Steve Benen at MSNBC:

Donald Trump has an unusually ugly record when it comes to separating those he perceives as fools from their money. As we’ve discussed before, the Republican ran a fraudulent charitable foundation and created a fraudulent “university” that was designed to do little more than rip off its “students.”

Not to mention all those overvalued condos he sold.

But his new trick is really breathtaking.

The New York Times reported over the weekend on Trump’s 2020 political operation and the brazenly underhanded tactics it employed to swindle its unsuspecting donors. The article began by featuring a financially unstable cancer patient in Kansas City, who chipped in $500 last September after hearing Rush Limbaugh talk about the Republican ticket’s financial needs.

What the hospice-bound patient — making his first-ever campaign contribution — didn’t know was that Team Trump accepted the $500 donation, withdrew another $500 the next day, and then took another $500 once per week through mid-October. It wasn’t long before the cancer patient’s bank account had been emptied by the then-president’s political operation, causing the man’s utility and rent payments to bounce.

How did the operation manage that? By including a tiny box with a tick already in it saying it could do that very thing.

Facing a cash crunch and getting badly outspent by the Democrats, the campaign had begun last September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors, for every week until the election. Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out. As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed.

Default acceptances should be illegal.

Initially, there was an easily overlooked pre-checked box on the donation page — which, naturally, many supporters didn’t see — that turned a single donation into a monthly contribution. As Election Day drew closer, the pre-checked box created weekly contributions.

And then they added a whole bunch of confusing text that made it even harder to see what was happening.

Not surprisingly, banks and credit card companies were soon inundated “with fraud complaints from the president’s own supporters about donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands of dollars.”

Because the then-president was so energetically stealing $$$ from his own fans.

And it’s not over.

The same New York Times report added:

Now WinRed is exporting the tools it pioneered during the Trump re-election across the Republican Party, presaging a new normal for G.O.P. campaigns. Today, the websites of various Republican Party committees and top congressional Republicans, including Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, include prechecked yellow boxes for multiple or recurring donations.

I wonder if they’ve given any thought to the long-term effects of stealing wads of cash from their own supporters.

Updating to add, at Skeletor’s suggestion:

Leila Miller at the LA Times tells us:

Kelly Blackwell longs to escape her life as a transgender woman in a California men’s prison, where she struggles every day to avoid being seen in her bra and panties and says she once faced discipline after fighting back when an inmate in her cell asked for oral sex.

If Blackwell doesn’t want to be seen in his bra and “panties” why does he wear them? Skip the bra and wear underpants with no frills; problem solved.

After more than 30 years, and two decades since Blackwell began hormone therapy, her chance to leave arrived last fall when groundbreaking legislation gave transgender, intersex and nonbinary inmates the right, regardless of anatomy, to choose whether to be housed in a male or female prison.

Oh I see, so now it’s the women in women’s prisons who get to be afraid of the inmates in their cells.

The demand has been high, with 261 requests for transfers since SB 132 took effect Jan. 1, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Yeah no shit. Safer for the men, and lots of rape opportunities. (Do we really think there are that many men who really do identify as women in the California prison system? No we do not.)

“I won’t be around predatory men and I won’t be around staff that frown upon trans women,” Blackwell, 53, said in a phone call from Mule Creek State Prison, east of Sacramento.

But the women I’m around will be around a predatory man! Or at least they won’t be sure they’re not! But that’s cool, this is all about me! I get what I want!

But more than two hours away, at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, there’s fear. Inmates say guards have warned them that “men are coming” and to expect sexual violence.

Oh no, I’m sure it will be all sisterhood all the way.

The Times spoke to more than a dozen inmates in women’s and men’s prisons to understand how the new law is playing out. Although advocates and inmates say the transfers have been received well, several claim that misinformation spread by prison staffers is stirring up transphobia and that more must be done to educate inmates.

I’m sure the new trans cellmates will do all the educating that’s needed.

Jen Orthwein, an attorney who represents transgender inmates and worked on the bill, said that not all inmates want or have access to hormone therapy or gender-affirming surgery, and that “any expression of femininity in a men’s prison places people in danger.”

