Mslexia has issued a statement – a bad, stupid, smarmy, chickenshit statement.

All that plus difficult to read – but hey, tiny white print on a lavender background is so Feminine, amirite?

Mslexia exists to support all writers who identify as women, regardless of their prior background or current circumstances, including issues relating to their age, race, class, income, disability, sexual preference, location, health status, fertility, caring responsibilities and gender assignment. We stand against all forms of abuse and harassment.

Mslexia aims to foster a welcoming and inclusive environment that encourages women to express themselves across a wide range of literary genres in the knowledge that they, and their writing, will always be treated with respect.

Therefore, we absolutely respect any woman’s right to freedom of speech, within the law. However, if a Mslexia judge expresses views that threaten to undermine Mslexia’s climate of welcome and inclusivity, we will always ask her to step down from that role.

So “Mslexia exists to support all writers who identify as women” – as opposed to supporting all writers who are women. I’m ancient enough to remember a time when it was enough to just be a woman, and it wasn’t enough to just “identify as” a woman [while not actually being one]. I think we shouldn’t have swapped the one for the other. I think we should go on thinking of women as women, and leave it at that. Men who wish they were women are a separate issue, and frankly not our problem. That’s not to say we can’t be supportive or sympathetic, it’s just to say that it is literally not our problem and that women still have a lot of inequities and injustices to deal with; we don’t need to take on men’s issues along with ours, let alone instead of ours.

Notice that in that list of 11 items in under “including” that sex is not included. Mslexia exists to support all writers who identify as women, including men but not including all women. Uh…thanks? Mslexia exists to support all writers who identify as women but it will drop a woman like a stone if she supports a woman who supports a woman who fails to agree that men are literally women if they say they are.

(I still, after all these years, find it hard to believe – this new “feminism” that includes some men and excludes women who don’t agree that those men are literally women.)

Mslexia aims to foster a welcoming and inclusive environment that encourages women to express themselves across a wide range of literary genres in the knowledge that they, and their writing, will always be treated with respect.

No it doesn’t. Obviously not.

Therefore, we absolutely respect any woman’s right to freedom of speech, within the law. However, if a Mslexia judge expresses views that threaten to undermine Mslexia’s climate of welcome and inclusivity, we will always ask her to step down from that role.

That is, they don’t aim to foster a welcoming and inclusive environment that encourages women to express themselves across a wide range of literary genres in the knowledge that they, and their writing, will always be treated with respect. Despite the fact that they just typed words saying they do, they don’t, because immediately after typing words that say they do, they typed more words that say they don’t. You can’t have both, chums. You can’t say you support women and then say you dump women who fail to agree that men can be women.

I don’t understand.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell dismissed the suggestion that Amy Coney Barrett would vote to scrap the Affordable Care Act.

“This mother of seven, including multiple children who were born or adopted facing preexisting condition medical challenges, is just itching to block families like hers from accessing medical care. What a joke,” McConnell said, per an NBC News reporter.

I’m not being sarcastic, I really don’t understand. If Evil Mitch said that, it means that he gets why universal health care is necessary, and is willing to let us know that he gets it. But they hate universal health care. They want it to be health care for those who can afford it. He’s admitting that it would be bad to scrap the ACA because scrapping it would mean millions would be unable to afford health care and/or get insurance if they had pre-existing conditions. But Mitch and his gang long to scrap the ACA.

I seriously do not understand why he would say that out in the open.

They’ve made the letter a petition now, so the whole world can sign. Signatures are flooding in.

If you sign a letter or say a thing in support of JK Rowling you must be punished.

Punish her. Never mind that she didn’t do anything wrong, punish her, just to be safe.

I started seeing stories on this about a week ago, and it was so…horror-movie like and gruesome I wasn’t sure what to do with it so decided to wait and see. New developments mean that waiting is over. Meet “Barbie Kardashian”:

Limerick, Munster. A teenager who was “born a male but identifies as a female” is facing four counts of making threats to kill or cause serious harm. The accused, who has demonstrated a pattern of criminal and extreme physical and sexual violence towards women, is eager to be held in female custody while awaiting trial.

So that he can have an abundance of new female victims. Well surely no one will go along with that plan.

Gardaí, the national police service of the Republic of Ireland, says 18-year-old Barbie Kardashian made threats of violence against two individuals in July, August and September of this year.

The youth was arrested on the night of Thursday, September 24, and has been remanded into custody.

