Oh Lord.

LeelaFacepalm

Rex Tillerson had confirmation hearings on Wednesday, for the position of Secretary of State. Watching a brief video compilation reminded me of Reagan, with the constant “I don’t recall” “I don’t know” and “I need more information”. I’m surprised someone didn’t ask him his name, just to get a fucking answer out of him. Think Progress has all the deadly details of the questions Tillerson found himself unable to answer, including questions about Exxon lobbying against U.S. sanctions in other countries. Tillerson tried to claim he didn’t have enough information to answer that one, either, even though he was the effing CEO of Exxon. Details at Think Progress.

Via Think Progress.

Warren v Carson.

Elizabeth Warren questions Ben Carson at a Senate confirmation hearing (screen grab).

Elizabeth Warren questions Ben Carson at a Senate confirmation hearing (screen grab).

It is still so difficult to process that Ben Carson is going to be in charge of anything, let alone Housing and Urban Development. This is a man who can barely string a sentence together, and when he does, it’s usually a mess, as he’s not someone you could describe as quick on the uptake. As usual, he’s ill-informed and clueless. It’s rather obvious he doesn’t much care if HUD is used to funnel money into Trump’s pockets, either. It’s not even clear whether or not that had occurred to him at some point.

At Carson’s confirmation hearing for secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Warren noted that President-elect Donald Trump will be uniquely positioned to benefit from HUD contracts due to his real estate business. During a press conference a day earlier, Trump had revealed a plan * to allow his sons to run his business instead of putting his assets in a blind trust as other presidents have done.

“My concern is that among the billions of dollars that you will be responsible for handing out in grants in loans,” Warren said to Carson. “Can you just assure us that not one dollar will go to benefit either the president-elect or his family?”

“It will not be my intention to do anything to benefit any American,” Carson declared boldly. “It’s for all Americans.”

[…]

After Carson had a flustered moment, he came out with this:

“You can take it to mean that I will manage things in a way that benefits the American people,” Carson insisted. “If there happens to be an extraordinarily good program that’s working for millions of people and it turns out that someone that you’re targeting is going to gain $10 from it, am I going to say, ‘No, the rest of you Americans can’t have it’? I think logic and common sense probably would be the best way.”

Warren had the correct response to that puddle of lukewarm vomit:

Warren replied: “The problem is that you can’t assure us that HUD money — not of $10 varieties, but of multi-million dollar varieties — will not end up in the president-elect’s pockets.”

“And the reason you can’t assure us of that is because the president elect is hiding his family’s business interests from you, from me, from the rest of America,” the senator said. “And this just highlights the absurdity and the danger of the president-elect’s refusal to put his assets in a true blind trust.”

“He knows what will benefit him and his family financially but the public doesn’t.”

And there’s the big old rub to it all. Trump refused to hand over his taxes, so he could be worth much less than he claims, how would we know? Trump refuses to obey nepotism laws, insisting on making “president” a family job. Trump refuses to place his assets in a blind trust, openly intending to use the office of president to strongarm a whole lot of money into his pockets. For all the Trump-Idiots out there, how well would any of this openly corrupt garbage have gone down with President Obama, or any other president? Would have been howling your heads off, wouldn’t you? Fucking hypocrites.

I edited out the ‘controversial’ in that link. I am sick to death of media latching onto the word controversial to describe things which are outright fucking wrong. Any time you see ‘controversial’ being used, it’s yet another part of normalising every thing that is immoral and wrong.

Via Raw Story.

“Clovergender”

CG

While I’ve been dozing under my rock, yet another type of insidious bigotry is drenching the ‘net, based on the time immemorial pastime of linking LGBT peoples with pedophilia.

Martin Shkreli has given the LGBT community another reason to despise him.

The pharmaceutical executive, who rose to infamy by hiking the price of a drug used for an AIDS-related condition by more than 5,000 percent, is now promoting “clovergender,” an identity concocted by trolls to mock LGBT people.

Before his Twitter account was suspended for harassing a Teen Vogue writer, Shkreli urged his followers January 4 to “please spread clovergender awareness.” The term, which has sprung up on several social media accounts early this year, appeared to be used by adult individuals claiming to be “a child trapped in a man’s body who is attracted to other children.”

However, “clovergender” is a hoax. Snopes debunked it, tracing the birth of “clovergender” and this definition, which ridicules the identity of transgender and gender-nonbinary people, to a 4chan thread from December 31.

