News Worth Knowing (which you may have mssed) #4

“News Worth Knowing (which you may have missed)” is one of the regular features of our weekly 1-hour lunchtime vigil downtown. This one involves me taking about 5-7 minutes reporting on a few things which are outside the main headlines but which I think are still worth some attention. I’ve taken to posting those things here for whatever additional attention they get. So here is edition #4, a bit longer than usual but still, I hope, worth the read. Comments are always welcome.

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Being arch about “The Arch”

I got a notice about the National Park Service taking public comments on the DC “Arch” desired by The Orange Overlord. So I thought I’d get in on the fun and submit a comment. This was it:

I write in opposition to the proposed “Triumphal Arch at Memorial Circle.”

Contrary to the description, this proposed arch celebrates not our founding principles but rather a parody of them. It is “monumental” for the sake of being monumental, its size substituting grandeur for grace, expansiveness for elegance.

It is, to put it simply, big just for the sake of being big, not for any artistic or even memorializing purpose; it’s an expression not of national pride but of national pridefulness.

Which is why it seems oddly appropriate that the proposal is “drawing on the historic Roman precedent of erecting freestanding arches,” that is, reaching back to a time of emperors and empires, of “bread and circuses” and gladiatorial contests to find inspiration for architecture as well as for fights on the White House lawn.

It is particularly improper for this latest outgrowth of Donald Trump’s desperate desire to be remembered as someone of oversized importance to be intended as an entrance to Arlington National Cemetery, where if it has any effect at all it will be to disrupt and distract from the solemn air, the contemplative atmosphere, of the site.

If it is to be built anywhere, let it span some side avenue somewhere, where it can, in time, come to be seen like the monuments and arches peppering London, as a pretty but ultimately quaint and otherwise unimportant reminder of times when some leader’s sense of self-importance outran their self-awareness.

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This is a feel-good one

Todd Blanch (not a typo; the thought of him makes me go pale) said in April that the Epstein files “should not be a part of anything going forward.” In other words, “Get over it.”

Well, one of Jeffy’s estates was a place called Zorro Ranch in New Mexico - and the people of New Mexico are apparently not willing to get over it.

A small bipartisan commission headed by state Rep. Andrea Romero is going after not just abusers but those who enabled them.

The commission, which has a $2 million budget, has now issued 14 subpoenas to targets ranging from Epstein’s estate through local law enforcement and state officials, Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase, up to the FBI and the DOI (Department of Injustice).

Meanwhile, state authorities have reopened a criminal investigation that was closed in 2019 at the request of the DOI and searched the ranch in March.

No big media splash, no self-promoting puffery, just a state commission doing the work the minions of TOO were too corrupted, cowardly, or contemptuous of others’ pain to undertake.

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Taking action

The 2027 National Defense Authorization Act - NDAA - is coming to the Senate floor.

One provision, section 224, would set about “synchronizing cooperative efforts” in military research and integration between the US and Israel, essentially aiming to intertwine the two militaries, which would decrease any leverage the US has over Israel (not that we’re using what we have) while increasing leverage Israel has over the US by making the US at least partly reliant on Israeli military technology.

There will be moves to strip section 224 - which may have been renumbered as section 219 in later versions - from the bill.

I’m confident that in my home state of New Jersey we can count on Senator Kim and probably Senator Booker to support those moves. (”Probably” because Booker’s refusal to oppose arms to Israel, acceptance of AIPAC money, and persistent referral to the slaughter and devastation of Gaza in the passive voice as if it is a natural disaster with no human agent - that is, the IDF - involved give me reason to doubt.)

However, they made need some pushing to commit to - in the event those moves fail - opposing the NDAA in full - which, in fact, they should anyway.

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Home Sweet Homeless

In the first weeks of The Orange Overlord take two, on February 7, 2025, HUD Sec Scott Turner said the agency would stop enforcing the 2016 Equal Access Rule, which requires services funded by HUD to have equal access to programs for individuals based on their gender identity.

Now he’s announced a proposed formal federal rule change, formalizing and institutionalizing the anti-trans bigotry they’ve been practicing so far.

The rule would apply to all HUD programs and would allow providers of services, including housing and shelters, to demand “assurances or evidence” to confirm the stated sex of the person matched their birth certificate with no regard to their gender.

Public comments can be submitted through June 29 at:

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/04/28/2026-08244/equal-access-to-housing-in-hud-programs-revisions

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And there is always more to do

TOO and the noxious goo of acolytes, toadies, and grifters that make up his maleficent maladministration have decided to go all in on their hatred of trans people.

