Scott Pruitt cut the EPA off at the knees yesterday.

Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, stripped a half-dozen scientists and academics of advisory positions Tuesday and issued new rules barring anyone who receives E.P.A. grant money from serving on panels that counsel the agency on scientific decisions.

The move will effectively bar a large number of academic researchers, many of them experts in fields ranging from toxicology to epidemiology, from advising the E.P.A. on scientific matters, since the agency is one of the largest funders of environmental research.

They get the grants because they know the subject – so Pruitt throws them out. Let’s not have any experts on environmental science in the EPA, because … Read the rest

Here’s something I bet you didn’t know: women dressing up in exaggeratedly “feminine” clothes is appropriation.

Across the globe, men, women and non-binary individuals practice cross-dressing and drag as a form of expression. The encyclopedia Britannica identifies individuals in drag as performers dressing as the opposite sex or rather, outside of their assigned gender. It is a way of experimenting with the aspect of “the other” in terms of identity.

This practice can be seen in a myriad of settings, including the television show, Ru Paul’s drag race. Individuals who practice drag and cross-dressing have often been persecuted throughout history, resulting in violent discrimination that can even lead to death. Although it has become more socially acceptable over the

NPR on John Kelly’s twisted understanding of the Civil War:

During an interview Monday night on Fox News, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said that “the lack of the ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”

His comment was swiftly countered by confounded observers, who pointed out that the Civil War was fought over slavery and that compromising on slavery would be morally unconscionable — and that the country did strike such compromises for decades and they did not, in fact, prevent war.

They did prevent war for several decades. Lots of people died in time to miss the war, so from that point of view, the compromises were a big success…except of course for the … Read the rest

10. That said, pro-Islamic State channels on Telegram are hungrily sharing updates on their supposed "brother." See below: pic.twitter.com/vd5f1eZ66R

— Rukmini Callimachi (@rcallimachi) October 31, 2017

The crying with laughter emojis are nice.… Read the rest

The Times reports:

Eight people were killed when a man drove 20 blocks down a bike path beside the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon before he crashed his pickup truck, jumped out with fake guns and was shot by police officers, the authorities said.

Federal authorities were treating the incident as a terrorist attack and were taking the lead in the investigation, a senior law enforcement official said. Two law enforcement officials said that after the attacker got out of the truck, he was heard yelling, “Allahu Akbar.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference: “Based on information we have at this moment, this was an act of terror, and a particularly cowardly act

Sarah Sanders wants us to stop saying slavery was wrong.

During a White House news briefing on Tuesday, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Chief of Staff John Kelly’s praise of Robert E. Lee and remarks about how “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,” not the Confederacy’s refusal to abolish slavery.

“Look, all of our leaders have flaws — Washington, Jefferson, JFK, Roosevelt, Kennedy — that doesn’t diminish their contributions to our country, and it certainly can’t erase them from our history,” she said. “And General Kelly was simply making the point that just because history isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it’s not our history.”

No, he was not. He said what … Read the rest

This again.

We older women (I’m much older than JHB) have a way with words and a look. ‘Punch you in the face’ covers it Women are not wilting wimps! https://t.co/PLU8blt2Av

— Rt Hon Nadine Dorries (@NadineDorries) October 31, 2017

Oh please. It’s not always that easy, to put it mildly.

Plus people shouldn’t have to “have a way” to deal with various forms of personal interference. We don’t expect to be pushed and slapped and jostled in the street if we happen not to look ferocious for a second. We expect ordinary everyday respect for boundaries. It’s not everyone’s responsibility to scare off attackers, it’s everyone’s responsibility not to be an attacker.

Perhaps you could follow every intimidated,

So the White House chief of staff is a fan of the Southern secessionist defenders of slavery.

Kelly was interviewed on Fox last night and delivered this pile of crap.

Kelly was asked about the decision of a church in Alexandria to remove plaques honoring George Washington and Robert E. Lee.

“I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man,” Kelly said. “He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Easier than persuading the laws of physics to change their minds.

You can in fact have both a growing economy and good environmental standards.

The thing about the economy that a lot of people miss is that a strong economy is basically everyone, not just the richest chunk of it. If you have to pay people to properly maintain your factory – that money isn’t vanishing into a void, it is going into their pockets where it will then be spent on the stuff that they need.

Not only that but regulation creates those jobs, and creates sub-industries which otherwise wouldn’t exist. For example, with mining, what happens when the mine runs … Read the rest

Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes do a quick summing up:

The first big takeaway from Monday morning’s flurry of charging and plea documents with respect to Paul Manafort Jr., Richard Gates III and George Papadopoulos is this: The president of the United States had as his campaign chairman a man who had allegedly served for years as an unregistered foreign agent for a puppet government of Vladimir Putin, a man who was allegedly laundering remarkable sums of money even while running the now-president’s campaign, a man who allegedly lied about all of this to the FBI and the Justice Department.

The second big takeaway is even starker: A member of President Trump’s campaign team admits that he was working

But now that we’re talking about Emmett Till…I missed the news last January that Carolyn Bryant Donham admitted that most of what she testified about Till was false. It was a week after Trump’s inauguration and I was a little preoccupied.

The woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, spoke to Timothy B. Tyson, a Duke University professor — possibly the only interview she has given to a historian or journalist since shortly after the episode — who has written a book, “The Blood of Emmett Till,” to be published next week.

In it, he wrote that she said of her long-ago allegations that Emmett grabbed her and was menacing and sexually crude toward her, “that part is not true.”

…

Emmett,

Times headline:

Trump, Responding to Manafort Indictment, Says Democrats Should Be Focus of Inquiry

A few tweets:

MSNBC: Manafort indicted
CNN: Manafort indicted
Fox: Are feet shoes

— Jazz. (@LeaderoftheNew) October 30, 2017

https://twitter.com/PalmerReport/status/925030233811668993

Oh, it’s Princess Ivanka’s birthday? Sad.

Paul Manafort just agreed to turn himself in to the FBI. What should we report on?
CNN: Manafort
MSNBC: Manafort
Fox News: Hamburger emoji pic.twitter.com/Wjsvkb2coW

— Roberto Aram Ferdman (@robferdman) October 30, 2017

How the Manafort news is playing on Fox right now pic.twitter.com/vSYsVQ3oED

— Jonathan Cohn (@CitizenCohn) October 30, 2017

… Read the rest