I thought feminism was supposed to mean equality for all, if that’s the case why does “feminism” need to mentioned if equality was mentioned? Because clearly feminism is women’s advancement only.
Just classic. Feminism means equality for all, therefore, there’s no need to mention “feminism,” because the goal is equality for all, so that just makes this pesky scare-quoted “feminism” thing superfluous AND totally creepy because it’s women’s advancement only. WHY CAN’T WOMEN JUST FOCUS ON EVERYBODY GOD DAMN IT and by everybody I mean men, especially with men who wave the Murikan flag not once but TWICE.
Former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg publicly defied the Justice Department special counsel on Monday, announcing in an extraordinary series of media interviews that he had been subpoenaed to appear in front of a federal grand jury investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election but that he will refuse to go.
“Let him arrest me,” Nunberg told The Washington Post in his first stop on a media blitz, saying he does not plan to comply with a subpoena from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to hand over emails and other documents related to President Trump and nine other current and former Trump advisers.
But that’s apparently not because he’s keen to defend Mr Golf.
Nunberg seized the national media spotlight for much of Monday afternoon to denounce Mueller’s investigation as a “witch hunt” and to detail what he said he had learned about the probe from his private interview last month with Mueller’s team.
…
Nunberg said repeatedly that he believes Mueller is trying to build a case that Trump was “the Manchurian candidate.” He said that he suspects Mueller has concluded that Trump “may have done something” based on the questions he was asked by the special counsel’s team.
The line of questioning, Nunberg told MSNBC anchor Katy Tur, “insinuated to me that [Trump] may have done something, and he may very well have.” He added, “Trump may have very well done something during the election. I don’t know what it is. I could be wrong, by the way.”
Hey, he may have done it, but to hell with the subpoena anyway, let the prosecutor arrest me!
Sounds like a manic episode.
Nunberg — who advised Trump in the run-up to the campaign but was fired shortly after Trump declared his candidacy — was unsparing in his criticism of the White House staff and even of the president himself.
He complained to The Post that Trump had treated him, as well as Stone and others, terribly and would eventually regret it.
In one of his CNN interviews, he said Trump sometimes acted like “an idiot,” noting that he met last year with Russian leaders inside the Oval Office, where he shared classified intelligence.
“Granted, Donald Trump caused this because he’s an idiot,” Nunberg told CNN anchor Jake Tapper. “Who the hell advised him to allow those Russians in the Oval Office?”
But all the same he won’t comply with the subpoena.
Refusing to comply with a subpoena from the special counsel could have real consequences. Susan McDougal, a former business partner of Bill Clinton, spent 18 months behind bars for civil contempt after she refused to testify before a grand jury investigating the Whitewater real estate controversy during Clinton’s presidency.
McDougal said in an interview Monday that she would not do anything differently — though Nunberg should know that being incarcerated is no joke. She said she was moved from facility to facility and spent a good deal of time in isolation.
“It is not an easy thing to do,” McDougal said. “You don’t just go sit and work out in the afternoons.”
McDougal questioned why Nunberg was appearing on television suggesting he knew things that might be of interest to Mueller. “Why would he do that and then not cooperate?” she asked. “The difference is, I didn’t know anything.”
Right? That’s what I’m wondering. Why be all defiant while also telling the national media what the investigation is up to?
Aides in the West Wing watched Nunberg’s television interviews closely, voicing frustration that he had thrust Russia back into the headlines and laughing over what they considered Nunberg’s lack of discipline.
Ah, it must be so refreshing to have someone else to laugh at for lack of discipline.
Nunberg told The Post that he was planning to go on Bloomberg TV and tear up the subpoena.
But he soon changed his plans. Later Monday afternoon, Nunberg called into MSNBC for a lengthy, live interview with Tur. Minutes later, he called into CNN, where Gloria Borger interviewed him. And the next hour, Nunberg was on CNN again, this time with anchor Jake Tapper.
Relative to the restrained comments or flat-out silence of other witnesses in Mueller’s investigation, Nunberg’s interviews were provocative. Nunberg told Tur that his lawyer is “probably going to dump me,” prompting Tur to ask, “Are you ready to go to jail?”