They have proposed a new federal rule regarding the distribution of all discretionary federal funds and grants across all agencies - “discretionary” meaning anything not set by law.

Centrally, it requires that before a grant recipient can get any money they have to go through a “pre-issuance review” done by a political appointee who is explicitly instructed to look for any sign of a “denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans” or support for “the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic,” with “sex” and gender being declared as identical - which they decidedly are not.

Note well: They are not examining the grant in question, they are examining the entire organization requesting it.

So any institution that acknowledges in any way, even indirectly, that transgender people, or nonbinary people, or gender-diverse people exist - maybe it has a DEI policy, maybe healthcare coverage includes gender care, maybe it allows trans restroom access or sports participation, anything at all - could be deemed to “deny the sex binary” and so denied funding.

Hell, it’s easy to imagine a university looking for a grant for a new gymnasium being rejected on the grounds of promoting “gender ideology” because its medical school has a class on human sexuality that includes a section on gender being on a spectrum - because remember, it’s the whole organization, not the grant request, that’s on trial.

What they’re proposing, in short, is that federal funding be available only to those people and institutions who are prepared to actively behave as if trans folks literally do not exist. Don’t mention them, even by suggestion, even indirectly, even from areas unrelated to the funding. Erase them entirely from archives, historical records, even, it would appear, from casual language or offhand reference - or risk losing all federal funding.

Oh, and be sure to act fact, because the same proposal includes means to cancel any existing grants.

This is more than draconian, more than diabolical. It is outright evil.

Comments can be submitted through July 13 at

https://www.regulations.gov/document/OMB-2026-0034-0001

and be assured I’ll bug you about this every week until then.

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A revealing footnote to that

During a press event at the Oval Office on Thursday, in the middle of a long, rambling response to a question about the voter-suppression SAVE Act, TOO went off about “mutilization of your children for transgender purposes” (No, you’re not wrong; there is no such word as “mutilization.”) and that there are six states where “they take your child from you do what they want to do,” which is “transgender mutilization.”

The next question was not a follow-up, nothing about “which six states.” Rather, it was another reporter asking about US intelligence staffing.

And so the normalization of this man’s descent into paranoid delusion continues apace while another lie about trans folks goes unchallenged.

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The White House lawn isn’t the only place where there are fights

Finally some encouraging news, as the courts show there’s still fight in the legal system, especially at the district court level.

Last July, ICE instituted an unprecedented policy of mandatory detention without bond of anyone they said was undocumented. Formerly, that had only been applied to those caught crossing the border; now it was to be applied to everyone, no matter where in the US they were found or how long they have lived here.

As a result, thousands of immigrants filed suit to be released based on improper detention, that ICE was misapplying the law - which it was - and the vast majority of them won.

That is, until February 6, when the extreme right-wing 5th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed that overwhelming rejection of ICE’s new policy and upheld the mandatory detention scheme.

So what happened? Judges in the 5th Circuit switched from addressing claims of not following the law to addressing claims of a denial of due process, and continued setting people free.

According to data gathered by Politico, since the February ruling, District judges in the circuit have ordered bond hearings or release of detainees more than 1,200 times on due process grounds - that’s nearly 60% of all immigration detention rulings on all bases in the 5th Circuit since Feb. 6.

What’s more, overall, across all circuit courts and again according to Politico, since the new policy went into effect last July, there have been rulings in at least 15,100 immigration cases - and the Whitest House has lost at least 13,300 of them, a loss rate of 88%.

Finally, while the 8th Circuit agreed with the 5th, the circuit courts of the 2nd, 4th, and 6th Circuits have all reached the opposite conclusion, which means it will at some point be at SCOTUS. Which is potentially bad news but you have to wonder if there’s a point where when decisions of the district courts are so overwhelmingly on one side and are supported by a majority of the circuit courts that have ruled on the matter that even this court not dismiss them.

Keep hope alive. And keep on keepin’ on.

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You have the best week you possibly can and we’ll see you then.

Remember, comments and reactions are always welcome.

 

News Worth Knowing (which you may have missed) #3

For something over a year, on every Tuesday we’ve had a one-hour lunchtime vigil downtown. Over that time we’ve developed some you could call them traditions, one of which has become me taking about 5-7 minutes on “News Worth Knowing (Which You May Have Missed),” reporting on three or four things outside the main headlines, which I’ve taken to posting here. So here is News Worth Knowing (Which You May Have Missed) #3. Comments are always welcome.