“We’re creating a new gender to trolls SJWs with,” posted an anonymous user, in a reference to “social justice warriors.” They then coined “clovergender” and ascribed fake preferred pronouns like “cl / clir /climself.”

“We will be trolling on Tumblr and Facebook,” the user stated. Another replied, “I see potential in this.”

Just what this sociopathic asshole has to gain from this, I don’t know, and it really doesn’t matter. I guess it’s just his way of getting his kicks. The potential for damage is overwhelming though, and it’s not like people in general don’t already have a whole lot of hatred for LGBT peoples anyway. They do, and those who are always looking for any reason to fire up that hate will grab this garbage and run with it. We have one state after another attempting to legislate bigotry and hate, and I imagine there will legislators who will seize on this as well, in order to shore up their always faulty reasoning.

After gaining momentum on the message boards of 4chan and Reddit, the term did indeed find its way to broader social media. A new Facebook page claimed to be created in response to “the horrible pain and backlash somee [sic] Clovergender people receive. We are against that. We think a kid should do what he wants.”

[…]

Several Twitter accounts, which follow and retweet LGBT outlets and influencers, are also attempting to intertwine the fake cause with the real-life movement. At least one has attributed Shkreli’s Twitter ban to clovergender discrimination.

The ruse duped some folks on social media, who reacted with disgust to the “clovergender” community.

The myth of the sexual predator has dogged the LGBT community since time immemorial. The call for “bathroom bills,” which prohibit transgender people from using restrooms that correspond with their gender identity, is the most recent example of how conservatives are painting queer people as perverts. “Clovergender,” if it perpetuates, will only continue to stoke these mistruths and biases.

So. We find ourselves back at the beginning again, folks, having to fight this blatant lie again, over and over. Be aware of this, spread the word, get the truth out there, we all know the drill.

Full story at The Advocate.

On This Day…

Now-Rep. Randy Weber (R-TX), during his 2012 campaign CREDIT: AP Photo/Pat Sullivan.

Now-Rep. Randy Weber (R-TX), during his 2012 campaign CREDIT: AP Photo/Pat Sullivan.

A day after Donald Trump shouted down CNN reporter Jim Acosta at his first “press conference” since July and accused his network of providing “fake news,” a Republican Congressman is demanding that Acosta be fired.

Two years ago to the day, Rep. Randy Weber (R-TX) made national news for a tweet comparing the president of the United States — unfavorably — to Hitler. He laterapologized for his observation that “Even Adolph [sic] Hitler thought it more important than Obama to get to Paris. (For all the wrong reasons.) Obama couldn’t do it for right reasons,” and deleted the tweet.

He never removed a January 2014 tweet in which he called Obama “Kommandant-In-Chef”… the Socialistic dictator,” nor others suggesting POTUS stood for “Poor Obama Trashed U.S.”

But now, apparently, Weber has decided that being rude to the president is an offense worthy of firing.

On Thursday morning, he tweeted:

The CNN reporter who was disruptive to the press briefing, & disrespectful to Trump-should be fired & prohibited from any press briefings.

Ah, where’s that ferocious con love for free speech? As always, it’s the first casualty whenever there’s criticism or hard questions.

Via Think Progress.

The Man Behind the Curtain.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky speaking at CPAC 2011 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr).

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky speaking at CPAC 2011 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr).

Trump’s antics are excellent at diverting attention, and certainly, for many people, trolling the Pendejo-elect is fun, and no doubt a safety valve. As these distractions trundle along, the man behind the curtain is busy doing all the nefarious dirty work. It’s the hands of the man behind the curtain that need watching.

Exhibit A in this sordid department is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is as comfortable lying with a poker face as Trump is attacking critics like Streep. The takeaway is, watch what they do, not what they say.

McConnell’s latest bout of high-stakes hypocritical lying came Sunday, when he told CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation” he would not slow down or reschedule any of this week’s conformation hearings, after Democrats protested that nominees like billionaire Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education designate, had not submitted financial disclosure forms. McConnell has scheduled most of the hearings for Wednesday, the day Trump gives his first press conference since Election Day and the day after President Obama gives his farewell address. The hearings will get scant coverage on television, the medium that most helped elect Trump.

“All of these little procedural complaints are related to their frustration at not only having lost the White House but having lost the Senate,” McConnell said, referring to Senate Democrats’ demands for probing the many conflicts of interest and private agendas of the most billionaire-filled cabinet in history. “I understand that, but we need to, sort of, grow up here and get past that.”

