Kids get 3 dolls and 5 pencils. He got $2.9 billion.

I finished the book A Secret I Can’t Tell, The First Generation of Children from Openly Gay and Lesbian Homes by Joe Gantz. The secret is the children had gay parents and were afraid to tell anyone. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s Gantz did extensive interviews with families headed by gays or lesbians. Well, more accurately he sat there with a tape recorder and let them – parents and children – talk about anything they wanted. After a first round of interviews he briefly contacted the families for an update. Shortly after that he selected five families for inclusion and the book was published. And a few months later the publisher went out of business. The book sat on the shelf for close to 40 years before Gantz tried to get it published again. Before this second edition he contacted some of the children again, now close to or in their 50s, for another update. First, a minor quibble – I wouldn’t call these children the “first” generation. I’m sure lesbian and gay parents ended up raising children decades and centuries before the 1970s. In all but the first story the parents married opposite sex partners before realizing they were homosexual. So part of the story is the breakup of the marriage and how that affected the children. In that first story the couple divorced and only later did the father figure out he was gay. In only a couple of the families did the children feel a lot stress about not being able to explain their parents. That inability tended to isolate the child from their peers. They tended to have few close friends. In other families the children didn’t care much if their friends knew. But there were other stresses – trying to blend the children of two families into one. Going to court so the lesbian couple would have custody (one thing worse than leaving children with lesbians is leaving them with a religious maniac father). Watching their parents’ marriage disintegrate without the parents explaining why. Whether the child will accept the new stepparent giving love and discipline and whether they’ll get along with new stepsiblings. In other words, all the same stresses of straight families experiencing a breakup that are magnified by lesbian and gay issues. One of those issues is the parent going through a second adolescence – wanting to explore their new understanding of their sexual interests while still having to take care of children. This does not imply children do better when raised by straight couples. It does mean the children would do better in a society that doesn’t demonize LGBTQ relationships. I enjoyed the book. It is a good exploration of what lesbian and gay families had to deal with in the years on either side of 1980 when our society more universally condemned same sex relationships. Thankfully, we’ve come a long way since then. No movie on Sunday. I went to Detroit’s Greektown and had supper with Sister and Niece. I was surprised the parking structure nearby showed up on Google Maps but was actually demolished. We did not get the flaming cheese. When a table about ten feet away did Sister said she could feel the heat and did not want a flame that big anywhere close. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported that America First, a legal group founded by Stephen Miller, the most racist of the nasty guy’s advisors, has sued Chief Justice John Roberts in his role of the Judicial Conference. The suit, if successful, would drastically shift power between the Executive and Judiciary branches of government. The Judicial Conference is the organization that manages the federal courts. It issues policy. It handles harassment complaints against judges. It promotes ethics rules. It provides financial, technological, legislative, and program support services. It develops an annual budget. And it produces plans on how to assign judges. Needham explained the reasoning in the suit: The Judicial Conference is an agency, not a court, because it doesn’t issue a decision. It responds to congressional oversight. The claim is that if it is an agency it is part of the executive branch and thus under the control of the president. And if it is under the control of the nasty guy he can do such things as: Slash the budget. Replace congressional oversight (see Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s inquiry into the freebies from billionaires given to Alito and Thomas) with his own. Protect judges who rule in his favor and harass those who don’t. Needham is quite surprised and annoyed that Roberts and Alito haven’t publicly said anything about the case. Both have issued statements and op-eds over far less matters and Needham lists several. Why the silence on a direct challenge to their power? I scanned through the comments to read what others think of Needham’s take. Several say that this is a part of the efforts by the Supremes to allow the nasty guy to become dictator. Some believe the Court is avoiding conflict with the nasty guy so there is no appearance that the Constitution is being violated and that the Court has no power. Others say don’t confuse “the Court” with “conservatives on the Court” – Ketanji Brown Jackson is definitely speaking out and condemning the case. And RETIII wrote this is brought as a lawsuit. It will go to federal court and get tossed. If it is appealed up to the Supremes, they simply refuse to hear the case. Lawsuit blocked. No need to comment on it. As part of a series of explaining the right Oliver Willis of Kos discussed why Republicans are so bad at managing the economy. After showing how the economy always declines under Republicans (at least as far back as Reagan) Willis gets to the explanation. The reason is Republicans push tax cuts favoring the rich and large corporations. Research shows these cuts don’t stimulate the economy. Instead they increase economic inequality and cut the money that could have been used to invest in America. But focusing on the needs of the middle class runs contrary to the interests of the super rich, who disproportionately benefit from the tax cuts. These people are largely unaffected when services and protections for middle and working class people are cut. Don’t cater to the rich and the rich stop donating to Republicans, their major source of money. So Republicans will say again that their economic policies just need another chance. Along with that they claim liberal policies – the ones that restore the economy after every Republican crash – are a failure. Needham didn’t mention that polling shows Republicans do a great sales job on this issue. Voters still rate Republicans better than Democrats at handling the economy. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that Senators Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren called for an ethics probe into a recent nasty guy scheme. It appears to be an offer of dinner with the nasty guy to the top investors of his $Trump crypto coin. After the scheme was announced the coin’s value increased by more than 50% and insiders got $0.9 million in trading fees in just two days. Yes, this sounds like “pay to play” corruption, according to the letter to Trade Representative Jamieson Greer written by Schiff and Warren, of ...

