A London sex-work researcher is adding her voice to the growing dismay over the police decision to begin releasing the names of men accused of buying sex, as a petition demanding police reverse the policy is launched.
Chief John Pare announced the new policy at last week’s police board meeting, touting the move as another tool in the fight against human trafficking.
The change was championed by the London Abused Women’s Centre and others advocating for an end to prostitution, but it drew a swift backlash from organizations representing sex workers and their allies advocating for the continuation of prostitution.
“I don’t know how the decision was made. It is a perfect illustration of ignoring research in favour of moralizing,” said Treena Orchard, a health studies researcher at Western University.
Moralizing? It’s moralizing to work to prevent trafficking? It’s worth sneering at those efforts in order to make sure prostitution remains a job option?
Experts have identified London as a hub for human trafficking — defined as the exploitation of people for profit through force, fraud or coercion — because of its location along Highway 401 between Toronto and the U.S. border.
President Trump called @mattgaetz last night from Hanoi to talk the Cohen testimony and the threats (since rescinded) Gaetz made about Cohen. "I was happy to do it for you. You just keep killing it," Gaetz was heard telling him. (Gaetz told me he doesn't discuss calls w/POTUS)
Interesting, but full of holes. “Gaetz was heard” by whom? Where was this? Would Gaetz really exchange criminal chitchat with Trump in the presence of witnesses? How does Dovere know it was Trump? How does whoever heard what Gaetz said know it was Trump?
Leading up to the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump directed his personal attorney at the time to threaten legal action against the colleges and high school he attended if they publicly released his grades or standardized test scores, the attorney, Michael Cohen, told Congress on Wednesday.
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“When I say conman, I’m talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores,” he said.
Somehow I always kind of suspected the “brilliant” part was shaky.
In support of his testimony, Cohen provided a May 2015 letter he penned to the president of Fordham University, the New York school Trump attended for two years in the 1960s before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania.
The letter warns that media outlets had requested Trump’s records but were denied by his legal team. Cohen reminded the school that Trump’s student records were protected by federal law, and he threatened to hold the school liable “to the fullest extent of the law” if the university released them.
Cohen emphasized that violating Trump’s confidentiality could result in “both criminal and civil liability and damages including, among other things, substantial fines, penalties and even the potential loss of government aid and other funding. This criminality will lead to jail time.”
The laws are real and Trump’s grades have never been released.
Now, this is Trump. If his grades were impressive, they’d be out there. What are we to conclude? That he’s every bit as thick as he appears to be, which is thick as two short planks.
Cohen said in his testimony that “the irony wasn’t lost on me” that Trump in 2011 criticized President Barack Obama for not releasing his records. He attached to his testimony an Associated Press story that quotes Trump as saying, “How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard? I’m thinking about it, I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records.”
Whatever the wizardry was, it didn’t get Trump into Columbia and Harvard.
Trump said this of Warmbier and North Korea: “He tells me that he didn’t know about it and I will take him at his word.” Trump added that Kim “felt badly about it. He felt very badly.”
On its face, Kim’s claim that he was unaware of Warmbier’s arrest and treatment is beyond laughable. Kim rules North Korea with an iron fist. He wouldn’t know that an American college student had been arrested in his country? He would miss how Warmbier’s arrest and incarceration became a massive national and international story? And at no time in the 18 months Warmbier was held would anyone in Kim’s government ever see fit to mention that they were holding an American prisoner?
Cardinal George Pell, once the third most powerful man in the Vatican and Australia’s most senior Catholic, has been found guilty of child sexual abuse after a trial in Melbourne.
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Pell, who is on leave from his role in Rome as Vatican treasurer, was found guilty of sexually penetrating a child under the age of 16 as well as four charges of an indecent act with a child under the age of 16. The offences occurred in December 1996 and early 1997 at St Patrick’s Cathedral, months after Pell was inaugurated as archbishop of Melbourne.
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Pope Francis, who has previously praised Pell for his honesty and response to child sexual abuse, has yet to publicly react, but just two days after the unreported verdict in December the Vatican announced that Pell and two other cardinals had been removed from the pontiff’s council of advisers.
Pell’s conviction and likely imprisonment will cause shockwaves through a global Catholic congregation and is a blow to Francis’s efforts to get a grip on sexual abuse.
