Originally a comment by Claire on God’s instrument.

To: God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit

CC; Archangel Michael

Sir,

I am writing to gain some clarity on the proclamations made by your emissaries here on Earth. Previously we had been led to understand that Barack Obama had gained the presidency by nefarious means such as getting more votes etc and was installed against your will. In office we were further informed by Metatron, the Voice of God, also known as Fox News that President Obama committed hideous crimes in office, such as wearing a tan suit, eating fancy mustard, being good at singing and worst of all, improving access to healthcare.

Obviously we understand that President Trump is your Chosen One, as evidenced by his moral and unimpeachable conduct such as conducting affairs with porn stars and sexually assaulting women, lying, cheating, money-laundering and so on. His divine mission to lower taxes on the top 1% and to sell out the US to Your Favored dictators such as Mr Putin of Russia is progressing as planned.

However, we are now given to understand that in contrast to previous statements, Mr Obama was in fact allowed to ascend the presidency, if not explicitly planned by you. We remain confused about whether Mr Obama is in fact Lucifer, the Great Adversary with his hand-maiden, the anti-Christ Hilary Clinton and as such should shunned and excoriated, or whether he in fact was part of the greater plan to get the new Messiah elected to the presidency in order to bring about the End Times.

If you could please respond in the usual means through your prophets here on Earth in the next 10 business days, I will be able to proceed with the Divine Plan of welcoming Russia’s help in the election and ensuring President Obama, Secretary Clinton and her hordes of demons are sent back to Hell or Benghazi whichever is most convenient.

Yours etc.

Secretary for Energy, Rick Perry and Attorney-General Bill Barr

Speaking of women, and why they need to be able to organize and meet as women, today is International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

“Sexual violence against women and girls is rooted in centuries of male domination. Let us not forget that the gender inequalities that fuel rape culture are essentially a question of power imbalances.” — UN Secretary-General António Guterres

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is one of the most widespread, persistent and devastating human rights violations in our world today [and] remains largely unreported due to the impunity, silence, stigma and shame surrounding it.

In general terms, it manifests itself in physical, sexual and psychological forms, encompassing:

• intimate partner violence (battering, psychological abuse, marital rape, femicide);
• sexual violence and harassment (rape, forced sexual acts, unwanted sexual advances, child sexual abuse, forced marriage, street harassment, stalking, cyber- harassment);
• human trafficking (slavery, sexual exploitation);
• female genital mutilation; and
• child marriage.

To further clarify, the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women issued by the UN General Assembly in 1993, defines violence against women as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.”

That should be sex-based violence, but you get the drift.

Oh good god. The BC NDP Women’s Rights Committe proudly announces its own suicide:

Hugs, tears and cheers as — after many passionate conversations — we have voted to approve a historical name and constitutional change today! We’ll now be known as the Women’s and Gendered Rights Committee. Changing our constitution to welcome in two-spirit, non binary and gender nonconforming folks.

#intersectionalfeminism #biggertents

Yaaaaaay hooray hooray hooray yet another thing women don’t get to have for themselves but have to share with men who call themselves “two-spirit” or non binary or gender nonconforming – which basically means all men, because anyone can simply say “I’m gender nonconforming.” So haha yay women don’t get to organize as women any more, so go home bitches!

There are, as you might expect, many critical comments, which the committee replied to with more infuriating bullshit:

We are proud to continue to do good work supporting women. Our resolutions this year included asks that covered everything from Period Promise to abortion rights and safety to increasing access to legal aid. We have proudly, for years, included space for trans women. Because they are women. And we were proud this weekend to make a few more people feel welcome.

We will continue to make safe space for women. It will continue to be a space free of those who use the him/his pronouns. We are proud to be inclusive of other folks for whom gender has been cause of their discrimination and lack of safety. And we will continue to support those in our community who need it most and advocate on the issues that affect people.

So what are they going to do, confirm all members’ use of pronouns? How would they even go about that? They won’t, will they – it will just be a matter of self-declaration. Anyway even if Joe with the beard and the habit of talking over women does use eccentric pronouns, what’s that got to do with women’s need to organize and meet as women?

Not one god damn thing.

Rick Perry says it’s god’s plan.

Like a lot of evangelical Christians, Energy Secretary Rick Perry believes in a God who gets involved in every aspect of our lives — including the election of Donald Trump as President.