When McConnell mocks “procedural complaints” and says “grow up,” he means the GOP must be free to quash anything that interferes with their power grab. This is the GOP’s Senate leader who single-handedly blocked President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, a moderate praised by Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-UT. McConnell is also responsible for blocking Obama’s appointment of 84 federal district court judges—one-eighth of the district court bench—including noncontroversial nominations. And he is the same Republican who in February 2009 wrote a letter to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, saying “prior to considering any time agreements on the floor on any [Cabinet] nominee, we expect the following standards will be met.” That included completing FBI background checks, all financial disclosures, Office of Government Ethics vetting, committee questionnaires and “courtesy visits with members.”

McConnell has long been one of the least principled Republican leaders. In the late 1990s, he opposed all forms of campaign finance reform when the McCain-Feingold bill was proposed, countering deregulation of donation limits and disclosure by donors was all that was needed. McConnell changed his tune on disclosure after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, because the biggest GOP donors wanted to throw all the mud they could but were too cowardly to publicly attach their names to the political attacks they funded.

McConnell is a committed hypocrite, a master of two-faced falsity, and filled with sociopathic ruthlessness. While all eyes are on Trump, he’s busy pushing the mountains of shit through the door before anyone even notices. It’s past time to take eyes off the puppet, and pay attention to the puppet masters.

Full article at Raw Story.

The Presidential Inauguration: Softly Sensual.

Trump humps flag. Twitter.

Trump humps flag. Twitter.

The man responsible for planning President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration says the event will be notable for its “soft sensuality.”

In response to a question about whether he had enough performers for the swearing-in, Tom Barrack, the chairman of the inauguration committee, told reporters to expect something “beautiful.”

“We’re fortunate in that we have the greatest celebrity in the world, which is the president-elect, side by side is the current president…So what we’ve done instead of trying to surround him with what people consider A-listers is we are going to surround him with the soft sensuality of the place,” Barrack said in the lobby of Trump Tower.

“It’s a much more poetic cadence than having a circus-like celebration that’s a coronation.”

Oh, right. As if people are going to believe the King of Crass, the Prince of Pussy Grabbing didn’t want to put on the bigliest, yuuuugest circus ever. It’s always interesting to see just what shit people try to spin when things don’t go the way Donny wants. I guess all those frantic pleas that went out to one entertainer after another were what, performance art? I’ve never bothered to watch any inauguration, and this one I’ll be especially pleased to skip, but I have to say that even if I had planned on watching, the words “soft sensuality” combined with “Donald Trump” would effectively scare me away.

Naturally, the Twitterati are all a twitter over this latest spin.

Full story at CBS News.

All the Dress Shops.

kaminesky-blog-nyc-dress-shop-lower-east-side

© Ken Kaminesky.

The Pendejo-elect is still all a-twitter over Ms. Streep’s speech. Naturally, he insists he did not watch the Globes, and did not see or hear the speech, he’s just having this massive over-reaction over nothing at all. Donny also added that that he was “not surprised” that he had come under attack from “liberal movie people.” Oooh, those nasty liberal movie people. All that said, Team Trump isn’t having much luck with the nasty liberal music people, either, but a stupid denial has been issued:

Mr. Trump said that, Ms. Streep and her allies aside, he was confident that celebrities and others would turn out in strong numbers for his inauguration.

“We are going to have an unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout for the inauguration, and there will be plenty of movie and entertainment stars,” Mr. Trump said. “All the dress shops are sold out in Washington. It’s hard to find a great dress for this inauguration.”

Interesting how focused Donny is on dresses. Perhaps he has pussy grabbing on his mind. I guess there’s no suit a/o tuxedo shortage in Washington. As Trump continues, ineffectually, to appear unruffled by all those nasty liberal types, his team is still trying to gather any talent at all for the inauguration. The latest reach out was to Charlotte Church:

@realDonaldTrump Your staff have asked me to sing at your inauguration, a simple internet search would show I think you’re a tyrant. Bye [followed by 4 shit icons.]

Via NY Times and Raw Story.

The Red Wave.

Creatas Images / Getty Images.

Creatas Images / Getty Images.

Another journalist has gone running to the nazi side, in this case, the co-founder of Politico, Mike Allen, who is described as one of the most powerful journalists in D.C. Allen has apparently decided to do everything in his power to normalise the fascist state we now find ourselves in, to the point of praising Breitbart’s journalism to the skies. Why yes, made up bullshit is just great journalism, didn’t you know? Just this tiny snippet, because the whole damn things sickens me.

