House Republicans Vote to Hobble Independent Ethics Office

So it begins.  Donald Trump. a/k/a Der Fuhrer has not even yet been sworn into office and the reign of corruption begins.  House Republicans, with no notice or debate, voted yesterday to significantly curtail the power of an independent ethics office that oversees the conduct of Members of the House of Representatives and House congressional officials.  One can only assume the move was taken in the wake of Der Fuhrer's refusal to disengage himself from his business empire and not use the office of the presidency to further enrich himself.  Obviously, this does not bode well for the country and the typical American voter and signals that things will likely only get worse.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the disturbing development.  Here are story highlights:  

House Republicans, defying their top leaders, voted Monday to significantly curtail the power of an independent ethics office set up in 2008 in the aftermath of corruption scandals that sent three members of Congress to jail.

The move to weaken the Office of Congressional Ethics was not public until late Monday, when Representative Robert Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced that the House Republican Conference had approved the change with no advance public notice or debate.

In its place, a new Office of Congressional Complaint Review would be set up within the House Ethics Committee, which before the creation of the Office of Congressional Ethics had been accused of ignoring credible allegations of wrongdoing by lawmakers.

The full House is scheduled to vote Tuesday on the rules, which will last for two years, until the next congressional elections.

The surprising vote came on the eve of the start of a new session of Congress, with emboldened Republicans ready to push an ambitious agenda on everything from health care to infrastructure, issues that will be the subject of intense lobbying from corporate interests. The move by Republicans would take away both power and independence from an investigative body, and give lawmakers more control over internal inquiries.

Mr. Goodlatte defended the action in a statement issued Monday evening, saying it would strengthen ethics oversight in the House while also giving lawmakers better protections against what some members have called overzealous efforts by the Office of Congressional Ethics.
 

Let's be clear.  Goodlatte is a liar and obviously id looking to enrich himself off of lobbyist bribes.  Now corruption is a GOP "family value."  The cesspool gets worse and worse.  

Trump: Putin's Willing Accomplice in the Hacking Attacks

David Frum is not wild eyed liberal.  Indeed, he is a hardcore traditional conservative - or at least what a conservative used to be prior to the rise of the Christofascists, white supremacists and, of course, Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Fuhrer within the GOP.  Moreover, but faced with the choice between Trump and Der Fuhrer, Frum has never been a friend to Hillary Clinton.  Yet, in a piece in The Atlantic, Frum hits on an important aspect of the Russian hacking effort to throw the 2016 presidential election to Trump: Trump's willing complicity in exacerbating the impact of the leaked information and blowing the disclosures far out of proportion. Equally, disconcerting was Trump's reference to information on several occasions before the contents of the leaks had been publizied. Did he know what was coming in advance?  The Kremlin has confirmed communications with Trump's campaign during the election.  Did Trump cooperate in the hacking efforts?  Trump is claiming ignorance and down playing the need for a bipartisan investigation.  Frum suggests it may be because such an investigation might expose the full extent of Trump's complicity and prior knowledge.  Here are article highlights:

“It’s all just an attempt to delegitimize Donald Trump.” That’s the argument you hear from Trump supporters each time new information comes to light about how hard Russian spy services worked to damage Hillary Clinton. You heard it again on Thursday.

The Trump supporters are 100 percent right: The information is delegitimizing. The president-elect of the United States reportedly owes his office in considerable part to illegal clandestine activities in his favor conducted by a hostile, foreign spy service. It’s hard to imagine a crisis of presidential legitimacy more extreme than that. But that’s no argument against airing this information. It’s precisely why the information must be aired.

Vladimir Putin took a fearful risk. If the Electoral College had taken a slightly different bounce on November 8, Putin would now be facing an enraged President-elect Hillary Clinton. Putin had every reason to expect that he probably would end up facing a President Clinton. Yet he took the gamble anyway, apparently doing something none of his Soviet predecessors had ever dared to do: mount a clandestine espionage and disinformation campaign on behalf of one candidate for U.S. president, and against another.

