I’m curious about why “Sophie Molly” does this.
People mostly don’t bare their teeth like that when smiling, and they even more mostly don’t grit them like that. In other primates a gritted teeth grin like that is a threat response.
Maybe he thinks it makes him look more womany.
The metamorphosis of the Washington Post:
Longtime Washington Post writer Karen Attiah says she has been fired from the publication’s Opinions department for “speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns.”
The Post, which has been overhauling the entire department, declined to comment on personnel matters. But Attiah’s Post biography has been revised to say she “was” a columnist, indicating she is no longer employed.
…
Attiah posted a string of messages about political violence in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week. She criticized what she called “empty rhetoric” denouncing violence that hasn’t been matched by actions.
One of her posts asserted that “part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence.”
Attiah didn’t reference Kirk by name, but she also said to a commenter that “refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is… not the same as violence.”
Did he in fact espouse violence though? I haven’t researched the subject but the impression I have via the reporting is that he didn’t. He espoused hierarchies, but that’s not the same thing. I know one can go all rhetorical and point out how (silently, passively) hierarchies are in fact violent, but it does matter what people actually say and what they don’t say.
Attiah wrote in a Monday blog post that “my commentary received thoughtful engagement across platforms, support, and virtually no public backlash.”
But her assertion that Kirk “espoused violence” may have been flagged by Post management.
Two Post staffers told CNN that management also took issue with Attiah misquoting a Kirk remark on affirmative action from 2023.
…
The Opinion department has been in turmoil for months, driven by Post owner Jeff Bezos and his desire to change the direction of the editorial board.
Bezos said in February that “we are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Over the summer the Post hired a new Opinion editor, Adam O’Neal, who said he would reorient the department accordingly.
I notice some missing pillars. Equality, justice, compassion – the stuff that can sometimes get in the way of absolute “personal liberties.”
Trump told a crowd of tens of thousands at a memorial for Charlie Kirk that he “hates” his opponents, despite Kirk’s widow saying she forgives the man charged with fatally shooting her husband.
The president gave the last of more than two dozen speeches at a public event that reflected on Kirk’s impact within the Make America Great Again movement. He said Kirk told a staff member he was not afraid of students who disagreed with him in the crowd at Utah Valley University. “I’m not here to fight them – I want them to know them and love them,” Trump quoted Kirk as saying.
But Trump said he felt differently to the rightwing activist, adding: “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents and I don’t want the best for them, I’m sorry.”
And by “I’m sorry” of course he means sorry not sorry.
You gotta hand it to him, he is good at saying things in public that most adults with functioning brains know better than to say in public.
Illinois congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh said she was injured Friday as a result of getting knocked to the ground by a U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement agent.
The incident took place during a demonstration outside of the Broadview ICE detention facility near Chicago. Abughazaleh, a Democrat seeking to represent Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, posted a video on X, writing: “This is what it looks like when ICE violates our First Amendment rights.”
“This escalation isn’t surprising,” she said. “We shouldn’t be shocked that ICE agents that are allowed to operate outside the law operate outside the law. This should be a processing facility, meaning people should not be held there for more than 12 hours at a time, but they are being held there for days, even weeks.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement to MSNBC, “These fame hungry, sanctuary politicians are so desperate for their 15-minutes of fame that they will go so far as to put our law enforcement at risk and obstruct justice.”
Except they’re not putting “our law enforcement” at risk, and they’re not obstructing justice. You on the other hand…
H/t Mostly Cloudy
Democrats on Sunday framed President Trump’s public demand that Attorney General Pam Bondi not “delay” in prosecutions of political enemies as a threat to American democracy.
I don’t think “framed” is the right word there. “Described” or “characterized” would be better. It’s not really all that controversial or debatable that a president leaning on an AG to prosecute people the president doesn’t like is not kosher. Is “not kosher” equivalent to “threat to democracy”? Good enough for government work, I’d say.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) argued on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday that Trump is turning the DOJ “into an instrument that goes after his enemies, whether they’re guilty or not” and “that helps his friends.”