Describing how he approached a speaking engagement in front of a Trump-friendly audience in Wyoming shortly after the election, Allen said he decided to “shut up” so he could “listen to you about what you liked about Trump, how you came to your decision, what your inputs were.”

“A lot of it is also psychic and sociological and social. The anti-PC thing I think is a huge part of it,” he said, before going on to recount a conversation he had with a Trump-supporting friend on a train shortly after the election.

“People in America [were] just living their lives as they always have, and things were just changing too fast. ‘I’m living my life the way I always have and all of the sudden I’m the bigot, I’m a bad guy,’ and I think that was a huge part of this red wave.”

All of a sudden you’re the bigot, the bad guy. Well, if you are a bigot, yes, that makes you a bad guy. Right here in the open is why people voted for Trump – they want to be able to stay on top of the people pile, being bigoted assholes with the ability to make other people miserable. It’s disgusting. Repulsive. Sickening. Bad guy isn’t enough. Evil asshole, perhaps.

Full story at Think Progress.

Ethics & Team Trump: Never the Twain Shall Meet.

ethics

The Office of Government Ethics has been attempting to chase down Team Trump, who are doing everything in their power to evade, so far, successfully. Is “people who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear” still a thing? If so, it would appear that Team Trump has everything to fear.

New emails reveal that the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) reportedly “lost contact” with President-elect Donald Trump’s team during the ongoing transition to power, despite efforts to warn officials about ethical issues posed by nominees and “blind trusts.”

According to emails uncovered by MSNBC, OGE director Director Walter Shaub contacted Trump aides in November expressing deep frustration with the lack of cooperation between his organization and the president-elect’s team. Shaub reportedly cautioned Trump against creating a blind trust of his business holdings without speaking to the OGE first, noting that the ethics office only considers something a blind trust if its assets have “been sold off”—a very different standard that the “half-blind” trust floated by Trump’s own team. (To date, Trump has not suggested that he will sell off his assets.)

MSNBC noted that the emails, which it obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, included few details regarding any efforts by the president-elect to divest from assets that could result in potential conflicts of interest during his presidency.

[…]

Shaub also argued that Trump’s staff was risking “embarrassment” by refusing to allow the ethics office to review the financial records of potential cabinet selections before they were announced, saying some could potentially violate federal law.

“They run the risk of having inadvertently violated the criminal conflicts of interest restriction at 18 USC 208,” Shaub wrote. “If we don’t get involved early to prevent problems, we won’t be able to help them after the fact.”

The tension may explain the OGE’s effort to troll Trump on Twitter in late November.

Look, a bonus Sunday Facepalm! The only way to maybe get the Pendejo-elect’s attention is to troll him on Twitter. For fuck’s sake. Even some conservatives are appalled:

Yes. And not only that, but McConnell’s deep hypocrisy is on show as well:

The Republican-controlled U.S. Senate plans to rush forward this week with confirmation hearings for many of Donald Trump’s nominees for cabinet and other key executive positions. Though many of the picks have not yet completed the customarily required ethics clearances and background checks, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has shown no willingness to delay.

[…]

But back in 2009, McConnell took the exact opposite view. A letter to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), posted on Twitter by Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington co-founder and former Obama administration ethics adviser Norm Eisen on Sunday, shows he demanded that “financial disclosures must be complete” before any confirmation hearings be scheduled.

How things change, eh?

Think Progress has the full stories: Government Ethics and McConnell.

Whitesplaining Apologies.

censored_1

Lawrence Ware at Fusion addresses the massive facepalming wrong of whitesplaining apologies by people caught doing things which are racist as hell. Mr. Ware lists the 5 worst whitesplaining strategies, which also apply to other types of notpologies.

1. “I apologize to anyone who may have been offended.”

This is the classic non-apology. To say that these words have meaning at all is pushing it. The person in the wrong isn’t expressing remorse over what they’ve said or done; they’re merely acknowledging the response of the offended. This statement is but a logical step away from saying, “Y’all just need to stop being so damn sensitive.”

2. “I have black friends.”

Somehow a white person caught doing something racially problematic thinks having a black person as a favorite in their iPhone absolves them of racism. Someone should tell them it just doesn’t work that way. Put succinctly, we don’t give a damn if a white racist has a black friend.

