The editor who wrote the headline made a weird choice – Trump Discussed Naming Campaign Lawyer as zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. I think it would have been more eye-catching to focus on the Trump attempting a coup part, but maybe that’s just me.

Anyway. The campaign lawyer bit is also batshit, to be fair.

President Trump on Friday discussed making Sidney Powell, who as a lawyer for his campaign team unleashed a series of conspiracy theories about a Venezuelan plot to rig voting machines in the United States, a special counsel investigating voter fraud, according to two people briefed on the discussion.

Well duh. Only someone who traffics in batshit conspiracy theories is going to believe in the “voter fraud” myth.

Most of his advisers opposed the idea, two of the people briefed on the discussion said, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, who in recent days sought to have the Department of Homeland Security join the campaign’s efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in the election.

That is, Giuliani, who is corrupt and slavish enough to try to get DHS to help Trump steal the election, opposed the Sidney Powell idea. How integretatious of him.

Ms. Powell accused other Trump advisers of being quitters, according to the people briefed.

But the idea that Mr. Trump would try to install Ms. Powell in a position to investigate the outcome sent shock waves through the president’s circle. She has repeatedly claimed there was widespread fraud, but several lawsuits she filed related to election fraud have been tossed out of court.

Still not getting the shock waves thing. Do the people in “the president’s circle” think he’s careful? reasonable? law-respecting? decent? Surely not, so why the shock waves? Trump does trump-like things; surprise surprise.

Mr. Trump has been in contact with Ms. Powell in recent days, despite the fact that the campaign last month sought to distance itself from her as she aired wild and baseless claims about Dominion Voting Systems machines, which were used in some states, somehow being connected to a Venezuelan plot to control the election.

Or not despite the fact but because of the fact. Trump likes crazy. We know this.

Part of the White House meeting on Friday night was a discussion about an executive order to take control of voting machines to examine them, according to one of the people briefed.

Mr. Giuliani has separately pressed the Department of Homeland Security to seize possession of voting machines as part of a push to overturn the results of the election, three people familiar with the discussion said. Mr. Giuliani was told the department does not have the authority to do such a thing.

31 days to go.

Remember, kids, everything is worse for trans people – earthquakes, racism, fleas, pandemics, misogyny, Starbucks, everything. Miscarriages? Worse for trans people, obviously.

A 32-year-old man with obesity, Sam, arrived at the emergency room to be treated for intermittent abdominal pain that had been going on for 8 hours, according to a case described in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2019.

We can see where this is going already.

A triage nurse chalked this up to his “untreated chronic hypertension” and designated his symptoms as “nonurgent.”

Sam told the nurse that he was transgender, had taken a pregnancy test that was positive, had not menstruated in years, and had “peed himself” earlier that day. Yet the nurse still “deployed implicit assumptions about who can be pregnant” because she had “no clear classificatory framework for making sense of a patient” like him.

Or to put it another way, Sam had fucked up her-his body so thoroughly that the nurse was confused. No doubt that does add complications to a miscarriage, but then maybe we need to recognize that fucking up your body that thoroughly has its downsides? Maybe the issue is more medical/physical than political? Maybe this isn’t a particularly good example of How Society Oppresses Trans People?

Essentially, because of deep-seated assumptions that only women can be pregnant, the fact that Sam could be pregnant just didn’t compute.

The deep-seated assumptions are correct though. It’s true that only women can be pregnant.

It took several hours for a physician to discover that Sam was actually pregnant and in labor. Tragically, Sam delivered a stillborn baby after no heartbeat could be found.

… Sadly, this outcome [might] have been able to be avoided if the nurse had not had the assumption that men can’t be pregnant.

It’s not an assumption, it’s reality. In the context of a medical emergency it can be dangerous to appear to be the sex you’re not.

Big emphatic subhead:

Pregnancy, and pregnancy loss, isn’t limited to women

Yes it is. That’s exactly what it’s limited to.