Therefore they must be transferred to a women’s prison, because women exist to shield men from male violence. It’s nobody’s job to shield women from male violence.

I’m curious about something.

I randomly saw this painting in a book and the name of the painter popped up in my brain (and I checked and it really was the painter), and the thing about that is that I don’t know why. I don’t know how I knew and I don’t know why it was so quick and automatic. I “recognized” the painter but I don’t know why I did. We’ll talk about who it is eventually but for now I’m curious to see if anyone else recognizes the painter, with or without knowing how.

There are other paintings by this painter that are what’s called “iconic” – instantly recognizable, and no surprise about it. But to me this one doesn’t particularly look reminiscent of those…but it probably does in some way, or I wouldn’t have known who the painter was. Or maybe I would, if I’d seen it before and remembered without knowing I remembered – the way I know how to type but can’t list the keys in the right position without looking. So I’m curious about all that, so tell me what you see. Don’t say the name for now.

“Grace” Lavery is a fake woman but by god he’s a genuine troll.

So adorable. Teehee. Only a man could think that would be funny.

No, no one will ever become the first trans woman to need an abortion, let alone to have one.

In any other context Lavery would probably make erudite fun of the idea that technological progress is so relentless and inevitable that some time in the next 40 years or so men will be able to get pregnant. In any other context Lavery would probably realize that by then climate change will have triggered such dire consequences that no one will have the slightest interest in trying to re-engineer male bodies to make them pregnancy-enabled, let alone the funding.

And then, in addition to that, there’s the fact that abortion isn’t like prizes in sports, or the career ladder, or the glory of discovery, or getting elected to high office. Abortion is a necessary basic technology, and that’s all. Bragging rights for being the first trans woman to “get” an abortion are not a thing, any more than bragging rights for being the first trans woman to insert a diaphragm would be.

In baseball news –

Texas governor Greg Abbott said on Monday that he won’t throw the ceremonial first pitch as planned at the Texas Rangers’ home opener, the latest jab in a fight that is pushing corporate America into the political battle over voting rights.

I suppose “home opener” means the first game of the season which is being played in the home town of the Texas Rangers. I guess we’re all supposed to be fluent in Baseball.

The Republican governor informed the Rangers via a letter, citing Major League Baseball’s decision to move the MLB All-Star Game from Atlanta in response to Georgia’s sweeping new voting laws, which include new restrictions on voting by mail and greater legislative control over how elections are run. Critics of the law say it will make it more difficult for minority groups to vote in Georgia.

Because it will. Closing voting sites and drop boxes will of course make it more difficult for people to vote, especially people without much money, without cars, without the ability to take time off work whenever necessary, without someone to watch the kids, without the stamina needed to stand in a line for five hours. That’s the whole point. Put up obstacles that will be obstacles to the people who vote Democratic as opposed to the people who vote Republican.

“It is shameful that America’s pastime is not only being influenced by partisan political politics, but also perpetuating false political narratives,” Abbott said.

It’s not false at all. Voting laws in Georgia (and Mississippi and Alabama and the rest of the former slave states) were intended to impede black people from voting, and they did so. That’s why the Voting Rights Act was passed. These new post-Shelby laws are the same kind of thing, albeit slightly more subtle.

Originally a comment by latsot on To be seen.

It’s not difficult to train face recognition to work with black people. If you trained the machine learning systems with plenty of black and white faces, it would be fine with both.

However, most facial recognition software has historically been trained on mostly white people, so has a problem reacting to dark skin. It presumably didn’t occur to the people who trained the systems that some faces are not white.

There are lots of other examples of software that has taken on the racism of its trainers. For example, many police forces in the US (and some in the UK) use software to predict where crime is likely to happen (for the purposes of resource planning and management). It’s trained on historical data and since the police’s arrest records contain a racial bias toward arresting people who aren’t white, the software predicts that future crimes will occur in areas where the population is mostly non-white. And since the police are institutionally racist, they see this as ‘working’.

It could be classified as a GIGO problem, yes, but it’s better classified as Racism In Racism Out.

The war on epidemiology continues.

