Normally committed to a daily dose of Israel-bashing, the NYT outdid itself on Feb 6th with two front page articles in the News section and sourly in the Food Section. “Zaitoun: Recipes from the Palestinian Kitchen” by the Pakistani/Iranian author Yasmin Khan, offers recipes for roast chicken, cauliflower soup and spicy shrimp and tomato stew. Although these sound appetizing, the meat of the article is the opportunity to offer the following observation made about the West Bank when the author worked for War on Want, a British charity: “Seeing the physical apparatus of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank was very hard to witness.” We are told that in writing this book, she “made a point not to quote any Israeli sources..an absence that she hoped would send a message: Palestinian voices are not always heard. Listen.” Then, with unsated appetite, the Times journalist quotes Joudie Kalla, author of Palestine on a Plate: “If you look deep into the books, they are about keeping our heritage alive in a world that is so desperately trying to hide us away.”

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If you happen to be a 6′9″ inch German man named Florian Maria Georg Christian Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck, it’s not surprising that you would be comfortable with an oversized movie that plays longer than Gone With the Wind. At over 3 hrs, the film needs editing and shortening but if you cut it to 2 1/2 hrs., you’d have a minor masterpiece. Even in its present frame, it’s a powerful and moving experience merging World War II with post-war communist Germany seen through the filter of a budding artist searching for his authentic and singular form of expression.

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Not everyone reads the WSJ but any American who wants to understand what happened at the Parkland School Massacre should read the interview conducted by Tunku Varadarajan with Andrew Pollack, father of Meadow, murdered by Nikolas Cruz ( A Parkland Father’s Quest for Accountability 1/12/19). If you can’t get that, read the book that Pollack co-wrote - “Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies That Created the Parkland Shooter and Endangered America’s Students” coming out in February. For those who believe that the primary problem here was and is gun control, this is particularly mandatory.

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There were two firsts in the NYT of Jan 5, 2019. One was the pronouncement by new congressperson Rashida Tlaib (D Mich) to her young son who congratulated her on her victory by saying, “Momma, look you won. Bullies don’t win” to which she responded, “Baby, they don’t. Because we’re going to go in there, and we’re going to impeach the motherf—er.” The other was the fact that the word was spelled out completely, something I had never seen in the Times. I googled to see whether that had happened before but came up short with references only to the Times’ squeamishness about printing the word and numerous examples of what permutations they used to avoid it.

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In today’s Times a letter to the editor appears from Letty Cotton Pogrebin regarding the accusations of anti-Semitism in the Women’s March: “Since the first Women’s March in 2017, a number of feminist intermediaries have tried to help bridge the organizers’ ideological and political gaps, with scant success. Until all of us understand that anti-racism and anti-Semitism are the same toxic madness split at the root, and until we embrace intersectionality, without defining any woman out, our struggle against sexism and racism will be hobbled by our squabbles with one another.” When I googled Letty’s name with different combinations of women’s march/anti-Semitism, only one article surfaced written in March 2017, a few months after the first march. Here’s what Letty said then: “When it comes to Israel and Palestine, I’m with Nancy Kaufman, CEO of the National Council of Jewish women, who says she’ll work with anyone except those who reject Israel’s right to exist. This winter she (Kaufman) met in advance with organizers of the Women’s March on Washington to ensure that message would be ‘pro-something, not anti-Israel.’ She received assurances that the march would focus on the issues NCJJW cares about - women’s health, reproductive justice, immigration, children and families, economic equality, voting rights, misogyny and bigotry. The Washington March did all that and more based on its core commitment to intersectionality, the belief that forms of oppression are linked and must be confronted simultaneously. Given today’s vitriolic political environment, intersectionality is not just a galvanizing theory, it’s an organizing tool. (Moment magazine, 3/6/17

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Like Chirlane McCray, First Lady of New York who has written about her feelings of resentment at being an outsider at Wellesley College, Michelle writes about Princeton where she picked up “the quiet, cruel nuances of not belonging.” How different both these women are from Sonia Sotomayor who expressed enormous gratitude for the tutoring and mentoring she received at Princeton to bring her up to a level where she could properly compete with the other students and continue to make it all the way to the Supreme Court on her own merits. Although I haven’t read “Becoming” yet, I am struck by there being no mention in Wilkerson’s rave review of an America that could jettison the cruel legacy of slavery, devote itself to affirmative action to help the victims of segregation mingle with the best and brightest in the country and incredibly, elect a bi-racial man as president for two terms. The pride in being an American should properly have been felt by the future First Lady at her own graduations from two of the most prestigious schools in the world. I doubt there’s another black woman who had the opportunity to earn comparable degrees and achievements anywhere else on this planet.

