Abortion

It seems we’re in for another round of Republicans trying to make abortion illegal:

Lawmakers around the country are passing bills restricting abortion that could one day factor into a challenge to Roe v. Wade under a Supreme Court whose balance of power is newly tilted toward conservatives.

In the latest example, lawmakers in Alabama on Tuesday passed a bill banning abortion in nearly all cases. The bill now goes to Republican Governor Kay Ivey, who will decide whether or not to sign the bill into law.

The move in Alabama comes just weeks after Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, signed into law a restrictive new ban on many abortions in that state.

The reason is obvious, they think there’s a chance the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade. Even if they don’t, it’s quite likely that they will vote to further restrict it:

Currently, the justices are considering whether to take up for next term provisions of three laws in two states that have been blocked by the lower courts. An Indiana provision, for example says that a state can prohibit abortions based solely on the race, sex or disability of the fetus. Another requires that fetal remains be buried or cremated. A third mandates that an individual seeking an abortion obtain an ultrasound at least 18 hours before the procedure.

An Alabama law — separate from the controversial measure passed this week — prohibits doctors from performing a particular procedure called “dilation and evacuation” that supporters of abortion rights say is the most commonly used method for performing pre-viability second trimester abortions.

Waiting in the wings is another case concerning a Louisiana law that requires doctors to have admitting privileges in nearby hospitals. These particular cases do not ask the justices to overrule Roe directly, but critics say their purpose is to chip away at a woman’s right to choose.

I guess it’s a good time to donate to get rid of Senator Collins.

Since the law in Alabama will ban abortion in almost all cases, it’s also a good time to see what that will lead to:

In 2013, 22-year old Beatriz Garcia found herself in the middle of the global abortion debate, a symbol and a lightning rod for what happens when a woman who lives in a country with a total abortion ban faces a life-threatening pregnancy. Beatriz was from El Salvador, which has one of the harshest and most notorious abortion bans in the world. She suffered from lupus nephritis, an autoimmune disease where the body’s immune system targets its own body tissues, and her first pregnancy almost killed her. Doctors warned Beatriz of the danger of having another baby, but when her son was eighteen months old, she found out she was pregnant again. Making matters worse, the fetus was anencephalic, meaning it did not have a brain. If it did not die in utero, it would die shortly after birth. Faced with the prospect of dying and leaving an infant son behind for a fetus with no chance of survival, Beatriz and her doctors agreed that the safest course of action was what they called an “interruption,” a euphemism for abortion. However, the hospital’s lawyer said that interrupting the pregnancy would violate Salvadorian law. An international firestorm ensued.

…

By the time the government reached a decision, fifty-five days after her initial petition, Beatriz was almost seven-months pregnant. The medical panel, which did not include a high-risk obstetrician, determined that Beatriz was not quite close enough to death for an abortion to be justified. The perverse catch was that the longer doctors waited to perform a cesarean, the more complex and risky the procedure would be and the greater her chance of permanent organ damage. At twenty-seven weeks, Beatriz started having contractions and doctors delivered the baby, which died five hours later.

…

Between 2001 and 2011, El Salvador investigated one hundred and twenty-nine women for abortion-related crimes, mostly “suspicious” miscarriages. Forty-nine women were arrested, and thirteen were convicted and sent to prison. That’s thirteen too many. Oberman discovers that it was doctors working in Salvadoran public hospitals who turned women into the police, while private doctors, who served wealthier women, did not report their clients. The result is that abortion is only functionally illegal for the patients who cannot pay for privacy.

This is what Republicans want. And if you think they won’t move on to contraception next, you’re stupid.

Yeah, he needs to be impeached

I’m still not sure the time is right to impeach President Trump, but this letter with (currently) 803 former federal prosecutors makes a good case:

Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.

The Mueller report describes several acts that satisfy all of the elements for an obstruction charge: conduct that obstructed or attempted to obstruct the truth-finding process, as to which the evidence of corrupt intent and connection to pending proceedings is overwhelming. These include:

· The President’s efforts to fire Mueller and to falsify evidence about that effort;

· The President’s efforts to limit the scope of Mueller’s investigation to exclude his conduct; and

· The President’s efforts to prevent witnesses from cooperating with investigators probing him and his campaign.

