Samantha Bee on the Supreme Court’s historic Title VII opinion

While welcoming the ruling that said that firing someone because they are gay or lesbian or transgender violates the law, she says that there is much more that needs to be done to protect the transgender community. She highlights the particularly precarious and dangerous situation in our society of the black trans community who get the whammy of racism added to the homophobia and transphobia. And black transwomen have to deal with the added sexism as well.

What is appalling is that so many people try to act as if the non-trans community has to be protected from the trans community, when the reality is the other way around.
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Ok, this is even more stupid

Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ was always a stupid slogan. Trump and his supporters never specify when it was that America was great before, because to name any particular period in the past would be to say that the injustices that existed then, and there would be many, are preferable to what we have now.

But the Trump campaign has now come up with something even stupider. As I have mentioned, I am now on Trump’s email list and it has been a source of endless amusement to see their desperate gambits to get money from me.
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The parties really know how to pick ’em

Just after virulently anti-gay Bob Good won the Republican nomination for a Virginia congressional seat, another hateful nutjob is likely to win the party’s nomination for a seat in Georgia. (Thanks to commenter Tadas.)

The House’s highest-ranking Republicans are racing to distance themselves from a leading GOP congressional candidate in Georgia after POLITICO uncovered hours of Facebook videos in which she expresses racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic views.

The candidate, Marjorie Taylor Greene, suggested that Muslims do not belong in government; thinks black people “are held slaves to the Democratic Party”; called George Soros, a Jewish Democratic megadonor, a Nazi; and said she would feel “proud” to see a Confederate monument if she were black because it symbolizes progress made since the Civil War.
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John Oliver on the prison scandal

At the best of times, the state of US prisons are a scandal but what is happening during the pandemic is unconscionable, with inmates kept in conditions that guarantee that almost all of them will be exposed to the virus. John Oliver examines the problem and provides some common-sense steps that could be taken to ameliorate the situation but of course they are not being done because being seen as soft on criminals is seen by many politicians as a electoral death sentence, even though there is no way to confine the virus to just the prison population.

Is the word ‘welsh’ derogatory?

In an earlier post, I casually wrote that Donald Trump is a “notorious welsher on debts”, meaning that he feels free to not pay what he owes. It is not a word that I commonly use but am familiar enough with that it came naturally to me when I wanted to describe Trump’s practice of defaulting on his debt obligations.

That is the common meaning of the phrase ‘to welsh’. But later it got me thinking. ‘Welsh’ also refers to the people of Wales, a distinct nationality with their own language that makes up part of the United Kingdom. Was using the term ‘welsh’ the way I did a slur on them, implying that they as a people were prone to this type of dishonesty?
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We are witnessing a sea change in racial attitudes

Dahlia Lithwick amasses a wealth of evidence to argue that we have seen a significant positive shift in the attitudes of white Americans on the issue of race during the Trump presidency. While that is good for the country, it does not bode well for him or the Republican party.

To be clear, Republicans have got a majority of the white vote in elections for the past 56 years and will likely get it again this year. But the large margins that they obtained previously are dwindling, and it is their determined efforts at gerrymandering and driving down the minority vote that has enabled them to stay in power despite alienating every other group. As that margin of white majority becomes smaller, it may not be enough to compensate for their losses elsewhere. So we can expect even more desperate efforts at increasing the white vote with racist and xenophobic fearmongering, coupled with even more intensive efforts at minority voter suppression. But that too can backfire. As we have seen in recent state elections, the efforts at voter suppression have angered minority voters who have become even more determined to vote despite the obstacles placed in their way.
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California covid-19 cases rise as people flout safety guidelines

After initially managing to bring the covid-19 infection rate down in California, the state I live in, and the state started to open up a bit, there has been a disturbing resurgence in cases, similar to rises seen in other states. It has not been statewide but mainly in certain counties. This has resulted in the governor Gavin Newsom ordering restrictions on behavior.
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What else happened in Tulsa

Most of the media coverage of Trump’s Tulsa rally focused on the embarrassingly meager crowd and the bizarre elements of Trump’s speech in which he launched a ten-minute explanation as to why he looked so shaky when he walked down a ramp at West Point and then more time showing that he could drink a glass of water with just one hand. Really. What he did not speak about was George Floyd, Juneteenth, and the 1921Tulsa massacre that happened a few miles away, all of which would have been very timely. But in his mind, trying to heal deep racial wounds is utterly unimportant when compared to trying to show that he retains basic motor functions.
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