We Resist: Day 328

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Wednesday, December 13, 2017
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One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

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Here are some things in the news today:

Earlier today by me: Doug Jones Won! and Republicans Attack Team Mueller as Corrupted by Bias.

Andy Towle at Towleroad: Trump: I Knew Roy Moore Would Lose. "Given his need to think he's right about everything, it's not surprising that Donald Trump tweeted on Wednesday morning that he knew Roy Moore would lose the special Senate election in Alabama, despite recording robocalls and campaigning for the vanquished child molester. Tweeted Trump: 'The reason I originally endorsed Luther Strange (and his numbers went up mightily), is that I said Roy Moore will not be able to win the General Election. I was right! Roy worked hard but the deck was stacked against him!'" Oh my god. Shut up, Trump. JUST SHUT UP.

Shane Savitsky at Axios: Omarosa Out at White House. "The White House stated this morning that Omarosa Manigault resigned as the Director of Communications for the Office of Public Liaison effective January 20, per the AP. Manigault originally rose to public prominence as a contestant on [Donald] Trump's former reality show The Apprentice."

The White House says she resigned, but:


[Content Note: Video may autoplay at link] The Editorial Board at USA Today: Will Trump's Lows Ever Hit Rock Bottom?
With his latest tweet, clearly implying that a United States senator would trade sexual favors for campaign cash, [Donald] Trump has shown he is not fit for office. Rock bottom is no impediment for a president who can always find room for a new low.

...And as is the case with all of Trump's digital provocations, the president's words were deliberate. He pours the gasoline of sexist language and lights the match gleefully knowing how it will burst into flame in a country reeling from the #MeToo moment.

A president who would all but call Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand a whore is not fit to clean the toilets in the Barack Obama Presidential Library or to shine the shoes of George W. Bush.

This isn't about the policy differences we have with all presidents or our disappointment in some of their decisions. Obama and Bush both failed in many ways. They broke promises and told untruths, but the basic decency of each man was never in doubt.

Donald Trump, the man, on the other hand, is uniquely awful. His sickening behavior is corrosive to the enterprise of a shared governance based on common values and the consent of the governed.
They go a little easy on Bush here, in my opinion: I definitely doubted Bush's basic decency more than once during his presidency, like when he lied us into a war that killed or displaced more than a million Iraqis or tasked his Justice Department with finding a legal defense of torture or outed a spy for political retribution. But the fact that Trump is deserving of condemnation in comparison even to the president who did those things, well, that's notable. And reverberatingly terrible.

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Amanda Michelle Gomez at ThinkProgress: Obamacare Enrollment Is Winding Down. How Successful Was Trump's Sabotage? "In fact, not only did the Trump administration scale back the advertisement budget, officials barely advertised open enrollment by word of mouth — which is free. There were a couple of tweets from agency accounts. But the president, the man with the largest bully pulpit, was largely mute on Obamacare open enrollment, unless he was badmouthing it. While the Trump administration took a backseat, other organizations — with significantly less money and manpower — looked to fill the void. Groups like Get Covered and the Indivisble ACA Signup Project formed. President Barack Obama, former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services officials Andy Slavitt and Lori Lodes, and even late night host Jimmy Kimmel plugged HealthCare.gov."

[CN: War on agency] Amy Littlefield at Rewire: Merger Could Make Catholic Health Giant 'Too Big to Fail,' Threatening Reproductive Health.
Two Catholic hospital giants are considering merging to create the largest hospital operator in the United States, granting unrivaled power to a system that would restrict access to reproductive health care.

The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that the merger of Ascension and Providence St. Joseph Health would create "an entity of unprecedented reach, with 191 hospitals in 27 states and annual revenue of $44.8 billion."

The article omits any mention of the threat to reproductive health care posed by the merger. But reproductive health advocates expressed grave concerns about the consolidation of power by an entity that restricts access to such care on religious grounds.

"These systems will have even greater financial and political clout and it will become more and more difficult for people to suggest that denying women reproductive health care is not appropriate," Lois Uttley, director of MergerWatch, told Rewire.

Catholic hospitals, which account for one in six acute-care beds nationwide, follow directives from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which restrict access to gender-affirming care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, and end-of-life options. As these health systems expand their clout, the Trump administration and the U.S. Supreme Court have moved to give them broad new leeway to restrict reproductive health access for patients and workers.
This is big news, and big trouble for pro-choice patients and any patient with a transgressive body. Fuck.

[CN: War on agency] Casey Quinlan at ThinkProgress: Parental Notification Laws Delay Minors' Access to Abortion Care, Study Finds. "Parental notification laws requiring parents to be involved in a minor's decision to get an abortion result in delayed abortion care and a decrease in abortions for minors, according to a new study [published in the Journal of Adolescent Health]. These laws do not increase certainty in a minor's decision to get an abortion or help improve parental support. ...In fact, after implementation of the parental notification requirement, the proportion of abortions that happened in the second trimester went from 23 percent to 26 percent among minors."


[CN: White supremacy] Akilah Johnson at the Boston Globe: Boston. Racism. Image. Reality. "A national survey commissioned by the Globe this fall found that among eight major cities, black people ranked Boston as least welcoming to people of color. More than half — 54 percent — rated Boston as unwelcoming. ...Here in Boston, a city known as a liberal bastion, we have deluded ourselves into believing we've made more progress than we have. ...The median net worth of non-immigrant African-American households in the Boston area is just $8, the lowest in a five-city study of wealth disparities. It's hard to ignore the dramatic contrast to the $247,500 net worth for white households in the Boston area."

[CN: Climate change; hurricane] Damian Carrington at the Guardian: Global Warming Made Hurricane Harvey Deadly Rains Three Times More Likely, Research Reveals. "Hurricane Harvey's unprecedented deluge, which caused catastrophic flooding in Houston in August, was made three times more likely by climate change, new research has found. Such a downpour was a very rare event, scientists said, but global warming meant it was 15% more intense. The storm left 80 people dead and 800,000 in need of assistance. The scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative usually publish their assessments of the role of climate change in extreme weather events around the world as soon as possible. However, in this case they waited for the work to be confirmed by peer review because of the current US government's opposition to strong action on climate change."

[CN: Police brutality] Alfonso Serrano at Colorlines: Police Shootings Are a Bigger Problem Than Previously Thought. "The report [by Vice], 'Shot By Cops and Forgotten,' looked at the 50 largest police departments based on full-time employees, which covered about 148,000 staffers who serve 54 million Americans. ...The report also found that the number of unarmed people shot by police is undercounted, and that American police shoot people at more than twice the rate calculated in previous analyses."

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?
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