I even walked Ruby listening to him on WVIA, the local public radio station.

Having endured every syllable of that nightmare, I can tell you that what he did was very studiedly and purposefully not give a State of the Union speech. He didn’t have anything to say on the major policy issues he is losing so badly on, so all he did was introduce a dozen or so audience-plants he thought of as either heroes or victims, and then turn his head to face them in the gallery as the applause began. The gold medal winning Olympic hockey team got the biggest applause of the night, and then for good measure, he awarded the goalie a Presidential Medal of Freedom. That got another flood of applause. He was on a roll, so he also gave out two Medals of Honor, and he probably would have thrown a Bible up there to someone if he had thought of it.

He must have figured out that the applause would keep going as long as he didn’t turn to face the Congress again, because if he did, they would stop clapping, thinking he was going to return to his speech. So he would just stand there facing whomever he had introduced and let the applause keep going, eating up more and more of his time. I haven’t seen a breakdown of the speech, but I would bet that he spent half his time making long and often lurid introductions and then letting the applause run on and on.

When he was finished, he hurriedly nodded at the applause and moved away from the podium. For reasons we can only imagine, he rushed out of the chamber faster than any president has ever left one of these speeches. He hardly shook anyone’s hand, he was in such a rush to leave. Maybe he was trying to protect his right hand, which once again was deeply bruised and covered with sloppily applied pancake makeup.

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Last week, I wrote about the Heritage Foundation’s Saving America by Saving the American Family: A Plan for the Next 250 Years. The plan is, essentially, to make women drop out of school, marry young, have tons of babies, rely financially on their husbands, be unable to divorce, and wind up in the poor house if they don’t follow these rules. But I wanted to zero in specifically on the policy section of the piece, which comes at the very end and which I haven’t seen get the coverage it deserves. Because what the Heritage Foundation is proposing is a massive cash transfer from poor single mothers to better-off married couples. This really is the plan: Take from the poor to give to the “right” kind of families. Make poor mothers work, and pay better-off ones to stay home. Further impoverish single mothers to force them to marry.

The Heritage Foundation wants to eventually end cash welfare as we know it (“Credits designed specifically to benefit poor single mothers may be well intended, but they have proven to incentivize single motherhood in poor communities,” Heritage laments). They don’t propose totally doing away with welfare benefits here, I suspect because they realize that would be a nonstarter. But they do propose taking resources that currently mostly benefit poorer families and redirecting them to wealthier ones, so long as those wealthier families have married parents. The Heritage proposal would only give its proposed benefits to married couples (policies should “privilege marriage as directly and explicitly as possible,” Heritage writes, emphasis theirs). It would only give benefits to married couples in which one partner works and makes above a certain income. And it would incentivize women dropping out of the workforce… unless they’re poor or single.

Here are the specifics.

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1. Child tax credits only for married couples who are the child’s biological parents, who are working, and who make at least $30,500. The Heritage proposal would get rid of the Earned Income Tax Credit, because that credit gives more money to struggling single parents than better-off married ones, as well as the Child Tax Credit, and replace them with what they call a Family and Marriage (FAM) tax credit of $4,418 per child per year for four years. But this credit would phase in for families once they’re earning $30,500 per year — in other words, poor families wouldn’t qualify. It would only go to married parents — single parents wouldn’t qualify. It would only go to biological parents — step parents wouldn’t qualify. A person could be working full-time, but even if they’re earning above minimum wage, they may not qualify for this tax credit.

2. Bonuses for larger families — but only for married couples, only for biological parents, and not for the poor. Additionally, Heritage proposes a 25% per-child bonus to their FAM tax credit for third children and beyond. But, again, poor families are out of luck, as only couples with at least one working spouse qualify, and that spouse has to make at least $30,500.

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3. More money for higher earners, none for the lowest. The FAM credit phases in at $30,500, and goes up from there relative to income. That’s right: This is government family support that gives more money to families that already have more money. And it gives the most money to families that are the most stable: Those with two married parents who make more than six figures. The credit doesn’t begin to scale down until a family makes $110,000, and even then, the wind-down is small (beginning at just 5%). Why set up a program that gives people more money as they make more money? Because “the FAM credit’s phase-in would incentivize work.” All of this means that a married couple with three children making $400,000 a year would get $14,000 additional dollars from the US taxpayer — while a single mom making $20,000 a year would get nada.

