More Wednesday Male Beauty

Quote of the Day: Is Trump Mentally Ill?

I have mixed feelings about conservative pundits and columnists who for years happily acted as apologists for some of the ugliest memes spread by the GOP and who in their own way assisted in allowing the alternate universe of Fox News and Breitbart to go largely unchallenged.  Now, some of them are belatedly issuing clarion calls about the dangers to America and the world by Der Trumpenführer and Republicans only too willing to go along with his insanity.  Jennifer Rublin is a case in point.  For far too long she closed her eyes to the embrace of ignorance and racism that increasing motivated much of the GOP base and found a leader in Trump and in many ways, the equally scary Mike Pence. In a column in the Washington Post Rubin calls it like it is - too bad she didn't start speaking out this forcefully eight or nine years ago.  Perhaps better late than never is the rule that applies, but what damage now being done to the nation could have been avoided if party had not been placed above country for so long.  Here are column highlights:

Trump’s unprecedented degree of out-and-out lying to the American people about things large (a conspiracy to cover up terrorist attacks) and small (crowd size) — especially stated in the presence of the intelligence community (as he did at CIA headquarters the day after his disappointing inauguration turnout) and the military — raises the legitimate concern that we cannot rely on the president’s words or assume his perceptions are accurate.  The military and intelligence officers listening to his rants know he babbles nonsense. They surely are entitled to doubt the mental stability and trustworthiness of the commander in chief.

Consider what else Trump might think is true: Our borders are open. Mexico will pay us back for the wall. Tariffs will hurt China, not the American consumer. The Russian government is no worse than the United States when it comes to human rights and international conduct. In other words, much of Trump’s world view — we’re losing, our allies are stealing us blind — and the policies he pursues are based on nothing but his imagination and urban myths fanned by right-wing talk radio. Far too many Republicans have played along, reticent to call out his reverence for Russian President Vladimir Putin, silent when his plan for a wall on our Southern border started a war of words with Mexico and utterly unwilling to confront him on the noxious travel ban.

More is needed however from Republicans, Cabinet officials, Democrats, conservatives outside government and the public. Trump’s dangerous delusions need to be addressed head on — in part to determine if he is intentionally stoking fear or if he is intellectually and emotionally unfit.

I would argue that Trump has more than demonstrated that he is mentally unfit.  He needs to be removed from office NOW.

Betsy DeVos Teaches the Value of Ignorance

With Mike Pence - a religious extremist himself - casting the deciding vote for the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, ignorance, bigotry, and a desire to re-segregate the nation's public schools.  Worse yet, the Department of Education is now headed by a woman who also seeks to force her right wing Christian beliefs on the nation's public school children.  When she says she wants to return god to schools, it's her god and not that of liberal mainline denominations or the progressives in the Catholic Church. As for Hindus, Muslims and non-Christians, her attitude is "too bad, I don't care."  For the LGBT community, DeVos is an existential threat given her vitriolic opposition to LGBT rights.  True, she claimed to oppose discrimination, but her years of activism and staggering financial denations to leading hate groups tells a very different story.  The New York Times editorial board rightly takes Republicans who voted for her to task.  Here are excerpts:

“Government really sucks.” This belief, expressed by the just-confirmed education secretary, Betsy DeVos, in a 2015 speech to educators, may be the only qualification she needed for President Trump.

Ms. DeVos is the perfect cabinet member for a president determined to appoint officials eager to destroy the agencies they run and weigh the fate of policies and programs based on ideological considerations.

She has never run, taught in, attended or sent a child to an American public school, and her confirmation hearings laid bare her ignorance of education policy and scorn for public education itself. She has donated millions to, and helped direct, groups that want to replace traditional public schools with charter schools and convert taxpayer dollars into vouchers to help parents send children to private and religious schools.

Even champions of charters, like the philanthropist Eli Broad and the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association, opposed her nomination.

In Ms. DeVos, the decades-long struggle to improve public education gains no visionary leadership and no fresh ideas. Her appointment squanders an opportunity to advance public education research, experimentation and standards, to objectively compare traditional public school, charter school and voucher models in search of better options for public school students.

