Louisiana Republican Considers Medical Evidence, Nixes Anti-Trans Bill. No, Really!
National wingnuts are mad. He doesn't care, because they're not from his district.
On Wednesday, a pretty remarkable thing happened in the Louisiana state Senate: The Republican chair of the Health and Welfare Committee, state Sen. Fred Mills, voted against moving a ban on gender-affirming healthcare for minors to the full Senate, killing the bill, at least for now. (Other Republicans are already pushing to bring the bill up for a floor vote by bypassing the committee process; more on that in a bit.) So for now at least, Louisiana is the only Southern state to to have rejected a ban on gender- affirming care. The vote gives trans kids and their families a bit of breathing room, not only in Louisiana but also in nearby states that have banned the lifesaving care that's endorsed by every major medical and pediatric professional association in the country.
Possibly even more remarkable: Mills, a pharmacist, said he decided to vote against the bill because he had paid attention to the testimony during hearings, and had read a report the Louisiana Department of Health published in March. That report reviewed Medicaid statistics between 2017 and 2021 and found there had been exactly zero surgeries for gender reassignment performed on minors in Louisiana. What's more, in the same period, very few Louisiana minors diagnosed with gender dysphoria — just 14.6 percent — received either puberty blockers or hormone therapy, and among those who did, the vast majority, more than 75 percent, were 15 to 17 years old. What's more, the report found that trans minors who did receive such care had better mental health, and that there was an extremely low rate of patients who later regretted getting the treatment — about one percent, which is lower than the two or maybe four percent regret rates for breast enhancement that we found in an extremely cursory search (we ignored the stats from law firms).
So hey, Mills decided, not exactly an issue needing the state to interfere in medical decisions made by families and their doctors.
Mills told the Louisiana Illuminator — and could we please have more newspapers with 19th Century names like that? — that the report didn't back up the wild claims made by the people wanting to ban gender-affirming care.
“My decision was really, really based on the numbers,” Mills said. “All the testimony I heard by the proponents that children are getting mutilated, I didn’t see it in the statistics.”
It was a pretty big setback for the fascist busybodies who think families and their doctors shouldn't be allowed to decide on the health care they believe is appropriate, as indy journalist Erin Reed points out. Louisiana's House had voted for the ban, House Bill 648, 71 to 27, which led to an intense effort by LGBTQ rights advocates to educate Louisiana senators about the medical data. Ultimately, though, Mills seems to have been most influenced by the report from the state health department, which Reed points out is in line with most reliable academic research, as well as the positions of the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Reed adds that, up to now, the Louisiana report has gotten comparatively little attention, in contrast to a seriously sketchy 2022 report that the government of Florida commissioned in support of Florida's ban on gender-affirming care for patients on Medicaid. That Florida report claimed — against the consensus of American medical associations — that gender-affirming care is "experimental" and "harmful."
But wait, hold the fuck on: The Florida report was politically tainted garbage full of manipulated data, and was sharply criticized in a review by several healthcare researchers (and a law prof for good measure) at Yale University:
We are alarmed that Florida’s health care agency has adopted a purportedly scientific report that so blatantly violates the basic tenets of scientific inquiry. The report makes false statements and contains glaring errors regarding science, statistical methods, and medicine. Ignoring established science and longstanding, authoritative clinical guidance, the report instead relies on biased and discredited sources, including purported “expert” reports that carry no scientific weight due to lack of expertise and bias.
So repeated and fundamental are the errors in the June 2 Report that it seems clear that the report is not a serious scientific analysis but, rather, a document crafted to serve a political agenda.
Politically skewed medical "research" from Ron DeSantis's medical bureaucracy, which is presided over by antivaxxer quack Joseph Ladapo? Well fetch our salts.
Oh, and it gets worse, as Reed explains:
In a lawsuit aiming to reverse Florida's Medicaid ban, the discovery process unearthed documents from the Florida Surgeon General’s Office. These papers reveal the unambiguous objective of the research: to arrive at an outcome where "care is effectively banned."
Gee, massaging the data to force a conclusion you prefer seems to be some kind of trend in Florida's politicized healthcare bureaucracy. Whenever DeSantis is finally gone, the entire state health apparatus will need to be de-Ladapofied.
Reed also notes the report was written by members of the rightwing "American College of Pediatricians," a hate group whose name mimics that of the legitimate American Academy of Pediatrics, but which is explicitly anti-LGBTQ and endorses "conversion therapy" to torture the gay and trans out of people.
