What is transphobic? Saying that a man competing against women in sport is unfair is transphobic. We’re told.

Advantage? What advantage? What advantage could that doctor in the middle possibly have?

Mike Bloomberg describes for us his vision of hell plan to get lots done because desks and screens.

Dallas News:

Since my younger daughter is only 11, I didn’t expect the weight of the letter she brought me that night around 11 p.m., hours after I’d put her to bed.

In glittery red ink, the same she used for her Christmas list, her words sank my heart. At a friend’s birthday party, they were playing on the little girl’s phone. The girl handed it to my daughter and said, “Boys are disgusting.” My daughter clicked on a male classmate’s Snapchat story to find a video of him and a few other boys from her class laughing as they watched rape porn. She said the woman was bound up, saying “no” as a masked man approached her.

Her letter went on to describe a group of boys in her sixth grade class frequently joking about assaulting the girls in the parking lot. She said if any of the girls aren’t sitting with their legs closed, the boys will ask if they want to get pregnant. And if the girls’ legs are crossed, boys from this group often walk by and say, “Spread ‘em.”

This does not give me hope for the future.

Princess Ivanka gets another fawning interview with people who should know better:

[T]hings got worse at the end of the interview when Brennan went to extreme lengths to portray her as a moderating force in her father’s White House.

On the topic of immigration, Brennan described Ivanka as “vocal in your opposition” to the inhumane family separation policy her father implemented in April 2018, noting that she described the policy as a “low point.” But Ivanka was not in fact “vocal” in opposition to the policy — in fact, the opposite is the case.

As my colleague Emily Stewart chronicled at the time, Ivanka — supposedly an advocate for women and families in the administration — only spoke out in opposition to the family separation policy after her father signed an executive order in June 2018 ending it. She was conspicuously silent in the days leading up to that point, as heart-rending stories and images of children being separated from their families along the southern border were in the news.

Because guess what, Ivanka isn’t some stealth-decent person working undercover in her daddy’s corrupt regime. She’s what she looks like: a pampered rich offspring who has no intention of cutting off the cash supply by offending her rich daddy.

Brennan’s misleading characterization of Ivanka’s position on the family separation policy was later echoed in a tweet from the Face the Nation account that included video of the exchange and has a ratio of more than 3,100 (largely critical) replies to 151 retweets as this is published — one that indicates CBS’s framing is going over [badly].

Ok, but you have to admit, her hair is very smooth.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Hey, how about interviewing the people at Ma’s Pie Shop?

I just wish for someone who I feel good about voting for

Honestly, that’s not a realistic wish, unless your bar for “feel good about” is fairly low. (And maybe it is for you, in which case the rest of this post will seem like I’m jumping on you. I’m really just using your post to take aim at a commonly-expressed sentiment that I think is a problem in general, even if it isn’t a problem in your specific case.)

Even if all of politics came down to a simplified one-dimensional ideological spectrum, you would have to be one of the relatively few lucky ones who happens to occupy a point on that spectrum that is at or close to a viable candidate.

Add in another dimension, such as personal qualities of the candidate, and it gets even harder. Allow for one or more other political dimensions (e.g. social and fiscal), and… your odds of finding a viable candidate close to you in political space are pretty slim.

Voting isn’t like picking a restaurant for your small group of friends, where it really ought to be the case that you can find a place that all of you feel good about; it’s like trying to select a single dish that your entire town will eat. There just isn’t likely to be any way to satisfy all those disparate diets and allergies, let alone mere preferences. The best you can hope for is something that will keep you nourished; tasty and exciting is not a realistic expectation.