Afterthoughts

 

Since Trump has summoned his flying monkeys for Tuesday, someone had a brilliant idea:  Arrest the bastard on Monday instead.

If the Trans Health Equity Act goes through, low-income Maryland residents will not only have access to gender-affirming therapy but Medicaid will pay for it.  Up yours, Florida.

Governor Tim Walz signed a law which provides free breakfast and lunch for all public school children in Minnesota.  In California they only get lunch.  Time to step up.

Michigan's civil rights law now prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.  It only took forty years and Democratic control of both houses, and of course Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

On the ninth anniversary of its annexation, Vladimir Putin stopped by Crimea.  Unlike Joe Biden, he's afraid to get any closer to his criminal war.

After slandering trans people and their providers ("By definition they are pedophiles"), a Houston doctor named Hotze was thrown out of a state senate hearing considering still more legislated hate.  Not for that, for using the word "bullshit."  Texas politicians have delicate sensibilities, it seems.

Doubling down on the hate, the Kentucky legislature cooked up a bill that goes farther:  Providers would be forced to stop and "de-transition" children who are already receiving care.  "I can't support anything that would cost the life of even one of our Kentucky teens," said Governor Andy Beshear, citing statistics on suicide.  But suicide among the marginalized is not a deal-breaker for the "pro-life" party.

On Trindade Island, a remote turtle refuge off the coast of Brazil, plastic debris from the ocean is forming rocks.  "Pollution has reached geology," said geologist Fernanda Avelar Santos.

Emmanuel Macron ran for re-election last year on a promise not to raise the retirement age, but that's exactly what he did this week, without consulting parliament.  Consequently the country is broken out in violent protests.  In Paris, where a prolonged sanitation strike has turned the City of Light into a city of shite, the police have banned gatherings on the Place de la Concorde.  The Revolution is never dead.  It's not even past.