The fact the President is also refusing to abide by any and all subpoenas from the US House only makes me more likely to support it. As House Speaker Pelosi asks:

“Will the administration violate the Constitution of the United States and not abide by the request of Congress in its legitimate oversight responsibility?” she asked, adding, “Every day they are advertising their obstruction of justice by ignoring subpoenas and by just declaring that people shouldn’t come speak to Congress.”

She said Congress was on “a path that is producing results and gathering information and some of that information is that this administration wants to have a constitutional crisis because they do not respect the oath of office that they take.”

Mass extinctions

Hey, this makes me feel good:

Compiled by 145 expert authors from 50 countries over the past three years, with inputs from another 310 contributing authors, the Report assesses changes over the past five decades, providing a comprehensive picture of the relationship between economic development pathways and their impacts on nature. It also offers a range of possible scenarios for the coming decades.

Based on the systematic review of about 15,000 scientific and government sources, the Report also draws (for the first time ever at this scale) on indigenous and local knowledge, particularly addressing issues relevant to Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.

“Biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people are our common heritage and humanity’s most important life-supporting ‘safety net’. But our safety net is stretched almost to breaking point,” said Prof. Sandra Díaz (Argentina), who co-chaired the Assessment with Prof. Josef Settele (Germany) and Prof. Eduardo S. Brondízio (Brazil and USA). “The diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems, as well as many fundamental contributions we derive from nature, are declining fast, although we still have the means to ensure a sustainable future for people and the planet.”

The Report finds that around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history.

The average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20%, mostly since 1900. More than 40% of amphibian species, almost 33% of reefforming corals and more than a third of all marine mammals are threatened. The picture is less clear for insect species, but available evidence supports a tentative estimate of 10% being threatened. At least 680 vertebrate species had been driven to extinction since the 16th century and more than 9% of all domesticated breeds of mammals used for food and agriculture had become extinct by 2016, with at least 1,000 more breeds still threatened.

But there’s good news:

“The overwhelming evidence of the IPBES Global Assessment, from a wide range of different fields of knowledge, presents an ominous picture,” said IPBES Chair, Sir Robert Watson. “The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”

“The Report also tells us that it is not too late to make a difference, but only if we start now at every level from local to global,” he said. “Through ‘transformative change’, nature can still be conserved, restored and used sustainably – this is also key to meeting most other global goals. By transformative change, we mean a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.”

Ok, maybe not such good news. We have a similar warning about Global Warming and President Trump is trying to get everyone to ignore that, but I’m sure his administration will really push to save the world in this case. Yeah, the planet is fucked.

Happy May Day

Today is International Worker’s Day and it’s being supported in the traditional way in countries like France, Turkey, Venezuela, Spain, South Korea, and all over the world. The traditional way is to demonstrate for the rights of workers, which is why the US doesn’t celebrate it. The US only has the tame equivalent, Labor Day, and even that is viewed as a holiday for the end of summer.

Here’s the Wikipedia summary of what it’s about:

1 May was chosen to be International Workers’ Day to commemorate the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago. In that year beginning on 1 May, there was a general strike for the eight-hour workday. On 4 May, the police acted to disperse a public assembly in support of the strike when an unidentified person threw a bomb. The police responded by firing on the workers. The event lead to the death of eight and injury of sixty police officers as well as an unknown number of civilian killed or wounded. Hundreds of labour leaders and sympathizers were later rounded-up and four were executed by hanging, after a trial that was seen as a miscarriage of justice. The following day on 5 May in Milwaukee Wisconsin, the state militia fired on a crowd of strikers killing seven, including a schoolboy and a man feeding chickens in his yard.

Trump wants the US to sell more weapons in war zones

This is not surprising:

Trump said he would be revoking the United States’ status as a signatory of the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty, which regulates international trade in conventional weapons, from small arms to battle tanks, combat aircraft and warships. President Barack Obama signed the pact in 2013 but it has never been ratified by U.S. lawmakers.