   

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4. No help after a child’s fourth birthday. As it stands, parents can claim the Child Tax Credit until a child’s 17th birthday. The Heritage plan cuts parents off when their kid turns four. They claim that these early years are when parents need the most help. But children don’t stop needing food and a roof over their heads once they’re kindergarten age. The Heritage Foundation is clear that the purpose of this plan isn’t to support children, but to incentivize parents to have more of them: “The FAM credit is designed specifically for families with newborns or young children. Lawmakers interested in family policy may be inclined simply to expand the CTC. However, this approach would be inefficient as a family formation incentive. Only a small fraction of the benefit would go toward new parents, while most of it would go to families that are already formed.” They continue: “many other family benefits, such as the CTC, are backloaded to later in life when many parents are on more solid financial footing and may be past their prime child-bearing years.” Emphasis mine, because this is truly stunning: The Heritage Foundation only wants to give parents tax credits for their (expensive) children if those parents (mothers) are in their “prime child-bearing years” and might make more babies. Eggs too old? No child tax credits for you.

5. Pay women to stay home. The Heritage Foundation could have proposed a generous paid leave program, which would allow parents of newborns to stay home and care for them in that crucial first year. But their aim is not to make sure that young children receive the best possible care. Their aim seems to be to get women out of the workforce. And so they’ve instead offered a $2,000 per-child credit for one parent (almost always the mother) to stay home and care full-time for her child — but again, this only applies to married couples where one spouse (almost always the husband) is working and makes more than $30,500 per year. You’re a single mom who wants to stay home with your child? Tough luck, get to work. You’re a low-income married parent who wants to stay home with your child? Tough luck, get to work. If the concern really were for children — if the view really was that young children are best off being cared for at home by a parent — then this policy would apply to all parents of young children. But that’s not the concern. The concern is that women aren’t living their lives in the way Heritage deems acceptable.

6. Fund this whole scheme by getting rid of Head Start. Head Start is an incredible program that has had vast positive impacts, increasing high school and college graduation rates, adult incomes, health outcomes, and overall wellbeing. Studies have found it even decreases child abuse and neglect. This proposal would effectively end it, and use the money saved to give tax breaks to wealthy married couples with children.

7. Pay people to marry young. The final Heritage policy is a $2,500 deposit into a savings account for every new baby born in the US — but the only way to get the full benefit of that money as an adult is to marry well before the age of 30. That is, when an American is born, the government will deposit $2,500 into a savings account for them, which they cannot touch until they either marry or turn 30. At either marriage or age 30, they can start to withdraw from the account, but only over three years — so about a third of the original value per year. They get the full withdrawal amount each year (roughly one-third of the total account value) if, in each year, they are married but not yet 30. If they’re over 30, whether they’re married or not, they pay a tax penalty. In other words, to get the full benefit, you have to marry by 27 — below the average age of first marriage for women (28.6) and men (30.2) alike. Again, the point is not to incentivize marriage; it’s to incentivize women especially marrying as young as possible, despite early marriage being tied to higher divorce rates.

xx Jill

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Saturday evening, as I was sitting in a middle school gymnasium watching my daughter, her friends, and a few hundred random people roller skating, I was supposed to be on my laptop, working on Sunday’s D&D campaign for Anastasia and her bloodthirsty group of teen maniacs. Instead, I was scrolling through the news on my day off.1 Tsk.

Anyway, before getting back to scripting out an encounter with some rather peeved fire giants and potentially unleashing a primordial god and apocalyptic destruction, I saw that the rapidly dying doofus in D.C. was ranting and raving about…Susan Rice?

Wait, what? Susan Rice? I haven’t heard her name in years. Is she even in politics in any way whatsoever these days?

Well, no. She’s doing what so many former administration officials have done over the years, namely, cashing in on their connections. Tacky? Sure. But, ahem, both sides2 do it, and no one seems to be in much of a rush to end it.

