Apr 17th, 2018 10:49 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Nice little free verse poem here:
Sean Hannity reminds you:
Michael Cohen wasn’t his lawyer
But he still expects attorney-client privilege.
And he has nothing to hide
But he ordered MC not to reveal him.
And He defended MC all week
But now MC’s a liar.
And that’s why Hillary Clinton must be stopped.
QED.… Read the rest
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Apr 17th, 2018 10:35 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Glosswitch looks askance at the breeding stock view of women.
Pregnancy and childbirth – where would we be without them? Essential to the continuation of our very species, everyday phenomena don’t get more miraculous. It’s a pity they’re entrusted to such unworthy vessels.
It works out ok if you think of it as a purely mechanical process, which can be easily replicated by any decent engineer. Of course if you do that you may have trouble tracking down that decent engineer and finding any women willing to perform the purely mechanical process. It’s been a human tragedy all along, that women are such garbage yet nobody can have any babies without them.
Just look at the evidence: if the
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Apr 17th, 2018 10:10 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Strange times.
The lyrics are helpfully provided.
Its not hard to use the right words
When your talking to people
And you know the ones the prefer
Its not that complicated
To use respectful language
Its the least you can do
if you don’t it shows the truth
About you and your loyalty
To the patriarchy
Your false feminism
Hides your misogyny
Terfs are trash
We won’t stand for trans exclusionary feminism
Theres nothing radical about traditional gender binaries
If you intentionally
misgender anybody
Your a sexist piece of trash
That deserves a brick to the teeth
Equality is for everybody
You gotta lot of nerve
coming round with that
Swerf talk terf talk
Gonna get that sidewalk
curb stomp
…
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Tags: Misogyny
Apr 16th, 2018 4:12 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
I’m sure this is not at all sinister. Haley says there will be sanctions on Russia and Trump says nope there won’t.
Preparations to punish Russia anew for its support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government over an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria caused consternation at the White House. Haley had said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” that sanctions on Russian companies behind the equipment related to Assad’s alleged chemical weapons attack would be announced Monday by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
But Trump conferred with his national security advisers later Sunday and told them he was upset the sanctions were being officially rolled out because he was not yet comfortable executing them, according to several people familiar
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Apr 16th, 2018 3:24 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
You couldn’t make it up.
Lawyers for Mr. Cohen, the president’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, had sought to keep the identity of one of Mr. Cohen’s clients a secret in a court challenge of an F.B.I. search of Mr. Cohen’s office.
And the mystery client izzzzzzzzzzz
Sean Hannity.
[A]fter several minutes of back and forth between the government and Mr. Cohen’s lawyers, Kimba M. Wood, a judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, ordered that Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, Stephen Ryan, disclose in open court the name of a client in question, who turned out to be Mr. Hannity.
Before Mr. Hannity’s name was revealed in the courtroom, Mr. Ryan had argued
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Apr 16th, 2018 11:53 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Nate Silver points out an aspect I would love to know more about. (I don’t suppose we ever will.)
Stephanopoulos doesn’t quite pose the “why not wait?” question directly to Comey, but Comey’s thinking seems to have been influenced by concerns that pro-Trump elements within the FBI would leak word of the Weiner emails to the media.
From the transcript where they’re talking about why he sent the letter about re-opening the emails investigation:… Read the rest
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Tags: Comey
Apr 16th, 2018 11:20 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Oh gee golly I wonder what happened here: a Russian investigative journalist dies after falling from his fifth-floor flat.
Maxim Borodin was found badly injured by neighbours in Yekaterinburg and taken to hospital, where he later died.
Local officials said no suicide note was found but the incident was unlikely to be of a criminal nature.
However, a friend revealed Borodin had said his flat had been surrounded by security men a day earlier.
Total coincidence I’m sure. They were there to pick up cigarette butts.
Vyacheslav Bashkov described Borodin as a “principled, honest journalist” and said Borodin had contacted him at five o’clock in the morning on 11 April saying there was “someone with a weapon on his
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Apr 16th, 2018 9:06 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Funny thing: I did a search of the Comey interview and the word “truth” appears 48 times. “Truth matters” appears 3 times.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Right at the beginning of your career, you’re involved in prosecution of major mafia figures. How does that form you?
JAMES COMEY: Well, it’s a tremendous education to get– a view inside La Cosa Nostra, the mafia, both in the United States and in Sicily. And to realize that the mafia is an organization like any other organization. Has a leader, has underlings, has values, has principles. They’re entirely corrupt. And it is the antithesis of ethical leadership.
But I didn’t know it at the time. But it was forming my view that the truth has
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Tags: Comey
Apr 16th, 2018 8:45 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Times has some highlights of The Interview.