The word “clandestine” is the key term here. In every election, foreign governments have their preferred candidates. It was no secret in 2004 that America’s French and German allies hoped George W. Bush would lose, or that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu felt the same way about President Obama in 2012. Those allies made their wishes known through the familiar and lawful method of grumbling to sympathetic American journalists about the awfulness of the incumbent administration. What they did not do was organize their spy agencies to break the law of the United States. But that is evidently what Russia did—and it seems to have worked.

Obama pledged today that before he leaves office, the American people will learn more fully how the Russians did it.

This will be important to know. But there is something else important to keep in mind.  The content of the Russian-hacked emails was actually remarkably unexplosive. Probably the biggest news was that Hillary Clinton had expressed herself in favor of a hemispheric common market in speeches to Wall Street executives.  . . . We learned that Hillary Clinton acknowledged differences between her “public and private” positions on some issues. None of this even remotely corroborated Donald Trump’s wild characterizations of the Russian-hacked, Wikileaks-published material.

Without Trump’s own willingness to make false claims and misuse Russian-provided information, the Wikileaks material would have deflated of its own boringness. The Russian-hacked material did damage because, and only because, Russia found a willing accomplice in the person of Donald J. Trump.

Many questions remain about how the Russian spy services did what they did. That includes Putin’s motives for ordering the operation. But on issues from Crimea to Syria to NATO to the breakup of the European Union, Trump’s publicly expressed views align with Putin’s wishes.

Over Trump’s motives for collaborating so full-throatedly with Russian espionage, there hangs a greater and more disturbing mystery—a mystery that Trump seems in no hurry to dispel. And maybe he is wise to leave the mystery in place: as delegitimizing as it is, it’s very possible the truth would be even worse.    

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

Monday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 2

The Coming Onslaught of Anti-LGBT Proposals in 2017

My Trump supporting "friends" continue to thing my sense of foreboding and doom is unfounded. That's easy to say when you are a heterosexual white Christian.  For those of us that do not fall in that category, there is much to fear, especially if one is a member of the LGBT community which is a favored target of the Christofascists ascendant in the Trump/Pence cabal (one mus remember that Pence himself is vitriolically anti-LGBT).  Here in Virginia the LGBT community is protected at the state level thanks to our Democrat governor, Terry McAuliffe, but with statewide elections in November what happens in 2018 will be frightening if the Republicans win the governor's mansion.  In short, it is difficult to feel much security in 2017 and beyond.  A piece in Mother Jones looks at some of the coming attacks on LGBT Americans.  Here are article highlights:

In 2016, state legislatures across the country proposed more anti-LGBT measures than they had in almost a decade, and activists anticipate more of the same in 2017. There was some good news last year: There was a dramatic jump in proposed pro-LGBT rights bills. And in North Carolina, Gov. Pat McCrory lost his reelection bid, and his defeat was seen as a victory for opponents of the LGBT discrimination legislation that he'd championed.

While the 2015 legalization of same-sex marriage in the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges decision was a high point in gay rights, there are a number of proposals for 2017 whose intent is to roll them back. During a recent press call, the ACLU predicted a crop of "religious exemption" bills in the near future, laws that allow businesses and service providers to use their religious beliefs as justification for refusing service to a member of the LGBT community. "A Trump administration will embolden some of the folks in state legislatures who already wish to move legislation that harms the LGBT community," Bowman says. "That piece is very concerning."

Lawmakers in a number of states have already pre-filed discriminatory bills for 2017. Here are some of them: 

Alabama: HB24 would allow adoption agencies and foster care facilities to refuse, on the grounds of religious objections, to place kids in certain homes. The bill would also allow them to refuse to refer children to other agencies.

Missouri: HB205 would let government and religious officials refuse to perform marriages because of religious objections. SB98 aims to make transgender kids in school use an individual bathroom instead of the bathroom that matches their gender identity.

Tennessee: SB1 would give mental health counselors the ability to refuse service to LGBT patients on religious grounds.

Texas: SB92 would standardize nondiscrimination laws across the state, effectively preventing localities from passing stronger protections. The ACLU also notes that Texas does not have any state-level nondiscrimination laws for LGBT citizens on the books.
The ACLU plans to keep an updated list of discriminatory bills on their website throughout the year.

