demmiblue
demmiblue's JournalWhy Gorsuchs Alleged Sexist Classroom Comments Are So Troubling and Revealing
Source: Slate
On Monday, not long before the start of Senate confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Neal Gorsuch, NPR released a startling story: According to one of the judge’s former law students, Jennifer Sisk, Gorsuch once made an extraordinarily sexist classroom comment. Sisk alleges that in April 2016, Gorsuch “interrupted our class discussion to ask students how many of us knew women who used their companies for maternity benefits, who used their companies to—in order to have a baby and then leave right away.”
Mark Joseph Stern Mark Joseph Stern
When few students raised their hand, Gorsuch reportedly “became animated” and said, “Come on, guys. All of your hands should be up. Many women do this.” He later added, in Sisk’s words, that “companies have to ask these sort of questions at the interview so that companies can protect themselves.” Sisk brought her concerns to two deans, but it’s unclear whether they ever spoke to Gorsuch.
What should we make of these remarks? Sympathetic lawyers may be tempted to dismiss them as a law school hypothetical gone terribly awry, an unfortunate pedagogical misstep. But I find them to be quite revealing. The comments may seem out of character for Gorsuch himself, whose clerks, colleagues, and students have largely praised as a respectful professional. But they are not out of line with Gorsuch’s own opinions, which devalue the profound, constitutionally protected connection between women’s individual autonomy and economic equality. Gorsuch has already admitted that he holds corporations’ “religious freedom” in higher esteem then women’s liberty. So it is not at all surprising to discover that he also values corporate interests over a woman’s right to be free from pregnancy discrimination.
The starting point of any discussion about reproductive freedom and economic equality is Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the court famously asserted that the “ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made this declaration the centerpiece of her dissent in Hobby Lobby, in which the court allowed for-profit corporations to deny women access to contraception through health insurance plans that they helped to pay for. Ginsburg explained how the decision undermined “a woman’s autonomous choice, informed by the physician she consults,” to control her own body. Rather than allowing women to make decisions about their reproductive health, Hobby Lobby allowed corporations to insert themselves into this highly personal decision.
Read more: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2017/03/20/gorsuch_s_sexist_classroom_comments_are_troubling_and_revealing.html
What Do Trump's Unforced Errors Tell Us About His Priorities?
Source: Dorf on Law
Many of us have assumed all along that this is the ultimate ego trip for the world's most insecure narcissist. There is still plenty of evidence to support that theory, of course, but lately I have begun to wonder if Trump is starting to show that he has an agenda that he truly cares about.
Or perhaps he is even more incompetent than he seemed to be all along. He is supporting a regressive agenda, to be sure, but the surprise is that he is spending political capital on things that have so little upside for him politically or personally. For a man who is all about being seen as a winner, he is picking some very foolish fights.
The most obvious current example is Trump's embrace of the Republicans' shockingly cruel and ill-conceived attempt to replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Even before the Congressional Budget Office's released its analysis showing how many people would be harmed by the Republicans' bill, it was obvious that this was going to be a political mess.
Read more: http://www.dorfonlaw.org/2017/03/what-do-trumps-unforced-errors-tell-us.html
Matt Taibbi: Trump the Destroyer
Trump has stuffed his Cabinet with tyrants, zealots and imbeciles – all bent on demolishing our government from withinSource: Rolling Stone
Morning, February 24th, National Harbor, Maryland, the Conservative Political Action Conference. Chin up, eyes asquint, Donald Trump floats to the lectern on a sea of applause and adulation. The building is shaking, and as fans howl his name – Trump! Trump! Trump! – he looks pleased and satisfied, like a Roman emperor who has just moved his bowels.
"Great to be back at CPAC," he says. "The place I have really?..."
The thought flies into the air and vanishes. Last year at this time, Trump was bailing on a CPAC invite because a rat's nest of National Review types was threatening a walkout to protest him. There was talk of 300 conservatives planning a simultaneous march to the toilet if the formerly pro-choice New Yorker was allowed onstage.
Whether Trump remembers this now, or just loses his train of thought, he goes silent.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-on-trump-the-destroyer-w473144
A VERY GOOD DOG interrupted a cross-country skiing race over the weekend 🐶 (video tweet)
https://twitter.com/NBCOlympics/status/843916019231997954
Woah Shamrock! Retired race horse bolts and unseats rider
Manafort's plan to 'greatly benefit the Putin Government'
Source: Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, secretly worked for a Russian billionaire to advance the interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin a decade ago and proposed an ambitious political strategy to undermine anti-Russian opposition across former Soviet republics, The Associated Press has learned. The work appears to contradict assertions by the Trump administration and Manafort himself that he never worked for Russian interests.
Manafort proposed in a confidential strategy plan as early as June 2005 that he would influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and the former Soviet republics to benefit the Putin government, even as U.S.-Russia relations under Republican President George W. Bush grew worse. Manafort pitched the plans to Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, a close Putin ally with whom Manafort eventually signed a $10 million annual contract beginning in 2006, according to interviews with several people familiar with payments to Manafort and business records obtained by the AP. Manafort and Deripaska maintained a business relationship until at least 2009, according to one person familiar with the work.
