Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

I don’t know how many of you remember the resignation of NY Times reporter Donald MacNeil during the height of the COVID pandemic and if you don’t, the details are all right here. Without taking a position on the merits of the pressure he was under, I do think it was unfortunate that he had to leave at the time he did because he was a great science reporter in the middle of a once in a century pandemic. We lost something valuable.

His newsletter today shows just what we lost. He takes on the NY Times’ truly shitty treatment of Dr. Anthony Fauci at the hands of Benjamim Wallace-Wells the other day. This is just the opening. I urge you to read the whole thing:

I love science-fiction series like “The Man in the High Castle” because they force us to question our ingrained assumption that history was always ordained to turn out as it did. It was set in 1950’s America after the Allies lost World War II. Germany had beaten us to The Bomb, vaporized Washington and stormed ashore at Virginia Beach. Berlin and Tokyo had divided the U.S. between them. Most Americans were cowed but prospering under the new regime. The few resisters were holed up in the Rockies fighting a losing guerilla war.

I kept thinking of that series as I read David Wallace-Wells’ interview with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, which is destined for this Sunday’s New York Times magazine. It is amazing how the certainty with which we look back on even recent history so quickly erases our memories of how much confusion and fear reigned at the time. Of course the Normandy Invasion would succeed. Of course the bomb dropped on Hiroshima would not be a dud. Of course we won, and Eisenhower, architect of Normandy, would go on to be President — instead of being hanged at the Nazis’ equivalent of Nuremberg.

My father was at Normandy and I read history. In 1944, those outcomes were not so clear.

What Mr. Wallace-Wells did was adopt the sneaky suspicion of the MAGA crowd that the scientific elite (liberals, they assumed) somehow knew or should have known how things would turn out: whether masks would work, whether lockdowns or school closures made sense, whether vaccines would pan out, how much herd immunity would develop, whether there would be breakthrough infections, how the virus would mutate, even how many Americans would die.

The truth is that many of the early guesses made by science proved wrong. When the data changed, good scientists changed their advice. But, like the MAGAmites, Mr. Wallace-Wells makes Dr. Fauci personify all science and treats him as if he knew the truth but concealed it for political ends. “I’m not trying to prosecute you” he says soothingly, but it’s just a less foamy-mouthed version of Rand Paul or Jim Jordan asking: “Some people say you lied, Dr. Fauci. Your response?”

That’s unfair. This time it was me that was there, not my dad. That’s not how it happened.

The whole interview showed Fauci on the defensive, trying to correct Mr. Wallace-Wells’ rewriting of history. To me, his most telling answer was: “David, we’re playing a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking here. This is some really serious Monday-morning quarterbacking.”

For perspective: On May 24, 2020, The New York Times movingly devoted its whole front page to the names of 100,000 dead. Can you imagine we would have done that if we’d known that we were less than 10 percent of the way to the top of a mountain of 1.1 million dead? 100,000 seemed horrific; in retrospect, it was just the first inning. Should we have known?

The pandemic was a whorling protoplasmic cyclone that lasted years longer than expected. Its outcome was unknowable from the start. Our response was mostly not science-based, but an ugly national bar fight. Now the ghouls are wandering the field, shooting and stripping the wounded.

I presume that Mr. Wallace-Wells is not a MAGAmite. But in his intro, even before his questions begin, he rewrites history from that perspective: Fauci dismissed the threat as “minuscule.” Fauci opposed masks. Fauci played down aerosol spread. Even the opening line is unfair: “It was, perhaps, an impossible job. Make one man the face of public health amid an unprecedented pandemic….”

Fauci was never the lone face. Hundreds of experts, in and out of government, were interviewed. I interviewed dozens of them myself. Some were on TV often: Scott Gottlieb, Peter Hotez, Leana Wen, Paul Offit and Bill Schaffner instantly come to mind. There was no shortage of expert opinion, and they did not always agree. And the side with the alternative facts had its own experts, who also got airtime: Dr. Scott Atlas with his bizarre theories of T-cell immunity from benign coronaviruses (900,000 deaths occurred after his assurances that the epidemic was fading away), the Great Barrington bunch, Dr. Didier Raoult and the defenders of chloroquine and ivermectin, Dr. Demon Sperm and the other Frontline Doctors, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the rest of the Disinformation Dozen. They too were interviewed and lionized.

Nor was Fauci “made” the face of public health. He became it by default because studies are boring and it’s more fun to personalize it, to pit St. Anthony against Fire Fauci, the way you’d pick Team Jen or Team Angelina, whether what’s at stake is a million lives or a few years with Brad Pitt. Also, our other public health generals were cowering in silence. (More on that below.)

The Q&A itself expands on the “blame Fauci for everything” theme. Fauci didn’t intuit that there was asymptomatic spread even though China and the WHO initially said there wasn’t. It’s Fauci’s fault that Zoom-schooled students lost years of math proficiency. Fauci didn’t tell seniors often enough that they were in danger. Fauci set us up for high death rates in red states. Fauci infected black Americans with vaccine hesitancy. Fauci failed to force Congress to pass paid sick leave. Fauci neglected to face down the NYPD and cancel the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and shut down New York in February because…oh, yeah — Fauci wasn’t the mayor and he’s in Bethesda. Fauci funded lethal research in China that caused the lab leak that may or may not have happened.

