Closing out the half-year: Top 10 posts of 2017

2017 blew through with the energized, concentrated malice of a year that knew it had big, “2016”-labeled shoes to fill and the certainty that it could still be so much worse for so many more people. It was amazing, at least to me, how many were quick to celebrate the end of last year and cheer on the new one even as the United States was preparing to swap out its administration for what can best be described as a pack of Fallout-style feral ghouls, only with less impulse control and extra rot.

Preliator-wise, 2017 only began halfway though the year, so I don’t have quite a year’s worth of posts to look back on. But I’m not about to do a year’s-end retrospective each June 23^rd, so just-over-six months’ worth of blogging is what we’re going with here. So without further ado, I give you the obligatory Top 10 Posts of 2017, as ranked by unique page views (which counts only individual sessions and not repeat page loads).

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10) Atheists tour Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter

Published: September 15 | Unique views: 8

YouTube atheists Seth Andrews and Matt Dillahunty visited Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter and filmed their tour, complete with narration.

Creationism: Magical sky-fairies, dinosaurs, incest and geologically impossible events all wrapped up in a lie told to children.

No puppycide post this week

I suppose I should mention this, but there will be no puppycide post this week – my news sources have gone quiet this week.

Of course, this can only mean that police have now stopped shooting household pets, and not that they’re presumably still putting bullets in dogs leashed in their own yards and occasionally wounding and/or killing bystanders (or themselves) and we just aren’t hearing about it because it’s the holidays. I’m sure it’ll stay all clear on the puppycide front well into 2018, too.

Whilst I’m at it, I’m sure cops will never shoot an innocent animal again, and they’ll even stop gunning down unarmed Black men and teenagers … wait, I can hear you laughing. Went too far, didn’t I?

Egypt considering new law to ban atheism

Over the last few days, several outlets have reported that the Egyptian government may be about to outlaw atheism:

Following the 2013 overthrow of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, Egyptian authorities launched a crackdown on dissent that initially targeted the ousted president’s supporters but which later widened, targeting also liberal activists including many who had risen against Morsi: journalists, members of the LGBT community and now atheists.

The Egyptian parliament has in recent days discussed a proposed bill to criminalize atheism. The draft law was submitted by Amr Hamroush, the head of parliament’s Committee on Religion, who argues that lack of belief in God is a form of contempt of religion (something punishable by up to five years in prison under Egyptian law).

“Atheism rates are on the rise in Egypt. It is a dangerous trend that needs to be curtailed as it threatens the very fabric of our society,” he said, adding that religious institutions have a major role to play in countering the phenomenon.

It’s difficult to tell how likely the bill is to pass from the outside; we can only wait and see whether it does or doesn’t. But the fact that it’s entirely believable for this to happen illustrates everything that’s wrong with letting religion and state intertwine, and why it’s so crucially important to uphold strict secularism in government.

It also throws into sharp contrast all the deluded whinging from US Bible-thumpers who claim that criticism of their homophobia and preventing them from violating the Establishment Clause means the government is criminalizing Christianity. Once again, they only need look abroad to see what actual religious persecution looks like.

(via @sarahemclaugh; retweet by @Popehat)

Trump admin. drops trans military ban for now

After months of repeated court losses, Trump & co. have now stopped trying to ban fully qualified US citizens from serving in the armed forces (and kick out the thousands who are already there) based only on their gender identity.

The Trump administration has abandoned its bid to prevent openly transgender people from serving in the U.S. military, the Pentagon announced late Friday night.

In July, the Trump administration attempted to delay an Obama-era Department of Defense ruling allowing openly transgender Americans to enlist in the military from January 1.

[…]

However the policy has met with several federal court challenges—with two federal appeals courts upholding rulings that the Trump administration could not enforce the ban.

In a statement to Reuters, the Department of Justice said it would not fight the January 1 deadline and was not challenging the court rulings, but that the Trump administration may consider other means of blocking transgender people enlisting.

"The Department of Defense has announced that it will be releasing an independent study of these issues in the coming weeks," the official said.

The move was so characteristically Trumpian in its pointless, petty cruelty to begin with. Trans service members are no less physically and psychologically capable than are cisgender troops; what medical requirements some of them have are comparatively minor, costing only a tenth of the military’s Viagra budget; thousands of them are already in service at home or overseas; and studies have confirmed that allowing them to serve openly has “no significant impact on unit cohesion or operational readiness” – in short, kicking them out serves no real purpose whatsoever and would only weaken the military, all in order to get rid of trans people because the current White House leadership doesn’t like them (or is possibly pandering to the reliably bigoted White Evangelical crowd).

It’s almost as though letting naked bigotry direct decision-making makes for shitty and harmful policy. Who’d a’ thunk it?

(via Joe.My.God.)

Daily Links: 12/29/17 – Birthday links

Twenty-six. Twenty-six. Dunno, that number sounds mighty odd to me.

• Roy Moore’s last-ditch voter fraud complaint is ignored as Alabama officials certify Doug Jones’ Senate election victory.

