Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 832
March 17, 2016
The right’s shocking admission: Stunned by Trump’s dominance, some GOP pundits concede that Dems have been right about Republicans all along
"America's in the middle of a real political storm — a real tsunami — and we should have seen this coming." - Marco Rubio It was always inevitable, I suppose. The Republican Party has debased itself for decades – courting racists, placating religious lunatics, and using the culture wars as a political wedge. Candidates like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin are natural outgrowths of this conservative ecosystem; they're exactly what you'd expect it to produce. This is the climate Republicans have cultivated, and what we're seeing now is the logical conclusion of those efforts. The GOP establishment continues to eat itself from within, as officials scramble to make sense of it all. You might call it an identity crisis of sorts. Longtime Republicans are now questioning the party's broader strategy. Here's Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist for the Wall Street Journal:
“Liberals may have been fond of claiming that Republicans were all closet bigots and that tax cuts were a form of racial prejudice, but the accusation rang hollow because the evidence for it was so tendentious. Not anymore. The candidacy of Donald Trump is the open sewer of American conservatism...It would be terrible to think that the left was right about the right all these years.”Terrible indeed, but no less true. Here's a similar Tweet by Max Boot, a neoconservative hawk and prominent Republican intellectual: “I'm a lifelong Republican but Trump surge proves that every bad Democrats have ever said about GOP is basically true.” Welcome to the club, Max. Happy to have you. In addition to embracing the worst elements of its base, the GOP also blundered in its strategic decision to cede the business of governing to Democrats and focus instead on obstructing President Obama. “Our top political priority over the next two years,” Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell famously said in 2010, “should be to deny President Obama a second term.” One of the less incoherent objections Trumpites raise against the Republican Party is that it hasn't delivered on any of its promises. Legislatively, the GOP has been virtually useless. Election after election, session after session, Republicans have failed to pass any meaningful pieces of legislation, which is what happens when compromise becomes a heresy in your party. The GOP's stated strategy – at least since Obama was elected – has been to create gridlock, to make the country ungovernable. Recall how they used the nation's credit rating to blackmail the opposing party, not to accomplish anything but to score points with their purist base. And just this week, we have the nihilsm of a Republican senate, led by McConnell, refusing to do its job and consider President Obama's Supreme Court nomination. The bogus talking point is that the people's voice ought to be heard before choosing a new Justice. But the people already spoke in the last election, when they gave Obama a second term. But that doesn't matter because McConnell is hostage to the Tea Party reactionaries that dominate the Republican-led Congress. This is the kind of bureaucratic inertia Americans are rejecting. In their bottomless cynicism, Republicans have tried to break the government so that they could then reproach the Democrats for ruining it. This worked temporarily, but it was bound to backfire at some point. Now something like 87 percent of the country disapproves of the job Congress is doing. Republicans wagered that the country would blame Obama for the mess they manufactured. Instead, their base is – rightly – blaming the GOP establishment, and Donald Trump is delivering the message. Trump voters hate Obama, of course, but not nearly as much as they do their own party. The GOP committed itself to grievance politics and a strategy of political arson years ago. Had they gone another way, had they been serious about the difficult work of governance, Donald Trump would not have devoured their party this cycle. Once again, he's their Frankenstein, and no one in the party can stop him. Our only hope is that the Democrats will."America's in the middle of a real political storm — a real tsunami — and we should have seen this coming." - Marco Rubio It was always inevitable, I suppose. The Republican Party has debased itself for decades – courting racists, placating religious lunatics, and using the culture wars as a political wedge. Candidates like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin are natural outgrowths of this conservative ecosystem; they're exactly what you'd expect it to produce. This is the climate Republicans have cultivated, and what we're seeing now is the logical conclusion of those efforts. The GOP establishment continues to eat itself from within, as officials scramble to make sense of it all. You might call it an identity crisis of sorts. Longtime Republicans are now questioning the party's broader strategy. Here's Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist for the Wall Street Journal:
“Liberals may have been fond of claiming that Republicans were all closet bigots and that tax cuts were a form of racial prejudice, but the accusation rang hollow because the evidence for it was so tendentious. Not anymore. The candidacy of Donald Trump is the open sewer of American conservatism...It would be terrible to think that the left was right about the right all these years.”Terrible indeed, but no less true. Here's a similar Tweet by Max Boot, a neoconservative hawk and prominent Republican intellectual: “I'm a lifelong Republican but Trump surge proves that every bad Democrats have ever said about GOP is basically true.” Welcome to the club, Max. Happy to have you. In addition to embracing the worst elements of its base, the GOP also blundered in its strategic decision to cede the business of governing to Democrats and focus instead on obstructing President Obama. “Our top political priority over the next two years,” Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell famously said in 2010, “should be to deny President Obama a second term.” One of the less incoherent objections Trumpites raise against the Republican Party is that it hasn't delivered on any of its promises. Legislatively, the GOP has been virtually useless. Election after election, session after session, Republicans have failed to pass any meaningful pieces of legislation, which is what happens when compromise becomes a heresy in your party. The GOP's stated strategy – at least since Obama was elected – has been to create gridlock, to make the country ungovernable. Recall how they used the nation's credit rating to blackmail the opposing party, not to accomplish anything but to score points with their purist base. And just this week, we have the nihilsm of a Republican senate, led by McConnell, refusing to do its job and consider President Obama's Supreme Court nomination. The bogus talking point is that the people's voice ought to be heard before choosing a new Justice. But the people already spoke in the last election, when they gave Obama a second term. But that doesn't matter because McConnell is hostage to the Tea Party reactionaries that dominate the Republican-led Congress. This is the kind of bureaucratic inertia Americans are rejecting. In their bottomless cynicism, Republicans have tried to break the government so that they could then reproach the Democrats for ruining it. This worked temporarily, but it was bound to backfire at some point. Now something like 87 percent of the country disapproves of the job Congress is doing. Republicans wagered that the country would blame Obama for the mess they manufactured. Instead, their base is – rightly – blaming the GOP establishment, and Donald Trump is delivering the message. Trump voters hate Obama, of course, but not nearly as much as they do their own party. The GOP committed itself to grievance politics and a strategy of political arson years ago. Had they gone another way, had they been serious about the difficult work of governance, Donald Trump would not have devoured their party this cycle. Once again, he's their Frankenstein, and no one in the party can stop him. Our only hope is that the Democrats will.
Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan’s Vanity Fair embrace: To understand the photo’s polarizing responses, start with #OscarsSoWhite
Just like you, maybe, I saw the recently released Vanity Fair portrait of Michael B. Jordan and Ryan Coogler and thought it was a beautiful snapshot of two straight men showing affection for each other; two superstars captured in a rare moment of tranquility. And just like you, maybe, I witnessed the online criticism it elicited over the last week. The responses ranged from violent disavowal to exasperated pride. One refrain, however, interested me most of all: “Why does America keep emasculating black men?” The commenters who asked this, black men themselves, were offended by the image. As a queer man of color I bristled at their response, keenly aware of the homophobia and femmephobia such a sentiment implies. But as someone who has spent the last year documenting the overwhelming whiteness in Hollywood by creating Every Single Word, a video series that edits down mainstream films to only the words spoken by people of color, I know that these comments demand something far more challenging and complex: my understanding. These men were responding not from a place of intentional hate, but one of terrified preciousness. They fear that one of the few reflections they are afforded as black men could suddenly be devalued and effectively destroyed, and, with unfortunate language, they are protecting it at all costs. This fear is not new. In 2014 Nate Parker, the writer, director and star of the Sundance hit "The Birth of a Nation" (the surefire 2017 best picture nominee, not the deeply racist 1915 propaganda film), sat down for an interview with BET. In this interview he declared that “to preserve the black man you will never see [him] play a gay role.” The video has since been taken down but, like an elephant, the Internet forgets nothing; an article on Ebony, several blog posts, and a now-defunct URL from Bossip have preserved this quote for posterity. “I refuse to allow any piece of work to emasculate me,” he said in this same interview. In 1993 Will Smith played Paul, a gay character in "Six Degrees of Separation," but infamously refused to take part in the kiss the role required. As legend goes, he was urged against it by Denzel Washington. If we want to understand the monolithic definition of what it means to be a Great Black Man on Film, look no further than the film industry’s definition of the so-called “best.” The Oscars have nominated 20 performances from black men in the best actor category, more than half of which are shared between only four actors: Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Sidney Poitier and Will Smith. Nate Parker’s performance as Nat Turner will likely become the 21st. A recent article in the New York Times details this thoroughly in “What Does the Academy Value in a Black Performance?” More than half of the nominated performances, the article points out, depict arrest or incarceration. And three-quarters contain violent or criminal behavior. Unsurprisingly, the academy – whose voter base was 94 percent white in 2014, according to the L.A. Times – has a pretty narrow view of what it means to be a black man. None of these nominations, including Parker’s likely one, honor performances of characters who are black and gay. In her TED Talk, the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie outlines the dangers of these monolithic narratives. “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” It seems as though Nate Parker, Will Smith and the commenters have been fed the single story that power is masculinity and masculinity is heterosexuality. Such a myopic narrative robs its protagonists not of power but of humanity. Justin Simien, the writer and director of "Dear White People," recently said that “there is an obsession with black tragedy. If you see a black movie… It’s people who are enduring these horrible tragedies, or they’re saintlike… You know what that says, very subtly? It says that we’re not human. Because human beings are multifaceted.” To be black and gay is one such human facet that viewers do not get to see in mainstream film. As with the commenters, I must force myself to see neither Parker nor Smith as the enemy; they are victims whose fear was unfortunately expressed through symbolic distancing. This is not about Michael B. Jordan’s and Ryan Coogler’s sexuality; it never was. It’s about what people feel when they see avatars of themselves doing something they fear will take away their power. Part of the privilege of whiteness is the diversity of white avatars that appear on-screen. White people can afford to be less precious about their symbols because they have so many options. People of color, including black men, cannot. Of course we care about images of ourselves on screens, whether they are our own or similar to our own. Just as we check selfies to make sure we look good, or un-tag pictures of ourselves if they don’t represent who we want to be, we also care about the celebrities that represent us. Like pictures, celebrities are our avatars; they stand for us when we’re not there. They are our proxies in fantasy worlds, historical retellings, and red carpet photographs. They are meant to be just like us. Maybe. This is, of course, not just about who gets to win awards and play characters, but about who our symbols permit us to become. For me, the dearth of queer Hispanic men on-screen prompted me to fear that I didn’t exist, or worse: shouldn’t. We need more queer black men on-screen, more queer men of all colors. And when I say that, I mean that we need to complicate our notions about who and what a person of color can be, by depicting all diversity – not monolithic ideals – within communities of color. It feels like white people were handed smartphones with unlimited storage and told to take pictures of themselves while people of color, all people of color, were thrown one disposable camera with the same instructions. All we can do is fight over the camera to take 27 photos and hope — against all odds — that one of them will look just like us. All of us. Maybe.