This idea that we should have know what was unknowable and that the fact that we didn’t indicts all the scientists who were working on the problem is driving me mad. Yes, there were many things that should have gone better and if we’d had decent political leadership at the time, it probably would have. But blaming Fauci and the other scientists for what so many now insist were unnecessary lock downs or this widely held belief that if he hadn’t gone to virtual school children’s learning would have not been interrupted is infuriating. There were so many corpses they had to bring in refrigerator trucks to hold them! Kids’ learning would have been disrupted no matter what — everyone was terrified and thousands were dying! The idea that we could have had anything resembling “normal” during that first year is absurd. Nobody knew what that virus was going to do, they were all learning on the fly.

The US did terribly during the pandemic compared to other countries not because we went too far but because we didn’t go far enough:

There is no question that we, as a nation, did terribly against Covid-19. Even though we are the world’s richest country, invented both of the best vaccines and had first dibs on them, we did worse than any of our wealthy peers — much worse than we should have. It’s in the data.

As Mr. Wallace-Wells shows in his footnotes, the easiest thumbnail measure of that is Covid deaths per million population.* Peru, Bulgaria and Hungary did the worst, with 6,500 to 5,000 per million, respectively. (Peru had many problems, but its worst was that it ran out of oxygen. Most eastern European countries did poorly because of corruption, broken health systems and distrust of government. They live now in the world we’d live in if “Man in the High Castle” were set in 2028 and President for Life Trump was beginning his fourth term.)

The U.S. is 15th worst on the list, with almost 3,500 dead per million. (Roughly tied with Slovenia, Mrs. Trump’s homeland.) Britain is 21st, with 3,240. Germany is 56th, with 2,058. Canada is 83rd, with 1,360, roughly tied with Israel at 1,338.

In my opinion, if we’d had better leadership, we would have fallen somewhere between Germany and Canada. Germany got hit hard earlier than we did, Canada later. They’re both roughly our peers in per capita wealth and expertise, both are democratic, both have their own MAGA-style movements. (Someone was shot dead over a mask in Germany and Canada had a major trucker strike over vaccines.)

Sweden, which many scientists favored by the right initially suggested we should imitate, did much worse than all its Nordic peers.

The countries that did really well, by contrast, with less than 800 dead per million, are mostly in Asia, even though they were hit first by travelers from Wuhan: Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam. What advantages did they have? Harsh initial lockdowns with no home quarantine. Tight borders with visitors held in hotels for two weeks. Universal masking. Plenty of tests from the git-go. Rigid contact-tracing. Unlike us, they went through SARS two decades ago and they knew the threat was real. Then, later, they had widespread acceptance of vaccines. (Non-Asian Australia and New Zealand also did well with similar tactics.) I’m ignoring India, Indonesia and most of Africa because their data are shaky. China didn’t even pretend to issue honest data when it ended its Zero Covid policy in December, but even if it had 1.6 million dead in January (the highest estimate, and I doubt they reached it) it still did far better than we did because they have triple our population.

Meanwhile, the American “lockdowns” that provoked such anger here were a joke, a garden party. Not just by China’s standards — even by Italy’s. The virus was inside the walls by January 15. We travelled freely around cities and between states. We overcautiously closed beaches but we also held country-wide motorcycle rallies. We had almost no tests until mid-March and no easy-test regimen (walk-in clinics, sidewalk tents) until 2021. Quarantine was done at home on the “Scout’s-honor-wink-wink” system. Our level of vaccine acceptance is still appallingly low.

The incessant whining about how horrible even those lame mitigation efforts were is indicative of how shallow so much of our culture has become.

There’s a lot more at the link. MacNeil’s perspective is a necessary counter to the rapidly gelling conventional wisdom that Fauci and others must be held accountable for “forcing” us to endure lock downs and mask mandates when it wasn’t necessary. The million dead are now forgotten. It’s a shame that this piece isn’t on the front page of the NY Times.

They’re coming for no-fault divorce

I saw this news making the rounds on twitter a few days ago and was astonished at the response. There seems to be quite a few pissed off men about this. I had no idea it was on the menu but it stands to reason that it would be. Ban abortion and birth control and end no-fault divorce. Family values, macho style:

STEVEN CROWDER, THE right-wing podcaster, is getting a divorce. “No, this was not my choice,” Crowder told his online audience last week. “My then-wife decided that she didn’t want to be married anymore — and in the state of Texas, that is completely permitted.” 

Crowder’s emphasis on “the state of Texas” makes it sound like the Lone Star State is an outlier, but all 50 states and the District of Columbia have no-fault divorce laws on the books — laws that allow either party to walk away from an unhappy marriage without having to prove abuse, infidelity, or other misconduct in court. 

It was a hard-fought journey to get there. It took more than four decades to end fault-based divorce in America: California was the first state to eliminate it, in 1969; New York didn’t come around until 2010. (And there are caveats: Mississippi and South Dakota still only allow no-fault divorce if both parties agree to dissolve the marriage, for example.) 

