Kereea Says Unionize

but I find it very difficult to believe people who look like Whoopi Goldberg and whatever that white guy's name is could produce a biological child who looks like Paolo Montalban

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

I am not uptight about privacy because I'm hiding something. I'm uptight about it because the people who dismiss my right to privacy are dangerous to you and me and our families, personally, all the time.

Do I hate Lich McConnell? Yes. Should he die? I think he should. It's only right and natural for him to die. Personally it seems to me that he's being very lazy and shirking responsibility by not dying.

If he is actually brain dead, his staff should say so. However, I'm not convinced he is actually brain dead. Despite all his maladies, his brain has always held out (even if it's hard to tell). It's almost a medical wonder just how feeble the rest of his body is compared to his brain. He's probably conscious, capable of vocalizing, and that's it. Not brain dead, but he might as well be.

But if he was brain dead, it would be responsible to tell the public that he was no longer capable of representing his constituents. Even if he hasn't been properly able to for years now. Even if he is a partisan hack in the safest red seat in america. Even if the bulk of the lobby behind him is for bourbon and guns and it's slowly literally decaying his state with mold and death. But what he is probably capable of is grunting a yes or no answer to a question. Which is technically functional. I wouldn't mind being wrong, of course. And if I am wrong, every single member of his staff should be held as legally accountable for that deception as possible. But, really. Calling for someone to be jailed hardly seems threatening anymore. Perhaps they should be held to a more time honored Kentucky tradition and stuffed into a barrel for a few years.

HOWEVER since the Senate REQUIRES in-person voting on all things, and is even more resistant to rule changes than the House, what this means is that for the moment the Senate is operating on a 52-47 GOP majority instead and any committee he is on is 1 GOP vote short (which might mean = on the Appropriations Committee, iirc). Collins (Chair of Appropriations) has cancelled SEVERAL committee meetings and votes due to him not being able to come in.

I am currently assuming Alive but Too Feeble to Physically Return at the moment. And given this is the fucker whose security was begging him for YEARS to use a walker but wouldn't because of optics, he probably won't let himself be seen unless he looks OK by his own standards (the recent in-Capitol wheelchair use is a big sign he'd declined enough to have no choice).

Vie the NYT:

How did they manage to get the Balkans to go along with that all on their own with nothing but peace and love.

Tell me about Istanbul what was going on there with the name change, and why is a cathedral that predates islam listed as a mosque.

Saw someone bring up that the ottomans ended the jizya tax for Christians and tried to frame it as something they did out of the kindness of their hearts instead of the historical reality of France and England making that a condition that needed to be met if the sultan wanted their help in the Crimean war.

Can't forget

You’re being told Dems are feckless, and that the “Establishment Dems” (whatever that means) are responsible for everything bad happening in the country (even things Republicans did)

It’s not productive, it doesn’t help anyone.

So here are two stories you probably missed of Dems who are fighting back, making noise and doing the work!

Let’s celebrate the positive instead of focusing on the negative.

No shirt, no bra, completely bare torso, just like cis men are allowed to

It's about desexualizing breasts and "female presenting nipples" and not being criminalized for our bodies if we want to go topless because it's a million damn degrees out. This was a popular growing movement that was still widely known a decade ago!

this story is going viral now, from July 4th.

here’s a video of Patriot Front harassing a Jewish man on the metro in Washington DC from January.

“While the Jew resides in America, it will never be holy until all of you are gone.”

On the one hand most of those in the USA who could be described as working class are neither white nor male, and on the other those who are telling us that the Hunt for the Working Class must take priority over all else tend to be middle-class white men when they're telling us we must give up our commitment to other issues – women's rights, racial justice, immigrant rights, climate action. There is immense condescension in their imagined Working Class White Man whose prejudices must be pandered to, and of course those prejudices are their own or at least something they're willing to accept. (There's also a lot of nostalgia in this version of the working class, an image of that class as masculine manual laborers of the industrial variety when a lot of the working class in our fairly post-industrial nation is disproportionately people of color doing pink-collar women's work, casual and gig-economy labor, urban workers, janitors, and farmworkers.)

As sociologist and New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottam put it last October, "Their rhetoric — and the conventional wisdom that flows from it — suggests that we cannot talk about economic solutions without abandoning our commitment to the Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor that are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party’s base. The conceit at the heart of that belief is that poor white people are too racist, and too uniquely ignorant of their racism, to vote in their best interests. Therefore, Democrats have to accept a little racism to win the working class." Cottam is a Black woman; Black women are the single most loyal constituency of the party, the ones who vote for it in the highest numbers, but I have never heard similar arguments about how we must bend to their needs no matter what. She continues, "Our culture is built to eternally forgive men, generally, and white men of means, especially, for their mistakes. Every single time, they were young and immature and it would be a shame to hold them accountable for anything they did wrong.""