Ah isn’t that adorable.

(He didn’t really get it from Marks & Sparks.)

Hur hur.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on 9 a.m. Pacific time.

After reviewing the affidavit (it’s here, the link @6 is to something else), I would say it’s not a completely uninformative nothingburger, but not terribly illuminating or new.

My notes:

— A criminal investigation was opened after the return of the 15 boxes. In other words, it’s not just the discovery that Trump continued to withhold documents that triggered a criminal inquiry.

— Of the 15 boxes that Trump voluntarily turned over, there were 67 documents marked confidential, 92 marked secret, and 25 top secret. Many also carried other designations, including those relating to human intelligence (i.e. sources)

— According to the FBI agent, many of the documents contain national defense information, which is a basis for criminal liability separate and apart from any classification status (this is not really new info)

— The classified documents were not kept in any orderly fashion and were interspersed with other nonclassified materials

— some of the documents bear what appear to be Trump’s handwritten notes (unclear whether those notes were made during his time in office or later)

— Trump’s counsel wrote a letter to investigators pointing out the president’s authority to declassify, and demanded that the letter be provided to any court. The DOJ did in fact attach the letter to the warrant application; Trump’s position was not “hidden” from the judge

None of the unredacted portions shed any light on how DOJ came to believe there were additional materials being withheld. Unsurprising as that would reveal sources and methods.

The BBC offers some summaries:

The Department of Justice – which obtained the search warrant – described its work as a criminal investigation over the improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorised spaces.

A criminal investigation of Trump, that is.

The 38-page affidavit said there was “probable cause” to believe that “evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed” breaking federal laws would be found at Trump’s home.

Not a coincidence.

Trump is truth socialing his views.

Affidavit heavily redacted!!! Nothing mentioned on “Nuclear,” a total public relations subterfuge by the FBI & DOJ, or our close working relationship regarding document turnover – WE GAVE THEM MUCH. Judge Bruce Reinhart should NEVER have allowed the Break-In of my home. He recused himself two months ago from one of my cases based on his animosity and hatred of your favorite President, me. What changed? Why hasn’t he recused himself on this case? Obama must be very proud of him right now!

You have the right to remain silent…

What Judicial Watch had to do with it:

Not long after the National Archives acknowledged in February that it had retrieved 15 boxes of presidential records from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, Trump began fielding calls from Tom Fitton, a prominent conservative activist.

Fitton, the longtime head of the legal activist group Judicial Watch, had a simple message for Trump — it was a mistake to give the records to the Archives, and his team should never have let the Archives “strong-arm” him into returning them, according to three sources familiar with the matter.Those records belonged to Trump, Fitton argued, citing a 2012 court case involving his organization that he said gave the former President authority to do what he wanted with records from his own term in office.

Fitton told Trump he should not give up any more records.

While Trump continued to publicly tout his cooperation with the Archives, privately the former President began obsessing over Fitton’s arguments, complaining to aides about the 15 boxes that were handed over and becoming increasingly convinced that he should have full control over records that remained at Mar-a-Lago, according to people with knowledge of his behavior at the time.

This is where Trump’s stupidity comes into play: he obsesses over what one guy said to him instead of considering what a range of legal experts think. Trump is a one guy kind of guy.

Even people close to the former President have begun to privately question the competence of the legal team around him, particularly Christina Bobb, the former One America News Network TV host who has become one of the faces of Trump’s legal team in the aftermath of the Mar-a-Lago search.

Here we see one of the drawbacks of being a flagrant bully and cheat: the finer legal minds may decide they just don’t feel like squandering their talents on a flagrant bully and cheat.

Trump’s advisers have made it clear they want this fight to be a political not legal battle.

Well of course they do. A legal battle is not good for him, because he’s a crook. If he makes it a political battle he can win by shouting and fussing and carrying on.

Some of Trump’s allies believe the former President is more secure than ever, at least politically speaking. In the days following the FBI search, Trump raised millions of dollars and saw an outpouring of support — including from his potential GOP rivals in a 2024 presidential primary.

The head of the Asshole Party sees an outpouring of support, because they gotta lotta assholes in that party.

