The Republican Congressional staffer who pissed on Malia and Sasha Obama the other day has resigned.

Elizabeth Lauten, communications director for congressman Stephen Fincher, gave up her post on Monday.

Ms Lauten earlier criticised Sasha and Malia Obama on Facebook following their appearance in short skirts at a Thanksgiving ceremony.

Yeah she “criticized” them all right.

Her deleted post reads: “Dear Sasha and Malia: I get you’re both in those awful teen years, but you’re a part of the First Family, try showing a little class. At least respect the part you play.

“Then again, your mother and father don’t respect their positions very much, or the nation for that matter. So I’m guessing you’re coming up a little

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Right Wing Watch discusses a scathing review by Gregg Frazer of a David Barton book, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson.

RWW says Barton likes to call everyone he approves of a “Founding Father” and includes this passage from Frazer’s review:

This leads to one last area of concern in America’s Godly Heritage which can best be expressed as a question: Who counts as a “Founding Father?”

This issue reappears frequently in Barton’s works. He seems to count anyone of whom he approves who was living at the time of the Revolution, the founding of the political system under the Constitution, or within fifty or sixty years of those times as a “Founding

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Adam Rutherford doesn’t have much sympathy for James Watson’s complaints of undue neglect.

The great scientist James Watson is to auction his Nobel prize medal. He told the Financial Times this week that following accusations of racism in 2007, “no one really wants to admit I exist”, and as a result his income had plummeted and he has become an “unperson”.

If his income plummeted as a result of people avoiding him, that can mean only that he no longer gets big fees for speaking or lecturing. Well…yes, and?

If people no longer want to pay to hear him talk, then they don’t. If that’s because he revealed himself to be a racist, then well done people who no … Read the rest

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Jesus takes a stab at speaking in tongues. He’s a natural.

… Read the rest

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Some terrible people in Pakistan accused the Bollywood star Veena Malik of “blasphemy” and hurting feelings and inflaming sentiments and the rest of the menu of bullshit. The other day a judge totes agreed and sentenced her to 26 years in prison.

What was the blasphemy? She acted in a scene loosely based on the marriage of Mo’s daughter.

The offending scene involved Malik re-enacting her own wedding to businessman Asad Bashir Khan while a religious song played in the background.

There was outrage following its original broadcast in a daytime programme on Geo TV in May, with blasphemy cases filed against the channel’s owner and the show’s anchorwoman, as well as Malik and her husband.

On 26 May,

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Football. Germany. Frankfurt v Dortmund. Frankfurt’s Hans Seferovic scored the winning goal. He dedicated the goal to Tuğçe Albayrak.

Seferovic lifted his jersey after the goal to reveal a written tribute to Tugce on his undershirt, with the hashtags “civil courage,” “angel,” “courage,” and “respect.”

… Read the rest

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Curious as always, I naturally looked around this Young America’s Foundation place to see what it’s like. I found a link titled UCSB Students Believe Global Warming is One of the Biggest Threats to the World. I could feel the scorn rising off the words. Silly silly UCSB students – what does it matter if sea levels rise and glaciers melt and rivers dry up and crops fail?

And yet, I was still surprised by Ashley Pratte’s style of argument.

According to Weather Channel founder John Coleman, man-made climate change is a myth.  Well, college students at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) would strongly disagree.

In a statement Coleman said, “The ocean is not rising significantly.  The

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anthrosciguy pointed out that something called Young America’s Foundation has a speaker’s page for Sommers.

Topics:Education, Feminism, Law / Constitution, Political Correctness, Race & Culture
Fee: 3,000 – 5,000

Not bad for an hour’s work.

POPULAR LECTURES:

1. The Case for Conservative Feminism (How the once noble cause of feminism lost its way and why it may take conservative women to put it back on track)

2. Guilty Because Accused: Why the new federal regulations on campus sexual assault are a travesty of justice. (Pressured by the Obama administration, our colleges and universities have abandoned all pretense of due process in cases of sexual assault.)

3. When Bad things Happen to Good Laws: The Truth About Title

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Oh dear god here we go again.

Sinn Fein is refusing to say if it will hand over to gardai the minutes of a star chamber-style inquiry into 100 cases of suspected sex abuse involving members of the Provisional movement, held in Dublin eight years ago.

The secret investigation flies in the face of repeated denials by Sinn Fein leadership of their knowledge of a culture of sexual abuse within the Republican movement.

I guess Sinn Fein learned from the bishops? And Holy Mother Church?

The 2006 ‘review’ was carried out in the wake of information which emerged in Northern newspapers and the Sunday Independent that a “rape victim” had been summoned to appear before a Provo kangaroo court.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Again Josh, Official SpokesGay writes a Facebook post that I have to put here.

Had a long conversation with one of my best friends last week. We talked a lot about how different life, sex, love, politics look as we enter middle-age as compared to how it looked to us in the late 80s when we were just coming out.

About the double-edged sword of cultural ghettoization. How the closure of a famed gay bar provokes sadness and outcries about how those young baby fags don’t understand what they’ve lost. And they don’t, but not necessarily for the Very Important Reasons we middle-aged are thinking of.