3. “I know MLK quotes.”
Some white people have a tendency to take MLK’s words out of context. When King wrote in Where Do We Go From Here, “Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn,” he was probably talking about the same white folks who are misusing his words, like Seattle Mariners backup catcher Steve Clevenger, who apologized for his offensive comments about the Charlotte, North Carolina, protests by harkening back to MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech: “I am also proud that my inner circle of friends has never been defined by race but by the content of their character.”

4. “You misunderstood.”

This is insulting. The statement implies that what the offended party heard was not actually what the offensive person said. A slightly more authentic, yet just as problematic, approach is the “that’s not what I meant” defense. In that case, one owns that what they said might have been distasteful, but insists that they didn’t intend for it to offend. It’s similar to a 5-year-old who accidentally hits their sibling, but thinks screaming “I didn’t mean to do it” will sufficiently solve the problem. Just because a person didn’t mean for something to be racist, doesn’t mean that they didn’t do something hella racist. Just ask the folks who believe that the Confederate flag is all about heritage. Yeah, white folks who say this sound about as dumb as them.

5. “I don’t see race.”
Aside from the fact that it is nearly impossible, this is a statement centered in white privilege. In Racism Without Racists, Edwardo Bonilla-Silva argues that pretending that race doesn’t exist only perpetuates white privilege because it doesn’t force us to address the systemic nature of oppression. Racism is not just interpersonal—it’s also institutional.

A few words of advice to white folks caught being racist: Just own it. It’s not cool, but admit it and learn from your mistake. Your attempts to whitesplain your way out of having said something racist is coming off about as ridiculous as Shaggy’s attempts to prove his fidelity in “It Wasn’t Me.”

Full article at Fusion.

Missing Out On $50 Trillion and Millions of High Wage Jobs.

chart

CREDIT: Department of Energy (DOE).

Clean energy. It’s the only possible way to go right now, and there’s more promise in clean energy than anything else, but Pendejo-elect Trump is making sure that America will not only miss out on all the money clean energy can bring, but the millions of jobs which go with it. No, much better to commit to filthy energy, which can stuff a few select, already overflowing pockets with more money, making sure that the environment gets destroyed, and to keep on denying climate change. Oh yes, that’s just so much better, by golly, that will make America great again, you betcha. :insert near-fatal eyeroll here.:

A few days ago, Joe Romm at Think Progress had an article up about the clean energy, and how it will be a $50 trillion industry, and how Trump has determined that the U.S. will not be a part of it.

The best charts of 2016 reveal the clean energy revolution is unstoppable. At least, it is unstoppable globally.

But if the United States makes a historic blunder and shifts its focus back toward dirty energy just when the rest of the world has made a $50 trillion (or higher) commitment to a carbon-free future, then it won’t reap the vast job-creating benefits of the remarkable ongoing cost reductions shown in chart above.

That article is here.

Today, there’s an article about all the jobs created by clean energy.

Renewable energy jobs in select countries (excluding large hydropower). CREDIT: IRENA.

Renewable energy jobs in select countries (excluding large hydropower). CREDIT: IRENA.

China is preparing to go big on the only major new source of sustainable high-wage employment in the coming decades.

Beijing’s newest 5-year energy development plan invests a stunning 2.5 trillion yuan ($360 billion) in renewable generation by 2020. Of that, $144 billion will go to solar, about $100 billion to wind, $70 billion to hydropower, and the rest to sources like tidal and geothermal power.

The Chinese National Energy Administration said in a statement Thursday the resulting “employment will be more than 13 million people.”

China is already doing way better than the U.S. in this regard, and President-elect Trump’s commitment to opposing clean energy will not make things any better. As the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) reported last year, China already has over 40 percent of all jobs in renewables, globally, while the U.S. has under 10 percent (see chart above).

We know clean energy jobs are the only major new source of sustainable high-wage employment in the coming decades for several reasons.

If you’re one of those Americans who fell for Trump’s “jobs!” bullshit, perhaps you should look into moving to China, I hear they are hiring. The full article is at Think Progress.

The Conservative Rally Cry: No More Porn!

Todd Weiler (Facebook).

Todd Weiler (Facebook).

The attempt to legislate a pre-loaded porn nanny is here. Now we move on to the anti-porn crusade being spear-headed by Utah republicans, alarmed over the porn consumption stats of Utah, which are very high indeed. A couple of decades ago, I live in Utah, SLC specifically. It’s not difficult to understand why porn consumption is so very high there, it’s a state based on serious repression, and a deliberate suppression of knowledge. Naturally, Utah is going with the “won’t anyone think about the children!” whine to defend their latest draconian measures. You could seriously counter the importance of porn among children by providing proper sex education. Demystifying goes a long way in making something a whole lot less interesting. It helps if you aren’t always muttering “forbidden!” too, but I expect that’s a road too far for Utah. All that said, the majority of porn consumers in Utah are not children. They are adult, hetero men.

