For some reason Trump has been unable to hire new lawyers to help him clear up this little misunderstanding.

Trump and his legal team spent the afternoon before his arraignment interviewing potential lawyers but the interviews did not result in any joining the team in time for Trump’s initial court appearance scheduled for 3pm ET on Tuesday after several attorneys declined to take him as a client.

Trump has also seemingly been unable to find a specialist national security lawyer, eligible to possess a security clearance, to help him navigate the Espionage Act charges.

The last-minute scramble to find a veteran trial lawyer was a familiar process for Trump, who has had difficulty hiring and keeping lawyers to defend him in the numerous federal and state criminal cases that have dogged him through his presidency and after he left the White House.

This is the downside to being a conspicuously bad person. People don’t want to deal with your shit, even for lots of money.

Among the Florida lawyers who turned down Trump was Howard Srebnick, who had discussed defending the former president at trial as early as last week in part due to the high fees involved, but ultimately declined the representation after conferring with his law partners, the person said.

Oh boy, high fees, but…um…oh the hell with it, it’s not worth the torture.

Part of the problem of recruiting new lawyers has been Trump’s reputation for being a notoriously difficult client who has a record of declining legal advice and seeking to have his lawyers act as attack dogs or political aides rather than attorneys bound by ethics rules, people close to the process said.

Along with his reputation for being a complete asshole, a reputation which is bolstered by the thousands of hours of video we’ve all seen of him being a complete asshole.

It all makes sense now – straight people can be “queer.” Who knew?!

Then what does “queer” mean? Interesting? Special? Better than all those boring beige people in long term relationships (commonly known as “marriages”) with someone of another gender?

Dennis isn’t having it.

Give that child a scholarship to a university of her choice.

Guest post by Jonathan A. Gallant

I invite truly virtuous individuals to join my new organization “Electron Justice”.  We are dedicated to decolonializing electricity by eliminating all the terminology of the colonialist, Eurocentric, heteronormativist old culture we must overturn.

For example, consider the coulomb, the unit of electric charge.  It is named after the engineer and electrical experimenter Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, who was also a militarist and a colonialist.   He served in the French army for 28 years, retiring with the rank of captain right after the French Revolution.  Part of his military service was spent overseeing military construction in Martinique, a Caribbean island where black slaves labored on plantations, and which remains a French colonial possession to this day.  

The family of James Watt obtained its wealth from Watt’s father’s shipping business, which was partly involved in the slave trade.  Moreover, James himself was a long-time friend of the philosopher Adam Smith, the famous proponent of (gasp!) market capitalism.  Alessandro Volta was an aristocrat, named a Count by Emperor Napoleon in 1810.   The father of André-Marie Ampère was a counter-revolutionary who was guillotined by the Jacobin revolutionary government in 1793.   No connections between Georg Simon Ohm and obvious forms of wrongthink have been discovered.  However, since he died in 1854, it is certain that Ohm never filed a DEI statement, as is now routinely required for all academic candidates in Mathematics, Physics, and Electrical Engineering.

On these grounds, we call for abolition of all the electrical units—coulombs, watts, volts, amps, and ohms–named after these malefactors.  Even if their association with retrograde practices and ideas is a little vague in some cases, there is no question that they are all old white men.  Therefore the continued use of units named after them could discourage members of marginalized communities and female persons from following electrical pursuits, such as studying Physics, charging their cellphones, or replacing a light bulb.  On the contrary, we demand that electricity be granted a new set of diverse, equitable, and inclusive units. 

In order to raise consciousness about our cause of Electron Justice, we are beginning a campaign of direct actions.  Until the electrical units are changed, wherever we go we will turn off the lights or blow the fuses:  our motto is “No Justice, No Current”.   

The Argus, a local paper in Brighton and Hove, reports:

Police have made an arrest after online threats to kill campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen.

A Twitter account in the name of Layla Le Fey posted threats to the campaigner also known as Posie Parker.

Here’s a surprise. The story had said police arrested a woman after the online threats. It said it just a few minutes ago, but now they’ve changed it. There were many objections and I’ll be damned for once someone paid attention. Unfortunately they do say “a woman” later in the story. Inch by inch by inch we’ll win this war.

One tweet said: “I’m a trans woman and I’m not ashamed to admit I’d be happy to physically kick the s**t out of you pull your eyes out and break your spine.

“I live in Portslade, East Sussex, UK. If you want to prove your point that some trans people are extremely violent, I’m game.”

Women rarely do that kind of thing, and women rarely even threaten to do that kind of thing, probably because we know we can’t carry through and because the threat might attract violence to us.

