Right? RIGHT?
If male writers were marketed in the same way as female writers. Via Christopher Hamilton-Emery. pic.twitter.com/1IwN8MfckZ
— Jane Harris (@blablafishcakes) October 4, 2017
Get yer kit off
Oct 4th, 2017 10:46 am | By Ophelia BensonThey’re regrouping
Oct 4th, 2017 10:30 am | By Ophelia Benson
Prompted by Saudi Arabia’s announcement that they’ll let women drive – don’t get too excited.
You can support Jesus and Mo on Patreon.
Timeserver Rex
Oct 4th, 2017 10:20 am | By Ophelia BensonWell, I guess Tillerson will be cleaning out his desk soon.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was on the verge of resigning this past summer amid mounting policy disputes and clashes with the White House, according to senior administration officials who were aware of the situation at the time.
The tensions came to a head around the time President Donald Trump delivered a politicized speech in late July to the Boy Scouts of America, an organization Tillerson once led, the officials said.
Just days earlier, Tillerson had openly disparaged the president, referring to him as a “moron,” after a July 20 meeting at the Pentagon with members of Trump’s national security team and Cabinet officials, according to three officials familiar with the incident.
In an unscheduled statement to reporters Wednesday morning, Tillerson directly addressed that version of events, saying, “I have never considered leaving this post.”
But did he deny calling Trump a moron? No he didn’t. He had to resort to the old “I’m not going to dignify that with a response” ploy, which won’t make the Donster happy.
Pence has since spoken to Tillerson about being respectful of the president in meetings and in public, urging that any disagreements be sorted out privately, a White House official said. The official said progress has since been made.
“Look, Rex, we’ve got to keep up the fiction because what do we look like if we don’t? We can’t just come right out and say we accepted jobs in the administration of a sleazy lying corrupt moron.”
In August, Trump was furious with Tillerson over his response to a question about the president’s handling of the racially charged and deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, administration officials said. Trump had said publicly that white nationalists and neo-Nazi sympathizers shared blame for violence with those who came out to protest them.
“The president speaks for himself,” Tillerson said at the time, when asked on “Fox News Sunday” about Trump’s comments.
Hammond said Trump addressed the issue with Tillerson in a meeting the next day. He said that during the meeting, Trump congratulated another White House official, Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert, for his performance on the Sunday news talk shows. Bossert had defended Trump’s controversial pardon of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Well that’s the thing, isn’t it – Trump is a moron and he’s also a complete narcissist who judges everything on how flattering to him it is.
The frustrations run both ways. Tillerson stunned a handful of senior administration officials when he called the president a “moron” after a tense two-hour long meeting in a secure room at the Pentagon called “The Tank,” according to three officials who were present or briefed on the incident. The July 20 meeting came a day after a meeting in the White House Situation Room on Afghanistan policy where Trump rattled his national security advisers by suggesting he might fire the top U.S. commander of the war and comparing the decision-making process on troop levels to the renovation of a high-end New York restaurant, according to participants in the meeting.
But what did Tillerson think he was? Not a moron? Did Rex ever think the Donster is a smart guy? He can’t have. He took the job. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for him.
Trump has already seen an unusually high level of turnover in his administration, with the departures of his national security adviser, deputy national security adviser, his chief of staff, press secretary, communications director — twice — his chief strategist, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the acting head of the Justice Department. Last Friday Trump accepted the resignation of Tom Price, the Health and Human Services secretary.
Because he’s a chaotic narcissistic dangerous fool. What did anyone expect?
Possess your own SoHo
Oct 4th, 2017 8:58 am | By Ophelia BensonPro Publica, the New Yorker, and WNYC have collaborated on an investigation of that time a few years ago when New York prosecutors were considering bringing a felony fraud case against Ivanka and Donald Junior Trump, but didn’t.
In the spring of 2012, Donald Trump’s two eldest children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., found themselves in a precarious legal position. For two years, prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office had been building a criminal case against them for misleading prospective buyers of units in the Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo development that was failing to sell.
Oh surely not. Real estate grifters never mislead prospective buyers.
By which I mean, they do that routinely; I’m surprised to learn that anyone even considers prosecuting them. I thought they had some kind of Real Estate Grifters’ Exemption to lie to people about the product.
In June 2006, during the season finale of “The Apprentice,” Donald Trump Sr. unveiled the Trump SoHo as a visionary project. The luxury development was intended to mark the ascension of Ivanka and Donald Jr. — then 24 and 28 years old, respectively — as full players in the Trump empire. They signed the licensing deal alongside their father, and photographs of Ivanka were featured in the Trump SoHo’s advertising, under the tagline “Possess your own SoHo.”
