Trump responds to Obama’s speech: "Look, he was an incompetent president, that's all I can say. Grossly incompetent." pic.twitter.com/bgkbMFvURr

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 17, 2020

Well, no.… Read the rest

It’s not a sign of a healthy movement for social justice when all it can offer is repetition of dud slogans. By “dud” I mean slogans that don’t even work as slogans, independent of how often they get repeated.

Like so:

We'll keep saying it until *everyone* knows:

Trans rights = human rights.
Trans rights = human rights.
Trans rights = human rights.
Trans rights = human rights.
Trans rights = human rights.
Trans rights = human rights.

#IDAHOBIT

— Amnesty UK (@AmnestyUK) May 17, 2020

That’s just stupid. You can’t force people to “know” something just by typing it six times on Twitter. You can type any old nonsense six times on Twitter; you can do it six times … Read the rest

Pink News is worse than ever.

Meet the powerful international cabal of…lesbians.

“TERF is hate speech and it’s time to condemn it,” gender-critical writer Amy Dyess announced in October 2018 – words she now regrets.

Hmm. Amy Dyess has, shall we say, picked quite a few fights with various women – fights that came out of nowhere and escalated the way a rocket escalates. I’m one of those women and I had barely interacted with her.

“TERF is a slur used to sexually harass, threaten, and silence lesbians,” continued Amy’s viral Medium post, which was liked more than 4,300 times.

Back then, Amy was connected to an international network of powerful lesbians.

Ah yes the famous international network … Read the rest

Eric Trump says Democrats are exploiting the pandemic to Defeat Donnie the Good.

He told the geniuses at Fox yesterday:

They think they are taking away Donald Trump’s greatest tool, which is being able to go into an arena and fill it with 50,000 people every single time. You watch, they’ll milk it every single day between now and Nov. 3. And guess what, after Nov. 3 coronavirus will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen.

Ah yes, we’re all milking it. We just love not being able to get on a bus or take our time deciding which ice cream to get. We also love watching people die in agony.… Read the rest

Oh so that’s which movie it is. I’ve never seen it (and have no desire to).

A few hours after taunt-tweeting at Laurence O’Donnell, suggesting the MSNBC anchor cried when forced to admit that, yes, the President made a lot of money on The Apprentice (a dubious claim that has been debunked before), but a few hours before he retweeted a pic of new Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany done up like Supergirl, Trump shared a “deep fake” video in which his own head was superimposed on Pullman’s as he gave the St. Crispin’s Day-esque speech from the Roland Emmerich’s 1996 film Independence Day.

In which The Enemy was From Space, so not really all that applicable, … Read the rest

The Beeb reports:

Two teenage girls have been murdered in a so-called “honour killing” in north-west Pakistan following a video circulated on the internet.

They are said to have been shot dead by a family member earlier this week in a village on the border of the North and South Waziristan tribal districts.

The killing occurred after a short mobile video of them with a young man surfaced on social media, police said.

Totally understandable. Female people are a commodity, whose value rests on the purity (as opposed to filth) of their genitals. They belond to the men in their family, and if their genitals are rendered impure, they become not just worthless but a liability. Their filth equals … Read the rest

I have to return to this absurdity, because there’s just so much absurdity in it.

pic.twitter.com/L3sxMC9fXm

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 16, 2020

It’s the fact that he tweeted it that’s so grotesque – that it’s right there for all to see.

You know, a normal person wouldn’t see it as flattering in the first place. A normal person wouldn’t see a clip with her head perched awkwardly on someone else’s body as a compliment. It’s not a compliment, is it. It’s a statement that Trump’s body is not all that glorious, along with a statement that his general self-presentation is not all that great. The alternative body is relaxed, comfortable, cool – not herky-jerky and flailing like Trump’s … Read the rest

This one is soooooooooooooo pathEtic…………………..

pic.twitter.com/L3sxMC9fXm

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 16, 2020

… Read the rest

Maya Forstater notes how confused about human rights some core human rights organizations are:

Stonewall was set up to defend the rights of gay and lesbian (and later bisexual) people. Its charitable objects are to promote human rights as set out in the Human Rights Act, the European Convention on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These are the laws which protect everyone’s rights. But in 2015 it adopted the “trans rights” cause and since then has been enthusiastic about ignoring and undermining women’s rights.

Stonewall has called for ‘gender identity’ to replace ‘gender reassignment’ (the idea of transition) as a protected characteristic in equality law and to “remove exemptions, such as access to single-sex spaces”.

… Read the rest

Late Friday night – oh hey Nancy by the way I’ve gotten rid of another one of those pesky General Inspector losers who kept getting in my way.

President Donald Trump has removed State Department Inspector General Steve Linick and replaced him with an ally of Vice President Mike Pence — the latest in a series of moves against independent government watchdogs in recent months.

Ah yes, one of those “independent” government watchdogs who are allies of the badmaddogs.

Trump informed Congress of his intent to oust Linick, a Justice Department veteran appointed to the role in 2013 by then President Barack Obama, in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday night.

As one does. Not during … Read the rest

Trump is getting more and more tantrummy about the CDC.