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Let’s start with some brief statistics about the explosion of pornography online: porn sites receive more hits than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined - 35% of all downloads are porn related; 90% of boys and 60% of girls have seen internet porn before the age of 18; 83% of boys and 55% of girls have seen same-sex intercourse online; child-porn is one of the fastest growing businesses; pornography is a global $97 billion industry.

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I had the honor of writing for George H.W. Bush starting in October, 1987 when he was still vice president and through his term as president. I was still writing for President Ronald Reagan at the time and the vice president sort of “inherited” me for his upcoming campaign.

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Sometimes a movie that’s been panned turns out to be more enjoyable than those that appeal to critics who pay attention to words like auteur and oeuvre. Sometimes a bowl of mac and cheese is preferable to pate de foie gras and so it is with great pleasure that I urge you to treat yourself to some comfort food in the sizable portion of Viggo Mortenson as you haven’t seen him before.

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There’s a grand guignol atmosphere in “The Favourite,” with 18th century men coiffed in long sheep-like wigs, made up to look like drag queens and Queen Anne herself looking more like a madwoman than a regal character. Though the story of the queen and Sarah and Abigail, the two women who service her in every sense of the word, is loosely based on historical fact, the language is full of contemporary curse words which seem anachronistic. Surprisingly, they turn out to have been in use during that century - especially the two four letter words with a “u” as the only vowel; this is significant because it lends credibility to some of the sexual behavior you might have thought was not in vogue at that time. Certainly there is no historical record to support the movie’s contentions.

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We talked over a relaxed dinner at an intimate K Street bistro, Romeo and Juliette, and later in his office where, between votes on the House floor, we shared a little brandy – the Spanish brand, Fundador, Ryan’s favorite – to celebrate the imminent recess.

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Women are reshaping America’s leadership as evidenced in the November mid-term elections. Now a former First Lady has been packaged as a seductive rock star the likes of Madonna, Cher, Oprah, Beyoncé and now, Michelle. Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Sarah Jessica Parker are expected to be along as well when Michelle Obama launches her book tour in her hometown of Chicago, Nov. 13. Her inspirational memoir entitled “Becoming” is the first of a two book deal with Crown, part of Penguin Random House.

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Pickleball is the fastest growing sport in the U.S. and popular with seniors, offering a good workout year round with low-impact on joints.

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Americans are living through a period of constant disgruntlement - political, social and historical. No matter what your ethnicity, there’s a statue or a painting of someone in your city or at your school that has to come down, perhaps because of slave-owning, or ancient harm to indigenous people, or womanizing or having too much money. Some people object to the plaque of David Koch on the side of the new fountain he installed in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art - never mind that he paid for everything, helping to keep that site the most visited by tourists to our city. Some want Columbus toppled from his perch atop the circle named for him - five centuries is apparently insufficient to forgive his misdeeds to the Indians And nobody wants the name Trump on their building for a million reasons that you surely know by now.

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You won’t know this if your information comes mainly from the NYT and the WSJ, but Alyssa Milano (founder of MeToo) has withdrawn from the Women’s March to protest its organizers’ support of Louis Farrakhan. Leader of Nation of Islam, Farrakhan chanted “Death to the U.S” and “Death to Jews” while in Iran last week, while on the domestic front, he denied being an anti-semite and called himself an “anti-termite” instead. Linda Sarsour, a self-described brown Palestinian and Tamika Mallory, an African-American have endorsed the statement that “no Zionist can be a feminist” and Mallory refers to Farrakhan as “goat” - greatest of all time.

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There’s more heat in a New York Times putdown of Melania Trump’s wardrobe than in Jason Reitman’s biopic of Gary Hart’s aborted run for a presidential nomination in 1988. Overstuffed with tons of newsroom and campaign chatter, Reitman neglects to give the primary players - Hart and his wife - sufficient opportunity to deal with the complicated and conflicted inner feelings of a man and his wife watching their shot at a brilliant future slip down the drain. And not because of a grand love affair, but rather a casual dalliance with a young and as played here, vapid Donna Rice. In real life, Donna had a fresh–faced prettiness but Reitman casts her as an overly made-up girl who looks more like a lap dancer than a model or pharmaceutical salesman, both of which Donna was.

