In a troublingly familiar move, Trump has banned congressional Democrats from attending his first state dinner. It’s a petulant rebuke of American tradition.

On Tuesday, Trump will host French President Emmanuel Macron at the White House. But unlike his two immediate predecessors, he hasn’t invited any congressional members of the Democratic Party to attend, including leaders like Rep. Nancy Pelosi or Sen. Chuck Schumer. He has also excluded members of the media.

That was the opening line to a Fox News article promoting the claims of Christian numerologist David Meade, who allegedly said that the imaginary planet known as “Planet X” or “Nibiru” will appear in the sky on April 23, triggering the beginning of the Rapture.

According to a specific sect of evangelical Christians, the key to understanding the Rapture lies in Revelations 12:1-2.

“And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of 12 stars,” the passage reads. “She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth.”

In its latest move targeting civil rights of LGBT people the Trump administration is moving to roll back an Obama-era rule that banned discrimination against transgender people in health care.
The 2016 rule, embedded in the Affordable Care Act, prohibited anti-transgender incrimination by doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies, The New York Times reports.

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The Times notes the judge's ruling came after "eight states, a network of Roman Catholic hospitals and the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, representing 19,000 doctors, challenged the Obama-era rule." That judge "temporarily stopped enforcement of the protections for transgender patients, saying that Congress had outlawed discrimination based on sex — 'the biological differences between males and females' — but not transgender status."

Women’s rights—in the form of reproductive rights—didn’t make the cut. And the nomenclature around Israel has changed.

Hillary Clinton, when she was secretary of state under Barack Obama, had added dedicated sections on reproductive rights in country reports, evaluating the state of access to abortion, contraception, and maternal health as well as other reproductive rights (against forced sterilizations, for instance). The first report to include the section was released in 2012, for the previous year.

But the latest report does away with the “reproductive rights” section, replacing it instead with one that focuses exclusively on “coercion in population control,” referring to the World Health Organization for data on maternal mortality and contraception. It skips assessments of availability of abortion or contraceptive measures. A side-by-side comparison with reports from previous years shows drastic change:

Al Franken will make his first public appearance next month since leaving the Senate last December over sexual harassment allegations.

The former senator from Minnesota will be discussing Russian interference in the 2016 election at the Privacy XChange Forum, a privacy and cybersecurity forum being held in Lisbon, Portugal, on May 1, according to a press release sent out Friday.
The title of the event: "Lies and Lying Liars in 2018: Privacy, Competition and Russian Election Meddling."
"Recent scandals like the Cambridge Analytica breach and the Russian interference in our 2016 election were shocking -- but not surprising if you've been paying attention to tech companies' failure to protect users, and the US government's failure to hold them accountable," Franken said in the news release by the organizer of the forum, identity protection company CyberScout.

One of the enduring myths of white privilege and resentment towards non-whites is the false equivalency of affirmative action with reverse discrimination. There is a sense among some racially unempathetic whites that any effort to reverse centuries of discrimination against people of color by opening doors that would otherwise be slammed shut in their faces is unfair and that true equality is only achieved through color-blind admissions policies in higher education.

Justice in Britain, a country that boasts it all but invented the presumption of innocence and trial by jury, is becoming a matter of money. We’re going the way of the United States and building a market-based rather than a rights-based system; where the rich have every advantage and the jails are filled with the black and the poor.

It hasn’t happened yet, but allow me to clutch some straws from the prevailing wind. Last week, Southwark crown court began hearing the case of Das insurance company against its former CEO, Paul Asplin, who it accuses of passing business to companies in which he had a financial interest. He is pleading not guilty and the case continues. Whatever the verdict, one feature already stands out: Das is bringing a private criminal prosecution. So are many other companies. Britain now has its first firm of private prosecutors: Edmonds Marshall McMahon, set up by former government lawyers. They realised that cuts to specialist crime teams meant many fraud cases could not and would not be pursued by the state. The demand for their services is so strong they are receiving six inquiries a day.

Queen of “alternative facts” Kellyanne Conway came up with another whopper tonight, this one designed to be a gotcha about James Comey’s supposed bigotry. Maybe her microwave wasn’t watching but the Fox camera was!

Apparently, Conway thinks that if she accuses Comey of racism, people will somehow forget that she serves as adviser to the bigot in chief, Donald Trump. Maybe she also figured we’d forget that his firing of Comey smacked so much of obstruction of justice that it led to the appointment of a special counsel in the Russia probe.