“I searched ‘funny cat videos,’ but things are so bad that they’re all making serious ones.”
Punish the rich? They have been underpaying their taxes for decades.
Also, at 70, they likely have no income from a job, but are managing their wealth. Capital gains tax rate is 15% up to $600,000, and 20% for over $600,000.
“I thought I’d walk to work because the weather is nice, and because I abandoned my car at the gas station when I saw the prices.”
A reminder that Jared Kushner could not pass a top security clearance when he worked with his father-in-law in the White House.
He now is a shadow negotiator with Russia and Israel.
Here’s a smile to remind you that you’re not alone during the Holidays ❤ It is often a very stressful and anxiety-inducing moment for trans and queer folks, making it twice as important to look out for each other. Self-care is key!
Maga is a cult. tRump chose his cabinet on what compromising information he could get on them, either from his own sources or from Putin. So they dare not disobey him even to the point of humiliating themselves. Hugs
Madrid traffic lights to promote gender equality and LGBT toleranceBen Vine
Thirty-nine percent of U.S. adults still believe homosexuality is “morally unacceptable,” according to a new report from the Pew Research Center published last week.
Pew researchers surveyed a representative sample of 3,605 adults in the U.S. last March, as part of a study about moral attitudes in 25 different countries, according to the report. Respondents were asked whether they believed certain behaviors — including homosexuality — were morally acceptable, unacceptable, or not a moral issue. (In U.S. surveys, the word “unacceptable” was changed to “wrong.”)
Within the U.S. sample, 39% viewed being gay as morally wrong. That placed the U.S. ninth among all countries surveyed by rate of anti-gay sentiment, between Israel (47%) and Hungary (34%). There was a slight net shift upward compared to Pew research from 2013, which found 37% of adults in the U.S. believed homosexuality was immoral.
Researchers did find significant differences in opinion between demographics, however. Sixty-two percent of U.S. women said it was acceptable or not a moral issue to be gay, compared to 56% of men. Disapproval also skewed older, with 43% of U.S. adults 40 years old or older saying homosexuality was unacceptable, compared to 33% of those aged 18-39. People with lower levels of formal education were also more likely to disapprove of all the behaviors surveyed, which included getting an abortion, gambling, and watching pornography.
The largest gaps in acceptance appeared to be based on religiosity. Fifty-eight percent of U.S. adults who said they pray daily disapproved of being gay, compared to just 24% of those who said they pray less often or not at all. That was especially true for Christians, who were “often among the most likely to consider each of the nine behaviors to be morally unacceptable,” researchers noted. In Nigeria, one of several African nations where U.S. evangelical groups have heavily influenced anti-gay laws and public opinion over the past two decades, 96% of respondents said being gay was immoral. (The most gay-accepting countries of the 25 surveyed were Germany and Sweden, where only 5% said homosexuality was unacceptable.)
The government wants to ban care nationwide, and hospitals are shutting down treatment. Parents just want it all to stop.
The Pew questions specifically asked respondents for their views on homosexuality, rather than the broader LGBTQ+ umbrella, and did not ask about transgender people. A Pew survey of LGBTQ+ adults in the U.S. last year found that most believed attitudes toward gay, lesbian, and bisexual people were becoming more positive, but that acceptance of trans people had declined.
The new Pew report also found that the U.S. was the only country where a minority of respondents (47%) viewed their neighbors as “very” or “somewhat” morally good. Democrats and left-leaning independents were more likely to view other citizens as morally bad, researchers noted, but that trend was also true for people outside the U.S. who did not support their country’s governing party. Overall, the U.S. is “in the middle of the pack” on most behaviors surveyed and was not uniquely judgmental, researchers noted, though U.S. respondents were generally less approving of extramarital affairs than most other countries and more positive about marijuana use than any country other than Canada.
Samantha Riedel is a writer and editor whose work on transgender culture and politics has previously appeared in VICE, Bitch Magazine, and The Establishment. She lives in Massachusetts, where she is presently at work on her first manuscript. … Read More
This is very interesting. The doge guy is under oath so can’t lie. But he realizes he is going to have to admit to be antisemectic. He works for a nazi and it is well known a lot of the doge people were Nazis themselves. He suddenly realizes he will have to say it was the Jews people who were discriminating during the Holocaust. First he tries to say it is DEI due to focusing on women which is gender so the grant had to be slashed. But then he says women were discriminating against the males. Finially when the lawyer asks how, he just gives up and admits it was the jewish people / Jewish women. He probably thinks women discriminate against men because he can’t get a girl to date him or have sex he doesn’t have to pay for. I think Brandon who is the black gentleman on the far right of the screen has the best and correct take on why the doge man / kid simply did not want to or couldn’t honestly answer the question. Hugs
It’s another week full of legal proceedings. And a little politics, too.
