Month: May 2023

Texas GOP Rep: “Our Schools Are Not God-Free Zones”

Texas GOP Rep: “Our Schools Are Not God-Free Zones”

This is another attempt at a Christian take over of the US.   As is pointed out, the idea that the US was founded as a Christian nation is a complete fabrication fantasy by religious zealots.   But these Christian warriors won’t stop, won’t be deterred by facts, and will keep pushing until they manage to take over the US and create the Christian Taliban to force the public to live by their religious doctrines.   Think of it, everyone forced to live by the dictates of the worst of the fundamentalist of the Christian religion.  We have seen this in other countries where religion has taken over the government.  Think of Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia.   Women lose all rights, no other religions tolerated, schools do not teach facts or science but instead push religious text as the truth no matter how impossible or debunked they are.   You think the bans on abortion, trans people including adults allowed medical treatment to transition, and bans on drag shows are the end of what these religious zealots want?   No, they want complete control to force their religion, their religious way of life on all the public.   First they took over the Republican Party and then the courts.   Now they are taking over state governments and school boards.   Back in the 1980s Christian leaders pushed their most harden followers to go to homeschooling.   Because it is clear that education shows the flaws of fundamentalist religious beliefs.   The more liberal a church tries to force people to believe in the bible / holy texts the more good education based in science and historical fact disproves it.   So the solution was to ruin public education.   And that is what has been happening by the Republican Party driven by corporate greed and religious zealotry.   I just read some more actions of Florida to force government to pay for private / religious education.   Interesting fact, countries that do not have private schools have the greatest quality public education.   Because if the wealthy have to use the same schools as the public or the poor, they make damn sure those schools are well funded and have the best teachers possible producing the best outcomes for all students.   In the US you have expensive private schools that have the best education for the smallest amount of students, public education system for the majority of students that struggle to provide an education, and the worst possible homeschooling or charter schools which can mean anything from a single focused education on one subject to simply pushing religious dogma as truthful accepted education.   The children are the future as everyone knows, so the ideology and religious zealots are trying to change the future by keeping the children from learning true science, true history, true biology, and true understanding of reality.   Hugs 

Courthouse News reports:

Senate Bill 1515 would require a poster of the Ten Commandments to be in every public school classroom in the state. Under Senate Bill 1396, public school districts would be able to adopt policies allowing for a moment of prayer and a reading from the Bible or other religious text during the school day. Senate Bill 763 is a measure that would allow school districts to employ chaplains to serve as school counselors.

Republican state Senator Mayes Middleton of Galveston authored both SB 1396 and SB 763. During the layout of SB 1396 on the Senate floor, he told his fellow lawmakers that the bill is needed to expand religious liberties in public schools. “The reality is that our school children and faculty spend much of their lives in the school building and classroom…and our schools are not God-free zones,” said Middleton.

The Texas Tribune reports:

Waving a copy of the Ten Commandments and a 17th-century textbook, amateur historian David Barton recently argued that Christianity has always formed the basis of American morality and thus is essential to Texas classrooms.

“This is traditional, historical stuff,” he told a Texas Senate Education Committee last month. “It’s hard to say that anything is more traditional in American education than was the Ten Commandments.”

For nearly four decades, Barton has preached that message to politicians and pews across the country, arguing that church-state separation is a “myth” that is disproven by centuries-old texts, like the school book he showed senators, that reference the Ten Commandments and other religious texts.

As Right Wing Watch has doggedly reported for years, Barton’s claims that foundational US documents directly quote the bible are completely false.

Mayes Middleton is a former board member of the anti-LGBTQ Texas Public Policy Foundation, which is behind the state’s ongoing pogrom against trans people.

 

 

S_E_Pan hour ago

A perfect example of grooming

Houndentenor an hour ago

When I was in public school I was very religious. I prayed often. Of course my intent was to pray not to make a big show of praying. I did it as often and in the way I wanted. I didn’t need anyone to tell me when or how to do it. This is still true. To quote George Will (yes, I know but it’s a good quote): “As long as there are math tests, there will be prayer in the public schools.”

This isn’t about God being in schools. This is about staking out territory and making those who aren’t their specific brand of Christianity feel marginalized. That’s the point. A good many Christians are uncomfortable with these measures, not because they don’t think children should learn about religion or pray, but because the teachings are not in line with what they teach at home and at their churches. Evangelicals love to talk as if they speak for all Christians. The rest of American Christianity really needs to stand up against their tyranny.

Joeonhold 2 hours ago

Yes, your schools are technically, God Free Zones. If you want God in your school, that’s what Catholic and Christians and other religious schools are there for. Please don’t try to push your “Christian Morals” on everyone in Public Schools. Because not everyone follows what you believe in.

BartmanLA 2 hours ago

I thought this was settled LAW, the Separation of Church and State. This needs to be absolutely challenged if this becomes law in Texas.

jimbo65  BartmanLAan hour ago

It should be, but I think this is exactly what they want. They want it kicked up to SCOTUS, where they’re counting on it being overturned.

Nic Peterson  BartmanLAan hour ago

Settled law and stare decisis is dead.

