Monster Who Bragged About Killing Family of Baboons Forced to Resign by Idaho Governor.

Good riddance.

  
(Trigger)

durrati  

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Tuesday October 23, 2018 · 4:33 AM PDT

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Idaho state Fish and Game Commissioner Blake Fischer recently posted trophy photos and couldn’t keep from bragging about killing a whole family of baboons with his trusty bow and arrows.

Fischer also posted shots of his prowess at killing giraffes and cheetahs but I will spare you the carnage.

Idaho’s Republican Governor, C. L. “Butch” Otter, was not amused and called for and readily accepted Fischer’s resignation.
Huffington Post

“In a resignation letter to Idaho Gov. C. L. “Butch” Otter, state Fish and Game Commissioner Blake Fischer cited poor judgment in posting the images.

“I recently made some poor judgments that resulted in sharing photos of a hunt in which I did not display an appropriate level of sportsmanship and respect for the animals I harvested,” he wrote.”

“Harvested” isn’t that precious?

How does baboon taste, Blake?

“Otter, who first appointed Fischer to the seven-member commission in 2014, said he asked for and received Fischer’s resignation on Monday.

“I have high expectations and standards for every appointee in state government. Every member of my administration is expected to exercise good judgment. Commissioner Fischer did not,” Otter said in a statement.”

Quite right Governor, posing with slaughter baby monkeys is indeed poor judgement.

But what are some more disdainful of today?

Carrying live babies is somehow emasculating, but posing with dead ones is not I suppose.

Good thing Idaho’s governor has more humanity than Morgan. 

(Please visit my website The Durrati Column and sign up for my newsletter. Thanx!)

Against a Federal Registry of Genitals

An infant receiving a check-up. (photo: Kevin LaMarque/Reuters)

By James Hamblin, The Atlantic

22 October 18
readersupportednews.org

A report that the Trump administration plans to define gender based on the appearance of infants runs counter to developmental biology and individual privacy.

ife might be more orderly and easy to understand if biology worked just like this:

People come in one of two sexes, male or female. This is determined by chromosomes, and XX means female, and XY means male. Males have penises and testicles—which are all similar in appearance and curvature and size—that secrete testosterone in similar proportions. This testosterone is metabolized and functions similarly in all men and causes them to have similar amounts of musculature and deep voices and certain amounts of facial and back hair, and to act in particular ways due to this hormone. It causes their brains to develop and make them behave in ways that are “manly.”

These men are attracted to women, specifically women who look normal, which is a result of the fact that they definitionally have exactly and only two XX chromosomes that cause them to develop clitori and uteri and breasts and ovaries that produce estrogen and other hormones that cause cycles of growth and shedding of the uterine lining, and who predictably bear children when sperm meets egg. All of these features develop and function the same way in all women who are normal—whose amounts of hormones make their bodies look and feel more or less the same, and whose brains develop and function in a way that is female, and which consigns them to certain roles in social hierarchies.

This is the middle-school health class version. Like any simplistic model, this one is presented as an introduction. Most 11-year-olds do not yet know about enzymes and cell biology, and have barely begun to consider the complex differences between humans, and aren’t ready to grapple with the social implications of the simplistic dichotomy. Plus it would be impossible to go into greater depth without the class snickering every time the teacher said “ambiguous genitalia” or “micropenis.”

The paradigm is somewhat similar to saying that automobiles come in two forms: cars and trucks. This is a worldview that is easily challenged by the existence of SUVs and station wagons—neither of which would suddenly disappear, even if government officials tried to make up a definition that excluded them.

Yet this is the paradigm that the Department of Health and Human Services is preparing to use to define gender, according to a memo reported in The New York Times today: “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 ... Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.”

Much is being made of the proposed policy’s relevance to the 1.4 million Americans who identify as transgender, as the Times story did, reporting that the proposal is an eye to “defining transgender out of existence” and prompted in part by “pro-transgender court decisions.” The implications go beyond this, even. There is also the scientific implausibility and fundamental impossibility of imposing such a definition. Just as it’s overly simplistic for a government to define all people based purely on chromosomes or physical appearance, many genotypic and phenotypic varieties exist outside of the proposed binary.

The agency proposes to define gender “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” Which would indeed be ideal at a bureaucratic level. Even looking no further than the maternity ward or doula’s chambers, though, human biology does not abide by the rules laid out for us in sixth grade.

