".... the final nail in his coffin...."

A bunch of links about Trump's newly dumped tax forms — beginning with the screwiest one:

Yeah, thanks. I'll try not to let "cynics" dissuade me from pounding nails into coffins. What had stood out to me was that no one seemed to see any crimes, so it's certainly cheerful to have The Daily Beast come along and declare — who needs crimes? — that there's never been a better reason to throw Trump in prison.

"The Daily Beast issued an apology to the laptop repairman who first obtained Hunter Biden's computer after the liberal blog erroneously alleged the device was ‘stolen.'..."

"The apology came as Mac Isaac launched a defamation lawsuit against the Daily Beast as well as CNN, Politico and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., over how they portrayed him while pushing the narrative during the 2020 presidential election that the content from Hunter Biden's laptop was the product of Russian disinformation... It is unclear if the apology is tied to any resolution to Mac Isaac's suit against the Daily Beast."

From "Daily Beast issues apology to laptop repairman amid lawsuit after claiming Hunter Biden's laptop was 'stolen'/John Paul Mac Isaac filed a defamation lawsuit against the Daily Beast, CNN, Politico, Adam Schiff" (Fox News).

Maybe it's just a coincidence. Maybe the Daily Beast just suddenly felt stricken by its conscience and wanted to atone, to square up with the truth, to commit anew to the grand tradition of journalistic professionalism.

"Who Actually Wants Trump to Send in the Feds? Police Unions/Protesters say local cops and the feds are clearly colluding on the spooky crackdown that began in Portland and could soon spread to Chicago and other cities."

Says The Daily Beast.

I don't know. Is that for some new drink?

I'm just trying to read "The Shady History of Mayor Pete’s Wine Cave—and the Ultra-Rich Couple That Owns It" at The Daily Beast and noticing a question posed in the sidebar: "Why Does Starbucks Melt Conservative Brains?"

I'm thinking they're concocting one of their flavors to squirt into coffee. Who wants caramel or toffee nut when you can have melted conservative brain? How many pumps?

The article is actually about the supposed phenomenon of "right-wingers... falling for hoaxes." It contains this embedded tweet, which I don't find to be an effective critique of right-wingers:

Brian Kilmeade: "Maybe there's an anti-law enforcement credo that's going through [Starbucks] ... Racial sensitivity training, what about law enforcement sensitivity training?" pic.twitter.com/xbHB4seaDt

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) December 17, 2019

The real phenomenon here is: Articles must be written. Headlines must be clickable. Anger is the caffeine of the internet. The pot must be stirred. The frappaccino must be blended... and God knows what's in there — melted conservative brain, melted left-wing brain, melted everything.

That's how it looks from my outpost on the internet, where I don't get angry, and I don't melt. I'm blending my own frappuccino... with 3 pumps of cruel neutrality.

ADDED: So what's "shady" about the people who own the now-famous "wine cave"? The subheadline is "$100,000 checks, plum ambassadorships, and a $102 million settlement. The cave has been an oasis for dollar-eyed Dems long before Elizabeth Warren made it instantly infamous."

Dollar-eyed Dems — I guess those are the Democrats who are less left-wing than Elizabeth Warren. But candidates have to raise funds. Why trash a candidate for his ability to raise money? The Democrats are going to need a lot of money for the 2020 elections. Why would anyone who wants Democrats to win make fund raising into something dirty?

"You think you’re woke but you’re sleepwalking through a nightmare" — slogan for the Time to Get Organized for an Actual Revolution National Tour.

"I’m with the Time to Get Organized for an Actual Revolution National Tour. We’re touring all across the country to organize thousands into the ranks of the revolution," said "a teenage-looking boy" in the "Free Speech Zone" near a Trump fundraiser in Beverly Hills.

Quoted in "'No Celebrities': Embarrassing Turnout at Trump’s Beverly Hills Fundraiser" in The Daily Beast.