 

Pony Is Thrilled To Have Her Overgrown Hooves Finally Cut | The Dodo

They Voted to Eat their Young

Why it Matters,  They Voted to Eat their Young.  By Randy

  Picture1  Jakuniku-kyoushoku.  “It’s the year 2022, and the population has risen to a third of a billion for the United States.  Pollution, catastrophic climate change and blind greed-based taxation has caused severe shortages of food, water and housing nationwide while the military budget grows beyond the ability of the nation.  Only the wealthy can afford health care.  The environment is oppressively hot and humid thanks to the out-of-control greenhouse effect.  Corporate America has taken on the role of feeding most of the nation’s population with tasteless processed foods, over-preserved and under scrutinized, while nutritional and safety factors are the new cost of repeatedly underfunded government overwatch programs and an overworked populace repeatedly asked to sacrifice more and more so the wealthiest may receive favorable tax breaks.  The Soylent Corporation produces their wonder food called Soylent Green…” (edited quote of Soylent Green film summary, 1973).

   I am quite fascinated by movies, books and articles detailing the expected world of my current life, like the above movie synopsis.  I read 1984 and thought it was Oracular. Picture2 My father kept Popular Mechanics magazines from the 1950’s and 1960’s that tell me I should be flying my car by now.  Shortly after I was born American men were walking on the moon, stepping out of the nation’s boundaries as explorers and architects of a new future.  During that time, a generation fought against itself – one side imagining the heights we could go if we only dreamed, if we only loved one-another, if we only gave more than lip service to the idea of freedom, while others suffered a nightmare of bullets in jungles they didn’t know existed but a short time before.  Men of Peace, men of hope, men like John Lennon died to bullets, and it seemed like the generation had made its choice.  The fall of Jimmy Carter, the rise of Trickle-Down politics and Glory of Greed, Iran/Contra-gate, a new war in the land of sand and oil, and a new rising NRA became the Siren’s Song spelling the end to the hope of Lennon and King. 

  In ‘Men in Black’, Tommy Lee Jones asked Will Smith ‘They are beautiful, aren’t they…Picture3the stars…I never look at them anymore’.  Have we lost the hope that seemed to infect America when I was young, when cars were shaped after rocket ships and kids would look to the stars and dream of following in Buzz Aldren’s steps?  It is no wonder to me why people long for the world to be like it was in the ‘60’s.  Life was simpler back then, provided you weren’t drafted, a woman, a minority or poor.  Marjory Taylor Greene has called for a new America, a new Civil War, a new Hitlerian dystopia where we must declare our votes.  She wants to void criminal charges for a national secrets leak because it was originated by someone who was white, Christian and anti-war.  Lauren Bobert says that babies are being murdered after birth for the convenience of a late abortionist.  Our most recent president is in court for Rape, Tax Fraud, and his followers are going to Jail for Sedition and Violence in efforts to Overthrow the Government, but that’s all “fake news”.  Fox News pays $787,500,000 to avoid justice, Governor DeSantis kidnaps destitute families and declares gay people to no longer exist in Florida, and “Good Guys with Guns” stood by and watched babies be shot.  Across The Land of the Free, men are being accused of horrible crimes for telling stories to children and their parents in public libraries.  The religious right has declared the liar, the glutton, adulterer, the jealous, the proud, the lazy and the wrath filled to be saintly.

   I don’t think anyone really cares what Marjory Taylor Greene really believes since the idea that she would be called upon to seriously debate a moral standard in anyPicture4 capacity beyond a cautionary one is surely pure comedy.  She is surely not the cause of our troubles, only the parasite that feeds on our weakened flesh.  She is a result of a country that gains their beliefs from news anchors and pundits, like rags flapping in a breeze that the ill-considered salute unquestioningly.  I understand; I’m a Chicago Cubs fan, and I could respond to any challenge with “We’ll get them next year”.  Then one year they somehow kept winning and the joke became real. 

  The ’Trump in Politics’ era, which coincided quite conveniently with the ”No” era of the republicans brought about a fracture in what was respectable public speech. Picture5 I was raised that it is the obligation of every man to those who follow behind to make a world better than he found it so that his children may live their life without war, famine, disease, poverty.  But suddenly there was a black man in the White House and the era of fear and denial was upon us.  Now we are strangled by guns, anger, lies and false reality.  The preeminent focus is not what is best for our youth, our country, but what will regain the lost power of the ’50’s for those longing for a world gone by.

  What happened to love? Picture6 What happened to my neighbor?  What happened to those Sunday School lessons?  Have we lost already the promise of our fathers, the charge of those who came before?  We are meant to be a country of builders.   I feel anger and despair in those around me as they are denied their reality, denied their choice, denied their identity. 

  I would propose a new law, a new rule:  When finally that long line in the cold of November on that blustery Tuesday, alongside the ballot of new candidates and propositions, tax law and millages, sets a screen.  On that screen flip pictures of the voter’s family, his friends, his loved ones.  And, then, maybe his vote isn’t one designed to enact vengeance and fear but hope for those who come after.  Maybe then the vote is for the ones who truly matter in all that we do:  Those who will inherit the decision about to be made.

 

How Pundits’ Inflation Myth Crushed The Working Class

https://www.levernews.com/how-pundits-inflation-myth-crushed-the-working-class/

May 5, 2023•Andrew Perez,Matthew Cunningham-Cook&David Sirota
 
After corporate media lied America into a war and a financial crisis, data show they lied about a main source of price hikes — and brutal policies followed.
How Pundits’ Inflation Myth Crushed The Working Class
How Pundits’ Inflation Myth Crushed The Working ClassPeople walk by the One Franklin Square Building, home of The Washington Post newspaper, in Washington, D.C. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
 

One year ago, as price hikes were becoming a major national concern, the world’s third-richest man touted his newspaper columnist asserting that corporate profits were not a driving force behind inflation — blaming temporary COVID-19 pandemic aid instead.

While Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and others were trying to steer the inflation discourse away from a focus on business profiteering, there was already data showing that most of the price increases Americans were experiencing could be attributed to larger corporate profit margins.

Those figures were hardly surprising: Corporations that had been permitted to grow into oligopolies during the era of lax antitrust enforcement were now able to leverage their outsized market power to hike prices — and to do so with less fear of competitors undercutting them. It’s a reality that has since been recognized by a Federal Reserve study, a top economist at UBS, European central bankers, and, most recently, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.

And yet, corporate media outlets ignored the available data, choosing to publish and platform pundits who scoffed at accusations of what they derisively called “greedflation” and who insisted that the problem is workers being paid higher wages. That decision delivered devastating consequences for America’s working class.

As with the WMD lies used to justify the deadly Iraq war, and financial deregulation triumphalism leading to the 2008 financial crisis and bank bailouts, the fake media narrative about inflation became conventional wisdom, was echoed by lawmakers, and justified specific policies. In this case, the narrative provided government officials justification to cut off pandemic aid, block new spending, abandon any push for a minimum wage increase, and raise interest rates with the express goal of driving down workers’ wages.

The results: a sharp increase in the number of Americans who can’t afford to pay their bills, and now mass layoffs amid a slowing economy.

Directing blame for inflation away from corporations and toward government spending that temporarily boosted the working class was lucrative for the world’s wealthiest like Bezos and for the giant companies that belong to corporate lobbying groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The discourse manipulation helped stall momentum for anti-price-gouging legislation, higher taxes on the wealthy, and an excessive corporate profits tax. The propaganda also provided a justification for companies to keep jacking up prices as the government inflicted economic pain on workers and families.

The Lever contacted several pundits who helped cement the narrative that “greedflation” was fake, and by extension, that government aid to the working class was the primary inflation culprit. Those who replied offered no apologies for helping create propaganda that justified cutting off millions of Americans from that aid, and they offered no response to a series of reports and analyses indicating that corporate profits have been driving historic price increases — exactly as some progressives accurately noted.

A “Flimsy” Democratic “Conspiracy Theory”

Early last year, the Washington Post editorial board published an op-ed claiming that President Joe Biden’s White House was offering “a bizarre message on inflation,” asserting that “pinning the current inflation problems on corporate greed is a flimsy argument.”

When House and Senate Democrats scheduled hearings a few months later on the role of corporate profiteering in inflation, the U.S. Chamber, the nation’s top business lobby, responded with letters to lawmakers pointing them to the Post op-ed.

“The premise of your hearing has been roundly refuted by economists,” the organization wrote to Sen. Bernie Sanders (Ind.-Vt) in April 2022.

To an extent, the Chamber was right: The economist and pundit class had certainly disputed the notion that profiteering was playing a key role in driving inflation.

So did Republican lawmakers like Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who used his time in the hearing to try to shift blame away from corporate price gouging and instead towards government spending.

First, he cited former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers’ warning that Democrats’ 2021 pandemic aid package would spur inflation.

“Democrats ignored common sense,” said Grassley, adding that they were now “grasping at straws to find a scapegoat, hence, blaming inflation on corporate greed, never mind that economists across the political spectrum overwhelmingly reject the theory.”

However, Lindsay Owens, executive director at the Groundwork Collaborative, testified to Sanders’ budget committee that her organization had reviewed hundreds of earnings calls, and found that corporate CEOs were actively bragging to investors that they had been able to mark up costs on goods and services far beyond the rising costs paid by the companies.

“Over and over, in sector after sector, the message from corporate America is clear: CEOs are telling their investors that the current inflationary environment has created significant opportunities to extract more and more profit by raising prices on consumers,” she wrote. “Their strategy is simple — pass along rising costs, and then take even more.”

A few weeks after Sanders’ hearing, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) released a study that found: “​​Corporate profits have contributed disproportionately to inflation.”

EPI’s chief economist Josh Bivens wrote that more than half of companies’ price increases since the start of the pandemic “can be attributed to fatter profit margins, with labor costs contributing less than 8 percent of this increase,” adding: “This is not normal.”

The EPI analysis should have been definitive — but the corporate pundit class chose to ignore it.

A few weeks after EPI released its study, Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell wrote an op-ed calling “greedflation” a Democratic “conspiracy theory” equivalent to conservatives using a veterinary drug to try to cure COVID-19.

Rampell, who once wrote a piece standing up for legacy admissions at Princeton University such as herself, soon published another column arguing that Democrats were wrong to discuss corporate greed as a factor driving inflation . She instead cast partial blame on the one-time $1,400 pandemic aid payments mailed out by Democrats shortly after Biden took office.

Bezos, the Post’s owner, blasted Rampell’s column out to his millions of followers on Twitter, a few days after he criticized Biden for arguing that raising corporate taxes would help bring down inflation.

Rampell separately wrote, “For ‘corporate greed’ to be the culprit behind the recent spike in prices, well, you’d have to believe either that businesses suddenly got much greedier — that this is the greediest Thanksgiving ever! — or that businesses somehow suddenly got much more effective at acting upon that greed.”

The latter appears to be exactly what happened: Data compiled by the Roosevelt Institute study suggested that corporations that had grown larger in the era of lax antitrust enforcement were able to use their expanded market power to inflate prices, knowing they would not be undercut by competitors.

The Washington Post and Rampell did not respond to questions from The Lever.

As recently as February, Rampell tweeted out that those questioning her assertions about inflation are “internet trolls” and that despite all the data, she was right to repeatedly suggest that corporate profits were not a driver of price hikes.

