has been moving along rapidly, and I haven’t put much here because it’s moving so quickly that posting doesn’t keep up with the changes. Anyway, we’ve likely all heard of the non-government workers who are directed by an unelected, unsworn, non-government worker and are accessing US Treasury data bases and We The People’s personal and financial data. If not, well; it’s everywhere. Anyway, I spent a lot of time writing to my Rep, the one of my senators who’s not insane, and Sen. Chuck Schumer about this yesterday, and had more letters and calls (messages) about other business this morning. I’ve had 6 stories up to post only to find as I began to set up posts that something had changed, and they weren’t accurate news anymore. However, here’s a thing. Many people have been despairing of and finger-pointing to “the Dems” as being at fault for all of this. Here is where Dems’s actual momentum is at this time:
Senate and House Dem Presser Outside USAID Today (Video) – Please Watch And Share by Simon Rosenberg
Senate and House Dems forcefully challenge Trump/Musk’s illegal attacks on USAID and the US government Read on Substack
Above is the link to the video, and all of what Simon Rosenberg wrote. Here’s a snippet:
Friends,
I was really impressed with the House presser today and decided to send it along to all of you. Please watch and share with others you think might be interested. You all have wanted Dems to fight – well here you go!
Note that several speakers today talked about how important the calls are they’re receiving from constituents. These calls matter everyone. Keep working it!
(snip-go see everything, and if you’ve contacted your legislators, thanks and please keep it up! If not, I don’t know what it’s gonna take, but to me, we don’t want things to get worse than this, so now is the time. Unless you think this is all fine, of course, but I don’t think you’d be reading here if you did. Links to contact and phone numbers are right beneath.)
Here’s the only one of the tabs I was going to post, but it gives good background if someone needs a little more info in order to act: Musk’s Little Green Men
I just now learned that today is International Compliment Day, and you know I’m here for that-I love giving compliments! Stay As Wonderful As You Are! (Also enjoy this toon, which is funny, but unfortunately on topic. YOU Are Still AWESOME!)
January 22, 1953 The Arthur Miller drama, ”The Crucible,” opened on Broadway. It was a parable that reflected the climate of fear that pervaded American society and the politics of its time, witchcraft in the late 17th century, communism in the mid-20th. In both times there existed also the fear of false accusation. From the New York Times review of the Broadway revival in November 2001: “Today, the play is a cautionary tale of astounding immediacy. Its themes include the pathology of rumor, the arrogance of the religiously righteous, the dangers of private panic in the face of public terror, and the individual’s difficulty in acting rationally in the face of mob hysteria.” scene from the original production Read the playwright’s reasons for writing it:
January 22, 1973 Women won control of their reproductive rights when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that Americans have a constitutional right to privacy, and thus women may terminate a pregnancy before the last 10 weeks. Only during the last trimester, when a fetus can survive outside the womb, would states be permitted to regulate abortion of a healthy pregnancy. Prior to the Court’s ruling that the decision was private and belonged to the pregnant woman, abortion was essentially illegal in all states except New York (as of 1970). About the decision History of New York’s law
January 22, 2001 President George W. Bush signed a memorandum the day after his inauguration reinstating full restrictions on U.S. overseas aid that might go to any program that provided abortions or considered them an option for women. Known as the Mexico City policy, or global gag rule, first signed by President Ronald Reagan, it had been withdrawn by President Bill Clinton as soon as he took office.
Where’d all these shivs come from all of a sudden? Read on Substack
Maxwell Frost represents the 10th House District of Florida. I dutifully looked that up for you before realizing it’s right there on the screen.
Over the last three years, the states have been on fire with anti-trans legislation, bathroom bills, healthcare bans, and most recently sports segregation bills. In 2024, the Heterosexism Santa Anas whipped these flames into a an actual fire tornado. But on Tuesday this week, Republican Congress members took new action that might just reverse this trend: They decided to take away states’ rights to regulate trans bodies and start making these bans national. First up was an amendment to Title IX that would ban trans sports participation. Grotesquely titled the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025,” HB 28 passed the House 218-206 — but its fate in the Senate is uncertain given the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster (there are 53 Republicans in the Senate this year). If it reaches Trump’s desk, he’s guaranteed to sign it.
