The joint winners of the @ParkPlazaHotels *Brand or Marketing Campaign* Award are @YouTube and @Playboy! #BritishLGBTAwards pic.twitter.com/xs55CRrSjw

— British LGBT Awards (@BritLGBTAwards) May 11, 2018

What?? Playboy winning an LGBT award? What could be more straight and heteronormative, not to mention patriarchal and sexist, than Playboy?

The LGBT Awards honour… Playboy. Seriously? So sad this movement now reeks of misogyny. https://t.co/zB1GtOFKTg

— Janice Turner (@VictoriaPeckham) May 12, 2018

Because nothing says sexual equality better than a brand which has treated women as sexual objects for decades https://t.co/Phbc6BEbB9

— Hadley Freeman (@HadleyFreeman) May 12, 2018

So the porn industry is now officially bankrolling the LGBTQQUPPGWEEEEQQQQI 'community. Disgraceful: https://t.co/BpUGEKqAYr

— Julie Bindel (@bindelj) May 12, 2018

… Read the rest

John Kelly on NPR this morning:

Are you in favor of this new move announced by the attorney general early this week that if you cross the border illegally even if you’re a mother with your children [we’re going] to arrest you? We’re going to prosecute you, we’re going to send your kids to a juvenile shelter?

The name of the game to a large degree. Let me step back and tell you that the vast majority of the people that move illegally into United States are not bad people. They’re not criminals. They’re not MS-13. Some of them are not. But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States into our modern society. They’re

Oliver North, that guy in charge of funneling profits from weapons sales to Iran to right-wingers in Nicaragua who were waging war against the socialist government, has found a new low to burrow his way to: calling activists for gun control “terrorists.”

“They’re not activists—this is civil terrorism. This is the kind of thing that’s never been seen against a civil rights organization in America,” Oliver North told the Washington Times. “You go back to the terrible days of Jim Crow and those kinds of things—even there you didn’t have this kind of thing.”

By “a civil rights organization” he means the National Rifle Association, which he was just elected president of. I don’t consider the NRA a civil … Read the rest

May 13 updating to correct: Jared Keller explains that the event was not at the White House and wasn’t military spouses in general.

The photo was actually taken at the annual Joint Armed Forces of Washington Luncheon (JAFOWL) on April 24, not the White House. In fact, it only shows members of the Air Force Officers’ Spouses’ Club.

…

Given that the wives in this photo chose to marry Air Force officers — 20 percent of whom identify as a racial minority, below the rate for officers across the entire U.S. armed forces — it would make sense that there might be a distinct under-representation of black and Asian military spouses, and it’s certainly a problem. But the issue isn’t

Oliver North. We thought we’d escaped him, didn’t we. Not so fast there, buddy – he’s back. He’s the new head of the NRA, and he’s on Fox News saying all Iranians are liars.

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): Colonel, you alerted me before we came on the air. I made some phone calls, top sources in Israel have confirmed that multiple rockets were fired at Israel within the last couple hours. And Israel has in fact — they were fired from Syria, Israel has responded. No Israelis were injured, though, in the attack against them. This having to do with Israel’s previous military attacks against Syria in recent weeks. Nothing to do with the Iranian deal, I was told, at

Another one of these – another “___ while black” item. This time it’s falling asleep while working on a paper in the dorm common room while black.

Other entrants include: couponing while black, graduating too boisterously while black, waiting for a school bus while black, throwing a kindergarten temper tantrum while black, drinking iced tea while black, waiting at Starbucks while black, AirBnB’ing while black, shopping for underwear while black, having a loud conversation while black, golfing too slowly while black, buying clothes at Barney’s while black, or Macy’s, or Nordstrom Rack, getting locked out of your own home while black, going to the gym while

The Graun did a sarcastic Q&A about the Intellecshual Dark Web:

How do they hold their dangerous conversations? Through some kind of shadowy underground network? They go on Rubin’s YouTube show, which has 700,000 subscribers. Or they host popular podcasts, attracting thousands in monthly donations.