But back to Louisiana: The reaction of the anti-trans bigots has been swift. The state Republican Party — repeating the lie about "genital mutilation surgery" that the state report showed isn't happening — called for the state Senate to "override the committee vote" and to put HB 648 on the floor where it can be passed by all the sensible Rs who don't bother with facts.
If it gets that far, Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, seems likely to veto the bill, but the Rs have just enough seats in the Lege to override, even if Mills voted against. But who knows? Maybe Mills has a friend or two who also know how to read!
National anti-trans bigots have also called on the Internet Flying Monkey Hate Brigade to go after Sen. Mills, as the Illuminator illuminates:
“Fred Mills has sided with the butchers and groomers,” Matt Walsh, a conservative commentator tweeted to his nearly 2 million followers. “He will regret it. This is the biggest mistake of his political career, and also the end of his career. He’s going to be infamous and disgraced by his own base. We’ll make sure of that.”
The paper notes drily that Mills is term limited, and hasn't said whether he'll seek another office when his term ends. Other prominent wingnuts have been more explicit, like some asshole named Greg Price, who told his nearly 300,000 Twitter followers to “let Senator Mills know how you feel about him single-handedly killing this bill to ban sex changes for kids” and helpfully directed them to his state Senate website for his contact details. (The phone numbers appear to only be for his office, fortunately.)
The stupidest fucking response came from one Andy Ross, the president of something calling itself the "State Freedom Caucus Network," who suggested that Mills himself must be some sort of drag performer perv, because
"This RINO Republican - Louisiana State Senator Fred Mills - once dressed in drag as a 1st grader in a TV commercial. And now he just killed the bill that would ban transgender surgeries on minors."
Sen. Mills told the Illuminator he isn't worrying about the rightwing backlash:
“Why should I?,” Mills said in an interview. [...] “They don’t live in District 22. They don’t have a 337 area code.”
“I didn’t run for office to serve those people."
“Always in my heart of hearts have I believed that a decision should be made by a patient and a physician. I believe in the physicians in Louisiana. [...] I believe in the scope of practice. I believe in the standard of care.”
Yes, we checked, and the man really is a Republican, and has a perfect score from National Right to Life, the antiabortion group. But on this bill, he saw the research and made the rational decision. And for now, trans folks in Louisiana and their families can breathe a little sigh of relief.
[Erin in the Morning / Louisiana Illuminator / Daily Advertiser / Louisiana Department of Health / Yale doctors' review / Erin in the Morning]
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ChatGPT Writes Stunningly Awful Megan McArdle Column ... Wait, No, It's The Real Megan McArdle
We are begging McArdle to stick to writing about overpriced kitchen appliances.
There are bad political opinion columns. (We have written a few ourselves!) Then there is whatever the hell this is from the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle. Is this an early contender for worst column you will read about a candidate during our interminable presidential campaign season? It's early, but yes.
Seriously. Our eyes are bleeding. She’s Peggy Noonan without style.
Lord, the things we read for you people. You’re welcome.
Anyway:
Vivek Ramaswamy is emerging into the spotlight. His poll numbers are still pretty low, not even 4 percent, but they are rising at a brisk clip, which is more than anyone else in the Republican presidential field except former president Donald Trump can say.
That link goes to a poll tracker from Real Clear Politics. Ramaswamy is that second green line (WHY, Real Clear Politics?), the one in the lower right corner:
Screenshot: Real Clear Politics
Ramaswamy’s polling average actually dropped by four-tenths of a percent this past week while McArdle was writing this column. And when you start out at 3.3 percent, four-tenths is a good-sized drop.
If you’re going to take these averages this seriously nine months before voting starts, at least describe them somewhere in the universe of accurately.
So far, Ramaswamy’s rise is broadly in keeping with the historical GOP tradition of regularly catapulting some long-shot primary candidate into his 15 minutes of fame — and then out again onto the rubber-chicken-dinner circuit.
Here we have the pundit’s self-fulfilling prophecy: The obscure candidate is rising (again, not according to the polls) because the nation’s bored political opinion columnists are writing columns in the nation’s most widely read newspapers telling you he’s rising. All this means is that whatever consultants Ramaswamy is overpaying to get him some earned media are actually doing their job.
It’s fair to wonder because, eight years on, no one understands exactly what made Trump different from predecessors such as Herman Cain. I have a theory and so do you, but no one can say for sure.
