Trump 2.0 - No more "DEI" celebrations or activities

DIA memo leak. Notice any pattern?

Texas realism

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Super Bowl half-time show

Probably Michael, most men, old people, and pearl-clutching "Christians" were too focused on the dancing derrieres, eh?

Here's another chance:

This is MAGA

The Justice Department today told the U.S. Supreme Court that businesses can discriminate against workers based on their gender identity without violating federal law.

Solicitor General Noel Francisco told the high court that a civil rights law banning sex discrimination on the job doesn’t cover transgender bias.

[...]

“The court of appeals misread the statute and this Court’s decisions in concluding that Title VII encompasses discrimination on the basis of gender identity,” Francisco said in a brief filed with the court.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide in the coming months whether to take up the case. It’s also been asked to consider two other cases testing whether sexual orientation bias is a form of sex discrimination banned under the existing law.

[...]

The DOJ’s brief follows a New York Times report that the Department of Health and Human Services is considering limiting its definition of gender to sex assigned at birth.

[...]

[T]he Sixth Circuit last year became the first federal appeals court in the country to conclude that transgender bias is sex discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It previously recognized transgender discrimination as a form of prohibited sex stereotyping.>The American Civil Liberties Union has intervened in the case.

[...]

The Justice Department—and 16 states that recently asked the Supreme Court to scrap the decision—say Congress didn’t intend Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination to cover bias against lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender employees.

  Bloomberg

Jesus.

This is why the Supreme Court judges are so important. Expect more shit for years to come.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Courts slowing the forward motion of the Trump Regime

A fourth federal judge has ruled against the Trump administration's decision to prematurely end grants aimed at cutting teen pregnancy rates.

Judge John Coughenour in Washington state ruled Tuesday afternoon that the administration unlawfully ended grants two years early for the King County Health Department in Seattle, which participated in the Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) Program.

[...]

Federal judges have now ruled in four different cases involving nine TPP grantees that the administration's actions were unlawful.

The rulings mean the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will have to process applications for the final two years of funding.

The HHS last year sent notices to grantees informing them that their grants would end two years earlier than originally planned, arguing that the program was ineffective.

Trump appointees at HHS are pushing to give the TPP program a greater emphasis on abstinence education.

  The Hill

Abstinence education? Gee, I wonder if that's ever been tried.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Sexual ignorance is an American tragedy

[David Wiley, a professor of health education at Texas State University, ] was discussing [human papillomavirus] with his students — the different types of HPV, the connection between HPV and cervical cancer, and its prevalence; “you know, just an intro, lower-level course,” he recently recalled — when a male student raised his hand with an earnest question: What was his risk of contracting cervical cancer?

“And I don’t know what’s sadder,” Wiley told The Intercept, “that he asked that question or that really nobody in the classroom even laughed because they didn’t know either.”

The question wasn’t terribly surprising to Wiley, who has been teaching and researching health education — including sex education — for nearly four decades. Many of the students who’ve come through his classes over the years have been woefully uninformed about the workings of their own bodies, he says. But Wiley doesn’t blame the students — after all, “if you never teach people math, how are they going to learn calculus? So, that’s part of our problem: You get exactly what you pay for.”

And in Texas — along with a majority of other states — when it comes to sex education, that means sinking millions into programs that preach to students the virtues of abstinence until marriage while foregoing actual education on sexuality and reproductive health, including the use of contraceptives (aside from emphasizing their failure rates), the prevention of STDs, and the importance of consent.

The federal government began funding so-called Abstinence-Only Until Marriage programs in 1981 as a way to encourage “chastity” and “self-discipline.” Since then, the feds have poured more than $2 billion into this strategy — commonly known as “ab-only” — without any proven positive effects.

[...]

Texas was an eager adopter of the abstinence-only approach, which expanded in 1996 and continued rapid growth during the George W. Bush administration, and has spent more than any other state on ab-only programs. Yet the state has also consistently had among the highest rates of teen pregnancy — it’s currently fifth in the nation; Arkansas is No. 1 — and maintains a stranglehold on the top spot for the number of repeat births to teens (at 24 percent).

  TThe Intercept

You can trace a lot of our problems back to Ronald Reagan. This is just one of them.

Trump, an alleged serial adulterer who has bragged about sexually assaulting women and has been accused of such behavior close to two dozen times, has asked that abstinence funding be increased. And in the budget deal he signed last month, he got his wish, enough to bring total spending on abstinence up to $100 million for 2018.

Oh, the irony. To be fair, though, he doesn't have a clue what he's signing.

Along with the return to Bush-era funding levels to push the ab-only message, Trump has appointed anti-abortion, anti-birth control, and pro-ab-only advocates to positions within the Department of Health and Human Services and has yanked funding for a successful evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention strategy.

And removed helpful women's health pages from the government website.

Given the clear failure of these programs, it’s perhaps unsurprising that ab-only advocates in recent years have made a concerted effort to rebrand their efforts — forsaking the title “abstinence education” in favor of “sexual-risk avoidance” programs, language co-opted from the public health community. Among the biggest proponents of ab-only programs — and their rebranding — is Valerie Huber, a Trump appointee to HHS. Huber started her career promoting ab-only programs in her son’s school before moving on to manage the ab-only program at the Ohio Department of Health. She became the president of the National Abstinence Education Association in 2007. (The advocacy organization has also rebranded itself. It’s now known as Ascend.)

Jesus, these people.

“Our critics like to pigeonhole this as a religious issue,” she said, “but the truth is that this has value for every student regardless of faith or moral framework — or lack thereof.”

