Month: May 2023

Many transgender bills are authored by experts in hate

It’s the usual suspects:

At least 17 states have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors, though judges have temporarily blocked their enforcement in some, including Arkansas. An Associated Press analysis found that often those bills sprang not from grassroots or constituent demand, but from the pens of a handful of conservative interest groups.

Many of the proposals, as introduced or passed, are identical or very similar to some model legislation, the AP found. Those ready-made bills have been used in statehouses for decades, often with criticisms of carpetbagging by out-of-state interests. In the case of restrictions on gender-affirming care for youths, they allow a handful of far-right groups to spread a false narrative based on distorted science, critics say.

“These are solutions from outside our state looking to solve nonexistent problems inside our state,” said Aaron Jennen. “For whatever reason, they have the ear of legislatures in states like Arkansas, and the legislators will generally defer to and only listen to those individuals.”

The AP obtained the texts of more than 130 bills in 40 state legislatures from Plural, a public policy software company, and analyzed them for similarities to model bills peddled by the conservative groups Do No Harm, which also criticizes efforts to diversify staffing in medicine, and the Family Research Council, which has long been involved in abortion restrictions.

One of the clearest examples is in Montana, where nearly all the language in at least one bill can be found in Do No Harm’s model. Publicly available emails from December show the Republican sponsor, Sen. John Fuller, tweaked the model before introducing it weeks later. Democrats criticized his efforts.

“This is not a Montana issue; it is an issue pushed by well-funded national groups,” Democratic Sen. Janet Ellis said during debate in February.

Republicans pushed back.

“Someone mentioned this is not a Montana solution. And I can tell you that I won my election on this issue,” said Republican Sen. Barry Usher, who ran unopposed in the general election after winning his contested primary.

The Montana bill passed in March with much of Do No Harm’s model language intact and has been signed into law.

Do No Harm’s model and the 2021 Arkansas bill endorsed as a model by the Family Research Council also have many similarities, including the assertion — rebutted by major medical organizations — that the risks of gender-affirming care outweigh its benefits.

Republicans’ recent focus on legislation to restrict aspects of transgender life is largely a strategy of using social “wedge issues” — in the past, abortion or same-sex marriage — to motivate their voting base, political observers say. And it does appear to resonate; a Pew Research Center survey a year ago found broad support among Republicans, but not Democrats, for restrictions on medical care for gender transitions.

It’s important to recognize this for the political strategy it is. They’ve done it many times before. And they are always based upon misinformation, bigotry and repression. This time they’re going after kids, even as they rend their garments claiming they are “saving the children.” It’s heart-breaking.

I can’t bring myself to write about the debt ceiling debacle again. I had foolishly thought the Democrats had a specific back-up plan for when the lunatics in the House decided to crash the economy for shits and giggles. Anyone could have seen they would try to do that. But apparently the White House and the Dem leadership didn’t see that coming? Really? But a huge part of the problem is, as usual, the way the media is covering the issue.

Anyway this piece from TNR spells out the current dilemma:

Having watched Capitol Hill fall into chaotic convulsions over the debt ceiling a million times before, I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to properly negotiate your way through a debt ceiling crisis is to not negotiate at all. But it would seem, for the moment, that President Biden is going to dip a toe in those waters and fashion some sort of compromise. A deal may not be possible; it won’t take but a handful of House Republicans to scuttle any sort of bipartisan offering. So it may be too early to say that Biden is breaking his vow not to repeat the mistakes his former boss made in 2011.

But this might be a good occasion to point out the other big mistakes that have brought us to this point. Namely, those of the political media, who can rightly be said to have spent the last decade botching their coverage of the debt ceiling, mainly by failing to speak one plain truth: We keep getting dragged to the brink of default because the GOP has become a gang of extremists. This is villainy—their villainy—and the media has let them off the hook by treating this psychosis as all part of the natural order.

Over at New York, Jonathan Chait (not for the first time) runs down the most recent spate of examples that indicate we’ve already slid down a slippery slope: Here’s an unchallenged contention in The New York Times categorizing the debt ceiling standoff as “the ordinary stuff of politics”; there’s Jake Sherman blithely declaring that in “modern times, the debt ceiling is raised with negotiations.” (The American Prospect’s David Dayen has a deeper dive into Sherman’s particular brand of malpractice in this regard.) This is misinformation—or at the very least, it omits the most critical fact of all. As Chait writes: “These arguments conflate negotiation, which is historically common in debt-ceiling bills, with extortion, which isn’t.”