And as he wrapped up the MSNBC interview, he asked Tur, “What do you think Mueller is going to do to me?”
Nunberg sounded similarly skittish on the phone with Tapper and appeared to have second thoughts about his decision to defy Mueller.
“Should I spent 80 hours going over my emails, Jake?” he asked.
“If it were me,” Tapper replied, “I would . . . It sounds like a pain, but he is the special counsel.”
Yep. Sounds manic.
Editing to add video of Nunberg squealing (literally squealing) in outrage at being told to hand over all his emails with Bannon and other fish while Katy Tur keeps asking him questions like an adult. Half hilarious half outrageous. H/t Dave Ricks
Adam Lee has a post on the wall of silence around Lawrence Krauss. We like to pounce on churchy sexual predators, he observes, but then we back away in panic if it’s one of the bros.
When serious allegations of sexual assault were made against Michael Shermer, several high-profile atheist individuals and groups circled the wagons around him and tried to build a wall of silence – either dismissing the accusations as unimportant, outright refusing to mention them, or trying to dissuade others from doing so. To this day, Shermer hasn’t faced any personal or career consequences that I’m aware of.
And now the same thing appears to be happening with Krauss.
There’s a group of people calling themselves Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia, whose original mission was to inject an appropriately balanced and skeptical viewpoint into articles on supernatural and paranormal topics. That’s a mission I’d be all in favor of. However, as Hayley Stevens points out, they’ve apparently adopted a new purpose: making sure the allegations against Krauss are kept off his biography page on Wikipedia.
You can see this for yourself: as of today, March 5, Krauss’ Wikipedia page has no mention of any recent developments – not the allegations themselves, not Krauss being barred from multiple college campuses, not several of his upcoming talks being canceled. If you look at the talk page, you can see several contributors deleting edits by other users that mention these things, and insisting that the Buzzfeed article is just “gossip” and that “Buzzfeed isn’t usually considered a reliable source”, and that this merits totally excluding any mention of it.
As for the journalists who wrote the Krauss story, one of them, Peter Aldhous, has reported for the journals Nature and Science and teaches investigative and policy reporting at UC Santa Cruz. The other reporter, Azeen Gorayshi, has written for the Guardian, New Scientist, Newsweek, and Wired, among others. The editor, Virginia Hughes, has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times, National Geographic, and Slate.
Well they have a defense for that: notice the wording: “Buzzfeed isn’t usually considered a reliable source” – it’s a sibling of Trump’s constant “everybody is saying” and “people are saying.” It’s also self-fulfilling – enough people go “Buzzfeed isn’t usually considered a reliable source” and it becomes ever more true. Some “skepticism.”
And then, Adam goes on, there’s Matt Dillahunty. He knows Matt slightly, and considers him a generally good guy and an egalitarian. But. There was that inconvenient evening with Matt and Sam Harris and Lawrence Krauss that was scheduled for two days after the BuzzFeed story dropped. Oh dear. I wrote a post about that, and about the irritating bro smugness of the conversation between Harris and Dillahunty, and how comfortable these guys are defending Krauss amongst themselves while the women are never there. Just never never never fucking there. The atheist movement gets a zero on the Bechdel test yet again, or more like a minus 500 because they used their all-bro event to explain why bitches be lyin about Krauss and isn’t that just a terrible thing now. And then they get huffy!
Afterward, Matt wrote this post on Facebook, in which he wrote angrily that Buzzfeed’s Virginia Hughes contacted him on his personal cell phone to ask about a followup she’s writing, presumably related to Krauss. He considered this an unforgivable breach of his privacy.
I left a comment on this thread. I don’t have a screenshot of it – more on that in a second – but I said that, whether Matt thinks of himself this way or not, he’s a public figure with regards to this story; that getting public figures to comment on stories they’re connected to is literally a journalist’s job; and that in my opinion, nothing she did constitutes harassment.
How did Matt respond? He deleted the comment and blocked Adam without a word. He did the same thing to anyone else who didn’t kiss his bum and say he was correct on all points. He did it to Amanda Marcotte.
