On the one hand:
Comedian. The word is comedian. https://t.co/ttKHll121m
— Ophelia Benson (@OpheliaBenson) November 10, 2017
On the other hand:
https://twitter.com/Friedmanzone/status/929032523253977089
I attach “far too much significance” to it. One tweet, five words long – that’s “far too much significance.”
Mansplainers; honestly.… Read the rest
Louie CK now is losing gigs the way women who spoke up about his creepy nonconsensual behavior lost gigs.
… Read the restThe distributor of Louis C.K.’s coming film “I Love You, Daddy” said on Friday that it would not go ahead with its release of the movie. The announcement comes one day after The New York Times published a report in which multiple women shared their recollections of encounters in which Louis C.K., the Emmy Award-winning comedian, had engaged in sexual misconduct.
“I Love You, Daddy,” which is written and directed by Louis C.K., was acquired by the entertainment company the Orchard in a $5 million deal after the movie made its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. The
Trump goes to ForrinLand and tells it how much better the US is than everyone else.
… Read the restPromising to pursue “mutually beneficial commerce” through bilateral trade agreements, Mr. Trump roundly condemned the kind of multilateral accords his predecessors pursued, reprising a message he brought to China this week that blamed weak American leadership for trade imbalances that he said had stripped jobs, factories and entire industries from the United States.
“What we will no longer do is enter into large agreements that tie our hands, surrender our sovereignty, and make meaningful enforcement practically impossible,” Mr. Trump said.
It was a strikingly hostile message to an audience that included leaders who had tied their fortunes to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a sweeping
Actually the word on Louis CK has been out for awhile, but I guess before Harvey Weinstein Day it didn’t get much traction…though I bet it got plenty among his colleagues. Vanity Fair reported some of it last August and cited Gawker and Vulture stories.
Vanity Fair started with Tig Notaro.
… Read the restTig Notaro is ready to sever ties with Louis C.K. Despite the fact that he’s credited as a producer on the comedian’s Amazon series One Mississippi, which will soon debut its second season, Notaro is telling viewers that this is nothing more than a vanity credit for C.K.—one she wishes would disappear completely.
“He’s never been involved” in the series, she said in a recent interview with Daily
Emily Nussbaum on Louis CK and the whole damn thing.
… Read the restWe are all going to be writing pieces about how these scandals change the way we look at art—at Louis C.K.’s comedy, but also at the movies that were produced by Harvey Weinstein, or that star Kevin Spacey, or are directed by James Toback, as well as the TV shows and albums created by Bill Cosby. That’s a critic’s issue; it’s an issue for fans and philosophers. It’s certainly a particularly pungent question when it comes to a show like “Louie”—an auteurist sitcom on FX in which the main character is explicitly based on its creator, or C.K.’s independent streaming project “Horace and Pete,” which
Scott Pruitt isn’t letting some damn scientific report change his mind about pouring lots more CO² into the atmosphere, because this is America, dammit, we like our air dirty and our warming global.
… Read the restEPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said a newly released government report that lays most of the blame for the rise of global temperatures to human activity won’t deter him from continuing to roll back the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, a major rule aimed at combating climate change.
“We’re taking the very necessary step to evaluate our authority under the Clean Air Act and we’ll take steps that are required to issue a subsequent rule. That’s our focus,” Pruitt said in an interview with USA TODAY Tuesday. “Does
… Read the restIn 2002, a Chicago comedy duo, Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov, landed their big break: a chance to perform at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo. When Louis C.K. invited them to hang out in his hotel room for a nightcap after their late-night show, they did not think twice. The bars were closed and they wanted to celebrate. He was a comedian they admired. The women would be together. His intentions seemed collegial.
As soon as they sat down in his room, still wrapped in their winter jackets and hats, Louis C.K. asked if he could take out his penis, the women said.
They thought it was a joke and laughed
President Donald Trump’s upscale Mar-a-Lago club received permission from the federal government to temporarily hire 70 foreign housekeepers, waiters and cooks to fill out its staff during its upcoming busy season, with its managers attesting there aren’t enough Americans qualified, willing and available to do the work.
Liars. When Americans apply to do the work Mar-a-Lago doesn’t hire them.
… Read the restThe president’s hiring of foreign workers at the Florida resort over several years was criticized by his opponents during the 2016 campaign after he slammed companies for moving jobs out of the U.S. and others for hiring immigrants in the country illegally. During the Republican primary debates, Trump defended Mar-a-Lago’s hiring practices, saying not enough Americans
Hans Fiene at the Federalist comes right out and says it – God did those people killed in Sutherland Springs a favor.
… Read the restFor those with little understanding of and less regard for the Christian faith, there may be no greater image of prayer’s futility than Christians being gunned down mid-supplication. But for those familiar with the Bible’s promises concerning prayer and violence, nothing could be further from the truth. When those saints of First Baptist Church were murdered yesterday, God wasn’t ignoring their prayers. He was answering them.
“Deliver us from evil.” Millions of Christians throughout the world pray these words every Sunday morning. While it doesn’t appear that the Lord’s Prayer is formally a part of the worship services
Trump in China sounds like Basil Fawlty meeting Lord Melbury (who in fact is a conman).
… Read the restPresident Trump heaped praise on President Xi Jinping of China on Thursday, blaming Mr. Trump’s own predecessors for China’s yawning trade surplus with the United States and saying he was confident that Mr. Xi could defuse the threat from North Korea.