Sure we can. Trump had already been a national celebrity for 40 years, he was a genius at saying outrageous horseshit that kept the media’s attention on him, he had personal relationships with the president and owner of the nation’s most-watched 24-hour news network that he leveraged into hours upon hours upon hours of free media. Herman Cain was a Black man with a business career consisting mostly of running a sixth-rate national pizza chain who was trying to break through with a GOP base composed of suburban white people who think the 1964 Civil Rights Act is one of America’s greatest historical tragedies. Also he had all the personality and on-camera charisma of soggy Cheerios. This isn’t hard.
But if such a plan can work, Ramaswamy is the candidate most likely to execute it successfully. Imagine a Trump Scale running from 1 to 100, where 100 is Trump and 1 is a soft-spoken social worker who has been happily married to the same man for 43 years. Ramaswamy is about a 63, by far the closest match in the current primary field.
What … what even is this? You can’t just make up some sort of numerical scale to try and capture unquantifiable properties and then awkwardly shoehorn them into some sort of supporting evidence for your thesis. What if we said “Imagine a Christopher Rufo Dumbass Wingnut Scale where 100 is Christopher Rufo and 1 is an angry suburban dentist writing a Substack with fewer subscribers than Colonoscopy Monthly. Megan McArdle is about a 63, by far the closest match in the field.”
That would make zero sense, right? Also we’d rank Megan “Train Six-Year-Olds to Rush School Shooters” McArdle much closer to 100 if we were inclined to make up such a scale. Which we are not.
Ramaswamy’s fortune allows him to self-fund and puts him beyond economic sanction — and he has used that advantage to raise a giant middle finger to the liberal thinkers of the professional managerial class.
Most of the current Republican Party claims to be raising a giant middle finger to the liberal thinkers of the sneeringly dubbed professional managerial class. Ramaswamy is no more unusual in this regard than, like, this lunatic.
Also would it surprise you to learn that McArdle follows up this point by complimenting Ramaswamy for making Don Lemon mad during an early-morning interview that most of CNN’s audience probably has on as background noise while they’re trying to get the kids off to school? That’s not a feat akin to raising a middle finger at the professional managerial class, that’s just Tuesday.
Let Ramaswamy insult a moderator at a primetime debate badly enough that people are still talking about it eight years later and get back to us.
If he has a shot, it will be because he hits many of the same notes while remaining a little more upbeat, a lot more in command of policy details and even, occasionally, something of an old-fashioned market conservative.
Totally. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about beating Donald Trump, it is that his fans care deeply about his command of policy details.
Also, remain upbeat? The current second place candidate in that polling average chart McArdle linked to earlier is Ron DeSantis, who is about as charming and upbeat as one of those mutant fish that live at the bottom of the Marianas Trench and go their entire lives without ever seeing light. And he’s ahead of Ramaswamy by almost 20 points.
He suggests we might curb the excesses of woke capital with an even stricter version of shareholder capitalism that forces companies to focus on profit — a solution a lot of CEOs might also prefer.
Woke capital is a nonsense term that we should not even indulge. But in the context in which the right wing uses it, plenty of companies manage to be extremely profitable while also remaining “woke” – that is, by embracing diversity in hiring and in their customer bases or by being environmentally conscious or whatever. You would think a libertarian would understand the whole concept of maximizing profits by maximizing your customer base. Hell, you’d think a seven-year-old understands that concept.
Of course companies can’t help it if conservatives are whiny piss babies who don’t want to share their shitty beer or their cheap, made-by-Indonesian-slave-labor T-shirts with gay people or transgender Instagram influencers. Fine. More Bud Light and knockoff Batman tees for Target’s customers who are not judgmental assholes.
Nor could he resolve conflicts over social issues by directing corporations to focus on profit rather than politics. If LGBTQ+ creatives quit Disney over its storylines, that is an issue of profitability.
That’s what we just said! If McArdle already knows policing the business of “woke corporations" is a bad idea, why is she telling Ramaswamy in the previous paragraph that it might be a winning one?
Is Megan McArdle secretly a shill for Donald Trump? Don’t know, but if we were Ramaswamy’s campaign consultant, we’d tell her to stop helping.
GOP Rep. Glenn Grothman Knows Who Biden Oppressing, It Is White Man Judges Who Make Sex To Women
It is probably very rude to just hurl around terms like 'white supremacist,' but hurl we must.
Glenn Grothman, he is one of those white people in Congress. He is a Republican. Those are his primary characteristics. He is from the Sheboygan area of Wisconsin, so when he says white supremacist things, we imagine he says them with cheese on his breath.
He's shown up on Wonkette throughout the years.
When he was a state senator, he pushed a bill to make sure everybody understands how much single parents contribute to child abuse. He once told Alan Colmes that he thought women who said their pregnancies were "unintended" were only saying that because they'd been trained to.