I wonder, who was embarrassed? Was it the people at The Daily Beast imagining that Trump ought to be embarrassed? He doesn't seem like a guy who gets embarrassed. Especially about the lack of "celebrities." Isn't it embarrassing that Democratic Party candidates get all the celebrities?

Here's an article from late November 2016 in Vanity Fair, "Did Celebrity Endorsements Contribute to Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Upset?/The divide in celebrity endorsements between candidates was as large as ever in the 2016 presidential election—and the candidate with the most lost":

The gulf between celebrity endorsements on the Democratic versus Republican side is stark during every election, but this year, the rift seemed infinite. Hillary Clinton had Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, and even Lebron James. #ImWithHer hashtags decorated social output from Ariana Grande, Jennifer Lopez, the Kardashians, and Rihanna, as well as YouTube stars like Tyler Oakley. Clinton carried far and away the majority of celebrity seals of approval....

Many of the celebrity P.S.A.s this year leaned into the idea that no one wants to hear about politics from a Grammy/Oscar/Emmy winner. Lena Dunham’s parody of the earnest P.S.A., “Sensual Pantsuit Anthem,” tried to promote Hillary Clinton and voting through an attempted self-aware rap....

[Trump] removes middleman when it comes to endorsements. Instead of the transitive property of Katy Perry (“I’m a Katy Perry fan; Katy Perry is a Hillary Clinton fan; I’m a Hillary Clinton fan"), there’s the much simpler “I’m a Trump fan” equation, for better or worse.

Trump is his own celebrity. Is that better or worse than having other people to be your celebrities? Please, before answering, watch this video, which came out a few days before the 2016 election.



And come on, let's talk about what's embarrassing!

You think you’re woke but you’re sleepwalking through a nightmare...

ADDED: When the system tries to bring you down, listen to this, which was the actual soundtrack to this post, here at Meadhouse:

"When Rachel Dolezal was unmasked as a white woman who misrepresented her racial and ethnic identity..."

"... in part to bolster her professional bona fides as a voice of the disenfranchised, she was penalized—heavily. She went from rising media star to late-night punchline, unemployable and impoverished. I don’t wish poverty on Warren, but I don’t understand how her only punishment for a similar fraud seems to be that she may become president."

From "Women of Color Shouldn’t Trust Elizabeth Warren/With affirmative action on the chopping block, we can’t afford to back a candidate whose fraud played into ugly stereotypes about programs to boost diversity and equality" by Keli Goff (The Daily Beast).

So... that's there. But I can't read the whole thing because it's got a $100/year paywall after the first few paragraphs. Who would pay $100 a year to get into the back pages of The Daily Beast?! That's more than The New Yorker (which is much, much better, has a fantastic archive, and sends you a paper copy in the mail).

3 Daily Beast headlines.

1. "Michelle Wolf Compares Ivanka Trump to Herpes: ‘You Always Show Up When We’re About to Get F*cked.'"

2. "Anthony Kennedy, You Are a Total Disgrace to America." "And now we learn that on top of everything else, Kennedy may just be corrupt. So his son Justin, if last week’s New York Times account is correct, in essence kept Donald Trump in business for the better part of a decade, overseeing $1 billion worth of loans to the Trump Organization via Deutsche Bank, where he worked. Justin and the Trump kids are buddies, it seems. Justin and Trump himself are palsy-walsy."

3. "John Oliver Is Devastated Over SCOTUS: ‘Everything Is Terrible Now.'" (Oliver was a lot better than the Beast's headline makes him seem. He was mocking the Donald Trump Jr. tweet that said, "OMG! Just when you thought this week couldn't get more lit... I give you Anthony Kennedy's retirement from #SCOTUS," which clearly deserves the mockery Oliver deftly delivered: "I’m afraid I’m going to have to disagree with Mister Junior on this, because I don’t think this is ‘lit’ at all. I mean, it’s obvs crayAF, no one is denying that fam, but I would argue that this week’s news was neither lit nor on fleek nor was it three fire emojis. Now, granted, I’m still a little shook jsyk, but I personally believe Kennedy’s retirement is super werpt. And I’m happy to announce that in saying that, all of the slang words I just used are now officially dead forever—and that includes ‘werpt,’ a term that doesn’t even exist for which I preemptively ruined just in case.")

