Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

… gradually, and then suddenly.

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.

Petty moves from a petty man.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

In after Baud. Damn.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Decision time: keep arguing about the last election, or try to win the next one?

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

They don’t have outfits that big. nor codpieces that small.

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Gay Rights Are human Rights

Rest in Peace, At Last: Dianne Feinstein, Trailblazer

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There are many tributes, but it will be hard to beat this one. The Washington Post reprints a profile from 1984, about a history most of us never knew — “Dianne Feinstein makes the vice-president shortlist” [Unpaywalled gift link]:

After a while it begins to feel relentless. Here come the national news magazines, and the suburban dailies, and the eastern papers, and Cable News Network and the “CBS Morning News”; here come Brussels and Tokyo television men, wondering if she might spare them a moment or two. Here comes the AM radio man, following her even into a late-night television appearance, asking about it again…

Last Saturday, in a two-hour visit at his home in North Oaks, Minn., Walter Mondale interviewed Dianne Feinstein about her possibilities as Democratic candidate for the vice presidency of the United States. “A symbol of the very best in America,” Mondale said afterward, as the two of them smiled broadly for reporters. It was a laboriously publicized visit, like nearly everything connected with the present fuss over the vice presidency; it has been duly noted that in his first 10 days of interviewing potential running mates, Mondale interviewed and thus publicly flattered Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, a southerner; Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, a black; and Dianne Feinstein, a woman.

A Jewish woman, at that.

A Jewish woman from San Francisco, which in other parts of the country has what advertising people might call an “image problem.”

She knows the odds on this…

A kind of bruised sound is creeping into her voice.

“I mean, after all the b.s. you can take in this job, well, I can hold my head high,” Feinstein says. “And that’s nice, too.”

The mayor of San Francisco is sitting, as she says this, on a bench alongside Stow Lake, which is a small and locally cherished man-made lake in Golden Gate Park. She is wearing a slightly sweaty T-shirt, blue warm-up pants, running shoes and tortoise-shell sunglasses. She is the mayor of an odd, fickle, 700,000-person city, a woman shoved into office by a double murder, elected to a standard term, subjected to an unyieldingly nasty recall campaign, upheld by a vast majority of the voters and ushered nearly without opposition into a second mayoral term….

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I’m Fucking Done

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It’s time to break this rogue court.

I'm Fucking Done

With apologies to the lawyers in the Jackaltariat, there’s nothing left to save in the current court. Its majority, in place barring radical legislative change I don’t see coming anytime soon, is a corrupt, wholly owned, claque of elite religious fanatics.  Or perhaps, more accurately, a coalition of lease-to-own hacks and true believers.

Its decisions are a parody of judicial reasoning.  They constitute a radical power grab–a judicial coup–which has been running in a slow rolling way since at least 2000 with Bush v. Gore.

Whether by enlargement or an express legislative limitation of the court’s review powers, it’s time to end this antidemocratic attack on our society.

I’m just fucking done. Past done.

And yeah–I know nothing can happen until/unless we retake the House and extend control of the Senate beyond the Manchinema roadblock.

One more thing: this could have been avoided if not that many people had chosen not to piss away votes on “principle” in 2000 and 2016.  Spilt milk and all that. But if anyone needed a reminder (no one here) 2024 is the next most important election of our lives.

Open goddamn thread.

PS: Don’t get me started on the willed scientific illiteracy of the majority, contaminating their rulings on anything involving technical issues and regulation. Intercourse them orthogonally with oxidized farm implements.

Image: after William Hogarth, The Bench, engraving by William Dent, roughly 1790s.

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Appropriate medical care improves health — LBGT edition

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Campbell et al in the most recent AEA Papers and Proceedings examined the effect of hormone replacement therapy as a form of gender affirming care for transgender individuals in the US.  Shockingly they found that when people got good medical care, they did better than when they did not.  Their key outcome of interest was an initial suicide attempt which is an extreme outcome but a highly relevant outcome:

 

By using the US Transgender Survey (USTS) and recently developed estimation techniques, our study aims to contribute new evidence on the relationship between the uptake of HRT and the outcomes of transgender youth. Our event study approach compares youth who started HRT (treated group) with those who initiated HRT a year later (control group). Results indicate that HRT is associated with a 5.7 percentage point reduction in the risk of attempting suicide, which amounts to a 14.4 percent decrease in the risk of attempting suicide relative to the pretreatment mean. Moreover, the effect is largest when HRT began at younger ages (i.e., 14–15).

WOW — appropriate medical care leads to a better health outcome.

 

 

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The Sid Meiers Effect

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One of the weirder things I have witnessed over the past twenty years of blogging is how so many writers out there, particularly those with an ax to grind about an issue or issues approach things as if they, alone have the gospel truth, and that what they are writing, if followed, will change the trajectory of the world. It’s really bizarre, honestly.

