It turns out that Martin Shkreli isn’t just the kind of asshole who buys the rights to patented meds in order to inflate the price by 5000%, he’s also the kind of asshole who harasses and threatens women in public.

Martin Shkreli, the former hedge fund manager awaiting sentencing for defrauding his investors, should have his bail revoked after offering his Facebook followers $5,000 to grab a strand of Hillary Clinton’s hair during her book tour, federal prosecutors say.

I saw that yesterday, via Twitter. I wanted to post about it but decided it might look too trivial or random. But the Secret Service doesn’t think so and the Post doesn’t think so, so ok then.

Shkreli’s conduct since

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on He seemed super upbeat.

Politico:

Many Republicans were furious with President Donald Trump’s budget deal Wednesday

On just his first day in office, President Trump blatantly lied to the American people about the size of his inaugural crowd.

Republican leaders shrugged off criticism of the President, saying that nobody really expects Trump to literally mean what he says.

President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, and admitted in a subsequent interview that the reasons given in the termination letter were pretextual, and the real reason was Trump’s frustration with the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russian intelligence.

Republican leaders described themselves as “concerned.”

After neo-Nazi violence claimed the life of … Read the rest

In fact Trump is so manic that he’s turned himself inside out.

Mr. Trump told reporters after the calls that the deal may signal a new era of bipartisanship. “I think we will have a different relationship than we’ve been watching over the last number of years. I hope so,” he said. “I think that’s a great thing for our country. And I think that’s what the people of the United States want to see. They want to see some dialogue. They want to see coming together to an extent.”

Oh. Really? That’s what the people of the United States want to see? I thought they wanted to see lots and lots of name-calling and wild accusations. I thought … Read the rest

I’m reading Frederick Crews’s Freud, and plan to share observations from it over the coming weeks. Laura Miller reviews it in Slate.

Crews goes gunning for two distinct Freuds: the doctor/scientist and the man. The former, as Crews acknowledges, has suffered a steep fall in reputation over the past 45 years. The biological model on which psychoanalysis was based has been superseded by newer discoveries, particularly in neurochemistry. Freud published the works that would establish his reputation as a savant of humanity’s unacknowledged inner life in the early 1900s; over the subsequent century, it has become ever harder to ignore the lack of empirical evidence for the effectiveness of psychoanalysis as a therapy. Our growing understanding of the

Facebook. Russia. Ad buys. Bot accounts. Business Insider:

Facebook on Wednesday said it has found evidence that fake accounts “likely operated out of Russia” bought thousands of ads during the US presidential election that were designed to amplify divisive political messages.

Facebook said the ads were part of elaborate “information operations” in which “organized actors,” including governments, use social media to deceive the public and distort political sentiment.

The social network discovered roughly $100,000 in ad buys between June 2015 and May 2017 “associated with roughly 3,000 ads” and connected to nearly 500 affiliated fake accounts.

“Our analysis suggests these accounts and Pages were affiliated with one another and likely operated out of Russia,” Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex

Grady Judd, Florida’s Joe Arpaio.

Florida sheriff is telling certain members of the population in Polk County that they won’t be welcome at shelters in the area, and his statement has spurred controversy as Hurricane Irma barrels towards the state.

The Polk County Sheriff Twitter account tweeted Wednesday that law enforcement officers would be checking IDs at every shelter in the county. The purpose, the account said, was to turn away sexual predators.

The sheriff of Polk County, whose photo is on the Twitter account, is Grady Judd.

Of course sexual predators aren’t the only people who will be scared off by that announcement.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida spoke out against his language, saying Judd was

Rush Limbaugh is telling his listeners that Irma is fake news, faked in a plot to get people to go out and stock up on batteries.

“These storms, once they actually hit, are never as strong as they’re reported,” Limbaugh claimed on his syndicated radio show. He added that “the graphics have been created to make it look like the ocean’s having an exorcism, just getting rid of the devil here in the form of this hurricane, this bright red stuff.”