“I’m a big believer that the God of our universe is still very active in the details of the day-to-day lives of government,” Perry told Fox News in remarks aired on Sunday.

“You know, Barack Obama doesn’t get to be the President of the United Sates without being ordained by God. Neither did Donald Trump.”

Perry went on to say that being God’s instrument on Earth doesn’t mean that Trump is a perfect person. Echoing the argument of other white evangelical Christians, the Texas Republican went on to cite several biblical figures, including King David, whose private lives didn’t always align with biblical standards.

Never mind about “private lives,” which is code for extramarital sex. The issue goes way beyond “private life.” Trump is transparently and unavoidably a very bad man in every way – mean, greedy, selfish, callous, a bully, a liar, a thief, corrupt, ruthless, ignorant, willful, reckless – there is nothing good about him. If that’s ordained by god then god is a shit.

Anyway that claim is just a handy way to excuse anything and everything, which basically means we can’t make any moral judgments at all. If this walking shouting textbook of all that is evil can be explained away as God’s Plan then so can anything.

Ekemini Uwan, a public theologian and a co-host of the podcast “Truth’s Table,” told CNN in February that Trump’s election was not exactly an answer to her prayers.

Uwan said she believes that God is supremely in control of the entire universe, from the smallest atoms to American politics.

“We can’t say that it’s not God’s will for Donald Trump to be president, because he is the president,” she said.

But the theologian draws a distinction between God’s sovereignty and God’s approval. That is, what God allows to happen is not the same thing as what God wants to happen.

Cheap. Cheap cheap cheap, and glib, and easy, and worthless. The hell with it.

The latest oops is a mass of documentation that the Trump people tried hard to find a rug big enough to cover everything.

Internal emails show that the White House scrambled to come up with a justification for freezing the money [for military aid for Ukraine] just days after the White House Counsel’s Office was told that an anonymous CIA official had filed a complaint with the agency’s general counsel concerning the president’s July 25 phone call, suggesting people on the inside knew they were fucked.

The Washington Post reports that a confidential White House review of Trump’s decision to put a hold on aid to Ukraine has “turned up hundreds of documents that reveal extensive efforts to generate an after-the-fact justification for the decision and a debate over whether the delay was legal.” In early August, for example, email exchanges show acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney asking acting Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought to provide and update on the legal rationale for holding up the aid and how much longer it could be delayed.

Yo Russ, will you please get off your ass and come up with this fig leaf for us before we all fry.

Vanity Fair quoting the Post:

Mulvaney’s request for information came days after the White House Counsel’s Office was put on notice that an anonymous CIA official had made a complaint to the agency’s general counsel about Trump’s July 25 call to Volodymyr Zelensky during which he requested Ukraine investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, as well as an unfounded theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. This official would later file a whistle-blower complaint with the intelligence community’s inspector general, which ignited the impeachment push when its existence became public.

Pliny on the grim truth:

Let’s see, who’s an easy group to exploit? Oh I know: prisoners! Yeah, let’s exploit them, because we can.

Inmates at several West Virginia prisons are getting free electronic tablets to read books, send emails, and communicate with their families—but there’s a catch.

Any inmates looking to read Moby Dick may find that it will cost them far more than it would have if they’d simply gotten a mass market paperback, because the tablets charge readers by the minute.

Under a 2019 contract between the West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation (WVDCR) and Global Tel Link (GTL), the company that is providing electronic multimedia tablets to 10 West Virginia prisons, inmates will be charged 3 cents a minute to read books, even though the books all come from Project Gutenberg, a free online library of more than 60,000 texts in the public domain.

Win-win! The content is all free and the company gets to charge for it!

[T]he Appalachian Prison Book Project, a nonprofit that offers free books and education to inmates, says the fee structure is exploitative.

“If you pause to think or reflect, that will cost you,” says Katy Ryan, the group’s founder and educational coordinator. “If you want to reread a book, you will pay the entire cost again. This is about generating revenue for the state and profit for the industry. Tablets under non-predatory terms could be a very good thing inside prisons. GTL does not provide that.”

According to the contract, using the tablets will cost $0.05 per minute (currently discounted to $0.03) to read books, listen to music, or play games; $0.25 per minute for video visitations; $0.25 per written message; and $0.50 to send a photo with a message.

