Nyah nyah, you don’t get the nice corner office any more.

The Trump administration’s program to shake up media representation at official briefings and press calls in Washington is set to affect the Pentagon, with credentialed media being rotated out of assigned workspaces for media newcomers.

The conservative-leaning One America News Network is set to replace NBC News, Breitbart will be given space held by National Public Radio, the New York Post has been offered the New York Times’ workspace and HuffPost will replace Politico.

The changes are set to take place on 14 February in what the Pentagon calls a new “annual media rotation program”, according to an internal memo seen by CNN.

The moves are largely symbolic

King’s College London has a page for Yasmin Benoit, but doesn’t really explain what her research will be or why KCL thought she would be a good visiting researcher.

Yasmin Benoit is a British model, multi-award-winning asexual activist, writer, speaker, media consultant and researcher.

What’s an asexual activist? How do you activist a negative? How do you activist being asexual?

Starting her career as a model and advocate for diversity in the fashion industry, Yasmin was described as the “unlikely face of asexuality” by Cosmopolitan Magazine after publicly coming out as asexual in 2017. She started the #ThisIsWhatAsexualLooksLike movement for diverse representation and visibility, co-founded International Asexuality Day (April 6), and is a board member of the Asexual Visibility and

Asexual babe shares her tits with an enthralled public.

If she really is “asexual” why does she choose to pose for photos looking so exaggeratedly sexual? It’s like saying you hate country music while regularly posing for photos playing a banjo.

Also, what research? If she’s a visiting research fellow then what’s her research going to be? Hair twiddling 101? Wearing a bra instead of a shirt? Attention seeking in adulthood?… Read the rest

The NY Times on the coup:

The Trump administration plans to scrutinize thousands of F.B.I. agents involved in Jan. 6 investigations, setting the stage for a possible purge that goes far beyond the bureau’s leaders to target rank-and-file agents, according to internal documents and people familiar with the matter.

The proposal came on a day that more than a dozen prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington who had worked on cases involving the Jan. 6 riot were told that they were being terminated.

In short we’re at the mercy of a criminal. He instigated the January 6 riot in an effort to steal a second term as president, and too many people in too many states were … Read the rest

We’re faced with both a deadly serious coup and an onslaught of dumbass incompetence.

President Donald Trump declared victory on Friday in his long-running water war with California, boasting he sent billions of gallons south — but local officials say they narrowly prevented him from possibly flooding farms.

“Today, 1.6 billion gallons and, in 3 days, it will be 5.2 billion gallons. Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory! I only wish they listened to me six years ago — There would have been no fire!” he said in a post on his social media site.

Right, and if there’s a shed on fire next door to you the thing to do is flood the entire neighborhood.… Read the rest

Allah hates women.

Hira Anwar, 14, lived in two contrasting worlds in New York, where she was born and raised. Outside her home, she was a typical American teenager, laughing with friends, posting videos on TikTok and dreaming of a boundless future.

Inside the home, her reality was very different. Her parents, Pakistani immigrants who had settled in the United States over two decades ago, expected her to adhere to their cultural and religious values, which demanded modesty from women. 

So laughing with friends, posting on TikTok, and dreaming of a future=not modest? She should be friendless, silent and invisible, hopeless?

That’s not modesty, it’s annihilation.

Hira was fatally shot by her father and an uncle on Monday night,

The dictator purges law enforcement:

The Trump administration is set to expand a purge of career law enforcement officials, with dozens of FBI agents who worked on January 6, 2021, US Capitol attack and Trump-related investigations as well as some supervisors being evaluated for possible removal as soon as the end of Friday, according to people briefed on the matter.

This is, already, a dictatorship. Purging law enforcement officials because they enforced the law=dictatorship. If laws don’t apply to Trump, then nothing can stop him, and that’s a dictatorship. At the rate we’re going he’ll be eating people on camera in a week or two.

Agents who worked the investigation of Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents, and those

None of this is by the book.

Federal employees are receiving additional communications that appear designed to entice them to accept the Trump administration’s “Fork in the Road” resignation offer, despite mounting questions about whether the offer is legal.

While the initial offer to federal employees to resign by Feb. 6 and retain their pay and benefits through Sept. 30 came directly from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), some of the latest guidance is coming from agency leaders, further sowing confusion over what’s to be believed.

Employment attorneys and union representatives emphasize that OPM, which handles many human resource matters for federal workers, lacks the authority to promise paid leave for government employees other than

The subhead gets at the essence of the matter.

President Trump at moments of national tragedy has always been more comfortable finding fault than providing comfort or expressing empathy.

In fact you can omit the “at moments of national tragedy” part. Trump just in general has always loved to attack and sneer and jeer rather than doing the other thing. He’s the guy who jeered at the very idea that he would take his own kids to the park.

In the wake of this week’s midair collision near Washington, Mr. Trump was more than happy to jump to conclusions and pull the country apart rather than together. After declaring it to be an “hour of anguish for our nation,” Mr.

George Mason University shouts Breaking Barriers for Menstruators:

Menstrual equity has been a prevalent topic that is kept behind closed doors for centuries, even though it requires more attention and recognition in our society.

Wut?

Wtf is a “prevalent topic”? How do you keep any kind of topic “behind closed doors”? What centuries are we talking about? Was there a time before all those centuries when “menstrual equity” was front and center?

Menstrual equity can be referred to as the idea that 

Wait wait wait – you mean “defined as.” Not “referred to” but “defined as.”

Why is a barely literate adolescent allowed to write rules and regulations for a university?

