Oh, oops, it turns out that the teacher who was “pleasantly surprised” by the extra $1.50 a week…
…wasn’t.
So uh, @CBSNews tracked down the secretary who got the $1.50 @SpeakerRyan was so excited about and she doesn't seem super thrilled. pic.twitter.com/qZsIyJol07
— Tim Hogan (@timjhogan) February 5, 2018
Now Trump is saying it’s “treason” to refrain from applauding when he speaks.
President Trump on Monday accused Democrats who did not clap during his State of the Union address of being un-American and even treasonous. His remarks came in a rambling, discursive speech at a factory in Ohio, during which he celebrated his revival of the American economy as the stock market plummeted by more than 1,000 points.
“Can we call that treason?” Mr. Trump said of the stone-faced reaction of Democrats to his speech. “Why not? I mean, they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.”
Stupid pile of hamburger and polyester. Despising Donald Trump is not at all the same thing as not loving our country. On the contrary, I think for most of us it’s because we value the good parts of our country (while we long to see the back of the bad parts, such as Donald Trump) that we despise The Orange Pretender so much.
But even more than that – how fucking dare he call it “treason” to choose not to applaud him. He could call it bad manners at a State of the Union if he liked (but then we could all point out his own instances of bad manners, which would clog all the communication pipes for a decade), but not treason. He doesn’t get to pretend that he and the country are one and the same, and he doesn’t get to pretend that worship of him is mandatory. He’d put us all in camps if he could but he can’t. Vile toad.
And by the way what about his “love” for our country? If he loved it would he blot its record the way he is? I think not.
Mr. Trump was speaking during a visit to a company near Cincinnati that makes pneumatic and hydraulic cylinders. The company, Sheffer Corporation, awarded each of its 126 employees a one-time bonus of $1,000 after the passage of the tax cut, and the White House clearly hoped to use it to drive home the message of economic health in last week’s State of the Union speech.
“Your paychecks are going way up,” a beaming president said to this more friendly audience. “Your taxes are going way down.”
Yeah right, factory workers’ paychecks are going “way up” because of the Republicans’ tax cut. It might be as much as 75 cents a week for the skilled workers.
As Mr. Trump patted himself on the back for the tax cut, he went after the Democrats for opposing the $1.5 trillion legislation. He delivered a lengthy digression on the State of the Union address, noting that Democrats sat on their hands as he ticked off one measure of success for the country after another.
“It got to a point where I really didn’t even want to look up too much during the speech over to that side because honestly, it was bad energy,” Mr. Trump said.
Poor guy. He’s always so full of positive energy for everyone around him and for all of us, yet what does he get in return? Stony faces and no applause. It breaks the heart.
“Even on positive news, really positive news like that, they were like death and un-American,” he said, repeating, “Un-American. Somebody said treasonous. I mean, yeah, I guess, why not.”
That “somebody” was Donald Trump, but whatevs.
The Times uses the normal restrained newspaper language to describe the infantile out of control disgusting president.
President Trump accused a top Democratic lawmaker on Monday of being “one of the biggest liars and leakers in Washington,” calling Representative Adam Schiff of California “Little Adam Schiff” and accusing him of illegally leaking confidential information from the House Intelligence Committee.
In an early-morning tweet, Mr. Trump ominously said that Mr. Schiff “must be stopped,” though he did not elaborate.
The president’s insult came as Mr. Schiff is expected to call for a vote on Monday afternoon for the Intelligence Committee to release a Democratic rebuttal to the classified memo that the panel’s Republicans released on Friday, which accuses federal law enforcement officials of abusing their powers to spy on a former Trump campaign official.
Etc etc etc, as if it were all quite normal. It’s not normal. This disgusting childish spoiled-rotten bullying is not normal. This loathsome red-faced insult-spewing despot is not normal.
Also Trump today:
Little Adam Schiff, who is desperate to run for higher office, is one of the biggest liars and leakers in Washington, right up there with Comey, Warner, Brennan and Clapper! Adam leaves closed committee hearings to illegally leak confidential information. Must be stopped!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2018
This disgusting man is head of state.
This is disgusting. Never once did I hear President Bush refer to a Member of Congress with such offensive language in private, much less in public. Decent people simply don't behave this way. https://t.co/Fl10S9NsEJ
— Richard W. Painter (@RWPUSA) February 5, 2018
https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/960592929575391233
Originally a comment by iknklast on Genius shmenius.
While at a play this weekend, I found myself wondering something I have wondered frequently: Why is it that men dressed as women is considered hilarious and campy, while women dressed as men can be taken seriously and not laughed at or mocked?