Hmmmm.

Hungary’s state audit office has issued a report about the risks of the country’s education system being “too feminine”, saying it could hurt the development of boys and create demographic problems.

…

“The phenomenon called ‘pink education’ has numerous economic and social consequences,” states the report by the state body, which is seen as close to the nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán.

Why is it called that though? What color is “masculine” education? Does “masculine” education also have numerous economic and social consequences?

“If education favours feminine traits” such as “emotional and social maturity” and “provokes the overrepresentation of women in universities, equality (of the sexes) will be considerably weakened”, the report concludes.

Seriously? They’re going with that? They’re saying emotional and social maturity is bad? They want more manly emotional and social cluelessness and crudity? Less thought, more bullying?

The report adds that boyish traits of creativity and innovation are “necessary for the optimal development of the economy”.

Who says those are boyish traits? And how do they interact with social and emotional maturity? Is there any reason all four traits can’t co-exist?

Tomorrow is going to be interesting.

A federal judge in Florida on Thursday ordered that a redacted version of the affidavit used to obtain a warrant for former President Donald J. Trump’s Florida residence be unsealed by noon on Friday — paving the way for the disclosure of potentially revelatory details about a search with enormous legal and political implications.

It will be heavily redacted to protect people Trump is going to want to have killed.

Justice Department officials had previously suggested they will abide by [the judges’] general guidance but push hard to scrub anything that could expose witnesses in the case to intimidation or retribution by Mr. Trump’s supporters. After the search at Mar-a-Lago, the F.B.I. reported a surge in threats against its agents; an armed man tried to breach the bureau’s Cincinnati field office, before being killed in a shootout with the local police.

They want to protect the gang boss.

Following up on Screechy Monkey’s tip about a target letter – Google turns up nothing current but Twitter is more helpful.

Trump is melting down on his pretend-twitter. I took a deep breath and went directly to the source to collect his exclamations.

Even though I am as innocent as a person can be, and despite MY campaign being spied on by the Radical Left, the FISA COURT being lied to and defrauded, all of the many Hoaxes and Scams that were illegally placed on me by very sick & demented people, and without even mentioning the many crimes of Joe and Hunter Biden, all revealed in great detail in the Laptop From Hell, it looks more and more like the Fake News Media is pushing hard for the Sleaze to do something that should not be done!

All very convincing.

Joe Biden said he knew nothing about the Break-In of Mar-a-Lago or, the greatest political attack in the history of the U.S. Does anybody really believe this???

Define “this.”

The Radical Left Democrat prosecutors are illegally trying to circumvent, for purely political gain, the Presidential Record’s Act, under which I have done absolutely nothing wrong. It can not be circumvented, for me or any other President. They illegally Raided my home, and took things that should not have been taken. They even broke into my safe, an unthinkable act!

Things. The took things. Things that should notof been tooken. How dare they broke into my safe where I hid the best shit.

People are having a lot of innocent fun with this –

Prepare to shed a tear.

Alix Fitzgerald takes a deep breath, conscious of articulating* her point in the clearest possible terms. “The only way I can describe this,” she begins, her voice tinged with sadness, “is that it’s like grief. “It’s like something has been ripped away.”

*[conscious of the need to articulate]

Fitzgerald, a proud trans woman, is mourning the loss of rugby. She had been an active member of East London RFC women’s team, but the Rugby Football Union’s ban on players “assigned male at birth” in female contact rugby last month prematurely spelt the end of her career.

I don’t give one single teeny tiny shit. Why should I? What about the woman who isn’t on the team because Fitzgerald, a man, is? What about her grief? What about what was ripped away from her? Why are we being nudged to feel lachrymose sympathy for a selfish man intruding on women and taking one woman’s place?

The rationale for the controversial decision, which echoed others made by British Cycling and swimming’s world governing body this year, was simple. Given the limited scientific research currently available on trans women, rugby’s governing body argued that the safety of female players could no longer be guaranteed.

The decision doesn’t need a “rationale.” Women’s sports are for women. That’s the whole point of them.

Fearing a ban on trans women was imminent, the 54-year-old front rower turned out for every single game for her club last year – a record she is fiercely proud of.

