On Friday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel met with Donald Trump at the White House. During a press appearance, the two sat side-by-side in familiar chairs, while the sounds of cameras clicked away. The press called for a handshake. Merkel asked Trump if he wanted to do a handshake, the same handshake that U.S. presidents do with visiting foreign dignitaries in those chairs each time. Trump ignored the requests. They did not shake hands.
Later, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer would claim that Trump simply did not hear the requests. The video makes that explanation seem very unlikely.
For people doubtful that Trump heard the request to shake Angela Merkel's hand, this shows he did: pic.twitter.com/bg1dnhLsp3
TRUMP: Send a good picture back to Germany, please. Make sure.
MERKEL: [chuckles]
REPORTER: How did your talks go, Mr. President?
TRUMP: Very good.
REPORTER: Talk about NATO?
TRUMP: [nods] Many things.
MERKEL: [answers in German]
REPORTERS: Handshake? Handshake?
MERKEL: Do you want to— Mr. President? Can we have a handshake, please?
TRUMP: [continues to look straight ahead, as Merkel leans toward him; ignores her utterly]
REPORTERS: Handshake?
WH HANDLER: Okay. Thank you, fellas. Thank you. Over here.
The debate, such as it is, since then has been about whether Trump heard the requests for a handshake. Spicer told the German newspaper Der Spiegel that Trump hadn't heard them. Were that indeed the case, and given the ensuing commentary about how rude he'd been to the leader of a key U.S. ally, one might imagine Trump would issue an apology. He has not.
But. BUT. All of that misses the larger point, which is that, even if it were true that Trump simply did not hear the press nor Merkel request a handshake, he shouldn't have to be prompted to engage in what is a basic (and expected) diplomatic gesture.
If Trump didn't hear the prompting, all that means is that he needed to in order to do his job. One of the most rudimentary functions of his job.
I don't know why any American would find it satisfactory that the president can't perform basic diplomatic tasks with our allies, without being instructed to do so. Especially the Tremendously Successful Businessman Donald Trump, who wrote (ahem) an entire book on "the art" of U.S.-centered business deal-making, which virtually always ends in a handshake.
By saying he simply didn't hear the request, they're essentially arguing: "Oh he wasn't being rude! He's just catastrophically ignorant about his job!" Anyone who finds that reassuring has set a bar for the presidency so low that any expectation of competence is "unfair" to Trump.
If you don't believe a president shouldn't have to be told to shake a foreign leader's hand, I can't imagine what basic competency is reasonable to expect.
Do you think Hillary Clinton would've needed to be prompted to shake Angela Merkel's hand? The answer to that question is an unequivocal no.
There is also this: Trump has previously made headlines by shaking men's hands in a way that is inappropriate. I wrote previously: "Trump's handshake with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe today was distressing. He held the PM's hand far too long, jerking him toward him, just like he did to Neil Gorsuch during the SCOTUS nomination announcement. It is also a feature of serial abusers of women that they have no respect for men's bodies/consent either. It just manifests differently."
He also tried it with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but was infamously thwarted.
That we know Trump habitually uses handshakes as displays of dominance is just another datapoint suggesting it wasn't that he "didn't hear" the request to shake Merkel's hand, but ignored it. To prove a point.
The only point he made, however, is that he is a man who will boast about grabbing women to humiliate them against their wills, and refuse to shake a woman's hand in a sign of respect at her request.
Belly up to the bar, and be in this space together.
I've got a bunch of errands that I've been putting off for ages, at various places that don't have evening or weekend hours, so I'm taking the day off tomorrow to get all this shit done, and I will be back on Monday! See you then.
At today's White House Press Briefing, Sean Spicer was an even bigger disaster than usual, which is really saying something.
He went on an extended, agitated ramble in response to a question about Trump's assertion that President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower; refused to call on a New York Times reporter; angrily responded to CNN's Jim Acosta stating facts about the wiretapping claim with "Jim, I think that's cute"; and then:
Spicer just actually said these real words for real: "There's this assumption in Washington that if you get less money, it's a cut."
The scariest part of submitting that piece for me is that there are no caveats. No obligatory "I know she's not perfect" or "I don't agree with her about everything." These things are true, but I wanted to be able to write one damn piece where I can say I'm fond of and grateful to her without apology. Because I am tired of having to reflexively say that my candidate isn't perfect, in a way no one else is obliged to do for their candidate, just because the candidate I support is a woman who is held to unreasonable expectations of perfection.
Even when I include caveats, I get bad faith criticism. I'm a shill; I'm uncritical in my support; I only support her because we're both women; whatever. So fuck it. I'm not going to keep breathing life into the idea that there must be special disclosures to signal support for Clinton.
If people don't know or believe by now that I'm not a mindless cheerleader, they're never going to. And obliging me to constantly acknowledge her failures in order to defend myself, as the cost of saying anything positive about her, doesn't serve either one of us. That's a game I no longer want to play.
And I didn't. After that, for the remaining seven months of the campaign, I did not caveat my support for Hillary Clinton. I resisted the external obligation to reflexively insert stipulations and degrees of distance; to immediately undermine my advocacy and enthusiasm for her with some dogshit concession to people who were never going to support her, anyway.
You know who never felt compelled to acknowledge their candidate isn't perfect? Trump supporters.