Once he became a US congressman, he raged at the Supreme Court marriage equality ruling, because wasn't the 14th Amendment passed by Christian civil war heroes, to advance the Christian lifestyle?
He was siding with Russia against Ukraine way back in 2019, when today's war was a mere twinkle in Vlad Putin's peenhole. He sides with Putin's peenhole twinkles quite a bit, actually.
He's the dumbass who said DC can't be a state, at least in part, because there's nothing to milk in DC. (Also nothing to mine, manufacture or grow. That's what makes a state, according to the rules Glenn Grothman made up that day.)
He thinks nobody cares about January 6 — the terrorist attack Donald Trump incited against America to overthrow the government and steal the 2020 election — except reporters.
Then there's his racist shit, like when he furiously opined about all these white people shoving Black Kwanzaa down his throat. In March, he was one of just 26 House Republicans who couldn't bring themselves to denounce white supremacy and say that the Great Replacement conspiracy theory — the one that inspires all the white supremacist mass shootings — is bad.
Well breaking news, but Glenn Grothman has said some more racist shit.
He got real pissy on the House floor yesterday because Joe Biden won't even nominate any white man judges who like to put their man wangers inside a woman's no-no. Why won't Biden nominate those? You know, just good old white people, the type who are men, with traditional Christian penises, who like to stick them in traditional Christian vaginas? Why does Joe Biden hate white people?
\u201cWisconsin's finest Glenn Grothman is on the House floor right now complaining that Biden isn't nominating enough straight "white guys" as judges\u201d— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar) 1685040256
Daily Beast, transcribin':
Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) cried oppression on the House floor Thursday when he complained to peers that Joe Biden isn’t appointing enough straight “white guys” to be judges. In the president’s first two years, he appointed 97 federal judges. “I was expecting maybe 25 or 30 were white guys,” Grothman said. “Five of the 97 judges were white guys. Of those, two were gay. So, almost impossible for a white guy who’s not gay, apparently, to get appointed here.”
It is obviously reverse racism if Joe Biden doesn't choose at least 25 or 30 white guys out of 97 judges. Instead it was five. And two of them were gay dudes.
Can gay dudes even call themselves white?
And who's a white guy gotta blow around here to get a judgeship from Joe Biden, you know, besides a whole buncha guys?
You might remember that earlier this year, back when Tucker Carlson was gainfully employed, he went on a real bender about this. (Tucker is also a white supremacist, in case you have forgotten him.) Tucker got his information about Joe Biden's gay satanic critical race groomer crusade against white male judges from a Claremont Institute cuck.
Tucker Has Idea For Biden Judicial Picks, It Is WHAT ABOUT SOME WHITE MEN?
As the Daily Beast notes, it's been a priority for Biden to try to get some more representation from people who aren't straight white guys into the judiciary. They cite statistics from 2022 what say 78 percent of Article III federal judges are white, and 70 percent are dudes. And how many are both of those things at the same time?
This tweet has the answer to that:
\u201cCurrently sitting federal judges: 1,407\n\nWhite men: 779 (55.4%)\n\nBlack women: 63 (4.5%)\n\nStats from FJC: https://t.co/K9WLkBQYRG\u201d— Max Kennerly (@Max Kennerly) 1675743091
So what Tucker was bitching about, and what Glenn Grothman is bitching about, is that Joe Biden won't even give white straight dudes a chance to, um, continue to assert white straight dude supremacy over the judiciary.
Know what we think about that? We'll tell ya what we think about that, you want us to tell ya what we think about that? We'll tell ya what we think about that, you want us to tell ya? OK here we go, we're gonna just say it.
Hey Wisconsin dude, go fuck yourself with some cheese-shaped dicks, why dontcha? How about that, why dontcha?
Ope, we just told ya.
Follow Evan Hurst on Twitter right here.
Just got to BlueSky!
I have profiles those other places but I think I forgot how to log on.
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Cool TN Lady Gonna Fill The Social Studies Standards With Awesome Stuff Like 'Barack Obama Did The Tornados'
Of course we've met her before, your Wonkette's on top of shit!
The Education Wars just never go away, and in today's dispatch from the front lines we'll look at Tennessee, where a rightwing conspiracy theory fan and anti-Muslim bigot has just been appointed to the committee that sets standards for the state's social studies curricula.