…

Michèle Finan, solicitor for Mr Kardashian, insists her client would be “exceptionally vulnerable in a prison setting,” and is “very anxious she be detained in a prison facility for females, as she identifies as a female.” The solicitor requested that her client’s “certificate of gender recognition” be submitted to Limerick District Court, which is hearing the case.

Wait. Wait. Seriously, slow down, wait. WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER WOMEN?

This deeply disturbed kid has a history of violently attacking women so he should not be detained in a facility for women. How is that not blindingly obvious?

And when I say “violently” I’m not messing around.

In 2012, the boy was made subject to a care order after violently attacking his own mother. The mother had fled to a women’s refuge with her eight-year-old son in 2010 to escape his abusive father. Staff at the refuge expressed concern about the child’s violence toward his mother. Mother and son moved into a rented accommodation after a year and a half, until he carried out the particularly brutal attack on his mother at age 10. The child was then placed into care.

He continued sharing plans to kill his mother, including a scheme detailed to an aftercare manager that involved obtaining his mother’s new address and gaining entry to the home. At the advice of gardaí, the mother recently fled to a different part of the country to ensure safety from her son.

This is one time I’m giving a content warning. The next paragraph is the main reason I hesitated to post about this at all.

On May 1 of last year, the 17-year-old was a backseat passenger in a car when, suddenly and without provocation, he lunged forward and dug his nails into the eyes of the female care worker driving the vehicle. The teen boy “wrapped her legs around the victim’s head and chest, refusing to let go, and bit the care worker on the hand” while threatening to kill her. The care worker was left with torn eyelids. “Clumps” of hair had been ripped from her scalp. The woman had to be hospitalized.

But never mind all that – he wants to be housed with the women, so the kindly officials gave him what he wants.

A TEENAGER WAS today remanded in continuing custody on charges of making threats to kill two people.

Barbie Kardashian, (18), of no fixed abode, appeared before Limerick District Court, via video-link from the women’s section of Limerick Prison.

They did it. They went ahead and did it.

There’s a mug shot.

Gee, who could have guessed – it turns out that Trump is not a devout Christian after all. It was all an act!!! Are you amazed?

The president’s alliance with religious conservatives has long been premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats hold them in disdain. In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes praise on conservative Christians, casting himself as their champion. “My administration will never stop fighting for Americans of faith,” he declared at a rally for evangelicals earlier this year.

But it’s transparently a ploy, given that Trump had never given the slightest hint of religiosity until he decided to become king of Murka.

But in private, many of Trump’s comments about religion are marked by cynicism and contempt, according to people who have worked for him. Former aides told me they’ve heard Trump ridicule conservative religious leaders, dismiss various faith groups with cartoonish stereotypes, and deride certain rites and doctrines held sacred by many of the Americans who constitute his base.

We’re supposed to recoil in disgust at this point but I can’t oblige. I agree with him on this one. If that makes me a trumpish vulgarian on the subject then so be it.

The fraud on the other hand is a whole different matter.

A white house spokeser asked for comment said blah blah plus

The president is also well known for joking and his terrific sense of humor, which he shares with people of all faiths.

Nah. His sense of humor isn’t terrific. He’s not intelligent enough for that.

It helped that Trump seemed to feel a kinship with prosperity preachers—often evincing a game-recognizes-game appreciation for their hustle. The former campaign adviser recalled showing his boss a YouTube video of the Israeli televangelist Benny Hinn performing “faith healings,” while Trump laughed at the spectacle and muttered, “Man, that’s some racket.” On another occasion, the adviser told me, Trump expressed awe at Joel Osteen’s media empire—particularly the viewership of his televised sermons.

It’s very Mark Twain, isn’t it. He’s the Duke and the Dauphin to the life.

The conservative Christian elites Trump surrounds himself with have always been more clear-eyed about his lack of religiosity than they’ve publicly let on.

See? We’ve known that all along. Of course they have – you’d have to be very dense and inattentive to think Trump meant any of it.

Look at this stupid chain of “accused of”s and “previously criticized”s and “branded as”s all linked up to make a hearsay accusation of Wrongthink against…you’ll never guess…a woman. Funny how reliably it’s a woman these days.

A HISTORY professor accused of being transphobic will head a new women’s rights initiative at Oxford University.