Women don’t need men being fiercely proud of stealing places in women’s sports. Men are not the underdogs in this scenario, so their ferocity is not that of the plucky underdog but instead that of the bigger stronger faster overdog, so get out of here with that manipulative crap.

On the day the ban was passed, Fitzgerald chose to stay at home, numbed, she says, “by a huge sense of rejection”. The phone rang. It was a member from her rugby club who wanted to check in on her. “My wife, Anne, picked it up. I couldn’t take the call. It was the second worst day of my life,” she reflects.

Diddums. Has he ever thought about how the woman he’s replacing feels?

Updating to add:

One trans woman who did turn up to voice her disappointment was Julie Curtiss. The Hove RFC player had been liaising with the RFU’s welfare officers in early June – more than a month before news of the ban on trans women was announced – having been invited to play for the Sussex women’s veteran team at a competition this autumn.

“I personally don’t think that the people who are running around and trying to influence various sports bodies have women’s sport at heart,” insists Curtiss. “I don’t think any of them are particularly interested in women’s sport, ultimately. I think their main thing is to try to systematically go through each of the sectors of society where we want to exist and kick us out.”  

So we’re supposed to think Curtiss has women’s sport at heart? Ha. Curtiss has Curtiss at heart.

After the vote, the body reached out to Curtiss and suggested there were several other avenues she could explore, such as coaching or refereeing. While she does have aspirations to coach, doing so right now would be “tacitly agreeing to what the RFU has done” and a reminder of the marginalisation of the trans community across sport.

You can’t do both. You can’t both mess with your hormones and be “included” across sport. That’s not “marginalisation,” it’s just sport.

“It’s taken me back into that fear place, where I’m reminded by institutions that I’m not ‘woman’ enough,” says Curtiss. “It’s really hard to quantify exactly what that means but it has really knocked my self-confidence and my ability to operate in society.”

It hasn’t made the slightest dent in his self-involvement though.

Same old smoke and mirrors:

Trans golfer sparks outrage as she attempts to qualify for ladies PGA tour

Outrage why? Because the golfer is not a “she.” Lying in the headline is not a good look for a newspaper.

A Scottish golfer who is attempting to qualify for the ladies’ PGA tour has sparked a fresh row over whether transgender athletes should compete in women’s events.

The row is over whether men should compete in women’s events.

Hailey Davidson, who became the first trans golfer to win a professional tournament last year, is trying to earn a Ladies Professional Gold Association (LPGA) tour card.

If successful, Davidson will become the first trans golfer to earn the card.

He’s not a “trans golfer,” he’s a trans woman, i.e. a man. Because he’s a man, he shouldn’t be competing against women. It isn’t fair.

Davidson began hormone therapy in 2015 and has undergone gender reassignment surgery. Before the therapy, the golfer competed as a male.

No he didn’t “compete as a male,” he simply was a male, and still is. He competed against other men.

And while some have accused her of having an unfair advantage against other female competitors, Davidson claims that some of her rivals can hit the ball further after she lost 30 yards from her drive after undergoing therapy.

Oh just stop. Stop trying to cheat. Have some dignity, along with a sense of fairness.

Davidson has previously claimed that the outrage is “not about protecting women’s sports or me having an advantage, it’s just that you don’t like trans people.”

It’s that we don’t like men invading women’s sports. Get out of it.

Jon makes an important point.

Politics, justice, freedom struggles, equal rights campaigns – none of that is about “kindness.” Keep your damn kindness and just give us what’s rightfully ours.

Kindness is a good thing in its place, but expanded out of its place it can be intrusive and patronizing and ultimately infuriating. Give us our due and then don’t bother us.

Helen Lewis says social justice crusades are a kind of substitute religion for The Young.

In the U.S., the nonreligious are younger and more liberal than the population as a whole. Perhaps, then, it isn’t a coincidence that they are also the group most likely to be involved in high-profile social-justice blowups, particularly the type found on college campuses. They’ve substituted one religion for another…

…Many common social-justice phrases have echoes of a catechism: announcing your pronouns or performing a land acknowledgment shows allegiance to a common belief, reassuring a group that everyone present shares the same values.

