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To put this in perspective, let me tell you that my sister first started smoking cigarettes when she was 11 years old, the same age as your daughter. This was in the early 90s, when smoking was still fairly widespread. She was smoking daily by the time she was 13 or 14. A lot of my friends started around then too. By the time I was 16, I was friends with more than a dozen kids who smoked every day.All of these people are in their mid-to-late thirties now, and are all “okay.” About half of them are still smoking. Granted, I don't talk to all of them regularly. Some of them I only see an occasional Facebook post from. But, to the best of my knowledge, none of them has any major health complications. They hold down jobs, own property and pay taxes. No one has cancer yet, and cigarettes are a LOT worse for you than vaping. So, to me, "okay" is very much a matter of perspective. If my friends and family can start smoking at a young age and be relatively okay, I imagine your daughter can vape and also be okay. Of course, none of this information means that the people I know won't develop health problems in the future, and the same would, to a lesser extent, apply to your daughter.There is a legitimate point of view that says that kids are going to experiment regardless of what we do, and that if your daughter really wants to find out what nicotine is all about, it's wonderful that she chose a delivery device that won't put tar in her lungs, contains 95% fewer toxins than cigarettes, won't affect her athletic performance, and doesn't seem at all likely to give her cancer.Does that mean that vaping is completely harmless and safe? Of course not. There's a lot of bad science and propaganda there to sort through, so it's hard to say exactly what vaping does and does not do to you. It definitely dehydrates you. It definitely increases your chances of getting pneumonia. It seems very likely to be bad for your immune system, although I want to read into that research a little more before I make up my mind. It disrupts your sleep patterns, like any other nicotine addiction. None of this is great, but I don't consider any of it to be earth-shattering either. Many of the other claims, such as popcorn lung, or ridiculously high levels of formaldehyde, end up being nothing more than poor research and scare tactics used by groups who don't want to see the vaping industry grow, for one reason or another. If there's truly more going on, we will likely need to wait 20 years or so to find out what it is.The thing that actually bothers me about an eleven-year-old vaping (and I think about this a lot, because my own children are 10, 11 and 12, and my girlfriend vapes heavily) is that nicotine is addictive, complete with cravings and withdrawal symptoms. That, to me, isn't something I want my child dealing with. It seems like a very adult problem to face. At that age, they should be paying attention in class and playing with their friends, not tapping their foot anxiously and waiting for a chance to hide in the bathroom or behind the building to sneak a few puffs (I certainly remember my friends having some of these moments). Children just shouldn't have an additional need to face like that, and our society certainly doesn't allow for it, or accept it. What's going to happen when she wants to sleep over at a friend's house, and the parents flip out when she pulls out a Juul and starts puffing away? How many calls do you want to get from the principal because your daughter was found vaping on school grounds? How bad do you want her grades to get, because she was busy daydreaming about her next puff instead of paying attention to the teacher? Do you want to deal with her snapping at you because she's out of pods and going through a nicotine fit? Is she responsible enough to keep track of her device, and keep it charged? Who's paying for all this?Of course, my sister and several of my friends survived most of these hazards, and smelled worse doing it. Most of them didn't have parental permission, but a few did. Like most things in parenting, you have to decide what's okay for you. At least you are talking about it, rather than her hiding it for years like my sister and friends did (some more successfully than others).