Still, not exactly a household name at this moment in time. What in the world did Rice do to send Trump into spasms of rage other than be Black and female, which, admittedly, is usually all that’s required? Turns out she’s on the board of Netflix because…reasons. Trump has been meddling with a multi-gazillion-dollar merger between Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery because his billionaire fascist buddy David Ellison wants to buy WBD but didn’t make a successful bid. It’s all drama and Ellison is trying to have the regime illegally block the merger.

Anyway! Rice said something that hurt wittle Donny’s feefees, and he demanded Netflix fire her or else!

I’ve been a little distracted for the last couple of weeks, so I’m a little annoyed I missed this, but it’s worth reading her entire statement made on Preet Bharara’s podcast:

“When it comes to the elites, you know, the corporate interests, the law firms, the universities, the media, I agree with you, Preet, it is not, it’s not going to end well for them. For those that decided that it was, you know, that they would act in their perceived very narrow self-interest, which I would underscore is very short-term self-interest, and, you know, take a knee to Trump, I think they’re now starting to realize, ‘Wait a minute, you know, this is not popular.’

“Trump is not popular. What he is doing, whether on the economy and affordability or on immigration, now, is not popular, and that there is likely to be a swing in the other direction, and they are going to be caught with more than their pants down, they’re going to be held accountable by those who come in opposition to Trump and win at the ballot box.

I’ve been saying for some time now that the billionaires and corporations made the bet that the regime would cross the fascist finish line. They would bend the knee, reap the rewards, and there would be no consequences because the rule of law was done.

In the worst-case scenario, the regime would fall, but then Democrats would do what they’ve always done: Try to get things back to normal and “look forward for the good of the nation.” No more billionaire-friendly fascism, but still, no consequences, right?

Except that’s not how Democrats are talking about what comes next:

“And I can tell you Preet, you know, as I talk to leaders in Washington, leaders in our party, leaders in the states, if these corporations think that the Democrats, when they come back in power, are going to, you know, play by the old rules and say, ‘Oh, never mind, we’ll forgive you for all the people you fired, all the policies and principles you’ve violated, all, you know, the laws you’ve skirted,’ I think they’ve got another thing coming.”

This is the thing that sent the right into a foaming rage and got Trump to start his little tweet temper tantrum. Rice is talking about accountability and it triggered the panic response of the fucking fascists.

I have been banging the drum about this since early last year:

I picked up the hashtag #NurembergThemAll from to express this sentiment, and it sums up what Rice is saying as well (although she is far more polite about it). They all thought this would be another round of “racist white men wilding” with no price tag. No hangover. No pentalies. Maybe just a wagging of fingers and clucking of tongues. The fact that people like Susan Rice, Susan fucking Rice, about as far from a rabid firebrand as it gets, are talking about a radical break from how we’ve always let racist asshole bygones be racist asshole bygones tells you that something is fundamentally different this time.

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It’s everywhere. From the grassroots brushfires spreading faster than ICE can control to, as Rice says, “leaders in Washington, leaders in our party, leaders in the states.” Behind every conversation about affordability and housing and immigration is accountability. That’s never happened before, and every racist piece of shit who has been running rampant since January of 2025 knows it. It’s absolutely terrifying them. The louder we get, the more panicked and confused they get. Consequences for Those People! Not us!

As of right now, Netflix is ignoring Trump’s latest temper tantrum:

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos is brushing off President Donald Trump’s demand to remove former U.S. national security advisor Susan Rice from its board of directors, even as the streaming giant seeks federal approval of its bid to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery.

“This is a business deal. It’s not a political deal,” Sarandos told BBC Radio 4’s flagship “Today” program on Monday, Feb. 23. “This deal is run by the Department of Justice in the U.S. and regulators throughout Europe and around the world.”

Just like Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Sarandos is aware that Trump will not be president for life and the next DoJ will come looking at all of the corporations that made corrupt deals to boost their profits. He’s also aware the courts are no longer rolling over for the regime, and it’s better to fight now than lick fascist boots and pay a steep price in the long run. Ask Disney what happened to their subscriptions when they bent the knee.

Expect to keep seeing this kind of enraged reaction coming from Trump and his cult. Everything they say and do is predicated on the idea that they will never be held responsible for their actions. The more we talk about just that, the more real it becomes. The more real it becomes, the more inevitable it will be. That inevitability will be like an anvil sitting on the chest of every fascist in America, crushing them with fear of what happens when their coup fails (and it will).

