Walter Shaub thinks Trump’s strong-arming of New York is not getting nearly enough attention.

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1228765317138198529 https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1228768416061890565

Or (or and) it could be that in the firehose of bad shit that Trump sends out every day it becomes very difficult to spot the top maximum utmost worst things.… Read the rest

Trump does think he is in effect a king. Someone surely must have told him that in fact the powers of a president are not those of a king, but he equally surely must have paid no attention.

And Barr is his enabler.

Barr was once seen as a potential check on Trump’s overt desire to take command of the justice department, deploying its investigators and prosecutors at his whim and his will. But this week, critics warn, the attorney general has been revealed as an eager accomplice in eroding norms meant to insulate the criminal justice system from political interference, threatening the bedrock principle of equality before the law.

I’m not sure who once saw Barr as a … Read the rest

More on Fair Cop:

Harry Miller was visited by Humberside Police at work in January last year after a complaint about his tweets.

He was told he had not committed a crime, but it would be recorded as a non-crime “hate incident”.

He hadn’t committed a crime, yet the plods “visited” him at work. No crime, but punishment anyway.

The court found the force’s actions were a “disproportionate interference” with his right to freedom of expression.

…

Mr Justice Julian Knowles said the effect of police turning up at Mr Miller’s place of work “because of his political opinions must not be underestimated”.

He added: “To do so would be to undervalue a cardinal democratic freedom.

“In this

… Read the rest

Janice Turner writes that Lisa Nandy brands herself as Labour’s truth teller:

Rational, grounded, fearless of factions, the only leadership candidate prepared to tackle the self-delusion and disconnect which lost four elections, she’d won many prospective votes, including mine. Until Tuesday, when Nandy signed up to a witch-hunt of thousands of (mainly female) party members, including me.

It’s that “expel the transphobic bigots” pledge, which Turner calls astonishingly totalitarian.

It not only demands signatories “accept there is no material conflict between trans rights and women’s rights” but says anyone who disagrees is a bigot. It names Woman’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance as “hate groups” whose supporters are transphobic and must therefore be expelled.

News flash: not wanting to … Read the rest

Trump will be blowing another gasket in 10, 9, 8, 7…

Reuters:

The U.S. Justice Department is closing its criminal investigation into whether former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lied to investigators about his communications with the media without bringing any charges against him, his attorneys announced in a statement on Friday.

In a letter his lawyers also released from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., prosecutors said that “based on the totality of the circumstances and all of the information known to the government at this time, we consider the matter closed.”

Trump can always console himself by remembering he put McCabe through two years of hell and took away his pension.… Read the rest

More from the Barr is dirty files:

The New York Times is reporting that attorney general Barr has assigned an outside prosecutor to “scrutinize the criminal case” against Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser.

The review is highly unusual and could trigger more accusations of political interference by top Justice Department officials into the work of career prosecutors.

“Highly unusual” as in “unprecedented in living memory,” according to prosecutors Rachel Maddow talked to yesterday. This is not what the Justice Department is supposed to do. The fact that it’s doing it in a case that Trump has loudly and frequently bellowed about makes it all the more grotesque.… Read the rest

I don’t think Bloomberg should be running, let alone elected, but he is in a good position to give Trump what he dishes out.

.@realDonaldTrump – we know many of the same people in NY. Behind your back they laugh at you & call you a carnival barking clown. They know you inherited a fortune & squandered it with stupid deals and incompetence.

I have the record & the resources to defeat you. And I will. https://t.co/fO4azmZaUg

— Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) February 13, 2020

Trump knows that’s true and he hates it.… Read the rest

Yasssssss.

Police officers unlawfully interfered with a man’s right to freedom of expression by turning up at his place of work to speak to him about allegedly “transphobic” tweets, the high court has ruled.

Harry Miller, a former police officer who founded the campaign group Fair Cop, said the actions of Humberside police had a “substantial chilling effect” on his right to free speech.

Miller, 54 and from Lincolnshire, claims an officer told him he had not committed a crime, but that his tweeting was being recorded as a “hate incident”.

At this point in the story I always pause to think about the torrents of abuse that have been poured over women on Twitter, with neither the police … Read the rest

Yes, that’s right, frame it as “first for transgender athlete!!” as opposed to “man hopes to qualify for women’s Olympics.” Make it sound like an exciting innovation as opposed to a man cheating a woman out of a place at the Olympics.

On Dec. 8, 2019, 28-year-old Megan Youngren became one of 63 women at the California International Marathon to officially qualify for the 2020 U.S. Olympic marathon trials, the race that will determine the team for Tokyo. Her 40th-place finish in 2:43:52 came as both a relief and a reward, after four months of intense training. But it also marked another significant moment: With her qualification, Youngren is set to make history on Feb. 29 as the first

… Read the rest

Interesting. I saw the tweet, and found it exceedingly disgusting, but didn’t quite make the connection. Good thing other people did.

Another corrupt quid pro quo, but this time broadcast on Twitter for all the world to see https://t.co/OSuUZEpxWJ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 13, 2020

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1228052609560449027 https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1228049961775960065 https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1228044224567894017 … Read the rest

Barr has been putting on a show of indignation.

Attorney General Bill Barr told ABC News on Thursday that President Donald Trump “has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case” but should stop tweeting about the Justice Department because his tweets “make it impossible for me to do my job.”

I can all but hear them planning it. “Pretend you’re pissed off about my tweets.” “Hahahaha sir you’re a genius.”

Barr ignited a firestorm this week after top Justice Department officials intervened in the sentencing of Roger Stone, a longtime friend and former campaign adviser to the president who was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction of justice.

In a stunning reversal, the

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Define “civil liberty“.

It all comes down to the initial claim that trans people actually are the sex they feel they are. Yet too often rebuttals are dismissed with the insistence that these academic, intellectual debates ignore the suffering and needs of real, live people.

Yet we are told that we must prioritise the suffering and needs of some few, real live trans identified males over the suffering and needs of all real, live women and girls. We are told that there is no actual conflict since, because “transwomen are women”, they are all in fact the same group, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a bigot who desrves … Read the rest

Well that’s a mess.

https://youtu.be/TeHQr7AqO3Q… Read the rest

Another day another letter.

Letter signed by some @UniKent academics&students demanding I be no platformed (I'm speaking there on working-class women and feminism). Unsurprisingly, offers no evidence of how my views or research are "transphobic". These scholars can be contacted at kentopenletter@gmail.com. pic.twitter.com/HE5W12uwDE

— Selina Todd (@selina_todd) February 13, 2020

I haven’t been able to find the letter in non-image form so I’ll just have to proceed with this one. The very first sentence is odd – colleagues at the University of Kent have recently been informed that the university “has chosen to uphold the invitation to Selina Todd” – as if there were something shady about inviting someone to speak and then not withdrawing the invitation. As if the … Read the rest

The ACLU’s Staff Attorney on their National LGBT & HIV Project:

Three cis girls actually filed a lawsuit in CT today claiming that they face irreparable harm & sex discrimination because their trans peers are able to participate fully in school life. Imagine that being your legacy into adulthood? Urging the state to police young Black women.

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) February 13, 2020

They’re not “cis” girls. Chase Strangio doesn’t get to other them from their own sex like that. They’re just girls. They didn’t choose it, they were born it, as we all were. That doesn’t make them a subcategory of their sex.

But even more dishonest is that “because their trans peers are able to participate fully … Read the rest