“I’m a different animal now”: “The Mommy Group” author gets real about having kids and how America needs to change to support mothers
Elizabeth Isadora Gold knows that her new book, “The Mommy Group,” might be a bit daunting to those whose lives don’t include any babies at the moment. “I’ve been calling it a non-invasive IUD,” Gold says, with a wry laugh. Blending elements of memoir and journalism, the book follows a group of seven Brooklyn women who came together in 2010 to share their burdens during pregnancy, childbirth and their babies’ first year. Overall, they’re a privileged group – well-educated, healthy and financially OK (though some are more OK than others) – they’re all straight and most are white. But the struggles they face are those that can happen to all mothers, from all backgrounds; throughout the book, we see them work though infidelity, birth trauma, postpartum depression and parenting children with developmental disability. There’s a lot of humor in “The Mommy Group” – when you’re getting sleep in one-hour chunks and feel permanently connected to a breast pump, you pretty much have to laugh to keep from crying – but Gold has a serious message, too. By telling our stories, she argues, women can not only support each other but push for political change as well. Are you still close to the women in your Mommy Group? We are still very connected. I’m in very good touch with everyone. In any given week, my daughter will have playdates with three or four kids within the group. These are some of my closest friends. Which made it, not incidentally, fairly tricky to write about them. I was wondering about that – how did that process go? How much did you check in with them? Did you worry about self-censoring? It was hard. I have a very formal nonfiction background. I have this very specific ethos of nonfiction writing, that not only do you have to be truthful, but that you have to push really hard to get the internal truth. I had thought almost from the beginning of this group, oh my god, this is a book. I sort of jokingly would be like, I’m going to write a book about us! And they’d be like, yeah, yeah. Because they didn’t really know me as a writer, they knew me as a pregnant and then breast-feeding person. And then when I said, no, actually, I’m really going to write a book about us, I asked everybody for permission. I said, I’m going to interview you. I asked everybody how they felt. We agreed that names and identifying details would be changed – professions, some details about neighborhoods. It’s not far from who they are. Everybody sat for interviews. Everybody was very open. All the dads had to be on board. I had been so nervous that they were all going to hate me at the end of this, that I had been really scrupulous about the facts. I knew I had to be emotionally on point and not cover up for what people’s unhappiness or dissatisfactions had been. And that was tricky, especially talking about people’s husbands. But I made sure that everybody felt good about it – and they’re smart women, they understood that this was going to contribute some record of what it’s actually like to be a mom. It’s really special to me that they all felt like they were participating in something that was bigger, that wasn’t just me getting to write a book, but that had like a higher purpose, not to be too arrogant about it. The book has a lot of light moments and a lot of humor, but you write really honestly about falling apart, postpartum, and being on a daunting cocktail of drugs. What did it feel like to write about that, and how are you doing now? The book coming out is fairly concurrent with the fifth anniversary of getting postpartum. I’m still on the same cocktail of drugs. I don’t consider myself recovered; I don’t consider that I will ever be recovered. I don’t consider that there’s such a thing as recovery – I think that you grow and you change and you learn more about yourself. Postpartum got me back into therapy after a few years of not being in therapy. I’m definitely a person who ought to be in therapy. For me, the radical honesty approach is definitely the best approach. I have no compunction about telling people what medication I’m on, and why, and what happened. This doesn’t hold true for everybody, but it makes me feel less anxious to just be like, this is where I’m at, this is who I am. One of the things I think the book captures is how you can have all these theories about what’s right for kids, generally speaking, but then when you meet your own child, get to know your own child, you realize there are like 20 different right answers to any problem, and it all just depends on your own kid and your own family. I feel like a lot of what I learned having postpartum was that I had to give up a lot of the ideas that I had about being the mom of a little baby and what that would look like. And it was bad for me, in terms of the fact that I was mentally ill, but it was not bad for Clara. Nothing happened that was bad for her in that scenario. I had to deal with being sick, but she was fine. It wasn’t like any decisions were made that weren’t optimal for her. In a weird way, I think – and I talk about this in the book – I think the fact that she had so many caregivers early on. She would have had a good relationship with Danny anyway, because he adores being a father and wanted to be an equal partner always, but I think she has a particularly exceptional relationship with him, because he had to do a lot of mommy-style caregiving for her. One of the things you talk about in the book was the level of honesty that your mommy group was able to come together with. The ability to share even the ugly stuff is so affirming and so crucial to building a community, because being a mother is really hard and you’re expected to think it’s all sunshine and roses, when you’re just freaking out. I can’t help but think of the crazy election, this crazy political moment that we’re in, people talking about Hillary Clinton being held to a higher standard because she’s a woman. I think there’s some truth to that. I think women are held to this higher standard in terms of not letting them see you sweat. I think it’s really important to let them see you sweat, because that’s where change comes in. Conditions for working mothers have not really improved since the 1980s. We don’t have maternity leave, we don’t have subsidized childcare, our reproductive rights are still up for grabs in dramatic ways, we still don’t have financial parity. This is especially true for poor women, and there are more poor people in this country, proportionately. There’s too little support in a profound way, a profound way. That is part of what this book is about – that the process of becoming a mother is so difficult and complicated, physically, emotionally, and we’re so not supposed to talk about it. We’re not supposed to say, the day I became a mother I wasn’t the same person ever again. I’m different, I’m a different animal now. You know, we’re not supposed to admit that. But it’s hard on your body. If you’re trying to work and pump breast milk – it’s so weird and uncomfortable. And the lack of sleep, and the million other decisions you have to make every day that you didn’t even know were decisions you had to make, like what’s my approach to this parenting dilemma, what’s my strategy? I remember when my children were little, tiny, I would always walk around knowing which ones of their fingernails and toenails I needed to trim. Like I could get five fingernails done before somebody would start crying, and then in my head I would think, I’ve got to go back and get that nail. Tina Fey has this great part, I think in "Bossypants," where she talks about how the only time she was able to trim her daughter’s fingernails was while her daughter was pooping on the potty. This became her thing that she did. And she was like, how did I become the person who trims her daughter’s nails while she’s pooping? That’s parenthood. And I think that’s particularly working motherhood, you just catch as catch can in this really intense way. And that’s the part that really you don’t know about until you’re in it. You think, well, I can manage it. I can deal with little sleep. And it’s not that – it’s the feeling that you really are walking around with a piece of you across the city. It’s a really strange feeling. In the book one of the moms says, “It’s like being on an acid trip all the time.” That sentence got us through the first year of parenthood! It’s like your brain has been so radically rearranged, it’s almost not worth trying to go back. It’s like, how do I navigate the new normal? Yes. And that’s my theory in the book, is that it takes a full two years. I have a friend who adopted a 2-year-old, and I feel like, it was still two years before she felt like she had kind of gotten not only in the swim of being a mom but also felt like she could get her Self, with a capital S, back again. Two years isn’t that long in the grand scheme of things, but you need it, you need to go through a process and figure out who you have become, because you’ve become someone different. When you’re in it, the two years feel endless. And at the end of it – I think it’s important, that point about self. Between our sexist society, and feminist messages about how women can and should be in the world, it can feel hard to calibrate – or it’s hard for me, anyway – how self-centered I’m allowed to be and still feel like a good mother, or wife, or friend, or employee. You sacrifice yourself for your child all the time. But as some people will very wisely say, you have to put your oxygen mask on before you help others. It feels like a complicated decision on a day-to-day basis. It is. Obviously it depends on what your capabilities are. This is one reason mommy groups are so great. Because you can be with the kid while you’re also taking care of yourself. And that’s helpful, because you don’t have to feel guilty about the not spending time or the childcare aspect, you can get the adult conversation and the support that you need at the same time. But it’s a day-to-day set of decisions. And, I have to say, these are a privileged set of decisions. Many, if not most, women in this country don’t have a choice about whether or not they’re going to have a nanny, or keep the kid an extra hour in daycare, or take a personal day when the kid is sick. Many, if not most, women in this country are in such a state of financial insecurity that they just have to do whatever they have to do – if they take an extra personal day, they lose their jobs. Emotionally, I think it’s a wider problem. But having the privilege to be able to decide these things – sadly, it’s kind of a nice problem to have. And again, if we had the basic laws in place that we needed to have, then the conversation could be more about what is the emotional quality of parenting. What’s the emotional quality of life as parents, what’s the emotional quality of motherhood? Then we would be able to work on the other parts of the conversation, which could be much more about, what can we achieve as women, what are our goals, post-parenthood, what do we want that life to look like? But until we have the legal parts in place, it’s catch-as-catch-can for most women. Do you think this society is ever going to be as structurally friendly to families as, say, Scandinavian countries are? I hope eventually, someday. But I don’t know. We have a big, not-homogenous country, with a great deal of hostility toward the idea of giving anyone “extra” support. I teach college students, and their ideas about the world are quite different than mine. I think they have this acceptance that it’s not looking like they’ll be able to do everything. I think that they’re still waiting, too. I look at my college students now, who are maybe going to have kids in another 15 years or so, and I have no idea what’s going to happen. Who knows? You have to put a value on children – and you have to put a value on education, you have to put a value on women’s agency over their own bodies, if you want to put a value on motherhood, which in turn values children. The conversation is very broad, and it’s either super-complicated or so simple that it’s ridiculous. The fact that gender issues are so huge in this election and that people still don’t understand that women simply don’t yet have equality – and we’re arguing over the Supreme Court, the idea that something has to be pro-woman, that there still exists a land where … We’re still a special interest! We’re still a special interest! We’re the majority at this point! Most people in college are women, most people in grad school are women. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever! So this, to me, is the broader message of the book. I was raised by a third-wave feminist, I was a women’s studies major at an all-women’s college. We need to organize; we need to talk to each other. Because if we don’t, then we’re all in these little isolation tanks thinking that we’re the only people who have the feelings that we have. And that goes for trying to get pregnant, miscarriage, breast-feeding, going back to work – all of this stuff, if you walk around feeling like your individual body is the only body that’s having this stuff happen to it, you’re going to feel crappier. And nothing will ever change.Elizabeth Isadora Gold knows that her new book, “The Mommy Group,” might be a bit daunting to those whose lives don’t include any babies at the moment. “I’ve been calling it a non-invasive IUD,” Gold says, with a wry laugh. Blending elements of memoir and journalism, the book follows a group of seven Brooklyn women who came together in 2010 to share their burdens during pregnancy, childbirth and their babies’ first year. Overall, they’re a privileged group – well-educated, healthy and financially OK (though some are more OK than others) – they’re all straight and most are white. But the struggles they face are those that can happen to all mothers, from all backgrounds; throughout the book, we see them work though infidelity, birth trauma, postpartum depression and parenting children with developmental disability. There’s a lot of humor in “The Mommy Group” – when you’re getting sleep in one-hour chunks and feel permanently connected to a breast pump, you pretty much have to laugh to keep from crying – but Gold has a serious message, too. By telling our stories, she argues, women can not only support each other but push for political change as well. Are you still close to the women in your Mommy Group? We are still very connected. I’m in very good touch with everyone. In any given week, my daughter will have playdates with three or four kids within the group. These are some of my closest friends. Which made it, not incidentally, fairly tricky to write about them. I was wondering about that – how did that process go? How much did you check in with them? Did you worry about self-censoring? It was hard. I have a very formal nonfiction background. I have this very specific ethos of nonfiction writing, that not only do you have to be truthful, but that you have to push really hard to get the internal truth. I had thought almost from the beginning of this group, oh my god, this is a book. I sort of jokingly would be like, I’m going to write a book about us! And they’d be like, yeah, yeah. Because they didn’t really know me as a writer, they knew me as a pregnant and then breast-feeding person. And then when I said, no, actually, I’m really going to write a book about us, I asked everybody for permission. I said, I’m going to interview you. I asked everybody how they felt. We agreed that names and identifying details would be changed – professions, some details about neighborhoods. It’s not far from who they are. Everybody sat for interviews. Everybody was very open. All the dads had to be on board. I had been so nervous that they were all going to hate me at the end of this, that I had been really scrupulous about the facts. I knew I had to be emotionally on point and not cover up for what people’s unhappiness or dissatisfactions had been. And that was tricky, especially talking about people’s husbands. But I made sure that everybody felt good about it – and they’re smart women, they understood that this was going to contribute some record of what it’s actually like to be a mom. It’s really special to me that they all felt like they were participating in something that was bigger, that wasn’t just me getting to write a book, but that had like a higher purpose, not to be too arrogant about it. The book has a lot of light moments and a lot of humor, but you write really honestly about falling apart, postpartum, and being on a daunting cocktail of drugs. What did it feel like to write about that, and how are you doing now? The book coming out is fairly concurrent with the fifth anniversary of getting postpartum. I’m still on the same cocktail of drugs. I don’t consider myself recovered; I don’t consider that I will ever be recovered. I don’t consider that there’s such a thing as recovery – I think that you grow and you change and you learn more about yourself. Postpartum got me back into therapy after a few years of not being in therapy. I’m definitely a person who ought to be in therapy. For me, the radical honesty approach is definitely the best approach. I have no compunction about telling people what medication I’m on, and why, and what happened. This doesn’t hold true for everybody, but it makes me feel less anxious to just be like, this is where I’m at, this is who I am. One of the things I think the book captures is how you can have all these theories about what’s right for kids, generally speaking, but then when you meet your own child, get to know your own child, you realize there are like 20 different right answers to any problem, and it all just depends on your own kid and your own family. I feel like a lot of what I learned having postpartum was that I had to give up a lot of the ideas that I had about being the mom of a little baby and what that would look like. And it was bad for me, in terms of the fact that I was mentally ill, but it was not bad for Clara. Nothing happened that was bad for her in that scenario. I had to deal with being sick, but she was fine. It wasn’t like any decisions were made that weren’t optimal for her. In a weird way, I think – and I talk about this in the book – I think the fact that she had so many caregivers early on. She would have had a good relationship with Danny anyway, because he adores being a father and wanted to be an equal partner always, but I think she has a particularly exceptional relationship with him, because he had to do a lot of mommy-style caregiving for her. One of the things you talk about in the book was the level of honesty that your mommy group was able to come together with. The ability to share even the ugly stuff is so affirming and so crucial to building a community, because being a mother is really hard and you’re expected to think it’s all sunshine and roses, when you’re just freaking out. I can’t help but think of the crazy election, this crazy political moment that we’re in, people talking about Hillary Clinton being held to a higher standard because she’s a woman. I think there’s some truth to that. I think women are held to this higher standard in terms of not letting them see you sweat. I think it’s really important to let them see you sweat, because that’s where change comes in. Conditions for working mothers have not really improved since the 1980s. We don’t have maternity leave, we don’t have subsidized childcare, our reproductive rights are still up for grabs in dramatic ways, we still don’t have financial parity. This is especially true for poor women, and there are more poor people in this country, proportionately. There’s too little support in a profound way, a profound way. That is part of what this book is about – that the process of becoming a mother is so difficult and complicated, physically, emotionally, and we’re so not supposed to talk about it. We’re not supposed to say, the day I became a mother I wasn’t the same person ever again. I’m different, I’m a different animal now. You know, we’re not supposed to admit that. But it’s hard on your body. If you’re trying to work and pump breast milk – it’s so weird and uncomfortable. And the lack of sleep, and the million other decisions you have to make every day that you didn’t even know were decisions you had to make, like what’s my approach to this parenting dilemma, what’s my strategy? I remember when my children were little, tiny, I would always walk around knowing which ones of their fingernails and toenails I needed to trim. Like I could get five fingernails done before somebody would start crying, and then in my head I would think, I’ve got to go back and get that nail. Tina Fey has this great part, I think in "Bossypants," where she talks about how the only time she was able to trim her daughter’s fingernails was while her daughter was pooping on the potty. This became her thing that she did. And she was like, how did I become the person who trims her daughter’s nails while she’s pooping? That’s parenthood. And I think that’s particularly working motherhood, you just catch as catch can in this really intense way. And that’s the part that really you don’t know about until you’re in it. You think, well, I can manage it. I can deal with little sleep. And it’s not that – it’s the feeling that you really are walking around with a piece of you across the city. It’s a really strange feeling. In the book one of the moms says, “It’s like being on an acid trip all the time.” That sentence got us through the first year of parenthood! It’s like your brain has been so radically rearranged, it’s almost not worth trying to go back. It’s like, how do I navigate the new normal? Yes. And that’s my theory in the book, is that it takes a full two years. I have a friend who adopted a 2-year-old, and I feel like, it was still two years before she felt like she had kind of gotten not only in the swim of being a mom but also felt like she could get her Self, with a capital S, back again. Two years isn’t that long in the grand scheme of things, but you need it, you need to go through a process and figure out who you have become, because you’ve become someone different. When you’re in it, the two years feel endless. And at the end of it – I think it’s important, that point about self. Between our sexist society, and feminist messages about how women can and should be in the world, it can feel hard to calibrate – or it’s hard for me, anyway – how self-centered I’m allowed to be and still feel like a good mother, or wife, or friend, or employee. You sacrifice yourself for your child all the time. But as some people will very wisely say, you have to put your oxygen mask on before you help others. It feels like a complicated decision on a day-to-day basis. It is. Obviously it depends on what your capabilities are. This is one reason mommy groups are so great. Because you can be with the kid while you’re also taking care of yourself. And that’s helpful, because you don’t have to feel guilty about the not spending time or the childcare aspect, you can get the adult conversation and the support that you need at the same time. But it’s a day-to-day set of decisions. And, I have to say, these are a privileged set of decisions. Many, if not most, women in this country don’t have a choice about whether or not they’re going to have a nanny, or keep the kid an extra hour in daycare, or take a personal day when the kid is sick. Many, if not most, women in this country are in such a state of financial insecurity that they just have to do whatever they have to do – if they take an extra personal day, they lose their jobs. Emotionally, I think it’s a wider problem. But having the privilege to be able to decide these things – sadly, it’s kind of a nice problem to have. And again, if we had the basic laws in place that we needed to have, then the conversation could be more about what is the emotional quality of parenting. What’s the emotional quality of life as parents, what’s the emotional quality of motherhood? Then we would be able to work on the other parts of the conversation, which could be much more about, what can we achieve as women, what are our goals, post-parenthood, what do we want that life to look like? But until we have the legal parts in place, it’s catch-as-catch-can for most women. Do you think this society is ever going to be as structurally friendly to families as, say, Scandinavian countries are? I hope eventually, someday. But I don’t know. We have a big, not-homogenous country, with a great deal of hostility toward the idea of giving anyone “extra” support. I teach college students, and their ideas about the world are quite different than mine. I think they have this acceptance that it’s not looking like they’ll be able to do everything. I think that they’re still waiting, too. I look at my college students now, who are maybe going to have kids in another 15 years or so, and I have no idea what’s going to happen. Who knows? You have to put a value on children – and you have to put a value on education, you have to put a value on women’s agency over their own bodies, if you want to put a value on motherhood, which in turn values children. The conversation is very broad, and it’s either super-complicated or so simple that it’s ridiculous. The fact that gender issues are so huge in this election and that people still don’t understand that women simply don’t yet have equality – and we’re arguing over the Supreme Court, the idea that something has to be pro-woman, that there still exists a land where … We’re still a special interest! We’re still a special interest! We’re the majority at this point! Most people in college are women, most people in grad school are women. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever! So this, to me, is the broader message of the book. I was raised by a third-wave feminist, I was a women’s studies major at an all-women’s college. We need to organize; we need to talk to each other. Because if we don’t, then we’re all in these little isolation tanks thinking that we’re the only people who have the feelings that we have. And that goes for trying to get pregnant, miscarriage, breast-feeding, going back to work – all of this stuff, if you walk around feeling like your individual body is the only body that’s having this stuff happen to it, you’re going to feel crappier. And nothing will ever change.
