This blogaround brought to you by a horsehair brush.
Recommended Reading:
Digby: Trump and the Media: Beneath the Surface Hostility, a Deep and Dangerous Symbiosis
Chauncey: [Content Note: White supremacy; police brutality] Welcome to the Terrordome: Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions Ramp Up Their Crusade Against Black and Brown Americans
Chase: [CN: Gender policing; ciscentrism] An Open Letter to Those Praising the New York Times 'Tomboy' Piece
Melissa: To Swim Is to Endure: On Living with Chronic Pain
Marykate: [CN: Sexual assault] American Women Pay an Average of $1,000 in Medical Bills After Being Sexually Assaulted
Jeff: [CN: Whitewashing] Whitewashing Hollywood Movies Isn't Just Offensive—It's Also Bad Business
Rae: Celebrate Hubble's Birthday by Tearfully Reviewing Its Best Photos
Leave your links and recommendations in comments. Self-promotion welcome and encouraged!
The Monday Blogaround
Everything Is Fine. (Everything Is Not Fine.)
Patricia Zengerle at Reuters: Entire U.S. Senate to Go to White House for North Korea Briefing.
Top Trump administration officials will hold a rare briefing on Wednesday at the White House for the entire U.S. Senate on the situation in North Korea, senior Senate aides said on Monday."Unusual." Indeed.
All 100 senators have been asked to the White House for the briefing by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the aides said.
While top administration officials routinely travel to Capitol Hill to address members of Congress on foreign policy and national security matters, it is unusual for the entire 100-member Senate to go to such an event at the White House, and for those four top officials to be involved.
Meanwhile, as I noted in today's We Resist thread, Trump has dispatched a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group toward Korean waters, and has called U.N. Security Council ambassadors to the White House, saying North Korea is "a problem that we have to finally solve."
1. Last 24 hours seen 3 major intell indicators of escalating US threat to strike NK. Haley's threat, UNSC & Senate to WH. Trouble inbound.
— Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) April 24, 2017
2. WH must have made a decision to strong arm Kim to stop ICBM/Nuke tests but may be miscalculating his resolve. Watch for Accelerated tests
— Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) April 24, 2017
This is extremely worrisome. To put it mildly.
The Movement Against Smart Women
We are in a moment in the United States in which millions of women across the nation feel, quite rightly, like the presidential election was a referendum on how we are valued by our country. Given the choice between a proudly feminist candidate and a confessed serial sexual abuser, the latter now occupies the Oval Office.
That general election followed a primary in which the proudly feminist candidate, who is the most qualified person ever to seek the presidency, was denounced by her (then) Democratic opponent as an "establishment" candidate, which was an inherently misogynistic argument, being made by a man with tremendously less policy knowledge than she has.
Following the election, we have been subjected to a national gaslighting, a central part of which is telling that historic female candidate to "go away" and telling the women who want to talk about her to "get over it" and STFU.
Despite that fact she was right about the current president, and lots and lots of other stuff, and that many of her prominent female supporters were a bunch of goddamned Cassandras who were right not only about her general election opponent but her primary opponent, as well.
And now, if any of the people who were profoundly, insistently, dangerously wrong can even bring themselves to begrudgingly admit we were right, it is followed immediately by the belligerent assertion that it doesn't matter. A line is drawn: Sure, you were right, but now we are where we are, so let's move on.
Let's not.
Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign can be seen as a turning point at which the harassment of and 'splaining at knowledgeable—and correct—women reached such epic and visible proportions that it became difficult to ignore, even to those most determined to ignore it.
But it was not, as it is sometimes regarded, the instigation of this dynamic. It was the nadir. It was the broadest (pun intended) issue around which people on either side of the dynamic coalesced, the one to which mass media paid the most attention.
Clinton's campaign was the inevitable culmination of a movement against smart women which has been underway for quite some time.
One might reasonably argue that this movement's genesis is virtually impossible to pinpoint, as there are examples of smart women being ignored, shouted down, and harmed stretching back to the origins of the country, and then back before that.
There is a long and ugly tradition into which neatly fits what might called a new iteration of an ancient movement.
This new iteration is heavily centered around online discourse, and the many ways the internet has abetted its rise. By giving women more opportunities to speak, to participate in the public conversation with lower barriers to entry, the internet also provided more opportunity for people to insert themselves as arbiters, contrarians, devil's advocates, disruptors, and silencers.
And while there is no shortage of sadistic abusers who try to silence smart women via threats and harassment, the movement against smart women is largely led by (primarily although not exclusively) white men whose interactions with us are not evidently abusive, but are insistently disrespectful, condescending, patronizing, and hallmarked by pervasive wrongness about basic facts.
Whatever our areas of expertise, they are worthless to these men who have contempt for smart women. There is no deference to our knowledge, no matter how frequently and unassailably demonstrated. Armed with nothing but their own certitude and some reductive bullshit they gleaned from a social media meme, they come at us with hostile lectures, laughable in their inaccuracy.
Any attempt to engage, to provide the actual facts or relevant context or necessary history, is met not with thoughtful discussion but an unaccountable insistence that they are right, that the details don't matter, that their opinions are just as valid as our facts, and, inevitably, that we are bitches.
We are not even allowed to be authorities on our own lives, no less anything else.
On occasions when they are proven indisputably incorrect, they do not concede or apologize or credit us with bettering them. They disappear.
These interpersonal dynamics are replicated across the culture: In almost every industry, women are underrepresented in leadership roles; in academia, female professors are obliged to fret about self-aggrandizing male students giving them poor reviews because their instructors refused to defer to their claimed expertise; in hardware stores and at car dealerships, knowledgeable women are treated like ninny-brained know-nothings.
And of course this infects our politics.
That Black women should be leading the Democratic Party and shaping its future shouldn't be a controversial suggestion.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 19, 2017
No other group who has been so reliably right as a voting bloc would be questioned as having earned leadership and influence.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 19, 2017
How many more times do Black Democratic women have to get it right before the rest of us agree that they are the leaders of this party?
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 19, 2017
Proof of competency, no matter how consistent, does not qualify smart women as experts. To the absolute contrary, the more a woman is consistently right, the more likely she is to be likely to be treated with hostility.
That is the signature of the movement against strong women.
The more you demonstrate that you know what you're talking about, the more you are hated.
It is a feminist backlash, but a very specific one: Women who are smart—and attendantly capable and independent—are threatening. And must be stopped.
The only thing "worse" to these guys than women who expect to be treated like their equals is a woman who expects them to be her equal.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 4, 2017
Men who are still clinging to antiquated notions of sexual entitlement and homestead helplessness are being left behind. And deservedly so.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 4, 2017
It's no surprise that the campaign of Hillary Clinton, one of the most competent and knowledgeable women on the planet, became the focal point of this movement against smart women, who have no truck with the idea that coasting on privilege is men's birthright.
But this movement is bigger than the campaign, even as the campaign has highlighted one of its essential truths with which we refuse to meaningfully reckon: The mostly white men—and the exceptionalized women who share their meme-based educations, or proudly boast about their "alternative facts"—are resentful about losing their privilege.