“I Stand By That 100 Percent”

The Post editorial board and Rampell were far from alone in arguing that it was a “conspiracy theory” to suggest that corporate profits are responsible for much of the price inflation that people have experienced during the pandemic.

Jason Furman, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama, shared Rampell’s column about Democrats’ inflation “conspiracy theory” on Twitter, praising her for calling out “this dangerous misguided nonsense.”

A scion of a wealthy and powerful real estate family, Furman later tweeted that “many of the arguments for ‘greedflation’ are unequivocally wrong & confused.”

Economist Justin Wolfers told NPR last fall, “My friend and economist Jason Furman says, ‘Blaming inflation on greed is like blaming a plane crash on gravity.’ It is technically correct, but it entirely misses the point.”

Furman continued to double down on this narrative when contacted by The Lever.

“I do think corporations maximize their profits and try to raise prices as high as they can — and that we have too much corporate concentration so prices are too high,” Furman said. “But I don’t see any evidence that changed over the last few years. What did change was demand fueled by highly expansionary fiscal and monetary policy.”

Summers, the former Clinton Treasury Secretary who helped usher in the deregulation of the banking industry that led to the 2008 financial crisis and created “too-big-to-fail” banks, said in May 2022 that the idea that corporate profits played a role in inflation was “preposterous.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) amplified Summers and Furman’s criticisms of the “greedflation” narrative on the Senate floor last May.

Bloomberg Opinion columnist Matt Yglesias, whose Slow Boring blog is reportedly read by White House staff, wrote a post last May entitled: “Greedflation is fake.” Yglesias urged readers to suppose they ran a company that decides to hike prices in response to a temporary surge in demand.

“So imagine your surprise when politicians start screaming that the high-profit margins prove that this inflation is really ‘greedflation’ driven by monopoly power when all you did was make tables available promptly to people who wanted tables,” he wrote, adding: “Greed is a constant. But the cause of this particular inflation was a surge in demand, not a surge in greed.”

Reached for comment by The Lever, Yglesias responded, “In terms of my piece, I believe my thesis — as you yourself quoted it back to me — was that inflation could not possibly be attributed to an increase in the level of corporate greed. I stand by that 100 percent.”

He added, “What I remember from my economics textbooks is that if you have a surge in demand that runs up against relatively inelastic supply, what happens is that prices go up (inflation) and so do profits — that’s broadly speaking what I think is going on here and what I assume the economists whose work you’re summarizing are explaining.”

Corporate Spin To “Disguise Profit Margin Expansion”

Several recent economic studies and comments from central bankers indicate that corporate profits are, in fact, driving price hikes.

“Firms raised markups during 2021 in anticipation of future cost pressures, contributing substantially to inflation,” researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City wrote in an economic review published this January.

In March, UBS Chief Economist Paul Donovan released a revealing commentary concluding: “Recent inflation has been driven by an unusual expansion of profit margins.”

He explained: “Profit margin-led inflation is not caused by a supply-demand imbalance. Profit margin-led inflation is when some companies spin a story that convinces customers that price increases are ‘fair,’ when in fact they disguise profit margin expansion.”

Donovan noted that “widespread reports of rising agricultural prices allow supermarkets and restaurants to raise the price of food.” Other spinnable stories include “supply chain disruption (in fact global trade is at a record high), labor shortages (in fact wage costs are rising far less than prices), and in the most circular of arguments ‘general inflation,’” he wrote.

Several days later, a top official at the European Central Bank gave a speech suggesting that corporate profiteering is sustaining inflation.

“Opportunistic behaviour by firms could also delay the fall in core inflation,” said Fabio Panetta, an executive board member at the bank. “In fact, unit profits contributed to more than half of domestic price pressures in the last quarter of 2022. In some industries, profits are increasing strongly and retail prices are rising rapidly, in spite of the fact that wholesale prices have been decreasing for some time.”

He added, “This suggests that some producers have been exploiting the uncertainty created by high and volatile inflation and supply-demand mismatches to increase their margins, raising prices beyond what was necessary to absorb cost increases.”

On Tuesday, the conservative Wall Street Journal reported, “Inflation has proved more stubborn than central banks bargained for when prices started surging two years ago. Now some economists think they know why: Businesses are using a rare opportunity to boost their profit margins.”

On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve once again hiked interest rates — increasing the risk that the U.S. economy will fall into a recession.

For its part, The Washington Post recently republished a Bloomberg column that noted: “The idea that corporate profit expansion has been a big driver of inflation was once mostly confined to trade unions and left-wing academics, but it’s now taken seriously.”

But neither Bezos nor the newspaper’s editorial page have themselves responded to — or apologized for suppressing — the data showing their inflation narrative was false.

Three stories with something in common.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/05/05/fulton-county-georgia-trump-investigation-electors-immunity/

Multiple Georgia Fake Electors Accept Immunity Deal
Georgia Gov Signs Bill Allowing Removal Of Local DAs

Need to use a public bathroom

GOP Indiana Governor Signs “Don’t Say Gay” Bill

GOP Indiana Governor Signs “Don’t Say Gay” Bill

Notice how these bills are written as vague as possible to include anything the right doesn’t like.   Remember, gender and sex includes more than trans or gay people, it also includes all the hetero straight people.  They have gender and they have sexual relationships.  But of course the people behind these bills don’t mean the straight hetero kind as it is “normal” right.  They only mean that icky kind they don’t like.   Who cares that gay and trans people exist, let’s make any mention of them illegal, just like Russia did.   Remember when the president of Iran said they don’t have gays in Iran, as that is a western disease?   They just force all gay men to become women and as for lesbians, well women have no rights so they are forced into relationships with me.   That is what these bills in Florida and other red states comes down to, the forcing the end of LGBTQ+ people out of society and back into hiding again.   The writers of these bills don’t care about the health or well-being of the gay or trans kids, it is about pushing their religious church doctrines of moral correctness on everyone else.   Same with the attempts to ban everything their religion hates, it is about forcing every person in these red states to live by strict Christian church doctrines and standards.   Fuck you if you have a different idea or way of living, you will live by our demands, by our church morals because we are the Christian Taliban.   Hugs

