Trump's attorney Michael Cohen abruptly drops his suit against Buzzfeed and Fusion GPS. Gee, I wonder why?

Courtesy of Politico: 

Embattled attorney Michael Cohen has dropped a pair of much-touted libel suits against BuzzFeed and the private investigation firm Fusion GPS over publication of the so-called dossier detailing alleged ties between President Donald Trump and Russia. 

Cohen abandoned the suits late Wednesday as he continues to fight to recover documents and electronic files seized from his home, office and hotel room last week by federal authorities as part of what appears to be a broad criminal investigation into his conduct. 

"The decision to voluntarily discontinue these cases was a difficult one," Cohen's attorney David Schwartz said. "We believe the defendants defamed my client, and vindicating Mr. Cohen’s rights was — and still remains — important. But given the events that have unfolded, and the time, attention, and resources needed to prosecute these matters, we have dismissed the matters, despite their merits." 

The dossier claims that Cohen met with Russian operatives somewhere in Europe, including Prague, to attend a meeting to “clean up the mess” created by public disclosures of other Trump associates’ reported ties to Russia. 

So why would Cohen suddenly drop these lawsuits?

A couple of reasons spring to mind.

For one Cohen is under criminal investigation, and being sued for defamation by the attorney for Stormy Daniels.

That means he would be involved in at least three legal battles at the same time, one of which might see him face time in a federal prison.

That is a lot of money be spreading around. Even if he is rich, there is a limit. 

The other reason is discovery in the Fusion GPS and Buzzfeed cases.

Any evidence that Cohen has to reveal to battle them in court is likely going to then be made available to the media, and will definitely be available to the Mueller team.

And as we have witnessed before team Mueller are known for jumping on newly revealed information quickly and decisively.

In response to all of this Cohen might not remain Trump's personal attorney for long.

In fact one of Trump's past legal representatives has reportedly told Trump he cannot Trust Michael Cohen.

Courtesy of Slate: 

One of President Donald Trump’s longtime legal advisers said he warned the president in a phone call Friday that Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and close friend, would turn against the president and cooperate with federal prosecutors if faced with criminal charges.

Mr. Goldberg said he cautioned the president not to trust Mr. Cohen. On a scale of 100 to 1, where 100 is fully protecting the president, Mr. Cohen “isn’t even a 1,” he said he told Mr. Trump…. In the call, Mr. Goldberg [-] said he told the president Mr. Cohen could even agree to wear a wire and try to record conversations with Mr. Trump. “You have to be alert,” Mr. Goldberg said he told the president. “I don’t care what Michael says.”

Of course IF Trump fires Cohen that would then give him less reason to go out on a limb to protect his former boss. 

You know it is almost as if Trump is being outmaneuvered on all sides.

More about Donald Trump's affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels.

As it turns out there was a reporter from Slate working on the story about Trump and Daniels before the election.

Jacob Weisberg did not post that story because he did not feel he had enough corroboration to write it with confidence that it could stand up to scrutiny.

Now that the Wall Street Journal has written their account of Daniels receiving $130,000 in hush money Weisberg has written about what he learned during multiple interviews with Daniels.

From the article: 

Daniels, whose given name is Stephanie Clifford, did indeed have a story about Trump, which she related to me in a series of phone conversations and text exchanges that took place between August and October of 2016. 

Daniels told me she’d gone to Trump’s hotel room after meeting him at a celebrity golf tournament in Nevada in 2006. There they’d begun a sexual relationship, which continued for nearly a year. They’d met in New York and more than once in Los Angeles. In early 2007, Trump had invited her to a party to promote Trump Vodka, where she was photographed. He’d also invited her to his Miss USA pageant that year. 

In our conversations, Daniels said she was holding back on the juiciest details, such as her ability to describe things about Trump that only someone who had seen him naked would know. She intimated that her view of his sexual skill was at odds with the remark attributed to Marla Maples.

You may remember that Maples reported that it was "The Best Sex" she had ever had.

You know just like Trump is the least racist person you have ever met, the best businessman in history, and the healthiest person to ever occupy the White House.

Weisberg sort of glossed over the more prurient details and instead focused on what was then a pending financial agreement between the lawyers for Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels' attorney: 

Daniels said that, through intermediaries, she and Trump had worked out an agreement for the presidential candidate to pay her a six-figure sum to keep quiet. More specifically, she said her lawyer Keith Davidson, a Beverly Hills–based attorney who specializes in claims against celebrities, had worked out the terms with Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen. 

Daniels told me that agreement involved a complicated arrangement to shield the real names of the parties. She texted me an unsigned two-page document spelling out this arrangement, the title of which was “Exhibit ‘A’ to the Confidential Settlement Agreement and Release: Assignment of Copyright and Non-Disparagement Agreement.”* The document she texted me indicated that in the main agreement—a document I never saw—“Stephanie Gregory Clifford aka Stormy Daniels is referred to by the pseudonym ‘Peggy Peterson,’ and ___________ is referred to by the pseudonym ‘David Dennison.’ ” 

The document Daniels sent me included two additional pseudonyms, “David Delucia” and “RCI,” but did not indicate which person and/or entity those pseudonyms referred to. Another provision in the document I saw stated that only Daniels’ lawyer Keith Davidson and a lawyer for the other party would be allowed to retain copies of the side-letter agreement identifying the parties by their actual names.

