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
Hmmm.
A lawyer speaks:
“And when they finally have the genitalia they want?” is an interesting sentence. I remember when genitalia were just part of the package deal and no substitutions were offered.
She’s welcome to be abundantly clear but I still don’t believe her.
Former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has been arrested in connection with the ongoing investigation into the funding and finances of the SNP. Police confirmed a 52-year-old woman was taken into custody as a suspect and is being questioned by detectives.
It follows the arrest and release of her husband, ex-SNP chief executive Peter Murrell in April. A spokesman for Ms Sturgeon confirmed she was cooperating with the investigation.
She probably won’t have to spend time in a cell, but if she does, I wonder if she’ll urge the screws to put her in with a trans laydee.
Patients are supposed to be at the heart of everything the NHS does. This is considered such an important principle that, a decade ago, the fledgling NHS constitution was rewritten after the mid-Staffs scandal, in which so many patients died, to make clear it should frame every aspect of NHS work.
You’d think that would be self-evident. What else would be at the heart of health care?
Yet, last week, the NHS Confederation, the membership body for NHS providers, published guidance that appears to cut this ethos adrift. [Its stated objectives are incredibly important: supporting trans staff by helping healthcare leaders to understand their needs and address any workplace discrimination they may face.] But it also includes guidance on how to handle requests for same-sex care that gets the law badly wrong and could lead NHS trusts to unlawfully discriminate against female patients.
Brackets mine. I’m not sure I agree with the (no doubt obligatory) stipulations in the brackets. I’m not sure I think the NHS should even be hiring trans people for work involving patients, given the state of the ideology around “trans” and the peremptory bullying demands that issue from that ideology. That of course would be “discrimination” and probably illegal…but the reality is that trans people are encouraged to be nuisances and time-wasters and attention-hogs at best and persecutors of women at worst.
The NHS Confederation cannot override the law and is not a statutory body like the CQC. Yet its guidance directly contradicts it. It claims it would be “discriminatory” for a patient to refuse to be treated by a trans healthcare professional of the opposite sex unless “evidenced clinical harm may result”. This is legal gibberish – individuals are not directly bound by equalities law in their conduct as patients – and the law does not say providers should only accept requests if there would otherwise be clinical harm.
Its guidance wrongly claims it would probably be discriminatory for a provider to honour a request for same-sex care by excluding trans staff of the opposite sex if the request has “no clinical merit”, opines without basis that there will be “extremely few circumstances” where this request is lawful and says “patients expressing any such view should be informed of the discriminatory nature of their request [and] that such behaviour is unacceptable”. It does not even mention the law on consent.
Again, this is the result of years of drip drip drip indoctrination. Of course women shouldn’t be forced to have a man inspecting her genitals because he claims to be a woman. It’s obvious yet people have been relentlessly trained to think (or at least say) it’s twanzphobic. Drip drip drip indoctrination will do that to you.
Grey Slavery is back in the news gossip.
He adds several hundred tweets, which are too boring to read, let alone share. He’s enjoying the attention a lot.
H/t Mostly Cloudy
The Times says Aileen Cannon won’t be recused.
The news of Judge Cannon’s assignment raised eyebrows because of her role in an earlier lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump challenging the F.B.I.’s search of his Florida club and estate, Mar-a-Lago. In issuing a series of rulings favorable to him, Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee, effectively disrupted the investigation until a conservative appeals court ruled she never had legitimate legal authority to intervene.
In other words she’s the last person who should be filling this slot.
There are all kinds of reasons other judges couldn’t be assigned to the case. It’s almost as if there are too many reasons. Assigning a judge who has already tried to protect Trump from the consequences of his crimes, and been caught doing it and replaced and made to look like a corrupt fool – a judge who was appointed by Trump, to the shock-horror of all observers on account of how underqualified she is – is not a very wise or judicious thing to do.
The clerk clarified another matter: whether Judge Cannon would continue to handle the case. Since news of Judge Cannon’s assignment emerged early Friday, observers have speculated that it could only be an initial assignment before being handed to another judge.
But Ms. Noble confirmed that no court practice would return the case to be assigned to another judge. In short, Judge Cannon’s assignment is permanent unless she were to step aside.
