Last Call For Certified Jackasses

Oklahoma's state Health Commissioner has abruptly resigned a day after it was revealed that the state issued a non-binary birth certificate for an Oregon resident.

 

Oklahoma Health Commissioner Dr. Lance Frye unexpectedly resigned from the post on Friday, effective immediately, the state health department said.

Department spokesperson Rachel Klein said Frye “felt it was time to move on” from leading the agency.

His departure came a day after state Republican leaders, including Gov. Kevin Stitt, expressed outrage upon learning the health department in May issued a birth certificate with a nonbinary gender designation.

The birth certificate was issued as part of a settlement with an Oklahoma-born Oregon resident. The settlement was reached under the administration of former state Attorney General Mike Hunter, Frye said.

Frye lauded “the dedication, resilience and tenacity of the OSDH team,” in a statement released Friday by the department. “They have worked tirelessly over the last two years to ensure Oklahomans had access to not only COVID-19 testing, vaccinations and critical information, but to other life-saving services.”

Stitt, who appointed Frye, praised his handling of the coronavirus pandemic in the state.

“Dr. Frye provided steady leadership during Oklahoma’s COVID response from his role in surge planning on the Governor’s Solution Task Force to guiding our vaccine rollout that was Top Ten in the nation as Commissioner of Health,” Stitt said in a statement.

Although Frye encouraged mask wearing to slow the spread of COVID in Oklahoma and was commonly seen wearing one, he refused to publicly disagree with Stitt’s stance to not issue a statewide mask mandate.

Deputy Health Commissioner Keith Reed has been named interim commissioner of health, according to Kevin Corbett, state Secretary of Health and Mental Health.

 

You'd better believe Frye was told to resign or to be fired.

Never forget that Republicans want to stop LGBTQ+ folks from ever existing.

Ohio Republicans New Trans-Ender Policy

Ohio Republicans have decided that of all the problems facing the Buckeye State right now, the one that needs immediate attention is quite literally making trans kids illegal under state law.

 

A new bill would prohibit children under age 18 from obtaining hormones treatments, puberty blockers and surgery to transition genders, even with parental consent.

House Bill 454, called the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, is sponsored by a quarter of the Ohio House. All are Republicans. There are two sponsors — Reps. Gary Click of Sandusky County and Diane Grendell of Geauga County. Twenty-three Republicans are cosponsoring the bill.

The bill seeks to prevent gender-affirming health of youth under 18 through a handful of actions: Through restrictions on private insurance plans and Ohio Medicaid, potential sanctions on the licenses of medical professionals, potential cuts to public funding of hospitals and clinics, limits to what a school official can keep from parents when a child shares their gender identity in private.

The bill is similar to Arkansas’ SAFE Act, which Gov. Asa Hutchinson vetoed on April 5. A day later, the legislature overrode the veto. By July 21, a federal judge stopped the bill from going into effect as a lawsuit over its constitutionality wends its way through the courts.

Aaron Baer, president of the Center for Christian Virtue, a Christian conservative policy organization formerly known as Citizens for Community Values, said that his group is championing the bill in Ohio and helped draft HB 454. It contains the same provisions as the Arkansas bill, which the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom helped author.

“We’ve been talking about this issue for a very long time,” he said.

Maria Bruno, Equality Ohio’s public policy director, said it’s appalling to see Ohio children being used as political pawns by lawmakers seeking re-election.

“This bill attempts to ban evidence-based medical treatment that is supported by medical professionals, including but not limited to the American Academy of Pediatricians, the Endocrine Society, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the American Psychiatric Association,” she said.

 

The party of "you'll never take OUR FREEDOMS" and "GOVERNMENT STAY OUT" again has no problem turning the entirety of society into a mechanism of state-enforced monitoring of kids to prevent them being trans, requiring the punishing adults for helping them, and destroying their support networks with no recourse or remorse.

Even the bill's name, Save Adolescents From Experimentation, relegates being trans to "a dangerous phase we have to save kids from" rather than "We should help these kids navigate some really tough choices here and let them know they are loved."

No, it's YOU ARE ILLEGAL and IF YOU DO THIS ADULTS WHO CARE WILL BE PUNISHED, to kids.

To kids.

 

Republicans are horrific monsters. And it doesn't matter what DeWine thinks because his veto will be overridden if this many Republicans are co-sponsors.

Sunday Long Read: No Girls Allowed

Five decades ago, Alice de Rivera changed public schools forever when she applied to New York state's famous Stuyvesant High, the state's premier magnet residential high school for science and mathematics.  Having attended a similar school 25 years ago in North Carolina, this story definitely hit home.

Fifty years ago this month, at a time when America was divided on questions of war, race, and gender, Alice de Rivera decided that she was fed up with her lousy high school in New York. She was thirteen, with arching eyebrows that made her look as if she was questioning everything about the world. Her father, Joseph, was a psychology professor, and her mother, Margaret, was an educational therapist; the family had moved around between college towns before settling in Brooklyn, where de Rivera enrolled in John Jay High School, the local public school. “I was good at studying and skipped third grade, which is why I was so young when I was at John Jay,” she told me, recently. She was always a bit of a tomboy, and, though shy, she was unafraid to stand up for herself. She sometimes ran her brother’s morning paper route, a job that few girls she knew undertook. As a freshman, she was named the editor of John Jay’s underground newspaper, the Streetfighter. Later, to a reporter, she described herself as “cerebral,” and argued that being smart shouldn’t hurt a girl socially. “It’s good if a boy asks you to help him with his homework,” she said.