…

Gun activists denounced the treaty when it was under negotiation as an infringement of civilian firearm ownership, despite the well-enshrined legal principle that says no treaty can override the Constitution or U.S. laws. The treaty is aimed at cracking down on illicit trading in small arms, thereby curbing violence in some of the most troubled corners of the world.

President Trump sees an opportunity for the US to sell more weapons. He doesn’t care if it leads to more violence in some war torn country. You can see this in his veto of the War Powers Act resolution in Yemen.

Trump encourages immigration and Asylum seekers

After reading this (which notes that, after a large fall as he took office, the number of Southwest border apprehensions is way up under Trump):

There was no crisis on the border until Donald Trump entered office and set about to create one.

I have really bought into the idea that the increasing number of people seeking asylum in the US isn’t despite Trump, it’s because of Trump.

You might be thinking about the terrible things that the Trump administration has done to people crossing the border, taking children away from their parents and putting them in cages should come to your mind, but think about what he says. He continually rages about how easy it is to get into the US and how once they’re here, how easy it is for them to get into our society. He also rages about how lawyers are right at the border working to free anyone taken in, abetted by those horrible judges who don’t let his administration do what he wants it to do.

And you don’t have to just listen to him. His administration is so bad at making rules and regulations, it’s continually in the news how another of his proposed rules was declared unconstitutional or how one of his orders was halted by a court. Here’s a new example:

The Trump administration Tuesday took another drastic step to discourage migrants from seeking asylum, issuing an order that could keep thousands of them in jail indefinitely while they wait for a resolution of their asylum request.

In an effort to deliver on President Trump’s promise to end “catch and release” at the border, Attorney General William Barr’s order directed immigration judges to no longer allow some migrants who have sought asylum from posting bail.

This is so obviously unconstitutional that Barr delayed its enforcement for 90 days, he knows it won’t hold up. It’s obviously a PR move by Trump to show his base that he’s trying something (and it’s not a coincidence that it’s cruel) but I would argue that it’s also a shout to people who might be seeking asylum that there’s nothing Trump can do to stop them.

If Trump had quietly taken time to figure out a strategy that would be legal, he could probably really cut immigration and the number of asylum seekers. But his ego doesn’t allow for a strategy that doesn’t get him attention and his incompetence makes it almost impossible to put together a rule that is both legal and workable.

Typical Trump

This story has lots of the elements that make President Trump so awful:

President Trump taunted California on Friday with an attention-grabbing threat to dump detained migrants into the state’s “sanctuary cities,” despite warnings from his advisors that such action would run afoul of the law.

Let’s count the ways this is typical Trump:

1. He wants to do something even though it’s illegal.
2. He says he will do something after his aides say it’s not under consideration since it’s so stupid.
3. He wants to do something to punish his opponents.
4. He thinks his opponents think something is awful because he doesn’t like it.
5. He lies about the stupidest things.
6. He thinks something stupid he did before is popular so he’s repeating it.

Really:

“California certainly is always saying, ‘Oh, we want more people,’ ” Trump told reporters during an unrelated White House event Friday. “And they want more people in their sanctuary cities. Well, we’ll give them more people. We can give them a lot. We can give them an unlimited supply. Let’s see if they’re so happy.

“They’re always saying they have open arms. Let’s see if they have open arms,” he continued.

Sanctuary cities are already taking and caring for immigrants. We don’t think this is horrible (although we think Trump’s treatment of them is).

He also claimed that smugglers had left Texas ranches along the border littered with bodies after abandoning the migrants with nothing more than a sandwich, a soda and vague directions to Houston. Although smugglers have been known to abandon people after getting them across the border, it was unclear what Trump was referring to.

Yup, just making stuff up.

After repeated suggestions by Miller, Homeland Security officials sought a formal legal opinion which said that the plan would be inappropriate and not in accordance with federal law.

HIs own administration says something is stupid and illegal, so he wants to do it more.

The Post reported that the proposal was intended to act as payback against President Trump’s political foes in areas where undocumented immigrants, who might otherwise be deported, could be offered a safe harbor. There are currently over 140 sanctuary jurisdictions — cities and counties — across the U.S., including at least 37 cities — San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Miami and Los Angeles, among others.

Another administration official called the suggestion a “non-story.”

(From here) It’s to get back at his political foes and the suggestion is silly … well, until he repeats it himself.