selling presidential access to individuals or entities, to include foreign nationals and corporate actors with vested interests in federal action, while personally enriching the President and his family.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted several writers discussing the nomination of Ed Martin for US Attorney for the District of Columbia and how there are predictions his nomination won’t even get through the Senate committee. That prompted Dworkin to add:

Should Ed Martin fail ... maybe we have reached a point where no, anything and everything doesn’t go. And if you defy Trump on this, you can defy him on other things. Crack the wall. Let the tide do the rest.

Down in the comments exlrrp quoted a tweet by Aaron Rupar, who quoted the nasty guy. This comment has been reported several times in news outlets. The comments were made in response to big box stores saying they may have empty shelves before Christmas. Rupar wrote:

Trump: “I don’t think a beautiful baby girl that’s 11 years old needs to have 30 dolls. I think they can have three dolls or four dolls ... they don’t need to have 250 pencils. They can have five.”

A response by Nathalie Baptiste:

Every time Trump talks about toys you get more insight into how little he interacted with his children when they were young.

A bit below that exlrrp posted a meme. The first part was from a CBS News report:

Trump family’s net worth has increased by $2.9 billion thanks to crypto investments, new report says.

Andrew Weinstein responded

Your family: 3 dolls and 5 pencils. Trump’s family: $2.9 billion Any questions?

In the comments is a tweet by Fiona Webster, the start a thread. On the left of the image are guns designed for hunting. On the right are guns designed for killing humans. There is a notable difference between the two. In response to the Supremes allowing a ban on transgender troops while the case goes through the courts (and will eventually get to the Supremes) paulpro posted a cartoon (author not specified) showing a military drill sergeant towering over the nasty guy and saying “I’m transgender! You gotta problem with that, punk?” Much further down exlrrp posted a meme of yesterday’s meeting between the nasty guy and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. The meme shows the nasty guy saying “We don’t do much business with Canada.” Below it is a graph showing Canada is our top trading partner with Mexico right behind, each doing more than twice the trade the US does with China. Below exlrrp added “He means Canada’s not paying him anything.” I would put the emphasis on “him.” In a second roundup Chitown Kev quoted Yuval Levin of The Atlantic:

Congress is not doing its job, and the vacuum that its dereliction has created is encouraging presidential and judicial overreach. Congress’s weakness is our deepest constitutional problem, because it is not a function of one man’s whims and won’t pass with one administration’s term. It is an institutional dynamic that has disordered our politics for a generation. It results from choices that members of Congress have made, and only those members can improve the situation. It is hard to imagine any meaningful constitutional renewal in America unless they do. [...] The reasons for the subsequent decline in Congress’s stature and assertiveness are complex, but some of the very measures Gingrich took to consolidate power on Capitol Hill contributed to the trends we are witnessing now. Gingrich advanced an almost-parliamentary model of the House of Representatives. He empowered the speaker and majority leader at the expense of the policy-focused committees, and set in motion a process that robbed most members of the opportunity for meaningful legislative work. His moves dramatically accelerated what was by then a 20-year trend toward the centralization of authority in the hands of congressional leaders. House leaders of both parties have pushed further in that direction in this century, and the Senate has largely followed suit. These efforts were intended to make Congress more effective, but in practice, they rendered most legislators almost irrelevant.