They didn't waste their energy genuflecting to purists by compulsively disgorging dehumanizing codswallop in acquiescence to rigorous policing of his insufficient perfection. Instead, they showed up at rallies and screamed, "Lock her up!"
That observation should not be mistaken as a recommendation of such aggressive indecency. It is, rather, to note the abject failure of meeting that undiluted zeal with simpering apology for supporting a candidate of whom we had numerous reasons to be proud.
[Photo: Michael Davidson for Hillary for America.]
Fully a year before I wrote the pieces referenced above, I wrote this piece, about how bracketing one's support for Clinton with disclaimers about her failure to be perfect was a reflection of the misogynist double-standards to which we hold women:
I have no objection to examining Hillary Clinton's strengths and weaknesses; evaluating the efficacy and decency of her policies. That's what the media and potential voters should be doing.
But strengths and weaknesses is not the same as "perfection vs. flawed." The entire framing around Clinton is deeply problematic.
Of course she is not a "perfect" candidate. There are no perfect candidates. But here is an article, and it's one of many, that writes about Clinton being "flawed" as if that is somehow unique to her.
What's unique to Clinton is the idea that she could be—or should be—perfect. Her male competitors are not held to that standard. And thus there is no reason to discuss their "flaws," because it's taken as read that they will not be perfect, not be ideologically pure, not be magically capable of being equally and wholly appealing to every potential voter to the left of center.
...If you understand the very basic feminist tenet that women are held to impossible standards, for which there is no male equivalent, then you understand the dynamic underwriting articles that talk about Hillary Clinton's failure to be perfect.
Which is the same dynamic underwriting the reflexive need so many of us have to start even the most milquetoast endorsement of anything about Hillary Clinton and/or her policies with, "Clinton isn't a perfect candidate, but..."
No shit she isn't. No one is. But it's only Clinton who somehow warrants these incessant caveats about her lack of perfection.
Yes, let us talk about the positions Clinton holds with which we disagree, but let us also do it without the misogynist qualification about how she isn't perfect, thus upholding the profoundly misogynist narrative that women should and can be perfect. That women have to meet impossible standards for which no (white) male Democratic candidate is even expected to reach.
We ignored the cost of indulging this evident misogyny at our own peril—and, as has surely become clear now, if it weren't before—to the peril of the very nation, and its most vulnerable citizens.
As Hillary Clinton spent 18 months working herself to exhaustion to earn every last vote, each caveat from a supporter signaled doubt to the people she was trying to win over. Each qualified endorsement telegraphed there was reason for hesitation. Every equivocation communicated that maybe all those things they'd heard about her were true.
Maybe it wasn't worth showing up for Hillary Clinton, if even her supporters, who'd made up their minds, couldn't bring themselves to voice their support without couching it in a hesitating shame.
Every last one of those contemptible caveats reverberated in a chorus of doubt. They did not merely communicate a True Thing, that she is not perfect, a thing that is true about every human being on the planet, nor even that she was not a flawless candidate, a thing that is true about everyone who has ever run for office, but communicated something, in their echoing collective, that was manifestly untrue: That Clinton was icky.
Despite the fact that she was the most qualified candidate ever to run, despite the fact that her record was patently not more troubling than any Democratic candidate (and less than many), despite the fact that she had acknowledged and apologized for many of her positions for which she'd been criticized, despite the fact that she had become more progressive in her politics, despite the fact that she was competent and smart and experienced, despite the fact that she offered full-throated rejections of every bit of indecency proposed by her despicable opponent, there was still just something about her.
Icky. She was treated like a schoolgirl on the playground who's been tainted with cooties.
And I know, oh how I know, that people who insisted on their precious caveats will now insist to me that her gender had nothing to do with it. They will lay out their cases about how imperfect she was. They will contend that what they said didn't matter, and they will blame her, sniffing that she was a flawed candidate. Don't blame them for pointing it out.
But I do blame them. I blame every person who held Clinton to a different standard than her male peers. I blame every person who, even if they voted for her, couldn't bring themselves to offer unqualified support. Who couldn't find a way to disagree with her without indulging trash tropes about a woman's insufficient lack of perfection.
(It's possible, friends. I found a way to do it.)
I have heard, over and over, that to point out Clinton's insufficient perfection was a necessary act of conscience. Fine. I'm quite certain I cannot dissuade anyone to dismount that particular high horse. I will only say this: My conscience was satiated not by distancing myself from a presidential candidate who would have occasionally necessitated my criticism for positions with which I disagree, but by doing every goddamn thing I could to get her elected.
Not just because she was a fine candidate, but because she was running against a Russian nesting doll of character defects, whose platform was a turgid sack of rancid bigotries.
Donald Trump is not merely imperfect. He is a vile specimen whose authoritarian contempt for democratic institutions is outmatched only by his seething hatred of marginalized people. Shamelessly, he endeavors to obliterate the services of the federal government that aren't dedicated to state-sponsored violence, while his party abets his reckless destruction and proposes "healthcare reform" that will straight-up kill people.
That this is what his presidency would look like was patently evident when he was a candidate, from Day One. My conscience did not allow me to take a long gaze at this impending monstrosity and insert cringing caveats about his opponent not being perfect.
The point is, the point has always been, that she was better. By miles. By the distance of unfathomable galaxies.
But her presidency was derailed, in part, because of a ubiquitous, incomprehensible need to say that she's flawed. And to dismiss as a shill anyone who refused to unnecessarily undercut her strengths with conciliatory caveats about her weaknesses.
