I mean, really, people have been asking for a BW stand-alone film since … well, since ScarJo first gave us a taste of the character in the otherwise-so-so Iron Man 2 in 2010. People have been asking, people have been begging, people have been mocking Marvel, etc. And, for my money, the closest I thought we would get was her near-co-star role in Captain America: Civil War.
Aside from some vague expressions of interest from Feige et al. over the years, and an announcement that they were looking at it back in 2014 (!), this news — that a writer has been hired — is the first concrete sign of anything resembling a production.
The #metoo resurgence of accusations against sexual misconductors has led to a resurgence of previously made accusations against Donald Trump. These were mostly raised during the presidential campaign (and indirectly supported by Trump’s reprehensible Access Hollywood tape), but amidst general disbelief that Trump would get anywhere near the White House, they eventually became he-said-she-said charges that people believed or disbelieved as they chose to vote.
Now with a number of people being hounded from office or their jobs for past improprieties, the women who accused Trump across the decades are in the spotlight again. The White House claims that eyewitnesses have debunked these sundry charges, but, in fact, the eyewitness information provided by the White House itself really does no such thing.
Not that that proves anything, but it’s indicative of how the White House will simply lie in order to get people to stop paying attention to something Trump finds irksome. Which does make one wonder what else they will lie (or are lying) about.
What do school vouchers mean in this age of Betsy DeVos?
Vouchers for private education are not new to this Administration, but as Trump’s Secretary of Education, De Vos has been pushing those programs like crazy. Public schools, after all, are full of government and unions and even (crazy though it sounds) minorities and poor people and unbelievers. Only by taking tax dollars and turning them over to private educational institutions can good people get the right-thinking education for their successorsfollowers children.
So what sorts of things do kids get to learn at some of the more, um, devout private schools that are paid for by voucher programs?
— How Satan invented “psychology” and “evolution” in the late 1800s in a plot against the growth of Christianity in the United States.
— How women getting the vote led to increasingly un-Biblical behavior in the United States.
— How the Civil War was really a punishment by God of blasphemy and religious cults, and how He made a good thing out of it by causing the South to rise again as the Bible Belt.
Remember, these are lessons being taught from book being bought with your tax dollars, handed over to religious zanies running private schools who are thrilled to have such funding, even as they despise the government that makes it possible.
Because suggesting that white people have intrinsic advantages in our society, and so also have blinders to problems that non-white (non-male, non-cis, non-straight) people have, is apparently, a racist and sexist thing to say in the eyes of certain, as they say, “snowflakes.”
“We need to make it clear that there’s a group of non-accusers, that have not accused the judge of any sexual misconduct or anything illegal,” explains one of Moore’s campaign spokespeople on CNN.
Yes, Jane Porter, Roy Moore spokesperson, is setting the bar of proof at “Well, if not every 14-year old in reach of Roy Moore at the time is accusing him of hitting on her, playing underwear games with her, etc., then clearly he must be innocent.”
Of course, why should Moore care whether his spokesfolk are coherent? He has the Republican Party financially back behind him again, as they’ve concluded that having even an accused molester like Moore hanging out at their Senate cocktail parties and eyeing their grandchildren is better than having anotehr (gasp!) Democrat in Congress.
Brock Turner is already out of prison, having served 3 months of his 6 month conviction for raping an unconscious woman.
Turner, who apparently has plenty of money to spend, objects to having to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life, and so is paying for an appeal to overturn his conviction and get a new trial.
Turner, then 19, was arrested in 2015 after two of his fellow students at the Northern California university saw him outside of a fraternity house on top of an unconscious woman. He was convicted of sexual assault the following year.
Turner’s lawyer, Eric Multhaup, said in papers filed on Friday in a California appeals court that the initial trial was “a detailed and lengthy set of lies.” He argued that a prosecutor in the trial incorrectly told jurors the sexual assault occurred behind a trash bin.