De Rivera was especially strong in math and science, and she scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on a city-wide math examination. But John Jay was poor in those subjects, and teachers showed no interest in mentorship. She lived a twenty-minute subway ride away from Stuyvesant High School, a specialized public school in downtown Manhattan that was widely regarded as the best secondary school in the country, and one that focussed on math and science. But, since its founding, sixty-five years earlier, Stuyvesant had been all-male, so de Rivera was barred from applying. In the fall of 1968, at the student union, de Rivera met Mia Rublowsky, a tenth-grade math whiz who was also feeling stifled, and considering applying to Stuyvesant despite the sex restriction. In the lunchroom, the two of them talked about the unfairness of the system, and how to fight back. “My parents were not unmoved, but both of them, especially my mother, did not see it as an atrocity on the level of Vietnam,” de Rivera said.

The pair met with Ramona Ripston, an activist at the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which had fought cases on behalf of the Black Panthers and conscientious objectors to the draft. Ripston informed the girls that Rublowsky couldn’t apply to Stuyvesant, because she was too old to transfer in, even if she were a boy. (The school accepted only freshmen and sophomores, and Rublowsky would soon be a junior.) But de Rivera was a perfect plaintiff. “As a freshman asking to transfer into a specialized high school, I was a clean case,” she said. Ripston convinced Eleanor Jackson Piel, an activist lawyer, to take on the case pro bono, and de Rivera was soon meeting regularly with the two women about her case and taking notes in a three-ring binder. Fighting educational sexual segregation was a radical idea at the time: most Ivy League universities, prep schools, and specialized public schools were still all-male. But Piel felt that barring academically talented girls from attending an élite public school violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause, and intended to take the school to court.

At the women’s encouragement, de Rivera requested an application from Stuyvesant. The principal at the time was Dr. Leonard J. Fliedner, a stuffy, sixty-nine-year-old chemist who had authored the textbook “Chemistry: Man’s Servant.” Students called him the Flea. (This was also, cheekily, the name of the school’s underground newspaper.) At the school’s commencement ceremony, in 1960, after he gave an American Legion award during a period of growing counter-cultural sentiment, they booed him so loudly that it made the Times; one journalist pointed to the incident as a sign of unrest among the youth. Fliedner whacked down de Rivera’s request with a nasty letter that read, in essence, “no girls.” He later told a reporter, “It wouldn’t be just her. There would be a couple of hundred others. And we simply haven’t got the facilities. We’d need a girls’ gym and medical facilities, and a dean of women.” On January 20, 1969, de Rivera filed a lawsuit in New York against the state’s Board of Education.

The story has a bittersweet ending, and Stuyvesant High remains the Empire State's top secondary school today, but the latest battle now involves the fact that three-quarters of Stuyvesant High's students are Asian-American, and how both Bill de Blasio and Andrew Cuomo say its time to change how students are selected, something that will almost certainly end up before the Supreme Court.

Last Call For Shaving The World, One Guy At A Time

Gillette, the grooming company we all grew up with and their tagline, "The Best A Man Can Get", reexamined what that phrase really means in the Trump Era with this commercial.

Needless to say, the #NotAllMen folks went absolutely insane with rage over it this week.

Today, the battle for men’s souls reached an extraordinary new frontier: men’s shaving brands. On Tuesday, Gillette released an ad that takes stock of a handful of cultural issues that have always lingered just beneath the surface but became full-blown talking points over the past year: sexual harassment, bullying, and a blanket excusal of this behavior because “boys will be boys.”

Most shaving ads feature gravelly voiced men booming out phrases like Mach 3 or titanium razors, while the camera zooms in on blades gliding over lathered faces. Gillette’s new ad asks viewers to think a little bit harder about its tagline A Best a Man Can Get. Really, what it asks for isn’t much: basic human decency. The ad states explicitly, “We believe in the best in men.” There are clips of Terry Crews, a sexual assault survivor, testifying in front of Congress that men need to hold other men accountable. The commercial shows men doing just that: holding off a pack of bullies, and stopping another guy from harassing a woman.

But it's 2019, so here’s an incredibly exhausting sentence to write: the commercial sparked a wave of anger among conservatives and men’s rights activists that crested with a tweet from British TV personality and professional blowhard Piers Morgan that reads, “Let's be clear: @gillette now wants every man to take one of their razors & cut off his testicles.” (Gillette: need a new tagline?)

Morgan is the most public face of a widespread backlash. On Youtube, the commerical’s already been downvoted almost 330,000 times, versus a relatively meager 74,000 upvotes. A Voice for Men, a "male supremacy" organization that’s classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, urged its supporters to boycott the grooming brand. Another shaving product purveyor attempted to step into the void by declaring it “understand[s] how men work and don’t try to change them into women.” Again, not exactly an accurate reading of the commercial.

“We expected debate,” Pankaj Bhalla, Gillette’s North America brand director, told CNN, although, we’re not sure that boycotts from hate groups is exactly what Bhalla had in mind. Bhalla specifically says that “the ad is not about toxic masculinity. It is about men taking more action every day to set the best example for the next generation."

