Now Trump is hating on public schools. Naturally: schools are there to make guys like him a profit.

If for some reason you haven’t been clear about what President Trump thinks about traditional public schools, consider what he said about them in his State of the Union address Tuesday night.

There was this: “For too long, countless American children have been trapped in failing government schools.”

That’s cute. It makes public schools sound like gulags.

Trump spent most of his education-related comments on the subject of “school choice,” which he and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have put at the top of their education agenda. DeVos has said her chief priority was expanding alternatives to traditional public schools, which she once called “a dead end.”

A dead end because they don’t make anyone rich. Every human activity should make a profit for someone.

Ugh.

Repeat to infinity and beyond.

Trump, Limbaugh, medal, of freedom.

There was Mother Teresa, “a heroine of our times,” and Rosa Parks, “a living icon for freedom in America.” Elie Wiesel kept “watch against the forces of hatred,” while Jackie Robinson “struck a mighty blow for equality, freedom, and the American way of life.”

I wouldn’t have led with Anjezë Bojaxhiu aka Mother Teresa, since she was an enemy of freedom and not the friend to the poor she was made out to be; the other three are much better illustrations of the point. There are humanitarians, and then there are their opposites. Rush Limbaugh is their opposite. Limbaugh despises humanitarianism and mocks it for fun and profit.

Now, joining them and other recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award bestowed by the government on a civilian, is Rush Limbaugh, “the greatest fighter and winner that you will ever meet.”

Spoken like a true bully. What’s the highest value? Fightingandwinning!

“Rush Limbaugh, thank you for your decades of tireless devotion to our country,” Trump said.

Bollocks. Limbaugh got rich doing what he does; it has nothing to do with devotion to our country or to anything else that’s not Rush Limbaugh.

But before first lady Melania Trump could finish draping the medal around Limbaugh’s neck, critics of the talk-show host began to recirculate online some of the most derogatory and inflammatory remarks he’s made over the course of his career against women (whom he has regularly labeled “feminazis”), black people, Native Americans, immigrants and the disabled community, among others.

(Why “the disabled community” but not “the immigrant community”? Commonalities are not the same thing as communities. Bad journalistic habit.)

They pointed to the time Limbaugh — a divisive media figure who has been accused of racist and sexist remarks — called Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” because of her support of women’s access to birth control. Or when he promoted the debunked birther claim* that former president Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Or when he questioned why Native Americans would be upset about their forced removal and ethnic cleansing since “they all have casinos.” Or when he compared asylum seekers coming to the U.S. border to the invasion of Normandy. Or when he said that actor Michael J. Fox was faking the symptoms of his Parkinson’s disease.

*the lie

…

Limbaugh’s fans and supporters, on the other hand, said it was fitting that such a role model would get public recognition. Trump campaign spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany thanked the host for having “inspired a generation.” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) agreed, calling the honor “well-deserved.” Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, ripped Democrats for not rising to their feet in the House chamber for Limbaugh.

Yes, why wouldn’t they leap to their feet to applaud an honor given to a guy who makes a lot of money insulting and jeering at the underdogs of the world?

It never stops.

You couldn’t make it up. A woman is invited to give a lecture, and a man takes to Twitter to wonder how he can “proceed” in this tragic emergency.

Yes, bub, it is indeed a matter of freedom of speech and no-platforming, as well as a matter of sexism and misogyny, a matter of bullying and silencing, a matter of meddling and shutting down.

I wonder how much Christopher Lloyd would like it if he were invited to give a lecture at a university and another academic denounced him on Twitter and mused aloud about how to prevent him from giving that lecture. Would he think that was perfectly all right because he still has “numerous platforms” which he “uses daily”?

Note the unconscious sexism of that bit. He’s repulsed that Kathleen Stock has ways to say things in public and that she uses them, daily. The hussy! How dare she! Why doesn’t she know her place?!

It just never stops.

Rush Limbaugh said what now?

Just five years ago, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh went on a pro-tobacco rant on his show, during which he downplayed the risks of smoking, said it’s “a myth” that secondhand smoke causes illness or death and argued that smokers aren’t at any greater risk than people who “eat carrots.”