Another tweet made a threat to burn down her house. “I’d be interested in setting fire to her house with with her in it,” the tweet said.

That’s a threat to burn down her house and kill her.

Uhhhhh…for what purpose?

I guess we’re supposed to gasp and say “Wow Willoughby is so hot.” But that’s stupid. We know he uses filters and extremely heavy makeup…but anyway what woman age 57 posts selfies like that? He’s trying to look like a teenage beach bunny or some shit but we know it’s fake so why do it??? Why isn’t he embarrassed to do it? Why doesn’t he look at it and realize what a fool it makes him look?

That open mouth thing – we know why models and actors do that, and why photographers tell them to do that, but why does Willoughby think that means he should do it? While pretending to be a woman? Why doesn’t he get that we don’t think “Phwoarrrrrr,” we think “Ewwwww.”

Who made him so desperate for attention? Who did this to you, Jonathan?

I’d share the tweet itself but he deleted it. Too late!

One more…the review hosted by LSE blogs:

In Underflows, Cleo Wölfle Hazard invites us into the hydrological, cultural and epistemological dynamics of both public imaginaries of water and water-related networks as well as the researcher relationships and ‘straight science’ norms that excise affect, care and kinship from the processes of knowledge production and communication. In doing so, he unpacks the settler-colonial land relations that shape water imaginaries and, by extension, water governance throughout the increasingly drought-stricken, dammed and extracted west coast of the US, tying in critiques and analysis with a queer and trans orientation to the world.

Or, to put it less flatteringly, attaching the absurd and decadent pseudo-politics of “trans” to a real and terrible ecological disaster. There is plenty to say about the drought-stricken, dammed and extracted western US (the reviewer errs in saying west coast, because the damming is mostly inland), but a connection to “a queer and trans orientation to the world” is decidedly not one of them.

Through the story of a salmon-costumed confessional performance art project undertaken by the author and his collaborator and partner July Hazard, we glimpse what even the ‘straight’ scientists working within the disciplinary bounds and normative scripts of their field might gain from ‘queering’ or ‘transing’ science in a way that makes room for affect, care and interspecies kinship.

Do we though? Do we glimpse that? Somehow I doubt it.

More on queering the fish:

Rivers host vibrant multispecies communities in their waters and along their banks, and, according to queer-trans-feminist river scientist Cleo Wölfle Hazard, their future vitality requires centering the values of justice, sovereignty, and dynamism. At the intersection of river sciences, queer and trans theory, and environmental justice, Underflows explores river cultures and politics at five sites of water conflict and restoration in California, Oregon, and Washington.

But there is no intersection of river sciences with queer and trans theory. Those two items don’t intersect. You might as well say Manhattan’s Riverside Drive intersects London’s Kensington High Street. It doesn’t. They’re thousands of miles apart.

Incorporating work with salmon, beaver, and floodplain recovery projects, Wölfle Hazard weaves narratives about innovative field research practices with an affectively oriented queer and trans focus on love and grief for rivers and fish. Drawing on the idea of underflows—the parts of a river’s flow that can’t be seen, the underground currents that seep through soil or rise from aquifers through cracks in bedrock—Wölfle Hazard elucidates the underflows in river cultures, sciences, and politics where Native nations and marginalized communities fight to protect rivers. The result is a deeply moving account of why rivers matter for queer and trans life, offering critical insights that point to innovative ways of doing science that disrupt settler colonialism and new visions for justice in river governance.

You what now? How did “settler colonialism” get in there?

It’s hilarious but it’s also intensely annoying, watching a boutique gender-haver try to attach xirself to the politics of indigenous people as if boutique gender were comparable to genocide and mass displacement.

Another Sokal hoax. Has to be. Right? Right?

Wait there’s more.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on A uniquely favorable jurist.

This NYT article reports on the clerk’s explanation for how Cannon was assigned to this case. In a nutshell:

Judge Cannon’s handling of the prior case was irrelevant. The “low number” rule Rob reports Ken White mentioning was not in play here.

Her assignment was “random” in the sense that judicial assignments usually are — that is, strictly speaking, although there were 10 judges who were eligible to receive the case, it was not a 1 in 10 chance, because that’s weighted by how full each judge’s caseload is, and 3 of those 10 judges are senior judges (semi-retired) who have smaller dockets and are at or close to their limit.

There is nobody, in the clerk’s office or otherwise, who sits down and says “hmm, who do I think should get this case?”

Short of trying to file in a different division, or a different district entirely, there wasn’t anything DOJ could have done to avoid the assignment — and filing somewhere else might have led to venue challenges, motions to transfer, etc.