Frankly, men need to do better, so that the boys of today will be better men tomorrow.  What a horrific concept, right?  And yet the other side's argument is that "Men will continue to be terrible until women give them the respect and deference they deserve just for being men" and that can no longer fly in 2019, guys.

It never could.  "We need to celebrate masculine values like strength, honor, duty, and self-reliance but let's only practice that when it's convenient."

It's sad.  Be the best a man can get, eh?

The Trans-National Race To Erase

The Trump regime is pondering defining trans Americans out of existence at both the federal and state levels, yet another reversal of Obama-era federal policy that would eliminate basic civil rights protections for more than a million Americans.

The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. The policy prompted fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.

The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.

“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

The new definition would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who have opted to recognize themselves — surgically or otherwise — as a gender other than the one they were born into.

“This takes a position that what the medical community understands about their patients — what people understand about themselves — is irrelevant because the government disagrees,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, who led the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in the Obama administration and helped write transgender guidance that is being undone.

The move would be the most significant of a series of maneuvers, large and small, to exclude the population from civil rights protections and roll back the Obama administration’s more fluid recognition of gender identity. The Trump administration has sought to bar transgender people from serving in the military and has legally challenged civil rights protections for the group embedded in the nation’s health care law.

Several agencies have withdrawn Obama-era policies that recognized gender identity in schools, prisons and homeless shelters. The administration even tried to remove questions about gender identity from a 2020 census survey and a national survey of elderly citizens.

For the last year, health and human services has privately argued that the term “sex” was never meant to include gender identity or even homosexuality, and that the lack of clarity allowed the Obama administration to wrongfully extend civil rights protections to people who should not have them.

As I have said time and time again, the goal is absolute cruelty to the Obama coalition, not to just break it up and render it politically non-viable, but to smash it to bits and make sure that those who need federal protections the most never get them, to make sure that they never have the political power again to ever dare challenge the status quo of white, Christian, cisgender male patriarchy.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) asserted on Sunday that Democrats would impose “mob rule” if they won the U.S. House of Representatives in November.

During an interview on Fox News, the senior senator from South Carolina adopted President Donald Trump’s talking points on so-called Democratic “mobs.”

“I think people are going to be voting on the mob rule of the Democratic Party,” Graham told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. “If you elect Democrats to run the House, you know exactly what you’re going to get. They’re going to try and impeach the president and impeach [Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh].”

“They don’t care about your wallet — they just want to get in your wallet,” he continued. “[Kavanaugh’s confirmation], to me, was a despicable episode in the history of the Senate. These [migrant] caravans will never be stopped by Nancy Pelosi. And when it comes to standing up to the world, you need a strong leader like President Trump.”

Graham revealed that he had been handpicked by Trump to campaign for Republicans in 13 states.

“I’m going to let everybody in these states know what happens if you put the Democratic Party in charge of this country,” he said. “You’re rewarding mob rule. You’re undercutting the rule of law. Don’t give these people power.”

“The best thing you can do to make sure [the Kavanaugh confirmation battle] never happens again is punish them for what they were willing to do to this good man,” the senator added. “Two weeks from Tuesday, we can decide what kind of country you want to be. Do you want to be the country of people who run you up and down the halls [of Congress] and spit on you. Or do you want to be a country of Republicans who can actually deliver for working families out there?”

“Nancy Pelosi will welcome the caravans here,” he concluded. “Donald Trump and the rest of us will stop them.”

Or as Adam Serwer keeps saying, "The cruelty is the point".

Besides, the Trump regime's base runs on fear and hatred, and must always be fed new enemies lest the base turn on Trump.  And history tells us that deadly violence against "the other" will only get exponentially worse in the months and years ahead.  They're letting us know exactly what is coming, and they want us so terrified that we hide forever.

I don't plan to let that happen, and if you care about this country, neither should you.

 

Last Call For It's The Trumpconomy, Stupid

The NY Times notes that while college-educated suburban white women are bailing on the Republicans in huge numbers, college-educated white suburban men are sticking with Trump, and the reason is Trump's tax cuts have been very, very good for them.

White men without a college degree were Mr. Trump’s most reliable supporters, but they made up only 33 percent of his total vote. College-educated white men were also essential to putting him over the top.

One reason for their continued support now: White college-educated men have benefited unequally in the Trump economy. While the president’s favorite barometer of success, the stock market, is up 26 percent since he took office, individual stock ownership is concentrated among people in the upper income brackets, who are far more likely to be white. The Republican tax cut also delivered higher benefits to whites than to blacks or Latinos, according to a recent study.

These men, largely Trump voters whose support for him has solidified since his election, are business owners and sales executives, veterinarians and lawyers — men who largely wouldn’t be caught dead at a Trump rally chanting “Lock her up!”

They may cringe at a president who humiliates cabinet secretaries and foreign allies, and who utters a stream of easily disproved falsehoods.

But many have quietly struck a bargain with Mr. Trump: They will overlook his trampling of presidential norms because he is delivering just what they want on the economy, deregulation, immigration and foreign affairs.

“He’s tough, he’s a bully, but boy things are getting done,” said JD Kaplan, who runs a graphics business from his home on a neatly landscaped block in Dublin, an affluent suburb of Columbus. Mr. Kaplan, 63, who is a Republican activist, moved years ago from northeast Ohio’s struggling Rust Belt, where a younger brother still runs Kaplan Furniture, a store their grandfather founded.