In reality, many people who are not women (nonbinary people, transgender men, and others) get pregnant. One 2019 Rutgers study suggested that up to 30 percent of transgender men have unplanned pregnancies.

I wonder who those “and others” are. Or not so much wonders as understands that that “many people” is just the typical hand-waving. The people are not all that “many” and in any case they are all women. By definition.

Naturally, those pregnancies can also be lost, just like cisgender women’s. The emotional toll of a miscarriage or stillbirth is devastating for anyone, regardless of gender, but there are additional factors weighing on transgender people’s recovery from this loss.

So you see, kids, you have to remember to always add “additional factors weighing on transgender people” to every bad thing that happens to anyone anywhere.

Joe Biden wants to punch him out but Jill Biden says nope.

“That was such a surprise,” she told CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert on Thursday, seated next to her husband, Joe Biden. “It was really the tone of it … He called me ‘kiddo’. One of the things that I’m most proud of is my doctorate. I mean, I worked so hard for it.”

Why did he call her “kiddo”? It seems so over the top – like caricaturing his own caricature. The whole thing was facetious, but it’s that kind of facetious that is just a phony pretense of not really being insulting because aw come on aincha got no sense of humor? Jokey-insulting. So why kiddo? I haven’t been able to figure it out. Maybe it’s just because he couldn’t resist another level of belittling.

Writing for the Journal, Joseph Epstein, a former adjunct professor at Northwestern University, suggested her doctorate in education from the University of Delaware did not entitle her to use the honorific “Dr”, as she was not medically qualified. Her use of “Dr” therefore “feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic”, he wrote.

Unfortunately Martin Pengelly forgets to point out that Epstein has no graduate degrees, which makes it a little odd that he taught at Northwestern even as an adjunct.

Jill Biden of course does have the right to call herself “Dr” while Epstein does not.

The column met with widespread outrage and accusations of sexism, as well as delight in the apparent hypocrisy of many attendant rightwing attacks. The Journal’s editorial page editor defended the column, calling its critics “overwrought”.

Oh please. The column was at best rude and utterly gratuitous as well as sexist.

Colbert asked the president-elect if the column had made him want to stand up for his wife, “to like get out the pool chain and go full Corn Pop on these people”.

That was a reference to remarks for which he was criticised in the Democratic primary, when he reminisced about facing down a bully at a pool in the Delaware of his youth.

The president-elect seemed tempted, but Dr Biden said: “The answer is no.”

He said: “I’ve been suppressing my Irishness for a long time.”

Joseph Epstein needs to suppress his whatever the fuck that was.

Why not shepherds? Priests? Angels?

America’s newest branch of the military is about to celebrate the end of its first year, and now members of the Space Force will have something to call each other.

Vice President Mike Pence announced on Friday that members will be called “guardians.”

On the one hand it sounds a bit fascist, and on the other hand it sounds soppy. We’re not orphans, we don’t need “guardians.”

“It is my honor on behalf of the president of the United States to announce that henceforth the men and women of the United States Space Force will be known as guardians,” Pence told an audience at the White House. “Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and guardians will be defending our nation for generations to come.”

See it doesn’t fit. The other four are simple, descriptive, direct. (“Airmen” obviously needs work but at least it’s not fanciful.) “Guardians” is marketing-speak, it’s a public relations word, it’s touchy-feely, it’s soppy.

No, that doesn’t apply to the newspaper of the same name, because it used to have Manchester in front, which is the opposite of soppy.

Trump is soothing his poor bruised ego with the thick poultice of cash he’s fooled a lot of people into giving him.

Deflated by a loss he has yet to acknowledge, Mr. Trump has cushioned the blow by coaxing huge sums of money from his loyal supporters — often under dubious pretenses — raising roughly $250 million since Election Day along with the national party.

Not bad as a consolation prize.

His astonishing talent for raising money by being a flaming asshole means he is still the boss of the Republicans.

