Sunday School 7/14/19

I didn't visit any of the classrooms today, because I saw all I needed to see on the president's Twitter feed.

Three of his tweets this morning collectively garnered at least 348,524 'likes' which, I guess, is better than the tweets themselves. I mean, with almost 62 million followers, most of which are actual people, not bots, that count could be a whole lot worse.

The tweets in question? Here they are.

I have never had a doubt that Trump is a racist. And the "Progressive" women he's talking about? Yeah, they're all people of color: AOC, and Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley. Of the four, only Omar was born outside of the United States; she's a naturalized citizen.

And we know he is a sexist bastard, whether it's holding Theresa May's hand or grabbing someone by the pussy, or his strange affinity for his daughter, and of course he's told us that he has a 'type' when it comes to sexual assault.

We know that he does not like being challenged by anyone, but especially not by women in general, specifically women of color, and even more dreaded? Women who have ideals and principles, two things which this president sorely lacks.

His tweets today should have cleared up any misunderstandings regarding any of this.

See you around campus.

Wondering on Wednesday (v138)

Wondering, wondering, wondering... about hypocrisy, tonight.

I wonder if the people who are outraged - outraged, I tell you! - about Sarah Sanders being asked to leave a Virginia restaurant were equally outraged when gays were refused services? It's funny, because some of the same people who think the latter is OK think the former is not. And suggesting that 'we' (meaning liberals, or Democrats) would be outraged if a gay person was denied services, when we all should be outraged when that happens, right? And not for nothing 'we' already did the outrage thing on this, resulting in marriage equality, among other things.

I also wonder about people who think protesting administration officials is 'discrimination' - what particular protected class might Sanders and Kirstjen Nielsen represent?

And how about Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao rising to the occasion and defending her man, Kentucky's Republican obstructionist Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell? If you haven't seen it, you can watch it here -- and the article raises some interesting points, too, about how conservatives in particular reacted the incident. I can't help wondering if they get how bad they look?

Speaking of how bad they look, I wonder if the folks who think it's wrong for a business owner to refuse service to someone think it's OK when the president calls upon his followers to boycott American businesses? You know, when he gets mad at Amazon, or Nordstrom, or anyone else? Is it OK for him to do that in his official capacity, I wonder?

Thinking about the Supreme Court decision today that people can't be forced to pay fees to support non-political activities of unions, even if they directly benefit from those activities, made me think about another Supreme Court decision: the one about companies having deeply held beliefs.

Consider the argument about people working for companies like Hobby Lobby, which doesn't believe in providing certain types of contraception that are required benefits under the Affordable Care Act.  It's been said many times on my social  media pages and possibly yours as well, that a person doesn't have to take a job if the benefits aren't to their liking, and if you go to work for Hobby Lobby you know what you're getting, blah blah blah and you don't have to work there if you don't like it yadda yadda yadda. 

I wonder why a person who thinks it's OK for someone to be denied a benefit based on a company's belief thinks it's OK for person to get (for free) a benefit their coworkers pay for? How can both of these be OK?

I wonder about civility in the age of Trump. You know: talking about penis size during a presidential debate, and about the physical appearance of his female opponents, and of course the Access Hollywood tape, and promising to pay anyone arrested for assaulting protesters at his rallies, and all of that stuff and of course,lying about President Obama's birth certificate.

When the president says stuff (and by stuff I mean outright lies, abusive comments, insulting comments, derogatory comments, denigrating comments, racist comments, sexist comments, abject falsehoods and the like) it's OK, it's all rah rah and #MAGA and #AmericaFirst and the like, with not the slightest concern for civility or honesty or humanity, but when an FBI guy does a little reassuring pillow-texting with his paramour, all bets are off and he's nefarious and everything is deadly serious and he has to be lying about it being innocent? Why is that, I wonder? Why does nothing the president says or does matter, but everything everyone else says and does matters as if it were life and death?

And I'll stop after this one: why must the Mueller investigation end, I wonder, when it's been going on for not even 14 months and is producing results -- indictments and guilt pleas -- when the Benghazi investigations - 7 or 8 of them, I think? -  lasted years, cost millions, and resulted in nothing?

I wonder about all of this, I do. I could keep going, but I think you get the gist.  The outrage! Oh, the outrage!

No -- make it faux, the outrage.

About that, I don't have to wonder.

Sunday School 6/3/2018

I wandered around the Sunday School classrooms with mixed results today. My mission was to try and get a sense of how each of them were covering the 'she said, she said' of Roseanne Barr and Samantha Bee, and I have to say, things were not entirely as I thought.

Where to start? Well, ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos didn't mention either Barr or Bee, which is interesting given that ABC was the network which fired Barr for her racist comment. 

