No... But it would be a fun commute.

On Monday, earlier reports that the female protester was arrested on 27 December were confirmed to BBC Persian by human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, who added the protester is 31 years old and mother to a 20-month-old child.

https://twitter.com/MsJulieLenarz/status/956217002233880576

A #Metoo feminist and a mother allegedly engaged in a relationship with an Afghan refugee has refused to report his sexual assault on her preteen daughter on the grounds that it would lead to his expulsion from Sweden.

When getting a penis inside your peekachoo is more important than the safety of your children

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201801241061018805-sweden-feminism-sexual-assault/

Unrepentant invaders. Deport them all.

‘F*ck This Conservative, F*ck This Person!’ Illegal Aliens Charge Pro-Amnesty Thom Tillis’ Senate Office

Re: Yesterday's comments: It's on.

Railhenge.

It appears that somebody in Washington is not a complete moron.

Railhenge. ~ mpetrie98 at January 25, 2018 6:18 AM

Don't know if you've ever driven down 99, mpetrie, but abandoned high-speed rail pedestals might actually beautify it.

This is a stretch of highway that is home to such legendary beauty spots as Stockton, Bakersfield, Fresno, and Lodi (of "Oh Lord, Stuck in Lodi" fame).

Somebody needs to tell the California legislature that there is a difference between science and a science project.

The usage figure behind California's proposed plastic straw ban rests on a survey done by a 9-year-old in 2011.

[Posted this in yesterday's link thread by mistake]

Hell, I ain't even mad about this. As it was said, it's morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money. UA = University of Arizona.

Events hosted by FORCE in the past include an even titled “Deconstructing Cisnormativity,” a discussion designed to tackle the “taboo” surrounding abortion, and another dedicated to making crafts out of expired condoms provided by the UA Women’s Center.

...

Following a new trend that Campus Reform has observed at other colleges, FORCE interns will actually need to pay for their unpaid internship, since they must enroll in a three-credit course hosted by the Women’s Studies Department as a condition of enrollment.

Thus, the unpaid internship will cost in-state students roughly $3,029 and out of state students $4,888.05, according to UA’s tuition calculator. Chris Sigurdson, the school’s media officer, confirmed to Campus Reform that students must “pay for all academic credit they receive and that includes credit they receive for internships.”

https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10426

Related: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shut-up-and-take-my-money

As I told a bartender who kept automatically putting straws in my whiskey & coke, straws are for children and imbeciles.

Why are you gets ng drinks from a barber?

Ah, bartender - fucking dyslexia

Well, if you go to high-end hair places some will actually serve you some booze. I say bartender, you say barber, to ma to, to mat o.

Meanwhile:

On a cold day in January, Judge Rosemarie Aquilina faced a difficult choice. She could either make a principled decision and uphold the responsibilities imposed by the Michigan Code of Judicial Conduct, or she could listen and believe the experiences of the young women Nassar assaulted and cast her impartiality to the winds.

As a wise old man would say of the situation: “She chose…poorly.“

https://blog.simplejustice.us/2018/01/25/seaton-judge-rosemaries-baby-advocacy/

If inaction is an action and silence is complicity, doesn't that mean all the gymnasts who kept quite over the years are at fault for all the victims that followed them?

The new Pharisees. #Hypocrites

1,000 private jets deliver elites to Davos for climate summit

Um, luj, many of them were children at the time. Did you really not know that? What's more, many also likely thought that since their parents were in the room with them (Nassar blocked the view with towels and tables), that whatever pain or abuse they suffered couldn't really be abuse. (Is it so odd that even teens might think that way?) On top of that, when some dared to speak to their parents and the latter spoke up, pretty much everyone - coaches, administrators, etc. - threatened them into silence. One victim said that people she thought were her friends called her a liar. On top of that, many, at the time, probably had no idea there were even a dozen victims - never mind 160-plus - who would believe them and rally to their side - but they DID know there were dozens of people who would take Nassar's side in a heartbeat.

Sheesh.

"Michigan Assistant Attorney General Angela Povilaitis addressed the court in Lansing before former USA Gymnastics and..."

http://www.wtva.com/content/national/470973753.html?ref=753

"...He asked 11 year olds to tell him if they were on their periods so he could be sure they were ripe for his abuse. Children that were prepubescent, often unaware of their bodies. Children whose parents sat feet away, near children. But the assaults he perpetrated on these trusting young girls was not limited to the hours and hours and hours of sexual penetration...

