Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

How has Obama failed you today?

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

We have all the best words.

This blog will pay for itself.

This Blog Goes to 11…

No one could have predicted…

Word salad with all caps

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

This is how realignments happen…

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot

Technically true, but collectively nonsense.

Naturally gregarious and alpha

Also, too.

What fresh hell is this?

We Survived Breitbartpocalypse!

I personally stopped the public option…

This is a big f—–g deal.

Almost as fun as hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Shock troops for the Unitarian Jihad.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Han shot first.

Wetsuit optional.

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The War On Women

Lisa Page is done being quiet

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I understand the argument when people say Trump isn’t the worst president ever — or even the worst this century. In terms of body count through pointless military actions and the number of lives ruined through financial malfeasance and mismanagement, Trump doesn’t come close to George W. Bush (yet).

But Trump is in a class by himself in his willingness to recklessly gin up rage against entire groups of people and tell outrageous lies that endanger individuals. He eagerly and often does both for political gain, to get himself off the hook or to paint himself as less sleazy by comparison to others. It’s grotesque and repellent, and, as far as I know, it’s unmatched in US history. In this way, Trump has exposed countless people to crackpots and mobs and has caused death and mayhem, though not at scale…so far.

Two of his favorite targets are former FBI lawyer Lisa Page and agent Peter Strzok. Trump defames them not because they engaged in official misconduct (investigations turned up indiscreet behavior but nothing illegal) but rather because they were critical of Trump in text exchanges, which Trump latched onto as evidence of a “deep state” conspiracy. Trump has relentlessly mocked the two and called for their jailing, just like the tinpot authoritarian he aspires to be.

Trump’s behavior toward Page and Strzok is particularly disgusting to me because they aren’t public figures. The way he leers about “lovely Lisa” and lingers over the word “lovers” when talking about Page and Strzok at his hate rallies is grotesque because no one deserves to have their private business publicly mocked by a foul, degenerate hypocrite like Trump. (It’s also jarring to me because I once found it impossible to imagine Trump using the word “lovers” outside the context of a food order in which it immediately follows the word “meat.”)

Anyway, after remaining silent and hoping in vain that Trump would move on, Page has had enough of the shitgibbon’s shit, as she says in an interview with Molly Jong-Fast in The Daily Beast. Here’s an excerpt where Jong-Fast describes why Page decided to speak out:

I asked her why she was willing to talk now. “Honestly, his demeaning fake orgasm was really the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she says. The president called out her name as he acted out an orgasm in front of thousands of people at a Minneapolis rally on Oct. 11, 2019.

Ugh. That’s just so many shades of fucking cringe.

I hope Ms. Page gets some measure of relief from breaking her silence and highlighting the many ways Trump and his nasty sycophants have subverted our federal law enforcement institutions. The whole interview is worth a read.

Open thread.

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These People Are Certifiably Insane

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When you aren’t donating to your favorite personal weblog, you might consider throwing Planned Parenthood some many, because these fucking anti-abortion lunatics are certified nutjobs:

A bill to ban abortion introduced in the Ohio state legislature requires doctors to “reimplant an ectopic pregnancy” into a woman’s uterus – a procedure that does not exist in medical science – or face charges of “abortion murder”.

This is the second time practising obstetricians and gynecologists have tried to tell the Ohio legislators that the idea is currently medically impossible.

The move comes amid a wave of increasingly severe anti-abortion bills introduced across much of the country as conservative Republican politicians seek to ban abortion and force a legal showdown on abortion with the supreme court.

Fetus fetishists.

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Here It Is (Open Thread)

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I get tired of saying it, so I assume y’all get tired of hearing it, but the presence of the leering misogynist Donald Trump in the Oval Office is a daily, incarnate insult to women, a constant orange beacon that illuminates our second-class citizenship. And it is made all the more unbearable by the complicity of the (overwhelmingly white) women who helped put him there.

This is a truth we confront daily. But sometimes, the base materials that created this hideous aspect of Trumpism come together under pressure to yield a perfect diamond of ignorant, braying sexist bullshit. And here it is:

For those disinclined to watch the clip, Trump is celebrating himself signing the Woman’s Suffrage Centennial Coin Act, which commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote. (The 19th Amendment passed the House in 1919 and was ratified in 1920.)

