What a surprise. While everyone is distracted by the Las Vegas gun slaughter, the Trump administration acted. They reversed the Obama administration, and will allow employers to block contraceptive coverage for women. I mean, so long as there’s some guy who doesn’t want her to have it.
It’s part of their general pattern. The Trump’s administration appointed Andrew Wheeler, a coal lobbyist who denies climate change, to be the number two person at the EPA. They have lots of open seats. The Trump EPA fired most of the career professionals — people who actually know stuff? — in favor of political appointees like Mr. Wheeler.
On Friday, AG Jeff Sessions released an “All Departments and Agencies” memo. It reinterprets the idea of ‘religious freedom’. Now, anyone can use their own individual beliefs as justification to discriminate against anyone else they interpret their god as disliking. The LGBTQ will probably be the first recipients of this ‘freedom’, but not the last.
There was no word about the religious rights of those people being denied. Wrong god?
Earlier this week, FEMA looked at the real state of Puerto Rico. You know, where only half the people have access to drinking water, and only five percent have electricity? It was too embarrassing. By Thursday, FEMA removed all those bad numbers from the official Hurricane Maria website. Instead, they added a slew of disconnected statistics about how much they’ve done, but without any overall comparisons. “Cell Phones: No Cost Roaming Charges.” Oh, happy happy, joy joy. “More than 15,100 federal civilian and military personnel, including more than 800 FEMA personnel, are on the ground…”. And there’s more. The Washington Post caught the change, and asked FEMA. Their spokesperson suggested that, no, it wasn’t a thing at all. And the Post reported that FEMA quickly restored the damning numbers.
Or maybe not. When I looked, neither measure was on the FEMA hurricane site.
On a depressingly familiar party-line vote, House Republicans decided the most important thing on their schedule was something nobody had asked for: a bill limiting abortion rights. And so they completely missed the deadline for reauthorizing the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a critical program for poor children.
Trump and the Republican party are using the sound of screaming on the TV to cover what they’re doing. Republicans are looking to do the absolute minimum governance possible, while quietly pushing to make things worse. Contraceptive coverage? They’d ban contraceptives completely, if they could. But expect the gun silencer and the concealed carry bills to resurface soon.