In short the fix is in already. He’s going to get away with it, isn’t he. Get away with it, get elected, get to destroy whatever shards and fragments are left.
Trump is displaying his usual taste and wit.
Donald Trump vowed Saturday to continue running for president even if he were to be convicted as part of the 37-count federal felony indictment that was issued against him this week.
“I’ll never leave,” Trump said in an interview aboard his plane. “Look, if I would have left, I would have left prior to the original race in 2016. That was a rough one. In theory that was not doable.”
Translation: He’ll continue to barge ahead because he’s a deranged narcissist.
While Trump said campaign fundraising had skyrocketed since the indictment was issued, he conceded it was an unwelcome development.
“Nobody wants to be indicted,” said Trump. “I don’t care that my poll numbers went up by a lot. I don’t want to be indicted. I’ve never been indicted. I went through my whole life, now I get indicted every two months. It’s been political.”
Sure it’s been political: he decided to run for a political office that presented him with all sorts of new opportunities to commit crimes. He got elected and duly committed many crimes. Some of them (though not enough) are now catching up with him.
The BBC reminds us that Trump is charged not just with taking all those documents he had no right to take, but also with lying and obstruction in order to hang on to them.
Mr Trump has been charged with 37 counts of unauthorised possession of classified material, obstruction of justice, concealing documents, and making false statements to law enforcement.
…
Republicans, including some of Mr Trump’s presidential rivals, rushed to his defence on Thursday as news of the indictment first broke.
While they may still take issue with what they view as a politically motivated prosecution, they may find it more difficult to explain why Mr Trump held onto such sensitive national security after leaving the White House.
Where does political motivation end and enforcement of the law begin? Republicans are usually big fans of enforcing the law.
The alleged mishandling of classified documents is only one part of the case against Mr Trump. The others involve charges of obstruction of the investigation and lying to and misleading investigators.
Those last two weren’t allowed even when he was president. [See: Nixon, passim.]
“The biggest obstacle in cases of this kind is proving intent,” says David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University.
“But the indictment provides an enormous volume of very specific information showing Mr Trump’s personal awareness and involvement, including his proposing that various statements be made to investigators that he knew were false.”
Meanwhile he’s campaigning to be put back in the office so that he can steal more classified documents.
The Guardian is still resorting to the gender uncritical framing.
Oxford University’s new professor of LGBTQ+ history has accused the government of “fanning a culture war” over freedom of speech, insisting it is alive and well in higher education.
Is there such a thing as LGBTQ+ history? I suppose you can lump two or more unrelated things together and then do history of both of them, but is that a genre of history or just a random list?
Matt Cook, who was this week named as the first Jonathan Cooper chair of the history of sexualities, a newly created post at Mansfield College, was speaking only days after the appointment of the government’s first “free speech tsar” for higher education.
Oh him. He’s the guy who went on the radio and made such an exhibition of himself by being unable to stop repeating “kind of” and “you know” multiple times in every sentence.
Cook, a renowned cultural historian who has written extensively on queer urban life, the Aids crisis and queer domesticity, denied that free speech was under threat in higher education.
“Of course there’s protests about certain people speaking and there has been historically, about figures as diverse as David Icke and Enoch Powell, and that’s right,” he said.
“But these people still spoke in university contexts, despite the protests and despite the calls for people not to speak in university forums. It’s only a tiny fraction of cases where people actually don’t speak.
“So my sense is that it’s not a huge problem. I think the issue has been blown out of proportion. I also think there’s some political expediency in this. It’s a way of fanning a culture war. I don’t think we need additional protections for free speech in the university. Free speech is pretty alive and well.”
I wonder if that’s really what he said. I wonder if the Guardian cleaned it up for him.
Jolyon Maugham urging more more more puberty blockers.
Updating to add – the replies to Maugham’s tweet are almost all in dissent. That’s encouraging.
In a post on Truth Social on Thursday, Mr Trump said he had been summoned to appear on Tuesday afternoon at a federal court in Miami, Florida, where the charges against him will be read.
“I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former president of the United States,” Mr Trump wrote.
That’s another symptom of his profound stupidity. He thought he could get away with anything because of his sacred status. Of course, he wouldn’t have said the same thing about Obama.