Trump signed the Woman’s Suffrage Centennial Coin Act next to a woman dressed as a beauty pageant contestant in a tight “suffragette white” sheath dress and sash. Trump wonders aloud why it took so long to get this particular act signed into law — wholly ignorant of the meaning of the word “centennial,” it appears — and credits himself with finally getting it done.

Then Trump asks the Platonic Ideal of the anti-woman Trump woman, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), to give remarks. This clip mercifully spares us Blackburn’s remarks, but we can assume they were embarrassingly obsequious. She may even have credited Trump with giving women the right to vote rather than signing an act creating a commemorative coin 100 years later, who knows.

So, if you see women in your life who are not Marsha Blackburn rage-drinking or punching through plaster walls, this sort of thing might explain it. Open thread!

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Sure, I’d Vote for A Woman, BUT…

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A reminder: Annie Linskey was brought up from the minors (in this case, the Boston Globe) because she wants to do to Elizabeth Warren what Amy Chozick did to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 cycle.

Every word Linskey writes should be scrutinized from that angle, including ‘and’ and ‘the’. (The Matt Viser co-credit can be ignored, as can Viser himself.)

Over the past few days, two of the leading male candidates in the Democratic presidential primary race — Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg — have escalated separate lines of attack as they attempt to counter the field’s most prominent woman: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is antagonistic and angry.

She also is an uncompromising elitist, they argue, suggesting that if she were the nominee, it would harm the party in the must-win states in the upper Midwest.

The new attacks, marking a more vigorous phase of the race, get at something far beyond her policy positions, and into one of the most fraught areas for a female candidate: Is she likable?

Pushing that argument is treacherous given that many Democrats remain upset over what they view as sexist treatment of Hillary Clinton, the party’s last nominee. Warren’s allies view the language being used against her as constructed to be particularly devastating for female candidate and beyond the policy divisions between her and her rivals.

Women’s activism — driven in part by Clinton’s loss — has fueled social and political movements, evident in the #MeToo campaign and in election results during the 2018 midterms and on Tuesday night. But it also comes as Democrats worry about turning off voters — many of them white, working class, and male — in states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin….

It’s not me, but Some People Say… Thank heavens, Mike Bloomberg is about to parachute into Alabama and save us from the Mean Mommy!

Don’t just take my word — listen to Boston professional reporter, Mr. Charles P. Pierce:

… This kind of thing makes me crazy. An opponent launches a new “line of attack.” It is then described in detail, just so everybody gets the point. Then the reporters make no real value judgments as to whether the “line of attack” is a crock of beans or not—which, in this case, it plainly is.

show full post on front page

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How To Start A Revolution

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Remember Lauren Duca? A decade ago in Trump years (2016), she wrote a viral Teen Vogue article, “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America”

Over a million people read the essay in under 24 hours (and one of them was Dan Rather, who shared the essay on Facebook that afternoon). As a friend put it at the time, “It’s like you decided to write about politics, and a hole opened in the center of the Earth.”

Her first post to Pancake Brains is heartwrenching. I honestly don’t know how she’s still standing, but I’m grateful she is and is still reminding us our democracy is at risk. As you can guess, she’s targeting empowering young people to stand up and take back their country and change the world.

How To Start A Revolution by Lauren Duca

Teen Vogue award-winning columnist Lauren Duca shares a smart and funny guide for challenging the status quo in a much-needed reminder that young people are the ones who will change the world.

In other news, enough tricksters stopped by that I am out of candy, but mostly because I encouraged a group of middle school boys to stop back by before they headed home and be rewarded with my leftovers as the clock struck 8. They were also rewarded with a Bixby and Scout visit. I had to work tonight while juggling Halloween, so they had to hang out in the back of the house because I could not also juggle them. I released the hounds just in time for the one last group of costumed revelers.

Open thread

 

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Holy Toledo

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This is just…well, watch for yourselves if you didn’t see it live:

Trump uttered the words “white supremacy” under duress in the speech, snorting, eyes darting around like a hostage forced to read a sentence denouncing his comrades for a propaganda video. That’s what the media will almost certainly focus on, that Trump acknowledged that “white supremacy” is bad.