“Whether it was Obama who started it or not, the economy’s better,” he said. “I see my brother’s businesses are doing better, my graphics business is doing better, my wife’s got a better job.’’

Dublin is in Ohio’s 12th Congressional District, where Troy Balderson, a Republican, squeaked out a 1-point victory in a special election in August.

Mr. Balderson is on the ballot again on Nov. 6 against the same Democratic opponent, Danny O’Connor. The race has dropped out of the national spotlight it held during the summer, but the same dynamics are at work: whether Mr. O’Connor, an official in Franklin County, which includes most of Dublin, can attract enough votes in the suburbs to offset rural conservatives who favor Mr. Balderson.

Here, as elsewhere around the country, the vote has become largely a referendum on the president.

Interviews in August and on a recent return visit showed that while Mr. Trump is losing droves of white women with college degrees, many of their male counterparts now strongly support him.

They are country-club Republicans who long voted for business-friendly politicians like Gov. John Kasich, who represented the 12th District in the House and is the national face of never-Trump Republicans.

Trump has given country-club male Republicans basically everything they could have wanted from a GOP government, especially economically, and no matter how much of an autocrat he is, they will never vote for Democrats as long as the economy remains in the non "crashing and on fire" state it was in 2008. 

That's the big reason why Obama won, because the economy was so bad, even the country-club Republicans didn't think the GOP could fix it.  Once the bleeding stopped and Obama tried to regulate Wall Street even a little, these same Republicans turned on him, and Democrats got repeatedly crushed.

Like it or not, white Republican men still run the country and have since forever, and that's not going to change anytime soon.

It doesn't mean however that we can't vote their proxies out.

Just don't depend on them to look out for anything more than their own interests.

A Higher AI-er That Hires, Expired

Judging from Amazon's latest experiment in machine learning in removing the bias in HR from hiring for technical positions, AIs are only as intelligent as the data you feed them to learn and grow from.

Amazon.com Inc’s machine-learning specialists uncovered a big problem: their new recruiting engine did not like women.

The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants’ resumes with the aim of mechanizing the search for top talent, five people familiar with the effort told Reuters.

Automation has been key to Amazon’s e-commerce dominance, be it inside warehouses or driving pricing decisions. The company’s experimental hiring tool used artificial intelligence to give job candidates scores ranging from one to five stars - much like shoppers rate products on Amazon, some of the people said.

“Everyone wanted this holy grail,” one of the people said. “They literally wanted it to be an engine where I’m going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we’ll hire those.”

But by 2015, the company realized its new system was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way.

That is because Amazon’s computer models were trained to vet applicants by observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period. Most came from men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry.

In effect, Amazon’s system taught itself that male candidates were preferable. It penalized resumes that included the word “women’s,” as in “women’s chess club captain.” And it downgraded graduates of two all-women’s colleges, according to people familiar with the matter. They did not specify the names of the schools.

Amazon edited the programs to make them neutral to these particular terms. But that was no guarantee that the machines would not devise other ways of sorting candidates that could prove discriminatory, the people said.

The Seattle company ultimately disbanded the team by the start of last year because executives lost hope for the project, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Amazon’s recruiters looked at the recommendations generated by the tool when searching for new hires, but never relied solely on those rankings, they said.

Amazon declined to comment on the recruiting engine or its challenges, but the company says it is committed to workplace diversity and equality.

The irony here is that when it comes to technical positions, Amazon, like most American corporations, wants cheap H1-B labor from overseas, and the massive majority of H1-B workers are male.  The bias in STEM has been towards men for decades, so when Amazon put in ten years of hiring 75-80% men for technical positions into the hopper, the program "learned" that bias too and spat out the same results.

The problem with AI, like any computer program, isn't the program.  It's the people who program it.

You don't have to be a genius super-coder to pick that up.

Last Call For Supreme Misgivings, Con't

The Borking of Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination by whatever means necessary has now become a moral imperative for Democrats.

Earlier this summer, Christine Blasey Ford wrote a confidential letter to a senior Democratic lawmaker alleging that Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her more than three decades ago, when they were high school students in suburban Maryland. Since Wednesday, she has watched as that bare-bones version of her story became public without her name or her consent, drawing a blanket denial from Kavanaugh and roiling a nomination that just days ago seemed all but certain to succeed.

Now, Ford has decided that if her story is going to be told, she wants to be the one to tell it. 

Speaking publicly for the first time, Ford said that one summer in the early 1980s, Kavanaugh and a friend — both “stumbling drunk,” Ford alleges — corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County. 

While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth. 

“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.” 

Ford said she was able to escape when Kavanaugh’s friend and classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them, sending all three tumbling. She said she ran from the room, briefly locked herself in a bathroom and then fled the house. 

Ford said she told no one of the incident in any detail until 2012, when she was in couples therapy with her husband. The therapist’s notes, portions of which were provided by Ford and reviewed by The Washington Post, do not mention Kavanaugh’s name but say she reported that she was attacked by students “from an elitist boys’ school” who went on to become “highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.” The notes say four boys were involved, a discrepancy Ford says was an error on the therapist’s part. Ford said there were four boys at the party but only two in the room.