"...For many of these girls, Nassar was not just a doctor but a confidant, a role model, sometimes the only affirming male influence in their lives. The level of Nassar's predation reaches even higher because he often knew the victim's parents, some of whom were fellow doctors, others who unwittingly sent patients to him. He even knew some of the parents were police officers. He was so well practiced in his abuse and continually empowering himself that he believed he would get away with it despite any parents' profession. He believed he was untouchable. This defendant not only robbed these children of their innocence, he robbed many of them of their good health. He performed no healing, only hurt. With so many heartbreaking stories of unnecessary treatments, misdiagnoses, inaccurate medical treatment, which we know has resulted in lasting permanent damage. Many of these survivors wonder whether their now lifelong injuries could have been treated had he not wanted the continued access to their young bodies. He wasn't a world-renowned doctor. As one of our experts so eloquently put it in preparing this case for trial, he was performing hocus pocus medicine...

"...To know your truth, to be called a liar, by not only your abuser but to also not be believed by other trusting adults. What does that do to a person? Adults who were supposed to protect you and could have made it stop and could have prevented others from the same fate. What does that do to a child? We saw first hand what it does. And with each time he got away, he was empowered to continue and perfect and abuse even more.

"It should not take finding a collection of 37,000 vile and disgusting images to believe these women and girls. It shouldn't take investigative journalists to expose predators. It should not take one brave woman put in the unenviable position and choice to go public with her name and be the only public person for months. But thank God we had these journalists. And that they exposed this truth and that they continued to cover this story. Thank God Rachael Denhollander made the first contact with the reporter and decided to allow them to publish her name...

"...Yet, even after the first day and the conclusion of the first week, it was brought to my attention by many involved in this case that there are still people in this very community and elsewhere, I would imagine, who are saying that these women were all in it for the money or the attention. Are you kidding me? After 150 heart-wrenching, raw, graphic, visceral impact statements, how can anyone ... believe that? Even to this day, even as this historic sentencing hearing is broadcast around the globe, there are still likely people who doubt. Perhaps those 2,000 folks who voted for this defendant as school board member. Perhaps the many petition writers we're aware of -- who included doctors and trainers and athletes and lawyers -- who spared nothing to come to the defense of this defendant over 16 months ago. And continued to defend him for months even after he had been charged with Kyle Stephens' abuse.**** I hope and pray that they are watching, that they are listening and that they have learned their lesson...

"...The final (and seventh) takeaway is that we as a society need investigative journalists more than ever. What finally started this reckoning and ended this decades long cycle of abuse was investigative reporting. Without that first Indianapolis Star story in August of 2016, without the story where Rachael came forward publicly shortly thereafter, he would still be practicing medicine, treating athletes and abusing kids. Let that sink in for a minute. Right now, he would be at his office ... not far from this courtroom and the Michigan State University campus abusing children, had it not been for the investigative reporters and Rachael who brought this case. We know federal law enforcement did not stop him nor did trainers or coaches or deans or medical supervisors. Victim disclosures to adults didn't stop him. Reporters began the story and excellent victim-centered, offender-focused police and prosecutors grabbed the baton and brought us here today..."

****For those who don't know, she was six at the time. More on that in a second.

"Larry Nassar Victim Abused at Age 6 Says Father Didn't Believe Her — and Guilt Led to His Suicide"

http://people.com/sports/kyle-stephens-larry-nassar-sexual-abuse/

"...'[Nassar] tore us apart. He labeled me within my family as someone that was just a vile person,' Stephens said of Nassar during a Thursday appearance on Megyn Kelly Today alongside fellow victims Rachael Denhollander and Mattie Larson. 'My dad had spent time in his life defending abused children. So the fact that his child would make such a heinous accusation with no pretense, really made me a target for [Nassar].'...

"...Years later, when she was 12, Stephens told her parents about the abuse and her mother and father confronted their friend Nassar. Stephens said Nassar denied the abuse and 'my parents chose to believe Larry Nassar over me.' She said her parents made her speak with Nassar about the allegations, and the predator allegedly told her, 'No one should ever do that, and if they do, you should tell someone.'

"After that, Stephens said in court that her relationship with her parents deteriorated, especially her connection to her father.

"'His belief that I lied seeped into the foundation of our relationship,' she said. 'Every time we got into a fight, he would tell me, "You need to apologize to Larry" … I started to question whether the abuse ever happened.'

"As time passed, the Nassars began pressuring Stephens into babysitting their children, she said. When she was at their home, the family acted as if she never accused Nassar at all. Disconnected from her family, Stephens said she began doing all she could to pay for her own counseling, as she knew she could not ask her parents for help.

"She ended up confronting her father about Nassar again when she was 18, before leaving for college. Her father, who later killed himself, finally believed her.

"'My father and I did our best to patch up our tattered relationship before he committed suicide in 2016,' Stephens told the court through tears. 'Admittedly, my father was experiencing debilitating health issues, but had he not had to bear the shame and self-loathing that stemmed from his defense of Larry Nassar, I believe he would have had a fighting chance for life.'"