They have been activated by being held to the same expectations as women and other marginalized people. And smart women, and other marginalized people, who Know Things are visible evidence that their fortunes aren't exclusively dictated by banks, billionaires, and trade policy.
Faced with the erosion of their privilege, the members of the movement against smart women have done what they've accused marginalized people of doing lo these many years—playing the victim.
Which is not to say that there aren't policies which are harmful to privileged men. Of course there are. But those men aren't turning to the smart women who have solid plans for addressing those policies, because those plans include the expectation of yielding the privilege underwriting the luxury on which they've traded for their whole lives.
They don't want serious solutions. They want their privilege restored.
And they view smart women as a deep and abiding threat to the restoration of that privilege. For good reason, as we aren't keen to remain second-class citizens in deference to lazy men's egos.
So they're coming after the smart women.
And that is in no small part because masculinity has defined itself exclusively in contradistinction to the feminine for so long that challenges to the idea of inherent male superiority has left millions of American men floundering—and the best answer most of them have found for the question "What is my role if not a keeper of women?" is "I am a victim of oppression by women." Femininity has become the center-pin around which masculinity pivots—on one side there is dominion; on the other side, subjugation.
A great number of men have responded to this by being overt oppressors. And a great many more have responded by ostensibly arguing for equality, while remaining firmly indifferent to social justice.
They want to talk about their own dwindling opportunities in an increasingly corporatized, automated state while ignoring that, where their opportunities are limited, so are everyone else's, but they retain the privilege that preferences them.
Justice doesn't look like upholding those rules. Justice looks like changing the rules altogether—which is something smart women have known for a very long time.
Women have had to change the rules, because we were told "You can't," because we had seemingly unnavigable barriers put in our way by people who didn't want us to succeed, because the rules were designed so that we fail. For many of us, the odds have been against us our whole lives; everything we've ever done has been in defiance of the distinct likelihood—and expectation—that we would settle for less than we wanted.
But we wanted more, and so we changed the rules—primarily by raising the bar.
The men who resent that the bar has been raised, their unearned privilege undermined and replaced with an expectation to achieve to the same level as women who hadn't their head start, can now do naught but whine about victimhood. They haven't yet realized that they are not victims of women, who only want the equality that's been denied them, but victims of a patriarchal culture that has spoiled men with the promise of success without effort, and robbed them of the will to expect more of themselves.
Intersectional Feminism/Womanism has built a framework for implementing new rules. And, yes, that progress is a long slog. Instant gratification isn't part of the deal—but smart women who tell you the truth, rather than what you want to hear, is.
And we all need to get real about the fact that there is a vast and reprehensible movement being orchestrated against Smart Women Who Know Things, by men who think the truth sucks.
There are few people more viciously hated than women who tell the truth about dangerous men lots of people are determined to admire.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 14, 2017
The endemic rejection of smart women is a problem. It is one of the key reasons we are now saddled with a president who doesn't know anything about the job. It is one of the key reasons why the Democrats are running away from Hillary Clinton and elevating Bernie Sanders, despite the fact that his economic credentials are absurd. It is one of the key reasons that lots of good ideas aren't heard, until a man says them—and sometimes that doesn't happen quickly enough, or at all.
This movement, which transcends political affiliation, must be called out, examined, and dismantled. It is having catastrophic consequences, which is to say nothing of the harm done to individual women by regarding us with contempt.
One doesn't have to be a woman, or even particularly smart, to see that.
Daily Dose of Cute
As I have previously mentioned, Matilda looooooves ribbons. So when I gave her a pink ribbon that came tied around the top of a bag with some chocolates in it, she went typically bananas over it.
Matilda totally loses her shit over ribbons. pic.twitter.com/m3NKgC6Ikn
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 23, 2017
[Images embedded in the tweet show Matilda the Fuzzy Sealpoint cat getting increasingly goofy over a pink ribbon I'm dangling in front of her.]
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 23, 2017
[Image embedded in the tweet shows Matilda looking like a wild-eyed adorable monster going after the ribbon.]
LOL this cat and her ribbons!
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
We Resist: Day 95
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 in the news today:
Ben Blanchard and Ju-min Park at Reuters: U.S. Carrier Group Heads for Korean Waters, China Calls for Restraint.
Chinese President Xi Jinping called for all sides to exercise restraint on Monday in a telephone call about North Korea with U.S. President Donald Trump, as Japan conducted exercises with a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group headed for Korean waters.Everything is fine. (Everything is not fine.)
Trump sent the carrier group for exercises in waters off the Korean peninsula as a warning, amid growing fears North Korea could conduct another nuclear test in defiance of United Nations sanctions.
Angered by the approach of the USS Carl Vinson carrier group, a defiant North Korea said on Monday the deployment was "an extremely dangerous act by those who plan a nuclear war to invade."
"The United States should not run amok and should consider carefully any catastrophic consequence from its foolish military provocative act," Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the North's ruling Workers' Party, said in a commentary on Monday.
"What's only laid for aggressors is dead bodies," the newspaper said.
This, among many other examples, is why it is a very bad thing to have a president who treated the office like an entry-level position and is doing on-the-job learning (such at it is).
* * *
Tim Mak at The Daily Beast: Senate Trump-Russia Probe Has No Full-Time Staff, No Key Witnesses.
The Senate Intelligence Committee's probe into Russia's election interference is supposedly the best hope for getting the public credible answers about whether there was any coordination between the Kremlin and Trump Tower.And that's not all. At Yahoo News, Michael Isikoff reports: Senate Russia Probe Flounders Amid Partisan Bickering. "[T]he panel has made little progress and is increasingly stymied by partisan divisions that are jeopardizing the future of the inquiry, according to multiple sources involved in the probe. The committee has yet to issue a single subpoena for documents or interview any key witnesses who are central to the probe, the sources said. It also hasn't requested potentially crucial evidence—such as the emails, memos and phone records of the Trump campaign—in part because the panel's chairman, Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., has so far failed to respond to requests from the panel's Democrats to sign letters doing so, the sources said."
But there are serious reasons to doubt that it can accomplish this task, as currently configured.
More than three months after the committee announced that it had agreed on the scope of the investigation, the panel has not begun substantially investigating possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, three individuals with ties to the committee told The Daily Beast.
The investigation does not have a single staffer dedicated to it full-time, and those staff members working on it part-time do not have significant investigative experience. The probe currently appears to be moving at a pace slower than prior Senate Intelligence Committee investigations, such as the CIA torture inquiry, which took years to accomplish.
No interviews have been conducted with key individuals suspected of being in the Trump-Russia orbit: not Michael Flynn, not Roger Stone, not Carter Page, not Paul Manafort, and not Jared Kushner, according to two sources familiar with the committee’s procedures.
"It's either a real investigation or not," said one individual with knowledge of the committee's activities. "You have to have an approved investigative guide. You have to make it formal. Can you have a credible investigation with only seven part-time staffers, doing everything in secret?"
This is despite the committee's leadership giving off a bipartisan, cooperative impression to the public.
[Teaspoon Action Item: Burr Washington office: (202) 224-3154. Winston-Salem office: (800) 685-8916. Senate Intel committee phone: (202) 224-1700. Senate Intel Committee fax line: (202) 224-1772.]
