From Germaine's trigger files: Quack cosmetics, quack products, quack marketers

Quackery triggers me. It has for decades.

On TV today, being momentarily distracted with real life* I failed to hit the mute button once the commercials came on. My mistake. 

* Getting my lunch corn on the cob out of the microwave.

In a stupor of disbelief, I listened to an entire TV ad by former supermodel Cindy Crawford. She was hawking a youth-restoring skin product the marketers call Meaningful Beauty. The "science" behind this miracle product comes from Dr. Jean-Louis Sebagh at his clinic in Paris. According to Crawford's website: 

After my first treatment of super antioxidants from a rare melon in the South of France I saw instant, glowing results.

Dr. Sebagh and I developed Meaningful Beauty as an easy-to-use system that delivers younger-looking skin by combining science, technology and nature. The powerful melon super antioxidants are the secret to the formulas — and exclusive to Meaningful Beauty.

The fate of my beautiful face is 

somewhere in those leaves, maybe

Well, being an old fart with wrinkly skin, I immediately looked for peer-reviewed science publications by Sebagh. I want instant youth too! Sadly, there are none. 

I then breathlessly went to Crawford's FAQ page to look for the ingredients so that I could evaluate the possible mechanism of action of this miracle, face-saving product. Oops, no list of ingredients unless a consumer (sucker) buys it. See the Q&A at the bottom of the image.

By golly it's magic, rare muskmelon leaves!!

And, It's never too late — and never too early — 

to start taking care of your skin!!!

See!! Stuff from rare cantaloupe leaves 

even works on the young 'uns!!

(Just kidding, actually she's 88 years old)

This is what a country with a government that serves special interests before the public interest far too often delivers to the public. Quack products. Bullshit explanations. Irrationality. Lies. No empirical evidence. Here we get just slick marketing backed by unsubstantiated claims from a pretty face and sophisticated, morally rotted marketers.

No shame. No moral qualm. No peer reviewed evidence. Just pure, raw capitalist greed. Yay unregulated capitalism!! Shaft us hard again!!

News bits: About DoJ stalling DJT investigation; Hunter pleads guilty; Etc.

A Raw Story article cites reactions by two people who suspected the DoJ intentionally slow walked an investigation of DJT for over a year. Reactions critical of the DoJ were triggered by yesterday's WaPo article, FBI resisted opening probe into Trump’s role in Jan. 6 for more than a year, (discussed here yesterday) reporting the intentional sabotage of by the DoJ of any investigation of DJT's role in the 1/6 coup attempt. RS writes:  

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) on Monday reacted with alarm to a new report in the Washington Post showing that the Department of Justice and the FBI dragged their feet for more than a year in launching an investigation into former President Donald Trump's role in inciting the January 6th Capitol riots.

"This Washington Post investigation confirms what I have been concerned about for almost two years: While the DOJ moved quickly to investigate the foot soldiers of the Jan 6 attack, it waited far too long to investigate leaders of the effort to overturn the election," said Schiff.

Andrew Weissmann, a former prosecutor who worked under special counsel Robert Mueller, delivered a scathing assessment of the DOJ's inaction on his Twitter account.

"The extent of the delay by DOJ was inexcusable," he wrote. "Not appearing political is not a reason to fail to do one’s job."

What Weissmann said about not appearing political is not an excuse to do nothing should be true. Sadly, it isn't. Our two-tiered rule of law really is political. It's heavily biased in favor of the rich, famous, powerful and high level politicians. That is true for both Dems and Repubs.

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Breaking, Earth shattering news: The NYT writes about a plea deal for Hunter: 

Under a deal with the Justice Department, the president’s son agreed to probation for filing his taxes late, and he can avoid a charge that he lied about his drug use when he purchased a handgun.

The Justice Department has reached an agreement with Hunter Biden for him to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and avoid prosecution on a separate gun charge, according to a court filing on Tuesday, moving to close a long-running and politically explosive investigation into the finances, drug use and international business dealings of President Biden’s troubled son.  

Under a deal hashed out over several months by Hunter Biden’s legal team and federal prosecutors, he will plead guilty to misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his 2017 and 2018 taxes on time and agree to probation, the court filing said.

