Account information for this Lucianne member

This week six London councils united to protest against new rules on single-sex spaces. These were Lambeth, Waltham Forest, Southwark, Hackney, Haringey and Lewisham, which are apparently “boroughs with some of the highest trans and non-binary communities in the country”. “Trans men are men, trans women are women”, chant the councillors in a video posted on social media, in which they individually deliver dramatic lines (full script below): Councillor Paul Perkins, Leader, Waltham Forest Council (Green): “We serve 1.7 million Londoners and pledge to be boroughs of sanctuary for our trans, non-binary and intersex communities.” Councillor Martin Abrams, Leader of Lambeth Council (Green):

“Politically correct.” I was introduced to that fatuous phrase about 35 years ago while watching an episode of the television series Thirtysomething. The following day, I mentioned it in a casual conversation with a colleague. Confessing that I had never before heard the expression, I told her I found an astounding clumsiness in its construction. “(The character) said it without a hint of irony,” I complained. “Isn’t ‘politically (long pause) correct,’ a contradiction in terms?” “Not at all,” she educated me. “We used it all the time at Occidental,” explaining everything I needed to know. “Some things simply cannot be said,” she continued, “or even thought.”

The Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies have... been targeting their neighbors' civilian infrastructure. Perhaps to these countries, a "deal," even a bad one, sounds as if it might free them of Iranian threats without any cost. Their security calculations have to be quite different from ours: Why not just sit back and let America and Israel do all the heavy lifting? The problem, of course, as the US has seen again and again, like Charlie Brown's football, is that any deal signed with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) would only postpone its threats to the oil and gas infrastructure of neighboring countries.

President Donald Trump got handed an ugly jobs headline Friday. The economy lost 23,000 payroll jobs in July, and revisions erased another 103,000 jobs from May and June. That can't be dressed up; a weak jobs report is a weak jobs report. But buried one line deeper is a number worth noticing. Private employers added 30,000 jobs in July while government payrolls fell by 53,000. If government employment had simply remained flat, the headline number would've been a gain of 30,000 jobs. Statistics can tell very different stories depending on where somebody stops reading. The easiest headline is "23,000 jobs lost." It's accurate, but so is "private employers added 30,000 jobs."