Besides the obvious answers about men being default, and sissy, and all that, one thing struck me in this performance that I think says a lot: The men playing women were playing it to the hilt. They were dressed ridiculously, they simpered, they had foolish wigs, they posed “coquettishly” in a very exaggerated manner. The women playing men just…played men. They put on the outfit, they did the part, they didn’t butch it up, they didn’t exaggerate stereotypical male characteristics. They just played the role.
This, I think, is another aspect of that whole misogynistic thing that happens in the entertainment world. I have long found it uncomfortable when men played women and now I realize why – because they play us like some sort of alien being who is strange and unfamiliar, and very, very silly. When women play men, I can enjoy the show (if it is good in other ways) because they do not go out of their way to make themselves “macho” or do anything to exaggerate characteristics – unless the script calls for that because a character is a woman playing a man and doing it badly.
So much of entertainment is centered around the male as the norm, the female as the outlier. The male as the doer, the female as the receiver. The male as the leader, the female as the follower. And the most exaggerated, June Cleaver-esque distortions of woman’s reality.
I have a plan, and I hope I can stick to it. If you know anyone who is a creative type, or you yourself are a creative type, please join me. Maybe we can create a website, or something, that could send this around the world (I’m sorry, I have no idea how to send this around the world; I don’t do Facebook, and I have no idea how to get the message out). I plan to write something feminist – play, poem, short story, or essay – for every single day of Woman’s History Month. Every day. An entire work (which is why I do not say novel – I can write a 10-minute play in one day, but I have never yet managed to write a novel in one day).
I think women need to assert themselves in the entertainment world – maybe even take it over. The men have been in control too long.
If anyone wants to get this plan moving beyond my own little corner in my own little room on the second story of my own little house in my own little state, feel free to promote the idea, boost it, steal it, whatever – just, if you steal it, allow me to participate. That is all I ask.
Trump this morning:
The Democrats are pushing for Universal HealthCare while thousands of people are marching in the UK because their U system is going broke and not working. Dems want to greatly raise taxes for really bad and non-personal medical care. No thanks!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2018
UK Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt:
I may disagree with claims made on that march but not ONE of them wants to live in a system where 28m people have no cover. NHS may have challenges but I’m proud to be from the country that invented universal coverage – where all get care no matter the size of their bank balance https://t.co/YJsKBAHsw7
— Jeremy Hunt (@Jeremy_Hunt) February 5, 2018
In the UK even the Tories don’t attack the principle of a national health, at least not in public statements.
Theresa May has rebuked Donald Trump over his claim the NHS is failing, publicly backing her health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, after he tweeted disagreement with the US president’s view.
The response from May – who generally seeks to avoid criticising Trump – came after the president condemned Democrat plans for a universal healthcare system by noting in a tweet Saturday’s protest march in London demanding more NHS funding.
Democratic plans. Not Democrat plans; “Democrat” is not the adjective; the adjective is Democratic. Using “Democrat” as the adjective is a calculated insult from the other side, and it’s also illiterate.
Asked whether May backed Hunt’s opinion, her spokesman said: “The prime minister is proud of having an NHS which is free at the point of delivery.
Glosswitch at the New Statesman takes issue with the way “genius” male movie-makers get a pass for obvious misogyny in their movies because Genius. Are they even Genius? she asks.
One of the many ways in which abusive men get away with terrible things is because we’re supposed to respect their genius (and assume that misogyny is somehow a necessary part of it). Right now we’re calling time on the misogyny, but why can’t we call time on the perception of genius too?
…
Men who don’t like women – and there are an awful lot of them – frequently make art that a male-dominated establishment considers to be amazing, but which a high proportion of women consider to be crap. You didn’t know this? That’s because up till now we haven’t said.
Why haven’t we said? Partly because of the hipster aura around guys like Tarentino.
Just as the “best” postmodern theory tends to be appallingly written in order to fool us that the difficulty is in the ideas, the nihilism and misogyny of the “best” male directors is so glaringly obvious we end up assuming we’ve missed the hidden message (so we use “hyper-reality” as a posh way of describing unimaginative exaggeration). The real creativity isn’t in Manhattan or Inglourious Basterds; it’s in the imaginative contortions critics have gone through to make these films seem more than the sum of their parts.
[jumps up waving hand] I’ve considered Manhattan misogynist all along – misogynist, and bad, and self-admiring.
There’s nothing unsophisticated in recognising that an industry mired in sexism will produce art that is tainted by sexist beliefs. There’s nothing childish or bourgeois about calling time on representations of the human condition which fail to accommodate half the human race. For too long genius has been defined as male, far removed from such petty concerns as granting consideration to the female gaze. This isn’t just unfair; it’s dull.
Time to say good-bye to hipster misogyny.
