So, yes, I’m going to have to read at least some of that ridiculous rah rah us! report, to see exactly how bad it is. And yes I’m going to have to inflict it on you.

The declared purpose of the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission is to “enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union.” This requires a restoration of American education, which can only be grounded on a history of those principles that is “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling.” And a rediscovery of our shared identity rooted in our founding principles is the path to a renewed American unity and a confident American future.

So they’re saying that the teaching of the history of American principles has to be unifying, inspiring, and ennobling, which pretty much negates the part about being “accurate and honest.” Notice they didn’t say “true,” which seems telling. Anyway unifying for whom? Inspiring and ennobling for whom? I don’t think pretending American history has been one long march to ever-increasing awesomeness is going to inspire everyone.

The facts of our founding are not partisan. They are a matter of history. Controversies about the meaning of the founding can begin to be resolved by looking at the facts of our nation’s founding. Properly understood, these facts address the concerns and aspirations of Americans of all social classes, income levels, races and religions, regions and walks of life. As well, these facts provide necessary—and wise—cautions against unrealistic hopes and checks against pressing partisan claims or utopian agendas too hard or too far.

Hahaha subtle. “Don’t come after our billions! Leave Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk alone! Get off my golf course! Socialism! Awkkk!”

The principles of the American founding can be learned by studying the abundant documents contained in the record. Read fully and carefully, they show how the American people have ever pursued freedom and justice, which are the political conditions for living well.

So…the Trail of Tears? Broken treaties? Two centuries of slavery and another century of Jim Crow? Violent suppression of labor organizing? The three strikes law? Prisons overflowing with people serving long or life sentences for minor drug crimes? That’s us ever pursuing freedom and justice?

This is only the first page.

I may never manage to reach the second.

The Trump administration’s “1776 Report” has historians running out of red ink.

“It’s a hack job. It’s not a work of history,” American Historical Association executive director James Grossman told The Washington Post. “It’s a work of contentious politics designed to stoke culture wars.”

…The 45-page report is largely an attack on decades of historical scholarship, particularly when it comes to the nation’s 400-year-old legacy of slavery, and most of those listed as authors lack any credentials as historians. While claiming to present a nonpartisan history, it compares progressivism to fascism and claims the civil rights movement devolved into “preferential” identity politics “not unlike those advanced by [slavery defender John C.] Calhoun and his followers.”

“I don’t know where to begin,” said public historian Alexis Coe. “This ‘report’ lacks citations or any indication books were consulted, which explains why it’s riddled in errors, distortions, and outright lies.”

Well the people behind the “report” are using the word “report” in a very special way. They don’t mean anything to do with truth, for instance, or evidence or reasoning or argument. They’re using “report” to mean something more like “angry shouting.”

“It’s very hard to find anything in here that stands as a historical claim, or as the work of a historian. Almost everything in it is wrong, just as a matter of fact,” said Eric Rauchway, a history professor at the University of California at Davis. “I may sound a little incoherent when trying to speak of this, because the report itself is not coherent. It’s like historical wackamole.”

Well it’s not supposed to be history. It’s supposed to be angry shouting!

He pointed to sections misinterpreting Puritan John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” speech, and to a section claiming the civil rights movement “came to abandon the nondiscrimination and equal opportunity of colorblind civil rights in favor of ‘group rights.’ ”

Oh yes, the old “I don’t see color” argument. Brilliant.

“Group rights is not anathema to American principles,” he said, recalling the formation of the Senate. “Why do Wyomingers have 80 times the representation that Californians have if not for group rights?”

Because they’re white guys with cattle, which is completely different!

Historian Kevin M. Levin, author of several books about the Civil War, said: “The 1776 report views students as sponges who are expected to absorb a narrative of the American past without question. It views history as set in stone rather than something that needs to be analyzed and interpreted by students.”

Well you see it’s the definitive narrative; the press release said so. “This is our narrative, that is ours; it is definitive.”

