More gloating over the dreary (however lucrative) future that awaits the princess and the pea:

Among the social set that Jared and Ivanka would prefer to rejoin—the one they occupied aboard Adriatic-anchored yachts and on the carpet at the Met Gala—there is a sense of looking around for who, if anyone, will welcome them back. Case in point: an article speculating that Ivanka would attempt to reenter the New York art scene spread around their social circle and wound up in my inbox a dozen times. (For what it’s worth, people familiar with the first daughter’s art collection referred to it as “unimpressive before COVID,” but, post-COVID, “virtually unsaleable.”)

You can see what she’s going for: the quiet, understated, tasteful Old Money look of the Spencers and Cavendishes, as opposed to the gaudy LOOK AT ALL MY GOLD look of the Trumps and who the fuck else does that? If she buys an Art Collection that must mean she’s intelligent and Tasteful and not at all vulgar and arriviste and greedy.

But it’s not going to work any more, is it.

The vast array of responses I’ve collected over the past week have amounted to a few key takeaways: The couple will be accepted, whether in New York or Palm Beach, by a combination of society-adjacent couples and real-deal Republicans, but not by the group of people to which they would like to belong, and not without social consequences for those who do choose to pal around with Jivanka.

Put it this way: their new crowd won’t be all that Tasteful.

But the princess may not care. She’s adapted.

The couple has changed markedly since they left New York for Washington nearly four years ago. Ivanka on stage at the RNC, introducing her father as she had four years earlier, had hardened. She wasn’t the so-called moderating influence that so many people had wanted her to be, though that was never her plan. She had been publicly criticized by the world she left behind (and snubbed by world leaders who ignored her to her face), so there was no reason to cater to them anymore. She, like her father, had been buoyed by the crowds at events she keynoted. Those people in red hats who wait in line to see her—and, to be sure, there are many—are her people now. She was no longer the liberal outlier who privately disagreed with her father; they had become one and the same.

She used to think she was better than that. She probably still does, but now she realizes it’s all she’s going to get.

Regardless of where they settle and whether they find acceptance, they’ll never be free of prying eyes. “People will be nice to their faces,” a former friend said. “After all, it’s called polite society for a reason. But people will be falling all over themselves the next day to say how awful they’d been and how they had no idea. Her father’s vulgarity and his father’s criminality will always loom too large in the background.”

H/t KBPlayer

A couple of Republican election officials in Michigan tried to play the racism card and got scorched.

Analysts and voting rights advocates, as well as Democrats, condemned Republican canvassers for an initial 2-2 vote along party lines that threatened on Tuesday night to stall official approval of Democrat Joe Biden’s win in Michigan, before reversing course and unanimously certifying its presidential election results.

…

Democrat Joe Biden crushed Republican Donald Trump in Wayne county by more than a two-to-one margin, and won the state by 146,000 votes, according to unofficial results. Wayne county is the state’s largest and home to Detroit – an overwhelmingly Black city that leans overwhelmingly Democratic.

Probably all the more so when the Republican on offer is Donald “good people on both sides” Trump.

The Rev Wendell Anthony, a local pastor and head of Detroit’s branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called them a “disgrace”.

“You have extracted a Black city out of a county and said the only ones that are at fault is the city of Detroit, where 80% of the people who reside here are African Americans. Shame on you!” [he] said.

Another infamy day.

A former friend of the Princess’s confirms that she’s as loathsome as she seems to us peasants.

Donals Trump’s daughter was obsessed with status and used to blame classmates for her infractions of school rules while projecting a refined persona, Lysandra Ohrstrom, who was a maid of honour at her wedding, claimed in Vanity Fair.

“She had the Trump radar for status, money, and power, and her dad’s instinct to throw others under the bus to save herself,” alleged Ohrstrom, who described Ivanka, 39, as her best friend growing up.

…

Beneath her polish, the future president’s daughter occasionally betrayed “rougher, more Trumpian edges”, she wrote. “Ivanka would regularly relay stories of teachers or observers who had commented that she had the most innate talent they had ever seen for whatever new pursuit she was taking up.”

We can tell. She radiates conceit and overconfidence.

Ohrstrom said she had written the article to show the true Ivanka, despite the risk of being branded a hypocritical, privileged elitist looking to capitalise on her first family connection.

“Although friends and family have warned that this article won’t be received the way I want, I think it’s past time that one of the many critics from Ivanka’s childhood comes forward – if only to ensure that she really will never recover from the decision to tie her fate to her father’s.”

I share that fierce hope that the princess never recovers.