Schumer warned, “This is the path to a dictatorship.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) framed the current moment “one of the most dangerous” the country has faced, saying on ABC’s “This Week,” “We are quickly turning into a banana republic.”
He’s not wrong. I wish we could say he’s wrong, but he’s not. Trump publicly telling the AG to go after his enemies is very banana. It wouldn’t be any better if he’d done it privately, but the fact that he did it publicly is a sign that norms and public opinion are not a deterrent. That’s scary. It’s all scary, and that’s scary too.
So is Pam Bondi willing to be another John Mitchell?
Trump is worried that Attorney General Pam Bondi is moving too slowly to prosecute his political adversaries on fake charges. Trump has good reason to be concerned. He is carrying out his project to consolidate authoritarian power against the trend of declining public support for his administration and himself…
Autocracies are headed by one man but require the cooperation of many others. Some collaborators may sincerely share the autocrat’s goals, but opportunists provide a crucial margin of support. In the United States, such people now have to make a difficult calculation: Do the present benefits of submitting to Trump’s will outweigh the future hazards?
As Bondi makes her daily decisions about whether to abuse her powers to please Trump, she has to begin with one big political assessment: Will Trump ultimately retain the power to reward and punish her? It’s not just about keeping her present job. On the one hand, people in Trump’s favor can make a lot of money from their proximity to power. On the other, Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, served 19 months in prison for his crimes during Watergate. If Trump’s hold on power loosens, Bondi could share Mitchell’s fate.
Fingers crossed!
Shortly after MSNBC reported that Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, had accepted $50,000 in cash from FBI agents posing as businessmen last year, allegedly in exchange for a promise to help secure government contracts, the pro-Trump podcaster Megyn Kelly posted “We DO NOT CARE.” This kind of acquiescence to corruption has been one of Trump’s most important resources. But the American people become a lot less tolerant of corruption in their leaders when they feel themselves under economic pressure.
Well, that’s all very nice. The “border czar” takes bribes. Prominent journalists tells us we do not care. This “go right ahead, we don’t mind” approach is why we’re stuck with Trump. It starts to wobble only when it hits our own wallets. What lovely people we must be.
Trump has a shrewd instinct for survival. He must sense that if he does not act now to prevent free-and-fair elections in 2026, he will lose much of his power—and all of his impunity. That’s why he is squeezing Bondi. But for her, the thought process must be very different. Trump is hoping to offload culpability for his misconduct onto her. She’s the one most directly at risk if she gives orders later shown to be unethical or illegal.
The survival of American rights and liberties may now turn less on the question of whether Pam Bondi is a person of integrity—which we already know the dismal answer to—than whether she is willing to risk her career and maybe even her personal freedom for a president on his way to repudiation unless he can fully pervert the U.S. legal system and the 2026 elections.
It’s gonna be a bumpy 14 months.
Trump wants his Attorney General to do something, so he yells at her in public on his personal social media toy.
He’s stupid but he can’t be so extremely stupid that he thinks this is normal and president-like and not at all cringe-worthy. So why does he do it? I suppose it’s because he doesn’t care about being cringe-worthy because we can’t get rid of him so why should he? So the libs think he’s childish and embarrassing and idiotic, so what?
CNN:
President Donald Trump increased pressure on Attorney General Pam Bondi to bring criminal charges against several political foes, calling her out by name Saturday as he noted he had reviewed statements critical over what he says is a lack of action in the investigations. Just over an hour later, however, he expressed support for the nation’s top law enforcement official.
In his remarkable first post to social media Saturday, Trump essentially called on Bondi to use the power of the Justice Department more aggressively.
Remarkably flagrant and remarkably mindless. The combination of brutality and cluelessness is a weird thing to watch.
Trump went on to rail against former US Attorney Erik Siebert, who announced Friday he would step down after facing intense pressure from the president to charge James with mortgage fraud. CNN has previously reported that Justice Department prosecutors in Virginia believed they have not gathered enough evidence to indict James.