Period poverty is a kind of poverty that

So what’s he supposed to do? Where, exactly, does he put the speculum?

Reduxx reports:

A French gynecologist has been sanctioned by medical authorities after a trans activist group reported him to the Minister of Equality for comments which they deemed to be “transphobic.” Dr. Victor Acharian, who operates in the Pau region, has been prohibited from practicing medicine for five months, with an additional one-month probationary period.

In August 2023, a trans-identified male and his partner visited Dr. Acharian’s office in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. After a few minutes of waiting, the secretary told the man that the doctor had refused to see him.

“I told her that I’m not competent, but I can guide you. I can refer you

TIME magazine:

The Trump Administration is facing its first major test after a passenger jet and Army helicopter collided mid-air in the Washington, D.C. area on Wednesday night, in what officials are calling the most fatal aviation disaster on U.S. soil in more than two decades.

The collision quickly raised concerns about the state of air traffic control and oversight and sparked questions about recent leadership changes within the federal agencies charged with regulating air travel.

Just days before the crash, President Donald Trump enacted a sweeping shake-up of the federal agencies responsible for aviation oversight, removing the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), David Pekoske, and eliminating all the members of a key aviation security advisory group.

Um.

Trump’s 1st week:
– 1/20: FAA director fired
– 1/21: Air Traffic Controller hiring
freeze
– 1/22: Aviation Safety Advisory
Committee disbanded
– 1/28: Buyout/retirement demand
sent to employees
– 1/29: First American mid-air collision
in 16 years

Trump: “It’s… pic.twitter.com/qLTANKcU6T

— ThisWillHold (@ThisWillHold) January 30, 2025

Now that he mentions it I remember flinching at that ATC hiring freeze. Really we’re gonna economize on that? Penny wise and pound foolish at all?… Read the rest

Trump says it’s all the fault of the women and other worthless kinds of human.

President Trump blamed diversity requirements at the Federal Aviation Administration and his two Democratic predecessors for the midair collision over the Potomac River on Wednesday night, saying that standards for air traffic controllers had been too lax. Mr. Trump cited no evidence, and even admitted when pressed that the investigation had only just begun.

Moments later, he blamed the pilots of the Army helicopter that appeared to fly into a passenger jet that was on final approach to Reagan National Airport, across the river from the capital.

Mr. Trump went back and forth between blaming diversity goals that he said were created by President Barack

Oh well, he’s exceptionally gifted, so that’s ok then.

A teenage boy who used his phone to film young girls undressed in a changing area at the National Aquatic Centre in Dublin has been spared a custodial sentence and a criminal record.

The 17-year-old “exceptionally gifted student”, who cannot be named because he is a minor, had pleaded guilty to two offences under the Child Trafficking and Pornography Act for knowingly possessing two videos on his mobile phone at the centre in Blanchardstown on a date in 2022. He was aged 14 at the time.

Garda James Grogan had said the teen used his phone, which was placed on a kiosk floor, to film girls aged five and nine

What it was like on the inside:

Security agents escorted the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Agriculture out of her office on Monday after she refused to comply with her firing by the Trump administration, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Phyllis Fong, a 22-year veteran of the department, had earlier told colleagues that she intended to stay after the White House terminated her Friday, saying that she didn’t believe the administration had followed proper protocols, the sources said.

In an email to colleagues on Saturday, reviewed by Reuters, she said the independent Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency “has taken the position that these termination notices do not comply with

So there are some checks on Trump and his loonies. Good to know.

The White House budget office rescinded a memo ordering a broad freeze on federal grants and loans after Republican senators “hit the ceiling” over the order, which caught them completely by surprise and created confusion in their home states.

…

“Republicans were starting to hit the ceiling because the state governments, people in our states were coming to us saying, ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait. What does this mean? Does it mean we’re going to lose funding for X, Y, Z?’” said one Republican senator who requested anonymity to discuss the uproar behind closed doors caused by the memo. “As drafted the initial memo sounded so broad,

Amnesty does its favorite fingers-in-ears childish repetition thing yet again.

Transgender rights are human rights.
Transgender rights are human rights.
Transgender rights are human rights.
Transgender rights are human rights.
Transgender rights are human rights.

— Amnesty International USA (@amnestyusa) January 28, 2025

As always: of course trans people have human rights. That doesn’t mean there are special new rights just for trans people, and Amnesty conspicuously fails to say what it means by “transgender rights.” Is there a “transgender right” for men to plant themselves in women’s toilets and changing rooms and organizations? No, but we can be pretty sure Amnesty thinks there is. It’s interesting that it’s careful not to spell that out though.… Read the rest

Ah. We’re at concentration camps already.

President Donald Trump signed a memo Wednesday that sets in motion preparations for a facility to house thousands of migrants at the U.S. military camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which he said was an effort to “halt the border invasion.”

“I hereby direct the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security to take all appropriate actions to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States,” the memo to the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department says.

Trump previewed the directive at a signing ceremony for the Laken Riley Act,

Originally a comment by Rev David Brindley on Ok ok we take it back.

An interesting article from Salon, “MAGA’s true believers don’t understand capitalism — Trump will teach them a hard lesson.”

The highlights

America is a nation at war with its mythologies.

For all the electoral postmortems about the desire for economic change, what’s unsurprisingly absent is what seems, to me, an obvious omission: an all-enveloping misunderstanding of American capitalism.

(…)

With due respect to the many Americans who voted for Donald Trump, their overwhelming sense of entitlement dwarfs that of the hard-working immigrants who cut their grass, scrub pots and pans in the restaurants they frequent, and care for their kids and elderly loved ones. Too