A rather tasteless double meaning there.
The Trump SoHo was beleaguered from the start: Named for one of Manhattan’s trendiest neighborhoods, the development wasn’t really in SoHo, but located just west of it, near the entrance ramp to the Holland Tunnel.
Ummmyeah, “just west” but a world away, because who the fuck wants to live near the entrance ramp to the Holland Tunnel? Plus that business of naming it SoHo when it’s not SoHo – that’s so Trump. So, not surprisingly, people didn’t rush to snap up these hot properties. That’s where the lying and fraud comes in…well, that plus the massively undesirable terms.
Zoning laws wouldn’t allow a residential tower at the location, so the Trumps fell back on an alternative: a “condo-hotel,” in which buyers got a hotel room rather than an apartment, and were legally prohibited from staying there more than 120 nights per year. Worse, the high-priced condos hit the market in September 2007, just as the global economy began to crater in what became the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Oh, awesome – who wouldn’t want to pay an inflated price for a third of a hotel room overlooking the entrance to the Holland Tunnel? Besides absolutely everyone?
And yet…
Business was slow, but the Trump family claimed the opposite. In April 2008, they said that 31 percent of the condos in the building had been purchased. Donald Jr. boasted to The Real Deal magazine that 55 percent of the units had been bought. In June 2008, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, alongside their brother Eric, gathered the foreign press at Trump Tower in Manhattan, where Ivanka announced that 60 percent had been snapped up. “We’re in a very fortunate position,” she said, “where we have enough sales and now we are strategically targeting certain buyers.”
That’s amazing!
But not true.
None of that was true. According to a sworn affidavit by a Trump partner filed with the New York attorney general’s office, by March of 2010, almost two years after the press conference, only 15.8 percent of units had been sold.
This was more than a marketing problem. The deal hinged on selling at least 15 percent of the units. By law, the sales couldn’t close with anything less. The Trumps and their partners would have had to return the buyers’ down payments.
Some buyers concluded that they’d been cheated. In August 2010, some sued the Trump Organization and others involved in the project in New York federal court. “This action seeks to redress the substantial and ongoing pattern of fraudulent misrepresentations and deceptive sales practices” by the Trumps and the other defendants, the suit charged. The plaintiffs argued that there’s a vast difference in value between a unit in a building that is 15 percent sold and one that is 60 percent sold. Their complaint accused the sellers, including the Trumps, of “a consistent and concerted pattern of outright lies.”
I guess the deal with real estate grifting is that they can talk whatever bullshit they like about what’s going to happen, because who can demonstrate they knew it wouldn’t happen? But lying about what has already happened is not quite so easy to get away with.
They did get away with it though.
After the civil suit was filed, the Manhattan district attorney’s office opened a criminal investigation. Prosecutors are often wary of getting involved in a dispute between wealthy litigants. But in this instance, according to a person familiar with their thinking, the lawyers in the Major Economic Crimes Bureau quickly concluded that there was enough to warrant an investigation. They believed that Ivanka and Donald Jr., might have violated the Martin Act, a New York statute that bans any false statement in conjunction with the sale of a security or real estate. Prosecutors also saw potential fraud and larceny charges, applying a legal theory that, by overstating the number of units sold, the Trump were falsely inflating their value and, in effect, cheating unsuspecting condo buyers.
But then Marc Kasowitz paid a call on the DA, who told the prosecutors to drop the case. Kasowitz had contributed $25 k (which seems like a trivial sum to me) to the DA’s re-election campaign; the DA returned it after that meeting.
I recommend reading the whole article. It’s not an “aha!” about the money; it’s not at all clear that that made a difference. But. The whole thing is just skeevy as hell. It’s typical Trumpiana – lying, gilding, puffing, cheating, hyping, thieving, manipulating, backrooming, sleaze sleaze sleazing. It just sickens me that people like this are running the government. They’re cheap crooks and they should be selling used cars in Perth Amboy.
Pattern detection
Oct 4th, 2017 8:15 am | By Ophelia BensonPolanski is in the news again.
Renate Langer, a 61-year-old former German actress, has reported to the Swiss police that the film director Roman Polanski raped her at a house in Gstaad in February 1972, when she was 15.
Ms. Langer is the fourth woman to publicly accuse Mr. Polanski of sexual assaulting her when she was a teenager.
