By David Futrelle
I find a lot of interesting and funny stuff on Twitter every day so I thought I’d try rounding some of that up for you all on a regular, perhaps even daily basis. Today, it’s all (or mostly) about the FAILURE of the Republican’s attempts to destroy healthcare. A good day (so far, but it’s not even noon yet where I live)!
Sorry, international readers, but today’s tweet collection is pretty US-centric. But there is a tweet about New Zealand if you scroll down enough.
Sen. McConnell takes a deep breath and begins inflating his neck pouch in a show of anger at the failure of #SkinnyRepeal. pic.twitter.com/MTpV9x7iG1
— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) July 28, 2017
LOL OWNED pic.twitter.com/qi2evWAdxH
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) July 28, 2017
— nick (@nick_pants) July 28, 2017
Take joy in the sadness of these bozos. pic.twitter.com/njbz8MNmIx
— TakedownMRAs (@TakedownMRAs) July 28, 2017
In the end, the president's closing message – that his attorney general is terrible – couldn't put the bill over the top
— Alex Burns (@alexanderburns) July 28, 2017
https://twitter.com/jesseberney/status/890818981568937984
Can't be said enough. The people who actually killed this bill were the activists and ordinary Americans who mobilized against it. https://t.co/l0nA1jSeEm
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) July 28, 2017
https://twitter.com/feministabulous/status/890923749637328896
Literally, we were one vote away from medical catastrophe. Do. Not. Rest.
— Phillip Atiba Goff (@DrPhilGoff) July 28, 2017
https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/890894713448017921
https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/890933126599409666
https://twitter.com/darth/status/890952827543011328
The three Repubs to break with McConnell and kill the bill were Collins, Murkowski and McCain.
If your Senator(s) voted no, please call and thank them! If they voted yes, call and give them hell! You can get the numbers of your Senators (and more info) at 5Calls.org Moveon.org, or on the Senate website or by calling the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121.
And in other news:
"Men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them." https://t.co/moOsk1tqI0
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) July 28, 2017
https://twitter.com/AlongsideWild/status/890637074927243264
https://twitter.com/braddybb/status/890633298581504000
Why you never wear GREEN on TV🤗 pic.twitter.com/IsC8TuE3Ei
— Jesse McLaren (@McJesse) July 28, 2017
OT, but I gave some serious side-eye to the notion that CHS is a feminist scholar…
https://www-bizjournals-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2017/07/27/deloitte-drops-workplace-diversity-groups-for.amp.html
For what it’s worth, I call the bedroom I share with Beloved “our room,” not because I need to assert ownership, but because I need to assert boundaries. Not that I’m doing a great job at that: S routinely comes in and climbs into bed with me when she wakes up in the middle of the night.
But when we’re getting dressed, or changing, the kids get ushered out of our room. The kids each nominally have a room, but they’re not out of the stage where they want to sleep apart from each other.
For those who have been blocked by Trump for posting against his policies, a Federal Court has said public officials can’t do that sort of thing on official accounts (and probably not on well known personal ones where policy is discussed). I’m hoping it gets extended to the “mute” button as well, as if Trump mutes ya, your speech isn’t being heard.
Oh, and Fox News recently had Scott Adams (Dilbert etc.) on as part of their coverage of … the North Korean missile test launch.
I saw that. Now Trumplethinskin has a suitably buttkissing chief of staff. I think he’s still pissy about Preibus telling him he should drop out of the race after the Access Hollywood tape came out.
Well, Trump was going to lash out at someone after the healthcare humiliation – I can’t muster a great deal of sympathy for Reince.
TPM has a great timeline of the whole sorry spectacle.
In his Lebensraum.
Thank you, Arctic Ape!
@kupo,
They are labelling and stereotyping millennials as people who don’t like to be labelled and stereotyped? This is too meta for me…
Laughter, if only it truly was the best medicine, cos I am laughing my ass off at these tweets! Cry little snowflake, your tears are medicine for millions.
With all of these shenanigans going on in the US and Europe these days, oftentimes, I feel like I have it way too easy here in Australia. Too insulated from the thick of things. We don’t have any equivalent of the Obamacare repeal or the migrant crisis or the Law and Justice Party – the worst we have is Pauline Hanson! There’s no need for me to call my representatives 5 times a day for anything. On one hand, I worry that something along these lines will happen here eventually; on the other, I worry that something not happening is rendering us soft.