About a week before the election Daniels stopped responding to texts and emails, likely due to the fact that she had reached that financial agreement which the Wall Street Journal reported on recently.

Now it is very unlikely that this story by Weisberg would have changed the outcome of the election, because let's face it unless this was gay sex, or sex with a black person, Trump's deplorables would not be bothered in the least.

However, as has been pointed out by a number of commentators, this story would have DESTROYED the candidacy of any other politician that we can think of, and that right there tells us just how far away from our moral center we have drifted since Donald Trump rode down that escalator to announce his candidacy.

In Touch got even more information about this fling from Daniels back in 2011. Here is their story:

Stormy told In Touch, “[The sex] was textbook generic,” while discussing the fling they had less than four months after Donald’s wife, Melania, gave birth to their son, Barron. “I actually don’t even know why I did it, but I do remember while we were having sex, I was like, ‘Please, don’t try to pay me.’” 

At one point, Stormy told In Touch, she excused herself to go to the bathroom. “When I came out, he was sitting on the bed and he was like, ‘Come here.’ And I was like, ‘Ugh, here we go.’ And we started kissing.” After having sex, Stormy said, “We hung out for a little while and he just kept saying, ‘I’m gonna call you, I’m gonna call you. I have to see you again. You’re amazing. We have to get you on The Apprentice.’” 

Of course Trump never did get Daniels that gig on "The Apprentice" or kept any other promises that he made to her.

However he DID pay her off, which is why she is denying all of this now.

On a final note the fellow adult film star that Stormy Daniels invited to a threesome with Donald Trump appeared on the Megyn Kelly show to tell her side of things.

I do not typically post video of Kelly's show, but I think you will like this.

“Picture this: Donald Trump chasing me around the bedroom in his tighty whities isn’t something you forget.”

And now none of us will be able to forget it, or that such an embarrassing POS is occupying the People's House. 

Paul Ryan is too afraid to be confronted about Trumpcare to hold any town halls.

Hey no town halls right now, until we are finished screwing you over.

Courtesy of Slate:  

House Speaker Paul Ryan won’t hold public town hall meetings because he’s concerned about protesters coming in from outside his district. Ryan, who once seemed to relish overflowing town halls, seemed to make the policy official after holding several closed-door meetings with constituents. 

“I don’t want to have a situation where we just have a screaming fest, a shouting fest, where people are being bused in from out of the district to get on TV because they’re yelling at somebody,” Ryan told reporters in Madison on Friday. “That does nobody any good. What I want to do is have a civil, good, quiet conversation with constituents.” That is why Ryan says he has been “looking for new and creative ways to interact with my constituents in a civil way.” 

So far, these “new and creative ways” have meant telephone town halls, meetings with constituents behind closed doors with pre-arranged questions and no follow-ups, and office hours.

Another Republican coward who talks big in private, but is too afraid to face the music when his constitutions want him to explain how he can take health care away from millions of Americans. 

Trumpcare details leaked. Yes it is just as bad as you imagined.

New information has now surfaced on the Republicans' attempt to health care away from millions of Americans.

The new "plan," if one can call it that, is to leave the Obamacare framework in place and then just make it shittier.

Here are some key points as reported by Slate:  

1) Instead of providing Americans tax credits to buy insurance based on their age, as the House bill does, the Senate would offer them based on “financial need”—which is more or less how Obamacare works. But under the GOP’s proposal, fewer Americans would qualify for help. Under the Affordable Care Act, households can receive insurance subsidies if they earn up to 400 percent of the poverty line. Senate Republicans would lower that threshold to 350 percent. Subsidies will also be smaller for those who still qualify.

The writer of the article volunteers that he is not sure who this would please.

The answer of course is that it would please the ancient demon to which Republicans have apparently pledged their allegiance, and their very souls.

Or it could be to please their insurance company donors. Kind of the same thing really.

2) The Senate bill eliminates all of Obamacare’s taxes except the “Cadillac tax” on expensive health plans. This will please the medical device makers, investors, high earners, and insurance companies that were taxed by the ACA.

Yes but it will also dramatically cut the funding that the health care law would need to survive, essentially ensuring that it will ultimately fail.

Good planning.

3) It rolls back Obamacare's Medicaid expansion “more gradually than the House bill,” according to the Post, though how much more gradually is unclear. Senate Republicans have been haggling over whether to phase out the expansion over as little as three years or as many as seven—but the final outcome would be the same either way. Meanwhile, it sounds like the Senate is going to run with its plan to impose even more draconian spending cuts on Medicaid over the long term by capping per-patient spending, then increasing funding more slowly each year than the House would.

And here is where more Americans get left to die on their own without access to health care.

Can't have a GOP health care plan that doesn't kill people, now can we?

4) What about consumer protections? The House bill notoriously allowed states to opt out of Obamacare's insurance regulations, such as rules barring carriers from discriminating against patients with pre-existing conditions or requiring them to cover certain services. Sensing that it might be politically suicidal to strip cancer and heart patients of their protections, Senate moderates have reportedly resisted going down that path. Right now, it's unclear who won the argument.

And with that the Republicans do away with any pretense of wanting to help more people get access to health care, or that they support their ability to keep it when they need it most.

