Today in Trump's America

This is -- how shall I put it? -- deplorable:

A bigoted Brooklyn woman launched a sickening attack on two Muslim women pushing their babies in strollers — punching them in the face and trying to pull off their hijabs, prosecutors said Friday.

Emirjeta Xhelili, 32, hurled Islamophobic insults as she pounced on the two victims near her Bath Beach home about 1:30 p.m. Thursday, authorities said.

“Get the f--k out of here,” Xhelili, 32, allegedly yelled at the pair, according to prosecutors. “Get the f--k out of America, b-----s.”

As she punched the 23-year-old women in the face and kicked them in their legs, she tried to rip the traditional Muslim veils off their heads at Bay 20th St. and Cropsey Aves., police sources said.

“This is America — you shouldn’t be different from us,” she yelled, prosecutors said.

"You shouldn't be different from us." From who? With a name like Emirjeta Xhelili (sounds real Anglo-Saxon, doesn't it?), I'd love to know where her family originated.

This is the sort of people that Trump not only attracts, but validates -- he's given permission for behavior like this.

It can get much worse, and I fear it will -- I remember hearing reports after 9/11 of Sikh business owners being shot dead at their establishments, because everyone who wears a turban must be a terrorist, right? And given that Trump's basket of deplorables includes racists, gun nuts with their penis substitutes, the ignorant, "Christians", the KKK, Tony Perkins and the rest of our society's lower depths, it's only a matter of time.

Via TPM.

Image of the Week

I haven't done one of these in a while, but since the news these days is so cheerful (All Trump, All the Time!), I decided to dig through the archives.

Here's one from a series I worked on for a while way back when, called "Combinations". I may go back to it. Someday.

OMG!! Sharia Law!!1!

The president has nominated a Muslim for the US District Court for Washington, D.C.:

Abid Qureshi, the global chairman of law firm Latham & Watkins’ pro bono practice, has been nominated by U.S. President Barack Obama for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. He is the first ever Muslim to be nominated to serve the federal judiciary, according to Muslim Advocates, a civil rights legal advocacy group. . . .

Qureshi, who was born in Pakistan, has been leading the Los Angeles-based firm’s pro bono practice since 2012 and has been a partner at the firm since 2006. He received a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 1993 and a law degree from Harvard Law School in 1997.

According to Latham’s website, Qureshi’s expertise lies in fraud cases including healthcare and abuse and federal securities law. He also has “substantial experience handling internal corporate investigations, governmental inquiries and regulatory proceedings.”

I can hardly wait for the reaction from Frank Gaffney and Pam Geller, America's leading Islamophobes.

Culture Break: Kazaky: The Sun

I seem to be forgetting to post things until a day or two later this week. Anyway, we haven't featured Kazaky for a while, so here's "The Sun," with their usual mix of athleticism, eroticism, and abstraction:

The Times Strikes Again

It's sort of a toss-up whether this is clueless of cynical. I've voting for cynical: Note the headline and caption:

Senate Democrats Block Zika Bill Over Planned Parenthood Provisions

By EMMARIE HUETTEMAN and SABRINA TAVERNISESEPT. 6, 2016

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, in the Capitol on Tuesday. “It’s hard to explain why, despite their own calls for funding, Democrats would block plans to keep women and babies safe from Zika,” he said. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times

And notice how the Times treats the real sticking point in the body of the story:

As Congress returned from a seven-week recess on Tuesday, Senate Democrats again stymied a $1.1 billion plan to fight the Zika virus, demanding that Republicans drop an effort to block Planned Parenthood from receiving money to combat the mosquito-borne disease.

Democrats, who had essentially blocked the same legislation in late June, had enough votes Tuesday to prevent Congress from moving emergency funding public health experts say is desperately needed as they prepare for the possibility that Zika will spread to other states along the gulf coast. The vote was 52 to 46, and Republicans needed 60 votes to advance the bill.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican majority leader, said that although efforts to fight the virus had produced encouraging results, the problem was far from over.

“It’s hard to explain why, despite their own calls for funding, Democrats would block plans to keep women and babies safe from Zika,” Mr. McConnell said before the vote.

A bare mention of the poison pill in the bill -- defunding Planned Parenthood, which is the GOP's latest target in its anti-sex, forced birth crusade. So of course, it's all the Democrats' fault, because you can't really expect the Republicans to write legislation that doesn't incorporate at least some part of their social agenda.

OK -- the article does address the Democrats' objections, in a sketchy sort of way, down in the body of the story. But we all know that it's the headline and the lead that have the most effect -- and how many people will bother to read the whole story?