So we've got a Senate committee making nice noises about how they're definitely totally for sure going to get to the bottom of whether the U.S. president colluded with a foreign government to get elected, but they've woefully understaffed the investigation, haven't conducted interviews with key players, haven't issued a single subpoena, and haven't requested any evidence. Terrific.
This is why I keep saying over and over like the brokenest of broken records, that we need an independent select committee if we're ever going to have a meaningful investigation into what is potentially the nation's most significant act of treason in its history.
* * *
Bryant Harris, Robbie Gramer, and Emily Tamkin at Foreign Policy: The End of Foreign Aid as We Know It. "Donald Trump's vow to put 'America first' includes a plan to drastically cut assistance to developing countries and merge the State Department with USAID, according to an internal budget document and sources. The administration's March budget proposal vowed to slash aid to developing countries by over one-third, but contained few details. According to a detailed 15-page State Department budget document obtained by Foreign Policy, the overhaul also includes rechanneling funding from development assistance into a program that is tied closely to national security objectives. ...[S]hutting down, or even just scaling back, an agency dedicated to issues like disease prevention and food security could prove [devastating]. 'That will end the technical expertise of USAID, and in my view, it will be an unmitigated disaster for the longer term,' said Andrew Natsios, the former USAID Administrator under President George W. Bush."
Brian Beutler at the New Republic: Trump Will Provoke a Crisis or Be Humiliated This Week. "It's hard to imagine a better metaphor for Donald Trump's presidency than if, backed by a Republican-controlled Congress, he celebrates his 100th day in office by shutting down his own government. This outcome is by no means inevitable, but the odds of it are astonishingly high: Government funding runs out on Friday, and Trump hits the 100-day mark on Saturday. ...To secure border-wall funds from Congress before day 100, Trump is actually flirting with two different modes of extortion. The first one, which hasn't been expressed as a formal threat, is that he will not sign spending legislation unless it funds the wall; the second, which he tweets about frequently, is that unless Democrats agree to fund the border wall, he will sabotage the Affordable Care Act by freezing billions of dollars in insurance subsidies the law authorizes to reduce out-of-pocket costs for the near-poor."
David Edwards at Raw Story: Trump Budget Chief: Border Wall Will 'Protect Millions of Low Income Americans' Who Lose Obamacare. "During an interview one Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace noted that [Donald] Trump had offered Democrats a deal: If you fund the border wall, payments to Obamacare will not be cut. 'You are holding hostage health insurance for millions of lower-income Americans,' Wallace pointed out. 'Actually, what I would say is they're holding hostage national security,' [Trump Budget Director Mick Mulvaney] replied. ...Mulvaney insisted that Trump was trying to build a border wall to 'protect millions of low income Americans' who may lose their health care benefits in the tradeoff."
In case you're wondering if Trump has planned any more supercool Please Clap for Me events, the answer is yes:
[Content Note: White supremacy] Jessica González-Rojas at Rewire: Trump's First 100 Days: A Blueprint to Hurt People of Color. "The Trump administration sees the country's changing demographics—the rising number of nonwhite and foreign-born people—as the chief internal threat. ...Trump's budget amounts to an obscene redistribution of money and resources from the working poor—of whom a disproportionate amount are people of color, including immigrants—to the wealthiest. In order to fund the criminalization and persecution of immigrants, Trump proposes stripping those very communities of the support they rely on to thrive."
[CN: Violent homophobia; eliminationism] Andy Towle at Towleroad: NYT Editorial Board Warns Trump Administration: 'Time is Not on the Side of Gay People' in Chechnya. "The New York Times Editorial Board urges the United States to take more stringent action toward Chechnya. The southern Russian republic's president Ramzan Kadyrov has reportedly stated his intentions to exterminate the country's gay people before Ramadan on May 26. Writes the NYT Editorial Board: 'Moscow is unlikely to take meaningful action against Chechnya, or to rethink its broader policy toward gay rights, in the absence of strong and sustained international pressure. In recent years several countries from the Americas and Europe have promoted equality for gay and transgender people as universal human rights. The Obama administration, and in particular former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, deserves much credit for making this a diplomatic priority. ...Without American leadership, forging a global consensus that gay rights are human rights will take longer. Time is not on the side of gay people living in terror in places like Chechnya.'"
[CN: Video may autoplay at link] Sam Levine at the Huffington Post: Donald Trump's Earth Day Statement Is Shameful. "Donald Trump released an Earth Day statement touting his commitment to protecting the environment, despite doing the exact opposite in the first few months of his administration. ...The statement also noted that Trump is committed to 'rigorous science' and 'honest inquiry.'" All the mirthless laughter in the multiverse.
Let America Vote: Republican Congressman Considering Senate Bid Introduces Nationwide Voter Suppression Bill. "Congressman Luke Messer (IN-06), who has taken steps toward a formal run for Senate in Indiana, today introduced a nationwide voter suppression bill. Messer used the Indiana voter ID law as a model for his legislation even though the judge who upheld the law has since denounced voter ID laws as purely political and said laws like it 'appear to be aimed at limiting voting by minorities, particularly blacks.'"
[Teaspoon Action Item: Messer Washington office: (202) 225-3021. Muncie office: (765) 747-5566. Richmond office: (765) 962-2883. Shelbyville office: (317) 421-0704.]
[CN: White supremacy; threats] Esther Yu Hsi Lee at ThinkProgress: Workers Don Bulletproof Vests While Taking Down New Orleans' Confederate Monument in Middle of Night. "Workers in New Orleans on Monday began removing the first of four Confederate monuments known as the 'Lost Cause of the Confederacy.' They took down a statue originally erected to honor members of a white supremacist organization who fought against racial integration within the city's police force and state militia. The roughly four-hour removal process for the Battle of Liberty Place monument began at 1:30 a.m. in an effort to avoid protesters who want the monuments to stay, including people who have in the past made death threats."
What have you been reading that we need to resist today?
The Fifth Sentence on Page 34
Whatever book you're reading right now, turn to page 34 and share the fifth sentence. No titles. Just the sentence. Let's see what story we end up telling together, in these series of isolated sentences!
"There were swings, a playground, a flagpole, and a soccer pitch where we played every day."
[Previously.]
What Is Bernie Sanders' Endgame?
Despite continuing to make clear that he is not a Democrat, Senator Bernie Sanders has been on a "unity tour" with DNC Chair Tom Perez and has been elevated to co-chair of Democratic outreach.
It's been a troubling couple of days, as Sanders has deemed Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff insufficiently progressive; declared reproductive rights negotiable; denounced threats against Ann Coulter more vociferously than he denounced threats from his supporters against Hillary Clinton and her supporters; and then declared that "the model of the Democratic Party is failing."
"I think what is clear to anyone who looks at where the Democratic Party today is, that the model of the Democratic Party is failing," Sanders told CBS's "Face the Nation."Ostensibly, Sanders' endgame is "changing" the Democratic Party to make it more competitive nationally. But I have some questions about that.
..."Clearly the Democratic Party has got to change. And in my view, what it has got to become is a grassroots party, a party which makes decisions from the bottom on up, a party which is more dependent on small donations than large donations," Sanders said.