The Prison Policy Initiative estimated in 2017 that wages in West Virginia prisons range between $0.04 and $0.58 an hour.

Seems fair, right?

Although the books on Project Gutenberg are all free, there is little the organization can do to stop GTL and the WVDCR from charging for access to the tablets.

“It’s all very sad,” Greg Newby, CEO of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, wrote in an email to the Appalachian Prison Book Project. “From the trademark license of Project Gutenberg eBooks, I don’t see leverage to do anything about it. I’m glad that prisoners seem to have less expensive access to PG eBooks than to other content, but would greatly prefer if it was all free (and other reforms to the exploitation of prisoners).”

Hey I have an idea, what about trying rehabilitation instead of exploitation?

Ok, I know, crazy idea.

Karen Ingala Smith, who is an expert in the field, reminds Jo Swinton of a couple of things:

I am pig sick of people who have not run refuges (and probably spent little if any time in them) saying that allowing men in to women’s refuges is a matter of individual risk assessments. No. No it isn’t.

What are women’s refuges refuges from? Not from grasshoppers or missionaries or loud music.

As for @joswinson saying that abuse in lesbian relns is same as men’s violence against intimate partners, how dare you?
How many women are killed by female partners/exes? Hardly bloody any.
How many women in UK are killed by male partners/exes? On average at least 1 every 4 days.

Ok but women engage in the violence of talking back, which if you think about it is really the worst violence of all.

@Scottish_Women tweeted:

Case study from NHS policy. If a woman is agitated cos there is a man on her ward then staff should ‘re-iterate that the ward is female only & that there are no men present.’ If she continues to be vocal then ‘Ultimately it may be the complainant who is required to be removed.’!

The Gender Reassignment Policy Review page 16:

Inpatient Scenario:

A nurse is summoned to a patient’s bed in a female ward. The patient appears to be agitated. When asked what’s concerning her, the woman explains she didn’t expect to be sharing the ward with a  man and points to the bed opposite. She states it’s inappropriate to have ‘him’ in the ward with the other women. She tells the nurse she can’t relax and wants ‘him’ removed from the ward. If this doesn’t happen she’ll make a formal complaint – the hospital has a duty of care to look after her and they’re not taking this seriously by putting her in this situation.

The nurse listens and tells the woman she’ll see what she can do. She says that she understands having a transgender person on the ward will be upsetting to other women and leaves to talk with a senior colleague about the matter.

The response to the patient’s concern isn’t appropriate and breaches legislative protection afforded to transgender people. Someone’s trans status can not be disclosed to a third party without the express permission of the trans person and the assumption that others in the ward will feel uncomfortable is unfounded. In this instance there is no need to either disclose or seek permission to disclose gender identity. The nurse should work to allay the patient’s concerns – it would be appropriate to re-iterate that the ward is indeed female only and that there are no men present. Her duty of care extends to protect patients from harassment and should the woman continue to make demands about the removal of the transgender patient and be vocal in the ward it would be appropriate to remind her of this. Ultimately it may be the complainant who is required to be removed. The nurse should check with the transgender patient and sensitively ask if everything is ok. If the transgender patient has heard any of the discussions it is imperative that she is given every assurance that the matter will be dealt with. If the transgender patient is visibly upset and there is spare capacity, it would be appropriate to offer her the option to move to a single room, though this must be with the interests of the patient in mind rather than conflict avoidance.

General appreciation of transgender issues is relatively low within our communities and often this is used as a rationale for behaviour that is essentially transphobic. If a white woman complained to a nurse about sharing a ward with a black patient or a heterosexual male complained about being in a ward with a gay man, we would expect our staff to act in a manor that deals with the expressed behaviour immediately.

Emphasis mine.

Notice that there is no requirement to talk sensitively to the woman who doesn’t want to be in a ward with a man. Notice that the nurse is told to tell the woman that the ward is indeed female and there is no man present WHEN IT’S NOT AND THERE IS. Notice that the woman is discussed as a disruption at best and an evil bigot at worst. Notice that all the concern is for the man.

A woman not wanting to be in a hospital ward with a man is not the same as not wanting to be in a ward with a black person or a gay person. It is not the same.

I seriously hope we can do a lot better than Joe Biden.

