Hasta La Gadget!

A gay adult film star is setting an important example of how to be an ally by donating $250 he earns from every sce he shoots to the Gay-Straight Alliance network.

Markie Moore of Next Door Studios made the announcement Saturday morning at The Phoenix Forum, a trade show for adult online entertainment, in Tempe, Arizona. The adult entertainer, who originally hails from Colorado and previously announced his retirement, told the audience that not only had he decided not to retire, but he wanted to donate a portion of his salary from that point forward for queer youth.

“I’ve always felt a calling within myself to help people ― especially those who can’t necessarily help themselves,” Moore told the crowd. “And over the years it’s only gotten stronger, this feeling. And I thought that I had to subtract myself from the adult industry to make this happen. So I took some time to reflect and I realized that this is the very industry that changed my life for the better. Being more confident, comfortable with who I am, comfortable with my sexuality. So I’ve decided not to retire and from this point forward I will be donating $250 from every scene to the GSA network ― the Gay-Straight Alliance network.”

Moore then went on to say that he thinks what LGBTQ people need now more than ever is love and support.

“[The GSA is] a charity that organizes clubs within middles schools and high schools for LGBTQ youth, giving them a safe place to learn, a comfortable place to socialize and avoid that hate ― and just to grow,” he continued. “I believe we just need to love each other. Just be kind.”

Gay-Straight Alliances are important resources for LGBTQ youth in schools, providing support and safe spaces in what may otherwise be hostile environments.

We’d love to see more powerful statements of support for LGBTQ youth like this in the future.

You learn more about Markie Moore below (while the video is PG-13, you may not want to watch it at work in other potentially sensitive environments).

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It has been nearly two years since Rachel Dolezal was outed by her parents for being a white woman who claimed to be black. Unfortunately, she is still a national news sensation.

On Tuesday, nearly half a million people tuned in to a Facebook Live video hosted by The New York Times that featured Dolezal (and only Dolezal), who shamelessly plugged her new autobiography, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World. Thousands more also likely tuned in to her appearance on the “Today” show that same morning to watch Dolezal recount her unusual life experiences, much of which we’ve all heard before.

People should have found a more productive way to spend their time because, frankly, Dolezal doesn’t deserve it. Dolezal is a master manipulator and people, time and again, have consumed her bizarre story as if it is one that carries enough magnitude or depth to explore race in America in an authentic and accurate way. It doesn’t.

This public infatuation with Dolezal is just a dark, twisted cycle fed by media consumers who drive interest and content creators who provide coverage ― but it is all crafted in a way that benefits Dolezal most. With the release and promotion of her new book, Dolezal is still able to profit from selling her story of being a white woman privileged enough to claim and convince members of the public that she is black, taking up space otherwise occupied by people who don’t have the luxury of crafting their own racial identity. 

I was among the many journalists who covered Dolezal’s alarming story when she was first exposed in June 2015. However, later in that same week, Dylann Roof murdered nine black people in Charleston, South Carolina, in a racially motivated act of terrorism. In the immediate aftermath of that tragedy, I wrote a piece in which I made a personal vow never to report on Dolezal again because I had firmly concluded that dissecting her story was meaningless when compared to the trauma and terror actual black people face every day:

In the last few days, I have seen former NAACP leader Rachel Dolezal’s white face, terribly tanned and masked as “black,” plastered across TV screens, her name dominating my Twitter timeline and her life dissected through discussions I’ve both overheard and participated in. I no longer care to see, hear or say her name.

I have remained committed to that promise, until today. In the last 48 hours, Dolezal’s face has painfully popped up on social media feeds and widely respected national news platforms, each time with a new weave, the same spray tan and mention of her new autobiography leading headlines. This is deeply upsetting because it immediately triggers disappointment in how easily society can succumb to sensationalized stories like Dolezal’s self-calculated spectacle. It does not, and likely will never, serve as a useful catalyst for understanding this country’s racial dilemmas.

We could instead turn our attention to the hate crimes being carried out across the country and the tragic killing of Timothy Caughman, a black man, by a white terrorist. We could focus on the horrendous death of Darren Rainey, who was burned “like a boiled lobster” in a Florida jail. We can help find black and Latinx girls who have gone missing in Washington, D.C. ― the case has alarmed the city’s black residents, but seemingly not nearly as many whites. We could dedicate our energy to defending prominent black women like Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Ca.) and journalist April Ryan from shameful attacks made against them by white male public figures. We could explore the experiences black women face in the workplace, dig deeper into the ongoing police brutality against black boys and girls, amplify the experiences of black Muslims living in fear and/or discover stories that prioritize mental health care in black America.