Grossman, the AHA executive director, said: “This is written as if no historical scholarship has been produced in nearly 70 years, so it’s bereft of any professional historical sensibility at all. There are no historians on this commission. Would you take your car to a garage where there’s no mechanic?”

But it’s definitive!

I didn’t realize that former presidents get intelligence briefings.

Adam Schiff says Trump should be the exception, which seems only prudent.

House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff said Sunday that President Donald Trump should be barred from daily intelligence briefings immediately — and remain cut off from briefings once President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in.

…

Schiff’s comments come a day after Susan Gordon, Trump’s former principal deputy director of national intelligence, penned an op-ed in The Washington Post arguing that Trump must not be briefed on intelligence after Jan. 20.

…

Former presidents typically receive routine intelligence briefings and access to classified information after they have left office.

Schiff added that he thinks U.S. allies withheld information from the Trump administration because “they didn’t trust the president” to protect intelligence, which, in turn, “makes us less safe.”

I say cut him off.

At least he’s miserable.

The President has been in a foul mood for several days and has lost interest in the performative parts of the presidency he once relished, a source he’s spoken with in recent days told CNN.

While he’s eagerly anticipating his military-style send-off from Joint Base Andrews on Inauguration morning — one of the few items that have cheered him up recently — there were already signs the crowd may be smaller than he’d hoped. And a slate of actual celebrities lined up for Biden’s inauguration has disappointed a president who tried and often failed to secure A-list support for his own presidency.

It’s so typical that he doesn’t get how pathetic and feeble he’s going to look sulking out of attending the inauguration and instead staging his own little parade that nobody cares about. That’s a LOSER parade.

He taped a “goodbye you love me” video yesterday, which isn’t going to make him look any less loser.

The video is expected to be released on Tuesday, an official said, although a final timing had not been determined. Unlike most of his predecessors in the television era, a live prime-time farewell address attempting to burnish what has become a badly tarnished legacy is no longer in the cards.

And yet he used to be such a star.

On his last full day as president, Trump is expected to issue a final raft of pardons and commutations and could sign new executive orders, according to White House officials. He is taking exit meetings with aides, posing for photos in the Oval Office, keeping tabs on his carefully planned departure ceremony and receiving briefings from the Secret Service on security for an inauguration he does not plan on attending.

His schedule was empty except for the notice he dictated himself weeks ago asserting he’d “work from early in the morning until late in the evening” and “make many calls and have many meetings.” His vice president was scheduled to convene a final meeting of the coronavirus task force.

He dictated that. Weeks ago. He dictated a meaningless empty claim weeks ago, saying he would work MANY HOURS and do ALL THE MEETINGS N PHONE CALLS – which sounds like a kindergarten child’s idea of what Going To Work is.

Trump is scheduled to deliver remarks before his final departure from Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday, where a military-style ceremony is being planned. Invitations have gone out to Trump’s friends, allies and former administration officials saying it will begin at 8 a.m. ET. Each invitee is allowed five guests; organizers hope to secure a large crowd because Trump has complained about the size of his gatherings in the past.

Please come to my goodbye party and please bring LOTS OF PEOPLE with you because at this rate it looks as if it will be about 10 people and some blowup dolls.

22 hours and 16 minutes.

Speaking of “can you think of one good quality in Trump?” –

Objection!

No. Not drinking and staying up late do not add up to being “a worker.” Trump was very productive on Twitter, too, but that also doesn’t count as “work,” especially given the quality and content of his tweets. And what really doesn’t count as work – what counts as a pathetic infantile waste of time – is “watching every show.” The giant baby “watches every show” because they talk about him; he watches them to see what they say about him. It’s nothing to do with work, let alone his job.

According to all the reports he’s done literally no work since the election, he’s done nothing but try to steal it back. He hasn’t done or said one single thing about the pandemic since the election. He hasn’t done or said one single substantive thing about anything else either. His “work” on January 6 set off the violent attack on the Capitol. No, the fact that he’s not an alcoholic does nothing to compensate for that.

Smug bullying white guy trashes multiculturalism the day after Martin Luther King day and the day before the white guy’s status vanishes like a puff of smoke.

