More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Virginia Republicans Bow to Trump and Betray Constituents

Every Virginia Republican member of Congress voted for the horrific "big beautiful bill" backed by the Felon.  Every Virginia Democrat in Congress voted against the bill both because it savages social programs and also because it adds trillions of dollars to the national debt.  Much like the Felon, all of the Republicans who voted for the bill lied through their teeth and claimed few would be harmed by the bills provision and utterly ignored the huge increase to the national debt that will result. They also ignored the huge tax cuts given to the very wealthy under the bill.  (In the interest of full disclosure, the husband and I could see a not insignificant cut in our taxes - assuming we don't have to flee the country as anti-LGBT measures increase - but in good conscience, I cannot ignore the widespread harm that will be inflicted on many Americans.)  Perhaps the worse Republican liar of all is Jen Kiggans, who worked in the health care field, and  who has to know that many will lose access to health care -300,000+ Virginians will likely suffer and six or more rural hospitals in Virginia may ultimately be forced to close - but chose to prostitute herself to the Felon and to betray so many Virginians. One can only hope Democrats field a strong candidate who can defeat Kiggans and send her into retirement.  Statewide, voters in Southwest Virginia and rural areas that voted for Republicans will reap what they have sown.  A piece in the Virginian Pilot looks at the vote:

Republican leaders in the House found enough votes Thursday to pass President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” after several Republicans flipped their votes overnight to support the massive bill.

Overall, the bill will raise the country’s debt ceiling by $5 trillion. The bill also shifts budget priorities to add roughly $150 billion in new national defense spending, with priorities including shipbuilding, and more than $160 billion to expand U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations.

In total, the bill is expected to increase the national deficit by $3.4 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan body created by Congress in 1974.

The bill is poised to gut social services in order to pay for the spending plan. The bill reduces federal Medicaid and Affordable Care Act spending by nearly $1 trillion over the next decade, which is projected to eliminate coverage for 11.8 million Americans. The Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance program will see more than $200 billion cut over the same time, with states responsible for shouldering costs and harsher requirements to qualify for food stamps. Other social services like Planned Parenthood would also be defunded.

The 218-214 vote came with two Republicans joining Democrats in opposing the revised bill, which the Senate approved with Vice President JD Vance breaking a tie on Tuesday.

Here’s how Hampton Roads lawmakers reacted to the bill, which now heads for Trump’s desk to be signed into law on Friday.

Rob Wittman

Wittman, a Republican representing Virginia’s 1st District, voted for the bill despite previously joining Rep. Jen Kiggans and other Republicans to voice concerns over its impacts on Medicaid. In a statement issued after passage, Wittman said the bill eliminates waste in Medicaid and provides protections for Americans both financially and through national defense.

Jen Kiggans

Kiggans, a Republican representing Virginia’s 2nd District, voted for the bill.

Kiggans said in a statement she ultimately supported the bill due to its investments in border security, national defense and tax cuts, and added she believes to reduced spending to programs like Medicaid and SNAP aren’t about cutting support, but more about promoting “long-term independence” for Virginians.

Bobby Scott 

Scott, a Democrat representing Virginia’s 3rd District, voted against the bill. He said in a statement the bill hurts more than 300,000 Virginians who are now at risk of losing health care, and added the bill balloons the nation’s debt and is worse for Americans than if Congress had done nothing.

“Once again, Republicans rushed to jam their Big, Ugly Bill through Congress,” Scott said. “This bill is a collection of policies that will harm America’s working families, bestow tax breaks on the wealthy, and significantly increase the national debt. Every single Democrat in Congress voted against it, while almost every Republican in Congress voted for it while having the audacity to try to call the legislation ‘beautiful.’”

