His what?

Former President Donald Trump’s promised press conference to refute the allegations in the indictment handed up by the Fulton County DA’s Office is now very much in doubt, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.

He wants to blather about the indictment in a press conference? Is there any limit to his stupidity?

Sources tell ABC News that Trump’s legal advisors have told him that holding such a press conference with dubious claims of voter fraud will only complicate his legal problems and some of his attorneys have advised him to cancel it.

Trump announced the planned press conference with a social media post shortly after he and 18 co-defendants were indicted late Monday in Georgia. He said he would present, “A Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia.”

Georgia’s Republican governor responded to that with his own social media post declaring, “The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen. For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward – under oath – and prove anything in a court of law.”

Yes but he won’t be under oath so he’s free to tell any lies he wants and he’s stupid enough to do it. In public.

How we live now:

Yellowknife residents have been ordered to begin evacuating the city immediately as wildfires approach, N.W.T. officials said Wednesday evening.

While the city is not in immediate danger, Environment Minister Shane Thompson said a “phased approach” to evacuating will allow citizens to get out safely by car or by plane.

People most at risk go now, the rest have until noon tomorrow.

“The fire now represents a real threat to the city,” Thompson said at a news conference Wednesday evening, adding it could reach the outskirts of the city by the weekend. The fire was about 17 kilometres from the city on Wednesday, he said.

…

Thompson said Wednesday that the highway from Yellowknife to Alberta is safe to drive. People are being urged to fill up their vehicles before leaving Yellowknife, but he said the Department of Infrastructure will have a tanker full of gas along the route, and tow trucks will also be out in force.

“At Big River [Service Centre], they have informed us they have a lot of gas available and they will have other gas brought in Friday,” said Thompson. Pilot vehicles will also be on the highway to escort evacuees through smoky areas in the fire zone.

“The window of opportunity right now is going to allow us to evacuate everybody safely,” Thompson said, adding, “we need you to do it now,” because the fire threatens both air and road access.

Does that sound terrifying enough yet?

People who cannot leave by road, and residents who are immunocompromised or have other conditions that put them at higher risk, are asked to register for evacuation flights. Air evacuations are scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. Thursday. 

Air evacuees are being advised to go to Sir John Franklin High School in Yellowknife, with standard carry-on baggage only, after 10 a.m. Thursday. Pets will be allowed on commercial carriers, but must be crated. On military aircraft, pets should be crated if possible. 

I’m not sure we all fully understood that global warming would be quite this literal.

H/t Your Name’s not Bruce?

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on WHO snake oil.

A small logical, and ethical, point: The claim that most Western countries are ‘the least racist countries there has (sic) ever been, anywhere’, whether it is true or not (I happen to think it largely true), does not entail that no racism occurs in them, nor that instances of racism should be ignored. And we might remember that the existence of these ‘least racist’ societies has depended upon people struggling to achieve fairness & justice. I wonder on which side certain commentators would have been on fifty, a hundred, or 150 years ago? I wonder also why, say, the Windrush business in the UK, or Republican efforts to suppress the Black vote in many parts of the USA do not interest them. We do not live in a fantasy world, a perfected present where the ill consequences of slavery have somehow been magically expunged. There is a complacency, a refusal to face realities, in the view that we do live in such a fantasy present.

I also think that certain commentators should broaden their acquaintance, not necessarily personally, but at least with what animates the American & British extreme right as well as the self-righteous & Chomskyian left. The complacency and hypocrisy of certain British acquaintances of mine, who suppose that once the slave trade and slavery in the British Empire were ended, that was that and we should congratulate ourselves on our humanity, whereas those dreadful Americans – just look at them! They forget that their slaves were on islands thousands of miles away (out of sight and happily out of mind – so long as the money kept coming in) and did not form a large population within their own shores. They consider it bad taste to be presented with the facts of slavery, what it did for the British economy, and its continuing effects.

I find this debate, if you can call it that, infantile and ridiculous. It consists in reducing things to sentimental ‘woke’ lefties on one side, and complacent fools, virulent racists and the type of people who would no doubt be happy to be on the faculty of Prager University, if it existed, on the other. When a debate is reduced to this level, it becomes a face scowling at itself in a mirror. Why is it so difficult to recognise what happened in history, a history that does not magically stop at some (never specified) point and works in our changing present? Moral cowardice? Complacency? A desire not to be upset in any way?