These stories deserve as much, if not more, attention than Dolezal, and this is precisely where my personal journalistic priorities lay.

While Dolezal didn’t expect to have her story revealed to the world, she did have control of deciding whether to share the truth herself sooner. She chose against it, ultimately finding comfort in masking her identity for decades and pushed to the verge of misery when it was all uncovered. She has since been fired from her position as the president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, been removed from her job as a professor of African studies, and legally changed her name to Nkechi Amare Diallo (which means “gift from the gods”). And, yes, she still identifies as black. But the struggles Dolezal currently faces is a situation for which she can only blame herself ― and one that may not have escalated as quickly had she been honest from the beginning.

Dolezal has every right to tell her story, write a book and talk about her life experiences, but it does not mean the media or its consumers should amplify her voice or promote her mission to spout what most of us already know, and what many of us no longer care to read or watch. Almost immediately after Dolezal appeared on the NYT on Tuesday, #ActualBlackWomen began trending on Twitter as a way to deliberately overshadow her 30-minute feature by highlighting the books real black women have written.

We’ve probably all been guilty of sharing Dolezal’s story, or at least parts of it, at some point ― but we must recognize that it is distracting, counterproductive and unnecessary. Let’s return our focus to more pressing matters affecting marginalized, overlooked and misrepresented communities of color.

Surely, the stories of these black people deserve your attention, too.

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Mornings can be rough. Mornings with kids might be even rougher.

Whether they won’t get ready for school or they’re awake hours before their parents even want to think about getting out of bed, kids have a way of making mornings memorable.

Here are 23 tweets that prove there’s nothing easy about mornings as a parent:

The HuffPost Parents newsletter, So You Want To Raise A Feminist, offers the latest stories and news in progressive parenting. 

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It wasn’t quite in the league of predicting the Dow would hit 36,000 months before the dot-com bubble burst, but when New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait unveiled his book on Barack Obama’s enduring legacy shortly before Donald Trump’s election, it seemed ― for lack of a better term ― poorly timed.

Trump, after all, was not just running to undo Obama’s record. He embodied, in many ways, the antithesis of the former president: brash, not particularly interested in policy detail and prone to push societal pressure points. When Chait stood by his premise, the internet, that unforgiving beast, let him have it. Ben Domenech, writing for the conservative National Review, called it “an author’s nightmare” to “have your book arrive just as its central thesis is dashed against the sharp rocks of reality.” Other conservatives indulged in similar schadenfreude, treating the book as prima facie evidence of liberalism’s aloofness.

“It was so completely taken for granted that Trump would completely wipe away the Obama presidency that the existence of this book was itself a punchline,” Chait recalled. “It was like, ‘You poor, sad man.’”

Months later, Chait looks far more prescient. Though Trump is president and Republicans control both houses of Congress, the Obama legacy, to an unexpected degree, has endured.

The failed effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, after a seven-year commitment to that principle, was just the latest sign of this. Trump has left the president’s signature foreign policy achievement ― the Iran nuclear deal ― in place. He’s offered no indication of a serious desire to undo the thawing of relations with Cuba, either. Though he has weakened workplace protections for the LGBTQ community, he has largely accepted the advancements made on gay rights, and publicly declared same-sex marriage settled law. He has indicated a desire to undo Dodd-Frank regulatory reform. But a wholesale overhaul no longer seems to be a pressing priority. He’s taken a hard-line stance on immigration while still preserving Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program ― a protection for the so-called Dreamers that Trump had pledged to ax. He’s introduced harsh new screening guidelines for refugees but has found his attempts rebuffed by the courts so far.

There are areas, of course, where major breaks have occurred: the authorization of the Keystone pipeline and the scuttling of the Trans Pacific Partnership free trade agreement, to name a few. But on matters like infrastructure investment and lowering prescription drug prices, Trump seems more likely to adhere to Obama’s legacy than depart from it.

Veterans of the past administration say they aren’t particularly surprised. Though the Obama legislative portfolio may not have been particularly popular in the moments of passage, officials always felt comfortable in its longevity. Legislative progress, they figured, is as tough to unravel as it is to put together primarily because it shifts the voters’ frame for the role government plays.