1. Hillary Clinton having won the popular vote is not evidence of a failing model, but of an antiquated electoral system in desperate need of reform. Why is Sanders not leading a visible and sustained focus on the Electoral College?
2. I understand that Sanders believes Democrats need to start being competitive in smaller races across the country (and I agree). But why did he choose to use his platform to support an anti-choice mayoral candidate in Omaha, a white man named Heath Mello? And why did he not choose to use his platform to support a progressive mayoral candidate in St. Louis, a Black woman named Tishaura Jones, who ended up losing by only 888 votes?
3. Is Sanders unaware, or does he simply not care, that he is risking alienating the existing Democratic base? And what the costs of that could be? By continually criticizing the Democratic party, and by suggesting there doesn't already exist a grassroots of Democratic activists, he (and the Democratic leadership) will not only find out that grassroots activism already exists, but quickly find out how much grassroots party organizing has relied on women's unpaid labor. And, as I noted on Twitter, I'm not talking about voting, but about all the work that happens in between days we head to the voting booths. The volunteering. The organizing. The making calls to Congress. The showing up in between.
It may well be safe to assume that people will still show up to vote, because we're the people who won't let fascists win because of hurt feelings. But it's a big risk to alienate the people who have the experience of organizing outside elections. That's the stuff that people might be less willing to do, when they're getting shit on for their troubles.
This passage from Laurel Brett's piece "Still We'll Rise" is incredibly important:
Doesn't it mean anything that this "tour" is traumatizing women? We raised money, canvassed, made phone calls, stuffed envelopes, went on Facebook and educated people, and for many of us, November 8th may have been one of the worst nights, if not the worst night, of our lives.This isn't about "sour grapes." It's about the unpaid labor of women, especially women of color, which has been and is being taken for granted, and about what should be the easily understandable fact that women aren't going to keep giving their unpaid labor to a party that will happily accept their labor but not their input. Who will let us stuff envelopes but not lead.
And now here you are, posturing and strutting your stuff as if HRC had not aced the popular vote and created the most inclusive platform in the history of the Democratic Party. Don't take us for granted. We won't do all that work again for a candidate who compromises on our issues.
4. I have been told countless times now that we must sacrifice "identity politics" (that is, the policy needs of marginalized people) to focus on economic populism (which is not the same thing as economic justice) because "Bernie is right about working class people." Okay. My question is: Which working class people?
Because, as I recently noted, Trump has made a deeply dishonest promise to the working class, which is, in part, dishonest because it fails utterly to acknowledge who constitutes a significant portion of the working class. Specifically, retail workers, who are disproportionately women and disproportionately people of color.
And while I keep hearing that Sanders is "right" about working class people, what I don't hear is anything that meaningfully differentiates his rhetoric from Trump's about who the working class actually is in this country.
Further, I don't hear much discussion about how to address the fact that "it's possible more than 8,600 brick-and-mortar stores will close their doors in 2017." That translates into a shit-ton of jobs. And while I agree that it's critically important to raise the minimum wage for these workers, that won't matter if the jobs disappear.
We're careening headlong into a major retail crash, which is going to send the economy into a tailspin, and there is no discussion or preparation for the fallout.
Fast food is being automated. Service jobs are being automated. Manufacturing jobs are being automated. And retail is being automated via the internet.
Also: Construction collapses with no retail spaces to build and no one able to afford new homes. Retail construction is what saved the industry during bad housing markets. What is the plan?
Stump speeches about banks and billionaires won't cut it. Is Sanders actually interested in being a leader on economic issues for everyone in the working class, or is he just interested in focusing on the same select group of working class voters that Trump is, the only difference being that he makes them slightly different insufficient promises?
* * *
I want and need answers to these questions. I'm not asking them because I "hate Bernie Sanders." I'm asking them because I don't see evidence of a leader who wants to make the Democratic Party more viable. To the absolute contrary, I'm seeing what looks very much like a reckless man whose ego is leading a party (of which he isn't even a part) down a road to ruination.
This "unity tour" looks an awful lot like every other call for unity we've seen before: Privileged people not listening, shitting all over marginalized people, and telling us that it's our responsibility to STFU and get on board, or else we'll be the ones subverting all the cool unity.
As I have said many times before: If your revolution doesn't implicitly and explicitly include a rejection of misogyny, racism, and other bigotries, and you aren't centering intersectional analysis in your solutions, then you're not staging a revolution; you're staging a change in management.
If that is indeed Sanders' endgame, it's time to be honest about that.
Trump Was and Remains Catastrophically Unprepared for the Presidency
"The U.S. presidency isn't an entry-level job."--Hillary Clinton. https://t.co/T47GlAWu1Z
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 14, 2017
Donald Trump did an interview with the Associated Press, the complete transcript for which is available here. The entire thing is appalling, for all the usual reasons, but chief among them is the further evidence that Trump had no idea what he was getting into and doesn't even appear remotely ashamed that he is dangerously clueless about the gravity of the United States presidency.
For example: He casually admits that when he said NATO is obsolete that he didn't know anything about NATO. (Emphasis mine.)
TRUMP: They had a quote from me that NATO's obsolete. But they didn't say why it was obsolete. I was on Wolf Blitzer, very fair interview, the first time I was ever asked about NATO, because I wasn't in government. People don't go around asking about NATO if I'm building a building in Manhattan, right? So they asked me, Wolf ... asked me about NATO, and I said two things. NATO's obsolete — not knowing much about NATO, now I know a lot about NATO — NATO is obsolete, and I said, "And the reason it's obsolete is because of the fact they don't focus on terrorism." You know, back when they did NATO there was no such thing as terrorism.It's horrendous that he was unfamiliar with NATO in the first place, and horrendous that he thinks there's no problem with admitting he didn't.
Further, his claim that he now knows "a lot about NATO" is fairly suspect, given his assertion that "back when they did NATO there was no such thing as terrorism." NATO was established in 1949, smack in the middle of a 16-year terror spree in New York City orchestrated by George Metesky, who planted explosives "in theaters, terminals, libraries, and offices. Bombs were left in phone booths, storage lockers, and restrooms in public buildings, including Grand Central Terminal, Pennsylvania Station, Radio City Music Hall, the New York Public Library, the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the RCA Building, and in the New York City Subway. Metesky also bombed movie theaters, where he cut into seat upholstery and slipped his explosive devices inside." He "planted at least 33 bombs, of which 22 exploded, injuring 15 people."
That certainly wasn't the only act of terrorism before 1949, but it was a significant one, which happened in Trump's hometown. His ignorance of history is stunning. Of course, that's partly because Trump's definition of terrorism seemingly excludes domestic terrorism committed by white men.
Elsewhere in the interview, Trump expresses surprise at how much the presidency necessitates caring about people. (Emphasis mine.)
AP: You've talked a little bit about the way that you've brought some business skills into the office. Is there anything from your business background that just doesn't translate into the presidency, that just simply is not applicable to this job?Only after becoming president did Trump realize that you have to give a shit about other people, because "almost everything affects people."
