… Read the rest

Can we not stop this?!

NBC News tweets:

Analysis: The first two witnesses called Wednesday testified to President Trump’s scheme, but lacked the pizzazz necessary to capture public attention.

Oh yes, very analysis, much thoughtful.

PIZZAZZ??? What are we, six? Were we expecting clowns and fireworks and a street dance? Can we not be adults for one day? Lust for “pizzazz” is what got us in this fucking mess.

I’m not the only one who reacted that way.

James Fallows:

FWIW, my “analysis”: What we don’t need: a journalist’s guess about “how this played.” What we do need: reportage of who said what, how it was backed up, what was new, how it matches the records and the

Another odd argument from Jolyon Maugham, which started with a gripe about the state of the BBC:

John Humphries may be gone but his attitude to equalities lives on at the BBC. If you’d like to know more about self-ID this Q&A – from leading feminist charity @fawcettsociety
– is well worth a read. https://fawcettsociety.org.uk/sex-gender-and-gender-identity-qa

What naughty Nick Robinson had said:

Should the law treat me as a woman if I chose to identify as one? Yes @lucianaberger
of the @LibDems told me on @BBCr4today despite criticism by some women that their rights are being ignored

Maugham argues in response:

The purpose of societal norms isn’t to guard against the worst amongst us – that’s the job

Andrew Marantz, a New Yorker writer who’s written about for instance Mike Cernovitch, talked about Zuckerberg and Facebook and Free Speech on Fresh Air yesterday.

GROSS: There’s a lot of pressure now on social media to prevent smears, hate speech, threats, disinformation, propaganda. And, you know, Facebook is a good example of a company that appears to be trying to deal with it. So what has Facebook done recently to try to cut down on propaganda, disinformation, smears, threats?

MARANTZ: So in one sense, Facebook is doing a lot of stuff. In another sense, they’re kind of running away from their responsibility. Often, something really awful will happen on Facebook. Like, they will add fuel to the fire of Rohingya

Trump claims to be totally bored by the whole thing.

The White House and its allies sought to dismiss the hearing as dull and irrelevant. Press secretary Stephanie Grisham and Trump’s son, Eric, both dismissed it as “boring”, with Eric adding “#Snoozefest” in a tweet.

The president himself seemed to have found the historic day soporific, judging by his low energy, croaky voiced performance at a joint press conference with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan which started an hour late.

…

“Are you talking about the witch hunt?” Trump asked a reporter in the White House east room who sought his first impression. “Is that what you mean? Is that what you’re talking about? I hear it’s a joke.

Another chickenshit club:

Rape prosecutors in England and Wales were given a conviction rate target which was never made public.

BBC Newsnight has had access to a Law Society Gazette investigation, which found that from 2016 prosecutors were judged against a 60% target of cases ending in conviction.

So what do you do if you want to hit the target? You don’t prosecute the tough cases. This is what James Comey reminded the SDNY prosecutors when he was their boss: if they made it their goal to have zero losses, then they were in the chickenshit club, because they would prosecute only the sure things.

Rape convictions in England and Wales are at their lowest level since 2008,

Kate Smurthwaite writes:

Ok I’m seriously at my wit’s end. I’ve sold out shows in York the last couple of years with a fair bit of ease so although I wasn’t planning a larger-scale tour this year I figured when the opportunity came up I’d accept a date there.

My new show is called “bitch” and, as ever, it’s about lots of things but one of the key reasons it’s called that is because I get called “bitch” so much online, including on Facebook, Twitter, Insta and YouTube. I’ve tried reporting these messages and over and over the social media sites, including Facebook, have told me that the word “bitch” doesn’t breach their community standards so they can’t

One of the potential bad side effects of Trump’s extortion of Ukraine was said to be undermining the bipartisan support for Ukraine v Putin.

So the Republicans are now making it happen.

Republicans on the House intelligence committee appear to be using their questioning time to add credibility to the baseless conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election. (The US intelligence community has thoroughly confirmed that Russia interfered in the election.)

Meanwhile Fox News is doing its thing.

Fox News has so far done its best to present Bill Taylor’s testimony as un-explosive.

As the rest of the media has marveled at Bill Taylor’s statement that Trump “cared more about investigations of Biden” than Ukraine policy,

Oh, this is good. Erdoğan has arrived and Trump is presidenting him.

When asked by pool reporters about the public impeachment hearing, Trump said, “It’s a witch hunt, it’s a hoax. I’m too busy to watch it. I have not been briefed.” He added, “They’re using lawyers that are television lawyers.”

Television lawyers! Television lawyers!!! What does he think he is?! He’s the television president of all time!

His press secretary has tweeted to tell us that the hearings are boring.

This sham hearing is not only boring, it is a colossal waste of taxpayer time & money. Congress should be working on passing USMCA, funding our govt & military, working on reduced drug pricing & so much more. @realDonaldTrump

Somebody with a high-up job at the State Department got the job by telling a bunch of whoppers.

A senior Trump administration official has embellished her résumé with misleading claims about her professional background — even creating a fake Time magazine cover with her face on it — raising questions about her qualifications to hold a top position at the State Department.