The woman Turner was convicted of sexually assaulting, was found near a garbage enclosure but not behind a trash bin, according to Turner’s appeal. Multhaup said that implying otherwise gave the impression Turner tried to hide his activities with the woman.
The judge who gave him a 6 month slap on the wrist (3 months with good behavior) suggested that he had to consider “rehabilitation and probation for first-time offenders.” Turner apparently is not particularly rehabilitated.
Ironically, given that the sentence was lambasted as terribly light, if Turner succeeds in his appeal and in getting a new trial, he could actually end up serving more time.
Or, alternately, his lawyer could then claim that he can’t get a fair trial. It won’t give him back the whole three months (sob) he served in prison, but it would get him off from having to register as a sex offender.
That’s the point of this article in The Federalist. The author can’t seem to quite go whole-hog and say that character is meaningless (indeed, she keeps insisting that it’s of great importance), but she does dance around it a lot, ultimately coming down hard on the side of “Even if Roy Moore sexually assaulted young and under-age women, at least he’ll vote for more conservative ideologues on the Supreme Court, and that’s what really matters, because his leching after teenagers half his age is a private sin, not a public one, so it pales compared to his willingness to get rid of abortion, so it’s all okay.”
One irony here is that this is an attitude, a moral relativism, that conservatives often accuse liberals of. But social conservatives explicitly claim a moral righteousness, a purity, a demand for virtue in others, that flies directly in the face of this sort of realpolitik. Ultimately, the author has to sort of shrug and say, “Hey, God does great things through immoral people in the Bible, so God probably wants you to vote for Roy Moore.”
I’m not sure that’s a particularly moral argument, and it seems a poor theological one; hopefully it’s not (as it was last November) a winning one.
They’ve stopped joint fund-raising events and pulled the people they sent to Alabama to help canvass for him.
Moore’s trouble have a weird triangle shape to them. In one corner is Moore and his Alabama political supporters. Opposing him, but for different reasons, are the Democrats (locally and nationally) and the national GOP (even the folk out on the fringe of that party, like Ted Cruz).
Part of the opposition there comes from the charges against Moore. But part of it is old-fashioned politics — the Dems thirsting after a Senate seat, the GOP desperate to avoid losing one but profoundly unhappy with the idea of Moore, an anti-establishment pol / religious nutjob / accused chaser after under-aged girls getting into the Senate.
I’m fascinated by intersection of partisan politics and morality on display, even as I find myself repulsed by Moore both based on the (credible) accusations and his (documented) theocratic zaniness. I actually worry about both of those a lot more than the caucus sizes in the US Senate.
The “politics of resentment” are not about small government per se, as the GOP has ostensibly been fighting for. Rather, it’s a tribalistic demand that government work for the people — but not for all of the people.
The core of the ethnonationalist perspective is that a country’s constituent groups and demographics are locked in a zero-sum struggle for resources. Any government intervention that favors one group disfavors the others. Government and other institutions are either with you or against you.
What FOX and talk radio have been teaching the right for decades is that native-born, working- and middle-class whites are locked in a zero-sum struggle with rising Others — minorities, immigrants, gays, coastal elitists, hippie environmentalists, etc. — and that the major institutions of the country have been coopted and are working on behalf of the Others.
[…] From an ethnonationalist perspective, government overreach is when government tells people like me what to do. The proper role of government is to defend my rights and privileges against people like them.
If government is protecting Them, then it must, perforce, be oppressing Us. Some of this comes from the fact that, yes, as institutionalized discrimination against those other groups has been combated, it has meant that the folk who used to assume the lion’s share of the societal pie and representation of what it meant to be “American” are having to share more evenly. But it’s become particularly acute in the face of prolonged economic downturns and stagnation that have nothing to do with any of this, but which provides the very real (if misplaced) feeling of being oppressed and disadvantaged.
Add in fear-mongering and rabble-rousing by conservative media and pundits (e.g., the truly chilling 2009 Limbaugh quote in the story), and you’ve got a sizable fraction of the population suddenly ready to take up torches and pitchforks to overturn societal institutions — but just for their own benefit.
