Oh yay, an award for service to gender equity.

Activist and author Bettina Arndt, who has dedicated the latter part of her career to what she sees as the unfair treatment of men in today’s society, has received an Australia Day honour for her work.

In a decision certain to outrage feminists and other community members, Ms Arndt was admitted as a Member (AM) of the Order of Australia for her “significant service to the community as a social commentator, and to gender equity through advocacy for men”.

Oh that kind of “equity.” The way a white person would be providing significant service to racial equity through advocacy for white people.

The citation for her honour mentions her 2018 campus speaking tour, which was called the “Fake Rape Crisis” tour, as well as her contributions to controversial academic Jordan Peterson’s website Thinkspot.

Yes we definitely need more people saying all rape allegations are false.

Ms Arndt said she did not expect the award to silence or mollify her critics, but it would make her supporters “rather happy” to see an alternative point of view receive the imprimatur of official recognition.

Indeed. Let’s also hear the “Genocide is Good” point of view and the “What’s All the Fuss About Slavery?” point of view and the “unskilled workers are lucky to get any pay at all” point of view. The world is in imminent danger of becoming too progressive.

She also said programs to combat domestic violence unjustly demonised men – despite men overwhelmingly being the perpetrators.

That’s because women are so annoying, don’t you get it?

Ms Arndt said the link between misogyny and domestic violence applied only in “deeply misogynist” countries, naming Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia as examples.

She claimed there was no evidence of such a link in “egalitarian societies” such as Australia, the United States and Britain.

Well I guess if you live in a cell with no access to any form of media you could be unaware of the evidence…

Uh…what???

CNBC reports:

The Trump administration also employs the son of Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney. The White House pays him nearly six figures to serve as a sports liaison. According to government documents, Giuliani’s son, Andrew H. Giuliani, makes $95,000 per year working for the White House. His official title is “Special Assistant to the President and Associate Director of the Office of Public Liaison.”

Joe Biden should have told Hunter Biden he couldn’t take that 50k per month job with Burisma because the only reason he was offered it was the fact that Joe was Vice President.

By the same token, and several other tokens in addition, Rudy former prosecutor Giuliani should not be letting his son profit from his (Rudy’s) close and corrupt relationship with Trump.

To put it mildly.

The 31-year-old Giuliani has served in the Office of Public Liaison, which acts as “the primary line of communication between the White House and the public,” since March 2017.

Three years ago, so he was 28 when he got the gig. Not bad pay for a kid.

He made $77,000 serving as an associate director in 2017, and got a raise in 2018 to $90,700 though his title didn’t change. In the two years he has been employed by the White House, his pay has increased by $18,000.

I’m sure he deserves every penny of it. I’m sure he works his ass off as a…a what now? A sports liaison? Meaning he watches sports on tv and then tells Trump what he saw? Sure that’s worth 95k a year. All those dinners at Trump’s hotel add up.

The son of the former New York mayor was a college golfer. He joined the Duke University golf team in 2006 but was cut from the team in 2008 after he allegedly threw an apple at a teammate and threw and broke a golf club in a parking lot. The then-college student sued the university but the case was dismissed in 2010.

So no wonder he got a White House job! He’s a natural!

Rudy Giuliani told The Atlantic that hiring Andrew “wasn’t the usual ‘hire my kid’ situation.” “He’s known the president since he was a baby,” he told The Atlantic. “Now, did he know him in the first place because he was the mayor’s son? Sure, but they also had a relationship independent of me.”

And…that’s different from the usual ‘hire my kid’ situation how, exactly?

“He doesn’t really try to be involved in anything,” an anonymous former senior White House official told The Atlantic. “He’s just having a nice time.”

Of course he is, on 95k a year and the right to throw apples at anybody he wants to except Trump.

Trump in 2014:

Trump’s administration in May 2018:

The top White House official responsible for leading the U.S. response in the event of a deadly pandemic has left the administration, and the global health security team he oversaw has been disbanded under a reorganization by national security adviser John Bolton.

The abrupt departure of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the National Security Council means no senior administration official is now focused solely on global health security. Ziemer’s departure, along with the breakup of his team, comes at a time when many experts say the country is already underprepared for the increasing risks of a pandemic or bioterrorism attack.

Oops.

Ziemer’s last day was Tuesday, the same day a new Ebola outbreak was declared in Congo. He is not being replaced.