Beastly graphics.

The Daily Beast is going for a distinctive graphic style. Here's how the top of the front page looks right now:



Red and yellow predominate, but notice the streaks of magenta in the red background and the intense blue of Melania's shoulder (and also dotted around around her jacket).

Like the colors, gender is heightened and highly contrasted. 2 of the 4 rectangles are feminine, 2 are masculine. The males are: 1. In shadows, 2. Brutally violent, 3. Not individuals. The females are: 1. Specific individuals, 2. Distinguished from each other through color and style, 3. Distinguished morally: One is depicted as a saint, the other as complicated, mysterious, and dangerous.

Here's "Inside the Cult of Melania Trump/Does the first lady of the United States have something she’s afraid to confront in the little city where she grew up?" It's really just an article about Melania's home town:

Today, [Melania's] family has a modern two-floor white house in the center of the modern part of Sevnica. It has a built-in garage, a mansard floor, a balcony, and a small satellite dish on the roof. While not grandiose, it is still far from the modest apartment where Melania and her sister Ines grew up.

What's a mansard floor? That's a mistake, no?

The house is not far from a statue of an enormous boot, a monument installed at the entrance to the city in honor of local Kopitarna shoe factory. (Last year Kopitarna sent Ms. Trump “White House” slippers as a present.)...

That's comically dull. Meanwhile, we hear of Bojan Pozar, who's writing (or has written) a book about Melania and who "interviewed several local men who claimed that they had once been Melania’s boyfriends" and said she was "cold" — which either means Melania was (and maybe is) cold or that these guys never really attained the elevated status that we in the United States call "boyfriend."

Also in the article, the way some Slovenians would like to hear Melania speak Slovenian and would like her to wear Slovenian clothes. So... basically, this is a completely inconsequential puff piece about Melania, and it contains absolutely nothing that's religion-like or cultish about anybody's interest in her. Nor is there anything to justify the subtitle, nothing about Melania's fear of anything back home.

But it's a fascinating graphic. It made me think of another article about an American First Lady, one that really did work on the idea religion — "Saint Hillary," a cover story by Michael Kelly in the NYT Magazine in 1993 (previously blogged here). Sample text:

Driven by the increasingly common view that something is terribly awry with modern life, Mrs. Clinton is searching for not merely programmatic answers but for The Answer. Something in the Meaning of It All line, something that would inform everything from her imminent and all-encompassing health care proposal to ways in which the state might encourage parents not to let their children wander all hours of the night in shopping malls.

When it is suggested that she sounds as though she's trying to come up with a sort of unified-field theory of life, she says, excitedly, "That's right, that's exactly right!"

The 1993 cover image of Hillary makes a nice contrast to the graphics that sear the Daily Beast today. The color idea here was white white white:

"The Furry Raiders’ leader, a man named Foxler who dresses in a fox suit with a Nazi-like armband (no swastika, only a paw print)..."

"Foxler claims he’s not trying to evoke Hitler, never mind his name (a combination of “Fox” and his supposed surname “Miller”), his Nazi-like armband (he says is based on a character in an old video game), or pictures of him throwing his arm up in a Nazi-like salute (an accident, he said).... Fascist furries are nothing new, but until recently, 'they were rare individuals who were more interested in uniform fetish than espousing Nazi ideology,' Deo, another furry told The Daily Beast. But the rise of the alt-right has ushered in the #AltFurry, a hashtag under which right-leaning furries can organize, and the uninitiated can encounter more cartoon rabbits in Nazi uniform than they possibly expected to see in their lifetimes...."

The Daily Beast is keeping up with things that might matter in "Neo-Nazis Are Tearing the Furry World Apart."

Bernie supporters say they saw what was coming and tried to help Hillary, but...