Oh accused of; well what more do you need to know. It could be some random crackpot in the pub just before closing, but do let’s make it the basis for a story in the Oxford Mail because hey, it’s only a woman. Also why does she get to be a history professor when the inquisitors on Twitter don’t? What’s so great about her besides brains and education and discipline?

Professor of Modern History at Oxford University Selina Todd is one of the academics who will lead the research programme that was announced earlier this month.

But Prof Todd has previously been criticised by LGBT+ campaigners for holding ‘anti-trans’ views and supporting the group Woman’s Place, which was recently branded as a ‘trans-exclusionary hate group’ by the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights.

She’s one of the academics leading the research programme but wait wait wait SOMEBODY SAID SOMETHING.

Why is “somebody said something” even worth a newspaper story? Why do newspapers keep publishing them? The people who say this kind of shit tend to be very stupid and very blinkered and very aggressive toward women so why is it worth solemnly publishing their accusations in newspapers??

It is unclear how the new Women’s Equality and Inequality, which is part of the Oxford Martin Programme, will improve the rights of all women, including trans women, as both Prof Todd and Oxford University did not provide a comment when contacted by the Oxford Mail.

Improving the rights of all women does not entail improving the rights of trans women, because trans women are men. All this insisting that women can’t talk about women’s rights without being interrupted to be told we have to include men in women’s rights is such perverse backward-looking misogynist shit I can barely credit that we’re still arguing about it.

Also, “both X and Y did not” is bad English.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on How DO we put up with it?

Most murdered? Come off it. One look at official homicide statistics should put that to rest, but activists are actively hostile to data. Just as with the religious, statistics and math and facts are not how they came by their beliefs in the first place. Remember, “If your original Hebrew disagrees with my original King James — your original Hebrew is wrong. If your original Hebrew agrees with my original King James, your original Hebrew is right.”

They’ve heard the idea that trans people are being murdered and denied basic rights at a terrifying rate. They’ve heard it a lot. As Daniel Kahneman wrote in Thinking, Fast and Slow, “People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory.” Because they so easily recall claims of the dire straits of trans people, they are absolutely certain that any stats showing a contrary scenario are false. And now everyone they talk to treats the claim as obviously true.

Whether due to the company they keep or social media siloing, they’ve heard it about trans people more than any other group, and everyone they interact with is of like mind. As Albert Speer wrote:

… in normal circumstances people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them, which makes them aware they have lost credibility. In the Third Reich, there were no such correctives, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied in a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fantastical dream world, which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world. In those mirrors I could see nothing but my own face reproduced many times over.

John Cleese is on a tear at the moment.

I’m hearing Basil in that one. “Oh I see, it’s my fault is it.”

It’s infuriating but it’s also depressing. The Trump campaign and Cambridge Analytica persuaded black voters in swing states that Trump would be preferable to Clinton. That’s worked out well.

Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential election campaign has been accused of actively seeking to deter 3.5 million black Americans in battleground states from voting by deliberately targeting them with negative Hillary Clinton ads on Facebook.

By “negative Hillary Clinton ads” they mean “dishonest disparaging” Clinton ads.

According to the investigation, the Trump campaign’s goal was to dissuade them from backing the Democrat entirely, by targeting them with “dark adverts” on their Facebook feeds, which heavily attacked Clinton and, in some cases, argued she lacked sympathy with African Americans.

Unlike Trump, who has all the sympathy in the world, along with understanding and knowledge and a long history of concern and involvement.

The effort is said to have been devised in part by Cambridge Analytica, the notorious election consultant that ceased trading last year following revelations that it used dirty tricks to help win elections around the world and had gained unauthorised access to tens of millions of Facebook profiles.

The whole thing is a criminal enterprise, and here we are.

Bookstores have to be safe spaces!

Don’t they? Isn’t that the whole point of them? Or have I misundertood?

Rabble Books thinks they do.

An Australian bookstore will no longer stock J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, in order to make the shop a “safer space” for customers.

It’s a sad fact about the Harry Potter books that they tend to burst into flames after you’ve read a few pages. No, that’s not it, they’re laced with arsenic. No, wait, they’re contaminated with plutonium. No, I know, there are tigers and rattlesnakes between the pages.

Rabble Books and Games located in Maylands, a suburb of Perth, made the announcement on Facebook this week, saying that it would no longer house Rowling’s books and those written under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith after her latest novel has been labeled as transphobic. The store’s Facebook page has since been deactivated.