Already a Democratic party representative, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, is insisting that the US powerlifting tournaments allow transgender women to compete, so that people who look very much like Geoff Capes, and have the same chromosomes as Geoff Capes, and the same bone structure and musculature, can compete against women. Meanwhile, the fastest female college sprinter in the US is CeCe Telfer, who, once again, is not what you or I or science would call a lady, and one of the world champions in women’s cycling is a chap called Rachel McKinnon, whom I have mentioned here before.
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Those who support the rights of transgender women to compete in women’s sports often cite the only piece of research done on the issue which ‘proves’ that it is a myth that transgender women have an advantage over normal women. This study was published in 2015 and is cited every time the issue arises — but I have one or two problems with it, to tell you the truth. First, it concerned a total of just eight athletes, which is a smallish sample (no control group, either). Second, it was not carried out by a qualified geneticist or social scientist, but by a ‘medical physicist’ by the name of Joanna Harper. And third, Joanna Harper, once an athlete herself, was, um, how can I put this, not always called Joanna. She was raised as a boy and transitioned to being a fairly fast lady in her thirties. So she has skin in the game and we might surmise that she, or he, set out to prove a thesis, rather than, in good Popperian practice, trying to disprove it.
Why is that? I suppose because they don’t doubt any of it? But then why do they continue to support him? Because it’s worth it to them to stick it to women, stick it to the poor, stick it to brown immigrants, stick it to people of color generally.
And everybody kept yielding time to the egregious ranking Republican member, Jim Jordan of Ohio, or to Jordan’s fellow Freedom Caucasian, Mark Meadows of North Carolina, and those two jamokes couldn’t get out of their own way.
Jordan insisted that some dark—Dare he say, Clintonian?—forces were behind Cohen’s testimony, using the name of Lanny Davis, the old Clinton hand who is Cohen’s attorney, as a conjuring word. Jordan expressed surprise that Cohen might have consulted with the chairmen of other committees before which he might testify. He got so insufferable that Steve Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts, went all Southie on Jordan’s mug, running through a litany of people connected with the Trump campaign and/or the administration* who have been arrested, indicted, convicted, or copped a plea.
Crime isn’t crime unless it happens in Chicago.
This was a vivid look into the chronic ward of the prion disease that has eaten away the higher functions of American conservatism—and, thus, those of the Republican Party as well—since Ronald Reagan first served up the monkey brains almost 40 years ago. These are the complete creatures of the talk-show culture, the perfect products of two and three generations of gerrymandered in-breeding. These are the monsters from inside The Bubble.
And the gerrymandering continues, so they will only get worse.
When people say "what has Julie Bindel ever done for women in prison" – her tireless and fearless campaigning for women is humbling. https://t.co/etz11iLvn0
What was that about Mark Meadows again? The guy who pointed to a silent Black Lady who works for Trump as his token that Trump is not a racist, and then pitched a huge wrathful noisy fit that anyone would say that was a racist thing to do?
Here’s another video where he says we’re going to send Obama “back home to Kenya.”
His bit starts at 2:48 but it’s worth watching the other guy’s venom too, if only for the bit where he mentions Chicago.
Oversight’s a cruel committee– Their chairman’s from an inner city! Let’s all believe that Cohen lies, Or I won’t get my Nobel Prize. #thepoetryofdonaldtrump
After all that Look At Me Solve North Korea, Trump failed ignominiously because it turns out – who could possibly have guessed? – that Kim isn’t going to roll over just because Trump tells him to.
President Trump and Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, abruptly ended their second summit meeting on Thursday after talks collapsed with the two leaders failing to agree on any steps toward nuclear disarmament or measures to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
“Sometimes you have to walk,” Mr. Trump said at an afternoon news conference in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam.
He said Mr. Kim had offered to dismantle the North’s most important nuclear facility if the United States lifted the harsh sanctions imposed on his nation — but would not commit to do the same for other elements of its weapons program. That, Mr. Trump said, was a dealbreaker.
“It was about the sanctions,” Mr. Trump said. “Basically they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, but we couldn’t do that.”
But we were told that Mr. Trump is The Genius of The Deal. Was that not true? Have we been deceived?
The premature end to the negotiations leaves the unusual rapprochement between the United States and North Korea that has unfolded for most of a year at a deadlock, with the North retaining both its nuclear arsenal and facilities believed to be producing additional fissile material for warheads.
Was it in fact an unusual rapprochement? Is there any chance it was not an unusual rapprochement at all but rather Kim pretending to rapprocher in order to get what he wanted from Trump? I think there is some chance of that.
