And so it begins …

I wrote earlier that when Sarah McBride was elected as a member of the House of Representatives, that her taking office on January 3rd would upset the bigots in Congress because she is a trans woman. I forgot that new members actually arrive on Capitol Hill much earlier than that so that they can go through orientation, set up their offices and staff, etc.

Already, the anti-transgender publicity hogs in the GOP like Nancy Mace and Margery Taylor Greene have decided to take action to prevent McBride from using the women’s bathrooms.

After Delaware elected the first ever openly transgender member of Congress earlier this month, a Republican introduced a bill to ban her from using the bathroom that corresponds with her gender identity.

The South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace introduced the bill, which comes a little less than two months before Sarah McBride is due to be sworn in as the first openly transgender member of Congress. The measure would charge the House sergeant at arms with enforcing the bill, though it is unclear exactly how, according to the Hill.

“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say. I mean, this is a biological man,” Mace told reporters on Monday, according to CNN. She added that Mace “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, period, full stop”.

McBride has responded to this tantrum like a adult.
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Joe Biden: Craven on Israel to the very end

Joe Biden has been cravenly subservient to whatever the Israeli government does. Nowhere has this been more apparent that his non-response to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and their additional brutal assault on Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank and their attacks on Lebanon. Kamala Harris’s failure to distance herself from those policies and refusing to even allow a Palestinian speaker at the Democratic convention hurt her with many Arab-American voters and also those who are outraged at what is going there, though whether it was decisive in her defeat is unclear.

The one tiny step that Biden took was to say in October that he would cut off military aid to Israel if they did not increase the supply of food, water, medicine, and other essential items to Gaza where they have been deliberately starving the population, a war crime of staggering proportions. The target that Israel had to meet to prevent this cut off was very modest, just an increase from the almost zero that was going in at the time of the ultimatum. Biden also conveniently put the deadline to be after the election.

Well, that deadline finally arrived with Israel not doing anything close to meeting the targets and, to no one’s surprise, Biden decided not to carry out his threat.

Jonah Valdez writes about what happened.
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The complicated history of Tulsi Gabbard

Jeremy Scahill over at Drop Site reviews the history of Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, who transitioned rapidly from being antiwar and supporting Bernie Sanders, running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 and then endorsing Biden that year, to becoming an ardent Trump supporter.

Scahill writes that she will be a shock to the US intelligence system but that the charges that she is an undercover agent for Vladimir Putin, or at least an apologist for him, are oversimplified.mIt is a long analysis and well worth reading in full.

Here is part of it.

If confirmed as the next Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard would represent one of the most unorthodox political figures to hold such a senior national security post in U.S. history. A veteran of the war in Iraq, Gabbard was elected to Congress in 2012 and emerged as a sharp critic of the U.S. forever wars launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. She denounced U.S. regime change wars, including the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and consistently opposed U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s scorched earth war against Yemen, which extended from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. On multiple occasions, she accused Trump of being “Saudi Arabia’s bitch,” taking orders from his Saudi “masters,” and of supporting Al Qaeda. She has called for pardoning whistleblowers Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and fought to change U.S. laws permitting domestic surveillance of Americans.
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Why would anyone own dozens of watches?

As part of the defamation verdict against him Rudy Giuliani has been ordered to hand over his assets to pay the amount he owes to two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.

Rudy Giuliani has relinquished dozens of watches and a Mercedes once owned by movie star Lauren Bacall to two former Georgia election workers who won a $148m defamation judgment against him, his lawyer said.

Joseph Cammarata said in a letter filed late on Friday in Manhattan federal court that the trove of watches and a ring were delivered by FedEx to a bank in Atlanta, Georgia, in the morning.

The 1980 Mercedes-Benz SL 500 was turned over at an address in Hialeah, Florida, and an undisclosed amount of funds from Giuliani’s Citibank accounts were also surrendered to the two women who won the judgment, according to the letter.
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What unified government control by the GOP means

As a result of the elections, Trump and the GOP will have control of both houses of congress. So far, Republicans lead 220-213 in the House of Representatives with two races still to be called. Trump has picked three house members – Matt Gaetz, Elise Stefanik, and Mike Waltz – to be part of his administration so special elections will have to be called to replace them but since they represent districts that have been Republican for years, those are not likely to change the balance. Gaetz has already resigned, no doubt to end the congressional ethics inquiry into allegations of his behavior towards underage women and other malfeasances. It is not clear if the report that has been compiled will be released.
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Can the US follow Sri Lanka’s new example?