CNN returns to touting anti-Trump polls in the hopes that the mid-terms will go Democrat.

Attention white wimmens: Now with more Racism!™

Found this today:

"I Was Tortured in Gay Conversion Therapy. And It’s Still Legal in 41 States."

Almost all, in other words.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/opinion/gay-conversion-therapy-torture.html

"Sam Brinton is the head of advocacy and government affairs at the Trevor Project, which provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to L.G.B.T.Q. youth."

Excerpts:

"In the early 2000s, when I was a middle schooler in Florida, I was subjected to a trauma that was meant to erase my existence as a newly out bisexual. My parents were Southern Baptist missionaries who believed that the dangerous and discredited practice of conversion therapy could 'cure' my sexuality.

"For over two years, I sat on a couch and endured emotionally painful sessions with a counselor. I was told that my faith community rejected my sexuality; that I was the abomination we had heard about in Sunday school; that I was the only gay person in the world; that it was inevitable I would get H.I.V. and AIDS.

"But it didn’t stop with these hurtful talk-therapy sessions. The therapist ordered me bound to a table to have ice, heat and electricity applied to my body. I was forced to watch clips on a television of gay men holding hands, hugging and having sex. I was supposed to associate those images with the pain I was feeling to once and for all turn into a straight boy. In the end it didn’t work. I would say that it did, just to make the pain go away.

"I have begun to repair the damage that conversion therapy caused me and my family. But the failed promise of change has very likely caused a permanent tear in our relationship..."

"...We constantly hear from survivors of conversion therapy who have been so hurt that they are contemplating suicide. So we know the severity of the problem.

"A new report tells us just how huge it is. Nearly 700,000 adults in the country have received conversion therapy at some point, including about 350,000 who received the treatment as adolescents..."

What happens when you can't climb the identity politics totem pole.

@lenona: Jesus rode the cross for our sins, not to set an example of how to treat those some alleged "Christians" regard as sinners.

If these allegedly "Christian" therapists all died at the same time, they would probably bust Hell wide open, IMO.

What happens when you can't climb the identity politics totem pole.

I would expect her to be hounded out of Ha-vard by Spring Break...

The new Pharisees. #Hypocrites

As I like to say, I don't want to hear one damn word about my carbon footprint. NOT. ONE.

From Gogs link

(CNN)If the 2020 election were held today, President Donald Trump would lose, convincingly, to three of the most-mentioned potential 2020 Democrats, according to a new CNN/SSRS poll.

While 2020 polling in 2018 is of relatively limited value, a deeper dive into potential Trump head-to-head matchups with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, former Vice President Joe Biden and talk show host Oprah Winfrey reveals a major problem for Trump as he seeks to build a winning coalition in 2020:

So in otherwords, Trumps numbers are exactly the same as what they were before the election, and the only reason he won is becuase all resaon to the contrary, the DNC ran Clinton

Um, Darth, why not? Aside from the fact that maybe private jets shouldn't exist? Two wrongs don't make a right.

I suppose you've heard about the big changes China is about to impose on how the U.S. and Europe will have to deal with their recycling? (Makes me glad I never bought bottled water in my life.)

Mpetrie, glad to hear you feel that way.

From Dan Savage's book "The Kid" (pp 17-18):

"...As homophobes have gotten used to the idea of us, they’ve become more subtle. Arresting us, electroshocking us, and killing us have gone out of style. Of course, gay-bashing remains a popular coming-of-age ritual for disturbed young straight boys all over the country (R.I.P., Billy Jack Gaither), but it is no longer sanctioned by the state (the men who murdered Matthew Shepard and Billy Jack Gaither will, with any luck, soon be resting in peace themselves).

"Even the most recent attacks on gays and lesbians by religious conservatives arrived disguised as compassion. When Christian conservatives began buying ads in newspapers and on television promoting an almost entirely fictional 'ex-gay movement,' the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force called the campaign a 'kinder and gentler homophobia.' Men and women who claimed to have 'freed themselves' from the gay lifestyle beamed at us from full-page ads in The New York Times and other papers. It was hard to take these ads seriously. Many gays and lesbians asked, 'What harm could they do?'

"A considerable amount, as we quickly discovered. Gays and lesbians were never the true targets of these ads and their 'message of compassion.' The target was straight people, and the message was not that Jesus loves the little homos, all the little homos of the world. No, the advertisers wanted straight people to believe that the only thing preventing them from living in a world free of homosexuality were those stubborn gays and lesbians ('Why can’t they just give themselves to Jesus Christ?'). By arguing that we didn’t have to exist, these ads implicitly argued that we had no right to exist.