It is, indirectly, the seeming victory of the Ayn Rand philosophy: I’m going to grab mine, you go pound sand.
A tip of the hat to the TV producers who, briefly (i.e., until the studio removed it 15 minutes later), put up a memorial plaque commemorating where Trump was recorded saying such charming things as, “I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Gee, remember when so many people thought that was the most outrageous thing they ever heard, and that someone who said that should withdraw from the Presidential campaign? Trump proved them wrong, both by going on to say (and continuing to say) any number of equally outrageous things, and by being elected President of the United States.
In the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein (and others) sexual harassment (and worse) scandal(s), Samantha Bee has some advice for men. I am sorely tempted to say that this should be one of those mandatory HR videos that employees are required to watch.
First off, he expanded the ease of letting companies off the hook for the contraception mandate. “Gee, we’re devoted religiously to not spending money on our female employees to have birth control, because then we can keep their wages down the rest of the time by claiming that they’ll need all this time off for having kids because they keep getting pregnant.”
One new rule offers an exemption to any employer or insurer that objects to covering contraceptive services “based on its sincerely held religious beliefs.” Another regulation offers a new exemption to employers that have “moral convictions” against covering contraceptives.
Because employment is fungible, so anyone who is stuck at an employer who feels their moral stance outweighs the moral stance of their employees can easily just walk out that door and find a job somewhere else, the sluts.
Two rules were issued because just religious objections weren’t enough.
The Trump administration has legal reasons for issuing two rules, one for religious objections and one for moral objections. Most lawsuits attacking the mandate assert that it violates a 1993 law protecting religious liberty. The administration acknowledges that the law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, “does not provide protection for nonreligious, moral conscientious objections.”
But, the administration says, “Congress has a consistent history of supporting conscience protections for moral convictions alongside protections for religious beliefs.”
So my headline misspeaks. It’s not just about theocrats, it’s about anyone who has a moral objection. Of course, anyone can claim a “moral” objection. The line between “moral” and pretty much any other justification or bias or hang-up is a short one. Ultimately, this sets a precedent for saying, “If you don’t agree with something in a law, you can just kinda skip doing it.” That’s probably not the message they want to be sending, but I guarantee it will raise further objections to all sorts of laws, which will get selective support depending on what it is and who else dislikes it.
In passing, the Trump Administration further hand-waves off any idea that contraception might be a medical treatment for certain conditions. But it notes it’s doing the nation a favor by making sex less risk-free.
The new rules also suggest that the contraceptive mandate could promote “risky sexual behavior” among teenagers and young adults.
For a serial philanderer, it seems odd that Trump is so gung-ho now about preventing “risky sexual behavior.” Of course, Trump doesn’t really care about these rules; this is Pence / Sessions territory here. Trump is interested only insofar as it solidifies his paradoxical evangelical base.
Meanwhile, the Justice Dept. made it clear that religious objections would apply to more than just nassssty birth control.
The twin actions, by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Justice Department, were meant to carry out a promise issued by President Trump five months ago, when he declared in the Rose Garden that “we will not allow people of faith to be targeted, bullied or silenced anymore.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions quoted those words in issuing guidance to federal agencies and prosecutors, instructing them to take the position in court that workers, employers and organizations may claim broad exemptions from nondiscrimination laws on the basis of religious objections.
Mr. Sessions’s guidance issued on Friday directs federal agencies to review their regulations with an eye to expanding their protections for religious believers. Conservative religious individuals and organizations have objected for years to nondiscrimination laws that have affected whom they can hire and fire, whom they can serve and how they can operate. The new directive affords them far broader latitude.
It’s the “Get Out of Discrimination Laws Free (If You Claim That God Told You It’s Okay To Discriminate)” card. And just the sort of thing that Jeff Sessions (and MIke Pence) salivates over as how the government should work, and how people should be allowed to discriminate willy-nilly (but only the right kind of discrimination).
