It’s time for my annual-ish reading round-up. Record-keeping has many benefits, chief amongst them, counter-intuitive insights. This year’s book diary has revealed that in a year I’d have said was pretty so-so, it turns out the number of books I really loved was unexpectedly high, about three times that of the previous two years. The […]
Reading
An election year like no other If you hadn’t already had your mind blown by what these authoritarian MAGA monsters are capable of, all you had to do was observe the grotesque display that the Texas government put on this week. The despicable cruelty they dispensed upon a woman and her family enduring one of the worst crises of her life says it all. They didn’t care that she was carrying a fetus with anomalies so extreme that it would probably be stillborn or live for a very short time if it were brought to term. There was no hope. Nor did they care that her pregnancy was risky and dangerous to her and her ability to have more children in the future. Instead, they demanded that she endure the full length of that pregnancy anyway, no matter the price she and her family would have to pay and go through childbirth all in order to appease fundamentalist demands that essentially define pregnant women as incubators and nothing more. She finally had to flee to a civilized place that recognized her as a human being. This issue is not going away.
He’s right there. Why won’t they talk to him in public? Hunter Biden wants a public hearing for good reason! The Democrats are backing him: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., backed that call for a public hearing while speaking to reporters on Wednesday. She was one of multiple Democratic lawmakers to address Republicans’ impeachment inquiry of Biden, including Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who described in the investigation as “more like a what-is-it, not a whodunnit.” “I won’t even call it an investigation, I’ll call it an exercise in futility,” Ocasio-Cortez said about the Hunter Biden investigation, describing it as “groundless and unsubstantiated.” The New York congresswoman said there is more pressing business than Hunter Biden. “We need to do far more than worry about baseless investigations that are conducted more on podcasts than, frankly, on a grounding of evidence,” she said. Aaaaand, needless to say, Republicans are having a hissy fit: Lol. Here’s how that ended: Hunter Biden did the right thing.
December 24
- Deck the halls, etc.
- Prep full turkey dinner
- Make sure Janie nails down “Hark!”
- TINSEL
- See if George remembers to pick up the Merry Christmas wreath
- The families are coming. Spike the eggnog
December 25
- Clean the house because of the “miracle” (I didn’t know the entire town was coming over and they were going to drag all the snow in and SING)
- Send thank you notes to everyone we’ve ever met, I guess. Even Sam “still-with-the-hee-haw?” Wainwright
- Have a heart-to-heart with George to see if he’s okay. Also talk to Pete, Janie, and Tommy. And whoever at the Building & Loan lets Uncle Billy keep a pet squirrel
- Prep another full turkey dinner. Apparently
- Make more cookies? Violet is still passed out in my mudroom
- It’s just—we live in upstate New York, and everyone forgot to stomp the snow off their boots before coming in?
- Who the heck is Clarence?
December 26
- Take a breath.
It is urgent to end the loss of life and destruction in Gaza, but as the joint Statement by the Prime Ministers of Australia, Canada and New Zealand recognises, a sustainable ceasefire will require agreement to a balanced set of conditions consistent with eventually achieving a lasting peace based on a two-State solution. This is Continue reading »
I do not believe that anything I say about what is happening in Gaza will affect Israeli or American policy in that conflict. But I want to be on record so that when historians look back on this moral calamity, they will see that some Americans were on the right side of history. What Israel Continue reading »
With some honourable exceptions, most of the media and the parliament enthusiastically support almost everything the Director General of the Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation Mike Burgess has to say. Although Burgess is not an extreme hardliner in the Australian intelligence world, many of his statements should not go unchallenged. Earlier this year, Burgess said foreign Continue reading »
Another year passes and Australian citizen, journalist and publisher, Julian Assange is still detained in the UK as the US continues its pursuit of extradition for publishing material over a decade ago which revealed war crimes committed by the US and its allies in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US’ blatant attack on freedom of speech Continue reading »
From the destruction of Gough Whitlam’s ASIO file, Sir John Kerr’s burnt Royal letters of support reduced to ash in the Yarralumla incinerator, to the missing 1975 Government House guest books, these lost archives raise serious concerns about the care with which our vice-regal records are maintained, and our capacity to write a full and Continue reading »
The most disappointing part of the Victorian Ombudsman’s report on alleged politicisation of the public sector is the ‘nothing to see here’ response by the Secretary of the Premier’s Department, Jeremi Moule. Perhaps this is not surprising given Victoria, like so many other jurisdictions in recent years, has appointed someone closely associated with the First Continue reading »
The Dubai climate conference may have handed activists a new tool.