Art illuminates loneliness: “The experience of loneliness, particularly urban loneliness, is intensely visual”
The prose in Olivia Laing’s “The Lonely City” is so fine it could makes anyone who is not the author’s friend or relative almost glad she suffered so much if it led to a book like this. “The Lonely City” is part memoir, part meditation on personal isolation, part critical study of a handful of visual artists. By looking at the lives and works of Andy Warhol, Edward Hopper, Henry Darger, David Wojnarowicz and others, she gets deep into both the sources of creativity and the nature of the human psyche. (The book also ventures into other bits of culture including Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and the Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit.”) Subtitled "Adventures in the Art of Being Alone," “The Lonely City” begins with the paradox that a huge city teeming with people can be, at least for some, a deeply lonely place. As Dwight Garner writes in the New York Times, Laing “picks up the topic of painful urban isolation and sets it down in many smart and oddly consoling places. She makes the topic her own.” Laing is also the author of a well-regarded book about authors and alcoholism, “The Trip to Echo Spring.” Her first book, the award-winning “To the River,” follows her walk along the body of water -- running through Sussex, England – in which Virginia Woolf drowned herself. An Englishwoman now living in Cambridge, Laing spoke to Salon from a stop in New York City. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. This book uses various visual artists as lenses to look at loneliness. Why did artists make sense for this rather than filmmakers or musicians or novelists? I didn’t want to write about writers because my previous book, “The Trip to Echo Spring,” was about writers, and I felt I wanted to escape from that. I think, as well, the experience of loneliness, particularly urban loneliness, is intensely visual. I was living in New York, having that classic experience – which I’m having right now – of looking out a window and being surrounded by other windows looking back. That correlated so strongly with the experience of loneliness – that one feels at once entrapped, unable to reach out, but at the same time, exposed to other people’s gazes. That visual trap is where I started out, and that led me to Edward Hopper’s paintings. It just seemed like visual art was a really powerful way for me to come at loneliness from several different angles. If you had written about novelists or songwriters in terms of loneliness, who might it have made sense to include? I think Jean Rhys is a fantastic writer about loneliness; there are many, many books. And I do write about music – I write about Klaus Nomi. There’s a point where I list the music I was listening to – I was listening to Antony and the Johnsons, I was listening to Justin Vivian Bond… I mean country music, my God, you could do a whole thing on rural loneliness and country music. Yeah, absolutely. You mention Hopper. Your book focuses on “Nighthawks” – probably the most ubiquitous of his paintings. I was surprised you found more to say about it. Were you surprised yourself that there were new insights to be had? Yes – it’s the same thing with Warhol. Some of the people I talked about are so incredibly well-known, but they hadn’t been looked at from this angle. The perspective I was coming at was quite fresh, and that often illuminates new material, because you’re coming from a wholly new perspective. Back to Warhol. This is another surprise. He was a very public figure, he seemed to have a posse around him – the Factory itself was a bunch of friends and colleagues who worked together. But he was a deeply lonely person, as well, wasn’t he? I think sometimes he was – yeah. It wasn’t important to me that the people I put in the book were always lonely. Some of them were very socially connected – David Wojnarovich as well. I felt like Warhol’s work and life thought about issues of isolation deeply and well. And that was something that hadn’t particularly been explored, because we tend to take him at face value as this very socially fluent figure. But actually, the way he used technology in particular – the tape recorder, the cameras – was a way to broker and buffer his social interactions because of his anxiety, his desires for connection, his fear of rejection… These lonely issues were quite close in his life. I was giving a talk last night, and there was a Warhol expert in the audience. She was saying that she agreed, that I was right, and that it was interesting to hear of Warhol being talked about as lonely, because it gets said so rarely. But there were moments in his diaries where he does, quite frankly, admit that he never quite got the closeness in his life that he would have wished – that he never got as close to people as he wanted to. There’s a fair bit about the AIDS crisis in the book. How does that fit in, besides the fact that it related to several of the artists you discuss? Can disease amplify loneliness and isolation, or vice versa? We think of loneliness as afflicting the individual, but actually it affects groups of people because of social and political forces. I wanted to try and make sense of that, so I did it via the AIDS crisis. I could have done that with other things; what I said about AIDS is true of the refugee crisis. A group of people get dehumanized, stigmatized, and that group of people becomes intensely lonely. So that was something – a larger thing – I wanted to think through. Especially in relation to the AIDS crisis in late ‘80s and early ‘90s New York. But it’s a much larger issue. The book is about these visual artists, but also your own experience. Did working on the book make you feel more isolated, or did it make you feel connected to a tradition or a lineage or a way of looking at the world? Yeah – it did absolutely. It was important that I not end the book with, “Hey, I solved my loneliness by making something!” That didn’t happen… But the book does have an arc of finding a kind of beauty, a kind of interest in loneliness through the works I was examining. The frank declarations of human vulnerability was so moving to me. What I was trying to do was strip away some of the shame around loneliness, which I think is actually the most personal element. And did you say “lineage”? Yes, I did. That really resonates for me. I did feel like these were people I related to very deeply. David Wojnarovich was interviewed by Nan Goldin for Interview magazine, and she said, “What do you want from your work, David?” And he said, “What I most want is to alleviate the alienation of other people. That’s the thing that’s most important to me.” His work did that for me, and that is the beauty of art around loneliness – it does have this effect of building empathy, relieving shame, building community. It’s powerful. What’s next for you? What kinds of topics are you thinking about these days? I’m thinking about the body, particularly as a political force. We’re at a really interesting moment – on one hand, we’re in a technological, kind of disembodied age, and yet there’s so much protest going on. The Black Lives Matter movement, the Arab Spring… People resisting and changing the world by the force of their bodies on the streets. I’m really interested in thinking about that… But it’s very early stages. I was trying to place something this book reminded me of. Do you have models as a writer, or writers who inspired you in the early stages? Sure. I feel like I’m kind of doing my own thing, quite strongly, because I do write these hybrid books that people have trouble trying to work out and categorize… But right from the beginning, people like Bruce Chatwin and W.G. Sebald, the freedom that they created in their work... And people like Maggie Nelson – being able to write beautifully, be a critic, and to be political… Those are things that matter to me and I know matter to Maggie as well. Those are the sort of allyships I feel.The prose in Olivia Laing’s “The Lonely City” is so fine it could makes anyone who is not the author’s friend or relative almost glad she suffered so much if it led to a book like this. “The Lonely City” is part memoir, part meditation on personal isolation, part critical study of a handful of visual artists. By looking at the lives and works of Andy Warhol, Edward Hopper, Henry Darger, David Wojnarowicz and others, she gets deep into both the sources of creativity and the nature of the human psyche. (The book also ventures into other bits of culture including Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and the Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit.”) Subtitled "Adventures in the Art of Being Alone," “The Lonely City” begins with the paradox that a huge city teeming with people can be, at least for some, a deeply lonely place. As Dwight Garner writes in the New York Times, Laing “picks up the topic of painful urban isolation and sets it down in many smart and oddly consoling places. She makes the topic her own.” Laing is also the author of a well-regarded book about authors and alcoholism, “The Trip to Echo Spring.” Her first book, the award-winning “To the River,” follows her walk along the body of water -- running through Sussex, England – in which Virginia Woolf drowned herself. An Englishwoman now living in Cambridge, Laing spoke to Salon from a stop in New York City. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. This book uses various visual artists as lenses to look at loneliness. Why did artists make sense for this rather than filmmakers or musicians or novelists? I didn’t want to write about writers because my previous book, “The Trip to Echo Spring,” was about writers, and I felt I wanted to escape from that. I think, as well, the experience of loneliness, particularly urban loneliness, is intensely visual. I was living in New York, having that classic experience – which I’m having right now – of looking out a window and being surrounded by other windows looking back. That correlated so strongly with the experience of loneliness – that one feels at once entrapped, unable to reach out, but at the same time, exposed to other people’s gazes. That visual trap is where I started out, and that led me to Edward Hopper’s paintings. It just seemed like visual art was a really powerful way for me to come at loneliness from several different angles. If you had written about novelists or songwriters in terms of loneliness, who might it have made sense to include? I think Jean Rhys is a fantastic writer about loneliness; there are many, many books. And I do write about music – I write about Klaus Nomi. There’s a point where I list the music I was listening to – I was listening to Antony and the Johnsons, I was listening to Justin Vivian Bond… I mean country music, my God, you could do a whole thing on rural loneliness and country music. Yeah, absolutely. You mention Hopper. Your book focuses on “Nighthawks” – probably the most ubiquitous of his paintings. I was surprised you found more to say about it. Were you surprised yourself that there were new insights to be had? Yes – it’s the same thing with Warhol. Some of the people I talked about are so incredibly well-known, but they hadn’t been looked at from this angle. The perspective I was coming at was quite fresh, and that often illuminates new material, because you’re coming from a wholly new perspective. Back to Warhol. This is another surprise. He was a very public figure, he seemed to have a posse around him – the Factory itself was a bunch of friends and colleagues who worked together. But he was a deeply lonely person, as well, wasn’t he? I think sometimes he was – yeah. It wasn’t important to me that the people I put in the book were always lonely. Some of them were very socially connected – David Wojnarovich as well. I felt like Warhol’s work and life thought about issues of isolation deeply and well. And that was something that hadn’t particularly been explored, because we tend to take him at face value as this very socially fluent figure. But actually, the way he used technology in particular – the tape recorder, the cameras – was a way to broker and buffer his social interactions because of his anxiety, his desires for connection, his fear of rejection… These lonely issues were quite close in his life. I was giving a talk last night, and there was a Warhol expert in the audience. She was saying that she agreed, that I was right, and that it was interesting to hear of Warhol being talked about as lonely, because it gets said so rarely. But there were moments in his diaries where he does, quite frankly, admit that he never quite got the closeness in his life that he would have wished – that he never got as close to people as he wanted to. There’s a fair bit about the AIDS crisis in the book. How does that fit in, besides the fact that it related to several of the artists you discuss? Can disease amplify loneliness and isolation, or vice versa? We think of loneliness as afflicting the individual, but actually it affects groups of people because of social and political forces. I wanted to try and make sense of that, so I did it via the AIDS crisis. I could have done that with other things; what I said about AIDS is true of the refugee crisis. A group of people get dehumanized, stigmatized, and that group of people becomes intensely lonely. So that was something – a larger thing – I wanted to think through. Especially in relation to the AIDS crisis in late ‘80s and early ‘90s New York. But it’s a much larger issue. The book is about these visual artists, but also your own experience. Did working on the book make you feel more isolated, or did it make you feel connected to a tradition or a lineage or a way of looking at the world? Yeah – it did absolutely. It was important that I not end the book with, “Hey, I solved my loneliness by making something!” That didn’t happen… But the book does have an arc of finding a kind of beauty, a kind of interest in loneliness through the works I was examining. The frank declarations of human vulnerability was so moving to me. What I was trying to do was strip away some of the shame around loneliness, which I think is actually the most personal element. And did you say “lineage”? Yes, I did. That really resonates for me. I did feel like these were people I related to very deeply. David Wojnarovich was interviewed by Nan Goldin for Interview magazine, and she said, “What do you want from your work, David?” And he said, “What I most want is to alleviate the alienation of other people. That’s the thing that’s most important to me.” His work did that for me, and that is the beauty of art around loneliness – it does have this effect of building empathy, relieving shame, building community. It’s powerful. What’s next for you? What kinds of topics are you thinking about these days? I’m thinking about the body, particularly as a political force. We’re at a really interesting moment – on one hand, we’re in a technological, kind of disembodied age, and yet there’s so much protest going on. The Black Lives Matter movement, the Arab Spring… People resisting and changing the world by the force of their bodies on the streets. I’m really interested in thinking about that… But it’s very early stages. I was trying to place something this book reminded me of. Do you have models as a writer, or writers who inspired you in the early stages? Sure. I feel like I’m kind of doing my own thing, quite strongly, because I do write these hybrid books that people have trouble trying to work out and categorize… But right from the beginning, people like Bruce Chatwin and W.G. Sebald, the freedom that they created in their work... And people like Maggie Nelson – being able to write beautifully, be a critic, and to be political… Those are things that matter to me and I know matter to Maggie as well. Those are the sort of allyships I feel.