• A Nashville, TN man spends 20 of a 30-year sentence behind bars; then sentencing guidelines are revised and he’s released to begin his rehabilitation, forging connections with his family and community. Now the government decides the new guidelines don’t apply and are set to throw him back in prison.
  (via @radleybalko)

• Botched drug raids, wrongful police shootings and criminalizing poverty: Another round of criminal justice news in the US.

• Speaking of, Radley Balko has a bunch of terrifying, totally unrealistic “predictions” about civil liberties violations we may see in 2018.

• Illinois becomes second state (after California) to ban the “that person was gay/trans so I panicked and murdered them” defense.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Despite Trump’s rhetoric and his unshackling of ICE, he still deported far fewer Mexican immigrants in 2017 than Obama did in 2016. (Not that Obama gets applause for that.)
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• College presidents still say, and are still completely wrong to say, that “hate speech is not free speech”.
  (via @Popehat)

• Here’s an idea: Make all counselors either obtain a license or stop practicing, regardless of whether or not they base their practice on religious doctrine. (It’ll never pass.)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

A shirt for assholes

I’m loving this trend of people putting their political beliefs on their clothes. It makes spotting bigots and trolls effortless.

Should be the de facto uniform of the Republican Party, no?

(via Christian Nightmares)

Daily Links: 12/27/17 – Trump admin. proposes axing offshore oil drilling safety regulations

• In which the Trump administration presumably looked at the Deepwater Horizon oil spill ^[pictured] and figured there’s really no need for any of the safety regulations implemented since then.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• FBI celebrates taking down a “terrorist” who told undercover agents he couldn’t go through with the attack they’d helped him prepare.

• A Minnesota prosecutor is the latest to think destroying a teenager’s life with child porn charges will somehow protect her from the evils of sexting.

• Arizona Republican lawmaker wants to force independent local officials to run with party labels in order to keep sneaky liberal sanitation workers and pothole-fixers out of office.
  (via @fark)

• Bangladeshi atheist blogger faces up to 14 years in prison because he “hurt religious feelings” by mocking Islam.

• Finally: Indonesian baker refuses to make a cake that would violate his religious beliefs. Clincher: Not for the usual reason.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Truck shields Trump’s golf swing from media

We – or at least, Americans – live in a world where the US President and his cronies try cartoonishly hard to pretend he doesn’t spend all his time golfing, even in moments when he’s visibly golfing.

"You Can't See Me" ❌ 👀 A large truck is attempting to block cameras from capturing video of President Donald Trump golfing 🚚 🏌 https://t.co/qeO0k6c4YP pic.twitter.com/YO34DA6MGq

— CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) December 27, 2017

Photo and video crews were stymied in their attempts to film President Trump on a golf course Wednesday, an apparent response to CNN's recent footage of the commander-in-chief on the links.

As the president completed another round at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, a large white truck obscured nearby journalists -- who were positioned on public property -- from getting a shot of Trump on their cameras.

When CNN's photojournalist moved his camera, the truck likewise moved, blocking the picture.

It’s also a world where the Secret Service has to take the time to clarify this isn’t part of their job:

Cathy Milhoan, a spokeswoman for the Secret Service, said the agency was not responsible for the truck.

"The USSS is in the business of protection and investigations not in commissioning vehicles to block the media's view of the President's golf swing," Milhoan said.

The problem, of course, isn’t that Trump golfs, or that he golfs more than his predecessor did, or even that he does this despite having spent years bashing said predecessor for his golfing. (Well, it is a problem, but Trump’s naked hypocrisy is fairly low on the outrage totem pole by now.) The problem is that he and his cronies (seriously, I’d love to know what that truck driver’s exact orders were) go to such asinine lengths to pretend that something that’s obviously happening isn’t. The highest representatives of the US government are gaslighting the media and the entire country on a daily basis and they fully expect to get away with it – which, so far, they have.

Meanwhile, a few years ago, the same conservative pundits who now defend every vainglorious thing Trump says and does were losing their minds because then-President Obama took a selfie.

(via @KFILE)

In which I talk about my watches

And now for something completely different. Feel free to ignore this if time-keeping wrist ornaments aren’t your thing.

For most my life I never saw much interest in collecting things. That said, I always liked wristwatches; I’d ask for them as a kid, and two of my favorite birthday presents were watches, both of which I still have (seen below). The funny thing is I’m the diametric opposite of a jewelry guy; I have no desire to adorn my neck, fingers, earlobes and other body parts with shiny baubles – it makes fighting assassins much harder when they can choke you with your own pendant, you know. But lately my interest in watches has turned into something of a mild fascination; something about a nice timepiece on the wrist just clicks for me, not to mention how they’re fairly marvels of engineering.

So I’ve decided I’d start myself a little watch collection, beginning with the four I presently have (not counting a $10 hunk of plastic I keep shoved in my drawer somewhere), arranged by length of ownership (older to the left, newer to the right):

Stand in awe before my mad photography skills.
Also, you would not believe the amount of lamp-wrangling jujutsu I had to pull off for this mediocre lighting.
[full size (2048×1353)]

From left to right:

Trump claims victory against “happy holidays” or something

On this Christmas day, we celebrate the fact that Americans can once again say “Merry Christmas” to one another without fear of being arrested, tarred, feathered, exiled, thrown into a snake pit or lynched by SJWs.