This is Republican politicians, with some the best health care available in the world, looking down at the masses and urinating on the sick and elderly standing below.

But wait, there's more.

5) The Senate bill would kill funding for Planned Parenthood but wouldn't bar the government from subsidizing private insurance that pays for abortions, which will infuriate religious conservatives.

Well if Lisa Murkowski wants to save her chances of being reelected she will have to vote no to killing funding or Planned Parenthood, and I cannot imagine that too many arch conservatives are going to support a bill that allows the subsidizing of abortions, which would suggest that this bill is dead in the water.

But, perhaps not.

Courtesy of WaPo: 

Aides stress that the GOP plan is likely to undergo more changes to garner the 50 votes Republicans need to pass it.

The opposition to this bill is almost overwhelming with 67% opposing it.

Just take a look at the protests outside of Mitch McConnell's office today.

Dozens of protesters, some in wheelchairs, stage "die-in" in Mitch McConnell's office; they were soon dragged out https://t.co/WPxrMTKkYA pic.twitter.com/hwsqiaRCHf

— CBS News (@CBSNews) June 22, 2017

Does not get much more impassioned than that.

Look if they manage to pass this bill, it will be the undoing of the Republican party.

Once they put their brand on it they can no longer blame the lack of coverage on Obamacare, nor can they suggest that they have any better ideas than the ones presented by the Democrats.

In fact the passing of this bill will likely someday be touted as the event which ushered in the start of single payer health care in America.

Though for me that credit will always go to President Obama, who laid the groundwork necessary to provide Medicaid for all.

Watch Donald Trump flee executive order signing ceremony without actually signing the document.

President Trump forgets to sign executive order, walks out of ceremony. Pence remembers, grabs executive order from desk. @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/h1kDBvwcP5

— Vic Berger IV (@VicBergerIV) March 31, 2017

Courtesy of Slate: 

President Trump gathered the press on Friday to sign two new executive orders on trade. He spoke very positively about what he was going to sign. "Thank you everybody," he said from the podium. "You're going to be seeing some very, very strong results very, very quickly. Thank you very much."

The commander in chief immediately sought out the door, and seemingly couldn’t get out of the room fast enough. Never mind that he hadn’t actually signed anything. 

Vice President Mike Pence seems to have noticed the president’s mistake and ran after him. Trump appears to gesture that he wants the orders to be brought to him so Pence then goes to the desk and picks up the orders so the commander in chief can sign them in another room. That’s not quite how things usually work, considering Trump likes to have the press take photos of him signing executive orders.

Did you notice Pence trying to get his boss to stay in the room only to be sent to fetch the document like the trained poodle that we know him to be?

What what made Trump cut and run like that?

That becomes clear when you watch this alternative tape of the event.

Did you hear that reporter asking about Michael Flynn?

THAT seems to be what triggered Trump's flight response, and it essentially proves that the whole Flynn debacle has him very on edge.

And who can blame him?

After all Michael Flynn "has a story to tell."

Homophobic former governor of North Carolina has the sads because nobody will hire his bigoted ass.

Courtesy of Slate:  

Pat McCrory was supposed to have another job by now. After voters tossed the former Republican North Carolina governor out of office—thanks in large part to HB2, the deeply unpopular anti-LGBTQ bill he championed—McCrory groveled at Trump Tower, clearly expecting a consolation prize from the new president. But here we are in mid-March, and Donald Trump, who famously dislikes losers, has yet to offer him a role in the new administration.

Bereft of employment, McCrory has slid into the role of professional victim, blaming his humiliating downfall on LGBTQ advocates, corporations, protesters, nonprofits, athletic leagues, transgender children, “silent” conservatives, and pretty much everyone but himself. Recently, he took his tearful tirade to the podcast Listening In, whining to host Warren Cole Smith, who is best known for declaring that Mitt Romney’s Mormonism made him unfit for public office.

During the interview McCrory complained that is problems stem from a pro-LGBTQ group:

The Human Rights Campaign led the public opposition to HB2, criticizing the bill for barring transgender people from certain public bathrooms. In his interview, McCrory repeatedly blamed the HRC for his defeat, asserting that the group is “more powerful than NRA.” 

“I said that nine months ago and everyone laughed,” McCrory confided in Smith, “and now everyone’s going, ‘you know, maybe they are,’ because they put their pressure on corporations. The NRA puts pressure on politicians. The HRC puts public pressure, threatened boycotts on major corporations through the U.S. with a false narrative, and it worked.”

By "false narrative" I think he means the truth about his blatant homophobic tendencies. 

The one thing that I do hope is true is that this Human Rights Campaign is more powerful than the NRA. That just makes me feel good all over.

Almost as good as seeing this pathetic POS getting what's coming to him.

See? Even with all that is going on there is still some good news in the world.

Senate Torture Report now available as a graphic novel.

Courtesy of Slate: 

The 2014 torture report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee is a 500-plus-page denunciation of the CIA’s use of EITs, or enhanced interrogation techniques, during George W. Bush’s presidency. Now Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, the pair behind the best-selling graphic novel adaptation of the 9/11 Commission Report, have illustrated the torture memo in powerful, disturbing detail. Here’s an excerpt from their haunting book.

Haunting is right take a look at some of the pages.

Damn reminds me of some of the horror comics I read as a kid.