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Meaningful actions

Just not meaningful in the way you might have thought, but full of meaning nonetheless.

Here’s an incident which seems to summarize a lot of what’s happening in and around Israel. It happened on April 28, but I learned of it on June 2, which is why it’s here.

Lebanon and Israel announced a ceasefire on April 16. Twelve days later, on April 28, Israel declared new yellow line, pushing its military control further north, further into Lebanon.

As a result, Ain Arab, a small farming village nestled in the plains near the southern border, was now inside that line and IDF soldiers went door to door giving the people of the village hours to leave, telling them, according to one villager, “You either leave right now or you die.”

Over 1.2 million people have been displaced in Lebanon since March 2, many of who have no idea if or when they will be able to return to their homes.

Israel is engaged in active ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon, with significant indications it intends an on-going, indefinite, occupation of the area and oh my haven’t we been here before.

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Multifront resistance

Israel could not conduct its repeated egregious actions Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank, and - as we keep forgetting - even Syria without US arms and aid. That military aid should stop, and legislative attempts to that end have been made, but they haven’t gotten far, so far, but there is another front to this: direct nonviolent civil disobedience protests against weapons shipments.

There have been such protests at ports in France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, and last year in Oakland, California.

I raise this because the latest port action occurred on May 22, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, at the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal. The port is routinely used by the major shipper Maersk and the Israeli-owned company Zim to transport tons of weapons and spare parts to Israel.

The protesters called on the International Longshoreman’s Association to refuse to load Zim-owned ships destined for Israel. They succeeded in blocking the port for over three hours; ten people were arrested for the civil disobedience.

The action didn’t stop the shipments - which was not really a surprise - but hopefully it can serve as one more link in a growing chain of solidarity.

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Another part of being an informed voter

Judd Legum and the folks at Popular Information have figured out that two supposedly progressive PACs are actually linked to House GOPpers.

One, California Blue, appears to have been active in a single California Congressional district.

The other, Real Change, which describes itself as “dedicated to electing grassroots candidates who are committed to progressive values,” was active in several Congressional district primaries. One was the 7th CD in New Jersey, where they attacked the Democratic frontrunner, Rebecca Bennett, while promoting her opponents.

They sent out mailers accusing Bennett of “STANDING WITH ICE” and “CASHING IN ON TRUMP’S TERROR,” employed AI images of her in a MAGA hat, and used footage that was previously used by the Congressional Leadership Fund - which is the super PAC of House Republicans.

(The effort failed; Bennett won the primary by a comfortable margin.)

This is an update of an old right-wing tactic dating back to at least 1972, where it was the root of Watergate. GOPpers thought George McGovern was the weakest Democrat among those striving for the party’s presidential nomination, so they set out to build him up while undermining the others.

So just remember if you see any ad claiming to be from “Real Change PAC,” it’s a false flag and don’t believe it.

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If they’d only do it the white - I mean right - way

For over 50 years, foreign nationals with legal status in the US - individuals married to US citizens, holders of work or student visas, refugees, political asylum seekers, and others - have been able to apply for and complete the process of obtaining permanent legal residence, that is, a green card, from within the US.

On May 22, Citizenship and Immigration Services said those who want to apply for green card have to return to their native country and apply from there.

The agency didn’t say when the change would come into effect or if individuals would be required to remain outside the US throughout the entire process or whether the policy impacts those whose green card applications are already underway.

But the central fact here is once those folks leave the US to apply, there’s no reason to think they would be let back in again.

The changes come on top of steps already taken (and challenged) to restrict and limit entry for people from a total of 39 African, Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern countries - note what they all have in common - who have either been outright denied entry or barred from final decisions on their asylum, work permit, green card, and citizenship applications.

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And speaking of that

Pete Hogsbreath has announced the number of religions to be recognized by the US military has been cut from over 200 to just 31, with such as desists, humanists, wiccans, Unitarians, and atheists vanishing into “Other” or “None.”

Of the 31 categories remaining, 21 - maybe 22 - are sects of Xianity.

And so we continue toward being a white Xian fundamentalist ethno-state.

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So what? Climate change is a hoax, anyway

The National Science Foundation is planning to remove hundreds of ocean monitoring instruments from four sites in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

These instruments are part of observational network, gathering data on a number of factors affecting the health of the oceans and marine life - but most particularly for studying climate change and monitoring effects on the oceans, including on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, an ocean system that some warn is at risk of collapse.

