Awww Donnie wanted to make it that the mean woman (not his actual language) couldn’t sue him for defaming her because he’s Too Important and Federal, and the judge says he can’t.

A federal judge on Tuesday denied the Justice Department’s effort to effectively end a defamation lawsuit against President Donald Trump brought by a longtime magazine columnist who has alleged he raped her in a luxury department store dressing room, paving the way for the case to proceed.

The DOJ had sought to intervene in the case and substitute itself as defendant in the lawsuit filed by E. Jean Carroll, a move that likely would have curbed the proceedings, since the federal government can’t be sued for defamation.

Quite a hail Mary. How could the DOJ be the defendant? It was Don the Grabber who said Carroll lied, and he didn’t say it as part of his job with the government, he said it as the lying grabbing little shit he is.

Shortly after Carroll’s allegations became public, Trump denied them, telling reporters, “She’s not my type,” and accusing Carroll of lying to boost her book sales.

The DOJ has fallen very far under Sessions and Barr but not that far.

In a 61-page opinion, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that Trump “is not an ’employee of the Government,’ as Congress defined that term,” and therefore the lawsuit isn’t, as the Justice Department argued, against the United States.

This means he can be sued.

The Carroll case is one of a litany of legal threats posed to Trump, many of which are likely to escalate if he loses the presidential election next week.

Fingers crossed.

In his opinion, Kaplan also rejected the Justice Department’s argument that Trump’s statements regarding Carroll were made within the scope of his employment, writing, “while commenting on the operation of government is part of the regular business of the United States, commenting on sexual assault allegations unrelated to the operation of government is not.”

Good to know!

On Tuesday, Carroll said she was gratified by the outcome. “When I spoke out about what Donald Trump did to me in a department store dressing room, I was speaking out against an individual,” she said. “When Donald Trump called me a liar and denied that he had ever met me, he was not speaking on behalf of the United States.”

He was speaking on behalf of his scummy little self.

Once again people lose their damn minds over a long-dead guy who called himself a “prophet.”

Tens of thousands of people have marched through the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, demanding a boycott of French goods amid a row over France’s tougher stance on radical Islam. They burned an effigy of President Emmanuel Macron, who has defended cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Police blocked the marchers from reaching the French embassy. Mr Macron has become a target in several Muslim-majority countries after his defence of French secularism.

Muhammad is gone; he’s been gone for centuries. There are more important things to worry about.

On Monday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also called for a boycott of French goods. In a televised speech, he said Muslims were now “subjected to a lynch campaign similar to that against Jews in Europe before World War II”. He said “European leaders should tell the French president to stop his hate campaign”.

But there is no lynch campaign. It’s the teacher who was murdered.

Humans: wasting their time on gods and prophets while children go hungry.

The student inquisitors had Kevin Price in their sights a month ago:

Cambridge University Liberal Association (CULA) released a statement last Sunday (27/09) condemning the “shocking and pervasive” transphobia among leading members of the Cambridge Labour Party, including prominent councillors.

“Liberal”! Ha!

The statement accuses the Cambridge Labour Party, who currently control Cambridge City Council, of “tolerating a stream of transphobia by leading members of its council group.”

CULA particularly highlights that the Labour Party have failed “to take action against former Cambridge Deputy Leader, Councillor Kevin Price, who has been regularly retweeting anti-trans content for at least six months.”

Except of course the content is not “anti-trans,” it’s pro-truth.

Price has retweeted accounts which call trans people “fetishists” and describe the phrase ‘transwomen are women’ as a “mindless cult statement.”

That’s because it is. Trans women are in fact men, men who say they “feel like” women or “identify as” women. That’s what the label “trans women” means. It is both mindless and cultish to insist that they are also women, literally women, women in fact as well as fantasy.

Similarly to Price’s endorsing of transphobic tweets, Labour councillor Carina O’Reilly in June tweeted the following: “‘Woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain.”

And? It’s the truth, after all. The word “woman” is not any of those things.

A CULA press release also outlined that Price has liked tweets promoting a crowdfunder created by former Cambridge Labour councillor, Ann Sinnott, “which seeks to challenge the right of trans women to access women’s spaces and services.” The crowdfunder, at the time of publication, has raised over £40,000.

And? Women need women-only spaces, and trans women should not try to force women to share those spaces.

CULA condemned “the failure of the Labour group to stand with the trans community”, commenting that “transphobia in Cambridge Labour appears to be rife – permeating every level of the group.”