Why? Why is it? How do we know it is? Why would the government want to “control” us in the sense of forcing us to wear masks for no reason? What does it gain from doing that? Cui bono? What does Fauci gain from it? Why hasn’t Fauci been telling us to wear masks for the past 40 years, pandemic or no pandemic? What is it for?

So many levels of meta that you can’t figure out what is being said:

I awoke this morning as I do every morning with a burning, unquenchable lust to be seen. Thankfully, what with it being Transgender Day of Visibility and all, I might finally have that need met.

You see what I mean. That sounds like self-mockery, but would the Guardian be publishing genuine self-mockery by a trans person? Does any trans person ever self-mock? Especially for wanting to be seen every god damn second?

I, personally, began my morning with a mantra: “I am seen. I am visible. I am here to represent.” I repeated this into my phone screen, its front-facing camera reflecting my face back to me, while still lying in bed, wrapped in the powder-pink weighted blanket I got for free last summer in a Pride sponsorship with Local Linens, the national bedding conglomerate that partnered with Amazon for an exclusive line of products.

Clearly self-mocking, surely, but…to what purpose? Aren’t we under strict orders to take all this with deadly seriousness?

My friend Xanthippe, a New York-based diversity and inclusion consultant who’s been working with Amazon

Oh come on – laying it on a bit thick don’t you think?

who’s been working with Amazon for the past couple of years to help them improve their facial recognition software so that it stops misgendering trans and nonbinary people, helped get me that deal. I’m so lucky to have the support of my community.

Rolling out of bed, I slipped on my fluffy, trans flag Ugg slides and ambled to my dresser where I retrieved an oversize black T-shirt made made by Macy Rodman, a musician here in Brooklyn and trans woman herself. If I was going to be seen today – think of it as me channeling Annette Bening in American Beauty, I will be seen today – it would only be right that I use my platform, ie, myself, to promote members of my community, yeah?

Consumerism, pop culture, insatiable narcissism, yes, we get it, but…

Lacing up my boots and donning my new favorite mask – a cloth one featuring a beaded portrait of Dr Rachel Levine, the first openly trans federal official confirmed by the Senate, that was hand-embroidered here in Brooklyn by a local trans ally – I set out to scrounge up the visibility I deserved at the coffee shop two blocks away.

…

Visibility is a fraught subject for many within the trans community, which itself is a very real thing and not a reductive myth of a fictive monolith perpetuated to make it easier for individuals to make sweeping, universal claims on behalf of the whole collective. “Trans visibility and recognition has skyrocketed,” wrote Alex V Green for BuzzFeed two years ago, “but Black and brown trans women are still dying. It doesn’t seem like a politics of visibility can really save the most vulnerable among us.”

…

Those are very good points, but what about me – the first openly trans woman to order an iced oat milk latte at my neighborhood coffee shop this morning? Surely, that’s significant – brave, even. That kind of representation is so important … right?

It was published on March 31 – maybe it was meant as April Fool hur hur but a mole at the Guardian jumped the gun.

None so blind as those who will not see.

Yes, fgm and female infanticide are things done to female people because of “gendered ideas” but those ideas are about female people as opposed to male people. They are rooted in the sex of both. Female “purity” and male ownership of that “purity” exist because the female people gestate the babies.

In a different world, where girls and women were bigger and stronger than boys and men, the ownership of the gestational person wouldn’t work the same way. It would have to be a consensual form of ownership, which wouldn’t be ownership but loyalty or devotion. But we don’t live in that world, sadly, so girls and women are subject to control and violence while men and boys are trained to see them as sluts and whores and rebellious witches. All of that is because girls and women are that subordinate sex that gestates the babies. Men can transition until they turn blue but it won’t make them that subordinate sex that gestates the babies.

Trump must be chewing the carpet with rage that he never managed to do this: Putin passes law that benefits Putin.

Vladimir Putin has signed a law that will allow him to run for the presidency twice more in his lifetime, potentially keeping him in office until 2036.

I wish news outlets would stop saying stupidly redundant things like “in his lifetime.” Obviously in his lifetime; he’s not going to pass a law saying he can run for office after his lifetime, now is he.

But the point is: behold the man, making laws that grant him more power.

The Russian president signed the legislation on Monday, ending a year-long process to “reset” his presidential terms by rewriting the constitution through a referendum-like process that his critics have called a crude power grab.