Notes from an individual therapy session the following year, when she was being treated for what she says have been long-term effects of the incident, show Ford described a “rape attempt” in her late teens.

The White House is denying everything, the Senate Judiciary says the Thursday vote on Kavanaugh's confirmation will proceed without delay or without investigating Ford's claim, and most likely we will have a rapist on the Supreme Court who will be the fifth and deciding vote to end legalized abortion, end legalized birth control, and end women's control of their own reproductive health, their bodies, their freedom and their lives.

Republicans will do nothing.

A lawyer close to the White House said the nomination will not be withdrawn. 

“No way, not even a hint of it,” the lawyer said. “If anything, it’s the opposite. If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried. We can all be accused of something.”

"We" meaning white, male, straight Republicans.  "We can all be accused of something."  Racism. Sexual assault.  White privilege.

Brett Kavanaugh is being put on the Supreme Court to end that.

He will be appointed to the court by a man currently under investigation for criminal malfeasance both before and during his term in the Oval Office.

He will be confirmed by a Senate where Republican women will be the deciding votes to sentence America's women to a life of servitude and punishment for daring to have sex while fertile (and otherwise).

Senate Democrats have to find a way to stop him.

Period.

Last Call For The Snowiest Of Snowflakes

Silicon Valley techbros are asking "what about us white guys?" and want safe spaces away from all that horrible non-whiteness and vagina-having where they can finally feel included in America.

Paul Mann wants to create a safe space for white men.

Mann, a white man who has spent years in the education industry, has begun leading workshops in San Francisco that encourage people in his demographic to explore feelings about race and gender and think about how to better assist women and nonwhites in their workplaces.

Most diversity training is inclusive of all races and genders. But Stepping Up, Mann’s program that began in January, is unusual because the workshops are designed for white men and led by a white man.

It’s an approach that has inevitably stirred controversy. It’s not something that Starbucks, for example, will pursue when it closes its stores in Mayfor a half-day diversity training in the wake of the arrest of two black men at a Philadelphia coffee shop. And creating a “safe space,” a stated goal of Stepping Up, is a concept traditionally associated with people who feel marginalized or victimized.

But Mann says some white men are afraid of saying the wrong thing or worry they’ll be put on the defensive — and Stepping Up allows them to express themselves openly and practice language without hurting anyone.

“All this attention has been paid to tech companies not having enough women and not being racially diverse,” Mann said. “It just seems obvious to me that we are ignoring the whole half of the equation, which is white people and men.”

Kim Scott, a former Google executive and author of the leadership book, “Radical Candor,” strongly disagrees with the approach, saying it’s important to learn from people with different backgrounds and perspectives.

“I am glad they care enough to discuss the issue,” Scott said. “I’m very sorry to hear that white men feel so fearful that they feel they have to have this conversation without inviting women and minorities to join.”

I have to say, if you feel the need to have a diversity workshop without any actual diversity in your diversity workshop, it's not a diversity workshop.  Sure, asking white men to think about gender and race is definitely needed, but when your first criteria is "needing to limit the space for the discussion on diversity to white men" you're not just missing the point, you're butchering it.

On purpose.
 

Dirty Words Gone Dirt Cheap

The Trump regime is now telling American science agencies what they are allowed to do, what they are allowed to research, and most importantly what they are now allowed to say.

The Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases — including “fetus” and “transgender” — in any official documents being prepared for next year’s budget.

Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden words at a meeting Thursday with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget, according to an analyst who took part in the 90-minute briefing. The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

In some instances, the analysts were given alternative phrases. Instead of “science-based” or ­“evidence-based,” the suggested phrase is “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes,” the person said. In other cases, no replacement words were immediately offered.

The question of how to address such issues as sexual orientation, gender identity and abortion rights — all of which received significant visibility under the Obama administration — has surfaced repeatedly in federal agencies since President Trump took office. Several key departments — including Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, as well as Justice, Education, and Housing and Urban Development — have changed some federal policies and how they collect government information about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.

In March, for example, HHS dropped questions about sexual orientation and gender identity in two surveys of elderly people. 

HHS has also removed information about LGBT Americans from its website. The department’s Administration for Children and Families, for example, archived a page that outlined federal services that are available for LGBT people and their families, including how they can adopt and receive help if they are the victims of sex trafficking.

At the CDC, the meeting about the banned words was led by Alison Kelly, a senior leader in the agency’s Office of Financial Services, according to the CDC analyst, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly. Kelly did not say why the words are being banned, according to the analyst, and told the group that she was merely relaying the information.

Other CDC officials confirmed the existence of a list of forbidden words.It’s likely that other parts of HHS are operating under the same guidelines regarding the use of these words, the analyst said.

Those whom the Trump regime deem undesirable are being disappeared from the government's language and from the government's programs.  The crowning achievement in all this will be the 2020 Census, where those who don't agree with the regime will erased from government records altogether.   Mass disenfranchisement done the easy way, and there's nothing to indicate that the GOP isn't doing this on purpose to justify government spending cuts.

And this is definitely a screaming signal of authoritarianism we now live under in America.  First they came for the LGBTQ, to paraphrase Niemoller.

Breaking The Silence, Finally

In a move sure to upset Donald Trump, TIME has not named Donald Trump person of the year in 2017.

TIME has named the Silence Breakers, the individuals who set off a national reckoning over the prevalence of sexual harassment, as its 2017 Person of the Year. 