Smoking and eating carrots are not mutually exclusive.

“Smokers aren’t killing anybody,” the conservative host declared in an April 2015 segment of the “Rush Limbaugh Show,” then argued that tobacco users should be thanked because their purchases generate tax dollars that fund children’s health care programs.

“I’m just saying there ought to be a little appreciation shown for them, instead of having them hated and reviled,” Limbaugh said. “I would like a medal for smoking cigars, is what I’m saying.”

So smoking is a right-wing cause? People on the left are all stupid smoking-avoiders because it’s so politically correct, and good honest folks on the right all smoke like chimneys because God and country and tobacco? Is that it?

Fast forward to Monday, when Limbaugh, 69, went on his radio show to announce that he had been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. Limbaugh said he has begun treatment for the cancer, but didn’t go into details, the Daily News reported. He only said he had noticed shortness of breath close to his birthday on Jan. 12, then had two professionals diagnose the cancer on Jan. 20.

I wonder if he’ll find a way to blame the left for that too. We messed with his pleasure in smoking, and we made him have lung cancer.

On his show, Limbaugh talked about the glamour of smoking and how “cool” it was, the Daily News reported.

That is neither cute nor funny nor politically incorrect. It’s just bad. Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known, and smoking is not healthy, so using a popular radio show to promote its coolness is bad. Very bad.

This isn’t like other protests. This is the protesters threatening, browbeating, and assaulting people attending a discussion of women’s rights. It’s mostly men threatening and assaulting mostly women.

The woman in the pink hat is holding a sign that says “women’s voices matter,” and a large man lunges at her and shoves her. So…women’s voices don’t matter? They’re going with that? That’s what they want to tell us?

The “protesters” hop up and down screaming “TERFs out!”

They’re not protesting exploitation or oppression or injustice…they’re protesting women who are trying to defend their rights against men who demand – with menaces – admission to the category “women” despite the brute fact that they are men. That’s not a glorious cause, that’s not a people’s flag, that’s not freedom, that’s not no child shall go hungry, it’s not anything resembling a path to a better world. It’s men bullying and pushing and demanding and punishing. It’s the same old boss just like the same old boss. It’s ugly, it’s angry, it’s mean, it would stamp on you if it could.

More on the “have you ever considered doing sex work?” question:

Members of Parliament were in the House of Commons for debate on a Conservative motion seeking to condemn the decision by the Parole Board of Canada to release a convicted murderer on day parole in Quebec City and allow him to “meet women, but only to meet [his] sexual needs.”

So that’s a question for conservatives? And MPs on the left think it’s fine to send male murderers out to get their “sexual needs” met? I’m on the left, but I lean toward thinking women don’t exist to meet the “sexual needs” of murderers (or anyone else). I lean toward thinking women aren’t a kind of implement for the use of men.

Conservatives have hammered the government over the past week on why the case managers for the killer allowed him to search out women to fulfill his “sexual needs” and Public Safety Minister Bill Blair said last week an investigation is taking place.

Why only conservatives? The NDP think that approach is just fine?

“I would ask the honourable member to consider listening to the voices of sex workers,” said NDP MP Laurel Collins, who represents the riding of Victoria.

All sex workers are pleased to have murders on day parole sent to them for getting the ol’ needs met?

“Sex workers are saying that sex work is work, and I also ask the honourable member if he considers the Harper government’s decision to implement Bill 36, which criminalized the work environments, the establishments that sex workers go to to feel safe, that criminalized their ability to hire security, if he acknowledges that this is a factor in this death and many others.”

Pimps, you mean?

So pimps are there to protect the women from murderers?

I don’t think so. Pimps are there to take a cut.

In response to Collins, Viersen said: “I would just respond to that by asking the honourable member across the way if it’s an area of work that she has ever considered and if that is an appropriate –”

His remark immediately prompted calls of “shame on you” from other members in the House of Commons.

I don’t think so. I think he has a point. I think there is a real issue about “privileged” women (and men of course) promoting “sex work” who would never do it themselves and would likely not be thrilled if their daughters took it up. I think that’s what he was talking about, and it is a relevant question. The “sex work” performed by women who meet the “needs” of men is not work like factory or farm or transportation work.