Princess Ivanka and Marco Rubio have an awesome new plan for Princess Ivanka’s pet project of family leave. It’s so genius. What you do is, you tell people to pay for it out of their savings, and then they can have it! The CEO and the WalMart employee alike can have paid leave if they pay for it with their own money! It only costs about $1.50 a week, right? And people are getting these huge raises of $1.50 a week thanks to the tax cut – except for CEOs and similar who are getting like $10,000 a week – so it all works perfectly.
Marco Rubio is starting to strategize with Ivanka Trump to win over skeptical Republicans on a traditionally Democratic issue: paid family leave.
Capitalizing on President Donald Trump’s endorsement of the idea in his State of the Union address, Rubio is trying to marshal Republicans behind a plan that would neither impose a mandate on employers nor raise taxes to pay for it — two hurdles that have long halted the GOP from embracing paid family leave.
And they finally hit on it! Make the people who want the leave pay for it! And go right on calling it “paid family leave” at the same time!
Rubio has barely started crafting a paid leave bill, much less a broader legislative strategy. But he envisions an idea that has recently gained traction in conservative circles: allowing people to draw Social Security benefits when they want to take time off for a new baby or other family-related matters, and then delay their checks when they hit retirement age.
For instance, a person who would begin receiving full benefits when he or she turns 67 years old but wants to take six weeks of paid leave wouldn’t draw Social Security checks until six weeks after his or her 67th birthday.
It’s practically FDR-level progressive, yeah?
“That’s a new idea for Republicans who still identify it as something that comes out of the left,” Rubio said of paid family leave. “Forcing companies to provide it is perhaps an idea that finds its genesis on the left, but the notion that pregnancy should not be a bankruptcy-eliciting event is one that I think all Americans should be supportive.”
I don’t know, it seems kind of scary-lefty for Republicans to say use your own savings to keep from going bankrupt when a baby turns up. Shouldn’t people be made to give half of the money to the nearest CEO to balance things out?
Rubio and Ivanka Trump have recently exchanged emails about paid family leave. And in his Senate office in late January, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) also privately pitched the concept to the president’s daughter, who gave it a warm reception, according to one person familiar with the meeting.
Yaaaaay paid family leave for all, paid out of their own Social Security! Utopia at last!
Rubio argues the overall plan would benefit those with lower incomes, since they’re less likely to work for companies that proactively offer paid family leave.
Of course, they also won’t have much in their Social Security accounts, because it’s based on income, but oh well – they should have thought of that before they decided to be low income.
Speaking of the difference between saying insults and violence are the same thing and saying they are related…Eve Wiseman at the Guardian starts a piece on Jo Brand with that subject:
It was early in November and, responding to a headline about an MP taking his personal trainer to the cinema, Ian Hislop had chuckled: “Some of this is not ‘high-level’ crime, is it?” But Jo Brand, hosting, didn’t smile. The temperature changed quite suddenly. “If I can just say,” she began, “as the only representative of the female gender here today – I know it’s not high-level, but it doesn’t have to be ‘high-level’ for women to feel under siege in somewhere like the House of Commons. Actually, for women, if you’re constantly being harassed, even in a small way, that builds up, and that wears you down.” There was a pause. Then the audience started cheering.
See how that works? She doesn’t say they’re the same, and she says that doesn’t mean they don’t both matter. Too bad Katie Roiphe can’t see that not very obscure point.
Today, Brand, a woman who refuses to be described as a national treasure, preferring “national disgrace”, says she didn’t plan to say a word. “I’m a real hectorer usually – it was lucky I didn’t shout, because otherwise it wouldn’t have taken the wind out of everyone’s sails in the same way. It had an impact.” She says this as if it was a surprise but, of course, Brand, now 60, has been making an impact for decades, first with her monotone standup about men and weight (“I read that book Fat Is A Feminist Issue, got a bit desperate halfway through and ate it”) and today for her dry contributions to primetime TV where, as well presenting the sister programme to The Great British Bake Off, she is often the lone woman on a panel of men.
I hadn’t heard of her before. Clearly a big mistake.
One of Brand’s small pleasures is an hour on Mumsnet. Partly because of the usernames. “My favourite is ‘EatShitDerek’. I’m dying to know the story behind that one.” Partly because she’s a mother, of two teenage girls. And partly because she feels it’s a good reflection of people’s attitudes to controversial topics. “I understand the generational gap in feminist thinking, but the problem comes when the conversations are shut down – they need to be discussed. As a nurse, for instance, I learned that five times as many black people were diagnosed as schizophrenic than white people, and I wanted to know why. You can’t explore difficult questions without offending some people. So I had to admit I was coming from a point of ignorance, and then start a conversation.”