What’s more clear than the GOP’s chances to get the bill through the Senate, however, is that the Democratic approach to this Republican proposal is very different from how they have responded to anti-trans efforts in the past. This week only two Dems sided against trans people, Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez. (Both represent Texas swing districts, if that matters to you.) But more importantly than the relative unity of the Democrats — even from Reps. Tom Suozzi and Seth Moulton who just recently decided to broadside the party for liking trans people so much they threw the election — they actually sounded a bit salty that the GOP was trying this shit on their watch. Almost like hating trans people was an affront to their values or something.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got a lot of attention for her speech:
She started on fire by calling out infamous anti-woman actions to make it clear that she isn’t buying GOP protestations that the bill is somehow motivated by concern for girls and women. Then she hit them for what they were actually doing:
“[You] open up gender, and, yes, genital examinations into little girls in this country in the so-called name of attacking trans girls. To that, today, what we have to say are two words: Not today.
“The majority right now says there is no place in this bill that says it opens up for genital examinations. Well, here is the thing: There is no enforcement mechanism in this bill. When there is no enforcement mechanism, you open the door to every enforcement mechanism.”
She also stressed that having these laws on the books limits the freedoms of cis (that is, “non-trans” if you’re new) women and girls:
“What this also opens the door for is for women to try to perform a very specific kind of femininity for the very kind of men who are drafting this bill, and to open up questioning of who is a woman because of how we look, how we present ourselves, and yes, what we choose to do with our bodies.”
AOC wasn’t the only one to body the misogynistic GOP. Congresswoman Sara Jacobs sharpened her shiv and stuck it right in,
“This bill doesn’t even come close to protecting women and girls in sports. In fact, it puts all women and girls in danger of sexual abuse.”
Lori Trahan, the only woman Division-1 athlete in Congress, attacked on the same line, this time asking, What about the children?
“[T]he consequences of that approach will be devastating: Girls as young as 4 years old being subjected to invasive lines of questioning about their bodies and even physical inspections by an adult, a stranger, a predator, all because some creep accuses them of not being a girl. What parent would want to put their daughter through that? I know I wouldn’t.”
Brand new Congressman Rep Maxwell Frost turned up the heat even more, if that’s possible, giving a few small but horrifying details about a recent investigation into a volleyball player in his home state of Florida. And he did it in front of a sign naming HB 28 “The GOP Child Predator Empowerment Act.”
That’s some shit, y’all. His video was posted to Twitter, which I will link this one time, because he’s almost as good at this as AOC.
And this Dem messaging? It got under Republican skin. When secret Wonkette girl crush Rep. Jasmine Crockett accused Nancy Mace of whipping up cissexism as a fundraising tactic, Mace actually challenged Crockett to step outside and fight. Joy Reid had a great take on this, but there’s nothing funnier than Mace herself, thinking she can take Crockett on when just five weeks ago she had her arm in a sling from shaking a man’s hand (yr Wonkette did not see any evidence she’d even visited medical staff or had any injury diagnosed, but damn that sling was sure real for a couple days).
This is, to use a technical term usually found only in the official records of the Parliamentarian of the House, some cool ass shit. I know that many of us have been waiting for Dems to hit the GOP and hit them hard when they come after minorities or rights or values that we on the Left would like to see them protect. So folks have to be wondering, what woke them up?
Though your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke doesn’t have hard information, it would be irresponsible not to speculate that last November’s election made a difference. And by this we mean not only the elevation of Trump, once again, to head of the executive branch which may indeed have lit a fire in some, but also the election of Sarah McBride, an election which elevated the entire US House of Representatives by finally making it possible for a trans legislator to participate in debates on the bills that target us.
Many noticed that McBride didn’t instantly and loudly fight back when Nancy Mace attacked her personally, using McBride’s election as an excuse to pass new bathroom restrictions for those working on Capitol Hill. But as yr Wonkette reminded at the time:
McBride [needs] a chance to work, a chance to develop reputation and influence. She needs to do some very careful relationship building now.