During a campaign event in Greenwood, South Carolina Thursday night, former Vice President Joe Biden told a protestor who confronted him over the Obama administration’s mass deportation policies to “vote for Trump,” prompting outrage from immigrant rights groups and activists.

“You should vote for Trump,” Biden repeated as Carlos Rojas, an organizer with Movimiento Cosecha, urged the former Vice President to depart from the destructive record of the Obama White House and support a moratorium on deportations.

I suppose that’s Biden Demonstrating That He’s Not Some Crazy Radical?

Biden was also confronted by climate activists from Friends of the Earth during the Greenwood event, which came a day after the 2020 Democratic presidential debate in Atlanta.

“Please don’t take money from corporations,” said a woman in the audience.

“I do not take money from corporations,” replied Biden, whose campaign last month greenlighted the creation of a super PAC organized by corporate lobbyists who serve clients in multiple major industries, including fossil fuels.

“You listen to Bernie too much, man, it’s not true,” added Biden, referring to rival 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Oh please. Of course he takes money from corporations.

Joe Biden’s campaign is drawing more support from big-ticket donors than any other candidate in the race — yet he still can’t match his rivals’ cash flow.

Biden has raised $20.7 million from contributions of at least $500 — $1.5 million more than his nearest competitor, despite entering the race later than all of them — thanks to the former vice president’s strong connections and goodwill among the traditional donors who have long financed the Democratic Party. Biden drew donations from 114 former big money fundraisers for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the third quarter, the most of any Democrat, according to a POLITICO analysis.

But it’s been nowhere near enough to make Biden the leader of the fundraising pack. In fact, his big-dollar dominance, and his reliance on those donors, is more evidence of how quickly small-dollar donations have become the most important component of political fundraising in a sprawling, fractured Democratic race. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg are all outraising Biden, and stockpiling cash significantly faster than him, on the back of major support from online donors that Biden has been unable to build.

But hey you listen to Bernie too much, maaaaaaaaaan.

Julie Bindel tweets:

This shows how grotesquely unethical these so-called feminist pro-BDSM academics are. Shame on her: Grace Millane trial: expert on sexual culture testifies

So I read the linked article. Dear god.

The defence team representing the man accused of murdering Grace Millane has called an academic to speak about sexual culture.

The man is on trial in the High Court at Auckland, charged with murdering Ms Millane on the night of 1 and 2 December last year.

It is not disputed that the British backpacker died in his apartment or that he later buried her body in a suitcase in the Waitākere Ranges.

The Crown’s case is that the accused strangled her to death, while the man’s defence says her death was accidental after they engaged in consensual choking during sex.

Stop right there.

They engaged in consensual choking during sex? Oh really? Yet only she ended up dead. Was it “consensual choking” or was it he choked her? At least be clear about it.

So the defense called Professor Clarissa Smith of the University of Sunderland to explain about consensual choking in which only the woman ends up dead.

The court heard she had been asked by the accused’s defence team to speak about modern male and female sexuality, and BDSM practices, breath play and erotic asphyxia.

Prof Smith told the court attitudes about sexuality and sex were constantly changing and had moved on from “a powerful mythology” that sex had a single purpose.

“So it’s not just reserved for one’s life partner or marriage but it can be extremely pleasurable for people who are not in a long term relationship.”

Hello, that’s not the issue. Long term, short term, that’s not the issue. The issue is strangling and death.

Professor Smith said BDSM was an “umbrella term” for a range of sexual practices including bondage, domination and sadomasochism.

One of the man’s lawyers Ron Mansfield asked the professor if it was true that such practices were humiliating or violent towards women.

Prof Smith said the practices were about exploring the experiences of humiliation and violence in a “safe environment” without genuine intent to humiliate or be violent.

How did that work out?

Eh?

How did that work out for Grace Millane?

How well did that “safe environment” work out for her?

Prof Smith said public discussions of “kinks” had become widespread after the popular novel 50 Shades of Grey was published.

Mr Mansfield also asked the professor if breath play – a practice whereby breath is restricted during sex – was aggressive or an assault.

“It would be if it’s without consent but where two people have consented to take part in that then it absolutely is not. But that’s the same for any kind of sexual act. Within BDSM it is very important that consent is given and that a couple agree on what they’re going to do.”

Cool cool cool cool, so then everything will be fine, except that Grace Millane ended up dead and buried in a suitcase.