Wait, you’re saying none of those things ever happened, and that no-one was ever prevented from uttering whichever seasonal greeting they like, and that most people don’t give a damn about whether or not they’re wished “happy holidays”?

Well then, someone should inform Trump of this, because he seems to think he’s won some great cultural victory.

President Donald Trump sent out Christmas Eve wishes by praising himself for “leading the charge against the assault” on the phrase “Merry Christmas,” in yet another example of the president claiming to have won a dispute that never really existed.

People are proud to be saying Merry Christmas again. I am proud to have led the charge against the assault of our cherished and beautiful phrase. MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 25, 2017

Trump has repeatedly hammered on the false notion that American citizens were somehow unable to freely say the season’s greeting until he became president. Even a pro-Trump TV ad thanks the president for ending a war on Christmas that didn’t exist in the first place.

Given that Trump has shown no quarrel with offering generic holiday blessings in the past, it’s a safe bet he doesn’t actually give a damn about which phrase is used either – he’s just pandering to his base, stroking their persecution complex to keep them coming back to daddy Trump for protection against the evil liberals and secularists and non-Christians generally. And if anything will come out of this, it’s that their “cherished and beautiful phrase” is becoming tainted by its association with dunderheads and assholes.

That the sitting President stokes this demagogic fire is bad enough. That millions of voting adults are also celebrating how they can now say a mundane greeting that they were never remotely barred from speaking in the first place is terrifying. It’s time to stop pretending the crazies only make up a small fraction of the US populace.

(via Joe.My.God.)

Edit (12/26/17 @ 8:10 PM ET): Typo fix.

Daily Links: 12/24/17 – Christmas eve links

• Another federal appeals court rules against the latest version of Trump’s travel ban, puts their decision on hold pending a Supreme Court review.

• Bexar County, Texas deputies pursue unarmed woman wanted for car theft, shoot her dead – as well as an unrelated six-year-old boy inside his home. They claim she’d pointed a gun at them, but several hours after her death no gun had been found.
  (via @greg_doucette, retweeted by @Popehat)

• Fox News Channel is already basically Breitbart TV, and now the Fox News website appears to be following suit.
  (via @KFILE)

• If you’re dumb, you’ll lie on camera. If you’re really dumb, you’ll lie about your previous lie caught on camera. If you’re former Republican Congressman and current Ambassador to the Netherlands Pete Hoekstra, you’ll lie about your previous lie caught on camera … on camera.
  (via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)

• Teenaged neo-Nazi murders his girlfriend’s parents after they forbade her from seeing him because he’s a neo-Nazi. Sure proved them wrong.
  (via @fark)

• You know your contractor’s no good when he runs off with your $41,000 and then hires a hitman to kill you when you complain.
  (via @fark)

• Finally, this report about Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin receiving a gift-wrapped box of horse poop made me giggle a bit too hard.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Trump tells rich friends his tax plan will make them richer

Remember that Republican Tax Scam bill they passed and that Trump recently signed into law? The one they said was all about cutting taxes for everyone, especially the middle class, and that Trump promised would be bad for him and that his rich friends would all be calling him to complain because they wouldn’t benefit from the cuts?

That’s what he was saying publicly in November. Now that the bill’s gone through, I wonder what he’s telling his buddies behind closed doors …

President Trump kicked off his holiday weekend at Mar-a-Lago Friday night at a dinner where he told friends, "You all just got a lot richer," referencing the sweeping tax overhaul he signed into law hours earlier. Mr. Trump directed those comments to friends dining nearby at the exclusive club -- including to two friends at a table near the president's who described the remark to CBS News -- as he began his final days of his first year in office in what has become known as the "Winter White House."

Wait, you mean the lifelong avaricious businessman who lies about absolutely everything also lied to the public about his plan to further enrich his already obscenely wealthy pals? And he’s such a moron that he immediately bragged about it in a place where it was guaranteed word would leak to the press? Yeah, that’s the sitting US President all right.

(via Joe.My.God.)

Judge rules US gov’t must give ACLU access to man detained for months without lawyer

Since September, the US military has detained an unidentified US citizen suspected of joining ISIL/Daesh somewhere in Iraq without allowing him to speak to a lawyer, even though he’s never been charged with a crime. It’s about as serious and blatant a violation of someone’s Constitutional rights as it gets. The ACLU’s been on the case since the beginning, and they’ve just secured a federal court ruling in their favor:

"Somewhere in Iraq, a United States citizen has been in the custody of the U.S. armed forces for over three months."

That is how a federal Judge on Saturday begins her ruling, describing the situation of a never-charged American classified as an enemy combatant, as she ordered the Pentagon provide the prisoner with "immediate" access to a lawyer.

The still-unnamed man was captured by the Syrian militia in mid-September and handed over to the U.S. military as a suspected member of the Islamic State.

A couple weeks later, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a habeas corpus petition and seeking to represent the man, who, by the government's own account, requested an attorney after being read his Miranda rights.