If we are ever fortunate enough to again have the possibility to vote for a Democratic female candidate who has managed to run an intolerable gauntlet of misogynist bullshit and emerge as a serious contender for the presidency, I hope we will do things differently. I hope we will remember that there is no need to stress that she is not perfect, because she is foremostly a human being, and thus imperfect as are we all.
Because, on the subject of imperfection, Clinton being a flawed candidate was not her biggest problem. It was her flawed constituency, who couldn't find it in themselves to vociferously support an imperfect woman.
In Hillary Clinton's concession speech, she said: "To all the little girls watching right now, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world."
A music theory teacher, instructing a class of young girls at the SOL LA Music Academy, gave her students that section of Hillary's speech, with the assignment to write a song.
Below, with a big hat tip to my friend Leah McElrath, is the result.
Video Description: As piano music begins to play, text appears onscreen: "In a music theory class of young girls, the teacher handed out a section of Hillary Clinton's concession speech. The assignment was to write a song. This is what happened..."
A young girl, with light skin and brown hair, sits at a piano, surrounded by her classmates—a diverse group of young girls. The girl at the piano is the pianist and lead singer of the piece. The other girls play additional instruments and/or participate as back-up singers.
The lead singer sings: "Never doubt that you are valuable / And powerful / And deserving / Of every chance and opportunity / In the world / To pursue / And to all the little girls / Who are watching this / And to all the little girls / Who are watching this..."
As she sings, the players of string instruments come in.
"Never change about who you are / Invincible / And confident / Leading to a deeper plan / Possibilities / Coming true / And to all the little girls / Who are watching this / And to all the little girls / Who are watching this..."
Strings. Beautiful strings. The strings fade, and the piano solos. Cut to images of the girls from the group holding hand-made signs. One reads: "I want to be the change." Another reads: "I want everyone to have an education!" Another: "I want to create the future!" Another: "I want to help animals." Another: "I want to make a difference!" Another: "Dreams can become reality..." Another: "All girls matter." Photos of the girls standing in groups, holding their signs, tossing them into the air, grinning.
"Never doubt that you are valuable / And powerful / And deserving / Of every chance and opportunity / In the world / To pursue."
The girls throw their arms around each other's shoulders, swaying as they sing together.
"And to all the little girls / Who are watching this / And to all the little girls / Who are watching this / And to all the little girls / Who are watching this / And to all the little girls / Who are watching this..."
The song ends on the piano. Credits.
* * *
As y'all know, I'm inclined to cry at everything, anyway, but this one left me in a heap of heaving sobs. Not just because of the song itself, which would have been enough all on its own, but because I saw it today, a day on which the person who won the presidency has proposed eliminating arts programs and slashing the education budget.
Our president could have been instead the woman who inspired this song. It should have been.
One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.
So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.
As we stand together with our Irish friends, I'm reminded of that proverb—and this is a good one; this is one I like; I've heard it for many, many years, and I love it. "Always remember to forget the friends that proved untrue, but never forget to remember those that have stuck by you." We know that. Politically speaking, a lot of us know that. We know it well. [tepid laughter and applause]
Hearing the president talk about his enemies list through the prism of an Irish proverb makes it way more charming, don'tcha think?
Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent a letter to President Donald J. Trump, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and FBI Director James Comey requesting information about whether Lt. General Michael Flynn fully disclosed—as part of the security clearance and vetting process for his return to government—his communications with and payments from Russian agents, Turkish agents, or any other foreign agents, as well as his payments from foreign sources.
As part of his letter, Cummings released new documents obtained by the Oversight Committee—including payment vouchers, international financial transaction logs, and detailed email exchanges with Russian media officials—showing that the Kremlin-backed media outlet known as RT paid more than $45,000 for Flynn's participation at a gala in Moscow in December 2015, during which he dined with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in apparent violation of the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
...The documents reveal that Flynn also received $11,250 from a Russian charter cargo airline and $11,250 from a top Russia-based cybersecurity corporation.
Sofia Resnick and Amy Littlefield at Rewire: Exclusive: Why Did Mike Pence Fight So Hard to Keep This White Paper Secret? "Rewire has obtained a political white paper that Vice President Mike Pence has spent more than two years fighting to keep secret. This white paper details legal strategy shared with Republican governors in a 2014 email about the best way to challenge former President Barack Obama's order to provide temporary deportation relief to certain undocumented immigrants. ...The document focuses on what Republicans then claimed vociferously to be executive overreach by the Obama administration, a use of executive authority they now appear to at least tacitly support as employed by the Trump administration in its sweeping ban on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries." Keep your eyes on Mike Pence.
Trump has repeatedly said he will "soon" provide evidence that President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower, but somehow that evidence never materializes. Meanwhile...
Matt Shuham at TPM: Obama Chief of Staff: The President 'Can Not,' 'Did Not' Order a Wiretap. "Norah O'Donnell of 'CBS This Morning' asked Dennis McDonough, Obama's chief of staff from 2013 through 2017, about the 'multiple tweets by Donald Trump where he said President Obama has tapped my phones.' 'Is it legal for a sitting president to be wiretapping during–can the president order a wiretap?' she asked. 'The President can not order a wiretap,' McDonough responded. 'The President does not order a wiretap. The President did not order a wiretap.'"