How fascinating, but I have to wonder why it was ever the case, given the allegations about Shermer, which include one of flat-out rape of the “get her too drunk to say no or yes” variety. Matt knows that perfectly well, yet until recently he was on the schedule as introducing Shermer. I guess now he’s just sharing a stage with him.
Amanda Marcotte pointed out in her Facebook post on this that it’s not really fair to upbraid people for sharing stages with baddies, because it amounts to expecting them to damage their careers when they’re not the ones who did anything wrong. I saw her point, and think she’s right – it’s not fair at all. But…
But it still riles me when they go right on doing the bro-fests anyway, and talk over our heads when they do them, and solemnly agree with each other that we must not listen to women talking about a bro who is obnoxiously handsy and sexist around women.
For the past week or so, an avalanche of commentary about the chaos of the Trump regime has pointed to how key appointees are rushing toward the exits; how Trump springs new policies with little preparation and changes his views news cycle to news cycle; how ill-prepared Trump and many of his aides were for the rigors of the White House; and how recklessly they cast aside norms and rules aimed at preventing conflicts of interest and sleaze.
How did we get a government of this sort? For decades, our country has been witness to a war on public life. Legitimate dissatisfaction with government has turned into contempt for government itself and a denial of the indispensability of politics.
We value expertise from our doctors, nurses, engineers and scientists. But when it comes to government, there is a popular assumption that those who spend their lives mastering the arts of administration, politics and policymaking must be up to no good. This inclination, by the way, is prevalent in other democracies, too.
Well we do and we don’t value expertise from our doctors, nurses, engineers and scientists. There’s plenty of anti-intellectualism and down with expertisism aimed at them too. Anti-vaxxers? Goop? Detox? Homeopathy? Jade eggs? Naturopathic everything, chatter about the spirit as opposed to science, yadda yadda. People aren’t knitting their own freeway bridges yet, but it could happen.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we did the opposite? If we taught it as a cardinal principle that we should respect knowledge, and be aware of what we don’t know, and try to learn more instead of trying to diminish the value of knowing?
It is an attitude that leads voters to mistake inexperience for purity and outsider status (often, as in Trump’s case, a feigned outsiderism) for an exceptional understanding of the people’s wishes.
It has turned the word “politician” into an epithet, even though most of our best presidents (Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt especially) have been politicians through and through. The cliched and supposedly high-minded distinction between “a politician” and “a statesman” was always wrong. It’s coming back to haunt us.
Add LBJ to that list. If he’d been less of a “politician” he wouldn’t have been able to nudge and bully Congress into passing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
Yes, democracy can be frustrating. Our leaders have made big mistakes. Power and wealth are concentrated into too few hands. But repairing our problems requires citizens willing to engage in public life, not shun it, and people in government who respect the work they are asked to undertake.
Clueless narcissistic real-estate developers are not among those people.
“To every lying member of the media, to every Hollywood phony, to the role model athletes who use their free speech to alter and undermine what our flag represents…Your Time is running out. The clock starts now." –@DLoesch#Oscars90pic.twitter.com/SDVjeTxyfB
We’re supposed to report people who make threats, right? So that the system will work the way it’s supposed to, and people who make threats will be instantly and magically prevented from shooting up a school, and there will be no need to ban the sale of assault weapons.
“To every lying member of the media, to every Hollywood phony, to the role model athletes who use their free speech to alter and undermine what our flag represents, to the politicians who would rather watch America burn than lose one ounce of their own personal power, to the late-night hosts who think their opinions are the only opinions that matter…,” Loesch says against a backing track of ominous music. “…your time is running out.”
President Donald Trump loves putting his name on everything from ties to steaks to water — and, of course, his buildings. But now the Trump Organization appears to be borrowing a brand even more powerful than the gilded Trump moniker: the presidential seal.
In recent weeks, the Trump Organization has ordered the manufacture of new tee markers for golf courses that are emblazoned with the seal of the President of the United States. Under federal law, the seal’s use is permitted only for official government business. Misuse can be a crime.
Is using it to advertise and glorify the president’s profit-making golf courses misuse or is it official government business? That’s a tough one.