She worries about “no-platforming”.
“If older feminists’ opinions are suppressed, where do we go next? They did a lot of work to move women forward, they can’t be forgotten. But the anger that appears when people do try to talk – even around something as gentle as Caroline Criado-Perez’s plan to put a woman on the £10 note. She got death and rape threats. Who are these people threatening her, and why are they so angry?”
One evening, she was compering an awards ceremony, and a single advertising agency was winning every prize. When they inevitably won the final award, Brand rolled her eyes into the microphone, and tutted: “Not them again.” The crowd laughed, but when the agency’s CEO arrived on stage to receive his trophy, he whispered in her ear: “I always knew you weren’t funny, but I never realised what a cunt you were.”
“He did it to humiliate me, and it worked – I felt like I was shrinking. But then I took the microphone back and told the audience what he’d said. And I’d never heard 1,500 people gasp before. These bullies are lurking around every corner, but it’s worse when they’re anonymous online – at least in print you know where it’s coming from.”
Huh. What was that again about how “cunt” is not a misogynist insult in the UK? The CEO doesn’t seem to see it that way, nor does Jo Brand, nor does that audience of 1500 people.
Katie Roiphe is enlightening us again on How Feminism Has Gone Off the Rails™.
I have a long history with this feeling of not being able to speak. In the early Nineties, death threats were phoned into Shakespeare and Company, an Upper West Side bookstore where I was scheduled to give a reading from my book The Morning After.That night, in front of a jittery crowd and a sprinkling of police, I read a passage comparing the language in the date-rape pamphlets given out on college campuses to Victorian guides to conduct for young ladies. When I read at universities, students who considered themselves feminists shouted me down. It was an early lesson in the chilling effect of feminist orthodoxy.
This, incidentally, is why it’s so annoying that people keep calling her “second wave.” She was an undergraduate then, and her book was her introduction to the world. “Second wave” was not the early 90s. Katie Roiphe was part of the backlash against the feminist renaissance that started in the late 60s, which some people call the second wave. I know I’ve said that before but people do keep mixing up their decades.
Substantively, Roiphe says feminism is too angry, way too angry.
The widely revered feminist Rebecca Solnit made a related argument in a 2014 interview, speaking in the immediate wake of California’s Isla Vista mass shooting. “I think it’s important that we look at all this stuff together,” she said. “It begins with these microaggressions; it ends with rape and murder.” Solnit is not arguing literally that all arrogant men will go on to sexual assault. But by connecting condescending men and rapists as part of the same wellspring of male contempt for women, she renders the idea of proportion irrelevant, and lends an alluring drama to the fight against mansplaining. She gives a gloss of mainstream respectability and intellectual cachet to the dangerous idea that distinctions between Weinstein and a man who looks down someone’s shirt don’t ultimately matter.
Bollocks. Looking at them together and connecting them is not saying they are the same thing; Solnit was not saying that distinctions among them don’t matter. Hatred of and contempt for women is a large field, and we can talk about that without saying that the smaller insults are the same thing as physical violence.
I am not trying to suggest that the list makers don’t understand the difference in scale between leering and assault, but rather that the blurring of common (if a little sleazy) behavior and serious sexual harassment reveals a lot about how they think.
But again, it’s not a blurring. Saying they are related is not saying they are the same thing. She’s not making a real argument here, she’s just echoing the usual conservative “calm down, dear, it’s not that bad” riposte.
Then there’s the “what about the men” section and then that’s all I can stomach for now.
Adam Schiff explains the creation of the wall between the presidency and the Justice Department:
In the run-up to the release of a deliberately misleading memo, some Republicans hyped the underlying scandal as “worse than Watergate.” When it was published, however, it delivered none of the salacious evidence of systemic abuse that it promised—only a cherry-picking of information from a single FISA court application. The memo’s release provided none of the vindication the President sought or would claim, but it was hugely consequential nonetheless, in how it undermined the system of checks and balances designed to insulate the FBI from White House meddling established in the wake of Watergate.
The years after the Watergate scandal saw multiple Congressional investigations into misuses of law enforcement and intelligence powers. Under the leadership of Director J. Edgar Hoover, who served in that role for nearly 40 years, the FBI targeted domestic political groups it deemed to be “subversive” for unconstitutional surveillance and covert actions. The targets of these actions included socialist groups, anti-war protesters, and civil rights groups and leaders, among them Martin Luther King, Jr.
Groups, in other words, that wanted reforms, which should not be seen and treated and spied on as “subversive.” Framing all dissent, or all dissent from the left, as “subversive” is a misuse of law enforcement and intelligence powers.