Ms. DeVos has spent tens of millions and many years in a single-minded effort to force her home state, Michigan, to replace public schools with privately run charters and to use vouchers to move talented students out of failing public schools. She has consistently fought legislation to stop failing charters from expanding, and lobbied to shut down the troubled Detroit public school system and channel the money to charter, private or religious schools, regardless of their performance. She also favors online private schools, an alternative that most leading educators reject as destructive to younger children’s need to develop peer relationships, and an industry prone to scams.

In her Senate hearing, Ms. DeVos appeared largely ignorant of challenges facing college students, as well. She indicated that she was skeptical of Education Department policies to prevent fraud by for-profit colleges — a position favored, no doubt, by Mr. Trump, who just settled a fraud case against his so-called Trump University for $25 million. It was not clear that she understood how various student loan and aid programs worked, or could distinguish between them.

In the end, only two Senate Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, opposed Ms. DeVos, leaving Vice President Mike Pence to cast the tiebreaking vote. Maybe the others figured it wasn’t worth risking Mr. Trump’s wrath . . . . Maybe they couldn’t ignore the $200 million the DeVos family has funneled to Republicans, including campaigns of 10 of the 12 Republican senators on the committee that vetted her.

The tens of thousands of parents and students who called, emailed and signed petitions opposing Ms. DeVos’s confirmation refused to surrender to Mr. Trump. They couldn’t afford to have a billionaire hostile to government run public schools that already underperform the rest of the developed world.

Did anyone who backed this shameful appointment think about them?

The Warlike Unity of Gay Americans Against Trump

A piece in the New Yorker looks at a possible strength that the LGBT community my have in helping to lead the resistance to Der Trumpenführer's animus fueled regime: the fact that we cross all races and economic levels, come from many religious backgrounds,  and span literally all other minority groups.  Add in our allies and we have a network that can help galvanize opposition to Trump's illegitimate presidency.   Other than Muslims, LGBT Americans will likely be among the most targeted groups under the Trump/Pence nightmare, especially given the ascendancy of the Christofascists among the regime's inner circle.  We have an obligation to ourselves and to the future of the nation to make sure that Trump/Pence goes down to rejection and, with luck, impeachment.  The people need to take back their country from the billionaires and would be modern day fascists.  Here are article excerpts:

We have faced institutional oppression for as long as society has existed,” Corey Johnson, a young, gay New York City Council member, said on Saturday afternoon. “Progress is not guaranteed.” He was speaking to the several thousand demonstrators who had gathered outside Manhattan’s Stonewall Inn, the birthplace of the gay-rights movement. The last time such a large crowd converged on that spot, in June, it was to mourn: forty-nine men and women, many of them college-aged Latinos, had just been murdered at Pulse, a gay night club in downtown Orlando; the whole nation seemed to join in solidarity with its vulnerable citizens, even if Donald Trump, seizing on the shooter’s apparent allegiance to ISIS, tweeted that the murders proved him “right on radical Islamic terrorism.” Now, with Trump’s brand of hateful opportunism given the full force of law, the community came together again, to steel itself against threats to come and to protest the progress that has already been rolled back. As Johnson put it, referring to Trump’s anti-Muslim immigration ban, “We will treat injustices done against our neighbors as if they had been done against us.”

Trump’s ascension is driving the gay-rights movement to embrace its greatest natural strength: its extension across lines of race and class. Zeke Stokes, a vice-president at GLAAD, told me, “Our top priority is to make sure that we are locking arms with other parts of the progressive movement,” and Hari Nef, the trans actress and model, led her remarks at the rally with the legend of Marsha P. Johnson, a black trans woman who is said to have thrown the shot glass that started the Stonewall riots. . . . “They don’t know that we are Muslims, we are women, we are transgender, we are Mexican,” Carmelyn Malalis, the city’s commissioner on human rights, told the crowd. “They don’t know that we are united and never leave a brother or sister behind. Not ever.”

Such unity, loving and warlike, is the only defense against an Administration whose treatment of the vulnerable seems, like its whole agenda, to combine pernicious intentions with minimal planning.  . . . The left is sometimes ridiculed for its factionalism—its thicket of nonprofit support systems, its acronym for every gradation of identity. But when you shake one part of that structure, you learn how durably it is fastened to all the others.