Mr. Trump has long acted with few inhibitions when it comes to spending other people’s money, and he has spent millions of campaign dollars on his own family businesses in the last five years. But new records show an even more intricate intermingling of Mr. Trump’s political and familial interests than was previously known.

Normally that kind of thing is against the law, but when Trump does it, oh well trumps will be trumps hahaha pass the ice cream.

Those who have spoken with Mr. Trump say he appears shrunken, and over his job; this detachment is reflected in a Twitter feed that remains stubbornly more focused on unfounded allegations of fraud than on the death toll from the raging pandemic.

That is, stubbornly more focused on himself than on 350 million people who are not that self.

Whatever he decides to do next we can be confident he will keep himself front and center.

“There’s no bully pulpit as large as the presidency, but nevertheless, President Trump is likely to play a significant role in the future of the Republican Party,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “It’s very difficult to imagine him following the same pattern as George W. Bush, Barack Obama and other presidents have followed in keeping their mouths shut and letting the new president try to govern.”

Well duh; where’s the fun in that?

I’m not the only one who finds it absurd that Jolyon Maugham says judges must not meddle with what parents decide is best for their children.

How can he be? If he thinks for even a second? Some parents are abusive. Some are mentally ill. Some are alcoholics. Some are addicted to drugs that render them incapable. Some are religious fanatics. Some are sadists. The law sometimes has to protect children from their own parents. Maugham is a barrister; he can’t possibly be unaware of that fact.

What I’m saying.

The Guardian reports:

One of the Scottish Greens’ most prominent MSPs has resigned abruptly from the party, citing its “intolerance” to open discussion of potential conflicts between women’s and transgender rights.

Andy Wightman, the Scottish Greens’ list member for Lothian region and a highly respected campaigner for tenants’ rights and land reform, stated in his resignation letter published on Friday afternoon: “Some of the language, approaches and postures of the party and its spokespeople have been provocative, alienating and confrontational for many women and men”.

It’s the part about treating women’s rights as entirely secondary to trans rights that gets on our nerves. That and all the rest of it, but it’s rooted in this bizarre assumption that we are The Privileged Class now.

The Graun continues:

It appears that a clash over policy and decision-making in the party was brought to a head by Wightman’s attempts to vote for an amendment to the forensic medical services (victims of sexual offences) (Scotland) bill last week, which legislated for the option to request an examiner of a particular sex.

The amendment substituted the word “sex” for “gender”, which supporters argued resolved ambiguity but other MSPs argued was hostile towards trans women, and was passed overwhelmingly.

There you go, you see. If women’s requests for female examiners are framed as “hostile to trans women” how the fuck can women’s rights be protected at all? If women are required on pain of bullying and ostracism to pretend that men who identify as women are literally women, what rights can we have at all?

In his letter, Wightman – who joined the Scottish Greens in 2009 and entered the Holyrood parliament in 2016 – says it was “made clear” to him that if he voted for the amendment and against the group mandate, he would face “complaints and disciplinary action leading to possible suspension, deselection or expulsion”.

For voting for the option to request an examiner of a particular sex. That’s all.

KBPlayer alerted us to this, and reminded us that we encountered Andy Wightman in June last year, at a time when he was trying to obey the commands to endorse the new dogma. Much to my surprise he commented on the thread; it was a good exchange.

It’s depressing and infuriating that the Green Party officially thinks that women have no right to request a woman examiner in sexual assault cases.

Lesson time!

Your pronouns reflect…you!

It’s the old “feminism is just victimhood” trope.

Uh huh. It’s that simple. Just be full and capable and awesome and there will be no arbitrary unjust obstacles! Or maybe there will, but that means you get to overcome them and be better than everyone else. Yay we’re better than everyone else! Unjust obstacles are a good thing because we get to look so much more capable by overcoming them.

So…there are unjust obstacles, but they are thrown in front of trans people only. Women just sail through one open door after another, the bitches.

Let them eat…grouse? Truffles? Caviar? Foie gras? Saffron-infused fish and chips?

