The Trump gang has been using money meant to promote Obamacare enrollment to campaign against it.

The Trump administration has spent taxpayer money meant to encourage enrollment in the Affordable Care Act on a public relations campaign aimed at methodically strangling it.

The effort, which involves a multi-pronged social media push as well as video testimonials designed at damaging public opinion of President Obama’s health care law, is far more robust and sustained than has been publicly revealed or realized.

The strategy has caught the eye of legal experts and Democrats in Congress, who have asked government agencies to investigate whether the administration has misused funds and engaged in covert propaganda in its efforts to damage and overturn

Allison Pearson points out that porn is having some bad effects on girls.

I was having dinner with a group of women when the conversation moved onto how we could raise happy, well-balanced sons and daughters who are capable of forming meaningful relationships in an age when internet pornography is as freely available as a glass of water. Porn has changed the landscape of adolescence beyond all recognition. Like other parents of our generation, we were on a journey without maps or lights, although the instinct to protect our children from the darkness was overwhelming.

A couple of the women present said that they had forced themselves to have toe-curlingly embarrassing conversations with their teenagers on the subject. “I

This is annoying. Someone called Iona Italia wrote a post about Richard Dawkins’s de-platforming from a speaking event at radio KPFA in Berkeley. I think the de-platforming is rude and stupid and also shockingly under-justified by the people at KPFA, whose written explanation is about as cogent as a Trump tweet. But in writing about this Italia basically says it’s great that Richard is so rude. Yeah no – it’s not.

Dawkins has always been a man without a filter, who says exactly what he thinks, without worrying whether it might offend. This means that, in his public statements on politics, he occasionally sounds goofy or politically incorrect or voices a sentiment without considering how it will be interpreted by

Updating a post from three weeks ago, aka reporting one bad thing from Trump’s Very Large Array of Bad Things averted: the Afghan girls’ robotics team were granted visas after all.

At the urging of President Donald Trump, U.S. officials have reversed course and decided to allow into the United States a group of Afghan girls hoping to participate in an international robotics competition next week, senior administration officials told POLITICO on Wednesday.

The decision followed a furious public backlash to the news that the six teens had been denied U.S. visas. That criticism swelled as details emerged about the girls’ struggle to build their robot and get visas.

They got here.

For three days in the Daughters

Well that takes the biscuit.

A former Doctor Who actor has hit out at the BBC’s decision to cast Jodie Whittaker in the role, saying that the decision meant there is “a loss of a role model for boys”.

Peter Davison said she is a “terrific actress” but  that he has doubts that she is right for the role.

He said before an appearance at  at Comic-Con in San Diego: “If I feel any doubts, it’s the loss of a role model for boys who I think Doctor Who is vitally important for.”

I see – so it’s only boys who should have role models. Girls should just be passive blobs, with no goals, no choices, no aspirations, nothing … Read the rest

Emily Shire at the Daily Beast notes that the celebrity hijab-wearer and activist Linda Sarsour called Jake Tapper of CNN part of the alt-right.

The woman widely considered the face of January’s Women’s March and the larger intersectional resistance movement against the Trump administration took aim at a journalist from the news network the President has all but declared war on because Tapper raised a serious question about the state of intersectional feminism.

Monday afternoon, he retweeted a message from the Women’s March celebrating the birthday of the “revolutionary” Assata Shakur. The warm illustration of Shakur against a pink-to-purple background didn’t mention her conviction for murdering state trooper Werner Foerster when he pulled over a car with Shakur and

Originally a comment by Jeff Engel on Hannity no-awarded.

Movement conservatism has two faces (in several senses, yeah, but in this case)….

There’s the one facing the rubes, “the masses”, where you feed them raw meat and get them into the ballot boxes and screaming on talk radio. That one’s been anti-intellectual pretty much forever, certainly going back to the printing press, before it was “movement” conservatism at all. Now it’s Hannity; back in the day, it was pogroms then the KKK.

But there’s also the verbose, pretentious Buckley tradition, that draws in the college students who swallow conservatism but appreciate a well-formed sentence and being able to look down on people on the basis of money or education. … Read the rest