Tuesday: Maduro and Flores hearing
The U.S.-ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were captured by U.S. forces on January 3 at their Caracas home. They were arrested pursuant to an indictment federal prosecutors had obtained and taken to the U.S. to face those charges. Both pled guilty and are currently detained pending trial. The superseding indictment can be found here. We discussed it at length here.
There was supposed to be a status conference on the case this Tuesday. But the government wrote the Judge, Alvin Hellerstein in the Southern District of New York, requesting a “brief continuance.” The stated reason was to permit discovery to proceed before the parties returned to court, a reasonable request given the likely amount of evidence the government will be turning over to the defense and the time it takes to review it with defendants who remain in custody.
But the government has been busy on the case already, opposing the defendants’ efforts to use Venezuelan government monies to fund their defense. Prosecutors say Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela and hasn’t been considered by the U.S. to be so for several years. Madura and Flores’ lawyers argue the laws and traditions of the country permit it to fund their defense. A Venezuelan official has said they are prepared to do so.
The defendants argue that their inability to access certain third-party funds to pay for their legal fees violates their Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights to due process and effective assistance of counsel. The parties have filed their briefs, and Judge Hellerstein is expected to consider the legal fees dispute during the March 26 hearing.
Tuesday: Illinois Primary
Illinois voters head to the polls Tuesday to choose their Democratic and Republican nominees for the open Senate seat being vacated by Dick Durbin, who is retiring after almost three decades. Two members of the House, Raja Krishnamoorthi and Robin Kelly, have thrown their hats into the ring, leaving their seats up for grabs. Three additional Illinois representatives are retiring: Danny Davis, Jan Schakowsky, and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia.
That means the Illinois delegation will look different, possibly younger, heading into 2027, and we will have new names to learn. Kamala Harris won the state with 54.8% of the vote in 2024, and it’s unlikely Democrats will lose any seats. In Kelly’s district, former representative Jesse Jackson Jr, who pled guilty to misusing campaign funds in 2013 and was sentenced to 30 months in prison (he served a little under two years), is trying to make a comeback, but he is one of 10 Democrats running for the seat. Jackson, who represented the district for over 20 years before going to prison, is up by double digits in two polls.
Everyone expects Governor JB Pritzker to handily win reelection. But as a potential 2028 presidential contender, there will be heavy scrutiny of how he handles himself during the campaign and how well he performs and leads the Democratic ticket. So there’s a lot to see here.
Under Illinois law, only poll workers and poll watchers can be at the polls on election day, and other people may not mill around outside as voters go about their business. Nonetheless, there have been concerns that ICE might show up to intimidate people. But DHS’s Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity, Heather Honey, issued a statement in late February, saying “Any suggestion that ICE is going to be present at polling places is simply disinformation.” She committed that there would “be no ICE presence at polling locations” during a call with voting officials from across the country.
That makes sense and I’m inclined to believe it. But only because doing it now would trigger legal challenges that would likely be decided against the administration. If they’re going to do this, we’ll likely see it for the first time when voters go to the polls in November.
Wednesday: Fulton County.
As you may recall from our earlier discussion, Judge J.P. Boulee sent the Justice Department and Fulton County to mediation in the case filed by the latter over the government’s seizure of voting records. Wednesday is the date by which the parties must let the Judge know whether they’ve been able to resolve the matter voluntarily. If mediation failed, it will be up to the Judge to decide whether the records are due to be returned, which they almost certainly are (the government gets to keep copies), but the administration could face some messy, revelatory testimony in court if the County goes into the unusual decision to have a U.S. Attorney from Missouri take over the matter, rather than the local U.S. Attorney.
The Rest of the Mess
Pam Bondi wants to deprive state bar associations of their ability to consider ethics challenges to federal prosecutors’ behavior.
DOJ has posted a proposed new regulation in the Federal Register that would prohibit state bars from proceeding while DOJ is conducting an internal review. Nothing in the rule would preclude DOJ from engaging in endless delay and short-circuiting state investigations.
In practice, state bar associations have routinely deferred to DOJ to conduct internal ethics proceedings before they act against a Justice Department lawyer. But that was under the old rules, where DOJ took ethics seriously. And as a practical matter, state bars, not Pam Bondi or Donald Trump, decide whether to give a specific lawyer a license to practice law in their state, so it’s difficult to see how the government has a legal leg to stand on here. It would be like Donald Trump deciding who can be a barber in Oklahoma or a cosmetologist in Arizona.
There is a 30-day comment period for the proposed regulations that will close on April 6. Comments will be public. Expect a wide variety of members of the legal profession to weigh in against the administration’s transparent effort to prevent state bar action against DOJ officials who are in ethical trouble. Congress made it clear in a law called the McDade Amendment that government attorneys “shall be subject to State laws and rules … governing attorneys in each State where such attorney engages in that attorney’s duties, to the same extent and in the same manner as other attorneys in that State.”The measure was passed in 1998 amid concerns about overzealous prosecutors. Pennsylvania Republican Representative Joseph McDade (R-PA) championed the measure after he was acquitted on bribery and racketeering charges.
