Who would have thought it? Having a classless, obnoxious lawyer, ranting on social media, and stomping out of the courtroom during closing arguments is not a winning strategy. Donald Trump lost again and has been ordered to pay $83.3 million in damages to E. Jean Carroll.
The saddest thing about it is that will not derail the asshole’s presidential campaign in the slightest.
I just hope the Democrats hammer on his unsuitability for any office at all in the looming campaign.
The UN has a few words of condemnation for Israel.
The top court for the United Nations on Friday ordered Israel to take measures to prevent and punish direct incitement of genocide in its war in Gaza, although it stopped short of ordering a ceasefire in a case brought forth by South Africa.
“The state of Israel shall… take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of the genocide convention,” the International Court of Justice (ICJ) said.
In a sweeping ruling, a large majority of the 17-judge panel of the ICJ voted for urgent measures which covered most of what South Africa asked for with the notable exception of ordering a halt to Israeli military action in Gaza.
The court ordered Israel to refrain from any acts that could fall under the genocide convention and also ensure that its troops do not commit any genocidal acts in Gaza.
It’s something. It may be a rather ineffectual finger-wagging, but they openly state what’s obvious: Israel is a genocidal state that is killing and starving and depriving the people of Gaza of basic humanitarian aid, and should stop. Stop right now.
Unfortunately, we all know what the top genocider would say about that. Netanyahu says nuh-uh.
“The charge of genocide levelled against Israel is not only false, it’s outrageous, and decent people should reject it,” said Netanyahu.
“Our war is against Hamas terrorists, not against Palestinian civilians,” he added. “We will continue to facilitate humanitarian assistance and to do our utmost to keep civilians out of harm’s way, even as Hamas uses civilians as human shields.”
All 26,000 (so far) dead Palestinians were Hamas terrorists, I guess. Including the 10,000 dead children?
Somebody should explain to Netanyahu that even if they win on the body count score, even if they were to kill every Palestinian, they’d still lose the moral conflict, and the PR campaign. I know I’ll be voting against support for Israel whenever I get a chance.
Remember, well over a million civilians were killed in Vietnam, while about 60,000 Americans died. Who won that war?
I didn’t. I know next to nothing about her. Apparently, she’s facing all kinds of health problems now that she’s in her late 50s and did the usual thing we Americans do when facing a health crisis: go online and ask for donations. Given that simple story, I, a liberal weirdo, would think it deplorable that anyone would have to deal with our lack of a sane health care system. But no. Now the libs are coming for Mary Lou Retton, according to one far right web site.
From America’s Sweetheart to the libs enemy list.
That’s where American hero gymnast Mary Lou Retton, who turns 56 on Tuesday, finds herself after facing death in the fall after battling what her family is calling a rare form of pneumonia. When the public first found out about Mary Lou’s battle, it was also revealed by her daughters that their mother was uninsured.
At that time, the libs, who have no problem with hundreds of thousands of uninsured illegals pouring over the Mexican border, were livid. How dare Mary Lou not have insurance, they screamed on social media.
Now that Mary Lou has survived and appears ready to get on with life, albeit with an oxygen tank and looking like she’s in her mid-60s, the libs want blood and they appear ready to destroy the gold medalist darling because her family won’t disclose what they did with financial donations that were sent to Mary Lou to pay for her medical bills.
She’s not on my enemy list. If I were to scream “How dare Mary Lou not have insurance!” it wouldn’t be a complaint about Retton, but about how we’ve outsourced health care to MBAs in suits running for-profit insurance companies, and about the failure of the American state to provide a reasonable social safety net. I don’t understand the complaint by this far-right yahoo in the slightest.
What does the plight of immigrants have to do with that? They all ought to get basic health insurance applied to them, too.
He actually seems to be upset at one specific columnist for USA Today.
On January 8, super lib USA Today columnist Christine Brennan went on the attack in a column titled, “Months after hospitalization, Mary Lou Retton won’t answer basic questions about health care, donations.”