Though they have long been anathema to talk about, there are many thousands of variables that affect gestation and fetal development—some influenced by epigenetic factors generations before conception—that lead to a spectrum of outcomes for any given infant. This can include sex-chromosomal anomalies (XXY or XYY, for example), as well as irregular functioning of enzymes that activate or metabolize hormones, or the blocking of binding sites where hormones typically act, which effectively could lead an XY person to develop female genitalia (known as Swyer syndrome), or an XX person to develop male genitalia, and for thousands of infants each year who are born with “ambiguous genitalia” that can look something like a penis and a clitoris (which are fundamentally structurally analogous, spongy tissue consisting of a crus and glans that become engorged and hyper-sensitive during sex).

There are two statistical peaks in the distribution of infant outcomes that roughly accord with the states described in middle school, but there is also everything in between and on other sides. Entire textbooks are written on the wide variety of ways sex hormones can manifest during fetal development and throughout life. The exact number of infants born in the domain known as “intersex”—who, for any number of reasons, do not clearly fit into one of the two sexes based on genitalia or chromosomes or both—is difficult to know because for many years, such people were “normalized” at birth by default.

The idea of changing infant genitalia surgically at birth has become an area of intense ethical debate in recent decades, and it stands to only become more relevant, as infants born with ambiguous genitalia are becoming more common—or, at least, increasingly documented—which some evidence suggests is due to exposure to environmental pollutants that affect fetal development.

Human-rights organizations have campaigned against genital surgeries for intersex infants, and in 2017 three former U.S. surgeon generals published a report that argued, “While there is little evidence that cosmetic infant genitoplasty is necessary to reduce psychological damage, evidence does show that the surgery itself can cause severe and irreversible physical harm and emotional distress.” A policy from HHS that puts infant genitalia at the center of a person’s identity runs directly counter to this medical advice.

While the relevance of this discussion is not going away, some public intellectuals like the author Michael Pollan have suggested that bringing this policy memo to the forefront of national conversations is savvy politics just before the midterm elections. “Don’t take the bait!” he tweeted this morning. The implication is that the intention of the administration is to stir a culture war that, rife with misinformation and fear-mongering, will rally Trump’s base around the idea that liberals want to destroy the concept of men and women and, so, God and family, desecrating the very idea of America.

Looked at another way, the policy could just as well raise objections among people concerned about “big government” and defending individual rights. Scientific implausibility aside, this is a federal agency proposing widespread genetic testing and keeping records of citizens’ genitals. This is a proposal by the government imposing an expectation that everyone look and act in one of two ways, and that everything in between is somehow not right—an aberration, an anomaly, a flaw, a problem, a disease—rather than a marvel of the natural world, a way that humans survive and thrive not despite but because of our complexity as a species.

Even those who believe a simplistic dichotomy does and should explain the world—regardless of the millions of people who exist as evidence to the contrary—should see reason to question the American-ness of government imposing such a rigid prescription on everyone.

One of Ford's "corroborating witnesses" tells the Senate, a thing or two

jamess  

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Saturday October 06, 2018 · 6:32 AM PDT

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The Republicans may choose to ignore these supporting Witnesses.  But something tells me their voices won’t be silenced for long ...

[...] But late last night, a letter addressed to the body from Keith Koegler, a friend of Christine Blasey Ford and one of her corroborating witnesses, was released, in which he urged senators “to do what is right.”

In it, Koegler said he and at least seven others who had known about the alleged sexual assault that occurred when Ford and Kavanaugh were in high school were not interviewed by the FBI as part of its investigation.

“The process by which the Senate Judiciary Committee has ‘investigated’ the facts relating to the assault has been a shameless effort to protect Judge Kavanaugh,” he wrote. “The fact that the FBI did not interview either Christine or Judge Kavanaugh, by itself, renders absurd any assertion that the investigation was ‘thorough.'”
[...]

Here are a few excerpts from the letter from corroborating witness Keith Koegler, which backs up Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony — under penalty of perjury — to the Senate:

Members of the U.S. Senate:
[...]

Here are some of the things the FBI would have learned by interviewing me:

• I have a copy of the email thread between Christine and me in which she made it clear that Brett Kavanaugh was the judge who had assaulted her as a teenager. We exchanged those emails on June 29, 2018, two days after Justice Kennedy’s retirement announcement, before there was a shortlist for his replacement. It wasn’t until July 09, 2018, that the President nominated Judge Kavanaugh.
• Christine has accurately described the sequence of events that occurred in the months that followed, including her interactions with the Washington Post, Representative Anna Eshoo’s office, and Senator Diane Feinstein’s office. I know because I had regular contact with her during that time.
• There was no “grand conspiracy” to conduct a “political hit job” on Judge Kavanaugh—this was always about one woman struggling with a perverse choice: Suffer a brutal toll on herself and her family to fulfill a sense of civic duty and (possibly, though not likely) avoid spending the rest of her life looking at the face of the man who assaulted her as a teenager on the United States Supreme Court or, alternatively, live in silence with the knowledge that she might have been able to make a difference.
• Christine has been afraid of flying her entire adult life. Prosecutor Rachel Mitchell repeatedly challenged Christine about her of flying, in an effort to impugn Christine’s general credibility. I could have provided the FBI with the names of at least half a dozen people who have flown with Christine and can attest to the fact that she has panic attacks before she flies. She controls those attacks with medicine prescribed by a doctor.