This is the smoking cannon the radical Republicans have been looking for. What hideous, cruel crimes he committed. Late filing his taxes. The horror . . . . the horror . . . . and waddabout Joe Biden, the evil mastermind?

LOCK HIM UP!! LOCK HIM UP!! LOCK HIM UP!! 

/s

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The Hill writes:

Trump compares Hunter Biden charges to ‘traffic ticket’

Former President Trump and his allies on Tuesday bemoaned a plea deal struck between Hunter Biden and federal prosecutors over tax and firearm crimes, comparing it unfavorably to the charges Trump is facing over his retention of classified documents after leaving office.  

“Wow! The corrupt Biden DOJ just cleared up hundreds of years of criminal liability by giving Hunter Biden a mere ‘traffic ticket.’ Our system is BROKEN!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Yeah!! Hunter should have been locked up for hundreds of years, not just given probation.

Hm . . . . . if Hunter got, say, 300 years in the slammer for his crimes, then DJT should get, say, about 30,000 years. Right? 

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A new front in the radical right thermonuclear war on truth: What's this country coming to if we can't lie to people? We'll be doomed, doooomed I say!: A NYT news article reports:

I have my constitutional right to lie 

to people Goddamn it!

I'm gonna rip someone's lungs out

with my bare hands!

G.O.P. Targets Researchers Who Study 

Disinformation Ahead of 2024 Election

A legal campaign against universities and think tanks seeks to undermine the fight against false claims about elections, vaccines and other hot political topics

On Capitol Hill and in the courts, Republican lawmakers and activists are mounting a sweeping legal campaign against universities, think tanks and private companies that study the spread of disinformation, accusing them of colluding with the government to suppress conservative speech online.

The effort has encumbered its targets with expansive requests for information and, in some cases, subpoenas — demanding notes, emails and other information related to social media companies and the government dating back to 2015. Complying has consumed time and resources and already affected the groups’ ability to do research and raise money, according to several people involved.

They and others warned that the campaign undermined the fight against disinformation in American society when the problem is, by most accounts, on the rise — and when another presidential election is around the corner. Many of those behind the Republican effort had also joined former President Donald J. Trump in falsely challenging the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

This is how the modern radical right Republican Party spends its time and governs when it has power. 

Inconvenient facts, true truths, sound reasoning, political opposition and democracy itself are all in the crosshairs of the post-truth, morally rotted GOP. That the Republican Party is still competitive in federal elections in red states shows how sick and weak our democracy, the rule of law and our civil liberties have become.

Social science update: Perceptions of moral decline are an illusion

The NYT published an opinion piece about the recent publication of a massive, worldwide study about human beliefs about moral decline. The opinion was written by the senior author of the study, psychologist Adam Mastroianni at Columbia University.  The data indicates that belief in moral decline compared to the "good old days" is a universal human illusion. The same thing is seen in all countries examined so far. The NYT writes:

Your Brain Has Tricked You Into Thinking Everything Is Worse

Perhaps no political promise is more potent or universal than the vow to restore a golden age. From Caesar Augustus to the Medicis and Adolf Hitler, from President Xi Jinping of China and President “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. of the Philippines to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and Joe Biden’s “America Is Back,” leaders have gained power by vowing a return to the good old days.

What these political myths have in common is an understanding that the golden age is definitely not right now. Maybe we’ve been changing from angels into demons for centuries, and people have only now noticed the horns sprouting on their neighbors’ foreheads.

 

While previous researchers have theorized about why people might believe things have gotten worse, we are the first to investigate this belief all over the world, to test its veracity and to explain where it comes from.

We first collected 235 surveys with over 574,000 responses total and found that, overwhelmingly, people believe that humans are less kind, honest, ethical and moral today than they were in the past. People have believed in this moral decline at least since pollsters started asking about it in 1949, they believe it in every single country that has ever been surveyed (59 and counting), they believe that it’s been happening their whole lives and they believe it’s still happening today. Respondents of all sorts — young and old, liberal and conservative, white and Black — consistently agreed: the golden age of human kindness is long gone.

We also found strong evidence that people are wrong about this decline.