Brennan wants an accounting of the $459,324 that was raised for Mary Lou.
“Asked in several text messages and a voicemail on Monday about her lack of health insurance until recently, her financial situation and why she refuses to divulge where she was hospitalized or the name of her doctor(s) more than two months after she left the hospital, Retton, 55, declined to reply,” Brennan wrote.
Oh, Christine Brennan is a super lib
, however that is defined. All I can see about Brennan is that she writes about sports, nothing but sports, and about the impact of sports on people’s lives, and it’s no wonder I never heard of her. There’s nothing particularly liberal about her output, so that’s mystifying.
However, she has written multiple articles demanding an accounting from Retton about how she is spending the money that was donated to her, which is a) none of her business, and b) not at all liberal. It’s more Karenish than anything. Beyond that, she has written about drug abuse and spousal abuse and discrimination in the sports business — is that what has outraged the right-wing pundit?
He really has a weird idea about super lib
values.
Super Libs don’t want to help people like Mary Lou. They want them to repent and admit they don’t live life the right way like a Super Lib like Christine Brennan lives life and hence it’s time for Mary Lou to be dragged.
I guess Retton was a pro-Reagan conservative, but I don’t care. Everyone deserves basic human rights, and I don’t appreciate a frothing MAGA nitwit telling me, incorrectly, what my opinion on helping people is. But this is what people like him do, misrepresent and lie and get everything wrong.
Oh. There was another primary election yesterday, in New Hampshire. Given that the voters had an unappealing choice between two unpleasant people, it was predictable, I think, that the Republicans would choose the very worst.
Let’s stop for a second and appreciate the gravity of this moment. The Jan. 6 Capitol riot occurred three years ago, and the first chance the Republican Party had to rebuke this atrocity in a presidential election resulted in their endorsing it, via nominating the man responsible for inciting said riot.
The Republican party must be crushed.
Behold! The superior white master race!
I’ve had conversations with my son, a Major in the army, where he has lamented the difficulty of recruiting any more. It’s tough working with under-strength units, I guess. I’ll have to ask him what he thinks of Paul Gosar’s explanation, next time we talk.
Far-right congressman Paul Gosar is losing sleep over how few white people are enlisting in the army these days.
“The number of white recruits has plummeted,” Gosar wrote in an unhinged fundraising email sent out Thursday, with the subject line, “dismantling woke marxist ideologies.” “[It’s] a casualty of this cultural skirmish that has left our Army beleaguered and besieged by ‘woke’ ideologies.”
“This is not merely a crisis of numbers,” Gosar added. “It is a crisis of spirit.”
Gosar was responding to a recent investigation by Military.com that found that the number of white armymilitary recruits has been on a downward trajectory for the last half decade.
“Spirit”? “Woke ideologies”? That’s not the impression I get. I got to listen in to a big convo the leadership had with enlisted soldiers and their families (I’m family, I count). What I heard was enthusiastic officers discussing a deployment with enthusiastic troops, answering questions about how families were going to be taken care of while they were overseas. They discussed security issues and timetables. Is that what “woke” is?
Far-right commentators quickly pounced on those findings, and claimed they were “proof” that the armed forces had become overrun by “Marxists” who are forcing “wokeness” on its ranks—and, as a result, alienating prospective white recruits.
In recent years, supposed “wokeness” in the military has been a growing point of obsession among right-wing commentators, lawmakers, and culture warriors. That’s been driven, in part, by the Pentagon adopting LGBTQ-inclusive policies over the last decade. In 2011, the Pentagon rescinded the controversial “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, meaning gay and lesbian service members could serve openly. In 2021, a ban on transgender people serving openly was officially lifted. Growing LGBTQ acceptance in the military has inspired far-right memes painting American soldiers in rainbow flags, suggesting that they are “soft” compared to their global counterparts (images of Russia’s military, particularly when they first invaded Ukraine in early 2022, are often used side-by-side as comparison).