That the media cannot keep what is and what isn’t a “norm” straight in their head is the venial sin embedded within their debt ceiling coverage. The mortal sin is that the media has essentially conferred on the Republican Party the right to regularly stage these extortions. Imagine what would happen if the shoe was on the other foot—that a Democratic-controlled House majority was threatening to push the country into default unless a Republican president consented to a massive increase of the welfare state. It’s hard to imagine journalists referring to liberal hostage-taking as merely “the ordinary stuff of politics.”

This is another big lesson of the Obama era: The burden of bipartisanship, and the compromises that the media covets to a fetishistic extent, must be entirely shouldered by Democrats. (Marvel at the double standard: David Broder once made the insane insistence that the Obama-era Democrats needed to earn 70 Senate votes for any law they passed to be considered legitimate.) Throughout his tenure, Obama was regularly filleted for failing to reach a compromise with a Republican Party that had vowed to make him a one-term president by denying him a bipartisan win on anything. Pundits contorted themselves into pretzels in an attempt to ignore the fact that Obama and his fellow Democrats were the only party willing to stand in the ideological middle to make deals, a move that The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent referred to as “the centrist dodge.”

Obama spent an inordinate amount of time trying to play this game and please the naysayers. He allowed bipartisan “gangs” to build out their own health care reform ideas alongside the Affordable Care Act. He stumped for the votes of people like Olympia Snowe and Charles Grassley. He signed the Budget Control Act into law, unleashing the doomed “super committee” and the brutal sequestration budget cuts. And as soon as Obama was out of office, the moronic pundit drumbeat demanding more and bigger compromises fell silent. Donald Trump was never burdened by any such demands. The media’s bipartisanship fetishists essentially took four years off.

Now, with Biden back in office, we’ve returned to the Obama-era status quo where it’s up to him to make a series of painful choices in order to stave off economic collapse. There is never a demand that Republicans sacrifice anything, and you can see this in the coverage: You are probably aware that the White House is mulling across-the-board cuts to social spending and adding new and onerous work requirements to various aid programs. What are Republicans offering in return? As Politico reported on Wednesday, “House Republicans maintain that their job is done. They passed a bill. And now they are waiting for Biden to make a move toward agreeing to the spending restrictions outlined in their bill.” This reporting is included, without critique, in an article that repeatedly insists that “negotiations” are ongoing.

The Beltway media consensus conceives of the GOP as the party that’s allowed to exert maximal power to govern, while the Democrats are forced into the role of helpmate, permitted to step up occasionally to buffer the GOP’s excesses but not to exert maximal power themselves to advance their agenda. Any ambitious bit of liberal governance is usually confronted in the Beltway press with the question, “But how will you pay for it?” We may have become inured to this, but it is journalistic malpractice all the same. How have we paid for it? Quite dearly.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch called emergency measures taken during the COVID-19 crisis that killed more than 1 million Americans perhaps “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.” https://t.co/RxHm7vXvCI

— The Associated Press (@AP) May 19, 2023

Hyperbole much? Move over Jim Crow, we had to wear a mask and stay home during a pandemic for a few weeks. The humanity. That’s a Supreme Court Justice saying that. My God.

I guess the next time we get hit with a new deadly virus for which humans have no immunity (and we will) we’ll just go about our business and pretend it isn’t happening. No need to try to save lives. Just let ‘er rip.

We have lost 1.1 million people in the US in the last three years to this virus. We would have lost many times that without the mitigation efforts and the vaccines. And I guess that would be just fine — preferable, actually.

Next pandemic everyone just gets a gun and shoots through it. https://t.co/8iXS6kf8I7

— Schooley (@Rschooley) May 19, 2023

Against committed clowns

Scott Lemieux comments at Lawyers, Guns & Money on our authoritarian party’s redefinition of freedom. Lemieux referenced Jamelle Bouie’s helpful reframing of FDR’s Four Freedoms as an antimatter version for the MAGA party. It is a repudiation of everything conservatives once claimed to hold sacred and didn’t. But you knew that.