The Defense Department argued that the circumstances did not warrant the ACLU's having immediate access to the detainee.

The judge wasn’t convinced. And she doesn’t mince words about it.

In her at-times-blistering ruling, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia denied the Pentagon's motion to dismiss the ACLU's petition and ordered that it give the group "immediate and unmonitored access to the detainee."

[…]

Chutkan described the Defense Department's position in denying the ACLU access to the detainee "to be disingenuous at best."

She went on, "the Department's position that his request should simply be ignored until it decides what to do with the detainee and when to allow him access to counsel is both remarkable and troubling."

Officials were even considering getting the man to renounce his American citizenship so they could keep in him Saudi Arabia, presumably so he could be subjected to even worse treatment. This is an incredibly important ruling; imagine the ramifications if the judge had gone the other way. There’s zero doubt in any competent mind that the Trump administration’s position here is flatly unconstitutional, but all it takes is one court ruling that an egregious abuse of power is permissible in some circumstances to start the country down the same road that’s led to the PATRIOT Act, extraordinary rendition, illegal mass surveillance, and a litany of other travesties.

(via ACLU | Facebook)

Trump doesn’t want no AIDS-filled, hut-dwelling immigrants

Guys. Guys. I got something to tell you. I think Donald Trump may be a teensy bit racist.

According to six officials who attended or were briefed about the meeting, Mr. Trump then began reading aloud from the document, which his domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, had given him just before the meeting. The document listed how many immigrants had received visas to enter the United States in 2017.

More than 2,500 were from Afghanistan, a terrorist haven, the president complained.

Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They “all have AIDS,” he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.

Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.

Because as we all know, Africa is nothing but people in mud igloos living off rat kebabs.

Lagos, Nigeria
[source]

Meanwhile, there certainly aren’t tens of millions of Americans living in poverty right now.

Detroit (Delray neighborhood), Michigan, USA
[source]

Actually, I think I meant the opposite of “teensy bit”.

(via @GideonResnick, retweeted by @radleybalko)

This Week in Puppycide: 12/23/17

Here’s a roundup of recent headlines involving police shootings of pets and other animals.

• Averted | Dade City, FL (12/16/17): Deputy responds to a call about a FedEx worker who got bit by a dog, gets attacked and bitten as well until he runs them off with pepper spray. No jumping the gun, no needless loss of life.
  (via Dogs Shot by Police | Facebook)

• Unjustified | Shallotte, NC (12/18/17): K9 handler pursues a fugitive into a residence’s yard without notifying the owner, whose dog allegedly breaks free from its chain and attacks the K9 dog, whereupon the cop shoots it. Cop claims the owner refused to restrain his dog, which was later euthanized for its injuries.
  (via Dogs Shot by Police | Facebook)

• Unjustified | Crystal Lakes, OH (12/19/17): Deputy chasing a suspect on foot shoots a dog that “growl[ed]” at him; the dog later dies at the vet’s. Witness claims the deputy told him to restrain the dog, but shot it anyway even as the man complied. Body cam footage pending.
  (via Dogs Shot by Police | Facebook)

• Unclear | Pearland, TX (12/20/17): Sparse report says police were forced to shoot and kill one of three dogs after they attacked and severely injured a young woman. No indication what breed the dogs were, whether nonlethal means were attempted, etc.
  (via Dogs Shot by Police | Facebook)

• Attempted | Memphis, TN (12/21/17): Off-duty cop at an off-leash dog park shoots another dog that allegedly ran at him and his dog; the injured dog survives, though the extent of its injuries is unclear. Cop noted that he didn’t know how his dog would react around other dogs.
  (via Dogs Shot by Police | Facebook)

If you know of any similar stories I haven’t mentioned, you can leave them in the comments or send them in.

See my puppycide ruling explainer.

Daily Links: 12/22/17 – Important First Amendment victory for Trump protestors

• Important victory for free speech: All six defendants on trial for protesting during Trump’s inauguration ^[pictured], accused of “hiding behind the First Amendment” (WTF), are acquitted on all charges. Note how the prosecution had brazenly tried to get the jury to disregard the judge’s instructions on “reasonable doubt”.
  (via ACLU | Facebook)

• Beautiful: After Tennessee lawmakers ban cities from removing Confederate statues, Memphis exploits a workaround by selling the land its statues stand on to a nonprofit, which promptly takes the statues down overnight. Expect statue supporters to sue. State Republicans are already calling for an investigation.
  (via @radleybalko & @LilianaSegura)

• Meanwhile, watch and laugh as Fox News’s professional whiner Todd Starnes utterly melts down and demands the arrest of the Memphis mayor and city council for “wag[ing] jihad on American history” and “desecrat[ing] a gravesite”. But of course, his outrage is all about the “lawlessness” of the move (which was totally legal, just sly) and has nothing to do with the monuments themselves.

