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suffragette

suffragette's Journal
suffragette's Journal
December 16, 2017

Why isnt media linking forbidden words at CDC to Mulvaney being director of OMB?

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/cdc-bannedwords/

CDC gets list of forbidden terms, including: ‘fetus,’ ‘transgender,’ ‘diversity’

At the CDC, the meeting about the banned words was led by Alison Kelly, a senior leader in CDC’s Office of Financial Services, according to the CDC analyst who spoke on condition of anonymity. Kelly did not say why the words are being banned, according to the analyst, and told the group that she was merely relaying the information.

Other CDC officials confirmed the existence of a list of forbidden words. It’s likely that other parts of HHS are operating under the same guidelines regarding the use of these words, the analyst said.
Mulvaney is anti-science, against govt funding for science and in charge of OMB which is where that directive likely originated.

~~~

The ban is related to the budget and supporting materials that are to be given to CDC’s partners and to Congress, the analyst said. The president’s budget for 2019 is expected to be released in early February. The budget blueprint is generally shaped to reflect an administration’s priorities.

Federal agencies are sending in their budget proposals to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which has authority about what is included.



The linkage from Mulvaney at OMB to these orders seems pretty direct.

Mulvaney is anti-science, against govt funding for science and in charge of OMB.

As noted in the article above, OMB is the office which has authority about what is included in the budget proposals.

Mulvaney has expressed doubt about Zika and funding research about it before, so it looks like he is manipulating the language CDC can even use to request budget for research.

He’s also acting director of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Bureau.

This is the stuff of nightmares.

https://www.snopes.com/trumps-budget-director-pick-asked-really-need-government-funded-research/

On 19 December 2016, Mother Jones’ Pema Levy reported on one of Mulvaney’s since-deleted Facebook posts, unearthed by a Democratic opposition research group named American Bridge. This post from 9 September 2016 came at a time that Congress was debating funding research into efforts to fight the spread of the Zika virus. In it, Mulvaney suggested the federal government (whose budget office he is now nominated to lead) might not be well served by funding science research at all:

It has been a busy week, and with everything else going on I haven’t had a chance to post on Zika, which I know has been in the news a bit. I have received all sorts of emails and FB comments this week on Zika. Some people want me to pass a “clean” bill (which I suppose means not paying for it with spending reductions elsewhere). Other folks want us to fund more research if we can find a way to pay for it. No one has written me yet, though, to ask what might be the best question: do we really need government-funded research at all.

The post, though deleted, can still be viewed on a cached version of Mulvaney’s Facebook page. His argument against science funding (and science in general) seems to follow arguments made by other prominent Trump transition team figures: because science is sometimes wrong, or not clear cut, it shouldn’t be trusted.


https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/judge-declines-remove-trump-pick-mulvaney-consumer-financial-protection-bureau-n824711
December 16, 2017

Even more, Mulvaney is anti-science, against govt funding for science and in charge of OMB

Which is where that directive likely originated.

He has expressed doubt about Zika and funding research about it before, so it looks like he is manipulating the language CDC can even use to request budget for research.

He’s also acting director of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Bureau.

This is the stuff of nightmares.

https://www.snopes.com/trumps-budget-director-pick-asked-really-need-government-funded-research/


On 19 December 2016, Mother Jones’ Pema Levy reported on one of Mulvaney’s since-deleted Facebook posts, unearthed by a Democratic opposition research group named American Bridge. This post from 9 September 2016 came at a time that Congress was debating funding research into efforts to fight the spread of the Zika virus. In it, Mulvaney suggested the federal government (whose budget office he is now nominated to lead) might not be well served by funding science research at all:

It has been a busy week, and with everything else going on I haven’t had a chance to post on Zika, which I know has been in the news a bit. I have received all sorts of emails and FB comments this week on Zika. Some people want me to pass a “clean” bill (which I suppose means not paying for it with spending reductions elsewhere). Other folks want us to fund more research if we can find a way to pay for it. No one has written me yet, though, to ask what might be the best question: do we really need government-funded research at all.

The post, though deleted, can still be viewed on a cached version of Mulvaney’s Facebook page. His argument against science funding (and science in general) seems to follow arguments made by other prominent Trump transition team figures: because science is sometimes wrong, or not clear cut, it shouldn’t be trusted.


https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/judge-declines-remove-trump-pick-mulvaney-consumer-financial-protection-bureau-n824711
December 10, 2017

The earth hums and sings, just as the poets always knew.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/08/scientists-are-slowly-unlocking-the-secrets-of-the-earths-mysterious-hum/?utm_term=.921ff9e89b74

The world hums. It shivers endlessly.

It's a low, ceaseless droning of unclear origin that rolls imperceptibly beneath our feet, impossible to hear with human ears. A researcher once described it to HuffPost as the sound of static on an old TV, slowed down 10,000 times.

It's comforting to think of Earth as solid and immovable, but that's false. The world is vibrating, stretching and compressing. We're shaking right along with it.

“The earth is ringing like a bell all the time,” said Spahr Webb, a seismologist at Columbia University.




Hmm, so the poets were right about the music of the spheres:

'Tis the deep music of the rolling world
Kindling within the strings of the waved air
Aeolian modulations.

Listen too,
How every pause is filled with under-notes,
Clear, silver, icy, keen awakening tones,
Which pierce the sense, and live within the soul,
As the sharp stars pierce winter's crystal air
And gaze upon themselves within the sea.


Prometheus Unbound, Percy Bysshe Shelley
December 7, 2017

The Uneven Playing Field


http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/12/the_republicans_have_built_an_uneven_playing_field_of_morality.html

Al Franken, many argue, should now resign. He should resign immediately because there are credible accusers (another emerged Wednesday), and because the behavior alleged is sufficiently abhorrent that there is simply no basis to defend him. In this parade of unilateral disarmament, Trump stays, Conyers goes, Moore stays, Franken goes.