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The upcoming midterm elections are more important this year than perhaps ever. That’s because the country is more divided than in the past. The Democrats are pushing to win the House as the party out of power traditionally does in midterm contests. The Republicans are fighting to keep the Senate. A lot is at stake from the Supreme Court to the stock market, gun violence, healthcare, women’s reproductive rights, immigration policy, China and trade. All are reasons to get out and vote before the Tuesday election.
Woman are running this year in greater numbers—more than 3,200– most on the Democratic side attempting to close the gender gap. A lot is at stake—all 435 House seats and one-third of the Senate. America’s future is in the hands of voters.
Roughly 40 percent of voting-age Americans don’t exercise their right to vote — and we often assume disenchantment or indifference keeps them away from the polls. But that’s not always the reason. One in six eligible voters has a disability—that’s more than 34 million people— and for many of those, that is what keeps them away from the polls. The challenges are many.
But what if it is fear that’s keeping people from casting a ballot? It may not be fear of any potential candidate or of which level to pull — although some may claim that’s a problem, too. But there may be a very real fear of voting, of public places, waiting in line, signing your John Hancock in public or just feeling trapped in the voting booth – as an amalgamate of many different fears.
If while standing in line at the polls, your palms get sweaty, your heart pounds, you feel that your legs are on the verge of buckling under, your vision blurs, butterflies take flight in your stomach or your muscles stiffen and you want to run home to a safe place — you should know you are not alone.
About 8 percent of adults in the U.S. have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) at any given time, according to NIH the National Center for PTSD. Returning veterans and civilians alike have been diagnosed with this and other anxiety disorders, including agoraphobia (fear of crowded spaces) and claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces). This feeling of being trapped can be incapacitating and paralyzing, both while waiting in line and while in the voting space itself.
Anxiety can be a master manipulator, so people often avoid situations that provoke it. Voting is one we can’t control — not just the election outcome, but our surroundings and often excessive stimuli.
One agoraphobic woman in North Carolina, after voting for the first time, told me she couldn’t remember whom she voted for. But she did recall, “My palms were sweaty. It was like going into a lion’s cage. I felt I had to do it, but then had to get out before he bit me.”
Maryland photographer Stuart Pohost admitted his fear of voting overwhelmed him. “It was the same anxiety I felt when going in for major surgery. I was standing in line at the polls in a perfectly safe place feeling like I’m not safe at all, like I’m going to die, or pass out, or lose control.”
Voting caused him such tremendous anxiety that his therapist once accompanied him to the polls as part of his treatment. “The thing that bothered me about voting was not voting per se, not making the decision,” Pohost said. “The problem was waiting in line, which is a commitment. It was feeling trapped and feeling like I couldn’t leave the line if I wanted to.”
Shannon Evans of Council Bluffs, Iowa, found a solution: “I don’t vote unless I can get an absentee ballot mailed to my house. Too many lines, too many people with unattended children — just the thought makes my head hurt and my skin sweaty.”
Accompanied by her service dog, Pamela Thomas voted in Oklahoma. “My nerves were bad. I was shaking. Buddy, my service dog, tried to get me to leave. I just marked stuff, got my sticker and left. I honestly have no idea who or what I voted for. My brain could not focus on anything. I sat for 15 minutes before I could drive home.” Thomas vowed that the next time, “I will make sure I take a human with me or do an absentee ballot.”
Jodi Aman, LCSW, a psychotherapist in Rochester, New York, and founder of “Give Fear The Boot,” agreed with this plan. “Bring a friend to support you.” She also suggested concentrating on the ceiling or on a spot under the curtain. And “take a few breaths; focus on feeling empowered to take some action.”
“Anything can be a trigger if associated with past trauma,” Aman said. It could be sound, smells, a voting venue in a church if you are a victim of past abuse, or the fear of not making the right decision. “If you messed up a decision in the past, that could create anxiety.”
The chaos of the election and our feeling out of control and overwhelmed also triggers uncertainty. “It triggers us to get ready, and it often means danger. When we have chaos, we crave order.”
Aman’s philosophy is: “Disempower anxiety and empower yourself to take some action.” This advocate of self-compassion penned, “You 1, Anxiety O,” which explores how competition causes anxiety in our culture. “Your vote matters, but it’s not the only vote,” said Aman. “Some anxious people may feel too much responsibility.”
The good news, according to Aman: “Anxiety is usually curable. You can overcome it.” Early voting in some states is a step to mitigate some of the fear. Time will tell how successful it was.