Reefer Madness lives: Witness 3 of the maddest, most over-the-top objections to the “killer weed”
Marijuana prohibition appears to be tottering on its last legs, but that doesn't mean its foes have given up. While we've come a long way from the Reefer Madness-type scaremongering, some pernicious old tropes still linger and new concerns are being raised. Last week, Reefer Madness variants emerged from the mouths of a California anti-marijuana activist, a Massachusetts Democratic state senator and a South Dakota Republican state representative. One was a reprise of ridiculously over-the-top, old-school Reefer Madness, one was a newfangled—and eerily removed from nature—fear of pot plants, and one was an example of cruel bigotry worth calling out for its sheer nastiness. 1. Classic Reefer Madness. California anti-legalization activist Roger Morgan recently took a page from the playbook of drug warrior Harry Anslinger, the man who literally brought Reefer Madness to America during his decades-long reign as head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics with his yellow journalism tales of "killer weed." Morgan told Reason TV, that in "almost all of the mass murders that we've had in recent years," the perpetrator "has been a heavy marijuana user, because it changes the brain." Really? Well, no. Morgan mentioned three mass shooters who had used marijuana—Jared Loughner in Tucson in 2011, James Holmes in Aurora, Colorado in 2012, and one of the nine Paris attackers from last November. The folks at Reason helpfully came up four more mass shooters since 2011 who had smoked pot, but that makes only seven out of the 23 mass shootings since 2011 in a count maintained by Mother Jones. That's not "almost all" mass shootings, that's six out of 23, or 26 percent. As Reason noted, "It seems clear that Roger Morgan is just making shit up." Two other points are worth making here: Given rates of marijuana use among young men (which most of the shooters are), pot smokers are actually underrepresented among the mass murder population. Survey data indicate that 34 percent of 19- to 30-year-olds smoked pot in the last year. It could be asked whether marijuana use produces an amotivational syndrome when it comes to committing murderous mayhem. And secondly, although this is a nuance beyond either Anslinger or Morgan, correlation doesn't equal causation. That a mass shooter may have smoked pot at some point before embarking on his rampage does not mean he did it because he smoked pot. 2. Beware the reefer plant! Massachusetts voters will have a chance to legalize marijuana at the ballot box this fall, and the state legislature is not real keen on that. In fact, last week, with their Report of the Special Senate Committee on Marijuana, lawmakers outlined a number of concerns, including their fear of the unfettered pot plant. They objected to a provision in the legalization initiative that would allow people to grow up to 12 plants per household. Some of their objections were reasonable, such as what to do with multi-family residences (answer: zoning restrictions). But they also worried that "home-grown marijuana would not be tested for safety or potency," apparently oblivious to the fact that pot plants already grow by the millions and heedless of the notion that people growing their own marijuana might have an interest in protecting their own safety. As if that weren't enough, Sen. Jason Lewis (D-Winchester), head of the committee, went on a but-what-about-the-children riff totally ungrounded in reality: "You have issues with children in the household if you're growing marijuana," he claimed. The thing is, the only issues you have with growing marijuana are exactly the same issues you have growing any other plant. It doesn't do anything while it's growing except, well, grow. You, or your toddler, can't just pluck a leaf off the plant and chew it up and get high, nor would you want to. It doesn't taste good. And it's not like there are joints hanging off it when the plant is ripe. The buds have to be harvested, dried and trimmed before they're ready to go. Growing a pot plant is no more dangerous to children than growing a fern. 3. Reefer meanness. South Dakota has never liked medical marijuana—it's the only state to twice reject initiatives to allow it—but Republican state Rep. Kristin Conzer last week took that hostility to a new low. Lawmakers in the state Senate had already passed a bill that would allow for the use of non-psychoactive CBD oil to treat epileptic seizures like the life-threatening ones that bedevil 3-year-old Eliyah Hendrickson of Sioux Falls, whose parents lobbied hard to get the bill through. The House defeated the bill, thanks in part to the efforts of Conzer, who argued that Eliyah's parents might try to use the—need I repeat?—non-psychoactive oil to get themselves or their child high. Adding insult to injury, the compassionate Conzer suggested that, rather than look to their representatives to act on their behalf, people with seizure disorders should just move to another state. "I don't like the road we're going down," she said. "This is not a bill for South Dakota." Her behavior earned her a scolding from her hometown newspaper, the Rapid City Journal, not exactly a bastion of radicalism, which asked rhetorically, "On any level, from compassion for others to basic decency, is that really how we want to treat our citizens?" Phillip Smith is editor of the AlterNet Drug Reporter and author of the Drug War Chronicle.
Marijuana prohibition appears to be tottering on its last legs, but that doesn't mean its foes have given up. While we've come a long way from the Reefer Madness-type scaremongering, some pernicious old tropes still linger and new concerns are being raised. Last week, Reefer Madness variants emerged from the mouths of a California anti-marijuana activist, a Massachusetts Democratic state senator and a South Dakota Republican state representative. One was a reprise of ridiculously over-the-top, old-school Reefer Madness, one was a newfangled—and eerily removed from nature—fear of pot plants, and one was an example of cruel bigotry worth calling out for its sheer nastiness. 1. Classic Reefer Madness. California anti-legalization activist Roger Morgan recently took a page from the playbook of drug warrior Harry Anslinger, the man who literally brought Reefer Madness to America during his decades-long reign as head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics with his yellow journalism tales of "killer weed." Morgan told Reason TV, that in "almost all of the mass murders that we've had in recent years," the perpetrator "has been a heavy marijuana user, because it changes the brain." Really? Well, no. Morgan mentioned three mass shooters who had used marijuana—Jared Loughner in Tucson in 2011, James Holmes in Aurora, Colorado in 2012, and one of the nine Paris attackers from last November. The folks at Reason helpfully came up four more mass shooters since 2011 who had smoked pot, but that makes only seven out of the 23 mass shootings since 2011 in a count maintained by Mother Jones. That's not "almost all" mass shootings, that's six out of 23, or 26 percent. As Reason noted, "It seems clear that Roger Morgan is just making shit up." Two other points are worth making here: Given rates of marijuana use among young men (which most of the shooters are), pot smokers are actually underrepresented among the mass murder population. Survey data indicate that 34 percent of 19- to 30-year-olds smoked pot in the last year. It could be asked whether marijuana use produces an amotivational syndrome when it comes to committing murderous mayhem. And secondly, although this is a nuance beyond either Anslinger or Morgan, correlation doesn't equal causation. That a mass shooter may have smoked pot at some point before embarking on his rampage does not mean he did it because he smoked pot. 2. Beware the reefer plant! Massachusetts voters will have a chance to legalize marijuana at the ballot box this fall, and the state legislature is not real keen on that. In fact, last week, with their Report of the Special Senate Committee on Marijuana, lawmakers outlined a number of concerns, including their fear of the unfettered pot plant. They objected to a provision in the legalization initiative that would allow people to grow up to 12 plants per household. Some of their objections were reasonable, such as what to do with multi-family residences (answer: zoning restrictions). But they also worried that "home-grown marijuana would not be tested for safety or potency," apparently oblivious to the fact that pot plants already grow by the millions and heedless of the notion that people growing their own marijuana might have an interest in protecting their own safety. As if that weren't enough, Sen. Jason Lewis (D-Winchester), head of the committee, went on a but-what-about-the-children riff totally ungrounded in reality: "You have issues with children in the household if you're growing marijuana," he claimed. The thing is, the only issues you have with growing marijuana are exactly the same issues you have growing any other plant. It doesn't do anything while it's growing except, well, grow. You, or your toddler, can't just pluck a leaf off the plant and chew it up and get high, nor would you want to. It doesn't taste good. And it's not like there are joints hanging off it when the plant is ripe. The buds have to be harvested, dried and trimmed before they're ready to go. Growing a pot plant is no more dangerous to children than growing a fern. 3. Reefer meanness. South Dakota has never liked medical marijuana—it's the only state to twice reject initiatives to allow it—but Republican state Rep. Kristin Conzer last week took that hostility to a new low. Lawmakers in the state Senate had already passed a bill that would allow for the use of non-psychoactive CBD oil to treat epileptic seizures like the life-threatening ones that bedevil 3-year-old Eliyah Hendrickson of Sioux Falls, whose parents lobbied hard to get the bill through. The House defeated the bill, thanks in part to the efforts of Conzer, who argued that Eliyah's parents might try to use the—need I repeat?—non-psychoactive oil to get themselves or their child high. Adding insult to injury, the compassionate Conzer suggested that, rather than look to their representatives to act on their behalf, people with seizure disorders should just move to another state. "I don't like the road we're going down," she said. "This is not a bill for South Dakota." Her behavior earned her a scolding from her hometown newspaper, the Rapid City Journal, not exactly a bastion of radicalism, which asked rhetorically, "On any level, from compassion for others to basic decency, is that really how we want to treat our citizens?" Phillip Smith is editor of the AlterNet Drug Reporter and author of the Drug War Chronicle.