Whatever; it’s kink; don’t be kink-shaming now, that would be terrible.

The Times:

Joanna Cherry, the Edinburgh South West candidate who successfully campaigned for her Labour opponent Frances Carmel Hoole to be deselected for posting a derogatory tweet, said there was a “big dose of misogyny” in the debate over whether people can declare their own gender without medical certification.

Ms Hoole posted a picture of Ms Cherry with the words: “Bang and the Terf is gone”.

This one:

Ms Cherry said the debate had become “utterly toxic” and she had received death threats.

The row spilled over into a full-page advertisement in The Herald yesterday calling on Joan McAlpine, the SNP MSP, and Jenny Marra, the Labour MSP, to resign because of claims that they invited transphobic speakers to the Scottish parliament.

The advert, written in Scots and promoted by an organisation called Anent Transphobia, accused the MSPs of “emotional abuse” of the “vulnerable trans community”.

As opposed to the women community, which is notoriously invulnerable.

All three politicians said they would not be silenced by transgender lobbyists. On the Political Thinking podcast, hosted by the BBC journalist Nick Robinson, Ms Cherry said: “I am a lesbian and have been out for 30 years, and came out at a time when people were losing their jobs as a result of being gay, and when there weren’t equal rights for gay people.

“I also come at it as a feminist, and I have never said that I was not in favour of trans rights. In my former life as an advocate I worked for three years as a specialist sex crimes prosecutor, and prosecuted for rape, sexual offences and a large number of historical sex abuse cases.

“So I have good reason to understand the vulnerability of women and girls to sex abuse from male-bodied individuals — from men.”

…

“Like many other feminist politicians, and indeed male allies in the SNP and the Labour Party and indeed now the Lib Dems, I have concerns that rushing through self-identification legislation without looking at the impact on the Equalities Act could have unintended consequences.”

She criticised Twitter for suspending the accounts of women who “say things like ‘women don’t have penises’, stating a biological fact”.

“There is a big dose of misogyny in this debate, and I am just not prepared to give in to it. I won’t be bullied, and I won’t be silenced,” she added.

The bullying makes some of us louder instead of quieter.

In a joint statement, Ms McAlpine and Ms Marra called the advertisement “another attempt to smear and silence women for talking about their rights”.

They said: “It will not succeed. The Declaration of Women’s Sex Based Rights, a document that underlines the fact that much of the discrimination and violence that women experience globally — including FGM [female genital mutilation], selective abortion, rape, sexual exploitation and maternal mortality — is related to their sex at birth, not their ‘gender identity’.

“It is not ‘transphobic’ to discuss these matters and to ensure that the laws we pass protect all groups of people, including women.”

Tide turning?

@Girlguiding tweeted:

1 in 3 girls told us they don’t want to be leaders, as women who speak out are harassed. The women standing in the election are doing so despite the abuse female MPs receive. We need a world where girls feel confident – and safe – using their voices.

Linking to a Guardian article headlined “‘I’m not going to be bullied into silence.’ The women defying abuse to stand as MPs.”

Hmm. Bullied into silence, eh. A world where girls feel safe using their voices, eh. Another Guardian article, this one from last year:

The Girl Guides have spoken out against claims they are putting girls at risk by introducing a policy to allow transgender people to join the organisation.

The policy has been criticised by some of the group’s 500,000 members, with two leaders having their membership withdrawn after they publicly objected to it.

Hmm.

Replies on Twitter were sharp.

Just here for the ratio. You utter utter hypocrites.

Oh so now you know the difference between male and female

You are hypocrites. When women have spoken out about the need to protect women and girls by maintaining single-sex spaces, you are part of the chorus against them. You are helping teach girls not to stand up for their rights.

Have you considered that by eroding their boundaries & telling them they can’t say no to having a male in their space you’re the ones disempowering them?? They’ve seen YOU silence women who spoke out about it.

I actually cannot believe you had the gall to post this. Ex leader here.

Same feeling. Also ex leader.

The only people feeling confident & safe using their voices in @Girlguiding have penises. Girls have been told they don’t matter. ‍♀️

Nothing boosts a little girl’s confidence like being forced to sleep and shower with biological boys or stay at home. So empowering.

Teaching girls that they must not believe what they know to be true and removing their boundaries in favour of males, does nothing to encourage or prepare them for leadership.

