Barr is scorching the earth and sowing it with salt.

Roseanne Barr’s Twitter saga didn’t end with the cancellation of her show Tuesday. Early Wednesday morning, she was back at it, first blaming Ambien and defensively comparing ABC’s response to her racist and otherwise offensive tweetstorm to those of other celebrities who have made controversial comments.

But what she said yesterday wasn’t just “controversial” – in fact in sane circles it wasn’t controversial at all, it was unmistakably and crudely racist. “Ape” is not ambiguous.

Barr seemed to liken the reaction from her co-stars and those a supporter called “her underlings” to the way President Trump complains about members of his administration being “disloyal.” In response to tweets calling out Gilbert and Emma Kenney, who plays Barr’s granddaughter, Barr wrote, “i feel bad for @POTUS-he goes thru this every single day.”

Hmm yes POTUS feels bad for POTUS too, but neither of them has any business feeling sorry for him, because he spends his life insulting people in public. “Pocahontas.” “Cryin’ Chuck.” “Failing New York Times.” “Crooked Hillary.” Heidi Cruz:

"@Don_Vito_08: "A picture is worth a thousand words" @realDonaldTrump #LyingTed #NeverCruz @MELANIATRUMP pic.twitter.com/5bvVEwMVF8"

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 24, 2016

Trump will probably give Barr a cabinet post soon.

You kids wanna buy some archetypes? #JordanPeterson #jordanbpeterson #12rulesforlife #Atheism #kanye pic.twitter.com/sVSTODVtY6

— Jason Gussen (@JasonGussen) May 3, 2018

We need to deal with everyday racism, Don Lemon says.

CNN’s @donlemon: I give ABC credit for cancelling “Roseanne” – but this wasn’t the first time, so why was she given this opportunity in the first place? https://t.co/XuT2RWthhp pic.twitter.com/rvLNVSOD1X

— The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) May 29, 2018

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 lost to Obama):

Imagine the stink that would erupt were David Cameron to stand up in front of a dinner of rich Conservative backers and make a “joke” that implied that Sarah Brown had had a lesbian affair with Jacqui Smith and produced a love child (and an ugly one to boot). Can you imagine British papers deciding to downplay the story because it was in such bad taste, allowing Cameron to carry on with his assault on Downing Street?

Cross the pond and that is exactly what happened to John McCain at a fundraising dinner in Arizona a decade ago. “Do you know why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly?” he told a handful of big Republican funders. “Because Janet Reno is her father.”

Jesus. Misogyny much?

The remark packed into its 15 words several layers of misogyny. It disparaged the looks of Chelsea, then 18 and barely out of high school; it portrayed Reno as a man at a time when she was serving as the first female US attorney general; and it implied that Hillary Clinton was engaged in a lesbian affair while the Monica Lewinsky scandal was blazing. Not bad going, Senator McCain.

Any one of those elements would seem potentially terminal for a public figure. Yet here he is 10 years later presenting himself as a champion of feminism by appointing Sarah Palin as his running mate.

And according to Pilkington the US press barely touched it, which is why most of us didn’t know about it. (That was long before Twitter, of course…) They did him the favor of looking fixedly in the other direction. He still lost the election but he wasn’t outed for that shitty mean joke.

After his misogynist joke, McCain said sorry to Bill Clinton (though he made no direct apology to the three women involved) and the incident was all but forgotten.

Brilliant. He apologized to the bro but not to the women he actually taunted.

Whatever your politics, that’s shitty.

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 immediately ends access to safe, legal abortion at all but one health center in the state. If that’s not an undue burden, what is? This law cannot and must not stand. We will not stop fighting for every person’s right to access safe, legal abortion.”

That should be every woman’s right to access to safe, legal abortion. Men don’t need access to safe, legal abortion. If you disguise the class who is affected by this law you make it harder to explain the law and the ideology behind the law. This isn’t random; it’s part of the age-old policing of women’s reproductive capacities in the interests of men. If you don’t even understand that how can you know how to resist?

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 interviewed their occupants, who reported that 38 people living in their households had died between Sept. 20, when Hurricane Maria struck, and the end of 2017. That toll, converted into a mortality rate, was extrapolated to the larger population and compared with official statistics from the same period in 2016.

When infrastructure is smashed, people die.

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.

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 only people who would consider your comment a joke are racist lunatics, you have to reconsider your definition of the word “joke.” And when you try to apologize for your obviously racist comment by calling it a joke, you have to reconsider your definition of the word “apologize.”

It seems more likely that Barr, who President Donald Trump has praised in part because she and her character in the sitcom support the president, felt emboldened by the Trump era and confident she could let fly a “this black person looks like an ape” comment without fear of retribution.

What I’m saying. So many people feel emboldened by the Trump era, and act on their emboldened feelings.

Barr is a perfect avatar for this moment in our history. She’s white, she’s loud, she’s mean (she also took time Tuesday morning to tie Chelsea Clinton to some bizarre George Soros-related conspiracy) and she rants about unhinged narratives based on nothing but lies, like the tale of a global child-trafficking ring linked to Hillary Clinton that is jaw-dropping in its stupidity.