CULA emphasised that “no action has been taken by the Labour group towards Price or O’Reilly, the former of whom, until recently, occupied a top leadership role before deciding to step down…CULA call on Cambridge Labour to suspend these councillors for their hateful statements which attack the safety of their constituents.”

Liberal! Ha!

James Kirkup has more on the persecution of Kevin Price:

Mr Price is now facing the sort of ‘hostile response’ he spoke about – calls for his employer to dismiss him from his job, because of his thoughts on sex and gender and ultimately, because of his reluctance to say the holy words.

According to Varsity, a student paper, the Union of Clare Students has condemned him and demanded the college authorities act against him. By discussing issues of policy and law at a council meeting, Mr Price had jeopardised the ‘safety’ of the college’s trans and non-binary students, the union suggested in a statement.

Varsity further quotes one Clare student as saying Price is ‘unfit both to hold public office and to be in a position of responsibility over students.’

Now, I didn’t go to Oxbridge and I’m not much for Marxist analysis of society as a class struggle. But I know enough about both to suggest that there’s something both distasteful and revealing about a bunch of Cambridge undergraduates threatening the livelihood of a man employed to serve them because he refuses to share their opinions and adopt their language.

More on those Clare students:

In light of the recent revelations, the Union of Clare Students (UCS) released a statement affirming that “trans people deserve to feel safe and valued within Clare”, and that “our priority is to protect the welfare of Clare’s trans and non-binary community, ensuring that they feel not only safe but also empowered by the College they attend”.

Condemning Price, who is currently continuing his duties at the College, the UCS stated that Price has shown “a brazen contempt for the rights and dignity of trans and non-binary people”. They reassured students that “the UCS and MCR are currently in communication with the College on how best to resolve this situation while centring trans and non-binary students”, and that “the Senior Tutor is meeting with Price personally”.

So the UCS doesn’t pause at lying about Kevin Price. He didn’t show “a brazen contempt” for the rights and dignity of anyone.

The UCS’ LGBT+ Officer Frankie Kendal emphasised that “at Clare, we have a small but vibrant trans and non-binary community that should not only feel safe but feel celebrated”, furthering that for as long as Price continues to perpetuate transphobic views, “trans and non-binary students should not have to interact or rely on him for support in any way”.

In other words he should be fired.

Kendal, who is also a Trans and Non-Binary Rep on the Cambridge SU LGBT+ Campaign, furthermore highlighted that “the handling of this situation highlights that transphobia runs much deeper than a singular Twitter feed”.

Kendal denounced the College’s failure to make students aware of Price’s conduct when his Tweets were unearthed last month, alongside Council members mourning Kevin’s resignation “but not denouncing his transphobia” and “the way CULA used his original comments as a partisan campaigning tool”. Kendal affirmed that all these instances show a continued “failure to centre trans people”, alongside the fact that trans students “are not being prioritised as they should be”.

Why is there a need to “center” trans people? Why should trans students be “prioritized”?

Victoria Longstaff, former SU Women’s Campaign Trans Rep and Clare student, commented that Price is “unfit both to hold public office and to be in a position of responsibility over students” in light of his views. She added that transgender students relying on him in his position as a Clare porter is “a potential risk”, furthering that because of this she “must support either his resignation or his suspension from his duties at the college”.

There you go. Take his job away; ruin his life; persecute him for failure to Center and Prioritize trans people.

It’s disordered personalities run amok.

Now we go from Edinburgh students to Cambridge students:

A Labour councillor of 10 years and former deputy leader at Cambridge City Council has resigned over a motion on transgender rights.

The motion, brought by the Liberal Democrats to a session of the full council on Thursday (October 22), began with the words: “Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Non-binary individuals are non-binary.”

In other words the brainless reality-denying mantra that people are being forced to agree to or be shunned and possibly fired. This situation is grotesque – that people are being forced, on pain of losing their jobs and facing persecution, to say they agree with a stupid reality-denying lie.

The mantra being forced on people is not “Nobody should be shunned or fired or bullied for failing to obey gender stereotypes.” The mantra being forced on people requires them to agree that men are women and women are men. It’s like something out of a crude satire.

The ruling Labour group supported an amended version of the motion, which started with the three same sentences and received majority support.

Kevin Price , who represented King’s Hedges for the Labour party, said he could not support those words, saying they would “send a chill down the spines” of “many women,” and saying it is “foolish to pretend” there are not widely different views or concerns about women’s rights.