I don’t send my daughters to Guides, although I went, because you have proved yourself incapable of demonstrating leadership on the matter of what a girl is, or can be, and because they will not join an organisation that doesn’t safeguard properly.

I also went to Guides but my daughter will not be for this reason

Using their voices.

Who is John Solomon?

Top diplomats have repeatedly linked President Donald Trump’s posture toward Ukraine to John Solomon, the journalist whose reports gave false credence to a number of Ukraine-related conspiracies that have found a receptive audience in Trump and some of his closest allies.

Solomon, 52, had been working until recently as an opinion writer at The Hill and is now a Fox News contributor. His columns were cited three times in the whistleblower complaint that helped spur House Democrats to open their impeachment investigation into Trump.

He sounds like more of a trans journalist than a real one.

On Nov. 19, House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes, R-Calif., opened the second week of public impeachment hearings by citing Solomon’s scoops and findings as fact.

“Solomon’s reporting on Burisma, Hunter Biden and Ukraine election meddling has become inconvenient for the Democratic narrative,” Nunes said in his statement, which came just one day after The Hill announced it would be reviewing, annotating and correcting Solomon’s columns.

What Solomon does is “reporting” while what the impeachment inquiry is doing is “narrative” – according to the strikingly untruthful Devin Nunes.

So, who is John Solomon? The veteran Washington, D.C., reporter has become a regular on Fox News and a go-to source of information for Trump. A series of springtime articles he published about Ukraine helped kickstart the events at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.

His columns alleged corruption by Biden and a former ambassador and accused Democrats of working with Ukraine to hurt Trump’s chances in 2016. They gained traction as Trump, his allies and various Fox News hosts talked about them on TV and social media.

Never mind whether it’s true or not, it’s being talked about.

Solomon won an award in 2002 for a series on what law enforcement knew ahead of the Sept. 11 attacks. But media critics also questioned his early work, saying he had a “history of bending the truth to his storyline” and “massaging facts to conjure phantom scandals.”

Solomon’s commentary for The Hill has generated the most buzz. In 2017, he played a major role in pushing the inaccurate Uranium Oneconspiracy, alleging that Hillary Clinton sold a share of America’s uranium to Russia in exchange for a massive donation to the Clinton Foundation.

The Hill started labeling Solomon’s work as opinion in 2018.

Then, in March and April 2019, Solomon published a series of columns alleging conspiracies involving Democrats and Ukraine.

One of his key sources, apparently, was former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer.

According to the New York Times, Giuliani, whose activities were central to the administration’s efforts to get an investigation launched into Trump’s political rivals, gave Solomon a cache of information on Biden, his son Hunter and special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.

“I really turned my stuff over to John Solomon,” Giuliani told the New York Times.

I suspect it was more “stuff” than “information.”

Senior State Department official George Kent later testified that what he had described as the “campaign of slander” against former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch began with one of Solomon’s articles and ended with Yovanovitch’s removal.

And Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, director for European Affairs at the National Security Council, said he became concerned about Giuliani and the narratives he was pushing in part because of Solomon’s columns. State Department official Catherine Croft said the same.

…

Solomon’s opinion articles on Ukraine have advanced a number of unsupported allegations about Yovanovitch, the Bidens and supposed Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election.

He has had an assist from Fox News host Sean Hannity, Giuliani and Trump, who tweeted about Solomon’s work four times and recently suggested he should win a Pulitzer Prize.

Solomon has appeared on Hannity’s primetime TV show at least 55 times since March 20, according to our search via Nexis. He has been mentioned many more times, as well.

On March 20, Solomon went on Hannity’s show to promote a column he had published that day based on an interview he conducted with Yuriy Lutsenko, then the top prosecutor in Ukraine.

The column quoted Lutsenko falsely claiming that Yovanovitch gave him a list of people he should not prosecute, a charge the State Department denied and Lutsenko has since retracted. The column also claimed Yovanovitch had privately bad-mouthed Trump, citing a letter from former Rep. Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican, to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Yovanovitch denied both allegations during her testimony.

And Trump called in to Fox News yesterday to repeat the same filthy lies about Yovanovitch on the air.

Other impeachment witnesses have criticized Solomon’s writing on Yovanovitch. Kent testified that Solomon’s article “was, if not entirely made up in full cloth, it was primarily non-truths and non-sequiturs.” He later said he had “every reason to believe it was not true.”