The magazine's editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal revealed the selection Wednesday on TODAY along with the cover, a composite group photo that includes actress Ashley Judd, singer Taylor Swift, former Uber engineer Susan Fowler and a woman whose face cannot be seen. 

"The galvanizing actions of the women on our cover … along with those of hundreds of others, and of many men as well, have unleashed one of the highest-velocity shifts in our culture since the 1960s," Felsenthal said in a statement. 

The Silence Breakers emerged amid burgeoning allegations of sexual misconduct and assault by film executive Harvey Weinstein. As his list of accusers swelled, so did the number of people who spoke up to expose dozens of other famous individuals in Hollywood, politics, journalism and other industries as sexual predators.

Actor Kevin Spacey, journalist Charlie Rose, comedian Louis CK and U.S. Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota were among the high-profile names snared in an ever-growing web of alleged sexual harassers. Last week, former TODAY anchor Matt Lauer was also accused of sexual misconduct. 

The women, and men, who broke their silence to share their stories of victimization gave traction to the #MeToo campaign, which took off on social media and fueled a worldwide discussion on just how endemic sexual harassment has been. 

Felsenthal noted the hashtag, which he called "a powerful accelerant," has been used millions of times in at least 85 countries.

This was a good call from TIME.  Women are coming forward now and telling their stories, and we should believe them.  I have friends and family who have similar stories, and who have kept the stories to themselves for various reasons, most of all the victim blasting America does to anyone who comes forward to claim a powerful man has abused them.

Maybe going forward that will finally be different.

Here's the thing though, the #MeToo hashtag movement was started a decade ago by a black activist named Tarana Burke.  It gained steam only when actor Alyssa Milano mentioned it, giving credit to Burke for her long years of work in Brooklyn helping women.  The movement was there, it just wasn't visible.

Oh, and using Ollivander's Rule ("After all, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named did great things. Terrible! Yes. But great.") Donald Trump did come in second. To several women who claimed powerful men abused them.

There's a lesson there if America and the world chooses to learn it.

Last Call For It's Not Just White Men

The opioid epidemic hitting white rural communities is not just killing men, but killing women as well.  New statistics show a major spike in the death rates of white women, particularly in the Midwest and among the lower middle class, people like Anna Marrie Jones of Tecumseh, Oklahoma.

Fifty-four years old. Raised on three rural acres. High school-educated. A mother of three. Loyal employee of Kmart, Walls Bargain Center and Dollar Store. These were the facts of her life as printed in the funeral program, and now they had also become clues in an American crisis with implications far beyond the burnt grass and red dirt of central Oklahoma.

White women between 25 and 55 have been dying at accelerating rates over the past decade, a spike in mortality not seen since the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. According to recent studies of death certificates, the trend is worse for women in the center of the United States, worse still in rural areas, and worst of all for those in the lower middle class. Drug and alcohol overdose rates for working-age white women have quadrupled. Suicides are up by as much as 50 percent.

What killed Jones was cirrhosis of the liver brought on by heavy drinking. The exact culprit was vodka, whatever brand was on sale, poured into a pint glass eight ounces at a time. But, as Anna’s family gathered at the gravesite for a final memorial, they wondered instead about the root causes, which were harder to diagnose and more difficult to solve.

“Life didn’t always break her way. She dealt with that sadness,” said Candy Payne, the funeral officiant. “She tried her best. She loved her family. But she dabbled in the drinking, and when things got tough the drinking made it harder.”

There were plots nearby marked for Jones’s friends and relatives who had died in the past decade at ages 46, 52 and 37. Jones had buried her fiance at 55. She had eulogized her best friend, dead at 50 from alcohol-induced cirrhosis.

Other parts of the adjacent land were intended for her children: Davey, 38, her oldest son and most loyal caretaker, who was making it through the day with some of his mother’s vodka; Maryann, 33, the middle daughter, who had hitched a ride to the service because she couldn’t afford a working car; and Tiffany, 31, who had two daughters of her own, a job at the discount grocery and enough accumulated stress to make her feel, “at least a decade or two older,” she said.

Candy, who in addition to being the officiant was also a close family friend, motioned for Tiffany and Maryann to bring over the container holding their mother’s cremated remains. They opened the lid and the ashes blew back into their dresses and out into the pasture.

“No more hurt. No more loneliness,” Candy said.

“No more suffering,” Tiffany said.

They shook out the last ashes and circled the grave as Candy bowed her head to pray.

“We don’t know why it came to this,” she said. “We trust You know the reasons. We trust You have the answers.”

The answers are that the economic conditions that have crushed a generation of black and Hispanic working class Americans, once confined to the inner cities, have now become commonplace across all of 2016 America.  White, rural America is just now catching up in the misery department, accelerated by red state austerity and voting constantly against their own self-interests.

But now that it's affecting white women, well, now the austerity regime is maybe a problem in a country where the richest 1% now account for close to two-thirds of the total wealth.  Hell, just the wealthiest twenty Americans alone now own more wealth than the entire bottom half of the country.

And that's just the money we know about.

A Bunch Of Boobs In Springfield

Bon The Geek has asked me to pass on this article about Springfield, Missouri's ridiculous new city indecent exposure ordinance, and how it's likely not going to survive a legal challenge.