The post, which was written by store owner Nat Latter, said the shop would “not put books by transphobes on the shelves” and asked customers for suggested alternatives.

Gee. I wonder if they carry any books by misogynists. Racists? Antisemites? Snobs? Reverse snobs? Criminals? Exploiters? People who put empty milk cartons back in the fridge?

“While stocking a book isn’t an endorsement (good grief, that would be a minefield), and we will always take orders for books that aren’t in stock, there are more worthy books to put on the shelf — books that don’t harm communities and won’t make us sad to unpack them,” a spokesperson for Rabble Books and Games wrote.

Oh, okay, that helps – the books have to be worthy.

Worthy how? Worthy in what sense? Worthy according to whom?

Again…for the fifty thousandth time…I have to point out that is has never worked this way for women. No general bookshop has ever decided not to keep misogynist books on the shelves. That’s no doubt partly because there would be so few books they could keep on the shelves if they did that.

See, contempt for women is just normal, just everyday life. Updike and his buddies are just what literature is. “Transphobia” on the other hand…now that’s evil. People who don’t believe that men can become women by saying the words are worse than misogynist, worse than Nazis, worse than anyone.

The decision follows furious backlash against Rowling in recent months due to her constant attacks on transgender people.

Liar. Who wrote this? [looks] Someone called Serena Sonoma. Well, she’s a liar. Rowling doesn’t “attack” trans people, and what she has said about the ideology around what “trans” means has not been anything like “constant.”

The liar then instantly undercuts her own lie by giving all of two examples of this purported “transphobia,” first last December then “earlier this summer” – so that’s hardly constantly, is it. What Rowling said wasn’t “phobic” anyway, but the “constantly” is an extra layer of destructive lying.

Anyway, skip Rabble Books near Perth if you want to buy a Harry Potter book off the shelf.

Oh jeez.

Uh oh, it seems that billionaire Don hasn’t been paying a huge amount of income tax. You’d think the tariff on the income from all those billions would be quite a high figure, but…

Donald Trump, a self-proclaimed billionaire, paid only $750 in federal income taxes in the year he was elected US president, according to a stunning New York Times investigation that could shake up the presidential election.

My goodness. That’s a very small figure.

The president “paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency”, the paper reported, adding that “in his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

“He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years – largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.”

In all, the paper said, Trump paid no federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years its reporters examined. Many of his businesses, including his golf courses, report significant financial losses – which have helped him to lower his taxes.

He babbled at a “press briefing” today.

“Totally fake news, no. Actually I paid tax. And you’ll see that as soon as my tax returns – it’s under audit, they’ve been under audit for a long time. The [Internal Revenue Service] does not treat me well … they treat me very badly. You have people in the IRS – they treat me very badly.”

You’ll see that as soon as you see his tax returns, which will be never. It’s like that health care bill that we’re always going to see “in two weeks,” which is the same as jam tomorrow.

Pressed on why a billionaire only paid a few hundred dollars in the year he won the presidency, Trump insisted: “First of all I paid a lot, and I paid a lot of state income taxes too. The New York state charges a lot and I paid a lot of money in state. It’ll all be revealed. It’s going to come out but after the audit.”

In two weeks. You can see the taxes in two weeks, and two weeks ago, but never taxes today.

“Even while declaring losses, he has managed to enjoy a lavish lifestyle by taking tax deductions on what most people would consider personal expenses, including residences, aircraft and $70,000 in hairstyling for television,” the Times reported on Sunday.

Why did the IRS allow it?

“Ivanka Trump, while working as an employee of the Trump Organization, appears to have received ‘consulting fees’ that also helped reduce the family’s tax bill.”

Who the fuck would ever want to “consult” Princess Ivanka about anything? Consult the nearest Barbie doll instead; at least it’s cheap.

The paper added: “Over the past two decades, Mr Trump has paid about $400m less in combined federal income taxes than a very wealthy person who paid the average for that group each year.”

Making America great again.

No, that’s you.

I know GC people believe that people are gifted with some kind of magic, unmeasurable, immutable sexed soul at conception, but there’s just no evidence for that mate

That’s so gaslighty. That is not what gender critical people believe, that is the exact, precise opposite of what gender critical people believe. That’s the whole point. We don’t believe the fairy tale of the magic gender that belies the body, it’s uncritical trans ideology that believes and promotes that silly idea. All we believe is the tautology that a female body is a female body, and there’s nothing magic or unmeasurable about it. We call people who have female bodies “women” and we don’t call people who have male bodies “women.” That’s all; no magic required.