What do his admirers call it? An elegant power grab?

Officially, the new law limits Russian citizens to two presidential terms in their lifetime, outlawing the kind of shuffling between the presidency and the role of prime minister that Putin employed earlier in his career.

But the law specifically does not count terms served until it entered into force, meaning that Putin’s past four terms (including the current term) do not count and he can still serve two more. 

Yep, that’s crude all right.

Sometimes trans allies are so relentless in their allyship that they end up having to apologize to people for telling smelly lies about them.

He’s still at it though.

Another random set of tweets! But they’re too hilarious to pass up.

You’re thinking it’s parody. I looked him up, and he’s an art student and he’s written in this vein elsewhere so nope, he’s not joking.

There’s more; it’s all funny.

Here’s a wild idea: maybe it’s not that Jeezus wuz tranz but that the idea of being trans is rooted in the magical thinking of Christianity. God is ONE and also THREE but definitely ONE. God in three persons, blessed triniteeee. Plus there’s a pigeon in there somewhere. If God is God and also his son and also The Holy Ghost/a pigeon, then men becoming women by saying so is a doddle.

Moira Donegan at the Guardian has more on Sonmez and the Post.

When Sonmez tweeted a link to a Daily Beast story about the 2003 rape allegation against Bryant, with no commentary of her own, she received a torrent of abuse and threats from his fans.

They were angry at what they saw as Sonmez besmirching Bryant’s memory by acknowledging the accusation that he had been sexually violent towards a Colorado woman; they were willing to avenge this disrespect, or so they claimed, with more violence against women. The name-calling escalated into threats, and some of those threats seemed credible. Her home address was published online. For her own safety, Sonmez went briefly into hiding.

The Post did not stand up for her.

“A real lack of judgment to tweet this,” Marty Baron, the Post’s executive editor, wrote to Sonmez in an email, which contained a screenshot of Sonmez’ tweet. “Please stop. You’re hurting the institution by doing this.” Shortly thereafter, Barron suspended Sonmez from the Post as punishment for the tweet. She was not reinstated until a groundswell of support from hundreds of other reporters embarrassed the Post into retracting their decision.

You can look at it another way – you can see it as not Sonmez hurting the Post, but the Post and other news media hurting their own reputations by glorifying a man while ignoring his alleged violence against a woman. You can see that as the real issue here. Why do we treat male athletes as heroes and women as trivial expendable riffraff who should shut up about violence done to them by those male athlete heroes? Why is what we value and what we throw under the bus so wrong way around?

Sonmez first came forward as a survivor of sexual violence in the spring of 2018, when she wrote of being attacked by a colleague she had had worked alongside in China. Her descriptions of the man’s conduct mirrored allegations made by other women. But the exposure of coming forward subjected Sonmez to a new ordeal: public scrutiny, some of it hostile. A libertarian magazine published a long piece arguing that the fate of Sonmez’ attacker, who resigned from his job after an investigation, was an example of #MeToo gone too far – the piece was amplified by conservative media personalities. Then, at the Post, Sonmez was informed that because of her past history, and her public statements about it, she would not be permitted to cover stories that pertained to sexual violence.

The libertarian magazine was Reason, and the author of the piece was Emily Yoffe.

Donegan continues:

According to Sonmez’s Twitter, the Post has posited a curious rationale for the ban, claiming that they do not feel that Sonmez’ personal history would make her biased in her coverage of sexual violence – and indeed there seem to be no complaints about the quality of her work – but that other people would perceive her as biased. Indeed, the Post’s decisions about Sonmez seem to have been motivated largely by social media pressures and the fear of bad press. 

…

If we can take the Post at their word that they are worried not about Sonmez’ capacities, but about the perceptions of others, this is a very strange choice. In effect, this rationale is misogyny by proxy, with the Post outsourcing the moral responsibility for a sexist outcome on to their readers. They have to do a sexist thing not because they are sexist, but because other people are sexist, and those other people might be mad if the Post does not enforce a sexist outcome. The Post’s account of their own choices regarding Sonmez’ work, then, is that in personnel decisions, they defer to what they imagine are their readers worst impulses, and therefore are obligated to reproduces the bigotries of the public.

