The White House abruptly nixed the move

Apr 15th, 2019 5:36 pm | By

In other news – Trump does another disgusting thing.

For the first time in years, the United Nations’ committee on racism will not contain anyone from the U.S.

According to a report from POLITICO on Saturday, the White House blocked the renomination of human rights lawyer Gay McDougall, who had served on the committee since 2015. The White House has not announced why it failed to renominate McDougall, or why it opted not to nominate anyone else to the 18-member commission. POLITICO reported that State Department officials had already informed McDougall that she would be renominated before the White House abruptly nixed the move.

NOPE. No American on any stinkin’ international commission on racism on his watch. America was … Read the rest



Notre Dame des larmes

Apr 15th, 2019 4:53 pm | By

Neil Henderson shares some front pages.

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They are built, they get burned, they are rebuilt

Apr 15th, 2019 4:34 pm | By

More “it’s horrifying but it’s fixable and it’s not actually as horrifying as most of us thought” news: Sara L. Uckleman on Facebook, with a “please share”:

While what has happened to Notre Dame today has shocked me and moved me to tears more than once over the course of the evening, I’m finding that my background and training as a medievalist means I’m, overall, finding it a lot less devastating than many people.

Why?

Because I know how churches live. They are not static monuments to the past. They are built, they get burned, they are rebuilt, they are extended, they get ransacked, they get rebuilt, they collapse because they were not built well, they get rebuilt, they

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There will be nothing left

Apr 15th, 2019 11:29 am | By

A BBC reporter says it’s fully engulfed and there will be nothing left.

This is agonizing.… Read the rest



Nonono

Apr 15th, 2019 11:02 am | By

The fire is gobbling it up as we watch. This is horrible.

AAAAAGH

AAAAAAAAAAAAGH

The roof is gone. Fuckfuckfuck

https://twitter.com/Aka_Fabs_92/status/1117849160135241728

Update: the spire has collapsed.

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Paris

Apr 15th, 2019 10:49 am | By

Oh merde.

MERDE.

MERDE MERDE MERDE it’s reached the spire.

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4chan in the White House

Apr 15th, 2019 10:25 am | By

The BBC notices Trump’s targeting of Ilhan Omar:

On Monday Mr Trump stepped up his attacks against Ms Omar, calling her “out of control”.

He also said Mrs Pelosi “should look at the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and ungrateful US HATE statements Omar has made” before defending her.

Says the guy who has made more racist sexist appearance-ist statements than anyone can keep track of.

Also, … Read the rest



Revenue stream

Apr 14th, 2019 4:06 pm | By

Fox News is obsessed with Ocasio-Cortez.

A study found that the New York City Democrat was mentioned 3,181 times on Fox News Channel and its sister Fox Business Network during the six-week period of Feb. 25 to April 7, or just under 76 times a day. Not a day went by when she wasn’t spoken about on Fox.

The liberal watchdog Media Matters for America, which did the research, called it an obsession and said the first term representative has become the network’s latest bogeyman, “someone for hosts and guests to demonize, knock down and refer to whenever grievances need to be aired against the Democratic Party.”

I’m sure they’re professional about it though.

Tucker Carlson has called her

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On the ugliest corners of the Internet

Apr 14th, 2019 12:31 pm | By

Siiiiiiigh

As the world stared in wonder this week at the first image of a black hole, a new star was born here on Earth: Katherine Bouman, a 29-year-old postdoctoral researcher who developed an algorithm that was key to capturing the stunning visual.

On the ugliest corners of the Internet, however, this sudden fame for a young woman in a male-dominated field couldn’t stand. A corrective was quickly found in Andrew Chael, another member of the Event Horizon Telescope team, who, not coincidentally, is white and male.

On Reddit and Twitter, memes quickly went viral contrasting Bouman with Chael, who — per the viral images — was actually responsible for “850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code that were written

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Frankly, Chris

Apr 14th, 2019 11:33 am | By

Squalid Sarah Sanders pulls us down some more:

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Sunday that she doesn’t think congressional Democrats are “smart enough” to review President Donald Trump’s tax returns should they succeed in obtaining the documents.

“This is a dangerous, dangerous road and frankly, Chris, I don’t think Congress, particularly not this group of congressmen and women, are smart enough to look through the thousands of pages that I would assume that President Trump’s taxes will be,” Sanders told “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace.

Yes, that’s what the executive branch is supposed to do: go on tv to call the legislative branch stupid.

“My guess is most of them don’t do their own taxes, and

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That easy

Apr 14th, 2019 11:14 am | By

The Far Corner Café:

Click to embiggen.… Read the rest



Trump’s lawlessness is intensifying

Apr 13th, 2019 4:02 pm | By

Jennifer Rubin says Trump has taken an impeachment-level lunge into abuse of power territory.

The abusing asylum-seekers as retaliation against sanctuary cities and Democrats in general was bad enough, but he didn’t stop there.

Making matters worse, we learned he allegedly told Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan to close the border despite concerns about the legality of doing so. He allegedly told McAleenan, who is now also acting secretary of homeland security, that he — Trump — would pardon him later if need be.