One may certainly dislike Robin DiAngelo’s ‘White Fragility’ (I do), though its title certainly points to something (a craven distaste for recognising realities), but there are other books that certainly do put their fingers on realities:

Isabel Wilkerson: ‘Caste’

Eric Williamson: Capitalism & Slavery

Sathhnam Sanghara: Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

Vincent Brown: Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

Padraic X. Scanlan: How Slavery Built Modern Britain

I recommend them all to those who want to get away from the sterilities of the present debate.

How disgusting.

An Israeli journalist reported being pressured to change seats on an international flight on Tuesday, complaining that she was told by airline staff that any flight delays caused by ultra-Orthodox men attempting to enforce gender segregation would be her fault.

In a tweet, Neria Kraus, a U.S.-based correspondent for Channel 13 News, wrote that she had been asked to move by ultra-Orthodox men and alleged that she received no assistance after she turned to the Delta Air Lines flight crew for help.

Burying the lede. Why wasn’t the important bit in the first paragraph? Male religious fanatics tried to force a woman out of her seat because they think women are too filthy and whorey to sit next to.

In recent years, male ultra-Orthodox passengers on flights to and from Israel have increasingly refused to sit next to women, with travelers reporting clusters of ultra-Orthodox men approaching female passengers prior to take-off and requesting to switch seats.

Because god hates women. Men like that should be banned by the airlines.

There is no problem sitting next to a woman on public transportation according to Jewish law, asserted Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll, co-founder of the Orthodox feminist group Chochmat Nashim, complaining that “we in the religious community have allowed this by erasing women. When we erase women’s images, we get used to the idea that women aren’t there, and then we expect women not to be there in person.”

And that women are sinister, and dangerous, and filthy, and harlots, and all the rest of it. If sitting next to a woman is too difficult for men then they should stay home.

Elements of the ultra-Orthodox community have long tried to erase images of women from the public sphere through vandalism and by blurring their faces in news coverage.

Don’t call it a “community.” That’s a hooray word. Call it something not-hooray – sect, cult, gang, mafia.

The latest incident involving Kraus happened only a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that “Israel is a free country in which no one will restrict who can use public transportation, and no one will dictate where she or he will sit.”

He was responded to a series of incidents where women were asked to move to the back seats on buses or avoid using public transportation.

The back of the bus – or just get off the bus altogether. Unfuckingbelievable.

Guest post by Jonathan Gallant

Here is a thought experiment about academia.  Let us imagine that, about 40 years ago, a few academic operators had invented a newish subject called “Critical Chemical Studies”.   The focus of this subject would not be actual chemicals, but rather the language used in writing or talking about  Chemistry:  catalogues of the frequency of words like element, molecule, valence,  bond,  reaction, intermediate, rate, etc. etc.; and then endless gabble about the philosophical implications of the words’ spelling,  font type, sound, pronunciation, association, and usage.

    Before long, journals would be established to publish disquisitions in this vein.  The scholars of Critical Chemical Studies would not need laboratories, beakers, or spectrophotometers, for they would not do experiments; they would not produce things like nanosensors or new kinds of batteries or drug tests.   Instead, they would produce a steady stream of publications about chemical words in their parochial journals, and these publications would refer to each other, thus mimicking in a formal way a behavior of their academic colleagues who did actual Chemistry with chemicals.   Some of the scholars would then extend their logomachy to general propositions; for example the thesis that the lengths of terms like “coordination complex” and “dissociation constant” defined the general structure of the university, of human society, and of the universe.  Conjectures of this kind would be routinely referred to as “Theory”, thus imitating a status like that of the atomic theory and the kinetic theory of gases.   As a result of this mimicry and these “Theory” exercises, scholars of Critical Chem Studies would rise through the ranks into committees which made decisions about employment, departments, and curriculum in academe;  and in time they would also ascend into administration.    

   They might next get it into their heads that the University should endorse specific political doctrines, particularly ones focussed on certain favorite words— such as “Dilution”, “Equilibrium”, and “Ionization“.    These magic words and their acronym, repeated in innumerable notices, memoranda, statements, and edicts, would establish a new, conventional monoculture in the groves of academe.   A  new bureaucracy would be set up to make sure that everyone in the groves demonstrated fealty to the three magic words in all their teaching, research, writing, correspondence, reading, recreation, thoughts, and dreams—or at least said they did. 

Talk about an own goal.

FGM he says? FGM??????? GM is what trans ideology DOES to its believers. Trans ideology does “espouse” gender mutilation, along with breast removal and puberty blocking and related horrors. Of all things to choose to illustrate “You wouldn’t talk that way about _____” he chose genital mutilation. Think, man, think.

