Sunday morning roundup

Jazz Shaw at Hot Air says the broad contours of the first DJT-era budget are becoming visible, and that they likely spell curtains for the Export Import Bank, as well as cuts to a lot of arts-and-humanities fluff. Go Mulvaney!

The new thing among feminists is making menstruation into some kind of badge of honor. There was Ashley Judd's speech about blood-stained sheets at the pussy-hat march, and then the gal who ran a 26-milke marathon freely gushing down her legs. Now a yoga instructor attired in white has put out a video prominently displaying the red spot on her crotch.

Publishers are hiring "sensitivity readers" to alert editors to "potentially offensive" content in books:

Sensitivity readers have emerged in a climate - fueled in part by social media - in which writers are under increased scrutiny for their portrayals of people from marginalized groups, especially when the author is not a part of that group.

Should I have enlisted such a person when I wrote my novel High C at the Sunset Terrace?

Two opposing views on whether Squirrel-Hair's Florida rally yesterday was a good thing or not:

Salena Zito at the New York Post:

In the White House, President Donald J. Trump is like a lion in the zoo, a sort of sad, caged creature.

“But if you let him out of the zoo and into his natural habitat, he feels like the guy who actually won the election and is President of the United States,” said Bruce Haynes, a communications expert and founding partner of Purple Strategies, a bipartisan political consulting firm.

As Trump prepared to take the stage Saturday in Florida to address a crowd of enthusiastic supporters, it was instantly clear that his decision to escape Washington — and the past week’s drama — was exactly the right move at the right moment for him.

Susan Wright at RedState:

he’s campaigning a month after taking office, rather than dealing with the nightmare he’s got going on in Washington (and saying, “But Obama did it…” is not an excuse. If you didn’t like it from BHO, it doesn’t get better coming from DJT).

To draw from the transcript found at The Hill, I’ll break some of this down, line by line.

“I want to speak to you without the filter of the fake news,” Trump said to huge cheers.

Translation: I want to ladle raw sewage directly into your ears.

“The dishonest media, which has published one false story after another with no sources, even though they pretend they have them – they make them up in many cases. They just don’t want to report the truth.”

Almost as dishonest and false as promoting a story of a political opponent’s multiple affairs, with no sources. Or that part about all but directly accusing that same opponent’s father of being involved with the murder of a U.S. president. Also dishonest, false, and meant to harm a man’s family and their reputation.

Salena, I generally dig your stuff, but Susan has this one right.

Vice President Pence was in Germany yesterday as were Secretaries Mattis and Tillerson, and the reaction from their European audiences was interesting.:

US politicians in attending the conference in Munich pointed to a chasm between what Trump's envoys and the president himself said.

"Looks like we have 2 governments," Democrat Senator Chris Murphy said in a tweet.

Pence spoke about "shared values between the US and Europe (but Trump) openly wages war on those values".

German Chancellor Angela Merkel made no direct mention of Trump in her address in Munich.

Speaking of Tillerson, he's cleaning house at State, rooting out the career bureaucrats who had become accustomed to doing things their own way - and their expense accounts.