Good question.

On a completely unrelated subject, what does pole dancing have to do with football? And what does football have to do with pole dancing?

Being woke on the cheap – the very, very cheap.

It’s about those pronouns.

If everyone stated their pronouns, allowing those with a non-traditional gender identity to blend into the crowd, the quality of life of countless people could improve markedly, with negligible inconvenience caused to everyone else.

I am a cisgender, straight, white, male, middle-class Tory. If even I can muster enough self-awareness to recognise the uniqueness of others’ experiences and make small changes to the way I behave as a result, such as adding “he/him” to my social media bios, then you definitely can too. There is no basis for defying this that is both rational and compassionate.

It’s so easy – aka cheap. He can go on being Tory and thus ignore all the material difficulties that hinder people who are not middle-class and white and male, but at the same time he can “state his pronouns” and thus feel like a good conscientious person.

To refuse flat-out to even entertain the notion that others might have experiences and perspectives that you, an unimaginably privileged cisgender person, does not is indicative of calamitous levels of single-mindedness and bigotry. An unwillingness to do something so simple as stating your pronouns irrespective of its demonstrably momentous positive effect suggests a stark absence of humility and compassion.

Ah yes, we unimaginably privileged cisgender women, how dare we not “state our pronouns” in solidarity with men who want to “identify as” women and steal all their athletic prizes.

Privileged people like myself who identify as cisgender can never even begin to comprehend the experiences of by those who do not. 

I begin to suspect this is satire. Why is this shiny prosperous dude in such a lather about the agonies of trans people while he’s so indifferent to every other kind of marginalization there is?

Jason Reed is a student, freelance writer and treasurer of the LSE Conservative Society.

Something in the water at LSE?

Another filing:

White House Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President Jared Kushner violated the Hatch Act during a CNN interview on Sunday, according to a complaint filed today by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) with the Office of Special Counsel (OSC). Throughout the interview, Kushner advocated on behalf of the Trump campaign while appearing in his official government capacity on behalf of the Trump administration.

The Hatch Act prohibits executive branch employees from “us[ing their] official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.” Throughout the interview, Fareed Zakaria and Kushner openly discussed Kushner’s strategy to re-elect President Trump, while Kushner was identified in his government capacity.

Using the office to campaign for another term of having the office is an unfair advantage, which is why Congress passed a law forbidding it.

“Jared Kushner, like so many other senior officials in the Trump administration, has shown a complete disregard for ethics laws with a pattern of continuous violations,” said CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder. “The tone is set at the top. President Trump has made clear that he will not follow the rules himself or discipline those in his administration who do not, and his top advisors are acting accordingly.”

“Kushner’s blatantly political behavior while acting in his official capacity is a clear violation of the Hatch Act. The rules are in place to prevent the powers of the federal government from being used to unfairly benefit any candidate, and it is about time this administration started to follow them ,” said Bookbinder.  

About time? Nah. Three-plus years past time.

Since President Trump’s inauguration, CREW complaints have led to reprimands of an unprecedented number of Trump administration officials, including Dan Scavino, Nikki Haley, Stephanie Grisham, Raj Shah, Jessica Ditto, Madeleine Westerhout, Helen Aguirre Ferre, Alyssa Farah, Jacob Wood, Kellyanne Conway and Lynne Patton. Following CREW’s complaints against Kellyanne Conway, OSC took the unprecedented step of recommending Conway be removed from federal service in a scathing report detailing her numerous ethics violations. 

This one will be filed with all the others, of course.

No free press for you.

President Donald Trump’s targeting of CNN is moving to yet another arena: The annual presidential lunch with television network anchors.

CNN anchors are being excluded from Tuesday’s lunch, three sources said on Monday night.

Do they have a reasonable expectation to be included? Yes, they do.

Trump, like presidents before him, typically invites anchors from all the major networks to dine with him at the White House in advance of his State of the Union address. The lunch conversation is considered off the record, but it gives the anchors a sense of the president’s state of mind before they anchor SOTU coverage. “Despite Trump’s persistent attacks on the news media, he’s kept up such traditions,” Politico pointed out last year.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer attended last year’s lunch. Blitzer has been attending these lunches longer than almost any other anchor — 20 years in a row.