The Associated Press reports:

Indiana’s governor on Thursday signed a bill that will require schools to notify a parent if a student requests a name or pronoun change at school, one of the final bills approved in a legislative session that had targeted LGBTQ+ people in the state, especially students. Critics worry the law could out transgender children to their families and erode trust between students and teachers.

It also prohibits, from prekindergarten through third grade, instruction on “human sexuality,” something that is not defined in the bill. Holcomb said in a statement Thursday,“I also just believe its commonsense that sex education should not be taught in prekindergarten through third grade.” GOP bill author Rep. Michelle Davis said the law will “ensure Hoosier parents are in the driver’s seat when it comes to introducing sensitive topics to their kids.”

Read the full article.

The bill’s author, Rep. Michelle Davis [photo], has appeared on the Family Research Council’s daily podcast. Republicans hold supermajorities in both Indiana chambers.

 

 

Gustav26 hours ago edited

Then no talk about mothers/fathers/children because that teaches sexuality.

Todd20036  Gustav25 hours ago edited
 
TexasBoy 6 hours ago edited

“I also just believe its commonsense that sex education should not be taught in prekindergarten through third grade.”

First off, where in the hell was “sexuality” being taught in K-3, and secondly, does this now mean you can’t refer to your teacher as Mr., Miss, or Mrs. as they all explicitly imply gender, and Mrs. implies that there is a sexual relationship somewhere.

 

Oh that’s ok. When you talk about straight people you talk about good, normal people

When you talk about LBGT, you talk about straight people who have sodomy because they’re sick snd evil

SkokieDaddy – wiener dog dad8 hours ago

I guess there will be mass arrests on the first day of kindergarten when the teacher shows the children where the (gasp!) boy’s and girl’s restrooms are.

 

Todd20036 5 hours ago

It’s not about sex Ed. It’s about heather having 2 mommies

We are seeing LBGTs being made illegal state by fascist state

And santos thinks if gays and lesbians abandon trans people the MAGAts will leave us alone

AyJayDee2  Todd200365 hours ago

They’re just working their way toward making us illegal in the literal sense – it’s only a matter of time before they try to get Lawrence v. Texas overturned.

Shy Guy  Todd200365 hours ago

And Santos thinks if gays and lesbians abandon trans people the MAGAts will leave us alone
I don’t think he really thinks that. He’s just helping the fascists in their attempts to divide us up into as small groups as possible so that they can stamp on each in turn.

Sadly there are some that will agree with that message, thinking that they are the good upstanding ones, and those trans / drag queens / kinky people / whoever are ‘making us look bad‘.

(I’m also not sure why the message included TQIA+ as the ‘others’. What do they have against questioning people? Most of us were at some point. Asexual / Aromantic people are no threat to anyone. They can’t pretend that Intersex people are ‘making a bad choice’ like they try with the rest of us, since they were obviously biologically born that way! Just looks like a transparently lazy way to split the community.)

Stultus 5 hours ago

No surprise here. Indiana is a racist hater State that flies under the radar. Our politicians are pussies and are usually a year or two behind the others. Today, I am putting my Rainbow Flag out and keeping it there.

Niblet58  Stultus6 hours ago

Our local GOP rep decided to not seek re-election because she was so disgusted with her fellow colleagues in that party She and her husband are now independents. She refused to endorse any GOP candidate for her seat.

another_steve  Victor5 hours ago

Often overlooked in media discussions of this wave of anti-LGBT legislation is the fact that some kids will attempt — or succeed in — suicide on account of the hate directed to them.

The Republicans engaged in this campaign of hate are murderers, pure and simple.

Dayglo8 hours ago

Do we have any progressive straight allies paying attention to this wave of homophobic bullshit? Are there any wealthy or powerful gays in the fight or we still just in the “tsk tsk” stage of a fascist overthrow?

SkokieDaddy – wiener dog dad8 hours ago

He kiddies if you want to be an ally, change your name. If you’re Susie, ask to be called Susan. If its Malik, ask to be called Mallie. If your name is Billy, asked to be called Mister Smith. There are plenty of name changes that are not gender related. While this puts a burden on the teachers, it will point out the ridiculousness of this law.

 

DeSantis Gets Bill Allowing FL To Seize Trans Children

DeSantis Gets Bill Allowing FL To Seize Trans Children

What happened to parent’s rights?   Why can just one parent stop a field trip to see a play because they object to any children seeing an actor in a female role, yet a parent has no rights to help their child socially transition?   The only parents who have rights are maga republican parents.   This is the state that the king wannabe governor calls the “free state of Florida”?   This is the enforcement of a Puritan religious belief and view of Christian morality.   This is enforcing a dress code on the entire public to agree with church doctrine of how the bible says to dress.   This is real child abuse to separate children from loving parents following the medical advice of doctors, following the approved accepted best practice from the major medical organizations including the AMA and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is the largest professional association of pediatricians in the US.   But what do doctors know compared to religious conservatives who get their medical information from a book written 2,500 years ago before people even knew about germs.    Think of what the republicans are doing and have managed to do in the last two years.   They have set the country and civil rights back 100 years and have set child labor laws back 150 years.  Every poll says what the republicans are doing is unpopular and unliked by the majority, the republicans don’t care.   Why, because they want to rule the people, not serve the public.   Hugs

The New Republic reports:

The Florida legislature passed a bill Thursday that will let the state take transgender minors away from their families if they are receiving gender-affirming care.