It’s a sad day, frankly. Conservative religionists (or moralists) have long wanted this kind of protection, without realizing the implications. If someone can fire a person because of religious objections to their behavior, well that may sound great if it’s because they’re dirty homosexuals, or people who have children out of wedlock, or even, maybe, heretics and sinners of a different (or not) faith. What happens when someone says, though, “I have a moral objection to Baptists, because I think they are bad people who discriminate against the innocent, so if I find out one of my employees is Baptist, they’re outta here.” Or perhaps, “I morally consider male circumcision to be child abuse, so I have the right to inquire about any employee with male children, and fire their asses if they’ve done such a thing.”
Those conservatives should remember that discrimination is only a “good” thing when you’re the group in the majority, the group in charge. The demographics do not favor those moral persuasions. Which means their presumptions of being in the majority aren’t necessarily sound ones for long.
Everyone sort of went back to sleep on this one after their try failed in July. But despite an actual bipartisan effort to fix ACA problems, a key group of GOP Senators is back at it, pushing a bill forward as fast as they can so that they can get it in before the end of the month, when the majority-only reconciliation process runs out of time.
And, yes, as previously noted, this bill does all sorts of jolly, humane, compassionately conservative things, including:
— Letting states waive essential insurance benefits
— Letting insurance companies charge more for people with preconditions
— Remove mandates on large employers to provide health insurance
— Rolling back the Medicaid expansion
— Turning Medicaid into a block grant with a reduced budget
— Cutting off funding to Planned Parenthood for a year
The results are (still, again) in the short term lots of people losing insurance, in the long term even more people losing their insurance or being bankrupted by their medical expenses, and ongoing a further reduction in the safety net in case of (inevitable) economic downturn or disaster.
Some neat statistical analysis and visualization here about jobs that, from 1950 to 2015, remain predominantly one gender, are evenly split, or have substantially changed.
There are few (good) reasons for such divisions; most seem to be cultural. Still, it’s a remarkably different world than at the beginning of the period, where most such differences were seen not just “how things are,” but actively dictated by God and/or Nature. There seems to be less of that sort of attitude today (at least in the circles I circle in), if still a certain, “Well, this is something we [gender] do, so why are you wanting to do it?” social snubbery.
It will be interesting to see how this continues to evolve.
Literally don’t think about, as in the stuff that passes below our consciousness, that we don’t detect, let alone ponder. The stuff where we don’t even think about it as racism because it’s just How Things Are in our minds, axiomatic assumptions about people based on their race.
(Or their gender, or their sexual orientation, or …)
I say “we” and “our” — and I definitely include “me” and “my” in that.
These blind spots are, by definition, difficult to catch. The trick is, then, if someone points one out to us, giving that observation a fair shake and consideration, not just getting reflexively torqued because someone has accused us of a racist (etc.) belief which of course we aren’t so the accusation is absurd and deeply insulting and …
While it remains not uncommon for women breastfeeding their babies in public, even discreetly, to be asked to go someplace else or more fully enshroud themselves so that men who can’t control their ogling won’t be disturbed by the sight, even indirect, of a woman’s breasts, a visitor to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London found a particular irony when she was approached by a museum attendant.
“The staff member was friendly and polite, but obviously asking me to cover up was still intrusive, unpleasant and embarrassing for me, as well as obviously ludicrous.”
To make that point she tweeted several photos of museum pieces that feature women’s breasts, including one of herself standing in front of a statue of a woman breastfeeding a baby.
Laws that force doctors providing abortions to have admitting privileges in local hospitals are portrayed by their advocates as being designed to "protect women's health." But they are clearly and overtly designed to reduce the places where women (especially in rural areas and conservative areas) can actually get an abortion.
First, outpatient abortions are actually safer, statistically speaking, than outpatient colonoscopies. But nobody's passing laws to require doctors performing in-office colonoscopies to have local admitting privileges.
