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Australia Rings In The New Year With Rainbow-Colored Fireworks In Honor Of Marriage Equality

Rainbow-colored fireworks at Sydney's New Years celebration

Australia rang in the new year with an estimated 1.5 million attending the awesome fireworks show over Sydney harbor.

This year’s show included a section with rainbow-colored fireworks in honor of the recently passed legislation legalizing same-sex marriage.

Although a few couples received special permission to wed early, the official start date for marriage equality down under is January 8.

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NYT: Drunken Bragging By Trump Adviser Sparked FBI’s Russian Investigation

George Papadopolous

The short version of the story: it was bragging by a Trump adviser – not the infamous “pee-pee” dossier – that launched the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia.

From The New York Times:

During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.

Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.

The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired.

Donald Trump and Republicans have doggedly tried to assert the investigation began because of a dossier compiled by a former UK intelligence agent paid for by a rival campaign.

Now we know it was the bragging of a Trump camp 28 year-old idiot who then lied to the FBI leading to a plea deal and his cooperation in the ongoing Mueller investigation.

Trump Land folks have tried to discredit Papadopolous as a low-level “coffee boy,” but it turns out Mr. P was much more than that. According to Axios, he “helped arrange a meeting between Trump and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and “continued for months” to set up a meeting with Russian representatives, ‘keeping senior campaign advisers abreast of his efforts.'”

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“Make America Gay Again” Sign Posted Next Door To Mike Pence Vacation Home

Jason Auslander / The Aspen Times

Vice President Mike Pence surely got the message posted on the mailbox next door to the home he’s vacationing at in Aspen, Colorado.

And that message was, “Make America Gay Again.”

Neighbors of the home near Aspen where Pence and his wife, Karen, are staying posted the message Wednesday or Thursday on a stone pillar that sits at the end of driveways to both homes, Pitkin County Sheriff’s Deputy Michael Buglione told the Aspen Times.

Pence, a well-known homophobe who has fought LGBT rights for years, has described himself as a “Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order.”

#AndTheCrowdGoesWild!

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Donald “Back To Work” Trump Spends 5th Consecutive Day On Golf Course

Donald Trump, who tweeted Christmas night that he would get “back to work” the next morning, is spending his 5th consecutive day playing golf.

This is his 89th day at a golf course since taking office.

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Dept. Of Justice Will Not Fight Court Rulings Against Trump’s Transgender Military Ban, Enlistments To Begin January 1

The U.S. Justice Department announced Friday night that it will not fight the rulings of four federal courts against Donald Trump’s proposed ban on transgender military service members.

From The Washington Blade:

“The Department of Defense has announced that it will be releasing an independent study of these issues in the coming weeks,” the DOJ official said. “So rather than litigate this interim appeal before that occurs, the administration has decided to wait for DOD’s study and will continue to defend the president’s and secretary of defense’s lawful authority in district court in the meantime.”

The Justice Department on Friday withdrew its appeals of three court rulings against Trump’s transgender military ban — one from a federal court in D.C., another from a federal court in Maryland and another from a federal court in Washington State. A federal court in California also ruled against Trump’s trans ban, but the Justice Department had yet to appeal that decision.

In July, Trump announced via Twitter he would ban transgender people from the armed forces “in any capacity,” following up with a directive making good on that promise. As a result of litigation from LGBT legal groups, court enjoined the Pentagon from enforcing that directive. The Justice Department sought a stay on those decisions, but only as it pertained to allowing openly transgender people to enlist in the armed forces.

This means transgender Americans who want to serve their country will be able to enlist beginning January 1.

“This is a major victory in the litigation and great news for transgender troops, transgender military academy and ROTC students, and transgender people who have been waiting to enlist,” said Shannon Minter, Legal Director for the National Center For Lesbian Rights. “There is no reason to exclude transgender people from military service, especially when they have already proved their ability to serve. Transgender people are part of this country, and their willingness to take on the hardships and sacrifices of military service should be honored, not banned.”

