Dec 6th, 2018 7:11 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Meanwhile in Canada reminds us:
29 years ago on December 6th, 14 lives were taken – because they were women.
We will remember.
🌹Geneviève Bergeron, civil engineering student
🌹Hélène Colgan, mechanical engineering student
🌹Nathalie Croteau, mechanical engineering student
🌹Barbara Daigneault, mechanical engineering student
🌹Anne-Marie Edward, chemical engineering student
🌹Maud Haviernick, materials engineering student
🌹Maryse Laganière, budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
🌹Maryse Leclair, materials engineering student
🌹Anne-Marie Lemay, mechanical engineering student
🌹Sonia Pelletier, mechanical engineering student
🌹Michèle Richard, materials engineering student
🌹Annie St-Arneault, mechanical engineering student
🌹Annie Turcotte, materials engineering student
🌹Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz, nursing student
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Dec 5th, 2018 5:15 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
In Wisconsin, the Republicans in the legislature strip power from the newly elected Democratic governor, because that’s how they do things now.
After a rancorous, sleepless night of debate, Republican lawmakers early Wednesday pushed through a sweeping set of bills that will limit the power of Wisconsin’s newly elected Democrats, including the incoming governor and attorney general.
The legislation, which Democrats vehemently opposed and protesters chanted their anger over, passed through the Republican-held State Legislature after hours of closed-door meetings and some amendments. The votes fell largely along party lines; no Democrats supported the measures.
To make it worse, the legislature shouldn’t even be Republican-held, because the Democrats got far more votes but legislative seats are carefully gerrymandered to … Read the rest
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Dec 5th, 2018 10:54 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Rebecca Solnit notes that Trump’s crimes are so many and various that we lose track of them.
The current head of the federal government, the person who is supposed to somehow embody the rule of law, is in violation of a host of little laws and some major constitutional ones. USA Today reported in June 2016 that Trump and his businesses “have been involved in at least 3,500 legal actions in federal and state courts during the past three decades. Just since he announced his candidacy a year ago, at least 70 new cases have been filed, about evenly divided between lawsuits filed by him and his companies and those filed against them. And the records review found at
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Tags: Trump
Dec 5th, 2018 9:47 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Good god. Ross Douthat wrote a thing, and it’s so jaw-dropping I should just let it speak for itself. I won’t, but I should.
He starts by pretending that the “nostalgia” for George Bush the elder requires subtle explanation when in fact it’s just settled conventional routine: we have to pretend the newly deceased president was a gem, hidden or obvious. They did it with Nixon ffs so obviously they were going to do it with Shrub 1. But the fiction gives Douthat a pretext for quoting this bilge:
Franklin Foer described “the subtext” of Bush nostalgia as a “fondness for a bygone institution known as the Establishment, hardened in the cold of New England boarding schools, acculturated by
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Dec 4th, 2018 4:05 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Asha Rangappa on what’s really at stake:
Cohen’s guilty plea on Thursday demonstrates that Trump’s behavior is fundamentally incompatible with the vision of government expressed by the Constitution itself. To wit, Trump not only believes it’s OK to profit from the presidency, but he’s also willing to put the U.S. under a foreign adversary’s thumb to do it.
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Candidate Trump’s secret attempt to enrich himself through a business deal with a hostile foreign adversary is the embodiment of the twin evils the Constitution seeks to prevent. That the deal didn’t materialize is immaterial from a constitutional point of view: They may still have influenced Trump’s weirdly favorable view of Russia, or the inexplicable change in the Republican Party
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Tags: Trump
Dec 4th, 2018 11:30 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Oh gawd I’m listening to today’s Woman’s Hour, the segment about trans women in women’s sport, and it’s excruciating. It starts around 11 minutes in, with a recorded discussion between the host Jane Garvey and an academic, Beth Jones. Jones starts with burble about estrogen and testosterone and uses the word “cis” so Garvey asks her to explain it. It means people who are satisfied with or don’t question their gender, Jones says. So that would be hardly anyone then. Garvey points out that 99% of women are not trans and Jones is all “Oooooooh I wouldn’t say that, we don’t know, wibble wibble.” Garvey says at any rate the vast majority of women don’t call themselves cis; Jones … Read the rest
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Dec 4th, 2018 8:50 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Anna Moore at the Guardian:
Patrick Stewart was five years old when his father returned from the second world war to wage his own war on his wife. On weekend nights, Stewart would lie in bed, alert, awaiting his father’s return from the pub, ready for his rage, braced to throw himself between his parents to protect his mother.