I would have been impressed if that meeting had been a Marxist dialectic. It wasn’t. It was pretty much nothing but pragmatic answers about an assigned mission. Everyone was professional and disciplined about it, except me and my wife sitting quietly at home worrying about our little boy going off to a distant country with a side-arm and armor.
The disrespect I see is coming entirely from the far-right who want to compound enlistment problems by rejecting women and gay enlistees who are all contributing to the effectiveness of the military. If you’re concerned about racial differences in enlistment rates, don’t be a Republican who is enacting policies that increase the division between the poor and wealthy, and that selectively holds back black Americans. Fewer people sign up when the economy is good and when they have other opportunities at home, you know, because being in the military is a dangerous option.
A soldier with a rainbow badge on their backpack is still a soldier, you know. I would hope they wouldn’t be fighting for whatever Paul Gosar represents.
Look at this man. Does the phrase “all hat and no cattle” jump into your brain? It does mine.
That’s Oklahoma state representative Justin Humphrey in a suit and hat too big for him trying to justify his bill that would require women to get permission from their father in order to get an abortion. He is promoting a new and exciting law for his state.
Students who purport to be an imaginary animal or animal species, or who engage in anthropomorphic behavior commonly referred to as furries at school shall not be allowed to participate in school curriculum or activities. The parent or guardian of a student in violation of this section shall pick the student up from the school, or animal control services shall be contacted to remove the student.
He thinks this is a pressing issue because he heard second-hand that some kids were meowing at a school. That’s it. He is so quick to address rumors with legislative action that I think someone ought to tell him a few stories, true stories, about children hiding from school shooters. I’m sure he’d rush to pass gun control legislation in addition to his important furry control work.
Remember that brief moment?
The man has dropped out.
…15 months later, after botching his presidential campaign launch, throwing about $130 million dollars down the drain, and sustaining ruthless attacks from Trumpworld, it’s brutally clear that DeSantis was on the precipice of a different political fate: hubris.
On Sunday, two days before the New Hampshire primary, DeSantis ended his presidential campaign in a taped message he posted to X, the same social media platform where he started his campaign with a host of technical difficulties.
The Republicans must now embrace the reality that a corrupt serial rapist and wanna-be dictator is going to be their candidate (no one believes Nikki Haley is going to pull off an upset.) The rest of us have to focus on defeating the orange turdblossom.
I must say how much Florida looks like Russia. Russian academicians are proposing that it is necessary to disembowel philosophy.
Professor of the Department of Humanities at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation Dmitry Vinnik called for overcoming “the traits of comprador domestic philosophy.” To these features he included “the collective conviction that a philosopher must always be against the state and that a philosopher simply must be a pacifist,” “overt cosmopolitanism and intellectual snobbery.”
“Government assignments and curricula must be reviewed to ensure compliance with the values of our society and the interests of our state. All gender, feminist, postmodern and pacifist topics and courses should simply be abolished,” Vinnik noted.
Also, according to the professor, it is necessary to abolish “the courses of so-called critical thinking and fact-checking imposed abroad, which have nothing to do with philosophical skepticism or logic.” “In fact, this is a course in applied Russophobia,” says Vinnik.
I guess pacifism isn’t a legit philosophical position any more — philosophers must be militant and opposed to heresies like feminism. Also, critical thinking is anti-Russian…also, probably, anti-Floridian and anti-Texan.
Remember when Harvard president Gay, UPenn president Magill, and MIT president Kornbluth were pilloried for being insufficiently outraged about Palestinians on their campuses? They did give pretty tepid and timid answers to questions about campus protests, but I hate to break the news to you about college presidents: that’s their job, being professionally tepid and timid about everything in order to avoid antagonizing politicians and donors. They could have done better, but they never received any training in being forthright.