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During a fight at the Horizon Juvenile Center in the Bronx, twenty correction officers were injured by 16 and 17 year old boys who had been moved from Rikers Island due to a state law requiring that they be treated differently from adults in courts and jails. (”Officers Hurt at Youth Center, WSJ 10/4) Despite the fact that these young men were gang members, City Council members are concerned that staffing the Juvenile Center with correction officers and juvenile counselors is too similar to replicating the jail experience. In other words, 16 and 17 year old hoodlums are still just boys.

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“Outsider Faced Culture of Privilege and Alcohol” reads the title of one of the NYT daily attempts to undo the candidacy of Brett Kavanaugh (NYT 9/26/18) It reduces Deborah Ramirez, the woman who can’t be sure that she knows the difference between a plastic penis and a human one, into a half-Puerto Rican student who was the daughter of a telephone company lineman and a medical technician. Rather than praise her accomplishment in qualifying for a scholarship to an expensive Ivy League school on her own merits, it contrasts her with the wealthy Kavanaugh boy, son of a lobbyist and a judge. The only problem is that Martha Kavanaugh did not become a judge until 1995, several years after Brett graduated from Yale Law School and more than a decade after his possible penis got flashed as an undergraduate. In 1983 or 84, at the time that Deborah was sitting in the same circle as those super-privileged white people, the Kavanaugh parents were two hard-working lawyers, one of whom had gone to law school at night while working full time to support his family.

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Here’s how I met Stormy Daniels.

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Marilyn Maye, the darling of New York City’s bustling cabaret circuit, is the ultimate entertainer who has perfected and carefully honed her stage skills. Called “the greatest white female singer in the world” by Ella Fitzgerald, Maye is still going strong at 90. Her expressive and interpretive style sets her apart from most current cabaret performers. But it wasn’t until her senior years that she made a comeback. She is now a true inspiration and one of the most active of the 1.9 million nonagenarians in the country.

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Marin Mazzie succumbed to ovarian cancer this past week. At age 57 her death is a loss to the Broadway theater world.

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Imagine Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film, “Psycho” minus the legendary shower scene. Or Stephen Spielberg’s “Jaws” without the great white shark menacing the beachgoers, or James Cameron’s “Titanic” without the iceberg striking the ship. Without those memorable scenes, each movie would be less compelling and more forgettable.

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Hurricane Florence will, of course, result in the mainstream media launching attacks against President Trump.  Here’s tomorrow’s news today:

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Heavy-handed and cliche-ridden are the kindest adjectives I can summon for the screenplay of Meg Wolitzer’s novel; since I never read that, I can’t say whether “The Wife” is faithful to the original, but the film bats it out of the ballpark on both scores. The plot concerns a writer/husband who wins the Nobel Prize for Literature and his long-suffering writer/wife who turns out to be the actual talent that sparked his otherwise lifeless output. This is not a spoiler because the revelation is obvious at the start from the following tonsorial clues: Glenn Close has a hairdo like Joan of Arc, Jonathan Pryce has wild hair and a scruffy beard, the disturbed son has a nutty comb-forward - uh oh - something’s not right with this family!

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Yet another movie about the capture of Adolf Eichman, architect of the Nazis’ Final Solution of the Jewish Question. This one, directed by Chris Weitz, features two Hollywood stars - Ben Kingsley as Eichman and Oscar Isaac as Peter Malkin, the Mosad agent most responsible for his capture and, according to this movie, for the murderer’s final cooperation in Israel’s kidnap of an Argentine citizen. Living openly as Ricardo Klement, Eichman had a wife (the unrecognizable and little-used Greta Scacchi) and two children, one a handsome young man and one a toddler A young woman, briefly involved with the former, introduces him to her blind father who quickly figures out his father’s real identity and contacts Mosad with the information that Eichman is alive and well in Argentina.

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Despite a series of infelicitous statements on Twitter, Sarah Jeong has been hired as the newest member of The New York Times editorial board. Her tweets included such indecorous comments as “oh man, it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men”, “killallmen”, and at least one unflattering comparison between white people and dogs.

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Under the guise of being a reversal of the classic Cinderella story, Crazy Rich Asians gives us a super-smart, pretty Chinese-American woman who is a professor of Economics at NYU in love with a super-smart, handsome Chinese man from Singapore. He has to go home to be best man at a wedding and wants to take her along to meet his family. When they get there, she discovers that he forgot to mention that he is the scion of the Chinese Rockefellers - the wealthiest family with the best real estate, most lavish parties and best known name in that part of the world. Of course she cares only about true love, not money.