Before ending the news conference to fly back to Washington, Mr. Trump tried to put a good face on the outcome. “This wasn’t a walkaway like you get up and walk out,” he said. “No, this was very friendly. We shook hands.”
“There’s a warmth that we have and I hope that stays,” he added.
No, there isn’t. There is ice-cold Kim putting on an act, and idiotic Donnie buying it. That’s all.
The collapse of the talks came in the aftermath of withering congressional testimony in Washington by Mr. Cohen. “I think having a fake hearing like that and having it in the middle of this very important summit is really a terrible thing,” Mr. Trump told reporters.
Well then it’s too bad that Mr. Trump decided to be a criminal about 50 years ago, and acted on his decision, and then decided to run for president. All that is his doing, not ours.
The story of the portrait is a high point (of lowness) for me. Fake bidder. Hiked up price. Paid for by foundation. Twitter boast. It’s got it all.
Michael Cohen claims that President Donald Trump had him find a fake bidder to buy a portrait of him at a 2013 charity auction in the Hamptons so it would sell higher than everything else, and then paid the buyer back with Trump Foundation funds.
As one does, you know.
“The objective was to ensure that his portrait, which was going to be auctioned last, would go for the highest price of any portrait that afternoon,” Cohen said.
So that people would think he’s a hot item.
Just found out that at a charity auction of celebrity portraits in E. Hampton, my portrait by artist William Quigley topped list at $60K
Across the U.S. and in many places abroad, transgender athletes are breaking barriers in high school, college and pro sports and being embraced by teammates and fans. But resentments can still flare when transgender women start winning and dominating their sport.
Well now what do we mean by “barriers”? Not all barriers need breaking. If you have a barrier between you and the local grizzly bears, you don’t much want it broken, do you.
And they’re not really breaking “barriers” anyway, because there are no “barriers” labeled “No Trans People Allowed.” What they’re doing is breaking the rules, which doesn’t sound quite so progressive. People with male bodies are breaking the rules to play against women and girls, leaving a little heap of injured women and girls in their wake.
Transgender cyclist Rachel McKinnon holds hands with Carolien Van Herrikhuyzen during the UCI Masters Track Cycling World Championships in Carson, California, in 2018.Craig Huffman / via AP file
So touching and adorable, but look how massive McKinnon is next to Van Herrikhuyzen. Maybe not really so adorable after all. McKinnon is looking down at her as if she’s a puppy.
The AP solicited and received a comment from McKinnon, then went on to accuse women who want to compete against women of “vitriol.”
Helen Carroll, a longtime college athletic director, basketball coach and LGBTQ-rights activist, said many trans women athletes train extra hard to offset hormone treatment and face undeserved skepticism when they excel.
“As long as trans people are losing and are not the best, everything is OK,” Carroll said. “As soon as they start winning, that’s when the vitriol comes out about how they’re really still a man.”
The vitriol can surface even at the high school level. In the track and field community in Connecticut, the dominance of transgender girl sprinters Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood has stirred resentment among some competitors and their families.
Oh my my my will you look at that now. I just got through writing a post about Mark Meadows’s tantrum about the very idea that pointing out This One Black Woman He Knows could be a racist move at all in any way – and what do I find on Twitter.
Here's Mark Meadows, who just sidetracked the entire House Oversight Committee to assure him he's not racist, saying that "2012 is the time we are going to send Mr. Obama home to Kenya or wherever it is" pic.twitter.com/90L1xnWf6v
Something curious happened about 90 minutes into the Michael Cohen testimony which transfixed much of Washington on Wednesday: A woman rose behind Rep. Mark Meadows as the North Carolina Republican grilled President Trump’s former fixer on his characterization of the president as a racist.
“I asked Lynne to come today in her personal capacity to actually shed some light,” Meadows said.
Yep he said that.
Cohen said he knows her well, and Meadows launched on his absurd rant.
Meadows got to his point: “You made some very demeaning comments about the president that Ms. Patton doesn’t agree with. In fact, it has to do with your claim of racism. She says that as a daughter of a man born in Birmingham, Alabama, that there is no way that she would work for an individual who was racist. How do you reconcile the two of those?”
Say what? What does Birmingham, Alabama have to do with it? I’m pretty sure there were plenty of racist white people there in the days of Bull Connor and I don’t suppose the number has dropped to zero now, so I’m not getting his drift, or Patton’s if it’s hers.
