All entries by this author

He likes it

Apr 17th, 2018 4:34 pm | By

Trump is at his Palace of Golf with Shinzo Abe. They did a press conference. What does Trump do there?

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump used a press opportunity with Japanese President Shinzo Abe to tout Mar-a-Lago as the southern White House.

“Many of the world’s great leaders request to come to Mar-a-Lago and Palm Beach. They like it. I like it. We’re comfortable. We have great relationships as you remember,” Trump said seated on a couch next to Abe at the start of the bizarre presser at Trump’s Florida club Tuesday afternoon.

Glad we can be an advertising opportunity, Don. I guess we’d rather have you doing that than fumbling around with actual government.

https://youtu.be/4No4OBiExPA… Read the rest



Poking the enraged bear suffering from gout and a migraine

Apr 17th, 2018 4:01 pm | By

The lawyers are not happy.

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/986363806665334785

McConnell has said NO we’re not ever going to have a bill to protect the Mueller investigation, no no NO, now stop bothering him.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday thwarted a bipartisan effort to protect special counsel Robert Mueller’s job, saying he will not hold a floor vote on the legislation even if it is approved next week in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

McConnell said

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To protect the institutions

Apr 17th, 2018 11:43 am | By

I think I’m approaching an understanding of what happened with Comey and the emails and the press conference and the letter. Basically it’s that the alternative wasn’t as much better as we (with the luxury of not living through it) may imagine. He says over and over that it was a choice between bad options. There was no good one. What would have been so bad about not saying anything when the FBI closed the investigation? The fact that Fox and Trump-fan Twitter would have been all over it like an oozing infectious skin disease.

He explains it (again) in that NPR interview.

Inskeep: Let me circle back to the Hillary Clinton case and the decisions that you made

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This is not some tin-pot dictatorship

Apr 17th, 2018 11:04 am | By

Comey does an interview with NPR, in which he points out that it’s not normal for a president to be ranting in public that private citizens should be in jail.

“This is not some tin-pot dictatorship where the leader of the country gets to say, ‘The people I don’t like go to jail,’” Comey told NPR in the latest in a series of interviews to promote his new book.

In tweets Sunday and Monday, Trump alleged, without citing evidence, that Comey had committed “many crimes” and deserves to be jailed for leaking classified information and lying to Congress — allegations Comey denies.

Also, allegations that are ironic coming from Trump, who is not the most law-abiding president we’ve ever … Read the rest



Sean Hannity reminds you

Apr 17th, 2018 10:49 am | By

Nice little free verse poem here:

Sean Hannity reminds you:
Michael Cohen wasn’t his lawyer
But he still expects attorney-client privilege.
And he has nothing to hide
But he ordered MC not to reveal him.
And He defended MC all week
But now MC’s a liar.
And that’s why Hillary Clinton must be stopped.

QED.… Read the rest



Such unworthy vessels

Apr 17th, 2018 10:35 am | By

Glosswitch looks askance at the breeding stock view of women.

Pregnancy and childbirth – where would we be without them? Essential to the continuation of our very species, everyday phenomena don’t get more miraculous. It’s a pity they’re entrusted to such unworthy vessels.

It works out ok if you think of it as a purely mechanical process, which can be easily replicated by any decent engineer. Of course if you do that you may have trouble tracking down that decent engineer and finding any women willing to perform the purely mechanical process. It’s been a human tragedy all along, that women are such garbage yet nobody can have any babies without them.

Just look at the evidence: if the

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A brick to the teeth

Apr 17th, 2018 10:10 am | By

Strange times.

https://youtu.be/zNGTtqGG1Lk

The lyrics are helpfully provided.