Congress: In Congress, the First Amendment Defense Act, which allows refusal of service on a religious basis, and the Russell Amendment, which would allow federal contractors to do the same with hiring, are likely to be revived, this time with potentially greater chances for success.

Republican lawmakers, who control both houses of Congress and have President-elect Trump's assurance he'll sign the bill, expect FADA to pass, inviting "widespread, devastating discrimination against LGBT people," Jennifer Pizer of Lambda Legal Defense Fund told NBC. "This proposed new law violates both Equal Protection and the Establishment Clause by elevating one set of religious beliefs above others." . . . Other discriminatory riders could also be attached to must-pass bills, such as defense spending or budget proposals.

Supporters of LGBT rights will renew efforts to pass the Equality Act, which would prevent discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity at the federal level. . . . With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, its passage is unlikely. 

[M]any of his [Trump's] Cabinet picks have been vocally anti-gay throughout their careers. Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Trump's pick for attorney general, co-sponsored the State Marriage Defense Act in 2014, which would have allowed states to define marriage as only between a man and a woman, even after the Defense of Marriage Act was overturned by the Supreme Court. Tom Price, who was tapped to head the Department of Health and Human Services, called the federal recommendations for protecting trans people issued to schools and health care providers an "absurd" overreach of power.

Add to this list the rabidly anti-LGBT Betsy DeVoes, a prominent funder of a who's who of anti-gay extremist groups, who will head the Department of Education and likely move to end LGBT protections and turn a blind eye towards bullying.   

Trump supporting "friends" claim that they knew nothing of the anti-LBGT agenda that will unfold, yet had they spent a few minutes looking at the 2016 GOP party platform, the details were in plain view.  Somehow, they expect me to excuse their laziness.  I can't and I will not. 

America Now Resembles a Central Asian "Republic"

In lest than three weeks America's government will resemble something out of Central Asia - a nation ruled by a self absorbed strongman and a  circle of cronies.  Stated another way, our government and ruling class will so resemble a Central American banana republic out of the 1950's.  And 46% of Americans allowed this to happen by staying home out of laziness and irresponsible behavior and allowing less than 27% of voters to vote a would be strongman/dictator into office.  They were assisted, of course by the former head of the Russian KGB, the FBI's James Comey - who deserves to be view by history akin to Benedict Arnold, and a lazy and  stupid mainstream media.  We allowed this to happen and now, frighteningly, it looks like many are ready to sit back and do nothing to oppose the nightmare.  A column in the New York Times laments what has happened and the corruption and misrule likely to begin on January 20th.  Here are highlights:

In 2015 the city of Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, was graced with a new public monument: a giant gold-plated sculpture portraying the country’s president on horseback. This may strike you as a bit excessive. But cults of personality are actually the norm in the “stans,” the Central Asian countries that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union, all of which are ruled by strongmen who surround themselves with tiny cliques of wealthy crony capitalists.

Americans used to find the antics of these regimes, with their tinpot dictators, funny. But who’s laughing now?

We are, after all, about to hand over power to a man who has spent his whole adult life trying to build a cult of personality around himself; remember, his “charitable” foundation spent a lot of money buying a six-foot portrait of its founder. Meanwhile, one look at his Twitter account is enough to show that victory has done nothing to slake his thirst for ego gratification. So we can expect lots of self-aggrandizement once he’s in office. I don’t think it will go as far as gold-plated statues, but really, who knows?

Meanwhile, with only a couple of weeks until Inauguration Day, Donald Trump has done nothing substantive to reduce the unprecedented — or, as he famously wrote on Twitter, “unpresidented” — conflicts of interest created by his business empire. Pretty clearly, he never will.

But who’s going to hold him accountable? Some prominent Republicans are already suggesting that, rather than enforcing the ethics laws, Congress should simply change them to accommodate the great man.

And the corruption won’t be limited to the very top: The new administration seems set to bring blatant self-dealing into the center of our political system. Abraham Lincoln may have led a team of rivals; Donald Trump seems to be assembling a team of cronies, choosing billionaires with obvious, deep conflicts of interest for many key positions in his administration.