Other researchers’ data have even shown moral improvement. Social scientists have been measuring cooperation rates between strangers in lab-based economic games for decades, and a recent meta-analysis found — contrary to the authors’ expectations — that cooperation has increased 8 percentage points over the last 61 years.

Two well-established psychological phenomena could combine to produce this illusion of moral decline. First, there’s biased exposure: People predominantly encounter and pay attention to negative information about others — mischief and misdeeds make the news and dominate our conversations.

Second, there’s biased memory: The negativity of negative information fades faster than the positivity of positive information. Getting dumped, for instance, hurts in the moment, but as you rationalize, reframe and distance yourself from the memory, the sting fades. The memory of meeting your current spouse, on the other hand, probably still makes you smile.

When you put these two cognitive mechanisms together, you can create an illusion of decline.

Thanks to biased exposure, things look bad every day. But thanks to biased memory, when you think back to yesterday, you don’t remember things being so bad. When you’re standing in a wasteland but remember a wonderland, the only reasonable conclusion is that things have gotten worse.

That explanation fits well with two more of our surprising findings. First, people exempt their own social circles from decline; in fact, they think the people they know are nicer than ever. This might be because people primarily encounter positive information about people they know, which our model predicts can create an illusion of improvement.

Second, people believe that moral decline began only after they arrived on Earth; they see humanity as stably virtuous in the decades before their birth. This especially suggests that biased memory plays a role in producing the illusion.

If these cognitive biases are working in tandem, our susceptibility to golden age myths makes a lot more sense. Our biased attention means we’ll always feel like we’re living in dark times, and our biased memory means we’ll always feel like the past was brighter.

As long as we believe in this illusion, we are susceptible to the promises of aspiring autocrats who claim they can return us to a golden age that exists in the only place a golden age has ever existed: our imaginations.

Well now, that tosses some sand in the gears. First, humans are bombarded with negative stuff like mischief, misdeeds and miscreancy = biased exposure. Second, the human mind tends to whitewash negative experiences over time = biased memory. Together, those two stinkers** (biases) tend to create an illusion of moral decline. That tends to attract demagogues and regular politicians like the moth to the flame. Those promises tend to bamboozle a lot of people.

** Or, maybe not completely stinkers. Maybe whitewashing painful past personal experiences makes life easier for some or most people. 

Qs: Waddabout the real, not illusory, decline in respect for and reliance on facts, true truths and sound reasoning, especially when they are inconvenient, that America's political radical right is undeniably heavily invested in? Does fidelity to facts, true truths and sound reasoning even constitute a moral value? In a democracy, are lies to the public immoral, or if malice is there, evil?[1] How about lies in a dictatorship or theocracy?

Footnote: 

1. Consider our good friend Sissela Bok commenting on lies and deceit of the public in a democracy in her 1999 book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life:

“When political representatives or entire governments arrogate to themselves the right to lie, they take power from the public that would not have been given up voluntarily. .... But such cases [that justify lying] are so rare that they hardly exist for practical purposes. .... The consequences of spreading deception, alienation and lack of trust could not have been documented for us more concretely than they have in the past decades. We have had a very vivid illustration of how lies undermine our political system. .... Those in government and other positions of trust should be held to the highest standards. Their lies are not ennobled by their positions; quite the contrary. .... only those deceptive practices which can be openly debated and consented to in advance are justifiable in a democracy.”

News bits: Local newspapers under stress; Effects of loss of local newspapers; Climate change education

A NYT article discusses local government officials punishing local newspapers for printing unflattering content about how local government works or fails to work. This exemplifies the inherent conflict between powerful special interests including governments, big businesses and religious organizations on one side, and the usually far less powerful newspapers and the public interest on the other. The two sides are often or usually at odds. The big guys seem to usually get most or all of what they want. The NYT writes: 

Two of the most powerful women in the village of Delhi in central New York sat face to face in a brick building on Main Street for what would become a fight over the First Amendment.

It was the fall of 2019. Tina Molé, the top elected official in Delaware County, was demanding that Kim Shepard, the publisher of The Reporter, the local newspaper, “do something” about what Ms. Molé saw as the paper’s unfair coverage of the county government.