Remember Trump once made the following statement:

"Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I'd approve it! You bet your ass! In a heartbeat! In a heartbeat! And I would approve more than that!"

Gee, perhaps we should all buy a copy of this graphic novel and send it to the White House?

It's only $14.98, and it has pictures so perhaps Trump could actually understand what it says.

I don't know, worth a shot I guess.

Ohio State conceal carry advocate shot dead. I'm just going to give up trying to fix my irony meter.

Courtesy of Slate:  

An Ohio State concealed carry activist was shot to death at his residence near campus early Thursday, authorities say. Tarak Underiner, 20, was an Ohio State undergraduate and the treasurer of a group called Buckeyes for Concealed Carry. He testified in favor of a "campus carry" bill at a state legislative hearing on Dec. 1, 2016.

 A local TV station is reporting that police found "illegal drugs and weapons" at Underiner's residence and that his death may be drug-related.

This is your brain on drugs.

This is your brain on drugs splattered all over the wall, because somebody was carrying a concealed weapon.

Any questions?

After a month the Republican candidate for North Carolina governor has admitted that he lost the election.

Courtesy of Slate:  

North Carolina Republican Gov. Pat McCrory finally admitted defeat on Monday, conceding to his Democratic rival, current state Attorney General Roy Cooper. In a video message, McCrory asserted that he has “continued questions” about possible voter fraud, but that “I personally believe that the majority of our citizens have spoken.” He noted that the election was “the closest North Carolina governor’s race in modern history.” 

McCrory’s concession was not at all inevitable. Although he faced a deficit of more than 4,000 votes the morning after Election Day—a gap that has since grown to more than 10,000—he insisted that he might be the rightful winner. For weeks, McCrory alleged that rampant voter fraud swung the election to Cooper, launching a series of baseless challenges at county election boards in an effort to disqualify as many votes for Cooper as possible. Eventually, the Republican-controlled state election board ordered a recount in Democrat-heavy Durham County. By Monday morning, it was clear that the recount would not close McCrory’s deficit, likely spurring the governor to concede formally.

Just a reminder to all of the conservatives complaining about these recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, that McCrory refused to accept defeat for a month even though it was pretty clear that he lost the day after the election.

And it should also be noted that he made the accusation that there was voter fraud in North Carolina.

Gee maybe somebody should suggest a recount for president there as well.

Just a thought.

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Hillary Clinton now leads Donald Trump in the popular vote by almost 1.7 million.

Courtesy of Slate: 

Hillary Clinton’s lead in the popular vote over President-elect Donald Trump keeps growing and currently stands at 1.677 million votes. On Election Day, Clinton received 63,541,056 votes compared to Trump’s 61,864,015 while other candidates received 7,034,595 votes, according to the latest numbers published by the Cook Political Report. So far the numbers show Clinton obtained 48 percent of the popular vote, compared to Trump’s 46.7 percent. 

The numbers mean that Clinton’s lead in the popular vote is, so far at least, much greater than Al Gore’s advantage when he won the most number of votes but still did not become president. In 2000, Gore received 50,996,582 votes compared to 50,456,062 for George W. Bush—an advantage of 540,520 votes.

This of course is unprecedented and it frustrates the crap out of a whole lot of us who think the electoral college is now interfering with our democracy. 

However I really believe that petitions like this one encouraging members of the Electoral College to become "faithless electors" and vote their conscience instead of representing the outcome in their state are a waste of time, and very short sighted.

Remember something that seems like a good idea while partisan passions are high, might come back and bite us in the ass when the shoe is on the other foot.

Should we ultimately do away with the electoral college, as Senator Barbara Boxer is proposing?

Sure I think that it is well past time to do so.

Will it happen?

Nope, not while the Republicans are in charge of the House and the Senate.

But someday, yes I think we need to bring back the concept of one person one vote.

As it stands right now we appear to be the least democratic member of the democratic nations of the world.

And for America that is a very troubling position indeed.

Slate reveals the importance of the Russian DNC e-mail hack.

Source

Courtesy of Slate: 

A foreign government has hacked a political party’s computers—and possibly an election. It has stolen documents and timed their release to explode with maximum damage. It is a strike against our civic infrastructure. And though nobody died—and there was no economic toll exacted—the Russians were aiming for a tender spot, a central node of our democracy. 

It was hard to see the perniciousness of this attack at first, especially given how news media initially covered the story. The Russians, after all, didn’t knock out a power grid. And when the stolen information arrived, it was dressed in the ideology of WikiLeaks, which presents its exploits as possessing a kind of journalistic bravery the traditional media lacks. 

 .............

What’s galling about the WikiLeaks dump is the way in which the organization has blurred the distinction between leaks and hacks. Leaks are an important tool of journalism and accountability. When an insider uncovers malfeasance, he brings information to the public in order to stop the wrongdoing. That’s not what happened here. The better analogy for these hacks is Watergate. To help win an election, the Russians broke into the virtual headquarters of the Democratic Party. The hackers installed the cyber-version of the bugging equipment that Nixon’s goons used—sitting on the DNC computers for a year, eavesdropping on everything, collecting as many scraps as possible. This is trespassing, it’s thievery, it’s a breathtaking transgression of privacy. It falls into that classic genre, the dirty trick. Yet that term feels too innocent to describe the offense. Nixon’s dirty tricksters didn’t mindlessly expose the private data of low-level staff. 