I asked this question weeks ago. I’ve been reading more articles about Stone, and thinking about it — and I’d like to offer my take on this discussion.First of all, Mueller is a serious, disciplined man, and his focus may well be only on Russia-related matters and contradictory stories Stone has told about his relationship with Assange, and Stone’s role in helping Trump, Putin and wikileaks smear Podesta and Hillary, to throw the election to Trump. However, when Mueller incidentally comes across law-breaking outside the purview of his investigation, he seems to refer it to others. I am dearly hoping he does that if, for example, he were to review Stone’s email history and find evidence that Stone, and/or Sean Hannity concocted a bogus backstory with Tweeden for that dumb gag photo from an old USO tour.Roger Stone prides himself on being a dirty trickster. He’s proud of lying in 1960, when he was small, to other children to make them support JFK whom he liked at the time. (A few years later he read Goldwater’s book and moved right.) He told the other little kids that Nixon would want to make them to go to school on Saturday: his first dirty trick!He did “dark” things for the Nixon campaign as a young man, working alongside Colson, smearing people Nixon was running against — for example, giving a donation in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance to the other candidate — and then giving the receipt for that donation to a newspaper. In other words, Nixon wanted to present another candidate as a commie, based on nothing. Stone fabricated evidence and used it to knock the other candidate out of the running. That kind of garbage is his specialty; he takes pride and joy in it, and it is the essence of who he is.Quick: name an equivalent top-level Democrat professional dirty trickster! Having trouble? Yeah, I can’t think of one, either.Stone is a long-time partner/friend of the equally putrid, traitorous, lying Paul Manafort. Roger Stone was part of the 1988 campaign for George Herbert Walker Bush that Lee Atwater ran — and that Atwater, on his death-bed, repented of, desperately wanting to be absolved for having been involved in something as disgusting as the 1988 Republican presidential campaign. It was pure Roger Stone, and Stone may have had a big role in the racist Willie Horton ads, though it’s one more issue he’s coy about. (Stone is casually racist at other times, as when he referred to newsman Roland Martin as a “fat negro” on Twitter.) Stone also had a big role in the 2000 election Brooks Brothers Riot — when a bunch of middle-aged white men in expensive suits, flown in for the occasion, threw a violent tantrum, not just shaking windows but injuring people — to stop the legal recount of votes in Florida during the Bush v. Gore controversy.Stone lies casually about invented sex scandals, as when he said during the 2016 campaign that Ted Cruz had affairs with five women, to distract from what a sexual glutton and creeper Trump is. And Stone wrote a book sexually smearing Bill Clinton and painting Hillary Clinton as the enabler of a serial rapist. Stone hangs out with the InfoWars crowd, the National Enquirer crowd: you know — what passes for journalism and fact-checking in the modern Republican Party.I recently read an article about Kirsten Gillibrand. Apparently, I’m not the only one still angry at her for her role in stampeding Democrats (plus Bernie Sanders) into demanding Al Franken’s resignation. (I haven’t forgiven the other senators, either. Any of them.) Still, Gillibrand has gotten lots of campaign donations because of it! The article quoted a Republican who wished Franken had still been on the committee that heard Kavanaugh testify because it would have shown that if there’s an investigation and you’re cleared — then you’re cleared!Here’s the thing, though. There was no thorough, unlimited investigation of Brett Kavanaugh and the accusations against him. Donald Trump said there would be that kind of investigation, that the FBI could ask any question and talk to anyone within that week, but Donald Trump is a contemptible serial liar, like his friend Roger Stone. (Both of them were mentored by master liar and Republican monster Roy Cohn.) Republicans all knew Trump was lying as he said there were no limits on the FBI investigation, and as he mocked Dr. Blasey Ford — and Republicans were fine with it, as they are fine with all Trump’s lies.Here’s what Al Franken and Dr. Blasey Ford have in common: each of them wanted a real investigation. Each of them welcomed actual due process and a sober, serious, slow, deliberate gathering of facts. Each wanted to be questioned, rigorously, under oath.Other people, answering this question I asked, and writing elsewhere, say the fact that Franken stepped down, and did not get angry and throw a Kavanaugh-style hissy fit is a sign that Franken is guilty — practically an admission of guilt! But Roy Moore