The gangster candidate: Donald Trump and his supporters behave like the mafia, with veiled threats and acting above the law
One of the most notable aspects of the authoritarian personality, the kind that tends towards fascism, is for all the fetishizing of "law and order," there is a tendency to think the rules are only for other people, and that you and yours are justified in breaking them. So it is with Donald Trump, who crossed yet another line on Wednesday, in which he leveraged the threat of violence in order to scare Republican leaders away from blocking his nomination at a brokered convention. “I think we’ll win before getting to the convention, but I can tell you, if we didn’t and if we’re 20 votes short or if we’re 100 short and we’re at 1,100 and somebody else is at 500 or 400, because we’re way ahead of everybody, I don’t think you can say that we don’t get it automatically,” Trump said on CNN. “I think it would be — I think you’d have riots. I think you’d have riots. I’m representing a tremendous, many, many millions of people.” It's framed as a warning, but make no mistake: This is a threat. This is pure movie mafiosi stuff: Nice convention there. Shame if something happened to it. Trump's ease in speaking like a gangster issuing veiled threats shouldn't be the biggest surprise. While it's gotten lost in the shuffle of the primaries, there's a long history of allegations against Trump that he has ties to organized crime, hiring mob-controlled companies to build properties like his Trump Plaza condos. A great deal of his history of "deal-making" that he loves to brag about involves dealing with people who have literally been charged, investigated, and convicted of organized crime. But now that mentality — do what I want, or there will be violent consequences — is being applied to electoral politics. The abuse of protesters, the inciting language, the bullying of the press, and even putting your supporters through humiliating displays of submission? That's some real "Goodfellas" shit, right there. Which opens up the question of the role that law enforcement plays in this. While Trump usually dances at the edge of the law, violence is, as much as his followers might forget this at times, still illegal. But, as any good gangster knows, if you get the cops on your side, then the law tends to be less of an obstacle than it might otherwise be. On this front, there are some serious reasons to be concerned. The incident at a North Carolina rally where a Trump supporter sucker punched a non-violent protester has drawn a huge amount of attention, thankfully, but one under-examined aspect is the role the five sheriff's deputies that were leading the protesters played in the whole thing. Which is a shame, because, as disturbing as it is to see a Trump supporter act out violently against a harmless person, it's even more disturbing that there were five law enforcement officers standing right there who saw an unprovoked assault and did nothing. They simply allowed this flagrant law-breaking, right under their noses, and it's hard to shake the sense that it barely registered as law-breaking because the assailant was a conservative white man and the protester was an anti-Trump black man. Instead, they were so hyper-focused on shutting up the protesters, who were not breaking the law, that they couldn't even be bothered to deal with their first duty to enforce the law. The sucker-puncher, John McGraw has been arrested and charged. Now the five deputies involved have also been facing consequences: Demotions and a five-day suspension for three of them, and a three-day suspension for the other two. It's a disturbingly light punishment, considering that the incident showcased a clear preference for Trump over his critics, a preference that is interfering with their duty to treat all citizens as equal under the law. There's also the troubling but strong possibility that even these measly consequences are only happening because the incident was so widely publicized. There's a lot of evidence that law enforcement officers who are working Trump rallies are letting their sympathies for the candidate overwhelm their duty to protect and serve. Or, put less gently, Trump seems to be using law enforcement as muscle. There have been multiple incidents of journalists covering Trump rallies who have allegedly been bullied and abused by law enforcement even though they were not breaking the law. Photographer Chris Morris said he was choked by a Secret Service officer for trying to leave a media pen at a Virginia rally. (The Secret Service says they are investigating.) CBS news reporter Sopan Deb was detained at the violent Trump rally in Chicago, and charged with resisting arrest, which is what they hit you with when they can't think of an actual crime they were arresting you for. Sun Sentinel journalist Michael Mayo was told he was threatened with jail for standing in a crowd at a Trump rally, even though he'd gotten a ticket to the event like everyone else and was not, by his account, being disruptive. This is a pattern, and it suggests, unfortunately, that there may be men with badges who are abandoning their legal duties in order to be deputized by the Trump campaign. There hasn't been any polling of police support for Trump, but one poll of the military, which is a similar career to law enforcement, shows that Trump is the number one pick for that population. While police and military draw from diverse populations, only a fool would deny that these careers are more attractive to people with an authoritarian mindset than you'd find in just a random sampling of people. That's a problem because, as noted above, authoritarian-minded people often fall into the trap of thinking the rules are only for other people. Take, for instance, the Oath Keepers, an organization formed after the election of Barack Obama. The group is formed around the asinine idea that Obama is going to make them round Americans up into concentration camps and allow a U.N. takeover of the country, and that they have "higher" oaths to keep besides obeying direct orders. But since there's no actual reason to think the president is going to start requiring police to break the law, the real purpose of the Oath Keepers is to nurture the idea that right wing law enforcement officers are justified in putting ideological loyalties ahead of actual duties. There's reason to worry this mentality is impacting the Trump campaign. We don't need all the cops to be pro-Trump, but if a significant percentage of them put their love of Trump ahead of their duty to treat all citizens equally, that could lead to more violence and even riots, as Trump supporters will feel emboldened to act out violently without fear of consequences. And heaven help us if that becomes a problem at the Republican National Convention. John Kasich has chosen to speak out against this, calling Trump's threats "unacceptable". There's reason to worry, however, that his words will be filtered through the understanding that he expects to win a brokered convention, which will lead Trump supporters to disregard him. That's the problem with this gangster mentality. Once you cast everyone else as an enemy to be squished instead of another person with rights worth respecting, there's very little that can be done to control what happens next.One of the most notable aspects of the authoritarian personality, the kind that tends towards fascism, is for all the fetishizing of "law and order," there is a tendency to think the rules are only for other people, and that you and yours are justified in breaking them. So it is with Donald Trump, who crossed yet another line on Wednesday, in which he leveraged the threat of violence in order to scare Republican leaders away from blocking his nomination at a brokered convention. “I think we’ll win before getting to the convention, but I can tell you, if we didn’t and if we’re 20 votes short or if we’re 100 short and we’re at 1,100 and somebody else is at 500 or 400, because we’re way ahead of everybody, I don’t think you can say that we don’t get it automatically,” Trump said on CNN. “I think it would be — I think you’d have riots. I think you’d have riots. I’m representing a tremendous, many, many millions of people.” It's framed as a warning, but make no mistake: This is a threat. This is pure movie mafiosi stuff: Nice convention there. Shame if something happened to it. Trump's ease in speaking like a gangster issuing veiled threats shouldn't be the biggest surprise. While it's gotten lost in the shuffle of the primaries, there's a long history of allegations against Trump that he has ties to organized crime, hiring mob-controlled companies to build properties like his Trump Plaza condos. A great deal of his history of "deal-making" that he loves to brag about involves dealing with people who have literally been charged, investigated, and convicted of organized crime. But now that mentality — do what I want, or there will be violent consequences — is being applied to electoral politics. The abuse of protesters, the inciting language, the bullying of the press, and even putting your supporters through humiliating displays of submission? That's some real "Goodfellas" shit, right there. Which opens up the question of the role that law enforcement plays in this. While Trump usually dances at the edge of the law, violence is, as much as his followers might forget this at times, still illegal. But, as any good gangster knows, if you get the cops on your side, then the law tends to be less of an obstacle than it might otherwise be. On this front, there are some serious reasons to be concerned. The incident at a North Carolina rally where a Trump supporter sucker punched a non-violent protester has drawn a huge amount of attention, thankfully, but one under-examined aspect is the role the five sheriff's deputies that were leading the protesters played in the whole thing. Which is a shame, because, as disturbing as it is to see a Trump supporter act out violently against a harmless person, it's even more disturbing that there were five law enforcement officers standing right there who saw an unprovoked assault and did nothing. They simply allowed this flagrant law-breaking, right under their noses, and it's hard to shake the sense that it barely registered as law-breaking because the assailant was a conservative white man and the protester was an anti-Trump black man. Instead, they were so hyper-focused on shutting up the protesters, who were not breaking the law, that they couldn't even be bothered to deal with their first duty to enforce the law. The sucker-puncher, John McGraw has been arrested and charged. Now the five deputies involved have also been facing consequences: Demotions and a five-day suspension for three of them, and a three-day suspension for the other two. It's a disturbingly light punishment, considering that the incident showcased a clear preference for Trump over his critics, a preference that is interfering with their duty to treat all citizens as equal under the law. There's also the troubling but strong possibility that even these measly consequences are only happening because the incident was so widely publicized. There's a lot of evidence that law enforcement officers who are working Trump rallies are letting their sympathies for the candidate overwhelm their duty to protect and serve. Or, put less gently, Trump seems to be using law enforcement as muscle. There have been multiple incidents of journalists covering Trump rallies who have allegedly been bullied and abused by law enforcement even though they were not breaking the law. Photographer Chris Morris said he was choked by a Secret Service officer for trying to leave a media pen at a Virginia rally. (The Secret Service says they are investigating.) CBS news reporter Sopan Deb was detained at the violent Trump rally in Chicago, and charged with resisting arrest, which is what they hit you with when they can't think of an actual crime they were arresting you for. Sun Sentinel journalist Michael Mayo was told he was threatened with jail for standing in a crowd at a Trump rally, even though he'd gotten a ticket to the event like everyone else and was not, by his account, being disruptive. This is a pattern, and it suggests, unfortunately, that there may be men with badges who are abandoning their legal duties in order to be deputized by the Trump campaign. There hasn't been any polling of police support for Trump, but one poll of the military, which is a similar career to law enforcement, shows that Trump is the number one pick for that population. While police and military draw from diverse populations, only a fool would deny that these careers are more attractive to people with an authoritarian mindset than you'd find in just a random sampling of people. That's a problem because, as noted above, authoritarian-minded people often fall into the trap of thinking the rules are only for other people. Take, for instance, the Oath Keepers, an organization formed after the election of Barack Obama. The group is formed around the asinine idea that Obama is going to make them round Americans up into concentration camps and allow a U.N. takeover of the country, and that they have "higher" oaths to keep besides obeying direct orders. But since there's no actual reason to think the president is going to start requiring police to break the law, the real purpose of the Oath Keepers is to nurture the idea that right wing law enforcement officers are justified in putting ideological loyalties ahead of actual duties. There's reason to worry this mentality is impacting the Trump campaign. We don't need all the cops to be pro-Trump, but if a significant percentage of them put their love of Trump ahead of their duty to treat all citizens equally, that could lead to more violence and even riots, as Trump supporters will feel emboldened to act out violently without fear of consequences. And heaven help us if that becomes a problem at the Republican National Convention. John Kasich has chosen to speak out against this, calling Trump's threats "unacceptable". There's reason to worry, however, that his words will be filtered through the understanding that he expects to win a brokered convention, which will lead Trump supporters to disregard him. That's the problem with this gangster mentality. Once you cast everyone else as an enemy to be squished instead of another person with rights worth respecting, there's very little that can be done to control what happens next.
The night the Rolling Stones fired Donald Trump: Keith Richards once pulled a knife to get the GOP-frontrunner out of Atlantic City venue
In 1989, The Rolling Stones’ original members ended their seven-year hiatus and embarked on an ambitious and profitable 115-show tour of Europe and North America.
The American leg, named after their comeback album “Steel Wheels,” began in August in Philadelphia and ended in December in Atlantic City.
The final show, at the Boardwalk Hall (f.k.a Convention Center), aired on pay-per-view and — like the Miss America Pageant, also held at the Hall — was to be sponsored by the adjacent Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.
Even in the late-‘80s, however, The Stones didn’t want to be associated with Trump. So they cut a deal with him, stipulating he wouldn’t be involved in any promotional capacity outside of Atlantic City and, amazingly, wouldn’t be allowed at the show itself.
This story, told last summer and resurfaced on social media this week, illustrates just how deep the animosity went.
On the night of the event, “I get word that I have to come to the press room in the next building,” Michael Cohl, the tour’s promoter, told Pollstar last August. “I run to the press room in the next building and what do you think is happening? There’s Donald Trump giving a press conference, in our room!”
According to Cohl, Trump then tried to convince him that “they begged me to go up, Michael.”
“Stop it,” Cohl replied. “Don’t make a liar of yourself.”
Thinking he’d extinguished the fire, Cohl returned to the dressing room only to get word five minutes later that Trump (being Trump) had found his way back to the mic.
“Donald,” Cohl pleaded. “I don’t know if I can control this. Stop it.”
Again to the dressing room. Again word that Trump is promoting. This time guitarist Keith Richards offered his help:
“Keith pulls out his knife and slams it on the table and says, ‘What the hell do I have you for? Do I have to go over there and fire him myself? One of us is leaving the building – either him, or us.’”
“One of two things is going to happen,” Cohl told Trump. “You’re going to leave the building and, at 6:40, The Rolling Stones are going to speak on CBS News, or you’re not going to leave the building and I’m going to go on and do an interview to explain to the world why the pay-per-view was canceled”
Then, while literally telling Donald Trump “You’re fired,” Cohl noticed Trump’s “three shtarkers he’s with, in trench coats, two of them are putting on gloves and the other one is putting on brass knuckles.”
Cohl signaled his head of security, who “got 40 of the crew with tire irons and hockey sticks and screwdrivers,” effectively sending off Trump and his goons.
“And that was the night I fired Donald Trump,” Cohl concluded.
In 1989, The Rolling Stones’ original members ended their seven-year hiatus and embarked on an ambitious and profitable 115-show tour of Europe and North America.
The American leg, named after their comeback album “Steel Wheels,” began in August in Philadelphia and ended in December in Atlantic City.
The final show, at the Boardwalk Hall (f.k.a Convention Center), aired on pay-per-view and — like the Miss America Pageant, also held at the Hall — was to be sponsored by the adjacent Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.
Even in the late-‘80s, however, The Stones didn’t want to be associated with Trump. So they cut a deal with him, stipulating he wouldn’t be involved in any promotional capacity outside of Atlantic City and, amazingly, wouldn’t be allowed at the show itself.
This story, told last summer and resurfaced on social media this week, illustrates just how deep the animosity went.
On the night of the event, “I get word that I have to come to the press room in the next building,” Michael Cohl, the tour’s promoter, told Pollstar last August. “I run to the press room in the next building and what do you think is happening? There’s Donald Trump giving a press conference, in our room!”
According to Cohl, Trump then tried to convince him that “they begged me to go up, Michael.”
“Stop it,” Cohl replied. “Don’t make a liar of yourself.”
Thinking he’d extinguished the fire, Cohl returned to the dressing room only to get word five minutes later that Trump (being Trump) had found his way back to the mic.
“Donald,” Cohl pleaded. “I don’t know if I can control this. Stop it.”
Again to the dressing room. Again word that Trump is promoting. This time guitarist Keith Richards offered his help:
“Keith pulls out his knife and slams it on the table and says, ‘What the hell do I have you for? Do I have to go over there and fire him myself? One of us is leaving the building – either him, or us.’”
“One of two things is going to happen,” Cohl told Trump. “You’re going to leave the building and, at 6:40, The Rolling Stones are going to speak on CBS News, or you’re not going to leave the building and I’m going to go on and do an interview to explain to the world why the pay-per-view was canceled”
Then, while literally telling Donald Trump “You’re fired,” Cohl noticed Trump’s “three shtarkers he’s with, in trench coats, two of them are putting on gloves and the other one is putting on brass knuckles.”
Cohl signaled his head of security, who “got 40 of the crew with tire irons and hockey sticks and screwdrivers,” effectively sending off Trump and his goons.
“And that was the night I fired Donald Trump,” Cohl concluded.
In 1989, The Rolling Stones’ original members ended their seven-year hiatus and embarked on an ambitious and profitable 115-show tour of Europe and North America.
The American leg, named after their comeback album “Steel Wheels,” began in August in Philadelphia and ended in December in Atlantic City.
The final show, at the Boardwalk Hall (f.k.a Convention Center), aired on pay-per-view and — like the Miss America Pageant, also held at the Hall — was to be sponsored by the adjacent Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.
Even in the late-‘80s, however, The Stones didn’t want to be associated with Trump. So they cut a deal with him, stipulating he wouldn’t be involved in any promotional capacity outside of Atlantic City and, amazingly, wouldn’t be allowed at the show itself.
This story, told last summer and resurfaced on social media this week, illustrates just how deep the animosity went.
On the night of the event, “I get word that I have to come to the press room in the next building,” Michael Cohl, the tour’s promoter, told Pollstar last August. “I run to the press room in the next building and what do you think is happening? There’s Donald Trump giving a press conference, in our room!”
According to Cohl, Trump then tried to convince him that “they begged me to go up, Michael.”
“Stop it,” Cohl replied. “Don’t make a liar of yourself.”
