Oooh another Trump scandal. Wow, this one's bad.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast: 

The photographer says he attended Trump’s parties with one of the owners of the hair salon, Pierre Michel, that operated in both the Plaza and Trump Tower. The salon owner, Pierre Ouaknine, says his memories of those Plaza parties vanished after a recent surgery. But the photographer’s memories are crystal clear. Trump would take over “suites on the corners” of his hotel with views of Central Park and Grand Army Plaza, not to mention lots to look at inside, and wow his guests. 

The attraction for the men “was young girls assuming they’d get somewhere” by joining the party, the photographer says, “Of course, it never happens.” 

Young models were attracted to the fêtes with a simple, time-tested pitch. “You’ll meet rich guys who will help you,” says the photographer. “It was networking, but on a weird, bizarre scale.” 

The girls were as young as 15, he says, and “over their heads, they had no idea, and they ended up in situations. There were always dramas because the men threw money and drugs at them to keep them enticed. It’s based on power and dominating girls who can’t push back and can be discarded. There’s always someone to pick them back up. Nobody wants to call home and say ‘Help me.’” 

Trump would “go from room to room,” said the photographer, who added that “I was there to party myself. It was guys with younger girls, sex, a lot of sex, a lot of cocaine, top-shelf liquor” but no smoking. Trump didn’t approve of cigarettes.

Those men at these parties often knew each other. “It’s a small community,” the photographer says. “They exchanged information, facilitated each other. Trump was in and out. He’d wander off with a couple girls. I saw him. He was getting laid like crazy. Trump was at the heart of it. He loved the attention and in private, he was a total fucking beast.” 

The article goes on to point out that although there were ample amounts of cocaine at these parties that Trump himself never partook.

His drugs of choice were power and sex.

However the sources for the article claim that some of that sex was had with girls as young as fourteen years old.

Look we have all done things in our past to feel embarrassed about, but banging underage girls is typically not one of them. And especially not one that can be in the past of a man seeking to be the President of the United States.

Trump himself characterized those years like this:

Trump told me that consequence-free promiscuity was then his “second business… If I hadn’t got married, who knows what would have happened? You had drugs, women and booze all over the fuckin’ place.”

Gee that certainly lends an air of credibility to that 13 year old rape victim's story doesn't it?

ISIS accomplishes what the Republicans can only dream of accomplishing.

Courtesy of the Independent:  

Isis is believed to have ordered the closure of all women’s clinics supervised by male doctors in its Syrian heartlands in its latest assault on the rights of women. 

A culture of rape, forced marriages for child brides, the persecution of doctors and the exclusive use of medicines for militants have resulted in a crisis for women’s health under Isis’s brutal regime. 

According to activists, Isis has drastically restricted the work of male gynecologists in accordance with its leaders’ belief that men and women should be kept apart at all costs.

I read this and all I could think was how jealous the Republicans are that they don't have this kind of power. 

Because trust me, if they had this power, they would use this power.

The really terrible thing for the girls in Syria is that many of them are being forced into unions with ISIS fighters, often by their own fathers, and come to these clinics after suffering miscarriages, with STD's, or after suffering horrible abuse and rape at the hands of their new "husbands."

Some of these girls are as young as nine or ten, and without these clinics many of them will die. 

And you might want to believe that even Christian conservatives would be horrified at such treatment, but don't forget that no small number of them still see women as the property of men, and at least one website even supported the idea of marital rape.

Here's a shocker, recent study shows that purity pledges do not work. Or at least not for long.

Courtesy of Salon:  

Great/horrible news for proponents of comprehensive sex education: virginity pledges don’t work, according to science. That is, they don’t work unless signers are truly and deeply religious, in which case abstinence pledges are likely to delay sexual activity a few years — but usually not until marriage. A recent study published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies has found that the efficacy of virginity pledges is not only associated directly with signers’ religiosity, but also poses serious risks to young adults who go back on their word. 

To evaluate what role religious commitment played in young adults’ adherence to virginity pledges, researchers polled 1,380 college students aged 18-24 who attended a “large, public, Southeastern state university,” asking participants whether they had previously signed a virginity pledge, their virginity status and how many past or present intercourse and oral sex partners they had. Researchers also asked students to rate their religious commitment, based on how religion or spirituality influence their daily lives, how often they seek spiritual comfort and how frequently they participate in religious events. 

More than a quarter of respondents had previously made a virginity agreement, either in writing or verbally, which is consistent with national averages; according to a 2008 study of pledge signers, 23.8 percent of adolescents aged 12-17 had agreed to remain abstinent. A majority of signers, however, were — wait for it — no longer virgins at the time of the study. 65 percent of respondents who had signed a virginity pledge reported having had sexual intercourse, and a whopping 77 percent of signers had engaged in oral sex. 

For the most part, though, those who were having oral sex or full-on coitus were also the people with lower rates of religious commitment, indicating that sincere religious belief does play a role in a person’s dedication to remaining abstinent. The researchers differentiated between “religious commitment” and “religious participation” to control for those who might have been immersed in a spiritual lifestyle without being true believers themselves; sure enough, people who were solely “religious participants” exhibited more sexual behavior than committed believers.

Okay that last part might be true, or it might simply be that those who self identify as "religiously committed" are more likely to lie about their sexual activities.

