Poor Fox. They just can’t get it right.

Jesse Watters, the Fox News host who took heat this week for making a joke about Ivanka Trump that was criticized as lewd, said on Wednesday that he would be taking a family vacation until Monday. The move came just three days after his show began airing in a new high-profile time slot.

Mr. Watters, who denied that his comment about President Trump’s daughter was sexual, announced his upcoming absence near the end of Wednesday night’s edition of “The Five.” He will miss two days of the show’s first week in prime time after it took over the 9 p.m. slot from “The O’Reilly Factor,” and he will miss his “Watters’ World” show on Saturday.

So he messed up on his second day. That’s gotta hurt.

Mr. Watters’s highly scrutinized joke came during Tuesday’s show as the hosts discussed footage of Ms. Trump being jeered onstage in Berlin while she was speaking on a panel about female entrepreneurship.

“It’s funny, the left says they really respect women, and then when given an opportunity to respect a woman like that, they boo and hiss,” he said.

Oh yeah, the zany left doesn’t admire Sarah Palin, either. That’s because respecting women as a class is about thinking women are people; it’s not about thinking all women are perfect. I think that’s a pretty clear distinction.

Then he added with a grin: “So I don’t really get what’s going on here, but I really liked how she was speaking into that microphone.”

On Wednesday, after the clip had been shared widely on social media, Mr. Watters said in a statement that the comment had not been sexual innuendo, as critics perceived it to be.

Because Fox just isn’t like that, right?

Moses bites the bullet.

You can support J and M on Patreon.

Our dear ally Saudi Arabia –

A  man in Saudi Arabia has reportedly been sentenced to death on charges of apostasy after losing two appeals.

Several local media reports identified the man as Ahmad Al Shamri, in his 20s, from the town of Hafar al-Batin, who first came to the authorities’ attention in 2014 after allegedly uploading videos to social media in which he renounced Islam and the Prophet Mohammed.

He was arrested on charges of atheism and blasphemy and held in prison before being convicted by a local court and sentenced to death in February 2015.

The Saudi state plans to kill a man for not believing in a god and for rejecting Islam.

Under Saudi Arabia’s strict religious laws, leaving Islam can be punishable by harsh prison sentences and corporeal punishment – and a 2014 string of royal decrees under the late King Abdullah re-defined atheists as terrorists, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

Last year, a citizen was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 2,000 lashes for expressing atheistic sentiment in hundreds of social media posts.

This is our ally, keep in mind. Brave hater of Mooslims Donald Trump hasn’t uttered a peep about Saudi Arabia.

International human rights watchdogs have consistently condemned Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.

The Kingdom came under further scrutiny last week when it emerged it had been elected to the UN’s women’s rights commission.

Under the country’s system of guardianship, women’s rights and freedom of movement is heavily restricted. They are not allowed to drive, and voted for the first time in 2015.

“Electing Saudi Arabia to protect women’s rights is like making an arsonist into the town fire chief,” UN Watch Director Hillel Neuer said. “It’s absurd.”

Saudi Arabia has sat on the UN’s human rights council since September 2015.

That too is ridiculous. Saudi Arabia has contempt for human rights.

Maajid Nawaz tweets:

https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/857370244075200512

Well, this isn’t what I was hoping to see. Obama has agreed to do a talk at a health care conference sponsored by a Wall Street investment bank for the modest sum of Four Hundred Thousand Dollars.

Out of office for about three months, Mr. Obama has begun the process of cashing in. In February, he and his wife, Michelle, each signed book deals worth tens of millions of dollars. And Mr. Obama’s spokesman confirmed last week that he is beginning the paid-speech circuit.

A $400,000 speaking fee for addressing the Cantor Fitzgerald conference is a sharp increase from the amounts typically paid to his predecessors. Former President Bill Clinton averaged about $200,000 per speech while former President George W. Bush is reportedly paid $100,000 to $175,000 for each appearance.

I suppose nobody much wants to listen to Bush do a talk, even Republicans.

Aaron Blake at the Post has thoughts on why Obama shouldn’t be chasing the bucks the way the Clintons did.

For one thing, it continues a bad precedent.