Ivanka had spent her career projecting a more polished and intellectual version of the Trump brand, blending millennial feminism with a “mythical narrative” of business acumen, but this dissolved when she endorsed her father’s policies and judicial nominations, said Ohrstrom. “I’ve watched as Ivanka has laid waste to the image she worked so hard to build.”

And now it’s all over. I hope she’s miserable.

The article claims that Donald Trump paid close attention to the attractiveness of his daughter and her friends when they were teenagers. “He would barely acknowledge me except to ask if Ivanka was the prettiest or the most popular girl in our grade. Before I learned that the Trumps have no sense of humor about themselves, I remember answering honestly that she was probably in the top five. “Who’s prettier than Ivanka?” I recall him asking once with genuine confusion, before correctly naming the two girls I’d had in mind.”

And to top it all they won’t leave.

Republicans are shocked, shocked.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito was scheduled to speak with the government’s top cybersecurity official on Wednesday. But the night before, Christopher Krebs was cast out of a job.

“I was going to tell him thank you for a good job” helping to secure the 2020 election, Capito (R-W.Va.) said after checking her schedule to see if the call was still on. “I’m still going to tell him that — just not today.”

President Donald Trump on Tuesday evening fired Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, after he spent days actively debunking the president’s baseless voter fraud claims. And in a rare turn in the Trump era, Senate Republicans across the spectrum — from Trump allies to critics of the president — criticized the decision.

Capito said she was “disappointed” and flummoxed by Trump’s personnel decisions: “I can’t explain it.” Others were more blunt.

Oh come on. Of course she can explain it. Trump is a bad rotten self-dealing crooked lying criminal trying to steal the election. He’s also stupid.

The firing also set off renewed concerns that the president would spend his final weeks in the White House impulsively ousting officials who crossed him and making erratic policy shifts that could not be easily undone.

Ya think??

Krebs’ firing comes amid a purge of senior officials viewed as insufficiently loyal to the president, who is actively preventing President-elect Joe Biden and his transition team from beginning the transfer of power. Defense Secretary Mark Esper was the first to go, and there are broader fears Trump could fire CIA Director Gina Haspel or FBI Director Christopher Wray next. “If it looks like there’s just a flurry of them, it will raise more questions,” Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) acknowledged.

Oooh yes do raise more questions, and more and more and more and more, while Trump keeps doing whatever he feels like and everything falls apart. It’s very impressive, all this raising of questions.

In the days following the election, Krebs was publicly contradicting Trump’s baseless assertions of rampant voter fraud — both via his personal Twitter feed as well as a website set up by the agency dubbed “Rumor Control.” The platform has confronted head-on some of the most confounding conspiracy theories dominating the Trump legal team’s arguments, including unfounded claims of dead people voting and election machines “switching” votes from Trump to Biden.

“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” Krebs and other officials said in a statement last week on the integrity of the 2020 vote.

So, down came the hammer.

Powerful analogy! Birds are descended from dinosaurs therefore men are women. Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay….

As always, apologies for quoting the Daily Mail, but you know how it is.

The parents of an autistic teenage boy were warned he would be taken into care after they objected to him being given powerful hormone drugs to help him change sex.

Doctors at an NHS clinic had recommended he be given puberty-blockers – which delay adolescence – after the youngster declared he believed he was female.

But his mother and father, fearing the potential side-effects of the drugs, stopped him going to the clinic. And they suspected his abrupt decision to change sex was a result of his autism.

After the boy told the school he had been barred from treatment, a teacher told his parents that they should find alternative accommodation for their son or else he would be put into temporary foster care. And the school reported the couple to children’s services for being ‘emotionally abusive’ to their son by not supporting his wish to change gender.

And it gets worse!

A month later, the local authority placed him in a child protection plan after social workers concluded he was likely to suffer ‘significant harm’ under his parents’ care.

However, the family avoided seeing the boy go into foster care because a family friend agreed that he could live with them. Children’s services have now taken the boy out of child protection and earlier this year he moved back home.

People have lost their damn minds.

It is so strange to be a narcissist interviewing OB-GYNs who talk about women instead of about me. I don’t know how to describe it other than it feels like we are not talking about me. If we are not talking about me, it’s as if I don’t exist. Yes I really am that pathetic and needy. I’m so desperate to focus all the attention on me that I feel compelled to pretend that there are no women, there are only “women” – those evil bitches who erase my identity by being women instead of “a nonbinary person.”

It’s not that complicated.