TRUMP: Well in business, you don't necessarily need heart, whereas here, almost everything affects people. So if you're talking about health care — you have health care in business but you're trying to just negotiate a good price on health care, et cetera, et cetera. You're providing health. This is (unintelligible). Here, everything, pretty much everything you do in government, involves heart, whereas in business, most things don't involve heart.
AP: What's that switch been like for you?
TRUMP: In fact, in business you're actually better off without it.
And if that weren't incredible enough, he also explains that he's realized "how big" the presidency is, and what "great responsibility" is has. (Emphasis mine.)
AP: Can I ask you, over your first 100 days — you're not quite there yet — how do you feel like the office has changed you?I don't know what I find more appalling—that he's only now realizing the extraordinary gravity of the presidency and the scope of the federal government, or that he imagines that "human life" is only "involved in some of the decisions." Some.
TRUMP: Well the one thing I would say — and I say this to people — I never realized how big it was. Everything's so (unintelligible) like, you know the orders are so massive. I was talking to —
AP: You mean the responsibility of it, or do you mean —
TRUMP: Number One, there's great responsibility. When it came time to, as an example, send out the 59 missiles, the Tomahawks in Syria. I'm saying to myself, "You know, this is more than just like, 79 (sic) missiles. This is death that's involved," because people could have been killed. This is risk that's involved, because if the missile goes off and goes in a city or goes in a civilian area — you know, the boats were hundreds of miles away — and if this missile goes off and lands in the middle of a town or a hamlet ... every decision is much harder than you'd normally make. (unintelligible) ... This is involving death and life and so many things. ... So it's far more responsibility. (unintelligible) ... The financial cost of everything is so massive, every agency. This is thousands of times bigger, the United States, than the biggest company in the world. The second-largest company in the world is the Defense Department. The third-largest company in the world is Social Security. The fourth-largest — you know, you go down the list.
AP: Right.
TRUMP. It's massive. And every agency is, like, bigger than any company. So you know, I really just see the bigness of it all, but also the responsibility. And the human responsibility. You know, the human life that's involved in some of the decisions.
Trump is an impossibly shallow, deeply unserious man. He is catastrophically unprepared, and unfit, for the presidency. Which was patently obvious when he was running, and has only become even more painfully evident now that he's got the job.
And a big part of how we got here is a political press that was determined to project an aggressively undeserved parity between the two candidates, not only by eliding Trump's tremendous lack of preparation for this extraordinarily demanding and important job, but also by criticizing Hillary Clinton's preparation for it, turning that preparation into a negative.
.@chucktodd: #debatenight exposed Trump's lack of preparation, but Clinton seemed over-prepared at times.
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) September 27, 2016
Now here we are. And casting Clinton's preparedness as a problem seems more goddamn foolish and breathtakingly irresponsible than ever.
But far from examining their own responsibility, as Nate Silver has observed, "the media's election post-mortems have mostly ignored it because it implicates the media's judgement."
Which, suffice it to say, was lacking.
The Virtual Pub Is Open
[Explanations: lol your fat. pathetic anger bread. hey your gay.]
Belly up to the bar,
and be in this space together.
The Friday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by E=MC2.
Recommended Reading:
Shae: Feminists Get a Lot Right—Let's Celebrate That
Matthew: [Content Note: Violent homophobia] Hillary Clinton Slams Trump for Silence on Torture of Gay and Bisexual Men in Chechnya
E.A.: [CN: Islamophobia; anti-Semitism; nativism] Marine Le Pen Is Using Islamophobia to Draw Female Voters
Ragen: [CN: Fat hatred; death] Doctor Kills Fat Person, Gets Slap on the Wrist
Jessica: [CN: Rape culture; war on agency] The False Rape Narrative Has No Place in Feminism, Even in Fake Pro-Life Feminism
George: What the Hell Is This Beautiful Thing?
Fannie: First Crush Friday
Leave your links and recommendations in comments. Self-promotion welcome and encouraged!
Mmm Swampy
Donald Trump signed a couple more executive orders today, with some cool financial deregulations for his friends.
Trump as he signs new executive orders to loosen Wall Street regulations: "really the beginning of a whole new way of life"
— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) April 21, 2017
Spoiler alert: That "new way of life" isn't going to improve the lives of anyone who was legitimately economically anxious. https://t.co/BZ7NAuccU7
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 21, 2017
Basically: Trump continues to keep being exactly the kind of hideous disaster as a president we knew he would be. And that is terrible news for all of us who don't inhabit his gold toilet aficionado cohort.
On Hillary Clinton's Beautiful Refusal to "Go Away"
There are two words I have heard over and over since Hillary Clinton emerged from the woods after losing the presidency: "Go away."
I have heard them from random people responding to any news item about her; from commenters responding to my writing about her; from political pundits, especially but not exclusively of the male persuasion. I have even heard them from some of her supporters, who couch the admonishment in a heaving sigh of regret: "I just think it's time for her to go away."
It functions not unlike the ubiquitous scolding to "get over it"—and often in tandem: Get your grief and your anger and all your other stupid feelings out of public view, and take your loser candidate with you.
It's not entirely clear (to me) what Hillary "going away" would actually look like. I suppose that's because it depends on who is saying it. For some people, it would be an assurance she will never, ever, run again for public office. For others, seemingly nothing short of curling up in a ball and dying would suffice.
Not that it matters. The objective is the projection of contempt, which is satisfied by merely uttering "go away," irrespective of the precise conditions attached.
This is a thing we culturally do to women who fail—with the very definition of "failure" itself a constantly moving target, to suit our misogynist disdains. It can be a quantifiable fuck-up, which costs people their safety or jobs or other measurable assets, or something decidedly less so: A young female pop star who "fails" to be sufficiently aware that she is "annoying," or a fat woman who "fails" to project at all times an apologetic nature, indicative of her everlasting remorse for having wrought her monstrous self upon the world.
The latter examples are not actual failures, but subjective "failures" to hew to impossible standards around female visibility. Impossible, because a pop star who frankly addresses overexposure is summarily told to "go away" for her intolerant navel-gazing, and a fat woman who does not walk with her head held high is told, in so many words, to "go away" for not carrying herself with pride.
Women of color, and women of other marginalized classes, have less room to fail, and more exacting and unforgiving definitions of failure, than straight, white, thin, able-bodied, wealthy, cis women. There is no wiggle room—and there are precious few people invested in redemption narratives for marginalized women.
They are further burdened, much more so than privileged women, with representing the whole class of people who share their identities. A failure—legitimate or invented—is not just a personal one, but one inevitably used to underwrite bigoted commentary about the entirety of their communities.
Each deviation from the kyriarchetype increases a woman's odds of being held to impossible standards—and the chance of hearing "go away" as a result.
Even a woman like Sarah Palin, who benefits not only from her extraordinary privilege but also conservatives' absurd willingness to fail people upward, has been diminished since being the Republican Party's vice-presidential pick. She may still be able to score a White House invite, but she has been relegated from Celebrated Conservative It Girl to just another conspiracy-minded Facebook ranter.
Palin doesn't deserve any more chances, but it isn't irrelevant that the man who elevated her to her former prominence, Senator John McCain, hasn't suffered any professional consequence for his appalling decision that she was suitable to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
She was told to "go away." He was not.