threw lots of hissy fits. That didn’t make him innocent. (Well, maybe in Republican eyes it does …) Kavanaugh’s hissy fit, coached by Trump’s White House, is not proof that Kavanaugh is not or was not an aggressive, ugly, predatory drunk — and Kavanaugh’s hissy-fit was unbecoming a of a judge, let alone a candidate for our nation’s highest bench.When Al Franken was accused — he acted like a senator. It’s quite possible that neither he nor LeeAnn Tweeden remembers the circumstances surrounding that stupid joke picture he took standing over her. Maybe neither of them remember if she was asleep or awake. But after her surgical, precise “hit-job” day of interviews (after which she disappeared, before anyone could screw up the nerve to ask her a question about inconsistencies in her story), as a man who has been a feminist and a champion of women’s issues much of his life, Franken may have been inclined to believe that he made her uncomfortable in ways he had not realized. He thought they were friends — but could he have missed a signal? Isn’t it easy for a man to say that they were just joking around? And so, he apologized, sincerely. Then, other charges started rolling in — and he did what is proper for a senator to do in that case. He said he would not comment until the Senate Ethics Committee hearings on the matter.Women who had worked alongside Franken, and under his authority when he was head writer at SNL (going back to Laraine Newman days), and his staffers on the Hill, wrote group letters stating that they never saw him treat women with anything but respect. Republicans hollered about that — then copied the tactic with Kavanaugh, releasing a “spontaneous” letter signed by many women seemingly moments after he was accused, though at least one woman who knew him as a girl and said he was a great guy (Renate) revised her opinion when she learned about him and the other “Renate alumni” in the yearbook …Al Franken was robbed of his chance to appear before the Ethics Committee, with his accusers testifying under oath — with him and them all having to answer serious questions … just like Dr. Blasey Ford and other Kavanaugh accusers were robbed of a real investigation, and the chance to submit to questioning under oath that they would have welcomed.Here’s some more context some people may not have about the Franken case. (For those who read me regularly — I’ve used some of these examples and links before, so you may wanna skim …)When I’ve written about Franken on Quora, usually some right-wing guy posts the stupid photo in reply, as if I haven’t seen it, as if we all haven’t seen it — as if it’s irrefutable proof that he’s a monster. But again — who knows if she was asleep — if either of them remember anything about when it was snapped. Even if she was asleep, if they were friends, it’s still possible she laughed it off, as a guy might laugh it off when a friend draws a penis on his forehead when he’s passed out at a party. Franken did not have a lot in common with the people on those USO tours he did. A lot of people on the tours, including Tweeden, thought the invasion of Iraq was great, and W was great! Franken — not so much. He’s a guy who went to Harvard, a Swiftian satirist, but the USO wanted him to generate lowest-common-denominator stag party humor to entertain the troops. So, he generated it. It’s not his favorite kind of thing, judging from the rest of his work: SNL sketches, irony, nuance and smart, fact-filled books.Tweeden says she thought it was suspect that he wanted to rehearse their sketch and their stage business and kiss. Anyone who does comedy or who acts knows you don’t get on national television — or on stage before thousands or tens of thousands of people — without rehearsing your lines and stage business if you’re a professional. When Al Franken started on SNL with Tom Davis, they dressed up in sumo wrestling outfits several times. Here’s a later appearance:The Franken and Davis ShowI’m sure they rehearsed all bits, including sumo wrestling, more than once, not because they were actually hot for each other and getting off on it, but because comedy is hard, and physical comedy involves timing and getting the bit of business just right, and something can go wrong when you lunge at somebody or hit him over the head with a rubber chicken or throw a pie in his face, and you have to be serious about being funny, or you’re an amateur and a flaky ditz.Since these were tours in dangerous places, under stressful conditions, with people who didn’t necessarily have a lot in common, there were dumb sex jokes, onstage and off, to bring the troupe