In 2017, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that would withhold federal grant money from sanctuary cities. That order was later deemed unconstitutional by a U.S. appeals court. The administration later sued the state of California for what the Department of Justice viewed as interfering with federal immigration laws by acting as a sanctuary city.

The administration is now looking to change a handful of key immigration-related policies, even as the president continues his threats to shut down the border. Specifically, the White House intends to change rules to allow the government to detain migrant families for longer than the current 20-day limit imposed by what’s known as the Flores agreement, according to a senior administration official.

He also wants to separate families seeking asylum again. I know he’s just playing to his base, but these are policies that a large majority of the population thinks are bad.

So, typical Trump. But this being Trump, it’s hard to know whether this is just a passing fancy or if he’ll really push for it. And he would push for it not despite the fact it’s stupid and illegal, but because it is.

Republicans don’t support protections for people with pre-existing conditions

In one of the least surprising moves, the Trump administration backs getting rid of Obamacare:

O’Connor, in a sweeping opinion, said that the individual mandate requiring people to have health insurance “can no longer be sustained as an exercise of Congress’ tax power” because Congress had eliminated the tax penalty for people who go without health insurance.

Accordingly, O’Connor said, “the individual mandate is unconstitutional” and the remaining provisions of the Affordable Care Act are also invalid.

In its letter to the appeals court, the Justice Department said Monday that it “is not urging that any portion of the district court’s judgment be reversed.” In other words, it agrees with O’Connor’s ruling.

Obamacare includes the Medicaid expansion and protections for people with pre-existing conditions. This would get rid of both. Trump’s old motto was ‘repeal and replace’, I guess it’s now just repeal and fuck the millions of people helped.

Presidential ambitions

Ok, let’s pretend I’m running for President. Here are two of my positions that I think are different than others:

I think we should have a learner’s permit for voting: if a person takes a civics type course and passes a basic test on political knowledge, then they can vote when they’re 16; if not they can vote at 18.

I’m for utopian capitalism. By this I mean I support:

• universal healthcare
• universal housing
• a universal basic income

This, of course, means I support increased taxes, perhaps in the form of a large carbon tax—there is this global warming threat after all.

Trump: let’s stick it to the working class

The Trump administration is going after the working class and poor hard. In overtime:

With few exceptions, only workers who earn less than $23,000 a year can currently earn overtime pay under federal law. Overtime wages are defined as 50 percent extra hourly pay for employees who work more than 40 hours in a week.

In 2014, the Obama administration tried to double the threshold to include workers earning up to $47,000, tying future changes to the cost of living. The idea was that a dramatic expansion was needed because the government hasn’t raised the salary limit to keep up with inflation. For example, the $8,060 salary limit set in 1975 was the equivalent of about $50,440 in 2014 — far above the current $23,000 threshold. That means that over the years, more and more Americans have been working extra hours without getting paid for them, which is exactly what federal labor laws meant to prevent.

But Obama’s decision to double the limit created quite an uproar. In brief, here’s what followed: Powerful businesses groups freaked out. Then they joined 21 Republican-controlled states to sue the administration before the rule went into effect in 2016. The rule was put on hold during the legal dispute. A federal judge in Texas invalidated it in 2017, arguing that the Labor Department didn’t have the authority to make such a drastic change.

Companies were relieved, and workers were furious.

And instead of appealing the Texas court’s ruling, Trump’s labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, said he would create a watered-down version of Obama’s rule. Now the agency is only lifting the salary limit from $23,000 to $35,000 and scrapping the cost-of-living increases; that means about 2.8 million of the 4 million workers who expected to get overtime benefits won’t get them.