The bill passed the Senate by a vote of 26–13, mainly along party lines, and the House shortly after by a vote of 83–28, again along party lines. The measure now goes to the desk of Governor Ron DeSantis, who has previously expressed support for it and will likely sign it into law.

If he signs it into law, the measure will allow the state to take custody of a child if they have been “subjected to or [are] threatened with being subjected to” gender-affirming care, which includes puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy.

From my March 2023 report:

“Parents have the right to raise their children as they see fit, and government intervention should be a last resort,” Senate President Kathleen Passidomo [photo] said in a prepared statement Friday.

“Unfortunately, all too often we are hearing about treatments for gender dysphoria being administered to children, often very young children. That’s just wrong, and we need to step in and make sure it isn’t happening in our state.”

The bill’s Senate sponsor, Sen. Clay Yarborough, appeared here in March for his bill banning minors from public drag shows.

He first appeared on JMG in 2010, when as a member of the Jacksonville City Council he declared that gays, Muslims, and atheists should not be permitted to hold public office, otherwise God will smite the fuck out of the country.

 

Todd20036 18 hours ago

This is horse shit. Kids aren’t being operated on. They’re given puberty blockers until they are 18

And these laws are meant for if a kid is being physically or sexually abused

This is fascism. And if the feds won’t stop it then it won’t matter if Biden wins in 2024

Jack Frost  Todd2003618 hours ago

100% horseshit, its all made up to attack trans people. period. Its a start too, they’re not going to stop with trans kids. Next it will be taking children from gay couples and we need to know thats where its going.

Time to buy a gun if you live in FL.

Jonty Coppersmith  Jack Frost17 hours ago

Time to move the hell out if you live in FL.

Jack Frost  Jonty Coppersmith 16 hours ago

Again, thats their goal, so they can keep the state in R control forever.

And, unfortunately, the people most effected by these policies are too poor to move out.

JustDucky  Todd2003616 hours ago

Kids are being operated on. Approximately 1.5% of breast augmentation surgeries are preformed on girls under the age of 18. Thousands of cisgender girls receive “gender affirming” surgery every single year.

Funny how no Republicans are writing laws to take those girls away from their parents.

Estraven  JustDucky9 hours ago

Because they’ll never get a HUSBAND without HOOTERS silcone tits size 48 fucking E will they?

Can’t wait for them all to get fucking terminal BREAST CANCER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

TK-Fla  ThewolfIam18 hours ago

I’ve been tired of the Florida bashing but now I’m feeling the same way. Fuck this state. I want to get the fuck out of here ASAP. I just hope I can sell my home quickly. This place has become a quagmire of insanity. It’s horrible for all of the good LGBTQ+ people who choose to live here, including myself.

Paula 18 hours ago

Parents, get your Trans kids out of the state now. I am sure they included provisions to detransition the children too.
You know he’ll sign it. Anything to hurt someone.

Bruno18 hours ago edited

You can bet Florida is going to eventually be setting up contracts with “ministries” to “counsel” the trans kids they steal from their parents to pray away the trans.

Friday  Bruno18 hours ago

Who else would kidnap kids for being queer and not-abused for it?

Karl Dubhe IV 18 hours ago

Legalized kidnapping. Bringing back old Dixie, eh?

Librarykid  Karl Dubhe IV18 hours ago

Old Dixie, Hell, it worked at our southern border.

CB 18 hours ago

And what do they propose to do with these children?
And what happened to parents’ rights?

Todd20036  CB18 hours ago

They’ll be sent to “Christian” homes where hopefully, the children kill themselves

That’s the plan

Uncle Mark  CB17 hours ago

It’s like “Animal Farm”:
‘All parents have rights, but some have more rights than others.’

 

An Anti-Trans Doctor Group Leaked 10,000 Confidential Files

https://www.wired.com/story/american-college-pediatricians-google-drive-leak/

These people are mostly religiously driven, and they use fake or misleading information from debunked failed studies to push their hatred.   They chose their name to confuse people who mistakenly think they are the highly-regarded American Academy of Pediatrics.  They are behind a lot of the misinformation about abortion.  One of their main targets right now is trans children. This includes pushing schools to adopt junk science painting transgender youth as carriers of a pathological disorder, one that’s capable of spontaneously causing others–à la the dancing plague–to adopt similar thoughts and behaviors.  There is a lot more in the article.   How ever since I reloaded my computers the classic editor is not working like it use to allowing me to color in the pages easily.   I have to figure out if it is a setting on my security programs or if WordPress changed the editor.    Hugs

A Google Drive left public on the American College of Pediatricians’ website exposed detailed financial records, sensitive member details, and more.

Medical records on a shelf with a spotlight shining on them in the dark
PHOTOGRAPH: ROHANEH/GETTY IMAGES
 

A DOCTORS’ ORGANIZATION at the center of the ongoing legal fight over the abortion drug mifepristone has suffered a significant data breach. A link to an unsecured Google Drive published on the group’s website pointed users last week to a large cache of sensitive documents, including financial and tax records, membership rolls, and email exchanges spanning over a decade. The more than 10,000 documents lay bare the outsize influence of a small conservative organization working to lend a veneer of medical science to evangelical beliefs on parenting, sex, procreation, and gender.