Two years ago, Luke and Ryan Hart’s father shot dead their mother, Claire, and their 19-year-old sister, Charlotte, before turning his gun on himself. This happened days after Charlotte and Claire had left the family home in Lincolnshire in a bid for freedom. Until then, Lance Hart had exercised total control over his family.
The three of them were … Read the rest
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Dec 3rd, 2018 5:28 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Sigh.
Woman wins major sports prize. Man tells her to shake her booty.
What should have been a historic moment in football was ruined when Ada Hegerberg was asked to twerk on stage at the sport’s night of nights in Paris today.
Norwegian Hegerberg, who plays for Olympique Lyonnais in France, won the inaugural Ballon d’Or award for the best female player in the world, beating out 14 other nominees including Australia’s Sam Kerr.
Normally reserved for the men throughout its 62-year history, the 2018 Ballon d’Or finally recognised football’s best women and Hegerberg was rewarded for her outstanding international and club form before the man next to her put a dampener on her big moment.
DJ Martin Solveig,
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Dec 3rd, 2018 5:07 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Nope.
Dutch motivational speaker Emile Ratelband may feel like a 49-year-old but according to Dutch law he is still 69.
A Dutch court on Monday rejected Ratelband’s request to shave 20 years off his age in a case that drew worldwide attention.
Well he can’t literally shave any years off his age; he was asking to change his records – to lie officially about how old he is.
“Mr. Ratelband is at liberty to feel 20 years younger than his real age and to act accordingly,” Arnhem court said in a press statement . “But amending his date of birth would cause 20 years of records to vanish from the register of births, deaths, marriages and registered partnerships. This
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Dec 3rd, 2018 4:52 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
It turns out doctors can’t just fling meds around like so much potato chips. There are regulations.
The GP prosecuted for failing to register her online advice services for transgender patients with a health regulator in Wales says she has moved her service to England.
But Helen Webberley admits she has still not registered with inspectors there either.
She was fined £12,000 by a district judge who called the offence “serious”.
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Webberley was also told to pay £11,307 costs and her company, Online GP Services, has been fined £2,000 at the court hearing in Merthyr Tydfil.
The Abergavenny GP started a private service for transgender patients online in 2015, and said she has treated thousands of patients in that
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Dec 3rd, 2018 3:47 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Oh look, the Asian Women’s Handball Federation Championship yesterday.
Guess who was in Group A.
It’s our old pal Hannah Mouncey!
I thought rugby was Hannah’s sport, but no, handball is Hannah’s real favorite.
I have always been a handball player first. It’s the one constant I’ve had in my life from the age of 18 up until now, almost 30, and all the changes that have happened in between. As much as I’ve tried to get that across, it has somehow always got lost in the media’s obsession with football and the mainstream sporting codes.
I played football last year in Canberra with my mates, just to enjoy it. This year, with Darebin in the VFL,
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Dec 3rd, 2018 12:24 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Charles Blow says it’s only going to get worse.
I expect Trump to admit nothing, even if faced with proof positive of his own misconduct. There is nothing in the record to convince me otherwise. He will call the truth a lie and vice versa.
I also don’t think that Trump would ever voluntarily leave office as Nixon did, even if he felt impeachment was imminent. I’m not even sure that he would willingly leave if he were impeached and the Senate moved to convict, a scenario that is hard to imagine at this point.
I don’t think any of this gets better, even as the evidence becomes clearer. I don’t believe that Trump’s supporters would reverse course in
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Tags: Trump
Dec 3rd, 2018 12:08 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Greg Sargent at the Post reminds us what we now know:
I’m talking about the seven weeks or so that began in June 2016, when Donald Trump Jr. planned the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russians, and ended in late July, with GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump publicly calling on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.
What we now know is this. During much of that period, the Trump Organization was secretly pursuing a business deal in Russia that required Kremlin approval — even though the most senior members of Trump’s own campaign, and possibly Trump himself, knew at the time that Russia was waging an attack designed to sabotage our democracy on Trump’s behalf, which they eagerly sought
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Tags: Trump
Dec 3rd, 2018 11:05 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Post collects more lawyers who point out that Trump is witness tampering in plain sight.
In another tweet Monday, Trump praised another longtime associate, Roger Stone, who also has drawn Mueller’s scrutiny, for having said he would never testify against Trump.
“This statement was recently made by Roger Stone, essentially stating that he will not be forced by a rogue and out of control prosecutor to make up lies and stories about ‘President Trump,’ ” Trump wrote. “Nice to know that some people still have ‘guts!’ ”
The tweet about Stone drew immediate criticism from several lawyers, who said it amounted to witness tampering.
Among those who chided Trump was George Conway, the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne
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Tags: President Felon, Trump