Daniel Golden wrote a Pro Publica piece just after Trump stole the election, and it’s being re-upped now. It’s about the puzzle of how Jared Kushner got into Harvard.

I bet you’ve guessed already.

My book exposed a grubby secret of American higher education: that the rich buy their under-achieving children’s way into elite universities with massive, tax-deductible donations. It reported that New Jersey real estate developer Charles Kushner had pledged $2.5 million to Harvard University in 1998, not long before his son Jared was admitted to the prestigious Ivy League school. At the time, Harvard accepted about one of every nine applicants. (Nowadays, it only takes one out of twenty.)

I also quoted administrators at Jared’s high school,

From fatuous drivel like this good lord deliver us. The BBC yesterday:

Like many little girls, nine-year-old Autumn Norris loves dressing up and experimenting with make-up.

She has identified as a girl for the past two years, after telling her mother she felt she was in the “wrong body”.

Autumn had just had a bath when she first spoke about these feelings. She wanted two towels, one for the hair and one for the body, “like a woman”.

“She then came out of the bathroom with her two towels, saying: ‘I’ve got something to tell you Mum, I’m not Anthony, I’m not a boy, I’m a girl’,” says Fran Norris.

Fran Norris, bizarrely, was struck all of a heap. … Read the rest

ARE YOU KIDDING

A handful of male lawmakers dressed up for a hearing they presided over Tuesday in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, donning pearl necklaces as activists testified about their experiences with gun violence.

Pearl necklaces??

Ohhhh…right. ARE YOU KIDDING!!!!

Images from the statehouse — where legislators were considering arguments over a bill that would make it easier to take guns away from potentially dangerous people — caromed across social media as critics lobbed accusations of sexism and insensitivity at the necklace-wearing men.

The implication was clear, they said: These politicians thought gun-control activists were “clutching their pearls” in overwrought and self-righteous outrage — and, specifically, female outrage.

Because what, thinking gun violence is a bad thing … Read the rest

Robin Buckallew is doing Women’s History Month again:

Here we are again, Women’s History Month. It seems like only yesterday…and at the same time it seems like a million years ago. So, since there are still women around the world who are penalized merely for being a woman, I will continue my pledge. I will once again write every day of the month, and focus on women.

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on A terrible example for Donnie Junior.

A Fox in a Box, and a Chair that Declares (under Hair).

Hmmm.

I do not like Big Macs and Fries,

I do not like them served with Lies.

I will not eat them in your House,

Not with Epstein, or with Krauss.

Please put your fountain pen away,

I will not sign your NDA.

I will not eat them on the Mall,

I will not eat them by your Wall.

I will not load your Smocking Gun,

Or covfefe on Air Force One.

I will not catch your paper towels,

Or Retweet all your Twitter howls.

I will not march in your Parades,… Read the rest

Eliza Griswold at the New Yorker starts with a story of a father and two sons, Pehlu, Irshad and Arif Khan, driving home from a market in Jaipur with two cows.

That afternoon, Irshad climbed into the truck alongside his father and brother. Cows are sacred to Hindus but Irshad had made this trip dozens of times since he was a boy. He’d heard rumors of potential trouble for Muslims at roadside checkpoints, where members of a militant Hindu youth group called the Bajrang Dal were intimidating Muslim traders in the name of protecting cows. Still, Irshad wasn’t nervous. “We had no fear at all,” he told me recently. “We were coming from a government-organized fair, and buying and selling

Sarah Sanders issues a statement on the investigation of her boss’s racketeering.

Statement on Chairman Nadler’s fishing expedition. pic.twitter.com/tBsVzrtGYg

— Kayleigh McEnany 45 Archived (@PressSec45) March 5, 2019

“Killing babies.”

This is an official executive branch statement.… Read the rest

The incoherence of it all.

“I wouldn’t say they’re transphobic, but they need to be careful what they tweet”

Lucy Clark, football’s first transgender referee, reacts to comments of ex-sports stars like Sharron Davies and Martina Navratilova on trans athletes in women’s sportshttps://t.co/G0PEAgNlJL pic.twitter.com/oacPu0gtd1

— Victoria Derbyshire (@VictoriaLIVE) March 4, 2019

Victoria Derbyshire asks “What about the suggestion that trans athletes should have a separate category of competition?”

So that muddies the waters right off the bat. The issue is trans women competing against women. Trans men aren’t being unfair to men or women by competing against men, so the issue isn’t “trans athletes” in general but trans women who compete against women. The bad question allows Clark … Read the rest

Prince Jared’s buddies the Saudi dictators:

A dual citizen of Saudi Arabia and the United States had been imprisoned in the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh for about a week when he heard a knock on his door.

Guards dragged Walid Fitaihi, a Harvard-trained physician, to another room, according to a friend who took down the prisoner’s detailed account of his treatment. Dr. Fitaihi told the friend he was slapped, blindfolded, stripped to his underwear and bound to a chair. He was shocked with electricity in what appears to have been a single session of torture that lasted about an hour.

His tormentors whipped his back so severely that he could not sleep on it for days, his friend said,

He’s doing it again.

In State Dining Room where Trump is about to present another college football team (North Dakota State University Bisons) with another of his legendary junk food feasts. Making America great, one Big Mac at a time. pic.twitter.com/7dm39ZxHCW

— Sebastian Smith (@SebastianAFP) March 4, 2019

Never mind that these college kids might prefer to have something more elegant and memorable to match the surroundings, just give them the crap they can get for a few bucks on any busy downtown corner.… Read the rest