Also – “our enemies stoke these divisions,” he says, in the very act of stoking his own divisions.

24 hours + 30 minutes.

Daily Kos reports:

This [is] a quick heads-up on the “1776 report”, which was released today by the White House, of all days, on MLK Day. It’s another attempt to re-write and white-wash history and prop up the modern white supremacist movement.

The report was written by the “1776 Commission”, a rag-tag group of mostly white and conservative “historians”; it states that criticism of the Founding Fathers’ slave ownership ‘has done enormous damage’ and has had a ‘devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric’. The report claims that the nation’s founders detested slavery even though many of them owned enslaved people.

So what’s the idea here? That praise of the “founding fathers'” slave ownership would do tremendous gooditude and have an empowering effect on our civic unity and social fabric? Because I’m not seeing it. I think insisting that slavery was virtuous and the men who made the rules were awesome for entrenching it would be much worse for our civic unity and social fabric than that other thing.

The press statement announcing the report:

1776 Commission Takes Historic and Scholarly Step to Restore Understanding of the Greatness of the American Founding

Wossa historic and scholarly step?

Anyway – back in the real world – yes, in some ways, the white men who wrote the Constitution did a revolutionary and progressive thing, but, that doesn’t mean they did an infinitely perfect and not to be questioned thing. They left a lot out, and the lot they left out was actually quite important. The rights of the people they were displacing, the rights of the people they held as slaves, the rights of the people they didn’t allow to vote or get an education or do much of anything except bear children and be wives – all that and more was left out. We get to talk about that and think about it and write about it and make tv documentaries about it.

[The] 1776 Commission—comprised of some of America’s most distinguished scholars and historians—has released a report presenting a definitive chronicle of the American founding, a powerful description of the effect the principles of the Declaration of Independence have had on this Nation’s history, and a dispositive rebuttal of reckless “re-education” attempts that seek to reframe American history around the idea that the United States is not an exceptional country but an evil one.

Scholars and historians don’t present “definitive chronicles.” That’s not what they do; that’s not what history is. It’s a work in continuous progress, and even the best work isn’t called “definitive”; that’s just amateurish. And history isn’t a matter of “chronicles,” either; it’s not story-telling and it doesn’t claim to be telling the whole and only truth (because that’s not possible). I was taught that first thing as a history major. These hacks on the trump job are exactly that: hacks. Also nice touch doing this on Martin Luther King day. Racist assholes.

39 hours 23 minutes.

JL at the Glinner Update on the theft of the McIver Baths:

The McIver Ladies Baths is in the beautiful Sydney suburb of Coogee. It was built in 1886 and has been for the exclusive use of women and children ever since. Screened from view by its cliff-foot location, the pool provides the perfect place for women to swim and sunbathe in peace and safety, free from male interest and male eyes.

Make no mistake, that’s an issue when it comes to swimming.

Recently the Randwick and Coogee Ladies Swimming Association (R&CLSA), which manages the pool, decided that access would be extended to (genuine) transwomen, ie those who’ve undergone sex-reassignment surgery. The information on the website was updated accordingly.

All hell broke loose. TRAs screamed blue murder about intact males being prevented from using a female-only pool. In many cases, they proved exactly WHY it’s so important such facilities remain female-only.

And so on and so on and so on; read on for more empathy and persuasion.

Sydney boasts many beautiful beaches and dozens of seafront and harbour bathing pools. Why can’t women be allowed one little 20 meter long seawater baths? Because men will not allow us to have even one tiny place of our own that doesn’t include them. And when men ‘identify as women’, the validation they demand drives their determination to colonise our spaces with an even greater ferocity.

Especially since they never ditched their misogyny despite “identifying as” women.

Oops.

Makes ya think, don’t it.

The wording is deliberate, I think…on Google you see

Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘vagina’ candle explodes in UK woman’s …

And even when you see the whole thing you still flinch just a bit before you register the last word. Wicked but in this case appropriate, I think, given the preposterous recklessness of millionaire Paltrow telling women to shove her expensive candles up themselves*.