When Monica Crowley, another conservative woman with privileges akin to Palin's, was discovered to be a plagiarist, she was obliged to withdraw from contention for a spot in the Trump administration. When Neil Gorsuch was found to have plagiarized, he was confirmed to the Supreme Court.
She was told to "go away." He was not.
Because that is simply not a thing we tell men. I don't mean that the words "go away" are never spoken to a man (although you'll be hard-pressed to find nearly as many professional media types saying the literal words "go away" to any man as have said the same regarding Hillary Clinton). I mean the attendant expectation that they slink away from public view, never to return; that powerbrokers limit their opportunities because of their failures.
Men's failures and redemption narratives, however, go together like chocolate and peanut butter. There is an entire cottage industry dedicated to rehabilitating the images of men who have had real, significant, often criminal failures—athletes, pop stars, actors, politicians welcomed back to public acclaim with boilerplate profiles telling us all about their newfound gratitude, hard-won humility, and the love of a good woman, filed under headlines like "The Comeback Kid."
Hillary Clinton has not been—and won't be—granted any such generous reprieve, despite the fact that her "failure" was spending 18 months campaigning, day after exhausting day, keeping up a ruthless schedule that would drive most people half her age to collapse after three weeks, giving up time with her family, sacrificing anything resembling free time or privacy, making countless sacrifices on behalf of this country in order to prevent the exact outcome we now call her failure, sniffing that she was a weak candidate, even though she was derailed by foreign interference, breathtaking unprofessionalism from the intelligence community, and a tsunami of misogyny, yet still managed to win the popular vote by three million votes.
No, Hillary is told to "go away."
And because women are always told to "go away"—always have our hard work and tireless energies dismissed as failures if the result does not look like retrograde expectations of women or does not achieve precisely what we might have hoped—I am very, very glad indeed that Hillary is utterly refusing to go away.
I am glad because she still has important things to say and important things to contribute. She is not just a presidential candidate, but an accomplished stateswoman who represents this nation in a manner in which we can be proud.
I could write an entire essay just on the reasons that Hillary Clinton does and should have a prominent role in our national discourse. But, if you've read this far, you are probably already well aware of those reasons.
Hillary doesn't owe us a goddamned thing, and if she'd decided to spend the rest of her days on a sunny island somewhere, trading in her pantsuits for a bathing suit and drinking booze out of a coconut while merrily cackling at the Alt-POTUS 45 Twitter account, I would be undilutedly thrilled for her.
If she had decided to stay away, I would understand that. I would understand that so hard.
But that is a very different thing indeed from going away.
And I—selfishly, I readily admit—am incredibly relieved, and grateful beyond measure, that Hillary Clinton refuses to go away.
That she continues to speak, that she continues to advocate, that she continues to be seen, that she continues to exercise her right to speak freely, and to be heard.
Though I am ever despondent about the misogyny that obliges her to model such tenacious gumption, I am exhilarated by the example she is setting (again, and always) for young women who will, inexorably, be told in their lives to "go away."
And for we not-so-young women, too. That Hillary is also an older woman who refuses to go away is tremendously important. Older women occupy a very particular space in our culture—a space frequently defined by an abandonment of listening. Rather than valuing the lived experiences of older women, and the wisdom those lives have imparted, we turn away from them, dismissing them as irrelevant; we neglect to listen, just at the moment where they may offer insights most profoundly worth listening to.
Hillary has a voice. And people listen to it. She has experience, which people respect. She has knowledge, and it is widely valued. This is not the typical experience of older women, who are devalued at the intersection of misogyny and ageism—and whatever other parts of our identity (race, disability, body size, sexuality, gender) are used to devalue us, too.
Hillary's refusal to go away is a direct challenge to the habit of tossing away older women, like so much useless rubbish.
And it is a long sideways glance at every insolent shitheel who tells her to go away, meeting their gaze with a steely resolve and a firm NO.
No, I will not go away.
Because Hillary Clinton knows she has value, which is one of the most brazen assertions any woman can make.
It is magnificent to behold her assert it.
Daily Dose of Cute
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
We Resist: Day 92
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 in the news today:
Franco Ordoñez and Anita Kumar: Secret Meeting at Mar-a-Lago Raises Questions About Colombia Peace and Trump.
Donald Trump quietly met a pair of former Colombian presidents last weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, thrusting his administration into an ugly power struggle in Latin America that threatens to undermine the country's controversial peace agreement with rebel leaders.So, not only did Trump hold this secret meeting, at his deeply problematic private estate, but then his spokesperson straight-up lied about it. This is aggressively unacceptable—and it will barely get a passing mention in the political press, because there is so much other shit swirling around in Trump's tornado of chaos.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos is expected to push Trump to support the peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia at their first meeting at the White House next month. He wants the Trump administration and Congress to maintain the $450 million in foreign aid promised by former President Barack Obama to implement the plan to end Latin America's longest armed conflict.
The meeting between Trump and the former presidents, Álvaro Uribe and Andrés Pastrana – Colombia news media have reported it was arranged by an influential U.S. critic of the plan, Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida – was not on the president's schedule and was not disclosed to reporters who traveled with him to Palm Beach.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer initially declined to answer questions about the meeting, leading to a rash of speculation in Colombian media. Colombian newspapers, websites and radio stations debated the meeting’s significance — and whether it actually had happened. "I don't have anything for you at this time," Spicer said Wednesday when asked.
The White House later confirmed the meeting to McClatchy but downplayed its significance, saying it was a mere coincidence that both former leaders opposed to the peace pact were at the president's club. Aides to Rubio declined to comment.
"They were there with a member from the club and briefly said hello when the president walked past them," spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. "There wasn't anything beyond a quick hello."
But the leaders' own comments contradict the White House's characterization.
In a tweet following the meeting, Pastrana thanked Trump for the "cordial and very frank conversation" about problems in Colombia and the region.
* * *
Kenneth P. Vogel at Politico: Trump Lawyer: 'No Right' to Protest at Rallies. "Donald Trump's lawyers argued in a Thursday court filing that protesters 'have no right' to 'express dissenting views' at his campaign rallies because such protests infringed on his First Amendment rights. ...Trump's lawyers also argue that he had every right to call for the removal the protesters since they 'obviously interfered with the Trump campaign's First Amendment right' by 'vigorously expressing their disdain for Mr. Trump,' including by chanting and holding up signs depicting Trump's face on the body of a pig, among other anti-Trump messages. 'Of course, protesters have their own First Amendment right to express dissenting views, but they have no right to do so as part of the campaign rally of the political candidates they oppose,' Trump's lawyers wrote." Absolutely chilling.
[Content Note: Video may autoplay at link] Nick Penzenstadler, Steve Reilly, and John Kelly at USA Today: Trump Condos Worth $250 Million Pose Potential Conflict. "USA TODAY spent four months cataloging every property Trump's companies own across the country. Reporters found that Trump's companies are sitting on at least $250 million of individual properties in the USA alone. Property records show Trump's trust and his companies own at least 422 luxury condos and penthouses from New York City to Las Vegas, 12 mansion lots on bluffs overlooking his golf course on the Pacific Ocean, and dozens more smaller pieces of real estate. The properties range in value from about $200,000 to $35 million each. Unlike developments where Trump licenses his name to a separate developer for a flat fee, profits from selling individual properties directly owned by his companies ultimately enrich him personally."