Via Bark Bark Woof Woof.

And Now For Some Good News

China has upgraded giant pandas from endangered to vulnerable.

Decades of conservation work in China have paid off for the giant panda, whose status has been upgraded from "endangered" to "vulnerable" owing to a population rebound, according to officials.

The improvement for the giant panda was announced on Sunday as part of an update to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, the world's most comprehensive inventory of plants and animals.

The latest estimates show a population of 1,864 adult giant pandas. Although exact numbers are not available, adding cubs to the projection would mean about 2,060 pandas exist today, the IUCN said.

"Evidence from a series of range-wide national surveys indicate that the previous population decline has been arrested, and the population has started to increase," the IUCN's updated report said.

However, it's not all good:

The IUCN Red List includes 82,954 species - both plants and animals - and undergoes a major update every four years.

Almost one third - 23,928 - are threatened with extinction, it said.

Compared with previous years, even more species are under threat.

Carlo Rondinini, mammal assessment coordinator at Sapienza University of Rome, said almost 28 percent of mammals are threatened with extinction, three percentage points more than in the previous mammal assessment in 2008.

"A takeaway point we would like to emphasise is we are not journeying in the right direction with respect to species conservation," Andersen said.

"We are losing species at a faster pace than we have ever done."

The Field Museum of Natural History, in its exhibit "Evolving Planet," lists the present as the "Sixth Major Extinction Event." They're not being alarmist.

In Memoriam: Phyllis Schlafly

I try not to say anything negative about the departed, so in this case I'm going to let Sarah, Proud and Tall say it for me:

She was a nasty, hypocritical old baggage – she believed in jobs and power for her, but not for other women, that there was no rape inside marriage, that Anthony Kennedy should have been impeached for abolishing the death penalty for minors, and that all Muslims should be banned from the armed forces and political office.

She endorsed Donald Trump, but that might just have been because she was bats at the end.

She was a prude whose hatred of sex and those who dared to have it – in particular those who she thought God had cursed with disease for having it – somehow made her the respectable face of a campaign to stigmatise people with HIV and AIDS (and not just the gays) which gave the Reagan administration cover to ignore the AIDS crisis, held back AIDS education and funding of AIDS research for years, and therefore directly or indirectly resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the infection of twice that many again.

There are lots of disgusting people occupying places in America's public discourse, the Schlafly was one of the worst.

Betty Bowers, America's Best Christian, put it much more succinctly:

Today's Must-Read: The Press vs. The Clintons, Part ?

I've lost count. Digby's been on this, and comes up with another post today, taking off from this article by James Fallows. The concern is not just the bias of the press, but the effect it's having on our whole political process:

Twenty years ago I published a book called Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. The Atlantic ran an excerpt as a cover story, called “Why Americans Hate the Media.”

The main argument was that habits of mind within the media were making citizens and voters even more fatalistic and jaded about public affairs than they would otherwise be—even more willing to assume that all public figures were fools and crooks, even less willing to be involved in public affairs, and unfortunately for the media even less interested in following news at all. These mental habits of the media included an over-emphasis on strife and conflict, a fascination with the mechanics or “game” of politics rather than the real-world consequences, and a self-protective instinct to conceal limited knowledge of a particular subject (a new budget proposal, an international spat) by talking about the politics of these questions, and by presenting disagreements in a he-said/she-said, “plenty of blame on all sides” fashion now known as “false equivalence.”

I think one root cause is simply that, while liberals expect people to be honest and act responsibly, conservatives know better: they know they can feed bullshit to the press and the press will swallow it because controversy generates ratings. Fact-checking? What's that?

Digby brings up a good point:

But what he says about all this making people jaded is very important. It's not just the press, of course. We're in the middle of an epic hangover from the economic crisis and people are still feeling the pain. It takes a while to work that out an the political ramifications of big jolts like that can be huge. So, a lot of this is real --- or it's sincerely felt anyway.

But the way the media is covering this campaign is making things worse. And, as usual, they seem not to give a damn.

Of course they don't -- they've got their six- and seven-figure salaries and access to any Republican they want to talk to. Why should they care?

Digby also gives links to more must-reads.

 Paul Krugman: Hillary Clinton gets Gored

Josh Marshall: About as clear cut as they get

And this, from some months back from Jonathan Allen: The Five Unspoken Rules for Covering Hillary Clinton

That last link may be the most important. This isn't some crazy partisan delusion. It's real.