Asked if he believes Mr. Trump is unfit for office, Mr. Comey was quick to say yes, but not for reasons of his mental state.
Instead, Mr. Comey called Mr. Trump “morally unfit.”
“A person who sees moral equivalence in Charlottesville, who talks about and treats women like they’re pieces of meat, who lies constantly about matters big and small and insists the American people believe it — that person’s not fit to be president of the United States, on moral grounds,” Mr. Comey said.
The Guardian also has a sampling.
Life in the Comey household must have been awkward after the election
Early in the interview, Comey said he
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Apr 15th, 2018 4:33 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The Observer profiles the admirable Caroline Criado-Perez:
Two years ago, a young woman was running through London with her dog. Her route took her through Parliament Square, with the monuments of the establishment on all sides – legislature to the east, executive offices to the north, judiciary to the west and the church to the south. She ran past the bronze statues that lined her route, towering above her on their plinths: Nelson Mandela, Robert Peel, Disraeli, Edward Smith-Standley, Palmerston, Jan Smuts, David Lloyd George and the bronze of Winston Churchill. And she thought: “But they are all men!”
And because it was 8 March, International Women’s Day, and because the woman was the unstoppable feminist activist and campaigner
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Apr 15th, 2018 12:12 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
The CEO of Starbucks has apologized.
The men, who have not been identified, were arrested on suspicion of trespassing. But Starbucks did not want to press charges and the men were later released, Commissioner Richard Ross Jr. of the Philadelphia Police Department said in a recorded statement on Saturday.
They were released at 1:30 in the morning. I think the arrest was about 5 p.m. – so that’s 8.5 hours sitting in jail.
The company apologized on Twitter Saturday afternoon. Later that day, while the hashtag #BoycottStarbucks was trending on Twitter, Kevin R. Johnson, the chief executive of Starbucks, released a statement in which he called the situation a “reprehensible outcome.”
Mr. Johnson said he hoped to meet them in
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Tags: Starbucks
Apr 15th, 2018 11:24 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Dr Jen Gunter finds another jaw-dropper: a “naturopath” using “a remedy made from a rabid dog’s saliva” to fix aggression in a 4-year-old boy.
At first I asked if this was from The Onion, because honestly after reading I wasn’t sure.
But no, Dr. Zimmerman is really a naturopath and, well, this is how she summarized the problem…
This is a 4-year-old boy who is suffering from an inability to fall asleep at night, a fear of the dark, of wolves, werewolves, ghosts and zombies and who frequently hides under tables and growls at people. He is overly excitable and has a tendency to defiance. He was normal as a baby, not affected by sleep or temper problems.
Rabies-drool … Read the rest
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Tags: Woo
Apr 15th, 2018 10:27 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Carlos Lozada at the Post reviews Comey’s book. He’s not besotted with him.
Running through the book, a sort of geek chorus, is Comey’s doctrine of “ethical leadership,” an often preachy and sometimes profound collection of principles that he believes should govern those who govern. “A Higher Loyalty” is the brand extension of James Comey: the upright citizen turned philosopher, the lawman as thought leader.
I’ve learned to be suspicious of people – or maybe I mean men – who need brand extensions or hope to be thought leaders.
Comey understands that side-by-side comparisons are not a true measure of leadership, that leaders should be assessed against their own best performances and highest aspirations. “Ethical leaders do not run
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Tags: Comey
Apr 14th, 2018 6:16 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
In more racism news – a boy gets lost on his way to school so he knocks on a door to ask for directions – and gets shot at.
When 14-year-old Brennan Walker missed his bus Thursday morning, he decided to walk to his high school in Rochester Hills, Michigan. But he got lost, so he knocked on a door hoping to get directions. Instead, he ended up running for his life as a man allegedly fired his gun at the black teenager.
Jeff Ziegler, a 53-year-old retired firefighter, was arrested and charged with assault with intent to murder and a felony charge of possessing a firearm for allegedly shooting at Brennan.
Authorities on Thursday responded to a 911 call
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Apr 14th, 2018 4:54 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
A couple of guys go to Starbucks to meet a friend. They asked to use the restroom and were told it was only for paying customers. (Fun fact: I’ve used the restroom at various Starbuckses without buying anything, and no one batted an eye.) They hung out quietly chatting while waiting for their friend, and then…the police arrived and handcuffed them and arrested them.
Lauren, who asked that her last name not be used, shot video of the two men being arrested at the Starbucks just before 5 p.m. on April 12. She said the incident began after the men asked to use the bathroom and were told that it was only available for paying customers, which Philadelphia
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