"We are now of the belief that this model can greatly benefit the Putin Government if employed at the correct levels with the appropriate commitment to success," Manafort wrote in the 2005 memo to Deripaska. The effort, Manafort wrote, "will be offering a great service that can re-focus, both internally and externally, the policies of the Putin government."
Manafort's plans were laid out in documents obtained by the AP that included strategy memoranda and records showing international wire transfers for millions of dollars. How much work Manafort performed under the contract was unclear.
Read more: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_TRUMP_RUSSIA_MANAFORT?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-03-22-06-09-06
Labor nominee Acosta cut deal with billionaire guilty in sex abuse case
Source: Washington Post
There was once a time — before the investigations, before the sexual abuse conviction — when rich and famous men loved to hang around with Jeffrey Epstein, a billionaire money manager who loved to party.
They visited his mansion in Palm Beach, Fla. They flew on his jet to join him at his private estate on the Caribbean island of Little Saint James. They even joked about his taste in younger women.
President Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy” back in 2002, saying that “he’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Now, Trump is on the witness list in a Florida court battle over how federal prosecutors handled allegations that Epstein, 64, sexually abused more than 40 minor girls, most of them between the ages of 13 and 17. The lawsuit questions why Trump’s nominee for labor secretary, former Miami U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta, whose confirmation hearing is scheduled to begin Wednesday, cut a non-prosecution deal with Epstein a decade ago rather than pursuing a federal indictment that Acosta’s staff had advocated.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/labor-nominee-acosta-cut-deal-with-billionaire-in-sex-abuse-case-involving-40-underage-girls/2017/03/21/d33271a8-0d85-11e7-ab07-07d9f521f6b5_story.html
White Supremacists Target High Schools and Colleges in Renewed Recruitment Drive
Source: Newsweek
Two of the incidents of white supremacist fliers being handed out at high schools occurred in California. At Pioneer High School in San Jose last month, over a dozen fliers from multiple white supremacist groups were reportedly posted around the campus. The groups included American Resistance, a white nationalist magazine run by Jared Taylor, who has cited the election of President Donald Trump as an opportunity for his movement.
“It is widely understood that the election of Donald Trump is a sign of rising white consciousness,” Taylor wrote on his website shortly after Trump’s inauguration in January. “Now is the time to press our advantage in every way possible.”
The post also included a call to arms for followers, including instructions to put up posters, particularly targeting students.
Read more: http://www.newsweek.com/white-supremacist-schools-nationalist-colleges-571577
Congratulations, @SpeakerRyan and @realDonaldTrump! Your Obamacare replacement is worse than...
no replacement at all.https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/844235084035186689
The Congressional Budget Office recently said that around 24 million fewer Americans would have health insurance in 2026 under the Republican repeal plan than if the current law stayed in place.
That loss was bigger than most experts anticipated, and led to a round of predictable laments from congressional Democrats — and less predictable ones from Republican senators, including Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and John Thune of South Dakota, who told reporters that the bill needed to be “more helpful” to low-income people who wanted insurance.
But one piece of context has gone little noticed: The Republican bill would actually result in more people being uninsured than if Obamacare were simply repealed. Getting rid of the major coverage provisions and regulations of Obamacare would cost 23 million Americans their health insurance, according to another recent C.B.O. report. In other words, 1 million more Americans would have health insurance with a clean repeal than with the Republican replacement plan, according to C.B.O. estimates.
The C.B.O. estimated what would happen after a simple repeal when it considered a bill that Congress passed last year. (President Obama later vetoed that bill.) The bill left parts of Obamacare in place, so the 23 million estimate didn’t come with the kind of detailed analysis that accompanied last week’s score of the American Health Care Act. But the similarity of the two estimates highlights some of the difficulties of the current proposal, both for Democrats, who are strongly criticizing potential coverage losses, and for the repeal-or-die crowd, who hate the structure of this new bill.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/21/upshot/fewer-americans-would-be-insured-with-gop-plan-than-with-simple-repeal.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region
Anne Frank Center wants Tim Allen apology on Germany remark
Source: Freep
LOS ANGELES - The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect is calling on Tim Allen to apologize for comparing the experience of being a conservative in Hollywood to living in Germany in the 1930s.
Allen, who grew up in Detroit and is a Western Michigan alum, made the comments on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” last week while discussing his attendance at President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Of Hollywood, Allen said “you’ve got to be real careful around here or you’ll get beat up.” He added, “If you don’t believe what everybody believes, this is like thirties Germany.”
In a statement , Anne Frank Center executive director Steven Goldstein calls on Allen to “apologize to the Jewish people.” He tells Allen that “no one in Hollywood today is subjecting you or anyone else to what the Nazis imposed on Jews in the 1930s”
http://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/2017/03/21/tim-allen-anne-frank-center/99444490/?hootPostID=9b7d2866c7e4b5ab7f9c5dfd14429c7f
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