He said he has not voted against a Labour motion in his 10 years on the council, and said he did not intend to break that “principle”, and instead announced his resignation to the meeting, saying there are times when conscience “must be weighed against the pull of party”.

He also said that obviously trans rights are human rights.

But he added: “The inclusion of the first three sentences of this motion will send a chill down the spines of the many women who believe there is a conflict of rights and who want to be able to discuss those in a calm and evidenced-based way, as indeed was shown by world rugby in its recent decision to exclude transgender women in those areas of the sport which it controls on the grounds of safety and fairness for women.”

Dude’s been listening. Good man. I wish more would.

He said it is “foolish to pretend that there are not widely differing views in the current debate or that many people, especially women, are [not] concerned about the impact on women’s sex-based rights from changes both in legislation and within society and who fear, not only that those rights are under threat, but that they are unable to raise legitimate questions and concerns without a hostile response. The treatment of Rosie Duffield and JK Rowling has made clear that those concerns are well founded.”

By all accounts he was an excellent councillor, who got things done.

Lib Dem councillor Markus Gehring said: “I feel very sad that Cllr Price had to decide to resign rather than supporting what is a fundamental right, what is a human right for all people. I’m not fully understanding his motivation because I think inclusiveness is all over this motion.”

It is not a fundamental human right to force people to agree that you are what you are not. It was not the Inquisition’s fundamental human right to force Galileo to recant, and it’s not anyone’s fundamental human right to force people to agree that men are women if they say they are.

Then comes an absolute torrent of patronizing stupid:

Labour councillor Dave Baigent said he was in favour of the motion but expressed sympathy for those who struggle with change.

He said: “I respect people and listen to people who have difficulty with change, so I appreciate my comrade who has just resigned from the Labour Party for doing something because he wasn’t prepared to vote against what the Labour Party was suggesting, nor would I.

“That trans men are men and trans women are women is something that comes automatically to me because I have spent 30 to 40 years of my life fighting for people’s equality.”

It’s not about equality. The mantra is not “trans people have a right to equality with everyone else,” the mantra is transwomenarewomen and transmenaremen. Those are different claims; they are different kinds of claims. The first is political or philosophical, the second is ontological.

He said he has seen a range of changes as different groups battled for equality during his lifetime. He added: “It’s a very difficult area when things change in your life and your whole belief system is changed, so I understand people with difficulties over trans change, because I watched in 1965 when people said that black people were equal and people around me just couldn’t believe it, and I found that very hard at that time and I find it hard now that people have difficulty, but people do have difficulty.”

ARRRGGHH. Not the same. Price is not saying trans people are not equal and he’s not “having difficulty” believing trans people are equal. Pay attention.

It’s a damn tragedy that he had to resign.

They’ve found another witch.

The statement via Facebook:

Edinburgh Labour Students strongly condemns the recent behaviour of our University Rector, Labour NEC Equalities Chair and NEC candidate Ann Henderson. There is evidence that Ann attended a Woman’s Place UK meeting two weeks ago, whereby she made a comment implying that the party rulebook should require members to state their birth/legal sex for official party records. Such a comment implies opposition to self-identification as a principle; yet, self-identification is a principle that the Labour Party officially supports.

In August 2018, we reached out to Ann as she failed to comment or respond to concerns from a Labour Party member as to why she followed Woman’s Place UK on twitter. From our statement back in 2018, Woman’s Place: ‘… is a group that has referred to trans youth as mutilated/sexual predators, encouraged educators to treat trans youth as mentally ill and repeatedly referred to trans women as violent men, ‘parasites’ and rapists.’ As well as historically sharing material described as transphobic, Ann’s recent behaviour actively demonstrates a continuation of transphobic behaviour.

Transphobia has no place in the Labour Party. We will continue to do all that we can so that the trans community are not prejudiced against by those in positions of power. As Ann continues to engage in such behaviour, we wish to reiterate that we unequivocally do not support Ann holding office at our University, The University of Edinburgh, nor the Labour Party.

We have reached out to Ann to confirm her attendance and comments during this meeting, and we urge Labour Party members not to vote for Ann in the upcoming NEC elections if we want a Labour Party welcoming of, and inclusive of, the trans community.

Bullying is the new socialism.

Erase erase erase erase.

