To show his iron grip and sow chaos and despair

Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported Matt Gaetz withdrew from consideration for Attorney General. He said his nomination was becoming a distraction to the nasty guy. Gaetz said he had “excellent meetings” with senators to start the confirmation process. Likely some said they would oppose him – he’s hated my many fellow Republicans. What prompted the withdrawal was the renewed interest in his sexual transgressions his nomination stirred up. The House Ethics Committee deadlocked along party lines on whether to release their report on him. And women are coming forward to testify they had sex with him when underage. Gaetz resigned from the House to forestall the Ethics Committee report. Yet, he won another term that begins in January. If he takes the oath for that term he would be again under the jurisdiction of the Ethics Committee. I had reported that Sarah McBride of Delaware will be the first transgender person elected to the House. Oliver Willis of Kos reported it didn’t take long for Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina to introduce a resolution to segregate the Capitol bathrooms, banning McBride from using a woman’s room. And Speaker Johnson didn’t bother going through the motions of a resolution, he simply announced the bathroom segregation – and he did it on Transgender Day of Remembrance. Johnson said the policy will be enforced, but didn’t specify how that’s to be done – who is going to do the checking and what will be done with a violator. Mace and Johnson were praised by conservative lawmakers and pundits and decried by progressives. McBride, bless her, said don’t make a big deal of this, it’s just a distraction. There are more important issues. Willis concluded:

The effort to reinstate a form of segregation as official American government policy is the first major action by Republicans since their victory in the 2024 election. Based on the party’s clear support for attacking an oppressed minority group, more is sure to come.

Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna is one of the conservative firebrands in the House, though quieter than Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene. She also gave birth in 2023 and that and complications meant she missed dozens of House votes. Singer reported that last January Luna and Democratic Rep. Sara Jacobs of California introduced legislation to allow House members who give birth to vote remotely for six weeks afterward. Now, about ten months later, Johnson said he would not bring Luna’s legislation up for a vote. Luna said this is a very anti-family thing to do for a person who declares they are pro-family. A woman should not have to choose between serving their constituents and having children. I understand, though don’t agree with, Johnson’s position. He says he’s pro-family because getting pregnant can keep a woman out of politics and the business world. Giving birth keeping her out of the House, that’s just fine. Never mind he would lose a vote from a thin majority. Luna says when the next Speaker is voted on in January she will only vote for one who will allow women to vote remotely after giving birth. Singer noted there is a precedence for remote voting. Congress did it during the pandemic. Republicans ended it when they took the majority in 2023. In a pundit roundup for Kos, Greg Dworkin had a few good quotes. Mike Madrid of The Great Transformation discussed two previous mass deportations. Both affected Mexicans and US citizens of Mexican descent. One happened at the start of the Great Depression when politicians needed a scapegoat. Their story isn’t covered in American history because Mexicans don’t matter as much as Okies and Dust bowlers. Margaret Sullivan of American Crisis noted that the nasty guy got 49.99% of the vote. Also...

Don’t believe that these unfit nominees for Trump’s cabinet represent some lofty idea of making America great again. Despite all his effusive language about the supposed statesmanship of Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard, these picks are meant to do two things: show his iron-grip control over the Senate; and sow chaos and despair in the non-MAGA members of the American public.

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer said all those op-eds discussing various cabinet picks and using facts to explain how bad they are falling into the nasty guy’s trap. They’re playing the game the way he wants it played. I see arguing with facts is meaningless because all it does is show he is working from a position of power, where facts don’t matter. In the comments are a couple good cartoons. Ella Baron drew one of The Ministry of Truth. Above the entrance are statues of the nasty guy, RFK Jr, Elon Musk, JD Vance, and Matt Gaetz. Annie for Truth posted a meme of three dinosaurs in red hats watching the incoming meteor. One of them says, “This is gonna be great!” In a second pundit roundup Chitown Kev had a couple quotes. One is from the Pew Research Center looking at people who get their news from “news influencers.” About 20% of Americans and 37% of adults under 30 get news from influencers. Most influencers are on X, though many are also on Instagram and YouTube. A few more influencers identify themselves as conservative or Republican than identify as Democratic or liberal. That leaves about half who don’t explicitly identify. Almost two-thirds are men. More than three-quarters are not affiliated with a news organization. I see they are called influencers, meaning they are advocating for a particular position. They are not reporting news. Having that as a person’s primary source of news is deeply troubling. Jennifer Berry Hawes and Mollie Simon of ProPublica discuss “segregation academies.” A big reason why many conservatives want to pay for schools with vouchers, which is tax dollars, is somewhat about the conservative schools that churches sponsor. The bigger reason is race. These academies are far whiter than the communities they are in. They play an integral role in perpetuating school segregation and racism. John Cassidy of The New Yorker thinks Elon Musk’s support of the nasty guy is about money and not about making the world a better place, as is the case for George Soros. Cassidy offers evidence.