Talk about being sidelined.Who are these people? Among those often included are former Breitbart editor-at-large Ben Shapiro; husband and wife “professors in exile” Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, who resigned from Evergreen State College after denouncing a planned Day of Absence, where white students were asked to leave the campus; and psychologist and political correctness scourge Jordan Peterson.

You mean it’s all just … terrible people? Professional controversialists, I would call them. They

The BBC on a trial at the Old Bailey:

A teenage girl plotted a gun and grenade attack at the British Museum after her attempts to become a jihadi bride were thwarted, a court has heard.

Safaa Boular was 17 when she allegedly decided to be a “martyr” after her Islamic State fighter fiancé was killed in Syria, the Old Bailey was told.

It’s an interesting choice, the British Museum. Not Parliament (been done), not anything royal, not the Bank, not some hub of commerce – but a museum of history, art, culture, learning, archaeology. It is of course a product and symbol of Empire along with all that, but you can’t smash that symbol without smashing a lot … Read the rest

From a transcript of the Atlantic staff meeting Jeffrey Goldberg held along with Ta-nehisi Coates after (and about) the Kevin Williamson mess: Coates is asking himself why he didn’t say don’t hire him:

So I thought about it, like, you know how did I miss that? I’m Mr. Blackity Black, how did I miss that? And I think one of the things that happened is, again, like understanding the mission of The Atlantic, which I get. It might not be my mission, but I get it, and I work here. I understand it. Debate various views, you know, we fight it out. “Of no party or clique,” right? And I told Jeff this already, but we have been

Alice Dreger could have been part of Bari Weiss’s absurd “intellectual dark web” but she decided not  to. Hilariously, part of her reason was that absurdly dramatic photography that y’all have been mocking overnight.

At some point, Bari decided to do a story on this—the “intellectual dark web,” not our dietary problems—and at that point I started joking about it, asking if we would all get to have a uniform. I had in mind the jumpsuits from The Incredibles. To me, the joke was the idea that a bunch of renegades would have anything in particular in common. It seems kind of, um, contradictory to consider us as a group since the point is we are all bad

Obama on Trump’s bad move:

There are few issues more important to the security of the United States than the potential spread of nuclear weapons, or the potential for even more destructive war in the Middle East. That’s why the United States negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in the first place.

The reality is clear. The JCPOA is working – that is a view shared by our European allies, independent experts, and the current U.S. Secretary of Defense. The JCPOA is in America’s interest – it has significantly rolled back Iran’s nuclear program. And the JCPOA is a model for what diplomacy can accomplish – its inspections and verification regime is precisely what the United States … Read the rest

The BBC on Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the Iran deal:

Calling it “decaying and rotten”, he said the deal was “an embarrassment” to him “as a citizen”.

Going against advice from European allies, he said he would reimpose economic sanctions that were waived when the deal was signed in 2015.

In response, Iran said it was preparing to restart uranium enrichment, key for making both nuclear energy and weapons.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said: “The US has announced that it doesn’t respect its commitments.”

Trump has announced.

But then what is Trump but everybody’s idea of The Worst American?

Analysis by Jonathan Marcus, BBC defence and diplomatic correspondent

With a stroke of his pen President Trump has jeopardised the one

This again. Somebody at the White House pretends Melania Trump wrote a thing that was actually written by someone in the Obama administration. Why do that?

US First Lady Melania Trump has been caught up in another plagiarism row, following the launch of her new online safety for children campaign on Monday.

A booklet put out by Mrs Trump bore a striking resemblance to one published under the Obama administration.

The text and graphics of the “Be Best” booklet were nearly identical to those in the previous edition.

Well that’s not “a striking resemblance,” it’s plagiarism. Words aren’t like faces; you don’t have a resemblance, you have the same words. The word “good” isn’t “like” the word “good”; it … Read the rest