Elie Mystal on what a rat bastard Neil Gorsuch is:

We live in a culture that fetishizes vengeance. Nobody is going to cry if Tony Stark blasts Thanos’s face off this summer. Nobody is going to care if Game of Thrones returns with a ritualistic burning of the Lannisters. Morally, our society is more at peace with the death penalty than it might seem.

Compared to moral philosophy, the law offers a much more compelling case against capital punishment. Some would argue that the first law is a law against capital punishment: thou shalt not kill. And if Charlton Heston is not your idea of a law-giver, political philosophers will tell you that the only reason we’re even in

It’s all so technical, and I don’t have a gender identity degree. It’s over my head I’m afraid.

even in that instance though they still wouldn’t be a trans woman if they were afab, similar to how I am both trans and a lesbian but I am not a trans lesbian bc that’s appropriative of the identities of transfemme ppl.

— lesbian dad (@bigdoggenergy) April 5, 2019

Damn I’m lost already. People are allowed to be agender/genderless and still call themselves women because they see it as a sociopolitical label…so…does it matter what kind of body they have?

Oh maybe it does, because they’re not allowed to be trans women if they are women with women-type bodies, because that’s…appropriative … Read the rest

Huh. Really?

Admin official slams House Dem demands for Trump's tax returns: "This is a hill and people would be willing to die on it… we will see you in court."

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) April 5, 2019

People would be willing to die on the hill of Trump’s ability to keep his tax returns secret? Really? That’s their noble cause?

Maybe it’s just the one spokes. Maybe everybody else in there is saying “Nope, nope, not me, get yourselves some other fool to die on that hill, I’m not interested.”

President Donald Trump continues to hold his ground against Democratic efforts to obtain his tax returns, with one administration official telling CNN that the President and his

Marathons threw women overboard a year ago:

The San Francisco Marathon confirmed it will allow trans athletes to compete in accordance with their gender identity.

Which is to say, the San Francisco Marathon confirmed it will make it impossible for a woman to win its marathon ever again.

After the Boston Marathon announced on Monday that transgender runners will be allowed to register in the gender category which most closely corresponds with their identity, a Care2 petition urged San Francisco to clarify its policies. It notes that the Bay Area race “requires people signing up for the S.F. Marathon to select a gender, male or female” on its website.

“We would love to see San Francisco Marathon clarify whether

When I was a kid my brother and I liked to entertain the adults after a large meal with suggestions of gross-out combinations to make them squeal in disgust. Anchovies in chocolate sauce, cherry pie with a scoop of chopped herring; that sort of thing. Here’s another one:

If you want tickets for the forthcoming showdown between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek, which will be held later this month in Toronto, better act fast: There are two left — as of this writing, anyway — and they’re $1,500 apiece. The unlikely and unshaven pair will square off at the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto, which seats about 3,000, where they will debate whether capitalism or Marxism

I’m still chewing on Kevin’s formulation.

Meanwhile, in reality, transgender kids are bullied for being trans; the principle effect of that bullying is psychological harm; the principle means of that bullying is misgendering; and the principle justification for that misgendering is trustworthy adults in those kids’ lives who argue in support of misgendering transgender people.

The transgender kids who are bullied for being trans…would they be bullied any less or more if they were not trans but nonconforming? Does Kevin know? Does anyone?

As many people have pointed out, kids are bullied for a slew of reasons, because kids seem to have a deep need to police other kids and/or take out their aggressions on them.

How does Kevin … Read the rest

Mueller’s team is not happy with what Barr is doing with the report.

Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.

In other words, Barr is doing exactly what everyone expected him to do: he’s following up that unsolicited memo to the White House by withholding the report and misrepresenting what it says. He’s running interference for Trump and sabotaging the efforts of law enforcement to hold Trump to account.

At stake in the dispute — the first

Nice snap.

