants can’t require religious organizations to change their character.

…

“Except in the narrowest circumstances, no one should be forced to choose between living out his or her faith and complying with the law,” Sessions wrote. “Therefore, to the greatest extent practicable and permitted by law, religious observance and practice should be reasonably accommodated in all government activity, including employment, contracting, and programming.”

Bollocks. To a great many people, “living out her/his faith” means treating men as superior & dominant and women as inferior & subordinate. It means treating children as needing regular beatings to teach them how to be “good” (according to a narrow pinched religious idea of “good”). It means treating lesbians and gays as wicked outcast demons. It can mean treating people who follow rival religions as enemies.

Of course it can also mean compassion, generosity, altruism – but then that kind of thing is not likely to be in tension with laws about equal treatment and the like, is it. It’s the evil stuff they have to protect.

And civil liberties groups said there could be other effects. The principle allowing religious employers to hire only those whose conduct is consistent with their beliefs, for example, might allow a religious school to fire a teacher who had a child out of wedlock or a man who wed another man, said Louise Melling, deputy legal director at the ACLU.

“It is countenancing discrimination,” Melling said. “It is countenancing exercises of faith in a way that will harm other individuals.”

That’s why they like it. The chance to harm other individuals is the point.

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Trump lies again

Oct 6th, 2017 11:24 am | By

Trump being exceptionally disgusting even for him.

The Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia is “fighting for” violent gangs? How likely is that?

Greg Sargent at the Post explains:

This attack is absurd. Ed Gillespie, the GOP candidate, has been running ads that make the similar claim that Ralph Northam, the Democratic candidate, “voted in favor of sanctuary cities that let dangerous illegal immigrants back on the street, increasing the threat of MS-13.” As lieutenant governor, Northam did cast a tiebreaking vote against a bill that would have prevented any locality from restricting the “enforcement of federal immigration laws.” But as FactCheck.org noted in debunking the attack, the vote was procedurally meaningless — the result of a tactical trick by Virginia Republicans that never would have had any impact other than creating fodder for an attack ad. Regardless, Virginia doesn’t have any sanctuary cities in this sense, a fact Gillespie himself has admitted.

What’s more, this line questionably conflates undocumented immigrants with violent criminals, something that Trump himself underscored more emphatically by claiming that Northam is “fighting for the violent MS-13 killer gangs.” So Trump’s version is even sleazier and more dishonest than Gillespie’s rendition is.

Trump loves to scream that immigrants are CRIMINALS and a danger to our precious white virgins, but the reality is that immigrants commit less crime, not more. (It makes sense, dunnit, when you think about the incentives, not to mention the endemic violence here.)

So, whatever – an ugly race-baiting lie about a rival political candidate is just standard practice for our head of state. Same old same old.

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Students have rights

Oct 6th, 2017 10:25 am | By

CFI is explaining to public school administrators about the First Amendment. It’s kind of pathetic that such administrators have to have it explained to them.

The Center for Inquiry challenged two high schools in Louisiana, as well as the administrators of public schools and public school athletics, to cease recent policies that fringe on the First Amendment rights of students.

In a joint letter from a broad swath of the secular movement, CFI told Waylon Bates, principal of Parkway High School, as well as others in charge of school policies in Louisiana, that threatening to discipline student athletes for protesting during the National Anthem is unconstitutional. CFI demanded retraction of the threat as well as a commitment that organized prayer would no longer be permitted at high school football games.

Bates, with the support of Scott Smith, the superintendent of Bossier Parish Schools, had informed his student athletes they would be disciplined if they were to follow the lead of so many professional athletes who recently protested during the National Anthem.

The Supreme Court has long held that schools may not compel student participation in patriotic displays against their will. In West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, the highest court invalidated a law requiring public school students to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, or face discipline.

“Students don’t shed their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate,” said Nick Little, CFI’s Vice President and General Counsel, and one of the signatories to the letter. “Nor do they abandon those rights by putting on a football helmet. Students may not be compelled to be patriotic, and our courts have long recognized that.”

A better way to get students to be patriotic would be for the nation to be a better nation. Right now it’s a horror of a nation.

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President Pious

Oct 6th, 2017 9:44 am | By

President Pussy Grabber is doing his best to make it more difficult for women to get contraception. I hope Princess Ivanka comes darting out to tell us how empowering this is.

The Trump administration issued a rule Friday that sharply limits the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate, a move that could mean many American women would no longer have access to birth control free of charge.

No, that they would no long have access to birth control as part of their insurance. It was never “free of charge”; it was included in insurance coverage.