And yet, with all that, ABC happily gives her sitcom a prime-time slot. Behavior that once would’ve rightly destroyed careers now gets rewarded. It’s America in 2018.

I don’t much care about Roseanne Barr. She can spew her crazy all over the Internet and follow Twitter loons down conspiratorial rabbit holes to her heart’s content.

What I care about is ABC, which seems willing to tolerate her idiocy and contribute to the ongoing normalization of racism, xenophobia and outright craziness.

PBS will be giving Steve Bannon his own show at this rate.

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.

The tweet was deleted, this was the original comment on Valeria Jarrett. pic.twitter.com/Ydi5pdVqUw

— andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) May 29, 2018

Can’t really explain that away.

Ms. Barr initially dismissed accusations that the comment was racist, defending it as “a joke.” She also said on Twitter, “ISLAM is not a RACE, lefties. Islam includes EVERY RACE of people.”

Yeeeaaaah but 1. I don’t think Valerie Jarrett is part of the Muslim Brotherhood and 2. don’t forget the planet of the apes part.

Then she deleted the tweet, then a bit later she apologized.

“I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans,” she wrote. “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.”

Nah. That’s not just “bad taste” and it’s not just about “her looks.” It’s also not a “bad joke.”

I know almost nothing about Roseanne Barr and don’t care about her personally, I care about the way the rise of Trump has made this kind of shit possible.

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 on Project Blitz templates or have similar objectives. Some of the bills are progressing rapidly. An Oklahoma measure, which has passed the legislature and is awaiting the governor’s signature, allows adoption and foster care agencies to discriminate on the basis of their own religious beliefs. Others, such as a Minnesota bill that would allow public schools to post “In God We Trust” signs on their walls, have provoked hostile debates in local and national media, which is in many cases the point of the exercise.

Notice how atheists aren’t campaigning to have “We Are All Atheists Here” signs on the walls of public schools? Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone could be that forbearing?

(It’s the “We” that’s so infuriating. No we don’t! Not all of us, and you don’t get to speak for all of us, and you don’t get to exclude us for not being part of your “We.” You don’t get to forcibly sign us up to nonsensical beliefs and nonsensical “trust” in a nonexistent phantom of people’s imagination.)

In their guidebook for state legislators and other allies, the authors of the Project Blitz program have grouped their model legislation into three categories, according to anticipated difficulty of passage. The first category consists of symbolic gestures, like resolutions to emblazon the motto “In God We Trust” on as many moving objects as possible (like, say, police cars).

Critics of such symbolic gestures often argue that they act as gateways to more extensive forms of state involvement in religion. It turns out that the Christian right agrees with them.

“They’re going to be things that people yell at, but they will help move the ball down the court,” Mr. Barton said in the conference call.

In the name of our Lord Donald Trump amen.

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 dangling from a balcony, Gassama climbed up four floors of the apartment building and rescued the boy in less than one minute. When emergency services arrived at the scene, he had already pulled the child to safety.

And by “climbed up four floors of the apartment building” they mean he balanced himself at the top of one balcony and jumped to grab the bottom of the next and haul himself up…four times.

Macron invited him over for a chat the next day.

“I did not really think, I started climbing directly,” he told Macron. “As I was climbing up, I felt more and more confident.”

“Bravo,” replied the French president.

Gassama also spoke to Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo. He told her he arrived from Mali a few months ago and wished to stay in France.

“I replied that his heroic gesture was an example for all citizens and that the city of Paris will obviously be keen to support him in his efforts to settle in France,” Hidalgo wrote on Twitter.

It took less than 48 hours for French authorities to respond to Gassama’s wish. The Elysee Palace announced Monday he will be made a French citizen and has been offered a job by the Paris fire brigade.

It will be a cinch; they have ladders.

Note for news readers: the “on” in Macron is not pronounced like the “on” in bone or stone but more like the “on” in honk. Not exactly like, but much closer than bone. It’s not that hard to get right and it’s grating to hear people get it wrong so regularly.

Well, that’s blunt.

Well you've really done the Irish LGBT community a huge disservice. Thanks for making adoption an even more difficult prospect for them.

Oh, and for the straight guys? The Dad's don't get a say??? Well the male suicide rate among heterosexual men will most likely rise.

— ˈhɛnri (@HenryB1992) May 26, 2018

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 straight guys? The Dad’s don’t get a say???” The hidden premise is that a guy who ejaculates inside a woman should “get a say” in what she decides to do about the resulting pregnancy, i.e. that he gets to veto her decision to end the pregnancy. It still happens inside her body and not his, but he gets to decide that she may not opt out.

Note the hidden premise behind all of it, which is that women aren’t fully people the way men are, because the world at large has a stake in their pregnancies that trumps women’s stake in their own bodies, rights, lives, plans, autonomy, equality, everything.