Thinking he’d extinguished the fire, Cohl returned to the dressing room only to get word five minutes later that Trump (being Trump) had found his way back to the mic.
“Donald,” Cohl pleaded. “I don’t know if I can control this. Stop it.”
Again to the dressing room. Again word that Trump is promoting. This time guitarist Keith Richards offered his help:
“Keith pulls out his knife and slams it on the table and says, ‘What the hell do I have you for? Do I have to go over there and fire him myself? One of us is leaving the building – either him, or us.’”
“One of two things is going to happen,” Cohl told Trump. “You’re going to leave the building and, at 6:40, The Rolling Stones are going to speak on CBS News, or you’re not going to leave the building and I’m going to go on and do an interview to explain to the world why the pay-per-view was canceled”
Then, while literally telling Donald Trump “You’re fired,” Cohl noticed Trump’s “three shtarkers he’s with, in trench coats, two of them are putting on gloves and the other one is putting on brass knuckles.”
Cohl signaled his head of security, who “got 40 of the crew with tire irons and hockey sticks and screwdrivers,” effectively sending off Trump and his goons.
“And that was the night I fired Donald Trump,” Cohl concluded.
In 1989, The Rolling Stones’ original members ended their seven-year hiatus and embarked on an ambitious and profitable 115-show tour of Europe and North America.
The American leg, named after their comeback album “Steel Wheels,” began in August in Philadelphia and ended in December in Atlantic City.
The final show, at the Boardwalk Hall (f.k.a Convention Center), aired on pay-per-view and — like the Miss America Pageant, also held at the Hall — was to be sponsored by the adjacent Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.
Even in the late-‘80s, however, The Stones didn’t want to be associated with Trump. So they cut a deal with him, stipulating he wouldn’t be involved in any promotional capacity outside of Atlantic City and, amazingly, wouldn’t be allowed at the show itself.
This story, told last summer and resurfaced on social media this week, illustrates just how deep the animosity went.
On the night of the event, “I get word that I have to come to the press room in the next building,” Michael Cohl, the tour’s promoter, told Pollstar last August. “I run to the press room in the next building and what do you think is happening? There’s Donald Trump giving a press conference, in our room!”
According to Cohl, Trump then tried to convince him that “they begged me to go up, Michael.”
“Stop it,” Cohl replied. “Don’t make a liar of yourself.”
Thinking he’d extinguished the fire, Cohl returned to the dressing room only to get word five minutes later that Trump (being Trump) had found his way back to the mic.
“Donald,” Cohl pleaded. “I don’t know if I can control this. Stop it.”
Again to the dressing room. Again word that Trump is promoting. This time guitarist Keith Richards offered his help:
“Keith pulls out his knife and slams it on the table and says, ‘What the hell do I have you for? Do I have to go over there and fire him myself? One of us is leaving the building – either him, or us.’”
“One of two things is going to happen,” Cohl told Trump. “You’re going to leave the building and, at 6:40, The Rolling Stones are going to speak on CBS News, or you’re not going to leave the building and I’m going to go on and do an interview to explain to the world why the pay-per-view was canceled”
Then, while literally telling Donald Trump “You’re fired,” Cohl noticed Trump’s “three shtarkers he’s with, in trench coats, two of them are putting on gloves and the other one is putting on brass knuckles.”
Cohl signaled his head of security, who “got 40 of the crew with tire irons and hockey sticks and screwdrivers,” effectively sending off Trump and his goons.
“And that was the night I fired Donald Trump,” Cohl concluded.
In 1989, The Rolling Stones’ original members ended their seven-year hiatus and embarked on an ambitious and profitable 115-show tour of Europe and North America.
The American leg, named after their comeback album “Steel Wheels,” began in August in Philadelphia and ended in December in Atlantic City.
The final show, at the Boardwalk Hall (f.k.a Convention Center), aired on pay-per-view and — like the Miss America Pageant, also held at the Hall — was to be sponsored by the adjacent Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.
Even in the late-‘80s, however, The Stones didn’t want to be associated with Trump. So they cut a deal with him, stipulating he wouldn’t be involved in any promotional capacity outside of Atlantic City and, amazingly, wouldn’t be allowed at the show itself.
This story, told last summer and resurfaced on social media this week, illustrates just how deep the animosity went.
On the night of the event, “I get word that I have to come to the press room in the next building,” Michael Cohl, the tour’s promoter, told Pollstar last August. “I run to the press room in the next building and what do you think is happening? There’s Donald Trump giving a press conference, in our room!”
According to Cohl, Trump then tried to convince him that “they begged me to go up, Michael.”
“Stop it,” Cohl replied. “Don’t make a liar of yourself.”
Thinking he’d extinguished the fire, Cohl returned to the dressing room only to get word five minutes later that Trump (being Trump) had found his way back to the mic.
“Donald,” Cohl pleaded. “I don’t know if I can control this. Stop it.”
Again to the dressing room. Again word that Trump is promoting. This time guitarist Keith Richards offered his help:
“Keith pulls out his knife and slams it on the table and says, ‘What the hell do I have you for? Do I have to go over there and fire him myself? One of us is leaving the building – either him, or us.’”
“One of two things is going to happen,” Cohl told Trump. “You’re going to leave the building and, at 6:40, The Rolling Stones are going to speak on CBS News, or you’re not going to leave the building and I’m going to go on and do an interview to explain to the world why the pay-per-view was canceled”
Then, while literally telling Donald Trump “You’re fired,” Cohl noticed Trump’s “three shtarkers he’s with, in trench coats, two of them are putting on gloves and the other one is putting on brass knuckles.”
Cohl signaled his head of security, who “got 40 of the crew with tire irons and hockey sticks and screwdrivers,” effectively sending off Trump and his goons.
“And that was the night I fired Donald Trump,” Cohl concluded.
Stop measuring your “A4 waist”: This meme is the latest way the Internet measures women’s worth
Because thinness is not just a state of being but a competitive sport, social media keeps finding new ways for people to brag about how small a person can make herself. The latest: Are you as narrow as a letter-sized piece of paper? For most of us, the answer to that question is, I'm sorry but WTF are you talking about? But as Mashable's Alicia Tan reports, "The A4 waist challenge started in China around February and has seen hordes of Chinese women taking to their Weibo accounts to show off their trim waistlines." The idea is simple — snap a selfie holding an ordinary piece of A4 printer paper in front of your midsection, thereby demonstrating that your waist is tinier than an item that measures 8.27 inches across. Tan reports that "Since the challenge took off, Weibo now has millions of photos with the hashtag #A4waist." The trend has recently begun moving over to Instagram. #GOALS, am I right? The A4 challenge is just another in a long string of ridiculous social media trends in which women are encouraged to offer evidence of their tininess. The most durable has been the notorious thigh gap boast. Though the term is verboten on Instagram, the concept persists — demonstrate that when you stand with your feet and knees together, a breeze could still pass between the upper half of your legs. Of course, the wider the gap, the more successful the achievement. The trend has become so extreme that last year, controversy arose when Huggies was accused of photoshopping a thigh gap on a diaper clad toddler. Urban Outfitters has also come under fire after it was ordered by the British Advertising Standards Authority to remove an image of an underwear model's legs with a seemingly unnatural distance between them. More recent challenges have included the underboob pen one — which, technically, has been around for decades before Instagram — stick a writing device under your bra-free breasts, and if it doesn't fall to the ground, your breasts are too big or too saggy or somehow generally losing at life. We have Weibo to thank for this one's resurgence too. Hey, at least it turns out that pens aren't completely obsolete. Brilliantly, the meme has also spawned imitations, with generously proportioned men showing off their own pen-laden underboobs, and squishy midsections converted into coin holders. There has also been the belly button challenge, in which victory is attained by documenting the snaking of your arm behind your back to touch your navel. This, ostensibly, is another marker of just how diminutive your waist is, though as the Atlantic has pointed out, "It’s actually a test of shoulder flexibility, not fitness" and besides, "Even if you can touch your belly button, that doesn’t change the fact that no one likes a gloater." Though some meticulous A4 challengers have tried to prove their authenticity by sticking the paper in their pants, this new challenge remains easily gamed. A cursory scan of some other images shows that by angling the body a little to the side or simply holding the paper further from the body, it's not hard to give the appearance of a paper sized middle. (My waist is slightly more than eight inches wide and I'm wearing a sweater and it took less than a minute for me to replicate the #A4waist on my phone.) Objects are larger than they appear! And just like they have with the underboob, other Instagrammers have lately been putting their own spin on the challenge, posting photos of teddy bears under paper or, as my new hero did, a middle finger flaunting selfie behind a piece of poster board. Sure, some people are naturally narrow. If that's your build, go forth and rock it. But bragging about it, encouraging others to aspire to it, participating in stuff that promotes the idea that a size that is literally not possible many based on the width of their ribs, that's deeply messed up. And I say we just switch the orientation to horizontal and make this whole thing go away.
The 5 craziest things about Ted Cruz’s extremist, neo-McCarthyist, anti-Muslim foreign policy adviser Frank Gaffney
Millions of Americans are horrified by the meteoric rise of leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, and rightfully so. The billionaire real estate mogul is running a fascistic campaign, one based on overtly racist, xenophobic, far-right demagoguery. Much less discussed, however, is the fact that the runner-up in the GOP primary, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, shares with the American Mussolini many policies and views that are just as extreme — he is simply a bit more subtle about it (but not much more). We saw yet another example of this on Thursday, when it was announced that leading Islamophobe Frank Gaffney will be part of Cruz's foreign policy team. Gaffney is, to put it bluntly, an extremist. The Washington Post has described him as an "anti-Muslim gadfly"; this is an understatement — a huge one. The Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, the leading monitor of hate groups in the U.S., calls Gaffney "one of America’s most notorious Islamophobes." A columnist for the right-wing newspaper the Washington Times and a frequent guest on Fox News, as well as a former official in the Reagan administration, Gaffney has spread a number of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories — myths that are eerily reminiscent of anti-Semitic conspiracies in the early 20th century, albeit with Muslims as the new villains. In 1988, Gaffney founded the "think tank" (the SPLC writes it in scare quotes) the Center for Security Policy, which began as a neocon hub and morphed into an Islamophobic cesspool. The Hill has characterized the Center for Security Policy as "an extremist think tank headed by anti-Muslim conspiracist Frank Gaffney." Despite its extremely dubious credentials and peddling of conspiracies, right-wing news outlets often draw on anti-Muslim research by the Center for Security Policy. In his now infamous speech calling for banning Muslims from entering the U.S., Donald Trump in fact cited a thoroughly debunked study by the organization. Just how crazy and extreme is Gaffney? Here are five of the most outrageous — and dangerous — things about Ted Cruz's new foreign policy adviser. 1. Applauded a prominent white supremacist on his radio show Gaffney hosted white supremacist Jared Taylor on his nationally syndicated Secure Freedom Radio program in September 2015, as watchdog Media Matters documented . "I'm very pleased to have him with us," Gaffney said, introducing the white supremacist leader. The two discussed how Muslim refugees are "invading" the West. Cruz's new foreign policy adviser warned that, "if President Obama has his way," Muslim refugees will flood the U.S. and implement Sharia law. "He is the editor of a wonderful online publication, American Renaissance," Gaffney said, "and the author of six books, including 'White Identity,'" he added, applauding Taylor. As is evident from the title, "White Identity" is an openly racist book. The SPLC calls Taylor one of the country's "most outspoken and prominent white nationalists," noting he hosted a conference "where racist intellectuals rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists." Like Gaffney, Taylor has his own ersatz think tank, called the New Century Foundation, which the SPLC calls "a pseudo-intellectual think tank that promotes 'research' arguing for white superiority." American Renaissance, the racist magazine that Gaffney spoke so highly of, is "one of the vilest white nationalist publications, often promoting eugenics and blatant anti-black and anti-Latino racists," the SPLC notes. After Hurricane Katrina pummeled New Orleans in 2005, Taylor wrote, "When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.'" "I appreciate tremendously the work you're doing at American Renaissance and The New Century Foundation," Cruz's new foreign policy adviser told Taylor at the end of his show. "Keep it up and get back to us again very soon." 2. Openly called for neo-McCarthyism and a new HUAC "We need to establish a new and improved counterpart to the Cold War-era's HUAC," or House Un-American Activities Committee," Gaffney insisted in a 2011 op-ed titled "Anti-American activities: A Cold War-style Effort to Root Out Civilizational Jihad." HUAC persecuted and destroyed the lives of Americans accused of being affiliated with left-wing movements. It was a crucial part of the U.S.'s far-right, totalitarian McCarthyist movement (named after Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who was not involved with HUAC, which took place in the other legislative chamber, but who pursued similar policies in the Senate). Cruz's new foreign policy adviser wants the new HUAC to be devoted to "examining and rooting out anti-American — and anti-constitutional — activities that constitute an even more insidious peril than those pursued by communist Fifth Columnists 50 years ago." In the same op-ed calling for a neo-McCarthyism, Gaffney also declared that "the Obama presidency is determined to go to unprecedented lengths to mollify, appease and otherwise pander to what it calls the 'Muslim world.'" (In reality, the Obama administration dropped more than 23,000 bombs on six Muslim-majority countries in 2014, and has recently escalated a new war in Libya.) 