As the only obstacle between President-elect Joe Biden and the formal start of the presidential transition, General Services Administrator Emily Murphy is struggling with the weight of the presidential election being dropped on her shoulders, feeling like she’s been put in a no-win situation, according to people who have spoken to her recently.

This was never a position that Murphy thought she would find herself in, the people said. But as the government official in charge of signing off on the election result, President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the election has thrown Murphy into the middle of a political firestorm.

Facing mounting pressure from both sides, and even death threats, the sources say Murphy is working to interpret vague agency guidelines and follow what she sees as precedent to wait to sign off on the election result, a process known as “ascertainment” that would allow the official presidential transition to begin.

Jeez. The people who wrote this don’t know how to keep their subjects and verbs connected. Let’s try that again. “But as the government official in charge of signing off on the election result, Murphy feels that President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the election has thrown her into the middle of a political firestorm.” Clunky but at least coherent. “Facing mounting pressure from both sides and even death threats, the sources say, Murphy is working to interpret vague agency guidelines…” Just one little comma added and one subtracted, there, to make sense of it. Journalists should be able to do this on their own.

Anyway…so the point is that this is new territory because Trump has refused to concede. But in another way that’s not new territory at all, because Trump is a lying cheating thieving criminal, and his refusal to concede is simply a criminal’s attempt to commit more crimes far into the future. Or to put it another way –

Still, Murphy’s stalled sign-off is one of the more confounding decisions made since the election, since it’s clear Biden won and Trump’s legal challenges won’t change the outcome. Biden’s team has warned the delay has real-world consequences to national security and their Covid-19 response.

It’s clear that Biden won. Trump is just blowing smoke. Trump is trying to steal the election, and whether she intends to or not, Murphy is currently helping him, and she should stop doing that.

Sources close to Murphy describe her as a technocrat and policy wonk, with a lengthy career as a congressional aide and at GSA. It’s not clear what specific actions Murphy is waiting on before granting ascertainment. Sources tell CNN she is basing her decision on what she sees as the precedent set by the 2000 election, where there was not a clear winner for more than a month.

But this is not like that, on account of how there is a clear winner.

“My experiences with Emily have led me to believe she is an ethical and moral person, but I strongly disagree with her current decision not to ascertain the election,” said a former administration official and colleague of Murphy’s who had spoken to her in recent days. “I think she’s absolutely making the wrong decision. President-elect Biden clearly won. And there really is no question about that… It is wrong to delay, even by another minute, the signing of the ascertainment.”

And so the rot continues.

Kayleigh McEnany wouldn’t know George Orwell if he sat on her lap on the tube.

Enforcing rules to prevent the spread of a lethal pandemic is not “Orwellian.”

Orwell would not have admired Donald Trump. I say this with great confidence.

Evil Don fired a DHS director for stating the truth and bragged about it on Twitter.

NPR adds:

In response, Krebs tweeted “Honored to serve. We did it right. Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow.”

Trump lost the election to President-elect Joe Biden, in both the popular and electoral vote. Trump had for weeks prior to the election erroneously railed against mail-in voting as being ripe for fraud. The president had encouraged his supporters to vote in person on Nov. 3 — he later complained about the number of absentee ballots that supported his opponent.

Krebs’ firing came after his agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, last week released a statement calling the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”

It added, in boldface, that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

So mobster Don fired him, and publicly patted himself on the back for doing it.

The CISA campaign, led by Krebs, was originally intended to target foreign interference. However, as the president continued to repeat dangerously misleading information about the security of the election, the agency’s focus turned to rebutting many of the rumors and baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud that Trump had promoted from the White House.

A DHS official who has worked with Krebs but spoke on background for fear of retaliation last week told NPR that Krebs being fired would “rock CISA.”

“Chris has earned the trust of staff all across the agency,” the official said. “He’s easily been the most competent and able of any political appointee I’ve worked with.”

So naturally criminal Don fired him.

What? What’s he done now?

Let me guess – some crowd thing, that was canceled so as not to spread the virus even more, and he pitched a fit and said SPREAD THE VIRUS MORE.

Of course he did.

On Monday, after evaluating plans to hold a large annual event in the midst of an escalating pandemic, Arlington National Cemetery canceled the event planned next month, saying it could not mitigate the risk to thousands of visitors and cemetery staff.

But on Tuesday, after criticism from Republican lawmakers and public outcry, President Trump said he overrode Army officials, tweeting that he “reversed the ridiculous decision to cancel Wreaths Across America,” an annual event that draws thousands of volunteers to lay holidays wreaths on headstones throughout the cemetery.

So more people will get the virus, and more hospitals and healthcare workers will be swamped, and more people will die of the virus.