Past administrations have policed usage vigilantly. In 2005 the Bush administration ordered the satirical news website The Onion to remove a replica of the seal. Grant M. Dixton, associate White House counsel, wrote in a letter to The Onionthat the seal “is not to be used in connection with commercial ventures or products in any way that suggests presidential support or endorsement.”
Oh. It’s not? Huh. Then I guess sticking them up on the president’s profit-making golf courses is definitely misuse.
Eagle Sign and Design, a metalworking and sign company with offices in New Albany, Indiana, and Louisville, Kentucky, said it had received an order to manufacture dozens of round, 12-inch replicas of the presidential seal to be placed next to the tee boxes at Trump golf course holes. Two tee markers are placed on the ground at the start of a hole on golf courses to indicate where golfers should stand to take their first swing.
“We made the design, and the client confirmed the design,” said Joseph E. Bates, who owns Eagle Sign, declining to say who the client was.
They share a photo of tables covered with the things.
An order form for the tee markers reviewed by ProPublica and WNYC says the customer was “Trump International.” The Facebook page for Eagle Sign and Design shows a photo of the markers in an album with the caption “Trump International Golf Course.”
Slea-zeeeee. Also apparently a crime.
Eagle Sign makes a wide array of tee markers out of bronze and aluminum, and has made other signs for Trump’s courses, according to its website. At some of Trump’s golf courses, tee markers have sported the Trump family crest, which he took from the family that originally owned Mar-a-Lago without permission and then altered by adding his own name.
Bahahahahahahahahaha he’s so classy.
Is it hard to understand why this rule exists? I don’t think so.
The “law is an expression of the idea that the government and government authority should not be used for private purpose,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University specializing in government and legal ethics said. “It would be a misuse of government authority.”
Not unlike Kellyanne Conway flogging Princess Ivanka’s merch on tv.
Another surprise story out of the White House: Trump is in a bad mood. Really?!! Well that caught us all flat-footed.
Barry McCaffrey says he’s “starting to wobble in his emotional stability,” which comes as a huge shock because we never knew he had any emotional stability to wobble in.
[T]he developments have delivered one negative headline after another, leading Trump to lose his cool — especially in the evenings and early mornings, when he often is most isolated, according to advisers.
But surely Melania and Barron are there to cuddle and cheer him. No? They’re in their own quarters with the doors triple-locked?
For instance, aides said, Trump seethed with anger last Wednesday night over cable news coverage of a photo, obtained by Axios, showing Sessions at dinner with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who oversees the Russia investigation, and another top Justice Department prosecutor. The outing was described in news reports as amounting to an act of solidarity after Trump had attacked Sessions in a tweet that morning.
The next morning, Trump was still raging about the photo, venting to friends and allies about a dinner he viewed as an intentional show of disloyalty.
Well they didn’t invite him to come with them.
But to be serious for a second – isn’t that typical. It’s fine for Trump to call Sessions names on Twitter, but it’s an outrage for Sessions to have dinner with his deputy. Trump can be as mean, rude, abusive, slanderous, insulting, contemptuous, hostile, belligerent as he likes, while everyone else in the world is required to be servilely polite in return. One rule for Trump, and a completely opposite rule for the 7.6 billion not-Trumps on the planet.
A bill to make 18 the legal age for marriage in Kentucky has stalled in a Senate committee amid concerns about the rights of parents to allow children to wed at a younger age, according to several lawmakers.
Known as the “child bride” bill, Senate Bill 48 was pulled off the agenda just hours before a scheduled vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee for the second time in two weeks.
What about the rights of parents to spank children with spiked clubs? What about the rights of parents to lock their children out of the house on freezing nights? What about the rights of parents to hold their children’s hands in a flame to teach them about fire?
Parents don’t have “rights” to abuse their children. Children have rights not to be abused by their parents.
The bill’s supporters have said underage marriages most often involve a teenage girl marrying an older man and may have involved sexual exploitation of the girl.
An older man “marrying” a high school age (or younger) girl is itself sexual exploitation of the girl. He doesn’t do it because she’s a whiz at doing laundry.