This is what you get when you have a shameless crook in the top job. He wants to harm Letitia James because she prosecuted him, and he demonstrates this desire in public, by browbeating his own Attorney General and his own former US Attorney. It’s all so dignified and not corrupt.
Trump continued his sweeping crackdown on immigration on Friday, turning his focus to a visa program for skilled foreign workers. He signed a proclamation that adds a $100,000 fee for new applicants for H-1B visas that allow foreign workers like software engineers a chance to be employed in the United States.
The H-1B visa is designed to help companies fill openings for which American workers with similar abilities cannot be found. But immigration hard-liners and far-right activists have long argued that the visa allows companies to replace American workers with foreign ones.
And, the Times inexplicably neglects to say, pay them less. It could be said that the H-1B visa is designed to help companies fill openings for which American workers with similar abilities who are willing to work as cheaply cannot be found.
To obtain an H-1B visa, employers must attest that they have searched for qualified domestic candidates first, and that an H-1B worker will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of American workers.
There have been episodes in which the program has been used to bring immigrants for jobs that American workers had held. In 2015, about 250 technology workers at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla., were told that they were being laid off, and that they would have to train their replacements — H-1B visa holders who had been brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Similar episodes that year affected employees of Toys “R” Us and the New York Life Insurance Company.
The quest for cheaper labor never ends.
The program requires employers to pay H-1B workers, at a minimum, either the average wage for the job and the city where it is based, or the average wage of American-born workers doing the same job. Companies are prohibited from paying H-1B workers less than other workers with similar skills and qualifications. Still, about 60 percent of the positions paid “well below” the local median wage for the occupation in 2019, according to the Economic Policy Institute, which cited the Labor Department’s “broad discretion” to set H-1B wage levels.
In other words they’re “prohibited” from paying less but they do it anyway. What a surprise.
No. This is one of the items they get so entirely wrong.
Starting at 1:07:
…and I think that recognizing that people know best who they themselves are and recognizing and taking at face value who someone says that they are is important and is the decent way to interact with other people.
In ordinary circumstances, yes, but it takes only a few seconds of thought to come up with exceptions.
These days, though, it doesn’t really even need a few seconds: trans ideology is the looming leering unmistakable exception to this pseudo-rule. People don’t always know best who they themselves are, especially when they’ve been trained to think that a manufactured idenniny is “who they really are” in any dispute with the physical reality of who they really are.
Oh come on.
Mandatory sanctification of maga hero.
Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma introduced legislation this week that would require every public university in the state to construct “a Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza”, with a statue of the assassinated Republican activist and a sign calling him a “modern civil rights leader”, or pay monthly fines.
Just stop. He wasn’t any kind of civil rights leader. He was a talker, an advocate, an activist of sorts, but not a civil rights leader. Civil rights leaders don’t tell some kinds of people they are subordinate to other kinds of people. That’s the opposite of civil rights leadership.
And then making it mandatory to throw up a statue of him on every public university campus – that is ludicrous. It borders on inquisitorial. You will worship our guy or else; refusal is not permitted.
And he wasn’t important enough for that. Being killed didn’t make him that important.
Let’s hope it was just a stunt, which won’t get many votes and will disappear quietly.
The Oklahoma bill, sponsored by state senators Shane Jett and Dana Prieto, specifies that the memorial site must be in “a prominent area” on the main campus of every institution of higher education in the state system, and must include “a statue of Charlie Kirk sitting at a table with an empty seat across from him” or one of Kirk and his wife holding their children. Designs for the statue must be approved by the legislature.
Well don’t stop there. Why not a statue of Charlie Kirk watching Trump on tv? Cleaning out the kitchen sink trap? Opening a can of dog food? Putting gas in the car? Taking a shower?
Each plaza must also include “permanent signage commemorating Charlie Kirk’s courage and faith and explaining the significance of Charlie Kirk as a voice of a generation, modern civil rights leader, vocal Christian, martyr for truth and faith, and free speech advocate”.