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Friday Male Beauty

 

Republicans Didn’t Have to Do This to The Country

This 4th of July is not a time to celebrate.  Rather, with the passage of the horrific "big beautiful bill" pushed by the felon, it is a time for both fear and to mourn: mourn those who will die because of lost health care coverage, fear for senior citizens forced out of nursing homes due to Medicaid cuts, fear for patients and employees of rural hospitals - one analysis indicates 300 rural hospitals could be forced to close, including a number in Republican voting districts in Virginia - fear for children losing food assistance - the list is long. Most ugly is the reality that these cruel cuts have been made in order to give huge tax breaks to the super wealthy.  Yet, even with the cuts, the federal deficit will explode and potentially lead to increased inflation and a downgrade of federal government bonds. None of these horrors had to happen.  They were a conscious choice by congressional Republicans who chose to take their reverse Robin Hood agenda to new extremes and betray thousands, if not millions of their constituents.  The Felon has continued to lie about the impact of this legislation and Fox News and its imitators have been only too eager to repeat the lies.   A piece at The Atlantic looks at this conscious chose to harm millions:

In their heedless rush to enact a deficit-exploding tax bill so massive that they barely understand it, Senate Republicans call to mind a scene in The Sopranos. A group of young aspiring gangsters decides to stick up a Mafia card game in hopes of gaining the mobsters’ respect and being brought into the crew. At the last moment, the guys briefly reconsider, before one of them supplies the decisive argument in favor of proceeding: “Let’s do it before the crank wears off.” After that, things go as you might expect.

Like the Mafia wannabes, congressional Republicans have talked themselves into a plan so incomprehensibly reckless that to describe it is to question its authors’ sanity. . . . Congress is about to impose immense harm on tens of millions of Americans—taking away their health insurance, reducing welfare benefits, raising energy costs, and more—in order to benefit a handful of other Americans who least need the help. The bill almost seems designed to generate a political backlash.

Given that President Donald Trump and the GOP, unlike the morons in The Sopranos, are not collectively under the influence of crystal meth, the question naturally arises: Why are they doing this?

Republicans have historically been hesitant to pay for their tax cuts via offsetting cuts to government spending. This is politically rational in the short term. Reductions to government programs affect a much larger group of voters than the slice of wealthy Americans who benefit from GOP tax cuts. To avoid that backlash, congressional Republicans typically finance their tax bills with increased borrowing rather than reduced spending. The goal is to put the costs off to the distant future.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act employs this technique, adding some $3 trillion to the national debt. But because the cost of the tax cuts is so massive, and the budget deficit already so large, Republicans could not put the entire cost on the credit card this time. Instead, they plan to pay for a portion of the cost with budget cuts. This will expose them to a kind of blowback they have never experienced before.

Polling shows that the megabill is about 20 points underwater, reflecting the fact that its basic outline—a regressive tax cut paired with reduced spending on Medicaid—violates the public’s moral intuitions. And however much voters oppose the legislation in the abstract, they will hate it far more once it takes effect.

Republicans have mostly brushed off this brutal reality with happy talk. During a pep rally to psych up Congress to push the bill through before the crank wears off, Trump tried to reassure nervous legislators that the voters wouldn’t mind. “We’re cutting $1.7 trillion in this bill, and you’re not going to feel any of it,” he explained.

Not only is this nowhere close to true, but there is also no conceivable world in which it could be true. Even if $1.7 trillion worth of benefits really were going to undocumented immigrants or fraudsters, the cuts would still affect the doctors and hospitals who give them care, the farmers and grocers who sell them food, and so on.

In reality, the megabill will take food assistance away from some 3 million Americans, while causing 12 million to lose their health insurance. That is how you save money: by taking benefits away from people. Congress is not finding magical efficiencies. To the contrary, the bill introduces inefficiencies by design. The main way it will throw people off their health insurance is by requiring Medicaid recipients to show proof of employment. States that have tried this have found the paperwork so onerous that most people who lose their insurance are actually Medicaid-eligible but unable to navigate the endless bureaucratic hassle.

