Guest post by Maureen Brian, originally a comment on a Guardian piece about National Health Service funding problems.

First a bit from the Guardian piece by Bob Kerslake, for context:

I have this weekend decided to stand down from my role as chair of King’s College hospital, London.

This was not a decision that I took lightly. I love King’s and have the highest regard for the people who work there. But in the end I have concluded that the government and its regulator, NHS Improvement, are simply not facing up to the enormous challenges that the NHS is currently facing. This is especially true in London where the demands of a rapidly growing population are not being matched by

Oddly enough, the women who reported that Trump sexually assaulted them haven’t since then decided it was all a big fuss about nothing. They still wonder why the hell he was elected (sort of elected) anyway.

It was “heartbreaking” for women to go public with their claims against President Trump last year, only to see him ascend to the Oval Office, said Samantha Holvey, a former Miss USA contestant who in October 2016 said Trump inappropriately inspected pageant participants.

“I put myself out there for the entire world, and nobody cared,” Holvey said Monday on NBC’s “Megyn Kelly Today” show.

Not nobody – but for sure not enough to stop the pinchy-hand vulgarian.

During the television appearance and a news

Evangelicals have some very odd priorities.

Penny Young Nance, CEO of the evangelical group Concerned Women for America, told NPR on Monday that the most important issue in the Alabama Senate race is Democratic candidate Doug Jones’ support of abortion, and not whether Republican candidate Roy Moore is a pedophile.

I realize that evangelicals have decided to pretend to think that a fertilized egg is a thinking feeling planning hoping human being as opposed to a process that will become a thinking feeling planning hoping human being, but still. It seems pretty odd to be that indifferent to the well-being of thinking feeling planning hoping young girls.

NPR’s Steve Inskeep asked Nance on Monday if Moore is “worthy of being

In Goteborg last night:

Three people have been arrested for allegedly throwing firebombs at a synagogue in the Swedish city of Goteborg, the second anti-Jewish attack in the Nordic nation in two days. Jewish groups condemned the attacks as “unconscionable” and demanded that authorities take action.

…

The attack took place after some 200 people rallied late Friday in the southern city of Malmo, yelling anti-Jewish slogans and waving Palestinian flags to protest U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Nice work, Don.

On Saturday, Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom tweeted that those who called for Jews to be killed did something “totally unacceptable.”

The European Jewish Congress said Sunday it was “unconscionable that Jews

Oh will you look at that now.

Interesting to see the two female journos who actually broke the story being written out of history already pic.twitter.com/06LzCf2Q5Y

— Barbara Speed (@bspeed8) December 10, 2017

The MAN who took down WEINSTEIN the headline shouts.

It’s in the Times, the one in London, the one Murdoch owns.

The one in New York, the one Murdoch does not own, broke the story before Ronan Farrow did. Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the story, after months of investigation. All three of them took down Weinstein.… Read the rest

An important part of making the rich richer, of course, is doing away with all those pesky regulations on pollution and the environment and stupid liberal crap like that.

Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, has said the Trump administration’s high-profile regulatory rollback does not mean a free pass for violators of environmental laws. But as the Trump administration moves from one attention-grabbing headline to the next, it has taken a significant but less-noticed turn in the enforcement of federal pollution laws.

An analysis of enforcement data by The New York Times shows that the administration has adopted a more lenient approach than the previous two administrations — Democratic and Republican — toward polluters…

The Times built a database of civil

The cover story is that cutting taxes on the rich will cause an explosion of prosperity and profits and productive investment that will almost instantly flood down to the workers and make them rich and happy and patriotic.

That, of course, is just the cover story. The real reason for cutting taxes on the rich is that it diverts more money to rich people, making them even richer. The end. That’s the goal, that’s the glorious project, that’s what they want – ever-richer rich people, period.

Meanwhile, Kansas offers a snapshot of what actually happens when Republicans slash taxes on the rich.

After a failed economic experiment meant to boost economic growth blew a hole in the Kansas budget as

Who wanted to grab some of that Bears Ears land?

A uranium company launched a concerted lobbying campaign to scale back Bears Ears National Monument, saying such action would give it easier access to the area’s uranium deposits and help it operate a nearby processing mill, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and top Utah Republicans have said repeatedly that questions of mining or drilling played no role in President Trump’s announcement Monday that he was cutting the site by more than 1.1 million acres, or 85 percent.

No role, no role at all, it was a matter of principle.

“This is not about energy,” Zinke told reporters Tuesday. “There is no mine

This is an ad (aka advert) but it’s a scenic ad full of Seattle and Seattle-area goodness plus trains so I like it. It includes those neon-green fuselages I’ve mentioned I frequently see rolling past.

H/t Dave Ricks… Read the rest

Sometimes, I hear, people get reported to their employers for “transphobia” – but what exactly is “transphobia”? And why is it reportable? People don’t get reported to employers for misogyny do they? Not that I ever heard of. There has to be an action. People get reported for sexual harassment, but not for misogyny.

So, puzzling over these ambiguities, I hit the Google machine and found the Cambridge Student Union explanation of what transphobia is.

Transphobia has been defined by the Crown Prosecution Service as “the fear of or a dislike directed towards trans people, or a fear of or dislike directed towards their perceived lifestyle, culture or characteristics, whether or not any specific trans person has