Researchers who tracked the emergence of no-fault divorce laws state by state over that period found that reform led to dramatic drops in the rates of female suicide and domestic violence, as well as decreases in spousal homicide of women. The decreases, one researcher explained, were “not just because abused women (and men) could more easily divorce their abusers, but also because potential abusers knew that they were more likely to be left.” 

Today, more than two-thirds of all heterosexual divorces in the U.S. are initiated by women.

Republicans across the country are now reconsidering no-fault divorce. There isn’t a huge mystery behind the campaign: Like the crusades against abortion and contraception, making it more difficult to leave an unhappy marriage is about control. Crowder’s home state could be the first to eliminate it, if the Texas GOP gets its way. Last year, the Republican Party of Texas added language to its platform calling for an end to no-fault divorce: “We urge the Legislature to rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws, to support covenant marriage, and to pass legislation extending the period of time in which a divorce may occur to six months after the date of filing for divorce.” 

The Texas GOP retains an iron grip on both chambers of the state Legislature, and Republicans hold every single elected office statewide — from governor and lieutenant governor to the railroad commissioners and judges. Should they decide to prioritize ending no-fault divorce this legislative session, they would likely have the votes they need to turn their platform into law.

It’s not just Texas: A similar proposal is presently being workshopped by the Republican Party of Louisiana. The Nebraska GOP has affirmed its belief that no-fault divorce should only be accessible to couples without children. At the Republican National Convention in 2016 — the last time the party platform was overhauled — delegates considered adding language declaring, “Children are made to be loved by both natural parents united in marriage. Legal structures such as No Fault Divorce, which divides families and empowers the state, should be replaced by a Fault-based Divorce.” (It’s unclear whether the party’s twice-divorced nominee for president weighed in on the debate at that time.) 

Despite its deeply embarrassing premise — that the only way to retain a partner is to literally trap them in the relationship — right-wing blowhards like Crowder have been embracing arguments against no-fault divorce with increasing frequency. (Within the past year, conservative pundits Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Tim Pool have all criticized it.) 

I don’t think this is going to fly (men benefit from no-fault divorce too…) but I’m sure it will be added to the list of outrageous overreaches by this extremist wingnut Republican party.

The NY Times reports:

The only clue to the gambit was in the title of the otherwise obscure hodgepodge of a bill: “The Breaking the Gridlock Act.”

But the 45-page legislation, introduced without fanfare in January by a little-known Democrat, Representative Mark DeSaulnier of California, is part of a confidential, previously unreported, strategy Democrats have been plotting for months to quietly smooth the way for action by Congress to avert a devastating federal default if debt ceiling talks remain deadlocked.

With the possibility of a default now projected as soon as June 1, Democrats on Tuesday began taking steps to deploy the secret weapon they have been holding in reserve. They started the process of trying to force a debt-limit increase bill to the floor through a so-called discharge petition that could bypass Republican leaders who have refused to raise the ceiling unless President Biden agrees to spending cuts and policy changes.

“House Democrats are working to make sure we have all options at our disposal to avoid a default,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, wrote in a letter he sent to colleagues on Tuesday. “The filing of a debt ceiling measure to be brought up on the discharge calendar preserves an important option. It is now time for MAGA Republicans to act in a bipartisan manner to pay America’s bills without extreme conditions.”

An emergency rule Democrats introduced on Tuesday, during a pro forma session held while the House is in recess, would start the clock on a process that would allow them to begin collecting signatures as soon as May 16 on such a petition, which can force action on a bill if a majority of members sign on. The open-ended rule would provide a vehicle to bring Mr. DeSaulnier’s bill to the floor and amend it with a Democratic proposal — which has yet to be written — to resolve the debt limit crisis.

The strategy is no silver bullet, and Democrats concede it is a long shot. Gathering enough signatures to force a bill to the floor would take at least five Republicans willing to cross party lines if all Democrats signed on, a threshold that Democrats concede will be difficult to reach. They have yet to settle on the debt ceiling proposal itself, and for the strategy to succeed, Democrats would likely need to negotiate with a handful of mainstream Republicans to settle on a measure they could accept.

Still, Democrats argue that the prospect of a successful effort could force House Republicans into a more acceptable deal. And Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellin’s announcement on Monday that a potential default was only weeks away spurred Democratic leaders to act.

House Democratic leaders have for months played down the possibility of initiating a discharge petition as a way out of the stalemate. They are hesitant to budge from the party position, which Mr. Biden has articulated repeatedly, that Republicans should agree to raise the debt limit with no conditions or concessions on spending cuts.

But behind the scenes, they were simultaneously taking steps to make sure a vehicle was available if needed.

The discharge petition process can be time-consuming and complicated, so Democrats who devised the strategy started early and carefully crafted their legislative vehicle. Insiders privately refer to the measure as a “Swiss Army knife” bill — one that was intended to be referred to every single House committee in order to keep open as many opportunities as possible for forcing it to the floor.