[Content Note: Nazism; white supremacy] A couple of important stories today about Sebastian Gorka, Trump's deputy assistant and member of Steve Bannon's White House Strategic Initiatives Group. First, at Foreign Policy, Colin Kahl raises a concern about whether Gorka has a Top Secret or a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information security clearance. And at Forward, Lili Bayer and Larry Cohler-Esses detail that Gorka may be a sworn member of a Hungarian far-right anti-Semitic group, an affiliation which he did not disclose when applying for his visa nor his citizenship.
Sebastian Gorka repeatedly told me to talk to "White House press" when asked about @jdforward report he's a member of a Nazi-allied group.
It shouldn't be all that difficult to straightforwardly answer "no" if you're not a member of a Nazi-allied white supremacist group.
Ylan Mui and John W. Schoen at CNBC: 600+ Companies Are Bidding to Build Trump's 'Border Wall'—Including One from Mexico. "Customs and Border Patrol has already begun soliciting ideas from businesses, with more than 600 submitting design concepts. The agency is expected to release two formal requests for proposals soon, one focusing on a concrete wall and another for other types of barriers. A CNBC analysis of the companies that have expressed preliminary interest in the project shows most of them are based in California and Texas—more than 100 vendors each—according to a government database. Only two states, Maine and Vermont, did not have any businesses apply as of early this week." Big business for bigotry!
Caitlin Dewey at the Washington Post: Immigrants Are Now Canceling Their Food Stamps for Fear That Trump Will Deport Them. "In the two months since Trump's inauguration, food banks and hunger advocates around the country have noted a decline in the number of eligible immigrants applying for SNAP—and an uptick in immigrants seeking to withdraw from the program. Their fear, advocates say, is that participation could draw the eye of Immigration and Customs Enforcement or hurt their chances of attaining citizenship. Without federal nutrition benefits, many are resorting to food pantries and soup kitchens to feed themselves and their children." Fucking hell.
Rebecca Kheel at the Hill: Trump Nominates Boeing VP for Deputy Defense Secretary. "Trump on Thursday nominated a top Boeing executive to be the second-highest-ranking civilian at the Pentagon. Trump announced Patrick Shanahan's nomination to be deputy Defense secretary... Trump was critical of Boeing during the transition, saying costs for the replacement Air Force One program—two new 747s—were 'out of control.' But Trump's tune appeared to change after meetings with the CEO of Boeing... Trump previously owned stock in Boeing. A spokesman said in December that he'd sold it but offered no proof." Cool.
What have you been reading that we need to resist today?
Shaker Thumbs is your opportunity to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to a product or service you have used and that you'd recommend to other Shakers or warn them away from.
These sort of dishwashing liquid dispensing brushes have been around for some time, but I never had one before. I finally picked up this one, which was right in the mid-range price-wise (it's $9), and I love it so much!
One of the things that I really like about it is how easily detachable and reattachable the brush-head is. The whole thing comes apart very easily, for thorough cleaning, and then reassembles very easily, too.
It seems like such a small thing, but I've had other cleaning implements that themselves weren't super easy to keep very clean, and that annoys me to no end.
I've been using it daily for several months now, and it's holding up extremely well. No leakage of the dish soap, and the bristles are still in fine form. All of the pieces are just as easy to take apart and put back together as when first purchased. Yay!
Anyway! Give us your thumbs-up or thumbs-down in comments!
[Just to be abundantly clear, I am not affiliated in any way with Oxo, nor am I receiving any form of payment for recommending them. It's just a thing I've personally found super useful and am happy to recommend.]
The Trump administration has released its preliminary 2018 budget proposal, and it is devastating. It proposes widespread cuts to a number of agencies, which would profoundly impact the services provided by the federal government.
Before we get into the details, a few points of clarity.
1. Although it stands to have a similar effect, the budget proposal is entirely separate from the recent executive order on the "reorganization" of the executive branch. That is a different strategy altogether to obliterate the federal government.
2. The proposal covers only discretionary spending. Mandatory spending is set and determined by laws using different metrics, e.g. the size of the eligible population for any benefits provided by those departments, so that would not be affected by this budget. Discretionary spending is determined by Congressional budget resolutions, so, essentially, this is a request to Congress on what the president would like Congress to do.
3. Every year, the president sends a budget proposal to Congress. Rarely does that budget proposal get rubberstamped. Congress takes the proposal under advisement, to varying degrees, but generally makes changes. So this is not a final budget. It gives a good picture into the president's priorities, however.
4. How much Congress respects/enacts the president's budget proposal depends a whole lot on whether the same party holds both the executive and legislative branches. The Republican Congressional majority ignored President Obama's budget proposals and did whatever they wanted. We're about to find out how much that same Republican majority wants to give a Republican president what he wants.
So, to the details. Kim Soffen and Denise Lu at the Washington Post have a terrific rundown of what Trump is proposing. Following are a few highlowlights.
First: The budget proposes elimination of funding altogether for 19 agencies:
African Development Foundation
Appalachian Regional Commission
Chemical Safety Board
Corporation for National and Community Service
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Delta Regional Authority
Denali Commission
Institute of Museum and Library Services
Inter-American Foundation
U.S. Trade and Development Agency
Legal Services Corporation
National Endowment for the Arts
National Endowment for the Humanities
Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation
Northern Border Regional Commission
Overseas Private Investment Corporation
U.S. Institute of Peace
U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Every single one of those agencies serves an important purpose, but it is particularly notable that Trump is proposing to eliminate wholesale the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which, as Soffen and Lu note, "supports public television and radio, including PBS and NPR."