The American College of Pediatricians, which has fought to deprive gay couples of their parental rights and encouraged public schools to treat LGBTQ youth as if they were mentally ill, is one of a handful of conservative think tanks leading the charge against abortion in the United States. A federal lawsuit filed by the College and its partners against the US Food and Drug Administration seeks to limit nationwide access to what is today the most common form of abortion. The case is now on a trajectory for the US Supreme Court, which not even a year ago declared abortion the purview of America’s elected state representatives. 

The leaked records, first reported by WIRED, offer an unprecedented look at the groups and personnel central to that campaign. They also describe an organization that has benefited greatly by exaggerating its own power, even as it has struggled quietly for two decades to grow in size and gain respect. The records show how the College, which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes as a hate group, managed to introduce fringe beliefs into the mainstream simply by being, as the founder of Fox News once put it, “the loudest voice in the room.” 

The Leak

A WIRED review of the exposed data found that the unsecured Google Drive stored nearly 10,000 files, some of which are compressed zip files containing additional documents. These records detail highly sensitive internal information about the College’s donors and taxes, social security numbers of board members, staff resignation letters, budgetary and fundraising concerns, and the usernames and passwords of more than 100 online accounts. The files include Powerpoint presentations, Quickbooks accounting documents, and at least 388 spreadsheets. 

 

One spreadsheet appears to be an export of an internal database containing information on 1,200 past and current members. It contains intimate personal information about each member, including various contact details, as well as where they were educated, how they heard of the group, and when membership dues were paid. The records show past and current members are mostly male and, on average, over 50 years old. As of spring 2022, the College counted slightly more than 700 members, according to another document reviewed by WIRED. 

Data visualization: DataWrapper

The breach exposes some material dating back to the group’s origin. It includes mailing lists gathered by the group of thousands of “conservative physicians” across the country. (One document outlining recruitment efforts states in bold, red letters: “TARGET CHRISTIAN MDs.”) The ongoing recruitment of doctors and medical school students seen as holding Christian views has long been its top priority. The leaked records indicate that more than 10,000 mailers were sent to physicians between 2013 and 2017 alone. 

 

While the group’s membership rolls are not public, the leak has outed most if not all of its members. A cursory review of the member lists surfaced one name of note: a recent commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services, who after joining in 2019 asked that his membership with the group remain a secret. (WIRED was unable to reach the official for comment in time for publication.)

The SPLC’s “hate group” designation, which the College forcefully disputes, haunted its fundraising efforts, records reveal. A barrage of emails in 2014 show that the label cost the group the chance to benefit from an Amazon program that would eventually distribute $450 million to charities across the globe. Amazon would deny the College’s application, stating that it relied on the SPLC to determine which charities fall into certain ineligible categories.

A strategy document would later refer to a “unified plan” among the College and its allies to “continue discrediting the SPLC,” which included a campaign aimed at lowering its rating at Charity Navigator, one of the web’s most influential nonprofit evaluators. One of the group’s admins noted that despite SPLC’s label, another charity monitor, GuideStar, listed the College as being in “good standing.”

 

The College’s GuideStar page no longer says this and appears to have been defaced. It now reads, “AMERICAN COLLEGE OF doodoo fartheads,” with a mission statement saying: “we are evil and hate gays :(((”

The Google Drive containing the documents was taken offline soon after WIRED contacted the American College of Pediatricians. The College did not respond to a request for comment.

The Talk

Leaked communications between members of the group and minutes taken at board meetings over the course of several years speak loudly about the challenges the group faced in pursuing its deeply unpopular agenda: returning America to a time when the laws and social mores around family squared neatly with evangelical Christian beliefs.

Many of the College’s most radical views target transgender people, and in particular, transgender youth. The leak, which had been indexed by Google, includes volumes of literature crafted specifically to influence relationships between practicing pediatricians, parents, and their children. It includes reams of marketing material the College aims to distribute widely among public school officials. This includes pushing schools to adopt junk science painting transgender youth as carriers of a pathological disorder, one that’s capable of spontaneously causing others–à la the dancing plague–to adopt similar thoughts and behaviors.

This is one of the group’s most dubious claims. While unsupported by medical science, it is routinely and incuriously propagated through literature targeted at schools and medical offices around the US. The primary source for this claim is a research paper drafted in 2017 by Lisa Littman, a Brown University scholar who, while a medical doctor, was not specialized in mental health. The goal of the paper was to introduce, conceptually, “rapid onset gender dysphoria”—a hypothetical disorder, as was later clarified by the journal that published it. Littman would also clarify personally that her research “does not validate the phenomenon” she’d hypothesized, since no clinicians, nor individuals identifying as trans, had participated in the study.  

 

The paper explains that its subjects were instead all parents who had been recruited from a handful of websites known for opposing gender-affirmative care and “telling parents not to believe their child is transgender.” A review of one of the sites from the period shows parents congregating to foster paranoia about whether there’s a “conspiracy of silence” around “anime culture” brainwashing boys into behaving like girls; insights plucked in some cases straight from another, more insidious forum (widely known for reveling in the suicides of the people it has bullied).

A 2021 prospectus describing the group’s focus, ideology, and lobbying efforts encapsulates a wide range of “educational resources” destined for the inboxes of physicians and medical school students. The materials include links to a website instructing doctors on how to speak to children in a variety of scenarios about a multitude of topics surrounding sex, including in the absence of their parents. Practice scripts of conversations between doctors and patients advise, among other things, ways to elicit a child’s thoughts on sex with the help of an imaginative metaphor. 