Trump was able to get Cannon assigned to his civil case because he filed it in the division where she was one of only two judges. Even then it was not a sure thing, as another civil case he filed (against Clinton et al) got assigned to Judge Middlebrooks instead. It’s not like that division in Texas where the abortion pill case got filed because there’s exactly one judge and it was a virtual guarantee they’d get their anti-choice hack assigned.

Moral monster Willoughby

Immediately followed by ridiculous fake dressup Willoughby

Festive interlude.

Excuse me?

The two halves of the tweet disagree with each other. The first two curt bossy sentences just issue an order, without of course any authority to do so. The rest of the tweet pretends to give reasons for the curt order.

First of all, it’s just gibberish. Bits of vocabulary aren’t “required.” What are they gonna do, arrest us? Give us an F? Sue us? Carve us up? They’re not in a position to tell us what words to use or else.

Second, pronouns, like verbs and nouns and prepositions and the like, are neither preferred nor required, they’re just part of language. Use them correctly if you want to be understood, use them creatively if you don’t care about being understood. Next question?

But the intent behind the absurd claim is less trivial. The intent is to bully us into submitting to a new and stupid ideology that says men can become women by saying they are women.

No.

The Johns Hopkins definition of lesbian is doing the rounds.

I really think Johns Hopkins ought to explain, as well as delete and start over. I really think anyone in a position to promulgate the claim that women are non-men while men get to go on being men ought to explain the reasons for spreading such a blatant shameless in your face insult to women.

Humanists UK are going with “men are women if they say they are.” Women are going with “Goodbye Humanists UK.”

Sex Matters explains.

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate takes a very grim view of the Judge Cannon situation.

Cannon’s total lack of principle, combined with her evident incapacity to experience shame, renders her a uniquely favorable jurist for the former president. Indeed, if she maintains her grasp on this case, it is nearly impossible to envision Smith securing a conviction in her courtroom.

Cannon, a Trump appointee, gained notoriety while presiding over Trump’s attempt to halt the classified documents investigation in 2022. Following the search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s lawyers filed a complaint alleging that the search was illegitimate and unconstitutional; they demanded the appointment of a special master and, in the meantime, a freeze on prosecutors’ review of seized materials. In a calculated act of judge shopping, the case was assigned to Cannon…

Assigned by whom? Who was doing the shopping?

Trump’s lawsuit amounted to pure gibberish, a glorified Truth Social post that alleged a Democratic conspiracy. So Cannon promptly encouraged his lawyers to rewrite the suit so it sounded marginally less asinine. She then issued an order prohibiting the government from “further review and use of any of the materials” seized from Mar-a-Lago “for criminal investigative purposes.”

In other words she acted like a consigliere for Trump.

This command marked the first time in the history of the republic that a federal judge had claimed the power to stop a pre-indictment criminal investigation into a suspect. Cannon’s overreach provoked genuine shock in legal circles and fear in the intelligence community, as it effectively blocked officials from assessing the seized documents for national security risks. (Her order reflected a profound misunderstanding of national security damage assessments.) A right-leaning panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit—which included two Trump appointees—soon stayed this portion of her decision, highlighting its “chilling” effect on fundamental “national-security duties.”

You’d think that all by itself would be more than enough to make her the last person on the planet who should be the judge on Trump’s indictment and yet here we are. I still don’t understand why. Do they write names on bits of paper and put them in a hat and ask a passing intern to pull one out and that’s the judge? Which works because all the names on all the bits of paper are Cannon? I don’t understand why this is being allowed to happen. It’s like waking up on a bus racing down a mountain road with no guard rails and finding the driver is asleep.

But Cannon wasn’t finished. She agreed to Trump’s request for a special master and appointed Raymond Dearie, a well-respected federal judge. After Dearie tried to bring some discipline to the case, though, Cannon immediately ran interference for Trump. She overruled an order that would’ve required the former president to either disavow or stand by previous claims that FBI agents planted evidence at Mar-a-Lago. She spared him the burden of lodging specific objections to the review of individual documents, which would have revealed the bogus nature of his claim to executive privilege. And she extended deadlines to help Trump drag out the special master’s review for as long as possible.

She might as well be Ivanka.

The madness finally ended when a panel of the 11^th Circuit—made up of two Trump appointees and the ultraconservative William Pryor—ruled that Cannon had no authority to hear Trump’s lawsuit in the first place, rendering every one of her orders null and void. It was one of the most humiliating appellate smackdowns in recent history, a total demolition of literally every action that Cannon had taken from the outset of the case. The 11^th Circuit accused Cannon of attempting “a radical reordering of our caselaw” that violated “bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.” And it directed her to relinquish control over the case.