There’s a Twitter account named FemCare Community Health Initiative. It’s a puzzle that it hasn’t done something about that “Fem” yet, because elsewhere they’ve been scrubbing dutifully.

A menstruator doesn’t menstruate during pregnancy, so is it still virtuous to call her a menstruator?

Stupid menstruator. They’re so incompetent, having all these miscarriages all over the place. Clearly FemCare is the wrong name altogether, it should be MenCare.

These “revolutions” keep happening because…the problem never goes away.

For women and girls in Egypt, sexual assault has long been endemic – but victims are now fighting back like never before, writes Salma El-Wardany.

Except we’ve heard that before.

It began in July when claims were shared online against student Ahmed Bassam Zaki. Nadeen Ashraf, a 22-year-old fellow student, set up the Instagram account Assault Police to share these allegations and received an outpouring of messages from women claiming that Ahmed Bassam Zaki had blackmailed, assaulted, harassed and raped them.

Within days he was arrested and is on trial charged with “sexually assaulting three girls under the age of 18 and threatening them, along with blackmailing a fourth girl”. He denies the charges.

…

Nadeen was overwhelmed with the reaction and speed of progress. She said “within weeks there was a new law that was introduced in parliament to protect women’s identities when they’re in crimes of a sexual nature”.

The sexual assault of one particular activist, Sabah Khodir, was so harrowing that it drove her to leave the country and move to the US last year.

Still, Sabah has been instrumental in helping women coming forward, putting them in touch with lawyers and therapists, and is now seeing her efforts rewarded.

Earlier this year the highest religious authority in the land, Al-Azhar Mosque, released a statement in support of women, declaring that a woman’s clothing is never a justification for assault.

Weird that anyone has to be told that.

Erdoğan says Macron is crazy for not being a fan of political Islam.

France has recalled its ambassador to Turkey for consultations after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan insulted his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron.

He said Mr Macron needed a mental health check for pledging to defend secular values and fight radical Islam.

Mr Macron has spoken out forcefully on these issues after a French teacher was murdered for showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class.

That is, for showing cartoons of Mo as part of a class on freedom of speech. The BBC should have included that instead of making it sound as if Paty showed the cartoons just for the hell of it.

Depictions of the Prophet Muhammad can cause serious offence to Muslims because Islamic tradition explicitly forbids images of Muhammad and Allah (God).

Islamic tradition can forbid what it likes but it’s not the boss of all of us. Paty was teaching a class in a school, not a madrassa; we are not required to obey Islamic tradition.

But state secularism – or laïcité – is central to France’s national identity. Curbing freedom of expression to protect the feelings of one particular community, the state says, undermines the country’s unity.

It’s not a “community,” it’s a religion. Calling it a “community” is manipulative.

Responding to Mr Macron’s campaign to defend such values – which began before the teacher was murdered – Mr Erdogan asked in a speech: “What’s the problem of the individual called Macron with Islam and with the Muslims?”

He added: “Macron needs treatment on a mental level. What else can be said to a head of state who does not understand freedom of belief and who behaves in this way to millions of people living in his country who are members of a different faith?”

Erdoğan is the one who is not understanding freedom of belief here. Freedom of belief includes not believing in any god, and it includes freedom of questioning, discussion, analysis, doubt, disbelief, non-belief.

Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books on William Barr’s passion for authoritarianism:

There is, however, a very strong connection between Donald Barr’s hard-line Catholicism and [his son] William Barr’s present position as the main (perhaps the sole) intellectual buttress of Trump’s presidency. That connection lies in the idea of authority. Authoritarian rule is a defining feature of hierarchical institutional Catholicism. The magisterium of the church flows from the pope, who, on matters of faith and morals, may create doctrines that are infallible and therefore unquestionable. These include the bans on contraception, divorce, abortion, homosexual sex, and same-sex marriage. As a devout Catholic with links to the powerful Opus Dei movement, which galvanized the successful reaction against the liberalizing currents within the church, Barr holds to these principles as both articles of religious faith and bulwarks of the social order. In this, he is a central figure in the ever-growing influence of right-wing Catholicism under Trump, demonstrated yet again in his nomination of Barrett to the Supreme Court.

It’s such a fundamentally stupid idea, too. Why should one person – male person, of course – have absolute authority of any kind? Especially universal authority of the type the Catholic church thinks it has?