• Vox examines what the final Republican Tax Scam bill includes (allowing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) and doesn’t (killing student loan deductions, anti-abortion language, Johnson Amendment repeal, etc.). In short, it’s slightly less pungent shit.
  (via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)

• Finally, an ongoing Washington Post investigation reveals nearly a quarter of the 248 cops kicked off of the New Orleans police force for misconduct have been rehired elsewhere.
  (via @WesleyLowery; retweet by @KFILE)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Ohio enacts law using Down syndrome to ban abortion

Since anti-choice lawmakers can’t outright ban abortion (though that may well change come the next Supreme Court retirement), they instead try every trick they can think of to limit women’s access: banning late-term abortions, banning abortions upon detection of a fetal heartbeat (which happens before many women even realize they’re pregnant), imposing ridiculous regulations to force clinics to shut down, and so on.

Now, Ohio legislators have found a new one: using a congenital disorder as an excuse to further restrict women’s right to choose, all under the guise of preventing “discrimination”.

Ohio is prohibiting doctors from performing abortions in cases where tests reveal the fetus has or likely has Down syndrome.

Republican Gov. John Kasich signed the legislation Friday and the law goes into effect in 90 days. "The governor is pro-life and supports policies that protect the sanctity of life," press secretary Jon Keeling tells CNN.

The law prohibits abortions after prenatal tests reveal Down syndrome in a fetus or if there's "any other reason to believe" the fetus has the genetic condition.

A person performing an abortion in such a case could face a fourth-degree felony charge, and physicians could lose their licenses. The woman seeking the abortion would not be held accountable, according to the legislation.

The idea that Republicans and anti-abortion crusaders (but I repeat myself) give the slightest damn about discrimination is the funniest thing I’ve heard today. Down’s is no more than a convenient angle for them to exploit, especially given that it makes it more difficult for opponents to argue against this law without losing the optics game. The only ones engaging in discrimination here are the people on an ideological crusade to stamp down on women’s agency and bodily autonomy.

There’s little chance this law will go unchallenged; I suspect the ACLU is sharpening its litigious knives even now. That said, using other states as a predictor is tricky; North Dakota and Indiana both passed similar laws, and whilst a federal judge blocked the Indiana law, North Dakota’s has been on the books for years already.

Fox host suggests a “northern border wall”. I agree

This Fox News talking head suggests Trump should build a northern border wall in response to the Canadian government’s approach to fighting terrorism by employing reformed extremists to prevent radicalization.

Fox & Friends Floats 'Northern Border Wall' pic.twitter.com/YL0asQMY8e

— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) December 22, 2017

Transcript:

(Click to open/close:) [−]

JILLIAN MELE: President Trump might want to think about a northern border wall if Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gets his way. Get this: Trudeau says he welcomes reformed terrorists back into his country. Why?

JUSTIN TRUDEAU: We know that, actually, someone who has engaged and turned away from that hateful ideology can be an extraordinarily powerful voice for preventing radicalization in future generations.

MELE: One Canadian group called Project Someone receives hundreds of thousands of dollars through federal funding to deradicalize jihadists through art and poetry.

I would point out the border wall would be welcome, but to us, as it would ensure that no lost or drunken Canadians accidentally wander south into the United States of Trump.

That said, it would also trap a lot of desperate Americans who’d be welcome to join us in the land of poutine and free healthcare. It’s a conundrum.

(via Joe.My.God.)

OkCupid users agree: Golden showers much preferable to Trump

OkCupid is one of the bigger matchmaking sites out there, and one way they leverage this is by periodically polling their vast user base to glean what’s trending in the online dating world (and presumably society in general). One such survey conducted in February, which included some political questions, netted almost 270,000 US respondents, and they gave some very interesting answers.

First, on the question of everyone’s least-favorite White House occupant:

Trump Is A Deal Breaker

Trump certainly gets people riled up, and daters’ views on him — positive or negative — are considered a major deal breaker for singles considering potential matches. 74% of OkCupid respondents answered “Hell no” to the question “Trump?” Only 4% responded “Hell yes.” The more demure responses of “yes” and “no” came in at 7% and 15% respectively. […]

Nearly three quarters of OkCupid members share the same stance on Trump.

Naturally, they followed up with something now intrinsically Trump-related, with hilarious results:

And now for the golden ticket, er, shower. Believe it or not, some things are more shocking than Putin — like golden showers, and singles’ thoughts on them. Perhaps Trump’s recent scandal made them mainstream (excuse the pun), but a somewhat surprising discovery was how down daters are with golden showers — or at least how open they are to discussing them. While Trump proved to be a major deal breaker, golden showers did not; nearly a quarter of respondents claimed a golden shower was either a turn-on, or they could be convinced to try one out. The central takeaway here? More singles say they are willing to get pissed on than support Trump.

If anything, that’s understating it. According to those numbers, that’s twice as many people who’d either certainly or possibly be okay being pissed on as would put up with dating someone who supports Trump. And given how these numbers come from February and that Trump’s support base has only been eroding since then, that ratio would be even higher now.

Of course, the follow-up question is: How many people would be okay with, or would at least consider, pissing on a Trump supporter?

(via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)

Headline of the day

I feel the same way, only replace the swan fountain with a dog park.