Mate.

There’s an open letter supporting JK Rowling in the Sunday Times:

JK Rowling has been subjected to an onslaught of abuse that highlights an insidious, authoritarian and misogynistic trend in social media.

Rowling has consistently shown herself to be an honourable and compassionate person, and the appalling hashtag #RIPJKRowling is just the latest example of hate speech directed against her and other women that Twitter and other platforms enable and implicitly endorse.

We are signing this letter in the hope that, if more people stand up against the targeting of women online, we might at least make it less acceptable to engage in it or profit from it.

We wish JK Rowling well and stand in solidarity with her.

Signed by:

Ian McEwan, author; Lionel Shriver, author; Griff Rhys Jones, actor; Graham Linehan, writer; Maureen Chadwick, writer; Andrew Davies, writer; Frances Barber, actress; Craig Brown, writer; Alexander Armstrong, actor; Amanda Craig, writer; Philip Hensher, writer; Susan Hill, writer; Jane Thynne, writer; Ben Miller, actor; Simon Fanshawe, writer; James Dreyfus, actor; Frances Welch, writer; Francis Wheen, writer; Arthur Matthews, writer; Aminatta Forna, writer; Joan Smith, writer; Nick Cohen, journalist; Kath Gotts, composer & lyricist; Ann McManus, writer; Eileen Gallagher, writer & producer; Jimmy Mulville, producer; Lizzie Roper, actress; Stella O’Malley, author; Nina Paley, animator; Julie Bindel, journalist; Abigail Shrier, journalist; Rachel Rooney, author; Jane Harris, writer; Tatsuya Ishida, cartoonist; Lisa Marchiano, author; Zuby, musician and author; Debbie Hayton, journalist; Gillian Philip, Author, Jonny Best, musician; Manick Govinda, arts consultant; Russell Celyn Jones, writer; Magi Gibson, writer; Victoria Whitworth, writer; Dr Mez Packer, writer; Grace Carley, producer; Sam Leith, journalist; Malcolm Clark, television producer-director; Shirley Wishart, musician; Charlotte Delaney, writer; Nehanda Ferguson, musician; Justin Hill, writer; Trezza Azzopardi, writer; Birdy Rose, artist; Jess de Wahls, textile artist; Mo Lovatt, writer; Simon Edge, novelist; Tom Stoppard, playwright; and Amanda Smyth, writer

I endorse this message.

I never can figure out how this is supposed to work, this claim that a senator’s or justice’s religion makes no difference to what the senator or justice will do.

Much has been made of Amy Coney Barrett’s Catholic faith following her nomination for the supreme court. Some have speculated it may affect her rulings on matters such as abortion and LGBT rights, while others have expressed disquiet about her membership of the secretive People of Praise group.

Why is it “speculation” to think that “Catholic faith” will influence how Barrett rules on abortion? The “Catholic faith” is fanatically opposed to abortion, and correspondingly indifferent to the rights and needs of women, so if you hold “Catholic faith” then that’s what you’re buying into.

Barrett herself has said she will follow the law rather than her own beliefs, and she appears to have a supporter from a prominent Democrat, House speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Of course Barrett has said that; she wants the job! Wanting to make abortion illegal is probably part of why she wants it, though probably only a small part.

“It doesn’t matter what her faith is, or what religion she believes in,” said Pelosi who, like Joe Biden and Barrett, is Catholic. “What matters is does she believe in the Constitution of the United States.

But it does. It does matter. There are some believers who can bracket parts of their religions’ commands and claims, but it’s not safe or reasonable to assume that’s the case with all of them.

Sure, why not?

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law on Saturday requiring California to house transgender inmates in prisons based on their gender identity — but only if the state does not have “management or security concerns.”

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation houses men and women in separate facilities. Transgender inmates are often housed based on their sex assigned at birth. Advocates say this is dangerous, particularly for transgender women housed in facilities for men.

That’s so interesting, because you know what’s even more dangerous? Housing women in facilities for men. Which is a pity, because that’s exactly what California is doing here. Women who identify as trans aren’t going to ask to be housed with men, are they, nor are women who don’t identify as trans going to say they do in order to be housed with men. Men, on the other hand – you do the math.