On Wall Street, there is a more self-serving explanation for Musk’s bear hug of Trump. “It’s a poker move for the ages,” Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities who has long been bullish on Tesla’s stock, told CNBC. If that’s true, the play has already paid off big time. Between Trump’s victory on November 5th and the close of trading on Friday, Tesla’s stock price went from $251.50 to $320.72. According to Tesla’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Musk owns about 715 million shares, so based on that figure the value of his stake has risen by almost fifty billion dollars. ... The run-up in Tesla’s stock reflects investors’ conviction that the policies of a second Trump Administration will be favorable to the carmaker. But the presence of Trump in the White House could also have important implications for Musk’s other companies, many of which are subject to oversight by federal agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, or which have big contracts with government departments.

In the comments are a few good cartoons. One by Mike Luckovich shows Natives and Pilgrims around the table. A chief says, “Dinner’s over. Please make your way to the deportation wagons.” A cartoon by Sheneman posted by the Tennessee Holler shows a white man talking to an ICE agent who has detained a person of color, saying, “I think there’s been a misunderstanding, I only wanted you to deport the immigrants I don’t know personally.” Many of the nasty guy’s cabinet picks now have dirty pasts coming to light. That prompted RJ Matson to show two men on the National Mall.

First man: Let’s face it, I’ve got no future in this town without a felony conviction or an ethics probe. Second man: What about me? I’ve never paid hush money to anyone for anything!

Pedro Molina posted a cartoon on Kos. Two men are in a bar. One says, “OK, you voted for Trump, convince me I’m wrong about my worst fears.” The other replies, “Are you kidding?! I hope you’re right!”

What pro-life actually looks like

Kirsten Gillibrand, Democratic candidate for President, has released a policy initiative, the Family Bill of Rights: The right to a safe pregnancy, the right to give birth or adopt regardless of income or sexual orientation, the right to a safe and affordable nursery, and the right to affordable day care and universal pre-k. The release added:

It gives parents confidence that they're going to have the resources they need to meet the needs of their infant. It also gives them hope that their child is going to have all the resources and opportunities that they know that their child deserves.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville notes a contrast. She wrote that…

particularly in this moment of aggressive anti-choice horror, that this sort of policymaking is what being "pro-life" actually looks like.

McEwan quotes a Guttmacher study from 2005 that found 73% of women gave as their reason for an abortion, “I can’t afford a baby now.” That included no help from the father, not being able to work while pregnant or caring for a newborn, lacking health insurance.

Want to significantly reduce abortion? See Gillibrand’s Family Bill of Rights. Make sure having a baby isn’t a financial calamity.

But GOP lawmakers aren’t going for it because their real purpose isn’t to end abortion, but to make women’s lives miserable.

McEwan adds that she is delighted with the way Cory Booker and Julián Castro have been talking about these anti-abortion bills.

I am old enough to remember when even pro-choice male (and some female) Democratic politicians would practically crawl out their skins if obliged to say the word "abortion," no less vigorously defend it without qualification and caveat, and now here we are with four unapologetically pro-choice female senators running for president and two male candidates who can unyieldingly defend abortion access, who can say the word without a squeamishness that conveyed a deadly stigma.

Seventeen Solutions – family values

Continuing my overview of Ralph Nader's book, The Seventeen Solutions. Click here to get the rest of the series.

4. Protecting the Family Unit

I've posted many times about "family values." Usually in this blog it is about how LGBT are pulling the family apart or how LGBT people are corrupting children. Through it all there is lots of hand-wringing over the child's lost innocence and how we must protect children (who aren't as fragile as claimed). Childhood, even when we're not the threat, prompts lots of compassionate words from politicians (as they cut funding from schools again).

But all this political desire to protect disappears when up against the relentless onslaught of corporate advertising aimed at children. This isn't just through the TV. It also comes through phones, video games, and computer screens. It is to the point where children spend more time with these ads than with their parents. And trust their computer more than they trust Mom and Dad.