3. Insists Obama is secretly a Muslim "There is mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself," Gaffney wrote in a 2009 op-ed in the Washington Times. His evidence? Obama's father was Muslim; he has said the phrase "holy Quran," not just "Quran"; he uses the word "revealed"; and he claimed he looks forward to the day "when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully." "No believing Christian" would ever make such a statement about Israel-Palestine, insists Gaffney, who was awarded by the pro-Israel group the Zionist Organization of America for his die-hard defense of Israel. "The man now happy to have his Islamic-rooted middle name featured prominently has engaged in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain over Czechoslovakia at Munich," he continued in the op-ed. In another piece in the Washington Times, Gaffney has called into question "whether Mr. Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States," claiming "there is evidence Mr. Obama was born in Kenya rather than, as he claims, Hawaii." 4. Claims left-wing groups are training Muslim refugees to destroy the West "The radical left, with its activists, contractors, philanthropies and friends in the Obama administration, and Islamic supremacists have joined forces to use U.S. refugee resettlement programs as a prime means to achieve the 'fundamental transformation' of America," Gaffney insisted in a statement about a report published by his conspiratorial organization in July 2015. "The Red-Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration and the Agenda to Erase America" (green referring to Islamists and red, of course, referring to leftists), the Center for Security Policy report, claims that "networks of radical left non-profits, foundations, government agencies" and others "are using refugee resettlement as a pretext to import waves of immigrants from third-world nations" in order to destroy the U.S. The outlandish document maintains that Muslim refugees "are coached by leftist non-profits to capitalize on our generous welfare programs and shown how to maneuver around legal impediments – all at our expense – but are not being taught how to assimilate." Gaffney's group says this is part of Obama's "'Welcoming America' initiative, which seeks to 'seed' refugees throughout our communities and weed out 'pockets of resistance' with a full-throated effort vilifying anyone opposing his radical agenda." Accepting refugees fleeing violence (caused by U.S.-backed wars) "is literally an offensive to erase American laws, traditions and culture," the Center for Security Policy argues. 5. Says Muslims secretly control governments, echoing anti-Semitic conspiracies In the early 20th century, anti-Semites, white supremacists and fascists claimed Jews had infiltrated governments, which they controlled to enslave God-fearing Christians. Although these anti-Semitic conspiracy theories still exist today, many right-wing fanatics like Gaffney have inverted them, replacing Jews with Muslims. Cruz's new foreign policy adviser joins a slew of right-wing demagogues who claim that all-powerful Muslims are secretly pulling the strings above politicians, controlling governments around the world. Gaffney says the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated every nook and cranny of the world, and of the U.S. government in particular. He constantly accuses President Obama of acting in the interest of the Ikhwan. One of his accusations — which has been echoed by fellow far-right Republicans, including Rep. Michele Bachmann — is that Hillary Clinton's aid Huma Abedin is secretly working for the Muslim Brotherhood, and has connections to al-Qaeda. Other far-right websites have propagated this spurious myth. Yet Gaffney goes even further, insisting that right-wing libertarian and anti-tax activist Grover Norquist has "for years been running influence operations against conservatives on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist causes." In response to his baseless allegations, the far-right American Conservative Union banned Gaffney from its Conservative Political Action Conference. This only emboldened the anti-Muslim extremist. "Using language reminiscent of the Cold War, Gaffney declared, 'An influence operation is contributing materially to the defeat of our country, supporting a stealthy effort to bring Shariah here,'" far-right website WND wrote in 2011. "Grover Norquist is credentialing the perpetrators of this Muslim Brotherood influence operation," Gaffney insisted, adding, "We are in a war, and he has been working with the enemy for over a decade." Gaffney's claim is shockingly reminiscent of early Nazi tactics, where Nazi officials would accuse fellow right-wing figures who weren't far enough to the right of working for "the Jews."Millions of Americans are horrified by the meteoric rise of leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, and rightfully so. The billionaire real estate mogul is running a fascistic campaign, one based on overtly racist, xenophobic, far-right demagoguery. Much less discussed, however, is the fact that the runner-up in the GOP primary, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, shares with the American Mussolini many policies and views that are just as extreme — he is simply a bit more subtle about it (but not much more). We saw yet another example of this on Thursday, when it was announced that leading Islamophobe Frank Gaffney will be part of Cruz's foreign policy team. Gaffney is, to put it bluntly, an extremist. The Washington Post has described him as an "anti-Muslim gadfly"; this is an understatement — a huge one. The Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, the leading monitor of hate groups in the U.S., calls Gaffney "one of America’s most notorious Islamophobes." A columnist for the right-wing newspaper the Washington Times and a frequent guest on Fox News, as well as a former official in the Reagan administration, Gaffney has spread a number of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories — myths that are eerily reminiscent of anti-Semitic conspiracies in the early 20th century, albeit with Muslims as the new villains. In 1988, Gaffney founded the "think tank" (the SPLC writes it in scare quotes) the Center for Security Policy, which began as a neocon hub and morphed into an Islamophobic cesspool. The Hill has characterized the Center for Security Policy as "an extremist think tank headed by anti-Muslim conspiracist Frank Gaffney." Despite its extremely dubious credentials and peddling of conspiracies, right-wing news outlets often draw on anti-Muslim research by the Center for Security Policy. In his now infamous speech calling for banning Muslims from entering the U.S., Donald Trump in fact cited a thoroughly debunked study by the organization. Just how crazy and extreme is Gaffney? Here are five of the most outrageous — and dangerous — things about Ted Cruz's new foreign policy adviser. 1. Applauded a prominent white supremacist on his radio show Gaffney hosted white supremacist Jared Taylor on his nationally syndicated Secure Freedom Radio program in September 2015, as watchdog Media Matters documented . "I'm very pleased to have him with us," Gaffney said, introducing the white supremacist leader. The two discussed how Muslim refugees are "invading" the West. Cruz's new foreign policy adviser warned that, "if President Obama has his way," Muslim refugees will flood the U.S. and implement Sharia law. "He is the editor of a wonderful online publication, American Renaissance," Gaffney said, "and the author of six books, including 'White Identity,'" he added, applauding Taylor. As is evident from the title, "White Identity" is an openly racist book. The SPLC calls Taylor one of the country's "most outspoken and prominent white nationalists," noting he hosted a conference "where racist intellectuals rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists." Like Gaffney, Taylor has his own ersatz think tank, called the New Century Foundation, which the SPLC calls "a pseudo-intellectual think tank that promotes 'research' arguing for white superiority." American Renaissance, the racist magazine that Gaffney spoke so highly of, is "one of the vilest white nationalist publications, often promoting eugenics and blatant anti-black and anti-Latino racists," the SPLC notes. After Hurricane Katrina pummeled New Orleans in 2005, Taylor wrote, "When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.'" "I appreciate tremendously the work you're doing at American Renaissance and The New Century Foundation," Cruz's new foreign policy adviser told Taylor at the end of his show. "Keep it up and get back to us again very soon." 2. Openly called for neo-McCarthyism and a new HUAC "We need to establish a new and improved counterpart to the Cold War-era's HUAC," or House Un-American Activities Committee," Gaffney insisted in a 2011 op-ed titled "Anti-American activities: A Cold War-style Effort to Root Out Civilizational Jihad." HUAC persecuted and destroyed the lives of Americans accused of being affiliated with left-wing movements. It was a crucial part of the U.S.'s far-right, totalitarian McCarthyist movement (named after Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who was not involved with HUAC, which took place in the other legislative chamber, but who pursued similar policies in the Senate). Cruz's new foreign policy adviser wants the new HUAC to be devoted to "examining and rooting out anti-American — and anti-constitutional — activities that constitute an even more insidious peril than those pursued by communist Fifth Columnists 50 years ago." In the same op-ed calling for a neo-McCarthyism, Gaffney also declared that "the Obama presidency is determined to go to unprecedented lengths to mollify, appease and otherwise pander to what it calls the 'Muslim world.'" (In reality, the Obama administration dropped more than 23,000 bombs on six Muslim-majority countries in 2014, and has recently escalated a new war in Libya.) 3. Insists Obama is secretly a Muslim "There is mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself," Gaffney wrote in a 2009 op-ed in the Washington Times. His evidence? Obama's father was Muslim; he has said the phrase "holy Quran," not just "Quran"; he uses the word "revealed"; and he claimed he looks forward to the day "when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully." "No believing Christian" would ever make such a statement about Israel-Palestine, insists Gaffney, who was awarded by the pro-Israel group the Zionist Organization of America for his die-hard defense of Israel. "The man now happy to have his Islamic-rooted middle name featured prominently has engaged in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain over Czechoslovakia at Munich," he continued in the op-ed. In another piece in the Washington Times, Gaffney has called into question "whether Mr. Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States," claiming "there is evidence Mr. Obama was born in Kenya rather than, as he claims, Hawaii." 4. Claims left-wing groups are training Muslim refugees to destroy the West "The radical left, with its activists, contractors, philanthropies and friends in the Obama administration, and Islamic supremacists have joined forces to use U.S. refugee resettlement programs as a prime means to achieve the 'fundamental transformation' of America," Gaffney insisted in a statement about a report published by his conspiratorial organization in July 2015. "The Red-Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration and the Agenda to Erase America" (green referring to Islamists and red, of course, referring to leftists), the Center for Security Policy report, claims that "networks of radical left non-profits, foundations, government agencies" and others "are using refugee resettlement as a pretext to import waves of immigrants from third-world nations" in order to destroy the U.S. The outlandish document maintains that Muslim refugees "are coached by leftist non-profits to capitalize on our generous welfare programs and shown how to maneuver around legal impediments – all at our expense – but are not being taught how to assimilate." Gaffney's group says this is part of Obama's "'Welcoming America' initiative, which seeks to 'seed' refugees throughout our communities and weed out 'pockets of resistance' with a full-throated effort vilifying anyone opposing his radical agenda." Accepting refugees fleeing violence (caused by U.S.-backed wars) "is literally an offensive to erase American laws, traditions and culture," the Center for Security Policy argues. 5. Says Muslims secretly control governments, echoing anti-Semitic conspiracies In the early 20th century, anti-Semites, white supremacists and fascists claimed Jews had infiltrated governments, which they controlled to enslave God-fearing Christians. Although these anti-Semitic conspiracy theories still exist today, many right-wing fanatics like Gaffney have inverted them, replacing Jews with Muslims. Cruz's new foreign policy adviser joins a slew of right-wing demagogues who claim that all-powerful Muslims are secretly pulling the strings above politicians, controlling governments around the world. Gaffney says the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated every nook and cranny of the world, and of the U.S. government in particular. He constantly accuses President Obama of acting in the interest of the Ikhwan. One of his accusations — which has been echoed by fellow far-right Republicans, including Rep. Michele Bachmann — is that Hillary Clinton's aid Huma Abedin is secretly working for the Muslim Brotherhood, and has connections to al-Qaeda. Other far-right websites have propagated this spurious myth. Yet Gaffney goes even further, insisting that right-wing libertarian and anti-tax activist Grover Norquist has "for years been running influence operations against conservatives on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist causes." In response to his baseless allegations, the far-right American Conservative Union banned Gaffney from its Conservative Political Action Conference. This only emboldened the anti-Muslim extremist. "Using language reminiscent of the Cold War, Gaffney declared, 'An influence operation is contributing materially to the defeat of our country, supporting a stealthy effort to bring Shariah here,'" far-right website WND wrote in 2011. "Grover Norquist is credentialing the perpetrators of this Muslim Brotherood influence operation," Gaffney insisted, adding, "We are in a war, and he has been working with the enemy for over a decade." Gaffney's claim is shockingly reminiscent of early Nazi tactics, where Nazi officials would accuse fellow right-wing figures who weren't far enough to the right of working for "the Jews."