The House Dems did a fantastic job of articulating exactly how government interest in girls’ bodies becomes a predatory risk for cis and trans folks alike. But it wasn’t cis people that first noticed the problem or developed the argument. I know because I had to come up with these observations and arguments in 1996 without any cis help at all, and I spent 14 years teaching cis people patiently, over and over, how transphobia, like homophobia, is a weapon of sexism.
Whether McBride was secretly organizing Democratic rhetorical strategies and asking cis folks to take the point so that she couldn’t be marginalized as a trans radical, it’s certainly not an accident that it is now that congressional Dems are spending time on a daily basis talking to a real live trans person that they are figuring out how to talk about trans issues. Here’s hoping they’ll continue to make the GOP majorities bigoted victories more and more costly.
Tuesday afternoon, Politico ran a very good story about media and political attacks against Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and her response to the ongoing wildfires. The piece, by reporter Melanie Mason, points out that much of the criticism has been unfair and often baldface lies. It also notes that Bass’s public persona as a detail-oriented consensus builder has in part led to the perception that she’s not an action-oriented take-charge leader in this crisis. It’s one of the better discussion of Bass and the wildfires we’ve read, in addition of course to our own, ahem.
“Nationally, there’s just a pile-on. […] If you look at her replies [on social media] now, she could be posting a video of her literally running into a burning building and taking a child out of there, and people would still be replying ‘resign!’”
Mason’s piece is a smart, thoughtful look at how an accomplished politician is being dragged in the media, and how her own political instincts and strengths aren’t proving to be much help in countering the overwhelmingly negative coverage. Kind of like having a municipal water system that’s perfectly capable of handling building fires, but not designed to contain a fire hurricane made far more catastrophic by climate change. By all means, you should read it!
But because we are doing a Doktor of Rhetoric post today, we’re only going to discuss Mason’s very good reporting and analysis in the context of how Politico distorted its own goddamn coverage for the sake of adding more cheap shots to the shitstorm of belligerent bellyaching with which Bass is contending.
Later yesterday afternoon, Politico’s “California PM Playbook” column took Mason’s thoughtful, nuanced reporting and ran it through a bullshit filter, resulting in a column that mentions the pile-on of disinformation that Bass has faced, but ultimately paints Bass as responsible for her own unfair coverage, darn her.
California Playbook editor Lindsay Holden quotes and paraphrases Mason liberally, but hypes up the negatives almost to the exclusion of all else, leaving the reader with the impression that Bass, as Holden’s headline puts it, “has lost the plot.”
Mason depicts Bass as a competent leader whose substance-over-style political instincts aren’t necessarily a great match for a crisis where cable news and rightwing social media are driving the narrative:
Bass has also been hampered by instincts she honed as a deal-making legislator and coalition-building community activist. Never someone to actively seek the spotlight, her unflashy demeanor now comes off as uninspiring for people seeking a leader projecting command.
An unnamed Democratic consultant says that right now, LA needs a media hero, “someone to stand up in the middle of the Pacific Palisades or the middle of Sylmar or the middle of Hollywood every day and say, ‘This is our community, and we will rebuild.’”
The consultant added, “I want her to show some emotion, that she’s tapping into the fear and anxiety that so many people feel, and not reflect this soft brand of optimism that she’s been known for.”
Soft optimism bad, Henry V filtered through Independence Day good. But Mason also notes that after the widespread devastation of the first horrible hours, when high winds kept water bombers grounded and blew the fires out of control,
firefighters have been remarkably successful in halting additional damage — despite new fires cropping up throughout the week.
“All of those could have been massive conflagrations had they expanded, and they didn’t,” said Doug Herman, a Democratic strategist who works with Bass.