So the “not you” is pointed and spiteful. It’s not part of Trump’s job to be spiteful.

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham did not respond to a request for comment on Monday night.

Of course she didn’t. She serves the spiteful toad.

The president has directed his ire at CNN dozens of times over the past three years. He has declined all of CNN’s requests to sit down with him for an interview and has denigrated both the network as a whole and some of its individual journalists. His administration also suspended chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta’s press pass until a federal court ruled in CNN’s favor.

We’re more broken every day.

Ah yes, a remarkable achievement.

Laurel Hubbard kept alive her hopes of competing at Tokyo 2020 when she won the women’s super-heavyweight contest at the Roma World Cup, the first Olympic qualifying event of the year.

It would be a remarkable achievement should she make it because Hubbard, who will be 42 on February 9, ruptured ligaments in her left elbow at the 2018 Commonwealth Games in the Gold Coast and thought her career was over.

But not all that remarkable given the fact that Hubbard is a man and he’s competing against women.

Hubbard, who competed at national level as Gavin Hubbard before transitioning in her thirties, may find that her fate is not entirely in her own hands.

The woman who took the Commonwealth Games and Arafura Games titles, 19-year-old Feagaiga Stowers of Samoa, needs to be in the top eight of the final rankings to take an automatic qualification place for Hubbard to have a realistic chance.

Should Stowers make it, Hubbard would battle it out with Charisma Amoe-Tarrant, formerly of Nauru and now competing for Australia, for the Oceania slot.

In other words Hubbard hopes to take a slot away from a woman.

From Tatsuya Ishida:

So Trump doesn’t know where Kansas City is. I’m sure lots of people don’t, and the name does suggest that it’s in Kansas, but still, a president should know things like that. It’s not a random small town, it’s an important city in the Midwest or West or Plains States or whatever you want to call it – in the Heartland, if you like. It has a lot of cultural chops. Presidents should have a decent knowledge of US geography.

But does it really matter? Yes.

But here’s why Trump doesn’t get a pass. Because he and his administration have made a HUGE point of picking out the slip-ups of past politicians and questioning people over their supposed lack of knowledge of geography.

He talked about Obama’s flubs, he talked about Hillary Clinton’s purported imminent collapse, he talks about Biden’s flubs.

At a campaign rally in November 2019, Trump said this of Biden:

“They have him all freaked out because he makes a mistake every time he speaks. I can just see these handlers because they’re handlers like they use on horses. ‘Alright, get him off now, he’s been up there long enough!’ So they’re screaming, ‘Get off! Get off! Sleepy Joe, get off the stage! Please! Please, Joe, you’re doing fine. Joe, you’re doing fine. You’re doing fine.'”

And at a campaign rally in Milwaukee just last month, Trump again mocked Biden for forgetting which state he was speaking in; “When you do that, you can’t really recover,” Trump concluded.

And then…

Trump’s own Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reportedly challenged an NPR reporter to find Ukraine on a blank map after she asked him some questions regarding the President’s interactions with the country.

And she found it at once, so since then he’s been lying about it. (I wasn’t there. I didn’t see her find it. But come on – she has advanced degrees in international relations. It’s not like trying to locate a particular city on a blank map, or even one of the Baltic countries. She says she pointed it out at once and I believe her.)

The reason stuff like Trump’s Kansas flub can’t be totally ignored is because if the shoe [were] on the other foot — and it has been! — we know that Trump not only doesn’t ignore it, but seeks to make the flub some sort of sign of either declining mental ability or a lack of intelligence.

When he’s always the stupidest person in the room.

Morning Star reports on the WPUK meeting on Saturday:

Woman’s Place UK (WPUK) know better than most how challenging it can be, simply being able to gather together to discuss women’s rights. Many of their meetings have suffered intimidation, threats of violence, even a bomb scare.

A group of around 30 protesters did make a brief appearance as delegates arrived, claiming that the organisers were trans-exclusionary.

How dare women gather to talk about women’s rights.

