Thursday, October 17, 2024

BOOK: McConnell Called Trump “Stupid, Despicable”

BOOK: McConnell Called Trump “Stupid, Despicable”:

The Associated Press reports:

Mitch McConnell said after the 2020 election that then-President Donald Trump was “stupid as well as being ill-tempered,” a “despicable human being” and a “narcissist,” according to excerpts from a new biography of the Senate Republican leader that will be released this month.

McConnell made the remarks in private as part of a series of personal oral histories that he made available to Michael Tackett, deputy Washington bureau chief of The Associated Press.

Tackett’s book, “The Price of Power,” draws from almost three decades of McConnell’s recorded diaries and from years of interviews with the normally reticent Kentucky Republican.

Read the full article.

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Politico Raves Over Harris’s Interview With Fox News

Politico Raves Over Harris’s Interview With Fox News:

Politico Playbook reports:

Since she replaced President Joe Biden atop the ticket, the most pervasive knock on VP Kamala Harris has been that she’s too buttoned up, employing a risk-averse strategy that hews toward friendly interviewers who lob softball questions and don’t challenge her enough. After her Fox News sitdown with Bret Baier last night, you can forget that.

There are 19 days left in the election. And with no debate and Donald Trump playing it safe, Harris is showing that she understands she needs to take more risks in order to control her campaign narrative — and, despite some hiccups, she managed to do that.

This was a snapshot of a presidential candidate who knows she has work to do to close the deal, and is willing to take chances, play aggressively and, frankly, get comfortable with the street-fight mentality she’ll need to eke out a win.

Read the full article.

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Maddow: Trump Tried To Bribe Stormy Daniels This Year

Maddow: Trump Tried To Bribe Stormy Daniels This Year:

NBC News reports:

Former President Donald Trump this summer offered a financial incentive to adult film star Stormy Daniels if she agreed to keep quiet about Trump — including about the relationship that became the center of the hush money payments that ended up the subject of a New York criminal trial — ahead of this November’s election, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported on Wednesday.

In a case separate from the hush money trial, Daniels was ordered to pay for Trump’s legal fees after she lost a defamation suit she filed against him. About two months after the hush money trial, Trump’s lawyer told Daniels’ representative that the former president would agree to a lower payment if she agreed not to make any disparaging comments about Trump.

The Daily Beast reports:

Daniels still needs to pay “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in legal fees, Maddow explained, and in hammering out the exact amount, Trump’s lawyers allegedly offered to “pretend” she owed their client “less than they actually believed” she did.

Whereas they first estimated Daniels’ debt at $650,000, Maddow reported, they said they would settle her tab for $620,000, if she promised not to make any “defamatory or disparaging statements about him, his business, and/or any affiliates, or his suitability as a candidate for president.”

They then adjusted the fee, asking $635,000 if she refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Daniels reportedly turned them down, paying $627,500 and declining to sign the NDA.

Watch Maddow’s report.

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Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Trans trailblazer Gavin Grimm now struggles with homelessness & mental disabilities

Trans trailblazer Gavin Grimm now struggles with homelessness & mental disabilities:
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Gavin Grimm, the now-25-year-old trans man who made headlines for suing his Virginia school district over its transphobic bathroom policies, is struggling with mental health challenges, poverty and looming homelessness, according to The Guardian

Grimm sued the district after the Gloucester County School Board voted to ban him as a 15-year-old from using the boys’ bathrooms, even though he had already been doing so for months without incident. After years of litigation, he eventually won a landmark federal decision asserting the constitutional right to protection against educational discrimination.

Related

18 GOP-led states sue for the right to mistreat transgender employees at work
A federal court has already ruled against similar opposition in another trans-related case.

But even though the school district ended up settling Grimm’s case for $1.3 million in legal fees and other legal costs, the settlement didn’t provide him with stable housing or financial security. He only received $1 as a symbolic share of the settlement.

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To settle for personal damages, Grimm would have had to have given the school district’s lawyers access to medical records showing the impacts of the school’s discrimination on his health. After years of court battles, he didn’t like enduring another fight.

As his court victories mounted, Grimm gained notoriety: Trans actress Laverne Cox told people to Google him at the Grammys, Whoopi Goldberg interviewed him on The View, and in 2017, he served as the grand marshal for New York City’s Pride parade. But he hasn’t been invited to any paid appearances as the LGBTQ+ community’s focus has largely moved on to others.