"They fucking ignored us on all these battleground states... we were sounding the alarm for months,... We kept saying to each other like, 'What the fuck, why are they just blowing us off? They need these voters more than anybody.'"  Said Nomiki Konst, interviewed by The Daily Beast, which describes her as "a progressive activist and former Sanders surrogate who served on the 2016 Democratic National Committee platform committee."

“Once we were at the convention, Bernie people were on the ground—we could feel it, people were pissed off, there with their pitchforks ready to fight,” Konst recalled. “But before the convention, after the platform committee meeting that I was on, Bernie surrogates were talking constantly, saying, ‘Oh my god, Hillary is going to lose if she doesn’t address TPP and [free] trade and [all these] other issues. We were looking at the polling and thought that if these people stay home, she’ll lose.”...

“We were painting them a dire picture, and I couldn’t help but think they literally looked like they had no idea what was going on here,” she continued. “I remember their faces, it was like they had never fucking heard this stuff before. It’s what we had been screaming for the past 9 months… It’s like [they] forgot the basics of Politics 101.”

There's also this from Jane Kleeb, Nebraska Democratic Party chair:

“We not only screamed about this, we wrote memos, we begged,” Jane Kleeb, Nebraska Democratic Party chair and another Sanders booster who was at the DNC meeting, said. “I spent a good chunk of time writing memos about how [Bernie’s surrogates] could be utilized on the campaign trail, about ‘issue voters,’ about the environment, Black Lives Matter, Dakota Access Pipeline, rogue cops, you name it… I was [also] talking specifically about rural communities, and how [Hillary] completely ignored and abandoned anything that we cared about.”...

“The Clinton campaign believed they had the strongest and brightest people in the room… and they had no concept of why people would choose Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton,” Kleeb continued. “They mocked us, they made fun of us. They always had a… model that was supposed to save the day. We were street activists and they don’t get that. And that’s a fundamental divide. They ran a check-the-box, sanitized campaign. And voters don’t think like that. You don’t win elections that way.”

It's hard to picture a forthrightly left-wing campaign winning, so I'm not surprised these people were blown off. But it's also hard to picture Trump winning, even after he's won. How did that happen? It happened! Adjust to reality from there. It's hard to build on a foundation that feels like nonsense, but  clinging to the old illusion of reality has got to be a mistake. Or maybe it will work to stand back and wait for the inherent limitations of Trumpism to reveal themselves.

The problem of using material from "Idiocracy" in an anti-Trump ad.

Yes, the Donald Trump phenomenon feels like "Idiocracy" to a lot of people, but who owns that material? Not Etan Cohen, who wrote it, or his collaborator Mike Judge, and not Terry Crews, the actor who plays the President in the movie, but 20th Century Fox.

If you were the decisionmaker at 20th Century Fox, would you agree to letting that material be used in a partisan political ad? Even if you were opposed to Trump, it's not a good idea. Who are the continuing fans of that movie? I'll bet a lot of them are Trump supporters. And the movie stands on its own as a timeless critique of American culture and politics. It's bad to capture that value and channel it into something transitory and partisan.

Anyway, The Daily Beast quotes Mike Judge complaining:

“It kind of fell apart.... It was announced that [the ads] were anti-Trump, and I would’ve preferred to make them and then have the people decide. Terry Crews had wanted to just make some funny Camacho ads, and Etan [Cohen] and I had written a few that I thought were pretty funny, and it just fell apart. I wanted to put them out a little more quietly and let them go viral, rather than people announcing we’re making anti-Trump ads. Just let them be funny first. Doing something satirical like that is better if you just don’t say, ‘Here we come with the anti-Trump ads!’ Also, when Terry heard that announcement he wasn’t happy about it."

Of course, talking to The Daily Beast is creating virality. This ad is available there. I've watched it.

By the way, the text at The Daily Beast does not support its headline: "‘Idiocracy’ Director Mike Judge: Fox Killed Our Anti-Trump Camacho Ads." Judge doesn't say that! And Fox — the movie division (not even Fox News) — didn't nix the ads.

