The GOP’s glass house on sex crimes
Slate
Republicans have developed a strange obsession with pedophilia and sex crimes, said Jordan Weissmann, accusing critics of “don’t say gay” laws of being “groomers” who want to prey on kids. The irony is that “the GOP has many more notable and recent scandals involving the sexual abuse of minors and young students—as well as a recent track record of reacting to them with a shrug.” In 2015, former House Speaker Dennis Hastert pleaded guilty to making hush-money payments to cover up
“his history of sexually abusing high school wrestlers he had coached.” In 2018, Republicans ran Roy Moore as a Senate candidate in Alabama, despite multiple accusations he preyed on teen girls. Currently, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio serves despite accusations he ignored the predatory sexual behavior of a team doctor who molested dozens of boys when Jordan was a high school wrestling coach. And Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida is currently “the subject of a literal sex-trafficking investigation” involving a 17-year-old girl. Both political parties, of course, have had their share of sexual predators and creeps. But the GOP has repeatedly “circled the wagons” around its own—and that’s not “the behavior of a party that cares deeply about sexual abuse.”
A billionaire from the United Arab Emirates has built the world’s biggest Hummer—a two-story vehicle complete with a toilet and a sink. Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan’s “Hummer H1 X3,” which runs on four diesel engines, is 46 feet long, 20 feet wide, and 21.6 feet tall, making it 27 times the volume of a normal Hummer. The massive vehicle will be housed at the sheikh’s Off Road History Museum near Dubai, which is just as well—its top speed is 19 miles an hour.
A French senior citizen took a blue jacket hanging on a wall in Paris’ Picasso Museum and had it altered by a tailor—then learned the jacket was a modern artwork she’d inadvertently stolen. The 72-year-old had assumed the jacket was an ordinary garment someone had left behind, but learned differently when she returned to the exhibition several days later and was arrested. The now-altered garment, a piece by the Spanish artist Oriol Vilanova, was returned to its spot on the wall, and the woman was let off with a warning.