"This was an attempt by religious conservatives to introduce a deadly new kind of hatred into American culture: eliminationist homophobia. In his book 'Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,' Daniel Goldhagen described prewar German anti-Semitism as unique and murderous; he called it eliminationist. German Christian churches inspired visions of Jews
as 'Christ-killers,' and Jews came to be regarded as a poisonous anti-race that had to be eliminated in order to purify German culture. Well, Christian conservatives in America were attempting to inspire visions of gays and lesbians as 'Christ-rejectors,' and of homosexuality as a 'behavior' that must be eliminated to purify American culture. And they were calling it compassion!

"The distance is short between some people’s arguing that gays and lesbians as a group have no right to exist, and someone else’s taking it into his own hands to end the existence of an individual gay or lesbian person; in the wake of these ads came the murders of Matthew Shepard and Billy Jack Gaither. If the religious right is serious about 'washing the stain of homosexuality off the face of this great nation,' as one fundy web site I read puts it, there will have to be more murders. Few gays and lesbians will subject themselves to 'reparative therapy' quacks, and the vast majority of us have no interest in becoming 'ex-gay.' Homosexual behavior cannot be eliminated without eliminating homosexual people.

"Still, these days even the biggest anti-gay bigots take pride in appearing indifferent to the presence of homos. We can sweep into almost any room, even into Republican conventions, and brows hardly rise. The bigot may grip the facial muscles, locking a casual expression in place, but he doesn’t sneer, spit up, or throw things. He plays it cool..."

I doubt the conclusion of this tweet.

Is there any point in trying to make gay conversion therapy illegal? Aside from the sheer animal thrill of telling other people how to live, is there any reason to trust the state to know what gay conversion therapy actually is, let alone to decide whether or not people should be allowed to have it?

"So in otherwords, Trumps numbers are exactly the same as what they were before the election, and the only reason he won is because all reason to the contrary, the DNC ran Clinton."

Of course, those same polls had Clinton winning in a landslide. So there's that. Regarding those other candidates:

* Sanders would pull a lot (most) of the college vote. But he's a divisive figure in the party; he's the Democrats' Trump, but he has neither Trump's resources nor Trump's political street-fighting skills. Even so, of the three, he probably represents the strongest challenge to Trump.

* Winfrey, I don't have a good feel for. She'd pull the women's vote massively. But I think the rigors of a campaign would expose her as not having a lot of well-thought-out positions. Of course, the same is true of Trump. But Winfrey is accustomed to fawning treatment from the media and the people around her. I'm not sure she holds up under the campaign spotlight. Trump survived it in part because he was already skilled at dealing with negative media coverage, and Winfrey hasn't experienced very much of that. On the other hand, she is regarded as a power player in Hollywood, and can marshal up a lot of resources from there.

* The Democrats are idiots if they nominate Biden. He's a lousy campaigner; he has no base outside of his home state, and he's very vulnerable on the touchy-feely thing.

Of course, those same polls had Clinton winning in a landslide. So there's that. Regarding those other candidates ~ Cousin Dave at January 26, 2018 6:46 AM

Nah, the Dems will go with a youth and/or women's movement. In 2020, Trump will be 74 and the country will probably be tired of the chaos he brings with him. The Dems, looking back to the success of the younger Barrack Obama with Millennials and hammered by the identity politics they've fomented, will find their nomination process a shoot-out between Kamala Harris (young) and Elizabeth Warren (older, but a darling of the left-wing establishment). Michelle Obama's name will be floated, but her profile will be too low at that point.

Oprah has already ruled out a run, but might be cajoled into taking a major role in the campaign. Her experience getting burned with Obama's campaign will make her sensitive about getting involved in politics again.

Men will have very little chance with the Democratic party in this cycle. Terry McAuliffe and Rahm Emanuel will jump in, foolishly believing they still have any relevance or influence. Cuomo will realize the family power base is restricted to New York and sit this one out.

Jerry Brown and Joe Biden will make noises about running, but won't. Both will be dismissed as "old white men" despite their past contributions to the party and its goals.

Of course, the election is not for another 2 years. And a lot can change politically in that time. So....

The Dems, looking back to the success of the younger Barrack Obama

The thing most dems dont realize is the reason Obama won his first term is the same reason Trump won, he was presented as an outsider

The reason Obama won his second term is the reason Bush did, there were wars on

I bet Trump will still have a solid 20% base. Whether he gets the other 31% will depend on how Dems react after the midterms and how they run a candidate for 2020.

If they are as openly contemptible and entitled as Clinton enough people may just say fuck it one more time

Crid, for teens, maybe they should not be forced into it?