The GOP brought this on itself: Elites have decimated the working class, and Donald Trump is its revenge
From their “Dark Money” bagman Karl Rove to their philosophical guru David Brooks, the GOP elites are in a tizzy over saving the Republican Party from Donald Trump and the other intruders, extremists and crackpots who have fallen in behind Trump as if he were the Pied Piper of Hamelin. But who will save the party from the elites? Look around at just some of the other sheer lunacy their party perpetrates when it’s not trying to shut government down, redistribute wealth upward, and prevent the president of the United States (who, the last time we looked, has the constitutional right and mandate) from filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The Republicans in southern California just got a 7-6 majority on the region’s air quality board and have set out to reverse all of its safeguards, “reaffirming new smog rules backed by oil refineries and other major polluters,” according to the Los Angeles Times. Mary Lou Bruner, a Republican crank in Texas who claimed that a young Barack Obama had worked as a black male prostitute, is on track to become a key vote on the state’s board of education, the group that, as Matt Levin at the Houston Chronicle writes, is, “already drawing intense criticism for textbooks that, among other issues, downplayed slavery and racial segregation.” That’s important because the school board is such a major buyer of books its decisions affect editorial content in texts all over the country. So remember that Bruner is an eccentric whose Facebook declarations include “School shootings started after the schools started teaching evolution” and “The dinosaurs on the ark may have been babies and not able to reproduce. It might make sense to take the small dinosaurs onto the ark instead of the ones bigger than a bus.” Huh? Yet Republican elites seem quite satisfied to have a Mary Lou Bruner as the arbiter of what their children read in schools. And while we’re talking about education, travel over to Texas neighbor Louisiana and look at the legacy that former Republican governor and presidential candidate Bobby Jindal has left behind for his Democratic successor, John Bel Edwards. At The Washington Post, Chico Harlan reported,
“Louisiana stands at the brink of economic disaster. Without sharp and painful tax increases in the coming weeks, the government will cease to offer many of its vital services, including education opportunities… A few universities will shut down and declare bankruptcy. Graduations will be canceled. Students will lose scholarships… Since the 2007-08 school year, Louisiana has cut funding for higher education by 44 percent, the sharpest pullback in the nation.”Part of this can be attributed to the precipitous drop in oil and gas prices and loss of fossil fuel industry revenue crucial to the state’s economy. But the real problem, according to the Associated Press, is that
“Jindal, burnishing his fiscal conservative credentials for his failed presidential campaign, refused to hike taxes or approve any action that even resembled a tax hike, including trimming expensive business tax credits, even amid an economic downturn… Legislators are hearing that cuts described by the Jindal administration as ‘efficiencies’ actually went much deeper, striking at services. They’ve learned about borrowing practices that increased state debts and about threats to Louisiana’s cash flow because it spent down reserves.”The result? A calamitous budget crisis in the second most impoverished state in the country, a $900 million shortfall that has to be fixed by June 30 and another amounting to around two billion that will need to be closed next year. So that’s how you govern when you have the power. Thanks, Republicans! And while we’re at it, ponder, too, the once-great state of Kansas, where, under the right-wing ideology and bumbling leadership of Republican governor Sam Brownback, the clowns are running the circus. The state legislature there is moving toward passage of a bill that would allow the impeachment of Kansas Supreme Court justices for, among other newly-thought of high crimes and misdemeanors, “attempting to usurp the power” of said same legislature or the executive branch. The reason? As per Edward Eveld of The Kansas City Star, “A recent state Supreme Court decision, citing the Legislature’s constitutional duty to properly finance public schools, has demanded that lawmakers fix a school funding formula by June 30 or risk the shutdown of public schools for the 2016-2017 school year.” The court also has overturned death sentences and is considering a case that would void anti-abortion rules. The Republican legislature doesn’t like any of this one bit – not to mention that four of the seven judges were appointed by former Democratic Governor Kathleen Sibelius. So in a classic, don’t-raise-the-bridge-lower-the-river solution, the GOP legislators – who outnumber Democrats by three to one – have decided that the answer is to do away with the judges they don’t like and to hell with checks and balances. In the words of Esquire’s inimitable Charlie Pierce, “They recognize no limits to their power, no curbs to their desire. There are few frontiers in democratic government that they will not work to violate, or to twist to their own purposes. And they absolutely will not stop. Ni shagu nazad, as Stalin said to his army. Not one step backwards.” What happened to Kansas? A coup against common sense, sound principles and the “general welfare” hailed in the preamble to the US Constitution. And as it all has gone down, Republican elites seem to have developed a case of laryngitis. We could go on. Let’s not forget what Governor Scott Walker has done to Wisconsin and Michigan Governor Richard Snyder to Flint. Check out how Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner is endeavoring to “fix” higher education there. Will Republican elites please tell us where they stand on their man’s ax-wielding mania? And what Republican poobah has dared call out Grover Norquist, whose monomaniacal crusade against government has thrown public education into crisis, turned streets and highways into bottomless potholes, and produced stratospheric deficits? (Bobby Jindal, by the way, was just one of the many who signed Norquist’s no-tax pledge, a major reason why his state is barely holding on by its fingernails.) Finally, this is the party whose elites deceived America into war after cutting taxes on the wealthy so they wouldn’t have to pay for it. And so it goes. All of which leads us to the conclusion that what’s wrong with the GOP ain’t just about Donald Trump, apoplectic, mendacious malcreant though he is. Over decades, the Republicans have built castles of corruption and citadels of crony capitalism across the country and now the angry villagers are climbing over the ramparts. Not one step backwards? Too late.From their “Dark Money” bagman Karl Rove to their philosophical guru David Brooks, the GOP elites are in a tizzy over saving the Republican Party from Donald Trump and the other intruders, extremists and crackpots who have fallen in behind Trump as if he were the Pied Piper of Hamelin. But who will save the party from the elites? Look around at just some of the other sheer lunacy their party perpetrates when it’s not trying to shut government down, redistribute wealth upward, and prevent the president of the United States (who, the last time we looked, has the constitutional right and mandate) from filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The Republicans in southern California just got a 7-6 majority on the region’s air quality board and have set out to reverse all of its safeguards, “reaffirming new smog rules backed by oil refineries and other major polluters,” according to the Los Angeles Times. Mary Lou Bruner, a Republican crank in Texas who claimed that a young Barack Obama had worked as a black male prostitute, is on track to become a key vote on the state’s board of education, the group that, as Matt Levin at the Houston Chronicle writes, is, “already drawing intense criticism for textbooks that, among other issues, downplayed slavery and racial segregation.” That’s important because the school board is such a major buyer of books its decisions affect editorial content in texts all over the country. So remember that Bruner is an eccentric whose Facebook declarations include “School shootings started after the schools started teaching evolution” and “The dinosaurs on the ark may have been babies and not able to reproduce. It might make sense to take the small dinosaurs onto the ark instead of the ones bigger than a bus.” Huh? Yet Republican elites seem quite satisfied to have a Mary Lou Bruner as the arbiter of what their children read in schools. And while we’re talking about education, travel over to Texas neighbor Louisiana and look at the legacy that former Republican governor and presidential candidate Bobby Jindal has left behind for his Democratic successor, John Bel Edwards. At The Washington Post, Chico Harlan reported,
“Louisiana stands at the brink of economic disaster. Without sharp and painful tax increases in the coming weeks, the government will cease to offer many of its vital services, including education opportunities… A few universities will shut down and declare bankruptcy. Graduations will be canceled. Students will lose scholarships… Since the 2007-08 school year, Louisiana has cut funding for higher education by 44 percent, the sharpest pullback in the nation.”Part of this can be attributed to the precipitous drop in oil and gas prices and loss of fossil fuel industry revenue crucial to the state’s economy. But the real problem, according to the Associated Press, is that
“Jindal, burnishing his fiscal conservative credentials for his failed presidential campaign, refused to hike taxes or approve any action that even resembled a tax hike, including trimming expensive business tax credits, even amid an economic downturn… Legislators are hearing that cuts described by the Jindal administration as ‘efficiencies’ actually went much deeper, striking at services. They’ve learned about borrowing practices that increased state debts and about threats to Louisiana’s cash flow because it spent down reserves.”The result? A calamitous budget crisis in the second most impoverished state in the country, a $900 million shortfall that has to be fixed by June 30 and another amounting to around two billion that will need to be closed next year. So that’s how you govern when you have the power. Thanks, Republicans! And while we’re at it, ponder, too, the once-great state of Kansas, where, under the right-wing ideology and bumbling leadership of Republican governor Sam Brownback, the clowns are running the circus. The state legislature there is moving toward passage of a bill that would allow the impeachment of Kansas Supreme Court justices for, among other newly-thought of high crimes and misdemeanors, “attempting to usurp the power” of said same legislature or the executive branch. The reason? As per Edward Eveld of The Kansas City Star, “A recent state Supreme Court decision, citing the Legislature’s constitutional duty to properly finance public schools, has demanded that lawmakers fix a school funding formula by June 30 or risk the shutdown of public schools for the 2016-2017 school year.” The court also has overturned death sentences and is considering a case that would void anti-abortion rules. The Republican legislature doesn’t like any of this one bit – not to mention that four of the seven judges were appointed by former Democratic Governor Kathleen Sibelius. So in a classic, don’t-raise-the-bridge-lower-the-river solution, the GOP legislators – who outnumber Democrats by three to one – have decided that the answer is to do away with the judges they don’t like and to hell with checks and balances. In the words of Esquire’s inimitable Charlie Pierce, “They recognize no limits to their power, no curbs to their desire. There are few frontiers in democratic government that they will not work to violate, or to twist to their own purposes. And they absolutely will not stop. Ni shagu nazad, as Stalin said to his army. Not one step backwards.” What happened to Kansas? A coup against common sense, sound principles and the “general welfare” hailed in the preamble to the US Constitution. And as it all has gone down, Republican elites seem to have developed a case of laryngitis. We could go on. Let’s not forget what Governor Scott Walker has done to Wisconsin and Michigan Governor Richard Snyder to Flint. Check out how Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner is endeavoring to “fix” higher education there. Will Republican elites please tell us where they stand on their man’s ax-wielding mania? And what Republican poobah has dared call out Grover Norquist, whose monomaniacal crusade against government has thrown public education into crisis, turned streets and highways into bottomless potholes, and produced stratospheric deficits? (Bobby Jindal, by the way, was just one of the many who signed Norquist’s no-tax pledge, a major reason why his state is barely holding on by its fingernails.) Finally, this is the party whose elites deceived America into war after cutting taxes on the wealthy so they wouldn’t have to pay for it. And so it goes. All of which leads us to the conclusion that what’s wrong with the GOP ain’t just about Donald Trump, apoplectic, mendacious malcreant though he is. Over decades, the Republicans have built castles of corruption and citadels of crony capitalism across the country and now the angry villagers are climbing over the ramparts. Not one step backwards? Too late.From their “Dark Money” bagman Karl Rove to their philosophical guru David Brooks, the GOP elites are in a tizzy over saving the Republican Party from Donald Trump and the other intruders, extremists and crackpots who have fallen in behind Trump as if he were the Pied Piper of Hamelin. But who will save the party from the elites? Look around at just some of the other sheer lunacy their party perpetrates when it’s not trying to shut government down, redistribute wealth upward, and prevent the president of the United States (who, the last time we looked, has the constitutional right and mandate) from filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The Republicans in southern California just got a 7-6 majority on the region’s air quality board and have set out to reverse all of its safeguards, “reaffirming new smog rules backed by oil refineries and other major polluters,” according to the Los Angeles Times. Mary Lou Bruner, a Republican crank in Texas who claimed that a young Barack Obama had worked as a black male prostitute, is on track to become a key vote on the state’s board of education, the group that, as Matt Levin at the Houston Chronicle writes, is, “already drawing intense criticism for textbooks that, among other issues, downplayed slavery and racial segregation.” That’s important because the school board is such a major buyer of books its decisions affect editorial content in texts all over the country. So remember that Bruner is an eccentric whose Facebook declarations include “School shootings started after the schools started teaching evolution” and “The dinosaurs on the ark may have been babies and not able to reproduce. It might make sense to take the small dinosaurs onto the ark instead of the ones bigger than a bus.” Huh? Yet Republican elites seem quite satisfied to have a Mary Lou Bruner as the arbiter of what their children read in schools. And while we’re talking about education, travel over to Texas neighbor Louisiana and look at the legacy that former Republican governor and presidential candidate Bobby Jindal has left behind for his Democratic successor, John Bel Edwards. At The Washington Post, Chico Harlan reported,
“Louisiana stands at the brink of economic disaster. Without sharp and painful tax increases in the coming weeks, the government will cease to offer many of its vital services, including education opportunities… A few universities will shut down and declare bankruptcy. Graduations will be canceled. Students will lose scholarships… Since the 2007-08 school year, Louisiana has cut funding for higher education by 44 percent, the sharpest pullback in the nation.”Part of this can be attributed to the precipitous drop in oil and gas prices and loss of fossil fuel industry revenue crucial to the state’s economy. But the real problem, according to the Associated Press, is that
“Jindal, burnishing his fiscal conservative credentials for his failed presidential campaign, refused to hike taxes or approve any action that even resembled a tax hike, including trimming expensive business tax credits, even amid an economic downturn… Legislators are hearing that cuts described by the Jindal administration as ‘efficiencies’ actually went much deeper, striking at services. They’ve learned about borrowing practices that increased state debts and about threats to Louisiana’s cash flow because it spent down reserves.”The result? A calamitous budget crisis in the second most impoverished state in the country, a $900 million shortfall that has to be fixed by June 30 and another amounting to around two billion that will need to be closed next year. So that’s how you govern when you have the power. Thanks, Republicans! And while we’re at it, ponder, too, the once-great state of Kansas, where, under the right-wing ideology and bumbling leadership of Republican governor Sam Brownback, the clowns are running the circus. The state legislature there is moving toward passage of a bill that would allow the impeachment of Kansas Supreme Court justices for, among other newly-thought of high crimes and misdemeanors, “attempting to usurp the power” of said same legislature or the executive branch. The reason? As per Edward Eveld of The Kansas City Star, “A recent state Supreme Court decision, citing the Legislature’s constitutional duty to properly finance public schools, has demanded that lawmakers fix a school funding formula by June 30 or risk the shutdown of public schools for the 2016-2017 school year.” The court also has overturned death sentences and is considering a case that would void anti-abortion rules. The Republican legislature doesn’t like any of this one bit – not to mention that four of the seven judges were appointed by former Democratic Governor Kathleen Sibelius. So in a classic, don’t-raise-the-bridge-lower-the-river solution, the GOP legislators – who outnumber Democrats by three to one – have decided that the answer is to do away with the judges they don’t like and to hell with checks and balances. In the words of Esquire’s inimitable Charlie Pierce, “They recognize no limits to their power, no curbs to their desire. There are few frontiers in democratic government that they will not work to violate, or to twist to their own purposes. And they absolutely will not stop. Ni shagu nazad, as Stalin said to his army. Not one step backwards.” What happened to Kansas? A coup against common sense, sound principles and the “general welfare” hailed in the preamble to the US Constitution. And as it all has gone down, Republican elites seem to have developed a case of laryngitis. We could go on. Let’s not forget what Governor Scott Walker has done to Wisconsin and Michigan Governor Richard Snyder to Flint. Check out how Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner is endeavoring to “fix” higher education there. Will Republican elites please tell us where they stand on their man’s ax-wielding mania? And what Republican poobah has dared call out Grover Norquist, whose monomaniacal crusade against government has thrown public education into crisis, turned streets and highways into bottomless potholes, and produced stratospheric deficits? (Bobby Jindal, by the way, was just one of the many who signed Norquist’s no-tax pledge, a major reason why his state is barely holding on by its fingernails.) Finally, this is the party whose elites deceived America into war after cutting taxes on the wealthy so they wouldn’t have to pay for it. And so it goes. All of which leads us to the conclusion that what’s wrong with the GOP ain’t just about Donald Trump, apoplectic, mendacious malcreant though he is. Over decades, the Republicans have built castles of corruption and citadels of crony capitalism across the country and now the angry villagers are climbing over the ramparts. Not one step backwards? Too late.
