Democratic states are so much nicer than Republican ones

Hey, how about some good news, about people who are making other people’s lives better? All you have to do is go to a Democratically controlled state, you know, like Minnesota. High school kids have been lobbying for free menstrual products, and the state legislature is going to approve it!

Students and their allies have pressed lawmakers for years to address the problem they describe as “period poverty.” They detailed the indignities of struggling with periods at school without the products they need or the means to buy them. They framed it as a public health issue for those who viewed it as just a hassle.

The payoff for that hard work may come soon. Minnesota lawmakers appear poised to pass a bill requiring Minnesota public schools serving students in grades four through 12 to provide free pads, tampons or other menstrual products to students in all restrooms.

Advocates credit students for speaking out publicly and refusing to let the issue be ignored at the Capitol. Elif and other teens say in the fight they’ve learned some real-world lessons on power, persistence and making change.

It makes sense, it gives people dignity, it improves education. It looks like it also teaches students that they have the power to make a difference.

Travis Tritt, so brave

I think he’s one of those country-western singers I turn off the instant I hear them on the radio, but I had no idea he was so courageous. Travis Tritt has taken the bold step of dictating that concert venues must provide him with an alternative brand of free beer, because Budweiser has a trans spokesperson.

The courage! He knows that other artists might be afraid of stating their principles in public for fear of being ridiculed and canceled! But not Travis Tritt! He will boldly be ridiculous without worrying about ridiculed! In that, he shares an attribute with professional clowns. He might not be afraid of being laughed at, but he is terrified of trans women. Oh no! Dylan Mulvaney is laughing at him!

“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine”

Republicans are even more stupid and short-sighted than I thought. In Tennessee, the Republicans totally dominate the legislature, they have all the power, and they couldn’t resist the temptation to use that power to brutally squash even the vestiges of influence the Democrats have.

The Republican-led Tennessee House voted Thursday to expel two Democratic lawmakers who halted proceedings last week to join protesters demanding gun-control legislation after a mass killing.

In a historic act of partisan retaliation, the chamber voted 72-25 to oust Rep. Justin Jones (D), a 27-year-old community organizer elected in November to represent part of Nashville, and 69-26 to expel Rep. Justin Pearson (D) of Memphis. Republicans did not have enough votes to remove Rep. Gloria Johnson (D), a former teacher from Knoxville who lost a student to gun violence.

They were protesting the inaction of the legislature in response to the Covenant School murders, in which three nine-year old children and three adults were killed. The Republicans are so determined to do nothing that they finally did something, by throwing out the few activists they had.

Just to make their injustice even more cartoonishly garish, of course they evicted the two black troublemakers and left the white woman alone. Tennessee, can you be any more blatant?

At least the charges were revealing.

Republicans in the House filed the resolutions Monday to oust Jones, Johnson and Pearson, saying the three lawmakers “did knowingly and intentionally bring disorder and dishonor” to the House.

The only dishonor here is the action of cowardly Republicans who not only expelled the people who criticized them, but then proceeded to ignore the problem of gun violence in their state. Apparently, the most honorable people in the legislature were Jones, Pearson, and Johnson, and the Republicans moved decisively to silence them.

I do wonder what happens next. The Tennessee Three will be a focus of a growing activism in the state, but let’s get real: the racists who elected a swarm of fascists to the legislature are going to be happy with their actions, and we’re also going to see a growing conservative resistance.

They’re probably building a Death Star already.

Oh no! They’re going to have to get sober!

Maybe certain Kansans are going to oppose the “woke” by drinking Coors, but I have news for them.

Coors Light has been a sponsor of the Center on Colfax and the Pride Parade and Denver PrideFest for nearly two decades,” said Molson Coors spokesperson Michael Nordman. “Our Pride runs mile high so we are excited to support the Center’s vital programs and services that positively impact the LGBTQ community.”

Thanks to support from companies such as Molson Coors, Denver PrideFest has become the largest celebration of LGBTQ pride in the Rocky Mountain region.

I’m still not going to drink it.