But even setting Birmingham aside…what the fuck? “Look, here is A Black Woman who works for Trump, therefore, sir, Trump cannot possibly be a racist.” One, yes he can, and two, we know he is. Birtherism. Shithole countries. His obsession with that one particular border. Good people on both sides. Birtherism. The Central Park 5. He was sued by the Feds for refusing to rent to black people back in the 70s. Birtherism. His indifference to Puerto Rico after the hurricane. The almost total whiteness of his administration. Birtherism. Telling April Ryan at his first press conference to make an appointment for him with the Congressional Black Caucus, having first asked her if they were friends of hers.
Patton’s unusual appearance during the hearing was immediately panned by black politicians and journalists.
“So . . . you bring out the president’s black employee. And say, see, how could he be racist? This is something,” tweeted Lena Tillett, a reporter at WRAL in Raleigh.
Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-Mich.) said during the hearing that she, as a black person, has “endured the public comments of racism from the sitting president.”
“To prop up one member of our entire race of black people and say that that nullifies that is totally insulting,” Lawrence said.
“He brought out a black woman who is loyal to President Trump to prove that President Trump is not racist,” tweeted Yamiche Alcindor, White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour. “It was like show and tell. Incredible.”
Look look look, this one black person, therefore he is not racist.
At the end of the hearing Rashida Tlaib said using a black woman as a prop was racist and Meadows went ballistic.
A debate about the gender identity of Dr James Barry, the pioneering Victorian who adopted a male persona to become the UK’s first female-born doctor, has erupted after the award-winning author EJ Levy was accused of disrespecting Barry’s legacy by using female pronouns in a forthcoming novel.
Levy announced last week that she had sold a novel about the “true story” of Barry, titled The Cape Doctor. The forthcoming book, which will be released by Little, Brown, will trace Barry’s life story: born Margaret Ann Bulkley in Ireland, the future doctor became Barry at the age of 20 and left for Edinburgh to study medicine as a man. Barry joined the army after graduation, the start of a distinguished career as a military surgeon that spanned Cape Town, St Helena and Trinidad and Tobago. In 1865, Barry returned to the UK with dysentery, and died. A maid discovered the doctor’s biological gender after the death.
When Levy, winner of the Flannery O’Connor award, announced the news of her novel by describing Barry as “a heroine for our time, for all time”, other authors began to question Levy’s reference to Barry as “she”, including novelist Celeste Ng, who told Levy: “I’m now seeing you use she/her pronouns for Barry even as many are telling you Barry himself used and wanted he/him pronouns. I hope you and L,B will listen to these concerns and take them into account.”
But Barry “used and wanted he/him pronouns” at a time when people with she/her pronouns were not welcome to study medicine in Edinburgh and become doctors, and then to practice medicine. There were a few pioneers but it was a very uphill battle. Given that, we can’t know whether Barry really “wanted” male pronouns or simply resorted to them in order to get the freedom and the work she/he wanted to do. Barry didn’t leave a collection of tweets taking a position on pronouns.
Barry’s gender identity has been overwhelmingly framed as female by writers over the past 150 years, said Cardiff University professor Ann Heilmann, author of Neo-/Victorian Biographilia and James Miranda Barry: A Study in Transgender and Transgenre, exceptions being Patricia Duncker’s 1999 novel James Miranda Barry and Rachel Holmes’s 2002 biography The Secret Life of Dr James Barry.
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“While I understand that emotions run very high (understandably so, given the difficulties trans people face and in light of ongoing tensions between feminism and the trans community), I don’t think that Barry can be that easily mapped on to contemporary trans thought,” she said. “Though of course there have always been trans people, the lived and felt gender identity of an 18th and early 19th-century person would have been very different from our contemporary identity politics.”
And that person would not have called it a “gender identity” or understood what you were talking about if you used it.
Jeremy Dronfield, co-author of Dr James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time, said: “In my biography, I used male pronouns for Barry. He was, at least outwardly, a man. But whether Barry qualifies as transgender in modern terms is complicated. When Margaret became James, it wasn’t primarily because she wanted to be a man. She wanted to live the kind of life which in 1809 was impossible for a woman. Once the persona had served its purpose, Margaret intended to discard it. Circumstances prevented that. There’s evidence that Barry missed being a woman. But we also know that he relished being a man, his behaviour exceeding what was necessary for disguise. However, the claim made online that Barry left a will asking to be remembered as a man is false. He left no statement of identity.
“If Margaret had been born in 1989 instead of 1789, free to be a surgeon and soldier, would she have chosen to become a man? On balance, I don’t think so, but Margaret might have identified as non-binary. I have no argument with seeing James Barry as a transgender icon, or Margaret as a feminist role model. I do take issue with those who insist on recognising one and erasing the other.”
