Soraya is pretty obviously right about this.

She is speaking the absolute truth, explaining what most people know, even if they don’t admit it. I’d like to think this would be seen as honest and strong, but I’m doubtful. The biases she’s talking about yield strong negative responses when women defend their own interests. https://t.co/QSm3IhtsMr

— Soraya Chemaly (@schemaly) December 20, 2019

Do we think a woman whose job experience for being president consisted of being a small town mayor would get any traction?

Don’t make me laugh.… Read the rest

Hmmm.

Ardent ally just cannot understand it.

She took a great ruling for trans people, a good news day, and she shit all over it, and made it about her, and I simply don't understand the abject cruelty of that. I never will.

— Aidan Comerford (@AidanCTweets) December 19, 2019

She made it about her? Really? I missed that – I didn’t think it was about her at all, but rather about reality.

Let’s see it again.

Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill

— J.K. Rowling

It’s nice that the discussion is so reasonable, so nuanced, so careful and thoughtful and temperate.

That person has 90 thousand followers.… Read the rest

There’s much buzz about the fact that Billy Graham’s mag Christianity Today says Trump must go.

Much of what it says about why is wrong, of course, but not all of it.

We want CT to be a place that welcomes Christians from across the political spectrum, and reminds everyone that politics is not the end and purpose of our being. We take pride in the fact, for instance, that politics does not dominate our homepage.

That said, we do feel it necessary from time to time to make our own opinions on political matters clear—always, as Graham encouraged us, doing so with both conviction and love. We love and pray for our president, as we love and pray

David Roth on what the Trump aesthetic tells us about the Trump:

As with most things about Trump, there’s not a lot to unpack here. Unrelenting artlessness has been Trump’s signature for as long as he has been a public figure, and that is something that cannot and will not change. The man himself cultivates and inhabits a world of luxury that’s frozen in the 1980s, and he’s spent most of his life doing the same things over and over again. They’re things that, as a friend once put it to me, are what a child thinks a rich person would do, like take a limo to McDonald’s or wear a suit to a baseball game.

Or have a … Read the rest

How does this work in actual life?

Requiring women to call men women “is justified to avoid harassment” of men who call themselves women. The harassment of women who are just women, and who just are women, comes in a very distant second to the harassment of men who say they are women.

This is a judge telling women we have to call men women if the men claim they are women. Not should, not could if we want to be especially kind, but have to.

It feels very churchy, very 16th century churchy, very swear the oath or we light the fires.… Read the rest

It seems Trump is not in a good mood.

Deeply aggrieved by the proceedings and mindful of how they will stain his legacy, Trump spent the 24 hours before the vote on the phone with top officials and Republican lawmakers, according to multiple people familiar with his calls, expressing outrage at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and looking ahead to what his trial in the Senate will look like.

As he watched conservative pundits on television bolster his views, Trump called for religious intervention.

“Send god to help!”

“This shoild never happen to another President again,” he wrote, the misspelling of “should” hardly masking his outrage. “Say a prayer!”

Ok. “Dear god, please let Trump be impeached and convicted, and … Read the rest

Virginia Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger issued a fine statement:

“As a former federal agent and CIA officer, I have spent my professional career in search of facts and evidence—the facts and evidence necessary to uphold the rule of law and protect our national security. Today, I am driven by facts and evidence to protect the integrity of our democracy.

“This week, the House of Representatives will vote on two articles of impeachment. In advance of casting my vote, I have read the articles and studied the evidence—including the majority and minority reports, deposition transcripts, and public testimony.

“The facts are not in dispute; witnesses, including those called by both parties, affirm these facts. The President has abused his power by

Reading The Letter again. Much of it is reworked by the grownups in an attempt to disguise quite how infantile and incapable Trumpbaby is, but he pops up like a jack in the box despite them. Like here:

President Zelensky has repeatedly declared that I did nothing wrong, and that there was No Pressure. 

The grownups would not have said No Pressure. The grownups know that we don’t use capital letters for emphasis in formal writing.

You are unwilling and unable to accept the verdict issued at the ballot box during the great Election of 2016.

The great Election of 2016? What was so great about it? Given the whole Russian interference problem, and the discrepancy between the popular vote … Read the rest

They are BOYS’ socks, dammit. They are masculine socks. They are woven from the finest grass-fed testosterone. They are in BOY COLORS.

They are in STRONG COLORS. Not a pastel among them. Those are MANLY colors. Girls can’t wear colors like that, they can’t carry the weight.

Besides, they have dinosaurs on them. Duh. Girls can’t wear dinosaur socks! What rock do you live under? Girls can wear flower socks, birdy socks, baby bunny socks – not dinosaur socks. Only boys can wear dinosaur socks, because boys can stand up to dinosaurs but girls get squashed by them.

Girls’ socks:

Boys’ socks:

I hope we’ve got all that clear now.… Read the rest

Trump has sent an idiotic “letter” to Speaker Pelosi, to underline how stupid and uncomprehending he really is.

Over six pages, on White House letterhead, the president piles adjectives like cords of wood, fires rhetorical fusillades in all directions and invokes the judgement of the American people, the nation’s founding fathers and history itself.

As if we hadn’t been judging him all along. He’s given us bales of evidence, and we’ve made our judgement: he’s a disaster in almost every category one can think of. (Possible exceptions: he’s probably not a literal pollutant; he hasn’t so far burned down the White House.)

Here are five choice lines from a president whose capacity for the extraordinary and unprecedented is ever-expanding.