Ms. Shepard stood her ground. Not long after, Ms. Molé struck where it would hurt The Reporter the most: its finances. The county stripped the newspaper of a lucrative contract to print public notices, subsequently informing The Reporter that the decision was partly based on “the manner in which your paper reports county business.”

The move cost The Reporter about $13,000 a year in revenue — a significant blow to a newspaper with barely 4,000 subscribers.  

In recent years, newspapers in Colorado, North Carolina, New Jersey and California, as well as New York, have been stripped of their contracts for public notices after publishing articles critical of their local governments. Some states, like Florida, are going even further, revoking the requirement that such notices have to appear in newspapers.  

The trend is the latest example of how public officials and wealthy individuals are waging war on news organizations that cover them aggressively.

In Germaine's ideal world, local governments would not be able to attack newspapers like this. Doing so injures the public interest. Attacks like this are inherently anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian and pro-corruption. 

Q: Does it injure the public interest and is inherently anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian and/or pro-corruption for local governments to financially attack local newspapers?

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Social science research: There has been a lot of research directed to finding and quantifying effects of the loss of local newspapers in the areas they serve and the people they inform. A June 2022 article by Northwestern University comments on the effects of local newspaper loss:

The United States continues to lose newspapers at a rate of two per week, further dividing the nation into wealthier, faster growing communities with access to local news, and struggling areas without.

Between the pre-pandemic months of late 2019 and the end of May 2022, more than 360 newspapers closed, the report by Medill’s Local News Initiative found. Since 2005, the country has lost more than one-fourth of its newspapers and is on track to lose a third by 2025.

Most of the communities that have lost newspapers do not get a print or digital replacement, leaving 70 million residents — or a fifth of the country’s population — either living in an area with no local news organizations, or one at risk, with only one local news outlet and very limited access to critical news and information that can inform their everyday decisions and sustain grassroots democracy. About 7 percent of the nation’s counties, or 211, now have no local newspaper.

“This is a crisis for our democracy and our society, said Penelope Muse Abernathy, visiting professor at Medill and the principal author of the report. “Invariably, the economically struggling, traditionally underserved communities that need local journalism the most are the very places where it is most difficult to sustain print or digital news organizations.”

Recent research shows that, in communities without a strong print or digital news organization, voter participation declines and corruption increases, Abernathy said, contributing to the spread of misinformation, political polarization and reduced trust in media.

Pew Trust magazine wrote in 2020:

This growing dearth of local news outlets is leading researchers to call the places that have lost papers “news deserts,” and academic studies are finding a correlation between less local news and decreased civic participation in those places.

The Pew Research Center has been watching these trends. It recently reported that in 2018, the last year for which cumulative data were available, overall newspaper circulation in the U.S. shrank 8 percent and industry revenues dropped 13 percent—continuing a spiral that began in the mid-2000s. The center also calculated that between 2004 and 2018, newspaper newsroom employment dropped by almost half— 47 percent.

Qs: Does it injure the public interest and is inherently anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian and/or pro-corruption for local governments to financially attack local newspapers?

Should state or federal governments prop up professional local newspapers, or should they be left to the impulses of capitalism and free markets running wild and butt naked (unregulated)?

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Climate change education in public schools, or lack thereof: A NYT opinion piece discusses the situation:

This is the message, too, of the new middle-grade edition of Douglas W. Tallamy’s “Nature’s Best Hope,” a best-selling approach to conservation that begins at home. “Over the years, human beings have shown that we’re very good at destroying habitats. Now we have to show that we’re smart enough and thoughtful enough and caring enough to restore what we have ruined,” Mr. Tallamy tells young readers. “I believe we can do it, if you help.”

This is all crucial information for children who live in a country where only one state — New Jersey — includes the study of climate change at all grade levels, and where the science standards for middle-school students in more than 40 states include only a single reference to climate change. In hurricane-plagued Florida, middle-school science standards make no reference to climate change at all. 

Maybe it seems a little excessive for someone to bring home an armload of environmental books meant for her neighbors’ children to read, but to me it felt like an exercise in hope.