together and ease tension. Here is Leeann Tweeden on the USO tour with country singer Mark Wills:If she doesn’t believe in rehearsing, did she do that to Wills without getting permission in advance? Did he do that to her without permission? Should they both be pilloried for harassment? Or — might that kind of sophomorish humor have been typical of the tour, and basically harmless?Tweeden said during her one, blitzkrieg day of interviews that Franken laid a big, sloppy kiss on her while rehearsing, and she was repelled by him afterward, and wouldn’t let him near her, and frowned and looked down and wouldn’t talk to him — so he drew something silly on a picture of her and posed for that simulated groping picture while she was sleeping as payback, out of spite, ’cause she’d become cold toward him.Then, she said, when she and her husband saw Franken at a recent event, they said: Hi, Al, bye Al, and walked in different directions — so he’d know she wasn’t his friend! But wait. Hadn’t she already communicated to him on the tour that they were not friends, so pointedly that he paid her back by taking the picture? (No wonder she didn’t give follow-up interviews.)And why did she go to a USO dinner to honor him, years after the tour? He invited her because he thought they were friends. And she went — why, exactly? Smiling and happy and joking with him? Some say it’s like women in Hollywood; she needed to do it to get ahead.BREAKING: Leann Tweeden Honored Al Franken in USO DinnerBut she was a Hooters calendar girl turning into a FOX “News” commentator: how exactly could a left-leaning comedian/politician like Franken have any impact on her career?These are the kinds of questions that could have come up if she and he both testified under oath before the Senate Ethics Committee. And all of those other women accusing him — there were newspaper articles about them, but their stories were not vetted by the New York Times, the Washington Post or the New Yorker: very careful, fact-checking periodicals that did vet stories women told about Trump and Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby and Roy Moore. Did Franken as a radio host at Air America really say to a woman, off the air, something like “I get to do this to you because I’m famous?” That sounds awfully close to Donald Trump on the Access Hollywood tape saying “When you’re a celebrity, they let you do it.” It doesn’t sound like any Al Franken anyone had heard of before; it sounds like the people he’s spent decades passionately calling out in his books. It sounds like a paraphrase of Trump’s remark, inserted into Al Franken’s mouth, crafted by a professional lying political ratf**ker like Roger Stone.And some of the accusations against Franken get pretty Rashoman. Here’s Tina Dupuy writing in the Atlantic about her experience:I Believe Franken’s Accusers Because He Groped Me, TooAt a Media Matters party in 2008, on election night, when people like Franken were euphorically happy to see Obama win after eight years of W and his two ill-planned wars of choice, Dupuy asked to take a picture with Franken, and he hugged her. She says he squeezed the flesh at her midriff; that’s how he “groped” her. Elsewhere she said he fat-shamed her. But — isn’t squeezing flesh at the midriff a hug, kind of by definition? When a team of male athletes hug and climb all over each other when they win a series or a key game, are they sexually harassing each other? Or are they just incredibly happy, and sharing a victory?One person’s invasive touching is another person’s friendly gesture — as we saw when a Republican politician in Pennsylvania at a state government meeting freaked out when a Democratic colleague touched him on the arm:Are people like this Republican guy and Dupuy “wrong” to feel traumatized by touch they didn’t like? No. Of course not. They are entitled to their feelings, and others should respect them. But do they automatically get the right to ascribe malignant motives to the person who touched them in the way they didn’t like, and ruin someone else’s career? I don’t think they should have that right.Al Franken is a hugger. When he took pictures, for hours, with thousands of people at a state fair, he’d put an arm around the other person’s waist. It’s possible that a few of those thousands of people, over the years, thought he was putting his hand on their butt/copping a feel, when he wasn’t.I know a guy who runs a group in Nashville. He used to hug people who visited his organization; he told me now he feels it’s too dangerous. I understand why he feels that way, but it’s a shame. He gave nice hugs.Dupuy