“What should we make of all this?” Bouie asks of Republicans’ ongoing efforts to revoke the freedoms of any American who doesn’t drink at their fetid trough:

In his 1941 State of the Union address, Franklin Roosevelt said there was “nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy” and that he, along with the nation, looked forward to “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.” Famously, those freedoms were the “freedom of speech and expression,” the “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way,” the “freedom from want” and the “freedom from fear.” Those freedoms were the guiding lights of his New Deal, and they remained the guiding lights of his administration through the trials of World War II.

There are, I think, four freedoms we can glean from the Republican program.

There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.

There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.

There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.

And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.

In the nation Republicans are dismantling in full view, Bouie writes, “you can either dominate or be dominated.”

“It’s all Wilhoit’s Law, and the rest is mere details,” Lemieux observes.* They may act like clowns, but they are committed clowns.

*For those who need refreshing, “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition…”

where gender-nonconformity hurt you

Real Americans™ might want to reevaluate their life choices.

All 3 members of the Republican freshman class of 2020 who lectured us the loudest about family values and marriage didn’t have their marriages survive a second term. pic.twitter.com/Zel6uyB6Ut

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 18, 2023

People who complain loudest about having political opponents forcing randy random things down their throats have a new obsession, says Kat Abughazaleh of Media Matters. It’s piss. *

And transphobia.

I’m done pretending —

We need to talk about the Republican Party’s raging piss kink: pic.twitter.com/49kzYAHUFd

— Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) May 19, 2023

This would be embarrassing if Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was capable of it (Al Jazeera):

Most recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is expected to announce his bid to be the Republican presidential nominee, signed bills that ban gender-affirming care for minors, restrict chosen pronoun use in schools and force people to use the bathroom corresponding with their sex assigned at birth.

Lydia Polgreen adds in The New York Times:

The new bathroom law is particularly cruel and absurd. Politicians claim these measures seek to make bathrooms safer. But I have yet to see any of these legislators produce a shred of credible evidence that transgender people pose a safety threat to cisgender people in bathrooms.

[…]

Bathrooms have long been porcelain crucibles for our deepest fears and anxieties. One hardly needs to crack open the collected works of Sigmund Freud to understand why they have been the sites of repression and humiliation in service of enforcing hierarchies.

And while Josh “The Streak” Hawley boasted about his book of manly virtues…

And when the next campaign finance reports get filed, we will learn who bought them in bulk. pic.twitter.com/GuDbNYQule

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 19, 2023

North Carolina Republicans admitted being intimidated by Democratic soy girls.

The Democrats' intimidation campaign continues.

Their radical fervor belies the weakness of their position.#ncpol #ncga https://t.co/gn91Yp0NRk

— NCGOP (@NCGOP) May 16, 2023

There’s that conservative obsession with weakness again. <Sigh> Compensate much?

The GOP has a plan. GUNS! pic.twitter.com/vQnHC5i7io

— Jimmy Kimmel Live (@JimmyKimmelLive) May 12, 2022

Yeah, it’s been a trying week.

*Update: No, really, it’s piss.

Public urinators beware. Lauren Boebert is…Piss Cop. #TDSThrowback pic.twitter.com/h2BRUFa9KL

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) May 21, 2023

Baby foxes!

We are so excited to feature the two newest members of the Cincinnati Zoo fam…bat-eared fox kits! These 2 little boys were born on April 6th to first-time parents Frankie and Otis. While Otis prefers to live out of the public eye, you may have seen their mom, Frankie, during a program at the zoo! Through ultrasounds, radiographs and even thermal imaging, we were able to stay on top of how the babies and mom were doing during the entirety of her pregnancy and beyond. The kits are strong and full of personality already. These kits are not yet available to be viewed by the public.

Not bloody likely

The Freedom Caucus belated realizes that negotiations mean they won’t get everything they want:

The House Freedom Caucus is calling for “no further discussion” on legislation to raise the debt ceiling until the Senate passes the bill House Republicans approved last month that would pair an increase in the borrowing limit with steep spending cuts.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has called the bill “dead on arrival.”

The hard-liner conservative caucus said it adopted its official position on Thursday as debt limit negotiations continued behind closed doors between representatives for Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and the White House.

“The U.S. House of Representatives has done its job in passing the Limit, Save, Grow Act to provide a mechanism to raise the debt ceiling. This legislation is the official position of the House Freedom Caucus and, by its passage with 217 votes, the entire House Republican Conference,” the caucus wrote.