As I read those books, it dawned on me that picture-book authors and illustrators are laying the groundwork for a better climate future by tapping into children’s inborn compassion, curiosity and sense of justice. These books explain how important it is for everyone to help, kids included, and they give the adults no place to hide. If a child can care so much, shouldn’t we care, too?

Q: Is it reasonable to think that the reason that climate change science isn't taught much or at all in most public schools is due mostly, say ~90%, to these two influences: 

1. The pro-pollution business community (oil, gas, coal and chemical companies) and its massive, well-funded, decades-long anti-climate change propaganda war and the irrational public distrust of science it has intentionally fomented; and

2. Authoritarian radical right anti-government, brass knuckles corrupted capitalist politicians armed with their rigid authoritarian, pro-business, no-compromise ideology? 

Or, is public judgment,** ignorance and/or apathy also a major factor(s)?[1] 

** What if the public's judgment is significantly clouded by the anti-climate change propaganda war the pro-pollution business community continues to fight to this day. 

Footnote: 

1. Pew Research wrote this in April 2023: 

6 Climate change is a lower priority for Americans than other national issues. 

While a majority of Americans view climate change as a major threat, it is a lower priority than issues such as strengthening the economy and reducing health care costs.

Overall, 37% of Americans say addressing climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress in 2023, and another 34% say it’s an important but lower priority. This ranks climate change 17th out of 21 national issues included in a Center survey from January.

As with views of the threat that climate change poses, there’s a striking contrast between how Republicans and Democrats prioritize the issue. For Democrats, it falls in the top half of priority issues, and 59% call it a top priority. By comparison, among Republicans, it ranks second to last, and just 13% describe it as a top priority.

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Merrick Garland intentionally tried to protect DJT from culpability for his 1/6 coup attempt: The WaPo writes:

In the DOJ’s investigation of Jan. 6, key Justice officials also quashed an early plan for a task force focused on people in Trump’s orbit

A Washington Post investigation found that more than a year would pass before prosecutors and FBI agents jointly embarked on a formal probe of actions directed from the White House to try to steal the election. Even then, the FBI stopped short of identifying the former president as a focus of that investigation.

A wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution, and clashes over how much evidence was sufficient to investigate the actions of Trump and those around him all contributed to the slow pace. Garland and the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, charted a cautious course aimed at restoring public trust in the department while some prosecutors below them chafed, feeling top officials were shying away from looking at evidence of potential crimes by Trump and those close to him, The Post found.

Instead of restoring trust in the DoJ, this leads me to have even less trust in it. What other elite criminals and their crimes has the DoJ quashed?

This is more evidence that we have a two-tiered system of law enforcement and justice. The rich and powerful tend to get more leniency, benefits of doubt, and flat out free passes for most of their crimes, including serious ones. 

We have all heard the howls of self-righteous moral outrage from radical right Republican Party elites and their propaganda Leviathan, e.g., Faux Lies. Most Republicans in congress publicly claim that the DoJ is partisan, "weaponized" and corrupted for indicting DJT. This is more evidence that the howls of outrage are just insulting, cynical lies. The weaponization isn't against criminals and traitors like DJT. It is weaponized against non-elites and it protects criminals and traitors like DJT.

An Explanation of the MAGA Mindset?

I found this BigThink article very interesting.  It’s long but there is an audio link if you want to just sit back and listen to it.  It explains how people interpret reality differently, based on an inner voice interpreter and associated brain functioning.  For what it’s worth, it might help us in understanding the MAGA mind, or even our own mind, for that matter.

Link here for full article.

If tl;dr, just skip to “the punchline” and wing it. 😉

Some of the more interesting phrases and sentences that stood out to me:

• The thinking mind reinvents the self from moment to moment such that it in no way resembles the stable coherent self most believe it to be.
• …it is the process of thinking that creates the self, rather than there being a self having any independent existence separate from thought.
• …99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself — and there isn’t one.
• …but since the left brain didn’t have access to these requests, it made up an answer and believed it rather than saying, “I don’t know why I just did that.”
• The left brain was simply making up interpretations, or stories, for events that were happening in a way that made sense to that side of the brain, or as if it had directed the action. Neither of these explanations was true, but that was unimportant to the interpretive mind, which was convinced that its explanations were the correct ones.
• Over the last 40 years, several additional studies have shown that the left side of the brain excels at creating an explanation for what’s going on, even if it isn’t correct, even in people with normal brain functioning.
• The truth is that your left brain has been interpreting reality for you your whole life, and if you are like most people, you have never understood the full implications of this. This is because we mistake the story of who we think we are for who we truly are.
• Most of us live our lives under the direction of the interpreter, and that makes the mind our master, and we are not even aware of this. … While it is clear that these experiences are happening to us, we somehow retain the idea that we are still in charge of it all.

