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Sat, 25/05/2024 - 08:00
That’s from 2016. Look what he does to his female campaign employees who balk at his bullying behavior: Nearly eight years ago, convinced that she’d been treated unfairly, Jessica Denson sued Donald Trump’s campaign for workplace harassment. Then she discovered the lengths Trump’s attorneys would go to hit back — and their unwillingness to stop. Immediately, the campaign filed a counterclaim for $1.5 million. It won a $52,229 judgment, and the campaign froze her bank account and almost forced her into bankruptcy. She found it humiliating when the campaign lawyers branded her a “judgment debtor” in a subpoena. They monitored her Twitter account, which had 32 followers, and submitted hundreds of pages of printouts to a judge. They even deposed her mother, grilling her about the family’s religious practices. The judgment was ultimately thrown out by a judge, but her legal fight continues. The process has been “unbearable,” Denson said, describing the unrelenting pressure she felt from Trump campaign attorneys. “This had become my life. I had no income and had this lien against me.
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Sat, 25/05/2024 - 08:00
And yet I heard the CNN reporter on the ground talk about how big and diverse the crowd was and how the Biden campaign must be nervous about his appeal in this blue city. They interviewed the rallygoers (aka Trump fans) and earnestly listened as they complained about the economy without pushing back on their erroneous alternative facts. If you were just a casual viewer you would come away with the idea that Biden is in trouble in New York because tens of thousands of Democrats are abandoning Biden. The Trump people say 25,000 people showed up. It was actually more like 2500.
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Sat, 25/05/2024 - 06:30
Another contender enters the VP ring: Donald Trump appears to have a few requirements for his running mate, including that whoever it is does what they are told and does not steal the spotlight. He would also prefer an Ivy League pedigree, according to The New York Times, which reported that Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., a Harvard graduate, is now a “top contender.” According to three anonymous sources who have met with Trump, Cotton is a favorite, alongside North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and three of Cotton’s Senate colleagues: Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Tim Scott, R-S.C., and J.D. Vance, R-Ohio. According to the Times, Trump is also considering the five men for posts in his administration, should he win in November. Where Cotton is concerned, there are some issues to consider. Trump has privately expressed his admiration for Cotton’s reliability and abilities as an effective communicator, as well as praising the senator’s Army service and his elite education. But Cotton voted to certify the 2020 presidential election, which could be a dealbreaker for a man who refuses to acknowledge his defeat.
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Sat, 25/05/2024 - 04:57
Dutton has finally started to show his hand and build his campaign for the next election around energy policy and housing affordability. The problem is that his ignorance of the evidence demonstrates his incompetence. Ever since he became Leader of the Labor Party, Albanese has been determined to offer a small target by not departing Continue reading »
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Sat, 25/05/2024 - 04:55
In Asian media this week: TikTok stage of Sino-US rivalry ‘dangerous’. Plus: Human trafficking the curse of cyber-crime; Election body tells Modi to stop dividing society; Junta’s conscription campaign flagging; Xi, Putin give West the big finger; Thailand’s dugongs casualties of climate change. Asian newspapers reacted poorly to Joe Biden’s recent imposition of higher tariffs Continue reading »
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Sat, 25/05/2024 - 04:54
In his Budget reply, Peter Dutton said he wants to cut the permanent migration program from 185,000 to 140,000 while maintaining a two-thirds to one third balance in favour of the skill stream. We subsequently found out that this is part of his plan to reduce net migration to 160,000. The permanent migration contribution to Continue reading »
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Sat, 25/05/2024 - 04:53
What kind of population does Australia need? Jim Chalmers recently informed us that Australian citizens ought to have more babies. Commentators on various blogs and fora have returned to dwelling on Australia’s “carrying capacity” as though this is a farm and we are grazing cattle. Peter Dutton, in his Budget Reply, stated his intent to Continue reading »
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Sat, 25/05/2024 - 04:52
Released last week, the Australian government’s Future Gas Strategy states that “our trade partners […] are relying on Australian gas to transition their economies to net zero”, but falling demand and over-contracting from Japan, our largest LNG export customer, raise questions over this claim. Japan has on several occasions stressed the importance of Australian LNG for its energy security. Continue reading »
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Sat, 25/05/2024 - 04:51
Let me introduce myself. I am a child of Holocaust survivors. My mother survived Auschwitz and my father fought the Nazi war machine as a partisan during the Second World War. Ninety-eight percent of my extended family perished during the Holocaust. From a very early age, beginning perhaps when I was four, I became acutely Continue reading »
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Sat, 25/05/2024 - 04:50
While the antiwar zeitgeist has been quite understandably focused on the genocide in Gaza, over the past few weeks we’ve been seeing some very disturbing reports about empire managers ramping up nuclear brinkmanship escalations in Ukraine that are worth going over. Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp has been doing a great job covering these developments, as usual. Continue reading »
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Sat, 25/05/2024 - 03:00

When the world died, all that was left was chaos. All that awaited us was death. Living in the ashes of our civilization, I’ve learned two things: I can rely only on myself, and I am the only person in this whole wasteland who still drives a sensible car.