You might say it’s a pattern with this guy. You might say he seems to have had a taste for sexually assaulting barely pubescent girls.
Ms. Langer said in the interview that she had not previously reported anything to the police — and did not confide in friends and family at the time — largely out of concern for her parents. She said she told a boyfriend years later.
Her parents have now died.
Harland Braun, a lawyer for Mr. Polanski, the 84-year-old award-winning French-Polish film director, declined to comment on Ms. Langer’s accusation. Mr. Polanski pleaded guilty in 1977 to unlawful sex with Samantha Geimer when she was 13, but his lawyer has disputed other similar accusations in the past.
In August, a woman in Los Angeles, identified only as Robin M., came forward at a news conference to report that Mr. Polanski had sexually assaulted her in 1973 when she was 16.
At the time, Mr. Braun said in a statement that Mr. Polanski’s reaction had been “I don’t know what this is about.”
In 2010, the British actress Charlotte Lewis also accused Mr. Polanski of abusing her sexually when she was 16.
He’s a fugitive from justice in the US, since he fled the country in 1978 just before he was due to be sentenced in the Geimer case. Many Hollywood lovies have demanded he be pardoned.
In August, a Los Angeles judge declined to drop the case against Mr. Polanski in the United States for the second time.
On Monday, The Hollywood Reporter published an interview with Mr. Polanski in which he said he considered the Geimer case to be closed.
“As far as what I did: It’s over. I pleaded guilty,” he said.
And then fled the country before sentencing.
Guest post: The lies and condemnation never, ever stop
Oct 4th, 2017 8:06 am | By Ophelia BensonOriginally a comment by Freemage on Forced childbearing.
Fuck, these guys just don’t quit, do they?
I do greeter volunteering at PP. Since we own the property the clinic is on, women are able to drive past protestors and park in the lot, so it’s a clear walk to the door, so our main job is 50/50 between giving the women someone to talk to on the way in so they don’t have to listen to the shouts, and standing near the edge of the property to give the protestors someone else to yell at instead of women seeking health care.
It veers between rage-inducing blather and low comedy (such as the guy who struggled to put on his custom-built harness for his 20-foot tall flagpole with that ‘Christian flag’ at the top of it). But the lies and condemnation never, ever stop. Of course they repeat the bogus abortion-breast cancer claim, and they’ll invent any tale to support their skewed view of reality. (More low comedy–one of the regulars routinely talks about how “Just a couple weeks ago, I held two babies who’d been saved when their mother turned away from this place.” Per some of the old hands at the clinic, these ‘babies’ would need to be about 7 years old at this point, since that’s how long she’s been making the claim.)
I actually heard one of the worst of the regulars (they’re all bad, but some are more ‘sad’ than ‘vile’–this asshat is definitely at the ‘vile’ end of the spectrum) declare to a guy who had stopped his car to tell them to fuck off that, and I quote, “No woman ever died because of pregnancy. They died because of complications from the pregnancy.” I don’t think you could get an angel to dance on the edge of the razor he tried to split that hair with.
Forced childbearing
Oct 3rd, 2017 5:05 pm | By Ophelia BensonThe House of Representatives passed legislation Tuesday that would criminalize abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for instances where the life of the mother is at risk and in cases involving rape or incest.
The bill passed the House by a vote of 237 for and 189 against, largely on party lines.
The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which is similar to legislation that failed in 2013 and 2015, has support from the White House this time around.
The divisive issue of abortion has once again been brought to the forefront of national conversations since President Donald Trump assumed office. Trump issued support for the bill even before he won the election. In a letter dated September 2016 that was sent to anti-abortion leaders inviting individuals to join the campaign’s “Pro-Life Coalition,” Trump said he was committed to “signing into law the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would end painful late-term abortions nationwide,” as one of four points.
Sure he did; it’s a chance to stick it to liberals and make women’s lives harder. He likes that.
Similar legislation is already enacted in several states. But opponents of the legislation argue 20-week abortion bans are unconstitutional.
“This dangerous, out-of-touch legislation is nothing more than yet another attempt to restrict women’s access to safe, legal abortion,” Planned Parenthood Action Fund said online. PPAF also writes, “20-week bans are unconstitutional. 20-week bans are a clear attempt to erode Roe v. Wade. In fact, 20-week ban proponents are outspoken about their goal to challenge the 1973 Supreme Court decision protecting a woman’s right to safe and legal abortion.”
The Senate isn’t in a hurry to vote on it, and isn’t an easy yes…but still.