An NBC News investigation found that Mina Chang, the deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stability Operations, has inflated her educational achievements and exaggerated the scope of her nonprofit’s work.

…

Chang, who assumed her post in April, also invented a role on a U.N. panel, claimed she had addressed both the

Trump still thinks working in his administration=working for him.

President Trump has discussed dismissing the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, because Mr. Atkinson reported a whistle-blower’s complaint about Mr. Trump’s interactions with Ukraine to Congress after concluding it was credible, according to four people familiar with the discussions.

He’s been whining about the subject for weeks.

The president has said he does not understand why Mr. Atkinson shared the complaint, which outlined how Mr. Trump asked the Ukrainian president to investigate Mr. Trump’s political rivals at the same time he was withholding military aid from the country. He has said he believes Mr. Atkinson, whom he appointed in 2017, has been disloyal, one of the people said.

In … Read the rest

T-Mobile has big news for us – not an object or plan we might to give them money for, but an employee relations story.

Another Way to #BeYou: T-Mobile Brings Gender Pronouns to Retail Stores

At T-Mobile, #BeYou has become an employee mantra — so much so that it’s displayed on magenta-painted walls in company hallways around the country.

Really? How awful. Seriously. How gorge-risingly eye-rollingly horrible. Work is work, it’s not a therapy session and it’s not a theater for narcissism. Be You on your own time; at work pay attention to Not-You.

But it’s more than just a catchphrase. It’s representative of the company’s longstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion that is truly part of its DNA. With

Another move – finally!! – to give men a little attention for a change.

For the first time in its four-decade history, Dunedin’s Rape Crisis centre will work with sexual abuse victims of all genders.

The shift is part of a major overhaul of the organisation, which also includes changing its name to the Otepoti Collective Against Sexual Abuse (OCASA).

The move has been met with cautious optimism by the head of a New Zealand male survivors group, who said the more support organisations could work together, the better.

OCASA development co-ordinator Angelo Libeau said the historically women-only organisation had changed its constitution to work with people of all genders.

Good, because why should everything be about women all … Read the rest

In We already knew this but more so news, the SPLC has a new report on just how racist Stephen Miller is.

Senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller shaped the 2016 election coverage of the hard right-wing website Breitbart with material drawn from prominent white nationalists, Islamophobes, and far-right websites, according to a new investigative report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

Miller also railed against those wishing to remove Confederate monuments and flags from public display in the wake of Dylann Roof’s murderous 2015 attack on a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and praised America’s early 20th-century race-based, restrictionist immigration policies.

There’s this trove of emails, see.

The SPLC story is based largely on emails provided by

Outsports, self-described as “the leader in LGBTQ sports news & commentary for athletes, coaches & fans,” tweets:

For decades, women’s sports have existed to create opportunities for cis women and non-binary athletes. It’s finally time to include trans women in the growth and prosperity of women’s sports. Let’s have that conversation.

For decades, women’s sports have existed to create opportunities for women – but not all that many decades, and it took a fierce struggle, and the struggle for funding and coverage and fairness continues. Yes, women’s and girls’ sports exist to create opportunities for women and girls to play sports , and why shouldn’t they? That was the whole point, remember? Girls didn’t get that much opportunity, and … Read the rest

A wisdom tweet:

I think the sentence “cis people shouldn’t be in charge of trans people’s healthcare” is just as true as “men shouldn’t be in charge of women’s healthcare”. If you understand why one is true, take some time to realise that it’s the same reasons that make the other true.

Well let’s slow down. Is the one true? Is it a general truth that “men shouldn’t be in charge of women’s healthcare”? In what sense of “in charge”? Setting policy, or administering policy that is already in place? Is it true that no men should be part of an administration that includes women’s health? My answer would be no. I think women should be involved, certainly, but … Read the rest

Grifter Princess Ivanka has the gall to say her crime family is not profiting from Donnie’s presidency.

Ivanka Trump brushed off criticism that her family has profited off the presidency and said Friday a big difference between her family and Democrat Joe Biden’s is that President Donald Trump amassed his fortune before he entered politics while Biden’s wealth is “derivative” of his time in office…

Ivanka Trump, a White House adviser, pushed back against nearly three years of ethics complaints and lawsuits accusing the Trumps of trying to turn the presidency to their financial advantage.

His hotel a short walk from the White House? The one where Barr throws expensive parties? And foreign governments book stays? His golf course in … Read the rest

The NY Times reports:

Not long before the Ukrainian president was inaugurated in May, an associate of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s journeyed to Kiev to deliver a warning to the country’s new leadership, a lawyer for the associate said.

The associate, Lev Parnas, told a representative of the incoming government that it had to announce an investigation into Mr. Trump’s political rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr., and his son, or else Vice President Mike Pence would not attend the swearing-in of the new president, and the United States would freeze aid, the lawyer said.

The claim by Mr. Parnas, who is preparing to share his account with impeachment investigators, challenges the narrative of events from Mr. Trump and Ukrainian officials