No.

No no no no no.

No.

No.

No.

Oprah Winfrey is thinking about running for president.

What she lacks is political experience.

In an interview with Winfrey on Bloomberg last March, interviewer David Rubenstein broached the possibility, saying “It’s clear you don’t need government experience to be elected president of the United States.”

You don’t need it to be elected, tragically, but you do need it, or a relevant education, to do it well. You can’t just walk into it because you’re famous. Have we not learned that?

It’s true that she would be vastly better than Trump. If the choice were more Trump and Oprah Winfrey I would choose her in a shot. But the choice is not that, and this idea that just anyone can be president is one that needs to die.

An equalities watchdog has stepped in on the BBC-Carrie Gracie confrontation.

The Equalities and Human Rights Commission has written to the BBC to seek answers about allegations of pay discrimination following the resignation of Carrie Gracie as its China editor over its “secretive and illegal” pay culture.

The BBC is also facing the prospect of lawsuits from female employees who believe they have been paid less than men for doing the same jobs.

It’s all very disappointing, not to say infuriating.

The journalist, who has worked for the BBC for 30 years, said the corporation had offered to increased her pay from £135,000 a year to £180,000 but she refused because it did not guarantee her equality with its other international editors. Jon Sopel, the BBC’s North America editor, collects between £200,000 to £249,999.

Wow.

It really is backward and in high heels, because Gracie’s gig involves a foreign language, while Sopel gets to talk to sources in his own.

Jennifer Millins, employment partner at Mishcon de Reya, is advising more than 10 senior women at the BBC. She said: “They don’t feel their complaints are being dealt with in a meaningful way. The process has taken a very long time. If the BBC does not resolve this internally, then individuals will be forced to sue.”

Asked what the chances were of the BBC resolving the issue internally, Millins said: “Low.”

Up to 200 women at the BBC have made a formal complaint about pay. This includes a collective grievance lodged on behalf of 121 women by the National Union of Journalists.

Get a grip, Beeb. Do the right thing.

Carrie Gracie, the BBC’s China editor, wrote an open letter:

Dear BBC audience

My name is Carrie Gracie and I have been a BBC journalist for three decades. With great regret, I have left my post as China editor to speak out publicly on a crisis of trust at the BBC.

The BBC belongs to you, the licence fee payer. I believe you have a right to know that it is breaking equality law and resisting pressure for a fair and transparent pay structure.

In thirty years at the BBC, I have never sought to make myself the story and never publicly criticised the organisation I love. I am not asking for more money. I believe I am very well paid already – especially as someone working for a publicly funded organisation. I simply want the BBC to abide by the law and value men and women equally.

On pay, the BBC is not living up to its stated values of trust, honesty and accountability. Salary disclosures the BBC was forced to make six months ago revealed not only unacceptably high pay for top presenters and managers but also an indefensible pay gap between men and women doing equal work. These revelations damaged the trust of BBC staff. For the first time, women saw hard evidence of what they’d long suspected, that they are not being valued equally.

Many have since sought pay equality through internal negotiation but managers still deny there is a problem. This bunker mentality is likely to end in a disastrous legal defeat for the BBC and an exodus of female talent at every level.

Mine is just one story of inequality among many, but I hope it will help you understand why I feel obliged to speak out.

I am a China specialist, fluent in Mandarin and with nearly three decades of reporting the story. Four years ago, the BBC urged me to take the newly created post of China editor.

I knew the job would demand sacrifices and resilience. I would have to work 5,000 miles from my teenage children, and in a heavily censored one-party state I would face surveillance, police harassment and official intimidation.

I accepted the challenges while stressing to my bosses that I must be paid equally with my male peers. Like many other BBC women, I had long suspected that I was routinely paid less, and at this point in my career, I was determined not to let it happen again. Believing that I had secured pay parity with men in equivalent roles, I set off for Beijing.

In the past four years, the BBC has had four international editors – two men and two women. The Equality Act 2010 states that men and women doing equal work must receive equal pay. But last July I learned that in the previous financial year, the two men earned at least 50% more than the two women.

Despite the BBC’s public insistence that my appointment demonstrated its commitment to gender equality, and despite my own insistence that equality was a condition of taking up the post, my managers had yet again judged that women’s work was worth much less than men’s.