Donna Pollard, a Louisville woman who said she was married at 16 to an older man who began sexually abusing her when she was 14, has advocated for the bill. She told Courier Journal that opponents include the Kentucky Family Foundation, a Lexington-based conservative group that lobbies lawmakers on social issues. Family Foundation Executive Director Kent Ostrander did not respond to requests for comment.
Ah those reactionary groups that name themselves after the word “family,” by which they actually mean male ownership and dominance over girls and women.
Pollard testified in support of the bill along with a representative of the Arlington, Virginia-based Tahirih Justice Center, a women’s advocacy organization seeking to end child marriages in the United States.
Pollard said the man she now calls her “perpetrator” became violent and abusive after they married in 2000, a wedding she said was encouraged by her mother, who married at 13.
“I felt just completely and totally trapped,” said Pollard, now divorced.
As Russia’s virtual war against the United States continues unabated with the midterm elections approaching, the State Department has yet to spend any of the $120 million it has been allocated since late 2016 to counter foreign efforts to meddle in elections or sow distrust in democracy.
As a result, not one of the 23 analysts working in the department’s Global Engagement Center — which has been tasked with countering Moscow’s disinformation campaign — speaks Russian, and a department hiring freeze has hindered efforts to recruit the computer experts needed to track the Russian efforts.
In other words Trump has sent them a signal: Russia, if you’re listening, hack our elections in my favor, spasibo.
James K. Glassman, the under secretary for public diplomacy during the George W. Bush administration, said the center’s uncertain funding and temporary leadership reflected the administration’s lack of interest in countering either jihadist or Russian propaganda.
“They’ve got the vehicle to do this work in the center,” Mr. Glassman said. “What they don’t have is a secretary of state or a president who’s interested in doing this work.”
Mr. Tillerson is focusing his energies instead on drastically shrinking the department, leaving a significant part of its budget unused and hundreds of important decisions unmade.
A charity dealing with abuse survivors and promoting gay sexual health faces claims of sexual misconduct in the first recent charity sex scandal where the alleged victims are in the UK.
Leeds city council said it has referred two complaints about the Yorkshire-based organisation Men who Enjoy Sex With Men — Action in the Community (Yorkshire Mesmac) to police.
The Charity Commission also said it was in “ongoing engagement” with Mesmac, which has received more than £5m from councils, government and the police. The commission said it had “serious concern” after one of Mesmac’s former trustees was jailed for child sex offences committed during his time in post, including paying a boy, 15, for sex.
Brian Mynott, a Yorkshire-based therapist who works with abused young men, said he had spoken to a further three people, all victims of child abuse, who claimed to have been sexually harassed or asked for sex by Mesmac staff when they went to the charity for help. “They told me it was a pick-up joint and they did not want anything to do with it,” he said.
The kicker? This isn’t just employees breaking the rules – this is Mesmac policy.
The Sunday Times revealed in October that Mesmac explicitly allowed its staff to have sex with people they met through work, many of them young and vulnerable. In its official policy the charity stated that “sexual relationships are acceptable with service users initially met during work time”, although it added that intercourse “would be inappropriate if the service user has entered into a 1-2-1 or ongoing support relationship with the worker” and that sex with children was not allowed.
Mesmac dropped the policy after it was exposed but insisted that it had “never been made aware” of any case where a staff member had had sex with a client. However, The Sunday Times has established that in 2009 Mesmac’s then chairman, Brendon Fletcher, its treasurer, Paul Tidd, and another trustee, Richard Watts, had resigned in protest at the sex-with-clients policy and Mesmac managers’ refusal to change it.
Trump threw a fundraiser in the party room at Mar-a-Lago yesterday. There he whined and complained about the fact that Hillary Clinton hasn’t been “investigated” since the election while for some mysterious and baffling reason he has.
In the closed-door remarks, a recording of which was obtained by CNN, Trump also praised China’s President Xi Jinping for recently consolidating power and extending his potential tenure, musing he wouldn’t mind making such a maneuver himself.
“He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great,” Trump said. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.”
Haha, hoho, funny joke. He should take over all the comedy work.
He’s been in a bad mood lately.
Morale at the White House has dropped to new lows, and Trump himself has seethed at the negative headlines.
