Understatement of the Year: “It’s probably long overdue.” — Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times.
Archive for 2017
December 13, 2017
WE’D BE BETTER OFF LEGALIZING PROSTITUTION, BUT THIS IS A TERRIBLE BILL REGARDLESS: Prostitution Ad Ban Creeps Forward, Threatening Social Media and Sex Workers: The bill would gut Section 230 and make sex advertising a federal crime.. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is what has allowed a free Internet.
SALMA HAYEK IN THE NEW YORK TIMES: Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too.
One of the forces that gave me the determination to pursue my career was the story of Frida Kahlo, who in the golden age of the Mexican muralists would do small intimate paintings that everybody looked down on. She had the courage to express herself while disregarding skepticism. My greatest ambition was to tell her story. It became my mission to portray the life of this extraordinary artist and to show my native Mexico in a way that combated stereotypes.
* * * * * * * *
And with every refusal came Harvey’s Machiavellian rage.
I don’t think he hated anything more than the word “no.” The absurdity of his demands went from getting a furious call in the middle of the night asking me to fire my agent for a fight he was having with him about a different movie with a different client to physically dragging me out of the opening gala of the Venice Film Festival, which was in honor of “Frida,” so I could hang out at his private party with him and some women I thought were models but I was told later were high-priced prostitutes.
The range of his persuasion tactics went from sweet-talking me to that one time when, in an attack of fury, he said the terrifying words, “I will kill you, don’t think I can’t.”
When he was finally convinced that I was not going to earn the movie the way he had expected, he told me he had offered my role and my script with my years of research to another actress.
In his eyes, I was not an artist. I wasn’t even a person. I was a thing: not a nobody, but a body.
One of Kahlo’s final paintings before her death at age 47 in 1954 was titled “Self Portrait with Stalin.” As Nick Gillespie wrote at Reason last year, “That is some fucked-up art right there. Uncle Joe had died the year before and only the most deluded bitter-clingers were under any illusions about his reign of terror.”
When Hayek writes, that in Weinstein’s eyes, “I was not an artist. I wasn’t even a person. I was a thing: not a nobody, but a body,” she’s also neatly describing how the dictator whom Kahlo worshipped viewed his subjects in the Soviet Union, where, the Times staggeringly claimed earlier in August, the sex was awesome. I wonder if the Gray Lady would still have the chutzpah to run that article today, seeing as how the Weinstein allegations set in motion an ongoing Soviet-style cultural purge by the American left.
THE PAST IS ANOTHER COUNTRY: THEY DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY THERE. Former SI cover girl: Sexual harassment was once ‘a compliment.’ “As a matter of fact, you almost got offended if you did not get harassed. Like, if this photographer is known for hitting on [models] — or goes for all the brunettes — and you show up at the studio and you are a brunette and he does not hit on you . . . it is like, ‘What is wrong with me?’”
WITH NO PAYWALL! The Volokh Conspiracy has moved from the WaPo to Reason. A better home for a lot of, er, reasons.
VIDEO: Butchering A Complete Beef Round. “I had never heard of an Oyster Steak. The butchers have been holding out on us.”
MARY KATHARINE HAM: The Sad People Who Watched ‘A Christmas Prince’ 18 Days In A Row Craft A Statement.
Names have not been changed to protect the innocent.
‘GUT-WRENCHING’: Salma Hayek shares HORRIFIC stories of ‘monster’ Harvey Weinstein.
A LOOK AT THE Porsche Panamera Diesel.
JEFF DUNETZ: 18 Differences Between Chanukah & Christmas.
WHAT DOES YOUR BODY NEED MORE? SLEEP, OR EXERCISE? “That’s a terrible choice.”
WHAT DOES THAT MEAN, EXACTLY? FBI Officials Discussed ‘Insurance Policy’ Against Trump Presidency.
“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok wrote in a cryptic text message to Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer and his mistress.
“It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40,” Strzok wrote in the text, dated Aug. 15, 2016.
Andy is likely Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.
Read the whole thing.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why You Should Get More Magnesium In Your Diet.
MICHAEL WALSH: Twenty Steps to Last Night’s GOP Disaster.
AT AMAZON, Save On All-new Kindle Travel Gear.
QUESTION ASKED: Can Democrats Take Back the House in 2018?
Mr. Moore was a seriously flawed candidate, controversial enough to have been tossed off his own state’s Supreme Court twice, and more recently accused of having made improper sexual advances on teenage girls. (He denies the allegations.) Thus, much of the loss to Mr. Jones will be laid at the candidate’s feet. Still, the loss is a huge blow to Mr. Trump personally. He now has backed three straight candidates for statewide office who have lost. And the implications are enormous. “The challenges the GOP faced remain and the finger pointing will only increase,” said Douglas Heye, a longtime top Republican congressional aide. “We remain bitterly divided.”
For Democrats, the victory in a state they never dreamed of winning just a few months ago delivers a jolt of energy—and, perhaps as important, could encourage balky donors who have left the party’s national machinery seriously underfunded this year. Perhaps most encouraging for Democrats, the same coalition of voters that propelled the party to victory in Virginia last month also emerged in Alabama.
I’ve been arguing for a while now that the Republicans need to legislate as though there’s no tomorrow, and if they had, maybe things would have turned out differently in Alabama.
MEN HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN THIS: Study says flu hits men harder than women. As usual, the lived experience of men has been overridden by prejudice-based womansplaining. But now the science is settled!