In 2007, James Grundy dropped his pants in a pub and exposed his genitals to onlookers. James Grundy is now the Conservative Party member of parliament for Leigh, footage of the incident has been obtained, and it is time to apologize.

"I apologise for my actions and for any offence caused."

Back to basics. Read the rest

Nancy Astor was the first woman to sit in Parliament; this is true. She took her seat as a member of the Conservative Party on November 28, 1919. And so, to celebrate the centennial, the party put up a brand new statue of her outside of her former home at Plymouth Hoe. According to the BBC, the statue was made by artist Hayley Gibbs and cost £125,000, which was raised through crowdfunding.

It's somewhat of a relief that they paid for it themselves. Because Astor wasn't actually the first woman elected to Parliament. No, that honor went to that incomparable badass Constance Markievicz, the Irish revolutionary, suffragette, and staunch advocate for workers' rights. In keeping with Sinn Féin's abstentionist policy, however, Markievicz refused to actually take her seat in the British House of Commons, or participate in any parliamentary processes.

But okay, fine. Nancy Astor was the first woman to literally take her seat in Parliament. Whereas Markievicz famously advised women to, "Leave your jewels in the bank and buy a revolver," Astor once said, "I am the kind of woman I would run from." Case in point: while Astor claimed to despise the Nazi party for oppressing women, she also allegedly told Joseph Kennedy that she saw Hitler as a welcome solution to the “world problems” that were the Jews. According to the History News Network:

Astor wrote Kennedy that Hitler would have to do more than just "give a rough time" to "the killers of Christ" before she'd be in favor of launching  "Armageddon to save them.

Conservative thinkeur Ben Shapiro was interviewed by BBC host and UK conservative luminary Andrew Neil. It didn't go well for Ben at all. Facing straightforward questions about his beliefs, he had a tantrum, accusing Neil—chairman of The Spectator!—of being a leftist and finally storming off.

From The Spectator itself:

Ben Shapiro is the famous, fast-talking pundit who regularly ‘owns’ aggressive campus students with his quick wit and rapid repartee. Alas, Shapiro isn’t so ‘crazy smart’ when he comes up against difficult questions from a real interviewer. Yesterday he just couldn’t cope with an interrogation from the BBC’s Andrew Neil. He decided that Neil must be a typical BBC leftist and had an epic tantrum.

As soon as you take right-wingers out of the U.S. cable news environment or their creationist-style YouTube "debates", they fall completely to pieces under even the most impartial and disinterested questioning. With due respect to Andrew Neil, it's amazing how deferential mainstream U.S. media are to conservatives—and as a result inconceivable to an American conservative that a foreign counterpart might issue them challenging questions. So it's no surprise that Neil would humiliate Shapiro, or that Shapiro would do all the work himself given the barest length of rope.

Here's the full 16 minutes:

Here's @afneil interviewing @benshapiro - this is the full, unedited version. it is not Fox News or an unmediated YouTube video but a tough interrogation. https://t.co/9hn6MtdSJx

— Rob Burley (@RobBurl) May 10, 2019

Neil is absolutely no friend of the left: an HIV/AIDS denialist, climate-change critic and 9/11 conspiracy theorist. Read the rest

Christine Blasey Ford is a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California: “I thought he might inadvertently kill me. He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”

When the first murmurs of this sounded last week, conservatives had a 65-signature letter of support from women classmates ready to roll. They knew it was coming, and many of them are now talking like they knew it was true:

Photo: Jim Bourg/Reuters Read the rest

The term "cuck", short for "cuckold", is used largely on America's right to insult men they consider to have been taken advantage of, willingly submissive, or otherwise weak. Among the more curious terms in the modern political lexicon, it is amusingly derivative of the term's use to refer to a porn category centered around men forced to watch their partners have sex with other men, often men of color. Sex researcher David Ley studied the cuckolding phenomenon as a whole, saw conservatives angry at reportage of this work, wondered if something interesting is going on in their heads, and found that yes, yes there was, if only because it's going on in a lot of people's heads.

As one of the authors of the research, I find this thread fascinating. I've noted the conservative obsession with #cuckolding and suggest that this faux scorn masks a whole lot of hidden fantasy and desire...

— David J. Ley PhD (@DrDavidLey) January 25, 2018

Asked about his tweet, Ley told Gizmodo the following over email:

I honestly didn’t even know who he was? But, the research indicates that it is extremely likely that many of his followers enjoy this sexual fantasy. I always get sad and concerned when I see people publicly shaming healthy, normative sexual fantasies and behaviors. Hopefully by opening this dialogue, some of his followers might feel less shame and concern about their fantasies.

The rage aimed at Ley over his study, which ranges over attitudes to race and polyamory as well as cuckolding in particular, is remarkable. Read the rest

Roy Moore, a Republican of such unusually disgusting character that he lost Alabama to a Democrat, is not taking defeat well. He's filed a lawsuit to prevent the state's election board from certifying Doug Jones' victory.

Moore's attorney wrote in the wide-ranging complaint that he believed there were irregularities during the election, including that voters may have been brought in from other states. He attached a statement from a poll worker that she had noticed licenses from Georgia and North Carolina as people signed in to vote.