On Saturday, among donors gathered in the grand ballroom named for himself at Mar-a-Lago, Trump pondered the happiness of his former rival, wondering aloud whether she was enjoying life after the campaign.
“Is Hillary a happy person? Do you think she’s happy?” he said. “When she goes home at night, does she say, ‘What a great life?’ I don’t think so. You never know. I hope she’s happy.”
That’s not much to build his life on – hoping Hillary Clinton is as miserable as he is. Do we think she is? Nope.
Minister Louis Farrakhan engaged in a series of anti-Semitic remarks on Sunday.
Farrakhan has led the black nationalist group Nation of Islam since 1977 and is known for hyperbolic hate speech aimed at the Jewish community.
During the speech in Chicago, Farrakhan made several anti-Semitic comments, including, “the powerful Jews are my enemy.”
“White folks are going down. And Satan is going down. And Farrakhan, by God’s grace, has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew and I’m here to say your time is up, your world is through,” he later said.
Yeah that’s no good. Whatever you think of Israel, that’s no good.
Women’s March co-chair Tamika Mallory was in attendance, CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out on Twitter after she shared an image from the event on Instagram.
Mallory has posted on social media about Farrakhan in the past — on February 21, 2016, she posted an image of him from a stage at the Joe Louis Arena with the caption: “The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan just stepped to the mic for #SD16DET… I’m super ready for this message! #JUSTICEORELSE #ForTheLoveOfFlint.”
So Tamika Mallory, one of the four Women’s March leaders, goes to Farrakhan’s rally the other day, where he rambles on about how the Jews run the world and invented trans people and also pot that feminizes black men. She posts happy photos of the event, which Carmen Perez gives a thumbs up to. Questioned about this on twitter, she doubles down with some weird words about leaders who have the same enemies as Jesus.
Why is it so hard to say, yes, Farrakhan is a bigot and I dissociate myself from him? Obama did it. Instead, she doubled down. You can’t represent a mass movement if you’re going to be so divisive.
Crooks seeking legitimacy are not fenced out in America. The U.S. is teeming with enablers champing at the bit to serve rich thugs: lawyers, lobbyists, bankers, security firms, consultants and PR people.
Like Paul Manafort for instance, and like…Princess Ivanka.
Oh, Ivanka. Her livelihood is as opaque as her full-coverage foundation, but she plays a critical role in her father’s administration — and in the broader danse macabre of corruption and legitimacy.
The foundation dig is cruel but warranted – I noticed when watching that clip the other day where Princess rebukes the “inappropriate question” about the King’s pussygrabbing: she’s absolutely plastered in makeup, as if wearing a clay mask. It’s somewhat creepy.
The so-called first daughter proves that “laundering” applies to more than money. She washes and gilds just about everything she touches. Consider her warehouses upon warehouses of petroleum-based separates, many of them sewn for poverty pay in sweatshops. When you call this schmatte smorgasboard the Ivanka Trump Collection it does brisk business — if not on Rodeo Drive, then in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
…
It’s impossible to keep track of all the gangsters Ivanka has palled around with. But what’s truly damning are the shady real-estate projects she has made rise and go forth.
In 2006, she oversaw the development of the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower in Panama City. The project was connected to a Brazilian money launderer later arrested for fraud and forgery as well as a Russian investor who’d previously been jailed in Israel for kidnapping…
Ivanka was also a ranking official on the Trump SoHo, which has since shed the name Trump. In 2010, as ProPublica and WNYC have reported, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office began building a criminal case against Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. for using inflated sales figures to defraud prospective buyers. After receiving a visit from Trump family lawyer and campaign donor Marc Kasowitz, then-DA Cyrus Vance Jr. backed off.
There’s more, there’s Trump International Hotel and Tower in Vancouver, which the FBI is now investigating.
When an organization exists not to build buildings but to brand them, its business is optics. And Ivanka has long window-dressed the Trump Organization’s deals. She was born to make the shoddy look cute, to legitimize corruption.
And if it’s the coverup and not the crime that will ultimately bring down the Trump syndicate, Ivanka may turn out to be the point person for its demise.