Pandemic preparedness and global health security are issues that require government-wide responses, experts say, as well as the leadership of a high-ranking official within the White House who is assigned only this role.

“Health security is very fragmented, with many different agencies,” said J. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It means coordination and direction from the White House is terribly important. ”

Oops.

But hey, think of all the money we saved on that guy’s salary.

Of all the people in all the world there is probably just one person who has the very least right to ask “how did we get here?” to what he calls “the age of impeachment.” Who is that one person?

From a different corner of humanity, via Rosa Freedman:

So now the Senate Republicans are trying to figure out how they can possibly ignore what Bolton wrote.

Republican sources thought Saturday they were confident that they had the votes to defeat a motion for additional witnesses and documents, leading to an acquittal vote by the end of the week.

Pause a moment to absorb that – the fact that Senators wanted (and of course still want) to block all witnesses and documents that would show Trump’s criminal effort to weaken Ukraine and thereby the US for the sake of his own political gain. The Republican Senators wanted and still want to hide all that from us, so that Trump can continue doing things like that, and more and worse. This isn’t a parking ticket we’re talking about here.

“I can’t begin to tell you how John Bolton’s testimony would ultimately play on a final decision but it’s relevant,” Romney told reporters Monday. “And therefore, I’d like to hear it.”

He’d like to hear it, as if it were some optional extra, like grated cheese on the salad.

GOP sources expect the Senate Republican leadership to reiterate to their conference the arguments they’ve been making for weeks: That seeking Bolton testimony would raise constitutional and executive privilege concerns — and argue that going through a protracted legal fight for his testimony would accomplish very little since Trump is expected to be acquitted anyway. One GOP aide told CNN Monday morning that Bolton news doesn’t change the Republicans’ underlying point — if you aren’t going to vote to remove him, why drag the process out with witnesses?

Excuse me? Their argument is that they are going to acquit him no matter what, and that’s why there’s no need for witnesses? They’re openly saying that even now that there’s stark testimony from a key official they refuse to pay any attention to it because they are going to acquit him no matter what? So I guess Trump could invited Putin to tea and hand him the keys to everything and still the Republicans would say they’re going to acquit him no matter what. Interesting.

From the Times scoop by Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt:

President Trump told his national security adviser in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton.

The president’s statement as described by Mr. Bolton could undercut a key element of his impeachment defense: that the holdup in aid was separate from Mr. Trump’s requests that Ukraine announce investigations into his perceived enemies, including [the two Bidens].

So why hasn’t Bolton testified? The trumpies told him not to of course but they can’t stop him. He doesn’t work for them any more.

Mr. Bolton’s explosive account of the matter at the center of Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial, the third in American history, was included in drafts of a manuscript he has circulated in recent weeks to close associates. He also sent a draft to the White House for a standard review process for some current and former administration officials who write books.

Oh, I see, well that’s quite different. He has a book to sell. Of course that’s far more important than the survival of Ukraine and the survival of the US with Donald Trump still squatting in the Oval Office. Never mind then Mister Bolton, you go right ahead and put yourself first.

Over dozens of pages, Mr. Bolton described how the Ukraine affair unfolded over several months until he departed the White House in September. He described not only the president’s private disparagement of Ukraine but also new details about senior cabinet officials who have publicly tried to sidestep involvement.

New details about how courageous and public-spirited they are?

For example, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acknowledged privately that there was no basis to claims by the president’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani that the ambassador to Ukraine was corrupt and believed Mr. Giuliani may have been acting on behalf of other clients, Mr. Bolton wrote.

Yet now he’s bullying Mary Louise Kelly for asking him about it. What a tower of integrity.

Mr. Bolton also said that after the president’s July phone call with the president of Ukraine, he raised with Attorney General William P. Barr his concerns about Mr. Giuliani, who was pursuing a shadow Ukraine policy encouraged by the president, and told Mr. Barr that the president had mentioned him on the call. A spokeswoman for Mr. Barr denied that he learned of the call from Mr. Bolton; the Justice Department has said he learned about it only in mid-August.

And we know Barr would never lie about anything.

Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, said the Bolton manuscript underscores the need for him to testify, and the House impeachment managers demanded after this article was published that the Senate vote to call him. “There can be no doubt now that Mr. Bolton directly contradicts the heart of the president’s defense,” they said in a statement.

Republicans, though, were mostly silent; a spokesman for the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, declined to comment.

Nothing makes any difference; nothing ever will make any difference. They’re all criminals and they know it and they’re not going to stop.