Anything else? Smarter than Obama? Taller than Comey? Meaner than Trump? Deader than Martin Luther King?
After everyone from a Georgia representative to a deputy chief of the New York police department made the comparison with MLK, the slain civil rights leader’s son, Martin Luther King III, took time this week to reject it, noting that Kirk had accused prominent Black women of lacking “the brain processing power to be taken seriously”, while his father “was about bringing people together”.
And he told a woman to submit to her husband. He wasn’t a pro-rights monument.
If the Oklahoma measure becomes law, every school would be required to submit plans for its memorial plaza and statue to the legislature for approval. Failure to comply with the required memorial to Kirk would be punishable by a monthly fine of 1% of the school’s appropriated budget.
The bill also mandates that the schools take measures to protect their memorials from vandalism and automatically expel any students caught defacing them.
Anything else? The students have to contribute $10k a year for upkeep? The students have to pray to Saint Charlie every morning and evening on pain of expulsion? The students have to think what he thought and say what he said or be thrown off the university’s highest roof?
As the Oklahoman reports, both lawmakers behind the bill are members of the Oklahoma freedom caucus, an affiliate of the national far-right Republican group formed in 2015 by members of Congress.
One of the lawmakers, Jett, praised Kirk in explicitly religious terms, calling him “a faithful servant of Christ”. Last year, Jett criticized a bipartisan bill to restrict corporal punishment against students with disabilities by citing the Old Testament proverb, “Whoever spares the rod hates their child”, during a debate in the state house.
Oh gawd. These people are a nightmare. Any form of kindness or forbearance is evil, and dominance is the first virtue.
So very liberal and democratic.
The Lib Dem party conference has descended into a transgender row after members shut down a vote on biological men taking women’s roles.
Gender-critical activists had intended to force Sir Ed Davey into banning trans women from taking female positions with a debate and then vote on the issue. However, it was struck off the agenda after a rival campaigner warned it would be used to “legitimise bigotry”, calling the proponents an “extremist faction”.
Oh we’re the extremists. It’s extremist to know that men are not women, and not at all extremist to insist that men are women if they say they are and that women have no right to defend our own rapidly vanishing rights. Also it’s bigotry to know that men are not women.
The internal spat will pile pressure on the Lib Dem leader to clarify his stance on gender-based definitions after he repeatedly refused to say that a woman cannot have a penis.
Did he also refuse to say that Santa Claus is not a real person with miraculous powers to descend the chimney of everyone on the planet? How did we get to a place where adult political bosses pretend that magic is real?
Instead, Sir Ed insisted “the vast majority of people identify with the same gender they had at birth, but there are a few who do not” during an interview with Piers Morgan.
Blah blah blah. Childish drivel. People are whatever sex they are. They don’t have to “identify with” it, but they can’t choose not to be it, any more than they can choose what species to be.
He later described transgender rights as “a difficult issue” amid division in his party between pro-trans and women’s rights groups.
But he also, of course, came down on the side that tells women to fuck off. He’s a liberal and a democrat, and women are bad worthless people who must not be allowed to protect our rights.
Liberal Voice for Women, a group of gender-critical campaigners, was due to use the party’s annual conference to call for a vote on changing party rules that would bring the Lib Dems in line with April’s Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman. The current rules allow those who “self-identify as women” to stand for party posts set aside for women, which activists argue dilutes biological women’s chances of reaching the top of the party.
Sigh. It’s not just “activists” who “argue” that. Of course letting men take women’s posts dilutes women’s chances of reaching the top of the party; what else would it do? Men taking women’s posts=fewer women with posts=fewer chances to proceed in an upward direction. That’s a necessary consequence of letting men take women’s posts. And don’t call us “biological” women as if there’s some other kind.
But the Supreme Court ruled that the word “sex” in the Equality Act referred to “biological sex”, meaning that if a job is set aside for a woman, it must be a biological woman and not someone who identifies as such.
And the LibDems are ignoring the ruling, thus harming and oppressing women. So lib. So dem.