I know that many people are still trying to convince themselves that the incoming administration will govern normally, despite the obviously undemocratic instincts of the new commander in chief and the questionable legitimacy of the process that brought him to power. Some Trump apologists have even taken to declaring that we needn’t worry about corruption from the incoming clique, because rich men don’t need more money. Seriously.

But let’s get real. Everything we know suggests that we’re entering an era of epic corruption and contempt for the rule of law, with no restraint whatsoever.

How could this happen in a nation that has long prided itself as a role model for democracies everywhere? In a direct sense, Mr. Trump’s elevation was made possible by the F.B.I.’s blatant intervention in the election, Russian subversion, and the supine news media that obligingly played up fake scandals while burying real ones on the back pages.

But this debacle didn’t come out of nowhere. We’ve been on the road to stan-ism for a long time: an increasingly radical G.O.P., willing to do anything to gain and hold power, has been undermining our political culture for decades. . . . . People tend to forget how much of the 2016 playbook had already been used in earlier years.

People also tend to forget just how bad the administration of George W. Bush really was, and not just because it led America to war on false pretenses. There was also an upsurge in cronyism, with many key posts going to people with dubious qualifications but close political and/or business ties to top officials. Indeed, America botched the occupation of Iraq in part thanks to profiteering by politically connected businesses.

The only question now is whether the rot has gone so deep that nothing can stop America’s transformation into Trumpistan. One thing is for sure: It’s destructive as well as foolish to ignore the uncomfortable risk, and simply assume that it will all be O.K. It won’t.

I for one am not optimistic and still fear that leaving America may be in my future.  The only sticking point is one of figuring out how to facilitate my children and grand children leaving too.

Monday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

Americans Are Too Timid In Confronting Hate

Despite the efforts of Republicans to spin the 2016 presidential election results as an uprising of working class whites stressed over economic concerns (a lie that a gullible and lazy media has been happy to Promote), the sad truth of the matter is that hatred was a key element utilized by Donald Trump to rally the GOP base and to win over some past Democratic voters who were outraged to see what they viewed as their white Christian privilege being eroded - eroded by blacks, Hispanics, gays and others.  The other key was the usual Republican tactic of playing to religious extremism best embodied in anti-abortion rhetoric and anti-LGBT sound bites.  This latter ploy not only won over 81% of evangelicals but also duped some Hispanics and blacks to vote against their own interest. Now, with an unfit narcissistic madman in the White House and a GOP controlled Congress, in 2017 it will be all the more important to oppose and counter appeals to hatred.  A piece in The Daily Beast authored by a German sets out why confronting hate is so important.  Here are excerpts:

Late in the evening on Christmas day, Stephanie Pazmino slashed a black, transgender man after he offered her a subway seat. “I don’t want to sit next to black people,” Pazmino told the victim. A couple of weeks ago a man walked into a 7-Eleven in the Bronx. He had no intention to purchase anything but wanted to use the store’s microwave. When the Muslim clerk told him that this was against store policy, the man responded that he could do whatever he wanted. He told the clerk to go back to ‘his country’ and threatened to physically harm him.

At the beginning of December a hijab-wearing city transit worker was assaulted by a passenger who confronted her on the 7 train. “You’re a terrorist and you shouldn’t be working for the city,” said the man, according to reports, as he jabbed a finger at her MTA badge. He followed her off the train at Grand Central Terminus, and then pushed her down stairs at the station. (She was taken to hospital with injuries to her knee and ankle.) The attacker was not apprehended, and there were no reports of anyone trying to intervene.

According to the New York Police Department, bias incidents in New York have spiked 400 percent in the two weeks that followed the election of Donald J. Trump, compared to the same period last year.

Earlier this year, I was a witness to one such attack. Riding the 7 Train into Manhattan from Queens, arguably the most diverse place on earth, I heard someone yelling anti-Muslim insults. A man had pushed a young woman in a hijab off her seat, and the woman was crying.

I decided to stand between victim and perpetrator. I was the only person who responded until a man who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent joined me. My heart was racing, as I explained to her, between gasps for air, that there’s a red emergency button she can push if something like this ever happens again. The woman spoke little English and didn’t seem to understand.

I am not sharing this story to congratulate myself but to illustrate what I’ve learned from growing up in Germany.