The proximate cause of this discussion is earlier today I noticed Jesse Singal, a middling intellect and former writer for one of the NY rags, who has spent the last few years ranting about Trans issues. He’s one of Sully and Greenwald’s favorites, so that means he is kind of an edgelord douchebag with a dubious grasp of statistical analysis. Speaking of statistics, there is literally nothing that statistically ignorant writerslove more than a shoddy meta-analysis. It’s the dataset equivalent of of an asset backed security potentially jammed full of subprime loan tranches. At any rate, Singal was picking a fight with, of all people, Drew Magary:

If Magary even bothers to respond, this is not going to end the way it played out in Singal’s head when he started this ruckus.

Back to the point. Singal and those like him always seem to write as if the very existence of our species and nation is at stake if these issues with the troublesome trans people are not dealt with, and dealt with in the way he sees fit at this very moment (because, as we know, that may change moment to moment). It’s really kind of crazy.

There are so many people out there who really do not realize they are not the main character in this story, and I don’t know if that has changed over the past few decades because we spent so many years boosting people’s self esteem instead of making sure people have accurate self esteem, if the internet has just given everyone a bigger megaphone, or who knows what else. But when these guys write, it feels like they think they are at the helm of Civ IV making big decisions about the shape of their empire, rather than just being some windbag blasting out noxious fumes into an already smelly public discourse.

The trans and other various antigay bigots are really special cases, though, in that they seem to think there is some concerted effort teh left or the other villain du jour to transition everyone to the ick. And it’s just so absurd. First off, so what. If 50% of the population decided overnight they were going to transition, I would give zero fucks because it is not going to change how I live my life in any way, shape, or form. I’m still going to have the same like and dislikes, and the same sexual attraction I have always had and still have my “type.”. In case any of you are wondering what my type is, at this age it’s “willing.”

At any rate, none of the anti-trans shit that Republicans and others are pushing is going to change the number of trans people out there, just like no amount of bigotry is going to change the number of gay people out there. They’re still going to be trans, they’re just going to be more miserable than they already are, which if you look at the numbers for kids, is fucking horrifying.

And, if you are an old like me, you don’t have to fucking understand it. It literally does not impact your life. All you need to do is call people what they want to be called, don’t be a fucking bigot, and mind your own fucking business.

On a side note thank you for all the roofing advice- I have a person coming on Monday to give me a bunch of estimates.

Also, I am driving to Rhode Island tomorrow to pick up the cat this weekend.

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Some Excellent News

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This is great:

The House on Thursday passed landmark legislation that would enshrine marriage equality in federal law, granting protections to same-sex and interracial couples and clearing the way for President Biden’s signature.

“Today, Congress sends the Respect for Marriage Act to the president’s desk, a glorious triumph of love and freedom,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), quoting the gay rights activist Edith Windsor in comparing marriage to magic. “This legislation honors that magic, protecting it from bigoted extremism, defending the inviolability of the same-sex and interracial marriages.”

The House had already passed an earlier version of the Respect for Marriage Act in July, but the Senate delayed its vote on the bill until after the midterm elections. Late last month, the Senate passed the bill with a bipartisan amendment to allay some Republicans’ concerns about religious liberty. The amended bill passed the Senate in a 61-36 vote, with 12 Republican senators joining Democrats in favor of it.

Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer just keep getting shit done, and I gotta say I am still shocked how much Biden and Schumer have done. Nancy is Nancy and I knew she would come through, but the other two surprise me.

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Voice and exit

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Voice and exit are the two ways that people in shitty situations can attempt to influence their local environment. As a reminder, always know where your immediate exit line lies:

 

Open thread.

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Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Respect for Marriage, and Other Human Rights

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And 47 Republicans voted *for* it. Now, as NBC News points out, we need at least 10 Repub Senators to find some human dignity:

The House passed the Respect For Marriage Act Tuesday to codify legal same-sex marriage nationwide, fearing that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court will rescind the right after it overturned Roe v. Wade last month.

The vote was 267-157, with 47 Republicans supporting it.

The bill would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, enshrine legal same-sex marriage for the purposes of federal law, and add legal protections for married couples of the same sex…

House Democrats plan to vote later this week on a similar bill to codify the right to contraception, which was established by a more liberal Supreme Court in the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut ruling.

Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y., who is openly gay, emphasized the importance of Congress stepping in to protect same-sex marriage rights. “Imagine telling the next generation, my generation, we no longer have the right to marry who we love. Congress can’t allow that to happen,” he said.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the bill would “enshrine into law a fundamental freedom: the right to marry whomever you choose.”

“As radical justices and right-wing politicians continue their assault on our basic rights, Democrats believe that the government has no place between you and the person you love,” she said.

Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, blasted the legislation as “the latest installment of the Democrats’ campaign to attempt to intimidate the United States Supreme Court.”…

The legislation now goes to the Senate, where its prospects are uncertain, as it requires at least 10 Republican votes to defeat a filibuster. So far the same-sex marriage protections have only one GOP backer: Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.

The proposal has put GOP senators in a bind, caught between their culturally conservative base, which opposes same-sex marriage, and a large majority of the country that wants it to remain legal…

As I said, when Massachusetts was the first state to legalize marriage equality, it’s amazing how quickly opposition ebbs when ‘normal’ voters discover how much the new law doesn’t change anything in their own lives (except for maybe making some of their family members, acquaintances, and neighbors inexplicably happier).

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