So gaydar. That way “you can tell” if someone is gay. Maybe he’s a … Read the rest

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The New Republic ran a piece by Ken Silverstein about salary inflation at DC think tanks in February 2013.

Jim DeMint had recently left the Senate to become president of the Heritage Foundation, going from $174,000 a year to $1.2 million or more.

Once upon a time, the only way for a pol to cash in like that was to leave elected office in order to become a lobbyist—a nice living, but one that carries with it a stigma that would likely kill any future ambitions for high office. By contrast, a gig at Heritage, the main voice of the conservative movement, could be a good launching pad for a potential 2016 presidential bid. Candidate DeMint could run

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You know how I keep expressing astonishment at the way C H Sommers has gone from being an academic to being a shameless hack. It occurred to me to wonder if it’s just a simple matter of being better paid as a hack. Having wondered that, I decided to see if I could compare her salary as an academic to her salary as a hack for the American Enterprise Institute.

The bulk of her teaching career was at Clark University; she was an Associate Professor when she left to be a scholar at AEI. Clark reports the salary for associate profs to be $107,580.

The 990 tax form for the AEI reports some scholars’ salaries but not all.

That lists … Read the rest

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Here’s a good thing. I saw it via Leo Igwe on Facebook: he posted a picture of himself with a young girl who was fundraising for it at the Foundation Beyond Belief conference last July. The good thing is the Kasese Humanist Primary School in Uganda.

The more humanist schools the better, I say.… Read the rest

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Sandy Garossino, a former prosecutor, explains at the Huffington Post Canada how Jian Ghomeshi threw a wrench into his own defense by writing and publishing that Facebook post.

Normally in sexual assault trials, the accused doesn’t have to do anything and all the hassle falls on the complainant. The defense strategy is usually to batter the complainant’s credibility to death while the accused just looks on.

The Jian Ghomeshi trial will be very different.

Apart from the media notoriety and Ghomeshi’s status as a public figure, the most outstanding evidentiary feature of this case is his own widely disseminated statement on Facebook (now removed). This one act, seemingly taken in solitary desperation, radically re-set the trial dynamic by putting Ghomeshi’s

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This will give you nightmares.

David Futrelle at We Hunted the Mammoth collected some “fan art” devoted to Christina Hoff Sommers by her adoring admirers who call her (god I hate this, it’s so fucking twee) “Based Mom.”

GamerGaters sure do love their Based Mom! Christina Hoff Sommers, as you may or may not know, is a libertarian think-tanker who’s been grinding away at feminism for two decades, while still, rather perversely, claiming to be feminist.

Right? Right? That’s exactly what I say. Yes, of course, feminists can be critical about feminism; feminists can separate good feminism from bad feminism; feminists can say some ideas and claims that file themselves under feminism are shitty ideas and claims. But non-stop … Read the rest

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Saying good-bye to Tuğçe Albayrak.

… Read the rest

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I’ve been re-watching Lone Star.

We talked about it last month, and this past week I’ve been re-watching it. There are a lot of threads in it, that weave together throughout the movie, so there’s a lot to keep track of. There are some things I don’t think I caught before.

To remind or inform you of the core story: there was a murderous corrupt sheriff in the Texas border town where the story takes place named Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson). His deputy Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey) challenges Wade, and when Wade starts to threaten him, Deeds threatens to expose his corruption. Wade disappears a few hours later (in 1957), and Buddy Deeds is the next sheriff. About … Read the rest

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I saw this via Tehmina Kazi…and I can’t bear it. I can’t stand this one.

The Independent reports:

Thousands of people have joined silent vigils across Germany to pay tribute to a student who was beaten to death after stopping a group of men harassing two women.

Tugce Albayrak, 22, intervened when she heard the women screaming for help in a restaurant toilet in the city of Offenbach on 15 November.

But later, in the car park, she was brutally attacked with a bat by one of the men and left with critical head injuries, theSuddeutsche Zeitung reported.

Her parents made the decision to switch off her life support on Friday after doctors told them she would never

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The whole interview with Chris Boyce is on the CBC website.

There’s one clear discrepancy between his account and that of other people. He says he asked people who worked with Ghomeshi if they had anything more to report, and to tell him about it. The Fifth Estate people (see what I mean about awkward?) polled all those people to ask if Boyce had asked them that and every single one said no, there was nothing like that at all.

So…yes, it’s all too reminiscent of the way the JREF and DJ Grothe and even James Randi dealt with reports of sexual harassment and even rape. Silencing and lies.

And it’s in the same cause – the protection of popular … Read the rest

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The CBC show The Fifth Estate last night was about…Jian Ghomeshi.

Imagine the awkwardness! Ghomeshi was a CBC star, his show was a CBC show, his bosses were CBC bosses, the institution that fired him was the CBC, the institution that didn’t fire him sooner was the CBC – and there was Gillian Findlay on The Fifth Estate discussing the whole mess.

It makes for a fascinating program, which is frequently squirmy to watch. The Executive Director of CBC radio, Chris Boyce, is deeply uncomfortable to watch. He’s also terribly familiar. There are so many echoes in this whole show, and especially in what Boyce says. Findlay asks him why he didn’t act sooner, and he says with … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)