It would create a task force to help grandparents raising grandchildren, create a federal strategy for reducing earthquake risks, change the name of a law that governs stock trading by members of Congress, extend small business loans, protect veterans from the I.R.S., authorize a new Pentagon grant program to protect nonprofit organizations against terrorist attacks and more. Notably, the legislation was so broad and eclectic that it was referred to 20 committees, where it has sat idle for months. That was the point.

Mr. DeSaulnier’s intent was never to pass the elements of the bill, though he favors them all. It was to create what is known on Capitol Hill as a shell of a bill that would ultimately serve as the basis for a discharge petition — and a way out of the debt limit standoff.

“I wrote it in a way to be prepared,” said Mr. DeSaulnier, a former member of the Rules Committee who worked with Democratic procedural experts to craft legislation that could provide a debt-limit escape hatch. “I anticipated there would be these problems with the Republican caucus, whether it was abortion or the debt limit. I think it was the responsible thing as a legislator to do.”

Democrats say the beauty of the Mr. DeSaulnier’s bill — which Republicans have ignored — is that it long ago passed the threshold of being held in committee for at least 30 days, the minimum length of time to initiate a discharge petition to force action on legislation. And they said that the fact that it was under the jurisdiction of so many committees gave them several options for moving forward.

We’ve all been wondering about the discharge petition option. There was no reporting on any of this (that I saw anyway) so they managed to keep it under wraps which is a good thing. McCarthy won’t want to bring a clean debt ceiling bill to the floor once the Senate passes theirs but I could see a back room deal for a handful of the GOP frontline Reps who hail from districts Biden won to cross over and vote for this.

We shall see. This is yet another game of chicken and anything can happen but there are some possibilities.

All Disney had to do was read Ron’s book to make their case:

When the Walt Disney Co. went looking for evidence to feature in its new lawsuit against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, its lawyers found much of what they needed in DeSantis’s own recently published memoir.

Buried in Disney’s complaint against DeSantis is something surprising. Numerous quotes taken from “The Courage to be Free” appear to support the company’s central allegation: that the Republican governor improperly wielded state power to punish Disney’s speech criticizing his policies, violating the First Amendment.

Memoirs by presidential aspirants often lay out a blueprint for their coming candidacies. DeSantis’s does, too. It boasts extensively about his war on Disney to advertise how he would marshal the powers of the presidency against so-called woke elites.

Disney’s lawsuit cites exactly these passages. DeSantis — who signed a law taking control of Disney’s special self-governing district, and moved to nullify the company’s efforts to work around it — repeatedly flaunts the truth: These were retaliation against Disney for opposing his “don’t say gay” law limiting classroom discussion of sex and gender.

-DeSantis’s book brags about his rapid mobilization of the state legislature to target Disney’s tax district. The same passage declares that this happened because of the company’s “support of indoctrinating young schoolchildren in woke gender identity politics.” That admits to retribution against speech opposing his legislation.

-The book rips Disney for vowing to work to repeal the governor’s law, describing this as “a frontal assault” on it. That, too, is a description of political speech. Yet the book menacingly declares that, after this, “things got worse for Disney,” and that it would “soon find out” the truth about Florida’s war with Disney, i.e., the state would punish that speech.

-The book describes DeSantis’s discussions with Republicans in the Florida legislature about whether they were prepared to tackle the “thorny issue involving the state’s most powerful company.” That confirms Disney was the unique target of legislative action.

In a companion to the book’s launch, DeSantis wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed that explicitly discussed governmental actions against Disney as an effort to “fight back” against its “woke ideology,” which is to say, its political speech.

This is unusual, says Scott Wilkens, senior counsel at the Knight First Amendment Institute. In such lawsuits, Wilkens notes, you “often have to make inferences” about the motives driving government officials.

That makes DeSantis’s admissions remarkable. “You have pretty clear statements from Governor DeSantis that he is seeking to punish a corporation for its speech,” Wilkens told me. “That’s prohibited by the First Amendment.”

On that basis and others, Disney is asking the courts to halt DeSantis’s assault. To get around the obvious First Amendment problem, DeSantis insists his moves were legitimate because they targeted special Disney privileges originally created by government.

But that doesn’t justify the revocation of those privileges specifically as retaliation for speech, as David French argues in the New York Times. French notes that Disney’s case is strong and raises serious First Amendment questions in spite of government’s role in initially creating its unique arrangement. (Note: Most liberals don’t think Disney deserves these privileges, just that government shouldn’t nix them to chill its speech.)

DeSantis was too cute by half on this one. He thought he’d hit the populist sweet spot by going against a corporate arrangement opposed by the left over a culture war issue that thrills the right. Instead he just pissed everyone off. Even the wingnuts aren’t thrilled about going after Disney and liberals are appalled at his authoritarian power grabs. Taking on the states’ largest employer to make a crude point about LGBTQ issues just seems bizarre.

He is actually a pretty terrible politician but I’m beginning to think he really believes most of the extremist stuff he’s spouting. The relentlessness of it, the daily roll-out of yet another atrocity suggests that he has no intention of trimming his sails even as his numbers tank. Today he announced that he will sign a law expanding the death penalty in Florida to include child molesters, something the the Supreme Court has deemed unconstitutional. What’s next? Slavery? This guy was involved in the torture regime in Guantanamo, after all.