Most won’t bother to put it in context, i.e., to point out that the acknowledgement of the obvious was made necessary because one of Trump’s deranged followers murdered innocent men, women and children after parroting Trump’s own xenophobic demagoguery as his motive. Here’s a hot take from the non-Fox News media:

The fucking fuck? No, he did not “set a different tone,” you feckless fail muppets! Trump read an error-laden compilation of shitty platitudes designed to deflect blame from himself and shield gun owners and manufacturers from any consequences. And he did it poorly. Any pundit uttering or implying a “pivot” should be kicked in the junk repeatedly (metaphorically).

Meanwhile, back in Toledo:

Fellow citizens, we either kick the Republicans out of power at every level, or their insanity will engulf this country completely. We’re more than half way there right now. It really is as simple as that.

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Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Good Take / Really, Really Bad Take

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***********
Surely not even the most hardcore Talibangelicals could defend a serial child trafficker, you would would think.

Not so!, says Erick ‘Studying to Be A Pastor’ Erickson…

Hey, when you look at it right, *anything* can be an opportunity…

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This is a Great Line and Also True

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I love this:

I don’t know if the GOP will recover from the wave of activism from women they have unleashed. I know we still have a lot of work with older white women, but I gotta tell you, all the women I know are MOTIVATED AS FUCK to beat Trump and Republicans from now until forever.

Anecdotally, I have signed up to be a County Captain for the WVCantWait campaign to elect Stephen Smith. Governor. I have spent the last week getting acquainted with the other volunteers across the state, reading and interacting on the FB page, reading the literature, etc. At any rate, EVERY SINGLE VOLUNTEER I have interacted with is a woman. And they are all motivated and ready to kick ass, and committed and passionate and helpful. I know that it is probably inevitable that I will be a county captain for six months before I am replaced by a woman who would do a better job than me. It’s kind of awesome, actually- women and teachers are going to drag this god damned state and country into the future and I wouldn’t want to get in their way.

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Test the Damn Coatdress!!!!!!

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Earlier today, New York Magazine reported that longtime Elle advice columnist, E. Jean Carroll, was raped by the President 25 years ago in the ladies changing room at Bergdorf Goodman’s in New York.

The article is gripping, angering, and frustrating to read. And I’m a guy whose never been sexually assaulted – and yes, that happens to guys sometimes. I cannot imagine how hard it was to read for those, women or men, who have been sexually assaulted and/or raped.

I want to focus on something, however, that I’ve not yet seen addressed: that the coatdress that Ms. Carroll wore when she alleges the President raped her has been hanging on her closet door ever since. (emphasis mine)

The Donna Karan coatdress still hangs on the back of my closet door, unworn and unlaundered since that evening.

TEST THE DAMN COATDRESS!!!!!!!!!!

If someone had accused President Obama or President Clinton or a prominent Democratic elected or appointed official, hell if someone had accused Secretary Clinton, of sexually assaulting and/or raping them, and had also reported they had the clothing they wore that day and it has been unworn and unwashed ever since, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, David Bossie, Karl Rove – okay, Rove would hire someone as he can’t waddle that fast, Matt Schlapp – possibly same problem as Rove, Rudy Giuliani, Jacob Wohl, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Chuck “Rage Furby” Johnson, whichever Breitbrat is on duty this weekend, and 1/2 a dozen other people affiliated with the  Republican Party, the conservative movement, the alt-right, the Trump campaign or other supporting organization like his SuperPAC, Leonard Leo, Don McGahn on behalf of his real boss Mitch McConnell, and Matt Gaetz in an attempt to get Gym Jordan and Mark Meadows to stop wedgying him in the cloak room and giving him swirlies in the House locker room, would all be converging on the accusers home to GET THE DAMN COATDRESS AND TEST IT FOR THE DNA OF THE PERSON ACCUSED OF COMMITTING THE SEXUAL ASSAULT AND/OR RAPE!!!!!!

This isn’t chutes and ladders. It isn’t tic tac toe. There are no Marquess of Queensbury Rules. No one cares about good ring generalship, there’s no four knock down rule, you’re not going to be saved by the bell. What is needed here is effective aggression!

Get the coatdress. Have it tested for DNA. That is the only way you’re ever going to see any accountability here. Because as riveting as Carroll’s article is, it will not bring accountability. It will simply disappear into the 24/7/365 information panopticon that the President and his supporters have created. By tomorrow or Sunday it will be gone, surpassed by something to do with Iran. Or tariffs with China. Or that his golf game got rained out.