Differences
Oct 3rd, 2017 3:34 pm | By Ophelia BensonIt’s a grotesque fact of life here that commenting on mass shootings is one of the duties of the head of state. ABC compares the two most recent.
Former President Obama addressed mass shootings roughly 18 times during his administration, with some of his most damning comments coming exactly two years before this weekend’s deadly shooting in Las Vegas.
For Obama, it was the shooting at a community college in Roseburg, Oregon, where nine people were killed Oct. 1, 2015. And for President Trump, it was the Sunday shooting at a country music concert in Las Vegas, where at least 59 people were killed and 527 others injured.
One responded like an adult who thinks and feels, the other like a callous fraud who can barely read a speech written by others.
Obama opened his remarks in the press briefing room by saying “there’s been another mass shooting in America.”
“That means there are more American families — moms, dads, children — whose lives have been changed forever,” he said.
Obama went on to talk about how the response of many people to mass shootings has become almost routine, and to criticize those who only offered words instead of actions.
“Our thoughts and prayers are not enough,” he said. “It’s not enough. It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel. And it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America — next week, or a couple of months from now.”
“Of course, what’s also routine is that somebody, somewhere will comment and say, Obama politicized this issue. Well, this is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together,” Obama said.
“When roads are unsafe, we fix them to reduce auto fatalities. We have seatbelt laws because we know it saves lives. So the notion that gun violence is somehow different, that our freedom and our Constitution prohibits any modest regulation of how we use a deadly weapon, when there are law-abiding gun owners all across the country who could hunt and protect their families and do everything they do under such regulations doesn’t make sense,” he added,
Trump spoke as if pious words were indeed all that was called for.
“Hundreds of our fellow citizens are now mourning the sudden loss of a loved one — a parent, a child, a brother or sister,” the president said. “We cannot fathom their pain. We cannot imagine their loss. To the families of the victims: We are praying for you and we are here for you, and we ask God to help see you through this very dark period.”
That means absolutely nothing. “We are here for you”? He’s not. His administration isn’t. It’s just mouthing, what he did.
Trump quoted Scripture, ordered federal flags to be flown at half-staff and announced that he would be traveling to Nevada two days later.
He made no mention of gun laws or steps to be taken to prevent mass shootings from happening again.
“In times such as these, I know we are searching for some kind of meaning in the chaos, some kind of light in the darkness,” he said. “The answers do not come easy. But we can take solace knowing that even the darkest space can be brightened by a single light, and even the most terrible despair can be illuminated by a single ray of hope.”
That. That’s just fakey, pretentious, poeticky bibley bullshit in place of useful action or at least analysis. What “single ray of hope” is he even talking about? None, he’s just throwing words around the way he threw rolls of paper towels around in San Juan this afternoon.
Behold the canned chicken
Oct 3rd, 2017 11:57 am | By Ophelia BensonCBS is doing live updates of Trump’s jaunt to Puerto Rico. The most recent item is that he’s throwing paper towels to a crowd of people. Yes really: paper towels. “Here, Puerto Rico people, mop up the hurricane.”
The president — in what the White House press pooler described as a Stephen Curry impersonation — softly shot paper towels into the crowd. He also held up canned chicken breast for the crowd to see.
Reuters got a snap:
Score!
Trump spots a miracle
Oct 3rd, 2017 11:51 am | By Ophelia BensonTrump says what happened in Las Vegas was a miracle.
“Look, we have a tragedy. What happened is, in many ways, a miracle,” Trump said as he departed the White House for a trip to Puerto Rico on Tuesday morning. “The police department, they’ve done such an incredible job. And we’ll be talking about gun laws as time goes on. But I do have to say, how quickly the police department was able to get in was really very much of a miracle. They’ve done an amazing job.”
But if you’re going to go for a miracle, it would have been a better miracle to jam all the guy’s guns, or swap the bullets for blanks. It’s not much of a miracle to let him kill 59 people and injure more than 500 and then get the police there in a hurry.
We don’t always have to find a Good News story. What happened Sunday night was not a Good News story. There were no miracles. There was a bad man with an armory of guns in his hotel room.
Despite the historic number of people killed, Trump has repeatedly stressed that the shooting could have been even worse.
“I want to thank the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and all of the first responders for their courageous efforts, and for helping to save the lives of so many,” Trump said in the hours after the shooting on Monday. “The speed with which they acted is miraculous and prevented further loss of life. To have found the shooter so quickly after the first shots were fired is something for which we will always be thankful and grateful. It shows what true professionalism is all about.”