This follows firing of entire National Science Board, which is the advisory committee to the NSF.

The potential (partial) saving grace is here is that The Orange Overlord tried cut funding for program by 80% in both 2025 and 2026 and failed both times. Hopefully that losing string will continue.

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You have the best week you possibly can and we’ll see you then.

Remember, comments and reactions are always welcome.

News Worth Knowing (which you may have missed) #2

Every Tuesday, during a one-hour lunchtime vigil downtown, I'm given about 5-7 minutes to offer some . “News Worth Knowing (which you may have hissed),” reporting on a few things outside the main headlines. I decided to post them here, particularly because the very nature of it being weekly means it doesn’t have to be breaking, up-to-the-moment news, and so is much more in the nature of this thing here. All they have to be is just, hopefully, worth knowing. So here is News Worth Knowing (which you may have missed) #2. Comments are always welcome.

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Stephen Miller’s version of “the great replacement theory.”

Last October, the administration of The Orange Overlord (TOO) said the US would admit just 7,500 refugees in all of 2026, a 94% cut from the previous year’s level of 125,000. Most of the few available slots were to be taken up by Afrikaners supposedly fleeing a non-existent “white genocide” in South Africa.

On May 18, TOO’s underlings said the total would be raised to 17,500 - with all the additional 10,000 slots allocated to white South Africans.

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Some dreams should die - immediately.

On May 18, Meidas Touch News, quoting a New York Times report, said that above and beyond the murderous attacks on boats off Venezuela, the death toll for which is now above 200, the US already has troops engaged in joint operations in Ecuador, Guatemala has now made a secret agreement to allow similar joint operations there, and Honduras is expected to follow.

The excuse is always “drug trafficking cartels,” but the real point certainly appears to be normalizing the presence of American troops across Latin America with a goal of forcing Mexico to accept a large-scale US military presence there. - all part of an overall dream of direct US military dominance of the whole of the Western Hemisphere. Kind of like the Monroe Doctrine on steroids without bothering with any claims about “defending” anyone.

Oh, and don’t worry, they’ve already war-gamed military attack plans to respond to what reports call “the potential collapse of Cuba’s totalitarian government as early as this summer.”

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PEPFAR is on life support.

Since its start in 2003 under George Bush, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is estimated to have saved tens of millions of lives by funding HIV prevention and treatment in poor countries.

On May 5, the TOO gang announced a restructuring of the CDC’s role in distributing funding and overseeing PEPFAR-related programs.

Instead of the current interactive programs, countries will receive funding under bilateral five-year agreements which will require some reciprocal benefit to the US - meaning US corporations - such as access to assets like mineral resources.

In other words, the program has gone from humanitarian assistance to a transactional arrangement based around “Nice country you got there; it’d be a shame if lots of people died unnecessarily.”

The result is to fracture the on-going coordination between the CDC and local health agencies, the very thing that made the program so successful.

Experts on global health say this is effectively the end of PEPFAR.

But then again, what do we care, they’re just LGB people from shit-hole countries and we have our own LGBTQ+ people to screw over.

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Speaking of which…

Colorado, Maine, Missouri, and Washington have a total of six anti-trans measures on their fall ballot. Mores are in the works in Arizona, Nebraska, and Nevada.

The Nevada example is noteworthy because the governor, one Joe Lombardo, openly admitted his administration is offering a proposed constitutional amendment to ban “Men in Women’s Sports” specifically because, quoting him “That’s going to get people out to vote.”

The thing is, the public still largely endorses equal treatment trans folks but that same public for several years has been under a relentless and coordinated political assault from a concoction of reactionary flakes, gender bigots, and most importantly right-wing operatives looking to maintain and expand their power by deliberately generating and maintaining a social panic - one which, like most social panics, revolves around some emotional issue, usually involving some combination of sex and children and one which, precisely because it is being promoted and maintained as part of a deliberate campaign, hasn’t burned itself out in a few years the way most do.

The result has been that public opinion has shifted toward the reactionaries on a carefully chosen narrow set of emotion-driven issues, primarily trans girls being playing on girls’ school sports teams, bathrooms (of course), and pediatric healthcare, particularly the eye-bulging, spittle-flecked rants about non-existent “genital mutilation of children.”

And by the way, this is an assault that has gone effectively unopposed by whole swaths of the supposedly progressive left, some of who have actively embraced parts of it and thank you Gavin Newsom, Seth Moulton, and others for making the whole thing harder.