Rival activists succeeded in having the vote on Saturday morning struck off on the basis it would be “transphobic”.
This is despite a YouGov poll showing that three-quarters of Lib Dem members do not support the party’s stance on allowing gender self-identification.
Oh who cares what they think. They’re not liberal and democratic enough.
Here’s the smug prat who made it happen:
Some Good Law Project blither from Jolyon:
A dangerous narrative that frames trans people as a threat to women has solidified its grip on public discourse in recent months. It’s a narrative built on fear, not facts, and it’s having devastating effects on the trans community.
It’s not a “narrative.” It’s trendy to sweep all the words into the category of “narrative” (except one’s own words of course) but it’s stupid and inaccurate and manipulative. It’s also not “framing.” Calling it “framing” implies manipulation at best, lying at worst.
We’re not telling a story when we point out that trans women are men and that men are barred from some women’s spaces for reasons of safety as well as privacy. We are stating some obvious facts. If anyone’s telling stories around here it’s the men who insist that they really really are women in every sense so shut up.
The NY Times reported a couple of weeks ago that rescuers in Afghanistan don’t rescue women.
The first rescue workers reached Bibi Aysha’s village more than 36 hours after an earthquake devastated settlements across eastern Afghanistan’s mountainous areas on Sunday. But instead of bringing relief, the sight of them heightened her fears; not a single woman was among them.
Afghan cultural norms, enforced even in emergencies by the ruling Taliban, forbid physical contact between men and women who are not family members. In the village of Andarluckak, in Kunar Province, the emergency team hurriedly carried out wounded men and children, and treated their wounds, said Ms. Aysha, 19. But she and other women and adolescent girls, some of them bleeding, were pushed aside, she said.
It’s interesting that the Times translates “evil religious rules that punish women” to “Afghan cultural norms.” Yes, sure, they are cultural norms, but those cultural norms are specifically religious norms, enforced by the viciously theocratic and misogynistic Taliban. “Cultural norms” sounds so benign – eating certain foods on certain days of the week, charity, prayer, holidays – way too benign to encompass leaving women to suffer and die because men must not touch women but also women must not go outside or do any public work so hooray hooray we have a catch-22 that means women suffer and die. Don’t call it cultural norms, call it what it is: misogynistic theocratic rules laid down 16 centuries ago by a man who despised women.
Tahzeebullah Muhazeb, a male volunteer who traveled to Mazar Dara, also in Kunar Province, said that members of the all-male medical team there were hesitant to pull women out from under the rubble of collapsed buildings. Trapped and injured women were left under stones, waiting for women from other villages to reach the site and dig them out.
“It felt like women were invisible,” said Mr. Muhazeb, 33. He added, “The men and children were treated first, but the women were sitting apart, waiting for care.”
Because they’re so worthless and such whores, despite being the source of all those men and children who were treated first.
Though the Taliban have not released a gender breakdown of the casualties, women have faced an especially harsh ordeal, made worse by neglect and isolation, more than half a dozen doctors, rescue workers and women in areas hit by the quake said in interviews.
Afghanistan faces a critical shortage of health care workers and, in particular, of women in that field. Last year, the Taliban imposed a ban on women’s enrollment in medical education. The dearth of female doctors and rescue workers has been all too evident in the wake of the earthquake.
Brilliant. Just brilliant. Men must not touch women, but women must not get medical education, so hey presto the result is that women cannot get any kind of trained medical care at any time for any reason. The very best they can hope for is amateur care from the few women who are allowed to step outside.
Are we seeing a pattern or no?
A top House Democrat on Tuesday accused Donald Trump of “systematically dismantling” efforts to prosecute sex crimes and hunt down traffickers, as the president faces continued pressure to make public investigative files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
The memo from House judiciary committee ranking member Jamie Raskin and his staff, shared exclusively with the Guardian, said that beyond refusing the demands for transparency around Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, Trump has also undercut efforts to hold people accused of similar crimes accountable by “systematically dismantling the offices and programs we rely on to combat human trafficking and prosecute sex crimes”.