Plus it’s funny. Paltrow needs to be an object of ridicule.

Maybe she could team up with trans women of the “include us in your women-only swimming pools” type to create ever more expensive and dangerous quack remedies designed specifically for the Trans Laydeez.

H/t Rob

*She didn’t tell them that, as far as I know. It was jade eggs she told women to insert. I got my paltrows crossed; apologies!

Navalny news:

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny called on his supporters to protest after he was arrested at a Moscow airport Sunday.

“Don’t be afraid. Take to the streets. Don’t do it for me, do it for yourselves and your future,” Navalny said in a video posted to YouTube, the social media platform that has brought his anti-Kremlin message to the farthest corners of Russia. Navalny’s supporters say they will organize nationwide protests on Jan. 23.

A judge ruled to remand Navalny in custody for 30 days following his return from Germany, where he was recovering from an August poisoning that he blames on Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russian authorities had warned that Navalny would be arrested for violating the parole terms of a 2014 conviction in an embezzlement case, even though the European Court of Human Rights later ruled Russia had denied Navalny a fair trial.

Navalny appeared Monday afternoon in a makeshift courtroom inside the police station where he was being held. In a video posted by an aide, Navalny said he hadn’t been allowed to see his lawyers until moments before the legal proceedings began.

Generous of Putin to let him see them at all.

Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has repeatedly said he would not answer any more questions about Navalny, whom he has recently referred to only as “the Berlin patient.” Peskov abruptly canceled his daily call with reporters Monday, saying he didn’t want to distract reporters from a press conference held by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

Moscow’s own Kayleigh McEnany.

The Kremlin has consistently denied poisoning Navalny. At a press conference last month, Putin suggested Navalny worked for U.S. intelligence and was too insignificant for anyone to want to kill.

Even though international experts have determined Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, a chemical weapon developed by the Soviet Union, the Kremlin’s version of events appears to be prevailing among Russians.

If you keep saying it, they will believe.

She didn’t mean anything by it, and besides Trump told her to.

A Texas real estate agent who was part of the pro-Trump mob that attacked the US Capitol said on Monday she was just following the orders of Donald Trump even as she faced federal charges for her part in the insurrection.

“I have no guilt in my heart,” Jenna Ryan told NBC News. “I’m glad I was there because I witnessed history. And I’ll never get the chance to do that again.”

I certainly fucking hope not.

“President Trump requested that we be in DC on 6 January,” she said. “So this was our way of going and stopping the steal.”

…

“I listen to my president, who told me to go to the Capitol,” she told CBS in an earlier interview.

Useful evidence for the Senate impeachment trial, and federal prosecution later on.

She subsequently left a trail of social media posts documenting her participation in the insurrection, including a picture next to a broken window and a video of her saying: “We’re armed and dangerous. This is just the beginning.”

A Facebook live stream showed Ryan entering the Capitol, promoting her real estate business and saying: “We’re going to fucking go in here. Life or death.”

…

She told NBC that, though she joined a mob that broke into the Capitol, where some rioters ransacked offices and sought out lawmakers to kidnap and kill, some chanting “Hang Mike Pence”, she had not been advocating aggression.

In that case she should have turned around and left the scene. She didn’t leave, she stayed and participated and boasted about it.

It is unclear whether Trump will include any of the rioters in a list of about 100 people he plans to pardon in his last days in office. Allies have warned against it.

Meaning, they told him it would be bad for him. That means he won’t do it.

Trump is working hard on those pardons. Not the pandemic, not the vaccination program, not telling Putin to release Navalny, not helping with the investigations of the insurrection he made happen, but with mostly corrupt pardons.

On Sunday, Trump met his son-in-law Jared Kushner, daughter Ivanka Trump and senior advisers to thrash out a lengthy list of pardon requests, the Washington Post reported. The meeting took up much of the day. The president was personally engaged with the details of every case, it said.

With a normal president that wouldn’t need saying. With Trump it’s so rare as to need saying.