Test the damn coatdress!!!

Open thread!

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You Ladies are Just Being Hysterical

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This is a righteous piece by Rebecca Traister:

I have been thinking, like so many people this week, about rage. Who I’m mad at, what that anger’s good for, how what makes me maddest is the way the madness has long gone unrespected, even by those who have relied on it for their gains.

For as long as I have been a cogent adult, and actually before that, I have watched people devote their lives, their furious energies, to fighting against the steady, merciless, punitive erosion of reproductive rights. And I have watched as politicians — not just on the right, but members of my own party — and the writers and pundits who cover them, treat reproductive rights and justice advocates as if they were fantasists enacting dystopian fiction.

This week, the most aggressive abortion bans since Roe v. Wade swept through states, explicitly designed to challenge and ultimately reverse Roe at the Supreme Court level. With them has come the dawning of a broad realization — a clear, bright, detailed vision of what’s at stake, and what’s ahead. (If not, yet, full comprehension of the harm that has already been done).

You can not compromise one inch with fanatics. The moment you buy into their framework of things (“ABORTION IS EVIL”) and start saying things like it should be “safe, legal, and rare,” you are losing the battle. The only acceptable answer is “I support it and fuck you for telling people what to do with their own fucking body.”

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Keeping the Shit at Shoe Level

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If we’re still talking about abortion, here’s a dispatch from my current heartland location, where “Abortion Kills a Beating Heart” and “It’s a Child Not a Choice” billboards herald your arrival to a lot of little towns.

The South Dakota legislature has at least one anti-abortion bill on their to-do list every year. This year, they had two. One required that women wanting an abortion sign a 13 page document prepared by the Department of Health, and initial every page. This one was simple fuckery – the single Planned Parenthood location that provides abortions had its own consent form, but apparently it wasn’t enough of a waste of time and paper. That bill passed and is now law. The other bill was an attempt to force women to have an ultrasound prior to an abortion, and also to hear the fetal heartbeat. This one failed because the anti-abortion lobby thought it was unconstitutional.

The reason that the anti-abortion advocates here are sensitive to whether a law is constitutional, no matter whether the Supremes are now wired to overturn Roe, is because they played with fire and got burned in the last decade. A law prohibiting abortion was overturned by a referendum (with a healthy 56-44 majority) in 2006. One of the arguments in that referendum was that litigating Supreme Court challenges is an expensive waste of time. (Another was that this bill didn’t have the exceptions for rape and incest – only the life of the mother.) Since then, legislators have pretty much stuck to throwing as much sand in the gears of what little abortion machinery is left in the state, without causing a court challenge.

Even in this red state, a good majority of people are not ready to overturn abortion. People will vote for legislators who want to overturn it, because of party affiliation, but those legislators are handcuffed by popular opinion, at least in this state.

The lesson I take home from this little bit of politics is that, at some point, even in the fucked up political environment that we’re experiencing today, popular opinion matters.

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How About Just Not Being a Fucking Clod

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WTF is wrong with these people:

Men attending the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this year were worried about a lot of things. A global economic slowdown. Threats to cybersecurity. Populism. War.

And, several acknowledged at the meeting this past week, mentoring women in the #MeToo era.

“I now think twice about spending one-on-one time with a young female colleague,” said one American finance executive, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the issue is “just too sensitive.”

“Me, too,” said another man in the conversation.

***

Pat Milligan, who leads research on female leadership at the consulting firm Mercer and advises multinational companies on gender and diversity issues, said many of her clients had voiced concerns over saying or doing “the wrong thing” since #MeToo drew broad international attention.

“A number of men have told me that they will avoid going to dinner with a female mentee, or that they’re concerned about deploying a woman solo on-site with a male,” Ms. Milligan said. “People are concerned and have questions.”

“If we allow this to happen, it will set us back decades,” Ms. Milligan said. “Women have to be sponsored by leaders, and leaders are still mostly men.”

WTF is going on at dinners that I am missing? When I go to dinner with people, we order food, eat it, pay the bill, and leave.

