What was that about ethics?

Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., charged the Secret Service nearly $10,200 for guest rooms used by his protective detail during Trump’s first month at the club this summer, newly released spending records show.

He could of course charge them nothing, or charge them a nominal rate, but…no.

The Washington Post reported previously that Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club — where he lived from January, when he left the White House, to early May — charged the Secret Service more than $40,000 so that agents could use a room near Trump.

He could have chosen to do it differently, but he didn’t.

Legal experts have said there are no laws to prohibit Trump’s company from charging

… Read the rest

Speaking of ethics…

To see one reason why the red-blue divide on vaccines is getting worse, just turn up the volume…

Here's my report from @DonLemonTonight pic.twitter.com/RH4Z0vbvHe

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) July 10, 2021

It’s a clip of Fox News hacks telling people to refuse to get the vaccination – in other words telling people to keep spreading a killer virus and to get it themselves, in other words killing people. For money and fame and whatever other frivolous rewards they get from this activity, what they’re doing is making a pandemic worse than it would be without their propaganda. They’re knowingly causing disease and death.

We live in a strange world.… Read the rest

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1413848743871397891 https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1413852939479916546 https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1413846720446967813… Read the rest

They’re doing this again! I guess because it worked out so well last time?

White House officials have helped craft an agreement under which purchases of Hunter Biden’s artwork — which could be listed at prices as high as $500,000 — will be kept confidential from even the artist himself, in an attempt to avoid ethical issues that could arise as a presidential family member tries to sell a product with a highly subjective value.

For fuck’s sake! Could it be any more blatant? Hunter Biden is not an artist any more than he was a legitimate qualified board member of Burisma. He exploited his daddy’s name to make the big bucks in that laughable “job” with Burisma and now … Read the rest

Wayne Couzens has admitted murdering Sarah Everard. You’ll never guess what his secret hobbies were.

…underneath the veneer of respectability was a sexual deviant who, fuelled by extreme pornography, was driven to ever more depraved actions to slake his desires.

Extreme porn isn’t all that deviant though; it’s not rare enough to be deviant. It seems that a lot of men like watching women get beaten and tortured.

Despite being an armed officer tasked with protecting politicians, dignitaries and VIPs, Couzens admitted regularly cavorting with prostitutes and was also suspected of taking dangerous body-building steroids.

Cavorting? I doubt they spent the time skipping and jumping around.

…privately Couzens is suspected of having a dangerous addiction to extreme pornography.

“Extreme” … Read the rest

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of How Democracies Die tell us the biggest threat is not another insurrection but a steal.

The looming danger is not that the mob will return; it’s that mainstream Republicans will “legally” overturn an election.

They’re energetically at work on it now, like for instance all that voter suppression in Texas we were just reading about.

Last year, for the first time in U.S. history, a sitting president refused to accept defeat and attempted to overturn election results. Rather than oppose this attempted coup, leading Republicans either cooperated with it or enabled it by refusing to publicly acknowledge Trump’s defeat. In the run-up to January 6, most top GOP officials refused to denounce

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Somebody seems to have Marxism confused with theocracy. They’re not quite the same thing.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn continues her running feud with Taylor Swift, warning her that if we have a “socialistic govt,” the state would have to “approve her music,” and won’t “allow women to dress, or sing, to be on stage, or entertain.” pic.twitter.com/HGXziiai8K

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 8, 2021

… Read the rest

The game’s afoot.

https://twitter.com/suzanne_moore/status/1413527354589200384

Steerpike tells us:

It’s not just the boardroom where such clashes are being played out. Mr S hears word that the editorial floors of the Guardian and its Sunday sister the Observer have become riven with tensions over the perennial problem of trans rights. WhatsApp groups are ablaze with talk that Observer commentator Sonia Sodha could become the next feminist hounded out of the group, following Suzanne Moore’s purging in November.

Sodha has incurred the displeasure of the Guardian’s vocal trans-rights faction for daring to suggest that women have a right to free speech and should not be threatened for having opinions. She now faces public attacks on Twitter from Guardian contributors, attacks that go

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Originally a comment by Sastra on Gendered language at the abortion clinic.

James Randi used to do an experiment where college students who had previously given their birth dates were each presented with a paper written by a “master astrologer” describing what the stars said about them, specifically. After they finished their personalized readings, they were each asked to rank how accurate they were on a 10 point (?) scale. There were lots of 8s and 9s, and even some 10s. On the whole, they were all impressed, and gave the astrologer high marks, too. Then they were asked to pass the papers to the student in the next desk.

It was the same reading, of course, with the … Read the rest

What next? Bus drives are Nazis if they don’t let you throw bottles at people on the bus? Servers in restaurants are Nazis if they don’t let you push over all the tables? Bouncers are Nazis if they eject you from the bar for throwing a punch? Dog walkers are Nazis if they don’t let you kick their dogs?

Fox News pushing boundaries again:

Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren on Thursday joined a growing number of right-wing pundits and politicians comparing covid-19 restrictions to Nazism.