Its not hard to use the right words
When your talking to people
And you know the ones the prefer
Its not that complicated
To use respectful language
Its the least you can do
if you don’t it shows the truth
About you and your loyalty
To the patriarchy
Your false feminism
Hides your misogyny

Terfs are trash
We won’t stand for trans exclusionary feminism
Theres nothing radical about traditional gender binaries

If you intentionally
misgender anybody
Your a sexist piece of trash
That deserves a brick to the teeth
Equality is for everybody
You gotta lot of nerve
coming round with that
Swerf talk terf talk
Gonna get that sidewalk
curb

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She was just kidding

Apr 16th, 2018 4:12 pm | By

I’m sure this is not at all sinister. Haley says there will be sanctions on Russia and Trump says nope there won’t.

Preparations to punish Russia anew for its support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government over an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria caused consternation at the White House. Haley had said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” that sanctions on Russian companies behind the equipment related to Assad’s alleged chemical weapons attack would be announced Monday by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

But Trump conferred with his national security advisers later Sunday and told them he was upset the sanctions were being officially rolled out because he was not yet comfortable executing them, according to several people familiar

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Compromised

Apr 16th, 2018 3:54 pm | By

Erik Wemple at the Post says yes, it is sleazy for Hannity to be entangled with Cohen and Trump.

To understand from whom Hannity seeks legal advice, consider what Cohen once told a reporter who was preparing a hard-hitting story during the campaign on Trump and ex-wife Ivana Trump:

“I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse. And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know,” Cohen said. “So I’m warning you, tread very f[–––]ing lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be f[–––]ing disgusting. You understand

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Gasps in court

Apr 16th, 2018 3:24 pm | By

You couldn’t make it up.

Lawyers for Mr. Cohen, the president’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, had sought to keep the identity of one of Mr. Cohen’s clients a secret in a court challenge of an F.B.I. search of Mr. Cohen’s office.

And the mystery client izzzzzzzzzzz

Sean Hannity.

[A]fter several minutes of back and forth between the government and Mr. Cohen’s lawyers, Kimba M. Wood, a judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, ordered that Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, Stephen Ryan, disclose in open court the name of a client in question, who turned out to be Mr. Hannity.

Before Mr. Hannity’s name was revealed in the courtroom, Mr. Ryan had argued

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A rogue element

Apr 16th, 2018 11:53 am | By

Nate Silver points out an aspect I would love to know more about. (I don’t suppose we ever will.)

Stephanopoulos doesn’t quite pose the “why not wait?” question directly to Comey, but Comey’s thinking seems to have been influenced by concerns that pro-Trump elements within the FBI would leak word of the Weiner emails to the media.

From the transcript where they’re talking about why he sent the letter about re-opening the emails investigation:… Read the rest



Another reporter falls out the window

Apr 16th, 2018 11:20 am | By

Oh gee golly I wonder what happened here: a Russian investigative journalist dies after falling from his fifth-floor flat.

Maxim Borodin was found badly injured by neighbours in Yekaterinburg and taken to hospital, where he later died.

Local officials said no suicide note was found but the incident was unlikely to be of a criminal nature.

However, a friend revealed Borodin had said his flat had been surrounded by security men a day earlier.

Total coincidence I’m sure. They were there to pick up cigarette butts.

Vyacheslav Bashkov described Borodin as a “principled, honest journalist” and said Borodin had contacted him at five o’clock in the morning on 11 April saying there was “someone with a weapon on his

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Save domestic violence!

Apr 16th, 2018 11:08 am | By

Barry Duke at the Freethinker reports:

The Croatian Government voted on Friday to ratify the Council of Europe’s Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, widely known as the Istanbul Convention– and thousands, egged on by the Catholic Church, gathered to protest, saying the move would pave the way to same-sex marriage and will give rights to transgender people.

Because…families can’t beat up family members? So they want to preserve and protect domestic violence? I have to wonder what life is like in their families.

The Convention, agreed in 2011, has now been ratified by 29 countries, including 18 European Union member states. The treaty aims to be an instrument in combating domestic violence

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A tremendous education

Apr 16th, 2018 9:06 am | By

Funny thing: I did a search of the Comey interview and the word “truth” appears 48 times. “Truth matters” appears 3 times.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Right at the beginning of your career, you’re involved in prosecution of major mafia figures. How does that form you?