George W. Bush and Bill Clinton did this, too, as have Hillary Clinton, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan. And the more that Wall Street firms give out-of-office presidents and big-name politicians these paydays, the more they become the norm. Other presidents will know that such payments are on the table, and it risks coloring their decisions with regard to Wall Street and special interests.

Which is already happening with Obama, retroactively. Liberals loved (and miss) his presidency, but if there’s one thing the Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders wing is still sore about in the Obama administration, it’s the lack of prosecutions for anybody involved in the financial crisis. In September, Warren, a senator from Massachusetts, requested a formal investigation of why no charges were brought.

And now they’re paying him? Appearances, dude.

Also, this shouldn’t be why people go into government. The more people do it, the more it gets normalized. How’s that working out for us so far?

Blake quotes that bit from The Audacity of Hope that I blogged about recently.

I can’t assume that the money chase didn’t alter me in some ways. …

Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means — law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. …

And although my own worldview and theirs corresponded in many ways — I had gone to the same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my kids in many of the same ways — I found myself avoiding certain topics during conversations with them, papering over possible differences, anticipating their expectations. On core issues I was candid; I had no problem telling well-heeled supporters that the tax cuts they’d received from George Bush should be reversed. Whenever I could, I would try to share with them some of the perspectives I was hearing from other portions of the electorate: the legitimate role of faith in politics, say, or the deep cultural meaning of guns in rural parts of the state.

Still, I know that as a consequence of my fundraising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population — that is, the people that I’d entered public life to serve.

And yet here we are.

Word is the deal for the two books the two Obamas will write was $65 million. You’d think they could skip the chats to bankers.

Because it came up in comments and Dave Ricks provided a link, I belatedly learned of the Tuskegee airmen.

For historical photographs or information regarding the Tuskegee Airmen, contact: Maxwell Air Force Base by e-mail at afhranews@maxwell.af.mil or write the Air Force Historical Research Agency, 600 Chennault Circle, Maxwell AFB, Ala. 36112-6424.

• The Tuskegee Airmen were dedicated, determined young men who volunteered to become America’s first Black military airmen
• Those who possessed the physical and mental qualifications and were accepted for aviation cadet training were trained initially to be pilots, and later to be either pilots, navigators, or bombardiers.
• Tuskegee University was awarded the U.S. Army Air Corps contract to help train America’s first Black military aviators because it had already invested in the development of an airfield, had a proven civilian pilot training program and its graduates performed highest on flight aptitude exams.
• Moton Field is named for Tuskegee University’s second President, Dr. Robert R. Moton who served with distinction from 1915-1935. The Airmen were deployed during the presidential administration of Dr. Frederick Douglas Patterson (1935-1953).
• The all-Black, 332nd Fighter Group consisted originally of four fighter squadrons, the 99th, the 100th, the 301st and the 302nd.
• From 1941-1946, some 1,000 Black pilots were trained at Tuskegee.
• The Airmen’s success in escorting bombers during World War II – having one of the lowest loss records of all the escort fighter groups, and being in constant demand for their services by the allied bomber units.- is a record unmatched by any other fighter group.
• The 99th Squadron distinguished itself by being awarded two Presidential Unit Citations (June-July 1943 and May 1944) for outstanding tactical air support and aerial combat in the 12th Air Force in Italy, before joining the 332nd Fighter Group.
• The 332nd Fighter group was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation for its’ longest bomber escort mission to Berlin, Germany on March 24, 1945. During this mission, the Tuskegee Airmen (then known as the ‘Red Tails’) destroyed three German ME-262 jet fighters and damaged five additional jet fighters.
• The 332nd Fighter Group had also distinguished itself in June 1944 when two of its pilots flying P-47 Thunderbolts discovered a German destroyer in the harbor of Trieste, Italy.
• The tenacious bomber escort cover provided by the 332nd “Red Tail” fighters often discouraged enemy fighter pilots from attacking bombers escorted by the 332nd Fighter Group.
• C. Alfred “Chief” Anderson earned his pilot’s license in 1929 and became the first Black American to receive a commercial pilot’s certificate in 1932, and, subsequently, to make a transcontinental flight.
• Anderson is also well known as the pilot who flew Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of then-U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, convincing her to encourage her husband to authorize military flight training at Tuskegee.
• In 1948, President Harry Truman enacted Executive Order No. 9981 – directing equality of treatment and opportunity in all of the United States Armed Forces, which in time led to the end of racial segregation in the U.S. military forces.
• The U.S. Congress authorized $29 million in 1998 to develop the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site, with the University, Tuskegee Airmen Inc. and the National Park Service serving as partners in its development. To date, a mere $3.6 million has been appropriated for the Site’s implementation.