I know a 2006 Toyota Camry may not be very flashy or deadly, but it’s dependable, sturdy, and, affordable. And I’ve realized that’s what I need to survive this endless nightmare humanity has created for itself.

Let’s just start with the obvious: there’s air conditioning. Why doesn’t anyone else have that? I have no idea how you drive around an arid dead wasteland without the AC blasting.

Now, look at the safety features. For one thing, my Toyota has seat belts. On all the seats. That used to be standard. I just don’t understand how we reached the point where the number of skulls on your car means more than the number of awards your car got from J.D. Power & Associates.

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Sat, 25/05/2024 - 02:05

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Our friends at The Believer are now publishing web exclusives. To celebrate, we’re sharing excerpts of their inaugural weekly column, in which Katie Heindl (author of the beloved Basketball Feelings) writes about the WNBA for both longtime fans and the casual observer. If you want to follow along and bypass the paywall, pick up a Believer digital-only subscription. For just $16 a year, you’ll also have full access to the magazine’s complete two-decade archive, including the most recent issue.

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Sat, 25/05/2024 - 02:00
If you want to know what’s causing all the pessimism look no further than him I am loathe to discuss the polls right now because they’re all over the place and mostly within the margin of error which means the snapshot of the electorate we are seeing may be a mirage either way. There are arguments going on throughout the commentariat over whether the polling methodology is accurate and whether they are modeling the electorate correctly. I have no idea about that and frankly I don’t really care. It’s enough to know that the election remains close which I suspect is intensely frustrating to everyone in both parties at this point. It seems as though we are destined to re-enact this polarized groundhog day election every four years and it’s tiresome. It’s especially difficult for Democrats to deal with this considering that the Republican opponent is once again the most odious candidate in American history, a crude brute currently facing 88 felony counts and a record that includes two impeachments and an attempted coup. It’s as if the world has suddenly tilted off of its axis and nothing makes sense anymore.
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Sat, 25/05/2024 - 00:30
Have a voice in your own future Brian Beutler cautions against lefties shooting themselves in the foot in 2024: The 2000 election turned out as it did in part because a small but decisive number of voters convinced themselves the major parties were fundamentally similar and similarly unappealing. (Plus the whole Supreme-Court-stopping-the-count thing.) The consequences have shaped the entirety of my adult life; for people of a certain age—my age and just a bit older—the lessons against complacency and collapsing important distinctions have proven lifelong.  To see something very similar happen based on similarly lazy thinking in 2016 was a history-repeating trauma. One fateful hinge point ought to have been enough to create a whole oral tradition and stigma against falling into the same traps.
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Fri, 24/05/2024 - 23:00
So say those working to steal it So this is what it’s like to live history. You may have read about the Civil Rights movement and watched coverage of Vietnam, the first moon landing, and the Watergate hearings as they happened. But in this century, American history is more personal. A friend who lost her fiancé on Sept. 11 and dreads every anniversary. We participated in electing the first Black president, lived through the Great Recession, and sheltered from COVID-19. We watched the Trump insurrection unfold live. At a remove like past events, yes, but the feeling is more visceral. This week, we found out that key actors in our national drama fly flags representing support for unmaking our democratic republic and constructing in its place a white Christian theocracy. Heather Cox Richardson reminds us that the Appeal to Heaven flag has been on display “in front of the office of House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and over the houses of Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito and the architect of the right-wing theocratic takeover of the federal courts, Leonard Leo.” “Slow-motion train wreck” may be overused but feels right here.
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Fri, 24/05/2024 - 22:00

Dear Joseph (we’re both adults, so I can call you by your first name),

I regret to inform you that we cannot accept your book Heart of Darkness for publication. I loved how short it was, but I hated how dumb it was.

Your story makes no sense. Marlow—is that a first name? Last name? Beyoncé situation?—spends the whole time being like, “Oh no, it keeps getting darker as I go down this boring-ass river, which I could have predicted because I’m going toward a place literally called the heart of darkness.”

Just turn around and go home, dude! It’s not like you went to Great Wall Szechuan with your gorgeous daughter and your loser boyfriend, Gary, and you and Dani got in a fight in front of Jake with the great bangs, and then you read the same fortune cookie at the same time just as lightning struck the restaurant, which made you switch bodies and now you’re stuck. That’s a real problem with some actual stakes. And as my shining daughter’s English teacher, Mrs. Dotmore, always says, without stakes, a story is just a bore-y. Mrs. Dotmore has six cats.