Springfield’s new indecent exposure ordinance went into effect the moment the votes were cast. Almost as quickly, opponents of the new law are looking for ways to fight back. 

Jessica Lawson, who has been one of the organizers of the recent Free the Nipple rallies, said she was in contact Monday with someone from the American Civil Liberties Union. 

“They just reached out to me today,” she said. “We’re still discussing options with what we’re going to do.” 

Lawson posted a response from the ACLU on her group’s Facebook page: 

“We would be interested in talking to you and others about a potential legal challenge to the new ordinance,” it says. 

While protesters plan their next steps, people on both sides of the issue are reacting to Monday’s 5-4 vote.

And the ordinance is just appallingly stupid, designed to shut down Free The Nipple and Slut Walk rallies in town rather than raise awareness about rape and sexual assault.

We'll have more on this silliness on this weekend's Podcast Versus The Stupid.

Golden State Gets It Right On Equal Pay

California lawmakers have passed the nation's most ambitious legislation on equal pay for men and women in the workplace, and Gov. Jerry Brown says he'll sign the measure into law.

The bill has a number of provisions, but the piece that stands out the most is one that requires employers to pay men and women the same for “substantially similar work,” not just the exact same job, unless differences are based on productivity, merit, and/or seniority. 

This provision is what used to be called pay equity: not just requiring the same pay for the same job, but for different jobs that are similar in terms of effort, responsibility, and skill. While it isn’t mentioned much anymore, in the 1980s there was a strong movement toward laws that would require pay equality based on this concept. By 1989, 20 states had made adjustments among their own workforces based on “comparable worth,” or the idea of paying the same for substantially similar work in different jobs. More than 335,000 women got a raise and 20 percent of their gender wage gap was eliminated. That reduced the overall wage gap, and in five states it closed by 25 to 33 percent. 

Most of these projects have now been abandoned, however, although Minnesota has kept its own running. At the same time, progress on closing the country’s gender wage gap, which means that women make 78 percent of what men make, has stalled for about a decade. 

California’s new bill also bans employers from retaliating against employees who discuss pay. Even though all American workers have a legal right to discuss compensation with each other, about half say that doing so is either discouraged, prohibited, or could lead to disciplinary actions. That poses a significant hurdle for women trying to address unequal pay, given that it makes it very difficult to find out what everyone else at their job makes. Lilly Ledbetter, for whom the Lilly Ledbetter Equal Pay Act was named, didn’t know she was being paid less until 19 years later. On the other hand, in places like the federal government and unionized workforces, where pay is usually transparent, the gender wage gap is much smaller. 

Another provision of California’s law would allow employees to take action against wage gaps between different worksites, not just at their own location.

Now California's gender pay gap is still 16% between men and women, one of the smallest in the nation, but it still means that on average, men make six bucks for every five that women make for similar work in a similar position.  And a big chunk of that is Silicon Valley by itself, where the pay gap is twice that or more.  Luckily, this new legislation will go a long way towards fixing that problem.

Good job, Golden State.

The Evidence Mounts Against Comer

A second woman has come forward to say that Kentucky Republican and gubernatorial hopeful James Comer was abusive in college in the 90's.

In a letter to the Louisville Courier-Journal on Friday, Jennifer Osborne, a former roommate of Thomas, said an argument between Comer and Thomas once got so bad that Osborne threatened to call the police.

"On one occasion, there was a heated argument between Marilyn Thomas and Jamie Comer and I had to threaten to call the police in order to get him to leave our apartment," Osborne wrote in the letter.

Osborne and Thomas lived in an off-campus apartment in 1993, according to the Courier-Journal.

Thomas' allegations against Comer appeared Monday in the Courier-Journal, which published parts of the four-page letter where Thomas claimed Comer had been abusive and helped her to get an abortion when they were dating in the early 1990s. In that story, the Courier-Journal quoted another former roommate, Wendy Curley, who backed Thomas' account.

Comer's still running about ten points behind Hal Heiner for the GOP nomination for governor, the primary is in less than two weeks, and if Comer was expecting a come from behind win, well...

In all seriousness, these allegations are pretty brutal, and Comer has questions he needs to answer.  Of course, none of the Republican candidates for governor here are exactly "woman-friendly".

If You Don't Love Yourself, I'll Make You See Your Own Heart

Notorious RBG vivisected the case against same-sex marriage during Tuesday's oral arguments, and it was amazing.

During Tuesday’s marriage equality arguments in the Supreme Court, several of the Court’s conservative members suggested that same-sex couples should not be given equal marriage rights because these couples have not enjoyed those rights for most of the past. As Justice Antonin Scalia summed up this argument, “for millennia, not a single society” supported marriage equality, and that somehow exempted same-sex couples from the Constitution’s promise of equal protection of the law. 

Not long after her conservative colleagues raised this argument, however, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained exactly why marriage was long understood to be incompatible with homosexuality in just five sentences:

[Same-sex couples] wouldn’t be asking for this relief if the law of marriage was what it was a millennium ago. I mean, it wasn’t possible. Same-sex unions would not have opted into the pattern of marriage, which was a relationship, a dominant and a subordinate relationship. Yes, it was marriage between a man and a woman, but the man decided where the couple would be domiciled; it was her obligation to follow him.
There was a change in the institution of marriage to make it egalitarian when it wasn’t egalitarian. And same-sex unions wouldn’t — wouldn’t fit into what marriage was once.