ends her piece by saying she tweeted “Sorry” to Monica Lewinsky. Sorry for what? Does Dupuy think Monica Lewinsky stepped forward and accused Bill Clinton of harassment or assault, and was not believed? No. Monica Lewinsky made repeated sexual overtures to Bill Clinton, though he never got as involved as she wanted, and after they broke the consensual relationship off, they both preferred to keep it private, but Republicans and the media insisted on publicly slut-shaming both of them, endlessly. That’s who and what ruined Monica Lewinsky’s life, as she says in her TED talk …The price of shameWhat if Bill Clinton, along with Al Franken, has never harassed or assaulted anyone? What if Bill and Hillary have been the targets of a non-stop, flak-generating, lying Republican machine since the early 1990s, and if the sexual allegations against him are as bogus as stories about Whitewater, and Mena, and the “murder” of Vince Foster, and the political “assassination” of Seth Rich, and Benghazi, and stupid stories about the Clinton Foundation, and stupid stories about emails, and Travel-gate, and File-gate, and Pizza-gate …More context … when Franken ran for Senate, Matt Drudge published a picture of him in bunny ears and a diaper.Drudge smears "joker" Franken with doctored photoThe Ohio Republican Party also used that lying image of Franken. Think about that, for a second. Try to think of a time when the Democratic Party, in any state, has done something like that.Republicans who wanted to mock Franken after that mostly used an image of him as Stuart Smalley. If they only knew SNL history, they could have reached back for a photo of him dressed up as a sumo wrestler …Al Franken liked to tell a story about his Minnesota political hero Paul Wellstone; Wellstone’s tragic death got Franken to run for office. It was a funny story about Wellstone, as his son ran a race, trying to keep up with him, and frantically yelling for him to win. Franken’s Republican opponent Norm Coleman ran a bit of the speech out of context in an ad to make Franken look angry and unbalanced, like he’s just a crazy guy yelling:So, Al Franken countered by running Coleman’s ad in his own ad — and then showing the footage in context of him telling the warm, funny story of Paul Wellstone coaching his son. Coleman was shamed, and pulled the dishonest ad immediately. But — it turns out the National Republican Senatorial Committee had no shame that they could feel: they started using the footage in a lying context themselves:Repub ad dredges up footage of Franken “being” Wellstone | MinnPostAgain, think about that for a second. The National Republican Senatorial Committee did this. Now, try to think of a Democratic equivalent. Take your time.Republicans don’t believe in science anymore. There is over 90% consensus among climate scientists that man-made climate change is real and a threat to our country and the world. NASA agrees. The military agrees. But all major Republican leaders pretend not to know science is real. They scrub real science from .gov websites and “discourage” use of terms like “evidence-based” at the CDC.Republicans don’t believe in fact-checked media anymore. They watch FOX “News.” They don’t distinguish between news articles and editorial content. They don’t distinguish between a publication with a storied history and a hard-earned reputation that employs fact-checkers, issues retractions and apologies and occasionally fires journalists … and what Republicans read and watch: click-bait sites from Macedonia, Facebook feed put up by Russian cybertrolls, InfoWars, the National Enquirer and so on. If they see or read something they don’t like, Republicans shrug and call it “fake news.”Republicans yell about voter fraud, and pretend not to know what Brian Kemp did in Georgia or what happened in North Carolina. They pretend that Democrats are the ones stealing elections. They live a rich fantasy life.Republicans were fine with their leaders yelling that brown people were invading America and bringing Ebola over the border in 2014! And then, when the midterm election was over, they were fine with the threat of Ebola magically disappearing. They’re fine with Trump yelling about the Caravan, and how it’s full of Middle Easterners, it’s an invasion, maybe they’re bringing smallpox which no longer exists, Trump has got to move army troops to the border! And again, they’re fine with the Caravan melting away into nothing, when the midterm election is over. These lying games don’t dent their credulity, or their xenophobia, or their hunger for a wall — not one little smidge!All of Trump’s