Nonsense. The shooter’s room filled with smoke from the guns, which set off the fire alarm, which told the cops where he was. It’s not miraculous and not something to be particularly grateful for. I mean yeah it’s better that they stopped him as opposed to just saying “Nah, we’re on break,” but it’s not a bright side of what happened. There is no fucking bright side.
Not a real catastrophe
Oct 3rd, 2017 10:51 am | By Ophelia BensonOh goddddddd. Bozo is in Puerto Rico. Bozo is talking.
President Trump on Tuesday told Puerto Rico officials they should feel “very proud” they haven’t lost thousands of lives like in “a real catastrophe like Katrina,” while adding that the devastated island territory has thrown the nation’s budget “a little out of whack.”
Silly silly silly Puerto Rico, inviting a hurricane to visit them without checking the nation’s budget first.
Trump’s remarks came as he touched down in San Juan amid harsh criticism of the slow federal response to the natural disaster and after he praised himself earlier in the day for the “great job” and “A-plus” performance he said his administration deserved for its response to Hurricane Maria.
He’s an awesome A-plus guy, with the world’s most gorgeous blonde hair and a brain second only to Isaac Newton’s.
“Every death is a horror, but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous — hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here, with really a storm that was just totally overpowering, nobody’s ever seen anything like this,” Trump said, before turning to a local official to ask how many people had died in storm. “What is your death count as of this moment? 17? 16 people certified, 16 people versus in the thousands.”
Yay! So so lucky. Puerto Rico didn’t have a storm surge that drowned thousands of houses, instead it had winds that smashed every bit of infrastructure on the island, so they get to die more slowly than the people of New Orleans. SO LUCKY.
The president also seemed to fault the small island for imperiling the United States’s budget by requiring hurricane relief funds, saying, “I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack.”
He’s such a lovely thoughtful compassionate tactful guy.
Before Trump’s impromptu remarks, the president’s visit was intended to be highly scripted…
Yeah well. Toddlers don’t know from scripted.
As the president, clad in a black windbreaker and khakis, departed the White House, he said Cruz has “come back a long way,” before returning to one his favorite topics — himself and his own performance.
“I think it’s now acknowledged what a great job we’ve done, and people are looking at that,” he said. “And in Texas and in Florida, we get an A-plus. And I’ll tell you what, I think we’ve done just as good in Puerto Rico, and it’s actually a much tougher situation. But now the roads are cleared, communications is starting to come back. We need their truck drivers to start driving trucks.”
Yes can we please stop talking about Puerto Rico now and talk about Trump instead? About how awesome Trump is? Can we stick to that please? Is that asking too much?
How not to write a speech for Trump to read
Oct 3rd, 2017 9:01 am | By Ophelia BensonWe should not have to hear Donald Trump talking like this:
Hundreds of our fellow citizens are now mourning the sudden loss of a loved one, a parent, a child, a brother or sister. We cannot fathom their pain, we cannot imagine their loss. To the families of the victims, we are praying for you and we are here for you. And we ask God to help see you through this very dark period.
Scripture teaches us the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. We seek comfort in those words, for we know that God lives in the hearts of those who grieve. To the wounded who are now recovering in hospitals, we are praying for your full and speedy recovery, and pledge to you our support from this day forward.
We all know he doesn’t believe a word of that, and it sounds ridiculous read by the guy we’ve heard bragging about grabbing them by the pussy.
In memory of the fallen, I have directed that our great flag be flown at half-staff. I will be visiting Las Vegas on Wednesday to meet with law enforcement, first responders, and the families of the victims. In moments of tragedy and horror, America comes together as one. And it always has.
We call upon the bonds that unite us, our faith, our family, and our shared values. We call upon the bonds of citizenship, the ties of community, and the comfort of our common humanity. Our unity cannot be shattered by evil, our bonds cannot be broken by violence, and though we feel such great anger, at the senseless murder of our fellow citizens, it is our love that defines us today. And always will. Forever.
That, from him, is completely disgusting. He doesn’t get to babble about bonds that unite us and how our unity cannot be shattered and the love that defines us when picking fights is his favorite activity and he’s constantly boiling over with hatred.
In times such as these, I know we are searching for some kind of meaning in the chaos, some kind of light in the darkness. The answers do not come easy. But we can take solace knowing that even the darkest space can be brightened by a single light and even the most terrible despair can be illuminated by a single ray of hope.
Jezus – that is some bad speechwriting. His speeches should fit him; they should be plausible. They should be written in such a way that they sound like him. That passage obviously sounds nothing like Donald Trump. It’s way way way too elevated and full of deepities for a Trump to read aloud.