 ..............

The DNC dump may not have revealed a conspiracy that could end a candidacy, but it succeeded in casting a pall of anxiety over this election. We know that the Russians have a further stash of documents from the DNC and another set of document purloined from the Clinton Foundation. In other words, Vladimir Putin is now treating American democracy with the same respect he accords his own. The best retaliation isn’t a military one, or to respond in kind. It’s to defeat his pet candidate and to force him to watch the inauguration of the woman he so abhors.

Yes this is a big fucking deal, and we need to start treating it like it's big fucking deal.

Vladimir Putin is attempting to alter an American presidential election so that the tough minded candidate that he fears will lose, and the orange tinted candy ass he can control will win.

You know in the old Republican party even a hint of collusion with Russia would have inspired them to take their candidate out behind RNC headquarters and beat him with axe handles until he promised to surrender the nomination and leave the country on the next flight to Moscow.

This new RNC is run by a bunch of traitorous wimps.

After his big win last night Donald Trump brings campaign manager who manhandled female reporter on stage with him. You know, because he can.

Courtesy of Slate:  

Lewandowski doesn't usually stand by Trump's side during election night addresses. He's typically offstage, either watching or bossing people around. But there he was tonight, following Trump's wins in Florida, Illinois, and North Carolina, standing immediately to his candidate’s right.

This was not an accident. It was a display, and a vile one. Lewandowski was accused of aggressively grabbing Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields at a Trump event last Tuesday. She was bruised. The Trump campaign first denied that anything had happened, smearing Fields as either dishonest or delusional. Breitbart, Fields’ own publication, which serves as a mouthpiece for the Trump campaign, refused to fully defend its reporter, arguing instead the most likely explanation was that a Secret Service agent had grabbed her. Eventually, video emerged that showed Lewandowski lunging for Fields. Fields filed a police report, and she and a number of other Breitbart staffers resigned—all while the campaign continued to deny that Lewandowski had anything to do with it.

Meanwhile Breitbart's response to former staff members going public is to threaten them.

Courtesy of Politico:

Breitbart is getting litigious. 

The company sent out cease and desist letters to some of the employees who left the company in the past week, multiple sources with knowledge of the letters told POLITICO. Six staffers resigned in the past few days, citing the aftermath of how the site handled one of its reporters, Michelle Fields, accusing Donald Trump's campaign manager of strong-arming her as she tried to get the candidate's attention. 

I think this might be one of the best previews yet of what life would be like under Donald Trump presidency.

People being being abused by jack booted thugs, and pressure from propaganda outlets to keep quiet about it.

Now where have we seen this before?

Woman trolls Planned Parenthood protesters with sign that reads "Dear P.P. Thanks for helping with my yeast infection."

Courtesy of Slate:  

During her shift at Portland, Oregon’s Purringtons Cat Lounge on Sunday, Mary Numair looked out the street-facing windows and saw a woman carrying a sign that read “Abortion Kills Children.” Numair had noticed a group of protesters about a block away, gathered outside one of Portland’s Planned Parenthood health care centers. “I thought [the woman] might be lost. I said, ‘Hey, you’re gonna feel real silly. The protest is down that way,’ ” Numair, 29, told me. “She said ‘No, I need to stand here.’ I said, ‘Fuck this shit,’ went back inside, and started making my sign.” 

The sign, which Numair crafted out of masking tape and a piece of cardboard from the dumpster, praised Planned Parenthood for treating her chronic yeast infections when she was in her early 20s and uninsured. It also included a delightful cartoon of a vagina with a smiling clitoris and a stick figure with pigtails and prominent breasts (above). 

Numair’s best friend and co-worker clocked in early so she could head out to the protest, where she planted herself between two families with children. “In my first 30 seconds of walking out there, I did get called a whore,” Numair said. “One woman was shaking her head. I knelt down to her kid and said, ‘Do you know about yeast infections?’ ” 

Onlookers gave Numair the thumbs-up, and some passing cars honked in support, but she was the only counter-protester on the scene. Still, with a spontaneous chant, she managed to break up the protest in under a half-hour. “I don’t know why I started chanting ‘Yeast infections!’ but it just came out. I have this cold, so it was just this obnoxious squeak, cheerleader-like. And I started doing high kicks, which I don’t normally do, in my skinny jeans.” A religious leader was guiding a circle of protestors in prayers for Numair—but as her chants got louder and more grating, they stopped.

I love this SO much!

That my friends is how you call out these anti-choice nuts on their ignorance.

The AP obtains the e-mails of Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis. And yes they are just as batshit crazy as you imagine.

Courtesy of TPM:  

Davis' emails, obtained by the Associated Press under the Kentucky open records law, offer some insight into her state of mind in the weeks leading up to her five-day stint in jail for defying a federal court order to issue the licenses. 

"The battle has just begun," Davis wrote in the email to a supporter in July, hours after four couples filed a federal lawsuit against her. It was the start of a monthslong legal fight against licensing same-sex marriages. 

"It has truly been a firestorm here and the days are pretty much a blur, but I am confident that God is in control of all of this!!" she wrote to the supporter on July 2, the day the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against her on behalf of the couples. "I desire your prayers, I will need strength that only God can supply and I need a backbone like a saw log!!"