As the coronavirus pandemic stretches past its ninth week, tensions are rising between the White House and the nation’s leading public health agency. In interviews with CNN, senior administration officials in Washington, as well as top officials at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta describe a growing sense of mistrust and animosity between the White House and CDC over how quickly the US should reopen and how the government tracks data on the virus.

Similarly, if Trump Tower had a fire raging on the tenth floor, Trump would be expressing mistrust and animosity toward the NYC fire department.

Except no he wouldn’t, of course, at least … Read the rest

Brilliantly done.

https://twitter.com/AlessandraAster/status/1261612399725068288 https://twitter.com/AlessandraAster/status/1261612403495665664 https://twitter.com/AlessandraAster/status/1261612407220252673 https://twitter.com/AlessandraAster/status/1261612411464888321… Read the rest

Also today:

The Trump administration really thinks the American public will be impressed by the claim that their (nonexistent) pandemic response plan is in a binder (!), as opposed to Obama's wimpy one which is just sheets of paper stapled together. Beyond parody. pic.twitter.com/GvYvdx0SL5

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 15, 2020

I’m reminded of Trump’s “we have nicer apartments than they do.”

"The president said the Pentagon is developing a 'super duper missile' … what was the president describing?" — this exchange is basically an SNL skit pic.twitter.com/QmREiE2RDy

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 15, 2020

Trump offers some remarkably callous comments about the US coronavirus death toll, which currently sits at 86,607: "It's a very, very small percentage. I say

… Read the rest

Reuters reports:

Lying in rows of cots in a small hotel on the outskirts of Kiev, 51 babies born to surrogate mothers are stranded in Ukraine as the coronavirus lockdown is preventing parents from the United States, Europe and elsewhere from collecting them.

In other words the disgusting practice of renting human incubators (who just happen to be women, and not trans women at that) has resulted in 51 babies with no parents in the midst of a pandemic.

Interesting that exploiters of women choose Ukraine as their human incubator supplier. That couldn’t be because Ukraine is so desperate and vulnerable could it?

Ukraine imposed a ban on foreigners entering in March, and most parents have only seen their

… Read the rest

Them that’s got shall get…

When Congress set aside $30 billion for education institutions facing ruin because of the coronavirus pandemic shutdowns, it’s pretty clear this is not what they had in mind. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is reportedly throwing millions of federal dollars that were intended mainly for public schools and colleges at private and religious schools, according to a report from The New York Times. About $350 million of funding has reportedly been allocated to small colleges, many of which are private or religious, regardless of need. For example, the Wright Graduate University for the Realization of Human Potential in Wisconsin, which has a completely normal website that denies claims that it’s a cult, has reportedly

… Read the rest

I saw this a couple of days ago but couldn’t find the video clip so waited to post it. It’s sickening.

A black delivery driver in Oklahoma City had just delivered an appliance to a customer in a gated community when — as he was exiting — two white men blocked him in with a vehicle and interrogated him about why he was there. Why won’t white peoples leave us alone? pic.twitter.com/42vohZtZjm

— chris evans (@notcapnamerica) May 15, 2020

Nice of them not to shoot him though.

Updating to add a fuller clip

https://twitter.com/james1701a/status/1261167401653211137

and to note that these fuckers did this days after the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in a situation EXACTLY like this.… Read the rest

How to more cases than anybody in the world pic.twitter.com/VA9bPJiQ6i

— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) May 15, 2020

… Read the rest

Everywhere, around the world:

As the death toll rises, Trump’s claims to global leadership have became more far-fetched. He told Republicans last week that he had had a round of phone calls with Angela Merkel, Shinzo Abe and other unnamed world leaders and insisted “so many of them, almost all of them, I would say all of them” believe the US is leading the way.

None of the leaders he mentioned has said anything to suggest that was true. At each milestone of the crisis, European leaders have been taken aback by Trump’s lack of consultation with them – when he suspended travel to the US from Europe on 12 March without warning Brussels, for example. A week later,

… Read the rest

If the numbers are bad, here’s what you do: lie about the numbers.

Top Trump officials, huddled in the White House, itself the subject of a coronavirus outbreak, have according to reports begun questioning the number of deaths – and the president is among the skeptics.

He has a lot of practice being a “skeptic” about numbers. When he’s selling a thing, the value goes way up. When he’s reporting that thing to the tax people, the value goes way down. It’s magic.

One common claim is that hospitals receive more money from Medicare if they are treating a patient with the coronavirus compared with other illnesses, and so are inflating their numbers. Scott Jensen, a Minnesota state senator

… Read the rest

More from le jardin des roses:

TRUMP: "I want to make one thing clear. It's very important. Vaccine or no vaccine, we're back." pic.twitter.com/k4CTpyLOy3

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 15, 2020

“We’ll fight through it,” he says repeatedly, in his dopy clogged voice. Send me in, coach! We coulda beena contenda. Fight fight fight!

Trump is still out here claiming that the coronavirus will go away on its own pic.twitter.com/8bbFtQJBH6

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 15, 2020

“Wheya hadda problem come in, iddl go away, it may flare up, it may not flare up, wll hafta see wut happens but if it does flare up wir gunna pudout the fire, and we’ll pudit out quickly and efficiently, we’ve learned a … Read the rest