[...]
Keith Koegler
October 5, 2018

This letter goes to the heart of the GOP fig-leaf defense of Brett Kavanaugh:
1)  That this was a last-minute effort, to derail the Kavanaugh nomination.
2)  That this was an orchestrated smear campaign, a “political hit job” on Kavanaugh.
3)  That the FBI investigation was ‘thorough' — and proves Kavanaugh’s innocence.
Clearly none of these GOP cover-up rationalizations are true.

The nation and the Senate would know this — if the FBI had been allowed to do its Job, and had not been forbidden from talking to corroborating witnesses like Keith Koegler.  He is only one witness, among dozens, that the FBI was NOT allowed to talk to.

Half an Investigation is worse than none.  It amounts to a cover-up, that the Client wanted.

Something is very wrong when the White House legal staff is allowed to dictate very restrictive boundaries of the FBI Investigation, while at the same time the White House figurehead is allowed to tweet away — that the exact opposite is happening — that the FBI has “free rein” to investigate whatever they want.

That is what, in more equitable times, would have been bluntly called a “Cover-up”.  That is what would have been called “The Fix is in.”

Hopefully when Dems do some “house-sweeping” this fall — they’ll see to it that justice is actually done. That relevant and corroborating witnesses are talked to and considered.  That would include ALL or them.

What the GOP has done to trash Ford’s life — AGAIN — is truly a mockery, a sham, a travesty — to the “civic duty” she bravely chose to uphold.

Sadly the GOP members of the Judiciary Committee, have long since forgotten what that patriotic concept even means.

The GOP day-to-day Motto.

Mitch McConnell says it out loud—Republicans are coming for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid

Jen Hayden  

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Wednesday October 17, 2018 · 9:17 AM PDT

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In December 2017, the Republican-led Senate took a 2 AM vote to pass one of the largest tax cuts in history, cuts that would grossly benefit corporations and the wealthiest Americans, leaving nothing but crumbs for most Americans. Like thieves in the night, they made off with billions of tax revenue. Here’s how Rolling Stone described on the day of the vote:

Long after midnight, following a chaotic scramble that saw tax legislation being re-written on the fly, with handwritten edits in the margins and full pages crossed out, Senate Republicans passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act – a bill that would ultimately hike taxes on millions of middle-class Americans, swell the ranks of the uninsured by 13 million and explode deficits by $1.4 trillion in the first decade alone.

The winners in this bill are the Republican donor class: Corporations that would see their tax bills slashed by more than 40 percent – and get to bring home trillions in offshored profits at shamefully discounted tax rates as low as 7.5 percent; executives at companies with “pass through” earnings, who would get to deduct nearly a quarter of that income; heirs who would get richer from a doubling of the estate tax exemption, to $22 million for couples; and even private jet owners, who would get to deduct aircraft maintenance from their taxes.

Everything predicted about this greed-drive tax cut has come true. The U.S. deficit has exploded, adding an expected 17 percent increase in 2018 alone and no end in sight. With the deficit headed toward $1 trillion, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, and their greedy congressional pals are setting their sites on three of the most successful and important social programs in America: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

You see, the ballooning deficit is a feature of their tax cut, not a bug. This is what Sam Brownback did in Kansas. Cut taxes and then scream there isn’t enough money to pay the bills—all they can do now is slash education, health care, and other essential services. This has always been the Republican plan. They have wanted to destroy these programs since the day they were launched. And with a president free of any morals or values, they see their opportunity.

Listen to Mitch McConnell in his own words pivot from promising the tax cuts would not only be “deficit neutral” to less than a year later saying we cannot balance the budget without cutting Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. This would cause an economic apocalypse for millions of Americans.

Ted Cruz's wife complains about his $174K salary: ‘we’re not buying a second home anytime soon’

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Thursday October 18, 2018 · 10:17 AM PDT

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People are starving in the streets of America. Millions more are surviving paycheck to paycheck and millions are without healthcare, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz voted to repeal the health care of millions more. Cruz also voted for the #GOPTaxScam that lavished the super wealthy with tax cuts.