For the first time in human history, most children are born into homes where most of the stories do not come from their parents, schools, churches, communities, and in many places even from their native countries, but from a handful of conglomerates who have something to sell.

Parents are losing this war over their children

because the corporations have overwhelming resources at their disposal and because the perverse logic of the marketplace dictates that they put those resource to the most exploitative possible uses.

Though parents hold the dollars marketers have a three-step strategy to counter parents' control of child spending.

First, they entice children to nag their parents. Second, they take advantage of the absence of parents who travel or work long hours outside the home. Third they undermine the authority, dignity, and judgment of parents in the eyes of their children, thereby inducing kids to purchase or demand items regardless of their parents' opinions.

Marlboro Man taps into "teenagers' yearning for independence and freedom". The McDonald's McWorld campaign portrays adults as "lame, stupid pains-in-the-butt." PlayStation ads "explicitly degrade and devalue parents." The overall message is, "We understand you better than your parents."

The citizen organization Commercial Alert (Nader is one of the founders) promotes a Parents' Bill of Rights. This includes the Leave Children Alone Act, which bans TV advertising to children under 12; the Commercial-Free Schools Act; the Product Placement Disclosure Act, to prevent sneaking ads into media that parents assume to be ad-free; the Child Harm Disclosure Act, requiring the disclosure of information that a product could substantially harm a child's health; and the Children's Advertising Subsidy Revocation Act, to eliminate various federal subsidies for ads aimed at children under 12. Of course, corporations will fight tenaciously to maintain their profits.

What to do? Join citizen action organizations. "Put the TV in the closet, the cell phones in the drawer, and eat their family meals together." Search local papers, community organizations, and libraries for family activities. Participate in community institutions, such as food coops, energy production, health clinics, public works departments, city council meetings, local courts, artisan shops, farms, firehouses, hospitals, and newspaper.

Children should be "raised not by corporations, but by caring, thoughtful, engaged families."

This is the definition of family

I arrived home around 8:30 this evening and saw the item in my calendar about city fireworks display this evening. I had seen raindrops on the way home and saw drops on my deck. So I checked the weather map. It showed the eastern edge of rain coming over the city. Well, so much for fireworks. But at 10:30 I heard the fireworks going off. Sigh.



Since the big gay rulings by the Supremes about 10 days ago I haven't written much about the Fundie response. It's been loud. But why bother? They aren't saying anything new. And why let all that nastiness ruin our parade?

Even though I'm doing my best to ignore them, others have been playing close attention. People like Seething Mom, who wrote in part:

Thank you for pretending it is you that has had something precious taken from you when you have lost absolutely nothing but the right to be bullies.
…
Thank you for playing the victim card every time you lose a fight. Nothing turns the stomach more than watching a big fat bully blubber for sympathy when he is exposed for the mean-spirited SOB he really is.

And finally, thank you for all the crazies you endorse and embrace. Please keep giving them a megaphone and a public stage. We've got a lot of marriage bans to repeal and gay weddings to plan and we sure could use their help to reach the finish line.

Jamie McGonnigal notes how small their crowds are becoming and how desperate their fundraising emails are sounding. Alas, they will never be gone for good. They will certainly be around long enough to make us work for the other 37 states.

And no matter what the Fundies say, this is the definition of family:

Two brothers from Reseda sat in red lawn chairs at the entrance to the City Council chambers, having staked out the prime position so their aunts, Helen Andersen and Pam Holt, could have the first wedding of the day on Monday.

Holt has terminal cancer and can't be on her feet for long. They all know time is of the essence. More than a year ago, Holt’s doctor told her she had three months to live, said Tyler Mead, 21, one of the brothers.

"They've been waiting 18 years for this," Mead said. "I'd wait days in this line for them."

The two young men had to wait a while because while Holt was undergoing chemotherapy her drivers license expired and she had to visit several gov't offices to get a proper identity card. Even so, Anderson and Holt are now married.

I need kids?

Newsweek as a feature article by Joel Kotkin and Harry Siegel about the slump in the American birth rate and how that isn't good for the country. More Americans, especially since the start of the Great Recession, have decided to not have kids. Many have also decided to not have life partners, preferring the life of "singlism."