intelligence agencies, and the people he chose to run them, say Russia hacked the 2016 election to install Trump. Dan Coates, his Director of National Intelligence, also says so. Republicans shrug when Trump lies about it, and when he grovels before Putin, as in Helsinki. They don’t mind how Trump lies constantly. about everything. When he says “All I know is what I read online,” or when he disastrously changes policy because Republican talking heads told him to — it all makes sense to them. They don’t think that he is a traitor, doing tremendous damage to our country, or that they themselves are traitors for backing him. Republicans have left ethics, the rule of law and the reality-based universe behind.There is no Democratic equivalent for lying outfits like Project Veritas. Kirsten Gillibrand says we must believe all women who step forward. Well, does she believe the woman who went to the Washington Post, during the Alabama election Roy Moore took part in, and said Roy Moore got her pregnant as a teen and kept asking if she and the Post were going to bring him down?A conservative group tried to plant a fake Roy Moore allegation in the Washington Post. It failed.The Post saw through the tactic. But when right-wing asshole Andrew Breitbart, founder of the alt-right scum site Breitbart, smeared Shirley Sherrod with doctored, manipulated footage, she lost her job with the Department of Agriculture. When she was offered her job back, once her name was cleared, she chose not to go back. What had happened to her was perhaps too hurtful — and that might be one reason Al Franken left quietly. He had worked hard, for years, as a senator, building relationships within his own party and across the aisle, showing people he was a serious, hard-working person in government. When so many colleagues turned on him without giving him the chance to clear his name … maybe he just figured it was time to leave.This brings us back to Leeann Tweeden — because on Hannity’s show, she called Shirley Sherrod a racist. Tweeden was all indignant that Al Franken’s first apology to her wasn’t good enough — but she sort of deigned to accept his second, more lengthy apology.So, when is Leeann Tweeden going to apologize to Shirley Sherrod? Isn’t that apology long overdue?You know who Tweeden did not call a racist? Donald Trump. When Trump was leading the lying, racist Birther Movement, Tweeden expressed an opinion about that, also, on Hannity’s show. She didn’t say: “Oh, what a contemptible bigot, making up a garbage story that President Obama was born in Kenya, playing to Republican white identity politics and fears and suspicions of black people.” She didn’t say: “It embarrasses me as a Republican to see prominent Republicans lie so easily and thoughtlessly. Shame on Trump and those who accept and promote his lie.” No, she thought it was a brilliant political tactic Trump was using! In other words, Tweeden thinks it’s a great idea to MAKE STUFF UP about a Democrat you don’t like, and use it to try to bring that person down.So, why did Republicans have it in for Al Franken? Republicans used to say only they were funny, in the ‘80s, with the “hilarity” of PJ O’Rourke and Andrew Dice Clay. Democrats were too earnest and politically correct to be funny, they maintained. Well, all that got blown out of the water by Franken’s book Rush Limbaugh Is a Big, Fat Idiot. It led to Jon Stewart on the Daily Show and to all the genuinely funny left-leaning people who came out of that and followed. It led to Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee and John Oliver and also to Seth Meyers and a ton of other late-night hosts … Think of someone who’s as funny on the right. I dare ya.Franken’s later books like Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them went after FOX even more specifically. Franken is outraged by liars and hypocrites: sickened and angered by them. Watch him debate Bill O’Reilly on youtube sometime. It’s pretty electrifying. Franken saw, in advance, the horrible present world that the constant lying of Republican media and leaders might lead us to.Once Franken was in the Senate, he proved again and again that he was a man of substance. He didn’t grandstand … but as the Trumpsters came in, we saw that old satirist’s fire, mixed with his new, deliberate, statesmanlike ways. He asked the most pointed questions of Tom Price and Betsy DeVos and Neil Gorsuch at their confirmation hearings. At Jeff Sessions’ confirmation hearings as Attorney General, it was Al Franken who asked the question that led Sessions to perjure himself and say neither he nor anyone he knew in