All I can say, in the end, I guess, is that I’m so, so sorry for all the shit you’ve had to go through recently, my friends across the pond! Congratulations on stopping the repeal, and keep up the good fight. You are an inspiration!
For my two cents, I share my house with others (I don’t currently contribute financially but then again, I’m not strictly an ‘adult’) and I call my bedroom my room. I think most people call their bedroom their ‘room,’ because it is a private space for me.
My room is the place I go to when I want to feel safe and secure. That is why it is ‘my room’ and the other rooms are just other rooms. It isn’t a good idea to start telling people that calling their bedroom, their shelter from everyday life, ‘theirs’ is wrong. I kind of resent that as a dismissal of my need for privacy and solace- my ‘safe space’ if you will.
If you own the house, “my room” is the room you don’t allow anyone else to go into. (No, you can’t use my computer, borrow my sewing scissors to cut paper, or sit in the luxurious chair that I saved up for months to buy in my reading and knitting corner. Get out of my room!)
I didn’t feel like my husband’s place was really “mine” when I first moved in, so I can understand the need for a room that feels like it’s yours. The whole place except thee guest bedroom feels like mine now, though. 🙂
Edit: Also wanted to add that Pepper is in a super explory mood today, so to keep her from knocking over all the bags and trash cans I had to open a closet she rarely gets to see the inside of. 😛
Sometimes it’s just familiar wording. I live with my husband in our own apartment, and we still call the bedroom our room. The last time we shared with other occupants was about 12 years and several moves ago. I guess it does derive from family houses and flatshares where the bedroom was the only private space though.
@kupo
People considered Sommers a feminist in the 1970’s because she supported abortion rights and thought it was good if more women go to college and joined the workforce. Phyllis Schlafly criticized Warren Farrell for having the same positions and argued that he was still a feminist (post-Farrell deciding he couldn’t support NOW).
I understand that’s an extremely low bar to get over.
I think the Tweeter in Chief might really be unraveling. He has been tearing it up this morning tweeting (STILL) about going to “51 votes” and passing a Health Care bill (he’s really mad about that!) and going on to threaten the entire country to withhold ACA subsidies and credits.
I know we’re not supposed to diagnose but he really seems to be feeling an unbearable amount of pressure.
The schadenfreude of knowing he and his family are all completely miserable (excluding Barron hopefully, although I don’t know what kind of childhood that kid might be able to have) is what makes this somewhat bearable to me, enough to keep going at least.
Yeah. I really hope people are shielding Barron from everything.
As to the “my room” issues, I thought it was more an issue of “smashing things [presumably his things] in my room” than in the “my room” itself. He may be young and still at home, but I’m not sure that’s what he sounds like. Certainly there are many “adults” — mainly of the male persuasion — who think that way, but that sort of reaction is not conducive to being a success in the world. And too often the “thing” that gets smashed is an intimate partner.
We’ve had arguments about Christina Hoff Summers here before. I think she meets the basic definition of a feminist — at heart, I think she believes in the equality of women. But she has sold out for (presumably) money, praise, and fame. She was a professor at a small, respectable, but not all that well-known university (Clark University in Worcester, MA). Obviously, it takes a certain amount of drive to get to that point, and there’s no doubt that feminism helped her get there. But then she discovered that if she bit the hand that fed her, she could get a lot of attention and a better job. So I think it’s not that she’s not a feminist, but that her ambition trumps her dedication to the feminist cause. Feminism is in part an effort to allow women to pursue their dreams, but that doesn’t mean that everyone’s dream will be constructive. And she has harmed feminism in pursuing her dream.
I occasionally go to radical feminist sites where the type of feminist women who post here are regarded as fake feminists and derided as “libfems.” The ticklish question is who gets to decide who is or isn’t a real feminist. (Certainly not me or any other male.) There is always a problem in mass movements of people want to purge others who are not, in their view, pure enough. I think if you can accept Valerie Solanas as a feminist without approving of cutting up men, you can regard Hoff Summers as a feminist but condemn her for selling them out.
Hoff Summers often starts with a good point and then takes it off in a wrong direction. For instance, it is true that boys do not perform as well as girls in school. I think a large part of that is that girls are socialized to sit quietly, pay attention, and take school seriously, whereas boys are often chastised in a way (with a wink and a nod) that actually implies approval for acting up. “Boys will be boys,” after all. The lesser performance of boys is a real problem, but it is not because, as she claims, that there’s a “War on Boys,” and we need to make schools more boy-friendly, but that IMO we need to socialize boys to be more like girls in this respect. But you’re not going to get a cushy job in a right-wing think tank by saying stuff like that.