Yes, that includes me, though I'm quite a bit older than the 20- and 30-somethings who are in their prime child-bearing age and not bearing children. Without a life partner (and I'm content not to have one) I thought it unfair to any kid I might adopt. In addition, I've long said (at least to myself) with seven billion people in the world, I need kids?

The big reason the authors give for why a falling birthrate is bad is that as the birth rate drops and the population ages the harder it is to sustain the retirement benefits that have been promised. There is also the belief that as the population becomes more doddering the less robust the economy will be.

There is a bit of a debate about the effect of a declining birthrate will have on politics. Those that remain single (or at least childless) tend to become more liberal. The single women's vote was a big part of Obama's win last fall. However, conservatives will tend to keep having children. Will childless singletons shift the country more liberal or will the comparative lack of liberal babies make the country more conservative?

To solve the problem of too few babies the authors suggest ways to tweak tax code and other laws to make having babies less expensive. A commenter replies: Like they did in Germany, which has had no effect? Another notes we can't fix a problem by throwing babies at it.

I found the article frustrating for a very big reason. Nowhere was there a discussion about how the world is already overpopulated, that overpopulation is a big reason why we haven't fix the climate change problem, and that in a global view a declining American birthrate is a good thing. That discussion didn't occur in the first page of comments either.

The society people want

Conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly has complained that Obama's reelection means the end of Traditional America (and traditional families as seen in Leave it to Beaver). Mark O'Connell, a psychotherapist who is also gay and writing in the Huffington Post, says yup, O'Reilly is right. And let's rejoice that the diversity of the modern family is on display. While we do that let's also support the family configurations we have, rather support the only configuration -- Dad married to Mom with two healthy kids -- that "should be." O'Connell spends must of this article showing how much the modern family has changed from the Leave it to Beaver ideal.



Preserve Marriage Washington, the anti-gay side of the marriage equality campaign in that state, repeatedly said they needed $4 million to make sure their side won. They received only $1.3 million from Washington residents. National organizations pumped in $1.1 million with perhaps $0.1 million from other out-of-state donors. Which means they raised under $2.6 million, or fell 36% short of their goal.

Anti-gay pastor Joe Fuiton put it this way.

I respect elections. That’s what’s so painful here — it shows this is the society people want.

Yup, we do.



The GOP wants women and minority voters to like them. But why should they? The GOP doesn't like them. Even if the GOP tones down the rough edges, they still won't walk the walk. And voters notice. Terrence Heath explains it all in detail.

Of course, we're here only to create jobs

Since their takeover of the House the GOP has renewed its war on women. Some of the things in budget and related bills:

* Zero out funding for Planned Parenthood. This affects their ability to counsel women about birth control. This would increase the number of abortions.

* Zero out Title X funding, used to prevent, screen, and treat sexually transmitted diseases.

* Cut support for international family planning (opposite of what is needed to minimize the effects of global warming).

* Allow hospitals to refuse to terminate a pregnancy even if it would save the mother's life.

* Cut the WIC budget by about 10%. This pays for nutritional food for poor women with children.

Why is it moral and "pro-family" to put the needs of the unborn so highly over the mother to insist that a woman must carry a baby to term even if doing so will kill her. Then to cut funding on programs that would (1) prevent her from getting pregnant in the first place, (2) make sure she has enough nutrition so that the baby will be healthy, and (3) give the child enough nutrition and education to be a contributing member of society?

We were told the GOP was going to focus all their energy on fixing the economy. Instead we get a war on women, a war on the poor, a war on the middle class, a war on gays, and I'm sure I'm missing a few.

Living family values

June Carbone of University of Missouri-Kansas City has taken a look at family values in red and blue states and found a distinct difference. She wrote a book titled Red Families Vs. Blue Families. She had an interview on NPR with Guy Raz today. Alas, there is no transcript yet, so details are from listening online and pausing to type.

Blue states (those that voted Democratic 2004 & 2008) have lower divorce rates, lower teen pregnancy rates. Put another way, these states stress: grow up, get established, get financially sound, then have a family. A young person has a good idea of a viable marriage partner when one marries near age 30.

Red states have higher divorce rates, higher teen pregnancy rates. In these states it is expected one will avoid teen sex and get married out of college so one is getting established and starting a family at the same time. Marriage is at a younger age and a person doesn't yet know what a viable marriage partner means and can't tell who might fit the criteria.

Meaning, blue states tend to have families that are what the red states say is idea. States where teen pregnancy is dropping are also shifting from red to blue.

So who preaches family values?