Jimmy Carter campaigned for President in 1976 promising a scandal-weary nation that he would wall off the Department of Justice and FBI from political influence and direction. As President, Carter did just that, for the first time putting in place formal rules to govern interactions between the Department of Justice and the White House. Perhaps more important, he established an expectation that the extraordinary powers of the Department of Justice and the FBI would not be wielded as a cudgel against the political opponents of the president.
New checks and balances, and oversight mechanisms, were added in all three branches of government. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is one.
What we have witnessed during the first year of the Trump Administration is a determined effort to demolish the separation between politics and the fair administration of justice—an attempt to turn the DOJ’s investigative powers into the personal political tool of the president.
The president in the person of Donald Trump, that is. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about what happens in the future. For all we can tell he thinks he’ll never die and never be required to leave office.
[A] year later, it has become clear that the president views the idea that the DOJ should be anything other than an extension of his political operation as an unacceptable constraint on his authority. He told a reporter in December that he has “the absolute right” to do whatever he wants with “his” Department of Justice. The president has sought to put that statement into action from the very day he was inaugurated.
Remember that? I remember the horror and disgust when I watched him say that.
Both the president’s public statements and his private actions make it clear that he is seeking nothing less than to destroy the institutions and norms that shield the Department of Justice from his direction. This is all the more pernicious considering the fact that his own campaign is under investigation for possible collusion with the Russians in their interference in the presidential election. He would take the reins of the FBI to protect himself and to deploy their immense investigative powers against his political opponents at will.
During numerous oversight hearings over the years, I had many occasions to question former FBI Director Robert Mueller about the Bureau’s important work. Director Mueller frequently referenced in his testimony a little-known requirement for FBI trainees—each class of FBI agents would visit the Holocaust Museum to get a visceral look at what can result when law enforcement becomes a tool of repression, or worse.
As they launch their all-out assault on the pillars of the rule of law in this country, Republicans would do well to remember the abuses that prompted the creation of the wall between the DOJ and the White House, and the stakes if the FBI becomes simply another instrument of the President’s power.
Let’s hope they do remember. I feel as if we’re all on a tightrope.
Indonesia is often touted as that rare thing, a somewhat/comparatively liberal majority-Muslim state. To put it another way it’s touted as being not as bad as Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or Bangladesh or need I go on. But that’s one hell of a low bar.
Now it’s thinking of making all sex outside of marriage a crime.
Indonesia’s parliament is drafting proposed revisions to the national criminal code that could ban all consensual sex outside marriage, sparking alarm among activists who it would breach basic rights and could be misused to target the LGBT community.
The parliamentary commission drawing up recommendations to change the Dutch colonial-era criminal code has still to finalize its proposals.
But a draft, seen by Reuters on Monday, included measures to criminalize extramarital sex, same-sex relations, and co-habitation, all of which were previously unregulated by law.
Not very liberal, is it. Why should a government even care how citizens arrange their sex lives?
Last month, the Constitutional Court narrowly voted to strike down a similar petition filed by the Family Love Alliance, one of the conservative groups behind the move to push legislation through parliament.
“The truth is the majority of religions in Indonesia hold the same values, so…(the revisions) are representative of the majority and of all cultures in Indonesia,” said Euis Sunarti, a member of the Family Love Alliance, which likens itself to conservative evangelical Christian groups in the United States.
It doesn’t matter what kind of theocracy it is, as long as it is a theocracy.
Junimart Girsang, a member of parliament from the nationalist Indonesian Democratic Party of Stuggle (PDIP), said same-sex relations could not be accepted in the country.
“In legal terms, religious terms and ethical terms, we cannot have that in our country,” Girsang, a member of the parliamentary commission, said.
Few Indonesian politicians have voiced support for LGBT rights for fear of alienating a largely conservative voter base ahead of legislative and presidential elections next year.
Not all that liberal then, it seems.
I saw this tweet before I saw the CNN story and I thought it had to be a parody, despite the blue check.
I mean come on. Even Paul Ryan can’t be so clueless that he thinks $1.50 a week is a meaningful pay increase. $1.50 won’t get you a bus ride, or a half gallon of milk, or a pair of socks. You could probably get an apple with $1.50, or a couple of carrots, or a small tub of Greek yogurt. How can Paul Ryan possibly think anyone would be “pleasantly surprised” to have an additional $1.50 a week? It’s meaningless. $1.50 an hour would be a small raise; a week is just nothing.
And yet – it really was his very own tweet.
House Speaker Paul Ryan deleted a tweet Saturday touting the GOP tax overhaul after critics called him out for appearing out of touch with the reality of low-income individuals’ financial situations.