The cost of one of Trump’s weekends in Florida.

Trump did a little statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day on Sunday.

Astonishingly, he interrupts even that to mention his election. He interrupts in the second sentence to talk about his election.

I am deeply honored to speak with you tonight, as the World Jewish Congress gathers in New York City with the leaders from across the world.

First, I want to thank Ronald Lauder, not only for his many years of friendship – and he truly has been my good friend, he even predicted early that I was going to win the presidency – but also for his leadership of this organization. He has done a fantastic job.

Holocaust blah blah, six million Jews, two-thirds of the Jews in Europe, murdered by the Nazi genocide – did I mention I won the election? – We must stamp out prejudice and anti-Semitism everywhere it is found, and also I won the election. Thank you and good night.

https://youtu.be/KZG8HkIFW_c

There’s a guy called Corey Stewart who wants to be governor of Virginia. He calls himself a Conservative Republican; I think he means a Trumpian. He’s losing his shit (and trawling for votes) over the statue removal horror.

https://twitter.com/CoreyStewartVA/status/856699414907367424

Nothing? Nothing at all? War, famine, torture? Slavery? I think those are worse.

Also, as many tweets pointed out, he’s from Minnesota.

You were born in Minnesota, so let's amend: there's many things worse than a Yankee pretending to be a Southerner but it's still pretty dumb

— Matthew Kory (@mattymatty2000) April 25, 2017

You're no southerner, you are a Minnesotan. Respect your home state's sacrifice for helping the United States win the Civil War.

— Donté Stallworth (@DonteStallworth) April 25, 2017

https://twitter.com/treygraham/status/856706634227339264

https://twitter.com/MelanconJena/status/856722711149768705

He’s still on it though.

https://twitter.com/CoreyStewartVA/status/856872376490971146

https://twitter.com/CoreyStewartVA/status/856894340060200961

https://twitter.com/CoreyStewartVA/status/857001286838829056

Or the Parthenon, or Machu Picchu, or Angkor Wat, or the Great Wall. Just imagine!

Last night in New Orleans:

New Orleans on Monday began removing four monuments dedicated to the era of the Confederacy and its aftermath, capping a prolonged battle about the future of the memorials, which critics deemed symbols of racism and intolerance and which supporters viewed as historically important.

Workers dismantled an obelisk, which was erected in 1891 to honor members of the Crescent City White League who in 1874 fought in the Reconstruction-era Battle of Liberty Place against the racially integrated New Orleans police and state militia, Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in a statement.

That is of course “historically important” but not in the sense of “needs preservation in situ.” It’s historically very important that the South successfully resisted and defeated Reconstruction, but that doesn’t mean that monuments honoring that resistance are part of our Precious Heritage and must be retained. The monument honored the resistance. The resistance was all about keeping brown people forever subjugated. That’s not something we should keep on honoring with monuments.

The monument, which was sometimes used as a rallying point by David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan, has stirred debate for decades. Local leaders unsuccessfully tried to remove it in 1981 and 1993.

The workers were dressed in flak jackets, helmets and scarves to conceal their identities because of concerns about their safety. Police officers watched from a nearby hotel.

The monument was taken away on flatbed trucks.

The monuments were erected decades after the Civil War ended by people who wanted to demonstrate that the South should feel no guilt in having fought the war, the mayor’s statement said.

And no guilt in having fought to defend the institution of slavery.

The debate over Confederate symbols has taken center stage since nine people were killed at a black church in South Carolina in June 2015. South Carolina removed the Confederate battle flag, which flew at its State House for more than 50 years, and other Southern cities have considered taking down monuments.