Wouldn’t a simple opportunist take a pause on some of this satuff?

“It’s a teaching and learning job”

Candidates and officials could be using powers they don’t know they have for doing good, Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) argues. The American Prospect profiles the candidate for U.S. Senate from California:

The tough-as-nails single-mom image caters to the legions of suburban parents in the Golden State. But what actually differentiates Porter from her main opponents in the California Senate race—progressive antiwar hero Rep. Barbara Lee and Trump impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff—is that she’s been able throughout her career to make progress without carrying institutional authority. Porter acknowledged that she, Lee, and Schiff would likely take the same votes, at least on the major issues. But there’s more to politics than that. “I just want to fix some shit,” Porter writes in her book. “The job of a candidate should be to make their case for what they’ll do with that power.”

Porter, a former college professor, became known for her white-board dressing-downs of prominent CEOs and government officials, David Dayen writes:

But to me, her signature moment was at a hearing in 2020, days into the pandemic, with then-Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield. Porter’s staff found a provision in the federal code (42 CFR § 71.30, to be precise) enabling the CDC to offer free diagnostic testing for infectious diseases, regardless of insurance status. To that point, CDC had not offered COVID tests for free. 

When Redfield wavered, Porter interrupted. “No, not good enough. Dr. Redfield, you have the existing authority. Will you commit right now to using the authority that you have, vested in you, under law?” She pummeled Redfield until he agreed to make testing free. The hundreds of millions of COVID tests sent through the mail, one of the more quietly successful efforts of the past few years, sprung from Porter knowing the law and pressing at a hearing.

That’s a signature example of picking up unused power. Porter says in the book that the real work of Congress lies in civic education, to let the public into the policymaking process. But the Redfield incident suggests that extends to civic education for government officials, who often have no sense of their own power. Congress willingly gives up war powers authority to the executive branch. Statutes around for decades sit dormant, from the ability for the government to seize prescription drug patents if prices are too high, to the law passed thirteen years ago prohibiting banker compensation that’s tied to taking inappropriate risks, which the regulators simply never wrote. 

Porter has a bipartisan bill that would claw back “unjust” compensation from bank executives whose institutions fail. But even if it passed, the regulatory system has been reluctant to punish the wealthy and powerful. It’s a rare skill for a politician to know that the press conference the day the bill passes isn’t the end of the fight.

Porter means to govern. She wants “to fix some shit.” In Washington, D.C., of all places. She thinks that’s what she’s been hired for.

What a refreshing notion.

When governing is not your agenda

If Jared Leto in “a head-to-toe, mascot-style cat costume” at the Met Gala doesn’t satisfy your appetite for weird, there are always Republican governors.

Jamelle Bouie gazes upon attempts by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to make a trip to Florida the next best thing to vacationing on another planet. Be warned: Planet Ron is fighting an outbreak of the “woke mind virus.”

DeSantis warns Ronians with little exposure to Earth 1 that the infection is “a form of cultural Marxism that tries to divide us based on identity politics.” Bouie wonders what Ronians make of that (New York Times):

Now, I can follow this as a professional internet user and political observer. I know that “woke mind virus” is a term of art for the (condescending and misguided) idea that progressive views on race and gender are an outside contagion threatening the minds of young people who might otherwise reject structural explanations of racial inequality and embrace a traditional vision of the gender binary. I know that “cultural Marxism” is a right-wing buzzword meant to sound scary and imposing.

To a normal person, on the other hand, this language is borderline unintelligible. It doesn’t tell you anything; it doesn’t obviously mean anything; and it’s quite likely to be far afield of your interests and concerns.

Hunter S. Thompson likely visited Florida before Ron was Ron the First. But he’d recognize him as a pro even without the white boots.

DeSantis is not the only Republican prone to speaking in a language foreign to Earthlings. Bouie notes, “Republican politicians — from presidential contenders to anonymous state legislators — are monomaniacally focused on banning books, fighting ‘wokeness’ and harassing transgender people.”

That is, when they are not still questioning the results of the 2020 presidential elections here on Earth 1. Or trying to outdo one another on who can claim “the most draconian abortion views and policy aims.”

Gov. Greg Abbott works at reserving Planet Lone Star for Starians and to off-planet anyone that draws his sidelong glance.

When an AR-15-packing Starian slaughtered five of Abbott’s residents execution-style over the weekend (including a 9-year-old boy), Abbott’s response suggested “good riddance.” The victims were “illegal immigrants,” after all. (Possibly one was not.)

New York City Mayor Eric Adams accuses Abbott of deporting “asylum-seekers to New York and other major cities run by Black mayors” back on Earth 1. Politico reports:

Over the weekend, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot sent a letter to Abbott saying her administration also learned the Republican governor would resume busing children and families to Illinois on Monday. Lightfoot, a Democrat who lost a recent reelection bid, called the move an “inhumane” and “dangerous” decision.

Newsmax, one of off-worlders’ premiere propaganda outfits, is incensed that News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch has banished several of the most popular talking heads on Planet Ron and Planet Lone Star, including Tucker Carlson. Host Eric Bolling sees a “new world order globalist” conspiracy.