Oh, you know, it’s because he speaks for god, and god makes sure he stays infallible, and blah blah blah. But none of that is true, and there’s no real reason to think it is true, there is only the fact that lotsa people believed it before so who are we to stop believing it now? Which is stupid, and not a real reason. Popes are just guys, elevated by other guys, and called infallible by their brotherhood of guys, who relieve the misery of celibacy by raping children. Barr’s beliefs are stupid and infantile.

Barr’s understanding of executive authority is no more a matter of constitutional reasoning than a zealous Catholic’s acceptance of papal infallibility is a result of cool biblical analysis. It is a matter of faith.

And faith is another form of absolute authority. There’s a pattern here.

What must be understood about Barr is that he is not a lawyer in the political arena. He is a political ideologue and operative who happens to function through the law.

…

His function in public life, as he has always understood it, is to provide legal justification for the untrammeled exercise of power by Republican presidents. And for all his air of gravity, Barr is utterly shameless in his pursuit of this calling. He is willing to lie to the American people and to flout the very principles he claims to uphold.

I guess the takeaway is that Barr is an absolutist Republican because Republicans are more reliably authoritarian than Democrats.

H/t Tim Harris

Hugh Schofield at the BBC wrote a piece last January on a tv confrontation in 1990 between a Paris literary dude who boasted of “seducing” young girls and a woman who pointed out it wasn’t something to boast of.

The footage can easily be found on the internet. In a jocular tone the programme’s respected presenter, Bernard Pivot, asks Matzneff (then aged 53) what it is like to be a serial “collector of young chicks”.

All bald-headed suaveness, Matzneff explains how he prefers school-age girls who have yet to be “hardened” by disillusionment over men. He says they come to him because he listens and takes them seriously.

The panel nods understandingly. A Catholic woman who is there to defend fidelity in marriage laughs, as if at a charmingly naughty child.

But then Pivot turns to a woman who has so far been silent, a Canadian writer called Denise Bombardier, and the atmosphere suddenly changes.

“I feel like I am living on a different planet,” says Bombardier coldly. And she launches into a devastating attack on her neighbour.

Does he not understand anything about the rights of children, she asks. Has it never occurred to him that these young girls may end up damaged?

But the intellectuals of Paris gave her a hard time, not him. Imagine my surprise.

She had been warned by her publisher that attacking Matzneff would not go down well – and so it proved.

In newspaper articles she was described as “frustrated” and a “bitch” (the French is even more obscene).

“So (Bombardier) has discovered that in the year 1990 girls of 15 make love to men who are 30 years older than they are! Well, big deal!” wrote one critic.

Ah yes, girls of 15 “make love” to men of 45 – aka men of 45 rape girls of 15. It’s all in your point of view, eh what?

But what interested me was the “how times have changed” bit.

It is a measure of the extraordinary rapidity of moral change in our times that none of this could conceivably happen today.

By no stretch of the imagination could a contemporary author write so blithely of his seduction of underage girls – and, in Matzneff’s case, of boys too.

And even if he did, there would certainly be no-one leaping to his defence, accusing his detractors – like they accused Bombardier 30 years ago – of reactionary neo-Puritanism and failing to understand the wellsprings of teenage sexuality.

Ohhhhhhh yes there would. There would be the “sex-positive” types who do in fact very much accuse critics of reactionary Puritanism, and there would be the likes of Peter Tatchell and NAMBLA.

There is moral change but there’s also a lot of two steps back.

That’s how to do it.

Protesters have disrupted church services across Poland in the latest show of discontent against a court’s near-total ban on abortion. The protesters staged sit-ins and held pro-abortion banners, interrupting Sunday Mass at some churches.

The protests are considered unusual in a country where the Roman Catholic church has great influence. They follow a ruling by Poland’s top court that ending the life of a deformed foetus is unconstitutional.

…

Poland’s abortion laws were already among the strictest in Europe, with an estimated 100,000 women seeking a termination abroad each year to get around the tight restrictions.

The Catholic church as an institution hates women, whatever some nuns and priests may think.

In a park in Krakow, black underwear was hung up on lines between trees, while in Lodz, there was a protest in front of the city’s cathedral, where people called for a separation of church and state. Critics of the Catholic Church argue that it exerts too much political influence over government policy in Poland.

It’s like that here in the US, too. The Catholic church exerts way too much influence, especially over women and their bodies and their rights.

“I’m here today because it annoys me that in a secular country the church decides for me what rights I have, what I can do and what I’m not allowed to do,” one 26-year-old protester, Julia Miotk, told Reuters news agency.