Also note the recommended eradication of the U.S. Institute of Peace, which was "created by Congress in 1984 as an independent, nonpartisan national institute dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible, practical and essential for U.S. and global security." That is especially rich, given that these massive cuts have been proposed, again per Soffen and Lu, to pay for, among other things, "an increase in defense spending [and] a down payment on the border wall."
So to make the world's most powerful military even more powerful, Trump is proposing to eliminate the Institute of Peace—and has also proposed a 29 percent reduction in the State Department budget, significantly reducing diplomatic services, thus creating a higher probability of war.
The massive proposed cut to the State Department isn't even the highest proposed cut. That dubious honor goes to the Environmental Protection Agency, to which Trump has suggested a 31 percent reduction in their budget, which would: Eliminate more than 50 programs and 3,200 jobs, discontinue funding for international climate change programs, and cuts funding for the Superfund cleanup program and the Office of Enforcement and Compliance, among other things.
Additional proposed cuts: Agriculture Department (21 percent), Labor Department (21 percent), Department of Health and Human Services (18 percent), Commerce Department (16 percent), Education Department (14 percent), Department of Housing and Urban Development (13 percent), Transportation Department (13 percent), Interior Department (12 percent), Energy Department (6 percent), Small Business Administration (5 percent), Treasury Department (4 percent), Justice Department (4 percent), NASA (1 percent).
There are three departments whose budgets get proposed increases: Defense Department (9 percent), Department of Homeland Security (7 percent), Department of Veterans Affairs (6 percent).
It may seem like there were an awful lot of cuts necessary for a 9 percent increase in the Defense Department budget, but that's because the Defense Department already has an outsized budget to begin with.
In 2016, the EPA, for example, had a $8.14 billion budget. The Defense Department, in contrast, had a $580.3 billion budget, more than 71 times the budget of the EPA. So it takes a whole lot of big cuts to smaller department to give Defense a 9 percent boost.
Anyway. These are the basic outlines. And we have a pretty good idea of where Trump's priorities are (not that we didn't know already). Now we wait to see how much the Republican Congressional caucus agrees.
I don't have high hopes for significant reluctance to impose this atrocity.
Late yesterday, hours before Donald Trump's revised Muslim ban was due to take effect, U.S. District Judge Derrick K. Watson, a federal judge in Hawaii, ordered a nationwide freeze on the ban. Watson's stunning 43-page opinion [pdf] made absolutely clear that this was no "travel ban," and that Trump's own words, and those of members of his administration and surrogates, had made clear this was a Muslim ban—which thus renders it flatly unconstitutional.
Wrote Watson: "[A] reasonable, objective observer—enlightened by the specific historical context, contemporaneous public statements, and specific sequence of events leading to its issuance—would conclude that the Executive Order was issued with a purpose to disfavor a particular religion."
And then (emphases mine):
It is undisputed that the Executive Order does not facially discriminate for or against any particular religion, or for or against religion versus non-religion. There is no express reference, for instance, to any religion nor does the Executive Order—unlike its predecessor—contain any term or phrase that can be reasonably characterized as having a religious origin or connotation.
Indeed, the Government defends the Executive Order principally because of its religiously neutral text—"[i]t applies to six countries that Congress and the prior Administration determined posed special risks of terrorism. [The Executive Order] applies to all individuals in those countries, regardless of their religion." Gov't. Mem. in Opp'n 40. The Government does not stop there. By its reading, the Executive Order could not have been religiously motivated because "the six countries represent only a small fraction of the world's 50 Muslim-majority nations, and are home to less than 9% of the global Muslim population ... [T]he suspension covers every national of those countries, including millions of non-Muslim individuals[.]" Gov't. Mem. in Opp'n 42.
The illogic of the Government's contentions is palpable. The notion that one can demonstrate animus toward any group of people only by targeting all of them at once is fundamentally flawed.
[...]
Equally flawed is the notion that the Executive Order cannot be found to have targeted Islam because it applies to all individuals in the six referenced countries. It is undisputed, using the primary source upon which the Government itself relies, that these six countries have overwhelmingly Muslim populations that range from 90.7% to 99.8%. It would therefore be no paradigmatic leap to conclude that targeting these countries likewise targets Islam. Certainly, it would be inappropriate to conclude, as the Government does, that it does not.
Basically: Liar, liar, pants on fire. You're bigots and can't pretend otherwise.
At a rally in Nashville last night, Trump tantrumed mightily about the judge's decision.
President Trump vows that he'll fight a Hawaii judge who blocked his latest travel ban - saying he will take it to the Supreme Court pic.twitter.com/by3N86M37g
A judge has just blocked our Executive Order on travel and refugees coming into our country from certain countries. [edit] The order he blocked was a watered-down version of the first order that was also blocked by another judge, and should have never been blocked to start with. [edit] This is the opinion of many: An unprecedented judicial overreach! [edit] We're gonna fight this terrible ruling. We're gonna take our case as far as it needs to go, including all the way up to the Supreme Court!
He also speculated for the angry crowd that the ruling was "done by a judge for political reasons," and bellowed: "Let me tell you something: I think we ought to go back to the first one and go all the way. The danger is clear, the law is clear, the need for my executive order is clear."
Reverting to the even more extreme version of the ban will not solve the problem. Which is that this ban cannot pass constitutional muster.