Then, strangely, everything shifted from being about their responsibilities to all sides on a politically contentious issue to…plagiarism? Not that that isn’t an important matter, but it’s peculiar how we got this abrupt change in focus. What had happened is that certain ideologically motivated people had decided to really get those college presidents, and they’d been doing their best to dig up dirt on them. They didn’t find evidence of anti-Semitism (that would have been a bad tactic, since the dirt diggers tended to be anti-Semitic themselves), but they did find that one nasty little nugget, the horrible secret that plagues a lot of academics who are pressured to churn out lots of papers.*
Well, unsurprisingly, it turns out that neither anti-Semitism or an epidemic of cheating were the actual motivations behind the assault on university presidents, or universities in general. They really, really hate DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). This was another anti-woke crusade all along.
Gay’s resignation almost a month after Magill’s had initially redirected the backlash onto Kornbluth, who has largely evaded the brunt of the outrage, kept her job and remained relatively silent amid the calls for her ouster. But as the focus of the online outrage now trains on Business Insider, the calls for the presidents’ firings — once primarily fueled by concerns over antisemitism on campus — are shifting to a broader campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at U.S. colleges and then detouring into seemingly tit-for-tat plagiarism probes. The shift appears to reveal that the initial uproar was never really about protecting Jewish students, scholars told Salon.
“Given how quickly the focus of the people claiming to be concerned about antisemitism on our campuses shifted to academic dishonesty, it certainly appears that the focus was never really about antisemitism and protecting students,” Irene Mulvey, the president of the American Association of University Presidents told Salon. “It’s part of a long-running, well-funded effort to create a false narrative for the public that higher education is broken.”
What’s driving that well-funded effort are conservative billionaires, like Bill Ackman. Ackman’s campaign got briefly short-circuited when it was discovered that his wife, Neri Oxman, had the same plagiarism sins that were used to get Gay fired. Uh-oh. Need to recalibrate. Suddenly, Ackman is babbling about “nuance” and “context.” It would be funny if this weren’t a rich, powerful guy looking for pretexts to get people he doesn’t like fired.
But the act backfired for the financier, whose involvement in the controversy had brought him his fair share of criticism according to Bloomberg, last Thursday after Business Insider released reports accusing Oxman of failing to cite and copying passages from other authors without proper citation in her 2010 MIT dissertation, claims The New Republic notes are similar to those thrown at Gay. While Oxman acknowledged some of the claims and apologized for errors in a post to X, the outlet published a second report the day after alleging at least 15 new instances of plagiarism in her dissertation, including segments claimed to be directly lifted from Wikipedia.
With the ire aimed at his spouse, Ackman’s strong-minded stance against plagiarism in all forms suddenly became more nuanced, with the billionaire arguing in a post to X that charges of plagiarism in academia should be more context-reliant and weigh intentionality. The Business Insider reports prompted Ackman to expand his campaign against higher education to the journalism industry, with the Pershing Square CEO announcing his plans to launch an AI-powered dig for potential plagiarism in the outlet’s work.
What’s this about “intentionality”? I suspect he means plagiarism with intent to lend support to the poor and oppressed is bad, while plagiarism with an intent to enrich billionaires is good.
He just hates DEI. It is the root of all sins.
In the same post in which he detailed a strict stance on plagiarism, Ackman also gave voice to a conservative talking point about DEI, concluding, after meeting with students and faculty at Harvard, that DEI was at the core of the antisemitism cropping up on the campus in the wake of Oct. 7.
I think it would be a stronger point to argue that evangelical Christianity is at the core of that anti-Semitism. Except that conservative evangelical Christians also hate DEI, so he can’t blame them.
You know that DEI initiatives strongly oppose anti-Semitism, along with any racial or ethnic discrimination, right? You can’t be a DEI proponent and also promote bigoted ideas about any group.
This is really all about finding any excuse to cut down anyone who opposes the billionaire agenda.
Is too on the nose?