My bewilderment turned to dismay when I heard the BBC complain of being forced to make these pay disclosures. Without them, I and many other BBC women would never have learned the truth.

I told my bosses the only acceptable resolution would be for all the international editors to be paid the same amount. The right amount would be for them to decide, and I made clear I wasn’t seeking a pay rise, just equal pay. Instead the BBC offered me a big pay rise which remained far short of equality. It said there were differences between roles which justified the pay gap, but it has refused to explain these differences. Since turning down an unequal pay rise, I have been subjected to a dismayingly incompetent and undermining grievance process which still has no outcome.

Enough is enough. The rise of China is one of the biggest stories of our time and one of the hardest to tell. I cannot do it justice while battling my bosses and a byzantine complaints process. Last week I left my role as China editor and will now return to my former post in the TV newsroom where I expect to be paid equally.

For BBC women this is not just a matter of one year’s salary or two. Taking into account disadvantageous contracts and pension entitlements, it is a gulf that will last a lifetime. Many of the women affected are not highly paid “stars” but hard-working producers on modest salaries. Often women from ethnic minorities suffer wider pay gaps than the rest.

This is not the gender pay gap that the BBC admits to. It is not men earning more because they do more of the jobs which pay better. It is men earning more in the same jobs or jobs of equal value. It is pay discrimination and it is illegal.

On learning the shocking scale of inequality last July, BBC women began to come together to tackle the culture of secrecy that helps perpetuate it. We shared our pay details and asked male colleagues to do the same.

Meanwhile the BBC conducted various reviews. The outgoing director of news said last month, “We did a full equal pay audit which showed there is equal pay across the BBC.” But this was not a full audit. It excluded the women with the biggest pay gaps. The BBC has now begun a ‘talent review’ but the women affected have no confidence in it. Up to two hundred BBC women have made pay complaints only to be told repeatedly there is no pay discrimination at the BBC. Can we all be wrong? I no longer trust our management to give an honest answer.

Read the rest.

Holy shit. The case against the Bundys for that time they drew guns on the Feds has been thrown out.

A federal judge in Las Vegas dismissed charges against Cliven Bundy and his sons, Ammon and Ryan, on Monday.

Judge Gloria M. Navarro of Federal District Court, in a ruling from the bench, said that the government’s missteps in withholding evidence against the three Bundy family members and a supporter, Ryan W. Payne, were so grave that the indictment against them would be dismissed.

…

The 2014 standoff, the focus of Monday’s hearing, was set off when the Bureau of Land Management seized cattle from Cliven Bundy’s ranch in Bunkerville, Nev., in an attempt to force him to pay decades of back fees for grazing his cattle on federal land. Mr. Bundy insisted he did not have to pay the charges because, he said, he had inherited water rights on the land. At the height of the standoff, hundreds of antigovernment activists, many of them carrying guns, rallied to the Bundys cause, until the confrontation ended with the withdrawal of federal agents.

So then, emboldened, they went and stole Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon and occupied it for several weeks. What will they take over next?

Ari Berman covers the voting rights beat. Today he explains the National Voter Registration Act. In 1988 barely half of eligible voters voted in the presidential election, which was the lowest rate since the 1920s – decades before the Civil Rights movement and the Voting Rights Act.

In an effort to increase participation, Democrats in Congress—backed by a few Republicans— drafted the National Voter Registration Act, a bill that would require states to allow voters to register at Department of Motor Vehicle offices and other public agencies.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, led the opposition to the legislation. “This bill wants to turn every agency, bureau, and office of state government into a vast voter registration machine,” McConnell said in 1991. “Motor voter registration, hunting permit voter registration, marriage license voter registration, welfare voter registration—even drug rehab voter registration.” That same year, McConnell, who is now the Senate majority leader, wrote that “low voter turnout is a sign of a content democracy.”

Oh, certainly, just as it was in Mississippi in 1964, for instance.

The act passed Congress but Bush 1 vetoed it, the swine.

Congress passed it again a year later, and this time President Bill Clinton signed it into law, calling it “a sign of a new vibrancy in our democracy.” The “motor voter” law, as it became known, was an immediate success. In its first year in effect, more than 30 million people registered or updated their registrations through the NVRA. Roughly 16 million people per year have used it to register ever since.