The tweet shared the story of a secretary who, according to a report by the Associated Press, was “pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week.”
“A secretary at a public high school in Lancaster, PA, said she was pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week … she said [that] will more than cover her Costco membership for the year,” Ryan tweeted with a link to the full article.
A basic Costco membership costs $60 a year.
And 52 times 1.5 is 78 so wuhay she comes out way ahead – 18 whole spare dollars to buy socks with.
Paul Ryan deleted his embarrassing tweet of a blatant admission because he and Republicans don’t want you to know the truth: the #GOPTaxScam is a gift to corporate America and the top 1% at your expense.
He also doesn’t want you to know he got $500.000.00 from the Koch family. pic.twitter.com/ENXxASfAMP
— Nancy Pelosi (@TeamPelosi) February 3, 2018
https://twitter.com/jonfavs/status/959840911541788672
A whole six dollars more every month. Thank god for Republicans.
Meanwhile…government watchdogs spend government money to monitor Trump’s conflicts of interest…and the money they spend goes into Trump’s pocket. The government is paying Trump to let the government monitor his corrupt use of his office for self-enrichment. Nice racket.
An employee for the federal agency supervising the lease for the Trump hotel in Washington spent more than $900 for a stay there last year, according to a document reviewed by CNN — the first publicly known movement of federal taxpayer dollars into the highly scrutinized business.
The federal employee worked for the General Services Administration, the agency which supervises the lease of the Old Post Office building to the Trump Organization.
The GSA reimbursed the employee for a majority of the charges, which was in line with the agency’s policy on per diem expenses, according to a person familiar with the document. That means taxpayer dollars made their way into the hotel’s coffers.
And Trump owns the hotel so the coffers are belong to him.
Government watchdogs and the President’s opponents argue the payments to Trump’s business from governments — domestic or foreign –violate anti-corruption and self-dealing clauses in the Constitution. It says the President “shall not receive… any other Emolument from the United States” other than a salary.
But that was meant for all those peasants who came before him, not gold-plated Donald Trump.
More obligatory Spirit and Loyalty and Enthusiasm:
No, I did not send my four-year old to school in Patriots gear for “Super Bowl Spirit Day” on Friday.
Earlier in the week, I’d gotten an email from the preschool that my kids — Leila, almost 5, and Mateo, almost 3 — have attended for the last couple of years. Wedged between a reminder to “bring your patience” to pick-up (bothersome snow in the parking lot) and a request for donations for cancer research was a New England Patriots logo with the following message:
“In honor of the Patriots’ Super Bowl appearance, send your child to school in his or her Patriots gear! If your child does not own Patriots gear, send him or her to school wearing red, white, and blue. Go Patriots!”
Why do people do that? Why assume that love of football is universal? Why make people feel weird if they don’t love football? Why on earth do it to four-year-olds?
The author, Kate Mitchell, replied with a note pointing out the now well-known risks of football, and that the brain is quite a useful organ. The director replied politely but said they wouldn’t be changing their plans.
I decided to follow up with a bit more information: several links to articles about the issue including a piece in that very day’s New York Times.
I added:
“I acknowledge your decision not to reconsider promoting the sport on Friday — and I respect that individuals make their own choices about whether to watch, play, or support football. However, when an institution chooses to support or endorse another institution, it sends a message (intended or not) about the values of the institution doing the supporting.
And:
Obviously, my concerns are not so much about whether or not the kids dress up in Patriots gear on Friday. I am more worried about whether we encourage fandom for the sport/league from a young age, whether kids should be playing tackle football, and how we as a society should be demanding that the NFL value the lives and well-being of young men (and families) in our society. I appreciate you hearing me out on the big picture.
She decided to write to the teachers as well.
“Our reasons for boycotting football have to do with the NFL’s rejection of science and the evidence that proves the link between tackle football and traumatic brain injuries, as well as our support for Colin Kaepernick and his efforts to call attention to police brutality. While those might seem like two separate issues, we see them as one: a decision not to value the lives of young men, especially young men of color.
Leila will not be dressed in Patriots gear tomorrow. We will have a conversation with her tonight about our family’s values and how they square with football. We will also talk with her about the importance of being respectful of different points of view on this topic.”
She explained her thinking to Leila, who picked out her own (non-football themed) clothes for the next day, including a tiara.
As we entered her school, we stepped into a sea of Patriots gear. I felt my gut churn a bit. I felt like an outsider.
Leila loves her school. We have found it to be an inclusive environment that lives up to its mission of creating a safe and nurturing environment for our children to learn and grow. I left my daughter, feeling confident that she felt right at home and that the teachers would make sure that she did not feel excluded.