Are we sure it’s systematically as opposed to being Trump smashing everything that pops into his distractable brain?
Raskin’s memo to Democratic members of the judiciary committee comes in advance of testimony scheduled for Wednesday by FBI director Kash Patel, at which Democrats are expected to press him for details on the bureau’s handling of its investigation into Epstein.
Appearing before the Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday, Patel acknowledged shortcomings in how an investigation into Epstein was handled that led to the financier pleading guilty in 2008 to a charge related to procuring a child for sex . However, Patel insisted court orders prevented him acceding to Democrats demands to release more files related to Epstein.
Yeah see Patel wasn’t the FBI boss in 2008 and Trump wasn’t president then so it’s no skin off his ass to acknowledge shortcomings that are nothing to do with him. More recent stuff on the other hand…
“By diverting extraordinary amounts of money and personnel to its immigration crackdown, the Trump administration has undermined the investigation and prosecution of nearly every other law enforcement priority, including human trafficking and child exploitation,” Raskin wrote.
Trump has also cancelled hundreds of grants to local law enforcement agencies and non-profits that were used to help victims of such crimes, according to the memo. Federal funds are no longer flowing to trainings of sexual assault nurse examiners in disadvantaged areas or victim advocates employed at rape crisis centers, nor to American Sign Language interpretation for survivors of domestic violence.
Because none of that is important; all that matters is keeping brown people out of the white US of A.
[Raskin] also noted that several top officials, including defense secretary Pete Hegseth and health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, have been accused of inappropriate conduct, while the Trump administration acted to facilitate the return of “misogynist influencer” Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan from Romania, where they faced charges including rape.
Well rape is not a crime so…
Look, this isn’t complicated. Either you do what Trump tells you to do, or ya fiyad. It’s that simple.
The U.S. attorney investigating New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey said he had resigned on Friday, hours after President Trump called for his ouster.
Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had recently told senior Justice Department officials that investigators found insufficient evidence to bring charges against Ms. James and had also raised concerns about a potential case against Mr. Comey, according to officials familiar with the situation. Mr. Trump has long viewed Ms. James and Mr. Comey as adversaries and has repeatedly pledged retribution against law enforcement officials who pursued him.
Understood? It doesn’t matter that investigators found insufficient evidence to bring charges or raised concerns about bringing charges; their job is to bring charges when they’re told to bring charges. End of story.
Mr. Siebert informed prosecutors in his office of his resignation through an email hours after the president, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, said he wanted him removed because two Democratic senators from Virginia had approved of his nomination.
“When I saw that he got two senators, two gentlemen that are bad news as far as I’m concerned — when I saw that he got approved by those two men, I said, pull it, because he can’t be any good,” Mr. Trump said.
Obviously not. If The Enemy says you’re good at your job, you’re bad at your job. It’s like 2 + 2=4.
When asked if he would fire Mr. Siebert, Mr. Trump responded, “Yeah, I want him out.”
Ms. James, he told reporters, was “very guilty of something.”
Mr. Trump later disputed that Mr. Siebert had resigned, saying in a late-night social media post, “He didn’t quit, I fired him!”
Yes you did, Donnie, you’re a very big boy, everybody says so.
A lawyer for Ms. James, Abbe D. Lowell, called Mr. Siebert’s removal “a brazen attack on the rule of law.”
“The prosecutor did exactly what justice required by following the facts and the evidence, which didn’t support charges against Attorney General James,” he said. “Firing people until he finds someone who will bend the law to carry out his revenge has been President Trump’s pattern — and it’s illegal.”
Normally, yes, but under Trump, no.
The threat against Mr. Siebert was perhaps the most glaring example yet of the Trump administration’s efforts to exercise direct control over personnel and policy decisions at U.S. attorney’s offices around the country. Those moves have badly eroded the traditional distance between the White House and the Justice Department.
Eroded, no; nuked, yes.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, blasted Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr on Friday for threats he made this week related to Jimmy Kimmel’s show, calling the Trump administration official’s actions “dangerous as hell.”
