A demonstrator holds a sign reading “Trumpcare – Fake Healthcare” during a health care rally at Thomas Paine Plaza on February 25, 2017 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Rallies are being held across the country in support of the Affordable Health Care Act. (Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images)It was always unlikely to pass both houses of congress, but the extent to which Donald and the Republicans bungled this should be that big a surprise. Since election day slowly many of Donald’s supporters have come to understand that the Affordable Care Act that they love because it gave millions of them coverage and Obamacare which they hate for reasons are one and the same. Not all of his voters, by any means, but a lot of them. There are a lot of articles out there trying to explain why Trumpcare failed, if you want more of the details. Or here for a a good bit of analysis: How disastrous for Trump is healthcare collapse?
President Trump today blamed Democrats for bungling internal party negotiations on a piece of legislation that they’ve been campaigning on for over seven years the bill’s demise, to which Jayapal replied, “Hahahahahahah.”
They have a majority of both houses. They don’t need a single Democratic vote to pass anything. And we didn’t even get to the Senate and any attempt to filibuster, so there isn’t any way to put this on Democrats. Except that they will, and a certain number of their voters will believe it. Of course, they had a majority in both houses for most of Obama’s presidency, and they never managed to repeal Obamacare then, either. The ugly truth that they were keeping from themselves is that they only reason any of the votes to repeal passed in the house was because several factions within the Republican ranks knew it was a meaningless vote. Complete repeal wouldn’t pass in the Senate, and President Obama was ready to veto it if they did.
Newt goes from anticipating victory to trying to pretend he understood it’s a lost cause in just 7 hours.Even pro-Republican news sites were reporting earlier in the week Only 17% of Americans support ‘Trumpcare’, yet just hours before the rescheduled vote, folks like Newt Gingrich were tweeting and bragging about how Obamacare was going down. I mention Newt because just 7 hours later, Newt had changed his tune to “Why would you even schedule a vote?”
One reason it failed is that, yes, thousands of constituents called their Republican congresspeople and urged them to vote no. But don’t forget that another reason it failed was because there exists a group in Congress who want the replacement to hurt even more poor people: TrumpCare Postponed: Too Horrible for Moderate Republicans, Not Horrible Enough for Freedom Caucus. Even when Donald tried to negotiate directly with this small group, they couldn’t get them. And each concession Donald and the Speaker of the House offered the Freedom Caucus drove more of the moderate Republicans into the no camp. Obamacare is seen favorably by 57% of voters, making it far more popular than the replacement, our so-called president, or congress itself. And the provisions that the Freedom Caucus want to remove enjoy a walloping 90% approval from voters (as mentioned in that article), which makes if really hard for me to see how, even if they got this thing through the House, how it would have passed in the Senate.
It’s Friday! We’re four weeks into March already. I find myself a bit cranky at the end of the week. My husband’s surgery went well last week and he seems to be recovering well, but I’m just tried and really would like a long nap.
Anyway, here are the links I found interesting this week, sorted into categories.
‘Missing Richard Simmons’ And The Nature Of Being Known. “… speaking metaphorically, not every expression of gratitude arrives on paper, which you can keep with you, pinned to your life indefinitely. Some thank-you’s arrive written on rocks, and if you feel obligated to carry all of those rocks everywhere you go for the rest of your life, if you can’t learn to look at them, be grateful for them, and set them down, even they become a lot to carry.”
Man Arrested For Deadly Midtown Stabbing Reportedly Came To NYC To Kill Black People. A white man who subscribes to white nationalist views when to New York City for the explicit purpose of killing a homeless black person. And it was so, so, so difficult to find a news story covering the white supremacist hate crime that didn’t begin by describing how fashionably dressed the knifer was, or focusing on the police record of the victim,
“I’m the SCARY TRANSGENDER person the Media warned you about.” (Click to embiggen)Since I spent the majority of Friday and quite a good chunk of Saturday at the hospital while my husband had surgery and then recovered, I didn’t pay as much attention to the news as I often do. Oh, I did wind up spending a lot of time trying to read news online, but I wasn’t really processing it. When I could concentrate, I worked on a short story that I need to send to a ‘zine editor before the end of the month. Turns out I was also distracted enough Thursday night that I made a rather serious error in Friday links.