The reversal comes a day after cemetery officials announced they evaluated several options to hold the event — in consultation with public health officials and Wreaths Across America — and decided the cemetery could not safely execute the sprawling operation.

…

Republican lawmakers, including war veterans Rep. Dan Crenshaw (Tex.) and Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.), criticized Army officials when the cancellation was announced. “Our fallen deserve to be remembered,” Crenshaw said on Twitter.

But it’s entirely possible to remember them without physically going to Arlington at the height of a pandemic. The fallen are not there, they’re not sitting in the graves watching to see if people turn up or not. It’s possible, and responsible, to put off visiting the graves until later, while still remembering the dead now.

I wish someone in heavy boots would kick Trump in the head.

The full image:

I can’t begin to express how insulting to women that photo is.

Giuliani is earning the desired 2 20k per diem by lying in court:

Rudy Giuliani launched into a series of baseless claims about the election during an appearance on behalf of the Trump campaign in federal court on Tuesday, seeking to block Pennsylvania from certifying its election results.

Giuliani, who requested to appear on behalf of Trump this morning, alleged there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.

That’s false; there isn’t a single state election official in the country who has seen widespread irregularities. The Department of Homeland Security described the 2020 election as “the most secure in American history.”

Weird that this is how he wants to tie the bow on his career.

Giuliani is not a cheap date, apart from that one time at the Four Seasons garden center.

Rudy Giuliani asked for $20,000 a day to assist the Trump campaign’s legal efforts in battleground states, according to the New York Times.

The Times:

The request stirred opposition from some of Mr. Trump’s aides and advisers, who appear to have ruled out paying that much, and it is unclear how much Mr. Giuliani will ultimately be compensated.

Since Mr. Giuliani took over management of the legal effort, Mr. Trump has suffered a series of defeats in court and lawyers handling some of the remaining cases have dropped out.

A $20,000-a-day rate would have made Mr. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who has been Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer for several years, among the most highly compensated attorneys anywhere.

It seems a little greedy when Don is such a humble everyday guy and has all those kids to put through school.

See the cross and cleavage? Did I call it or what?

“End of” is not a persuasive rhetorical device, let alone an argument.

The word “are” is not magic. Saying Xs are Ys doesn’t change reality. I can say “houses are turnips” but that doesn’t make it true, not even if I go on to say “End of.”

Women are human. Women are people. Those are reasonable claims, and true if we all agree on what “women” means and what “human” and “people” mean.

People have rights. That’s a moral claim more than it is a factual claim, and there’s a lot of disagreement over what those rights are exactly, so saying “End of” after that one is also pretty silly. It’s not end of so much as beginning of.

One of the debatable rights these quarrels have made central lately is the “right” to be seen, accepted, endorsed, “validated” as whatever you say you are. I think it takes only about 5 seconds worth of thought to see how precarious the idea of such a right is, since if it were a real right we could all empty each other’s bank accounts.

And then there’s the image.

End of.

Well that’s crossing a line.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Monday that he has come under increasing pressure in recent days from fellow Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), to question the validity of legally cast absentee ballots in an effort to reverse President Trump’s narrow loss in the state.

SENATOR Lindsey Graham has been pressuring the Georgia secretary of state to get rid of legal ballots.

That’s…a crime, isn’t it? Isn’t there a federal law against trying to mess with votes and/or intimidate voters? Isn’t that just a straight-up you can be prosecuted crime?

(looks it up)

Yes, it is. There are state laws and federal laws against doing this shit.

Raffensperger and his wife have been getting threats, including death threats.

“Other than getting you angry, it’s also very disillusioning,” Raffensperger said of the threats, “particularly when it comes from people on my side of the aisle. Everyone that is working on this needs to elevate their speech. We need to be thoughtful and careful about what we say.” He said he reported the threats to state authorities.

The pressure on Raffensperger, who has bucked his party in defending the state’s voting process, comes as Georgia is in the midst of a laborious hand recount of about 5 million ballots. President-elect Joe Biden has a 14,000-vote lead in the initial count.

Trump won Michigan by 10 thousand votes in 2016. I just looked it up.

In the interview, Raffensperger also said he spoke on Friday to Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has echoed Trump’s unfounded claims about voting irregularities.

In their conversation, Graham questioned Raffensperger about the state’s signature-matching law and whether political bias could have prompted poll workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures, according to Raffensperger. Graham also asked whether Raffensperger had the power to toss all mail ballots in counties found to have higher rates of nonmatching signatures, Raffensperger said.