Margaret Hartmann at New York Mag: The U.S. May Be Preparing to Charge WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange. "On Thursday afternoon, the Washington Post reported that federal prosecutors are considering whether to bring criminal charges against members of WikiLeaks, while CNN said they have already prepared charges against Assange. As CNN explained, the Obama administration had decided to hold off on prosecuting Assange because they could not figure out how to go after him without targeting mainstream outlets that publish classified information."
(I have no love for Assange, who is currently hiding out in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid rape charges in Sweden, but I do have serious questions about whether the Trump administration is orchestrating this as part of their war on the free press, to set a dangerous precedent regarding publication of classified info, as well as whether they have an interest in getting Assange out of reach of European Union officials who may have questions for him about Russian collusion.)
Taegan Goddard at Political Wire: U.S. Moves Towards Imposing Steel Tariffs. "'The U.S. has set the stage for a global showdown over steel, launching a national security investigation that could lead to sweeping tariffs on steel imports in what would be the first significant act of economic protectionism by [Donald] Trump,' the Financial Times reports. 'The decision to use a 1962 law allowing the US government to limit imports that threaten its security readiness is intended to deliver on Mr Trump's campaign promises to bolster heavy industry and 'put new American steel into the spine of this country'… But it risks setting off trade tensions with China just days after Mr Trump avoided another conflict by backing down on a promise to label Beijing a currency manipulator, citing in part its help in dealing with North Korea.'"
[CN: Transphobia; homophobia] Sheri Swokowski at the Washington Post: Trump's Anti-LGBT Army Secretary Nominee Thinks Veterans Like Me Have 'a Disease'. "Like Mark Green—[Donald] Trump's nominee for secretary of the Army—I served my country in uniform. I was proud to be an infantry officer and retired honorably after 34 years. But as a transgender member of the military, I hid my authentic self for decades to continue serving the country I love. Unlike Green, I was forced to serve in silence the entire time, but I won't be silent now. I respect his Iraq War service as an Army flight surgeon, but the disrespect—the bigotry—he's shown over and over toward the LGBT community, including LGBT service members, doesn't reflect the spirit or direction of the military I know. Rather, his selection reflects poorly on the president and our armed forces. He's the wrong choice to be Army secretary."
[CN: War on agency; disablism] Sharona Coutts at Rewire: Trump Administration at Odds with Scientists and Advocates. "Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Tom Price is connected to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, an extreme libertarian doctors group that espouses many of the lies about abortion safety long rejected by the medical and scientific communities. In the current edition of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, the group once again lends support to the myth that abortion causes breast cancer, calling induced abortion 'conducive to breast cancer.' In the past, the group has taken outlandish positions on many issues, falsely claiming that unauthorized immigrants caused an outbreak of leprosy in the United States; that vaccines are linked to autism; and casting doubt over whether HIV causes AIDS."
[CN: Nativism] Ed Pilkington at the Guardian: Torn Apart: The American Families Hit by Trump's Immigration Crackdown. "'Bad hombres.' Those are the people Donald Trump says he is targeting for deportation under his immigration policy—the people he calls 'illegal aliens,' the gangbangers, violent criminals, and drug dealers who threaten public safety and undermine national security. But a very different pattern is emerging on the ground. In communities from Maryland to California and Oregon, immigration lawyers are reporting that individuals are being picked up with minimal or no criminal records who pose no risk at all to anyone. More than 90% of removal proceedings initiated in the first two months of the Trump administration have been against people who have committed no crime at all other than to be living in the country without permission."
[CN: Homophobia] Michael Fitzgerald at Towleroad: Family Research Council: Gay Witches Are Secretly Running Washington, D.C. "Hate group the Family Research Council (FRC) has come out with some awful nonsense over the years but group 'senior fellow' Robert Maginnis has possibly reached maximum stupid by suggesting that Washington, D.C., is run by evil gay witches." I wish!
[CN: Environmental racism] Yessenia Funes at Colorlines: Montana Tribes Want Keystone XL away from Their Drinking Water. "The 1,179-mile long pipeline is set to cross west of the reservation on the Missouri River—the same body of water the Sioux people fought to protect against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The Fort Peck Indian Reservation's only source of fresh water, from an intake plant, sits downstream. People on the reservation used to pull groundwater from their own wells. ...'Oh, what the hell, just do it to the Indians: I'm afraid that's just a lot of people's attitudes,' said Margaret Abbott, who lives on the reservation, to Rolling Stone."
[CN: Video may autoplay at link] Mark Hensch at the Hill: RNC Raises Record-Setting $41.5M Haul. "The Republican National Committee on Friday announced it raised $41.5 million in the first three months of 2017, its strongest-ever total for the first quarter following a presidential race. 'Our record-setting fundraising pace has been fueled by grassroots enthusiasm for [Donald] Trump and the Republican Party,' RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel said in a statement."
In other words: Republicans are definitely okay with all of the horrors detailed above, and in all the previous daily installments of this series. In fact, not only are they okay with it; they're forking over record amounts of cash to keep the hits coming. Sob.
What have you been reading that we need to resist today?
"It's a choice and that was the choice I made."
I once wrote that my favorite celebrity couple was always Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks (I'm old), because I loved the way Anne Bancroft talked about their marriage: "When I hear his key in the lock at night my heart starts to beat faster. I'm just so happy he's coming home. We have so much fun." And this: "I'd never had so much pleasure with another human being. It was that simple."
Because Iain and I are a different-sex couple, who don't have any truck for traditional gender roles, who regard each other as equals, and who made the choice not to parent, there aren't a lot of visible representations of marriages like ours. I'm a lot more likely to hear jokes about "ball-busting" and field expressions of shock if I mention Iain vacuuming, or read complaints about how couples like us are "selfish" for not having children, than I am to see or read anything that positively reflects our lives back to us.
So, like Bancroft and Brooks, I always enjoy hearing Ina Garten, aka The Barefoot Contessa, talk about her relationship of 48 years with her husband Jeffrey. This interview is particularly good, as she also spoke about their choice not to parent.
Ina Garten and her husband Jeffrey have one of the most coveted marriages on television. Over the course of 48 years together, they've shared laughs, love, and not to mention very good food, but the pair decided early on that they wouldn't share kids together.I love that she says, matter-of-factly, that parenting is a choice, and her choice was not to parent. No excuses or caveats. That's it and that's all.
"We decided not to have children," the Food Network star says in a new episode of the Katie Couric Podcast airing on Thursday. "I really appreciate that other people do and we will always have friends that have children that we are close to but it was a choice I made very early. I really felt, I feel, that I would have never been able to have the life I've had. So it's a choice and that was the choice I made."
I also love that she acknowledges the life she has led would have not have been possible if she had had children, which is something that resonates strongly with me. My life, and my work, would be profoundly different if I had not had the choice not to parent.