One of the stories in my weekly round up of the news this week was: Here’s What Happened At The Parents Of Trans Kids Mardi Gras Float. Which is actually a quite heartwarming stories about the parents of a bunch of trans people who put together a float about how much they love their trans kids and rode Sydney, Australia’s Mardi Gras parade. I originally planned to include that link in the section titles “News for Queers and our Allies,” but I also sometimes have a separate sections for news pertinent to particular portions of the Queer Community. And this week there were a lot of links related to trans people. So I kept moving those links around.
Unfortunately, several of the news pieces this time were about trans people were about less than happy things. Anyway, somehow in the course of moving all the trans pieces together, then moving some of them to another section, then moving others to yet another section, I accidentally moved the happy story about parents who love and support their trans kids to the “This Week in Awful People” section and didn’t notice until today!
So if you haven’t yet, go click on that link and look at the cool pictures and read some good news!
“Instead of focusing on the fact that 40 percent of the homeless youth on the street are identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender [and] rejected by their families out on the street, and what do we do about that, we’re now focusing on whether or not a transgender child, which bathroom they can use.” —form Vice President Joe Biden
“In their most vulnerable and difficult stage of life, trans kids are not just facing opposition from their peers, but from the government, from society itself.”
If you can, give a donation to: National Center for Transgender Equality. And if you want to help queer kids who have been rejected by their families and kicked out on the street : True Colors Fund or The Ali Forney Center are good places to start. Many communities have local programs focusing on teen homelessness and particularly queer teen homelessness, a quick Google search with the name of your city or town, and the words “queer teen homeless” should point you in the right way.
I gather lots of memes, info graphics, and succinct comments that I think might make a good companion to a blog post someday. A lot of them are potential illustrations for the next Friday Links. And then I don’t use them all. So I thought I could make a post with a bunch of the recent ones.
About tolerance and intolerance “The whole ‘How come you won’t tolerate my intolerance!’ is hardly a rhetorical home run, or a recent issue. Karl Popper nailed it in 1952.” (Click to embiggen)
About stupidity “Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous…” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer (click to embiggen)
About the lying liar and his masters “Turns out, it wasn’t Trump’s investments in Russia that shaped his pro-Putin views, it was Russia’s investment in him.” (Click to embiggen)
Who’s going to get hurt by Trumpcare (Click to embiggen)
(Click to embiggen)(Click to embiggen)(Click to embiggen)
About economic inequality Income inequality in America is much, much, much worse than we think it is. (Click to embiggen)
“The concentration of income and wealth is deepening around the world, driven by more than rising paychecks for top American financiers and chief executives. Returns to invested capital are outstripping economic growth across advanced countries, directing a growing share of economic rewards into the hands of the wealthy.” (Click to embiggen)
“No woman in a burqa (or a hijab or a burkini) has ever done me any harm. But I was sacked (without explanation) by a man in a suit. Men in suits missold me pensions and endowments, costing me thousands of pounds. A man in a suit led us on a disastrous and illegal war. Men in suits led the banks and crashed the world economy. Other men in suits then increased the misery to millions through austerity. If we are to start telling people what to wear, maybe we should ban suits.” Henry Stewart, London]It’s Friday! It is the third Friday of March. It’s also St. Patrick’s Day, though I didn’t come up with any holiday appropriate links this week.
I set up the Friday Links posts on Thursday evening to publish in the morning on Friday. About the time this posts to my FontFolly.Net blog in the morning, I’ll be leaving the house taking my husband to the hospital. He’s having surgery, it’s a something he’s been meaning to take care of for awhile. If everything goes as planned, I’ll get to bring him home again on Saturday. Between prepping for that, continuing the packing, and usual work things, I didn’t write as much this week.
Anyway, here are the links I found interesting this week, sorted into categories.
Tenn. protesters drown out Trump backer by chanting ‘bless your heart. One on-line friend explained that ‘Bless your heart’ is Southern slang for ‘You’re a self-defeating fool’; my Great-aunt Evabel (that I’ve wound up quoting a couple of times this week) had a way of saying it scathingly that communicated ‘You don’t have the sense the good lord gave a rock!’