What?!? That’s the only sensible reaction for someone minimally conversant in the Constitution and the rule of law. This is the conduct of a movie mob boss, not a president. Trump is so

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And now it’s the tallest

Apr 13th, 2019 10:41 am | By

I wanted to post about this yesterday but I couldn’t find reporting that got all the facts in one place. The Guardian has collected them:

Democrats including leading candidates for the presidential nomination have fiercely condemned Donald Trump and other Republicans’ efforts to smear the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, while urging other party leaders to do the same.

Attacks labeling one of two Muslim women in Congress as unpatriotic are “dangerous” and risk “inciting violence”, prominent progressives said on Friday, after Trump shared a video attacking Omar that included graphic footage of the 9/11 terror attacks.

Let’s not pretend that such things don’t risk inciting violence. We know they do.

Just last week, a Trump supporter in New York

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The Democratic party’s new intellectual center of gravity

Apr 13th, 2019 10:16 am | By

The pundits are declaring Elizabeth Warren irrelevant (after years of announcing she should run for president when she had only just started being a senator and was focused on that), but her ideas matter either way.

But since her initial announcement in December, Warren’s campaign has rolled out a series of detailed policy proposals in quick succession, outlining structural changes to major industries, government functions, and regulatory procedures that would facilitate more equitable representation in the federal government and overhaul the economy in favor of the working class. These policy proposals have made Warren the Democratic party’s new intellectual center of gravity, a formidable influence who is steadily pushing the presidential primary field to the left and forcing all of

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Before many women know they’re pregnant

Apr 12th, 2019 4:34 pm | By

More of that cis privilege that women are so loaded with: a bill criminalizing most abortion is now law in Ohio.

The six-week abortion ban known as the “heartbeat bill” is now law in Ohio. That makes Ohio the sixth state in the nation to attempt to outlaw abortions at the point a fetal heartbeat can be detected.

Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bill Thursday afternoon, just one day after it passed the Republican-led General Assembly. The law is slated to take effect in 90 days, unless blocked by a federal judge.

Now known as the “Human Rights Protection Act,” SB 23 outlaws abortions as early as five or six weeks into a pregnancy, before many women know they’re

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In light of the current political and social environment

Apr 12th, 2019 3:42 pm | By

No Pride Parade for you, Edmonton.

It is with heavy hearts that we inform you that the Board of Directors has voted to cancel the 2019 Edmonton Pride Festival. In light of the current political and social environment, it has been determined that any attempt to host a Festival will not be successful. Please keep in mind that we are a not-for-profit organization run almost solely by volunteers.

It has always been the goal of the Edmonton Pride Festival Society to host a safe and enjoyable event that is as reflective and encompassing of the entire community as possible, however given current events, we do not feel that this is attainable for this year.

Daily Hive has the detailsRead the rest



Abandoning the girls

Apr 12th, 2019 3:11 pm | By

The Trump Justice Department has backed off from defending a federal law banning female genital mutilation.

Government lawyers said on Wednesday they would not appeal a decision by a Michigan federal judge who dismissed charges involving FGM as unconstitutional, ruling it was a state issue.

Congress in 1996 outlawed FGM, a ritual that involves partial or total removal of external genitalia, which the World Health Organization has called “a grave violation of the human rights of girls and women.”

The CDC says half a million girls in the US have had it or are at risk of having it.

The decision by the U.S. government “is sending a damaging message to law enforcement, the courts and to the courageous

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How did it all go so wrong

Apr 12th, 2019 12:16 pm | By

Ratzinger is back, telling us the rapey priests problem is all the fault of liberalism.

“Why did paedophilia reach such proportions? Ultimately, the reason is the absence of God,” Benedict wrote in the 6,000-word essay published on Thursday in the German monthly Klerusblatt, the Catholic News Agency and other conservative media.

No. What was absent was recognition that other people are not Things for one’s own sexual gratification. What was missing was the minimal decency to refrain from traumatizing children for personal pleasure.

Benedict also faulted church laws that gave undue protection to accused priests. During the 1980s and 1990s, he wrote, “the right to a defence [for priests] was so broad as to make a conviction nearly impossible”.

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We are indeed

Apr 12th, 2019 11:08 am | By

Trump says “YOU’RE GOD DAMN RIGHT I AM!”

Only trouble is, his people were trying to deny it yesterday.

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The focus narrowed

Apr 12th, 2019 5:50 am | By

Foreign Policy pointed out in August 2017 that Wikileaks declined to publish material damaging to Russia.

In the summer of 2016, as WikiLeaks was publishing documents from Democratic operatives allegedly obtained by Kremlin-directed hackers, Julian Assange turned down a large cache of documents related to the Russian government, according to chat messages and a source who provided the records.

WikiLeaks declined to publish a wide-ranging trove of documents — at least 68 gigabytes of data — that came from inside the Russian Interior Ministry, according to partial chat logs reviewed by Foreign Policy.

In the months leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of potentially damaging emails about Democratic candidate Hillary

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