Melania and I are praying for every American who has been hurt, wounded or lost the ones they loved so dearly in this terrible, terrible attack. We pray for the entire nation to find unity and peace, and we pray for the day when evil is banished and the innocent are safe from hatred and from fear.
May God bless the souls of the lives that are lost, may God give us the grace of healing and may God provide the grieving families with strength to carry on. Thank you. God bless America. Thank you.
Phony as a 3-dollar bill.
Not right now, children
Oct 2nd, 2017 4:23 pm | By Ophelia BensonYet another iteration of the “now right after a mass shooting is not the time to talk about gun control” bromide – the one that makes absolutely no sense. Why isn’t right after yet another mass shooting very much the time to talk about gun control? It’s like saying “now right after a horrific multi-car crash caused by a driver texting is not the time to talk about not texting while driving.” Yes it is, it’s exactly the time to talk about it, when the dire consequences are right on the front page.
This one of course is the strikingly out of her depth Huckabee Junior.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday repeatedly deflected reporters’ questions about gun control, saying “there will certainly be a time for that policy discussion to take place, but that’s not the place that we’re in at this moment.”
Why? Because we should wait until people have become numb and desensitized again? So that nothing will go on being done? Because there sure as hell isn’t any other sensible reason for that glib deflection.
During the same media briefing, however, Sanders weighed in on the exact “policy discussion” that she said the White House would not engage in on “a day of mourning.”
“I think one of the things that we don’t want to do is try to create laws that won’t create — or stop these types of things from happening,” Sanders said. “I think if you look to Chicago, where you had over 4,000 victims of gun-related crimes last year, they have the strictest gun laws in the country. That certainly hasn’t helped there. So, I think we have to, when that time comes for those conversations to take place, then I think we have to look at things that may actually have a real impact.”
This is the White House not talking about gun control.
It’s talking about not-gun control – which is a whole other thing.
“Again, I think before we start trying to talk about the preventions of what took place last night we need to know more facts,” Sanders continued. “And right now, we’re simply not at that point. It’s very easy for Mrs. Clinton to criticize and to come out, but I think we need to remember the only person with blood on their hands is that of the shooter.”
Mm. Ok – so we should let children run around with sharp knives on the grounds that if anyone gets cut it will be only the knife-holder with bloody hands? So then we shouldn’t have traffic lights, because if any crashes happen it’s only the drivers who are at fault. Liberty for all! Very short life, but lashings of liberty.
Prayers and $$$
Oct 2nd, 2017 3:27 pm | By Ophelia BensonRafi Schwartz at Splinternews lists some Congressional people who offered thoughtsandprayers on the Las Vegas slaughter and have taken money from the NRA.
So who is sending their NRA-sponsored well wishes to the victims of the Las Vegas massacre today? Let’s take a look, with a little help from the campaign contribution database at opensecrets.org.
Missouri Republican Senator Roy Blunt received $11,900 from the NRA during the 2016 election cycle.
Saddened by the tragic loss of life in #LasVegas. My thoughts are with all of the families affected by this horrific attack.
— Senator Roy Blunt (@RoyBlunt) October 2, 2017
Virginia Congresswoman Barbara Comstock received $10,400 from the NRA during the 2016 election cycle.
I am heartbroken by the mass murder that took place last night in Las Vegas and I am praying for the victims, families, and first responders. The heroic actions taken by the SWAT team and many off duty police, no doubt saved many lives. To locate loved ones call 1-866-535-5654.
— Barbara Comstock (@RepComstock) October 2, 2017
North Carolina Senator Richard Burr; Colorado Congressman Mike Coffman; Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley; Texas Congressman Will Hurd…and a lot more. It’s a long inglorious list.
The sums are so small, too. Surely not worth the corruption.
War, homicide, suicide, guns
Oct 2nd, 2017 11:38 am | By Ophelia BensonI saw a tweet that staggered me.
Number of Americans killed on battlefields in all wars in history:
1,396,733
Killed by firearms in the US since 1968:
1,516,863
(NYT)
— richard bacon (@richardpbacon) October 2, 2017
Seriously?
Apparently so, yes. Politifact investigated and confirmed.
In a column published shortly after the on-air slayings of two TV journalists in southwestern Virginia, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof offered some “data points” about the pervasiveness of gun violence in the United States.
One of them was: “More Americans have died from guns in the United States since 1968 than on battlefields of all the wars in American history.”