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Puzzle was a good idea for a small movie about ordinary people whose lives enlarge when they discover gratification from an extraordinary skill for something small. It starts that way with a working class family - father owns an auto-repair shop, mother is a stay-at home housewife, neither son is a shining light Kelly MacDonald plays the part of a woman who has repressed her own feelings for a very long time, going thru the motions of marriage and motherhood by never admitting, analyzing or attempting to change anything. After getting a 1,000 piece puzzle as a random birthday gift, she discovers that she has a talent for this - an innate ability to see how things fit together There is an ironic contrast between her adeptness at this and her inability to see how the pieces of her own life have not served her well.

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Recently, a national columnist asked a question to help observe the release of my new book, The Presidents and the Pastime: The History of Baseball and the White House—the first to exhaustively explore the tie between America’s two great institutions: the national pastime and the presidency.

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A movie in which Jerusalem symbolizes religious oppression while Berlin represents freedom and liberty is a particularly obscene type of propaganda. Europe frequently compares Israelis to Nazis, claiming that the Jewish state does to Palestinians precisely what the Nazis did to Jews - a blasphemous comparison that an educated person should be ashamed to utter. Yet, here we are viewing “The Cakemaker” and watching Shabbat become synonymous with narrow-minded, even violent religious Jews - people who don’t trust non-Jews and punish those Jews who don’t subscribe to strict orthodoxy. In actuality, only 8% of Israelis identify as ultra-orthodox while 20% of Israelis are Arabs.

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On Thursday, June 21, the Times offered a front page article entitled “Incivility Infests Life in the U.S. on Trump’s Cue” , along with a heads-up about “The Art of Hooking Up” that appears on the front page of its Arts section. That review is of an installation at the Venice Architecture Biennale devoted to the “places and practices of casual sex,” specifically gay hookups with “colorful condoms and other sexual accoutrements” scattered on the floor of the pavilion. Although there are 71 participants in this biennale, in keeping with the Times’ devotion to promoting all things gay, this is the one it chose to highlight. More items deemed newsworthy on that day included violence in Nicaragua, the Taliban killing of 30 in Afghanistan and the omission of “horrific details” from the UN report on Syrian chemical attacks.

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In its ongoing mission to “epater le bourgeois,” the NYT Style section features an essay by a woman who decides to give sado-masochism a try. (Wanting to Be Dominated, But Not Quite Like That, Aly Tadros 6/10) She tells us about her previous travails - boiler-plate issues with an immigrant father who didn’t understand her, his illness and death, her drinking and her rejection by a previous boyfriend - none of these either extraordinary or interesting. The woman claims not to be a masochist yet she is willing to be bitten hard, whipped with a belt and treated as just one of this man’s submissive playthings outside of his relationship with the woman he lives with and presumably loves. Part of it is explained by her having the freedom to scream, cry and release all the emotions she previously hid or submerged in alcohol, but part is also the titillation of Fifty Shades of Gray and the ongoing acceptance of deviancy as a suitable subject for mainstream media. The subtext is that it’s restorative to behave like a child whose tantrums will be tolerated rather than a grown woman who is expected to control emotional outbursts and deal with common life situations.

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In keeping with the logic of Mayor de Blasio and his school chancellor, who both believe that a good solution for black and Latino minorities to get ahead in school is simply to eliminate the standardized test to get into New York’s toughest academies, why not do the same with the La Guardia school for the performing arts? Let’s forget about auditions and portfolios and try to even the number of boys who are admitted since only 26% of the student body is currently male. Why give priority to talent if you believe that intelligence and discipline, as reflected in the ability to ace a standardized test, are not essential pre-requisites for advanced academic work And why not insist that Asians are proportionately represented at La Guardia even if they don’t express as much interest in music and art. Or that girls, who currently account for only 40% of Stuyvesant are similarly favored to even their quota there.

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This was Virgil’s opening line in the Aeneid and it came to mind in the brief clip of Morgan Freeman, the latest celebrity apologizer, as he sat across from a comely tv interviewer wearing a short, tight, sleeveless, v-neck dress that had climbed to mid-thigh while she was seated. Unsurprisingly, he stared and commented on its brevity and when she stood and pulled it down, he pleaded with her not to change the object of his gaze She giggled flirtatiously at the time, but apparently thought twice when MeToo seemed a better route to follow and now 80 year old Morgan is in hot water too

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