But I also left feeling incredibly confused. Of all the things that educators could be encouraging our children to care about and be interested in, is a sport that has been scientifically proven to cause routine traumatic brain injuries really one of those things? And does it really merit an entire “spirit day” in its honor at a school for toddlers and preschoolers?
I get that for many, the Super Bowl is just pure fun. I get that we could all use common ground to rally around in times like these.
I am just not willing to cheer a multi-billion dollar business that values profit over safety. And I am especially resistant to the idea of an educational institution enlisting my small kids in such fandom.
Also how pure can the fun really be when the sport itself is built around deliberate violence? We frown on the Romans for going to see gladiatorial contests but we have lethal sports ourselves. It’s pathetic.
H/t Sackbut
Another thought about the Trump versus the FBI melodrama:
Mr. Trump’s current campaign threatens the autonomy of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, which was seared into the public consciousness after Watergate, according to veterans of the legal system. “Starting with Jimmy Carter, every president has embraced norms that preserve the independence of the D.O.J., law enforcement and intelligence matters from the White House,” Mr. Goldsmith said. “What is happening now is a violation of post-Watergate norms.”
What that passage doesn’t quite make clear is what Watergate has to do with it. Watergate made it eye-scorchingly clear how crucial it is to have federal law enforcement be independent of the president, so that he doesn’t get away with committing crimes while in office. Trump acts out every day the very reason he needs to stop acting out what he acts out every day – his megalomaniacal belief that the Justice Department is his Justice Department and has to do whatever he tells it to do. The independence of the DoJ is a bulwark against authoritarian government…even though it can be authoritarian itself, because nothing is simple. Trump and the Republicans are systematically breaking down that bulwark. This is dangerous, and a constitutional crisis.
David Strauss, a University of Chicago law professor, said Mr. Trump’s accusations were not mere political rhetoric, but messages with consequences. “It’s got to undermine public confidence in the F.B.I. to a certain degree. And it’s got to undermine morale at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department to an even greater degree,” he said.
“We have a president who seems to have no understanding of the professional ethos of the Justice Department, who has no understanding how these people think about their jobs,” he added.
Quite. That’s what I was saying about merit and skills and Trump the empty balloon.
Especially upsetting, some former officials said, is how Mr. Trump has publicly taunted specific individuals — a top F.B.I. official, an F.B.I. lawyer and an F.B.I. supervisor.
“It’s one thing for the president to criticize political appointees — although it is quite odd for him to criticize his own political appointees,” said Alan Rozenshtein, a lawyer who left the Justice Department’s national security division in April and now teaches at the University of Minnesota law school. But to attack career employees at the F.B.I. who are barred by regulations from publicly responding, he said, “that’s really bad.”
Some agents are leaving as a result. Josh Campbell, who spent a decade at the F.B.I. and worked directly for Mr. Comey at one time, wrote in The Times on Saturday that he was resigning so that he could speak out. “These political attacks on the bureau must stop,” he wrote. “If those critics of the agency persuade the public that the F.B.I. cannot be trusted, they will also have succeeded in making our nation less safe.”
One F.B.I. supervisor in a field office said public shaming of his colleagues had wiped out any desire he had to work at the bureau’s headquarters in Washington. “I’d rather chew glass,” he said.
MAGA.
How are they doing at the FBI? It can’t be easy.
In the 109 years of the FBI’s existence, it has repeatedly come under fire for abuses of power, privacy or civil rights. From Red Scares to recording and threatening to expose the private conduct of Martin Luther King Jr. to benefiting from bulk surveillance in the digital age, the FBI is accustomed to intense criticism.
What is so unusual about the current moment, say current and former law enforcement officials, is the source of the attacks.
The bureau is under fire not from those on the left but rather conservatives who have long been the agency’s biggest supporters, as well as the president who handpicked the FBI’s leader.
Republican critics charge that the birth of the investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and agents of the Russian government was fatally infected by the political bias of senior FBI officials — and President Trump tweeted Saturday that the release of a memo on the issue “totally vindicates ‘Trump.’ ”
But what if it’s not “political bias” but rather “bias” against a president who is in bed with Russia?
And/or – what if it’s “bias” against ignorant lazy talentless incompetence from a bunch of people who, whatever you think about the institution, have impressive skills?
KnowwhatImean? That’s an aspect of Trump that’s got to grate on a lot of people who do serious demanding work. He’s such an empty balloon. He has no talents, no skills, no training, no knowledge, no expertise – he’s all flash and marketing and nothing else. He’s a big meaningless noise, and here he is shouting at and accusing people who are – let’s be clear about this – Better Than He Is. He likes to rant about “merit” but that’s ironic when he himself has none.