The SAVE Act heads to the Senate for a vote this week.
We’ve been talking about it for months. This appears to be the week the Senate will vote on the SAVE Act. It has already passed in the House. In our conversation at Big Tent last week, Marc Elias opined it would not pass. The Senate would have to abandon the filibuster rule to get it across the finish line. That would be a last-ditch measure that Republican Senators have long argued against, but some seemed to waffle on the issue last week.
Trump tried to get Republican Senators to abandon the filibuster last November. He made that pitch with visiting Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at his side. Orban heads what he has called an “illiberal democracy” in that country. It was quite an image.
The issue last year was the pending government shutdown. Trump called on Senate Republicans to scrap the filibuster rule and allow simple majority votes to prevail on that issue and for most other legislation. They declined, even though, or perhaps because, Trump promised his party that if they did, the GOP would “never lose the midterms and we will never lose a general election” for the foreseeable future. It will be interesting to see if that pitch reemerges this week as Trump tries to pass a measure designed to suppress Democratic votes in the upcoming election.
Senators on both sides of the aisle have long understood the power that honoring the filibuster gives both sides; it’s a form of mutually assured retention of power. But Texas Senator John Cornyn, long a proponent of the filibuster, put out an op ed in the New York Post arguing that the SAVE America Act is more important than it is.
“For many years, I believed that if the US Senate scrapped the filibuster, Texas and our nation would stand to lose more than we would gain … My fellow conservatives and I have proudly used the 60-vote threshold to protect the country from all sorts of bad ideas and dangerous policies. But when the reality on the ground changes, leaders must take stock and adapt…Today, Democrats are weaponizing the Senate’s rules to block the SAVE America Act, defund the Department of Homeland Security and hurt the American people — all to spite President Donald Trump.”
It was quite a reversal of long-held principles in service of Trump from the Texas Republican, who is facing an uphill battle to hold onto his Senate seat. He faced a primary challenge from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Neither candidate reached the 50% threshold necessary for an outright win, so there will be a runoff, which is scheduled for May 26, although there have been whispers of a voluntary resolution. How we are about to find out if other Republican senators want to hold onto any of their institutional power or are willing to throw it away on Trump and a law that has strong arguments against its constitutionality.
Finally, Julie Le, the former government lawyer in Minneapolis who we met in this piece, when she begged a judge to hold her in contempt so she could get a good night’s sleep, has launched a Congressional campaign website. “This job sucks,” she told the judge. Now, it appears she might be looking for a new one, since she was ultimately removed after her outburst in court.
I need to apologize for the lack of posts the last three days. I have been spending a lot of time with Ron and I have been cooking three meals a day and doing the dishes and laundry which has left little time for posting. Then late last night Ron realized how much he had been taking of my time and so today he wanted to leave me alone. But then I did something I had not done for a month or more, I went to the abuse survivor site. And one post led to the next and eventually to eventally 40 open tabs of fellow abuse survivors discussions of what they went through. When Ron got back at 3:30 he noticed I was very upset. He kept asking why until I told him. Then he was angry. He wanted to go in and close the entire window of open tabs. He joked of taking my computer away from me like a teenager who went to the wrong websites. I had to explain it to him. I can’t talk to anyone about my childhood / young adult abuse. I don’t have anyone to share the memories with other than the blog and I feel horrible when I do that even though it helps me because I can’t help but think I am hurting people I care about like it hurts Ron when I share my memories with him. But on that site, on the male survivor website are people who went through what I did, and they understand, they can hear me, and I can hear them with out it harming us, except that it becomes a loop I struggle to break out of. I want to read every post and give a reply because I was there as they were, I am suffering as they are, and I can understand their pain and anger as they can mine. It is a place to share my memories with people and not feel I am damaging them because they are already hurt. Ron struggled to understand that and I told him. “You did not know my abusers like I did. But by the time you met them I had moved out of their home and they had moved on to their own homes and families. I reminded him my abusive hellspawn sister who threw parties offering me as a party flavor to any teen who wanted me male or female required her own son to sleep in her bedroom from his preteen years until he left the house as an adult”. I know she made me please her, did she do the same to him? I was paralyzed to help him. At the time ron did not know of my abuse but he felt something was wrong. It was well known in the “family” and no one thought it wrong. I suspect my oldest male hellspawn did the same to his two young daughters. I reminded Ron how my adoptive mother kept trying to kiss me on the lips when she was in the park model we owned. He looked stricken and walked away, I think he had not connected the dots of that and how I had to try to avoid that. Anyway I have deleted the window those tabs were in and I am going to reply to a few comments do the few dishes, and then try to do a cartoons / memes / news roundup hopefully for tomorrow. Hugs
Here’s a smile to remind you that you’re not alone during the Holidays ❤ It is often a very stressful and anxiety-inducing moment for trans and queer folks, making it twice as important to look out for each other. Self-care is key!
Scottie's Playtime 