Today is the day the MAGA House plans to officially vote for an “impeachment inquiry” I know this will come as quite a shock, but the current U.S. Congress is the least productive congress in almost a hundred years. Not since the first years of the Great Depression under Herbert Hoover has the legislative branch been so ineffectual. This may seem surprising considering that the Republican majority has dominated the news from the moment it took the oath last January, but it has barely managed to do the one thing it’s supposed to do which is pass legislation. They certainly have been busy though. They started with an epic battle for the Speaker’s office that ended even before the year was up with the dramatic defenestration of that same Speaker for committing the cardinal sin of compromising with the Democratic Senate and White House to keep the government running. That took weeks of effort leaving little time for anything else. Then they had to hold “oversight” hearings to yell at administration figures and provoke fights with witnesses and there was the huge issue of the Senate dress code.
This is my marmalade-making time of the year. Not because it’s the only time I can get hold of Seville oranges – I can get hold of the MaMade tins any time of year, and have only ever gotten fresh ones to use one time that I happened to visit a friend in Arizona who […]
The BBC will have to make £90m of cuts on top of its current £400m annual funding gap - while its entire funding model could be ripped up.
A day after the suicide of a man aboard the Bibby Stockholm exclusive data obtained by this newspaper shows migrants waiting three years or more for a decision on their future has more than trebled in the past year
Follow the data Take good news where you find it. Politico: Special counsel Jack Smith has extracted data from the cell phone Donald Trump used while in the White House and plans to present evidence of his findings to a Washington, D.C. jury to demonstrate how Trump used the phone in the weeks during which he attempted to subvert the 2020 election. In a court filing Monday, Smith indicated that he plans to call an expert witness who extracted and reviewed data copied from Trump’s phone, as well as a phone used by another unidentified individual in Trump’s orbit. The data from Trump’s phone could reveal day-to-day details of his final weeks in office, including his daily movements, his Twitter habits and any other aides who had access to his accounts and devices. The data, for example, could help show whether Trump personally approved or sent a fateful tweet attacking his vice president, Mike Pence, during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
Whether you are a pensioner or a parent, unemployed or living with a disability, you may be one of the millions of people who receive benefits from the State. Like the NHS, the welfare state is a safety net when times get tough; no one should be ashamed of receiving benefits. So why is the […]
“What is terrifying about happiness? / Happiness.”
Driving America into the ditch Donors were peeved over the bad publicity. In a House hearing on campus antisemitism last week, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) demanded university presidents from the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and MIT answer for antisemitic campus protests over the war in Gaza. Asked whether calling for genocide against Jews would violate codes of conduct, amount to bullying and harassment, and prompt expulsions, the administrators hedged. A video extract went viral. Michelle Goldberg responded, “If I’d seen only that excerpt from the hearing … I might have felt the same way.” The administrators “acquitted themselves poorly.” “But while it might seem hard to believe that there’s any context that could make the responses of the college presidents OK, watching the whole hearing at least makes them more understandable,” Goldberg added. “In the questioning before the now-infamous exchange, you can see the trap Stefanik laid.” But the trap was sprung. Over the weekend and under pressure from university donors, University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill and board chair Scott L.
Dear TomDispatch Reader, In 2022, when I was putting together the end-of-year plea I always post to keep TomDispatch going in a tough world, I wrote: “This time around though, I have to wonder whether it may be the last such missive I’ll write.” Well, as it happens (and thanks to the generosity of the readers of this website), it wasn’t. Three hundred and sixty-five days later — the beginning of our 23rd year and halfway through my own 79th year on this ever more embattled planet — I’m back, asking for your support. This is probably the least enjoyable thing I do at TomDispatch. I mean, why should I get any pleasure out of bothering you for money when, like... Read more
Source: Keeping TomDispatch Alive appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
Here at Pillsbury, we’ve made the difficult decision to retire our longstanding mascot the Pillsbury Doughboy. He is a bad coworker and a relic of an office culture that is no longer acceptable in the modern era.
He is seven feet tall, smells of yeast, and sleeps in his office. His favorite activity is compressing his body into the office fridge. Being constrained in cold temperatures seems to make him more powerful, and his muffled giggles are very distracting. We are sick of being asked to poke his belly. He spends most of the time moping around, feeding pigeons with pieces of his own flesh in the parking lot. When confronted about his day-to-day activities, the Doughboy sulks and whines about how everyone is so mean to him.
Sure, it’s cute when he giggles, but it’s unbearable when he cries. The most minor request from a coworker elicits a banshee scream that drives nearby coworkers to madness. When we politely asked him to stop microwaving his fish, he shattered the breakroom windows with his wailing.
Swing seats could be decided by Brits living in Moscow or Iran following changes to election rules
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Michael Rosenbaum/Lex Luthor, Reacher, Pretty Little Liars, Wytches, Peacemaker, What If, Doctor Who & more!