President Donald Trump reached a presidential milestone at his Palm Beach County, Florida, golf club on Saturday: One hundred days in office at a golf club that bears his name.
100 days in 13 months: not too shabby.
Trump, once a critic of presidential golfing, has ignored his own advice and made a habit of visiting some of the many golf courses emblazoned in his moniker. The habit is part of the broader trend of the President and first lady making frequent trips to properties owned and operated by the Trump Organization.
So, you see, he’s not actually golfing in the recreational sense, he’s working to exploit the presidency to promote his businesses.
In total, Trump has spent nearly 25% of his days in office at one of his golf clubs. It is impossible to know whether Trump golfs every time he visits one of his golf clubs because White House aides rarely confirm that he is golfing, and Trump has, at times, visited his golf clubs to eat a meal or meet with people.
Yeah whether or not he’s actually pushing the little white ball around with the long stick isn’t really the issue.
Norm Eisen, the chief White House ethics lawyer under Obama, called Trump’s 100th day at a golf property as president “an ignominious anniversary.”
“First, there is his hypocrisy in criticizing Obama for golfing and then playing much more himself,” Eisen said. “Then there is the fact that he is using his government platform to promote his businesses.”
Eisen added, “Finally, he is also mingling with representatives of corporate interests who are paying to play, and not just golf. Because they have business before the federal government, that creates more conflicts. Trump has hit an unprecedented ethics bogey.”
He’s providing jobs for the people who mow the grass.
Starting Thursday, March 1, 2018, Of Liberal Intent will host a new feature called Women’s Writes. For the duration of Women’s History Month, there will be a new post every day related to women and feminism. The author, Robin Buckallew, has declared the intent to write something every day for Women’s History Month every year until women everywhere have the same rights, opportunities, pay, and respect as men all over the world are able to command. The management of this site hope she lives a very long time…
Works posted there will be works of short fiction, essays, or excerpts from longer works. Please check in regularly to see any and all of the updates in this dynamic new area. This new section will continue to host the works of this author throughout the year, and will host the once a day posts every March until…well, unfortunately, the way it looks, probably until the end of the author’s life, even though she is still young(ish).
Posts will be uploaded at Women’s-Writes and shared on this page.
First post of new feature, Women’s Writes. A new post will appear every day of Women’s History Month.
Today, March 1, is the first day of Women’s History Month 2018, and I am posting my first piece. It was a singularly crazy day, following a singularly crazy week, and so I had to keep it a bit short, but if you start off the first day by breaking your vow, I have learned you will not succeed. So I opted for a haiku. #WomensHistoryMonth
I’m reading comments on this post about the reasons Lawrence Krauss got semi-banned from Case Western Reserve, and I’m brought up short by this comment – by, specifically, a bit where it quotes Sam Harris.
It’s an elephant that looms large for female atheists, but is invisible for male atheists: Ed Drayton noticed the gender disparity, didn’t know why, so he asked and got knowledgeable answers: Sam Harris also noticed it, didn’t know why, but didn’t let ignorance get in the way of instant expertise when, off the cuff at a book signing, he supplied an answer from his own imagination:
“I think it may have to do with my person[al] slant as an author, being very critical of bad ideas. This can sound very angry to people… People just don’t like to have their ideas criticized. There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree intrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women,” he said. “The atheist variable just has this—it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.”
I’ve seen it before, of course; I did a furious post about it at the time, of course (I’m nothing if not predictable), and yet…I hadn’t seen it in awhile and I’d forgotten details. The “estrogen vibe” bit has been much quoted and I fell into the habit of citing it that way when occasion arose to cite it, with the result that I neglected the rest of it. The estrogen vibe part is not the worst part. No.
I’ll tell you what is.
There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree intrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women,” he said.
“There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree intrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women,” he said.
What’s he saying there? He’s saying that the ability to take a step back from the given, the normal, the accepted, the mainstream, the conventional, the everybody knows, the unquestioned, the unquestionable – to take a step back from it and think about it, analyze it, question it, doubt it, be critical of it, is
INTRINSICALLY MALE.
It’s a truly astounding thing to say.