Source: BuzzFeed News

(via @radleybalko)

Daily Links: 12/20/17 – The problems with “drug-free zones”

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)

• The Myth of the Playground Pusher: How “drug-free zones” are less about protecting children and a lot more about drug-warrior politicians who want to burnish their creds with tougher sentences, innocence be damned.
  (via @radleybalko)

• Rep. Marsha Blackburn ^[pictured] (R-TN), noted telecom shill who understands nothing about net neutrality, introduces a bill that would codify the FCC’s anti-net-neutrality position into law.

• Law firm Appleby, whose leaked documents were the basis for the Paradise Papers, sues The Guardian and the BBC over their reporting, claiming “there was no public interest in the stories”.
  (via @KyellGold)

• Speaking of bad lawsuits: Password manager company Keeper is suing an Ars Technica reporter who wrote about a security flaw that has since been fixed. Considering that security firms’ credibility rests largely on their transparency regarding security flaws, this mostly ensures that no-one will trust Keeper again.
  (via @normative; RT: @Popehat)

• More data, this time from Las Vegas, shows that police body cameras reduce the number of complaints and use-of-force incidents.

• Ding dong, the child-molestation-enabling cardinal is dead. Naturally, he’ll get a full Vatican funeral with Pope Francis’s blessing.

• Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) sets his resignation date for January 2, 2018.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Finally, it’s a victory against breed-specific legislation as Montréal, Québec strikes down its pit bull ban.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Mass. middle school administrator busted for trying to pay for consensual sex

In an ideal world, the headline to this article would read “Parents outraged: Police waste time & taxpayer money arresting adult who tried to pay for consensual sex; also, his job is utterly irrelevant”.

This is not an ideal world. (And I am not a headline writer, which is perhaps a good thing.)

Parents are expressing concern after police busted a school employee in a prostitution sting.

Court documents note that Aaron Viera agreed to pay an undercover police officer $60 in exchange for sex in October.

Viera is the assistant principal at Beckwith Middle School.

Some parents said they learned the news through a newspaper article listing arrests in New Bedford in October. Other parents said they learned from their own children and through other parents on community Facebook groups.

Viera is currently on leave and has taken a “sexual education course”, which I presume consists of sitting him down and explaining to him that whilst having sex with another willing person is okay and exchanging money for services is okay, combining the two somehow makes you a Bad Person who deserves to be shunned by society and saddled with a criminal record like a common rapist.

I still cannot fathom the sort of busybody attitude that thinks what a school employee does in their private life is anyone else’s concern or has any bearing on that person’s ability to do their job.

(via @fark)

2017 statistics debunk Trump & Sessions’s crime fear-mongering

One way Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have tried to defend their tough-on-crime posturing is by pointing to (when not lying about) a supposed massive wave of violence sweeping through America’s cities. Their evidence: Some large cities saw an abnormal increase in violent crime in 2016, ignoring every other statistic that shows the overall crime rate has been dropping for decades across the country.

Now the 2017 numbers are in, and they show that trend is still going strong:

New analysis from the Brennan Center:

All measures of crime in the 30 largest American cities — the overall crime rate, violent crime rate, and murder rate — are estimated to decline in 2017 according to a year-end analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.

Crime in 2017: Updated Analysis directly undercuts any claims of a nationwide crime wave.

Key findings from the analysis include:

• The overall crime rate in the 30 largest cities in 2017 is estimated to decline slightly from [2016], falling by 2.7 percent.

• The violent crime rate will also decrease slightly, by 1.1 percent, essentially remaining stable.

• The 2017 murder rate in the 30 largest cities is estimated to decline by 5.6 percent. Large decreases this year in Chicago [down 11.9 percent] and Detroit [down 9.8 percent], as well as small decreases in other cities, contributed to this decline. … New York City’s murder rate will also decline again, to 3.3 killings per 100,000 people.

[…]

This is all very good news. The question now is if Trump and Sessions will continue to lie about the crime rate in America, or now that they’ve been in office for a year, if they’ll try to take credit for it.

It’s disheartening, in a jaded way, how difficult it is to tell which it’ll be. In fact, the only uncertainty revolves around whether Trump and Sessions’ policies, governed by their law-and-order shtick and unconstrained by facts, may slow or even reverse this trend. Given Trump & co.’s penchant for tainting absolutely everything, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Alabama town uses speed traps, civil forfeiture to fund police force; karma ensues

I am perhaps a little too amused by the ending to this otherwise outrageous story:

The mayor of Castleberry, Alabama, told residents at a recent town hall meeting their three-officer police department may have to shut down because of a steep drop in traffic ticket revenue.

Mayor Henry Kirksey blamed the drop in revenue on the bad publicity from coverage of a seven-plaintiff lawsuit alleging officers in the town of 550 people set up speed traps and made other spurious stops, charging $500 to recover impounded automobiles if drugs were present and using the state's asset forfeiture law to confiscate cash and belongings when available, as an October article in Al.com reported.

J.B. Jackson, the mayor whose idea of stops and confiscation paid for the department, a municipal court judge and a prosecutor, was ousted in an election last year. His former police chief, Tracy Hawsey, resigned in February after the suit was filed.