Judge is only saying they gave up when the viral approach was blown by an open announcement that they are anti-Trump. I wonder what really happened. He seems to still be trying to get the ad in circulation, so respect for rights owned by 20th Century Fox doesn't seem to be such a big consideration. Talking about the rights may be a device to give 20th Century Fox separation from the ad project. And that announcement Judge purports to be upset about: Maybe he chose to do that to make sure no one would misread it as pro-Trump. Once that's nailed down, it's time to send this thing out into the world with Judge, Cohen, and Crews sort of posing as victims — or so I suspect.

The fact is that the ad isn't really that good. What does it really say about Trump? If you don't know the movie too well, the use of a very buffoonish black man to make a statement is open to all sorts of interpretation and the potential for offense is great. Are they trying to say Trump is bad because he reminds them of a clownish, hyper-masculine black man? And why is the black man getting used as a means to an end?

"They would look at me — I’m a gay man—and they would say, ‘You’re a woman.’ Their sexuality is what gives them gender."

"I would ask, are you gay or heterosexual, and they would say, no, I’m waria, I’m a woman. What they’re most adamant about is that they’re not gay." Said David Brian Esch, who studied the Pondok Pesantren Waria in Indonesia.  Pondok pesantran means prayer school, and waria means transgender.

“One fascinating aspect of the pesantren is that it went along without any harassment from hardline groups for years and we all wondered why extremist groups were shutting down churches and ‘gayish’ nightclubs and leaving the pesantren alone,” Esch said.

“God created his creatures and I want to live as I am,” Oki, one of the waria at the pesantran, told Esch on camera. “It is my fate. Sometimes I feel sad because I want to pray at the mosque, but people look and talk about me.... Others have told me that being waria is a sin. I told them that we do not know God’s gender. We do not know if God is a man or a woman or waria.... I pray as a man because I want to face my god as a man. And I learned as a child to pray as a man, with the male dress, the sarong, and when I die I want to be buried as a man, even though I am waria,” Oki said. “I will be asked by God what my original family name is.”

Because this belief is prevalent, many waria say they don’t want gender confirmation surgery....

If you're slapping your head over that last line, know that the linked article is in The Daily Beast, in a section — I'm not kidding — called "PROGRESS," and the headline includes the phrase "Indonesia is more progressive when it comes to gender fluidity than the West." There's some mind-crushing obtuseness about the terrible oppression of gay people here:

Transgender people have been acknowledged throughout Islamic history, and the Prophet Muhammad’s wife is even said to have had a mukhannath (effeminate) servant who was only banished from the women’s quarters when the Prophet realized he was attracted to women. Even today in Iran, the Islamic government will pay for gender confirmation surgery for transgender people, making the country second only to Thailand in the number of such surgeries performed. (Homosexuality is punishable by death in Iran, and activists worry that some gay people may be forced into such surgeries to escape that grisly end.)

I will not and cannot "Read Chattanooga Shooter’s Blog."

The Daily Beast says:

The killer of four U.S. Marines in Chattanooga maintained a short-lived blog that hinted at his religious inner life. Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez’s blog had only two posts, both published July 13 and written in a popular style of Islamic religious reasoning.

A man used a blog format to put up a few sentences 3 days before he committed a mass murder. There's no "blog" to read. Adulazeez didn't "maintain" a blog, even "a short-lived blog." And I have no idea what counts as "a popular style of Islamic religious reasoning." The Daily Beast doesn't bother to define its term.

Abdulazeez did give us some evidence worth thinking about, but I wouldn't take the statements at face value. They were not written over a period of time, revealing a path of thoughts. And they were put up so close in time to the murders, which presumably were already in the offing, that the writing must be understood as representing what he wanted the public to think about him.

If he used a style that can, in fact, be identified as "a popular style of Islamic religious reasoning," that's reason to think about his statements not as pure reflections of his thought patterns, but as something cribbed and copied, perhaps to throw us off track or to play upon our tendency to jump to merge him with the grand, mythic mass of Islamic terrorists who have traipsed all over the American brain since 9/11.