Why are Democrats in favor and Republicans opposed? Because easy registration makes it easier for the riffraff to vote – people without cars, people who work long hours without domestic help and can’t find the time to get to a distant registration place, people who don’t have much money…people who have good reasons not to vote Republican.

[I]n recent years, Republicans have sought to gut the law. In 2013, the Supreme Court weakened a key part of the Voting Rights Act, ruling that states with long histories of voting discrimination no longer needed to clear their election changes with the federal government. After winning that fight, Republicans are now going after the NVRA in what voting rights advocates say is a thinly veiled effort to make it more difficult for Democratic-leaning constituencies to register to vote—and far easier for state officials to remove them from the voter rolls…

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear the newest challenge to the law, concerning whether Ohio can remove voters from the rolls who don’t vote over a six-year period. If a voter in Ohio misses an election, doesn’t respond to a subsequent mailing from the state, and then sits out two more elections, he or she is removed from the registration list, even if this person would otherwise be eligible to vote. Critics of this process say it turns voting into a “use it or lose it” right and will open the door to wider voter purges.

Ohio had huge success with the law between 2011 and 2016, getting 2 million voters purged, with 840,000 dumped for not voting often enough.

At least 144,000 voters in Ohio’s three largest counties, home to Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, have been purged since the 2012 election, with voters in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods twice as likely to be removed as those in Republican-leaning ones, according to a  Reuters analysis.

The Republicans want fewer but classier voters, and of course Trump is down with that.

For its part, the Trump administration has come out squarely in support of voter purges. The Obama Justice Department opposed the Ohio purge program, but Trump’s DOJ abruptly switched sides in the case. “After this Court’s grant of review and the change in Administrations, the Department reconsidered the question,” the DOJ informed the Supreme Court in August. “It has now concluded that the NVRA does not prohibit a State from using nonvoting as the basis for sending a [removal] notice.”

In June 2017, the DOJ also sent a letter to 44 states informing them that it was reviewing their voter list maintenance procedures and asking how they planned to “remove the names of ineligible voters.” If Ohio wins at the Supreme Court, it will “certainly embolden” the department and GOP-controlled states to undertake aggressive voter purges, says Vanita Gupta, who headed the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under Obama.

And that would open the door to broader challenges to the NVRA. “It’s a hugely significant case,” Gupta says. “If the court comes out with a broad ruling that says inactivity in voting is sufficient proof to kick a voter off of the rolls, that could have broad implications across the country for how voters are purged off the rolls per the National Voter Registration Act.”

That’s one way to do a fascist takeover.

Dana Goodyear at the New Yorker takes a look at “the purge” so far.

I’m calling it the Purge,” a friend who works in Hollywood told me, a few days into the post-Weinstein era. Off the top of his head, he listed half a dozen men in the entertainment business whose behavior, he hoped, would no longer be condoned. In the weeks to come, they started toppling, joined by others, in a seemingly never-ending cascade, the world’s longest domino trick. The morning-news anchor, the worldly talk-show host, the animation genius with the awful shirts, “feminist” men, liberals, tortured artists, moguls, icons, “bad boys,” funny guys, even the folksy curmudgeon from public radio: they are being fired; stepping down; awkwardly apologizing, engendering ridicule and pique; or defending themselves and inviting rage.

The self-important literary editor is another worth mentioning.

Goodyear tells a very interesting story about a writers’ assistant on “Friends,” Amaani Lyle.

The daughter of a touring jazz musician, she had grown up in a middle-class suburb of Los Angeles and attended progressive private schools, before studying film at Emerson College, in Boston. She was used to being the only woman of color in the room. “Friends,” then in its sixth season on NBC, was one of the most watched shows on television; being in the writers’ room meant a potential credit that would propel her career.