Another source of cost savings in the megabill involves killing tax credits and subsidies for renewable energy. Because renewables supply some 90 percent of new energy capacity in the United States, and because electricity demand is rising dramatically, these components of the bill will raise household costs, with the highest spikes hitting Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and South Carolina, which have huge wind and solar resources.

Perhaps the most severe political risk of the megabill is the potential for setting off a debt crisis. Rising deficits can cause interest rates to rise, which forces the government to borrow more money to pay the interest on its debt, which in turn puts even more upward pressure on rates, in a potentially disastrous spiral. This prospect is far from certain, but should it come to pass, it would dwarf the other harms of the bill.

You’d think sheer venal self-interest, if nothing else, would cause members of the Republican majority to hesitate before wreaking havoc on multiple economic sectors. Yet none of these outcomes has given them pause.

One explanation is that they don’t understand just how unpopular the bill is apt to be when it takes effect. Many Republicans rely on party-aligned media for their news, and these sources have mostly cheered the bill while ignoring its downsides. Both chambers of Congress have rushed the bill through with minimal scrutiny, shielding members from exposure to concerns

The second explanation is that Republicans in Congress, or at least some of them, do understand the consequences of their actions, and are willing to accept the political risk because they truly believe in what they’re doing. Republicans have, after all, spent decades fighting to reduce the progressivity of the tax code and to block the expansion of guaranteed health care for people unable to purchase it on their own.

The third explanation is that the political logic of doing the president’s bidding has created an unstoppable momentum. Trump has been flexible on the specifics of the legislation. . . . Using Trumpian lingo to label the bill was a clever decision to brand it as a Trump bill rather than to identify the measure by its much less popular contents.

Trump has accordingly treated internal dissent ruthlessly. . . . with rare exceptions, they have never entertained the prospect of actually opposing Trump’s big, beautiful bill. Their criticism begins from the premise that its passage is necessary. They keep repeating the phrase “Failure is not an option,” a mantra that seems designed to prevent them from considering the possibility that passing the bill could be worse than the alternative.

Or perhaps Republicans in Washington have simply grown inured to Trump-era warnings of catastrophe, which have blared for a decade on end, with accelerating frequency during the second Trump term. . . . .They have picked a bad time to let their guard down, however, because this bill is different. One way is that legislation, unlike executive action, is not subject to the TACO principle; once a law has been passed, Trump can’t just quietly back down. The other is that they will all have cast a vote for it. An angry public won’t merely blame Trump. The ignominy for the disaster will fall upon its authors.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

Thursday Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

MAGA Moral Bankruptcy and the War on Empathy

As Congressional Republicans debate the Felon's "big, beautiful bill," a bill that would inflict very real harm on millions of Americans so that the super wealthy can pay even less in taxes, it underscores the moral bankruptcy of MAGA world and today's Republican party that bears no resemblance to the party I grew up in and in which I once held positions.  Greed, selfishness and open hatred of others now definite both MAGA and the GOP. Indeed, many in the ugly world argue against empathy towards other, especially the poor and oppressed, following the lead of the malignant narcissist who leads today's GOP and the MAGA fascist movement. As for "conservative Christians" who have pledge fealty to the Felon and back policies that will harm millions within the USA and likely cause the deaths of millions in Africa in particular through cuts to humanitarian aid, their complete moral bankruptcy is on open display. Given the choice between (i) Christ's social gospel message and (ii) greed, selfishness and disregard for others - indeed the demonization of others, they have embraced the latter.  To call such "Christians" modern day Pharisees is to insult the Pharisees of the gospels.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this rejection of both empathy for others and the gospel message itself.  Here are article highlights:

Five years ago, Elon Musk told Joe Rogan during a podcast taping that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.” By that time, the idea that people in the West are too concerned with the pain of others to adequately advocate for their own best interests was already a well-established conservative idea. Instead of thinking and acting rationally, the theory goes, they’re moved to make emotional decisions that compromise their well-being and that of their home country. In this line of thought, empathetic approaches to politics favor liberal beliefs. An apparent opposition between thought and feeling has long vexed conservatives . .