Second, "admitting privileges" means being able to actually admit a patient to a particular hospital without an admission exam by hospital physicians. But these laws are ostensibly about responding to some dire (and rare) emergency complication from an abortion — and in a medical emergency, patients are seen and treated without the need of a referral by an external doctor with admitting privileges.
SCOTUS this year struck down a similar law in Texas, for that very reason, and the Oklahoma Supreme Court followed that precedent in striking down a state law with that provision.
I have little doubt we will see increasing efforts by state and federal legislatures to do what they can (where so inclined) to restrict abortion rights, and Trump has promised that he'll appoint judges — especially to the Supreme Court — that will support such efforts. Wins like this against disingenuous laws are going to become more difficult, I fear.
Oklahoma abortion restrictions blocked
The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked a state law that would have required abortion providers to have special relationships with hospitals, in continuing fallout from a U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down a similar provision in Texas.
The linked, rather screedy, piece makes two worthwhile points:
1. Even if Tillerson divests himself of every bit of Exxon stock, pension, golden parachute, whatever, he's still going to be approaching the role of the US chief foreign policy guy and diplomat from a lifelong career as an Exxon employee and executive.
2. And aside from oil reserves and regime stability, his knowledge of world affairs (and our knowledge of his opinions) is pretty limited:
'There’s a hell of a lot of other stuff the secretary of State has to do. Let’s start with Israel and Palestine. What sort of grasp of Israeli politics does Tillerson have? Any? And the internecine battles within the Palestinian world?Syria? Factions upon factions upon factions! The history of the relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The roles played by the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah and their histories. Does Tillerson know anything about any of this beyond the broad headlines? And that’s just one region of the world. There are several others, you know.
Then there are the issues that the State Department works on that go beyond state relationships. Potable water. Does he have a handle on that? The subjugation of women. Slavery and peonage. Malaria and other diseases. What’s he going to prioritize, and what’s he going to propose to do about those matters?
My point isn’t that he ought to be able to fix all these things. It’s that a normal pick would know a little something about all these matters, and have a sense of who to get on the phone when a crisis erupts somewhere. Tillerson will be learning on the job literally every day for his entire tenure, however long it lasts.
Except, that is, about fossil fuels and Russia.'
Just something to think about. Unless, of course, the message is that the only thing the US is interested in from foreign countries is oil & gas and other resources, and maybe overall stability to promote trade.
And, yeah, that's probably a good idea, for the variety of reasons given (she's a traditionally white woman, traditionally wearing an American flag, traditionally not very realistically shaped, and she's not real and can't go to foreign countries and give speeches or speak out about specific issues as they come up, even if her large media conglomerate owners would allow her to).
There's one other problem not mentioned: over the last several years, Wonder Woman become very stabby, which is probably not the sort of mascot, alive or fictional, you want representing the United Nations. It's one thing if this were the classic "Wonder Woman, ambassador for peace to Man's World, to show the way of love and understanding and, if that fails, some minimal amount of fisticuffs." It's another to have the current Goddess of War whose opening gesture to any problem is to launch herself bodily, sword and shield at the ready, toward a foe.
As tempting as gender inequality sometimes is to that sort of response.
Trump's nominee for Secretary of Labor, Andrew Puzder, has had most of the critical focus on him as an opponent of increasing the minimum wage (though his opinions on it are a scosh more nuanced than that), but the Department of Labor does more than just make sure people get paid. It oversees workplace safety laws, and it enforces workplace discrimination laws.
I like Carl's, Jr. food, but it's never had a significant presence in Colorado, so we've missed out on the "bikinis and dribbling sauces" string of commercials for a brand that Puzder — as CEO of the parent company CKE — says took on his "personality."
Question: if you were a woman needing to issue a complaint about sex discrimination — harassment, wage disparity, whatever — on the job, would you feel like the new Labor pick's "personality" would be supportive of you, or more interested in supporting the "hungry guys" at the factory?