“The House Freedom Caucus calls on Speaker McCarthy and Senate Republicans to use every leverage and tool at their disposal to ensure the Limit, Save, Grow Act is signed into law. There should be no further discussion until the Senate passes the legislation,” the caucus added.

And then there’s this:

The Democrats raised the debt ceiling with little drama when Trump was president. They’ve never threatened to default. But whatever.

The Freedom Caucus is not going to agree to any deal. Trump wants a default so he can supposedly ride to the rescue. So the whole thing will depend upon McCarthy’s willingness to lose his seat to save the world economy.

Yeah, I need a drink too.

The bigots won, but it’s not enough.

Ted is such a worm:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) this week opened a Senate investigation into his allegations that Anheuser-Busch markets Bud Light to underage consumers in its ad featuring transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

In a letter to Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth, Cruz and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) also asked the beer industry trade group Beer Institute, which Whitworth chairs, to conduct its own investigation. Or the company could say it’s sorry for any infraction and publicly disassociate from Mulvaney to avoid further inquiry, the senators wrote, making their actions appear more like a publicity stunt.

“We would urge you, in your capacity at Anheuser-Busch, to avoid a lengthy investigation by the Beer Institute by instead having Anheuser-Busch publicly sever its relationship with Dylan Mulvaney, publicly apologize to the American people for marketing alcoholic beverages to minors, and direct Dylan Mulvaney to remove any Anheuser-Busch content from his social media platforms.” (The letter repeatedly misgenders Mulvaney, who uses she-they pronouns.)

Mulvaney, a 26-year-old actor who chronicled her transition to a wide audience on TikTok, appeared in a one-off Instagram post promoting Bud Light for March Madness. She showed off a can with her likeness that the brand made especially for her.

As you’ve no doubt heard, the company caved and fired the ad execs who came up with the idea but that wasn’t good enough. They need more to keep the hate at fever pitch.

The hostility to transgender people is so extreme it makes my skin crawl at this point, particularly the thrill they all seem to get out of it. This primitive Lord of the Flies mentality is sick. Our culture is being twisted and degraded not by some trans girl on tik-tok, but by this depraved, bully-boy mentality that takes such joy in hurting vulnerable people.

Which side will the cops be on?

On January 6th the police did their jobs fighting against the rabid mob threatening to kill members of congress and Vice President Pence. But I still wonder what police around the country might do in the face of an organized right wing rebellion. So many of them are MAGA.

Here’s the story of one who was in cahoots with the Proud Boys leading up to January 6th:

It’s good to have friends in high places.

Federal prosecutors on Friday highlighted a nexus between a top intelligence official in D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, a relationship which continued from July 2019 through the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Former Metropolitan Police Department officer Shane Lamond, who supervised the intelligence branch of the department’s homeland security bureau, faces four counts stemming from allegations that he fed information to Tarrio about law enforcement investigations into him and then lied about it to federal agents.

An attorney for Lamond didn’t immediately return our request for comment. But the indictment lays out multiple situations in which Lamond allegedly initiated contact with Tarrio, feeding him sensitive information about investigations into the Proud Boys and Tarrio specifically.

At times, Lamond apparently suggests that he sympathizes with Tarrio politically.

After the November 2020 election was called, Lamond allegedly wrote to Tarrio saying, “Hey brother, sad, sad news today. You all planning anything?”

“Yep,” Tarrio replied.

One hour later, Lamond allegedly wrote to Tarrio that the pair should switch to an encrypted messaging app because social media accounts “belonging to your people are talking about mobilizing and ‘taking back the country.’”

Lamond was put on leave in February 2022 due to suspicions over his ties to the Proud Boys. At the time, Tarrio told reporters that Lamont would tell the group where counterprotestors were staging.

But at Tarrio’s seditious conspiracy trial this year, defense attorneys for the Proud Boys chief revealed several of the texts between the two as part of an effort to show that the group was cooperating with — and not attempting to overthrow — governmental authority.

That’s the nightmare fuel which permeates the texts, however: the prospect of polarized law enforcement officers siding with a violent right-wing street mob.

It’s only one guy but when I was watching that fatuous “weaponization” hearing yesterday with the FBI “whistleblowers” it was clear they are full-blown MAGA extremists. I have little doubt that there are many more just like them all over the country. And it’s a terrifying prospect.