Lyle’s job was to write down what the writers talked about. According to testimony she gave later, several of them talked about anal sex, oral sex, “fucking,” “pussies,” “schlongs,” what color hair they preferred women to have, what size breasts, and how one of the writers had missed his chance with one of the show’s stars. They referred to a lead actress as “having dried branches in her vagina”; one writer “frequently brought up his fantasy about an episode of the show in which one of the male characters enters the bathroom while a female character is showering and rapes her.” They doodled offensive anatomical drawings, vocalized pleasure while pretending to masturbate, altered a calendar in the writers’ room so that it read “pert tits” instead of “persistence” and “penis” instead of “happiness.”

“I can’t even say I was offended,” Lyle told me recently. “That’s how steeped in the culture I was. It was such a ubiquitous thing that it would’ve seemed off to have them not do that stuff.” She didn’t want to change the dynamic of the writers’ room; she wanted to diversify the show’s all-white cast. At the time, NBC was openly referred to as “No Black Characters.” Lyle, whose previous job had been at “Kenan & Kel,” on Nickelodeon, pitched a story line involving an African-American love interest for Joey, the character played by Matt LeBlanc.

After four months, Lyle was fired, ostensibly for typing too slowly.

She sued for wrongful termination and racial discrimination and lost, but her lawyer went on pursuing a sexual harassment claim.

The writers didn’t generally dispute the behavior Lyle had described; instead, they made a novel argument, on First Amendment grounds, that their behavior was a “creative necessity,” indispensable to the making of a show about a group of unmarried adult friends. The raunchy patter, so long as it wasn’t directed at Lyle, was part of their job. An amicus brief, signed by Steven Bochco, David Milch, Norman Lear, Diane English, and a hundred and twenty-seven other writers, argued that “the process creators go through to capture the necessary magic is inexact, counterintuitive, nonlinear, often painful—and above all, delicate.” Self-censorship could damage their productivity.

That’s an interesting idea. But is it true? Is it credible? Is it really the case that one can’t write a good screenplay without musing about rape scenes for the female characters? Does that apply to everything? Do writers also need to talk without inhibition about fantasies of torture, genocide, lynching, enslavement, in order to write a good screenplay? How do we know they wouldn’t have been better writers if they had inhibited themselves that way?

A dissenting amicus brief, filed by a group of legal scholars, argued that the habits of the writers’ room “effectively maintained an exclusionary culture that systematically, if unintentionally, marginalizes female writers and writers’ assistants.” A First Amendment exception to sexual-harassment rules would “essentially sanction this form of exclusion in the entire television writing sector.” In 2006, the California Supreme Court sided with the writers. After that, the female television writer told me, Warner Bros. began triumphantly including Lyle’s affidavit in mandatory sexual-harassment training sessions: “It was used as proof that anything goes in a writers’ room, and there’s not really such a thing as sexual harassment in that context, because to be creative you have to be able to say whatever comes to mind.”

Some women do what it takes to avoid being fired, but they’re not all happy about doing it.

One female television writer in her thirties, who has worked in a number of mostly male writers’ rooms, said, “I’ve been told I’m very staffable because I’m fun. I can take a lot of abuse and still crack a joke.” When she started out, her representatives told her that, as a woman, she would need to climb the ladder rung by rung; she understood that, if she ever wanted her own series, she could not get fired along the way. On a show where the female creator had been fired for being “crazy” and “difficult,” she developed methods of self-preservation, inuring herself to the indignities—such as an executive saying, as he listened to her pitch a sex scene, that he was “getting hard already,” and her male colleagues telling her to take it as a compliment. She regrets passing her methods down, teaching other women how not to ruffle the men in charge. “I had a friend who was interviewing for a staff writing job,” she told me. “I gave her the advice to have thick skin and a light heart. I felt like such a betrayer of my feminist values. What I was saying was, You have to seem fun while being abused. Everyone wants to have a good time while at work.”

Other women just get out. That of course is one reason there are so few women making movies so it’s one reason movies are so male-centric.

Kim Masters is an investigative journalist at the Hollywood Reporter.

Hollywood, Masters says, has long operated like a men-only club. “This town is shot through with a culture of intimidation, boys having fun, going to Las Vegas, hiring hookers. They don’t want female colleagues anywhere near them. Women are not invited and not promoted. I remember Dawn Steel saying, ‘If only I could go whoring with these guys my life would be so much easier.’ ”

Still, Masters has been shocked to see how pervasive sexual harassment is, particularly at certain studios and agencies. “It’s not just one or two people,” she said. “It’s woven into the fucking fabric.”