I have written in the past about Sri Lanka’s deteriorating democracy, with corrupt, nepotistic family dynasties that enriched themselves while pursuing chauvinistic policies that discriminated against minorities and brutally suppressed both an insurgency and a separatist movement. Those governments also systemically undermined the institutions that underpin democracies such as an independent judiciary, police force, the media, and other non-governmental institutions, and using thugs and other means to intimidate opponents and critics. I have written that I observed the US heading in that same direction, and Trump more than anyone represented that trend towards creating a government that merely paid lip-service to democratic governance while in reality making it into a corrupt personal fiefdom.

The situation has now reversed itself.

In September, the Sri Lankan presidential elections saw Anura Kumara Dissanayake (known as AKD) get elected, defeating two candidates who belonged to the past nepotistic dynasties while AKD came from very humble origins. AKD had been a member of parliament but his party held only three seats. After his election, he dissolved parliament and in the new elections held yesterday, his party won 159 seats in the 225-seat parliament, with 62% of the vote.
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Trump sends in the clowns

Trump has started nominating people to fill his administration and so far they are startling, even considering the low expectation that I had. He seems to have decided to populate senior posts with people who have little or no experience in the areas they are supposed to be dealing with or with the kind of administration skills required to run large organizations.

The most startling is the nomination of Florida congressman Matt Gaetz as attorney general. Gaetz was federally investigated on sex-trafficking charges for pursuing underage women and while the justice department finally declined to press charges, the congressional ethics committee is still investigating him. I suspect that Trump appointed him knowing that this would disgust many of the senior professionals in the justice department and they would resign, sparing him the trouble of firing them. He can now fill those positions with loyal hacks who will carry out whatever Trump wants them to do, and especially go after anyone who opposes him on anything. He promised revenge on his ‘enemies’ and there is no reason to think that he will not do just that, with an ‘enemy’ being defined as anyone who opposes or criticizes him.
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Reclaiming slurs

Kevin Drum stirred up a hornet’s nest in his comments in a post asking what exactly the term ‘queer’ meant these days when applied to issues of gender and sexuality. He thought that it had become an umbrella term for anyone who is not cisgender and heterosexual. It is simpler than listing all the categories like LGBTQIA+. Using queer as an umbrella term for those categories risks circularity since Q in the list stands for queer or questioning. But that can be dismissed as a quibble that will only worry language pedants and also by reserving Q only for ‘questioning’.

That seems to be a common understanding of the term. Unfortunately, Drum phrased it in a way that, while attempting to be amusing, was seized upon by some of his commenters to take offense and the conversation veered off in an acrimonious direction. We know that when it comes to comments on the internet, that is inevitable so we should not be surprised that it happened.
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Which bathrooms will Sarah McBride use?

In the previous post, I wrote about how Sarah McBride has been elected as the first transgender person in the US House of Representatives, a piece of good news in an otherwise dismal election.

But something occurred to me later and that is there is going to be an issue when she starts her tenure on January 3rd. Trump and the GOP have made much of the bathroom issue as a way to wage the culture war by attacking the transgender community, saying that people should only be allowed use bathrooms that correspond to the gender assigned to them at birth.

So will they demand that she use the men’s bathroom in every building that makes up the US Congress? What about when she visits the White House? What about the places she goes to as part of her official duties? Which members of Congress will support her right to use the women’s bathroom everywhere?

While using divisive and incendiary rhetoric is easy when you do not have to personally deal with the consequences, this is one issue that is going be very close to home.

A small piece of good news

The results of the election were overwhelmingly bad but in the debris there was one piece of good news and that was the election of the first transgender person to the House of Representatives.

Sarah McBride, a Delaware state senator, has made history as the first out transgender person elected to the US House of Representatives.
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McBride, 34, won Delaware’s at-large House seat in Tuesday’s general election against the Republican candidate John Whalen III, a former Delaware state police officer and businessman. The House seat, Delaware’s only one, has been Democratic since 2010, the New York Times reported.
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In 2011, at the age of 21, McBride came out as a trans woman in her university’s student paper and in a viral Facebook post.

Since then, McBride has worked on LGBTQ+ issues within and beyond her state. She worked on anti-discrimination legislation in Delaware that provided protection to trans people. She later served as the national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group. McBride also taught public policy at the University of Delaware and wrote a 2018 memoir entitled Tomorrow Will Be Different, as her state senate biography notes.

The LGBTQ community, especially the transgender part of it, is going to face a difficult future given the overt hostility that has been expressed against them in this ugly campaign by those who will now have much more power than they did before. Now more than ever, we need to rally round and support them.