It was a little different on Fox New Sunday with Chris Wallace, who talked about the vastly different treatment of the comments with his panel. Brit Hume noted that the c-word is right up there with the n-word, "the ugliest words in contemporary parlance" he said. And Hume noted

So, I think the two remarks were basically on par and what's not on par was the disparate treatment by ABC News towards Barr and by TBS toward Samantha Bee. Vast difference and it's pretty hard to argue therefore there's not a double standard.

Juan Williams, who is familiar himself with words, and consequences, disagrees about a double standard.

...when you think about what Roseanne Barr had to say in terms of calling Valerie Jarrett an ape - a black woman - this is something that's very deep and speaks to race in our culture. Dehumanizing people, it speaks to oppression, slavery - I can go on.

Brit Hume asked if calling someone the c-word wasn't dehumanizing.  Williams agreed, but

I think that calling -- two white women having an argument over immigration policy and separating children from parents and the like is, as I was going to say, vulgar and rank and unnecessary. It does not speak to the idea of tearing apart the social fabric around the most central and difficult issue in America, race. And that's what Roseanne Barr did not only in this instance, she had done previously with regard to Susan Rice, another Obama official, and I think --

Wallace interrupted, noting

Well, Samantha Bee has sad all manner of horrible things about all manner of women, yes, white, who were working in the Trump White House.

Williams was not having it.

I'm telling you, one of these items speaks to tearing at the social fabric in a way that can't be undone and puts us all in great danger. And therefore, it's not about team sports in terms of, oh, I'm a Trump supporter and I'm there to support Roseanne Barr, or I'm an Obama supporter, and therefore, you know, support Samantha Bee 

That's really juvenile compared to the seriousness of what's taking place. You think about the NFL players, you think about Charlottesville. I could go on. You understand that they are playing -- separating us as a society. 

On CNN's State of the Union, Dana Bash discussed the issue in the larger context of 'culture wars; and politics.  Linda Chavez, who worked in the Reagan administration, took a shot at liberals.

But I have to tell you, liberals walk right into the trap when they have a Samantha Bee out there not just using the most vile, vulgar word to describe a woman but going after her in such a personal way, going after her relationship with her father. Look, I have not a whole lot of use for Ivanka Trump, I don't think she should be in the White House. But you don't go after somebody in that kind of really nasty vile way, in a way that frankly the word and the fact that it was scripted and, you know, essentially she may have read it from a teleprompter says a world about liberals and their values.

In response, Karine Jean-Pierre, from Moveon.org, mentioned the president as a key figure in the culture war.

But here is the problem. You have the president himself who has used that word. It's been reported that he used the c-word to describe Sally Yates. Here's the thing. It is - it is really bizarre and wild that the president makes himself a victim and - he and his administration makes him a victim when he is the bully in chief. He used the bully pulpit to attack...racism was here before Donald Trump and sadly it will be here after Donald Trump. So that is a fact. But he has -- what he has done is he has normalized, he has given license to people to make it OK... And that is the problem we're in with this culture war, because it's coming from the White House.

On Face the Nation, CBS's Margaret Brennan had the discussion with her group as well. The gist of it there? The new expectation that a business will deal with things like this, whether it's boycotts or firing or accepting an apology - it all comes down to a business decision. The talking heads did note that conservatives who were just up on arms about the White House Correspondents Dinner and how the Trump gang was hammered were too busy calling for an apology to make any comment about what Roseanne had said.

Finally, on Meet the Press, again the round table group talked about the culture wars, and whether there's a double standard.

Katy Tur, a Trump target during the campaign, thought that while we were talking about Samantha Bee "using a word she shouldn't have used" we weren't paying attention to the story she was talking about -- the administration's policy of separating families at the border. Peggy Noonan reminded Tur that what Bee said was an obscene personal attack, and perhaps she wasn't as serious about the border issue, if she herself obscured it by her choice of words.

Joshua Johnson was more worried about something else.

I am more concerned about the fact that the same culture current that gave Roseanne Barr cover to tweet this and Samantha Bee cover to broadcast this is is the one that gave Stephen Colbert the cover to say that the only thing Donald Trump's mouth was good for was being Vladimir Putin's you-know-what holster. I mean, it's the exact same current that the Russians exploited to influence the 2016 election. It's out hate. It's our misgiving. It's our fear. The fault is not in our TV stars but in ourselves. And that's where the problem is. We have the power to change this...

And that's where we'll leave it for this week. 

See you around campus.

Trump in Transition (v26)

He's a mean one, Mr. Trump. A jerk, a slime, a pig! Oh -- sorry. I must have been typing out loud again.

The president continues his backsliding, hateful transition to the oafish NYC real estate developer he was before, well, before that fateful escalator ride.