Why would the media exaggerate the threat of a hurricane? Here’s Limbaugh’s theory:

There is symbiotic relationship between retailers and local media, and it’s related to money. It revolves around money. You have major, major industries and businesses

Lindy West on the feminist awesomeness of Ivanka Trump:

Ivanka Trump, first daughter, strode into Washington back in January with big promises: She was passionate about helping “working women,” she said, and she was going to close the gender wage gap even if it killed her.

Well, not if it killed her, not literally, but even if it mildly inconvenienced her, she was on it 110 percent, for the women. Well, not if it mildly inconvenienced her, she’s very busy, but definitely if there was a wage transparency policy already in place, she would not openly and glowingly support overturning it.

Well, unless her dad wanted to overturn it because doing so satisfied two of his top 10 vindictive

You’ve probably seen the video of the Salt Lake City cop losing his temper when a burn unit nurse explained why she couldn’t give him a blood sample from an unconscious patient. You’ve probably seen how he arrested her with considerable violence because she was doing her job.

Salt Lake City cops now have to stay out of patient contact areas and away from nurses at that hospital.

Gordon Crabtree, interim chief executive of the hospital, said at a Monday news conference that he was “deeply troubled” by the arrest and manhandling of burn unit nurse Alex Wubbels on July 26. In accord with hospital policy and the law, she had refused to allow a Salt Lake City police

The Guardian has more on the murder of Gauri Lankesh.

Gauri Lankesh was the editor of a Kannada-language tabloid that has frequently been critical of Hindu extremists.

Police said Lankesh, who was in her 50s, was shot by three assailants as she was entering the property on Tuesday evening and died shortly after. Officers said it was too early to speculate on the motive.

A small group of protesters formed outside her home as news of the killing spread.

Lankesh was known as a fierce critic of Hindu nationalist organisations in her state and was convicted of defamation last year for a piece accusing members of the Bharatiya Janata party of theft. She was appealing against the decision.

She

Trump went ahead with ending DACA, of course – because if there’s a mean thing to do and Trump has the choice, he’ll do it.

President Trump on Tuesday ordered an end to the Obama-era executive action that shields young undocumented immigrants from deportation, calling the program an “amnesty-first approach” and urging Congress to replace it with legislation before it begins phasing out on March 5, 2018.

“I do not favor punishing children, most of whom are now adults, for the actions of their parents,” Mr. Trump said in a written statement. “But we must also recognize that we are nation of opportunity because we are a nation of laws.”

The statement was released shortly after Mr. Trump, who

An Economist writer tells us the historiography of Gettysburg the site has changed.

When war memories were still fresh, that Pennsylvania town was a shrine to Union suffering. Confederate troops under Robert E. Lee invaded Pennsylvania to bring terror to Union territory. They seized farmers’ property and—in a monstrous touch—kidnapped free blacks and escaped slaves, sending scores southward into captivity. The war was still raging when Abraham Lincoln gave his Gettysburg address to dedicate a Union cemetery there, months after the pivotal battle outside town. So eager were locals for martyrs that Virginia “Jennie” Wade, a young seamstress shot by a stray bullet while baking for Union soldiers and the only civilian casualty of the battle, was pressed into

Outlook India reports:

Senior journalist Gauri Lankesh has been shot dead at her residence in Bengaluru.

NDTV reports that unidentified men shot at her seven times from close range and that three bullets hit her on the neck and chest, following which she collapsed on the spot.

“There has been a shootout at  Gauri Lankesh’s house this evening; she is no more. Her body was found in her veranda,” said M.N. Anucheth, DCP, West Bengaluru according to ANI.

…

Lankesh was the editor of the weekly ‘Gauri Lankesh Patrike’ and had been under attack for her views on communalism. She had been convicted in two defamation cases for articles critical of the Bharatiya Janata Party written in January 2008.