Elle advice columnist E. Jean Carroll has accused President Donald Trump of raping her in her new book, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal.

The cover story in New York magazine is believable and horrifying. The excerpt is realistic and in any other time would force a resignation.

This is the killer passage –

The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.

I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.

I guarantee you what pisses Trump off the most is the line, “thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain…”

The bottom line is he raped her.

Today is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. My wife reminded me this morning. Today, we get the most sunshine out of any other day of the year.

Unfortunately, as I look outside all I see are rainclouds and all I hear is thunder.

So much for the hours and hours of daylight.

Michael Wade on small acts -

No matter how small an act may be, if it is kind or cruel and needlessly done, there is a good chance that it will be remembered for many years.

Right this second, you are reading a post that will more than likely be forgotten in five minutes.

Casey Newton, writing at The Verge, has one of the most upsetting stories in a while. The working conditions of these content moderators for Facebook is appalling. It makes me rethink my engagement with the platform. It should probably do the same to you.

The Orlando-Sentinel, which leans far more Republican than Democrat, is already out with an editorial endorsement for the next President: Not Donald Trump.

The following paragraphs made me smile.

There was a time when even a single lie — a phony college degree, a bogus work history — would doom a politician’s career.

Not so for Trump, who claimed in 2017 that he lost the popular vote because millions of people voted illegally (they didn’t). In 2018 he said North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat (it is). And in 2019 he said windmills cause cancer (they don’t). Just last week he claimed the media fabricated unfavorable results from his campaign’s internal polling (it didn’t).

Maybe his lies will eventually catch up to him. Maybe.

Matt Carpenter just bunted for a double... yes, you read that correctly! pic.twitter.com/mtJUNpG4ji

— St. Louis Cardinals (@Cardinals) June 18, 2019

That must have been humiliating.

Nicholas Bate reminds us that there is always time for a new plan.

1. There can always be a new plan.
2. You just need a fresh page and a sharpened pencil.
3. Some quiet.
4. Some time.
5. A decent cup of freshly brewed coffee.
6. Build on what was working.
7. Be radical about new horizons

Robert McMillan, writing in The Wall Street Journal, has an interesting story about theft.

“Over the last two years, we’ve shown Google irrefutable evidence again and again that they are displaying lyrics copied from Genius,” said Ben Gross, Genius’s chief strategy officer, in an email message. The company said it used a watermarking system in its lyrics that embedded patterns in the formatting of apostrophes. Genius said it found more than 100 examples of songs on Google that came from its site.

Starting around 2016, Genius said, the company made a subtle change to some of the songs on its website, alternating the lyrics’ apostrophes between straight and curly single-quote marks in exactly the same sequence for every song.

When the two types of apostrophes were converted to the dots and dashes used in Morse code, they spelled out the words “Red Handed.”

Being a writer, I hate when I copy and paste something over and the quote marks are all messed up. I try my damndest to fix that and make them consistent. The whole idea of putting some sort of “watermark” to catch these types of thefts is nothing new. Learn more by reading the fictitious entry section on Wikipedia.

Today I learned the late, great Gloria Vanderbilt was Anderson Cooper’s mother.

I had no idea.

Andrew Sullivan, in his weekly column for New York Magazine, talks at length about how brazen, breezy, and ridiculous Donald Trump’s lies are.

For Trump, lying is central to his disturbed psyche, and to his success. The brazenness of it unbalances and stupefies sane and adjusted people, thereby constantly giving him an edge and a little breathing space while we try to absorb it, during which he proceeds to the next lie. And on it goes. It’s like swimming in choppy water. Just when you get to the surface to breathe, another wave crashes into you.

It’s really difficult for me to wrap my brain around the thought processes of the people who flock to him. Do they care about the lies? Do they admire the lying? Is it all professional wrestling to them with Trump as the Face and Democrats the Heel?

Sullivan raises the alarm again.

He will do anything, we have to understand, to protect his psychic attachment to his own self-interest. Anything. I’ll repeat what I believe: He will not leave his office if he narrowly loses in 2020. He’ll fight — and rally his supporters to fight with him. He’s not Nixon. He’s Erdoğan. When, since becoming president, has Trump conceded anything?A tyrant’s path to power is not a straight line, it’s dynamic. Each concession is instantly banked, past vices are turned into virtues, and then the ante is upped once again. The threat rises exponentially with time. If we can’t see this in front of our own eyes, and impeach this man now, even if he will not be convicted, we are flirting with the very stability of our political system. It is not impregnable.

I think most Americans want him gone, but the only real way to do this is through an election, and the only way to make it have an impact is to beat him in a landslide. I’m not sure it will happen.

I very much liked Seth Godin’s post today –

We spend all day communicating, and we’ve invented myriad ways to do it. You can buy a stamp, press a button, rent a room or use a microphone. Choose wisely.