“Watch your six — Sean Hannity. Who’s left that isn’t drinking the neocon-RINO Kool Aid,” Bolling told his intergalactic audience.

Earthlings, pick up a phrase book before visiting Planet Ron or Planet Lone Star. Or just do yourselves a favor and don’t. It’s not safe.

Here's what's going on in the Texas legislature in response to school shootings: All students in third grade and up to be trained in battlefield trauma care. https://t.co/n3izumblxL pic.twitter.com/hn4yeHoC2o

— Mark Elliott (@markmobility) May 1, 2023

Gutfeld: "This is a president who will abort a kid up until times tables!" pic.twitter.com/KdQ8IPlzdE

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) May 1, 2023

Greg Gutfeld: "It's like, when you are a conservative, you come out against white nationalism. And this is kind of the mirror image. Wokeism is like that. In fact, I would argue that wokeism is every bit as racist as white nationalism." pic.twitter.com/O5BLhNhm7j

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) May 1, 2023

That’s the most popular show on Fox News. They were beating Tucker before he was fired. Gutfield is very popular too. Just thought I’d share that with you. Have a nice evening.

This piece by Jenny Boylan is a super important read if you want to understand what transgenderism really is all about. I would imagine that most who read this site believe that all people should have the right to live their lives as they choose and support the rights of transgender people to live freely in our society. This goes much deeper:

There they are, in their Chevrolet Colorado, five dudes bouncing up and down as the truck grinds through the rugged American high country. Two guys up front, three in the back. Shania Twain is blasting. The fellow in the middle is singing along. “Oh, I want to be free, yeah, to feel the way I feel. Man, I feel like a woman!”

The other guys look deeply worried. But the person in the back just keeps happily singing away, even as the dude next to him moves his leg away. Just to be on the safe side.

This commercial aired back in 2004, and even now it’s not clear to me if it’s offensive or empowering, hilarious or infuriating. Twain says she wrote “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” after working at a resort where some drag queens were performing. “That song started with the title,” she said. “Then it kind of wrote itself.”

It’s a fun tune, and I admit I kind of loved seeing that commercial. But at its heart is an issue central to our current political moment.

When someone says they feel like a woman, what exactly does that mean?

Across the country, conservatives are insisting that — and legislating as if — “feeling” like a woman, or a man, is irrelevant. What matters most, they say, is the immutable truth of biology. Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, wants to restrict gender-affirming health care for all transgender people, including adults.A new dress code at the Texas Agriculture Department commands that employees wear clothing “in a manner consistent with their biological gender.” In Florida, a law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) keeps “biological males” from playing on the women’s sports teams in public schools.

This term, “biological males,” is everywhere now. And it’s not used only by right-wing politicians. People of good faith are also wrestling with the way trans people complicate a world they thought was binary. They’re uncertain about when, and how, sex matters, and just how biological it is. Some want to draw a bright line in areas where maleness and femaleness might matter most — in sports, or locker rooms, or prisons. Others are trying to blur lines that used to be clearer. At Wellesley College last month, for instance, a nonbinding student referendum called for the admission of trans men to a school that traditionally has been a women’s college. The president of the college, Paula Johnson, pushed back.

So what, then, is a biological male, or female? What determines this supposedly simple truth? It’s about chromosomes, right?

Well, not entirely. Because not every person with a Y chromosome is male, and not every person with a double X is female. The world is full of people with other combinations: XXY (or Klinefelter Syndrome), XXX (or Trisomy X), XXXY, and so on. There’s even something called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, a condition that keeps the brains of people with a Y from absorbing the information in that chromosome. Most of these people develop as female, and may not even know about their condition until puberty — or even later.

How can this be, if sex is only about a gene?

Some people respond by saying that sex is about something else, then — ovaries, or testicles (two structures that begin their existence in the womb as the same thing).

What do we do then, with the millions of women who have had hysterectomies? Have they become men? What about women who’ve had mastectomies? Or men with gynecomastia, or enlarged breasts?

Are these people not who they think they are?

It may be that what’s in your pants is less important than what’s between your ears.

In the past decade, there has been some fascinating research on the brains of transgender people. What is most remarkable about this work is not that trans women’s brains have been found to resemble those of cisgender women, or that trans men’s brains resemble those of cis men. What the research has found is that the brains of trans people are unique: neither female nor male, exactly, but something distinct.

But what does that mean, a male brain, or a female brain, or even a transgender one? It’s a fraught topic, because brains are a collection of characteristics, rather than a binary classification of either/or. There are researchers who would tell you that brains are not more gendered than, say, kidneys or lungs. Gina Rippon, in her 2019 book “The Gendered Brain,” warns against bunk science that declares brains to be male or female — it’s “neurosexism,” a fancy way of justifying the belief that women’s brains are inferior to men’s.

And yet scientists continue to study the brain in hopes of understanding whether a sense of the gendered self can, at least in part, be the result of neurology.A study described by author Francine Russo in Scientific American examined the brains of 39 prepubertal and 41 adolescent boys and girls with gender dysphoria. The experiment examined how these children responded to androstadienone, a pungent substance similar to pheromones, that is known to cause a different response in the brains of men and women. The study found that adolescent boys and girls who described themselves as trans responded like the peers of their perceived gender. (The results were less clear withprepubescent children.)