[…]

One plaintiff said Castleberry police in military-style camo pulled him over as he was pulling out of a driveway last October, impounding his car and seizing $1,750. According to the lawsuit and court documents reviewed by Al.com, he wasn't so much as charged with a traffic offense.

Another plaintiff alleges police confiscated $3,800 from her vehicle, claiming they were "proceeds from an illegal drug dealing or activity," in June 2016, but did not file a civil forfeiture request. Her car remains impounded.

[…]

When word of the lawsuit got around, people began avoiding Castleberry, which brought on a fiscal crisis. The town found itself with $60,000 in unpaid bills and a "six figure debt," Kirksey said.

Maybe – and this is just a thought – you shouldn’t have predicated your town’s police force on its ability to brazenly rob highway travelers. Especially if the people involved are also dumb enough to brag about it on Facebook.

That the town leadership engaged in this sort of skullduggery is infuriating, and that it backfired on them is satisfying. But here’s the part that got me laughing, following a city council vote to keep the police department going on a “limited basis” due to lack of funds:

Kirksey didn't hide his opinion of the council's decision. "We cannot go on like this," he said, "and if y'all want to bankrupt the city by continuing to have a police department that's fine by me."

Now that’s some fine pouting. Someone else might at least have faked some contriteness at being bitten in the ass by karma after years spent screwing innocent people out of their money and possessions, but I guess that’s not the Mayor Henry Kirksey way.

(via @radleybalko)

Daily Links: 12/19/17 – Chicago police blames teen they killed for a bystander they also killed

Quintonio LeGrier (l) & Robert Rialmo
[source]

• First a Chicago cop kills a teenager ^{[both pictured]} suffering a mental breakdown and a bystander. Now the city is suing the teen’s estate, blaming him for the bystander’s death.
  (via @alan_uplc; RT: @radleybalko)

• Following a three-year civil liberties lawsuit, a Canadian court strikes down the country’s solitary confinement regime, albeit with a one-year delay to let Parliament fix issues with the law. It’s unclear where things go from here.

• It’s bad enough that some slimebag restaurant owners illegally pocket their servers’ tips. Now Trump’s Department of Labor is asking: “What if we made it legal?”
  (via @donttrythis)

• Conservative college students get an English instructor fired over her peaceful protests, demonstrate yet again who the real snowflakes are.
  (via @radleybalko)

• Trump hates the NFL for allowing players to protest, but he loves letting taxpayers subsidize new football stadiums.
  (via @radleybalko)

• Finally: We’re witnessing the wholesale looting of America.
  (via @radleybalko)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Norway to decriminalize all drugs, focus on treating addiction

In 2001, Portugal took a radical approach to combating its epidemic of drug abuse by decriminalizing all drugs, opting to treat addiction not as a criminal problem but as a health issue. The results are more than clear: The country now has one of the lowest drug overdose and death rates in the world, soundly obliterating the prohibitionist argument that only ever-tougher laws can defeat the scourge of drug abuse. (Incidentally, countries where this mindset prevails never seem to reduce their drug use and overdose rates.)

Other countries are taking notice, though. Norway is set to become the first Scandinavian nation to remove all criminal penalties for drug use and focus on helping addicts rather than punishing them.

The majority of the Norwegian parliament, the Storting, backed the historic shift which was supported by the Conservatives (Hoyre), Liberals (Venstre), the Labor Party (Ap) and the Socialist Left (SV).

They directed the national government to reform its policies on drugs.

Sveinung Stensland, deputy chairman of the Storting Health Committee, told Norwegian publication VG: “It is important to emphasise that we do not legalise cannabis and other drugs, but we decriminalise.[” …]

Nicolas Wilkinson, the SV party’s health spokesman, told VG that parliament’s goal was to “stop punishing people who struggle, but instead give them help and treatment”. He added the aim is to transfer responsibility for drug policy from the justice system to the health system.

This isn’t happening on a whim. Norway has one of the highest drug overdose rates in Europe, with 2015 statistics placing the country’s drug-related deaths at 69.6 per million, third to Sweden (69.7) and Estonia (a whopping 126.8). (Meanwhile, Portugal is sitting pretty with only 3.) Norwegians caught in the grip of addiction can feel thankful their government has chosen to treat their illness and rehabilitate them rather than throw them behind bars and destroy their future prospects with a criminal record, as some countries are doing.

It sure seems like “liberal” policies always bring out the best in a nation.

(via @ggreenwald)

Edit (01/16/18 @ 7:04 PM ET): Added the missing article link and fixed the bottom attribution link.

Survey: Trump least-popular first-year president ever

Hair Furor’s first-year report card is in, and wouldn’t you know it: Nobody likes him.

According to President Donald Trump, his administration has been one of the most successful in American history. But the public strongly disagrees.

The Republican Trump is now the least popular first-year president in the country’s history and a vast majority believes he has failed to keep the promises that won him the White House, according to two new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research polls.

The results showed a poor approval rating for Trump. The president received a 32 percent rating, marking Trump as the least-popular commander-in-chief since approval ratings were recorded. Conversely, Trump received a 67 percent disapproval rating.