“I always believed that the Affordable Care Act was going to be harder to get rid of than Republicans and the pundit class thought post-election because it is harder to take a benefit away than to give it,” said Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s longtime adviser. “We are seeing that, despite Trump winning, the terms of the political debate have turned in Obama’s direction. The debate going forward is how to give people health care and the problem is conservatives don’t have an argument.”

The notion that Trump would move swiftly and effectively to erase the Obama legacy was far-fetched to begin with. Every opposition-party presidential candidate campaigns on undoing the past administration’s record only to find that the intricacies of governance don’t lend themselves to that vision.

Barack Obama himself didn’t close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, or fully end the war in Iraq, or undo all of George W. Bush’s tax cuts that he pledged to undo, or break apart the centralization of executive power in the manner he described while on the campaign trail.  

And yet, Obama’s struggle to scale back Bush-ism was different than the challenges Trump is confronting.

On the foreign policy front, at least, Obama was often tripped up by divided government or geopolitical realities, while Trump appears to have essentially accepted the practicality of keeping the Iran deal in place and letting relations with Cuba continue to improve.

“On our second full day in office we rolled back the executive order on torture and rendition and on the first day there was the now-infamous executive order on GITMO,” recalled Ned Price, a former national security spokesman for the Obama administration. “It wasn’t like it was empty campaign rhetoric. In this case, there was a lot said on the campaign trail and it was divorced from the reality of governing.”

Domestically, Trump has used executive action more aggressively to undo Obama-era gains. He’s rolled back federal standards for schools, rescinded requirements that top federal contractors disclose labor violations, reopened the Justice Department’s use of private prisons, and reversed a rule that prohibited some people with mental health problems from buying guns.

And then there are the changes to environmental policy, where Trump has made his greatest inroads. Early action included letting mountaintop miners dump waste in nearby waterways and allowing the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider strict fuel efficiency standards. An executive order signed on Tuesday instructed the EPA to roll back Obama’s Clean Power Plan, in addition to paving the way for coal leasing on federal lands, the rewriting of limits on methane emissions, and the removal of climate changes as a mandatory consideration in policymaking. Though Trump has not yet formally withdrawn from the landmark Paris Climate accord (one of Obama’s signature achievements), he will make it effectively impossible for the United States to meet the accord’s benchmarks.

And yet, even on this front, Obama’s legacy seems stronger than initially foreseen. There is the matter of the courts, which have already directed the EPA to act on its finding that climate change is a threat to human health, and will undoubtedly be hearing cases soon challenging Trump’s actions. And there is also the cumbersome rule-making processes that will end up delaying some of Trump’s directives, potentially for years. 

The Obama administration had to contend with these hurdles as well. But over the course of eight years they were able to make advancements on climate policy, and they did so precisely through the grunt work of governance that the Trump administration does not yet seem to fully appreciate.

“I would call it ‘the triumph of rigor,’” said Patrick Gaspard, Obama’s former political director. “Rigor matters. As does the ability to convince even those who voted against you that your approach was governed by a fierce integrity.”

“Too much is made of dealmaking and going with gut,” he added. “Obama had an informed decisiveness that contained the passion of those in trenches with him and the anxieties of those who feared change. That’s the weatherproofing on his policy legacy.”

Of course, there’s still plenty of time for Trump to rip apart the Obama legacy in a fashion he promised. And not everyone assumes that he’ll be content to let matters like health care reform, or the Iran deal, or refugee policy simply remain in place and move on.

“I assure you, I stand by my Chait review,” Domenech told The Huffington Post.

But the likelihood has clearly grown that Trump will end up taking a more nuanced approach, that he’ll work within the Obama governing framework instead of trying to dismantle it. On health care, already his administration is talking about working with Democrats to reform Obamacare, while House Republicans have begun looking at ways to fund a provision of the law that they previously sued the Obama administration to end.

“I had a book that seemed to be saying the opposite of what people felt at the time. It ran into that timing problem of people looking for an explanation of the opposite of what I was trying to explain. But it has become more apparent that it was correct,” said Chait. “I think it is going, in some ways, better than I predicted at the time.”

Want more updates from Sam Stein? Sign up for his newsletter, Spam Stein, here.

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Google has announced the launch of Google Calendar for iPad, giving users the ability to access and manage their Google Calendar and related tasks from the comfort of their Apple slate. Those who use Google Calendar with any sort of regularity will recognize it instantly — all the features are there, including the machine intelligence-powered features for setting goals and … Continue reading