In the packed hall, Pragna Patel, co-founder of Southall Black Sisters, helped kick-start the day, telling the crowd: “What a hopeful moment in history we have reached as feminists — and I know you’re thinking ‘what is she talking about’?”

Her optimism sprang, she went on, “from the fact that, all over the world, women are leading an unmistakably secular resistance against tyranny, misogyny and oppression. There is a new kind of feminism stirring in the air … women are on the rise, demanding a new kind of feminist citizenship, based not on identity but political values.

“It is exciting because it feels different … waves of ordinary, marginalised and poor women are rising up to demand economic equality and justice, and to prevent their leaders from ripping up well-crafted constitutions born out of long and painful struggles for freedom.”

On the minus side, said Patel, “we haven’t yet found a way of getting rid of the cul-de-sac of identity politics [which] muzzles voices of dissent from within. If we are not careful, we will find ourselves sliding towards regressive politics, that reinvigorates patriarchy and inequality whilst appearing to be progressive.”

This is especially true, true x a million, when the “identity” in question is based on nothing but a feeling, and is deployed to appropriate the materially real identity of marginalized people, i.e. women.

Joanna Cherry, QC and SNP MP for Edinburgh South West, praised “the bravery of people at UCL in holding this conference — though it is ludicrous that it requires bravery.”

…

She expressed “sadness about the way in which the LGBT+ movement has become fragmented over a resistance to talking about the true meaning of equal rights.

“I really believe that women’s rights are human rights, and I strongly believe in equal rights for everyone, and of course that includes trans people. But it has never before been part of the movement for equal rights that one group’s trumps another’s.”

Naturally enough, since a movement for equal rights that claims one group’s rights trump another’s is not a movement for equal rights. Not treating Xs as inferiors does not take away anyone’s rights; there is no such right as the right to treat Xs as inferiors. It all hinges on how one defines rights.

Maya Forstater, who lost her job at a think tank after tweeting about the difference between sex and gender identity, said: “My mother’s generation found the words to talk about the unfairness between the way that men and women are treated in society.

But our daughters are being told that it is unkind and exclusionary to even state the material reality that women are female, that being a woman is not a feeling, that being a woman is not a costume; it is not something you can identify out of, or identify into.”

…

Journalist and campaigner Julie Bindel addressed particularly younger women at the event, “for whom things are hellish right now, but also full of possibilities.

…

This was not a revival per se, she said: “We have always had a women’s movement. But we’ve seen that, in the past couple of decades, young women who would describe themselves as feminists got dragged into the neoliberal politics of the individual, where they dismiss any necessity of collectivism, where they would not have it that focusing on ridiculous, meaningless identities would get them absolutely nowhere.

Identity politics, without the politics, is what we’ve got now.”

Read the whole thing.

Yes but also a bit of no.

I suppose it’s probably true that he thinks “the base will love this” with every insult, but I also think he does it because he likes it, and that that’s who he is. He’s a profoundly nasty man, one who lashes out in rage at anybody who annoys him, no matter how close or loyal. Nastiness aka cruelty is at the core of his being, and one of his favorite activities.

It does appeal to the base, though, and how depressing is that? A hefty fraction of the population is thrilled and amused and energized by deliberate hostile cruelty and bullying from a gilded real estate fraud who frauded his way into the presidency.

At any rate – I certainly agree with Walter Shaub that the ethics part is far from secondary. Trump is an actively bad human being, and that can’t possibly be secondary.

It’s all about the coastal elites. Never mind soaring inequality, never mind low wages and de-unionization and crumbling schools, none of that matters, the real issue is coastal elites who don’t paint names on their barns. Well not names exactly; one name. But let’s pretend we mean names in general.

Would Nick Zerwas have said the same about, say, a grandchild of sharecroppers who painted OBAMA on the roof of a barn?

Why yes, this is what we’ve been saying all along.

I love having “transitioned to female” but oh gee I do miss the benefits of male privilege in business/career matters. My technology clients pay attention to me when I use my dudely real name and gosh darn it I miss that.

It’s so unfair that I have to think about this!

/sarcasm

Image via Lady Mondegreen