Which is why they chose the name "Ascend"?

“They’re trying to rebrand because ‘abstinence-only’ has become a dirty term. There’s no support for abstinence-only programs.” Polling shows that parents “overwhelmingly” want their kids to be getting sex education in the classroom — education that talks about the “value” of abstinence, she says, “but in conjunction with understanding condoms, … contraception, and now, increasingly, wanting young people to know about consent” — none of which the ab-only programs actually do, no matter what they’re called.

[...]

Although the Trump administration’s goal was to completely defund the TPP Program [created during Obama's administration to test science- and evidence-based sex education programs], it lost that bid when lawmakers put money into the new budget to keep it going. Meanwhile, a number of groups involved in the TPP Program — including Planned Parenthood — have sued the administration in federal court, claiming that defunding the project mid-cycle violates the Administrative Procedures Act. [...] The lawsuits, filed last month, are pending.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Culture of Fox News

This is not one bad apple.

This is the Fox News culture. Sexist and abusive.  Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, Charles Payne, Eric Bolling - who else?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

An Unusual YWA Offering

You won't find any other post in all the years I've been doing this as recommended reading from a Republican (unless it was to show how uncharitable they can be).  And you surely won't find any recommended reading from a Christian Republican, but I've just run across one.  And I recommend it.

Read it here.

You may have heard of this young woman recently, as it appears that a Twitter thread she wrote about sexism and Trump a couple of days ago went viral.

Late Apology

Oh How They Suffer

I'm really considering dropping my daily scanning of the Guardian. They used to be the best online magazine out there. In the last year or so, they've turned into another rag.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Still on the Books?

It's hard for me to remember back to '87, but I haven't heard so much about "conspiracy theories" lately. I wonder why.


Also, around that time (1989) there was the Washington Times spread on prostitution and callboy rings at the White House.

St. Ronald, indeed.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

I Object

An umbrella term for anyone who does not identify as just male or just female, nonbinary, for the first time in US history, is being legally recognized as a gender.

Everything was put in motion by Jamie Shupe, an Army vet who has been transitioning gender since 2013, the Daily Dot reported.

A petition filed by Shupe in late April included two letters from their doctors that state their gender should be nonbinary. Shupe, who prefers not to use gender pronouns, first petitioned to change their gender from male to female.

  RT

Fine, let's have a word that describes someone who doesn't identify with either sex - and not my aunt's "he-she", and frankly, if Shupe is transitioning there is already a word for that: transgender.  Just as cisgender describes those who identify with the gender of their physiology.  (Trans - across; cis - on the same side.) And if Shupe identifies with both sides of the gender coin, perhaps simply "ambigendered."  At any rate, f we need another word, could we make it something that sounds human? "Nonbinary" if you must, but I draw the line at using the pronoun "their" when you are speaking in the singular case.

Nancy Haque, a co-executive director for Basic Rights Oregon, told Oregon Live that while this was a “momentous day for genderqueer Oregonians,” it was not a total victory for nonbinary Oregonians.

"Genderqueer" Oregonians?? No. Just no. There is already way too much negative baggage attached to the word "queer".

"I was assigned male at birth due to biology," Shupe explained to Oregon Live. "I'm stuck with that for life. My gender identity is definitely feminine. My gender identity has never been male, but I feel like I have to own up to my male biology. Being non-binary allows me to do that. I'm a mixture of both. I consider myself as a third sex."

Fine.  But you are still only one person.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Women Are the Fairer Game

[M]isogyny is still thriving. When the Guardian began researching the online harassment of its own writers, they discovered something bleak: of the 10 contributors who receive the most abuse in the comment threads, eight are women – five white, three non-white – and the other two are black men. Overall, women Guardian writers get more abuse than men, regardless of what they write about, but especially when they write about rape and feminism.

  The Guardian

As I'm sure you're aware, Bill Clinton has suffered no career/financial fallout from his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Not so for Monica.

Her plan after graduating was to get a job and lead “a much more private life, and move towards a more normal developmental path”. But she found that nobody would employ her. The stigma outweighed her qualifications and aptitude. She couldn’t even get volunteer work with a charity. “I was going through such a hard time,” she says, “I felt so shattered, it took me six months to even get up the courage to approach this particular organisation. And when I did, they told me my working there ‘wasn’t a good idea’. It was a very desolate 10 years for me."

[...]

She drifted back to London and had coffee with her old LSE professor, Sandra Jovchelovitch. “She said to me, ‘Whenever power is involved, there always has to be a competing narrative. And you have no narrative.’ It was true. I had mistakenly thought that if I retreated from public life the narrative would dissipate. But instead it ran away from me even more.”

[...]

These days, she’s often approached by victims of online bullying, “when I’m on the subway, in line for coffee, at dinner parties.” Shamed people tend to seek each other out, the cure for shame being empathy. “Sometimes they’ll say, ‘I went through this, but it’s nothing like what you went through.’ But I tell them that, if I drown in 60ft of water and you drown in 30ft, we both still drowned. You either know what it’s like to be publicly shamed or you don’t.”

And so she’s spent much of the past few years trying to formulate practical advice for them. “To be able to give a purpose to my past, if I’m stuck with my past, feels meaningful to me,” she says.

[...]

In 2014, after a decade of silence, Lewinsky wrote an essay for Vanity Fair, headlined Shame And Survival. “The night before it was published, a friend gave me a card with an Anaïs Nin quote: ‘And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.’”

  Guardian