The nationwide uprisings of the past weeks—from the Women’s March to the resistance to the immigration ban—have reminded us that, although the people’s power can be gathered by revanchist right-wingers and finance-friendly Democrats, it belongs ultimately to the people themselves.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

Will Ordinary Americans Carry out Inhumane Acts for Trump/Pence?

One of the most frightening things about the atrocities perpetrated by Adolph Hitler and the Nazi regime were the horrors done to people by seemingly otherwise ordinary Germans.  Brutality and inhuman acts that one would never expect in a civilized society were done without flinching. Meanwhile, other Germans claimed to know nothing about the horrors that were being done daily.  A piece from the Baltimore Sun looks at the phenomenon and then looks at some of the inhuman things done by Americans during the first days of Der Trumpenführer - I saw the name on another bog and loved it -  Muslim ban and ask the question that should be haunting decent Americans everywhere: would our friends and neighbors willingly abuse others if they were merely "following orders"?  Add to this the studies that have shown individuals raised in deeply religious fundamentalist homes show far less empathy towards others and we could be facing a nightmare given the ascendancy of the Christofascists and alt-right extremists under Der Trumpenführer.  Here are article highlights:

A week ago, men and women went to work at airports around the United States as they always do. They showered, got dressed, ate breakfast, perhaps dropped off their kids at school. Then they reported to their jobs as federal government employees, where, according to news reports, one of them handcuffed a 5-year-old child, separated him from his mother and detained him alone for several hours at Dulles airport.

At least one other federal employee at Dulles reportedly detained a woman who was traveling with her two children, both U.S. citizens, for 20 hours without food. A relative says the mother was handcuffed (even when she went to the bathroom) and threatened with deportation to Somalia.

At Kennedy Airport, still other federal employees detained and handcuffed a 65-year-old woman traveling from Qatar to visit her son, who is a U.S. citizen and serviceman stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C. The woman was held for more than 33 hours, according to the New York Times, and denied use of a wheelchair.

The men and women who work for the federal government completed these and other tasks and then returned to their families, where perhaps they had dinner and read stories to their children before bedtime.

[N]o would-be autocrat can act alone. As a practical matter, he needs subordinates willing to carry out orders. Of course, neither Donald Trump nor Steve Bannon personally detained any of the more than 100 people held at airports over the weekend pursuant to the administration's executive order on immigration, visitation and travel to the United States. They relied on assistance.

What I mean by that, is that these are, in normal circumstances, people who likely treat their neighbors and co-workers with kindness and do not intentionally seek to harm others. That is chilling, as it is a reminder that authoritarians have no trouble finding the people they need to carry out their acts of cruelty. They do not need special monsters; they can issue orders to otherwise unexceptional people who will carry them out dutifully.

The famous Milgram experiment and subsequent studies suggest that many people will obey instructions from an authority figure, even if it means harming another person. It is also perfectly understandable (which does not mean it is justifiable). How many of us would refuse to follow an instruction from a superior at work? It is natural to want to keep one's job, even if at the price of inflicting cruelty on another human being, even perhaps a child.

It is far easier to do nothing, to trust that, somehow, America's dangerous course will be set right. But this is a dangerous gamble, and in fact an abdication of our responsibility as Americans and indeed as human beings. If we do nothing, that is a choice. It means we accept a government that has demonstrated it is capable of inflicting cruelty on the innocent and defenseless.  What will we do?

More Tuesday Male Beauty

Pence Dodges Question on Anti-LGBT "Religious Freedom" Order

Der Fuhrer is not the only one in his regime who is challenged when it comes to truth and veracity (indeed, the question would seem to be whether there is anyone who isn't a pathological lair).  Which brings me to homophobe and gay hater extraordinaire, Mike Pence.  It is commonly assumed that Trump tapped Pence as his VP choice in order to pander to Christofascists with whom Trump met in June, 2016.  During that meeting, Trump made promises to the leaders of a veritable who's who of anti-gay zealots and religious extremists, none of which bode well for LGBT Americans. High on that list was the passage of legislation and/or executive orders that would grant Christofascists of all walks, in and outside of governmental positions, the right to openly discriminate against LGBT citizens - and others who do not subscribe to their claimed religious beliefs.  On Sunday, Pence, a man with a decades long history of animus towards LGBT citizens (including support for conversion therapy) dissembled on This Week as to the regimes plans to legalize anti-LGBT discrimination.  The Advocate has highlights: 

In an interview aired Super Bowl Sunday, Vice President Mike Pence handed the ball off when asked if he expects President Donald Trump to issue an anti-LGBT so-called religious freedom executive order.