As if to underline the point, a second federal judge in Maryland, Judge Theodore D. Chuang, ruled overnight on a separate suit, issuing "a separate order forbidding the core provision of the travel ban from going into effect."
Chuang echoed that conclusion hours later, ruling in a case brought by nonprofit groups that work with refugees and immigrants, that the likely purpose of the executive order was "the effectuation of the proposed Muslim ban" that Mr. Trump pledged to enact as a presidential candidate.
Check and balance, mate.
This is good news, for now. Unfortunately, I suspect this is far from over. The fight will continue, because Trump isn't going to give up this indecency anytime soon.
I have no idea whether Beck's shiny new contrition is legitimate or whether it's just contrived self-reinvention to try to sell a new brand. And I don't care. He can go tell people to be nicer to each other all day long if that's how he wants to spend his time, but he can keep his goddamned hugs to himself.
I found this passage interesting, for the unintentional insight it provides into how Beck's Redemption Tour works.
Another new friend is the liberal TBS comedy show host Samantha Bee, whose program, "Full Frontal With Samantha Bee," he went on in December.
"My audience would like to stab you relentlessly in the eye," Beck told Bee.
"My audience wants to kill me for normalizing a lunatic like yourself," Bee replied.
Then they fed each other cake.
So, Beck's audience would like to stab Bee, and Bee's audience wants to kill her. What a cool point of agreement: Both audiences agree that Bee should come to harm for their meeting of the minds.
Glenn Beck, the man who spent years doing untold damage with his vile bigotry and outright lies, just gets to eat cake.
24: The percentage of respondents in a new PPP poll who support the GOP healthcare plan. Which, not coincidentally, is approximately the same percentage of people who will support Republicans no matter what fetid pile of slop they propose on any issue.
PPP's newest national poll finds that there is very little support for the American Health Care Act. Only 24% of voters support it, to 49% who are opposed. Even among Republican voters only 37% are in favor of the proposal to 22% who are against it, and 41% who aren't sure one way or another. Democrats (15/71) and independents (22/49) are more unified in their opposition to the bill than Republicans are in favor of it.
The Affordable Care Act continues to post some of the best numbers it's ever seen, with 47% of voters in favor of it to 39% who are opposed. When voters are asked whether they'd have rather have the Affordable Care Act or the American Health Care Act in place, the Affordable Care Act wins by 20 points at 49/29. Just 32% of voters think the best path forward with the Affordable Care Act is to repeal it and start over, while 63% think it would be better to keep what works in it and fix what doesn't.
The same poll also found: "Overall Trump has a 43% approval rating, with 50% of voters disapproving of him." He must be tired of all this winning. No wonder he has to convalesce at Mar-a-Lago every weekend.
Iain and I usually go to bed at the same time every night. I don't mean at the same o'clock; that would be far too disciplined for two people who turn into vampires given three consecutive days off. What I mean is that, whenever one of us finally decides it's time to crash into bed, the other typically follows.
Neither of us feels obliged to do so. It is a habit into which we've fallen because lying in bed at night, in the dark, talking about some article one of us read, or posing absurd hypotheticals to each other until we are laughing too hard to fall asleep, or predicting who Mourinho will start at the weekend, is one of our favorite parts of the day.
There's something magical about those nighttime conversations. Even though we could talk about any of the things we talk about at night during another part of the day—and do—the intimacy of our bed, our faces close on our pillows, makes me feel like we are the only people in the world in those moments.
One night recently, after I'd introduced a particularly nerdy (even by my standards) conversation about Wolverine, which we'd thoroughly mined, I said to Iain, "Do you ever wonder what it might be like to be married to someone with normal bedtime talk? More 'how was your day' and less 'regenerative properties of Wolverine'?" He laughed. He didn't wonder that. He was just glad we'd found each other.
So was I.
Today is the sixteenth anniversary of the day we met online, stumbling across one another in a long-defunct web community, because an Oscar Wilde quote on his profile piqued my interest enough to send him a five-word private message.
It was a chance meeting, with unlikely odds of becoming anything, given that we lived 4,000 miles apart at the time. But each of us had, immediately and urgently, a powerful if unaccountable sense of whatever it is that makes us delighted conspirators ensconced in the grown-up fort of our fluffy comforter every night.
We made sense to each other. And we helped one another make sense of ourselves.
I relocated temporarily to Scotland, and then Iain moved permanently to the United States, so we could start to build a life together. We lived in Illinois, with a friend, for a while, and then we moved to Indiana, eventually buying a home in which we stayed for 11 years.
At the end of 2015, as some of you know, Iain was transferred for work to Pennsylvania, and so we left the state which had long been our home, to embark on a new adventure. A cross-country move is an incredible upheaval, no less with five furry beasties in tow. But we have found a new home that we love, in a new place we continue to explore together.
Over sixteen years, we have lived in two countries, on two continents, and in three different states. The landscape has changed, our circumstances have changed, and we have changed as individuals. What has not changed is our desire to be together. To be in this, all of it, together.
When we were in the early throes of figuring out how to make this thing work, people would often ask me where we were going to live. Scotland? The U.S.? Somewhere else altogether? I would answer, with the confidence of someone filled with the abundant possibility of new love, that it didn't matter, because my home would be wherever Iain was.
That was, depending on your perspective, a romantic or foolish thing to say then. (It was probably a little of both.) Now, sixteen years later, it is just the truth.
