I read the opening of a piece by Elizabeth Goitein at the Atlantic on Trump and emergency powers the other day, and found it so alarming I stopped reading. Now it appears we’re being dragged over that threshold…which could be game over. It was for Germany, and it could be for us.

Trump has long signaled his disdain for the concepts of limited presidential power and democratic rule. During his 2016 campaign, he praised murderous dictators. He declared that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, would be in jail if he were president, goading crowds into frenzied chants of “Lock her up.” He hinted that he might not accept an electoral loss. As democracies around the world slide into autocracy, and nationalism

The airport pat-down patrol has been calling in sick.

Hundreds of Transportation Security Administration officers, who are required to work without paychecks through the partial government shutdown, have called out from work this week from at least four major airports, according to two senior agency officials and three TSA employee union officials.

Did you miss it? I’ll repeat.

Hundreds of Transportation Security Administration officers, who are required to work without paychecks through the partial government shutdown

Who are required to work for no pay. That’s what we call “slavery,” and it’s not allowed.

“This problem of call outs is really going to explode over the next week or two when employees miss their first paycheck,” a union official at

Speaking of girls and princesses – do children need drag queens?

An event at which a drag artist will read stories to children has sparked outrage on social media.

Alyssa Van Delle has been invited to Taunton Library in February as part of LGBTQ+ History Month.

The performer will read from children’s books that cover LGBT themes or challenge traditional fairy tales.

But what are “LGBT themes”? They’re a grab-bag, aren’t they, and drag queens don’t exactly represent all such themes. They don’t speak much to the L part, for instance, and by some lights they just plain insult it. Lesbians and gay men share some interests but not all; lesbians are women and gay men are men and there … Read the rest

News from Brazil:

The new Minister of Women, the Family and Human Rights, pastor Damares Alves, created more controversy by saying that “a new era has started in Brazil” and that “boys wear blue and girls wear pink.” The remarks were caught on a video that also shows her chanting the sentence and being applauded.

On Wednesday (2nd), she was sworn in, among cries from the audience  of “Hallelujah” and “Praise the Lord,” she made an emotional speech saying there there will be no more “ideological indoctrination” of children and teenagers, and that “girls will be princesses and boys will be princes,” and criticized unnamed media outlets.

Meaning, boys will be dominant and girls will be submissive. Yay?

Alves,

Yesterday some spiteful anonymous fool on Twitter tried to discredit Ocasio-Cortez. The Times reports:

“Here is America’s favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is,” read the tweet from AnonymousQ1776, which incorrectly described it as a video from her high school days. The account has since been deleted.

Only, nobody saw the clueless nitwit part, probably because it’s not there.

If the video showing her dancing and twirling barefoot on a rooftop was meant to be an embarrassing leak, it backfired badly.

The dance video — a mash-up of 1980s dance moves from the movie “The Breakfast Club” and the music of “Lisztomania,” by the French band Phoenix — proved to be too endearing to many

Wait, Trump did what now?

Bringing active federal law enforcement agents to the WH podium like this for a political press conference is a gross abuse of power and does immeasurable harm to the agencies they represent.

— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) January 3, 2019

opens Google news

Oy.

It was after 4 in the afternoon and the briefing room was half empty.

Minutes after 4:00 p.m., a voice came on the overhead speaker announcing that press secretary Sarah Sanders would hold a briefing in “five minutes.”
The scramble was on.
For a White House that has held increasingly rare briefings, the short notice was unusual yet not surprising. And as the press appearances have shrunk, the importance of each

Siiiiiiiiiiigh

In 2015, Ryan's pink tie didn't make the tweet. pic.twitter.com/Ampg5NfvJH

— Philip Bump (@pbump) January 3, 2019

… Read the rest

The Times is covering the new Congress live. They’re talking about it in the usual horse-race terms, as if the only reasons to object to Trump were purely political reasons.

Maggie Haberman:

Even before she was elected speaker, Ms. Pelosi on Thursday morning started a historic day with a left hook, suggesting that a sitting president could be indicted. She made the comments in an interview with the “Today” show on NBC, when the host, Savannah Guthrie, asked if she agreed that the Justice Department guidelines against indicting a sitting president should be honored by the special counsel, who is investigating whether President Trump’s campaign colluded with Russians seeking to put him in the White House.

“Left hook” – … Read the rest

The usual view is that freedom and equality are in tension; the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argues that they’re interlaced.

Anderson is the chair of the University of Michigan’s department of philosophy and a champion of the view that equality and freedom are mutually dependent, enmeshed in changing conditions through time. Working at the intersection of moral and political philosophy, social science, and economics, she has become a leading theorist of democracy and social justice. She has built a case, elaborated across decades, that equality is the basis for a free society. Her work, drawing on real-world problems and information, has helped to redefine the way contemporary philosophy is done, leading what might be called the Michigan school of thought.

Better days.

https://twitter.com/RepBarbaraLee/status/1080887666130989057… Read the rest

Two women entered a building.

Violent protests have paralysed the southern Indian state of Kerala after two women made history by entering a prominent Hindu temple.

Schools across the state are closed and public transport too has been suspended. One person was killed in clashes on Wednesday.

Here’s a bit of advice. If your god or gods think their Rules of Exclusion are so important that you should risk death to defend them, you need a new god or gods. Rules of Exclusion are a bad thing. Seeing people as contaminants, even if it’s only One Week Per Month contamination, is an idea that leads straight to horrors. Don’t have gods of that kind, because they’re bad gods.… Read the rest

Oh, we’re doing this again.

US agents have fired tear gas over the border into Mexico at migrants trying to enter the country illegally.

Around 150 Central Americans tried to make the crossing near the town of Tijuana to the south of California on New Year’s Day.

One US official described the migrants as a “violent mob”.

Was his name Ronald Stump?… Read the rest

Here they are – a few of the MILLION who formed the chain.

https://twitter.com/rosatullyyy/status/1080551190545485826… Read the rest