Some Portland Zoo inhabitants are happy with the snow.

… Read the rest

Meanwhile, in another part of the vipers’ den…

In the weeks after Roger Ailes was ousted as the chairman of Fox News in July amid a sexual harassment scandal, company executives secretly struck an agreement with a longtime broadcast personality who had come forward with similar accusations about the network’s top host, Bill O’Reilly.

The employee, Juliet Huddy, had said that Mr. O’Reilly pursued a sexual relationship with her in 2011, at a time he exerted significant influence over her career. When she rebuffed his advances, he tried to derail her career, according to a draft of a letter from her lawyers to Fox News that was obtained by The New York Times.

BillO, that great stalwart of Conservative … Read the rest

The chief ethics honcho doesn’t think much of Trump’s plan for how to avoid conflicts of interest during his “presidency.”

The head of the Office of Government Ethics is publicly slamming President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to continue profiting from his international company while he is in the White House.

Walter Shaub took the extraordinary step of saying Trump’s plan to retain a stake in the Trump Organization while his adult sons run the day-to-day operations falls short of what the OGE had advised him to do. The office counseled Trump to sell off his business assets and place the proceeds in a trust overseen by an independent manager.

Did you notice that Trump’s lawyer said, in an aggrieved way, that … Read the rest

Trump’s exchange with Jim Acosta of CNN:

Here's the exchange where CNN's Jim @Acosta tries to ask Trump a question and the President-elect refuses pic.twitter.com/LlwmhPj5w3

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) January 11, 2017

 … Read the rest

I was writing up Trump’s tweets, but now I’m watching the press conference. It’s hair-raising.

They’re transcribing in real time.

I look very much forward to inauguration. It’s going to be a beautiful event. We have great talent, tremendous talent. And we have all of the bands — or most of the bands from the different segments of the military. And I’ve heard some of these bands over the years — they’re incredible. We’re going to have a very, very elegant day. The 20th is going to be something that will be very, very special, very beautiful. And I think we’re going to have massive crowds because we have a movement. It’ s a movement like the world has

From a call for papers on an academic listserv which shall remain nameless:

When considering the flesh as site from which the legibility of citizenship is traced, the body, “by definition, yields to social crafting and force, the body is vulnerable. It is not, however, a mere surface upon which social meanings are inscribed, but that which suffers, enjoys and responds to the exteriority of the world, an exteriority that defines its disposition, its passivity and activity.” With subjectivity that becomes a defiant object of interpretation, queer migrations and global participations in citizenship and refugee statuses evoke destabilization. These subjectivities are *queerly* at times illegible and resulting citizenship(s) precarious as queer identity exceeds, transmutes, or coalesces what we think we

Another wrinkle in this story of The Glorious Repeal of the Affordable Care Act: the Republicans have told the Congressional Budget Office not to analyze the cost of proposals for repeal. Keep that shit a secret! Make sure the public can’t find out what a massive fuckup this will be!

Under the House rules, which passed on a party-line vote without any Democrats in favor, the budget office is prohibited from analyzing “any bill or joint resolution” that repeals or modifies Obamacare.

This prohibition probably reflects that Republicans have come to grips with the fact that several provisions within the massive health care law have reduced the federal deficit, thanks to tax increases or payment restrictions on Medicare providers.

The Local pointed out some extensive lying by Breitbart a few days ago.

Breitbart wrote an article about New Year’s Eve in Dortmund on Tuesday with the headline “Revealed: 1,000-man mob attack police, set Germany’s oldest church alight on New Year’s Eve”.

“At New Year’s Eve celebrations in Dortmund a mob of more than 1,000 men chanted ‘Allahu Akhbar’, launched fireworks at police, and set fire to a historic church,” the alt-right website reported.

But no. There was no mob, the actions were separate as opposed to coordinated, and the church was not set on fire.

There was in fact a total of around 1,000 people gathered to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Leeds Square, including “large and

The other day House Republicans made it possible for them to get around civil service protections by cutting the pay of individual workers to $1 thus in effect firing them.

House Republicans this week reinstated an arcane procedural rule that enables lawmakers to reach deep into the budget and slash the pay of an individual federal worker — down to $1 — a move that threatens to upend the 130-year-old civil service.

The Holman Rule, named after an Indiana congressman who devised it in 1876, empowers any member of Congress to propose amending an appropriations bill to single out a government employee or cut a specific program.

The use of the rule would not be simple; a majority of the