Harcourt Fuller, an assistant professor of history at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and a scholar of national and regional symbolism, said in an email that supporters of the monuments see them as part of their “historical and cultural legacy that needs to be maintained and protected.

“We’re talking largely about these concrete symbols,” he added. “By themselves, they’re lifeless. They’re not living symbols. But we as citizens project our own historical values onto them.”

And then we shoot up black churches.

The Liberty Place monument, which was 35 to 40 feet tall, commemorated a violent uprising by white Democrats against the racial integration of the city’s police force and the Republicans who governed Louisiana. The White League won the battle and forcibly removed the governor, but federal troops arrived three days later to return the governor to power.

The battle remained an important symbol to those who resisted Reconstruction, the period of transforming Confederate states after the Civil War. From 1932 until 1993, the monument bore a plaque that said, in part, that the “national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state,” the city statement said.

It wasn’t just the “period of transforming Confederate states” – it was the period of trying to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment in the South, of trying to establish and entrench a regime of civil rights, of trying to block efforts to reinstate slavery via Jim Crow laws. Generations of African Americans were much worse off because white supremacists successfully resisted.

The IHEU reports another freethinker slaughtered.

Yameen Rasheed (29) was well-known in the Maldives as a satirist, taking shots at the government, or at Islamist radicals, all the time promoting the values of secularism and democracy that he obviously held dear.

He was found dead in the early hours of Sunday morning, stabbed to death in the stairwell of his apartment.

The IHEU met Yameen Rasheed earlier this year, during his visit to the Human Rights Council with Forum Asia. He spoke on a panel with Rafida Bonya Ahmed, who herself survived a machete attack in 2015 during which her husband Avijit Roy was killed.

IHEU Director of Advocacy, Elizabeth’s O’Casey, kept in touch with Rasheed after meeting him at the event. Rasheed updated the IHEU on death threats against himself and other secularists, and IHEU raised his case with Ahmed Shaheed (the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief).

“I have just heard the horrific news that the world has lost an incredibly intelligent, articulate, kind and courageous man: Yameen Rasheed. I liked him enormously, although I did not know him well enough – to my eternal regret,” said Elizabeth O’Casey today. “And he has now been brutally murdered. And the secularist human rights community has lost yet another light, another blogger and activist, and the world is darker because of it.”

The IHEU joins Forum Asia and PEN International in calling for a full, transparent, impartial investigation, and supports the call by opposition figures for international involvement in the inquiry.

This god hides from us, but wants us murdered if we don’t believe it exists. Could there be anything more tyrannical?

It appears that the White House has refused to provide documents requested by the House Oversight committee investigating Flynn.

Also, the leaders of the committee say Flynn probably broke the law.

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn probably broke the law by failing to disclose foreign income he earned from Russia and Turkey, the heads of the House Oversight Committee said Tuesday.

Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and the panel’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), said they believe Flynn neither received permission nor fully disclosed income he earned for a speaking engagement in Russia and lobbying activities on behalf of Turkey when he applied to reinstate his security clearance. They reached this conclusion after viewing two classified memos and a financial disclosure form in a private briefing Tuesday morning.

…

Chaffetz and Cummings stressed that as a former military officer, Flynn would have needed special permission for his appearance at a gala sponsored by RT, the Russian-government-funded television station, for which he was paid $45,000. For his work lobbying on behalf of the Turkish government, he was paid more than $500,000.

“It does not appear that was ever sought, nor did he get that permission,” Chaffetz said.

That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a former military officer could just not be aware of.

The Oversight Committee asked the White House in March for documents pertaining to Flynn’s security-clearance applications, the vetting that occurred before he was named national security adviser, and all of his contacts with foreign agents, including any payments received. In particular, the committee heads requested to see a disclosure form known as the SF-86, on which Flynn was obligated to declare any foreign income.

On April 19, the White House sent the committee a reply, stating that any documents related to Flynn from before Jan. 20 — the day President Trump took office — were not in its possession, and that any documents from after that date did not seem relevant to the committee’s investigation.

“The White House has refused to provide this committee with a single piece of paper in response to our bipartisan request,” Cummings said.

Not good.