Interesting. Prosecutor Jennifer Rodgers in an opinion piece at CNN:

RICO also carries sentencing benefits. A conviction under Georgia’s RICO law would carry a mandatory minimum prison sentence of five years, and most of the other 40 charges in the indictment likewise involve mandatory minimum sentences of one year.

None of the other charged cases include a mandatory minimum, upping the stakes for a Georgia conviction not only for Trump, but his co-conspirators, who will be deciding in the coming weeks and months whether they want to take a plea deal that might help them avoid this consequence by allowing them to plead to a count without mandatory minimum penalties.

Here’s hoping they all abandon him, every last one of them.

In another part of the Fringe…

So there! Nyah!

BBC insults women with a headline:

Celebrity MasterChef: Cheryl Hole on why LGBTQ+ representation is important

So the BBC is cool with calling women “holes”?

Drag artist Cheryl Hole said LGBTQ+ representation on shows like Celebrity MasterChef is important with “the community under attack”.

She appears in the penultimate week of heats of the celebrity cooking show.

Is “Hole” a drag artist or a she? He can’t be both, now can he – only males can do female drag, because that’s what drag means.

Why on earth does the WHO do this?

[Ignore the first tweet.]

That crap isn’t a “first stop for health and well-being,” it’s just woo.

Joan Smith asks what Humza Yousaf thinks he’s doing talking about toxic masculinity.

“Men cannot be passive bystanders when it is our actions that are causing such pain, suffering and misery,” he declares.

The pain of being punched in the face for supporting women’s rights, for instance? The suffering that comes from being locked up in a women’s prison with a convicted rapist? Or the misery of being forced to refer to the man who attacked you as “she” in court because he “identifies” as a woman?

Noooo. Women who don’t comply with the orders issued by men who claim to be women don’t count as women or as having pain.

Of course not. Giving a woman a black eye results in nothing worse than a caution in Scotland, it seems, if the woman in question happens to be a “terf”. And Scottish prisons policy allowed even violent male offenders to demand transfers to the female estate until January this year, when a disbelieving public was confronted with photographs of “Isla Bryson” arriving at court in a blond wig.

…

“As men, we must listen,” Yousaf says in the Guardian, but there is no evidence that he (or indeed the leader of Scottish Labour, Anas Sarwar) is listening to women who offer a compelling critique of the reckless Gender Recognition Reform Bill. The most minimal safeguards were voted down during the Bill’s passage at Holyrood, with supporters flatly denying that predators would ever take advantage of the legislation to get access to vulnerable women. Or “identify” as women in order to serve their sentence in a less scary environment. 

…

Politicians don’t get to pick and choose which types of misogyny, and which aspects of male violence, are beyond the pale. Trans activism has created a tidal wave of woman-hating — and the targets are the very campaigners for women’s safety that Yousaf should be listening to.

Should be but never will be.

A shocking headline:

Seven police interviewed, station raided over ‘false’ non-binary claims

Victoria Police officers have searched the force’s Frankston station and interviewed several officers accused of claiming to be non-binary to fraudulently claim more money for civilian clothing allowances.

You mean claiming to be non-binary when they’re not actually non-binary?

So…how can they tell? What’s the difference? What were they searching for when they searched the station? Binary fingerprints? Binary clothes, binary badges, binary socks? What? What exactly is there to search for? What is the difference between real non-binary and fake non-binary? What happened to “people are who they say they are”?

Chief Commissioner Shane Patton announced a probe into the issue in July, after reports that some male officers had been rorting a discrepancy in the force’s clothing allowance by identifying as non-binary.

But if they identify as non-binary they are non-binary. Does the Chief Commissioner not know that? It’s the rule, and it’s absolute.

Under the scheme, female officers are entitled to claim about $1300 more than male colleagues.

I suppose that’s because clothing manufacturers systematically price women’s clothing higher than men’s even when the clothing in question is identical.

Professional Standards Command detectives arrested a member of the Frankston crime investigation unit on Monday, according to a police source not authorised to speak publicly.

But people are who they say they are!!!

Patton announced the investigation after the force noted a sharp increase in the number of officers identifying as gender-neutral over the previous year.

The claims were first raised by the @discernibleofficial Instagram page in June, which posted: “We have unconfirmed ­reports from inside Victoria Police that management is pulling their hair out after a majority of a CIU (crime investigation unit) in southern region changed their profile in the HR system to be ‘gender neutral’.”

Because they are gender neutral. Who is this “management” who dares to question it?

