All entries by this author

The organizing team will take time for more outreach

Dec 30th, 2018 4:09 pm | By

Ah I found the source of the Eureka march story.

HERE IT IS ON FACEBOOK

December 28 at 9:25 AM

The below PSA has just been released. Thank you to the women and men who helped make this decision.

Humboldt County organizers and supporters of the annual Women’s March have decided to not hold a rally in Eureka on January 19th. This decision was made after many conversations between local social-change organizers and supporters of the march.

The local organizers are continuing to meet and discuss how to broaden representation in the organizing committee to create an event that represents and supports peoples who live here in Humboldt. Up to this point, the participants have been overwhelmingly white, lacking representation

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A necessary quality for leadership

Dec 30th, 2018 11:52 am | By

Expect new Trump eruptions today: top military guy says Trump is crooked as a dog’s hind leg.

Retired four-star Gen. Stanley McChrystal did not mince words about President Donald Trump in a wide-ranging interview with ABC’s “This Week,” saying the president is dishonest and immoral and adding that he could not work for Trump.

“I don’t think he tells the truth,” McChrystal told ABC’s Martha Raddatz who questioned the general on whether he feels Trump is a liar.

When asked if Trump is immoral, McChrystal said: “I think he is.”

Trump slaps his immorality out there on Twitter every day. A moral person doesn’t talk to and about people the way Trump does, especially from a position of power.… Read the rest



Primary sources

Dec 30th, 2018 11:38 am | By

This Eureka Women’s March story is starting to piss me off, because it’s broken out of the far-right enclave now but I still can’t find a primary source – neither the Facebook group nor the putative press release.

The Washington Post for instance – it just repeats the reporting without linking to the sources it cites.

Organizers of the 2019 Eureka Women’s March, originally scheduled for Jan. 19, said in a statement that the decision came after numerous conversations with leading local activists and supporters of the march.

“Up to this point, the participants have been overwhelmingly white, lacking representation from several perspectives in our community,” the Facebook statement read. “Instead of pushing forward with crucial voices absent, the

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Why can’t we do this thing that’s against the law?

Dec 30th, 2018 10:39 am | By

John Kelly on his way out says hey Trump never ordered him to do anything illegal.

White House chief of staff John Kelly, who will depart President Donald Trump’s administration on Wednesday, told The Los Angeles Times in an extensive interview published Sunday that the president never ordered him to do anything illegal and added that the proposed border wall at the center of the government shutdown fight is not as it has been portrayed.

Listen, he also never sliced people’s arms off with a sword, so good news, right?

Kelly, set to be replaced by Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, who will serve as acting chief of staff, said he made sure the president

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The scale of the president’s mendacity

Dec 30th, 2018 10:17 am | By

Linda Qiu takes a look at The Year in Trump Lies.

Here at The New York Times, we have also fact-checked countless campaign rallies, news conferences, interviews and Twitter posts. After nearly two years of assessing the accuracy of Mr. Trump’s statements, we can draw some conclusions not just about the scale of the president’s mendacity, but also about how he uses inaccurate claims to advance his agenda, criticize the news media and celebrate his achievements.

One, he repeats his lies instead of admitting they are lies.

Examples abound. He has falsely characterized the December 2017 tax cuts as the “largest” or the “biggest” in American history over 100 times (several others were larger). He has misleadingly

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They all want to subordinate women

Dec 29th, 2018 4:20 pm | By

Peter Beinart says the authoritarian nationalist wave has one commonality:

[B]esides their hostility to liberal democracy, the right-wing autocrats taking power across the world share one big thing, which often goes unrecognized in the U.S.: They all want to subordinate women.

To understand global Trumpism, argues Valerie M. Hudson, a political scientist at Texas A&M, it’s vital to remember that for most of human history, leaders and their male subjects forged a social contract: “Men agreed to be ruled by other men in return for all men ruling over women.” This political hierarchy appeared natural—as natural as adults ruling children—because it mirrored the hierarchy of the home. Thus, for millennia, men, and many women, have associated male dominance with

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The future participants are the wrong sort

Dec 29th, 2018 12:30 pm | By

Errr…what?

News from northern California:

The organizers of the annual Women’s March have decided not to hold a rally in Eureka on Jan. 19, as previously planned, because they say participants do not represent the diversity of the area.

