Turkey doesn’t allow any lèse-majesté when people mention Erdoğan. People who lèse the majesté of Erdoğan get busted.

The boss of a cafeteria at a Turkish opposition newspaper has been detained after saying he would refuse to serve tea to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Senol Buran, cafeteria head at Cumhuriyet, was remanded accused of insulting the president. He denies the refusal was an insult, his lawyer said.

Trump would do the same thing if he could, but fortunately he can’t. He can’t stop us calling him a short-fingered vulgarian, a fascist, a bully, an ignorant shallow conceited stupid loudmouth, a tiny-fisted Nazi, a Cheeto, the pussygrabber-in-chief, a sexist racist pig, a fraud, a thief, a very bad man.

Mr

The reporting on conflicts of interest has finally gotten through to Trump and the Trumplings.

Realizing that his presidency could face potentially crippling questions over conflicts of interest, Donald J. Trump and his family are rushing to resolve potential controversies — like shuttering foundations and terminating development deals — even as the president-elect publicly maintains that no legal conflicts exist.

In recent days, the president-elect and his aides have said that he intends to distribute the assets of his personal charity and then close it down, has examined a plan to hire an outside monitor to oversee the Trump Organization and has terminated some international business projects.

He’s not exactly a quick study, is he. How long has it … Read the rest

A festive treat.

… Read the rest

Have a disturbing film clip from France24 (in English).

https://youtu.be/5tSYGfEg1IY

Do not read the comments.… Read the rest

I am relieved – the Rockettes don’t have to perform at Trump’s coronation inauguration if they won’t want to. Unlike some women in show business, they get to say No to Donnie from Queens.

Within hours of confirming plans to appear at the inauguration of Donald J. Trump, the Radio City Rockettes were plunged into a maelstrom of social-media outrage Friday amidreports that the performers were contractually obligated to dance at the ceremony or lose their jobs.

But as the day wore on, both the Madison Square Garden Company, which manages the Rockettes, and their union, the American Guild of Variety Artists, said that any of the dancers could opt out of the Jan. 20 inauguration ceremony

This is how we live now – an adviser to the next president saying grossly racist and malevolent things in public.

Carl Paladino, a former Republican nominee for governor of New York and an adviser to president-elect Trump, included the death of President Obama and “return” of first lady Michelle Obama to Africa on his list of things he wanted for 2017.

Paladino was responding to a survey by an alternative weekly magazine, Artvoice.

Asked what he would like to happen in 2017, he said he hopes that “Obama catches mad cow disease” and dies after having relations with a Hereford, a type of cow. Asked what he would most like to see go, Paladino responded that Michelle Obama

A “queer” woman explains why she hates lesbians so much.

Some years ago, a close friend and I developed a not-so-subtle code for queer women too basic for our tastes: We’d make an “L” with our thumbs and forefingers against our foreheads, like the loser sign that was popular when we were in middle school. In this case, the “L” stood for lesbian.

We, too, were lesbians—generally speaking. But the women my friend and I mocked (and trust, I am duly shamed by this memory) were what we’d call “capital-L lesbians.” We were urban-dwelling and queer-identified and in our 20s; the other women came from the suburbs, skewed older, and were, we presumed, unversed in queer politics. We

There’s a video. There’s always a video.

Anis Amri was killed in a suburb of Milan after he shot a cop.

Hours after the shootout, the Islamic State-linked news agency, Amaq, released a video that purports to show Amri swearing allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State.

Speaking in a black-hooded windbreaker on an iron bridge with white railing and scrawled graffiti, he called on Muslims in Europe to rise up and strike at “crusaders.”

“God willing, we will slaughter you like pigs,” he said in the video, whose date and location was not given.

Yeah that’s nice – a god who endorses murdering random people “like pigs.”

He added, “to my brothers everywhere,

The Hill reports that Trump said Michelle Obama didn’t mean it when she mentioned a hope deficit.

“We have tremendous hope, and we have tremendous promise and tremendous potential,” Trump said in Mobile, Ala., on the final stop of his “thank you” tour.

“And I actually think she made that statement not meaning it the way it came out,” Trump continued about Obama.

She was nice when he went to visit them that one time, and sat there looking like an overgrown child about to throw a tantrum. He said she couldn’t have been nicer. No doubt, Donnie from Queens, because she’s adult like that, but that doesn’t mean she thinks you’re a good future president or a good human … Read the rest