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We Need to See All the Videos Before Drawing Conclusions: Covington Catholic High School Students Yell at Young Women Edition

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Since we have to see all the videos of the fine young men from Covington Catholic High School, we definitely should make sure this is on the front page with the context provided by the person who both took the video and was in the group of young women being accosted and yelled at.

https://twitter.com/roflinds/status/1087507522259423232

Beware of the 21st century technological Panopticon. It sees all!

Open thread.

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Reading and Headline Writing are Fundamental: Epstein Lawsuit Edition

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Earlier today The Associated Press reported that a settlement had been reached in ONE OF THE lawsuits in south Florida involving Jeffrey Epstein. The headline and the wording of the tweets breaking the news were bad:

Here’s what’s in the actual AP reporting (emphasis mine):

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — A last-minute settlement was reached Tuesday in a long-running Florida lawsuit involving a politically connected financier accused of sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls, clearing the way for the victims’ lawyers to try to unravel a once-secret agreement that prevented federal criminal prosecution of the financier.

The non-prosecution agreement protecting Jeffrey Epstein was negotiated a decade ago by prosecutors in the South Florida U.S. attorney’s office, which was then run by current Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta. It is the subject of a separate federal lawsuit in Florida filed by victims who say the deal trampled their rights to be heard.

“That injustice needs to be addressed and will be addressed,” said attorney Jack Scarola, who represents fellow lawyer Bradley Edwards in the lawsuit settled Tuesday. “There is no justification for the broad scope of immunity that was granted.”

Epstein, 65, pleaded guilty in 2008 to two state charges after reaching the non-prosecution deal with Acosta’s office while under investigation for sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls. He served 13 months in jail, was required to reach financial settlements with many of the victims and registered as a convicted sex offender.

But Epstein could have faced a possible life sentence if federal prosecutors had pursued a draft 57-page indictment that was never filed. Now, Scarola and Edwards say that possibility still exists, and the victims — some of whom were only 13 or 14 when they were molested — may yet get their day in federal court amid a national #metoo movement that seeks to hold sexual harassers and abusers to account.

“They’re willing to talk. They want to share their stories,” Edwards said.

None of the victims was in court Tuesday and it wasn’t clear if any would be available immediately for interviews.

The settlement reached Tuesday involved a lawsuit Epstein filed against Edwards almost a decade ago. Edwards filed a counterclaim, contending that Epstein sued him maliciously, trying to harm Edwards’ reputation and derail his work with Epstein’s own abuse victims.

The final paragraph is where they buried the lede, as the saying goes. The lawsuit settled this morning IS NOT the Federal lawsuit seeking to set aside the Federal non-prosecution agreement that current Labor Secretary Alex Acosta negotiated and agreed to when he was a US Attorney in south Florida in 2008. The lawsuit settled this morning was between Epstein and one of the attorneys representing Epstein’s victims. It is important to highlight all this, because, as usual, everyone read the tweets and the headline and started jumping to the wrong conclusions on social media. Including people that are normally very good at not doing these things. For instance, the normally reliable Dr. Kendzior:

I’m not trying to knock Dr. Kendzior here, she’s just the most well known of the people I’ve seen so far who bit on the AP’s inaccurate headline and tweets. Everyone is busy, everyone is overwhelmed right now with the holidays, with getting by day be day, with the fact that it’s winter, with trying not to let the insanity emanating from DC and many state capitols, as well as from abroad, overtake their daily lives. So not having time to read the article is understandable. What isn’t, and what is also not forgivable, is that our news sources, including some of the best ones, seem to have gotten into a pattern of writing inaccurate and deceptive headlines and then tweeting them out to announce their reporting in a way that further compounds the inaccuracy. It is bad enough that there are hostile foreign state and, and in some cases both foreign and domestic, non-state actors conducting ongoing information and psychological warfare, having legitimate, credible sources of news doing the same thing because they can’t get their acts together makes the hostile state and non-state actors jobs easier.

Despite, or, perhaps, because of this morning’s settlement, Epstein’s crimes and the despicable story about how he was allowed to escape proper accountability for his crimes is not going away. The Miami Herald isn’t going to let this story go. And a lot of people’s foul, stinky laundry is going to get aired out in public. And the disingenuous stories they’ve been telling to cover their own misdeeds aren’t going to hold up when this happens.

Open thread!

 

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