Mr. Trump’s warm words, on a state visit to China replete with ceremony but short of tangible results, showed a president doubling down on his gamble that by cultivating a personal connection with Mr. Xi, he can push the Chinese leader to take meaningful steps on North Korea and trade.
In public, Mr. Trump projected an air of deference to China that was
… Read the restOn Monday, November 6, AT&T C.E.O. Randall Stephenson was in Washington, D.C., for a meeting with Makan Delrahim, the Justice Department’s new anti-trust chief, who was confirmed by the Senate in late September. They were there to discuss AT&T’s long-awaited purchase of Time Warner, which has been in the final stages of a protracted regulatory review. According to three people briefed on the conversation, Delrahim told Stephenson that if AT&T wanted the D.O.J. to green-light the $85 billion mega merger, he would have have to either sell Turner Broadcasting, the parent entity of CNN, which AT&T would acquire as part of the deal, or sell DirecTV, the satellite provider AT&T acquired in 2015.
To Stephenson, both
There was a big die-off in Northern Europe in 1258.
… Read the restWhen archaeologists discovered thousands of medieval skeletons in a mass burial pit in east London in the 1990s, they assumed they were 14th-century victims of the Black Death or the Great Famine of 1315-17. Now they have been astonished by a more explosive explanation – a cataclysmic volcano that had erupted a century earlier, thousands of miles away in the tropics, and wrought havoc on medieval Britons.
Scientific evidence – including radiocarbon dating of the bones and geological data from across the globe – shows for the first time that mass fatalities in the 13th century were caused by one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the past 10,000
Maine voters approved Medicaid expansion but the governor says they have to pay for it first.
… Read the restVoters in Maine approved a ballot measure on Tuesday to allow many more low-income residents to qualify for Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act, The Associated Press said. The vote was a rebuke of Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican who has repeatedly vetoed legislation to expand Medicaid.
At least 80,000 additional Maine residents will become eligible for Medicaid as a result of the referendum. Maine will be the 32nd state to expand the program under the health law, but the first where voters, not governors or legislators, decided the issue. Other states whose leaders have resisted expanding the program were closely watching the
Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker story is dated two days ago; today the Guardian adds a bit of confirmation:
… Read the restThe former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak has said he introduced the disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein to a Tel Aviv-based investigations firm made up of former spies reportedly hired by the producer to suppress sexual abuse allegations against him.
Weinstein allegedly hired an “army of spies” in an attempt to stop accusers from going public with sexual misconduct claims against him, according to a report in the New Yorker this week.
The magazine claims that among the private security agencies hired by Weinstein, starting from around autumn 2016, was Black Cube, which is largely run by former officers of Israeli
Here’s another jaw-dropper from Ronan Farrow.
… Read the restIn the fall of 2016, Harvey Weinstein set out to suppress allegations that he had sexually harassed or assaulted numerous women. He began to hire private security agencies to collect information on the women and the journalists trying to expose the allegations. According to dozens of pages of documents, and seven people directly involved in the effort, the firms that Weinstein hired included Kroll, which is one of the world’s largest corporate-intelligence companies, and Black Cube, an enterprise run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies. Black Cube, which has branches in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris, offers its clients the skills of operatives “highly experienced and trained in
Let’s hope this is spoiling Trump’s fun adventure in Chy-nah: voters said a big Nope.
… Read the restRepublicans awoke Wednesday to a series of aftershocks following Democratic victories across Virginia and other local elections that far exceeded either side’s expectations.
That performance, particularly in key suburban battlegrounds across the nation, validates a strategy that Democrats on Capitol Hill had embraced earlier this year: trying to win back the majority by riding a wave of liberal resentment toward President Trump while also promising rational governance to centrist swing voters.
The resounding victory by Gov.-elect Ralph Northam (D) tells only part of the story of Tuesday’s “old-fashioned thumping,” as former Virginia congressman Tom Davis called it. Beneath the top-of-the-ticket races, in many fundamental
Michael Lewis on Fresh Air yesterday on how Trump appointees in the departments of Energy and Agriculture are “ill-prepared for the jobs they have and uninterested in the work of the departments they’re running” and how bad and dangerous that is.
… Read the restMICHAEL LEWIS: Well, my mind when Trump was elected was on the subject of risk because I just finished a book, “The Undoing Project,” about people’s – the difficulty people had processing risk, in evaluating risk. And I was wondering what risks Trump brought with him. I then saw that the transition from the Obama administration to the Trump administration basically didn’t happen, (laughter) that – what normally happens after a new president comes in is that the day
But now there isn’t.
It is with regret that we advise that the 2018 Global Atheist Convention has been cancelled. More details at www.atheistconvention.org.au.
Thank you to all ticket purchasers and supporters.
They didn’t sell enough tickets so they canceled.… Read the rest
Greg Sargent at the Post on Trump’s nonsense about the Texas slaughter:
(I know, I’m harping on it, but Trump’s disgusting cynical frivolity about this cries out for obsessive finger-pointing.)
It has become an Internet meme that Donald Trump favors extreme vetting for arriving immigrants, but not for would-be gun buyers, and today in South Korea, Trump was confronted by a question about this contrast. It produced a useful answer — one that once again illustrated the deep rot of bad faith at the core of his approach to difficult policy questions.
You can see that bad faith when he closes his eyes. He’s taking a second to think up a way to sell the lies.
… Read the restIt’s being widely
Trump said if there had been “extreme vetting” of the guy who slaughtered all those people in Texas, “you would have had hundreds more dead.” You can watch him close his eyes while he pretends to think. You can see him end triumphantly with his cherished cliché “the great state of” Texas.