Kansas is for perverts

Kansas has passed a law to ban transgender athletes which has a few incidental consequences.

The legislation, which takes effect July 1, requires children to participate in school activities based on the gender assigned to them at birth. The Kansas Reflector reports that challenges could require a student athlete to undergo genital inspections or require a birth certificate for proof of the child’s gender.

Following the vote, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach applauded the legislature’s override of the governor’s veto.

“As the father of five daughters who are involved in sports, I care deeply about the fairness in girls’ sports,” Kobach said. “If any group challenges this law in court, I will defend it vigorously. And I am confident that the law will survive any challenge.”

Caring deeply about your daughters means insisting that they be available for genital inspections. I’m not going to look, but this sounds like a scenario you’d find on PornHub.

Now here’s a weird flex.

I believe there might be a small locus of science-belief centered around Lawrence, but the rest of the state is a benighted nest of bible-thumpers, so I disagree with his bigoted claims about “biological women.” Also, I told you conservatives have recently lost what little sanity they had over “woke beer,” that is, Budweiser.

I drink neither Coors nor Bud, and I’m not going to make a choice because of an imagined “woke” connection.

So much for impartial justice

Yesterday, I wrote about how a liberal judge, Janet Protasiewicz, was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Her opponent was spittin’ mad, because she had been “political,” campaigning on her support for pro-choice positions, as if he wasn’t, because campaigning on a rabid anti-choice position isn’t political, somehow. Some Wisconsin Republicans are already scheming to impeach her, because she is somehow bad for holding the opinions she has.

Clarence Thomas and his sugar daddy, Harlan Crow

Now consider the corruption of US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.

For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman [Harlan Crow] without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.

The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.

These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosures. His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said.

He’s rotten all the way through. It’s not just that he accepted absurdly expensive gifts from a right-wing billionaire, but that he knew it was unethical — he kept them secret.

I, too, am a public servant, although one that gets a salary less than a quarter of Thomas’s, and lacking all those additional perks. Every year I get sent an annoying form that I have to fill out, asking for all the details about any income above my salary, and wanting to know about any profitable associations that might bias my teaching or research. It’s mainly aimed at professors who, for instance, might have lucrative ties to pharmaceutical companies. At least I can say it’s easy for me to fill out, lacking additional revenues of that sort, but I do fill it out honestly and accurately.

If any of you readers feel like dropping by to whisk me off in your private plane for a vacation in Indonesia, thank you very much, but I will be listing it on my disclosure form.

Clarence Thomas wouldn’t.

“It’s incomprehensible to me that someone would do this,” said Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. When she was on the bench, Gertner said, she was so cautious about appearances that she wouldn’t mention her title when making dinner reservations: “It was a question of not wanting to use the office for anything other than what it was intended.”

Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer who served in administrations of both parties, said Thomas “seems to have completely disregarded his higher ethical obligations.”

“When a justice’s lifestyle is being subsidized by the rich and famous, it absolutely corrodes public trust,” said Canter, now at the watchdog group CREW. “Quite frankly, it makes my heart sink.”

Even those vermin in Congress have tighter restrictions on gifts than Supreme Court judges.

There are few restrictions on what gifts justices can accept. That’s in contrast to the other branches of government. Members of Congress are generally prohibited from taking gifts worth $50 or more and would need pre-approval from an ethics committee to take many of the trips Thomas has accepted from Crow.

When your ethical considerations are looser than those of a Matt Gaetz, and you can’t even abide by them, then we can safely say that you’re corrupt to the core. Don’t impeach Janet Protasiewicz, not when you’ve got the thievery and corruption of Clarence Thomas stinking up the joint.

The right-wing wackaloon temper tantrum against…beer?

The latest enemy du jour for the MAGAts is, surprisingly, beer. Apparently Anheuser-Busch, the maker of cheap swill, has hired Dylan Mulvaney, a trans woman and Tik-Tok influencer, to represent their brand, and now various posturing macho twits are destroying their cases of Budweiser in protest. Do we need to mention that they’ve gone out and bought beer that they then destroy, and Anheuser-Busch really doesn’t care if you spill their product on the ground, or if you filter it through your liver first before peeing it out? Probably not, thoughts like that are beyond them.