Now that he’s successfully declared pornography to be a public health crisis in his state, a Utah Republican wants to allow lawsuits against companies that put explicit content online.

State Sen. Todd Weiler (R-Woods Cross) sponsored a resolution that passed last year to declare the public health crisis, and he said the new bill would focus mainly on underage children and teens who become addicted to online pornography, reported the Salt Lake Tribune.

“I’m trying to kind of track the same path that was taken against tobacco 70 years ago,” Weiler told KSL-TV. “It’s not government coming in and saying what you can and can’t watch. It’s just basically a message to the pornography industry that if someone in Utah can prove damages from the product, that they may be held liable financially.”

That’s not likely, given that the whole notion of porn ‘addiction’ is a false one.

The lawmaker is working on a second bill that would close a loophole requiring public libraries to filter out adult content on wireless internet connections, and not just wired connections, and he also wants internet service providers to filter explicit content for all users, although they may opt out.

Intransitive has the best, simplest idea about the filtering question, which means it would never be implemented.

Weiler, who is an attorney, admits the first two or three dozen cases against pornographers would most likely be dismissed, but he believes they would eventually gain traction.

“I’m looking at where we can push the envelope as a state of Utah,” Weiler said. “To pretend that this is not having any impact on our youth, on children’s’ minds as they’re developing, as their attitudes towards sex and the opposite sex are being formed, I think, is foolish.”

Lawmakers in Tennessee and Virginia are considering measures that would declare pornography a public health crisis in their states, as well, and the Republican National Committee issued a warning in its 2016 platform about health concerns related to pornographic materials.

The new rallying cry of repubs everywhere, oh gods, porn! Perhaps if all republicans stopped their porn consumption, I’d bet the reduction in numbers would seriously impress them.

Via Raw Story.

The Wall Street Journal: We Will Not Call A Lie A Lie.

Credit: Screenshot

Credit: Screenshot.

Since President-elect Donald Trump won the election, he has continued his campaign habit of making inconsistent, unverifiable, or even just obviously false statements. The American public is left to rely on the media to learn the truth and make sense of his proclamations.

That’s exactly what the media is supposed to do with any politician—when the President lies, it is the press’ obligation to tell the public. But it’s doubly important with a politician like Trump, whose entire political career has often been punctuated by flagrant lies.

But when Trump lies, the Wall Street Journal—the second largest paper by circulation in the country—will not call it a lie, according to the its editor-in-chief Gerard Baker.

“I’d be careful about using the word, ‘lie.’ ‘Lie’ implies much more than just saying something that’s false. It implies a deliberate intent to mislead,” Baker told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press on Sunday.

Well no shit, Sherlock. A lie is a deliberate intent to mislead. That would be why it’s called a lie. A falsehood. A fabrication. For fuck’s sake, it truly is Nineteen Eighty Four, and Doublespeak is here.

Instead, Baker said the paper would investigate the claim, and then present both sides: What Trump said, and what the paper found. Then, the readers will be left to decide which account is correct.

As an example, Baker cited one of Trump’s more outrageous lies: When he claimed that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey gathered on rooftops to celebrate 9/11. Baker noted that the WSJ investigated his claim and found it baseless.

Right. That’s an excellent example of a lie, a deliberate intent to mislead people into thinking this made up bullshit was true. So, it’s a LIE. Big, yuuuuge LIE. It’s okay to say so.

“I think it’s then up to the reader to make up their own mind to say, ‘This is what Donald Trump says. This is what a reliable, trustworthy news organization reports. And you know what? I don’t think that’s true.’ I think if you start ascribing a moral intent, as it were, to someone by saying that they’ve lied, I think you run the risk that you look like you are, like you’re not being objective,” he said.

Oh fuck you, with bells on. You can leave it up to people to decide whether or not they are okay with someone lying, you can’t prevent that anyway. What you can do is call a LIE a LIE.  That’s not a moral judgement, it’s reporting the truth. Idiot. And fuck all this “both sides” bullshit, too. I’m not interested in being fair to tyrants, facsists, compulsive liars, or nazis, among others.

The full story is at Think Progress.