In debt collection, student loans, credit reporting, private schools, and consumer protection in general:

• The number of public enforcement cases announced in 2018 declined by 80% from the Bureau’s peak productivity in 2015. In 2015, the CFPB announced 55 public law enforcement actions. In 2018, this number had declined to 11.
• The average amount of monetary relief per case awarded to victims of illegal consumer financial practices has declined by approximately 96%. Under Director Cordray, the CFPB awarded an average of $59.6 million in consumer restitution per case. Under Director Kraninger, average consumer relief has declined to $2.4 million per case.
• Law enforcement addressing illegal credit reporting practices has declined sharply under the Trump Administration’s leadership. The CFPB has announced only two cases enforcing the Fair Credit Reporting Act and settled both without providing a single dollar of restitution to victims of illegal practices.
• Law enforcement addressing illegal debt collection practices has declined sharply under the Trump Administration’s leadership. Under Acting Director Mulvaney and Director Kraninger, the CFPB has announced only one case enforcing the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The CFPB agreed to settle this case without ordering a single dollar of restitution to victims of illegal debt collection practices.
• Law enforcement policing the home mortgage market has declined sharply under the Trump Administration’s leadership. Under Director Cordray, the CFPB announced 61 mortgage lending cases that returned nearly $3 billion in restitution to consumers at a pace of over $10 million per week. Under Acting Director Mulvaney, consumer relief in mortgage lending declined by over 99% to less than $5,000 per week for the entire nation. Under Director Kraninger, the Bureau has not announced a single mortgage-related case, nor any restitution for consumers.

In the budget:

Trump proposes to reduce crop subsidies by $22 billion. You betcha. Student loan “reform” will save $200 billion and “streamlining” conservation programs will save $9 billion. Tort reform will save $31 billion. Sure it will. “Enhancing” the VA pension program will save $3 billion. Eliminating manufacturers’ discounts will cut Medicare prescription payments by $75 billion and reducing payments to providers will save another $400 billion. Eliminating cost-of-living increases and raising contribution levels will save $135 billion in federal pension costs. “Reforming” SNAP will save $220 billion. “Testing new approaches” to disability will save $48 billion. The post office gets cut by $98 billion. Making it harder to apply for EITC and the child tax credit will save $68 billion.

And he will still massively increase the deficit because he gave out the huge tax cuts to the rich and corporations. What an advocate for the common man.

Russia is increasingly authoritarian

Oh dear, will this cause problems if I ever visit Russia?

Russian lawmakers have passed legislation that imposes restrictions on online media, officially banning “fake news,” and criminalizes anyone who insults the state. The bills passed on Thursday introduce fines for publishing materials showing disrespect to the state, its symbols and government organs.

Repeat offenders of the proposed law against insulting state institutions could face a 15-day jail sentence.

Would it make it even worse if I say that Russia is increasingly corrupt?

Russia’s Ministry of Justice is proposing a change to make some corrupt acts exempt from punishment, if the corruption is found to be unavoidable. The proposed rule says officials and public figures could be exempt if “objective circumstances” made it impossible for them to comply with corruption laws.

Sometimes you’re forced to accept a bribe I guess.

News of the corruption proposal is making headlines in Russia as the group Transparency International releases its annual Corruption Perceptions Index, which gives Russia a score of 28 out of 100 (with 100 being least corrupt).

…

Bribery in Russia increased in 2018, the Council of Europe said last month, citing Russian media in reporting that “the majority of corruption cases in 2018 were initiated against the staff of the Ministry of Interior of the Russian Federation,” with more than 790 employees charged.

And I guess it happens a lot. And it starts at the top:

But many experts in Washington argued that a more accurate understanding of Putin’s wealth could help crack down on cross-border corruption and give the U.S. more leverage with a foreign adversary. Putin has long been secretive about his financial holdings, but experts said that he could be the wealthiest man in the world, and that much of his assets have been stolen from the Russian state and handed over to a network of allies and oligarchs.

I could also say that Russia is a second-rate power with nukes given that its economy is the twelfth largest economy In the world (smaller than three US states) with the 47th highest per capita GDP according to the IMF. But that would be piling on.

The president is going to say it anyway, so we need to help him.

This is quintessential Donald Trump (via here):

In the days ahead of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s first visit to the White House during the Trump presidency, in March 2017, NSC career staffers were told the president wanted to tell Merkel that other NATO countries owed the U.S. money. Could they prepare a report on the topic? Career NSC staffers got to work and returned with the basics: that NATO countries don’t owe the United States money because that’s not how the military alliance works; that every NATO country is supposed to spend at least 2 percent of its GDP on defense, and that while many had fallen short of that commitment, others met it or were on track to do so. In short, no one “owed” the United States anything.