Many of the perps still have no clue.

“My experience of coaching these people is that they really don’t see why what they did was wrong,” she said. “It’s a failure of empathy or of introspection. Or they’re just sociopaths, or they’re really stupid. There’s a range. I sit down with these guys one on one. I start by saying, ‘Why are we here?’ Some say things like ‘I was set up.’ ‘It was a witch hunt.’ ‘You should have seen what the other guys did.’ ‘She participated.’ ‘I’m a Christian.’ All these deflective things people say. They just don’t get it. The workplace is a sandbox where they play out their social stuff and their family stuff.”

Change is slow.

Wary of appearing unenlightened, companies are scrambling to put women in leadership roles. Amazon is reportedly looking at a number of female candidates to replace Roy Price. But, while it’s one thing to celebrate women moving into a few positions vacated by disgraced men, actual progress will require a change in policy at the studios and at the networks. Katherine Pope, a television executive in her forties, who insists on interviewing women and people of color when she hires directors, said that the situation is dire. Even at companies where women hold impressive titles, there are layers of white men with veto power above them.

White men who didn’t have to put up with years of bullying to get there.

Uh oh – emergency emergency – a woman appears to have ambition. DANGER.

In recent months, New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand seems to have begun positioning herself for a presidential run in 2020. She’s been a vocal supporter of the #MeToo movement, pushed for Al Franken’s resignation, and endured a gross Twitter feud with the president. But despite her rising celebrity, a new op-ed in the Daily Beast suggests Gillibrand is too “too transparently opportunistic to be a viable candidate.”

Yeah. She’s supposed to be flirtatious about it, not just walk right up and say she wants it. Directness is great in a man but in a woman it’s gross and scary and emasculating.

In an essay published on Friday, writer and editor Ciro Scotti compares Gillibrand to “another New York politician criticized for basing her positions on supposedly canny calculations rather than on from-the-gut convictions,” and says she doesn’t appear “genuine” enough to run against Trump.

Ah what a funny coincidence that they both happen to be women. What are the odds, eh? Especially when female politicians are so outnumbered by the male kind?

All politicians are opportunistic; it’s practically a job requirement. But Scotti falls back on the same old, tired, lizard-brained and misogynistic argument that people used against Hillary Clinton: That ambitious women are off-putting. Not only that, he seems to say, Gillibrand is especially unappealing, because she seized political opportunities at the expense of men. The horror!

There are valid criticisms to be made about Gillibrand as a candidate, and I’m sure they will be over the course of the next three years. As Scotti’s op-ed confirms though, the road to 2020 will be long, tiresome, and full of sexist garbage — not that you’d thought otherwise.

Backward and in high heels, I tell you.

If tweets can get tenured academics bullied out of their jobs then why can’t they get presidents scolded out of theirs?

The last 12 months have seen one controversy after another over the tweets of George Ciccariello-Maher, an associate professor of politics and global studies at Drexel University. In a series of incidents, he has made statements that led to calls for his dismissal. In several instances, the university has criticized him. Ciccariello-Maher and his supporters have said that his comments have been distorted and that his academic freedom has been attacked.

On Thursday, he announced on Twitter that he was leaving his tenured job at Drexel. “After nearly a year of harassment by right-wing, white supremacist media outlets and internet mobs, after death threats and threats of violence directed against me and my family, my situation has become unsustainable,” he wrote on Twitter. “Staying at Drexel in the eye of this storm has become detrimental to my own writing, speaking and organizing.”

He pointed out that tenure isn’t much protection against that kind of thing.

He added, “In the past year, the forces of resurgent white supremacy have tasted blood and are howling for more. Given the pressure they will continue to apply, university communities must form a common front against the most reprehensible forces in society and refuse to bow to their pressure, intimidation and threats. Only then will universities stand any chance of survival.”

Crap writer though, isn’t he. Way too many stale off-the-shelf phrases in that passage. C minus.

The controversy over the professor started Dec. 24, 2016, when Ciccariello-Maher tweeted, “All I want for Christmas is white genocide.” The tweet went viral, with many conservative websites calling for Drexel to fire Ciccariello-Maher. Drexel condemned the tweet but didn’t fire him.