I find myself thinking of Barron now and then.
How can he have any of the usual fun kids have at age 10, 11, 12? Sleepovers, friends. But that goes for Malia and Sasha Obama, too, although they at least had each other, and their parents seemed pretty committed to raising them as “normally” as possible.
It seems like it must be awfully lonely for Barron. But maybe I’m just projecting. I know how much my own only child loved having friends and cousins over when he was that age (and now, too).
Trump has been somewhat successful in business because he inherited a lot of money and assets and has no ethics and no conscience, so he has been able to avoid the worst consequences of his many bad decisions. His business experience is entirely in a privately-held family business, where his sycophantic underlings do what he wants or get fired, and he has never been accountable to anyone for his decisions. This experience leaves him totally unsuited for running a large organization (in this case, the world’s largest) which was explicitly designed to limit the power of any one person or group. He is in the position of trying to fly a jet airplanes without knowing what any of those dozens of buttons do, pushing them randomly and cursing when they don’t do what he wants. He has no ability to learn and adapt, so things are probably going to get much worse as his frustration and anger increase. I think he fantasized universal adulation and everyone saying “Yes, Mr. President” to his every whim. (He seems not to have taken much notice of Obama’s presidency, or learned anything from it — or even taken note of the effect of his own Birtherism — or he would know better.) His fantasy just isn’t playing out, and he just doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to learn and adjust. He seems to rely on his own mistaken belief that he is smarter than everyone else and doesn’t need advice. We can only hope that he doesn’t end up getting into a nuclear war.
I have always thought that the US was not very good at being world leader, and I think it is a good thing that Europe in particular seems to have woken up and is taking up the slack. But the next few years are going to be a really rough ride.
As to Barron: yes, he’s in a tough situation. I think Melania dotes on him, but that’s not necessarily a great thing for a kid approaching adolescence. Hopefully he’ll be in a good school and be able to make friends — and the less he interacts with Dad, the better. But, yes, I feel bad for him. Hopefully he won’t end up a conscienceless weasel like his step-siblings.
In East Asian countries like South Korea and Japan, there’s no “crisis” of men and boys failing to graduate from high school or college because they’re socialized to be more docile and to respect authority. People are taught to value community and there’s a very high level of respect for teachers and professors. In the US, there’s more of a belief that the main purpose of education is to get you a job, and people (men especially) are more likely to show disrespect for instructors trying to teach legitimate subjects, which can cause a lowering of academic standards that hurts everyone (because you are what you put your mind to, not some immutable IQ or SAT score).
I’ve noticed that a lot in computer science courses especially. People showing disrespect because an instructor is covering theoretical subjects that aren’t direct “how-to” explanations. Plus there’s rampant cheating. At least a few people were written up for copying assignments in almost every computer programming class I’ve taken.
Yes, in Japan, for example, teachers are addressed with a special honorific “sensei”. I have some familiarity with Japanese education because my wife’s gtreat-great-grandfather help to found the first western-style agricultural college in Japan (in Sapporo), and we visited a private high school that is named for him (and they took us to a number of other schools).
One of the big problems in US education is that so many students (particularly white males) seem to think they can blow off school and still get a good-paying job. When that doesn’t work out they moan and vote for Republican’ts.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to imagine Trump lasts four years without having some sort of meltdown.
@wwth – to me it seems like we’re mid-meltdown already, but I personally have a MUCH lower tolerance to this kind of drama and pressure than 45 seems to have. I suppose having no conscience whatsoever helps him weather this better than the rest of us.
Trump finished college in the late 1960’s. Grade inflation was pretty bad then because you needed to get a 3.0 GPA or better every term to continue qualifying for an academic draft deferment. Professors were under a lot of pressure to give everyone higher grades than they deserved. Trump received four academic deferments while he was going to UPenn: http://www.snopes.com/2016/08/02/donald-trumps-draft-deferments/
Trump never worked for anyone other than himself or the family business. He’s been insulated from the “real world” all his life. He’s arguably a textbook example of a privileged white male who expects a good job after just “going through the motions” at school. You need to pressure yourself to do well, not just pass.