Raffensperger said he was stunned that Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to toss legally cast ballots. Absent court intervention, Raffensperger doesn’t have the power to do what Graham suggested, as counties administer elections in Georgia.

Chair of the Judiciary Committee, folks.

The Glinner update tells us there is a social worker, therapist and adjunct associate professor of social work at the University of Southern California called Ken Howard who thinks JK Rowling needs to be punished.

Ruth spotted him commenting on a thread about JK Rowling on the LGBTQ Nation Facebook page. In comments he now appears to have deleted, Howard stated that Rowling’s defence of women’s sex-based rights needs punishing “by way of a traumatic vaginal injury”.

It’s weird what a lot of angry trans activists or allies go straight to that. Not she’s wrong, not she’s wrong and doing harm, but she needs to be violently attacked in the genitals.

But Rowling isn’t stoking and abetting violence against trans women.

It’s funny how men like Ken Howard love trans women so fiercely and hate women even more fiercely. What does that suggest? To me it suggests that they know damn well trans women are not women, and that their loyalty is to other men while their violent loathing is reserved for women. Not pretend women, not trans women, but real women, the kind it’s possible to punish by way of a traumatic vaginal injury.

Rowling of course does not “promote trans women to be raped, maimed, or killed.” She doesn’t do that or anything resembling it, but therapist dude here does literally that toward her.

Ken Howard is the founder and director of GayTherapyLA. On his website he states, “I have devoted my professional career as a therapist almost exclusively to working with gay men as individuals or in gay male couples”. Only a couple of months ago he wrote about the need for gay men to have their own safe spaces.

So he gets that gay men need safe spaces, but he wants to see Rowling get a traumatic injury in the vagina for saying the same about women.

Unpleasant fella.

Good question.

I answered it by, basically, expanding on the “women have to signal obedience to the patriarchy” point, but there are probably further reasons (which is not to say that any of them are good reasons). The VP has more room for experiment, I think. If Biden did it it would look flaky and pathetic, like trying to be down with the kids. Partly it’s probably as simple as “Harris is young enough to get away with it.”

But why doesn’t she recognize it as obedience to the patriarchy? Now that’s something I would love to know.

Is it a coup or is it not? Ece Temelkuran has relevant experience:

President Trump’s refusal to concede to his successful challenger is “giving great comfort” to “authoritarian regimes” around the world, said Joe Biden’s biographer on CNN. “This is a source of delight [for them] … ” Turkey, my country, falls into that category of authoritarian regimes. But I can tell you that what is happening in the US is a source of horror, not delight, for those on the ground. We know the signs of when a political crisis becomes a de facto coup – so here’s a word of warning.

…

[A] spectre of hesitation is haunting Washington. While the Trump administration is doing its best to sow confusion and challenge the mail-in ballots that helped deliver Biden a victory, the president-elect is acting coolly “presidential”; he is receiving calls from world leaders, which, he suggests, are the first steps in restoring respect for the US across the world. This courtly behaviour, this “wait and see” approach towards the incumbent, depends on trusting the health of US institutions.

But contemporary authoritarianism works not by explicitly oppressing the people, but by accelerating the moral rot of already weakened institutions. Everything is riding on how those arms of the state and society – from the Senate and the supreme court to the press and the most insignificant of local public office – behave in the coming few days and weeks. And Trump has been manipulating these institutions for four years: see the way he used his term to pack the courts with rightwing judges at dizzying speed. Even the openly Biden-supporting media is hesitating to call a spade a spade, because they believe the institutions will prevail. Make no mistake, this is an attempted coup. If it were happening in Turkey the world’s media would not think twice about calling it so.

And we’re failing to shut it down. He could still bring it off.

Those who are analysing his behaviour in terms of psychology, referring to his famous allergy to losing, must be reminded: coups don’t always begin with a dramatic Reichstag fire, but through obscure and elusive machinations. Since the Americans might not know about our countries as much as we do about theirs, we can tell them that it has happened just like this here too – we trusted the institutions and were certain the leader wouldn’t dare.

Today’s authoritarian societies are not fully formed dictatorships, single-party states – they don’t need to be. They manufacture crises and prolong political instability, keeping the masses on their toes, but ensuring leaders can act with impunity. American democrats shouldn’t expect a clear-cut power-grab from Trump, but rather a maddeningly obscure process that keeps everything up in the air until the masses are exhausted and lose interest. Even if he accepts reality and his electoral loss, Trump’s “movement” will see its task as running a parallel political reality for the next four years that will constantly threaten Biden’s legitimacy.

Cheerful.