Measures like those coming in the fall have been called “ballot candy,” done not because of any benefit to the public or even in response to public interest - when you ask people what their concerns are, trans issues always rank very low on that list - but rather to, as Gov. Lombardo acknowledged, drive right-wing turnout by preying on the very fears and fantasies that they have been creating.

But here I have to inject a bit of hope for the future. The effect of a good number of these proposals is to stick into a state constitution things that are already illegal under state law. So their immediate impact on the lives of trans people is effectively zero. Then why do it? Specifically and avowedly to make it harder to undo.

The gender thugs know things are changing. Ten years ago, there was open talk of a “revolution” in our understanding of gender and today demographic analyses of the US population show that overall, the younger the age group, the greater the support for trans and nonbinary people. The reactionaries know they are losing and these measures are part of their effort to be, in William Buckley’s famous description of conservatives, “standing athwart history, shouting ‘Stop!’”

Because we’re seen this before. We’ve seen it before. In 2003, when support for same-sex marriage was rising and headed for a majority, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts struck down that state’s ban on same-sex marriage as violating the state constitution.

In the desperate immediate reaction to hold off that prospect, between 2004 and 2008 24 states added bans on same-sex marriage to their state constitutions specifically to hold off the rising tide.

It was of course the Obergefell decision in 2015 that undid all those measures. I can’t imagine that this Supreme Court will do anything like that, but still, history will not be denied and I can and do look forward to a time when the train of history runs over the gender bigots, their allies, and their useful idiot followers.

I may not live to see it - but then again, I thought (and said) the same thing about same-sex marriage.

Footnote: A couple of places where I’ve addressed some aspect of social panics:
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2009/01/think-of-children.html
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2022/04/052-erickson-report-for-april-21-to-may.html (from roughly 17:30 to 23:10 in the video)
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2022/10/064-erickson-report-for-october-27-to_30.html

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Ending on an up note.

Finally for this time out, we have some good news on the death penalty.

For the second time in two weeks, the Supreme Court, by a vote of 5-4. tossed out a death sentence.

In this case, coming out of Mississippi, the prosecution had removed four of the five Black jurors in the selection panel, claiming the removals were for “race-neutral” reasons. That is, it had nothing to do with them being Black oh no of course not perish the thought.

SCOTUS found the defense attorney wasn’t given opportunity to properly challenge the prosecution’s claims of “race-neutral” reasons, declaring that the District Court got the law right and the Mississippi state Supreme Court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals both got it wrong.

Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor were joined by Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts in the majority.

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You have the best week you possibly can and we’ll see you then.

News Worth Knowing (which you may have missed) #1

For something over a year now, I think about 14 months, a group of us have had a one-hour lunchtime vigil downtown every Tuesday, with the numbers usually running 25-30. It started focused on a demand that our Congress critter hold a town hall, but over time has broadened to encompass the whole gamut of reactionary suckiness with which we are afflicted.

We’ve also developed some for lack of a better term traditions, with one recently-emergent one being me taking about 5-7 minutes on “News Worth Knowing (Which You May Have Missed),” going on about three or four things outside the main headlines.

It occurred to me that since I have to prepare for that anyway, I might as well post them here, particularly because the very nature of it being weekly means they doesn’t have to be breathless, breaking, up-to-the-moment news. Just hopefully worth knowing.

So herewith the first of what I sincerely hope will be a weekly Tuesday evening feature called, again, “News Worth Knowing (Which You May Have Missed)” starting with two Updates which I know seems weird but trust me, it made sense at the time.

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Update #1

 I mentioned last week that Hawai’i had passed legislation redefining what a corporation is in a way that makes it harder to contribute to political campaigns. I added that Gov. Josh Green had until June 30 to either sign or reject the bill.

The Update is that it turns out I was wrong: He’d already signed it on May 14.

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Update #2

Our other update relates to the DOI (Department of Injustice) suing 31 states to force them to release confidential voter information. Two more of those cases, those in Maine and Wisconsin, came to a decision this week, bringing the total to eight - and the DOI has lost every one of them.

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This you may well not have missed but I’m doing it anyway because it made me white with fury.

On May 22, a post on the platform formerly known as Twitter said that the DOI is “quietly” removing from its website news accounts related to January 6, in what as mainstream an outfit as AP described as “the latest step by the Trump administration to dramatically rewrite the history of the assault on the Capitol.”

In response, the DOI thugs not only acknowledged doing it, they celebrated doing it. “There’s nothing quiet about it,” they crowed.