I'd say, also, be sure to read Krugman's piece, if you haven't already. It's up to his usual standard.

Welcome to Trump's America

Not because Trump is an instigator -- he's a facilitator for behavior like this:

A deaf high school senior in Omaha, Nebraska was the victim of a cruel prank this week when bullies took his backpack away and emptied the contents — including the battery for his cochlear implant hearing aid — into a school toilet.

KMTV reported on the story of Alexis Hernandez, a student at Omaha’s Burke High School, who looked around for his book bag during his lunch period on Wednesday and realized that it was gone.

He immediately notified school officials, who reviewed security footage but were unable to identify the two male students who waited until Hernandez left his table and then walked off with his belongings. School staff searched the school grounds for the bag to no avail.

Later, Hernandez’ homework, school supplies, tablet computer, hearing aid and debit card were found dumped into a toilet. Everything was ruined. He took a photo of the damage that was posted on social media and subsequently went viral.

It's not just that Trump is a racist asshole -- I don't know if he himself is racist or not, and I don't care -- he's playing that card for all it's worth. And when you give permission to treat one minority as less than human, you give permission to treat just about anyone as less than human.

Today's Must-Read: It's Not a Future Thing

Really scary article from the New York Times. (Since it's not about the Clintons, we can take it as largely accurate.) It's on the order of "Nice coastline you've got there -- be a shame if anything happened to it.":

NORFOLK, Va. — Huge vertical rulers are sprouting beside low spots in the streets here, so people can judge if the tidal floods that increasingly inundate their roads are too deep to drive through.

Five hundred miles down the Atlantic Coast, the only road to Tybee Island, Ga., is disappearing beneath the sea several times a year, cutting the town off from the mainland.

And another 500 miles on, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., increased tidal flooding is forcing the city to spend millions fixing battered roads and drains — and, at times, to send out giant vacuum trucks to suck saltwater off the streets.

For decades, as the global warming created by human emissions caused land ice to melt and ocean water to expand, scientists warned that the accelerating rise of the sea would eventually imperil the United States’ coastline.

Now, those warnings are no longer theoretical: The inundation of the coast has begun. The sea has crept up to the point that a high tide and a brisk wind are all it takes to send water pouring into streets and homes.

And of course, it's not just American cities that are in peril. Think about what's going to happen to London, Rio, Hong Kong, Sidney, Tokyo -- I'm sure you can come up with your own list. And how high will the Netherlands have to raise the dikes to avoid becoming a large inlet? (One Pacific Island nation -- and I've forgotten which one -- has already made arrangements to evacuate its entire population.)

Of course, there's obstruction in Congress to allocating funds to actually do something.

Yet Congress has largely ignored these pleas, and has even tried to block plans by the military to head off future problems at the numerous bases imperiled by a rising sea. A Republican congressman from Colorado, Ken Buck, recently called one military proposal part of a “radical climate change agenda.”

You can bet that if there were earthquakes in Colorado, this asshole would be screaming for someone to do something.

Of course, if you ask a Republican, this is all because the Chinese, with the help of the Clinton Foundation, are secretly pumping all the water from the Yellow River into the Atlantic to drown Washington, D.C.

Green Man Review Catch-Up

I completely forgot to do this yesterday, which was "What's New" day at GMR.

Only one review, but it's a new one -- more music from ECM. But there's lots of other good stuff, so click on over.

Saturday Science: Oops!

I meant to post this Saturday and just blipped on it.

I realize there have been no new installments on "Earth: A Biography" for a couple of weeks. Partly it's because a lot was going on before we hit the Cambrian -- new kinds of land formation (think "limestone") and a couple of significant mutations in living organisms. We just don't know for sure how it happened, and I'm trying to find some best guesses to lay out before we get to the Cambrian Explosion.

And it's also partly because there's been a lot of distractions in real life. Hopefully, those are past.

Today's Must-Read, Part 2: The Press' Anti-Clinton Bias

Via Bark Bark Woof Woof, this piece by Paul Glastris in the Washington Monthly:

Over the last two weeks, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has taken a hit in the polls, much of it pretty clearly due to aggressive press investigations involving her relationship with the Clinton Foundation when she was Secretary of State. Even Hillary fans should see that these investigations are warranted. After all, Clinton is running for the most powerful office in the world. While she was Secretary of State, her husband was overseeing a $2 billion a year charity. That charity took in donations from foreign governments and individuals with international interests. These facts raise legitimate questions. Did donors to the Foundation get special access to the secretary and the department as a result of their donations? If they did get special access, did they receive any favors? Did Hillary or her staff do anything illegal, unethical, or contrary to U.S. interests or administration policy?