I don't know about you, but making fascists spend every waking moment living in fear feels pretty fucking good to me.

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There are 251 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

As part of its strategy of arresting and warehousing immigrants in abhorrent conditions which are leading to illness and even death, the Trump administration is grabbing up pregnant and unaccompanied migrant children from across the country and shipping them off to Texas so that they can’t get safe and legal abortions — and where they also don’t get adequate medical care.

This is an administration rule: If an undocumented child is pregnant, she goes to a single South Texas shelter in San Benito, where abortion is outlawed and where she will be hours away from the large hospitals that have the kind of specialized obstetric care that pregnant girls need. The girls are being sent to Texas specifically because Texas bans abortion, and moving them there means that they won’t be able to end their pregnancies.

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There are reportedly more than a dozen pregnant girls currently being held at this center. Before this policy was put into place, pregnant children who were in the US illegally and without a guardian would be sent to trained foster families or specialized facilities; not anymore. The directive came from Angie Salazar, the director of refugee resettlement, but was pulled directly from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan.

Let’s first wrap our minds around the phrase “pregnant children.” These are mostly rape victims, some as young as 13. Adolescent pregnancies are by definition high risk — pregnancy is a leading cause of death for adolescent girls worldwide. And these are children who are scared and alone, who have traveled very far from home and faced all kinds of trauma and violence along the way (including, often, rape). They are without their parents and facing a life-altering and potentially deadly medical situation that is terrifying in the best of circumstances; they are in the worst of circumstances. They are still going through puberty, which means their bodies are not ready to give birth. They may have sexually transmitted infections from being raped, which can complicate deliveries. And after having control over every aspect of their lives stripped away, from where they live to what has happened to them sexually, the Trump administration is committing what I would qualify as tantamount to a second rape: Saying, just like a rapist does, your body is not yours, and I will do with it what I want.

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The Trump administration has been engaged in a massive military buildup in and around the Middle East preparing for an expected attack on Iran. Do you want to know what all those military assets have in common? They’re air-conditioned. There are no tents waiting to be erected when basecamps are established. No stockpiles of MRE’s, Meals Ready to Eat. There are no woven nylon bags or Hesco barriers ready to be filled with sand and rocks.

Trump has sent two aircraft carrier strike forces to the Middle East. The USS Abraham Lincoln is already in the Persian Gulf area along with its attendant guided missile destroyers, such as the USS Spruance, the USS Michael Murphy, and the USS Frank E. Petersen Jr. The USS Gerald Ford is said to be closing in on its expected station in the Mediterranean Sea, traveling with another group of guided missile destroyers, including the USS Normandy, the USS Rampage, the USS Thomas Hudner, and the USS Roosevelt. Both aircraft carriers are equipped with massive air power, including F-18 D/F Super Hornets, F-35C Lightning stealth fighter/bombers, E-18G Growler electronic warfare and jamming aircraft, E-2D Hawkeye airborne early warning and command aircraft, and MQ-9 Reaper drones. An unknown number of submarines are doubtlessly patrolling underwater in the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf area. Some American submarines carry nuclear weapons, some carry Tomahawk Cruise missiles, and some carry a mix of the two. The capability and positions of U.S. submarines is a closely guarded national security secret, but they’re out there ready to launch whenever and whatever Trump tells them to launch.

And of course he’s got his fleet of B-2 bombers back in Kansas and Missouri, ready to fly a kajillion miles and drop their bunker-buster bombs like they did when he hit Iran’s nuclear sites last year.

On bases in Qatar, Jordan, Kuwait and elsewhere in and around the Middle East, more airpower is stationed, including at least 100 F-15E Strike Eagle fighter/bombers and A-10C Thunderbolt ground strike aircraft, plus dozens of airborne refueling aircraft such as the KC-135 Stratotanker and KC-46 Pegasus, and an entire air fleet of cargo planes, including the C-5 Galaxy and the C-17 Globe Master.

I’m sure Trump has ground troops on standby, but neither the Pentagon nor White House is talking about putting “boots on the ground” in Iran. Trump doesn’t do sand and mud. He deploys only weapons systems with air-conditioning.