"Backbone like a saw log?"  Is that a Kentucky saying, or a crazy person saying?

But wait, there's more:  

Protesters crowded the courthouse lawn and news media from across the country descended on rural Rowan County. She complained to a supporter that the demonstrators stood outside her office window chanting into bullhorns. 

"Will your lawyers and several decent people be around you to protect you from the wicked threatening homosexual mob and their supporters?" a man from Somerset named Willie Ramsey wrote to ask. 

"They are going to try and make a whipping post out of me!!" she wrote in her response. "I know it, but God is still alive and on the throne!!! He IS in control and knows exactly where I am!!" 

"September 1 will be the day to prepare for, if the Lord doesn't return before then," Davis wrote him. 

("If the Lord doesn't return before then?" So she literally expects the end times to occur any day now.)

"I have weighed the cost, and will stay the course." Ramsey said he'd be willing to block the courthouse door if the law came for her that day. 

"I'm sure it will be a mad house!!" she told him, adding that "God will still be in control!!"

Whoa Nelly, that is some deeply psychotic babbling right there.

This woman is clearly suffering from a messiah complex and all of the media attention that she received only exacerbated her break with reality.

Here is what Slate had to say about the e-mails:

These are not the words of a rational public servant attempting to do her taxpayer-funded job to the best of her abilities. Nor are they the words of a conflicted religious person attempting to obtain an accommodation to balance her personal faith and public duties. These are the words of a religious fanatic who views herself as the protagonist in an epic, possibly biblical battle between good and evil—a millenialist zealot who hopes the rapture, rather than mere earthly courts, will intervene to save her.

Exactly! This is a woman suffering from a rather severe mental illness.

Which means that either Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz, who both showed up in Kentucky to support her, do not realize that, or suffer from the same or similar psychological issues.

Now don't get me wrong, I think that most people can have faith without necessarily losing the ability to separate reality from magical thinking, but in the case of this individual that is simply not true.

In my opinion a person like this should NEVER hold any kind of important public office, and any person who supports a person like this, should be kept as far away from the White House as humanly possible.

Simply put, this kind of thinking is dangerous.

Home schooling lobby "Make the anti-vaxxers seem rational."

“I’ve never seen a lobby more powerful and scary,” said Ellen Heinitz, the legislative director for Michigan state Rep. Stephanie Chang, who ran up against HSLDA backlash when she tried to pass home-schooling regulations a few months ago. “They make the anti-vaxxers seem rational.”

The above quote was taken from a Slate article that reports on the struggle that one New Jersey State Senator faced when trying to pass legislation to require parents to notify the state that they were homeschooling their children, submit proof of annual physicals, and to complete the same yearly tests that other New Jersey students had to take.

The response to this bill was quick and incredibly aggressive:

Soon afterward, a small group of home-schooling parents began following Weinberg around the capitol. The barrage of phone calls from home-schooling advocates so jammed her office phone lines that staffers had to use their private cellphones to conduct business. “You would have thought I’d recommended the end of the world as we know it,” said Weinberg. “Our office was besieged.”

Ultimately the state senator, Loretta Weinberg, dropped the bill and has little success with modified versions of it, removing the testing requirements, since.

Slate also reports similar obstacles which halted legislation in other states. Including Michigan which is where we get that quote at the top.

Now for those who simply do not trust the government, and do not want them educating their children, this might seem like no big deal, but there are some very troubling statistics:

• Forty-eight states have no background check process for parents who choose to home-school. Two have some restrictions. Arkansas prevents home schooling when a registered sex offender lives in the home, while Pennsylvania bans parents previously convicted of a wide array of crimes from home schooling. 
• Fewer than half of states require any kind of evaluation. In some of these, including Washington, New Hampshire, and Georgia, home-schooled students are tested, but these tests are not submitted to the school district, and there are no ramifications for failure. Others, like Oregon, require parents to submit the test scores only if the local districts request them. A third category of states, including Maine, requires that test scores be submitted but set no minimum score. 
• Seventeen states have no required subjects for home-schooled students. Of the 33 states that do, 22 have no means of checking whether a parent is actually teaching those subjects. 
• In 40 states, home-schooling parents are not required to have a high school diploma, even if they intend to home-school through 12th grade. 
• Twenty-five states do not require home-schoolers to be vaccinated. Another 12 mandate vaccinations but do not require records. Only five states require home-schoolers to submit proof of vaccinations at any time.

Now I recognize that whenever I introduce the topic of home schooling on this blog that emotions run high, and that several of my regulars have home schooled their children and are advocates of home schooling in general.

However as many of you know I have very strong reservations concerning home schooling, ESPECIALLY religious homeschooling, based on my own experiences and interactions with home schooled children over the years.

So I will simply suggest that you read the article over at Slate and perhaps come back here afterwards to share your thoughts, whether they be pro or con.

Even though it is illegal under federal law, public schools in Louisiana are openly teaching Creationism as part of their "science" curriculum.

Courtesy of Zack Kopplin over at Slate:  

Through a public records request, I obtained dozens of emails from the Bossier Parish school district that specifically discuss teaching creationism. Shawna Creamer, a science teacher at Airline High School, sent an email to the principal, Jason Rowland, informing him of which class periods she would use to teach creationism. “We will read in Genesis and them [sic] some supplemental material debunking various aspects of evolution from which the students will present,” Creamer wrote. 