That note doesn’t make it into Holden’s version, which instead seems to be cheering on style, and the hell with substance. After noting that Elon Musk’s attacks on Bass are “often half-baked or outright false,” Holden adds in an anecdote that wasn’t in Mason’s piece, bizarrely framing a dishonest video clip as somehow one more example of Bass’s “painfully poor messaging strategy” (a phrase Mason does not use):
The latest example came Tuesday afternoon, when CBS News sent out a misleading tweet suggesting its reporter asked Bass whether she “regrets” taking an overseas trip while the wildfires erupted. The accompanying video clip showed Bass answering “No.”
In fact, CBS’ Jonathan Vigliottiasked Bass whether, looking back, she still would’ve taken the diplomatic trip to Ghana.
CBS News subsequently revised the tweet to get the question right, and added a note to clarify that Bass was saying no, on reflection she wouldn’t have taken the trip. For all the good it did.
Here’s where we lost our patience with the Playbook piece: Holden went right ahead and insisted that Bass had fucked up:
The episode served as a mini illustration of Bass’ problems — specious information, followed by her own unwillingness to provide a fuller explanation, let alone a broader acknowledgement of her mistake. The narrative about her trip might have been put to bed last week, but Bass’ resistance to engage on it has allowed her enemies to continue painting her as an absent and ineffective leader.
Apparently, Bass should have anticipated that CBS would send a tweet distorting what she said, and she should have pre-debunked it, too. Shame on her! She really has lost the plot, all right.
Perhaps Mason should update her own piece with a close look at how her own outlet indulged in the kind of bullshit she was analyzing, but that might be a little too meta. And god knows Meta has enshittified itself plenty already.
The attention seeking lady screams out during a hearing at a member of the other party getting lots of attention from everyone in the room and also now from the media. And of course Comer who is a total republican tool who is lacking in the ability to think and reason but always pushes the maga talking points and wishes of the cult leader found that Mace threatening a fellow member was not in any way against the rules that say members can’t do that. Just as before he forgave the actions of Marge Greene. No matter what republicans can do no wrong regardless of what they do, however democrats are wrong even when they are following the rules 100%. Hugs.
The House Oversight Committee went off the rails on Tuesday as Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) fumed at Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) for using the term “child” in reference to her, resulting in Mace asking the Texas Democrat if “she wants to take it outside.”
“Somebody’s campaign coffers really are struggling right now. So she can’t keep saying trans, trans, trans, so that people will feel threatened. And child, listen,” Crockett said in a clip that quickly went viral, hitting Mace for her constant attacks and numerous social media posts about the trans community in recent months.
Mace jumped in and said, “I am no child! Do not call me a child. I am no child. Don’t even start, I am a grown woman, 47 years old.”
“I want to find out which of those emails,” Crockett tried to continue as Mace spoke over her.
“I have broken more glass ceilings,” Mace continued as Crockett also spoke.
“I am not a child, I am a grown woman. If you want to take it outside,” Mace added as Chairman James Comer (R-KY) gaveled her down.
“Mr. Chairman, the committee is not in order. Order or point of order! Point of order! Order! Order! Order!” other members could be heard saying.
Democrat Maxwell Frost (D-FL) took to social media to explain what happened next, writing, “Nancy Mace asked Jasmine Crockett to “go outside”. Chair Comer ruled that threatening violence against another member is okay, as long as it’s in the form of a question! Wild.”
The spat between Mace and Crockett came as the House voted to ban trans athletes from women’s sports at federally funded institutions. Crockett spoke again later during the committee meeting and slammed the GOP for attacking “the most vulnerable” members of society instead of trying to help the American public and govern.
Again Ethel is a woman I have been following since she was a teenager. She has gone through all the stages of transitioning, from doubt, trying to make it something else to finally admitting to herself and the world she is a woman and now living her life as one. The grand thing is she still fights so very hard for trans people despite the costs to her for taking on one of the growing popular atheist anti-trans people and others. She lost 2/3rd her income but never backed down, always telling the truth. She makes every video well researched and documents it, also she provides a transcript for those who would rather read than listen. I admit I admire her and her strength in her life struggles. But if you wish to learn more about those attacking trans stuff or the false idea that trans women are destroying female sports, I would watch her videos. Hugs
Scottie's Playtime 