To Nazism. Because of what? Are there concentration camps? Is there forced labor? Are there extermination camps? I’m not seeing the Nazism. I’m not seeing the Fascism and I’m sure as hell not seeing … Read the rest

Time to grow up now, people.

The headline:

Why Emma Corrin is using a chest binder

Oh I bet I know the answer to that one – because, like many others, she’s found a new way to be special and attention-worthy.

Who is she? An actor. She played narcissistic PrinCess DiAna in The Crown. Typecasting, it seems. So a different woman, poshly named Charlie Gowans-Eglinton, instructs us on how meaningful all this is.

Your response to the above may be largely generational. In the middle of the millennial age bracket at 33, I didn’t know about non-binary pronouns at school or even at university…But it’s a very small adjustment for me, personally, to make, isn’t it? Just swapping one word

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Another damn fool tries to erase the existence and needs of women, and thinks she’s progressive for doing it. I wish these people would hurry up and become adults.

I got pregnant four years ago, when I was 26, and had an abortion in my first trimester. At the time, I wasn’t in a position financially or emotionally to be a parent. I was unemployed, and I knew that choosing to have a child would make it very hard to get a job in the near future. I wasn’t in a living situation where I had room for a baby.

I didn’t feel ashamed about having an abortion. It was an easy decision for me. But as a 

… Read the rest

Pink News exclaims

Non-binary people are valid!

In other words…there is no descriptor for non-binary, you just are it.

So…what does the word mean then?

And why are we supposed to care?… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Idolatry.

So, once again: Muslims are people, and as such they can be the targets of bigotry and racism. Islam itself is a set of abstract, philosophical ideas about theology, metaphysics, ethics etc. to which concepts like bigotry and racism don’t apply. It’s perfectly possible to be critical* of the ideas and practices of Islam (not to mention the political ideology of Islamism) for reasons that have nothing to do with what people look like, where they’re from, or who their ancestors were. It’s even possible to oppose Islamists and white racists at the same time.

Whatever’s legitimate about the term “Islamophobia” can be expressed better – because more precisely – … Read the rest

Ari Berman on voting rights in Texas:

Texas law makes it monumentally difficult to register voters…

And voting in Texas could soon get even harder. On Thursday, the GOP-controlled legislature is beginning a special legislative session that will revive a sweeping voter suppression bill that was blocked at the 11th hour in May when Texas House Democrats staged a dramatic walkout before a midnight deadline, denying Republicans the quorum needed to pass it. So Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session to pass new voting restrictions, along with far-right priorities like banning critical race theory and preventing trans-gender athletes from competing in Texas sports. 

He’s wrong on that last one, but anyway.

The voting bill, known as SB7, 

… Read the rest

The hotness was most likely because of hotness.

The searing heat that scorched western Canada and the US at the end of June was “virtually impossible” without climate change, say scientists.

In their study, the team of researchers says that the deadly heatwave was a one-in-a-1,000-year event. But we can expect extreme events such as this to become more common as the world heats up due to climate change.

If humans hadn’t influenced the climate to the extent that they have, the event would have been 150 times less likely. Scientists worry that global heating, largely as a result of burning fossil fuels, is now driving up temperatures faster than models predict.

That is worrying. If it gets too … Read the rest

But why is this political? Why is it right v left? Why is it Republicans v Democrats?

Fox News warns that anyone under age 30 should not get vaccine, attack the left and Fauci for being pro vaccine. https://t.co/3BgksRz4XT pic.twitter.com/7fSh2jwDec

— Angelo Carusone (@GoAngelo) July 8, 2021

It’s not political, it’s technical. The two shouldn’t have anything to do with each other. Either the vaccine protects against the virus or it doesn’t. General vaccination either slows the pandemic or it doesn’t. The vaccine is either safe or not. Those are not political questions. Nobody wants to get the virus, so why is anyone making the issue political?

Is it just because “fuck you, that’s why”? Because it’s so urgent to … Read the rest

Revisiting the quest for a new blasphemy law:

Just hours after Kim Leadbeater took her seat in Parliament, following a campaign dogged by questions about a Batley school teacher forced to go into hiding for showing children a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, [Labour MP Naz] Shah delivered an eyebrow-raising intervention likening such depictions to the vandalism of Winston Churchill’s statue.

This call from a frontbench spokesperson to treat cartoons of Mohammed as equivalent to actual public vandalism has caused something of a belated backlash, amid fears it would mean the restoration of blasphemy laws. Such restrictions were abolished in England, incidentally, by the last Labour government in 2008.  Shah told the Commons:

As a Muslim, for me and millions of Muslims across this country and

… Read the rest

Disgraced loser Donald Trump held a “press conference” today to tell an indifferent world that he’s suing Social Media for not letting him use its platforms to incite a civil war.

The funniest part is the photo, titled Let’s Pretend This Is Still the White House.

He’s at his New Jersey golf club.… Read the rest

Hah!

https://twitter.com/JessDeWahls/status/1412839434635120649… Read the rest