Shit that Pissed me Off – 8/5

New York Post Puts a Nude Melania Trump on Their Cover

I hate feeling like Trump has a genuine beef with anyone.  I really do.

But this is sexist bullshit at it’s most base.  Trump posed for nude pictures several years ago.  OK.  I get it.  That has no bearing on how good her husband will be as a President.

For the record, he would be a shitty President.

His wife, however, made a very good nude model.  She was paid well to do it and it was her body.  Will the Post be following up with nude pictures of Bill Clinton?

I doubt it.  Because in politics, women are judged by appearance more than anything else.  I know plenty of people who refer to Hillary Clinton as “the pantsuit” without recognizing the sexism inherent in judging what she chooses to wear.

Does anyone call Trump “the suit and tie?”

No.  Because every damn male candidate wears a suit and tie.

I’d like to see him wear a kilt for a couple of weeks, though.  Just to see if anyone would start referring to him as “the kilt.”

Now Melania Trump posed for those pictures and knew they existed.  I would expect she is intelligent enough to not give a fuck that the Post published them.  Unless she should be getting royalties.  In which case they’d better pay up.

Knowing Melania was a good model brings up a more important issue, though: it would appear she was a more successful model than Trump has been a businessman.

This week’s Meme that Pissed me Off

I think the logical fallacy that pisses me off more than any other is the false equivalence fallacy.  In this case, someone who thought they were clever saw the following sign at the Democratic National Convention:

Now I hope most of us understand this isn’t the same thing.  This is a highly secured event, for one.  For another, this is to pick up credentials.  Which, I assume, are personalized.  Picking up your credentials at a private event is really not the same thing as voting.

So someone saw this sign and their response was: If voter ID laws are racist, so is this!

Um…what the fuck are you talking about?

Voter ID laws are racist (and classist) because they are specifically designed to disenfranchise minority and lower income voters by making it more difficult for them to register.  That is their purpose.  It certainly isn’t to prevent voter fraud because that’s not actually a problem.

Requiring a delegate to the national convention to have an ID is just good security.

Now the actual counter argument I’ve had with someone is if you are against voter ID, you are a hypocrite if you require an ID for anything else.

This is, of course, bullshit.  The number of ways in which being a delegate differ from casting a vote are so extensive, I could write a blog about just that.

But the fact is, this bullshit meme is a sideshow.  To argue that voter ID laws are reasonable ignores all the ways in which they are designed to be anything but reasonable.

And it ignores the simple fact that in a country where fewer than 50% of the electorate turns out to vote, we should be making it easier to vote.  Not harder.

Clint Eastwood  Says that The Things Trump Says Weren’t Racist When he Was Growing Up

I know that Eastwood is a conservative and honestly – that’s fine.  Different opinions and all.

I also know that he has reached the age where he would probably be telling kids to get off his lawn unless they are the children of the (likely hispanic) people he has hired to do the yard work.

So when Eastwood says we have entered the “pussy generation,” because people have a problem with Trump saying that most illegal immigrants are rapists, we can dismiss his sexist language as the language of a crotchety old dude.

Too bad John Wayne is dead. I feel like Eastwood could use a partner.

When he excuses Trump’s racism as something that wasn’t racist when he was grown up, though, we have to consider the things that weren’t considered racist when he was growing up.

Like blackface.  And segregation.  And openly passing laws designed to prevent black people from voting.

Wait – we’re still doing that last one (see above).

What bugs me a little bit isn’t that Eastwood has shown he is a racist jackass in his defense of another racist jackass.

It’s just that…I like watching Eastwood’s movies.  He just made it a little harder to do that.

I guess that’s my problem.  But when I was growing up, he mostly kept the fact that he was an asshole to himself.

Missouri Public Defender Assigns a Case to the Governor

The story itself is really kind of funny.  The Missouri Public Defender’s office is overworked and underfunded and Governor Jay Nixon (who is a Democrat so y’all can shut up about how partisan I am) has done basically nothing to help.  So the system director Michael Barrett used a little known provision that allows him to appoint any lawyer in the state to assist with the caseload.

Turns out Jay Nixon is a lawyer.

At some other time, I need to talk about how annoying it is that so many politicians are lawyers.

In this situation, though, this is a funny story and Nixon will almost certainly not end up working this case.  Although if he had an eye for publicity, he would do it anyway because it would make him look really good.

Thing is, this story highlights a problem that nobody really thinks about and that is overburdened public defenders.  John Oliver did a piece on this problem about a year ago and I would guess nothing has gotten better since then.

Governor Nixon would do well to use this situation to highlight the problem and start working to fix it.  Honestly, that’s all Barrett wants.  He’s not going to do that, though.

Because most of us don’t care about people who are too poor to pay for their own attorney.  We argue endlessly about the second and first amendments but we all assume that the sixth just plugs along and does what it does.  Even if it doesn’t, we are just talking about a bunch of poor people who are probably guilty anyway, right?