It’s the essential delusion of Donald Trump and his Pentagon war-mongers: that this country, or any country for that matter, can use air and naval power to achieve its foreign policy goals. To understand what a gigantic bulldozer load of horseshit that is, look no further than our ill-begotten, ill-carried out, and ill-ended military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Bush administration deployed five carrier groups at the start of the Iraq invasion and many more ground-based attack aircraft that we have on the ground in the Middle East right now. And Bush committed around 170,000 ground troops to the invasion and countless hundreds of thousands more over the years we were in both countries. After more than 20 fucking years, what do we have to show for it? Well, the Taliban has a tighter grip on Afghanistan than it did when we invaded in 2001, and they are far better armed, having stolen every scrap of U.S. military weaponry we gave to the Afghan “army.” Iraq is not led by anyone with “Hussein” in his name, but the country is still mired in sectarian strife, with Iran responsible for supporting the Shiite majority against the Sunni minority.

Quite an accomplishment, eh? And just think: The entire endless clusterfuck cost us $6 trillion and counting, with legacy payments to U.S. military retirements and disabled veterans that will push the total beyond $8 trillion, according to most estimates. And let’s not forget the 7,000 American troops who gave their lives. Their parents, brothers and sisters, spouses, and grandparents certainly haven’t forgotten them.

Trump probably thinks he’s a genius for coming up with the Grand Idea of using bombs to pound Iran into submission and achieve whatever goals he thinks he has. We don’t know what those goals are, because he hasn’t said. Leaks from the masterminds he surrounds himself with say that he wants to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. We were told he’d already done that last year with his bombing campaign, but hell, maybe Trump forgot, or maybe he’s just making shit up as he goes, or maybe he’s so befuddled by all the power at his fingertips that he just figures he can say anything he wants and call it a goal after he claims that he has achieved it.

Trump is reportedly considering a new goal as well: He is said to want regime change in Iran and may try to assassinate Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He even told reporters last week that “it would be the best thing that could happen” if Khamenei is gone. Trump is apparently unaware that Khamenei oversees a theocratic regime with plenty of little-ayatollahs standing by, ready to step into Khamenei’s shoes. The entire Iranian government, from its military to its Supreme National Security Council to the elite Republican Guards to its judiciary and cabinet and even its legislature is controlled from the top by religious leaders loyal to Khamenei and his Islamic lieutenants.

It ain’t as easy as yanking Saddam out of his hidey-hole and puttin’ in a puppet government, which didn’t work in Iraq anyway.

When is Trump, or Secretary of War Cocktail Shaker or Stephen “grab that kid he’s getting away” Miller or Little Marco going to pick up a book – even a tattered old copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica – and familiarize themselves, even a little, with the idea that the Iranian civilization is one of the oldest in the world, along with that of the Tigris-Euphrates valley – read: Iraq – and the people who live there have this thing called pride in who they are and what their civilization has accomplished over the last, oh, let’s just say 6,000 fucking years, and so they might be a little perturbed at the idea that we’re going to come in there and tell them how to run things.

I don’t know what to call this inflamed idiocy. Historians will write it down to hubris, you can count on that, but even hubris doesn’t capture the abject ignorance and bloated egotism behind the idea that you can just push a whole bunch of buttons and launch bombers and missiles and drones and ships and bring the people who have inherited the ancient and honorable civilization of Persia to heel.

So, buckle up. He’s going to spend hundreds of billions of our tax dollars on his insane plans, and if we’re lucky…very very lucky…he won’t get a new crop of young Americans killed in the process.

Madness, I say. Madness. For us, and the rest of the world, just another day in the life of America under Donald Trump.

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Jacob is terrified of oral reports he’s expected to give in his 10th-grade history class this school year. A therapist’s note recommends he be excused, and the school agrees. This scenario is playing out nationwide. The individuals and institutions involved are well intentioned and trying to help students feel more comfortable. But as psychologists who’ve studied and treated anxiety for decades, we believe that this approach — eliminating whatever makes students nervous — is making the problem worse. Here’s
why: Anxiety feeds on avoidance.