That sounded familiar. Really familiar. As it turns out, the web version of Kristof’s column sourced a PolitiFact article from Jan. 18, 2013, that fact-checked commentator Mark Shields’ claim that since 1968, “more Americans have died from gunfire than died in … all the wars of this country’s history.” (Shields used the year 1968 because it was the year presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated by gunman Sirhan Sirhan.)
We rated the claim True.
Two and a half years later, we wondered whether the statistic still held up, so we took a new look at the data.
They show their sources and add up the columns.
So the statistic still holds up: There have been 1,516,863 gun-related deaths since 1968, compared to 1,396,733 cumulative war deaths since the American Revolution. That’s 120,130 more gun deaths than war deaths — about 9 percent more, or nearly four typical years worth of gun deaths. And that’s using the most generous scholarly estimate of Civil War deaths, the biggest component of American war deaths.
We’ll offer some added thoughts for context.
These figures refer to all gunfire-related deaths, not just homicides. In fact, homicides represent a minority of gun deaths, with suicides comprising the biggest share. In 2013, according to CDC data, 63 percent of gun-related deaths were from suicides, 33 percent were from homicides, and roughly 1 percent each were from accidents, legal interventions and undetermined causes.
That’s a lot of suicides.
From a great height
Oct 2nd, 2017 10:38 am | By Ophelia BensonA gunman on a high floor of a Las Vegas hotel rained a rapid-fire barrage on an outdoor concert festival on Sunday night, killing at least 58 people, injuring hundreds of others, and sending thousands of terrified survivors fleeing for cover, in one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history.
Online video of the attack near the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino showed the singer Jason Aldean’s performance at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, a three-day country music event, being interrupted by the sound of gunfire. The music stopped, and as victims fell bleeding, concertgoers screamed, ducked for cover, or ran.
The video clips show what a massive advantage the shooter had given himself – a huge open area on the ground packed with people, overlooked by a tall hotel, with the shooter on the 32d floor. There was nowhere to run to, no cover to take.
I have nothing intelligent to say about this.
I’ll just note that I read somewhere that the four worst mass shootings in US history all happened in this past decade – this one, Orlando, Sandy Hook, and Virginia Tech.
Meanwhile Congress keeps doing more to make guns easily available.
Trump says he won’t fail, doesn’t explain why
Oct 1st, 2017 5:40 pm | By Ophelia BensonThe Post on Trump’s gruesome undermining of his own Secretary of State.
“Humiliating for Tillerson, but worse, renders him useless. He’ll resign, today or after a brief face-saving interval,” predicted former Obama administration ambassador and National Security Council official Dan Shapiro, one of many foreign policy experts who tweeted about Trump’s Sunday comments, sent from his New Jersey golf club.
So I went to look at Shapiro’s Twitter and that was valuable. I decided to look at all this as an interesting learning opportunity until the moment the nukes burst overhead. Might as well, right?
Later in the day Trump expanded on his point.
“Being nice to Rocket Man hasn’t worked in 25 years, why would it work now? Clinton failed, Bush failed, and Obama failed. I won’t fail.”
Ah. Because he’s so much better at all this than Clinton and Obama.
Tillerson of course is a terrible secretary of state.
Tillerson, a former ExxonMobil chief executive with no previous diplomatic experience, has been under a broader cloud in office, with lawmakers and others criticizing the slow pace of diplomatic appointments, his acquiescence to massive budget cuts proposed by the White House, and the State Department’s lack of visibility on a number of issues.
Other than that…
Carl Benjamin aka Sargon of Akkad
Oct 1st, 2017 1:09 pm | By Ophelia BensonYesterday there was an atheoskeptic or skeptoatheist conference in Milwaukee that was the subject of a lot of ginned-up “controversy” beforehand because that’s what the organizers went for. They invited several notorious Twitter abusers, because Let All the Voices Be Heard; some people who didn’t want to share a stage with notorious Twitter abusers dropped out, and others went ahead anyway.
One who went ahead was Thomas Smith of Serious Inquiries Only, who did a conversation with one of the worst notorious Twitter abusers, Carl Benjamin who tweets as Sargon of Akkad. Friends of mine were talking about how badly that went yesterday.
Charone Frankel posted a clip of the worst moment on Facebook.
Editing to add: Here is a sharper and easier to hear version on Twitter.
Sargoons cheer Carl Benjamin's tweeting 'I wouldn't even rape you' to a woman MP.#MythCon pic.twitter.com/Yo0O88Tejx
— drkmwinters (@KWintie) September 30, 2017
Carl Benjamin is no surprise. The cheers from the audience are a surprise.