the Trump campaign was in contact with Russia during the election … which led to Sessions having to come back and testify again and again — and it led to him recusing himself. In other words, Trump may shut down the Mueller investigation tomorrow, but the reason it has lasted this long … is largely Senator Al Franken.Al Franken was being mentioned as a possible presidential candidate for 2020. Like Trump he was a known name, a TV personality — but unlike Trump he’s genuinely smart, funny, substantive, and he’s also a real statesman.All of that is the context to keep in mind for Roger Stone’s tweet, just before Tweeden launched her blitzkrieg day of interviews, that it was about to be “Al Franken’s time in the barrel.” Well, it should be Roger Stone’s time in the barrel now, and not just about Russia. Stone paid Bill Clinton’s accusers thousands of dollars each to hold a press conference with Trump the day of the second presidential debate in 2016 and to help try to turn that debate into a circus. (Stone also paid a woman who was molested as a girl to appear; a judge demanded that Hillary represent the girl’s indigent attacker, back when Hillary was representing people who could not afford to hire legal counsel, when Hillary was an idealistic young lawyer.)Trump’s close ally Roger Stone paid rape victim $2,500 before she appeared at the debateSo, Stone paid off Kathleen Willey’s mortgage. And Stone says Trump also gave her money. Kathleen Willey is someone who is definitely lying; she sobbed and told Diane Sawyer that Bill Clinton lunged at her sexually, groping her, and she wanted to slap his face — but in real life she was still sending him love letters/give-me-a-job letters at the White House after the date of the alleged assault, writing stalkerish things like “I’m your number one fan.” A judge got furious at Bill Clinton for releasing that letter, saying he was invading Willey’s privacy. In fact, he was clearing his own name.Ken Starr, when he was investigating Bill Clinton, pretended not to know that Kathleen Willey was a serial liar who wanted to have an affair with Clinton according to Linda Tripp and others, and Starr set out to destroy Julie Hiatt Steele who would not lie and back Willey’s story, just as Starr was out to destroy Susan McDougal because she wouldn’t lie and make up stuff about Whitewater or say she had an affair with Bill Clinton.Starr and Willey: The Untold StoryIn contrast to the treatment of McDougal and Steele, being a professional Clinton accuser has been lucrative for decades; it caused Republican operatives (including Roger Stone?) to pay for Paula Jones’ plastic surgery and led to her Penthouse spread. There is no equivalent of Democrats paying women to accuse Trump or Moore or Ailes or O’Reilly or Kavanaugh that I’ve ever seen documented. Republican media made much of one Trump accuser who wanted to be flown somewhere for an interview and was asking a magazine to pay for her travel, and they were considering it. Ultimately, they did not pay her, and she is not among the nineteen women whose names/stories about Trump we know.What about when some of the same professional Clinton accusers who showed up at the debate, and who yelled never mind Donald Trump’s sexual crimes, focus on the Clintons, at that press conference before it — what about when they went to Senator Al Franken’s office hollering and demanding Franken’s head? Did Stone pay them again, then?Bill Clinton accusers barge into Al Franken's office, call on him to resignDid Stone pay any of the eight women accusing Franken? Did he correspond about these things with Tweeden or Hannity or anyone before Tweeden stepped forward? All of this is worth holding hearings about in the House, when the Democrats take over. It is a crime to destroy a senator in that way. During the week Chuck Schumer was advising his friend Al Franken to step down, Schumer sent a bogus document tying Schumer to sexual harassment to the Capitol Police.Reported Schumer Sex Suit Is 'Completely False': Ex-StafferSchumer never said: Oh, I’ve been accused, I must step down … He wanted the smear against himself investigated.Republicans keep on smearing. Jacob Wohl, the “mastermind” behind charges of domestic abuse against Michael Avenatti, is the same douchebag who tried to pay off women and get them to lie and say that Robert Mueller harassed them. You know Wohl — the guy whose Surefire Intelligence uses his mom’s phone number?Again, it’s the logical conclusion of where the GOP has been heading for years. People knew Roger Stone was a dirty trickster each time they hired him: Nixon; Reagan; George