He's a pig, for sure -- by his own admission.  He's rude - countless examples, not the least of which was his Megyn Kelly 'blood coming out of her...wherever' which, as he told us, meant her eyes (yeah, right) or his comment about Carly Fiorina's face. Or Rosie O'Donnell. Or flatchested women the world over.

So who is the latest victim of this delightful man and his petty attacks? That would Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, of course. And what did she do to Trump? Well, let's take a look at her tweets from earlier today.

When it comes to sexual assault, harassment and the general mistreatment of women, we must be able to call out anyone, Democrat or Republican. 

As elected leaders, let's rise to the occasion and not shrink away from it. That is what the larger #MeToo movement is all about. Let's send a clear message none of this is okay. 

 That means Farenthold should step aside. Moore should never set foot in the Senate, and president Trump should be held accountable.

The accusations against more are disgusting. And president Trump has admitted on tape to how he treats women. His campaigning for Moore isn't leadership, it's shameful. 

We are in a moment of reckoning - and the silence from Republicans is deafening. It is long past time for them to join Democrats in holding members of their own party accountable. 

President Trump should resign. But, of course, he won't hold himself accountable. Therefore, Congress should investigate the multiple sexual harassment and assault allegations against him. 

Now, I appreciate there are some very strong feelings about Gillibrand's position. She led the charge against Al Franken with her zero tolerance position, which endeared her to many and blew any chance she had of becoming president, according to others. Heck -- some commenters want her primaried for what she did to Franken; they, and others, feel she was both late to the game on calling out Trump, and wrong to call for an investigation of the creep-in-chief but not allowing Franken the same courtesy.  It's a mixed bag, for sure.

And after all of this, there was the Trump response, which was bigly presidential as you might imagine.

Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office "begging" for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump. Very disloyal to Bill and Crooked - USED!

Garbled message aside ("begging"? Disloyal to Bill and Crooked? USED! -- #WhatTheSniff), it's hard not to notice the (and would do anything for them) comment nestled in there, isn't it?  What do you think he meant?

a. This is simply talking about a rigged system that we have that is broken, in which special interests control our government.

b. This is a (fill in the blank) shooting off his mouth because, well, because he's a (fill in the blank) who frequently acts like a (fill in the blank), in the most presidential way possible.

c. This was an attempt to bully, intimidate and slut-shame Senator Gillibrand.

d. This was a statement by a misogynist, compulsive liar, and admitted sexual predator and a bully from whom no one is safe.

Yeah -  no matter which response you pick, the guy's a pig, a jerk, and a slime.

And no, I won't respect the office if the person occupying it doesn't have the sense to. And he's still #notmypresident.

Tidbits and Trivia (v2)

A quick look at some un-fact-checked facts, quotes and trivia:

• Protests are good for business. According to this article on Bloomberg.com, sales of sign-making materials spiked 30% in the week before Trump's bigly inauguration and the even more bigly Women's March the next day, with an estimated $6M invested. Kinda thinking I should check to see if I have stock in any of this stuff.

• According to this, from NPR, the Trump administration is looking for a tasteful wall between the US and Mexico. The wall "shall be physically imposing in height" with 18' possibly being acceptable but 30' more in the altitude they're looking for. It can be see-through (no giggling, please) or solid concrete, and must prevent climbing and tunneling.Our side must be "aesthetically pleasing...to be consistent with the general surrounding environment." That ought to be interesting.

• Kyle Reyes, a marketing executive or something, is now famous for putting together a "Snowflake Test" for prospective employees.  Reyes has shared the test for free "with all America" and wants people who read his piece to "help share (this) test with other patriotic Americans" like the kind who are "sick and tired of the sniveling,whining, entitled brats who believe that everything should be handed to them on a silver platter."  Reyes must think that passes for patriotic... 

• Are you good with gender-neutral terms? It seems there's a Writing Style Guide for students at Northern Arizona University advising them to use non-sexist words; the guide was issued at the beginning of the semester so everyone knew what was expected. Cailin Jeffers, a student, decided to test the waters by using a word she knew she was not supposed to - mankind - and her professor knocked down the grade. And, as often happens in cases like this, Professor Ann Scott and the NAU English department  "received threatening calls and emails" - dozens of the former, hundreds of the latter, including one telling her to "get off the face of the earth" and to "go put a gun to your head." The calls and emails must have been from a different kind of snowflake, I guess.

• And finally, according to this article, the DEA has seized over $4B in cash since 2007 from folks who are suspected of being involved with drugs; 81% of the cash was taken from people who were never charged civilly or criminally. And that's just the cash - it doesn't include other possessions or real estate. The Department of Justice has an Asset Forfeiture Fund, which has grown to $28B in the last 10 years. Who says crime doesn't pay?