Ciccariello-Maher and his supporters said that the irony and purpose of his tweet were lost on many. Ciccariello-Maher argues that white genocide doesn’t exist, and is a false image used by the far right to scare white people. So he says he was making a point, not calling for anyone to be hurt.

In April, Ciccariello-Maher was again in the news when he tweeted about his reaction when he saw a passenger in first class give up his seat on a flight. “Some guy in first class gave up his seat for a uniformed soldier. People are thanking him. I’m trying not to vomit or yell about Mosul.”

Not a very thoughtful remark. Mosul was Trump’s doing, not a random soldier’s. Then again I suspect everyone (except perhaps the soldier) was all too quietly self-congratulatory about it, and being on a plane is bad enough as it is – and besides it’s not something that should get him hounded out of his job. Now about that guy in the Oval Office…

Jennifer Rubin at the Post says it’s a stunt.

The move by Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) marks a major escalation in conservatives’ challenges to the FBI’s credibility as the agency investigates whether any Trump associates committed crimes. Another Republican, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), joined in the letter to the Justice Department.

Their letter makes what is called a criminal referral to the Justice Department, suggesting it investigate the dossier author, former British spy Christopher Steele, for possibly lying to the FBI. It is a crime to lie to FBI agents about a material fact relevant to an ongoing investigation.

This is an outrageous political stunt, one with no legal ramifications and obviously designed to take the heat off the White House as damning reports bolstering an obstruction-of-justice claim and questioning the president’s mental fitness have sent the White House spinning.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a member of the Judiciary Committee and a former prosecutor, tells me, “I cannot understand why it would be necessary for members of Congress to make a criminal referral to the FBI concerning information we know the FBI already has.”

Reason not the need; maybe they did it for the sheer joy of the thing.

Moreover, the statute that Grassley and Graham cite — 18. U.S.C. 1001 — requires that a misstatement be intentionally wrong and material. It is ironic that the Justice Committee chairman who witnessed now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions repeatedly make false statements under oath would ignore these misstatements of fact and choose instead to vaguely point to ones apparently made to other people.

Her emails! Clinton Foundation! Comey leaked his own memos! Squawwwwwwk!

Walter Shaub, former director of the Office of Government Ethics, tells me: “Just once, I’d like to see the Chairman express concern about the link between the sitting President’s campaign and a hostile foreign government, rather than calling for investigations either of people looking into that link or of a woman who may be the world’s most investigated human, hasn’t been in government for 5 years, and isn’t running for anything.”

…

“I know of no basis for believing that Steele may have lied to the FBI and thus no basis for the Grassley/Graham referral.,” says constitutional lawyer Laurence H. Tribe. “I’ve been following this closely and am also unaware of any basis for Senators Grassley or Graham to suspect such lying. Thus it’s hard not to view this referral as an abuse of power designed to undermine and thus obstruct the Mueller investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia in last year’s presidential election.”

Trump is dragging them down with him.

In case we still haven’t had enough farcical distraction yet, here’s another installment:

More than a year after Republican leaders promised to investigate Russian interference in the presidential election, two influential Republicans on Friday made the first known congressional criminal referral in connection with the meddling — against one of the people who sought to expose it.

Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a senior committee member, told the Justice Department they had reason to believe that a former British spy, Christopher Steele, lied to federal authorities about his contacts with reporters regarding information in the dossier, and they urged the department to investigate. The committee is running one of three congressional investigations into Russian election meddling, and its inquiry has come to focus, in part, on Mr. Steele’s explosive dossier that purported to detail Russia’s interference and the Trump campaign’s complicity.

That’s the ticket! Never mind the Russian role in the election, never mind Trump and Gang’s collusion, go after a guy who pointed it out! Public spirit at its finest.

The decision by Mr. Grassley and Mr. Graham to single out the former intelligence officer behind the dossier — and not anyone who may have taken part in the Russian interference — infuriated Democrats and raised the stakes in the growing partisan battle over the investigations into Mr. Trump, his campaign team and Russia.

Oh no, I’m sure their motives are far above any kind of partisan bias.