Patton then told all members in a statement that “conduct of this sort, if validated, is not acceptable and falls far short of the standards I expect from Victoria Police members and standards of behaviour outlined in our code of conduct and Victoria Police values”.

He said the option to self-describe had been introduced about three years ago as an act of good faith to support gender diverse employees.

What does “gender diverse” mean? How, exactly, does anyone know which is real and which is fake?

“This behaviour has had a significant impact on our gender diverse employees and our reputation among the Victorian LGBTIQ+ community. 

Oh no!! Oh no oh no oh no!!!!!!!

How’s their reputation doing among the Victorian women community? Have they ever sought to find out?

Officers wanting to claim the allowance, which is paid fortnightly, must now make a sworn statement if intending to self-describe as non-binary.

And the brass will know when they’re lying about it by……………………….?

The Herald on Leith Arches and its smug abrupt rude cancellation of a scheduled event because Leith Arches doesn’t like its “views.”

An Edinburgh Fringe venue has axed a show involving Father Ted creator Graham Linehan following a number of complaints.

“You can’t have a show involving Graham Linehan, he knows which people are women!!!”

The writer was the “surprise famous cancelled comedian” at the night being promoted by Comedy Unleashed at the Leith Arches.

He was due to appear in the show alongside Bruce Devlin, Mary Bourke, Dominic Frisby and Alistair Williams on Thursday night.

Today is Tuesday. How charming of Leith Arches to do this with all of two days’ notice. What exquisite manners.

Taking to X, formerly known as Twitter, Mr Linehan pointed to the legal difficulty the Stand Comedy found itself in after cancelling an in-conversation event with SNP MP Joanna Cherry.

Earlier this year, the club said a number of “key operational staff, including venue management and box office personnel” were unwilling to work on the event because of “concerns about Ms Cherry’s views.”

However, after the politician obtained legal opinion from leading human rights advocate, Aidan O’Neill KC, The Stand backed down and admitted that the cancellation constituted “unlawful discrimination”.

And did the same thing all over again to someone else. Clever.

It may be unlawful but it’s super enlightened, so no one will mind.

It’s more coherent and human-grammar-based than the first frenzied Announcement, but it’s just as ridiculous.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Now ineligible.

Beware of anyone telling you there are clear answers here.

I’m sympathetic to the arguments in the paper, though I wouldn’t draw any conclusions without hearing an opposing view. But even the authors of that paper concede that the major precedent on the “self-executing” issue is a case from shortly after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, and it’s by the then-Chief Justice Salmon Chase (in his capacity as a circuit justice), and it comes out the other way.

I don’t want to get into a long discussion about stare decisis and such. Suffice it to say that it’s a perfectly acceptable argument to say that Chief Justice Chase got it wrong. And it’s possible that today’s Supreme Court would disagree with Chase and agree with the authors. But it’s not how I would bet, and not just because it’s a conservative court.

The article strikes me as a perfectly reasonable piece of legal scholarship, but I’ve seen it passed around recently as the 163rd version of “THIS time they’ve got Trump! Here’s the ONE WEIRD TRICK that will keep him from regaining the presidency!” (Not saying that’s what OB or HHO are doing here. This thing’s been making the rounds, and with people who are less restrained in their commentary.) And I just don’t see it happening.

I strongly suspect that the Biden campaign is not going to get behind any effort to block Trump from being on the general election ballot, and even the few Republicans (Christie, Hutchinson) who have criticized him aren’t going to try to get him disqualified from the primary ballot. Yes, it’s possible that some activist groups will sue on their own, or some enterprising Secretary of State or other election official will decide to act on his or her own. Then you’ll have counter-demands from the GOP that Biden be disqualified from the ballot because, I don’t know, his border policies are aiding and abetting an invasion and insurrection or whatever. And the courts are going to be strongly motivated to say “no, we are not having this election decided by individual state officials taking it upon themselves to declare what an insurrection is by watching some videos and reading some tweets. If someone actually gets convicted of something, maybe then.”

There is no Adult in Charge who is going to step in and assert his or her (supposed) authority to make sure Trump can’t be president again because he was naughty. The American electorate is going to have to do their job again. And yes, that makes me nervous.

That’s just a prediction, and I could easily be wrong. But I’m going to need to see more than “a couple law professors came up with a neat argument.” There are law journals full of such neat arguments that will never be adopted by an actual court.

Sam Levine at the Guardian explains the “is he barred from running?” question this way:

Can Trump still run for president?