After all what can be more basic? How can we ever improve anything if we don’t have that habit of questioning the obvious? If we accept that it’s intrinsically male then women are useless for any kind of real thinking. It frames men as the innovators and rebels and reformers, and women as the bovine accepters.
But apparently that really is how most of them do see us, and that’s why they’re customers for endless iterations of An Evening With
Pangburn Philosophy presents an Evening with Sam Harris & Michael Shermer, Monday, March 5 in Dell Hall.
Join authors Sam Harris & Michael Shermer for a night of skepticism, science & reason.
Sit at the feet of the manly Thinkers who are intrinsically inclined to be “very critical of bad ideas” – except their own, of course.
Harris “explained” at the time that it was just a spontaneous reply to a question, not a carefully reasoned claim in a piece of writing. Yes; granted. He probably wouldn’t put it that starkly in a piece of writing. But the fact that it is what popped into his head when he was asked is striking and profoundly depressing. That’s how they see us. That’s what they think of us. We’re too sweet and loving to take a critical posture…so that’s why it’s absolutely necessary to leave us out of all the intellectual work and just keep hogging the microphone forever and ever and ever and ever…………..
Alec Baldwin, whose dying mediocre career was saved by his terrible impersonation of me on SNL, now says playing me was agony. Alec, it was agony for those who were forced to watch. Bring back Darrell Hammond, funnier and a far greater talent!
Mr. Trump had refrained from remarking on the show on Twitter for many months. But on Friday morning, Mr. Baldwin’s remarks were highlighted on Fox News and Mr. Trump weighed in soon after.
They share the tweet.
(An earlier version of the post in which Mr. Trump misspelled Mr. Baldwin’s name as “Alex” was deleted.)
It also spelled “dying” “dieing.”
Oh sweet Jesus.
At 4:24 am, Fox & Friends First ran a segment about Alec Baldwin saying he was tired of playing Trump on SNL. An hour later, Trump tweeting an attack on him.
So anyway, how mediocre has Alec Baldwin’s career been? Let’s ask Wikipedia.
Baldwin has won three Emmy Awards,[24] two Golden Globe awards and seven Screen Actors Guild Awards for his role. He received his second Emmy nomination for Best Actor in a Television Comedy or Musical as Jack Donaghy in 2008, marking his seventh Primetime Emmy nomination and first win. He won again in 2009.[25]
But a president who has long tried to impose his version of reality on the world is finding the limits of that strategy. Without Mr. Porter playing a stopgap role on trade, the debate has been marked by a lack of focus on policy and planning, according to several aides.
Morale in the West Wing has sunk to a new low, these people said. In private conversations, Mr. Trump lashes out regularly at Attorney General Jeff Sessions with a vitriol that stuns members of his staff. Some longtime advisers said that Mr. Trump regards Mr. Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation as the “original sin,” which the president thinks has left him exposed.
If it stuns his staff it must be scorching, because they can’t ever have thought he was a nice guy.
Mr. Trump’s children, meanwhile, have grown exasperated with Mr. Kelly, seeing him as a hurdle to their father’s success and as antagonistic to their continued presence, according to several people familiar with their thinking.
Yes if only it weren’t for Kelly, Trump wouldn’t be the bumbling but corrupt bozo he is.
Yet Mr. Trump is also frustrated with Mr. Kushner, whom he now views as a liability because of his legal entanglements, the investigations of the Kushner family’s real estate company, and the publicity over having his security clearance downgraded, according to two people familiar with his views. In private conversations, the president vacillates between sounding regretful that Mr. Kushner is taking arrows and annoyed that he is another problem to deal with.
It’s so sad that poor Prince Jared is “taking arrows” simply for having conflicts of interest you could march a battalion through.
Privately, some aides have expressed frustration that Mr. Kushner and his wife, the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump, have remained at the White House, despite Mr. Trump at times saying they never should have come to the White House and should leave. Yet aides also noted that Mr. Trump has told the couple that they should keep serving in their roles, even as he has privately asked Mr. Kelly for his help in moving them out.
I’m picturing Kelly packing boxes while listening for Princess or Prince coming up the stairs.