Commons leader Jacob Rees-Mogg has accused Unicef of “playing politics” after the charity launched a campaign to help feed children in the UK.

The Tory MP said the charity was meant to look after people in the poorest countries and should be “ashamed”.

It comes after Unicef said it would pledge £25,000 to a south London charity to help supply breakfast boxes over the Christmas holidays.

Unicef said every child deserves to “thrive” no matter where they are born.

Surely even Jacob Rees-Mogg can grasp that living in a rich country is compatible with being personally very poor. If you live in a rich country with crap social services and an enormous disparity in wealth and incomes, there are going to be some poor people in that country. If you live in the United States, to pick an example entirely at random, there are going to be many millions of poor people. I hope Rees-Mogg understands that the fact that he is rich doesn’t mean everyone else is rich, or even prosperous enough to have plenty to eat.

Mr Rees-Mogg was responding to a question from Labour MP Zarah Sultana in the House of Commons.

“For the first time ever, Unicef, the UN agency responsible for providing humanitarian aid to children, is having to feed working-class kids in the UK,” she said. “But while children go hungry, a wealthy few enjoy obscene riches.”

She asked if Mr Rees-Mogg would “give government time to discuss the need to make him and his super-rich chums pay their fair share so that we can end the grotesque inequality that scars our society”.

Certainly not, peasant.

Responding, Mr Rees-Mogg said Unicef “should be ashamed of itself”.

“I think it is a real scandal that Unicef should be playing politics in this way when it is meant to be looking after people in the poorest, the most deprived, countries of the world where people are starving, where there are famines and where there are civil wars, and they make cheap political points of this kind, giving, l think, £25,000 to one council,” he said.

“It is a political stunt of the lowest order.”

I keep thinking “imagine trying this bullshit with race – imagine white guys saying they ‘identify as’ black and trying to bully black people into agreeing.” Now we can see an actual example in the wild.

Trump longs and craves and pines and yearns to see a special counsel investigate something something something Hunter Biden, but it’s a little tricky in the last weeks of a lame duck presidency.

President Donald Trump is pushing extensively for the appointment of special counsels to separately investigate his baseless allegations of voter fraud and allegations surrounding Hunter Biden, the son of the President-elect, according to people familiar with the matter.

I wonder if it ever occurs to him that an investigation of his baseless allegations would simply underline the fact that they’re baseless. “Please please please investigate my fake claims! You’re sure to find something even though my claims are fake!!”

Justice Department rules say a special counsel must be named by the attorney general, though Trump has quizzed his team whether he could name one himself, according to one person familiar with the matter.

Sir no sir.

If the incoming acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, refuses to appoint the special counsels at Trump’s request, the President could fire him, the people said.

Score!

Next step:

Uhhh….

But Trump administration lawyers likely can navigate past those requirements by appointing someone to act like a special counsel even if the requirements aren’t all in place, as Barr did in giving special counsel powers to John Durham, the Connecticut US attorney reinvestigating the Russia investigation.

“Navigate past those requirements” is an interesting way to put it. “Ignore the rules” would be a slightly less interesting way.

Beware “wellness.” It’s always bullshit and sometimes it’s worse than that.

From 2018 but “wellness” promoters who tell us to poison ourselves haven’t gone away yet.

Yes, whilst this “pudding” is free from gluten and the milk we’ve drunk for centuries, any health benefits would be heavily offset by the terrible diarrhea you would likely get from lycorine, found in the deadly Narcissus flowers sat prettily atop the glass. You might briefly feel good because you’ve avoided sticky toffee pudding, but before long the convulsions could set in.

“Remember, as a general rule: If you are not 100 percent sure something is edible, just don’t eat it,” Botanist James Wong explained.

“If it’s a staple eaten for centuries, which you don’t have a diagnosed medical intolerance or allergy to, it’s probably safe.”

