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.

Yesterday was a good day

Several things that make me happy occurred.

  • Trump was arrested. That’s nice.
  • A liberal won the Chicago mayoral race.

    Brandon Johnson, a county commissioner and former public school teacher, was projected to win Tuesday’s mayoral runoff after promising to increase investment in social programs to address public safety fears in the nation’s third-largest city.

  • The Wisconsin supreme court was flipped to a majority liberal

    Liberals claimed control of Wisconsin’s high court in an election Tuesday, giving them a one-vote majority on a body that in the coming years will likely consider the state’s abortion ban, its gerrymandered legislative districts and its voting rules for the 2024 presidential election.
    Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz’s victory over former state Supreme Court justice Daniel Kelly will end 15 years of conservative control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. She could face ethical questions when the court takes up politically charged cases because she campaigned heavily on abortion rights and repeatedly called the state’s election maps “rigged.”

    This is the one I cared about most, because it’s the state next door, and I’ve got a grandchild living there. Wisconsin has been on a long slow ugly slide to the dark side, and this is a welcome and meaningful reversal. Also — a Democrat campaigning on abortion rights won? Please, Democratic party, realize that this is a winning issue for you.

I think that one thing that has been dragging Democrats down for decades is the timidity of conservative Democrats who want to be Republican Lite and refuse to embrace what the party stands for — progressive values, equality, and labor (they still suck on that last one).

The new NATO

It’s grown a bit today. Finland has joined the alliance.

I’m a bit bothered by that hole in the North — where’s Sweden? It seems they have applied to join NATO, but Turkey is being a pain in the butt, kind of a Minchin of Asia Minor.

But membership applications must be approved by all existing NATO countries. And Turkey positioned itself as a spoiler, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan using the process to extract concessions and score domestic political points. Although he ultimately came around on Finland, he has continued to hold out on Sweden, citing Stockholm’s refusal to extradite those he calls “terrorists” affiliated with the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

Charles XII would not have been happy. There he was, in exile in Turkey, when he rushed back to Sweden specifically to make sure they wouldn’t make peace with Russians.

Eventually, in the autumn of 1714, their warning letter reached him. In it, those executive and legislative bodies told the absentee King that unless he quickly returned to Sweden, they would independently conclude an achievable peace treaty with Russia, Poland and Denmark. This stark admonition prompted Charles to rush back to Sweden.

He would have wanted Sweden to be part of NATO, I’m sure.

We won’t mention that when he got back to Sweden he decided to declare war and invade…Norway? Where he was killed? History is complicated. I think we can safely say we’re living in one of the more complicated times in history.

Go Greene, go unseen

Marjorie Taylor Greene got some free PR time on “60 Minutes”. She used it to assert that Democrats are pedophiles who sexualize children.

CBS anchor Lesley Stahl was shocked to hear that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene stands firmly behind her frequent claim that Democrats are “pedophiles.” On “60 Minutes,” Stahl pressed Greene on her use of the slur, and the Georgia Republican defiantly responded that it’s the truth: “They support grooming children.”

“They are not pedophiles,” Stahl rejoined incredulously. “Why would you say that?”

OK, Leslie Stahl…I would ask, “Why would you let that baboon on the air?” I would also ask of any of the higher-ups at CBS, “Why did you let that slur air? Have you no editors?”

Back to you, Leslie: “Why did you make such a pathetically feeble response? You knew going into this what kind of nastiness and lies Greene would deliver, weren’t you at all prepared?

I knew this shitshow was coming on ahead of time, and chose to not watch the show (not a difficult decision, “60 Minutes” hasn’t been relevant for a long time.) Apparently, the American TV watching public felt the same.

Maybe someday the powers-that-be that fill our homes with “news” selected only for its controversial nature will realize that they are driving the culture wars they also deplore. The Right is a hate group.

After marriage equality triumphed, the “pedophile” smear against Democrats morphed into something stranger: the deranged charges of child trafficking that drive the QAnon conspiracy theory. When those accusations proved obviously false, right-wing media figures and MAGA Republicans such as Greene seamlessly shifted to widely applying the “groomer” term to Democrats advocating for tolerance of trans people, especially adolescent trans care and classroom discussion of LGBTQ issues.

The through line here, as historian Brandy Schillace points out, is that the right has recoiled both at the prospect of happy gay families and at young trans people finding better lives with their own parents’ loving support. The connection, Schillace told me, is “resistance to seeing homosexuals or transgender people as part of families,” carried out by associating LGBTQ people with “child predators.”

Stop treating them as a respectable part of the discourse.

Jesus. Greene is doubling down in a new ad.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1643048198502772736

That is grossly dishonest.

Admit it, Texas: you want to be a theocracy

Also admit that you’re just trying to recover the title of Worst State in the Union from Florida.

Texas legislators have proposed a bill to require the display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom in the state.

Never mind that this is a blatant attempt to establish an official state religion, or that it’s going to face overwhelming legal challenges, or that every non-Christian child is going to be insulted and harmed by this stupid poster, or that every Christian bully is going to be empowered to torment Jewish and Muslim kids (yeah, it’s a Nazi kind of bill.) This is simply a bad law. I’m sure most teachers in the state, even the Christian ones, would prefer that the state support them with better salaries, more supply money, and better facilities.

Maybe they should also dictate that the posters be mounted on steel plates that can be used as shields, because they’re sure as hell not going to do anything more substantial to prevent school shootings.