Yr Wonkette already introduced you last year to Laurie Cardoza-Moore, the nutball Tennessee bigot lady, when she was a member of the state textbook commission that was tasked with making sure only "age appropriate" materials were in them. You may recall that Tennessee was considering a measure that would have required state approval of every last item in the collections of school libraries; the bill's sponsor charmingly said that any materials not approved by the commission should be burned. Ultimately, the Lege settled for a different plan that gave the textbook commission the power to hear appeals of book challenges brought by parents, so the state could ban library books even after a local school board had gone through a challenge process and approved them. Hooray for compromise.
We guess that Ms. Cardoza-Moore must have either done a bang-up job on that commission, or at the very least that she has powerful friends in Tennessee, because clearly it's the latter thing. She was chosen for the Tennessee Standards Recommendation Committee by Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R), the slimebooger we came to know and loathe during the kangaroo court proceedings that expelled Democratic state Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson in April. Sexton also appointed her to the textbook commission in 2021, which is quite the coincidence.
In her new job, Cardoza-Moore will have a say in setting state standards for social studies classes, although we suspect she'll just photocopy the course offerings at Hillsdale College and say "Done!" As Judd Legum points out in his Popular Information newsletter, Cardoza-Moore doesn't actually believe in public schools; she's homeschooled her own five kids, and she's simply horrified that US history texts teach historical facts that make America look bad, such as the fact that the Constitution provided a framework for oppression of African Americans. In a 2020 Fox News interview, she blamed Common Core, because why not? She claimed, falsely, that schools no longer teach about the founding of the US, but instead skip ahead to the Civil War and Reconstruction so they can harp on all the slavery, those monsters.
"This is an outrage," Cardoza-Moore exclaimed. "It poses the greatest national security threat to our constitutional republic."
So yeah, she's a real peach. She somehow also took issue with a textbook's factual statement that the Republican Party was originally founded to fight the spread of slavery beyond the states where it was already allowed, complaining that it was "disinformation" because Lincoln was anti-slavery, which, yeah, that's what the book said. She was mostly upset the book didn't say that Democrats were pro-slavery and KKK, and also what about that Klansman Robert Byrd, huh?
Cardoza-Moore initially made her name in Tennessee politics by fearmongering about Islam, back when that was the thing the Right was certain would destroy America, because Barack Obama was president. She led some of the most paranoid opposition to a mosque being built in Murfreesboro, claiming that fully 30 percent of Muslims are terrorists and that the mosque would be a base for "radical Islamic extremists" bent on destroying Nashville's Christian music industry.
During her 2021 confirmation hearing for her seat on the textbook commission, she explained that bad school textbooks are directly responsible for wrecking America and of course the riots that burned all cities in America to the ground in 2020, several of them more than once.
While America slept, the hearts, minds and souls of our students were being influenced by disinformation. Tragically we have seen the result over the past few months; our streets have been filled with rioting destructive American young people who have not been taught the values entrusted to us by our nation's founders ... nor have they been taught our nation's history — history which many seem intent to destroy
See, if only kids been made to memorize more facts about how George Washington was a Christian and God wrote the Constitution, there might be a few more cities still standing in our great land.
As Legum details, Cardoza-Moore doesn't seem to have met a conspiracy theory she didn't glom on to. She's said that 9/11 was an "inside job," that Donald Trump was the true winner of the 2020 election, and that January 6 was a false flag attack by "Antifa." I'm just disappointed that she doesn't appear to have said anything about chemtrails. But she came kind of close in 2011, as Legum explains, when she
claimed that former President Barack Obama was causing "horrific tornadoes" because he made a speech that discussed the plight of Palestinians. Asked if she still held these views, Cardoza-Moore did not respond.
She also runs her very own "Christian Zionist" nonprofit called "Proclaiming Justice to the Nations," which recently ran a press release on her appointment to the social studies standards job. In it, we learn that she has previously helped the Florida Department of Education screen textbooks, "a successful review effort that 'caught and corrected dozens of books to prevent political indoctrination of Florida’s children,' a spokesperson for Governor Ron DeSantis noted."
In the press release, Cardoza-Moore reflected on the important task ahead of her, because
"The materials we will be reviewing can only accomplish the mission of educating good American citizens if our Tennessee textbooks are devoid of left-aligned historic revisionism and the toxic material found in the antisemitic Critical Race Theory; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; Social-Emotional Learning and Ethnic Studies.”
Impressive how she got all the rightwing shibboleths in there!
The statement also emphasized that Muslim groups opposed her appointment to the textbook commission, presumably because if she has the right enemies, that just shows what a great job she'll do for Tennessee students.
We can hardly wait to see what happens to Tennessee social studies standards. Haha, we kid, of course, because we read the history standards that Donald Trump's "1776 Commission" came up with, so we have a pretty good idea. Good luck, kids!
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