The complaint also noted the higher-than-expected turnout in the race, particularly in Jefferson County, and said Moore's numbers were suspiciously lower than straight-ticket Republican voting in about 20 Jefferson County precincts. The complaint asked for a fraud investigation and eventually a new election.

Moore lost by 20,000 votes. He's claiming they shipped in tens of thousands of out-of-state voters, got them all fraudulently balloted, and that none of them have since revealed the plot or how it was accomplished. It's an insane lawsuit, tailored exclusively to needs outside the courtroom: like a SLAPP, but instead of trying to deny public participation, it exists only to reinforce a media narrative.

Update: Judge already tossed it.

JUST IN: Judge denies Roy Moore's motion to prevent Alabama Senate Special Election results from being certified -@NBCPolitics https://t.co/QTp6RrjnbQ pic.twitter.com/c2b9fy6sNX

— NBC News (@NBCNews) December 28, 2017

Read the rest

Spoiler: it's Flesh Jenga. Wes Goodman, a Republican representative in the Ohio state house who championed anti-gay causes, quit Friday after being caught having sex with another man in his office. Moreover, he reportedly was known for making unwelcome advances toward younger men, reports Cleveland.com.

Another conservative with Ohio ties told cleveland.com that Goodman engaged in predatory behavior toward younger men after leaving Jordan's office, sending inappropriate material and propositioning them via text message and Facebook messenger.

The conservative operative said he'd target college kids who wanted to have him as a mentor and were scared to report his sexual advances because they didn't want to damage their own careers. A former co-worker shared screenshots of messages Goodman sent him that the operative likened to the lewd texts that derailed the congressional career of New York's Anthony Weiner.

There's a lot of laughter being aimed at this creep, but it's important to remember this sort of self-hatred isn't just directed inward. The consequences are always felt by family, friends, and their powerless victims. Read the rest

The Hollywood Reporter's Paul Bond reports that a controversial street artist's Facebook page was taken down as "Hate Speech" after posting rude pictures mocking Mark Zuckerberg's apparent presidential ambitions.

The work of a conservative street artist known for skewering the liberal politics of celebrities and corporations has been deemed "hate speech" by Facebook, which shut his page down on Sunday.

The notice comes just days after the artist known as Sabo attacked Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg with posters disparaging his alleged presidential aspirations. "F*ck Zuck 2020" read the posters, the symbol after the "F" being a middle finger. They were hung in the dead of night last week in various California cities.

However, there were also 'faux ads, made to look like a genuine movie poster for War for the Planet of the Apes, feature the image of a well-armed ape on horseback with the text: "BLM: Kill Whitey."'

Sabo's page is full of garbage, from amusing photoshops of politicans to edgy N-word race war chum and inexplicable Ted Cruz fan posters. Facebook's refusal to explain its actions allows him to highlight the most broadly popular (no-one other than Mark Zuckerberg wants Mark Zuckerberg to be president) as the only hate it actually cares about. And you know what? Sabo's probably right, which is a great reminder of why you don't want Mark Zuckerberg to be president. Read the rest

Jeb Lund writes about Trump's Vile Game of Distraction, running the wargames for what happens to his party now that he has destroyed its "beautiful dream of a permanent Christian ethnocentric oligarchy."

The twitter-consensus is that there's some kind of divide between principled conservatives and the Trumpkins who want to pick up his supporters after he's gone. Ah, but:

Ordinarily, a rich and powerful man amplifying the anguish of powerless women who claimed to have been raped by another extremely powerful man would be a noble gesture. Out of context and devoid of sound, it would have been a silent, stunning reminder that Bill Clinton would be nearly unthinkable as a Democratic candidate today. ... except, this time, it was done to distract from the very real possibility that the Republican Party nominee for President of the United States is a sex offender. That, and only that, was enough to arrest the endless forward movement of a party happy to glide on racism, religious discrimination, misogyny and xenophobia – profitably and seemingly forever.

Here's Paul Krugman, writing that Trump and the GOP are Predators in Arms, that it's naive to think Republicans care about sexual assault on any level other than its consequences for the horse race.

As many people are pointing out, Republicans now trying to distance themselves from Donald Trump need to explain why The Tape was a breaking point, when so many previous incidents weren’t. ...

Of course, we know the answer: The latest scandal upset Republicans, when previous scandals didn’t, because the candidate’s campaign was already in free fall.

It's officially a suspension, but it lasts the rest of his term: Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore was removed from office for gross misconduct Friday for abusing his office to try and block same-sex marriage legislation. It's his second canning; always the same old shit with Roy.

Moore’s misconduct regarding same-sex marriage litigation was sweeping and extensive. In January of 2015, a federal judge invalidated the state’s same-sex marriage ban. Moore promptly wrote letters to probate judges insisting that they remained legally prohibited from marrying gay people—in effect, demanding that they violate a federal court order. In May of that year, the judge explicitly held that probate judges must issue marriage licenses to all couples, same-sex or opposite-sex. The next month, the Supreme Court held that same-sex marriage bans violate the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Meet Alabama's next governor! Read the rest