One law enforcement official summed it up bluntly: “There’s a lot of anger. The irony is it’s a conservative-leaning organization, and it’s being trashed by conservatives. At first it was just perplexing. Now there’s anger, because it’s not going away.”
It turns out they’re not really conservatives. They’re opportunists/street fighters.
From the Classroom Vignettes file:
A teacher with Colorado’s Boulder Valley School District was placed on paid administrative leave following an alleged incident at the middle school, the school district said Thursday. CBS Denver confirmed the Lafayette Police Department is investigating reports that teacher allegedly assaulted a student who refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.
Karen Smith, Angevine’s physical education teacher, was placed on leave Thursday.
This again. Football players MUST stand up with their hands on their chests (one hand per player) when a certain song is sung. God MUST be namechecked whenever a politician comments on an outburst of violence. Students MUST swear fealty to a piece of cloth and to God at the start of every school day. All this MUST be mandatory or everything will rot and fall off and die.
Except of course that none of that is true, but it’s treated as if it were true.
In the Times, Emily Kelly tells us about her husband, a former football player who took a lot of blows to the head.
Professional football is a brutal sport, he knew that. But he loved it anyway. And he accepted the risks of bruises and broken bones. What he didn’t know was that along with a battered body can come a battered mind.
For decades, it was not well understood that football can permanently harm the brain. Otherwise, many parents would most likely not have signed their boys up to play. But this reality was obscured by the N.F.L.’s top medical experts, who for years had denied any link between the sport and long-term degenerative brain diseases like chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
Just as tobacco companies for years denied any link between tobacco and lung cancer.
That started to change in late 2009 when, for the first time, the N.F.L. publicly acknowledged that concussions can have long-term effects. In 2016, a top league official admitted that there is a connection between football and C.T.E., which has now been found in the brains of more than 100 deceased players. But for Rob, and countless other players, those admissions came too late.
And yet – people here still get wildly excited about football and expect everyone else to share their enthusiasm. I find that disturbing.
It wasn’t until I joined a private Facebook group of more than 2,400 women, all connected in some way to current or former N.F.L. players, that I realized I wasn’t alone.
Our stories are eerily similar, our loved ones’ symptoms almost identical: the bizarre behavior I had tried to ignore, the obsessive laundering of old clothes — our washing machine ran from morning till night.
It was comforting and terrifying all at the same time. Why did so many of us see the same strange behaviors? “Our neurologist said they do it to calm their brains,” one friend told me.
Symptoms consistent with C.T.E. are a recurring topic in the Facebook group. They include memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, aggression, depression and anxiety. These problems become apparent sometimes years or even decades after a player hangs up his helmet.
One woman may write a post, desperate and afraid of the man her husband is becoming — the rage, mood swings, depression, memory loss. A man so drastically different from the one she once knew. Hundreds of comments will follow, woman after woman confirming that she is going through the exact same thing.
While the symptoms and behaviors are telling, C.T.E. can be conclusively diagnosed only posthumously, because it requires the close examination of brain tissue. But many of us, including me, are convinced our husbands suffer from the disease. We try to comfort one another with the same words: “Just know you’re not alone.”
I don’t think the public has any idea how widespread this problem truly is. Rob and I hope that, in telling our story, we might help other families. There are likely to be hundreds of wives and partners of football players, maybe more, who live a life like mine. Sadly, there is a feeling of shame among those affected, in both the men and their families.
But hey, the Super Bowl is tomorrow. Let’s focus on that instead.
Trump is feeling perky.
“Trump the orator outlines the greatness of America to Democrats’ disgust” https://t.co/XpirrtTY6V
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2018
The Moony paper calls him “Trump the orator” – because he read an address written by other people, from a teleprompter, slowly and with difficulty and not at all well. Some orator.
Also, applauding himself. Also Mussolini-face.
Rasmussen just announced that my approval rating jumped to 49%, a far better number than I had in winning the Election, and higher than certain “sacred cows.” Other Trump polls are way up also. So why does the media refuse to write this? Oh well, someday!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2018
Funny how he always cites Rasmussen, which always has his numbers higher than anyone else.
This memo totally vindicates “Trump” in probe. But the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on. Their was no Collusion and there was no Obstruction (the word now used because, after one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead). This is an American disgrace!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2018
Why the scare quotes on his own name? Is he saying he’s not real? Is he telling us he’s a myth or a political fiction? Is he signaling that he’s being held captive?
Why is he talking about himself in the third person?
Sad about “their” for “there,” especially when immediately followed by the [cough] alternate spelling.
Anyway – nope, the memo does no such thing. “Trump” is still going to have to talk to Mueller. Feeling perky is not the same as being either vindicated or found innocent.