CNN reported on Monday that the final batch of clemency actions was expected to feature criminal justice reform-minded pardons as well as more controversial ones for allies and friends. Lobbyists have been pushing for months to include their clients on Trump’s valedictory list.

That’s why I said mostly corrupt.

On Sunday the New York Times reported on intensive lobbying for pardons as the Trump era draws to a close. Among startling details, an unnamed associate of Giuliani reportedly told an ex-CIA officer a pardon was “going to cost $2m”.

Gotta pay for all that ice cream somehow.

Participants in the Capitol riot have appealed directly – via television or their lawyers – for pardons from Trump. On Sunday Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a key Trump ally, appealed to the president directly, telling him not to pardon anyone associated with the attack.

“There are a lot of people urging the president to pardon the folks who participated in defiling the Capitol, the rioters,” he told Fox Business.

“I don’t care if you went there and spread flowers on the floor. You breached the security of the Capitol. You interrupted a joint session of Congress. You tried to intimidate us all. You should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and to seek a pardon of these people would be wrong. I think it would destroy President Trump, and I hope we don’t go down that road.”

When it affects him suddenly Lindsey Graham can find his backbone. Beat up those pesky black protesters all you want, but when it comes to Lindsey Graham’s workplace, whoa now, that’s a whole other kettle of crayfish.

45 hours and 44 minutes.

“Gender and identity reporter” Vic Parsons at Pink News tells us about a protest against those evil bitches who like to swim at a women and children only beach:

A “swim-in for trans inclusion” at the women-only coastal swimming pool in Coogee, Sydney, on 17 January saw trans and cis swimmers defy a transphobic policy the pool released last week and celebrate transgender pride and solidarity.

That is, there was a swim-in to pressure women who use the women-only coastal swimming pool in Sydney to agree that it can stop being women-only now, and to celebrate the pride and solidarity of men who take everything away from women.

Protestors held signs reading “Stop drinking JK’s pool-aid!” and “Let them swim”.

That is, protesters trashed JK Rowling for the seventy billionth time even though she has nothing to do with this issue, and demanded that women who want to swim without men present just fuck all the way off.

The protest, which saw hundreds of LGBT+ people demanding that the organisation apologise and include trans women, comes after the women-only pool was heavily criticised for introducing a new policy banning some trans women from the pool.

That is, the protest saw hundreds of people demanding that the women-only pool apologize for being women only and include men.

The new policy was then retracted, and the McIver’s Ladies Baths has now deleted its Facebook page and website.

Men win, women lose. Men can invade women’s spaces, women cannot refuse. Funny how rapey that sounds, isn’t it.

Janet Anderson, who started the viral #LetThemSwim hashtag on social media in response to McIver’s exclusion of trans women, said in a statement before the protest: “It’s time for women’s spaces to start advocating for ALL women. No woman left behind.”

That is, it’s time for women’s spaces to start advocating for MEN. Shut up about women.

Mardi Gras board director and co-organiser Charlie Murphy added: “We have seen a massive outpouring of community support for transgender people. The council has received thousands of comments, and more than 10,000 people have signed a petition calling for the pool to adopt an openly trans-inclusive policy.

“Gender should not be determined by what’s in your pants.”

But what’s in your pants has been known to rape women, so women don’t actually have the luxury of ignoring it.

At Sunday’s protest, trans activist Janet Anderson gave a speech emphasising that “trans folk have been silenced for too long” by the cultural mainstream, and pointed out that the majority of the public support trans inclusion. “What will it take for organisations like this to understand that this is what the public wants?” she asked.

It sounds so amiable when you call it “trans inclusion”; naturally the public says yes, sure, include everyone, we’re all human. It sounds much less amiable when you call it “men demanding to be allowed to swim in the women-only pool” and that’s why Vic Parsons didn’t word it that way.

Anderson also said that the McIver’s Ladies Baths latest website update on the policy was “ambiguous” and “leaves [the] door open to discrimination”.

