By the way, if you're wondering why coverage of the huge marches yesterday seems kind of muted, it's because those hundreds of thousands weren't sitting in diners in small-town America, and therefore don't count. Also many of them were women.

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 21, 2018

CNN reports:

Thousands of demonstrators gathered in cities across the United States on Sunday for a second day of Women’s Marches, calling for equality and respect while urging supporters to make their voices heard by voting in this year’s midterm elections.

Sunday’s marches were held one year from the day hundreds of thousands of women, donning pink hats, took to the streets of Washington in a stunning display of resistance to President

One wag issued instructions yesterday on what women at the women’s marches were allowed to think.

I also want to stress that if you do attend, it is CRUICIAL that you do with an INTERSECTIONAL mindset. Centering reproductive systems at the heart of these demonstrations is reductive and exclusionary.

The replies are a tad caustic. One included this eloquent cartoon.

… Read the rest

And in case you’re thinking it’s just the Coastal Elites aka Jews & feminazis – behold Omaha.

Chris Machian/The World Herald

The little girls carried signs and clutched pink balloons. They perched atop their fathers’ shoulders and walked alongside their mothers. They joined in chants of “This is what democracy looks like!” and “Strong women, strong world!”

They were among the youngest of the more than 8,000 people of all ages who marched through downtown Omaha on Saturday for the 2018 Omaha Women’s March. Last year’s local march, held the day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, drew 12,000.

Sweat, Donnie.… Read the rest

President Pussygrabber is attacking Planned Parenthood now.

U.S. health officials on Friday said they were revoking legal guidance issued by the Obama Administration that had sought to discourage states from trying to defund organizations that provide abortion services, such as Planned Parenthood.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) officials also said the department is issuing a new regulation aimed at protecting healthcare workers’ civil rights based on religious and conscience objections.

The regulation protects the rights of healthcare workers [to refrain] from providing abortion, euthanasia, and sterilization, the officials said during a media call with reporters.

But refusing to do one’s job is not a civil right. If you don’t want to be involved in abortions then … Read the rest

So I went to the march. It was pretty great.

I didn’t go to the whole thing – I went to the end. Down the hill to the Center, then through the Center and toward downtown a couple of blocks until I found the front of the march. I watched some and joined it some.

There were a couple of Jesus-head guys bellowing through a bullhorn, and the march would do a wave of screams and howls to drown them out every minute or two. I did my share of yelling.

I tried to position myself so that nobody behind me would whack me in the ankle with a stroller, but all the same somebody behind me whacked me in … Read the rest

Science magazine on the government shutdown:

The shutdown is “just deeply disappointing because Congress has had months to fund the government,” said Ken Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a statement. “Without a resolution the federal scientific enterprise will come to a screeching halt, potentially adding millions of dollars in costs and months of delay to taxpayer funded projects.”

It’s the spawn of “starve the beast” – of that whole right-wing trend to frame all government as the enemy, from Ayn Rand to Grover Norquist to these pieces of crap who are trashing everything now. They want to make the US a failed state; that’s the goal.

The shutdown’s impacts could

The National Secular Society on Arif Qawi and St Stephen’s school last Monday, before the theocrats bullied them into submission.

The chair of governors at a highly-performing primary school has called on the Government to issue guidance to help enforce standards on the Islamic headscarf and fasting.

Arif Qawi, chair of governors at St Stephen’s in Upton Park, east London, said the Department for Education should “step up and take it out of our hands”.

Mr Qawi said the school had faced a “backlash” from some parents after banning girls under the age of eight from wearing the hijab in school and encouraging children not to fast on school premises. He said he found it “unfair” that the Government had

Oops, no freedom from hijab for you, little girl.

St Stephen’s primary school in Newham, east London, hit the headlines at the weekend after the Sunday Times reported it had banned Muslim girls under the age of eight from wearing headscarves, to the delight of campaigners who argued it enforces religious conformity on children.

That decision, along with curbs on children fasting on school days during Ramadan, upset many parents, who said they had not been consulted.

Consulted about starving and dehydrating their children? Consulted about treating little girls as sexual vampires who have to be muffled up in cloth to keep them from Tempting males? Parental rights stop where child abuse begins.

On Friday, the school’s chair of

As you may have seen, Trump and Co want to force people to work to qualify for Medicaid.

Under the planned new Health and Human Services regulations announced last week, waivers will be granted to states willing to restructure their programs to force individuals who would otherwise be eligible for Medicaid to work—generally for about 20 hours a week—to qualify for coverage.

What if they’re not well enough to work? What if they can’t find work? What if they have small children at home and no one else to take care of them?

They should have thought of that before they became poor.

The plan purports to help the poor economically and health-wise, but its almost certain to make

Originally a comment by Maureen Brian on Great respect but it’s time to step aside.

I’m afraid my first reaction to some of these spoutings is to ask, “Which man told you to say that?”

That isn’t always justified. In fact I don’t often say it but the thought recurs and sometimes it is needed. There are too many people about who can be catapulted straight into apoplexy by my saying, “Yes, I remember that. In the early ‘80s I was spearheading the campaign at work to get an evidence-based job evaluation scheme introduced which looked only at what work you did, what knowledge you had had to gain and left out entirely matters of sex, race, class.” The … Read the rest

Oh this again,  or rather, still. Always. Never not. Woman interviews an idol of the right, woman is target of a torrent of abuse. The woman is Cathy Newman of Channel 4 (the UK one), the idol of the right is Jordan Peterson.

Ben de Pear, the editor of Channel 4 News, said Newman had been subjected to “vicious misogynistic abuse”. Having to calling in security specialists was a “terrible indictment of the times we live in”, he said.

Newman interviewed the psychologist, Jordan Peterson, about gender on Tuesday. A video of the full 30-minute interview has been watched more than 1.6m times on the Channel 4 News YouTube page and has attracted more than 36,000 comments.

I’ve watched … Read the rest

Guest post by James Garnett.

I see a lot of people cheering on a government shutdown. You need to consider what this means. It’s not just parks closing. During a shutdown, the National Science Foundation stops payments, which can rapidly result in research coming to a halt. For time-sensitive studies, this can mean the loss of data collection that can destroy a study completely. Research projects that have been funded to the tune of millions or even billions of dollars, which have been ongoing for years, can come to an abrupt end without results. That can cripple careers.

Also, remember that we are in the middle of one of the worst and most dangerous flu outbreaks in recent years. … Read the rest

Thought for the day:

https://twitter.com/laura_hudson/status/953707342951981056

Nope.

Not stepping aside.

Shocking and astonishing fact: young people are not always automatically right, and old people are not always automatically wrong. It’s a little more complicated than that.… Read the rest

Originally a comment by iknklast on The right to refuse to do your job.

I nearly lost my mother when I was 9 because a Catholic doctor had refused her any contraceptive care – then bawled her out when she got pregnant again. I suppose he felt my mother, a married woman in her mid-30s, had no right to have sexual relations anymore because getting pregnant was dangerous.

For the record, my mother was not, and never had been, Catholic. She was a member of a religion that didn’t go around poking its nose into married people’s bedrooms, though they could be fierce if someone got pregnant outside of marriage.

My mother had five children at the time, ranging … Read the rest