“I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying we’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying,” Cruz said on his podcast, “Verdict with Ted Cruz.”
“I like Brendan Carr. He’s a good guy, he’s the chairman of the FCC. I work closely with him, but what he said there is dangerous as hell,” Cruz said.
Cruz is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the FCC. He warned Carr’s actions could have long-term consequences.
…
Cruz went on to say Friday: “I hate what Jimmy Kimmel said,” but likened Carr’s comments about Disney taking the easy way or the hard way to a classic mob movie. I gotta say, that’s right out of ‘Goodfellas.’ That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it,” Cruz said.
Trouble in Paradise.
There are interns being thrown over the bannisters in the White House this evening. Judge tells Trump to redo his lawsuit so that it’s not so tedious and moronic.
A federal judge tossed Donald Trump’s $15bn defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, book publisher Penguin and two Times reporters, and said the suit was filled with “vituperation and invective” and violated civil procedure in federal cases for failing to get to the point.
So one has to wonder why Trump’s lawyers didn’t tell him that instead of letting him make a fool of himself? Sabotage?
Anyway, the Guardian account is a treat.
[Judge]Merryday cited Rule 8(a) of the federal rules of civil procedure requiring a complaint include a short and plain statement of the claim…
“Alleging only two simple counts of defamation, the complaint consumes eighty-five pages,” Merryday wrote. “Count I appears on page eighty, and Count II appears on page eighty-three … Even under the most generous and lenient application of Rule 8, the complaint is decidedly improper and impermissible.”
It’s impossible not to shriek with laughter at that. It’s so Trump. 85 pages of vituperation and invective before finally getting to the point.
Merryday noted the “many, often repetitive, and laudatory (toward President Trump) but superfluous allegations,” and “much more, persistently alleged in abundant, florid, and enervating detail”.
The judge’s order does not address the truth of the allegations nor the validity of the claims, but said “a complaint remains an improper and impermissible place for the tedious and burdensome aggregation of prospective evidence, for the rehearsal of tendentious arguments, or for the protracted recitation and explanation of legal authority putatively supporting the pleader’s claim for relief.”
So did he get his lawyers from the local detox center, or what?
H/t Mostly Cloudy
A new transparency row has emerged as the fallout from the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal row continues.
The Herald can reveal that health chiefs have refused to reveal another key piece of information regarding how the legal fees are covered.
It was revealed on Wednesday that the Central Legal Office (CLO), which is part of the NHS’s National Service Scotland unit, and appoints barristers on behalf of health boards, said there was “no legitimate” case to reveal the hourly rate paid to Jane Russell KC.
No legitimate case? Really? For people to know how much of their money is being pissed away on pretending a man is a woman?
However, the CLO -which is a publicly funded body – and NHS chiefs have been accused of “shameful secrecy” by Tory MSP Tess White. North East MSP Ms White said during a parliamentary debate in Holyrood that her understanding was the legal bill from NHS Fife currently sat at around £600,000.
Ms White, the equalities spokeswoman for the Scottish Tories, told The Herald: “This is just the latest example of the shameful secrecy that NHS Fife has displayed in its witch hunt against Sandie Peggie. Taxpayers have a right to know how much of their money was squandered by the health board defending the indefensible.”
Well quite. It’s public money and it’s being thrown away on pretending huge smug rich dude Theo Upton is not a dude.
Why does it surprise anyone that the Neville Chamberlain approach doesn’t work any better with Trump than it did with Hitler?
Late last year, ABC News spent $16 million to settle a defamation lawsuit with President Donald Trump. At the time, you could squint and see the business sense of it: Just pay up, say you’re sorry and this will all blow over.
Or, pay up, say you’re sorry, and next time the demand will be much higher. Which is more likely?
Across Corporate America, companies are learning the hard way that giving Trump what he wants won’t appease him — it will only stoke his appetite. (It seems some folks have forgotten the sage wisdom underpinning Laura Joffe Numeroff’s 1985 classic “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.” Spoiler alert: The mouse has some more demands.)