This kind of testing is important, said one of the researchers Russo quoted, “because sex differences in responding to odors cannot be influenced by training or environment.” A similar study was done in measuring the responses of trans boys and girls to echolike sounds produced in the inner ear. “Boys with gender dysphoria responded more like typical females, who have a stronger response to these sounds.”

What does it mean, to respond to the world in this way? For me, it has meant having a sense of myself as a woman, a sense that no matter how comfortable I was with the fact of being feminine, I was never at ease with not being female. When I was young, I tried to talk myself out of it, telling myself, in short, to “get over it.”

But I never got over it.

I compare it to a sense of homesickness for a place you’ve never been. The moment you stepped onto those supposedly unfamiliar shores, though,you’d have a sense of overwhelming gratitude, and solace, and joy. Home, you might think. I’m finally home.

The years to come will, perhaps, continue to shed light on the mysteries of the brain, and to what degree our sense of ourselves as gendered beings has its origins there. But there’s a problem with using neurology as an argument for trans acceptance — it suggests that, on some level, there is something wrong with transgender people, that we are who we are as a result of a sickness or a biological hiccup.

But trans people are not broken. And, in fact, trying to open people’s hearts by saying “Check out my brain!” can do more harm than good, because this line of argument delegitimizes the experiences of many trans folks. It suggests that there’s only one way to be trans — to feel trapped in the wrong body, to go through transition, and to wind up, when all is said and done, on the opposite-gender pole. It suggests that the quest trans people go on can only be considered successful if it ends with fitting into the very society that rejected us in the first place.

All the science tells us, in the end, is that a biological male — or female — is not any one thing, but a collection of possibilities.

No one who embarks upon a life as a trans person in this country is doing so out of caprice, or a whim, or a delusion. We are living these wondrous and perilous lives for one reason only — because our hearts demand it. Given the tremendous courage it takes to come out, given the fact that even now trans people can still lose everything — family, friends, jobs, even our lives — what we need now is not new legislation to make things harder. What we need now is understanding, not cruelty. What we need now is not hatred, but love.

When the person in that Chevy ad sings, Oh, I want to be free … to feel the way I feel. Man, I feel like a woman!, the important thing is not that they feel like a woman, or a man, or something else. What matters most is the plaintive desire, to be free to feel the way I feel.

Surely this is not a desire unique to trans people. Tell me: Is there anyone who has never struggled to live up to the hard truths of their own heart?

Man! I feel like a human.

Personal identity is the cause of the younger generation and as is the case with most causes that define a new generation, many in the older generations are confused if not downright hostile. It’s important that we all do our best to go beyond acceptance (which is, of course, the most important thing) to reach a fuller understanding.

The cruelty we are seeing on the right toward transgender people is shocking. We have to engage this issue seriously.

Get a load of the new young guns

Michelle Cottle in the NY Times:

Here’s a head scratcher for you: What happens when the leadership of a political party becomes so extreme, so out of touch with its voters, that it alienates many of its own activists and elected officials? And what happens when some of those officials set up a parallel infrastructure that lets them circumvent the party for campaign essentials such as fund-raising and voter turnout? At what point does this party become mostly a bastion of wingnuts, spiraling into chaos and irrelevance?

No need to waste time guessing. Just cast your eyes upon Georgia, one of the nation’s electoral battlegrounds, where the state Republican Party has gone so far down the MAGA rabbit hole that many of its officeholders — including Gov. Brian Kemp, who romped to re-election last year despite being targeted for removal by Donald Trump — are steering clear of it as if it’s their gassy grandpa at Sunday supper.

[…]

The backstory: Some Republican incumbents took offense last year when the Georgia G.O.P.’s Trump-smitten chairman, David Shafer, backed Trump-preferred challengers in the primaries. (Mr. Trump, you will recall, was desperate to unseat several Republicans after they declined to help him steal the 2020 election.) Those challengers went down hard, and Mr. Kemp in particular emerged as a superhero to non-Trumpist Republicans. Even so, scars remain. “That’s a burn that’s hard to get over,” says Brian Robinson, a Republican strategist who served as an adviser to former Gov. Nathan Deal.

The clash also made clear that Republican candidates, or at least popular incumbents, don’t much need the party apparatus anymore. This is part of a broader trend: The clout of parties has long been on the slide because of changes in how campaigns are funded. That got turbocharged in Georgia in 2021, when its legislature, the General Assembly, passed a Kemp-backed bill allowing certain top officials (and their general-election challengers) to form leadership PACs, which can coordinate with candidates’ campaigns and accept megadonations free from pesky dollar limits.

The PAC Mr. Kemp set up, the Georgians First Leadership Committee, raked in gobs of cash and built a formidable voter data and turnout machine. The governor plans to use it to aid fellow Republicans, establishing himself as a power center independent of the state party.