But the current ascendancy of this anti-empathy worldview, now a regular topic in right-wing social-media posts, articles, and books, might be less a reasonable point of argumentation and more a sort of coping mechanism for conservatives confronted with the outcomes of certain Trump-administration policies—such as the nightmarish tale of a 4-year-old American child battling cancer being deported to Honduras without any medication, or a woman in ICE custody losing her mid-term pregnancy after being denied medical treatment for days. That a conservative presented with these cases might feel betrayed by their own treacherous empathy makes sense; this degree of human suffering certainly ought to prompt an empathetic response, welcome or not. Even so, it also stands to reason that rather than shifting their opinions when confronted with the realities of their party’s positions, some conservatives might instead decide that distressing emotions provoked by such cases must be a kind of mirage or trick. This is both absurd—things that make us feel bad typically do so because they are bad—and spiritually hazardous.

This is certainly true for Christians, whose faith generally counsels taking others’ suffering seriously. That’s why the New York Times best seller published late last year by the conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, is so troubling. In her treatise packaging right-wing anti-empathy ideas for Christians, Stuckey, a Fox News veteran who recently spoke at a conference hosted by the right-wing nonprofit Turning Point USA, contends that left wingers often manipulate well-meaning believers into adopting sinful argumentative and political positions by exploiting their natural religious tendency to care for others. . . . But Toxic Empathy is not a sermon. It is a political pamphlet advising Christians on how to argue better in political debates—a primer on being better conservatives, not better Christians.

The Atlantic reported in 2015 that “the social psychologist C. Daniel Batson, who has researched empathy for decades, argues that the term can now refer to eight different concepts,” such as “knowing another’s thoughts and feelings,” “actually feeling as another does,” and “feeling distress at another’s suffering,” a kind of catchall term for having a moral imagination. Stuckey’s definition doesn’t distinguish among these different elements; she instead frames empathy itself as a specific emotion rather than a psychological capacity for understanding the emotions of others, which makes her usage especially confusing.

The toxic kind of empathy, she contends, is the kind that makes you double-check your specifically conservative political priors. Some examples: “If you’re really compassionate, you’ll welcome the immigrant” and “If you’re really a Christian, you’ll fight for social justice.” This argumentative technique, in which Christians are asked to consider their political positions in light of the logic of their own faith, can hardly be described as empathy in any common sense of the term. . . . Labeling those emotions as fruits of toxic empathy is a strategy for dealing with them: It resolves the tension between what one feels and what one thinks by dismissing one’s feelings as misguided. This approach glibly ignores the possibility that such emotions are in fact the voice of one’s conscience, and takes for granted that ignoring one’s sympathies for other people is a good Christian habit of mind.

It’s true that every person should be judged equally in the administration of the law, but it’s also the case that Christianity actually does dictate that the needs of the poor and powerless should be prioritized in society. Far from being a misleading interpretation adduced by bad-faith actors in political debates, it is rather the plain meaning of the Gospels, attested to by thousands of years’ worth of Christian saints and thinkers who have declared that God especially loves the poor and the oppressed. That fact remains as radical today as it was when Jesus was preaching, and now, just as then, there are people who can’t stand to recognize it.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Monday Male Beauty

 

The Supreme Court Opens the Door to Erasing Gays

Among its final ruling of its ending term, The U.S. Supreme Court opened the door to further erasing of LGBT themes in public schools.  On the flip side, in a case brought by Christofascist business owners the Court upheld a requirement that insurance companies  must continue covering preventive services  including HIV prevention medication, cancer screenings, and vaccines. The Advocate looks at the ruling:

At issue was whether insurers could be compelled to cover services such as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, which prevents HIV transmission. Public health experts say PrEP access is especially vital for Black and Latine gay and bisexual men and transgender women, who are disproportionately impacted by HIV.

