"The 2017 [Gallup] survey marks the 16th consecutive year Clinton has been the most admired woman. She has held the title 22 times in total, more than anyone else. Eleanor Roosevelt is second with 13 wins."

How awkward for Vanity Fair.

http://news.gallup.com/poll/224672/barack-obama-hillary-clinton-retain-admired-titles.aspx

http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/04/politics/house-russia-investigators-interview-rohrabacher-wasserman-schultz/index.html

"There’s more than one way to harass women. A raft of men in recent weeks have paid for accusations of sexual harassment with their companies, their jobs, their plum political posts. But one point has been overlooked in the scandals: Men can be belittling, cruel and deeply damaging without demanding sex. (Try sloughing off heaps of contempt with your self-esteem intact.) We have no consensus — and hardly any discussion — about how we should treat behaviors that are misogynist and bullying but fall short of breaking the law.

Twenty years ago, when I was a Moscow correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, two Americans named Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames ran an English-language tabloid in the Russian capital called the eXile. They portrayed themselves as swashbuckling parodists, unbound by the conventions of mainstream journalism, exposing Westerners who were cynically profiting from the chaos of post-Soviet Russia.

A better description is this: The eXile was juvenile, stunt-obsessed and pornographic, titillating for high school boys. It is back in the news because Taibbi just wrote a new book, and interviewers are asking him why he and Ames acted so boorishly back then. The eXile’s distinguishing feature, more than anything else, was its blinding sexism — which often targeted me."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-two-expat-bros-who-terrorized-women-correspondents-in-moscow/2017/12/15/91ff338c-ca3c-11e7-8321-481fd63f174d_story.html?utm_term=.1b6fa04e5675

"Come election day, Alabamians will have the sacred honor of participating in the democratic process by voting for either a child rapist or a weak-kneed white blob in a suit to go work on Capitol Hill for some unknown corporate donor. Personally, I can’t say that I will be taking part."

https://medium.com/@LeftistScumbag/doug-jones-is-a-terrible-candidate-acde501603c1

What initially looked like an impish dig at President Trump by French President Emmanuel Macron over climate policy has turned into a concrete plan.

First, when the Trump administration proposed slashing federal science budgets and then, on June 1, when Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, Macron took to social media to offer (in perfect English) to greet with open arms — and research dollars — American scientists worried about the political climate as well as global warming.

Macron urged worried climate scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs to see France as a “second homeland” and to come work there because “we all share the same responsibility: make our planet great again.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/12/11/promising-to-make-our-planet-great-again-macron-lures-13-u-s-climate-scientists-to-france/?utm_term=.f47be987bfed

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/french-president-s-climate-talent-search-nabs-18-foreign-scientists

I'll remember him as the senator whose question opened the door to the Mueller investigation.

and my husband was an FDNY 9/11 survivor.

Today is a day I count my blessings.

in the form of a Senate ethics investigation and hearing?

According to Politico,

The Democratic women of the Senate had been talking among themselves about the Franken allegations for weeks, one Democratic aide said. None, however, went further than to call for a Senate Ethics Committee probe of the Minnesota senator, whom many had considered a close friend.

That stance became increasingly untenable as the accusations against Franken piled up. In calls and texts, the female senators eventually came to an unstated agreement, according to another aide familiar with their discussions: The next credible story of misconduct in a credible news outlet would prompt them to call for Franken's resignation.

When POLITICO reported Wednesday that a former Democratic congressional aide said Franken tried to forcibly kiss her in 2006, the aide said, it “was the tipping point.”

The "next credible story of misconduct" concern an allegation of a 2006 attempt of an welcome kiss that the accuser found offensive, distasteful, and inappropriate. For his part, Franken denies the accuracy of this account.

Should Franken have been afforded a right to an investigation and hearing? Or was this truly "a red line in the sand"?

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/06/al-franken-democratic-senators-284915