As big-money conduits, leadership PACs can bring plenty of their own problems. But whatever their larger implications, in the current mess that is Georgia Republican politics, they also mean that elected leaders “don’t have to play nice in the sandbox with a group that is sometimes at odds with them,” says Mr. Robinson.

The governor says he will skip the state party’s convention in June, as will the state’s attorney general, its insurance commissioner and its secretary of state. At a February luncheon for his Georgians First PAC, Mr. Kemp basically told big donors not to waste their money on the party, saying that the midterms showed “we can no longer rely on the traditional party infrastructure to win in the future,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

New party leadership is on the way. Mr. Shafer is not seeking another term. (Fun fact: He is under investigation for his role in the pro-Trump fake-elector scheme of 2020.) Party delegates will elect his successor at the upcoming state convention. But the problems run deeper. Republican critics say that the party culture has become steeped in the paranoid politics of MAGA and election denial. And in the current environment, “everyone must pledge their undying loyalty to Donald Trump above all else,” says Jay Morgan, who was an executive director of the state party in the 1980s and now runs a public affairs firm in Atlanta.

Mr. Shafer defends his tenure, noting in particular that, since he took over in 2019, the party has gone from being mired in debt to having “over $1 million in the bank.”

To be fair, the Georgia G.O.P. has a rich history of rocky relations with its governors. But the Trump era, which brought a wave of new grassroots activists and outsiders into party meetings, put the situation “on steroids,” says Martha Zoller, a Republican consultant and talk radio host.

“Right now, it’s largely a place disconnected from reality,” adds Cole Muzio, a Kemp ally and the president of Frontline Policy Action, a conservative advocacy group.

That seems unlikely to change any time soon, as some of the party’s more extreme elements gain influence. In recent months, leadership elections at the county and district levels have seen wins by candidates favored by the Georgia Republican Assembly, a coterie of ultraconservatives, plenty of whom are still harboring deep suspicions about the voting system.

One of the more colorful winners was Kandiss Taylor, the new chairwoman of the First Congressional District. A keen peddler of conspiracy nuttiness, Ms. Taylor ran for governor last year, proclaiming herself “the ONLY candidate bold enough to stand up to the Luciferian Cabal.” After winning just slightly more than 3 percent of the primary vote, she declared that the election results could not be trusted and refused to concede — an antidemocratic move straight from the Trump playbook. As a chairwoman, she is promising “big things” for her district. So southeast Georgia has that to look forward to.

This is happening all over the country as the GOP is taken over at the state and local level my MAGA weirdos, QANON nuts and various white supremacists, anti-vaxxers and gun loons. This is the training ground for the future. And the more establishment types like Kemp (also a far right gun nut, by the way) don’t seem to be able to do much about it except collect money from rich people. They won’t be around forever.

This one was particularly egregious:

The fallout came fast whenFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s new election police unit charged Peter Washington with voter fraud last summer as part of a crackdown against felons who’d allegedly broken the law by casting a ballot.

The Orlando residentlost his job supervising irrigation projects, and along with it, his family’s health insurance. His wife dropped her virtual classes at Florida International University to help pay their rent. Future plans went out the window.

“It knocked me to my knees, if you want to know the truth,” he said.

But not long after, the case against Washington began falling apart. A Ninth Judicial Circuit judge ruled the statewide prosecutor who filed the charges didn’t actually have jurisdiction to do so. Washington’s attorney noted that he had received an official voter identification card in the mail after registering. The case was dismissed in February.

One by one, many of the initial 20 arrests announced by the Office of Election Crimes and Security have stumbled in court. Six cases have been dismissed. Five other defendants accepted plea deals that resulted in no jail time. Only one case has gone to trial, resulting in a split verdict. The others are pending.

In its first nine months, the new unit made just four other arrests, according to a report the agency released earlier this year. Critics say the low numbers point to the overall strength of Florida’s electoral system and a lack of sufficient evidence to pursue further charges. Nonetheless, as he gears up for a possible presidential run, DeSantis is moving to give the office more teeth, asking the legislature tonearly triple the division’s annual budget from $1.2 million to $3.1 million. The Republican governor also pushed through a bill ensuring the statewide prosecutor has jurisdiction over election crime cases — an attempt to resolve an issue several judges have raised in dismissing cases.

Voting rights advocates and defense attorneys say the expansion of the statewide prosecutor’s role to include elections enforcement is alarming.The office was created in 1986, and its portfolio typically includes offenses like extortion, racketeering and computer pornography involving two or more judicial circuits. The statewide prosecutor is appointed by the attorney general, Ashley Moody, a political ally of DeSantis, and also submits an annual report to the governor.

Defense attorneys say DeSantis is using the statewide prosecutor’s office to circumvent the role of local prosecutors, who have declined to pursue such cases.

“This cannot be what the framers of the Florida Constitution had in mind when creating this state’s system of justice,” Palm Beach County public defender Carey Haughwout wrote in a motion as part of the defense against one of the felons charged.

Oh who cares about the state constitution, amirite? This is about making Ron Desantis look like a manly man in a press conference. After that it’s whatever. Too bad about the people whose lives have been turned upside down but that’s just the price they must pay to live in Ron DeSantis’ Florida. It’s such a privilege.