HW Bush; W; Trump. They hired him and worked with him precisely because he is a lying scumbag who generates false information.This is what the Republican Party has come to. These are people who say the murder of those children at Newtown never happened. They voted for Donald Trump who went on the air with Alex Jones who goes after the parents of those murdered children. Republicans are fine with all of it. They’re fine with Trump leading the lying, racist Birther movement, and hiring Bill Shine who enabled O’Reilly and Ailes and other sexual predators on FOX as the White House communications director, and they’re fine with Trump also being a predator and lying every day and breaking every law and colluding … They are a party untethered from both basic morality and the fact-based universe. They now drift, baby-like, through a world in which they figure that anything they feel like believing is true.That’s why Kirsten Gillibrand and all those Democratic senators plus Bernie were wrong. Al Franken may have harassed women, but it’s also possible he never did. We do need a presumption of innocence. And people who want real investigations and due process — not the bogus Kavanaugh kind — have a precious right to those things.And self-proclaimed dirty trickster Roger Stone, after a life devoted to degrading our democracy, should be held accountable for every ugly, lying, smearing, rat-f***king thing he has done to individuals, and to our country, at long last.

email sez: “Christina Anderson requested your answer Why should I care about what a SIMP is? How come it is so popular and trending?”because … uh one, uh two, uh one two three quatro“everything old is new again!”I ain’t heard that expression in more than 45 years!Ah, the Good ol’ Days, when all the Rich Kids with their Spit Straws and Family Lawyers would squirt all the “simpletons” with mustard and relish from the packets they’d get at the school cafeteria and then laugh and Laugh and LAUGH about how much the resulting paint job would look like Snot all over the “mouth breathers” and the “four eyes”, and the “book worms” and the “jews”, ah, such fond memories of such Harmless Fun.AnywaySo when I SEEN it in writing, “In THIS Day and Age” then the Old Reliable “Assessment Tool” called the “Association Test” that schools start giving kids to segregate the “simps” and the “wimps” and the “tards of the A/V department” from the “jocks” and the “soxers” and the “can do no wrongs” with the last names that just coincidentally happen to match the “donated by” “brass labels” on school “wings” and libraries and athletic fields and ”A/V equipment”, and the term you offer here in this Column “A” instruction found its IMMEDIATE MATCH in Column B called“The Taunt”that goad “MADE YA LOOK! MADE YA LOOK! MADE YA FIND A PENNY BOOK!”So I JUST HADDA “Follow The Yellow Brick Road”, of course, “don’tcha know” to see what kind of Box Trap the “oo! a piece of candy” trail was leading the witless too THIS TIME!Upon Arrival at the Box, I THEN Notice the carpet runner covering the String that goes from the stick holding the box up, all the way across the ground and disappearing at the couch behind which the “Mischievous but Fun Loving” “Budding Leaders in the Making” are Ensconced with one hand on the string and the other hand covering their noses and mouths, all of which glistens from the spit and snot ejaculated all over the place from the snickering and chuckling whispers of “OO! this is gonna be SO FUN!”Next step was to highlight and right-click, “search google for” simpand WHAT SHOULD MY EYES BEHOLD!ANOTHER THREE pieces of the “Concentration Game”, the cards marked “popular” and “trending” and “hate” here in Column A just coincidentally matching their Analogs in Column B of the google results page.So in my OBVIOUS NEED To PROVE MY OWN “Not Understanding the question” and thereby Avoid finding myself “in the dark” under the box, I shot right back over here to REPORT The Intelligence to the Proper Agents of the Analysis Department for their further processing,such things as these, of course, being simply WAY Beyond MY Paygrade as a simpleton to have the least bit comprehension of all the intricacies and complexities and nuances and things of that nature,You may Collapse me now for my FAILURE to perform my duty as expected and instead must report that I was UNABLE TO LOCATE anything the least bit HATEFUL about the National Security Agency’s,ORThe Department of Homeland Security’sor any of the other Alphabet Soup Gang’suse of anything meeting YOUR CRITERIA of POPULAR and TRENDINGSIRS!PERMISSION TO BE DISMISSED!SIRS!?ees all right?