The good news is that as a result of these investigations we can now answer those questions pretty definitively: no, no, and no. The bad news is that the press doesn’t seem to want to take “no” for an answer, even if the answer is based on the evidence of its own reporting.

And it's not just the usual suspect, i.e., Fox News or CNN. It's the New York Times, AP, LA Times -- all the ones you thought were trustworthy.

Maybe Darrell Issa and Trey Gowdy have joined their editorial boards.

Today's Must-Read: E-Mail-Ghazi!!1!

Via Digby, this article by Kevin Drum on the FBI's report on Hillary Clinton's use of a private server while Secretary of State. I'll just give the lead-in here, because it's almost impossible to excerpt:

Have you read the entire FBI report on their investigation into Hillary Clinton's email practices? No? Well, I have, because that's the kind of professional I am. And I'm going to provide you with all the most interesting excerpts.

The report starts off with a whole bunch of technical detail about how the Clinton email server was set up and managed, and is basically uninteresting except to nerds. As everyone knows, Hillary's email was originally hosted on a personal server in her home (referred to as the "Pagliano Server") and was later transferred to a commercial hosting service, Platte River Networks (the "PRN Server").

I do suggest you read Drum's whole article, but here's the conclusion, with Digby's comment:

 That said, this report is pretty much an almost complete exoneration of Hillary Clinton. She wasn't prohibited from using a personal device or a personal email account, and others at state did it routinely. She's told the truth all along about why she did it. Colin Powell did indeed advise her about using personal email shortly after she took office, but she chose to follow the rules rather than skirt them, as Powell did. She didn't take her BlackBerry into her office. She communicated with only a very select group of 13 people. She took no part in deciding which emails were personal before handing them over to State. She had nothing to do with erasing information on the PRN server. That was a screw-up on PRN's end. She and her staff all believed at the time that they were careful not to conduct sensitive conversations over unclassified email systems. And there's no evidence that her server was ever hacked. There's remarkably little here. If you nonetheless believe that it's enough to disqualify Hillary from the presidency, that's fine. I have no quarrel with you. But if the FBI is to be believed, it's all pretty small beer.

Yes it is. But apparently either adds up to treason or a lack of judgment so severe that it makes the election of a fascist demagogue something worth considering. 

You'll note, by the way,  that Colin Powell is a lying sack of shit. But then we should already have known that right? If you want to blame someone for the Iraq war and the carnage in the middle east, he's way ahead of Clinton in that line. But there's no need to probe his tenure or write any of the breathless headlines we see daily about Clinton's much less significant time in office. Granted, he's not running for president. But I'm going to take a wild guess that if he were, this issue would not be seen as evidence of his innate dishonesty and personal corruption.

Meanwhile, that stalwart journalist Jake Tapper can't understand why Clinton won't hold press conferences so he and his fellow-travelers can continue to beat this particular dead horse.

Can we note once more what a disaster the mainstream press coverage of this election has been?

The Liberal Redneck on Colin Kaepernick

I don't really have anything to add:

We're All Fox News Now

I was going to write on the coverage of the latest Clinton "scandal" by the New York Times, but Paul Waldman has done a very thorough job:

Whenever some new piece of information emerges about Hillary Clinton or people close to her, we’re told that it “raises questions” of some kind, which means it’s being shoehorned into a larger narrative that says something fundamental about her: That she’s tainted by scandal, or corrupt, or just sinister in ways people can never quite put their finger on.

Yet somehow, stories about Donald Trump that don’t have to do with the latest appalling thing that came out of his mouth don’t “raise questions” in the same way. They’re here and then they’re gone, obliterated by his own behavior without going deep into question-raising territory.

The "newspaper of record" has had a kind of tarnished reputation since the days of Judith Miller and the lead-up to Bush II's invasion of Iraq. The real problem is, since the major news outlets have become so unreliable, if you really want to know what's going on, you have to hit a lot of sources, and most people won't.

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Via Digby, who sums it up nicely:

The papers have done a good job reporting on many of Trump's business dealings over the years. But since there isn't any left wing Judicial Watch or Citizens United spoon-feeding them new new drips of information on a daily basis, they report it out and that's the end of it.

They are being manipulated by the character assassins and they know it. But they don't care. They seem to convince themselves that at some point one of these scandals will add up to a big scoop (Monica!) and until then they'll keep the scandal mongers happy by publishing their hit jobs. The way they drool and grunt over every little nugget the right wingers throw in front of them, however, is embarrassing. (Some of them should stay off twitter.)