In another email exchange with Rowland, a parent had complained that a different teacher, Cindy Tolliver, actually taught that evolution was a “fact.” This parent complained that Tolliver was “pushing her twisted religious beliefs onto the class.” Principal Rowland responded, “I can assure you this will not happen again.” 

Another email was sent by Bossier High School assistant principal Doug Scott to Michael Stacy, a biology teacher at that school. “I enjoyed the visit to your class today as you discussed evolution and creationism in a full spectrum of thought,” Scott wrote. “Thank you for the rich content as you bring various sources to bear in your curriculum.” 

The Louisiana Science Education Act, passed by the state legislature in 2008, permits science teachers to use supplemental materials to “critique” evolution, opening a backdoor that these teachers are using, as intended, to teach creationism. Such lessons are allowed under this Louisiana law, but they are illegal under federal law. 

“We know that one in eight high school biology teachers advocate for creationism, even though it's unconstitutional,” says Josh Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education. “These emails make clear that many teachers are interpreting the Louisiana Science Education Act as allowing such unconstitutional and scientifically-misleading lessons.” 

On April 22 the Louisiana Senate Education Committee voted on a bill to repeal the Science Education Act, referred to by many on both sides as the “creationism act.” This was the fifth vote since 2010, and legislators voted 4–3 to keep creationism in Louisiana classrooms.

This kind of thing literally makes me sick to my stomach. 

Science is science, and fairy tales are fairy tales, and never the twain shall meet.

What Louisiana is subjecting their students to will cause them no end of discomfort if their intention is to pursue a college degree in a university NOT founded by an evangelist.

Let's face it coming to a regular college classroom convinced that the Biblical version of creation is just as valid as the scientifically vetted theory of evolution is going to seriously impede a student's ability to understand the concepts being taught in a biology class.

I have said it before, but it bears repeating, this is nothing less than child abuse.

Leave it to Mike Huckabee to creep everybody out with a tasteless joke at the expense of transgendered people.

[These] ordinances [say] if your 7-year-old daughter—if she goes into the restroom—cannot be offended and you can’t be offended if she’s greeted there by a 42-year-old man who feels more like a woman than he does a man. Now I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE. I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, “Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.”

Slate has more:  

Huckabee has long enjoyed bashing gay people and marriage equality, but this disgusting joke suggests the former Arkansas governor has lately discovered the joys of ridiculing trans people—who already face a stunning amount of discrimination and harassment. For what it’s worth, no state that has passed trans protections has seen Huckabee’s bathroom fever dream come to pass. But, of course, Huckabee isn’t really concerned about facts: He’s concerned about finding the kind of red meat Republican voters still care about. It seems that, by his calculation, maligning one of the most reviled and marginalized groups in society will still push GOP voters to the polls. 

You only have to listen to the reaction of the crowd to realize that Huckabee is not alone in his feeling that transgender people are disgusting sexual predators looking for an opportunity to prey on small children.

Of course the sexual predators are almost never a transgendered person. Instead they are far more likely to look more like this:

And how did Huckabee respond to an actual child molester (Link has much more graphic report.) once he was outed?

Like this of course:

Janet and I want to affirm our support for the Duggar family. Josh’s actions when he was an underage teen are as he described them himself, 'inexcusable,' but that doesn’t mean 'unforgivable.' He and his family dealt with it and were honest and open about it with the victims and the authorities. No purpose whatsoever is served by those who are now trying to discredit Josh or his family by sensationalizing the story. Good people make mistakes and do regrettable and even disgusting things. The reason that the law protects disclosure of many actions on the part of a minor is that the society has traditionally understood something that today’s blood-thirsty media does not understand—that being a minor means that one's judgement is not mature. No one needs to defend Josh’s actions as a teenager, but the fact that he confessed his sins to those he harmed, sought help, and has gone forward to live a responsible and circumspect life as an adult is testament to his family’s authenticity and humility. Those who have enjoyed revealing this long ago sins in order to discredit the Duggar family have actually revealed their own insensitive bloodthirst, for there was no consideration of the fact that the victims wanted this to be left in the past and ultimately a judge had the information on file destroyed—not to protect Josh, but the innocent victims. Janet and I love Jim Bob and Michelle and their entire family. They are no more perfect a family than any family, but their Christian witness is not marred in our eyes because following Christ is not a declaration of our perfection, but of HIS perfection. It is precisely because we are all sinners that we need His grace and His forgiveness. We have been blessed to receive God’s love and we would do no less than to extend our love and support for our friends. In fact, it is such times as this, when real friends show up and stand up. Today, Janet and I want to show up and stand up for our friends. Let others run from them. We will run to them with our support.

To sum up, Christian child molesters are okay, but a transgendered woman who has to pee is a menace to society.

Remember, it's not about protecting babies, it's about controlling women's sexuality.

Courtesy of Slate: 

During arguments for the recent Supreme Court case McCullen v. Coakley, which eventually led to the court striking down Massachusetts' buffer zone protecting abortion clinics from protesters crowding the door, it was revealed that many abortion clinic protesters think of themselves less as protesters and more as "sidewalk counselors." Jill Filipovic of Cosmopolitan decided to go to Massachusetts Planned Parenthood clinics to find out, exactly, what these protesters want to counsel women about. The answer turns out to be a little more complex than "don't get an abortion." 

