Jennifer Rubin at the Post on McConnell & Co’s reluctance to “poke the bear”:

Let’s cut through all this: Republicans are petrified of provoking Trump (“the bear”), whom they treat as their supervisor and not as an equal branch of government. The notion that Congress should not take out an insurance policy to head off a potential constitutional crisis when the president has repeatedly considered firing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein defies logic. By speaking up in such fashion, McConnell is effectively tempting Trump to fire one or both of them. That will set off a firestorm and bring calls for the president’s impeachment.

Or. McConnell must be hoping, it will … Read the rest

What a disgusting bunch of sexist philistines we are.

Professor Mary Beard has accused a US broadcaster of editing her own episodes of Civilisations to make them more anodyne, saying her on-screen appearances as a “slightly creaky old lady with long grey hair” had been cut.

Prof Beard, who hosts two episodes of Civilisations for the BBC in Britain, said the American edits of the show had seen her central arguments erased, her on-screen contributions reduced, and an episode on religion re-edited to focus more closely on Christianity.

This isn’t Fox, either, it’s goddam PBS.

Prof Beard said: “Really hope that friends in USA realise that my Civilisations episodes on PBS are very different from original BBC versions, have

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

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.

— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) April 17, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is…unsettling.

Just passed MICHAEL COHEN sitting & lounging in front of his hotel with his cronies enjoying the NYC Spring weather & looking like he didn’t have a care in the world.

I can report that he WASN’T on the phone with Trump on Friday at 5pm- guess he’s just ready to start the weekend pic.twitter.com/QJ1LFZGt5s

— Alison Greene (@GrassrootsSpeak) April 13, 2018

Sorry I couldn’t get a better picture but I must admit that I found this group a bit intimidating & I think his buddies were blocking my shots.

— Alison Greene (@GrassrootsSpeak) April 13, 2018

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

UPDATE: Blue Suit seems to

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