So why why why is she on this case? When she’s literally the worst possible person on the planet for the job?

Smith, for his part, has the option of requesting a different judge; 11^th Circuit precedent allows reassignment when the presiding judge appears unable to put “previous views and findings aside.” (This is a nice way of saying that they’re in the tank for the defendant.) Trump would surely fight such a request, and it’s impossible to say where the 11^th Circuit would come down.

Oh well it’s only a parking ticket.

But don’t worry, climate change is just a lefty plot to make people get rid of their SUVs, it’s not a real thing. Not real not real not real.

Tens of thousands of fish washed ashore along the gulf coast of Texas starting on Friday after being starved of oxygen in warm water, officials said.

Park officials for Brazoria County said that a cleanup effort was underway but thousands more fish were expected to wash ashore.

That’s ok. We can just print new fish.

Katie St. Clair, the sea life facility manager at Texas A&M University at Galveston, said that the warming of gulf coast waters through climate change could have contributed to the fish kill.

“As we see increased water temperatures, certainly this could lead to more of these events occurring,” Ms. St. Clair said, “especially in our shallow, near-shore or inshore environments.”

No no no, that can’t be right. Warming is a myth.

A United Nations report concluded in 2019 that warming ocean water had increased incidences of hypoxia — or low oxygen levels — in coastal waters, threatening fish populations. One of the authors of the report said at the time that oxygen loss and other effects of global warming would “create enormous pressure” on the Gulf Coast region in the future.

In addition to localized cases of hypoxia, a large “dead zone” of water spanning thousands of square miles is known to form in the Gulf of Mexico during the summer months.

It’s not dead, it’s resting.

Just try harder grrrlzzzz

No no no no no you stupid goons, you still don’t get it – we’re happy for you to play all-trans sports. Delighted. Go for it! It’s the playing “one man in the women’s sport” that we object to.

Pink News headline:

Historic all-trans rugby match sends a ‘big f*** you’ to transphobes

No, Pinky, it really doesn’t. Quite the opposite. All-trans sport is perfectly fine and doesn’t trouble us in the least. It’s the stealing women’s sports we object to. I think we’ve been very clear on this point.

Ken White on the unwinnable case scenario:

Yesterday, on our Emergent Situation Episode of Serious Trouble, Josh and I sparred a bit over the moral and political philosophy of Jack Smith’s decision to prosecute. I pointed out that the somewhat predictable assignment of the case to Judge Aileen Cannon — who proved herself to be an arguably lawless Trump partisan when she entertained his attempts to derail his own investigation — will make it extraordinarily difficult to convict him. If Judge Cannon presides over the case she can derail the prosecution in myriad ways, some of them unreviewable, if she wants to. Moreover, there’s reason to doubt that a Florida jury will convict Trump. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, striking Trump down with a federal indictment may make him more powerful than we can possibly imagine.

So that’s cheery.

But it doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be prosecuted.

So the Principles of Federal Prosecution suggest that if Jack Smith thinks that if Trump’s prosecution serves an important federal interest (it does) and the evidence is objectively factually and legally sufficient (it is), then he’s bound to bring the case even if Trump’s popularity makes a unanimous verdict difficult, risks a partisan judge, and threatens political upheaval. As Josh suggests, Jack Smith can and should make strategic decisions about what approach is soundest and most likely to lead to conviction. But the indictment in this case is overwhelmingly strong – one of the most devastating on its face that I’ve seen in my career. If Jack Smith can prove those facts, that is far more than enough to convict Trump. The only arguments against it are political.

The arguments for it are better.

Third, it’s corrosive and unjust to say that we won’t hold people to account because they are popular and powerful. The system doesn’t need more of that, thank you, we’re all stocked up. It’s already a fact, we don’t need to make it a policy as well. Strongmen already fare indescribably better than normal citizens when facing the justice system. Going full-on junta and making it an official principle of prosecution not to prosecute the powerful means abandoning even an aspiration of equality before the law.

Fourth, yielding to people who say “if you punish me or my friends for breaking the law I’ll hurt you” is a terrible way to run a society. It’s governance by thugs. If someone says “if you apply the rule of law to hold me accountable for my conduct, I will later abuse the rule of law to punish you,” you know that person is a dishonest, dishonorable partisan. There is no rational basis to believe that a dishonest, dishonorable partisan will ever behave well.

Once more unto the breach.

H/t Rob