Abdulazeez used the old story of the blind men and the elephant, which originated in India and appears in Jain, Buddhist, Sufi, and Hindu versions. He calls it "The Story of the Three Blind Men." Three? Is he mixing it up with the nursery rhyme of the 3 blind mice? I think — in all the versions — there were more than 3. According to Wikipedia, the Sufi version of the story doesn't have blind men at all. Which makes more sense. Why would blind men stay together rather than disperse themselves among the sighted population? In the Sufi version, the inability to see is achieved by putting the elephant in the dark:

Rumi, the 13th Century Persian poet and teacher of Sufism, included it in his Masnavi. In his retelling, "The Elephant in the Dark," some Hindus bring an elephant to be exhibited in a dark room. A number of men touch and feel the elephant in the dark and, depending upon where they touch it, they believe the elephant to be like a water spout (trunk), a fan (ear), a pillar (leg) and a throne (back). Rumi uses this story as an example of the limits of individual perception:

The sensual eye is just like the palm of the hand. The palm has not the means of covering the whole of the beast.

Rumi does not present a resolution to the conflict in his version, but states:

The eye of the Sea is one thing and the foam another. Let the foam go, and gaze with the eye of the Sea. Day and night foam-flecks are flung from the sea: oh amazing! You behold the foam but not the Sea. We are like boats dashing together; our eyes are darkened, yet we are in clear water.

Rumi ends his poem by stating "If each had a candle and they went in together the differences would disappear."

Whose pants is Donald Trump talking about?

I've been mostly ignoring Donald Trump, but something about the Mediaite headline "Trump Steamrolls NBC Reporter, Takes Shots at Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg" drew me in. Oddly, the post begins with material about how Trump owns a gun, as if the "shots" he was taking at Krauthammer and Goldberg were not merely metaphorical. (Does Trump also own a steamroller?)

And then came Trump’s time to bash all his famous conservative critics.

On Charles Krauthammer, who called him a “rodeo clown”: He’s “a totally overrated person that dislikes me personally. I’ve never met him. He’s a totally overrated guy, doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

On Jonah Goldberg, who compared him to a “failed man”: “I’m worth a fortune. You know, it’s interesting. I went to the best school, got great marks, everything else. I went out, I made a fortune, a big fortune, a tremendous fortune… bigger than people even understand. […] Then I get called by a guy that can’t buy a pair of pants, I get called names?” [Ed. note: Huh? Does anyone know why Trump would think Goldberg can’t buy pants? Send tips to tips@mediaite.com]

That's hilariously loutish, calling Jonah Goldberg "a guy that can’t buy a pair of pants." I googled trump jonah pants to see if Goldberg had responded, and I got to this headline at The Daily Beast: "Trump Teases Critic for Being Paralyzed":

Not content with insulting a female reporter’s intelligence and professionalism, Donald Trump apparently mocked a conservative critic for being paralyzed. Trump in an interview with NBC News was asked about columnist Charles Krauthammer, who is paralyzed from the waist down and has called Trump a “rodeo clown.” In response to criticism from Krauthammer and National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg, Trump said the following: “I went out, I made a fortune, a big fortune, a tremendous fortune… bigger than people even understand,” he said before discussing his plan to release financial statements. “Then I get called by a guy that can’t buy a pair of pants, I get called names?”

Here's the clip. He's obviously talking about Goldberg, not Krauthammer, when he gets to the pair-of-pants hyperbole.

Even if he had used that figure of speech when talking about Krauthammer, he wouldn't have been teasing Krauthammer for being paralyzed. He'd just have stumbled into an unfortunate image. And, look, Krauthammer has responded, and Krauthammer knows it's Jonah whose pants-buying wherewithal was called into question:

"[Trump is] repeating himself. I'm like Jeb on this. I'm done. The man's specialty [is] to suck oxygen, I'm going to be breathing fresh air... And I do want to make an appeal to the viewers out there to crowdsource, to buy Jonah a pair of pants. I think if you look under the table it's disgraceful the way he comes to the show."