At higher quantities, lycorine can be lethal if ingested. The plant’s toxicity has been known for centuries, and has been used in various suicide attempts over the years.

Ok. How about scrambled jade eggs? Are they safe?

I missed this news item from DC a couple of years ago:

The Cuba Libre restaurant in Penn Quarter has agreed to institute civil rights training for employees and pay a $7,000 fine following an incident in June in which two staff members attempted to prevent a transgender woman from using the ladies bathroom.

D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine announced today that his office had reached a settlement with the Washington location of the chain following an investigation that found Cuba Libre DC violated the city’s Human Rights Act by discriminating against Charlotte Clymer’s gender identity and failing to educate its employees on customers’ rights.

Customers’ rights? Or customers who are trans women’s rights. Clearly women’s rights are not on anyone’s mind here.

The restaurant agreed to:

• Create and maintain written compliance policies regarding gender identity rights.
• Implement and maintain a training program regarding customers’ rights.
• Post signage that states all individuals are allowed to use bathrooms corresponding to their gender identities.
• Report any complaints regarding the Human Rights Act to the attorney general’s office for the next two years.
• Pay a $7,000 penalty to the city.

No mention of women’s rights to use “bathrooms corresponding to their” sex.

Days after Clymer’s story of the discrimination she suffered at Cuba Libre made headlines, Gutin issued a public apology and pledged to make a contribution to an LGBTQ support group, Casa Ruby.

According to city’s investigation referenced in the settlement, Cuba Libre has fired the employees involved, already instituted many of the changes it has agreed to make, and entered into a separate settlement with Clymer that included a charitable donation to a non-profit.

Two employees who tried to protect women from a man (the former Charles Clymer at that) in their toilet were fired.

The Great Man quotes himself.

He hasn’t though. Or maybe he has, in the sense that he was even worse before. I don’t know, I didn’t know of him before. But in the sense of actually becoming thoughtful and not arrogant? No. No, there he has failed utterly.

In fact, amusingly, the very act of tweeting this vain “Look how awesome I am” self-quotation demonstrates that failure. His habit of blocking anyone who disagrees with him no matter how politely just underlines it.

Updating to add because I forgot where it was before:

Grace Lavery in action just a few hours ago.

Grace Lavery’s graceful response?

“Grace” Lavery gets a pile of crap published at Foreign Policy. Why FP is that gullible is beyond me. It’s about the Tavistock ruling (so that makes it suitable for FP because it’s in Another Country?).

In effect, the courts intervened in the transition-related care of children experiencing gender dysphoria, putting those children and their families in the position of having to seek care abroad.

But calling it “care” assumes the very thing that is at issue – that puberty blockers are a legitimate treatment for a genuine medical condition that needs treatment. That’s a very shaky assumption, and for Keira Bell, for instance, it turned out to be entirely wrong. Lavery is cheating by treating it as obvious and universally agreed that puberty blockers are a “treatment.”

The decision is an unprecedented juridical attack on the LGBT community in the U.K., in which the British state has asserted a right to enforce unwanted puberty—and to arrest transitions that are already in progress—on the slimmest of pretexts.

Another cheat. It’s not an “attack” at all, but whatever it is, it is not on “the LGBT community.” L G and B people don’t want puberty blockers, and it’s stacking the deck to try to portray the ruling as a form of homopobia.

We’re used to this kind of deceptive garbage in blog posts and tweets, but Foreign Policy ought to be able to see it and reject it.

It also reflects a disturbing escalation of anti-transgender policy across the United Kingdom.

But it isn’t “anti-transgender,” it’s anti-harmful medical interventions on children.

A formerly highly marginal ideology, the so-called gender critical position, has captured British institutions.

Which twin has the ideology here? The gender critical position is not an ideology so much as it’s a rejection of an ideology – the trans ideology that inculcates such dogmatic truths as “puberty blockers are essential treatment” and “protecting adolescents from dangerous medical interference is transphobic.” The foundational claim that people can have the body of one sex and the mind of another is an ideological claim of a fantastical nature.