NSC career staffers presented this information to a senior administration official in the West Wing. According to one of them, the official replied: “The president is going to say it anyway, so we need to help him. I mean, it’s not a legal document.”

The career staffers were flummoxed.

“It was the weird disregard for facts that made it offensive,” one of the then-staffers said. “They said, ‘Never mind all that, he’s going to do it anyway so give us stuff that helps the case.’ It was frightening, in a way.” The then-staffer said he refused to contribute further: “I didn’t want to lie.”

It’s also quintessential political correctness, you don’t say what’s true you say what the boss wants to hear. That’s what’s so bad about this, the only thing that matters to Trump is whether he likes it.

Religious discrimination

President Trump and conservatives are fond of yelling about religious discrimination (say Merry Christmas ya heathens) and hey here’s some (via here):

Maddonna, of Simpsonville, S.C., and her family had been told by Miracle Hill Ministries they were a great fit to help foster care children. Then the agency asked what church they attended. After learning the family is Catholic, Miracle Hill turned the Maddonnas away, saying they will only work with evangelical Protestants – not Catholics, Jews or people of any other faith. Miracle Hill, the largest foster care provider in South Carolina, is funded by the federal and state governments and must abide by laws that bar religion-based discrimination.

What say you President Trump?

Instead of denouncing this discriminatory practice, the Trump administration and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster doubled down, sanctioning the government-funded religious discrimination.

Ah, of course, it’s fine for certain religious groups to discriminate against others but try to make them sell cakes to gays and look out.

As Wonkette notes, this group doesn’t allow groups that constitute 65% of people in South Carolina to participate so this isn’t even a majority discriminating against a minority. This means that literally any group could be discriminated against if the Trump administration decides it’s ok–here it’s Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and us non-believers but next time maybe it will anyone who has been divorced or anyone who is left-handed. Yay.

More of Trump’s Political Correctness

The intelligence community has again said that President Trump is wrong:

On Tuesday, top intelligence officials described a different Iran than the president has, one that is not currently trying to make a nuclear bomb and appears to be complying with a 2015 nuclear agreement, even after Trump promised last year to withdraw from it.

On Syria, intelligence officials said the Islamic State would go on “to stoke violence” with thousands of fighters there and in Iraq, and with 12 networks around the world. They also said North Korea was not likely to permanently shed its nuclear weapons — contradicting a prediction Trump has made based on what he has called the “best” relationship the two nations have ever had.

Trump being Trump, he knows that this can’t be true:

In a series of posts the day after senior U.S. intelligence officials briefed Congress and directly contradicted some of Trump’s rosier estimations, the president reasserted his own conclusions and trumpeted his accomplishments on critical national security matters. He said the Islamic State’s control in parts of Iraq and Syria “will soon be destroyed” and there was a “decent chance of Denuclearization” in North Korea.

It’s a good time to remind everyone that when Trump says ‘fake news’ he means that he doesn’t like it, when he says something is wrong it’s probably right, and when his lips are moving or he’s sending out a tweet he’s lying. It’s all about his political correctness–it’s only right if it agrees with him.

Seven million more Americans uninsured because of Trump

As Kevin Drum notes, this isn’t sure yet but according to Gallup:

The U.S. adult uninsured rate stood at 13.7% in the fourth quarter of 2018, according to Americans’ reports of their own health insurance coverage, its highest level since the first quarter of 2014. While still below the 18% high point recorded before implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s individual health insurance mandate in 2014, today’s level is the highest in more than four years, and well above the low point of 10.9% reached in 2016. The 2.8-percentage-point increase since that low represents a net increase of about seven million adults without health insurance.

That’s a good job Donnie. Keep going and you can make even more Americans die.

An unsurprising result

I think most of us expected this:

In spring 2017, not long after President Trump took office, bullying rates among Virginia middle school students were 18 percent higher in places where voters had chosen Trump over Hillary Clinton, a study says.

There were no meaningful differences in bullying and teasing rates between Democratic and Republican localities before the 2016 election. But a statewide sample of more than 155,000 seventh- and eighth-grade students across Virginia’s 132 school districts suggested a correlation between voter preference and the rise in bullying after Trump was inaugurated.