“I think that’ll be the purview of the president,” Pence said when George Stephanopoulos asked him about the possibility of such an order on ABC’s This Week.

Last week a draft of an order with anti-LGBT language circulated in the media; it was first obtained by The Nation. It would allow businesses, nonprofits, and even government employees to discriminate, without repercussions, against anyone who offends certain religious beliefs. The beliefs include opposition to same-sex marriage, any sex outside marriage, transgender identity, and abortion.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer has said there are no plans for such an order right now but has said a variety of orders are always under consideration, therefore leaving the door open. LGBT and civil liberties groups have been quick to decry it, and constitutional scholars have said it likely is beyond the scope of what a president is allowed to do via executive order. But religious right activists are pushing it. It is similar to a pending piece of federal legislation, the First Amendment Defense Act, which Trump has said he would sign if it is passed by Congress.

Pence’s words may ring rather hollow, considering his long record of opposing LGBT rights, both as Indiana governor and earlier as a congressman. And given Trump’s opposition to marriage equality and support for the First Amendment Defense Act, he is not exactly an LGBT ally either.

Eliel Cruz, an LGBT rights and faith activist, told the Washington Blade, “The Trump administration will always choose the beliefs of anti-LGBT evangelicals over the dignity and rights of LGBT people.”

California and President Trump Are Going to War

As is his standard mode operation - and that of many bullies - Donald Trump's approach to anyone and anything that doesn't support his grandiose view of himself and/or his policies is to lash out, attack them/it and/or to claim their positions are false.  Be it polls that show he is the least popular president in modern history, news reporters that run stories on facts that Trump finds inconvenient or diminish to his inflated ego, their are attacked and depicted as liars, false news, or worse. Among Trump's favored targets is the State of California which voted resoundingly for Hillary Clinton, is thriving economically by employing approaches anathema to Trump/GOP failed policies, is on the forefront of environmental protection, and which sends more money to the federal government than it receives in return.  A piece in the Washington Post ooks at Der Fuhrer's vendetta with California.  Here are highlights:

President Trump had harsh words for one of his most fervent opponents during the pre-Super Bowl interview with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly that aired Sunday. Not President Vladimir Putin, mind you, whose alleged unpleasant habit of murdering journalists met with a shrug from the president. No, Trump lashed out at the nation’s largest state, California.

“I just spent the week in California,” O’Reilly said. “As you know, they are now voting on whether they should become a sanctuary state. So California and the U.S.A. are on a collision course. How do you see it?”

“Well, I think it’s ridiculous,” Trump replied. “Sanctuary cities, as you know I’m very much opposed to sanctuary cities. They breed crime, there’s a lot of problems. We have to well defund, we give tremendous amounts of money to California . . . "

We’ll note first of all that sanctuary cities do not “breed crime.” Analysis of FBI data shows that crime in sanctuary cities is generally lower than in non-sanctuary cities. But that’s beside the point.

More importantly, Trump says two things. First, that California is “out of control.” Second, that he doesn’t want to yank federal funding from the state, but he will if he has to.

California is one of the few states where federal funding isn’t that great a point of leverage. In 2015, California generated $405 billion in tax revenue, more than $100 billion more than the next-closest state. It consumes a lot of federal funding, too, mind you. But data from Pew Research for 2014 compared to 2014 IRS data shows that California gives the federal government more than it takes. . . . . Most states take more than they generate in taxes.

What’s more, data from the Tax Foundation indicates that federal funding makes up far less of California’s total state revenue than most other states’. 