Yes. The US constitution does not prohibit anyone charged with a crime, nor anyone convicted of one, from holding office.

The 14th amendment, however, does bar anyone who has taken an oath to protect the United States and engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” from holding office.

Relying on that provision, a slew of separate civil lawsuits in state courts are expected in the near future to try to bar Trump from holding office.

So agitated they can’t type a single coherent sentence.

“we would like to thank the public for bringing to our attention, about a comedian” – “via emails from, and rightly so, outraged members”

And they are an inclusive venue that excludes people who are accused of no one knows what via emails from, and rightly so, outraged members.

Timothy Snyder writes:

Section 1 of Article Two is one, but not the only, place where the Constitution defines who may run for president. Whereas Section 1 of Article Two has to do with a factors over which a person has no control, place of birth and legal status of parents, Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment concerns how an American citizen behaves. It forbids officeholders who try to overthrow the Republic from holding office again.

It is obvious on a plain reading of this part of our Constitution that (absent a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress) Donald Trump is now ineligible for the office of the presidency. He took an oath as an officer of the United States, and then engaged in insurrection and rebellion, and gave aid and comfort to others who did the same. No one seriously disputes this. Trump certainly does not. His coup attempt after losing the 2020 election is the platform on which is he is now staging what he portrays as his campaign for the presidency. The big lie he told at the time he continues to tell. He defied the Constitution and is now running against the Constitution.

Well I’d say Trump does dispute that he engaged in insurrection and rebellion. He would call it something else – something much easier to spell, for a start. He certainly disputes that he did anything wrong.

I was heartened just now to read a comprehensive, powerfully argued (and beautifully written) article by the (conservative) legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen. It defends the plain reading of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment on what would seem to be every historical and interpretive ground. It was written with all possible objections in mind. Rather than belabor these, I suggest you read the article itself (which should be published as some sort free ebook.)

The authors conclude that Trump is “no longer eligible to the office of Presidency, or any other state or federal office covered by the Constitution. All who are committed to the Constitution should take note and say so.” Although I am focusing on Trump here, the authors of the article are concerned with insurrectionists in general. For them, Trump is one of many people who are now, given their participation in Trump’s coup attempt, ineligible for office.

I thought at first “But doesn’t he have to be convicted to make that true?” Then I thought no, maybe not. He has to be convicted before he can be sentenced and punished, but maybe not before he can be ineligible to run again. I don’t know what the facts are on this.

I worry that we will find some excuse not to draw the obvious conclusion about Trump, so well grounded in the article. It was troubling, for me at least, to see the New York Times coverage of the article relativize its central finding with this vague but suggestive formulation: “voters remain free to assess whether his conduct was blameworthy.” This wording suggests that Trump can run for president, and that we as voters can then consider his ineligibility for that office alongside his legal problems (which the Times article then rehearses). That is wrong, because it misunderstands what ineligibility is.

Snyder compares it to Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is ineligible to run for president because he was born a citizen of another country.

we cannot decide to elect a president who is not a natural-born citizen. This is not an issue we are “free to assess,” because we are governed by the Constitution. For the same reason, we cannot vote for oath-breaking insurrectionists such as Donald Trump. Such people are barred by the Constitution from running for president.

H/t Harald Hanche-Olsen

Why would any radio personality bring in India Willoughby of all people to talk about hate?

James O’Brien spoke to former Loose Women panellist and trans woman India Willougby after two men were stabbed outside a Clapham gay bar in a homophobic attack, as police hunt for the knifeman.

Why? Why not talk to a gay man rather than a man who calls himself a woman? Especially when the man who calls himself a woman is the venomous misogyny-mongering horror show that is India Willoughby?

India said to James: “You see attacks on drag queens, drag queen storytime. Now drag is not trans. Drag is gay culture and for me, thugs and bullies, they do not differentiate when you’re out and about whether you’re gay or trans.

“They’re not checking who you are before throwing a punch, you’re all the same.”

Why get him in to change the subject to trans? Why get him in to bring the conversation around to himself?

India went on to say: “It’s all the responsibility of, to me as somebody who is trans, it’s the government, it’s British media who stand these flames in a horrendous way and unfortunately the gender critical movement.

“So it’s those three components that have all come together and you cannot control hate. Once you give permission to hate one group it goes elsewhere.”

Why bring him in to blame feminist women for male gay-bashing?

Detailed but irrefutable. Why “but”? Detailed and irrefutable are not incompatible or contradictory. He meant “and” but his brain tricked him, probably because he knows the “details” are inventions aka lies.