“I’m someone who has had worldwide visibility. I represent an outer crust of privilege most people will never see, and I cannot make ends meet no matter how hard I try,” he told The Guardian. He is one of the 8% of trans adults who have gone unsheltered over the last year

Grimm now suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder and stress-induced seizures in addition to having autism which affects his sensory processing. In May 2021, he spent four days in a coma after a grand mal seizure which seriously impaired his ability to work or drive. Combined, these have prevented him from keeping a job or finishing higher education, even though a generous benefactor helped fund it.

“The PTSD at its core is about not being safe or understood, being rejected, and the adults in my life not acting responsibly,” he said. “In high school, I was picked over and hyper-analyzed. I was tortured, harassed and bullied.”

While he receives some financial support from disability payments, his mother, and an ongoing GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign, he recently moved out of his apartment in Newport News, Virginia.

His mother has begun caring for his 19-year-old cat Rascal, but Grimm has begun couch-surfing with friends, occasionally staying with his mother, and spending some nights at a local dog park. He avoids houseless shelters, fearful of discrimination.

He volunteers some days with a climate justice group and spends time hanging in the garage of Evan Hamilton, a 66-year-old fellow trans man and “autistic stoner” who he met through a local queer group. Grimm wishes to eventually return to college to become a teacher.

Grimm said he’s voting Democrat in the upcoming election as a form of “harm reduction,” but he has been discouraged at the wav of anti-trans legislation that has swept the nation in the years since his case made headlines.

Virginia’s Department of Education under Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has tried to force districts to enforce policies forcing students to use bathrooms, pronouns, and names that align with their sex assigned at birth. Some state districts have refused but the policies and the hostile atmosphere they create still threaten the estimated 4,000 transgender students in Virginia.

Grimm said he’s disillusioned with mainstream liberal politicians who have so far not taken bold action against the Republican Party’s onslaught of transphobic culture warring.

“This system is built specifically to ensure the status quo continues, that people like me are disenfranchised, underrepresented and never have full equality under the law,” Grimm says. “But I know that what I did was important. Even though the system is not going to serve our ultimate liberation, it is what we have in place right now.”

“If I maintain housing while my cat is still alive, that’s all I can really hope for,” he added. “I’m prepared to face homelessness, but I just don’t want her to face it.”

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Sunday, October 13, 2024

AZ Dems Close Harris Office After Three Shootings

AZ Dems Close Harris Office After Three Shootings:

USA Today reports:

Arizona Democrats closed their field office in Tempe, Ariz. after three shooting incidents. The office served as a base for the Sun State’s congressional campaigns and Vice President Harris’s presidential effort in recent weeks.

The Tempe Police Department said the latest incidents on Oct. 6 involved gun shots fired at the Democratic campaign office at around 12:30 a.m.

Lauren Kuby, a state Senate candidate in Legislative District 8, told USA Today that candidates and staffers quietly moved operations to an undisclosed location to ensure the team’s safety.

Read the full article.

The post AZ Dems Close Harris Office After Three Shootings appeared first on Joe.My.God..

Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Franklin Graham Threatens To Sue Over Anti-Trump Ad

Franklin Graham Threatens To Sue Over Anti-Trump Ad:

Religion News Service reports:

The ad begins with a clip of renowned evangelist the Rev. Billy Graham, wearing glasses, a gray suit and tie, leaning in toward a pulpit. “But you must realize that in the last days, the times will be full of danger,” Graham declares. “Men will become utterly self-centered and greedy for money.”

Suddenly, a clip of former President Donald Trump is spliced in. Standing before a row of American flags at a campaign rally in Des Moines, Iowa, Trump says: “My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy.”

That ad, the result of a $1 million ad campaign by Evangelicals for Harris, is now the subject of a potential lawsuit from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based nonprofit that supports the ministries of Billy Graham’s son and grandson.

Read the full article. Watch the ad.

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Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Read Susan Stryker's foreword to Nico Lang's book on trans youth, American Teenager (exclusive)

Read Susan Stryker's foreword to Nico Lang's book on trans youth, American Teenager (exclusive):
Nico Lang and their book American Teenager

Queer journalist Nico Lang's new book American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era is out now. Below is an excerpt from the book: Its foreword, which trans studies scholar Susan Stryker wrote. The book is available at major books retailers.