The court’s decision was lauded not just by the British right-wing press like the Spectator but, more strikingly, by center-left media like the Observer, which applauded the decision, suggesting that it will “ensure that children will now receive the protection to which they are legally entitled.”

Yes, and what does that tell us? Perhaps that there may be some truth to the notion that children need protection from people who would permanently mess up their bodies (including their brains).

Hey kids, let’s have martial law!

Virginia state senator Amanda Chase [has thrown] her support behind President Donald Trump‘s refusal to concede to former Vice President Joe Biden, going so far as to say that the commander in chief should declare martial law and let the military oversee another election.

Is that fascist enough yet?

While some of Trump’s closest allies have acknowledged Biden’s victory, the president himself has not indicated he has plans to give up the fight to stay in power.

Chase, who is looking to garner the Republican nomination for governor, also refuses to accept the results, writing in a Tuesday Facebook post that Biden “is not my president and never will be.” She praised Trump for having a “backbone” and advocated for him to declare martial law, a recommendation made by General Michael Flynn, who[m] Trump pardoned on November 25.

We live in strange times.

H/t What a Maroon

The locusts might return for a second round.

New swarms of desert locusts are threatening the livelihoods of millions of people in the Horn of Africa and Yemen despite a year of control efforts, the United Nations has warned.

The UN says there have been good breeding conditions in eastern Ethiopia and Somalia, with Kenya also at risk.

And breeding underway on both sides of the Red Sea poses a new threat to Eritrea, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

This is after the worst locust invasion in 70 years.

Between January and August this year East Africa saw billions of the insects destroying crops across the region. “We lost so much of our pastures and vegetation because of the locusts and as a result we are still losing a good number of our livestock,” said Gonjoba Guyo, a pastoralist in North Horr sub-country in northern Kenya.

“I have lost 14 goats, four cows and two camels because of the locust outbreak and now there is lots of fear that we may face similar or worse consequences.”

There was massive rainfall in November which created a fabulous breeding ground for more locusts.

If I believed in a god I would wonder what the hell it’s thinking.

Trump lost but the Republican party remains the Republican party.

Today, to be an aspiring Republican politician in good standing, one must espouse a set of core beliefs that are either entirely baseless or provably untrue: the climate crisis isn’t real; gun safety laws don’t reduce gun violence; masks don’t reduce the spread of Covid-19. To many observers, embracing a conspiracy theory about corrupted voting machines or late-night “ballot dumps” would represent a break with reality. But for much of the Republican elite, that’s not a problem. They broke with reality long ago.

The Republican establishment is also increasingly willing to disenfranchise eligible voters if it helps them win. Between 2008 and 2016, America lost 10% of its polling places, with cuts falling hardest on minority communities. Ever-broader voter purges have kicked millions of eligible, registered voters off red-state voting rolls.

Republican gerrymandering has created bizarrely shaped districts that put goons like Jim Jordan in Congress.

These examples barely scrape the surface of the war on voting that Republican politicians, not just Trump, have waged in recent years. The president’s wild attempt to steal an election is a first in American history. But it didn’t come from nowhere. Trump simply absorbed his party establishment’s prevailing view – that it is acceptable to win elections through whatever means possible, including by throwing out large numbers of votes on technicalities, hoping conservative judges put ideology over country, or stoking fears about nonexistent fraud – and took that approach to its logical conclusion.

…

It’s commendable that a handful of Republicans stood up to a president and met the low bar he presented. But it’s not enough. Those who have admirably protected the American experiment from Trump must help America save it from the McConnell-era Republican party. That doesn’t mean Republicans need to change their minds about taxes, regulations, guns, or a host of other a host of other issues that divide the parties. But they do have to agree that democracy is the best way to settle our disagreements – and that those who don’t believe in democracy doesn’t deserve our votes, no matter how much we may support their other positions.

It’s pretty clear that’s not going to happen though.