She concluded that “this is not about keeping women safe, this is about policing women’s bodies… we must ensure that all women are welcome to use the baths… [not just those] who fit [an inappropriate, narrowly defined] idea of womanhood”.

Yes inappropriate and narrowly defined in the sense of meaning women as opposed to men who think of themselves as fluffy pink laydeeez.

More than 12,000 people have signed a petition calling on the organisation to issue a full apology, make clear that all women are welcome at the baths, and to reinstate and update its website to reflect that the women-only baths are trans-inclusive regardless of what gender-affirming surgery a trans woman has had.

“If there are single-sex spaces, it should be the individual’s right to choose that which best matches their identity,” the petition says.

That is, if there are single-sex spaces, men should always have the right to say that the women’s space best matches their identity, period end of story no argument. If the men in question are 7 feet tall and muscular and belligerent in affect they still get to choose the single-sex space for women, and splash about to their hearts’ content. That’s only fair.

Allons enfants de la patrie…

The pardons are being a nice little racket for some.

Allies and associates of President Donald Trump have collected tens of thousands of dollars in fees from those seeking pardons from the President, The New York Times reported Sunday.

I assume Donald expects a cut.

The Times, citing documents and interviews with more than three dozen lobbyists and lawyers, reported that the lobbying for clemency intensified as it became apparent Trump had no standing to challenge his election loss to President-elect Joe Biden. Those who monetized the lobbying efforts include a former federal prosecutor, a former personal lawyer to the President and a former top Trump campaign adviser, among others, the Times reported.

Nothing at all filthy or shaming or grotesque about any of this.

As of late December, Trump was considering pardons for more than two dozen people in his orbit whom he believes were targeted — or could be targeted in the future — for political ends. That’s in addition to hundreds of requests from others who have approached the White House directly, and tens of thousands more whose petitions are pending at the Justice Department.

According to the Times, former US attorney Brett Tolman has collected tens of thousands of dollars in recent weeks to seek clemency for several people. Tolman did not respond to the New York Times’ request for comment. CNN has also reached out to Tolman for comment.

…

The Times noted that “there is nothing illegal about Trump associates being paid to lobby for clemency” and that any explicit offers of payment to the President could be investigated for possible violations of bribery laws. There is no evidence, however, that Trump was offered money in exchange for a pardon, according to the newspaper.

Nothing illegal maybe but everything skeevy and corrupt and gross. It’s not how any of this should work.

As it happened:

Navalny has gone home to Russia and been arrested on arrival.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been detained after defiantly flying back to Moscow on Sunday, his spokesperson said, months after he was left in a coma when he was poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent.

Facing the threat of his arrest on touching down, the prominent Kremlin critic boarded a plane in Berlin, Germany, where he was evacuated for treatment in August from a hospital in Siberia on the insistence of his family.

The plane, which was originally headed for Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, was diverted to the capital’s Sheremetyevo Airport shortly before landing, Navalny’s press officer Kira Yarmysh confirmed in a tweet, without explaining why the plane was re-routed.

Yarmysh posted a video of Navalny being escorted away by officials in Sheremetyevo, saying he was being detained without explanation and was not allowed to bring his lawyer. His current whereabouts and status are unknown, Yarmysh tweeted Sunday.

Putin’s not subtle.

News from Afghanistan:

Two women judges working for the Afghan Supreme Court have been shot dead.

They were killed by unidentified gunmen on their way to work on Sunday. The deaths are the latest in a string of assassinations targeting journalists, activists and other political figures.

The women were shot dead in an early morning ambush, which also saw their driver wounded.

The incident happened in the Qala-e-Fathullah area of Kabul and no group has said it carried out the attack.

No group has said it carried out the murders.

Guy says “Arrest me” so they do.

More:

NEWBURGH, Orange County (WABC) — Police arrested a man from Orange County after he implicated himself in the siege on the U.S. Capitol.

Edward Jacob Lang, 26, posted pictures on social media including one that said “This is me.”

So FBI agents turned up and arrested him.

There’s not a whole lot of intellectual fire power in this “rebellion” is there…