Neither of us is easy. We each have our own set of quirks, idiosyncrasies, and flaws—possibly (almost assuredly) more than the average person. We are each fiercely independent, but also fiercely loyal. We both like lots of time on our own, and lots of attention in other moments. We like weird stuff, not always the same weird stuff. We both have a keen desire to do kind things for each other, and we both have a frustrating reluctance to accept kind things being done for us.
And yet.
The home we have built, wherever it is in time and space, is a place where we can each feel safe, be known, and make sense of ourselves.
There are nights, when I am lying in bed beside him, after we have finished our nighttime talk and we are both falling asleep in the quiet, that I think about sending that message—and I think about what if I hadn't.
It's a thought that fills me with something like panic. It was such a small thing, such a particular moment, so random a decision that set my life on this trajectory.
The anxiety that washes over me is so profound, as though there's a chance that somehow it could all be undone. If I hadn't sent that message which started this journey home…
One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.
So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.
Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.
* * *
Here are some things I've read today:
In a We Resist thread last month, I shared a piece by Russ Choma and Andy Kroll at Mother Jones about a real estate deal between Donald Trump and "a Chinese-American business executive who runs a company that touts its ability to exploit connections with powerful people to broker business deals in China." Now they are back with a follow-up: Businesswoman Who Bought Trump Penthouse Is Connected to Chinese Intelligence Front Group. "Further investigation by Mother Jones has unearthed a new element to the story: [Angela Chen, who also goes by the names Xiao Yan Chen and Chen Yu] has ties to important members of the Chinese ruling elite and to an organization considered a front group for Chinese military intelligence. ...Chen runs a business consulting firm, Global Alliance Associates, which specializes in linking US businesses seeking deals in China with the country's top power brokers. ...But Chen has another job: She chairs the US arm of a nonprofit called the China Arts Foundation, which was founded in 2006 and has links with Chinese elites and the country's military intelligence service."
In possibly related news... Charles V. Bagli and Michael Forsythe at the New York Times: Kushners, Trump In-Laws, Weigh $400 Million Deal With Chinese Firm. "A New York real estate company owned by the family of [Mr.] Trump's son-in-law has been negotiating to sell a $400 million stake in its Fifth Avenue flagship skyscraper to a Chinese insurance company with ties to leading families of the Communist Party. The Chinese company, Anbang Insurance Group, would pay to get a high-profile piece of Manhattan real estate and would commit to spending billions more to completely transform the 60-year-old tower into a chic condominium and retail citadel. If signed, the potential agreement would create a financial marriage of two politically powerful families in the world's two biggest economies, but it would also present the possibility of glaring conflicts of interest. The Kushner family, owners of the tower, would reap a financial windfall courtesy of a Chinese company, even as Jared Kushner, a senior adviser to Mr. Trump as well as his son-in-law, helps oversee American foreign policy."
Meanwhile... Mike Allen at Axios: Trump to host Xi at Mar-a-Lago. "Trump plans to host Chinese President Xi Jinping at the gold-plated Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida next month for a lowering-the-temperature summit with vast economic and security implications... For a White House that views China as threat #1, Trump's willingness to meet with Xi—and give him the Mar-a-Lago treatment, no less—will be seen as a reassuring sign by establishment powers in the U.S. and around the world."
Also... David Brunnstrom and Yeganeh Torbati for Reuters: Tillerson to Press China on North Korea in Tough First Asia Trip. "U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson faces a tough first trip to Asia this week when the former oil executive will seek to reassure nervous allies facing North Korea's growing nuclear and missile threat and press China to do more on perhaps the most serious security challenge confronting Donald Trump. ...But the chances of Tillerson persuading China to do more to curb North Korea's weapons programs while in Beijing appear scant, given China's anger at the deployment of a U.S. anti-missile system in South Korea last week, and Trump's repeated threats to impose punitive tariffs on Beijing to correct a large trade imbalance."
The above series of stories is a perfect example of why resisting Trump necessitates multitasking. No one who argues that we must keep focused on Russia connections is wrong. They are right! But we must simultaneously focus on Trump's relationships with China, which, thus far, have gotten far less scrutiny.
After all, he talked about China a lot during the campaign. Ahem.
[Video Description: Supercut of Trump saying "China" about a zillion times during the campaign.]
* * *
The juxtaposition of the following two articles is very interesting.
Sharon LaFraniere, Nicholas Confessore, and Jesse Drucker at the New York Times: Prerequisite for Key White House Posts: Loyalty, Not Experience. "Every president sweeps into office with a coterie of friends and hangers-on who sometimes have minimal experience in the arcana of the federal government. But few have arrived with a contingent more colorful and controversial than that of Mr. Trump, whose White House is peppered with assistants and advisers whose principal qualification is their long friendship with Mr. Trump and his family. ...The influence of longtime Trump friends and associates—some of them with vague portfolios—comes as a leadership void has been created by the Trump administration's slow pace in filling top jobs in many agencies. It has also added to the confusion of a West Wing already legendary for its power struggles, while bewildering Washington policy hands."