Idiot du Jour

By way of introduction, please note the following:

Amendment XIV

Section 1.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. . . .

Section 5.

The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Apparently, someone skipped class the day that amendment was discussed. From Mark Joseph Stern at Slate:

On Friday, the Texas Supreme Court refused to review a lower court ruling holding that cities may not deprive married same-sex couples the benefits it provides to opposite-sex couples. The court’s decision leaves in place a pro-equality ruling that forbids the government from discriminating against gay people for no good reason. But one judge, Justice John Devine, argued that his court should have taken the case and reversed the lower court’s judgment. His opinion is an ominous sign that conservative judges are striving to work around Obergefell v. Hodges and affirm the constitutionality of state-sponsored anti-gay discrimination.

Devine is clearly no fan of Obergefell, and his dissent attempts to minimize that decision to an almost dishonest degree. “Marriage is a fundamental right,” Devine wrote. “Spousal benefits are not.” Devine insisted that Obergefell’s affirmation of same-sex couples’ constitutional right to wed does not preclude Texas from discriminating against married, same-sex couples in other ways. Obergefell, the justice argued, was strictly limited to gay people’s fundamental right to marry. So long as a state does not revoke that right, it can deprive same-sex couples of other benefits guaranteed to opposite-sex couples. Specifically, Devine wrote, the government can refuse to give spousal benefits to its gay employees because they are gay.

Turns out it's all because marriage is for procreation. But you don't need a license to make babies, which, considering Justice Devine is from Texas, he should know.

I'm not going to get into all the usual arguments about sterile heterosexual couples, couples past childbearing age, couples who choose not to have children, because, quite frankly, they're beside the point: marriage is and always has been a public agreement between two persons (although in the past, it's been more between two families than two individuals) to undertake certain rights and responsibilities toward each other. Or, in my favorite definition, "Marriage is the recognition by the community of the establishment of a new household."

Now, as to Justice Devine's ridiculous assertion that marriage benefits are not a constitutional right:

The justice utterly overlooks the fact that Obergefell, like Windsor, has an Equal Protection component that is critical to its holding. In Obergefell, the court wrote that states may not “exclude same-sex couples from civil marriage on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples.” Devine insists that the “terms and conditions” of marriage are nothing more than the laws governing marriage, like minimum age statutes and bigamy bans.

That is really quite absurd. As every other court to consider the issue has recognized, this provision of Obergefell requires states to extend the same benefits to married same-sex couples that it does to married opposite-sex couples. That, at a bare minimum, is what Obergefell’s Equal Equal Protection analysis obviously requires.

Devine's reading of "terms and conditions" is so obviously self-serving that I don't even need to point it out. It also goes without saying that there's an agenda here, and it's not concerned with liberty and justice for all. Stern is quite rightly concerned about judges trying to work around Obergefell, and it's not just judges -- we already have too many examples of "conservative" (and what a travesty the conservative movement has become) legislators and state officials trying to chip away at marriage rights: in their minds, if no one else's, marriage equality is equivalent to abortion and women's reproductive rights. They'll keep chipping away at Obergefell, the same way they have at Roe v. Wade, and they'll find reactionary judges to support them.

Fasten your seatbelts -- it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Today's Must-Watch

Rachel Maddow on the history of "nativism"* and anti-immigrant sentiment in the US (fair warning: there's a section running several minutes of The Hairpiece spewing hate):

Adam L. Silverman has this post at Balloon Juice on the same subject.

It's a recurring nightmare, and it's not just America, or even any country established by immigrants. Look at what's going on in Europe right now, and the countries of Europe are largely homogeneous in ethnic make-up. Or were. Or think about the inter-tribal conflicts in Africa resulting from the creation of nation states with boundaries imposed by the colonial powers. It's all "Us vs. Them."

In part, I think it's due to our existence as social animals: by definition, membership in a group leads to distrust of those not in the group. Think of howler monkeys or gibbons vocalizing to establish their territories -- certainly one of the less harmful means of doing that. Chimps can get violent.

But we're so much more advanced than that. Aren't we?

Here We Go Again

You may have heard that Matt Bomer was cast as a transgender woman in the film Anything.

