The other day Fresh Air did a conversation with a reporter about the health insurance battle; one item jumped out at me:

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies in for Terry Gross, who’s off this week. We’re talking with Sarah Kliff about the Senate health care bill. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had hoped to get it to a vote before the July 4 recess but has postponed action because he can’t get enough support for it to pass. Sarah Kliff is senior policy correspondent for Vox and co-host of its podcast “The Weeds.”

When we left off, Kliff had explained that the Congressional Budget Office found the bill would leave millions more uninsured and would increase health

Peter Beinart on the two flavors of sexism:

On Thursday, Donald Trump tweeted that MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” when she visited Mar-a-Lago last December. On Tuesday, in the Oval Office, he interrupted a phone call with the Irish prime minister to call over a female Irish journalist, Caitriona Perry, while referring to her “nice smile” and “this beautiful Irish press.”

The incidents are two sides of the same coin.

Or to put it more clearly, they’re the same thing in different moods. The sexist insult and the sexist compliment are both expressions of patronage, of ownership, of altitude. The complimentary version can in fact be worse, because if not obediently and gratefully received … Read the rest

Here is an interesting concept –

Twitter is also a regular reminder of what has long been Americans’ least-favorite quality in Trump: his temperament. A Quinnipiac University poll this month found that just 29 percent of Americans describe Trump as “levelheaded.” Even one-third of Republicans said the president is not a prudent man.

Our “least favorite quality”? What, because he has other, better ones? His temperament is everything. It’s not as if you can put his temperament to one side in order to give due credit to other things about him; his temperament suffuses everything he does and says. It’s a very “Aside from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?” idea that Trump is separable from … Read the rest

Sigh. Not this crap again.

Read this & gasp. So…we should abandon Dr. King's dream & return to judging people by the color of their skin instead of their character? pic.twitter.com/IniWeMAdST

— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) June 28, 2017

… Read the rest

It’s Cardinal Pell’s turn.

Victoria Police has confirmed Cardinal Pell has been charged on summons over multiple allegations and is due to face Melbourne Magistrates Court on July 18 for a filing hearing.

A statement from the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney said Cardinal Pell had been informed of Victoria Police’s “decision and action”.

He denies all the allegations and says he’ll defend himself vigorously.

Cardinal Pell is the third most senior Catholic at the Vatican, where he is responsible for the church’s finances.

He is likely to step aside from his Vatican post while he fights the charges.

Victoria’s Deputy Police Commissioner, Shane Patton, confirmed in a brief press conference on Thursday morning that Cardinal Pell had been issued

I wrote about “community”speak in The Freethinker.

The day after the terror attack near Finsbury Park Mosque, the BBC interviewed Massoud Shadjareh, chair of the ironically named Islamic Human Rights Commission.

The IHRC is in fact not so much a human rights organization as a public relations firm with one client: a reactionary theocratic version of Islam. In 2015 it distinguished itself by giving Charlie Hebdo an award for “Islamophobia” two months after 12 members of its staff were murdered by the Kouachi brothers, who shouted the obligatory “Allahu akbar” afterwards.

Why does the BBC consult organizations like that? Why doesn’t it talk to the not loathsome organizations instead? Why doesn’t it talk to women instead of men? … Read the rest

Pro Publica provides a large bale of information on why Facebook does the strange things it does.

In the wake of a terrorist attack in London earlier this month, a U.S. congressman wrote a Facebook post in which he called for the slaughter of “radicalized” Muslims. “Hunt them, identify them, and kill them,” declared U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican. “Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all.”

Higgins’ plea for violent revenge went untouched by Facebook workers who scour the social network deleting offensive speech.

But a May posting on Facebook by Boston poet and Black Lives Matter activist Didi Delgado drew a different response.

“All white people

Ben Schreckinger at Politico takes a look at the Southern Poverty Law Center and its expanded…agenda.

Since 1971, the SPLC has fought racial discrimination in the South and established itself as the nation’s most prominent hate-group watchdog, most notably winning legal fights that put some of the last nails in the coffin of the Ku Klux Klan. It has also built itself into a civil rights behemoth with a glossy headquarters and a nine-figure endowment, inviting charges that it oversells the threats posed by Klansmen and neo-Nazis to keep donations flowing in from wealthy liberals.

Trump has been a kind of gift to them, P argues, renewing their Relevance Ticket and inspiring new donors.

The rise of Trump is a

Trish Bendix at Slate also writes about Facebook’s tendency to recoil at the word “dyke,” though as an aside in a longer piece on dyke marches under threat.

[M]uch like the larger community has done with “queer,” lesbians have been working to reclaim the word for their own use and identification for decades.

“Lesbians have long been the object of vicious ‘name-calling’ designed to intimidate us into silence and invisibility,” wrote J.R. Roberts in the 1979 essay “In America They Call Us Dykes.” “In the Lesbian/feminist 1970s, we broke the silence on this tabooed word, reclaiming it for ourselves, assigning it to positive, political values.”

Since then, dyke has been a political identity for many young lesbians, its meaning

Facebook is banning people – women mostly – for causing the word “dyke” to appear, while words like “cunt” and “whore” are of course sacrosanct. Perhaps you think Facebook is doing that only when “dyke” is being used as a pejorative? Ha no.

Lesbians are getting banned from Facebook in droves for posts that include the word “dyke.”

On Friday, in the days leading up to the annual Pride marches that take place in many North American cities, reports that lesbians were being banned from Facebook began to surface.

See the post for screenshots.

So, while the rash of bans over the weekend appeared to be targeted and connected to Pride, it’s not a new phenomenon. At Slate