Now Ted’s wife, Heidi Cruz, tells The Atlantic that Ted’s measly $174,000/yr salary is holding them back—from acquiring more real estate.

“I really feel mission-driven on what he’s accomplishing,” she clarified. But “it does take some supportiveness, you know. Six to seven years in it, with me being the primary breadwinner—it’s like, ‘Uh, yeah, this is when people say thank you. I’ll now take that appreciation.’” She laughed. “Yeah, we’re seven years into this, and we’re not buying a second home anytime soon.”

Heidi is a managing director for Goldman Sachs. I’m fairly certain that between Ted’s salary and her salary, they enjoy a level of comfort that many Americans can’t even imagine.

How much does she make? By Wall Street standards, her earnings at Goldman were merely good. On the Cruz’s joint tax return from 2010, it appears her salary was around $360,000. Cruz hasn’t released his 2013 or 2014 tax returns. His personal disclosure form has a line for salary for Heidi Cruz from Goldman Sachs, but doesn’t say what it is. But it is likely substantially higher. According to her LinkedIn profile, Heidi Cruz in 2013 was promoted to managing director—the final step on the ladder before becoming partner. According to Glassdoor.com, the typical managing director at Goldman has base salary of about $376,000 and total compensation –including bonus and stock – of about $600,000 per year.

Heidi Cruz, just like her husband Ted, is out of touch with the harsh economic realities most Americans face today. They aren’t thinking about a second home. Many are thinking where their next meal is coming from. It’s this attitude that tells you that Ted Cruz will never serve the people—he will always serve the wealthy few.

There’s a much better choice in Texas and his name is Beto O’Rourke.

Beto promises to be a fine and decent public servant, who all Americans can count on. Beto will always be thinking about the most vulnerable among us. Beto will fight for every American.

Ivanka's just as crooked as her dad. Stop pretending otherwise.

She helped her father conduct a series of real-estate scams. It's not likely she's "advising" Donald to be less crooked now that they're both in the White House.

Hunter  

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Wednesday October 17, 2018 · 9:58 AM PDT

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The whole Trump family is crooked. all of them. The only way any of these carnival barkers have been able to stay afloat the last few decades is by cheating everyone around them. Donald, Uday, Qusay, and The Good One are all quite certain that neither laws nor ethics could possibly apply to them.

In interviews and press conferences, Ivanka Trump gave false sales figures for projects in Mexico’s Baja California; Panama City, Panama; Toronto and New York’s SoHo neighborhood. These statements weren’t just the legendary Trump hype; they misled potential buyers about the viability of the developments.

That's from a new ProPublica investigation of the Trump clan's business practices.

Much of it is of the pattern we already know: Trump and/or his rotten kids lure real estate buyers to new projects with blatantly false claims; by the time buyers find out they were duped, the Trumps have already pocketed the money and oozed off to the next "deal." If it sounds familiar it's because it's the precise operational model of "Trump University," the scam real-estate college—and God help anyone who ever bought mail-order meat from this man.

If there's any particular message to be had in this new piece, it's the extent to which the much-heralded Ivanka has been in on the con. White House watchers forever waiting for "the good Trump" to pipe up against her father's latest monstrous plans for child prisons or deporting same-sex partners of diplomats might want to instead consider the possibility that "the good Trump" has been a willing partner in her father's worst impulses all along.

Her apparent role has been to go out and lie through her teeth after her papa has already worn out his welcome. She's very good at it. Or very bad at it:

His daughter Ivanka briefly boasted that she had personally sold 40 units. (A broker on the project said he couldn’t remember her selling even one.) Meanwhile, Ivanka told a journalist at the time that “over 90 percent” of the Panama units had sold — and at prices five times as high as comparable buildings. Both statements were untrue.

Well, you may say, perhaps she is just an idiot! And perhaps her brothers are idiots, and her father is an idiot, and there's not a person in the company who has the slightest grasp of what the hell they are talking about in any and all settings! Perhaps they are all so incompetent that there are three individual butlers assigned to getting each of their shoes on in the morning, and so it is completely unreasonable to presume they can remember the most crucial financial details of the projects they are trying to sell to the latest sucker.

A compelling argument, perhaps. But all of this coincided with Donald Trump taking on ever-shadier partners, snuggling up to the money-laundering side of real estate, spending difficult-to-explain piles of cash to finance projects he wouldn't in past decades have touched, and so forth; the family certainly seems to have a handle on how to get shady things done in order to keep the cash flow going.