Did Donald Trump leak his own tax returns? Many pundits believe he did and here’s why. The fact that this Whitehouse had a full statement (with at least one lie in it, of course) seconds after the first tweet teasing the news story is a very clear indication that they leaked it themselves. The article outlines more evidence, and the reasons why they would do it.
“Some people are like dark clouds, when they disappear, suddenly it’s a sunny day.”I’m sure that someone will tell me (as they have when other infamous bigots have died) that I should not speak ill of the dead. I will point out that the one of the oldest recorded instances of a this admonishment (a Greek text from about 600BC) is more accurately translated as, “Of the dead, nothing spoken unless truthfully.” So in that spirit, let me say that a dark cloud has passed, NARTH Founder and Leader in Ex-Gay Torture Movement Joseph Nicolosi Dead at 70. And that I wholeheartedly endorse the sentiment in this headline about this death: Ex-Gay Therapy Should Die With Its Pioneer, Dr. Joseph Nicolosi.
Nicolosi is just one of many who have profited over the years with the torture and bullying of gay people, often driving them to suicide. He was most recently in the news in 2012 when he tried to sue the state of California to overturn their ban on so-called gay conversion therapy for children and teens. A lawsuit which he lost, thank goodness! And just because another old, hateful bigot has died I know it doesn’t mean that this particular type of oppression is going to end. I can just hope that this death will get is a little closer to that ending, all right?
Source: thedesmondproject.com/Homelessness-Info.html (Click to embiggen)Joseph Nicolosi caused a lot of people—a lot of vulnerable children—pain and suffering and actually increased the odds they would commit suicide. His propaganda encouraged parents to kick their gay children out on the street, leading to more pain, suffering and death. And he profited from that pain and suffering. The organization he founded still profits from it. So, damn right I’m going to speak ill of the dead.
And the usual arguments why one shouldn’t speak ill (he’s not here to defend himself, think of his grieving family, et cetera) should all be overruled by the fact that there are thousands of dead queer kids who not only aren’t here, either, but had no one to defend them from Nicolosi and his fellow bigots. Their memory and their grieving families deserve the truth. And the truth is, the world is a slightly better place now that Nicolosi isn’t part of it.
In completely unrelated news, The DOJ Just Called for the Firing of 46 Obama-Appointed U.S. State’s Attorneys, Including Preet Bharara. This was very abrupt, and included at least one such prosecutor who was specfically asked to stay on recently by both Donald and Sessions. A mass firing is unusual in itself, and the initial reports of this made it clear it was very disorganized. At least one of the prosecutors admitting that he learned of his firing from the news—not even from a reporter calling for a comment. Also, the Justice Department doesn’t have any replacement prosecutors ready to nominate.
It’s becoming clear that there is more than enough evidence to indict a lot of Donald’s inner circle over various criminal charges, many of which border on treason. And if such an investigation got enough core Republican voters up in arms, Congress might actually do their job and start investigation the president himself. Getting rid of a lot of experienced federal prosecutors who are, by law, supposed to operate somewhat independently is one way to decrease the chances such a thing will come to pass.
It’s also yet another tin-pot dictator move, which this administration keeps doing again and again.
Buffy the Vampire SlayerIt’s Friday! We’re a couple weeks into March already. It’s been a weird work week, because the cold that I didn’t quite shake off has developed an annoying cough and a fever, so I’ve been trying to avoid people since I’m probably contagious. I’ve also been sleeping a lot.
Anyway, here are the links I found interesting this week, sorted into categories.
An Asexual’s Defense of Jughead Kissing Betty on Riverdale. “Allowing Jughead to have “an origin story,” as Aguirre-Sacasa says, is not letting the character or the community down (yet). Giving him a coming-out narrative could create a dialogue about the asexual experience we have literally never seen before on broadcast TV. Of course, if Riverdale gets more seasons and it fails to develop Jughead’s asexuality, that would indeed be a disappointing omission, and a missed opportunity to do something truly new and brave with a character onscreen.”
To me, he will always be the panicky (“Game over, man! Game over!”) yet cocky (“Don’t worry. Me and my squad of ultimate badasses will protect you!”) Marine PFC William Hudson, fighting and cursing with all his might as he’s dragged to his death by an alien xenomorph. Bill Paxton Was Film’s Quintessential Game-Over Man: An Appreciation.
