Preet Bharara said a thing.

"It's hard not to be proud of John McCain." Agreed. Whatever your politics. Yes, I'm watching the HBO special.

— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) May 29, 2018

“It’s hard not to be proud of John McCain.” Agreed. Whatever your politics.

Wellll, thought I. No. No it’s not. He chose Sarah Palin as his vice president. That means he chose her for president should he win the election and then die in office. That all by itself makes it not hard to refrain from being unmixedly proud of John McCain.

A friend pointed out another one, that I don’t think I was aware of. Ed Pilkington in the Guardian in September 2008 (two months before McCain … Read the rest

CNN reports:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for a controversial Arkansas law that blocks medication-induced abortions to go into effect.

The law, passed in 2015, says that any physician who “gives, sells, dispenses, administers, or otherwise provides or prescribes the abortion-inducing drug” shall have to have a contract with a physician who has admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

So that will make it much harder to get the drug.

Planned Parenthood said it will “swiftly” make another challenge to block the law in US district court.

“Arkansas is now shamefully responsible for being the first state to ban medication abortion,” Planned Parenthood Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens said in a statement. This dangerous law also

It seems the government may have underestimated the number of deaths caused by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico just a tad. The new estimate is roughly 4,600, compared to the previous count of…64.

An analysis of vital statistics by The New York Times last December found that 1,052 more people than usual died across the island in the 42 days after the storm. Other news organizations, including Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism and CNN, and Alexis Raúl Santos, a demographer at Penn State, have also challenged the government’s figure, finding evidence for hundreds of excess deaths in the weeks following the hurricane.

Researchers for this latest study visited more than 3,000 residences across the island and

So that’s over.

Stellar ratings and an apology weren’t enough to mitigate Roseanne Barr’s racist comments, and now ABC is pulling the plug on “Roseanne.” ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey says the network has decided to cancel the “Roseanne” reboot.

Dungey said in a statement, “Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show.”

It was either that or see everyone connected with Blackish walk out. They kept the better show.… Read the rest

Rex Huppke at the Chicago Tribune sees Roseanne Barr the way I do – trivial herself but a portent of the world we now live in.

Barr quickly defended her Tuesday morning tweet as a “joke.” She then tweeted that she was leaving Twitter. Five minutes later, likely feeling pressure from ABC — the network making stacks of money off Barr’s reboot of the old sitcom “Roseanne” — she returned to Twitter with a more formal and entirely unbelievable apology:

“I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me — my joke was in bad taste.”

When the

Living in Trump World.

A week after Roseanne Barr’s ABC sitcom closed out a successful comeback season, the outspoken comedian was at the center of a social media storm prompted by her reference on Twitter to “The Planet of the Apes” when mentioning a former top adviser to President Barack Obama who is black.

Early on Tuesday, Ms. Barr posted a comment about Valerie Jarrett, the former adviser to Mr. Obama, that said if “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”

I’ve never seen her sitcom and I’ve never been able to keep track of all the people named Roseanne we’re supposed to pay attention to. but I know what “ape” jokes are about.

https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/1001475467608842241

Can’t … Read the rest

Meanwhile, in another part of the Reactionary Forest, the Christianists are plotting to impose their religion on all of us.

The idea behind Project Blitz is to overwhelm state legislatures with bills based on centrally manufactured legislation. “It’s kind of like whack-a-mole for the other side; it’ll drive ‘em crazy that they’ll have to divide their resources out in opposing this,” David Barton, the Christian nationalist historian and one of four members of Project Blitz’s “steering team,” said in a conference call with state legislators from around the country that was later made public.

According to research provided by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, more than 70 bills before state legislatures appear to be based

Now here’s a feel-good story…about an IMMIGRANT, a BLACK immigrant, from AFRICA, from one of those “shithole” countries in AFRICA.

A West African migrant is being praised in France for scaling a building to save a boy hanging from a fourth-floor balcony in Paris. The man, Mamoudou Gassama, will be made a French citizen, the Elysee Palace announced today.

Gassama’s act was caught on video and went viral on social media. The incident happened on Saturday night in the north of Paris, the Malian migrant told French media.

Gassama was in the neighborhood to watch a soccer match in a local restaurant when he heard people screaming and cars honking in the streets.

When he saw the young child

Well, that’s blunt.

https://twitter.com/HenryB1992/status/1000406229754241024

Note the hidden premise in “Well you’ve really done the Irish LGBT community a huge disservice. Thanks for making adoption an even more difficult prospect for them.” The hidden premise is that people’s desire to adopt children is a reason to force women to bear those children against their wills. That’s the issue here: forcibly preventing women from ending their own pregnancies. The hidden premise behind that is that women have no right to make decisions about their own bodies, that women don’t own their own bodies, that women are a public resource first of all, and owe childless people who want children their pregnancies and deliveries.

Note the hidden premise in “Oh, and for the … Read the rest

What was that about separating children from their parents?

Forcibly separating parents from children has a history; it is our history. pic.twitter.com/1OgxeCLF8V

— Martha S. Jones, JD, PhD (@marthasjones_) May 26, 2018

In case you’re not familiar with the history – slave families could be broken up at any time at the pleasure of their “owners.”

Native American children were forcibly taken away to boarding schools at 6 yrs old. Beaten or worse,for not speaking English. I knew old Natives when I was a kid. Some talked with a lysp and had facial burns.

— Explorer David-Neel (@nevergop33) May 26, 2018

The lisp and facial burns were from torture for speaking their own languages at the schools.

https://twitter.com/CorbieCrow/status/1000838789244358657

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1000865151975903232… Read the rest

Speaking of children…

The US government seems to have lost some.

The federal government has placed thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children in the homes of sponsors, but last year it couldn’t account for nearly 1,500 of them.

Steven Wagner, a top official with the Department of Health and Human Services,disclosed the number to a Senate subcommittee last month while discussing the state of the Office of Refugee Resettlement(ORR) that oversees the care of unaccompanied immigrant children.

Wagner is the acting assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. ORR is a program of the Administration for Children and Families.

CNN reported earlier this month