And it worked for them. The same scams peddled the same way worked for years and years. That the whole family remains out of prison is an indictment of our national inability to prosecute crimes by rich people; you'll go to jail for stealing a loaf of bread, but if you steal the whole factory there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it.

Republicans Are Outraged About the Giant Deficit They Caused. Bottom Line: 'The rich get to eat, and everyone else takes the shit.'

Mitch McConnell. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

By Harry Cheadle, Vice

17 October 18

readersupportednews.org

To pay for their tax breaks for the rich, they want to take Social Security, healthcare from the rest of us.

he Republican war on government is no secret. For decades, the GOP has worked in concert with a coterie of right-wing institutions to cripple core functions of the state ranging from tax collection to public schools to healthcare. The party and its leaders are sometimes honest about their aims, like when Ted Cruz talks about abolishing the IRS, or when Newt Gingrich said they hoped Medicare would "wither on the vine" in the 90s. But they go about them in a piecemeal way, like a man trying to burn down his house by setting individual items of furniture on fire. Donald Trump's latest budget proposal outlined a host of harsh cuts that targeted mainly the poor, his EPA has worked to abdicate its responsibility to ensure the nation has clean air and water, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is being dismantled from the inside, and Trump's congressional allies want to make it harder for poor people—especially children and the elderly—to eat.

But the hairpin-turn logic Republicans employ to erode the government usually isn't so obvious as it was Tuesday, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decried the old GOP bugbear of government spending.

The hypocrisy here would be astounding if anyone had the capacity to be astounded anymore. After spending the Obama era frowning and sighing about how the national deficit (the gap between annual government spending and revenues) was troublingly high, Republicans decided last year to explode that same figure with a tax cut package massively tilted toward the rich and corporations. When warned by various experts that cutting taxes would mean lower revenues and therefore higher deficits, Republicans attacked those analyses as biased and claimed the deficit wouldn't go up all that much. Predictably, the experts were right and the deficit did increase because of the tax cut—despite the persistence of magical supply-side economic thinking. But after Congress passed a bipartisan spending bill that jacked up military spending among other priorities, McConnell is apparently back to caring about the deficit.

His solution doesn't involve cutting the defense budget or raising taxes. In remarks to Bloomberg, he made it clear that "we’re talking about Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid." Here's Republicans' excuse to go after the things they always wanted to destroy.

In fairness, these priorities do make up the majority of the federal budget—spending money to provide health insurance and other forms of security to the poor, the sick, and the old is expensive. But Medicare and Social Security are enormously popular, which is why Trump himself claimed that it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were trying to wipe out Medicare in a falsehood-laden USA Today column last week.

McConnell's comments make it clear just how big a lie that claim was. And it's not like the Senate leader is alone—his view is apparently shared by White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow, who said last month that "we have to be tougher on spending." (House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is leaving Congress, was another proponent of what's euphemistically called "entitlement reform," though he wasn't able to accomplish anything on that front.)

So, to recap: Republicans, who claim to care about how much money the government is spending, effectively spent a bunch of money by giving tax breaks to the wealthy.

Now they're demanding that to solve the problem partly created by that giveaway, the government should cut benefit programs aimed at alleviating suffering among the most vulnerable people in society. The GOP economic policy can be properly summed up by a bastardized Game of Thrones quote: The rich get to eat, and everyone else takes the shit.

This is obviously politically toxic, since most Americans actually seem to want Medicare expanded. It's also nonsensical from a common-sense policy perspective.

Even if you don't buy the lefty idea that deficits don't matter, if you were really concerned about the federal balance sheet, why would you reject the idea of ever raising taxes? Why is the revenue side of the ledger completely off the table whenever a conservative talks about fiscal responsibility?

The answer, of course, is that the rich want lower taxes and the Republican Party is the party of the rich. Even if the combination of tax cuts and slashed benefits is both unpopular and a bad idea on the merits, Republicans will still support it just as rats instinctively chew through wires even if it kills them and starts fires. And just as negotiating with those rats is pointless, debating Republicans on economic policy seems like a lost cause—the GOP only cares about deficits when it's politically convenient, and it won't be honest about its policy goals.

Even when McConnell admitted that the Republicans were going to go after Social Security and Medicare, it was clear that he was also doing a bit of political positioning. "Entitlement changes, which is the real driver of the debt by any objective standard, may well be difficult if not impossible to achieve when you have unified government," he told Bloomberg. In other words, if Republicans lose control of Congress in the midterms, expect them to start hollering at the Democrats about making vicious benefit cuts in the name of responsibility and thrift—cuts too unpopular even for the current crop of GOP politicians dominating DC to openly advocate for.

If Democrats learned anything from the past two years, they won't be listening.