It is indeed annoying.

The Sydney Morning Herald tells us:

Four in ten young men do not consider punching and hitting to constitute domestic violence, a national survey has found.

The survey of 1074 adults for anti-violence campaign group White Ribbon found 42 per cent of men aged 18 to 34 did not consider “hitting, punching or restraining” another person to be “a type of domestic violence”.

Were they raised by wolves? In what world is punching not violence? Also in what world is it ok for men to hit women?

The research found older men were more likely to recognise domestic violence. The proportion of men who did not consider hitting and punching to be domestic violence dropped to less than a third of men aged 35 to 54, and just 3 per cent of those aged over 55. Nearly nine out of 10 men aged over 55 also agreed non-consensual sex was domestic violence.

You wouldn’t think it would take that long to learn.

Originally a comment by Omar on Here for you.

It is at times like this that I am reminded how improbable our individual lives are against the backdrop of human history and evolutionary biology.

My maternal great-grandmother Mary-Ann Connor was a refugee from the Irish potato ‘famine’ of the 1840s, when social arrangements in Ireland somehow resulted in the export of a large part of its agricultural produce. She went as a refugee to New Zealand, where by chance she met my great grandfather, who was a sailor.

Mary-Ann had eleven children in all, ten of whom died in infancy: probably of TB, which was raging at the time. My grandmother was the only survivor of those eleven children. The grief must have been paralysing.

Added to that, to produce any one of us blogging here today, at every generation the right sperm cell has to meet the right ovum, with infinitesimal chance of that happening, to produce this, the only reality we will ever have, and arguably, despite Trump etc., the best of all possible worlds.

In a word: no.

Join a man who is roleplaying a woman for a discussion of the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed amendment to the US Constitution to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex, in other words to remove women from second-class status. There are plenty of women who can discuss the rights of women, there is no need to turn to men who are roleplaying women instead of actual women. There is no need to do that, and it’s spitting in the faces of women to do that.

That’s all the more true since back when “Charlotte” Clymer was Charles Clymer he was pretty notorious as a male feminist who bullied women.

So who is Charles Clymer? Clymer, who self-identifies as a Feminist Leader, has a Women for Equality Facebook page (which now seems mostly defunct) where he’s been alleged to verbally attack women as well as accused of deleting women’s comments who disagree with him. In an article for the Huffington Post last year, Darlena Cunha reported that a former moderator of his page, Zoe Katherine, disagreed with him and then was threatened with being kicked out of the group. “If we did it privately we were guilt-tripped, or simply ignored,” Katherine explained.

One commenter on the page, Stephanie Kay, described her exchange with Clymer to be equally as dismissive, but explained that she got this cake-topper of a response from Clymer:

“Stephanie, I’m going to let you in on a little secret that, apparently, no one has had the guts to tell you up to this point in your life: having a vagina does not grant you magical powers of perception and nuance anymore than my penis magically blinds me from the horrors of the world.”

Ah you can see the embryonic trans woman right there, clear as day – a better woman than you mere vagina-having women will ever be.

 Clymer desperately wants to be in the feminist spotlight. Read through his Twitter feed and you’ll find what seems like a lovely person, an “army vet and feminist” who tweets about all of the right topics: Ferguson, making research count for women, about rape threat investigations. His Twitter profile is a black-and-white of a young Gloria Steinem and her cat. He is expressing to you, he is demanding that you understand: Charles Clymer is dedicated to the cause of feminism and you and your magical vagina are going to believe him, like it or not.

That was 2014. How things change.

They were what?

“A federal health agency halted a public-service coronavirus advertising campaign funded by $250 million in taxpayer money after it offered a special vaccine deal to an unusual set of essential workers: Santa Claus performers,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“As part of the plan, a top Trump administration official wanted the Santa performers to promote the benefits of a Covid-19 vaccination and, in exchange, offered them early vaccine access ahead of the general public, according to audio recordings. Those who perform as Mrs. Claus and elves also would have been included.”

They…you…what…

They can’t even do things in a non-criminal way when there’s no need for the criminality!

“Listen up, Santa dude – promote the vaccine or we’ll burn your house down – no, wait, wrong script – promote the vaccine and we’ll put you at the head of the line.”

“No need, Mister Ambassador, I’m happy to promote the vaccine.”

“Listen here, you, take the deal or we’ll burn your house down!”