Excuse me? How can they possibly know that? People at a march can just show up, and the organizers can’t know in advance how “diverse” they are or aren’t.

“This decision was made after many conversations between local social-change organizers and supporters of the march,” organizers said in a press release.

They said organizers will continue to meet and discuss how to broaden representation to create an event that represents Humboldt County.

“Up to this point, the participants have

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Ideological fitness tests are applied for political purposes

Dec 29th, 2018 11:51 am | By

People tried hard to de-platform Caroline Norma but they didn’t quite get there.

Five days before I was scheduled to speak at a conference on Historical Materialism at the University of Sydney, I received an email from the organizers, explaining that they had refunded my registration fee and struck me from the conference program. They told me that comments I’d made in an online opinion piece three years earlier made my attendance inconsistent with “the commitment of the Historical Materialism Sydney conference organizers to creating an inclusive space for people with diverse gender identities.” In the greatest of ironies, my piece had criticized leftists for playing wedge politics in order to purge radical feminists from progressive circles. The conference was

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Let them eat surplus cheese

Dec 29th, 2018 9:38 am | By

Of course he did.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order Friday freezing federal workers’ pay for 2019, following through on a proposal he announced earlier in the year.

The move, which nixes a 2.1% across-the-board pay raise that was set to take effect in January, comes as hundreds of thousands of federal employees are expecting to begin the new year furloughed or working without pay because of a partial government shutdown.

Trump told lawmakers he planned to scrap the 2019 pay bump for federal workers in August, saying the federal budget couldn’t support it. In addition to the 2.1% pay increase, the executive order also cancels a yearly adjustment of paychecks based on the region of the country

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Taking a wrecking ball to decorum

Dec 28th, 2018 4:34 pm | By

Well that’s one way to put it.

In his first two years in office, President Donald Trump has rewritten the rules of the presidency and the norms of the nation’s capital, casting aside codes of conduct and traditions that have held for generations.

In Trump’s Washington, facts are less relevant. Insults and highly personal attacks are increasingly employed by members of both parties. The White House press briefing is all but gone, international summits are optional, the arts are an afterthought and everything — including inherently nonpartisan institutions and investigations — is suddenly political.

The thing is, though, Trump hasn’t actually rewritten any rules; he hasn’t done anything that thoughtful, and he couldn’t if he wanted to, because … Read the rest



And I’m Marie of Romania

Dec 28th, 2018 3:54 pm | By

Do women actually act like this? I don’t mean aren’t all women naturally gentle and benevolent at all times, because of course we’re not, but do we act like this? In my experience no, we don’t, not ever, because we can’t. We just can’t. We wouldn’t get away with it, it wouldn’t work, no one would put up with it for a second, no one would be intimidated by it, no one would keep saying “I apologize, ma’am,” no one would just stand there while we kicked a display to the floor.

Men, though? Even some men who are not bad guys, but…they nevertheless let themselves lose their temper that way, and shout that way, and intimidate everyone in sight … Read the rest



Her role saw her patrol parks in Mosul

Dec 28th, 2018 12:28 pm | By

Some people have a very strange idea of “morality.” The BBC reports:

A female Islamic State group member accused of letting a five-year-old girl die of thirst in scorching sunlight is facing war crimes charges in Germany.

The 27-year-old German, identified as Jennifer W, and her husband bought the child as a house “slave” in the IS-occupied Iraqi city of Mosul 2015.

Her husband chained the girl up outside after she fell ill and Jennifer W did nothing to save her, prosecutors say.

The five-year-old girl was among a group of prisoners-of-war when Jennifer W and her husband bought her.

German media say the child may have been a member of the Yazidi minority, many of whom were

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A criminal attempt by the president to obstruct justice

Dec 28th, 2018 11:20 am | By

Matthew Miller and Mimi Rocah explain why Trump’s deployment of Whitaker is his worst breach of the wall between president and Justice Department yet.

The SDNY’s case has already netted one guilty plea for a felony crime of violating campaign finance laws. In his guilty plea and sentencing allocution, Mr. Cohen stated that he worked “in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1,” who is widely understood to be the president. In addition, it is clear from the charging documents against Mr. Cohen that the Trump Organization, which was owned and controlled by Mr. Trump and his children at the time of the conduct, is likely implicated in this criminal scheme as well.