I’m a small but furious German. When I went to high school in Bavaria in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the horrors of fascism still echoed through the classrooms. Germans have internalized that the reason why Adolf Hitler was able to rise to power was that no one stood up for the Jews.

I have plenty of problems with Germany, but its people’s willingness to speak their minds and stand up for others isn’t one of them. Whatever you do, in Germany the public good trumps your individual desires.

Germans have also worked hard to understand how the unspeakable happened. They have one of those unwieldy compound words for it: Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “the process of coming to terms with your past.” The concept includes a duty to intervene when another’s dignity or life is in danger.

I vividly recall the teacher-led discussions in high school that dealt with the persecution and deportation of Jews. What would you do if it was your neighbor: look the other way or step up? We read eyewitness accounts of “good Germans” who hid Jews in their attics.

“The Jews had it coming,” my paternal grandmother told me. More than once she said, “The Nuremberg Rallies were the best times of my life.”

Perhaps it is for this reason, more than my schooling, that the recent spike in hate crimes hits close to home.

These aren’t isolated incidents anymore. Yet it is a trend our soon-to-be leader has decided to ignore. So how should we respond? What can we do to avoid becoming bystanders in something unspeakable? If you still think that we should just wait and see, I wonder when will you step in. Will you step in when it is too late?

When you move to the U.S., even from a western country like Germany, there will always be things that remind you that you don’t fully belong. Don’t get me wrong, there are many things I love about America. . . . . And yet for the most part, it is our job as immigrants to this country to assimilate to the American way, rarely the other way around.

I am beyond frustrated that we’re stuck with a president who, just like Adolf Hitler, despises refugees, intellectuals, journalists, women and non-Christians.

[T]he very thing that makes America great—its people’s quiet acceptance of other beliefs, their overwhelming friendliness, their effort to always get along—now threatens to become its downfall. I loathed having to read my friends’ whiny Facebook posts about how they were dreading Thanksgiving because of the elections. “Boohoo, I have to talk about politics to someone who thinks differently than I do!”

Here, this German said it. Will you still like me? I am asking because I believe what stands in the way is Americans’ compulsive need to be liked. At moments like this, though, we need to learn to object and intervene—whether in public protest or simply around the family dinner table. You don’t have to get into a fight to try out my little German lesson, but if you see something, do something.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” wrote the philosopher Edmund Burke. Exactly. So don’t just be good. Be a good German.

New Year's Day Reflections

Perhaps it's because I was up until nearly 3:00 am after hosting friends at our home last night and then had someone ring the door bell at 8:00 am setting the dogs off into barking mania.  Or perhaps it's because the weather is overcast and dreary.  More likely, the nightmare that will occur on January 20, 2017, continues to haunt me. In any event, I cannot remember a New Year's day on which I have had such a sense of foreboding and sense of impending calamity.  I sincerely hope that I am wrong, but I fear that 2017 will see the end of America as most of us have known it as Trumpism and neo-fascism are ascendant.  

Yes, last night's party was fun to an extent and it was nice to have numerous friends and neighbors gathered in our home, but as the clock struck midnight, I found it very, very difficult to say "Happy New Year."  I felt as if it was forced gaiety, at least on my part.  Not that I don't wish much happiness in 2017 to my family and friends.  I just fear that whatever good and happiness comes, it will be overshadowed by the continuing national tragedy as the Founding Father's republic dies.  Not all at, once by step by step as  Trump and Congressional Republicans destroy the social safety net, roll back the rights of many, LGBT Americans and minorities being particularly targeted.  History will no doubt find it ironic that the Electoral College that was supposed to be the fail safe measure to protect the nation was in fact what guaranteed the republic's death.

We have a drag brunch at 1:00 pm that we will be attending at a friend's restaurant.  Hopefully, it wall be a distraction from the gloom and foreboding that I feel.  At least there won't be many Trump voters in attendance, which, of course, will be a good thing. I am definitely not in the mood to be even remotely civil to such people today. 

To all my readers, I wish you a Happy New Year.  I hope for the best for all of us.  Meanwhile, if nothing else, the coming reign of Der Fuhrer will certainly give me plenty to write about.  

New Year's Morning Male Beauty