While the material is not expressly religious, it is clearly aimed at painting same-sex marriage as aberrant and immoral behavior. Physicians lobbied by the group are also told to urge patients to purchase Christian-based parenting guides, including one designed to help parents broach the topic of sex with their 11- and 12-year-old kids. The College suggests telling parents to plan a “special overnight trip,” a pretext for instilling in their children sexual norms in line with evangelical practice. The group suggests telling parents to buy a tool called a “getaway kit,” a series of workbooks that run around $54 online. The workbooks methodically walk the parents through the process of springing the topic, but only after a day-long charade of impromptu gift-giving and play. 

These books are full of games and puzzles for the parent and child to cooperatively take on. Throughout the process, the child slowly digests a concept of “sexual purity,” lessons aided by oversimplified scripture and well-trodden Bible school parables. 

Another document the group shared with its members contains a script for appointments with pregnant minors. Its purpose is made evidently clear: The advice is engineered specifically to reduce the odds of minors coming into contact with medical professionals not strictly opposed to abortion. A practice script recommends the doctor inform the minor that they “strongly recommend against” abortion, adding “the procedure not only kills the infant you carry, but is also a danger to you.” (Medically, the term “fetus” and “infant” are not interchangeable, the latter referring to a newborn baby less than one year old.)

The doctors are urged to recommend that the minor visit a website that, like others shared with patients, is not expressly religious but will only direct visitors to Catholic-run “crisis pregnancy centers,” which strictly reject abortion. The same site is widely promoted by anti-abortion groups such as National Right to Life, which last year held that it should be illegal to terminate the pregnancy of a 10-year-old rape victim.

The Professionals

The effort to ban mifepristone, which the Supreme Court paused last month pending further review, faces significant legal hurdles but could ultimately benefit from the appellate court’s disproportionately conservative makeup. Most of the legal power in the fight was supplied by a much older and better funded group, the Alliance Defending Freedom, which has established ties to some of the country’s most politically elite—former vice president Mike Pence and Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett among them.

A contract in the leaked documents dated April 2021 shows the ADF agreeing to legally represent the College free of charge. It stipulates that ADF’s ability to subsidize expenses incurred during lawsuits would be limited by ethical guidelines; however, it could still forgive any lingering costs simply by declaring the College “indigent.”

 

In contrast to the College’s some 700 members, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)–the organization from which the College’s founders split 20 years ago–has roughly 67,000. The rupture between the two groups was a direct result of a statement issued by the AAP in 2002. Modern research, the AAP said, had conclusively shown that the sexual orientation of parents had an imperceptible impact on the well-being of children, so long as they were raised in caring, supportive families.

Data visualization: DataWrapper

The College would gain notoriety early on by assailing the positions of the AAP. In 2005, a Boston Globe reporter noted how common it had become for the American College of Pediatricians “to be quoted as a counterpoint” to anything the AAP said. The institution had a rather “august-sounding name,” he wrote, for being run by a “single employee.” 

Internal documents show that the group’s directors quickly encountered hurdles operating on the fringe of accepted science. Some claimed to be oppressed. Most of the College’s research had been “written by one person,” according to minutes from a 2006 meeting, which were included in the leak. The College was failing to make a splash. In the future, one director suggested, papers rejected by medical journals “should be published on the web.” The vote to do so was unanimous (though the board decided the term “not published” was nicer than “rejected”). 

A second director put forth a motion to create a separate “scientific section” on the group’s website, strictly for linking to articles published in medical journals. The motion was quashed after it dawned on the board that they didn’t “have enough articles” to make the page “look professional.” 

The College struggled to identify the root cause of its runtedness. “To get enough clout,” one director said, “it would take substantial numbers, maybe 10,000.” (The College’s recruitment efforts would yield fewer than 7 percent of this goal in the following 17 years.) Yet another said the marketing department advised that “the College needs to pick a fight with the AAP and get on Larry King Live.” Another board member, the notes say, felt the organization was too busy trying to “walk the fence” by neglecting to acknowledge that “we are conservative and religious.” 

Montana Republican Says She’d Rather Her Child Died Than Be Trans

The discussion between Sam, Emma, and the crew as they break down what this woman is really saying here is the important part of the video.   Notice the woman says she spent all her time on the floor praying but it seems she neglected to talk to the very doctors who could have given her daughter the help she really needed.   Yes a book written 2,500 years ago has the updated medical knowledge to treat gender issues of teenagers today.   This woman wanted a religious womanly future for her daughter, she did not care what the daughter felt or what was going on in the daughter’s body.  The only things she was worried about was her god and her daughters continuing to be in her god’s good graces.   As she says at one point, she wanted her daughter to have a shining womanly future.  It seems the daughter was rejecting the woman’s religious views, and that couldn’t be allowed.   Hugs

Montana Republican State Representative Kerri Seekins-Crowe made controversial remarks during a floor debate on a bill that would ban transgender youth from participating in school sports.

Seekins-Crowe said that she would rather her child died than be transgender. Seekins-Crowe’s remarks were met with widespread condemnation. Many people called her remarks hateful and transphobic. Some people also called for her to resign from her position.

Seekins-Crowe’s remarks are a reflection of the deep-seated transphobia that exists in Montana and across the country and that transgender people are still facing discrimination and violence. They are also a reminder that there is still much work to be done to achieve equality for all people, regardless of their gender identity.