Not to mention the sage wisdom underpinning the widespread awareness that Chamberlain got it all profoundly wrong. We have been here before. Chamberlain’s policy was called, with disdain or rage, appeasement. You can’t appease a Hitler and you can’t appease a Trump.
ABC in December agreed to donate $15 million to Trump’s presidential library and pay $1 million in legal fees to the law firm of Trump’s attorney. It also published an editor’s note expressing regret for an on-air misstatement by George Stephanopoulos. The case had centered on the anchor’s imprecise wording around the 2023 verdict that found Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s. (Under New York law, Trump was not found liable for “rape,” as Stephanopoulos had characterized it.)
It doesn’t get any more squalid than that. Our revolting head of state forcibly shoved his revolting hand onto and into Carroll’s crotch, without her invitation or consent. He’s such a revolting human that he makes a big fuss about the word “rape” and extorts money to appease his big fuss. ABC should not have rolled over. Obviously.
Nine months after ABC conceded that fight, the network decided to throw in the towel on a fight that hadn’t even begun.
Just hours after the head of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, made vague threats to suspend ABC’s broadcast license over comments by Jimmy Kimmel during his show, the network pulled the plug on the comedian’s late-night show indefinitely.
So, what’s next? Requiring Trump’s approval before hiring any new talent? Firing some old talent just in case Trump might not like them? Begging Trump to send a list of people he would like to see chatting about him on the talk show benches?
On Thursday, Trump and other Republicans insisted that Kimmel’s suspension was a decision driven by poor viewership rather than punishing dissent.
“He had bad ratings more than anything else,” Trump said. Senate Majority Leader John Thune echoed that sentiment, saying Kimmel was simply a victim of market forces and that the network made “economic market decisions.”
…
On Air Force One on Thursday, Trump also appeared to depart from the “business decision” line and acknowledge that he just really doesn’t like being made fun of and thinks networks’ broadcast licenses should be revoked if they air overwhelmingly negative perspectives on him.
“When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump, that’s all they do,” he said. “They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.”
Yes they are. Yes, sir, they are. I would draw your attention to a little document known as the Bill of Rights aka the first ten amendments to the Constitution, in particular the first of said ten. Evening shows are in fact allowed to tell the truth about Donnie from Queens.
Texas A&M University swiftly fired a lecturer and removed two administrators after a student filmed herself arguing with the instructor that a children’s literature course broke the law because the coursework recognized more than two genders.
The student cited President Trump, who has signed an executive order saying his administration would push for the recognition of only two genders. After the video taken by the student was posted on social media, Republican politicians in the state, including the governor, demanded quick action from the public university, accusing the instructor of “blatantly indoctrinating students in gender ideology.”
The school’s moves were condemned by advocates of academic freedom, who say they reflected a state that was veering into authoritarianism at a moment when the Trump administration was using the weight of the federal government to target speech it disfavors.
On the one hand we don’t want the state micromanaging what universities teach, especially when the state=Donald Trump. On the other hand we don’t want universities teaching lies as settled knowledge. On the other other hand, religious universities teach lies as a matter of course, so what do we do with that?
Amanda L. Reichek, a lawyer for Dr. McCoul, said she was “never instructed to change her course content” before being fired.
“In fact, Dr. McCoul taught this course and others like it for many years, successfully and without challenge,” Ms. Reichek said in a statement. “Instead, Dr. McCoul was fired in derogation of her constitutional rights and the academic freedom that was once the hallmark of higher education in Texas. She has appealed her termination and is exploring further legal action.”
But should she be teaching actual absurd lies that are harmful to the less powerful half of the population? But if the answer is no, who is going to be doing the enforcing?
Academics have worried about a deteriorating environment for free expression on college campuses since Mr. Trump took office and began an attack on higher education over the perceived liberal bent of many campuses.
Yes, but on the other hand, women have worried about students being taught systematic lies about gender and sex, lies that leave women worse off than we already are.