Here’s something to make your blood run cold. From Semafor (sub. req.)

Think tanks often act as an administration-in-waiting for presidents — a place to stash future appointees, generate policy plans, and flag promising young staffers. This year their role on the right is taking on outsized importance, however, as the 2024 Republican field has made overhauling the bureaucracy with more reliable allies one of their top stated goals.

That’s where the Heritage Foundation, alongside 50-plus conservative organizations in partner roles, hopes to come in. In April, the conservative nonprofit unveiled the start of a new $22 million project intended to staff the next Republican presidential administration from day one — a “private LinkedIn for conservatives,” as Paul Dans, the lead of “Project 2025,” described it.

Their work dovetails with the goals expressed in Donald Trump’s calls to “destroy the deep state,” for example, and his plans to fire and replace federal workers en masse. Rivals like Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy have already accused Trump of not going far enough as president in rooting out ineffective or disloyal appointees and civil servants.

“What fundamentally unites our coalition is deconstructing the administrative state,” Dans told Semafor.

Besides the database the group is continuing to compile, the conservative think-tank’s ambitious effort is comprised of three additional pillars: A policy book for the next administration, an organized training effort dubbed the “Presidential Administration Academy,” and eventually a “180-day game plan of regulations and executive orders that a president could sign on day one,” Dans explained.

They’ve even recently begun taking the show on the road — some of the project’s top members have already visited Hillsdale College and Florida International University — to try and attract more promising young conservatives to Washington. Eventually, they hope to begin hosting roundtables and debates featuring some of the experts involved in the project’s policy book, and are even considering setting up posts along the campaign trail in key early primary states.

The reporter comments:

“Project 2025” is, at its core, a response to Trump’s win back in 2016. In an interview, Dans said how his upset victory “took Conservative, Inc., by surprise” and thus the movement was unprepared to properly help him as he took office.  Trump, who was superstitious about preparing a transition before winning, struggled to fill in the gaps himself.

“They certainly hadn’t done a lot of homework to support them,” Dans said, later adding: “I think we acknowledge, if nothing else, Biden was prepared to go in there.”

Heritage’s efforts also tie into ongoing conservative allegations of “weaponization” of government officials against their priorities (which are fiercely disputed by Democrats.) This is perhaps the most organized effort thus far to respond by trying to pack the executive branch with staff of their choosing.

Prior to this, the most aggressive attempt came from Trump, who issued an executive order dubbed “Schedule F” late in his term, with guidance from former Heritage staffers. The proposal — reversed by President Biden — sought to allow the White House to get rid of huge numbers of civil servants, who are typically protected against the whims of a new president. It’s now a key part of his plans for a second term.

“I think any candidate is going to have to, at a minimum, embrace a Schedule F sort of major reform,” Dans told Semafor. “We’re embarking on the 100 year reform period here in the United States.”

Heritage is also distributing its dense 887-page policy booklet, which covers topics ranging from, as Dans put it, “ending the woke military” to establishing “full spectrum energy dominance,” to 2024 presidential hopefuls plus some notable politicians. They’ve passed it on to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin as well as Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a critic of COVID-19 policies and a prominent spreader of anti-government conspiracy theories, and former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.

The last time they did this was in 2003 when they recruited a bunch of 20 something wingnuts from the Heritage Foundation to run Iraq. If you’ve forgotten how that went, get a copy of Imperial Life in The Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran:

The Green Zone, Baghdad, Iraq, 2003: in this walled-off compound of swimming pools and luxurious amenities, Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority set out to fashion a new, democratic Iraq. Staffed by idealistic aides chosen [by the Heritage Foundation!] primarily for their views on issues such as abortion and capital punishment, the CPA spent the crucial first year of occupation pursuing goals that had little to do with the immediate needs of a postwar nation: flat taxes instead of electricity and deregulated health care instead of emergency medical supplies.

 In this acclaimed firsthand account, the former Baghdad bureau chief of The Washington Post gives us an intimate portrait of life inside this Oz-like bubble, which continued unaffected by the growing mayhem outside. This is a quietly devastating tale of imperial folly, and the definitive history of those early days when things went irrevocably wrong in Iraq.

I can hardly believe they are planning to do this again, in the US this time, but they are.

They. Never. Learn. From. Their. Mistakes.

Ever.