As you can imagine, the trans community -- or at least, a vocal segment of it -- is up in arms. On social media, of course, because that way you don't actually have to think about what you're saying. This is one of the least hostile tweets:

Jamie Clayton Verified account ‏@MsJamieClayton

Jamie Clayton Retweeted Trans Hollywood

I really hope you both choose to do some actual good for the trans community one day. @MRodOfficial @MattBomer

Trans Hollywood @transhollywood

Making movies with transgender protagonists is not, on its own, progress. https://medium.com/@emilymaxima/making-movies-with-transgender-protagonists-is-not-on-its-own-progress-70ffe27c3086#.rbi203eop …

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5:19 PM - 29 Aug 2016

652 retweets 803 likes

Bomer blocked her on Twitter, temporarily (apparently, he has now unblocked her). I would too -- this is the kind of condescending crap he doesn't need to put up with. Bomer, as a matter of fact, has been a strong supporter of trans rights, which makes Clayton's tweet even more offensive.

The idea that trans characters must be played by trans actors is, on its face, ludicrous. These are actors. They make their living pretending to be someone else and if they make us believe they are that other person, we consider them good actors. As for what considerations go into casting a role, I've been there: you're looking for the actor who is a fit for the character. You're not thinking of the actor's real-life sexual orientation or gender identity -- those are irrelevant; you're looking for the actor who is capable of moving into this character and making the character real. When I was in college I was routinely cast as old men; I was skinny, had an angular face that would take age makeup well, and I could move the way an old man moves. I was nineteen or twenty. Hollywood has the added burden of name recognition: they have to have something to draw the audience, and casting a high-profile actor is one of those somethings.

But back to the core complaint: visibility of trans people. The fact that the film is being made at all, or that other films with trans characters have been made and been successful, seems to elude this group. They're not registering on what this actually means. I realize that at this stage of the game, when the trans community is coming under attack from the "Christian" right (now that gays and lesbians are pretty much mainstream), they want real trans people to be more visible. But this set of circumstances shows us that we're dealing with a two-pronged issue: resistance and inertia.

When I was a kid -- and I knew from a very early age that I liked boys -- there's wasn't even such a thing as a "gay man." There were only "queers," who were shady, diseased, and dangerous, and universally despised. You never saw gay characters on TV and seldom in films, and when you did, they fit the stereotype: sick, pathetic, and just barely people. I was hungry enough for any representation of people like me that even that was a plus: at least we existed. It took fifty years, but that's changed a lot. And it was the same process: overcoming first inertia, and then overcoming resistance.

And I have to say, these representations of trans characters are a lot more sympathetic than the early representations of gay characters in film. I can't stress how important that is: it means that the inertia of the status quo -- the stereotypes -- is already a thing of the past. So in that regard, Trans Hollywood's tweet is flat out wrong.

So, however much you may hate it, changing people's perceptions of marginalized groups takes time. It means you have to overcome the inertia of the status quo and the resistance of those who need someone to hate to justify their own existence. Having a very public snit because it's not happening the way you think it should doesn't help -- in fact, it's as likely to damage your cause as anything else, because you've shown yourself to be immature and not ready for prime time.

When we have trans actors and actresses playing cis characters in major motion pictures, then we're there.

The Press Strikes Out (Updated)

If you've been following the coverage of the Trump circus -- there's no way to avoid it, and I can't really call it coverage of the election campaign -- you've probably been as disgusted as I have at the sheer inanity of the press. John Aravosis has a good take-down, starting with Matthew Chapman's commentaries, via Twitter:

Matthew Chapman, who writes over at Blue Nation Review, has an epic tweet-storm up this morning about the media and the election.

You can read through Chapman’s entire litany below — you need to start reading from the bottom, then work your way up.

In a nutshell, Chapman argues that the media is failing us this election.

He notes, rightly, that “they’ve done nothing to educate us on the candidates’ policy (especially Clinton’s). They are only barely covering the candidates’ records.”

And he’s not record [wrong]. Think about it. When is the last time you heard anything about what Hillary Clinton plans to do as president? You’ve heard a lot about the Trump campaign’s false claims that Hillary is ill and that she’s a “racist.” We’ve also heard a lot about the now-debunked Associated Press story about the Clinton Foundation.

It goes on, and it's right on the nose. Click through to read the tweets.

It's become fairly obvious that the nightly news is no longer concerned with journalism -- it's entertainment, when it's not outright propaganda.

Update: Anne Laurie has a commentary at Balloon Juice on the press reaction to Trump's Mexico vist, with tweets. I like this one:

 Martha Jackovics @BeachPeanuts
 

Trump banned the press from his Mexico trip. The MSM takeaway here will be "Why won't Hillary Clinton do press conferences?"

11:15 AM - 31 Aug 2016

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