Or, more simply, when in doubt, assume/act as if the woman is lying.

Yes it’s just a bed of roses being a woman in journalism or any other bit of public life.

It was supposed to be an upbeat town hall to rally the newsroom, as Washington Post leaders highlighted their moves to defend reporter SEUNG MIN KIM from internet trolls. But sources tell us the March 16 Zoom meeting with hundreds of staffers went off the rails briefly when FELICIA SONMEZ, a breaking news reporter who has spoken openly about her experience as a sexual assault survivor, typed a pointed comment in the chat box: “I wish editors had publicly supported me in the same way.”

Sonmez was referring to an incident that occurred the day KOBE BRYANT died in January 2020. Former top editor MARTY BARON and upper management suspended Sonmez for tweeting a reminder that the basketball legend being showered in praise had also been accused of raping a woman. The Post retracted the suspension after more than 300 reporters signed a letter demanding her reinstatement. It also sent physical protection for Sonmez, who had to leave her house after her Bryant missive went viral and she received death threats.

Well you can see their issue though. On the one hand, a basketball legend. On the other hand, some woman journalist. You do the math. Male athletes are important. Female journalists are not. Female anythings are not, to be perfectly honest.

More than a year after the incident, the wounds are still fresh. On Friday night, Sonmez publicly criticized her boss, national editor STEVEN GINSBERG, after he was quoted in a Vanity Fair piece about the need to support female journalists when they’re subjected to harassment online. “Wish the same Post editor who is quoted in this piece supported me when I was doxxed and had to leave my home,” she wrote on Twitter, adding Ginsberg’s handle. (The decision to suspend her was made by Baron.)

She didn’t stop there. Sonmez also publicized that she is barred from writing about anything related to sexual misconduct or #MeToo. According to several people familiar with the decision, the prohibition began around the time that sexual misconduct allegations surfaced against Supreme Court Justice BRETT KAVANAUGH, and continued recently with news about Rep. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-N.Y.) acknowledging she is a survivor of assault as well as the harassment allegations against New York Gov. ANDREW CUOMO.

Well if that’s their policy it means no female journalists can report on sexual assault, because all women have experienced it. Nice little racket. Also nice little incentive for men who like to grab them by the pussy to do it to every female journalist they can reach, so that no woman can cover the story. Also nice way to damage the careers of all female journalists.

Sonmez, according to emails obtained by Playbook, has implored senior management at the Post to reverse the coverage ban. In an email to Ginsberg and his deputies last May, she wrote that “it is humiliating to again and again have to tell my colleagues and editors that I am not allowed to do my job fully because I was assaulted.”

Punish the victim to protect the perps. Nice all around.

Yes indeed, if you’re a man and you want a baby or six, there’s just one slight obstacle.

Lesbian couples! Perfect! You can get two babies at once!

But if he had any empathy for women he wouldn’t be OJ.

Huh, the Suez backlog is cleared. That’s good, because reports were saying it could take weeks.

The last ships stranded by the grounding of a giant container vessel in the Suez canal passed through the waterway on Saturday, according to the Suez Canal Authority (SCA).

…

Osama Rabie, the chairman of the SCA, said 85 ships were expected to pass through the canal from both sides on Saturday. They included the last 61 of the 422 ships that were queuing when the container vessel was dislodged, thus ending the backlog of shipping that built up during the crisis.

Good job. The port city of Seattle sends a fist-bump.

The one-guy insurrection in DC yesterday:

Early in the afternoon, a man rammed his vehicle into two Capitol police officers standing in front of a barricade. Exiting the vehicle, the suspect then lunged at officers with a knife. He was shot dead.

Yogananda Pittman, acting chief of Capitol police, told reporters two officers were taken to hospital after the attack. One, William “Billy” Evans, an 18-year department veteran and the father of two young children, died from his injuries.

It’s Trump who planted this particular seed.

Police did not immediately name the suspect and the motive remained unclear. Multiple news outlets, however, named the attacker as Noah Green, who was 25 and from Indiana.

Friends and family members told news outlets they had been concerned about Green’s mental health in recent years, especially after he posted disturbing comments to social media.