Anxiety and fear, particularly among young humans, are fed by a debilitating combo-- the belief that 1) the scary things is truly dangerous, so dangerous that 2) you can't possibly handle it.

I've written about this many times before. Students are still trying to grow coping mechanisms for Scary Things, and they are surrounded by adults who may or may not having very good coping mechanisms of their own. Choices for coping with scary, anxiety-inducing things include:

1) Perform a set of behaviors that will magically keep the Scary Thing at bay. This one is popular among adults, and the problem is that in this model, the scary thing is always right outside, just waiting to get you, and you have to keep performing your keep-it-at-bay activities forever. I'm convinced that much of what we're living through right now is a man (and some like-minded sycophants) frantically pursuing the belief that if he acquires enough wealth and fame and power, he doesn't have to be afraid of dying. No human has ever pursued this tactic so fiercely or extensively, and there is a lesson for all of us in the fact that despite the success of his pursuit, it clearly hasn't assuaged his fear in the slightest. 

2) Denial and avoidance. The Scary Thing isn't real, isn't happening, isn't a threat. You aren't really here. You will run away and therefor avoid it. You can't lose if you don't play. This is every student who is suddenly too sick to deliver their oral report. It's not really coping so much as delaying. Worse, it reinforces the notion that the Scary Things is too devastating and you are too weak to deal with it.

3) Strength. You are strong-- specifically, strong enough to cope with the Scary Thing. Even if you don't beat it (and by God, you might), you will still be okay afterwards. You might even get stronger by wrestling with it.

2 is the strategy that the authors are talking about, and I agree. Every time we give a student a way to avoid the Scary Thing, we reinforce the idea that it really is a threat, and they really aren't strong enough to cope. 

By contrast, when students take on what they’d rather avoid, they learn that worst-case scenarios rarely materialize, that discomfort is survivable, and that anxiety diminishes with practice.

As is always the case in education, there's a lot to balance here. Getting students to face the Scary Thing can mean they need a kick in the ass combined with a forcible closure of all escape routes, or it can mean that they need to have their hand held as they are coaxed and reassured to go forward. It almost always means prepping them for the Scary Thing so that they have the tools they need. 

It also means that teachers have to be thoughtful about how they handle failure in a classroom, in things both big and small. Through most of my career, I tried to respond to everything from wrong answers to a question in class to bombed assessments with a message, somehow, of "That's not what we want, but you are still okay." Students, particularly younger ones, are susceptible to the message that failing at school is proof that they are sorry excuses for a human being-- in other words, they are too weak and too incompetent to face the Scary Thing which is, in fact, a Big Scary test of their worth as a human being. 

Of course, as a teacher, you have to switch gears with a student who doesn't seem to experience any anxiety at all, and of course you have to try to assess whether the student is actually out of !#@%s to give or if that's just a defensive pose (see 2 above). 

Some teachers, it must be said, tend to make mountains out of molehills ("If I have to talk to you one more time it will go on your permanent record and you will never get into college or get a job ever!") which can feed some students' dramatic sense that they are engaged in an epic struggle with apocalyptic forces. This is not helpful.

The messages that students need to hear are--

1) You can do this.

2) If you don't manage it the first, or even the second time, you will be okay.

3) I am here to help you get better at doing this.

They need to hear these messages from teachers and parents and other adults as well. 

They can also, Lovett and Jordan point out, be taught explicitly about anxiety-- what it is, where it comes from, how people deal with it, and how it is a feeling that doesn't necessarily reflect reality. I suspect they could also stand to hear tales of anxiety from adults; sometimes, young humans feed their anxiety with the assumption that everyone else, adults especially, has everything completely under control and therefor there must be something wrong with the young human who does not. 

Adults might also just generally stop pushing the idea that it is a big scary world, that we are all balanced on the edge of disaster, and that young humans are particularly in danger (and incapable of dealing with that danger). 

Schools do not have to be anxiety farms, and teachers do not have to feed the idea that students face Scary Things that those students can't possible deal with or survive. We can believe in our students (and if you teach in one place for a long time, you will see the evidence as they grow and thrive and weather adversity), and we can let that belief color how we treat them. We are all of us stronger than we sometimes imagine; all we have to do is grasp that strength for ourselves and those around us.