Trump is mad about California because voters there overwhelmingly rejected Trump in November. Trump supporters have repeatedly tried to affix an “except California” asterisk to the popular vote result since, were it not for California, Trump would have prevailed on that metric. Saying “except California” has the tricky flaw of equaling “except for 12 percent of the American population,” 

Last week, Trump’s war with California took the form of attacking its public college system. After violent protests erupted on the campus of U.C. Berkeley, Trump suggested that he would pull funding from the school, which a) punishes the wrong party, since it wasn’t as though the school asked people to riot and b) can’t be done by executive order anyway.

On Monday, The Washington Post reported that the most visible manifestation of the California economy — the tech industry — had broadly united to file a joint amicus brief in opposition to Trump’s executive order on immigration. The tech industry employs a lot of immigrants to the United States, so there’s clearly a business motivation to take such a stand.

So this is the Cold Civil War that’s erupted. Trump threatens California’s funding; California threatens to pack up and go. Neither is likely to happen. But still — if you predicted that a president’s relationship with the Golden State would be rockier than his relationship with Russia, I’d like to ask your help with some lottery numbers.

 Trump is simply unfit for office.  #NotMyPresident.

Trump Claims That the Media Covers Up Terror Attacks

Each new day one sees another - or, in some cases, a half dozen or more - new lies emanating  from the White House and its sociopath occupant.  Worse yet, the scale and dangers posed by the lies continues to escalate.  Seemingly, there is no limit to what lies Der Fuhrer, his Minister of Propaganda, Kellyanne Conway, and others like the White House Press Secretary will spew either to confuse or confound average Americans not to mention citizens of other nations. Perhaps most chilling are the lies told about the media where anything displeasing to Der Fuhrer becomes "fake news" and the media is accused of covering up news stories - that actually do not exist - that play to support Trump's paranoia and narcissism.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this very scary trend. Here are excerpts:

The Donald Trump who arrived at MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa on Monday was subdued and dark, promising to keep the United States against “radical Islamic terror” through a strong defense, and accusing the press of willfully refusing to report on terrorist attacks.

But first, as he is wont to do, Trump let his mind drift back to a happier time, . . . . “We had a wonderful election, didn’t we?” the president said as he began his remarks. “And I saw those numbers, and you liked me, and I like you. That’s the way it worked.”

That was about as sunny as things got, although Trump has great praise for U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command, both of which are housed at MacDill. Trump did boast about pressuring Lockheed Martin to knock nine figures off the cost of the F-35, and he took a moment to boost his nominee for a vacancy on the Supreme Court, Judge Neil Gorsuch—though, weirdly, he did not mention Gorsuch’s name.

The threat to the U.S. is great, in Trump’s telling.

“The challenges facing our nation nevertheless are very large. Very, very large,” Trump said. “We’re up against an enemy that celebrates death and totally worships destruction. You’ve seen that. ISIS is on a campaign of genocide, committing atrocities across the word. Radical Islamic terrorists are determined to strike our nation as they did on 9/11, as they did from Boston to Orlando to San Bernardino and all across Europe.”

He continued: “You’ve seen what happened in Paris and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening. It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in may cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”

The last few sentences there are staggering: Trump’s assertion that there are attacks that the press is not reporting, and furthermore is not reporting for political reasons. In fact, the media love reporting on terrorism stories, following the old news adage that “if it bleeds, it leads.”

But never mind that: Just what attacks is Trump claiming have not been covered? He did not name any, and a request to the White House for a list was not returned. It’s a safe bet there are not any. Trump might prefer more frequent, or more salacious, coverage of European attacks, but that’s a different complaint.

Then there is the accusation that the press is intentionally covering up, for some nefarious reason that his audience will understand but need not go stated, a classic example of dogwhistle politics. That’s in keeping with his longstanding assault on the press, though when combined with the implication that they are doing so to undermine the nation’s security, it takes on an even darker shade. 

Once again, the nation is left to ask whether Trump’s wild deviation from reality is intentionally misleading or simply sloppy and careless. The natural comparison is to comments last week by senior Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, who claimed that Trump’s immigration executive order would have prevented the “Bowling Green massacre” that was not covered. There was, of course, no such massacre, . . .