Science supports the Eastern view (aka “the punchline”)

• So, for the first time in history, the findings of scientists in the West strongly support, in many cases without meaning to, one of the most fundamental insights of the East: that the individual self is more akin to a fictional character than a real thing. 

Questions:

1. Does this article help explain the MAGA mindset?
2. Did you find this article a good explanation for how the subjective reality of the inner voice has the power to negate objective reality for the MAGA voter?
3. If 99.9% of everything you do is for the self, does that leave only .1% room for selflessness?  In other words, other than a fraction of 1%, is it virtually impossible to be selfless?
4. If we are all controlled by that inner voice, what does that say about free will?  Chalk up another hash mark against it?

Op-Ed Making America hate again

 It’s difficult these days for a political columnist to avoid writing about Don the john Trump. Less mentioned, but as important, is to figure out why it is that millions of people seem still to adore the guy.

By Robert Kahn

Deputy editor emeritus, Courthouse News

Anyone, in any country, at any time on planet Earth, might be excused for lying, cheating and stealing to save his own skin. But to lie, cheat and steal, and induce one’s underlings to tap dance to the same tune, then throw them to the sharks, is, to me, the opposite of what America pretends to be about. Or did, once.

Remember how it used to be bad to be a Sore Loser?

To whine and moan, like a crybaby?

To blame your brother, when everyone knows you did it?

To hate your neighbor?

Remember how it used to be bad to be a braggart?

To strut about and mock your weaker peers? And grind your boot into their noses?

To claim you did things you never did, and deny what you did do?

To sulk after you were caught red-handed?

Remember how it used to be un-American to refuse to stand up and take your medicine?

Nathan Hale said: “I regret I have but one life to give for my country.”

He did not say: “I regret my country has no more money and lives to give to me.”

Men on the gallows have demonstrated more courage and honesty than Little Whiny Donnie has ever shown in his life.

My favorite words from a man on his way to the chopping block were Sir Walter Ralegh’s, on Oct. 29, 1618. He was beheaded on false charges by order of King Charles of England (who was in the pay of the king of France — the very charge of which he accused Sir Walter). On his way to the block, Sir Walter espied an elderly man in the crowd. Sir Walter asked why the old man was there.

“I have come to see you die, Sir,” the old man replied.

Whereupon Sir Walter removed his wig and gave it to the old-timer, saying that the old man could make better use of it than Sir Walter ever would.

There walked a man.

Anyone who reads the indictments against Don the john Trump must be struck not just by how often he lies, cheats and steals, but how often he induces other people to lie, cheat and steal for him, then tosses them aside like used Kleenex.

That, to me, and to anyone who calls himself an American, is a grievous sin: to sell out your friends for your own advancement.

But Little Donnie doesn’t know how to be a friend. And that, my friends, is un-American.

Then there’s the matter of sexual abuse. People in my generation (Baby Boomers) were taught to respect women — or at least try, or pretend to — not abuse them just because we could, with our superior strength.

Truth to tell, millions of us did not always follow that rule. But at least, in those days, boys who bragged about it were not admired, except by their fellow idiots and rapists.

Many of us, however, tried to abide by our mothers’ rules: Stand up when a lady enters the room. Hold open the door for her and let her go first. Do not swear or use crude language in the presence of a lady. Stand up when a lady leaves the room. Show some respect.

With all the right-wing bullshit we hear today about “traditional values,” where do those values come in?

“When you’re a star … you can grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Sigh.

Yeah, you can, I guess, these days, in the Republican Party.

https://www.courthousenews.com/making-america-hate-again/