The White House chief of staff is fine with all this coronavirus-defying:

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows defended Vice President Pence’s decision to continue traveling and campaigning despite his exposure to staff who have tested positive for COVID-19, saying Sunday that Pence is exempt from CDC guidelines because he is “essential personnel.”

But is campaigning essential activity?

Meadows told CNN that “we are not going to control the pandemic,” dismissing the notion that the appropriate COVID policy should be to “quarantine all of America.” Instead, Meadows argued, the focus should be on developing vaccines and therapeutics “to give Americans the relief that this is not a death sentence.”

And in the meantime it’s fine to infect people by the thousands.

MEADOWS: “We are not going to control the pandemic. We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas — “

JAKE TAPPER: “Why not get control of the pandemic?”

MEADOWS: “Because it is a contagious virus just like the flu.”

TAPPER: “But why not make efforts to contain it?”

MEADOWS: “Well we are making efforts to contain it.”

TAPPER: “By running all over the country and not wearing a mask? That’s what the vice president is doing.”

He’s essential activity!

So Pence’s staff is riddled with coronavirus.

At least five people in Vice President Mike Pence’s orbit have tested positive for coronavirus in recent days, including chief of staff Marc Short and outside adviser Marty Obst, a source familiar with the situation told CNN.

…

Despite the slew of coronavirus cases around him, Pence — who is the head of the White House’s coronavirus task force — is not quarantining, as per US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. Instead, he plans to continue traveling and campaigning in the final stretch to Election Day.

Because, you know, the hell with CDC guidelines, the hell with safety, the hell with everything except the self-interest of Trump and his dummy.

The developments raise new questions about safety protocols and transparency within the White House as the pandemic has killed more than 224,000 Americans.

Questions like: “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

The news comes just over a week before Election Day amid a blitz of campaign stops for Pence, who leads the White House coronavirus task force, including the vice president’s trips to Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire in the last week.

Pandemic or no pandemic! Skyrocketing rate of new infections or not! Winning is all!

“Today, Marc Short, Chief of Staff to the Vice President, tested positive for COVID-19, began quarantine and assisting in the contact tracing process,” Pence’s press secretary Devin O’Malley said in a statement Saturday. “Vice President Pence and Mrs. Pence both tested negative for COVID-19 today, and remain in good health.”

The statement continued, “While Vice President Pence is considered a close contact with Mr. Short, in consultation with the White House Medical Unit, the Vice President will maintain his schedule in accordance with the CDC guidelines for essential personnel.”

Uh huh. I’m sure the CDC guidelines say that campaigning for office is essential and well worth infecting thousands of people.

As President Donald Trump returned to Washington shortly after midnight from campaign appearances in Ohio, he said he had heard about Short’s diagnosis.

“He’s going to be fine. But he’s quarantining,” Trump said.

Typical Trump. He doesn’t know that Short is going to be fine; he has no way of knowing that. I’m so sick of people who claim to know things they can’t possibly know.

Short has been seen on the campaign trail actively eschewing the use of masks for months, including earlier this week traveling aboard Air Force Two. Neither Pence nor Short wore a mask on Pence’s trip on Thursday and Friday. As chief of staff to Pence, Short has been a key aide involved with the US coronavirus response. He has been reported to have advocated for an economy-first approach to the pandemic.

That is, a let-the-pandemic-rage approach to the pandemic. From the people in charge of the pandemic. Brilliant.

Short was a driving force against following the advice of the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, on the pandemic, a source familiar with discussions inside the coronavirus task force told CNN. Short would routinely push back on Fauci during task force meetings, believing the doctor’s concerns about Covid-19 were overblown, the source said. That attitude was prevalent throughout much of the Pence team, according to the source.

Well it’s easy to see why they would think Fauci’s concerns were overblown, if they never ever looked at the numbers.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued guidance that says people should stay home for 14 days after having contact with a person who has Covid-19.

Yebbut they’re just civil servants, who should probably all be fired.

Despite Pence being in close contact with Short as recently as Friday, the vice president plans to continue campaigning. Late Saturday, the vice president’s office released his schedule for Sunday, which includes more travel and remarks at a campaign rally in North Carolina.

Remember: this is the guy in charge of the coronavirus task force. I guess that means in charge of making sure it doesn’t do anything.

This one really struck a nerve. Not in a good way.

Sands is here for you, but not so here that it will call you a mother instead of a “birthing parent” (or a father instead of a “non-birthing parent”).

The replies are genuinely painful to read.