Alex Isenstadt and Kenneth P. Vogel at Politico: 'People Are Scared': Paranoia Seizes Trump's White House. "In interviews, nearly a dozen White House aides and federal agency staffers described a litany of suspicions: that rival factions in the administration are trying to embarrass them, that civil servants opposed to Donald Trump are trying to undermine him, and even that a 'deep state' of career military and intelligence officials is out to destroy them. ...It's an environment of fear that has hamstrung the routine functioning of the executive branch. Senior advisers are spending much of their time trying to protect turf [and] key positions have remained vacant due to a reluctance to hire people deemed insufficiently loyal... One senior administration aide, who like most others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the degree of suspicion had created a toxicity that is unsustainable."
* * *
[Content Note: Nativism] James Queally at the L.A. Times: ICE Agents Make Arrests at Courthouses, Sparking Backlash from Prosecutors and Attorneys. "[Octavio Chaidez], who has worked as a defense attorney in Los Angeles County for nearly 15 years, said he had never seen federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents make an arrest inside the confines of a courthouse. But in the past few weeks, attorneys and prosecutors in California, Arizona, Texas, and Colorado have all reported teams of ICE agents—some in uniform, some not—sweeping into courtrooms or lurking outside court complexes, waiting to arrest immigrants who are in the country illegally." Rage. Seethe. Boil.
Charlie Savage and Julie Turkewitz at the New York Times: Neil Gorsuch Has Web of Ties to Secretive Billionaire. "As a lawyer at a Washington law firm in the early 2000s, Judge Gorsuch represented Mr. Anschutz, his companies and lower-ranking business executives as an outside counsel. In 2006, Mr. Anschutz successfully lobbied Colorado's lone Republican senator and the Bush administration to nominate Judge Gorsuch to the federal appeals court. And since joining the court, Judge Gorsuch has been a semiregular speaker at the mogul's annual dove-hunting retreats for the wealthy and politically prominent at his 60-square-mile Eagles Nest Ranch." Of course.
Allegra Kirkland at TPM: Monica Crowley Files to Lobby on Behalf of Ukrainian Oligarch. "After turning down a top national security communications role at the White House amid plagiarism allegations, former Fox News analyst Monica Crowley has taken up a new pursuit: lobbying on behalf of a Ukrainian oligarch who's advocated for better relations with Russia." Sounds about right.
[CN: Worker endangerment] Ken Ward, Jr. at the Charleston Gazette: WV Senate Bill Eliminates Mine Safety Enforcement. "State safety inspectors wouldn't inspect West Virginia's coal mines anymore. They would conduct 'compliance visits and education.' Violations of health and safety standards wouldn't produce state citations and fines, either. Mine operators would receive 'compliance assistance visit notices.' And West Virginia regulators wouldn't have authority to write safety and health regulations. Instead, they could only 'adopt policies...[for] improving compliance assistance' in the state's mines. Those and other significant changes in a new industry-backed bill would produce a wholesale elimination of most enforcement of longstanding laws and rules put in place over many years—as a result of hundreds of deaths—to protect the health and safety of West Virginia's coal miners." OMG.
[CN: War on agency] Christine Grimaldi at Rewire: CBO Report Confirms GOP's Budgetary Plan to Attack Planned Parenthood. "Contrary to recent claims from GOP lawmakers and staff, Planned Parenthood is the only health-care provider to face 'defunding' under Republicans' Obamacare repeal, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The independent arm of the U.S. Congress all but confirmed the partisan vendetta against Planned Parenthood... The provision doesn't address Planned Parenthood by name. But Planned Parenthood is the only organization that meets the specific criteria Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives wrote into their plan to impose a one-year moratorium on Medicaid reimbursements to 'prohibited entities'—effectively preventing people with low incomes from accessing quality, affordable health care."
[CN: Trans hatred] Andrea Zelinski at the Houston Chronicle: Texas Senate Approves 'Bathroom Bill'. "The Texas Senate gave preliminary approval Tuesday to ban transgender people from using the bathrooms that best correlate with their gender... The Republican-dominated Senate pushed the bill through almost completely on party lines after senators debated the issue for more than four hours on the Senate floor. ...'This is the best privacy bill in the United States,' said Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston." Fuck. You.
[CN: Homophobia; nativism; Islamophobia] Luis Damian Veron at Towleroad: Gay Couple Separated by Trump's Travel Ban. "Paul Harrison is a Texas man who since 2015 has been in a long-distance relationship with an Iranian man, whose identity must be concealed due to Iran's draconian laws outlawing homosexuality. Their romance has played out largely in neighboring Turkey, which, despite a worsening climate for LGBT individuals, still remains more open than Iran. Harrison's fiancé had been slated to join him over the next few months, but Iran is one of six Muslim-majority nations whose citizens have been arbitrarily barred from entering the United States for at least 90 days." Goddammit.
What have you been reading that we need to resist today?
Listening to the Republicans try to sell their Trumpcare Trash plan is genuinely painful. Not only because of their intractable indifference to people's lives, but because nothing they say is true.
I am at the end of my rope with the myriad shameless lies they are using to promote this heap of garbage, from lies about Obamacare, to lies about how insurance works, to lies about what being poor and in need of healthcare access actually looks like.
In addition to the lie about "choosing one's own doctor," above, the other one that's doing me in right now is this "patient-centered healthcare" rubbish. "Patient-centered healthcare" means nothing. Especially to people with transgressive bodies who struggle to find healthcare providers who truly see us. Which is to say nothing of the fact there can be no such thing as "patient-centered healthcare" as long as healthcare is run through for-profit insurance companies.
Anyway. Which healthcare lies are driving you to distraction as you listen to this swill?
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