If all Democratic Senators vote no on all Trump cabinet nominees, it just gives the Republicans perfect political cover to vote yes on them all. Since the GOP has the votes to get any nominee through without Democratic support, the end result will be approval of all nominees without any participation from the Dems.

Here is a particularly telling detail from that NYT article:

The problem is this: you can’t legislate that. You can’t say “spanking is okay if the adult in question has properly examined their motivations and has the specific intent of wanting to discipline the child but no actual desire to harm the child.” That is an impossible standard.

I was thinking about this yesterday — the thing with Russia is that it’s not communist at all, really, anymore. They’ve fully embraced capitalism, with very uneven results. But Putin and his cronies miss the Soviet regime, not because of it’s communist underpinnings, but because it allowed them to wield power and…

For me, it is a question of results. My goal is to make spanking and any violence towards a child socially unacceptable. The current situation is that many people believe some forms of violence towards children, including spanking, are acceptable. I have tried arguing until I’m blue in the face about it. That’s done…

Except in that they are both hitting. They may be different versions of hitting and we can argue over what to do in these cases, but they’re all hitting.

No, that’s a typo, but Kinja won’t let me go back and fix it. What I’m saying is that it is much more complicated than just “rules for kids are different.” Sometimes they are, and sometimes they aren’t, and even if we actually differentiated everything that clearly, should we? Spanking is a controversial subject…

I wish you did not ever feel that you had to use a “last resort” with your children. I respect that you are trying to do right by your kids and that parenting is an incredibly challenging thing. I know it’s very easy for someone else to say “you’re doing it wrong” or criticize you, but that those things are…

It’s a legal document and was almost certainly drafted by a lawyer. Even Thicke’s statement was likely informed by legal counsel. Because child abuse is a social issue that me mostly adjudicate legally, lots of people get very familiar with the legal definitions and boundaries real quick — you see it with parents,…

I agree with everything you say here, but I am also currently trying to have some thoughtful empathy towards parents right now. And the think I keep coming back to is this: we have not done a good job, as a society, at finding ways to support parents in the difficult job of parenting. In fact, in many ways we have…

The world is not this black and white. Plus, a lot of your details are just wrong. Refusing to give medical care to an adult is considered wrong in most cases, for instance. Our criminal justice system takes adults’ possessions away as a form of punishment all the time. Rules for kids are different, but it’s not an…

Ah, I keep forgetting that we’re in an era in which words have no meaning.

I don’t think this actually answers the question. At all. The median income of Trump voters was above the national average. There is evidence that some Obama voters in a handful of key swing states (MN, WI, PA) came out for Trump because they feel left out of the economic revival and felt Trump’s attention to their…

Everyone knows the best way to inform the public about political issues is to carefully cherry pick one negative thing and one kind of positive thing about the Republicans, and then do the same for the Democrats, and then present those pieces of information, and only those pieces of information, as though they are all…

My husband and I had a good talk about this on Sunday. My reaction was and remains that the core “joke” there is “haha, men kissing each other is weird, especially if the men are good looking and famous!” It’s a classic “surprise!” joke, where the humor is supposed to come from your shock at an unexpected thing…

La La Land is decent. It’s moderately ambitious in a conceptual way but pretty dull in terms of the actual story it tells. It explores some of the same issues that Whiplash addressed (what artists must give up for their art, the impact of commitment to art on relationships and vice versa) but the tone and focus of…

Exactly. Someone mentioned it on Twitter this morning as a mistake, and I had to look at it for 30 seconds before realizing what the mistake probably was, and then I had to think for another 30 seconds to make sure I was right about it (“which symbol is which again? oh yeah, the arrow one is male cause it’s like a…

Yeah, I don’t think women are any more likely to know the difference between these symbols than men are. Which is not to excuse the mistake — this is boneheaded. It’s just not a uniquely male mistake, even if the content is about gender.

Sexism is not a wrong perpetuated by men. It’s an institutional force that affects all of us. The fact that motherhood results in lower pay for women is sexism at work, as it reflects a system that values certain kinds of work over others, and accommodates people who have fewer family responsibilities (men) while…

It messes with my head that people can be evil to other people but still have good qualities.