~~~

You can talk about gradations of harm—what Franken is accused of still pales next to child predation—but even that is a trap. The point is, as Jennifer Rubin notes Tuesday, that “one party has adopted a zero-tolerance position (with Sen. Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, set to go before the ethics committee) and another party opens its arms to people it believes are miscreants.” Rubin feels confident that becoming the party of alleged sexual abusers will harm the GOP in upcoming elections (did she live through last November?). My own larger concern is that becoming the party of high morality will allow Democrats to live with themselves but that the party is also self-neutering in the face of unprecedented threats, in part to do the right thing and in part to take ammunition away from the right—a maneuver that never seems to work out these days. When Al Franken, who has been a champion for women’s rights in his tenure in the Senate, leaves, what rushes in to fill the space may well be a true feminist. But it may also be another Roy Moore. And there is something deeply naïve, in a game of asymmetrical warfare, and in a moment of unparalleled public misogyny, in assuming that the feminist gets the seat before it happens.

This isn’t a call to become tolerant of awful behavior. It is a call for understanding that Democrats honored the blue slip, and Republicans didn’t. Democrats had hearings over the Affordable Care Act; Republicans had none over the tax bill. Democrats decry predators in the media; Republicans give them their own networks. And what do Democrats have to show for it? There is something almost eerily self-regarding in the notion that the only thing that matters is what Democrats do, without considering what the systemic consequences are for everyone.

We are at a moment in this country in which entire institutions that existed to protect women—from the courts, to our criminal statutes, to our workplace protections—have proved not only incapable of protecting us but also to be tools used to shame and silence us. The question we now face is really about which institutions need to be blown apart altogether and recreated to promote justice, and which institutions do not or cannot. The Senate, I would submit, is not about to be blown up and created anew, with greater institutional solicitude for women. Not now. And that means that when it comes to the Senate, we play by the institutional rules and norms as they exist, even as those rules and norms devolve into empty shells. The alternative is a game of righteous ball, in which the object is pride and purity, and Dems are the only ones playing.
December 6, 2017

Shirley Sherrod, Maxine Waters, ACORN, Planned Parenthood. When will we learn how far they will go

to smear and take down effective leaders and organizations?

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Hometown: Seattle, WA
Member since: Mon Dec 13, 2004, 02:55 AM
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