JAMES COMEY: Well, it’s a tremendous education to get– a view inside La Cosa Nostra, the mafia, both in the United States and in Sicily. And to realize that the mafia is an organization like any other organization. Has a leader, has underlings, has values, has principles. They’re entirely corrupt. And it is the antithesis of ethical leadership.

But I didn’t know it at the time. But it was forming my view that the truth has

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Samples

Apr 16th, 2018 8:45 am | By

The Times has some highlights of The Interview.

Asked if he believes Mr. Trump is unfit for office, Mr. Comey was quick to say yes, but not for reasons of his mental state.

Instead, Mr. Comey called Mr. Trump “morally unfit.”

“A person who sees moral equivalence in Charlottesville, who talks about and treats women like they’re pieces of meat, who lies constantly about matters big and small and insists the American people believe it — that person’s not fit to be president of the United States, on moral grounds,” Mr. Comey said.

The Guardian also has a sampling.

Life in the Comey household must have been awkward after the election

Early in the interview, Comey said he

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Basking

Apr 15th, 2018 4:59 pm | By

This is…unsettling.

A BIT intimidating? She says in the next tweet it felt like a Sopranos Flashback moment.

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And she thought: “But they are all men!”

Apr 15th, 2018 4:33 pm | By
And she thought: “But they are all men!”

The Observer profiles the admirable Caroline Criado-Perez:

Two years ago, a young woman was running through London with her dog. Her route took her through Parliament Square, with the monuments of the establishment on all sides – legislature to the east, executive offices to the north, judiciary to the west and the church to the south. She ran past the bronze statues that lined her route, towering above her on their plinths: Nelson Mandela, Robert Peel, Disraeli, Edward Smith-Standley, Palmerston, Jan Smuts, David Lloyd George and the bronze of Winston Churchill. And she thought: “But they are all men!”

And because it was 8 March, International Women’s Day, and because the woman was the unstoppable feminist activist and campaigner 

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A high likelihood of rampant criminality

Apr 15th, 2018 3:46 pm | By

Adam Davidson at the New Yorker says the investigation of Trump is in the final stage. Bottom line: he’s a crook and always has been.

I am unaware of anybody who has taken a serious look at Trump’s business who doesn’t believe that there is a high likelihood of rampant criminality. In Azerbaijan, he did business with a likely money launderer for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. In the Republic of Georgia, he partnered with a group that was being investigated for a possible role in the largest known bank-fraud and money-laundering case in history. In Indonesia, his development partner is “knee-deep in dirty politics”; there are criminal investigations of his deals in Brazil; the F.B.I. is reportedly looking into

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A reprehensible outcome

Apr 15th, 2018 12:12 pm | By

The CEO of Starbucks has apologized.

The men, who have not been identified, were arrested on suspicion of trespassing. But Starbucks did not want to press charges and the men were later released, Commissioner Richard Ross Jr. of the Philadelphia Police Department said in a recorded statement on Saturday.

They were released at 1:30 in the morning. I think the arrest was about 5 p.m. – so that’s 8.5 hours sitting in jail.

The company apologized on Twitter Saturday afternoon. Later that day, while the hashtag #BoycottStarbucks was trending on Twitter, Kevin R. Johnson, the chief executive of Starbucks, released a statement in which he called the situation a “reprehensible outcome.”

Mr. Johnson said he hoped to meet them in

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The rabies miasm

Apr 15th, 2018 11:24 am | By

Dr Jen Gunter finds another jaw-dropper: a “naturopath” using “a remedy made from a rabid dog’s saliva” to fix aggression in a 4-year-old boy.

At first I asked if this was from The Onion, because honestly after reading I wasn’t sure.

But no, Dr. Zimmerman is really a naturopath and, well, this is how she summarized the problem…

This is a 4-year-old boy who is suffering from an inability to fall asleep at night, a fear of the dark, of wolves, werewolves, ghosts and zombies and who frequently hides under tables and growls at people. He is overly excitable and has a tendency to defiance. He was normal as a baby, not affected by sleep or temper problems.

Rabies-drool … Read the rest