The Planet Today… Read the rest

About Brunei…

A harsh new criminal law in Brunei — which includes death by stoning for sex between men or for adultery, and amputation of limbs for theft — went into effect on Wednesday, despite an international outcry from other countries, rights groups, celebrities and students.

In other words, Shariah, of the most inflexible kind.

The sultan, 72, is also the prime minister and holds several other titles. He first introduced the draconian version of Shariah in 2013, as part of a long-term project to impose a restrictive form of Islam on his country, which is majority Muslim.

It’s nice to have projects, but that’s not a good one.

International protest delayed its implementation at the time, but

Never mind sexual violence, poverty, racism, corruption, Brexit, rising sea levels, disappearing coral reefs – let’s focus on PRONOUNS.

Schools in Brighton are to give out pronoun stickers to pupils in a bid to support transgender children.

The stickers, which are being handed out to pupils in secondary schools and colleges, are part of Brighton and Hove City Council’s pronoun badges campaign which aims to prevent “misgendering”.

The council’s badges indicate whether people would like to be addressed as “he”, “she” or “they” – and some are left blank to allow people to fill in their own pronouns.

Even if I thought people had a right to order the entire world to address them by a Special set of … Read the rest

You can’t ruin it if it doesn’t exist.

Republican Sen. Rick of Scott, one of the Republican senators President Trump has tasked with devising a replacement for the Affordable Care Act, denounced the “Medicare for all” proposal, warning that the progressive plan endorsed by several 2020 Democratic White House hopefuls would “ruin” the health care system in the U.S.

The what? We don’t have a system. We have a random chaos in which people who have enough money and/or jobs so exceptionally good that they include health insurance are ok, and everybody else is in deep shit. That’s not a system. A system would make sure everyone was covered, and we don’t have that.

The Florida Republican, a freshman

Oh is that what we’re calling it.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. came up in politics as an old-school backslapper whose greatest strength was his ability to connect. He doled out handshakes and hugs to friends and strangers alike, and his tendency to lavish his affections on women and girls was so central to his persona that it became fodder for late-night television jokes.

But the political ground has shifted under Mr. Biden, and his tactile style of retail politicking is no longer a laughing matter in the era of #MeToo.

His “tactile style” is it. I’ve heard that before – creepy guys explaining their creepy guy ways with “I’m a tactile person.” Uh huh, a tactile person with an … Read the rest

Another horror from the recent past:

Belgium’s prime minister, Charles Michel, is to apologise on behalf of the state for the kidnapping of mixed-race children, who were torn from their Congolese mothers at the end of the colonial period.

The “métis” children, the product of relationships between settlers and local women, were forcibly taken to Belgium and fostered by Catholic orders, among other institutions, between 1959 and 1962.

The children, born in the 1940s and 50s, did not automatically receive Belgian nationality and often remained stateless. A majority of the fathers refused to acknowledge paternity of their children.

What? What on earth even for? If most of the fathers pretended they weren’t the fathers, why steal them from their … Read the rest

It’s subpoena time!

The House Judiciary Committee authorized its chairman on Wednesday to use a subpoena to try to force the Justice Department to give Congress a full copy of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report and all of the underlying evidence used to reach his conclusions.

The chairman, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, said he would not immediately issue the subpoena. But the party-line vote won by Democrats who control the committee ratchets up pressure on Attorney General William P. Barr as he decides how much of the nearly 400-page report to share with lawmakers.

…

The committee also approved subpoenas for five former White House aides who Democrats said were relevant to an investigation into possible

Oh good, the Trump administration has thought of an excellent plan to make everything cheaper and more efficient: just turn over all the monitoring duties to local people.

The Trump administration plans to shift much of the power and responsibility for food safety inspections in hog plants to the pork industry as early as May, cutting the number of federal inspectors by about 40 percent and replacing them with plant employees.

See? Great! No federal dollars going to inspection, industry made to do the job itself. Win-win!

Under the proposed new inspection system, the responsibility for identifying diseased and contaminated pork would be shared with plant employees, whose training would be at the discretion of plant owners. There would