Vindman said all the “key elements were false,” noting that Solomon’s columns “smelled really rotten” before joking, “His grammar might have been right.”

Similar objections have been raised in testimony about two articles Solomon published about Biden in April, which were also referenced in the whistleblower’s complaint.

Etc etc etc. There’s no end to the slime.

Where Congress failed, FOIA succeeded.

An ethics group late Friday published nearly 100 pages of previously unreleased State Department documents that the group says shows “a clear paper trail” between President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo before a Ukraine ambassador was abruptly recalled.

The documents were published by American Oversight, which calls itself a non-partisan and nonprofit ethics watchdog and Freedom of Information Act litigator investigating the Trump administration.

And they’ve been litigating away like mad while we’ve been watching Trump yammer at everyone, and they have virtual warehouses of documents.

They appear to show two calls between Giuliani and Pompeo in March, around a month before former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, an anti-corruption expert, was abruptly called back to the U.S. in April and then removed from the post.

David Hale, undersecretary of state for political affairs, testified on Wednesday that Pompeo and Giuliani spoke on the phone twice in late March.

The information released Friday “reveals a clear paper trail from Rudy Giuliani to the Oval Office to Secretary Pompeo to facilitate Giuliani’s smear campaign against a U.S. ambassador,” Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight, said in a statement.

Yovanovitch has told members of Congress in an impeachment inquiry that her reputation was smeared by Giuliani, including false allegations that she badmouthed Trump and was blocking corruption investigations by circulating a “do not prosecute” list and stymieing investigation into the Vice President Joe Biden and his son.

And they’re still doing it, at least Trump is. Remember yesterday he told Fox News that that Bad Woman Yovanovitch refused to hang his photograph in the embassy? That’s a lie. The administration delayed sending the photograph for months; it was hung as soon as it arrived.

The emails also show that before the acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, took the job he was among six former Ukraine ambassadors who objected to “recent uncorroborated allegations” about Yovanovitch.

The April letter from Taylor and the five others says, “these charges are simply wrong.”

Taylor told Congress he was asked to return to lead the embassy in Kyiv in May by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In his testimony, Taylor said his initial reservation about taking the job was because of the poor treatment of Yovanovitch.

The April 5 letter from Taylor and the former ambassadors cited recent articles by John Solomon, who at the time was an opinion contributor for The Hill, that claimed the embassy under Yovanovitch interfered with the ability of the Ukrainian prosecutor to investigate anti-corruption cases, and that she criticized Trump.

Who is John Solomon and why was he telling lies about Marie Yovanovitch?

American Oversight says this is just the first round of disclosures.

“The evidence is only going to get worse for the administration as its stonewall strategy collapses in the face of court orders,” Evers said in the statement.

Bring it on.

Metaphors and slogans are all very well, but it helps if they get it right.

Dawn Butler:

I think I would replace pie with cake. @UKLabour

EQUAL RIGHTS

FOR OTHERS

DOES NOT MEAN

LESS RIGHTS

FOR YOU.

IT’S NOT PIE.

Fewer rights, they mean, but never mind that. Pie or cake, whichever, it’s still not true. It’s not true because it depends. Anything can be called a right, and it’s not difficult to imagine purported rights that would indeed mean fewer or no rights for other people. Look at US history for example – the ruling class in the South and much of the rest of the white population thought the federal government was violating their “right” to own slaves. They considered themselves to be the aggrieved party.

Think of “right to work” laws. What those are in fact is laws that weaken unions, and weak unions means employers are free to impose dangerous working conditions and crap pay and benefits. The word “rights” can be used to disguise exploitation or oppression. It depends.

Laws against domestic violence interfere with the “rights” of husbands to bash their wives. Laws protecting children interfere with parents’ “rights” to bash the kids when they make too much noise.

It’s depressing that a Labour MP and Shadow Women and Equalities Secretary doesn’t get this, or pretends she doesn’t.

gender is harmful tweets:

It seems, the promotion of violence against women is, quite literally, ‘in Vogue’… at least in visual form, in an article for @voguemagazine.

This is how emboldened, patriarchal violence against women has become folks. Here it is in plain sight for a Vogue article. 👀

The article is not about baseball.