In the same interview, she also said this, on the success of her and Jeffrey's lasting relationship: "The secret is that you just take care of each other and admire each other and support each other and you get that back."
That resonates with me, too. ♥
I appreciate Ina Garten's willingness to publicly share pieces of their relationship with us. I know, from my own experience, that the cost of doing that can be steep. There are a lot of people who are extraordinarily eager to respond with cruelty—especially when you are a fat woman talking about sustained, fulfilling romantic love, which fat women aren't supposed to have.
Her words are validating for those of us who have a relationship that might look a little bit like theirs, and, for those who might like to have a relationship like that one day, are a fine model of what can be.
That is no small thing in this world.
Republicans Fast-Track Second Try at Destroying Healthcare Access
Paige Winfield Cunningham, Kelsey Snell, and John Wagner at the Washington Post: White House Turns up Heat on Congress to Revise the Affordable Care Act.
Trump is pushing Congress toward another dramatic showdown over the Affordable Care Act, despite big outstanding obstacles to a beleaguered revision plan and a high-stakes deadline next week to keep the government running."Big outstanding obstacles." Well, that's polite, lol! Those obstacles include the fact that the plan is garbage, there's likely no more support for this iteration than the last one which failed, and the ridiculously fast pace means that the people who would be voting on it don't even know how much the plan would cost or what its effects would be:
Several congressional GOP aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk openly about the ongoing negotiations, said they worry that the rushed process threatens to create another embarrassing public failure over health care. The schedule would also make it nearly impossible for lawmakers to finish their work in time for official scorekeepers to provide a clear estimate of how much the legislation would cost or how it would affect coverage numbers.It's not like slowing things down would translate into the Republicans devising a better plan. They've had seven years since the Affordable Care Act was passed, so another month (or two, or a hundred) wouldn't yield a better healthcare access policy from a party that regards healthcare access as a privilege. But it would at least provide the space for critical facts about that plan to be assessed, so legislators wouldn't be ludicrously asked to vote on a massive piece of legislation about which they don't even know the most fundamental details.
But Donald Trump, who, despite tweeting this morning that the first 100 days is a "ridiculous standard" by which to evaluate the success of a new presidency, desperately wants to be able to claim a major success within that timeframe.
The effort reflects Trump's sense of urgency to score a victory on Obamacare replacement and move on to other legislative objectives, notably tax restructuring. Passing an Affordable Care Act revision would also allow the president to show progress toward a major campaign promise as he completes his first 100 days in office.President Unity does not understand, or care, that this push will dramatically increase the likelihood of a government shutdown, which will be another colossal mess on his already splattered record of failure.
"The plan gets better and better and better, and it's gotten really good, and a lot of people are liking it a lot," Trump said at a news conference Thursday. "We have a good chance of getting it soon. I'd like to say next week, but we will get it."
Democrats have so far been willing to work with Republicans to avoid a government shutdown, but any effort to schedule a vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act could destroy those talks and threaten a government shutdown that Republicans have vowed to avoid.Trump's position: "I think we want to keep the government open, don't you agree? So I think we'll get both." He is living in a fantasy world.
"There isn't going to be a warm, fuzzy feeling," House Democratic Caucus Chairman Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.) said of the impact a health-care repeal effort would have on spending talks.
Congress has five days next week to pass a spending bill, a tight timeline under the most generous of circumstance that would be nearly impossible to meet if House leaders also try to force a vote on the repeal legislation. Several Republican and Democratic aides said there is a chance that both parties could agree to pass a very short-lived spending bill — one that kept the government open one week, for instance — to give negotiators time to carefully complete a broader spending agreement. But Democrats are already warning that they could walk away if GOP leaders push for repeal.
"It doesn't really bode well in terms of negotiating with us that they're going to try to push off the vote on the [spending bill] to accommodate them on a bill we think is disastrous," Crowley said.
A dark, gruesome fantasy world in which healthcare access is not a right, and where presidents don't care about killing their citizens so long as it gets them a good headline.
Bernie Sanders, My Autonomy Is Not Negotiable
As Aphra_Behn reported on Wednesday, Bernie Sanders, in his capacity as co-chair of Democratic outreach, said flatly of Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff: "He's not a progressive," while declaring as "progressive" Nebraska Democrat Heath Mello, despite the fact that Mello has sponsored legislation that would restrict abortion rights.
Yesterday, Sanders defended that position to NPR Politics:
Sanders pushed back against the criticism. "The truth is that in some conservative states there will be candidates that are popular candidates who may not agree with me on every issue. I understand it. That's what politics is about," Sanders told NPR.This is absolutely incredible. After holding Ossoff to a litmus test on vaguely defined "economic issues," he gives Mello a pass on abortion rights because there are candidates "who may not agree with [him] on every issue."
"If we are going to protect a woman's right to choose, at the end of the day we're going to need Democratic control over the House and the Senate, and state governments all over this nation," he said. "And we have got to appreciate where people come from, and do our best to fight for the pro-choice agenda. But I think you just can't exclude people who disagree with us on one issue."
Economic issues are non-negotiable, but abortion is. It's just "one issue."
That "one issue" determines whether I have autonomy, agency, consent. It determines, in part, whether I am equal. Or whether I'm not.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) April 21, 2017
Bernie Sanders does not have the right to casually negotiate away my bodily autonomy. But he believes he does—no less under the auspices of centering economic issues as paramount, despite the fact that control over our reproduction is a crucial economic issue for women. Indeed, our self-determination regarding reproductive choices is the key indicator of women's financial security.
That Sanders fails to regard reproductive rights as a central economic issue is perfectly, terribly reflective of his comprehensive failure of intersectional analysis and policy.
That is the problem that I, and many others, have had with Sanders all along.
This isn't just an issue of Sanders prioritizing reproductive rights over economic issues: It's an issue of Sanders failing to understand, or acknowledge, that reproductive rights is a key economic issue.
Either he doesn't understand that, or he simply doesn't care, because it isn't a key economic issue for (cis) men.
And if Sanders were just another old dosey relic quickly approaching the end of an inglorious political career, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But he isn't. He is operating in an official Democratic Party capacity (a decision by the Democrats almost as inexplicable as allowing him to run as a Democrat in the first place).
Further to that, he has positioned himself as the arbiter of What Is Progressive. And treating women's autonomy, agency, consent, and very equality under the law as negotiable is a colossally retrogressive position. It is the opposite of progressive.
I am angry that Sanders is obliging me to fight against his profoundly unprogressive ideas, when I've got enough to fucking worry about fighting against Trump and the rest of the dirtbags in the Republican Party.
And I am angry that the Democrats, in continuing to give a platform to these garbage ideas, is shitting all over the work Hillary Clinton busted her ass doing to activate 10 million new Democrats who I'm guessing won't compromise on women's personhood, since they supported the candidate who was vocal and unyielding in her support of reproductive rights.
Any movement that wants to redefine "progressive" in a way that deprioritizes women's personhood is a movement of which I want no part.
Bernie Sanders' "progressivism" is toxic. The Democratic leadership needs to wake up to that reality, and fast.
Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker yes: "What are your favorite fermented foods? Have you ever tried making your own?"