[…]

In contrast, President Barack Obama began his first year in office with a 57.2 approval rating and began his second year at 46.7 percent, according to Gallup.

FAKE NEWS! SAD! #MAGA!

(via Joe.My.God.)

A year’s worth of studies show Trump was elected because of racism

Donald Trump

For a year we’ve been hearing about how Trump voters were motivated by “economic anxiety”, with organs like The New York Times devoting many thousands of words to explaining how a tough job market apparently compelled the “forgotten” millions of flyover America to cast their ballots for a xenophobic blowhard. And sure, that’s likely the reason many Trump supporters gave. But as survey after survey has found, the real reason they voted for a racist is – brace yourselves, this is a shock – they’re racist, too.

Over at the Washington Post, researchers Matthew Fowler, Vladimir Medenica, and Cathy Cohen have published the results of a new survey on these questions, with a focus on the 41 percent of white millennials who voted for Trump and the sense of “white vulnerability” that motivated them. The conclusion is very clear:

Contrary to what some have suggested, white millennial Trump voters were not in more economically precarious situations than non-Trump voters. Fully 86 percent of them reported being employed, a rate similar to non-Trump voters; and they were 14 percent less likely to be low income than white voters who did not support Trump. Employment and income were not significantly related to that sense of white vulnerability.

So what was? Racial resentment.

Even when controlling for partisanship, ideology, region and a host of other factors, white millennials fit Michael Tesler’s analysis, explored here. As he put it, economic anxiety isn’t driving racial resentment; rather, racial resentment is driving economic anxiety. We found, as he has in a larger population, that racial resentment is the biggest predictor of white vulnerability among white millennials. Economic variables like education, income and employment made a negligible difference.

[…]

To anyone who’s been following the research on this, the findings should come as little surprise. There have now been numerous studies that found support for Trump is closely linked to racial resentment, defined by Fowler, Medenica, and Cohen as “a moral feeling that blacks violate such traditional American values as individualism and self-reliance.”

The given explanation that Trump was made President primarily because of economic troubles has never held water. It’s easy to believe that many may have been seduced by Trump’s faux-populist allure – look, he’s got lots of money, so he must be good at the economy! – and that’s undoubtedly the case for some. But economic issues alone wouldn’t account for millions of mostly rural, almost exclusively White Americans standing by a man who attacks every minority group under the sun. It wouldn’t explain how they could vote for a man who lies as he breathes, and then bullies and belittles anyone who calls out those lies. Frankly, it wouldn’t explain how they could support someone as incredibly stupid, ignorant and incompetent at everything as Donald Trump.

There’s a much simpler and eminently more reasonable explanation: They voted for the candidate who best represented their values on the stage. And the values Trump represents and exudes are those of shallow thinking, a reflexive dismissal of anything that challenges their views, and a nativist tribalism that manifests as boundless racism.

Donald Trump is a flamboyant racist who was elected because he appealed to large swathes of America that are just as racist as he is. The cornerstone of his campaign was the myth that everything bad that happened to White America was someone else’s fault – particularly Mexicans and other browns, but also Blacks, Muslims, and everyone else the Good God-Fearin’ Christians already felt iffy about. Are we really supposed to pretend otherwise?

(via @fark)

This Week in Puppycide: 12/16/17

Here’s a roundup of recent headlines involving police shootings of pets and other animals.

• Unjustified | Durango, CO (10/11/17): Lawsuit alleges police investigating a car crash entered a family’s yard without warning, ignoring “beware of dog” signs, and then panicked and shot their Staffordshire bull terrier as he approached, reportedly without any aggression. The dog had to be euthanized for its wounds. The family had asked police to warn them ahead of their visit so they could put the dog inside, but the cops had ignored them.
  (via Dogs Shot by Police | Facebook)

• Justified | Mary Esther, FL (12/10/17): Pizza delivery man is attacked and severely injured by a hundred-pound pit bull who escapes its owner. Police respond and are similarly attacked, try and fail to use both a harness and a full can of OC spray, then shoot the dog dead. Dog was previously known to be aggressive.
  (via Dogs Shot by Police | Facebook)

• Attempted | La Mesa, CA (12/11/17): Police reservist talking to a homeowner is attacked by their pit bull, who bites the officer twice; the cop opens fire at the dog and misses, embedding a round in the pavement. The dog has been quarantined. No indication the officer let the owner attempt to restrain their dog, nor did they try to use non-lethal weapons.
  (via Dogs Shot by Police | Facebook)

• Justified | Alsip, IL (12/11/17): Police shoot & kill a “pit bull” that mauled and killed an elderly woman. The dog appeared well cared-for and had no priors of aggression.
  (via Dogs Shot by Police | Facebook)

• Attempted | Taney County, MO (12/11/17): Deputy searching for a fugitive shoots a veteran’s service dog in its own yard; dog survives but will likely lose a leg. Sheriff claims the shooter “feared for his safety” and refuses to pay the owner’s $1,000 vet bill.
  (via Dogs Shot by Police | Facebook)

If you know of any similar stories I haven’t mentioned, you can leave them in the comments or send them in.

See my puppycide ruling explainer.