Marriage has changed dramatically in the world over the last thousand years and even during America's relatively short history. Gender in marriage was all about financial arrangements: the man was the chief breadwinner, and the woman subservient.  That's complete changed in 2015.  The notion that marriage is about financial subservience, gender roles, or procreation is ludicrous, but that's the argument against same-sex marriage: "We've always done it this way."

Sure, and slavery, and women not being allowed to vote, used to be traditional law in America too. We got past that.  We'll get past this, as well.

The Oversharing Economy

Finally, a smartphone app that works as intended.




(It's fake but it's still brilliant.)

She's Always A Woman To Me

Just a reminder that while rampant, obvious racism is usually frowned upon by Republicans, rampant, obvious sexism is still widely acceptable and in fact is part and parcel of the GOP's anti-Hillary push. WaPo's Aaron Blake:

One WaPo-ABC poll question I didn't get into in this morning's post is this: Does the fact that Hillary Clinton would be the first female president make you more likely or less likely to vote for her in 2016? 

Twenty four percent of people -- including 40 percent of Democrats and 29 percent of women -- say that breaking the last, highest glass ceiling makes them more likely to back her. Two-thirds say it doesn't matter one bit to their vote. 

But if you look a little closer, you'll find something interesting: While most Republicans say Clinton's gender doesn't matter, about one-quarter of them (24 percent) say the fact that she would be the first female president makes them less likely to vote for her. Just 8 percent say it makes them more likely to back her.

Nobody should really be surprised by this, other than I think the number of Republicans admitting this is probably lower than it really is.  And yes, Republicans have a huge issue with women of their own creation.  This week's abortion bill nonsense proved that.

A symbolic messaging bill to ban abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy threw the party into disarray and was abruptly pulled at the last minute after a group of GOP women and swing-district lawmakers raised hackles over a rape-exception provision that required victims of sexual assault to report the crime to authorities before they could get an abortion. 

"None of us saw it coming," Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC) told reporters on Thursday.

Yes, because a woman was saying it.  Good luck in 2016, jagoffs.

Measuring Up In The Treasure State

If it seems that the new dress code for Montana's state legislature is a throwback to the days of Mad Men, it's because it's a throwback to the days of Mad Men.

Montana has never been known as a black-tie place. Governors wear cowboy boots and bolo ties, and people joke that a tuxedo is a pair of black jeans and a sport coat. But this winter, when lawmakers arrive at the State Capitol, they will have to abide by a new dress code: No more jeans. No casual Fridays. And female lawmakers “should be sensitive to skirt lengths and necklines.”

Republican leaders who approved the guidelines say they are simply trying to bring a businesslike formality to a State Legislature of ranchers, farmers and business owners that meets for only four months every other year. But the dress code has set off a torrent of online mockery, and is being pilloried by Democratic women as a sexist anachronism straight from the days of buggies and spittoons.

“The sergeant-at-arms could be standing there with a ruler, measuring hemlines and cleavage,” said Jenny Eck, a Democratic House member.

Ms. Eck said she was leaving a health care forum in Helena, the capital, on Monday when one of her Republican colleagues peered at her and told her that he was glad to see she was dressed appropriately.

“It just creates this ability to scrutinize women,” Ms. Eck said. “It makes it acceptable for someone who’s supposed to be my peer and my equal to look me up and down and comment on what I’m wearing. That doesn’t feel right.”

Yeah, commenting on a female colleague being "dressed appropriately" isn't creepy as hell or anything. Republicans sure like to re-live the "good old days" whenever possible, when women were "dressed appropriately" and stuff. 

 Why don't you find that cute new young page and swat her ass hello while you're at it, guys.

Jesus.

We're Hip To The Kids, Man

The College Republicans try to "stay relevant" in the 2014 election with an ad from 1974.

The first ad in a nearly $1 million campaign, "Say Yes To The Candidate," is based on TLC's "Say Yes To The Dress" and compares the Florida gubernatorial candidates to wedding dresses.

The ad opens with a woman explaining that she's on a budget. She first tries on the Republican Rick Scott dress.

"The Rick Scott is perfect," she says. "Rick Scott is becoming a trusted brand. He has new ideas that don’t break your budget."

He's dreamy and listens to records and drives a Dodge Dart.  He may even own a Timex!

The woman's mom prefers the Democratic Charlie Crist dress. She tells her daughter, "It’s expensive and a little outdated, but I know best." 

But of course, the Crist gown "comes with additional costs" like taxes, debt, and tuition increases, and the woman ultimately chooses the Rick Scott. 

CRNC national chairman Alex Smith told the Wall Street Journal that the ads are geared toward experiences young people have every day. 

"How do you reach the generation that has their earbuds in and their minds turned off to traditional advertising?" she said. "It's our goal to start the conversation by presenting ourselves in a culturally relevant way."

Culturally relevant being relative, with dialogue written by by Lifetime.  Also, the entire concept of marriage isn't relative to Millennials at all, especially since  Millennials are getting married far later in life, it at all.  In fact, numbers show 1 in 4 Millennials will never marry.

So why would they be worried about what wedding dress to choose?  Oh yeah, that's what Republicans think women want to be: married to some douchebag like Rick Scott.