…

They found that a 10-percentage-point increase in voters supporting Trump was associated with a 5 percent jump in middle school teasing because of race or ethnicity and an 8 percent increase in middle school bullying.

The paper is here. It includes this in their explanation for why they did the study:

Although rates of bullying have decreased since 2005 (Musu-Gillette et al., 2017), numerous media reports have claimed that racially and sexually related incidents are on the rise as a result of the 2016 presidential campaign (Bazelon, 2016). There have been more than 50 news reports of school bullying since the election in which students made statements linked to the newly elected president (Samaha, Hayes, & Ansari, 2017). The assumption of these reports is that the election of Donald Trump stimulated an increase in bullying behavior. The National Education Association (Blad, 2016), news analysts (Page, 2017), as well as experts on bullying (Juvonen, 2017) have characterized President Trump as engaging in bullying with his harsh and demeaning statements.

It is obviously difficult to demonstrate a causal link between statements by a public figure and schoolyard bullying. Nevertheless, there are incidents in which youth made threats and jeering statements that closely matched language used by President Trump (Thomsen, 2017). Such incidents are suggestive of the social learning model of aggression and classic studies showing how easily children model the aggressive behavior of adults (Bandura, 1971). However, skeptics have understandably questioned the evidential value of anecdotal observations (Kamenetz, 2016).

The President is a classic bully so it’s not surprising that some students might emulate him.

National emergency should mean impeachment

Democrats have said that they will not put funding for a border wall in the budget. President Trump’s response:

“We can call a national emergency because of the security of our country. Absolutely. We can do it,” Mr. Trump said. “I haven’t done it. I may do it. I may do it. But we can call a national emergency and do it very quickly. It’s another way of doing it. But, if we can do it through a negotiated process, we’re giving that a shot.”

If the president calls a national emergency when there is no emergency to get money for something the Congress has specifically failed to fund, I would think that would be grounds for impeachment even if it’s technically legal. Really, this would be the act of a dictator.

It’s also important to note that the president doesn’t care about the federal workers not being paid:

Mr. Trump expressed very little sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of federal employees going without a paycheck, saying many of them support his agenda.

“This really does have a higher purpose than next week’s pay,” Mr. Trump said. “And the people that won’t get next week’s pay or the following week’s pay, I think if you ever really looked at those people, I think they’d say Mr. President, keep going. This is far more important.”

Really, he doesn’t care:

Trump seemed to display little empathy for the 800,000 federal employees who have been furloughed or are working without being paid, saying that most workers support the shutdown and that the “safety net is going to be having a strong border because we’re going to be safe.” For workers who will not be able to pay their rent, Trump suggested that landlords would “work with” them and that he would encourage them to “be nice and easy” on their tenants.

I wonder how he thinks they’re going to buy food?

A poem and a picture

I haven’t done this for a while, so to start off the new year right here’s a poem:

The Earth does spin

And the soup will boil

The flute does grin

And the surf does toil

Yesterday’s been

But today we’ll spoil.

Also, here’s a picture from a major mountain in Malden:

Happy Old Year

The usual tradition is to come up with a New Year’s resolution that you will keep through the year. This tradition is paired with the tradition to abandon a resolution pretty quickly. I have decided on a better tradition: I will make a resolution on December 31 and keep it for the rest of the year, that’s much easier. So, I resolve to exercise each day for the rest of the year.

Oh and here’s a picture of a Pangolin to end your year right:

Trump makes America polluted again

It’s difficult to see how bad the Trump administration has been on the environment until you see a complete list like the NY Times has put together. It’s a list of 78 rules that have either been revoked or are in the process of being revoked. None of the rules by themselves are too terrible but put them together and you get:

All told, the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks could lead to at least 80,000 extra deaths per decade and cause respiratory problems for more than one million people, according to a separate analysis conducted by researchers from Harvard. That number, however, is likely to be “a major underestimate of the global public health impact,” said Francesca Dominici, a professor of biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health.

It might lead to an extra 8000 deaths a year, but it also might lead to higher corporate profits so who’s to say if it’s bad. Ok, I do.