It always fascinates me to see the feverish worry about tragically vulnerable men who identify as trans coupled with complete indifference to vulnerable women.

The law says officers have to ask inmates privately how they identify. That’s it; that’s the hurdle. They say how they identify then they choose which sex they want to be locked up with.

The law says the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation cannot deny those requests solely because of inmates’ anatomy, sexual orientation or “a factor present” among other inmates at the facility.

But the state can deny those requests if it has “management or security concerns.” If a request is denied, the state must give the inmate a written statement explaining the decision and give the inmate a “meaningful opportunity” to object.

The guy who authored the bill says there won’t be many management or security concerns.

“It’s just a false narrative about transgender people and about transgender women in particular that they’re somehow not really women and are just trying to scam their way into women’s bathrooms or facilities in order to do bad things,” [Senator Scott] Wiener said. “Overwhelmingly the people who are being victimized are trans people.”

That “somehow” is so precious – as if he just has no idea why anyone would say a man is not in fact a woman. It’s just a “false narrative” that men are not women. Ok, Senator Wiener, your house is my house, and it’s just a false narrative for you to say it’s somehow not mine.

There’s not a word in the whole piece about the safety of women.

The US health department is throwing away $300 million on a Don’t Worry Be Happy campaign due to run in the weeks leading up to (purely coincidentally) the election. Or to put it slightly less combatively:

The health department is moving quickly on a highly unusual advertising campaign to “defeat despair” about the coronavirus, a $300 million-plus effort that was shaped by a political appointee close to President Donald Trump and executed in part by close allies of the official, using taxpayer funds.

The ad blitz, described in some budget documents as the “Covid-19 immediate surge public advertising and awareness campaign,” is expected to lean heavily on video interviews between administration officials and celebrities…

Because what is more urgent and pressing right now than interviews between Trump’s hacks and “celebrities”?

Senior administration officials have already recorded interviews with celebrities like actor Dennis Quaid and singer CeCe Winans, and the Health and Human Services Department also has pursued television host Dr. Mehmet Oz and musician Garth Brooks for roles in the campaign.

Worth every dime of the 300 MILLION dollars. Which, by the way, is vastly more than HHS or the CDC normally spends on campaigns to inform and advise. It’s not a normal or routine figure at all.

The public awareness campaign, which HHS is seeking to start airing before Election Day on Nov. 3, was largely conceived and organized by Michael Caputo, the health department’s top spokesperson who took medical leave last week and announced on Thursday that he had been diagnosed with cancer. Caputo, who has no medical or scientific background, claimed in a Facebook video on Sept. 13 that the campaign was “demanded of me by the president of the United States. Personally.”

Yes but that’s Donald Trump, so the answer should have been “Oh hell no.”

“The Democrats — and, by the way, their conjugal media and the leftist scientists that are working for the government — are dead set against it,” Caputo told his Facebook followers in the Sept. 13 video. “They cannot afford for us to have any good news before November because they’re already losing. … They’re going to come after me because I’m going to be putting $250 million worth of ads on the air.”

Conjugal???? What are you trying to say, little fella?

The campaign is indeed under investigation by Democrats, who have charged that the massive ad blitz is an attempt to boost Trump’s standing on Covid-19 before the election and have unsuccessfully called on HHS to halt the contract.

…

10 current and former health officials told POLITICO that they have concerns about the campaign’s scope, goals and even how it has been funded — by pulling money out of health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control that are in the midst of fighting the pandemic, rather than working with lawmakers to set up a brand-new advertising effort with congressional oversight, or drawing on substantial internal resources and expertise in running health-related public service campaigns.

It’s not how sick you are, it’s how cheerful you are about it.

The suspect confirms the motive.

A man suspected of stabbing two people with a meat cleaver in Paris has admitted to deliberately targeting the former offices of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine, French media report.

The man, an 18-year-old born in Pakistan, reportedly linked his actions to the magazine’s recent republication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

I never can understand why religious fanatics don’t just let their god deal with it. Their god is supposed to be all-powerful and perfect, so why does it need their help?

Thinking their god needs human help to eliminate enemies betrays a certain feebleness in the belief department, if you ask me. The goddy murderers might as well be atheists.

The suspect, who was arrested not far from the scene on Friday, had “taken responsibility for his action”, sources told AFP, adding that he placed his actions “in the context of the republication of the cartoons”.

Oh well that’s all right then.