Taken together, these facts make clear

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The theology of Santa Claus

Dec 28th, 2018 11:08 am | By

The New Yorker posts a cartoon by Emily Flake on Facebook.

Our old friend the intersection between god and Santa again…but many commenters instead saw anti-Semitism.

–I agree this smacks of Anti-Semitism. At the very least a typically erroneous Christian stereotype of Jewish scripture.

–This is antisemitic. And it’s sparking hateful comments.

–This would be funny, if it wasn’t anti-semitic!

–That feels really antisemitic. And not funny.

–One anti-semetism from your increasing pathetic magazine. Shame on you..

Etc. There’s even a whole essay on it at Religion News Service!

The idea of an “Old Testament Santa” is anti-Judaism 101.

First of all, the very term “Old Testament.”

“Old Testament” is an unconscious piece of anti-Judaism. “Testament” means “covenant.”

To say

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Guest post: It started with that little sparrow

Dec 28th, 2018 10:44 am | By

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The Covenant.

When I learned Santa Claus was definitely just a story (I’d had my suspicions for a while,) I did think of God, and while I didn’t turn into a baby atheist immediately, I’m quite sure a seed of skepticism was planted.

My seeds of doubt were planted in public school, when there was still a fair amount of religious stuff (particularly songs we sang during daily “opening excersizes.”) One of those songs, “God Sees the Little Sparrow Fall,” was one of the things that started me on the road to doubt:

God sees the little sparrow fall,

It meets His tender view;

If God so loves the little … Read the rest



Other than that it went well

Dec 27th, 2018 3:41 pm | By

Like Basil Fawlty, Trump just can’t get anything right, can he.

President Trump has an uncanny knack for making a mess of simple, traditional functions every other president has managed to carry out with ease. Talk to a child about Christmas? Yikes — a “marginal” disaster. Go to Europe to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I? He skips one event rather than wilt in the rain and sulks through another. The worst anti-Semitic massacre in U.S. history? He whines about getting his hair wet and keeps campaigning. Visit the troops (finally) in Iraq? Oh boy.

What, just because he compromised their security? Picky picky.

So on his belated, first visit

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Let them eat cactus

Dec 27th, 2018 3:16 pm | By

Kirstjen Nielsen issued a statement yesterday:

Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen Statement on Passing of Eight Year Old Guatemalan Child

Murderous, callous, and chickenshits. The word is death. Nielsen’s statement is on the death of the eight year old Guatemalan child.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen M. Nielsen today released the following statement on the eight year-old Guatemalan national who passed away shortly before midnight on December 24 at Gerald Champion Regional Medical Center in Alamogordo, New Mexico:

“In the evening hours of December 24th, a child who had been apprehended with his father by the Border Patrol attempting to illegally enter the United States, died at an El Paso hospital after being taken for emergency treatment for

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He has to be SO POLITE

Dec 27th, 2018 11:58 am | By

That’s…quite astoundingly creepy.

https://twitter.com/zei_nabq/status/1077694528792989697… Read the rest



Sorry, can’t, government shutdown

Dec 27th, 2018 11:31 am | By

No wonder Trump forced the government shutdown.

Lawyers for President Donald Trump are invoking the government shutdown to seek a delay in a court case over claims that Trump is illegally profiting from business his Washington hotel does with foreign countries.

Justice Department attorneys representing Trump asked a federal appeals court on Wednesday to postpone indefinitely all further filings in an appeal related to a suit that the governments of Maryland and Washington, D.C., filed over Trump’s alleged violation of the Constitution’s ban on foreign emoluments.

Convenient, isn’t it. If you get sued for abusing your presidency to fill your pockets, you just shut down the government so that the case can’t proceed. Heads he wins, tails we lose.… Read the rest



The covenant

Dec 27th, 2018 11:14 am | By

So close, and yet

Hey, kids under 8 years old, thanks for reading The New York Times. But this time, please don’t. Maybe go play Minecraft or something instead.

… O.K., are they gone now? Cool. Here’s what President Trump said to a child about Santa Claus on Monday: “Are you still a believer in Santa? Because at 7, it’s marginal, right?”

“Yes, sir,” the child, Collman, responded twice. She had spoken with the president for at least 10 seconds before he suggested that her parents had been lying to her all her life.

Ah, are we going to talk about that?

No; the next paragraph is about Collman putting out cookies for Santa.

Whatever. But the thing is, … Read the rest