He was and remains the only actor ever slain on screen by a T-800 (a naked Arnold Schwarzenegger flung him into metal bars at the Griffith Park Observatory in The Terminator, 32 years before Gosling and Stone danced among the stars there in La La Land), a Xenomorph (a bug dragged him under the floor in Aliens while he raved his profane epitaph), and a Predator (Paxton emptied his sidearm into the advancing beast on an L.A. subway car in Predator 2; when that didn’t work, he tried a machete. And a golfball. Never say die! Even when dying is apparently your job.).
I didn’t intend to leave Paxton’s death completely out of yesterday’s weekly round up of links. But I’d wanted to write something a bit more personal than my usual inclusion in the links, so I had a separate draft post open with links to some of the best Paxton obits I had read, and then when I was assembling the links post, forgot to copy some from here to there!
Paxton appeared in a lot of my favorite movies. Frequently he played a slightly pathetic excuse for a human. Even more frequently, he died on screen. Seriously, directors apparently loved to kill him. And they did it a lot! In addition to the three famous deaths in the pull quote above, he was shot at least six times, stabbed, hacked to pieces with an axe, and in at least one movie both shot and stabbed. Even when he played an undead creature, an immortal vampire in the movie Near Dark, Paxton didn’t make it to the end of the film without being killed again. In the time loop movie, Edge of Tomorrow he’s only seen dying once on screen, but the script makes it clear his character died hundreds of times before the film was over.
His characters didn’t always die. And he wasn’t always the comic relief in a film. In Apollo 13 he portrayed astronaut Fred Haise, for instance, who gets to be heroic and live to the end of the picture. And in Twister he got to play a storm-chasing meteorologist still pining for his ex-wife, who risks his life for science, and lives!
Even though Paxton was often cast as a sort of smarmy loser whose lines would deliver many laughs in the film, he had a knack, using changes in body posture and facial demeanor, for making you forget about the other roles you’d see him in. There were a number of times I’d be well into watching his performance in a film before a moment would arrive where I’d go, “Oh! It’s Hudson!”
In interviews appearances on talk shows (when promoting a new film or series), he always came off as a nice guy. And he certainly had a sense of humor about his tendency to be murdered on film a lot. In his directorial debut, he cast himself as the character who is hacked to death by his own son with an axe on screen! So, clearly, he was in on the joke. Bill Paxton fought Aliens and The Terminator, but he was always just a guy from Fort Worth.
I’m going to miss seeing Bill pop up in my favorite movies and series.
“We don’t know them all but we owe them all.”I’ve written before about an acquaintance in college who was shocked that I’d never heard the pun about this day: March Forth! It’s a date! It’s a command! It’s a date and a command!
For the last few years I’ve been observing my own March Forth tradition. I urge you all on this March Forth, to go please donate to The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.
You can also go to this page on the NCHV website, click on the name of your state, and find a list of organizations helping the homeless in general and homeless veterans in particular in your community. Donate or volunteer.
The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness. A long read, but very enlightening information about the stress of the closet and how that still causes harm lang after a person comes out.
Eric von Dimpleheimer has assembled another masterpiece which you can download free. He explains: . “I began putting together an ebook of the various 2016 recommendation lists and sorting them by magazine (with some links to free stories), but as I kept coming across more recommendations, I abandoned the Sisyphean project. It is still useful (to me at least) and I thought others might be interested in it. I included two of Rocket Stack Rank’s annotated lists and Greg from Rocket Stack Rank is OK with me including them as long as the ebooks are free, which they are.”
![“No woman in a burqa (or a hijab or a burkini) has ever done me any harm. But I was sacked (without explanation) by a man in a suit. Men in suits missold me pensions and endowments, costing me thousands of pounds. A man in a suit led us on a disastrous and illegal war. Men in suits led the banks and crashed the world economy. Other men in suits then increased the misery to millions through austerity. If we are to start telling people what to wear, maybe we should ban suits.” Henry Stewart, London]](https://fontfolly.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/tumblr_olne71vsfn1ujinhho1_1280.jpg)
Font Folly 