The new regulation, issued by the Health and Human Services Department, allows a much broader group of employers and insurers to exempt themselves from covering contraceptives such as birth control pills on religious or moral grounds. The decision, anticipated from the Trump administration for months, is the latest twist in a seesawing legal and ideological fight that has surrounded this aspect of the 2010 health-care law nearly from the start.

What could be more edifying than seeing President “you can grab them by the pussy” making it more difficult for women to get contraception on “moral” grounds? You can grab them by the pussy, and they can’t even get contraception through their employee health insurance; hahaha it sucks to be a woman doesn’t it.

As part of the rule, made publicly available in the Federal Register late Friday morning, administration officials estimate that 120,000 women at most will lose access to free contraceptives — many fewer than critics predict.

They’re not free. Wouldn’t you think journalists for the Post could get this right? They’re part of employer-based insurance. That’s not the same thing as free – it’s part of their compensation, that they work for.

The rule follows some social conservatives’ increasing frustration with the pace at which the Trump administration has addressed their demands on issues such as the ACA contraception requirement. “An awful lot of people who voted for this president did so believing this was going to be something he would solve,” said Mark Rienzi, senior counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, who hailed the rule as a correction of overly aggressive liberal actions under President Barack Obama. “There are other ways to get contraceptives. You don’t need to force nuns to give people contraception.”

Nuns, and the Catholic church more broadly, don’t need to try to run the lives of everyone who works for them. And they don’t give the contraception in any case; they provide insurance coverage that includes it. It’s an included benefit, not a donation.

In his sweeping May 4 executive order on free speech and religious liberty, Trump directed his Cabinet to address the concerns of those who had “conscience-based objections” to contraceptive coverage.

In previewing the rule for reporters, Roger Severino, director of HHS’s office for civil rights and a longtime proponent of religious liberties, reiterated Trump’s May pledge from the Rose Garden. The president had promised that “we will not allow people of faith to be targeted, bullied or silenced any more . . . We are ending the attacks on religious liberties.”

On Friday, Severino elaborated: “That was a promise made, and this is the promise kept. … We should have space for organizations to live out their religious identity and not face discrimination because of their faith.”

But not, of course, for women to live without fear of unwanted pregnancy.

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The casting shower

Oct 6th, 2017 9:16 am | By

The New York Times yesterday:

An investigation by The New York Times found previously undisclosed allegations against Mr. Weinstein stretching over nearly three decades, documented through interviews with current and former employees and film industry workers, as well as legal records, emails and internal documents from the businesses he has run, Miramax and the Weinstein Company.

During that time, after being confronted with allegations including sexual harassment and unwanted physical contact, Mr. Weinstein has reached at least eight settlements with women, according to two company officials speaking on the condition of anonymity. Among the recipients, The Times found, were a young assistant in New York in 1990, an actress in 1997, an assistant in London in 1998, an Italian model in 2015 and Ms. O’Connor shortly after, according to records and those familiar with the agreements.

He gave a statement to the Times saying the way he’s behaved with “colleagues” (actually underlings, over whom he had all the power) has “caused a lot of pain.” The statement of course does not specify (aka admit) the behavior. “Behavior” is such a conveniently neutral word. He said he sincerely apologizes…but how sincere can an apology that evasive and self-protecting be? “I’m sorry I did something that you – my colleague – didn’t like.” Well what was the something? Forgetting a birthday? Or demanding sexual favors as a condition of employment?

Dozens of Mr. Weinstein’s former and current employees, from assistants to top executives, said they knew of inappropriate conduct while they worked for him. Only a handful said they ever confronted him.

Mr. Weinstein enforced a code of silence; employees of the Weinstein Company have contracts saying they will not criticize it or its leaders in a way that could harm its “business reputation” or “any employee’s personal reputation,” a recent document shows. And most of the women accepting payouts agreed to confidentiality clauses prohibiting them from speaking about the deals or the events that led to them.

Just standard, the executives say. Not evidence of wrongdoing. Move along.

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The experts

Oct 5th, 2017 5:58 pm | By

That time they threw a feminist conference and forgot just one little thing.

When a pink flyer promoting a feminism conference at Mexico’s biggest university was posted on social media this week, it did not take long before people noticed something was amiss.

The lineup featured two panels with 11 participants – and all of them were male.

Well…men know more about it, and they’re better at speaking, and they have more free time…it all makes sense.

The pink flyer though – that’s just stupid. We like other colors and pink doesn’t=women.

Organised by the humanities department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico(Unam), the 11 October conference appears to be intended as a homage to the feminist scholar Marta Lamas, who will host the event and debate the 11 men. The university did not immediately respond to queries about the event.

Sure. Definitely. An homage. For an homage you want to invite the best quality people, and that’s obviously not women.

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