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Esquire: NY Times Interview Reveals Trump Is In “Severe Cognitive Decline”

In an article for Esquire, writer Charles P. Pierce comes to the conclusion that Donald Trump is quite possibly in “severe cognitive decline, if not the early stages of outright dementia.”

You may recall that our current president is the oldest American president to take the office and that his father developed Alzheimer’s in the 1980s.

When you couple those facts with his spur of the moment Twitter rants and his terrible use of sentence structure/syntax when he struggles to explain himself, it’s not far-fetched to imagine.

Pierce writes, in part:

In this interview, the president* is only intermittently coherent. He talks in semi-sentences and is always groping for something that sounds familiar, even if it makes no sense whatsoever and even if it blatantly contradicts something he said two minutes earlier. To my ears, anyway, this is more than the president*’s well-known allergy to the truth. This is a classic coping mechanism employed when language skills are coming apart. (My father used to give a thumbs up when someone asked him a question. That was one of the strategies he used to make sense of a world that was becoming quite foreign to him.) My guess? That’s part of the reason why it’s always “the failing New York Times,” and his 2016 opponent is “Crooked Hillary.”

In addition, the president* exhibits the kind of stubbornness you see in patients when you try to relieve them of their car keys–or, as one social worker in rural North Carolina told me, their shotguns. For example, a discussion on health-care goes completely off the rails when the president* suddenly recalls that there is a widely held opinion that he knows very little about the issues confronting the nation.

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Donald Trump Fires Entire HIV/AIDS Advisory Council

Back in June of this year, six members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) resigned over Donald Trump’s inaction on the issue of HIV/AIDS.

In part, the resignations were based on Trump’s failure to appoint a chief to oversee White House policy on HIV/AIDS. Additionally, council members were appalled at policies and budget cuts to programs that address HIV/AIDS.

According to Newsweek, the Trump administration has now fired the remaining 16 PACHA members without any explanation.

Scott A. Schoettes, a Chicago-based HIV/AIDS activist and one of the members of the advisory panel who resigned over the summer, tweeted yesterday that the remaining council members had been fired for calling President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence “dangerous.”

“Remaining #HIV/AIDS council members booted by @realDonaldTrump. No respect for their service,” Schoettes wrote on the social media site. “Dangerous that #Trump and Co. (Pence esp.) are eliminating few remaining people willing to push back against harmful policies, like abstinence-only sex ed,” he added.

Gabriel Maldonado, CEO of the LGBT and HIV/AIDS group Truevolution and a remaining member of PACHA said the reasons for the firings remain unclear but may have been borne of a desire by the Trump administration to clear out appointments made by his predecessor Barack Obama.

“I can only speculate,” Maldonado said. “Like any administration, they want their own people there. Many of us were Obama appointees. I was an Obama appointee and my term was continuing until 2018.”

You’ll recall Trump told campaign rally attendees that he would be “better for the gays than Hillary Clinton.” #MyAss

If you want to really understand Trump’s opinion of LGBTs, remember this move comes less than a week after it was revealed that Trump reportedly asserted “they all have AIDS” in reference to 15,000 Haitians who were granted visas to enter the U.S. in the first half of 2017.

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Donald “Back To Work” Trump Golfs For 4th Day In A Row

I couldn’t possibly report this news better than the folks at Mediaite:

After President Donald Trump successfully saved Christmas, he triumphantly tweeted that he would be getting back to work the very next day, pulling up his bootstraps to make America great again “faster than anyone anticipated.”

Imagine everyone’s surprise when he showed up at the golf course the very next day to play a “quick” round. Now, imagine everyone’s surprise when he did this again the very next day, and, well, even the day after that.

Surely, the world thought, he could not golf for a fourth day in a row. Not even the most retired dads in the most retired parts of Florida can muster up four days in a row. That’s madness!

You know, the only reason I give a shit about the Trumpster golfing is he took President Obama to task so often for playing himself. In fact, he’s played more than 50% the amount of golf Obama did in his first year.

Here’s just one example:

The hypocrisy is unbelievable.