Other services potentially on the chopping block included screenings for cancer, depression, hepatitis B and C, and sexually transmitted infections, as well as a range of vaccines and counseling interventions.

The plaintiffs, a group of Christian business owners, argued that being required to cover PrEP violated their religious beliefs, claiming the medication “encourages homosexual behavior.” A lower court had previously sided with them, sparking concern that the ruling could jeopardize nationwide access to dozens of preventive health services.

Medical experts and LGBTQ+ advocates emphasized that PrEP is used by people of all backgrounds and sexual orientations, and that HIV “does not discriminate.”

Friday’s decision, on the last day of the Supreme Court's term, marks a significant win for LGBTQ+ health equity and for public health more broadly, following years of legal attempts to undermine the ACA’s nondiscrimination and preventive care mandates.

Obviously, this is a most welcomed ruling since the plaintiff business true desire in my personal view,  is to simply have LGBT individuals contract HIV and ultimately die.  There is literally nothing "Christian" about these people other than the Christian label they have misappropriated. 

On a much more ominous front, the same day the Court handed down the ruling on PrEP, it sided with anti-LGBT parents who objected to LGBT themed books and materials. The majority opinion authored by Samuel Alito - who seemingly was an inquisitor for the Spanish Inquisition in a former life - once again allows parental religious beliefs no matter how backward and bigoted to override the decisions of public school administrators and curriculum specialists.   Meanwhile, it ignores the reality that the most dangerous children and youths remains churches and church youth groups where sexual abuse by pastors and youth pastors  remains rampant.  A blistering dissent described in The Advocate authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor lays out the dangers posed by this ruling:

Justice Sonia Sotomayor has warned that Friday's Supreme Court ruling allowing parents in Maryland to opt their children out of lessons with LGBTQ+ books "threatens the very essence of public education."

The Court ruled 6-3 in the case of Mahmoud v. Taylor that not allowing opt-outs violates the parents' freedom of religion, with Justices Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting. Sotomayor sharply criticized the decision in her opinion, stating that it "constitutionalizes a parental veto power over curricular choices long left to the democratic process and local administrators."

"[Public schools] offer to children of all faiths and backgrounds an education and an opportunity to practice living in our multicultural society. That experience is critical to our Nation’s civic vitality," Sotomayor wrote. "Yet it will become a mere memory if children must be insulated from exposure to ideas and concepts that may conflict with their parents’ religious beliefs."

Parents from various religious faiths — Muslim, Roman Catholic, Ukrainian Orthodox, and others — sued Montgomery County Public Schools in 2023 after the district ended its policy allowing them to opt-out of lessons they objected to, including LGBTQ+ picture books. The district argued that allowing parents to opt their children out created concerns about absenteeism and social stigma against LGBTQ+ students and their families, while also putting them at risk of violating anti-discrimination laws.

The district also argued that students simply having access to information does not violate their parents' religious freedom, which Sotomayor concurred with in her dissent.

"Casting aside longstanding precedent, the Court invents a constitutional right to avoid exposure to 'subtle' themes 'contrary to the religious principles' that parents wish to instill in their children," she continued. "Exposing students to the 'message' that LGBTQ people exist, and that their loved ones may celebrate their marriages and life events, the majority says, is enough to trigger the most demanding form of judicial scrutiny."

Sotomayor also agreed with the district's argument that allowing opt outs for any lessons deemed controversial could affect any topic, resulting in "chaos for this Nation’s public schools." Requiring schools to provide advance notice and opt outs for every subject that might conflict with a parent’s religious beliefs "will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools," she said.

"That decision guts our free exercise precedent and strikes at the core premise of public schools: that children may come together to learn not the teachings of a particular faith, but a range of concepts and views that reflect our entire society," Sotomayor wrote. "Exposure to new ideas has always been a vital part of that project, until now. The reverberations of the Court’s error will be felt, I fear, for generations. Unable to condone that grave misjudgment, I dissent."

Monday Morning Male Beauty