Ya think?

In my experience the girls that were the most religious and goody two shoes were the ones that went the wildest in college. That is unless the college they attended was also super religious and oppressive and they continued to be browbeaten into submission until they graduated and THEN they went wild.

In my opinion losing your virginity should not have such a stigma attached to it, because then what happens is that the focus on its importance almost invariably makes the first time full of stress and more often than not incredibly disappointing.

Yes there are great love stories out in the world concerning high school sweethearts who waited to get married, were each others first and only, and who have marriages that have endured the test of time.

However those stories are few and far between these days.

Teaching young ladies that sexuality is perfectly normal, and that taking precautions to prevent disease and unwanted pregnancy, while choosing their partners wisely seems to me the best approach.

But then again I also do not believe I will burn in the eternal fires of hell for thinking impure thoughts or for coveting my neighbor's wife, so perhaps my perspective is little skewed from that of somebody who thinks that fumbling around with an inexperienced girl to take her virginity is a "gift."

Now hot sweaty, clothes rending, wild monkey sex with an experienced woman? Now THAT'S a gift.

Minnesota minister creates insular community where he is free to rape and sexually abuse young women for years.

Courtesy of the Star Tribune:  

Lindsay Tornambe was just 13 years old when she was chosen to be “sacrificed to God,” she remembers. 

That announcement in July 2000 came from a minister who led an insular faith community that included her family in central Minnesota. As Tornambe sat in the congregation with her parents, she remembers the minister calling out a list of 10 girls for a position of honor. He would later call them “maidens.” 

Soon, her parents dutifully dropped her off at his isolated camp, where what she now calls a nightmare of sexual abuse went on for about nine years. 

Pine County authorities announced Tuesday that the minister, 52-year-old Victor A. Barnard, is now facing 59 counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct involving his chosen maidens. 

Barnard ruled “like a rock star” over the camp and sexually exploited girls and young women at his whim while they lived apart from their families, according to court papers, which spell out the alleged abuses against two unnamed teens. 

Barnard had not been apprehended Tuesday evening but was believed to be in Washington state, where authorities have begun a manhunt for him. He is the subject of a nationwide warrant.

The 59 counts are based only on the two young women who cooperated with the authorities, there are undoubtedly many, many more young girls and women who were also molested by this guy.

You know besides my issues with religion in general, this is really one of the things about faith that concerns me the most.

Just ask yourself how readily you would accept that a 52 year old man was inviting young girls up to his isolated cabin for reasons that were NOT incredibly suspicious, if he were not using religion to camouflage his actions?

One would think that after the Jonestown massacre people would be incredibly wary of charismatic religious leaders who want to spend time with your wives or daughters, and start camps or communes in isolated areas, but some people are just not that sharp.

If you want to learn more click the link at the top, but I warn you it is a pretty upsetting read.

Has Sarah Palin ever said ANYTHING that was not full of hypocrisy? Never mind, rhetorical question.

Okay so you all remember this from yesterday right?

When I posted it I was mostly focused on the fact that it was yet another attempt to grift more money from the ignorant masses, and that Sarah Palin is woefully unqualified to host a show about hunting.

Well as the day wore on many people focused on that stupid quote, and pointed out that such a died in the wool narcissist like Sarah Palin was certainly not one to judge a young lady's desire to take pictures of herself and send them to friends and family.

And oh, you could NOT be more right about that.

I mean seriously?

Some have postulated that Palin was taking a cheap shot at the President over this famous selfie.

Which of course would certainly be true to form for her, since she seems to find EVERYTHING the President does objectionable in one way or another.

However before she starts giving people advice on how to behave in front of a camera, she might need to take a little of that advice herself.

She might also consider who else is engaging in the behavior that she seems to find so offensive.

Judgmental, hypocritical, and never self analytical, that is Sarah Palin in a nutshell.

Uh oh! Shelly let her batshit get out of control and now it might be about to backfire.

Courtesy of NPR:

Even as Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann backs off some from an inflammatory claim that a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer led to mental retardation in a young girl, two bioethicists are turning up the heat. 

Yes, the leading group of pediatricians in this country slammed Bachmann and said "there is absolutely no scientific validity" to statements that the vaccine against human papilloma virus is dangerous or causes retardation. 

And the Minnesota Republican has conceded she's not a medical professional, saying in a radio interview: "I am not a doctor, I'm not a scientist, I'm not a physician. All I was doing is reporting what this woman told me last night at the debate." 

But Dr. Steven Miles, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota, has ponied up $1,000 if the mother Bachmann talked about can produce medical proof that her daughter suffered mental retardation from the HPV vaccine, the Star Tribune reports. "These types of messages in this climate have the capacity to do enormous public health harm," Miles told the paper. "It's an extremely serious claim and it deserves to be analyzed." 

And Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania has placed what amounts to a $10,000 bet on the issue. 

I think that we can safely assume that there will be no VP slot open for Bachmann when Mitt Romney finally gets the nomination. I don't think the GOP is ever going to allow anybody to get that spot without much MORE stringent vetting than a certain Alaska politician was subjected to.

And for all intents and purposes we are watching that vetting play out right before our eyes.

I don't know about you, but I find it pretty entertaining!