I know the feeling.

The title is perfect:

How Do I Define My Gender if No One Is Watching Me?

How indeed? But we mustn’t point out that the whole idea of “defining” one’s “gender” is entirely about who is watching the Precious Self.

By Alex Marzano-Lesnevich

Mx. Marzano-Lesnevich writes extensively on transgender issues and is working on a memoir about nonbinary identities.

In other words Mx. Marzano-Lesnevich has nothing in her his their head other than this fiction of trans and non-binary idennninies.

When the lockdown started he she they thought it would be a nice rest from taking the idenniny out on parade.

Alone in my apartment, I imagined that all my difficulties in being seen and recognized as transgender-nonbinary would evaporate. No one would gender me except myself; my pronouns would be right there in the text box on my Zoom screen.

So I was surprised by how much my gender instead seemed to almost evaporate. No longer on the alert for how to signal a restaurant’s waitstaff that neither “he” nor “she” applied to me, or for whether colleagues and neighbors would use the right language — devoid of anyone to signal my gender to — I felt, suddenly, amorphous and undefined.

Lordy. They she he don’t seem to realize how much she he they is revealing.

What if – just spitballing here – what if this whole gender thing is all about signalling one’s magic gender to other people? What if it’s just a novel way to demand extra attention? What if there’s really no more to it than that? What if Mx’s artless confessions are spilling the beans on the pathetic truth?

Where did my own gender reside, then, if not in sending signals of difference? My friends and I had long joked, “Gender is a social construct!” every time one of us needed shoring up after a messy encounter with the expectations of the gender-conforming heterosexual world. But without that world, we now added a rueful punchline: “Too bad there’s no more ‘social’!”

No more social and no more Mean Mommy and Daddy in the shape of the gender-conforming heterosexual world (which of course includes all those evil radical feminists, who are not “gender-conforming” at all but don’t let that slow you down). With no Cis Enemy what is even the point of being gnc?

With the gender binary all but gone, what did it mean to be nonbinary? How do I define my gender when I — accustomed to how visible my gender usually makes me — am no longer being watched?

I know this one. You grow up, that’s what. You realize that nobody actually cares, because people are interested in other things, things that aren’t you. You realize you’re not that special. You realize that thinking of yourself as that special is kind of adolescent and embarrassing, so you stop doing it.

Of course that’s not the lesson Mx Mx learned.

As an apology to all the people who (quite reasonably) are not entirely fond of posts based on random tweets from random people, a completely random tweet from someone I don’t know that is its own justification.

The governor of Florida is a “my sacred right to do whatever I want regardless of the harm to others” jackass.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis on Friday announced an executive order banning “vaccine passports” in the state, which like the rest of the US continues to suffer under the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Suffer” as in die a horrible gasping death or have friends or family die such a death or be an intensive care nurse or doctor and watch patients die gasping. That kind of suffer. It’s absolute hell.

Companies around the world are working to develop such “passports”, secure records of vaccination against Covid-19 that might be used to help society and businesses return to full operation by managing entry to buildings or events. New York state has launched its own version.

The tin hat crowd is running around squawking about the secret police and our sacred liberties are gone and yadda yadda. Apparently they get to draw from the goods of society but can’t be expected to give anything back, even something so obviously reasonable as trying not to spread the virus.

But the Florida governor’s order claimed “requiring so-called Covid-19 vaccine passports for taking part in everyday life – such as attending a sporting event, patronizing a restaurant or going to a movie theater – would create two classes of citizens”.

That’s so fucking stupid. No it wouldn’t. It would temporarily create two categories of citizens, for pressing public health reasons. The end.

Vaccine passports have become the latest flashpoint in increasingly politicized battles over coronavirus policy. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a controversial far-right Georgia Republican, has said vaccine passports are Joe Biden’s “mark of the beast”, the Hill reported. She has also introduced a bill to ban such passports and fire Dr Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser.

But what justifies this? What’s the thinking? In what way is public health “political”? Even right-wingers don’t want to die gasping for breath in an ICU surrounded by exhausted traumatized nurses and doctors. What on earth is the point of making a political issue of precautionary measures? I’ll never understand it.