Don’t send an email when you should pick up the phone instead.

Don’t send a text when an email makes more sense.

Don’t have a meeting when a memo is more likely to get the point across.

Don’t give a speech when a blog post would reach more people with more impact.

And don’t write it down when it’s better said live…

Michael Wade with some wisdom –

You know the answer to this: 

Which makes a greater impression on a person: assistance on a major project or assistance on a minor item that will nonetheless be noticed every day?

There are times when it is very risky to describe any action as minor.

I really don’t follow hockey, but I did watch Game 7 of the Stanley Cup playoffs and rejoiced when the Blues won the whole thing. I have a couple of friends who are long time Blues fans and I’m so happy for them I could just burst.

The best roundup of tweets celebrating the win that I could find were sitting on a St. Louis Cardinals website, Viva El Birdos. Enjoy.

Rick Wilson, writing at The Daily Beast, has a pretty strong opinion about the recent interview Trump had with George Stephanopoulos.

We live in a world of counterfactuals, hypotheticals, and more tu quoque scenarios than a reasonable person can process. That said, I have to beg my Republican friends to imagine — just for a moment — what you’d be doing if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama said they would accept the help of a foreign power in a campaign and not report it to the FBI.

I’ll tell you what you’d do: You’d lose your fucking shit.

You’d spurt blood from your goddamn eyes.

You’d corner the market on guillotine, tumbrel, and pitchfork stocks. A gibbet would appear in Lafayette Park.

Fox News producers and on-air talent would grind out weeks of videos until they collapsed, as sick and exhausted as they keep saying Trump’s opponents must be. They’d work like galley slaves, a nearly naked Lou Dobbs beating a massive kettle drum to keep them producing screeching agitporn.

Entire forests would be leveled and pulped to write the condemnatory articles and books. The lights would dim on the Eastern Seaboard, and nuclear power plants would be brought online to support the massive surge of electricity needed to power a hundred thousand new servers hosting the hundred million articles and videos you’d make condemning this outrageous act.

You’d demand not only impeachment, but also drawing, quartering, and the wholesale razing of the villages of everyone involved. You’d call anyone else doing this a traitor, a villain, and the worst person ever to hold the office of president.

But we all know what’s going to happen to Trump, don’t we? It’s already happening:

Not a goddamned thing.

This isn’t hard to understand. It isn’t something shockingly new. Republicans don’t care about governing for the good of the people. They only care about power and the rich and powerful. As soon as the vast majority of Americans realize this and vote them out of power will they change.

Jack Gronsky, writing at Viva El Birdos, paints a picture of what it’s like to be at the end of a career and trying to figure out what’s next. Brilliant piece of prose.

David Brooks, in his column in The New York Times, describes an impending disaster for Republicans.

But it’s hard to look at the generational data and not see long-term disaster for Republicans. Some people think generations get more conservative as they age, but that is not borne out by the evidence. Moreover, today’s generation gap is not based just on temporary intellectual postures. It is based on concrete, lived experience that is never going to go away.

Unlike the Silent Generation and the boomers, millennials and Gen Z voters live with difference every single day. Only 16 percent of the Silent Generation is minority, but 44 percent of the millennial generation is. If you are a millennial in California, Texas, Florida, Arizona or New Jersey, ethnic minorities make up more than half of your age cohort. In just over two decades, America will be a majority-minority country.

I remember this being a prevalent thought during the last few years of the Obama presidency. It’s why I was shocked and saddened at the election of Trump. Looking back now, I think Trump is that last gasp of a party that has been surpassed by a whole generation about to be able to vote in the 2020 election.

What I don’t see is how the Republican party can change. Who are the young, dynamic Young Republicans and what will they stand for?

Warren Ellis has a modest proposal that made me laugh.

What I need is a post-death internet service. This is something people have been talking about a lot over the last few years. I don’t know if any true solutions were found for the thing that, this morning, I think I’d like the most. A year after I die, I’d like to post to Twitter or something. Hell, who even knows if Twitter will be there by then. He said, as if he were likely to outlive any internet service. Maybe it should go to my newsletter system instead.

But: just a message, a year after I die. Saying, hi, I died a year ago, but I just wanted to tell you something. Which, yes, is unsettling enough on its own, I know. It’s not unamusing to me, obviously. But.

Hi. I died a year ago, but I just wanted to tell you something. I loved being with you all, and I hope you’re all making the most out of life, because we only get one go on the ride. Hold on tight.

But I think mostly I probably just want to scare the shit out of people.

What a cool idea.

Jon Stewart, former host of The Daily Show, spoke on Capitol Hill today about continued funding for health care and benefits for 9/11 first responders. His passion is moving.

I really wish Stewart would run for political office someday.

Brent Simmons, regarding the web ―

The web is a conversation. Blog posts can be questions.