Anyway, Kid Rock aka Robert James Ritchie aka that annoying pimp for Trump marched out with his big guns and shot at a couple of cases at close range, and missed half of them. He had a buddy with a shotgun shooting at them at the same time, presumably as backup in case one tried to escape, and he missed, too. His firearms technique got some helpful criticism…from a woman. That’s gotta sting.

But I did serve in the Army, in the infantry, and I was actually raised in the South around firearms, and as a woman who has fired plenty of assault rifles and machine guns in my lifetime, I’m happy to offer Mr. Ritchie some guidance.

As you can see in the video, Mr. Ritchie, no more than 20 yards away from his targets, practically point-blank range with that kinda weapon, struggles mightily to take down the cases of Bud Light. In fact, after his tantrum, two of the cases are still completely upright, barely even touched.

Sorry, that’s a tad inaccurate because it wasn’t just him firing. Although Mr. Ritchie implies in the video that he’s the only one shooting, one of his buddies is actually off-camera, just to the right of the frame, firing what appears to be a shotgun — given away by three blasts that nick the left side of the table and land in the lake behind it.

So, between the two of them combined, from 20 yards away, well… let’s just say these two gentleman should stick to their day jobs.

What day jobs? The last time Kid Rock was popular was in the 1990s, and he’s just coasting now on the royalties from a few hit songs that I couldn’t even name.

Noticed! At last!

I got a mention in the latest issue of the college newspaper, the University Register. Only in the April Fools’ issue, unfortunately, and they misspelled my name, of course.

“The only current known readers of the UR are PZ Meyers and one of his spiders.”

Not mentioned is that PZ Meyers only manages to skim the paper 5 days after it was published.

Or that the spiders only read at a first grade level, so far.

Sour grapes

Wow. The Wisconsin loser, Daniel Kelly, is really pissed off about having to concede.

(Skip ahead to 3:40)

It’s hard to take his accusation that the Protasiewicz campaign was despicable, when Kelly campaigned with a version of the Willie Horton ad.

Conservative former Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly’s campaign for a vacant seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court is running an ad on social media that is nearly a shot for shot remake of the “Willie Horton ad” run by supporters of former President George H.W. Bush during his 1988 presidential race against former Democratic Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.
…
On Tuesday, Kelly’s official Twitter account posted his campaign’s version of the ad, which shows pictures of Kelly and his liberal opponent, Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz, over a simple blue background while a narrator details the sentence she delivered to Quantrell Bounds, a Thiensville man who sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl and posted a video of the incident to Facebook.

The ad, which includes a filter to make the video appear as if it’s playing on a VHS tape and match the period-specific look of the original, states that Protasiewicz “lets criminals off easy.”

It’s OK if you are a Republican, you know.

Also, they are extremely upset that Protasiewicz’s campaign for a judgeship was political. Wait, what? Republicans have totally politicized the courts, have been actively campaigning to get conservative judges installed, and now they’re complaining? Look at the US Supreme Court — if you don’t think that’s a politicized court, you need to get your ability to think checked. Also, and even I consider this weird, the state Supreme Court positions in Wisconsin are elected. They’re by nature political.

The bluntness of the Democrats’ message in Wisconsin inspired outrage on the right and worried chin-stroking from some liberals, uneasy with the concept of such openly partisan judicial elections. Republicans here warn that “the rule of law” might be replaced by “the rule of Janet,” and that if she wins, hyper-partisan court races will become the norm.
Protasiewicz and her allies say that they already were, especially in Wisconsin. After Dobbs, which put abortion rights back in the laps of state legislators and courts, the trend only accelerated.
“My value is that we have fair maps,” Protasiewicz said at the Tuesday night forum. “My value is that people should be able to make their own reproductive health care decisions.”

OK, Democrats, get over it. How can you be uneasy about “openly partisan judicial elections”? Elections, man. If you don’t recognize that people are going to be partisan over political decisions like gerrymandering and health care, you’re going to lose.