They called the accounts documenting the actual criminal charges, the actual convictions and guilty pleas at court, and the actual sentences given to those violent, rioting, insurrectionist traitors, they labeled those actual facts, as “partisan propaganda” and they were positively puffed with pride about erasing the history.

Among the records stripped were those regarding the convictions of members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers for seditious conspiracy, whose convictions the DOI last month asked a federal appeals court to vacate.

On May 21, they got their wish. The very next day, May 22, the DOI moved to have the cases dismissed entirely.

Related to all this is the fact that the DOI has subpoenaed The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets that have been critical of the The Orange Overlord (aka TOO) for records of their journalists’ activities, contacts, and more under the hoary excuse of investigating “leaks.”

I’ve taken to calling it the Department of Injustice, but it seems I should be calling it the Ministry of Truth. Or Minitru for short.

(And if by some chance you don’t get the reference, look it up! I’ll give you a hint: It comes from the same source as the quote “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past,” which appears to be the unspoken motto of Minitru.)

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Some bad news and some good news on the death penalty.

In 2023, in the case of one Edward Lee Busby, who was convicted of murder, the state of Texas agreed he was intellectually disabled to the point that he was ineligible to be executed and so entered a motion that his sentence should be commuted to life.

Without going into the complications of the whole case, which are considerable, after that motion failed Texas flipped sides and said in effect “what the hey, snuff him” - that is, arguing the man they said shouldn’t be executed actually should be.

Ultimately, by the unsurprising vote of 6-3 the Supreme Court vacated a stay of his execution, and Texas killed him on May 14.

On the other hand, after 29 years in jail for a murder he has persistently sworn he did not commit, a time that included nine execution dates, three last meals, and a Supreme Court ruling in his favor over a year ago, Richard Glossip is out of an Oklahoma prison.

For now.

In February 2025, SCOTUS vacated Glossip’s conviction, finding that the sole witness against him lied on the stand - and what’s more, prosecutors knew he lied but kept their mouths shut.

But instead of releasing him, the state of Oklahoma has announced it intends to try him yet again and fought to keep him in prison. It wasn’t until May 14, 15 months after his conviction was vacated, when a county court finally granted him bond.

So Glossip is out he’s but still facing new trial, one apparently to be based on same now-discredited evidence from the same now-discredited witness.

It is sadly true that under our criminal justice system - which really should be called our prosecutorial procedure system - that while the state is often willing to admit it did it wrong, that it got some procedural technicality wrong, it will often, if you will, fight to the death the avoid admitting it got it wrong, that it sent an innocent person to the gallows.

The death penalty, that remnant of barbarism, still hangs over us.

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Now to make sure you’re really depressed.

On May 19, the House passed the “Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act,” allowing TOO to strip federal funding from any school that “teaches or advances concepts” related to transgender people, looking to codify the bigoted, pseudoscientific fantasies of his Executive Order definitions of sex and gender into federal law.

The notion of “concepts” and what makes for “advancing” them are so vaguely defined that any discussion, material, or school library book that even mentions the existence of transgender people could be banned; even a transgender teacher could risk punishment for using their own name or pronouns.

Another provision requires public schools to forcibly out transgender (or even possibly transgender) students to their parents with no exceptions for potentially hostile home environments.

You’ve heard of state-level “Don’t Say Gay” laws; this is like a federal-level “Don’t Say Trans” law.

The silver lining here is that this now heads to the Senate, where the 60 vote filibuster barrier is one that no standalone anti-trans bill has cleared this entire Congress and this one will likely meet the same fate.

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Finally, something to keep on your radar.

During TOO’s first months in office, the Supreme Court’s GOP-approved majority used the notorious shadow docket and an underlying notion of the “Unitary Executive” to allow him to fire commissioners on various boards and commissions that are technically part of the Executive Branch, doing this despite and in the face of a 90-year old precedent from a unanimous Supreme Court decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which found that Congress had the Constitutional authority to create independent agencies whose commissioners could only be fired for cause.

One of the suits arising from those firings is that of the TOO-fired FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. That case had oral arguments in December and a decision is expected in the next few weeks - a decision in which it is predicted that the Scurrilous Six, the appropriately-acronymed SS, making up the majority will simply dump that 90-year old precedent in the trash, effectively (technically not legally, but effectively) giving TOO personal control over the makeup of the entire federal-level regulatory system by making those in charge of running and administering it subject to this personal whims and will.

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I'll end with my old closing from my TV days:

You have the best week you possibly can't and we'll see you then.