See also: those annoying yard signs (I bet you don’t have them in the UK – you luckies) that advertise the inhabitants’ virtues. The one I hate most leads with “IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE” and then lists the pieties. The pieties are mostly quite acceptable pieties, but I’m extremely tired of the smug self-admiring advertisement of them.

As politics has usurped religion, it has borrowed its underlying concepts, sometimes putting them into new words. John McWhorter, a linguist and Atlantic contributing writer, recently published a best-selling book reflecting on what he sees as the excesses of America’s racial-justice movement. Its working title was “The Elect,” after the Calvinist idea of a group chosen by God for salvation. (In the end, it was published under the more provocative name Woke Racism.) “The hyper-woke—who were firing people right and left, and shaming people right and left—think that they’re seeing further than most people, that they understand the grand nature of things better than the ordinary person can,” McWhorter told me. “To them, they’re elect.”

And being elect means they need to chastise the unelect.

Helen points out that Trump fans are another kind of elect.

There’s no escape.

Could it be that forced pregnancy will keep Republicans from taking over?

Abortion and Donald Trump will both appear on November’s ballot. On Tuesday, Pat Ryan, a Democrat and a decorated Iraq war veteran, upset Republican Marc Molinaro in a special congressional election in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley. Ryan won 52-48 after pre-election polls had painted him as the clear underdog.

…

On the campaign trail Ryan made abortion a central issue. “Choice is [on] the ballot, but we won’t go back,” he posted to Facebook hours before the polls opened. “Freedom is under attack, but it’s ours to defend.”

…

There is a clear backlash against the US supreme court’s evisceration of the rights to privacy and personal autonomy.

Whose rights to privacy and personal autonomy? Not everyone’s; only women’s. I doubt it’s mere clumsy writing that made Lloyd Green obscure that fact. Avoiding the word “women” has become second nature to many journalists and opinion writers.

Tudor Dixon, Michigan’s Republican candidate for governor, spoke of the upside of a 14-year-old rape victim carrying the child to term. “The bond that those two people made and the fact that out of that tragedy there was healing through that baby, it’s something that we don’t think about,” Dixon told an interviewer.

Weirdly, even there he manages to avoid saying “girl.”

Anyway, I hope he’s right about the backlash.

From last week:

A female comic and healthcare worker says she has been spat at on the street and shunned by long-time colleagues for daring to put on a performance about biological women.

Award-winning funny woman Elaine Miller’s Fringe show Viva Your Vulva: The Hole Story has been the target of abuse from those judging her as a “transphobe”. She says that at the end of the Edinburgh show she makes a reference to the importance of language in getting across healthcare messaging.

Like not saying “people” should get tested for cervical or testicular cancer? That kind of importance of language?

Her crime she says is not mentioning transwomen because they are “not relevant to the topic” of female biological anatomy.

Ya that kind.

In an interview with the Scottish Daily Express, Ms Miller said the show is about anyone with female anatomy, including trans men and non-binary individuals. She said: “I think my crime is that it’s only about female people and I don’t mention trans women at all because they are not relevant to the topic and that seems to have upset people.”

You know, somebody should lock Trump and trans women (yes all of them) in a room to duke it out for Who Is Most Self-obsessed On The Planet.

Trump thinks “executive privilege” is something like a guarantee of absolute monarchy – a magic holy term that empowers him to have take keep do say deny lie about whatever he wants. He thinks all he has to do is say the documents are covered by “executive privilege” and that’s the last word on the subject. In short he has a child’s idea of what being president means and what having been president means.

That’s why his exchanges with the National Archives were at cross-purposes.

The National Archives and Records Administration recovered more than 100 documents bearing classified markings, totaling more than 700 pages, from an initial batch of 15 boxes retrieved from Mar-a-Lago earlier this year, according to newly public government correspondence with the Trump legal team.

The numbers make clear the large volume of secret government documents recovered months ago from former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate, well before FBI officials returned there with a search warrant on Aug. 8 and removed an additional 11 sets of classified records. The warrant reveals an FBI investigation into the potential unlawful possession of the records as well as obstruction of justice.