Ok the Republicans are the minority and they’re hostile, while the Democrats are the majority and…not friendly, not affectionate, but not hostile in the sense of hostile to Cohen’s presence and testimony. Grant all that. It’s Democrats versus Republicans, with all that follows from that.
But if the two were reversed would Democrats be this assholish? This challenging, this stern, yes, but it’s more than that – there’s also taunting, sneering, raging, screeching. Do Republicans give themselves permission to be Trump-like in the era of Trump in a way they wouldn’t have before?
Update: Rep. Carol Miller, R-West Virginia, thinks it’s “a game” to establish whether or not Trump is a criminal.
It’s not a game, Representative Miller. It couldn’t possibly be more serious.
Update: Oh, Miller is angry that they have postponed hearings on child separation to do this one. Well who does she think is behind the child separation policy?!
Maybe this answers my question about would the Democrats carry on so grotesquely if they were in the hot seat.
In a break from watching the Cohen hearing, here is another lie that needs indignant documenting.
Donnie retweeted this lie from Princess Ivanka:
No I did not. I support a minimum wage. I do not however believe in a minimum guarantee for people “unwilling to work” which was the question asked of me. https://t.co/NTzw8Bimaj
No it wasn’t. That was not the question asked of her. That question that was asked of her? It was not that. Her characterization of it is dishonest, in the sense that it is a lie.
Here is the clip. What Steve Hilton actually asked her is:
Here’s the Green New Deal, here’s the guarantee of a job. They say yeah, that’s what I want, that simple. What do you say to those people?
THE GUARANTEE OF A JOB. Hilton said people want the guarantee of a job, and Princess translated it to “a minimum guarantee for people ‘unwilling to work'” WHICH IS THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT SHE WAS ASKED.
1st q asked by @NicolleDWallace about this despicable tweet was "is this illegal?" Answer is it's likely witness threat, but q should be why is MOC allowed to act this way even if it wasn't a crime.
— Jill Wine-Banks (now on Threads as jillwinebanks) (@JillWineBanks) February 26, 2019
A Republican member of Congress on Tuesday suggested without evidence that Michael Cohen engaged in affairs with multiple “girlfriends” and suggested his wife might cheat on him while he’s in prison — all on the eve of Cohen’s public testimony.
President Trump and his allies have camped out in a whole host of gray areas when it comes to obstruction of justice and witness tampering over the last two years. But this one from Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) doesn’t appear to be nearly so gray.
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We’re about to find out what Mueller’s thresholds are for obstruction of justice and witness tampering. But whatever they are, Trump is insulated because Justice Department rules say a sitting president can’t be indicted. That means Congress is the arbiter, and even if Trump would be convicted of witness tampering in a court of law, he could survive.
But Gaetz has no such insulation, and you can make a pretty convincing argument that his witness-related tweet is far less veiled that Trump’s have ever have been.
Trump told an audience of governors yesterday that Princess Ivanka has created millions of jobs. Of course she hasn’t. She and Daddy got some corporations to sign something saying they would offer lots of training – but they were doing that anyway, and signing something isn’t the same as actual jobs. Daddy was telling a whopper as usual.
In July of last year, Trump signed an executive order creating the National Council for the American Worker, co-chaired by Ivanka Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. One of the council’s priorities is asking companies across the US to sign the Pledge to America’s Workers. The pledge involves “committing to expand programs that educate, train, and reskill American workers from high-school age to near-retirement,” according to the White House.
Two hundred companies have agreed to the pledge, with each providing different numbers of training opportunities. This brings the total number of opportunities pledged to just over 6.5 million. (See the full list.)
Programs that educate, train, and reskill≠jobs.
First, the pledge does not translate to millions of immediate training opportunities. In a press release from the administration, the pledge is described as a commitment to “new opportunities over the next five years.”
Secondly, these are better understood as training opportunities, not necessarily “jobs.” In the same press release last year, the White House described these opportunities as “apprenticeships and work-based learning, continuing education, on-the-job training, and reskilling.” These opportunities can be for current employees.
Lastly, many of these opportunities pledged were already planned by the companies. As CNN previously reported, Walmart’s pledged amount over five years would just about match the rate that its program Walmart Academies has trained since it started in 2016. The Associated Builders and Contractors provides a similar example as it pledged to provide roughly as many opportunities in five years as it trains in one year.