The teasing is coming from Krauthammer, and now Jonah has the exquisite distinction of getting fixed in our heads as an icon of panstlessness.

Ludicrous headline at The Daily Beast: "Why Do Bi Women Smoke So Much Weed?"

Subhead: "Excluded by both straight and lesbian peer groups, bi women face one of the most challenging psychological spaces."

It's tough to face space. It's challenging to me to face the space of the compose window on this post, because look at the crash up of things we're supposed to believe: 1. People smoke marijuana to deal with their problems (not just for fun or to relax), 2. Being bisexual is a problem, 3. It's okay to talk about sexual orientation as a problem, 4. It's probably the bisexuality causing the marijuana smoking, not the marijuana causing sexual experimentation or a person's liberal-mindedness and pleasure-seeking causing both.

And the "so much" in that "so much weed" is just any marijuana use in the last year. It really should say, at best, "Why Do So Many Bi Women Smoke Weed?"  The statistics are: 38% of bisexual women "reported marijuana use in the last year," compared to 20% for lesbians and 5% for straight women. My hypothesis would be that the women who say they are bisexual are just more likely to try different things, to be more adventurous.

But, no, here's a "research scientist," from the Ontario HIV Treatment Network, Dr. Margaret Robinson, "who is herself bisexual": "[B]isexual women are exposed to sexism as well as biphobia and homophobia. It could be something about the anxiety we feel living at the intersection of multiple oppressions that instigates such elevated use of cannabis.”

Anxiety does indeed seem to be a strong undercurrent of bisexual life. The high prevalence of anxiety disorders among bisexual women, in particular, is a well-known psychological truism. Several studies have found that bi women have worse mental health outcomes than straight and lesbian women, including higher rates of anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders. One 2010 study suggests that the poor mental health of bi women could result, in part, from enduring the “psychic toll” of biphobia without having an “identifiable community” to provide support.

Robinson is "skeptical of previous research that suggests that bisexual women’s marijuana use could be ascribed to their 'sensation seeking.'" Why? "We have to look at trends in a broader context and the context for bisexuals is generally one of high stigma and social isolation. People rarely thrive under those conditions." I guess it has to be a problem.

The Daily Beast front-pages this teaser: "Scott Walker's Indian Mascot SNAFU."

What's the SNAFU?

"One of the reasons the Daily Beast is struggling to attract readers has to be Troll City: the comments which mar the view of the last couple of paragraphs of every article."

"Your writing is pretty good, Beast, but the quality and intelligence of your comments is at the bottom. The nastiness spewing from these red-captioned paragraphs negatively colors your whole enterprise."

Says a comment to a Daily Beast article titled "Hillary for President...of the Universe," subtitled "Sure, Hillary Clinton could run for the White House. But where the world desperately needs a personality like hers is at the helm of a strong global governing body, says Sally Kohn."

"The Financial Times Wrote a Tina Brown Puff Piece."

"We've Annotated It."

How clean did "male feminist" Hugo Schwyzer come?

The Daily Beast has an interview with the headline "Porn Professor Hugo Schwyzer Comes Clean About His Twitter Meltdown and Life as a Fraud." I suspect he's playing a longer game, and this is first class bullshit. We've all heard of this guy now, and I wonder what's his next move, now that he has our attention.

Let's review the facts thus far. He got his academic credentials in British and medieval history, and he is a tenured professor at Pasadena City College, who taught classes in Women's Studies. It emerged that he, a 46-year-old married man, had "sexted with a 27-year-old sex worker activist." Then, he tweeted a lot about what a fraud he was. Who cares?! Well, I guess it was dramatic for a professor to let loose with a spate of tweets ostensibly attacking himself.

The Tea Party "is the same group we faced in the South with those white crackers and the dogs and the police."

"They didn’t care about how they looked. It was just fierce indifference to human life that caused America to say enough is enough. 'I don’t want to see it and I am not a part of it.' What the hell! If you have to bomb little kids and send dogs out against human beings, give me a break."

Said Charles Rangel (according to The Daily Beast).