In Trump’s tiny mind there can’t be such a thing as “unlawful possession” of documents from his Absolute Monarchy.

The figures on documents were included in a May 10 letter in which acting archivist Debra Steidel Wall told a lawyer for Trump, Evan Corcoran, that the Biden administration would not be honoring the former president’s protective claims of executive privilege over the documents.

Does not compute. They’re not “claims,” they’re Absolute Reality just as he was Absolute Ruler. He was the god-king so the papers from his god-kingship are protected by his godly kingyness. Executive privilege. Woman man person camera tv.

The archivist’s letter says the Justice Department had found “no precedent for an assertion of executive privilege by a former President against an incumbent President to prevent the latter” from obtaining from the National Archives presidential records that belong to the federal government and that are needed for current government business.

“Precedent”? What is this “precedent” of which you speak?

Once again the question arises: what about copies? Why isn’t the reporting explaining to us why there is so much agitation over The Documents with no mention of copies?

Anyway. Rolling Stone reports:

IN THE WEEKS after the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid, former President Donald Trump repeatedly made a simple-sounding but extraordinary ask: he wanted his lawyers to get “my documents” back from federal law enforcement.

Trump wasn’t merely referring to the alleged trove of attorney-client material that he insists was scooped up by the feds during the raid, two people familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone. The ex-president has been demanding that his team find a way to recover “all” of the official documents that Trump has long referred to as “mine” — including the highly sensitive and top secret ones.   

Sources close to Trump agree with outside legal experts that such a sweeping legal maneuver would be a long-shot, at best.  “I hate to break it to the [former] president, but I do not think he is going to get all [the] top-secret documents back,” says one Trump adviser. “That ship has probably sailed.”

But why is it implied that the documents are unique? Why wouldn’t Trump have multiple copies in multiple places? What are we missing? Is it that the originals have copy-proof Somethings that mean copies are essentially worthless? Or what?

Oh dear. That sounds way too much like “What is this drivel, throw it away and hand in the actual assignment by tomorrow or you get an F for the course.”

All the narcissism.

“Buckle up everybody it’s time to talk about my”

Stop right there.

Updating to add: It’s a parody.

“You can’t criticize or dispute ____, ____ is a mother’s child!”

The Daily Record rants:

The mum of a Scots transwoman who is competing in a women’s professional golf tournament has hit out at Judy Murray after she criticised her daughter’s place in the competition.

Why “the mum”? Why baby talk? Other people’s mothers aren’t “the mums,” they’re the mothers. We’re not all 6. Also why bother with a link for “mum”? Also stop saying “hit out at” when you mean “disagreed with” or “criticized.”

But the real point is, that’s not “her daughter,” it’s her son, which is why it’s not fair for him to be competing in a women’s tournament.

Hailey Davidson, from Stair in Ayrshire, became the first transgender woman to earn a Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) tour card and is currently taking part in the LPGA and Epson Tour Qualifying School in Palm Springs, America.

That is, Hailey Davidson is cheating a woman out of a place in the LPGA and Epson Tour Qualifying School in Palm Springs, America. It’s not cute.

Tennis coach Judy Murray branded the decision to allow the trans athlete to compete as ‘wrong’ and unfair on the other competitors.

Sharing a tweet about the golfer, the tennis coach wrote: “No. Not fair at all. Protect women’s sport. Listen to the facts, the scientists and the medics. This is wrong.”

As, of course, it is.

Sandra, who spoke to the Record from her home in Florida, where she lives with Hailey said: “Shame on Judy Murray for attacking another mother’s child.”

That’s idiotic. Every single human being is “another mother’s child.” Trump is a mother’s child. Putin is a mother’s child. Mass shooters are all mothers’ children. Torturers are mothers’ children. Even men who claim to be women are mothers’ children; that doesn’t mean we can’t say they’re wrong.

“You do not know my daughter Hailey and most importantly you know absolutely nothing about transgender men or women and therefore have no rights whatsoever to give your opinion on something you know nothing about.”

How does “Sandra” know what Judy Murray knows about trans people? Even if she does know, what right does she have to tell Murray not to talk about men in women’s sports?

None.