All entries by this author
Apr 17th, 2018 4:34 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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
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2 comments
Tags: Trump
Apr 17th, 2018 4:01 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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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9 comments
Tags: Trump
Apr 17th, 2018 11:43 am |
By Ophelia Benson
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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10 comments
Tags: Comey
Apr 17th, 2018 10:49 am |
By Ophelia Benson
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
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4 comments
Apr 17th, 2018 10:35 am |
By Ophelia Benson
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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3 comments
Apr 17th, 2018 10:10 am |
By Ophelia Benson
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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12 comments
Tags: Misogyny
Apr 16th, 2018 4:12 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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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Apr 16th, 2018 3:24 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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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3 comments
Apr 16th, 2018 11:53 am |
By Ophelia Benson
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
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5 comments
Tags: Comey
Apr 16th, 2018 11:20 am |
By Ophelia Benson
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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Apr 16th, 2018 9:06 am |
By Ophelia Benson
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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4 comments
Tags: Comey
Apr 16th, 2018 8:45 am |
By Ophelia Benson
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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Apr 15th, 2018 4:33 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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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Apr 15th, 2018 12:12 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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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Tags: Starbucks
Apr 15th, 2018 11:24 am |
By Ophelia Benson
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
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Tags: Woo