For decades the United States has recognized its greatest artists — about a dozen each year — with a national medal, an award created by Congress and typically distributed each year by the president at a White House ceremony.

Since 1985, arts figures including Georgia O’Keeffe, Frank Capra and Ella Fitzgerald have received the National Medal of Arts while similar cultural achievement has been recognized by the National Humanities Medal, which presidents have awarded to the likes of Steven Spielberg, Anna Deavere Smith and Louise Glück.

But neither of those medals has been awarded since President Trump took office, the longest gap ever and one that again draws attention to the president’s often awkward relationship with the arts. The deadline for nominations for the 2016 arts medals, which have yet to be awarded, was in February 2017.

“I’m hoping that it is a delay as opposed to a policy decision because I think it’s a good thing for these awards to happen,” said Robert Lynch, the president and chief executive officer of Americans for the Arts, an advocacy organization.

The White House responded to questions about the medals by saying that planning is underway to distribute them as in years past. “We are currently evaluating candidates and will likely issue later this year,” said Lindsay E. Walters, a White House spokeswoman.

It does seem the delay may be simply a matter of an administrative backlog. The National Medal of Science, and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation have also not been awarded since 2016.

But the holdup around the arts medals is notable because of President Trump’s rocky relationship with the National Endowment for Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His first proposed federal budget would have eliminated these agencies, which, in addition to promoting cultural programs, recommend candidates for the national medals to the president.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/15/arts/trump-has-not-yet-awarded-2016-national-arts-medals.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimesarts

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BREAKING: President Trump in new @CBSNews interview calls the European Union a “foe” of the United States. The president also said Russia is a “foe in certain respects” and China “is a foe economically.”
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10:16 AM - 15 Jul 2018

The Trump administration’s policies on family separation and abortion are driven by one view: A woman’s pain is fitting punishment.



Last spring, Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress worked together to pass a bill that would have gutted the Affordable Care Act. That piece of legislation doubled as an ideological manifesto: By letting states waive insurance protections for women who’ve been pregnant, given birth, survived a sexual assault, or experienced domestic violence, the GOP laid out a medical framework that treated women’s bodies as inherently sick, aberrations from the norm.

Over the past several months, the Trump administration has further clarified its theories of the female body. The man in charge of refugee resettlement in the U.S. has gone to court to prevent pregnant undocumented teens from accessing abortion care. The U.S. delegation to the World Health Assembly recently used military and economic threats in an attempt to sabotage a resolution promoting infant health through breastfeeding. At the Department of Health and Human Services, officials cut funding to a teen-pregnancy-prevention program that has helped teen births reach an all-time low, shifting resources to abstinence-only education. On Monday, Trump nominated to the Supreme Court a judge who is expected to be the fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. And as the government jails children who’ve been separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, pregnant immigrant women in detention centers are being denied medical treatment and shackled around the stomach. Many have miscarried while in custody.

Some of these acts may appear incongruous. Don’t the people whose moral compasses point toward fetal rights want infants to get proper nutrition? Don’t they want the fetuses inside pregnant detainees to survive? If children are precious and motherhood is a woman’s “most important job,” as Ivanka Trump has said, shouldn’t asylum-seeking parents get to keep their kids? But these policies aren’t contradictory at all. They are rooted in a consistent worldview that casts women as vessels whose reproductive capacity is the property of the state, and whose pain is fitting punishment for any supposed offense.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/07/abortion-family-separation-and-how-the-trump-administration-uses-female-pain-as-punishment.html

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Within the next few months, Brett M. Kavanaugh will get a vote in the Senate to determine whether he joins the Supreme Court. In all likelihood, that vote will be close but will work out in Kavanaugh’s favor. Republicans currently have a 51-to-49 majority in the Senate, and even if the ailing John McCain (Ariz.) doesn’t vote, if they hold the rest of their members (and they will) the result would at worst be a 50-50 tie that Vice President Pence would break.

That vote will be a vivid reminder that we are living in an age of minority rule. In fact, that is one of the central features of this political era. The Republican Party represents a minority of the American electorate, yet it controls not only all three branches of the federal government but also most state governments, as well.

Why do I say that a vote in Kavanaugh’s favor is an example of minority rule? Because the body that will confirm him is built in its current formation to almost guarantee Republican control, despite the fact that most American voters selected Democrats to represent them there.

Using Dave Leip’s invaluable election atlas, I added up all the votes cast for Democrats and Republicans in the 2012, 2014 and 2016 Senate elections, which put the current Senate in place. I didn’t bother with the few special elections since 2012, which in total wouldn’t change the results much, but I did include Bernie Sanders’s and Angus King’s last elections, since they are nominally independent but caucus with the Democrats. Here are the results:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/07/10/were-living-in-an-age-of-minority-rule/?noredirect=on