"Men and women are made different," Father Andrew Beauregard explains on camera while protesting at a clinic, "in that women, as the church teaches, reach their full potential in motherhood." There's a tight if inhumane logic to this thinking: Women exist to give birth. Thus, if a woman is choosing not to give birth, she is not working as she is supposed to. Which means she must be broken and needs fixing. Ergo, "counseling." 

As Filipovic found, none of the self-described counselors she spoke to actually "had any educational background or credentials in psychology, therapy, counseling, or mental health," but they do sincerely believe that something is deeply wrong with women who want to exert control over their own fertility or who want to have sex on their own terms. And they felt absolutely free to share that point of view with Filipovic.

Did you hear that one lady?

"If women want careers and education and everything and they don't want children what are they doing having sex?"

Why does nobody ask men that same question?

But then I forgot that it was a woman those convinced Adam to eat that apple. Which is why God punished her,and all that followed, with a painful childbirth, and demanded that from that day forward females must subjugate themselves to the will of their husbands.

This is why the abortion debate cannot be ignored, and why people must understand that these people will not stop with outlawing abortion in this country. They want nothing less than to turn women into breeding stock and put them back under the control of men.

And towards that end they have no lack of useful idiots to help them achieve that goal.

The Republican's most aggressive attempt to suppress votes yet. And it looks like it will succeed.

Courtesy of Slate:  

According to a six-month-long investigation conducted by Greg Palast for Al Jazeera, “voting officials in 27 states, almost all of them Republicans, have launched what is threatening to become a massive purge of black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters. Already, tens of thousands have been removed from voter rolls in battleground states, and the numbers are set to climb.” 

Specifically, officials have a master list of 6.9 million suspected “potential double voters.” And in Virginia, Georgia, and Washington the lists are “heavily over-weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel, and Kim,” all common to Democratic-leaning minority groups. 

The process for checking those names, a computer program called Crosscheck—touted by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a vocal supporter for voter identification—is incredibly inaccurate. “The actual lists,” notes Al Jazeera America, “show that not only are middle names mismatched, and suffix discrepancies ignored, even conflicting birthdates are disregarded. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores any Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected.” 

Given the tight races in Georgia and other battleground states, even a small number of false positives could turn the tide of an election, giving a strong advantage to Republican candidates for statewide and congressional offices.

In Georgia they simply misplace voter registrations that they don't want to accept:

On Tuesday, Judge Christopher Brasher of the Fulton County Superior Court denied a petition from civil rights advocates to force Georgia’s Secretary of State to process an estimated 40,000 voter registrations that have gone missing from the public database. 

All of that bullshit the conservatives have been throwing around about voter fraud, and the need for stricter restrictions at the polls, was all to lay the groundwork for crap like this.

You know there are a whole lot of reasons to vote for the Democrats in this next election. But perhaps one of the best is because they respect EVERY American's right to vote, and rather than attempt to suppress any group's ability to cast their ballot, they work overtime to make it easy for all of us.

I for one am beyond fed up with this underhanded shit.

The dark side of the pro-life movement part deux. Protecting the life of a "distinctly abnormal" fetus that has no hope of survival.

Courtesy of Slate:  

Marlise Munoz has been brain dead since Nov. 26, and the suffering of her family can only be getting worse. Munoz was found unconscious on her kitchen floor in November, probably because of a blood clot in her lungs. At the time she was 14 weeks pregnant. Ever since, she has been kept “alive” with a ventilator because the hospital where she was taken, John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, believes it must not withdraw “life-sustaining treatment” from a pregnant patient, based on a Texas law that so mandates. And now, lawyers for Erick Munoz, her husband, say that the fetus that his brain-dead wife has been kept on life support to carry is “distinctly abnormal.” 

So Marlise remains hooked up because the hospital is misreading Texas law. NYU bioethicist Arthur Caplan laid this out last week, explaining why the hospital is misinterpreting the law (and also why that law must be unconstitutional). “The fact that the fetus apparently has significant abnormalities shows just how awful, misguided and cruel the Texas law is,” he emailed me Thursday morning. “The uncertainties about the pregnancy—damaged fetus, almost no cases of trying to bring a 14-week-old to term in this circumstance, what he the dad is able to cope with, his dead wife’s wishes about wanting to have a child if she cannot parent, the massive costs involved and the impact of a tragic outcome on his other child—they point clearly in the direction of who should be making the decisions and who should have been making them all along. Not the hospital, not the legislature, not pro-life or pro-choicers—the husband.”

So this abnormal fetus is kept alive in the body of its deceased mother, with virtually no hope that it will be born alive and functioning, while the medical bills stack up and threaten to bankrupt the father, making it almost impossible for him to care for the child that he and his wife had earlier that IS alive. How is any of that "pro-life?"

And let's say that the best case scenario comes to fruition and the baby is born alive, severely deformed, and with a lifetime of hospital visits and surgeries in its future. Does anybody really think these anti-abortion people are going to adopt this child and pay for its future medical care?

Hell no!

As we know the anti-abortion movement only cares about fetuses, not children.