Prosecutors had also presented evidence in court in Washington DC, but a decision to file the indictment in southern Florida instead may offer some consolation for the Trump team.
Legal experts say the state – where the former Republican president is popular – is likely to produce a less Democratic-leaning jury pool than if the case had been prosecuted in the US capital.
And the judge will be Aileen Cannon, the hack Trump appointed who is so eager to give him every break she can.
Golly, I wasn’t expecting that while cruising for Trump news – the four children lost in the Amazon have all been found alive.
[Colombian] President Gustavo Petro said finding the group was a “magical day”, adding: “They were alone, they themselves achieved an example of total survival which will remain in history.”
The children belong to the Huitoto indigenous group. Mr Petro shared a photograph of several members of the military and Indigenous community caring for the siblings, who had been missing for 40 days. One of the rescuers held a bottle up to the mouth of the smallest child, while another fed one of the other children from a mug with a spoon.
Updating to add:
A dog on one of the search teams went missing…he was following a set of footprints…
This has to stop. It’s journalistic malpractice that is a massive danger to women.
A more accurate headline and less of a threat to women. It’s not women who are running around threatening to kill people, and news media have to stop saying it is.
The man who threatened Kellie-Jay Keen:
Good god. What’s coming out is…I’ve run out of words for it.
Screechy Monkey told us to see Robert Costa’s thread on the subject, so I see it, and holy shit.
This isn’t that loony guy in the park, this is former president.
Why, yes, that is very damning indeed.
How he carefully stored these documents:
That top left one? That’s the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago.
One interesting detail in the Trump indictment –
On two occasions in 2021, Trump showed classified documents to others, according to the indictment. One instance, which The Washington Post has previously reported on, was a July 2021 meeting at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., when Trump showed a writer, publisher and two members of his staff what he described as a “plan of attack” that Trump claimed was prepared for him by the Defense Department and a senior military official. None of the individuals present at the meeting, which was audio-recorded, had a security clearance.
Ah. He kept the stuff as souvenirs…he wanted to relive the glory days, when important people prepared plans of attack for him – for HIM, little Donnie from Queens, wouldja believe it?
Former president Donald Trump announced Thursday evening that he had been indicted in federal court in Florida over the classified information found at his Mar-a-Lago home.
…
Trump is charged under a part of the Espionage Act that bars willful retention of national defense information by someone not authorized to have it, according to people familiar with the case. Such information is defined as “any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Technically, that information does not have to be classified, but in practice the law is almost exclusively used to prosecute retention of classified material.
A conviction does not require any evidence of a desire to disseminate the classified information; having it in an unauthorized location is enough. But the crime requires a “willful” mishandling of material “the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” Charges are generally not brought without some aggravating factor making clear the retention was not accidental — such as evidence of intent to share the information, signs of disloyalty to the U.S. government, or simply the amount of documents taken.
Do we think Trump has provided enough signs of disloyalty to the US government?
Obstruction of justice: Trump is also charged [with] obstruction of justice for his alleged efforts to stymie the federal investigation, according to people familiar with the charges. People familiar with the investigation say the government gathered evidence that Trump directed his aides to hide classified papers in advance of an FBI search and told advisers and lawyers to falsely assert that all classified documents in his possession had been returned to the federal government.
False statements: Jim Trusty, an attorney for Trump, said on CNN that the former president is also accused of making false statements to federal investigators. It is unclear so far what those particular statements are. Publicly, Trump has suggested without evidence that FBI agents planted classified evidence at his home and claimed that anything sensitive found there had been declassified.
Grinding slowly.
First
A couple of points.
One, his claim is stupid and wrong. There are some surface resemblances, but the actual substance is very different.
Two, it’s quite staggering how bad he is at professional talking. That’s what professors do, it’s the “profess” in “professional” and “professor” – they talk well. This buffoon does it almost as badly as Kathleen Stock’s hilarious interlocutor at the Oxford Union. A million “kind of”s and almost as many “you know”s. He talks fast instead of well, and the result is a machine-gun delivery of stuttering and repetition with very little content. Why did Oxford make him an endowed professor?