In late January 2016 Richard Dawkins retweeted a typically malicious and misogynist tweet by Carl Benjamin, one that mocks a specific woman who had long been a target of Twitter abuse. He was disinvited to speak at the Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism as a result, but there was more uproar over that so he was disdisinvited i.e. reinvited.
Things have not improved much since then.
Not a joke
Oct 1st, 2017 10:58 am | By Ophelia BensonTillerson is trying to talk to North Korea, which admittedly is not a project full of promise but when the alternative is nuclear war you kind of have to try, mk? But Trump doesn’t think so, and Trump also doesn’t think it’s a bad idea for a president to undercut his own Secretary of State on Twitter. Yes I said on Twitter. The history books of the future, if there is any future, will be full of lines like “war broke out on Snapchat in the autumn of that year…”
I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2017
…Save your energy Rex, we'll do what has to be done!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2017
He should be
- removed from office
- arrested
The Times says it’s not clear if he’s a treasonous maniac or playing a fun game of good cop bad cop.
WASHINGTON — President Trump seemed to undercut his own secretary of state on Sunday as he belittled the prospect of a diplomatic resolution to the nuclear-edged crisis with North Korea even as the administration was seeking to open lines of communication.
In a fresh set of Twitter messages from his New Jersey golf club, where he was spending the weekend, Mr. Trump diminished Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson’s outreach to Pyongyang and its autocratic leader, Kim Jong-un, leaving the impression that he was focused on possible military action. On a visit to China, Mr. Tillerson acknowledged on Saturday that he was trying to open talks.
So what could be more productive than having Mr Clownshoe shouting on Twitter that it’s all for naught?
Negotiations with North Korea have long proved frustrating to American leaders. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both tried talks and granted concessions while ultimately failing to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. But national security analysts have said there is no viable military option at this point without risking devastating casualties.
White House officials have had no comment on Mr. Tillerson’s disclosure, and it was unclear whether Mr. Trump was aware of it in advance or was using his Twitter feed to play a diplomatic version of good cop, bad cop with his secretary of state. Mr. Trump plans to visit China, South Korea and Japan in November, among other destinations, to keep up regional pressure on Pyongyang.
Mr Trump should be locked up.
Mr. Tillerson, a former chief executive of Exxon Mobil with no prior government experience, has been deeply frustrated working for Mr. Trump, according to associates, who have said it is not clear how long he will choose to stay.
This was not the first time the secretary of state has been publicly contradicted by Mr. Trump. In June, the president launched a harsh broadside against the Persian Gulf state of Qatar barely an hour after Mr. Tillerson, trying to mediate a dispute among Arab neighbors, called for a “calm and thoughtful dialogue.”
The president has not shied away from undercutting other members of his own team during his eight months in office. The most sensational example came in July, when Mr. Trump spent days publicly castigating Attorney General Jeff Sessions as “very weak” and saying that he regretted appointing him.
The president’s tweets about Mr. Tillerson came on a day when he planned to attend the President’s Cup golf tournament and present the trophy to the winner at Liberty National Golf Club in Jersey City, not far from his own golf club in Bedminster, N.J. He planned to return to Washington in the evening.
In other words his tweets came on a day when he’s busy corruptly using his office to promote his business.
He should be removed and arrested for treason.
It is what it looks like
Sep 30th, 2017 3:12 pm | By Ophelia BensonNate Silver at FiveThirtyEight tells the media to quit rationalizing the monster.
I’m happy to acknowledge that Trump’s responses to the news are sometimes thought-out and deliberate. His criticisms of the media often seem to fall into this category, for example, since they’re sure to get widespread coverage and Republican voters have overwhelmingly lost faith in the media.
But at many other times, journalists come up with overly convoluted explanations for Trump’s behavior (“this seemingly self-destructive emotional outburst is actually a clever political strategy!”) when simpler ones will suffice (“this is a self-destructive emotional outburst.”). In doing so, they violate both Ockham’s razor and Hanlon’s razor — the latter of which can be stated as “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” One can understand why journalists who rely on having close access to Trump avoid explanations that portray Trump as being irrational, incompetent or bigoted. But sometimes they’re the only explanations that make sense.
Or, rather, irrational, incompetent and bigoted.
It isn’t complicated. What we see is what there is. He’s stupid, he’s malevolent, he has no impulse-control, he’s grotesquely narcissistic. He acts like an enraged toddler because he thinks and feels like an enraged toddler.
